Category: art

Antonio Rosmini is a bit of an interesting figure—his writing was initially put on the index of prohibited books and yet he ultimately was not only removed from the index (although there was and is dispute over whether his removal meant that his writing was ok, or just not heretical enough to be on the…

Nearly every named woman in the new testament, it seems, was named Mary and today’s saint is one of the more obscure of these, Mary the mother of John Mark (generally associated with the Mark who wrote the Gospel of) who gets a single mention in Acts, subtle enough that most people wouldn’t remember her…

Looking over the options for saints for today (and discovering too late that it’s the feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary), I stumbled upon Saint Heimerad who, despite his weird name has a kind of cool story, most notably with his nickname, “Fool for Christ.” He apparently had difficulty with living in community, was…

Early saints often ended up with rather—eccentric—biographies. The holiness of these figures drew people to them when they just wanted some alone time and in the case of Saint David the Dendrite, his solution to his was to climb an almond tree and live there for three years, thus his title (dendrite coming from the…

Most Catholic religious feasts commemorate the death of the saint. As far as I know, there are only three births celebrated in the Catholic church: Jesus (Christmas), Mary (September 8th) and John the Baptist (today). Jesus and John are mentioned in the Bible and I suppose once we had a feast celebrating the Immaculate Conception¹…

I was briefly excited when reading the biography of Marie of Oignies to read about her being married and convincing her husband that they should live in poverty and care for the lepers in Nivelles and this led to her foundation of the Beguines, a lay order that did not take formal orders. Then I…

There’s a Saint Aloysius church in Chicago, but it doesn’t have a Saturday Mass so I’m doing a picture instead of my nerd pilgrimage today.  Aloysisus Gonzaga was one of the generation of Jesuits who entered when the order had become established after Ignatius’s death and, although born an aristocrat and the heir apparent in…

Looking over the options for today’s saint, I ended up settling on Saint Silverius, who was one of the handful of popes without a roman numeral after his name (out of 267 popes, there are 41 without roman numerals). What’s more, his father was a pope, although he had married and bore Silverius before being ordained…