Josephine was born in a village in Sudan in 1869 and lived with her parents and four siblings. When she was 7 years old, she was picking flowers in a local field when she was snatched and kidnapped. Her abductors took her to a slave market and sold her like an animal to a rich Arab chief. He was a cruel man who beat her with a stick if she dropped anything or made a mistake. When he grew tired of her, he sold her again, this time to a Turkish General. The General’s wife insisted on Josephine being scarified like all of her slaves – a cruel and painful method of branding their bodies with permanent raised scars. Josephine was in agony for a long time while the wounds healed. She was eventually sold again, this time to an Italian family. They treated her with kindness and respect, allowing her to wear her traditional Sudanese dress, and they charged her with looking after their daughter Mimmina. When Mimmina was sent to boarding school in Venice, Josephine went with her to take care of her. The school was run by an order of nuns called The Daughters of Charity and with them, Josephine learned about God and the teachings of Jesus. She learned that Jesus asks us to forgive those who have wronged us. Despite all of the terrible things that had been done to her in her short life,

Josephine found forgiveness in her heart and she prayed for those who had stolen her away from her family, enslaved her and tortured her.

When Mimmina was leaving the school, Josephine was freed from slavery by the girl’s parents. She stayed in Venice, joined the religious Order and became a Daughter of Charity. St Josephine Bakhita spent the rest of her life helping the poor and hungry and teaching children to love another so that they could build a better, kinder world. She died in 1947 and was canonised in 2000.

St Bakhita is the Patron Saint of Modern-Day Slavery. This type of slavery still happens in the world today, when someone is forced to do a job and doesn’t get paid. We can pray to her for justice and freedom for these people. We can also pray to St Bakhita when we struggle to forgive others. She forgave those who kidnapped her and those who hurt her and she even prayed that God would show mercy to them.

Lawrence was born in  in 1594 in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, to a Chinese father and a Filipino mother. His father taught him Chinese and his mother taught him Tagalog. As a child, he served as an altar boy and went to a Dominican school where he was educated by friars. There, he learned to  write beautifully and, when he left school, he got a job as a calligrapher, copying the bible into beautiful manuscript. He married his childhood sweetheart, Rosario and they had three children. Their life was happy and peaceful.

Then one day, without warning, everything changed. Lawrence was falsely accused of murdering a Spanish nobleman. At that time, the Spanish army was in control of the Philippines so this was a serious crime and he knew that he would certainly face the death penalty.  The Dominican priests helped him to escape on a ship bound for Japan, where they were going to teach people about Jesus. He didn’t know when he would see his wife and children again.

But they were not safe in Japan. The authorities were determined not to let Christianity into their country and they threw Lawrence and the priests in prison. After two years, they were brought to trial and told that if they renounced Jesus, they would be set free.

When Lawrence refused, he was tortured and executed. Before he died, Lawrence announced, “I am a Catholic and I wholeheartedly accept death for God; if I had a thousand lives, I would offer all of them to Him.”

After his death, many Filipino people prayed to Lawrence to intercede to God for their intentions. More than 300 years later, in the 1980s, Pope John Paul II studied the miracles that had been reported by the people who prayed to him and he declared Lawrence a saint, beatifying him on a visit to the Philippines, and making him the first person in the history of the Catholic Church to be beatified outside of the Vatican in Rome.

St Lawrence Ruiz was canonised along with 15 other Christian martyrs in 1987. He is the first Filippino Saint of the Church and is the Patron Saint of the Philippines, Filipino Youth and of separated families.

John Henry Newman was born in London in 1801, the eldest of six children and his father was a banker in the City. They were financially well off, lived in a big house in Bloomsbury and he went to a very good school. They belonged to the Church of England and believed that this was the true church of Christ, so they didn’t have much time for Catholics.

When he was 24 years old, John was ordained an Anglican priest and became curate of St. Clement’s Church in Oxford. There, he made it his job to visit all his parishioners,
especially the sick and the poor. He soon also became a lecturer at Oxford University and started preaching at the University’s church, St. Mary the Virgin. John was amazed to see that the congregations started to grow as more and more people came to listen to his sermons. He taught people about the stories in the bible, but more importantly, he tried to help them to understand themselves and their relationship with God, because he believed that this is what really matters.

As the years passed, John began to change my mind about the Catholic faith and when he was 44, he left the Church of England and became a Catholic himself.  Two years later, he was ordained as a Catholic priest. He went to Dublin and set up a Catholic university (University College Dublin) which he ran for four years before returning to England.

Cardinal John Henry Newman died in Birmingham in 1890 at the age of 89 and his remains lie in a closed sarcophagus at the oratory there.

He said that, if we let God into our heart, He will stay there and persuade our heart
and change it. In Latin, he wrote this as, “Cor ad cor loquitur” – the heart speak to the heart.

He said that when we allow God’s heart to speak to our heart, we can show love to
others without expecting anything in return  – without them even knowing that we have done something for them out of love.

John Henry Newman also taught that we must always be searching for the truth. In his own life, he walked away from his childhood religion and from a job that he loved as an Anglican vicar because he came to believe that the Catholic faith was his true faith.

Carndinal Newman was made a saint by Pope Francis on 13th October 2019. He is the first English person who has lived since the 17th century officially to be recognised as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

St John Henry Newman is the Patron Saint of students and of everyone who seeks the truth.

Mary’s parents were both born and raised in Scotland before emigrating to Australia, where they met and married.  Mary was born in 1842, the eldest of eight children. The children were home schooled, and life was good until her father ran into trouble with his business and lost everything he had built. Feeling like a ruined man, he became ill and left the family to return to Scotland. Mary helped her mother look after the little ones. She took a job to feed and clothe them and to keep a roof over their heads. When she was 18 years old, a rich Aunt and Uncle sent for her to be governess to their children. Mary was happy to do this, but she was shocked to find that the neighbourhood where they lived was full of poor, native Aboriginal families whose children had no access to education. Mary decided to help, and after finishing lessons with her little cousins each day, she invited the local children to a makeshift classroom where she taught them to read and write.

One day, she met a young priest called Fr Julian Wood. He was in charge of a large, rural community and the Bishop had asked him to set up a Catholic school there. At that time, there were no Catholic teachers so he decided to found a new Religious Order of nuns who would be trained to teach the poor children in his new Catholic school and he asked Mary to help him. She agreed, and at the age of 24 years old, Mary became the very first Sister of the Order of St Joseph. Two of her siblings joined her and soon they were running a busy school. If children could pay, they used this money to buy books and pens. If they could not, they attended for free. The poorest children didn’t even have shoes or suitable clothes, and so Mary dressed them. In addition to other lessons, the nuns taught the children about the Catholic faith, but they welcomed students of all faiths and none.

At the age of 27 years old, Mary was ordained a nun in the new teaching Order of St Joseph, where the vows were simple:

1. Live poorly and own nothing
2. Go wherever you are sent.
3. Do good whenever you can and never see an evil without trying to remedy it.

She chose as her religious name St Mary of the Cross, saying, “Although I knew that I could not deserve this name, I promised that, at least,  I would try never to disgrace it.”

The Bishop was so delighted with the success of the school that he asked Fr Wood to set up more like this in parts of Australia and the priest, in turn, called upon Mary once more. This time, he asked her to set up a teacher training college in Adelaide.

Soon, the Order had grown to include 82 Sisters, managing 23 schools, an orphanage, a refuge for women who needed a safe place to stay and a House of Providence for homeless women.

The Order of St Joseph continued to grow and spread across Australia, with St Mary of the Cross leading them as Mother Superior. She devoted her life to supporting the nuns who joined her, training and supporting them to become teachers and to care for the poor and vulnerable. In her late 50s, she suffered a major stroke and spent the rest of her life in a wheelchair, but she continued to support and guide those around her.

Sister Mary died in 1909 at the age of 67 and she was canonised as St Mary of the Cross in 2010. St Mary is the Patron Saint of Australia and her feast day is celebrated each year in the Archdiocese of Brisbane. We can pray to her to support teachers and all those who are poor and vulnerable.

Thérèse was born in France, the youngest of nine children and her mother died when she was only 4 years old. She became a very angry child who couldn’t control her temper and she threw terrible tantrums.  At school, she was so far ahead of the class that, when she was 8 years old, she was put into a class with 14-year-olds. She didn’t have any friends and she continued to be very angry. Around this time, two of her sisters joined the local Carmelite Order of nuns and she decided that she wanted to be a nun too. The Mother Superior told her that she was too young, so she went to speak to the Bishop. He agreed with the Mother Superior, so she begged her father to take her to Rome to ask the Pope. The Pope told her that, if God wanted it, she would be allowed to join – but he refused to get involved. Thérèse had a tantrum on the floor in front of the Pope!

The next year, at the young age of 15, she was allowed to join the Carmelites. It was a difficult life. She spent hours every day praying and wasn’t allowed to talk to anyone except for short set periods. She continued to be irritated by lots of things, but she prayed to God to help her and she learned to control her temper and be tolerant of others, offering up these sacrifices to God. As well as her daily chores and prayers,  Thérèse made time every day to write  her memoirs in the convent, sharing her story and her understanding of God’s love. She called the book, “The Story of a Soul” and, in it, she said, “Remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do all that you do with love”. She also said, "The value of life does not depend upon the place we occupy; it depends upon the way we occupy that place.”

After nine years in the convent, Thérèse contracted tuberculosis and she died at the young age of 24. Her book was published and has become an important text for Christians all over the world in understanding what God asks of us and how He can help us. St Thérèse of Lisieux was canonised in Rome in 1925 by Pope Pius XI and she was made a Doctor of the Church in 1987 by Pope John Paul II. In giving her this great honour, Pope John Paul II said, “Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face is the youngest of all the Doctors of the Church, but her ardent spiritual journey shows such maturity, and the insights of faith expressed in her writings are so vast and profound that they deserve a place among the great spiritual masters.”  Before she died, St Thérèse promised to spend her heaven helping those on earth. We only have to ask.

St Thérèse of Lisieux is the Patron Saint of those who have lost their parents and of everyone who is sick.

Martin was born in 1579 in Lima, the capital city of Peru, at a time when his country was part of the Spanish Empire. He lived with his mother and his little sister Juana, who was two years younger than him. Martin’s father, Don Juan de Porres y de la Peña, was a Spanish nobleman and a soldier of the King. He left them when Martin was very young and wasn’t around much during this childhood. Martin’s mother, Ana Velasquez, was a freed slave of African and native Peruvian descent and she was mostly a single mother who had to work hard to keep a roof over their heads and to look after her children. At that time in Peru, black people were seen as being worth less than white people and his father was ashamed of Martin and his sister because of their mixed-race skin colour.

Martin told his sister that it’s not the colour of our skin that matters, but the colour of our souls.  He told her to trust God and that they must never feel sorry for themselves because they were poor and their father had left them.

Even though he was very poor, Martin was surrounded by people who were even poorer than his family, and he couldn’t help sharing his food with those around him.

Then, when he was 10 years old, a miracle happened! Martin’s father came back and told Martin and Juana that he loved them and that he was sorry he had abandoned them. He offered to pay for his son’s education and Martin told him that he wanted to be a doctor.

For the next five years, Martin worked as an apprentice to the town’s doctor, learning all about curing the sick. But when he was 15, he realised that this was not what he should do with his life after all. Instead, he went to the Dominican Monastery and asked if he could help them – not as a priest or a Brother, but simply as a helper. He did the jobs that no one else wanted to do and offered all of his work up to God. After a few years, he was asked to use his medical training to care for the sick.  

One day, he was asked to put down poison to kill the mice which had got into the church and nibbled through the altar cloths… but Martin couldn’t do it because he knew that they were innocent, hungry animals and that they were God’s creatures.

Instead, he spoke to one of the mice and explained that, if he would take all of his friends outside, that he would make sure that they always had food. The mice left and Martin kept his promise.

Martin de Porres eventually founded orphanages for homeless children and cared for lonely African slaves who had been forced to come to Lima. He gave shirts to those who had no clothes; bread to those who had no food and shelter to those who had no homes.

Martin de Porres died on 3^rd November 1639.  He was canonized more than 300 years later on 6^th May 1962 an he is the Patron Saint of mixed-race people and of anyone who faces discrimination.