Pope St. Pius V was a priest in religious life who became pope during one of the most tumultuous and critical periods in Church history.

“Therefore, rise, run to the Church; here is the Father, here is the Son, here is the Holy Spirit. He Who hears you pondering in the secret places of the mind runs to you. And when you are still far off, He sees you and runs to you. He sees in your heart, He runs, lest someone hinder, and also embraces you. His foreknowledge is in the running, His mercy in the embrace, and, as it were, the disposition of Fatherly love. He falls on your neck in order to raise one prostrate and burdened with sins and bring back one turned aside to the earthly toward heaven, in which he seeks his own Author. Christ falls on your neck to free your nape from the yoke of slavery and hang His sweet yoke upon your shoulders.” St. Ambrose (4th century, Doctor of the Church)

Blessed Marcel Callo was a pious French layman who was a martyr of Nazi Germany. Marcel was born in 1921 to a devout couple of modest means, Marcel Callo and his wife Felicita. Young Marcel was one of nine children and the family lived at Rennes in western France. He was educated at local schools and helped to take care of his younger siblings. He was a very devout child and became an altar server at age seven.

“Let the young men also be blameless in all things, being especially careful to preserve purity, and keeping themselves, as with a bridle, from every kind of evil. For it is well that they should be cut off from the lusts that are in the world.” St. Polycarp of Smyrna (1st-2nd centuries)

“[The Church] is called Catholic, then, because it extends over the whole world, from end to end of the earth, and because it teaches universally and infallibly each and every doctrine which must come to the knowledge of men concerning things visible and invisible…because it universally treats and heals every class of sins, those committed with the soul and those with the body, and it possesses within itself every conceivable form of virtue, in deeds and in words and in the spiritual gifts of every description.” St. Cyril of Jerusalem (4th century, Doctor of the Church)

St. Anne Line was a convert, wife and widow, and a martyr of Elizabethan Protestant England. She was born Alice Heigham c.1563 at Dunmow, Essex, England. Her father, Willaim Heigham, was a Calvinist landowner and was the son of one of King Henry VIII’s Protestant “reformers”. In her late teens, she converted to the Catholic Church with her brother, William. The pair were joined in converting by a young man named Roger Line. When their father learned of their conversion, they were both disinherited, with Alice, now known as Anne, losing her dowry. Roger was also disowned by his father upon his conversion.

Zeal for the salvation of souls is of so great a merit before God, that to give up all our goods to the poor, or to spend our whole life in the exercises of all sorts of austerities cannot equal the merit of it.

St. David Galván Bermúdez was a teacher, a priest, and a martyr of the Mexican Cristero War. David was born in 1881 in Guadalajara, in the state of Jalisco in western Mexico.

“Being obedient, Mary became the cause of salvation for herself and for the whole human race.” St. Irenaeus (2nd-3rd centuries)

St. Agnes of Assisi was an abbess, and with her sister, a pioneer in establishing one of the great mendicant women’s religious orders. She was born Caterina Offreduccio c. 1197 to a noble family in Assisi, Italy. Her father was Count Favorino Scifi and her mother was [Bl.] Hortulana of the noble Fiumi family. The family had a castle on Mount Subiaso, as well as a mansion in the city of Assisi, and this is where Catarina spent her childhood.

“The sainted martyrs…have inspired aged men to accomplish with much love a long course, and constrained them to support their failing steps by the staff of the Word;

St. Anthony Mary Claret was a missionary archbishop, chaplain to royalty, founder and publisher.

“God speaks by the mouth of Malachi, one of the twelve [minor prophets], as I said before, about the sacrifices at that time presented by you: ‘I have no pleasure in you, says the Lord, and I will not accept your sacrifices at your hands; for from the rising of...

St. Just de Bretenières was a missionary priest and a martyr for the Faith in Korea.

“Let no one lead you astray; the most pernicious kind of sin is the failure to realize one’s own sinfullness.” St. Caesarius of Arles (5th-6th centuries)

St. Caesarius of Arles was a great preacher, bishop and theologian of the early Church in Gaul (modern France). He was born at Châlons in Burgundy c. 470. This city is now known as Chalon-sur-Saône, located in eastern France. His parents were Gallo-Roman and were apparently of minimal Christian faith....

St. Elizabeth of Portugal was a wife, mother, and queen; as well as a generous philanthropist and a Franciscan tertiary. Elizabeth was born in 1271 to King Peter III of the House of Aragon, and his wife Constance of Sicily. She was born at the royal Aragon Palace at what...

“The most high and infinitely good God has not granted to angels the power with which He has invested priests.” St. John Chrysostom (4th-5th centuries, Doctor of the Church) “[about the life of a bishop]The turbulent have to be corrected, the faint-hearted cheered up, the weak supported; the Gospel’s opponents..

Blessed Niels Stensen was a brilliant scientist, Catholic convert, and devoted bishop and reformer. He was born to a Lutheran family in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1638.