Mary II was Queen of England, Scotland, and Ireland, co-reigning with her husband, William III and II, from 1689 until her death in 1694. She was also Princess of Orange following her marriage on 4 November 1677. Her joint reign with William over Britain is known as that of William and Mary.
Our Lady of Fátima is a Catholic title of Mary, mother of Jesus, based on the Marian apparitions reported in 1917 by three shepherd children at the Cova da Iria in Fátima, Portugal. The three children were Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto. José Alves Correia da Silva, Bishop of Leiria, declared the events worthy of belief on 13 October 1930.
Dorothy Day was an American journalist, social activist and anarchist who, after a bohemian youth, became a Catholic without abandoning her social and anarchist activism. She was perhaps the best-known political radical among American Catholics.
Philip Howard, 13th Earl of Arundel was an English nobleman. He was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970, as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Howard lived mainly during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I; he was charged with being a Catholic, quitting England without leave, and sharing in Jesuit plots. For this, he was sent to the Tower of London in 1585. Howard spent ten years in the Tower, until his death from dysentery.
The Mortara case was an Italian cause célèbre that captured the attention of much of Europe and North America in the 1850s and 1860s. It concerned the Papal States' seizure of a six-year-old boy named Edgardo Mortara from his Jewish family in Bologna, on the basis of a former servant's testimony that she had administered an emergency baptism to the boy when he fell ill as an infant. Mortara grew up as a Catholic under the protection of Pope Pius IX, who refused his parents' desperate pleas for his return. Mortara eventually became a priest. The domestic and international outrage against the Pontifical State's actions contributed to its downfall amid the unification of Italy.
Julie Billiart was a French nun, saint, educator, and founder of the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. She was born in Cuvilly, a village in Picardy, in northern France. She was paralyzed and bedridden for 22 years, but was well known for her prayer, her embroidery skills, and her education of both the poor and the nobility, especially her work with young girls. She had to flee Cuvilly after the start of the French Revolution and escaped to Compiègne, where the stress she experienced resulted in another illness that took away her ability to speak, and where she received a vision foretelling that she would found a new religious congregation that would eventually become the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. In 1794, she met the French noblewoman and nun, Françoise Blin de Bourdon, who became Billiart's co-founder and close associate, in Amiens.
Maria Teresa Goretti was an Italian virgin martyr of the Catholic Church, and one of the youngest saints to be canonized. She was born to a farming family. Her father died when she was nine, and the family had to share a house with another family, the Serenellis. She took over household duties while her mother and siblings worked in the fields.
The Three Secrets of Fátima are a series of apocalyptic visions and prophecies reportedly given to three young Portuguese shepherds, Lúcia Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto, by a Marian apparition, starting on 13 May 1917. The three children claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary six times between May and October 1917. The apparition is now popularly known as Our Lady of Fátima.
The Korean Martyrs were the victims of religious persecution against Catholics during the 19th century in Korea.
Rose Hawthorne Lathrop, OP, also known as Mother Mary Alphonsa, was an American Dominican, writer, social worker, and foundress of the Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne.
Alphonsa of the Immaculate Conception, FCC ; 19 August 1910 – 28 July 1946), was a nun in the Franciscan Clarist Congregation and an educator by profession. She was also known for being a victim soul, visionary and prophetess in the Kottayam pergunna of the erstwhile Travancore province of British India, in the present-day Kerala, India.
Anna Elisabeth "Anneliese" Michel was a German woman who underwent 67 Catholic exorcism rites during the year before her death. She died of malnutrition, for which her parents and priest were convicted of negligent homicide. She was diagnosed with epileptic psychosis and had a history of psychiatric treatment that proved ineffective.
Annibale Maria di Francia, RCJ was an Italian Catholic priest known for founding a series of orphanages, the Rogationist Fathers and the Daughters of Divine Zeal. He has been canonized as a saint and his feast day is 1 June.
Cornelia Connelly, SHCJ was an American-born educator who was the foundress of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, a Catholic religious institute. In 1846, she founded the first of many Holy Child schools, in England.
Margaret Clitherow was an English saint and martyr of the Roman Catholic Church, known as "the Pearl of York". She was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea to the charge of harbouring Catholic priests. She was canonised in 1970 by Pope Paul VI.
Anna Ivanovna Abrikosova, TOSD, later known as "Mother Catherine of Siena", was a Russian Greek-Catholic religious sister and literary translator, who died after more than a decade of solitary confinement as a prisoner of conscience in Joseph Stalin's concentration camps.
Edvige Carboni was an Italian Roman Catholic from Sardinia who relocated to Rome and became well known among the faithful and religious alike for her ecstasies and angelic visions. She recorded an extensive spiritual journal in which she recorded appearances from Jesus Christ as well as saints such as Gemma Galgani and John Bosco. Carboni also experienced demonic experiences and was said to have stigmata.
Satoko Kitahara – later known as Elisabeth Maria Kitahara – was a Japanese Roman Catholic. Kitahara was descended from aristocrats and samurai warriors; she worked in an airplane warehouse during World War II and became disillusioned after she and others learnt of Japanese atrocities during the conflict. She discovered Roman Catholicism and after a period of being exposed to churches decided to learn catechism so she could be baptized.
Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen, widely known as Sister Abraham and in Denmark as Søster Abraham, was a Danish nun, religious researcher and teacher. After becoming a Catholic nun in Sweden in the 1950s, she returned to study in Copenhagen but moved to Israel in 1965. After years of further study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, she earned a doctorate in 1991. In addition to her extensive understanding of theology, especially the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, she is remembered for her interest in iconography and for guiding pilgrims through the streets of Jerusalem.
