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September 22 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

Catholic history · Real stories · Every day

Catholic Saints for Kids

Junior Edition · September 22, 2026

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

A painting in the manner of an early Italian panel of a tonsured young friar in a white habit sitting on a bench in a bare stone room with a small barred window, a large open manuscript on his knees, one hand raised as he speaks to two young women in long red, green and blue gowns and white head-linen who sit facing him with their hands folded.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento tempera panel, from the paper's reference portrait based on The Temptation of St Thomas Aquinas, predella panel from the altarpiece of Saints Dominic, Peter Martyr and Thomas Aquinas painted for Santa Maria Novella, Florence (Bernardo Daddi, 1338 AD, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) View source artwork.

Start here 2 min read

The big question

Sisters sent to change St. Thomas's mind take his side

Locked in a castle tower for up to two years, the young friar got three books and learned them by heart.

His age
About nineteen
Where
A castle tower between Rome and Naples
When
The early 1240s AD, for up to two years
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More from this edition

A painting of a gaunt, dark-bearded pilgrim in a coarse rope-belted robe, with a staff, one sandal and one bare foot, being led down a stony hillside path by a man in a turban and long robe who holds his arm, with the walled city of Jerusalem and a grey dome on the ridge beyond.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of mid-sixteenth-century Spanish oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of Ignatius of Loyola (Jacopino del Conte, 1556 AD, Curia Generalizia of the Society of Jesus, Rome) View source artwork.

Story 02 3 min read

One last look

St. Ignatius gives his scissors to check Christ's footprints again

Told to leave Jerusalem with the other pilgrims the next day, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, thirty-two, climbed the Mount of Olives twice with no guide and no money.

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An old priest in a black soutane, white collar and black skullcap sits at a plain wooden table in a bare grey room and looks down at a sheet of handwritten parchment with a red wax seal; an inkstand and a quill lie to one side.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of seventeenth-century French oil portraiture, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait de saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) (anonymous, after a model by Simon François de Tours, circa 1660, Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris) View source artwork.

Story 05 3 min read

Who decided

How a runaway cardinal helped his old teacher

Saint Vincent de Paul's priests can now promise their whole lives to poor country people, after more than twenty years of waiting.

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Today in the Church for kids

Tuesday in the twenty-fifth week of Ordinary Time

Saint of the day for kids

Saint Maurice and companions

Saint Maurice and his companions were soldiers in the Roman army. They belonged to a group of soldiers called the Theban Legion, and the Church honours all of them as martyrs, people who gave their lives for their faith.

On this day in the Church for kids

  • 1220 At Viterbo, Pope Honorius III ruled that everyone joining the Friars Minor of Saint Francis of Assisi had to spend a year training and being tested first, and after that no friar could leave the order.Our reportSource
  • 1878 Saint Bernadette Soubirous made her final vows, the promises that bound her for life as a sister, at Saint-Gildard, the main house of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, twelve years after she entered the convent.Our reportSource
  • 1887 Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini set out for Rome to ask the Holy See to approve her Institute, open a house in the city and let her sisters go on mission.Source