Óscar Romero
OSCAR ROMERO was born in Ciudad Barrios, a town in the mountainous east of El Salvador, on 15th August 1917. He was the second of seven children. When he was thirteen he declared a vocation to the priesthood. He went to a seminary in San Miguel, then to the capital San Salvador, and from there…
Read MoreDorothy Kazel
Dorothy Kazel was born on June 30,1939, and joined the Ursuline Sisters, a teaching order in Cleveland, in 1960. Before entering religious life, she was engaged to be married. Feeling called to the life of a religious, she postponed her marriage in order to test her calling. She remained with the Ursulines until her death.…
Read MoreMaura Clarke
Sister Maura John Clarke was born Mary Elizabeth Clarke on January 13, 1931, the eldest of three children. Her parents, both born in Ireland, settled in Belle Harbour, Rockaway Beach, Queens, New York in the late 1920’s. It was in Manhattan that Maura, as we affectionately called her, was born. She entered Maryknoll in 1950,…
Read MoreIta Ford
Sister Ita Ford “I never said, ‘Help, or save me, or I’m drowning’,” Ita told her mother on a tape she sent home describing her close call with death on August 23rd 1980 in a flash flood which took her friend, Sister Carol Piette, M.M. “Something was happening and I said, ‘Receive me, Lord, I’m…
Read MorePeter Cartwright
Peter Cartwright was a man forged by the frontier, a plainspoken, passionate, and fiercely convicted man. Born on September 1, 1785, in Amherst County, Virginia, Cartwright came of age in the raw borderland of Logan County, Kentucky, where his family settled amid the hard edges of early American expansion. It was here, in the rough…
Read MoreAbraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln requires little introduction. Born in 1809 in Kentucky, he ascended from the obscurity of the frontier to the highest office in the land, navigating a path shaped by law, politics, and the sectional crisis of his time. As the 16th president of the United States, he bore the immense burden of leading the…
Read MoreGeorge Read
by Tim Scheiderer George Read is a founding father not known by many today, but during his lifetime, he was a man known by many for his integrity and generosity. He gave not only his time, but also his money to the creation of the new republic. He was also the brother-in-law of fellow signer,…
Read MoreJean Donovan
Jean Donovan was born on April 10, 1953. She was the younger of two children and raised in an upper middle class family in Westport, Connecticut. Her father, Raymond, was an executive engineer, and later chief of design, at the nearby Sikorsky Aircraft Division of the United Technologies, a large defense contractor for the U.S.…
Read MoreJim Elliot
Phillip James “Jim” Elliot (1927-1956), evangelical missionary martyr, was born in Portland, Oregon, one of four children born to a Plymouth Brethren evangelist and his wife, a chiropractor. A pious and forthright Christian from his grade school days onward, he enrolled at Wheaton College in Illinois in 1945. A leader in the school’s missionary league,…
Read MoreJohn Paul II
KAROL JÓZEF WOJTYŁA, elected Pope on 16 October 1978, was born in Wadowice, Poland, on 18 May 1920. He was the third of three children born to Karol Wojtyła and Emilia Kaczorowska, who died in 1929. His elder brother Edmund, a physician, died in 1932, and his father, Karol, a non-commissioned officer in the army,…
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