October 13 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

event · FÁTIMA, Portugal, October 13, 1917 AD

“I am the Lady of the Rosary,” Our Lady tells Fátima's children

At the last of six monthly apparitions she kept her summer promise to say who she was, asked for a chapel and said the war would end.

A half-length painting of the Virgin Mary in a red robe and blue mantle, cheek to cheek with the infant Christ Child, who holds a gold rosary. — Our Lady of the Rosary with the Child Jesus, painted by Bartolomé Esteban Murillo in about 1650–1655 AD.

At noon on October 13, 1917 AD, in a hollow outside the Portuguese village of Fátima, Our Lady told three shepherd children who she was: the Lady of the Rosary. She asked for a chapel to be built there, told them to pray the Rosary every day and said the soldiers would soon come home from the war. As she rose, the eldest child, Lúcia, saw her light thrown onto the sun, and the children saw St. Joseph and the Child Jesus beside it.

5 min read

An elderly bald priest in a black soutane and skullcap kneels on a stone floor with his hands joined, facing a row of priests in black seated on a bench along the wall of a bare whitewashed room. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of seventeenth-century French oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Vincent de Paul at the Deathbed of Louis XIII (Jean-Francois de Troy, 1731, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) View source artwork.

event · PARIS, October 13, 1642 AD

St. Vincent de Paul kneels to resign; priests re-elect him for life

Saint Vincent de Paul knelt before the superiors of the community of priests he founded, asked their pardon and resigned as its head. They refused the resignation, re-elected him for life, and after refusing more than once he gave way.

3 min read

More in this edition

A painted scene in a Gothic loggia: a haloed nun in black and white Dominican habit stands at right, hands clasped at her breast, speaking toward a tonsured friar seated at left who writes on a sloped desk; above them, in a golden mandorla, Christ appears with attendant figures.

column · SIENA, October 1378 AD

A year after learning to write, St. Catherine finishes her Dialogue

Saint Catherine of Siena finished the Dialogue, her book of conversation with God, in October 1378 AD, dictating it to her secretaries in a hermit's chapel outside Siena. St. Catherine had learned to write only the year before. She completed the book in the first weeks of a split in the Church, as cardinals who had broken with Pope Urban VI backed a rival Pope.

4 min read

A Renaissance manuscript painting of a judgment hall with classical columns: a bearded, blue-robed judge sits at left as two young men with raised scourges whip a half-naked man in the center, while a group of onlookers watches at right.

writings · ROME, 384 AD

St. Jerome is whipped before Christ's judgment seat for reading Cicero

In a letter from Rome in 384 AD to Saint Eustochium, a young woman vowed to virginity, Saint Jerome tells of a fever that nearly killed him about ten years earlier. During the fever he stood before the judgment seat of Christ, was condemned as a follower of Cicero and swore never again to own or read pagan books. Years later an old friend accused St. Jerome of breaking that oath, and he had to explain it.

4 min read

A painting in pale fresco colours of a late-Roman town house: a veiled woman in a dark grey-brown mantle stands in the courtyard with a hand at her face, a young man in a tunic and cloak stands at an open door on the left, and two women servants set a table with bread and bowls on the right. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian quattrocento buon fresco, based on St Augustine Leaving his Mother (Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-1465 AD, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano, Italy) View source artwork.

place · TAGASTE, Numidia, 375 AD

A dream tells St. Monica her son will stand where she stands

At Tagaste, in Roman North Africa, Saint Monica refused to let her son, Saint Augustine, live in her house or eat at her table. He had joined a sect, the Manichees, and was spreading its teaching. A dream in which a young man told her that where she was, her son was too changed her mind, and she took him back.

3 min read

Today in the Church

Tuesday of the Twenty-eighth Week in Ordinary Time

Saint of the day

Saint Edward the Confessor

Saint Edward the Confessor was a king of England.

On this day in the Church

1537 At Venice, St. Ignatius of Loyola, accused of having been burned in effigy in Spain and Paris, is declared innocent in doctrine and morals by the nuncio's Vicar General.Source
1909 At Seattle, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini becomes a citizen of the United States, the country of the emigrants she served.Source
2019 Pope Francis canonises St. John Henry Newman at a Mass in St. Peter's Square, 129 years after his death.Source

Quote of the day

“I want to tell you that a chapel is to be built here in my honour. I am the Lady of the Rosary. Continue always to pray the Rosary every day. The war is going to end, and the soldiers will soon return to their homes.”

— Our Lady, at the Cova da Iria, Fátima, October 13, 1917 AD, Lúcia dos Santos, Memoirs, as given in the Santuário de Fátima's Narrative of the Apparitions