Walfrid or Galfrido della Gherardesca was born in Pisa, of which he became a prosperous and honored citizen. He married a wife to whom he was deeply attached, and they had five sons and at least one daughter. After a time, Walfrid and his wife Thesia felt that God was calling them to enter the religious life. Walfrid had two friends - A kinsman named Gunduald and a certain Fortis, a native of Corsica: like him they were living in the world, but were drawn to a closer service of God under ...

After praying the Angelus, Pope Leo expresses his closeness with those reeling from the effects of the back-to-back cyclones in Madagascar, where some 16,000 people have been displaced.

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In his Angelus reflections on the Sunday Gospel, Pope Leo explains how the Gospel teaches us that we must love greatly for true righteousness.

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Colombia's bishops concluded their 120th Plenary Assembly with a call to the country for conversion and dialogue. The bishops also urged citizens to take part in the upcoming elections, exercising their right to vote “in full freedom and conscience, without corruption.”

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A Palestinian official in the occupied West Bank has labelled Israel's latest expansion of control there as a brutal blow to peace efforts.

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Click Here for St. Valentine Prayer's Discover More About St. Valentine Saint Valentine, officially known as Saint Valentine of Rome, is a third-century Roman saint widely celebrated on February 14 and commonly associated with "courtly love." Although not much of St. Valentine's life is reliably known, and whether or not the stories involve two different saints by the same name is also not officially decided, it is highly agreed that St. Valentine was martyred and then buried on the Via ...

Pope Leo XIV has appointed Sister Simona Brambilla as a Member of the Dicastery for Bishops, as she continues her service as Prefect of the Dicastery for Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life.

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St. Catherine was born in Florence in 1522. Her baptismal name was Alexandrina, but she took the name of Catherine upon entering religion. From her earliest infancy she manifested a great love of prayer, and in her sixth year, her father placed her in the convent of Monticelli in Florence, where her aunt, Louisa de Ricci, was a nun. After a brief return home, she entered the convent of the Dominican nuns at Prat in Tuscany, in her fourteenth year. While very young, she was chosen Mistress of ...

He was one of seven Florentines who had joined the Confraternity of the Blessed Virgin (the Laudesi) in a particularly lax period in the city's history and who were inspired by a vision on the feast of the Assumption to take up a life of solitude and prayer. After nearly fifteen years of austerity at a hermitage on Monte Senario he took the name in 1240 of Servants of Mary, or Servites. Six were ordained, developed as mendicant friars under the direction of James of Poggibonsi and Bishop ...

Paschal was the son of Bonosus, a Roman. He studied at the Lateran, was named head of St. Stephen's monastery, which housed pilgrims to Rome, and was elected Pope to succeed Pope Stephen IV (V) on the day Stephen died, January 25, 817. Emperor Louis the Pious agreed to respect papal jurisdiction, but when Louis' son Lothair I came to Rome in 823 to be consecrated king, he broke the pact by presiding at a trial involving a group of nobles opposing the Pope. When the two papal officials who had ...