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October 4 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

Catholic history · Real stories · Every day

Catholic Saints for Kids

Junior Edition · October 4, 2026

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

A painting in the style of an early Italian fresco: a noblewoman in a blue gown and rose mantle, holding a folded cloth, stands with her son at an open wooden door in a pink stone wall. A barefoot friar in a grey habit holds the door, servants with a basket look over the wall, and in a small open hut to the right a blindfolded friar lies on a pallet while another kneels beside him.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of an Assisi fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on Legend of St. Francis, scene 19: Stigmatization of St. Francis (Giotto di Bondone, 1297–1300 AD, Upper Church, Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

Start here 3 min read

The big question

St. Francis's letter never left, but his friend brought everything

When his friend arrived from Rome, the dying St. Francis let her in, though his rule kept women out.

His friend
Lady Jacoba, a widow from Rome
Where
The Porziuncola, below Assisi, Italy
When
His last week, 1226 AD
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Ink-and-wash drawing of a dry limestone quarry. A tall, pale, cut-stone wall runs across the picture under bare autumn trees. Two wagons of broken stone stand on a narrow track, two small workmen stoop in the distance, and sledgehammers, iron wedges, a hand drill, a coil of fuse and a wooden box lie on a stone block in the foreground.
About this picture

AI-generated drawing, in the manner of reportage ink and wash, of the Zakrzówek quarry in 1940, based on a photograph of the quarry by Hippocampus (2006, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5). No person in it is St. John Paul II. View source artwork.

Story 04 2 min read

A wartime job

The dynamite man kept telling his helper: be a priest

Karol Wojtyła, the future Saint John Paul II, was twenty and working in a stone quarry in wartime Kraków to keep himself and his father.

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An oil painting of a bare plastered student room lit from a leaded window, where a balding bearded man sits at a wooden table with an open book while a young man leans over and points to a line, and a second young man sits on a bed at the right holding a closed book.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of mid-sixteenth-century Roman and Spanish oil portraiture, 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 05 3 min read

Back to school

Locked in for a beating, St. Ignatius gets an apology

At thirty-eight, St. Ignatius of Loyola went back to school in Paris, where the head of his college had sworn to have him beaten in front of everyone.

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Today in the Church for kids

Saint Francis of Assisi, remembered on a Sunday in Ordinary Time

  • Saint Francis of Assisi, who gave up everything to live poor and started a brotherhood of friars

Saint of the day for kids

Saint Francis of Assisi

Saint Francis of Assisi was the son of a rich cloth merchant, but he gave up everything he would have inherited to live in poverty, and he founded the Friars Minor. St. Francis received the stigmata on La Verna in 1224 AD and died at the Porziuncola in 1226 AD.

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On this day in the Church for kids