12 Irish Saints and the Art They Left Behind
Ireland is called the land of saints and scholars, and it earned the title early. By the time the first…
Saint Patrick: The Slave Who Came Back
Saint Patrick was not Irish, and he did not choose Ireland. He was a Roman Briton, the son of a…
Saint Brigid of Kildare: The Saint, the Goddess and the Cross
Saint Brigid of Kildare is the only woman among the three patron saints of Ireland, and the only one about…
Saint Brendan the Navigator: Did an Irish Monk Reach America?
In the winter of 1976 a leather boat left Kerry, and eleven months later it reached Newfoundland. It had an…
Saint Columbanus: The Irish Monk Who Rebuilt Europe
Saint Columbanus was about fifty years old, and the senior teacher of the most important monastery in Ireland, when he…
15 Spanish Saints and the Painters Who Gave Them Their Faces
Spain has given the Church more canonised saints than almost any other nation, and it did something rarer still: it…
Teresa of Avila: The Mystic Who Was Also a Builder
Everyone knows the face Bernini gave her: head fallen back, mouth open, a marble nun undone by an angel with…
Francis Xavier: The Missionary Whose Body Refused to Decay
In February 1553 a burial party on a Chinese island dug up a crate they had packed with quicklime ten…
John of the Cross: The Poet Who Wrote His Masterpiece in a Prison Cell
On the night of 2 December 1577 a group of Carmelite friars broke into a small house in Avila and…
Ignatius of Loyola: The Cannonball That Made a Saint
On 20 May 1521 a cannonball came through the wall of the citadel at Pamplona, passed between Inigo de Loyola’s…