Church History

Music plays such an important part in everyone's life but how much do we know about the history of music? How did music shape our civilization and how was music itself shaped by the Catholic Church? Susan Treacy, an experienced professor of music, is an...

For over two decades, Eugenio Pacelli, Pope Pius XII, has been blasted in the public square as "Hitler's Pope", accused by bestselling authors of cowardice in the face of the Nazi regime. Some have even said that the pope was complicit in Hitler's grab...

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...

The Catholic Church has been a part of English history since the arrival of Christian missionaries to Roman Britain in the first century AD. England was evangelized in these early centuries to such an extent that, by the time the Romans withdrew in the...

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...

Louis Bouyer examines the underlying principles and teachings of the 16th century Protestant reformers. These topics include Scripture alone as source of Christian belief, justification by faith alone, God's free gift of unmerited salvation, the...

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...

Saint John of the Cross is the Church's premier teacher on contemplative prayer. Catholic tradition even calls him the Mystical Doctor. The sixteenth-century Carmelite priest not only wrote four massive treatises on the spiritual life, along with some of...

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...