Catholicism: The Pivotal Players

Is there a more winsome and beguiling figure in the entire history of the Catholic Church than Francis of Assisi? Even for non-believers, Francis seems to sum up what is best in t...

Thomas Aquinas’ contribution to the Church and to Western culture in general has been so massive that it is exceedingly difficult to get a grip on him. He was a philosopher, a sci...

Catarina Benincasa, known to the world as Catherine of Siena, is one of the strangest and most intriguing of the church’s saints. An uneducated woman from an ordinary family, she...

John Henry Newman has been characterized as perhaps the greatest Catholic theologian since Thomas Aquinas, and he was undoubtedly one of the most important theological influencers...

Gilbert Keith Chesterton is one of the most sparkling and effervescent figures in the great Catholic tradition. A physically large man with an even larger intellect and imaginatio...

Called in his own lifetime il Divino, Michelangelo is generally regarded as the greatest artist that Western culture has produced. How wonderful that the subject matter of this mo...

St. Augustine of Hippo is possibly the best example of how faith in Christ changed a person. Born into a wealthy family with a Christian mother and a pagan father, Augustine lived...

Many would argue that St. Benedict of Nursia contributed more to saving western Christian culture than anyone else. Born just after Rome fell, Benedict founded the religious commu...

A brilliant academic, Catholic prelate, writer, evangelist, and television personality, Fulton J. Sheen was also a mesmerizing public speaker, endowed with extraordinary oratorical...

One of the quirkiest and most intriguing of all the Pivotal Players was a twentieth-century Catholic writer of fiction from the American South, a woman whose macabre, puzzling, and...

Christ demands a decision. Will we serve him or some other master? A soldier who became a mystic and eventually the founder of the Society of Jesus, commonly called the Jesuits....

From where does the cultural regard for human rights emerge? What informs the Church’s teaching concerning the dignity of the human person? This 16th century scholar who became a D...