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...

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,...

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...

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...

Many Catholics have either left the Church or been scandalized by the errors or immorality rampant in her clergy. We’ve watched aghast as faithful Catholics have been restricted or punished without just cause, while those who confuse, contradict,...

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...