Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) was born to a family of German immigrants in New York City. When he was five, his father deserted the family. Because of the financial crisis this caused the family, his two older brothers left school and became apprenticed bakers. Young Isaac joined them in the family business. As a young man he had a mystical experience. This led him on a spiritual journey from the Methodist Church to Unitarianism, Mormonism, the Transcendentalist Community at Brook Farm, and finally to Catholicism at the age of twenty-five. This was a very countercultural move on his part as anti-Catholicism in America was at an all-time high. Shortly after becoming a Catholic, he felt a call to the priesthood and entered the Redemptorist Fathers. Isaac Hecker believed that Catholicism and Americanism were complimentary. If the Catholic Church could free itself from its European appearances, he thought, it could fulfill its ultimate mission: the conversion of America to Catholicism.

On March 11, the church celebrated the memorial of St. Martin of Tours (316?-397). Two parishes in the Archdiocese of Washington are named after him: St. Martin’s on North Capitol Street N.W. in Washington, D.C. and St. Martin’s in Gaithersburg. St. Martin was born of pagan parents in modern-day Hungary. His father was in the Roman army and at fifteen Martin followed in the footsteps of his father by joining the army. He became a catechumen a short time later and was baptized when he was eighteen. When he was twenty-three, he refused a bounty from the emperor Julian and said at the time, “I have served you as a soldier; now let me serve Christ. Give the bounty to those who are going to fight. But I am a soldier of Christ, and it is not lawful for me to fight.” For a while he was imprisoned but eventually discharged and went to be a disciple of St. Hilary of Poitiers.

Eusebio Kino was born in the principality of Trent in 1645. When he was twenty, he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) hoping to become a missionary in Asia. Instead, he was sent to New Spain where he was assigned to what was considered “the outskirts of Christendom”—an area comprising present day Sonoma in Mexico and southern Arizona. During the next twenty-four years he covered on horseback or on foot this very large territory, which was approximately twenty thousand square miles.

Saint Maria de Mathis founded the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in Italy in 1834. The vision for this new congregation was that the sisters should provide a reconciling presence among the poor. According to the Constitutions of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ each sister should be “a living image of that divine charity with which [Christ’s] blood was shed, and of which it was and is sign, expression, measure and pledge.”

Pierre Péteul was born on March 30, 1895. He served in the French army during the First World War. He was wounded at Verdun and received the distinction of five citations and the Croix de Guerre. After the war he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Friars where he received the religious name Marie-Benoît. He was sent to Rome where he earned a doctorate in theology. In 1940, he returned to France where he was stationed at Marseilles.

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Today, I want to present some thoughts on this important and relevant topic. “The number of women who are beaten and abused in their homes, even by their husbands is very, very high,” Pope Francis said in answer to a question by a woman named Giovanna, a victim of domestic violence .. “The problem is that, for me, it is almost satanic because it is taking advantage of a person who cannot defend herself, who can only [try to] block the blows,” he said. “It is humiliating. Very humiliating.” Giovanna said that she had four children to take care of after they escaped from a violent home. For women suffering abuse, help is available.

Dorothy Mae Stang was born in Dayton, Ohio on June 7, 1931. After she graduated from high school in 1948, she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Sr. Dorothy professed her final vows in 1956. From 1951 to 1966 she taught in Catholic elementary schools in Illinois and Arizona. In 1966 she volunteered to work in Brazil. Eventually she was drawn to the remote regions of the Amazon and the cause of poor farmers who were exploited and robbed by rich loggers and cattle barons. Because of her criticisms of illegal logging and her continual defense of poor farmers, her co-workers named her “the steel flower.”

Blessed James Miller was born in 1944 near Steven’s Point, Wisconsin. He was the oldest of five siblings of a farming family of which he was always proud. He loved farm work, but he started thinking about the priesthood as a high school student. The Christian Brothers who taught at the Catholic High School he was attending encouraged him to consider being a teaching brother. In 1959, at the age of 15, he joined the juniorate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers in Glencoe, Missouri. A juniorate is essentially a high school of boys thinking of a joining the religious congregation. The juniorate was also a self-sufficient farm that the students helped to run. After finishing high school, he entered the novitiate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers and then was sent to the University of Minnesota at Winona to study Spanish.

Bernard Francis Casey (nicknamed Barney) was born on November 25, 1870, in Oak Grove, Wisconsin. He was the sixth of sixteen children born to Irish immigrants Bernard James Casey and Ellen Elizabeth Murphy. He felt called to the priesthood after witnessing a drunken sailor stabbing a woman. First, he studied at the seminary for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Classes were taught there in either German or Latin—neither of which he knew because of his limited educational background. In time he was advised to consider a religious order if he wanted to pursue ordination to the priesthood. When he prayed about what he should do, he felt led to apply to the Capuchin Friars in Detroit. After entering the Capuchins in 1897, Barney Casey was given the religious name Solanus after Saint Francis Solanus (1549-1610), a Spanish Franciscan friar and missionary in South America.

Last Sunday Marcello Cardinal Semeraro, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, travelled to the village of Markowa, in southwestern Poland to preside at the beatification of an entire family: Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children. They were murdered because they had practiced the corporal work of mercy of sheltering the homeless.

I am continuing this series on Saints and Blesseds of the United States. This week I am featuring Blessed Stanley Francis Rother (1935-81) who has a special connection with my family. More on that below. Much of the material that I am presenting is taken from the website of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, his home diocese. Another useful source for this brief portrait of Blessed Stanley is an interview with his sister in the National Catholic Register.

Today’s column is devoted to Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich (1901-1927). Teresa Demjanovich was born to a Ruthenian family who had emigrated to New Jersey. She was a very intelligent young woman who graduated from high school at the age of 15. Although she wished to enter religious life, she delayed this to take care of her parents who were both terminally ill.

Rose Philippine Duchesne was born in Grenoble, France in 1769, in a well-to-do family. From her father she learned political skills and from her mother she learned a love for the poor. When she was nineteen, she entered the Visitation Order without asking her parents and remained in the convent despite parental opposition. While she was still a novice the French Revolution began. Convents, particularly of cloistered communities like the Visitation nuns, were suppressed. Even though she was forced to leave the convent, she began taking care of the poor and sick, opened a school for street urchins, and risked her life helping priests in the underground.

When I went on a pilgrimage to France in 2008, one of the places we visited was the Basilica of Sainte-Thérèse in Lisieux, France. One of the surprises of that visit to Lisieux was to see the statue there that had been donated by the Bishops of the United States. It was of Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini with the inscription on the statue as our first citizen saint. Here is the remarkable story of that valiant woman of God, Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini.

October 19th is the day when the Church in the United States celebrates the North American Martyrs. These eight Jesuit martyrs who were killed in North America between 1642 and 1649 were canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1930. I want to concentrate on three of these Jesuit martyrs as they were killed in what is now New York State: Saint Isacc Jogues, Saint Jean de Lalande and Saint René Goupil.

Msgr. Francis Glenn was Pastor of St. Paul Parish in Butler, PA for a quarter of a century. Msgr. Glenn was a great role model for me on how to be a wise and effective pastor. Over time I learned that he had been the Archivist for the Diocese of Pittsburgh and told me many stories about the Catholic Church in Western Pennsylvania. One day we talked about St. Peter’s Parish in Butler, which was known as the German church because this was where many Catholics from Germany worshiped on Sunday starting in the mid-nineteenth century. The transition to the use of English at St. Peter’s occurred sometime during the First World War. The German immigrants came to the United States because of the civil unrest and lack of opportunity in Germany after the Napoleonic Wars. One of these German couples, Thomas and Josephine Stehle, arrived in Butler in the 1830s. Thomas and Josephine are my great-great grandparents. Msgr. Glenn told me that it was a challenge to find German-speaking priests to minister to the congregation in Butler. At one point the Redemptorist Fathers were stationed at St. Philomena’s church in Pittsburgh took charge of the mission in Butler.

Anne-Thérèse Guérin was born in Etables, France on October 2, 1798. Her father, Laurent Guérin, was an officer in the French navy and was often away from the family for long periods of time. When Anne-Thérèse was fifteen, her father was murdered by bandits whom he encountered on his way home for a family visit. Isabelle Guérin, the mother of Anne-Thérèse, fell into deep depression as a result of the loss of her husband. Anne-Thérèse bore the responsibility of caring for her mother and her young sister as well as the family’s home and garden for the next ten years.

Statuary Hall is a chamber of the United States Capitol devoted to sculptures of prominent Americans. Of the many men and women honored by the fifty States in Statuary Hall, four of them are Catholic priests. Our saint for this week is one of those four priests represented in Statuary Hall: Saint Damien de Veuster of Molokai. Joseph de Veuster was born in Tremelo, Belgium in 1840 to a poor farmer and his wife. At the age of 13, he left school to help his parents on the farm. When he was nineteen, he entered the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary where he received Damien as his religious name. His older brother, Pamphile, was also a priest in this congregation. The Sacred Hearts Fathers agreed to provide pastoral care to the natives living on the Hawaiian Islands. Let me provide a little background to the pastoral situation the Sacred Hears Fathers were taking on.

We continue this series of columns on American Saints and Blesseds. Our Saint of the day: Saint Katharine Drexel. She was born in Philadelphia. Her father was an international banker and a member of one of the wealthiest families in the United States of America. Katharine had an excellent education through private tutors and traveled widely as a young woman. She learned the hard way that money could not buy safety from pain or death as she nursed her stepmother through a three-year-battle with a terminal illness.

In the liturgical calendar adapted for use in the United States, January 23 has been designated as the optional memorial of Saint Marianne Cope. Barbara Koob was born in Germany in 1838. Before she was two years old her family emigrated to the United States. At some point in time the family name was changed to Cope. Her family settled in Utica, New York where they became members of St. Joseph Parish. Barbara attended the local parish elementary school. After completing the eighth grade Barbara went to work in a textile factory to support her family.