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September 20 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

Catholic history · Real stories · Every day

Catholic Saints for Kids

Junior Edition · September 20, 2026

True stories of the saints for curious readers ages 10–12.

A barefoot young man in a coarse linen shirt and knee-length drawers carries a wicker basket of charcoal on his shoulder down a path between two rows of small lit furnaces in a sunlit walled yard, while an old turbaned man watches from a doorway at the far end.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of French oil painting of the middle of the seventeenth century, from the paper's reference portrait based on Saint Vincent de Paul ramene des galeriens a la foi (Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouy, 1876, Chapel of Saint Vincent de Paul, eglise de la Sainte-Trinite, Paris) View source artwork.

Start here 3 min read

A day in the life

The slave who kept fifteen fires from ever going out

Pirates sold him at Tunis to an old alchemist, and his whole job was keeping ten or fifteen furnaces burning day and night.

His age
Twenty-four
Where
Tunis, in North Africa
When
September 1605 AD
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More from this edition

An old nun in the dark brown habit and black veil of the Discalced Carmelites sits back inside a covered mule carriage halted on a dusty road at a town gate, a younger nun and a friar standing beside the carriage and a bare-headed servant in black holding his hat; behind them a long stone bridge over a low river and a walled castle above the town in failing evening light.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Spanish Golden Age oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Retrato de Santa Teresa de Jesús (Fray Juan de la Miseria, 1576, Convento de las Teresas, Seville) View source artwork.

Story 03 3 min read

On the road

Four coins for eggs, and no eggs in the village

St. Teresa of Ávila spent three days in a carriage with almost nothing to eat.

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A small painted panel of a plain vaulted hall: churchmen in scarlet mantles and red caps stand and sit together at the centre and left, two apart by the wall, while a notary in brown writes on a sheet of parchment at a green-covered trestle table and a guard in mail stands at the open door.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Sienese egg tempera and gold leaf on gessoed poplar panel, from the paper's reference portrait based on St. Catherine before the Pope at Avignon (Giovanni di Paolo, c. 1460–1463, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid) View source artwork.

Story 04 3 min read

Who decided

The same men who chose the Pope have chosen another

They say a shouting crowd in Rome frightened them in April, so their own votes never counted.

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An ink-and-wash drawing of a stony mule track running up between dry-stone walls to a small whitewashed church with a bell over its door and a two-storey convent block beside it, with a hill town below and bare mountains behind; sheep graze by a wall and no person appears in it.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a brush-and-ink reportage drawing with grey wash.

Story 05 2 min read

Two names, one man

The army looked for a soldier who had two names

The army spent months hunting a soldier called Francesco Forgione, and he was up a mountain the whole time.

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A painted panel of a bare stone room: a veiled woman in a coarse grey-brown habit holds an opened sheet of parchment with a round lead seal hanging from a cord, a sister leans in to read it with her, six more barefoot sisters stand in a row against the wall, an oil lamp burns on a bracket beneath a plain wooden cross, and a booted courier in a russet tunic waits in the doorway.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of an Umbrian panel painting in egg tempera on poplar over a burnished, tooled gold ground, from the paper's reference portrait based on Santa Chiara d'Assisi — single-figure detail of the fresco of St Clare and St Elizabeth of Hungary (Simone Martini, 1322-1326 AD, Cappella di San Martino, Lower Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

Story 06 2 min read

Who decided

A Pope offered her land. She said no.

For sixteen years St. Clare of Assisi and her sisters had owned nothing at all, and she wanted it kept that way.

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Today in the Church for kids

Sunday in Ordinary Time — the day of Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Ha-sang and their companions

  • Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, a priest, Paul Chong Ha-sang, and their companions, who were killed for their faith

Saint of the day for kids

Saints Andrew Kim Taegon

Saint Andrew Kim Taegon was the first Catholic priest born in Korea. He was ordained in 1845 AD and beheaded near Seoul the next year, when he was twenty-five, and the Church honours him together with Saint Paul Chong Ha-sang and the other Korean martyrs.

On this day in the Church for kids

  • 1378 The cardinals who had left Rome said the election of Pope Urban VI did not count and chose Cardinal Robert of Geneva instead, who took the name Clement VII; St. Catherine of Siena spent the rest of her life arguing that Pope Urban VI was the true Pope.Our reportSource
  • 1582 St. Teresa of Avila arrived at Alba de Tormes at six in the evening, too worn out to climb up to the castle, and was laid on the straw mattress her rule gave every nun, however ill she was.Our reportSource
  • 1918 St. Pio of Pietrelcina was found lying unconscious on the floor of the friary choir at San Giovanni Rotondo, bleeding from the five wounds of the stigmata.Our reportSource
  • 1968 Fifty years to the day after those wounds opened, St. Pio of Pietrelcina said Mass in front of his prayer groups, who had come to San Giovanni Rotondo from seven countries; he had three days to live.Source