Story 02 2 min read
His last night
A friar's wounds bled every day for fifty years
St. Pio died at half past two this morning, at eighty-one, in the small room he had lived in since 1916 AD.
Read storyCatholic history · Real stories · Every day
Catholic Saints for Kids
Junior Edition · September 23, 2026
True stories of the saints for curious readers ages 10–12.
About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Byzantine wall mosaic, from the paper's reference portrait based on John Chrysostom, marginal miniature in the Chludov Psalter (Anonymous Byzantine illuminator, middle of the 9th century, The Chludov Psalter) View source artwork.
Start here 2 min read
The big question
A widow of twenty paid for Antioch's best school
Anthusa spent her own money and her whole wedding dowry rather than touch a coin of her son's inheritance.
- Her age
- Twenty when her husband died
- Where
- Antioch, second city of the Roman East
- When
- About 349 AD
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Story 03 2 min read
What it cost
The shepherd boy his family sold two oxen for
St. Vincent de Paul was made a priest today at nineteen, and said his first Mass with nobody there but a server and a priest to guide him.
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About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a nineteenth-century reportage drawing in brush and ink with grey and umber wash.
Story 04 2 min read
The lost grave
A town hid its saint so well it lost her
Very nearly six hundred years after three bishops buried St. Clare deep under a new church in Assisi, diggers reached her coffin today.
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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 05 3 min read
The last journey
St. Teresa: a fever, a straw bed and eight early mornings
Doctors told the prioress that St. Teresa would not get better, and every morning she got up anyway.
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About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a Trecento buon fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on St Anthony of Padua, from the fragments of a double-sided dossal from San Francesco al Prato, Perugia (Master of Saint Francis, c. 1272 AD, Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia) View source artwork.
Story 06 1 min read
The man in the doorway
A friar looked at the door and saw St. Francis
St. Francis was alive at the time and far away in Italy, and Friar Monaldo saw him blessing the men in the room.
Read storyToday in the Church for kids
Wednesday in Ordinary Time — the day of Saint Pius of Pietrelcina, priest
- Saint Pius of Pietrelcina, a priest
Saint of the day for kids
Saint Pio of Pietrelcina (1887–1968 AD) was a Capuchin friar who lived at San Giovanni Rotondo in southern Italy. He carried the wounds of Christ's Passion on his body for fifty years and spent his days hearing people's confessions, and Pope John Paul II declared him a saint in 2002 AD.
Read their storyOn this day in the Church for kids
- 1600 Bishop François de Bourdeille of Périgueux made St. Vincent de Paul a priest at Château-l'Évêque, when he was only nineteen and for a diocese that was not his own.Our reportSource
- 1850 Men digging under the high altar of the church of Santa Chiara at Assisi reached the coffin of St. Clare of Assisi and opened it, six hundred years after she was buried there.Our reportSource
- 1968 St. Pio of Pietrelcina died at half past two in the morning, in his room at the friary of Our Lady of Grace at San Giovanni Rotondo, aged eighty-one.Our reportSource