Catholic Fire

Today marks the feast day of Saint Teresa of Calcutta - a beautiful servant of God who is one of our most celebrated mothers and a universal symbol of God's merciful and preferential love for the poor and forgotten. She has been widely known as both a model of mercy and of charity. There is no one more renowned for practicing the heroic virtue of charity than Blessed Teresa of Calcutta! A diminutive figure, just under five feet tall, she gave every ounce of strength she had to care for the poorest of the poor with love, prayer, and all the gifts God had given her. Mother Teresa’s parents named her Agnes—or Gonxha in her own language. One of four children born to an Albanian chemist and his wife, Agnes had a comfortable childhood. However, when she was about eight years old, her father died suddenly, which left the family in financial straits.  At the age of twelve, Agnes felt called to religious life to help the sick and the poor, and by the age of fifteen, she had focuse...

July 6 marks the feast day of St. Maria Goretti, a young virgin and martyr, who is a model of purity and mercy for all. Maria Goretti was a peasant girl who was stabbed fourteen times, while fighting off a rapist. She died forgiving her killer. Maria Goretti was born on October 16, 1890, in Coranaldo in the province of Ancona in Italy, the third of seven children of Assunta and Luigi Goretti. When Maria was six, her father, realizing he could not support his growing family on the barren countryside, took them south, toward Rome, to a village near Anzio, believing that in the rich, warm farmlands of the Mediterranean he would find a more prosperous living and a make a better life for his family. In order to make ends meet, Maria’s father entered into partnership with a man called Serenelli, and shared a house with him and his two sons, one of whom was called Alessandro. Luigi was a hard worker, but suffering from malaria, typhus, meningitis and pneumonia, he died in 1900, leavi...