Church History

While many Catholics are aware of great female saints such as Catherine of Siena and Thérèse of Lisieux, a view persists that, over the centuries, women played a limited role in the development of Catholic traditions and institutions. In...

Born into a black Catholic slave family, Fr. Augustine Tolton (1854-1897) conquered almost insurmountable odds to become one of the very first black priests in the United States. By his early death at 43, this pioneer black priest left behind a shining...

Though today a devout Catholic priest, when he was a teenager, becoming a priest was the very last thing anyone ever would have expected of Donald Calloway. In his teens he was a heavy drug and alcohol abuser, a high school dropout who had been kicked...

The Papacy explains that without the Pope's divinely guided leadership, the Church would suffer the contradictions and the divisions that many Christian groups know firsthand. The teaching passed down from the apostles would be subject to arbitrary,...

"The world is too small," Saint Frances Cabrini (1850–1917) once declared. "I would like to embrace it all, to reach every corner." This compelling, authoritative biography chronicles the astounding life of a petite Italian-born religious sister...

One chilly November morning in 1927, a slender young priest stood before a firing squad in Mexico City. Five shots cracked through the air, and he fell lifeless on the ground. The man was Miguel Agustin Pro, S.J. His crime? Being a Catholic priest. As a...

On August 9, 1945, an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing tens of thousands of people in the blink of an eye, while fatally injuring and poisoning thousands more. Among the survivors was Takashi Nagai, a pioneer in radiology...

On June 14, 1921, a priest knocks at the convent in San Giovanni Rotondo. He is in his early forties and wears a simple cassock, but he is no ordinary priest. He is Bishop Raffaello Carlo Rossi, future cardinal and the Apostolic Visitor sent by the Holy...

The mystery of death strikes at the core of the human soul. We instinctively recoil at the pain of losing loved ones, and as we grapple, we are quick to seek remedies to console ourselves. There is no one better suited to assuage our grief than the...

The Confessions of Saint Augustine is considered one of the greatest Christian classics of all time. It is an extended poetic, passionate, intimate prayer that Augustine wrote as an autobiography sometime after his conversion, to confess his sins and...

Here for the first time is a captivating autobiography of a French girl raised in the wild Moroccan frontier by her communist parents who fled France and vowed that "no one would speak to her of God and influence the development of her mind with...

Rome in the year 590 a.d. A plague is tearing through the city. Pope Pelagius II is dead. Outside the walls, Lombard soldiers are raising their swords. What can save the Eternal City? All eyes, and all hopes, are on the next Pope. Veteran writer Sigrid...