Showing results for "New" in Saints & Sainthood

Anne Catherine Emmerich was born in Germany in 1774. As a child she believed that angels, saints, and the Holy Family visited and talked with her as she worked in the fields. At twenty-four, she had her first mystic vision of the sufferings of Christ, accompanied by stigmata and bleeding as if from the crown of thorns. At twenty-nine, she became an Augustinian nun and continued to have visions and stigmata. In her visions, she recounted scenes from the life of Christ, which she seemed to have witnessed.

On the 14th of August 1941, a Polish monk named Maximilian Maria Kolbe was murdered in Auschwitz. Kolbe's life had been remarkable. Fiercely intelligent and driven, he founded a movement of Catholicism and spent several years in Nagasaki, ministering to the 'hidden Christians' who had emerged after centuries of oppression. A Polish nationalist as well as a monk, he gave sanctuary to fleeing refugees and his death was no less remarkable: he volunteered to die, saving the life of a fellow prisoner. It was an act that profoundly transformed the lives of two Japanese men.

At one point or another, most of us have ruminated on the ultimate meaning of our lives. We may ask questions such as what is this life all about? What is my purpose, and how might I come to realize it? And what does my prayer and reception of the sacraments really do for me? In this illuminating audio series, Fr. David Meconi, S.J., award-winning professor of historical theology at Saint Louis University and director of the Catholic Studies Centre, helps listeners answer such questions in seven soul-searching conferences.