(Feast Day ~ July 23) St. John Cassian (or St. Cassian, as he is sometimes called) was born around 360 in Marseille. Having heard of the great desert monks in the Middle East, John and a friend, Germain, traveled to Bethlehem to join a monastery and learn the ascetic life. There, stories of the great […]

(Feast Day ~ July 20) St. Margaret (or Marina) of Antioch is one of the martyr/saints of the early Church who became well-known throughout the world. Although she was undoubtedly a historical figure, the details of her life have been much embellished through the centuries and from place to place. The basic facts of her […]

(Feast Day ~ July 20) It would seem that Christianity has come full circle. For the first three centuries following the death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, Christians were frequently persecuted – either blatantly and openly or through more subtle forms – and sometimes tortured or even executed, simply because they were followers […]

Feast Day ~ July 16 The Church’s calendar of saints provides us with wonderful examples of those who lived according to the teachings given to us in the Holy Scriptures. St. Julia of Carthage is one who was able to courageously face a life of slavery and the death of a martyr by following those […]

Feast Day ~ July 10 Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes, and I shall keep it unto the end. Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall keep it with my whole heart. [Ps. 119:33, 34] The thirst for knowledge is often very great, and when that thirst […]

Feast Day ~ July 8 We have heard this story before: a well-educated young man of noble birth decides to reject the family wealth and political aspirations and become a monk. Then, after years of prayer, fasting, meditation, and study of Holy Scripture he feels moved to leave the familiarity of his native land and […]

(Feast Day ~ July 5) Christianity has always been a family affair: as St. Andrew, who told his brother Simon (Peter) about Jesus, and the brothers James and John were among the leaders of the early Church, this sibling sharing of the Christian life continued with the holy unmercenaries Ss. Cosmas and Damian, with the […]

(Feast Day ~ July 5) In this turned-upside-down world of ours, God sometimes provides us with examples of holiness in seemingly unlikely places. We are given a saint – an advocate in Heaven – whose path to sanctity was unusual. The household of a German Grand Duke and his wife, a princess, would rarely be […]

Feast day ~ July 3 We are reminded many times in Holy Scripture and in the witness of the saints that the Christian way of life is for all people and that God makes no distinctions among his children. There is neither rich nor poor, high or low estate, “neither slave nor free, there is […]

Feast Day ~ July 2 Michael, the son of Boris and Glafira Maximovitch, who was born in 1896 (in a village in what is now Ukraine), had several reasons to live a life of bitterness and sorrow. The first reason was ill health. Michael was sickly from birth, suffering from digestive difficulties. But the limits […]