In the year 320, forty Roman soldiers were left naked all night on a frozen pond at Sebaste, for refusing to sacrifice. Warm baths waited on the shore for any man who gave in. Before dawn, one did. The number on the ice stayed forty. This is their story, and three more like it: Marcellus, … Read more
Around the year 1205, a rich cloth merchant’s son knelt before a crucifix in a ruined church and heard it speak. Within a few years he had given up his inheritance in front of the bishop of Assisi, and within twenty he was dead on the bare floor of a chapel. Francis of Assisi is … Read more
Thérèse of Lisieux entered a Carmelite convent at 15 and died there at 24. She led no armies, founded no order and wrote no treatise. On October 19, 1997, Pope John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church, the youngest ever given that title. How does a hidden life like that end up … Read more
Between 1919 and 1920, three doctors examined the stigmata of Padre Pio: the wounds in his hands, his feet and his side. They did not agree. Two wrote that science could not explain them. The third called them self-produced by suggestion, and said they were kept up with iodine. By his death in 1968, the … Read more
If you have ever buried someone you would have died for, you already know this woman. Saint Zélie Martin buried four of her children: two baby boys, a daughter of five, and a girl not yet two months old. Four small graves in less than four years. A year after the last burial, her sister-in-law … Read more
Pick up a Catholic Bible and count the books: 73. Pick up a Protestant Bible and count again: 66. Seven books are missing — Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach (also known as Ecclesiasticus), Baruch, and 1 and 2 Maccabees — along with the Greek sections of Esther and Daniel. The Church read every one of them … Read more
The Letter That Wasn’t His In 1950, a letter began circulating across Catholic Europe. It claimed that Padre Pio, the famous stigmatist friar, had predicted three days of total darkness were coming — a punishment so severe that no artificial light would work except one specific kind of candle. Padre Pio denied writing a single … Read more
In October 1917, Lisbon’s most anticlerical newspaper sent its editor to Fátima to expose a hoax. He came back and put the word miracle on its front page.
Add up the numbers Genesis actually gives you and Methuselah dies the year the Flood came. What the Church requires you to believe about that — and what it deliberately leaves open.
She is famous for a number Augustine never wrote In a rented room at Ostia, the port of Rome, a woman of 56 lay dying a long way from the country where she was born. She told her two sons not to trouble themselves about where they buried her. Lay this body anywhere. Only remember … Read more
