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A universal brother, in search of God’s plan for him, he fell in love with Christ and with humanity, living the Gospel among the little ones and the least of the earth. This is Saint Charles de Foucauld, born in Strasbourg on 15 September 1858. Left an orphan while still a child, he was welcomed and raised by his grandfather. The outbreak of the 1870 war forced the family to move to Nancy, where Charles continued his secondary studies.
The Gospels present Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, as one of the two disciples of John the Baptist, who followed Jesus from the very beginning (Jn 1:35-39). He was born in Bethsaida in Galilee, on the shores of Lake Tiberias. He was a fisherman like his brother Simon (Peter). On his search for God, he became a disciple of John the Baptist, who baptized him. When John the Baptist pointed to Jesus as the “Lamb of God” (Jn 1:29-40) on the River Jordan, he immediately followed the Teacher and never left him.
The main information about the life of Saturninus comes from the Passio Saturnini, an anonymous text written around the mid-5th century—therefore composed roughly two hundred years after his martyrdom. According to this account, Saturninus arrived from Africa and reached Toulouse around the year 250, during the consulate of Decius and Gratus, where he was chosen as leader of the local Christian community.
Saint James of the Marches, born Domenico Gangale on September 1, 1393, in Monteprandone in the Ascoli region of Italy, spent his youth devoted to study. He first attended school in Ascoli Piceno, then the University of Perugia, where he earned degrees in both civil and canon law.
Virgil, born in Ireland in the 8th century, belonged to the tradition of itinerant monks who left their homeland to undertake long religious pilgrimages. Setting out around 743 with the intention of reaching Palestine, he interrupted his journey.
Paolo Girolamo Casanova, better known as Saint Leonard of Porto Maurizio, was born in Porto Maurizio—today’s Imperia—on 20 December 1676. At a very young age he moved to Rome to complete his studies at the Roman College and, fascinated by the austere life of two friars at the Retreat of San Bonaventura on the Palatine Hill, decided to enter the Order of Friars Minor at the age of twenty-one, taking the Franciscan habit in the convent of Santa Maria in Ponticelli.
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