Doctor on Christian Saints

Teresa of Jesus

Thu, 15 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Incarnation

Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada was born in Ávila in 1515 to a family with converso ancestry on her father’s side, which she never mentioned. At seven she and her brother set out to be martyred by the Moors and were fetched back by an uncle. At twenty she entered the Carmelite convent of the Incarnation outside the city walls, a large, comfortable and relaxed house where nuns of good family kept servants and received visitors in the parlour. She was ill for years, once so gravely that a grave was dug, and by her own account spent nearly two decades in a divided life of prayer and sociability that satisfied neither.

Thérèse of the Child Jesus

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Alençon and Lisieux

Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin was the youngest of the nine children of Louis Martin, a watchmaker, and Zélie Guérin, a lacemaker, both of whom have since been canonised. Her mother died when she was four and the family moved to Lisieux. Two of her sisters entered the Carmel there before her, and she wanted to follow them at fourteen. Refused by the superior and the bishop, she asked Leo XIII himself at a general audience in Rome. She was allowed in at fifteen, in April 1888.

Jerome

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Rome and the desert

Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus was born about 347 at Stridon, on the border of Dalmatia and Pannonia, and educated in Rome under the grammarian Donatus. He was baptised there, formed the classical library he carried with him for the rest of his life, and went east. In the desert of Chalcis near Antioch he lived for some years as a hermit, learned Hebrew from a Jewish convert to distract himself from temptation, and had the dream he never forgot, in which a judge told him You are a Ciceronian, not a Christian. He was ordained priest at Antioch on condition that he would never have to serve a parish.

Hildegard of Bingen

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The tithe child

Hildegard was the tenth child of a noble family and was offered to the Church as a tithe. At eight she was placed with the anchoress Jutta at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, where the women’s cell grew into a small convent. She took vows in her teens and when Jutta died in 1136 the nuns elected Hildegard their superior. She had seen visions since she was three, she later wrote, but told almost no one.

John Chrysostom

Sun, 13 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Antioch

John was born in Antioch around 349 and raised by his widowed mother, Anthusa. He studied rhetoric under Libanius, the most famous pagan orator of the age, who is said to have wanted John as his successor if the Christians had not stolen him. After baptism he lived first as an ascetic in the mountains south of the city and then as a hermit in a cave, standing to read and barely sleeping, until his health broke and he came back to Antioch.

Gregory the Great

Thu, 03 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Prefect, monk, pope

Gregory was born around 540 into one of the last great senatorial families of Rome, a city that in his lifetime was besieged, flooded, and emptied by plague. He became Prefect of the City at about thirty, the highest civil office left, and then gave it up. He turned the family house on the Caelian Hill into a monastery dedicated to St Andrew, founded six more on the family estates in Sicily, and became a monk in his own foundation.

Augustine of Hippo

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0100

Thagaste, Carthage, Milan

Aurelius Augustinus was born in 354 at Thagaste in Numidia to Patricius, a pagan town councillor, and Monica, a Christian who followed her son across the Mediterranean and is a saint in her own right, kept the day before him. He studied rhetoric at Carthage, took a concubine who bore him a son, Adeodatus, and became a Manichee, attracted by a religion that explained evil without blaming God. He taught in Carthage, then Rome, then in 384 won the chair of rhetoric at Milan, the imperial capital, where he heard the preaching of Ambrose and read the Platonists.