Experience the singing noise a medieval handcart makes as it trundles through the beautiful English landscape. No talking or explanation, just the landscape and atmosphere.
18 September 2026
Traditional Catholic Morning Prayers in English | September
Traditional Catholic morning prayers to help start your day in a holy way! The month of September is dedicated to the Seven Sorrows of Our Lady. I hope these prayers increase your devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary this month, to share in her sorrows and to and draw you closer to her Divine Son, Jesus Christ. Begin each day with morning prayer! This video is a compilation of many traditional evening prayers Catholics say, and should not be considered a replacement for those who have an obligation to pray the Divine Office morning prayers.
5 Anti-Catholic Myths Debunked by a Medieval Historian | Dr. Thomas Madden, PhD
From Matt Fradd
Professor of History, Dr Thomas Madden, is back to debunk common myths surrounding the Inquisition, Popes, and even the flat earth.
Are You a Klutz? St Joseph of Cupertino Is Your Saint!
St Joseph, whose Feast is today, was an Italian Conventual Franciscan who, according to contemporary accounts, was "remarkably unclever". He was ordained in 1625.
From Aleteia
By Philip Kosloski
St. Joseph of Cupertino was known to drop dishes, break pots and get into other blunders around the monastery.
While much is written about St. Joseph of Cupertino’s supernatural ability to levitate, outside of the chapel he was more prone to being a klutz.
He possessed an innocent and simple soul, but was not graceful in the kitchen. In many ways his simplicity made him childlike, not entirely aware of his surroundings.
Angelo Pastrovicchi relates this side of the saint’s life in his book, St. Joseph of Cupertino.
He was employed in the kitchen and refectory, but displayed a woeful lack of ability. At times he could not distinguish wheat bread from rye bread, often he broke dishes by letting them fall, upset pots in putting wood on the fire and committed other blunders of a similar nature.
Pastrovicchi explains that, “Some have ascribed this awkwardness to a defect of sight.” He could have also been born with an intellectual disability that would have been diagnosed differently in today’s medical environment.
Whatever the case is, many of us can relate to the experience of being a clumsy person, always getting into trouble for our inattentiveness.
The example of St. Joseph of Cupertino shows to us what truly matters in life. He may have not been perfect or graceful in his actions, but he possessed a truly simple soul, deeply in love with God.
It was his simplicity and humility that allowed God to work many miracles that astonished everyone. He never sought attention, fame or fortune. All he wanted was to serve God in the silence of his heart.
His example is inspiring and gives us hope, especially when it may seem that we can’t get anything right!
Abortion vs Reality
There are "ethicists", like Peter Singer, who argue that until true personality develops, around the age of 2 or 3, it should be legal to kill the child.
From Crisis
By Anthony Esolen, PhD
Abortion up to birth exposes the death cult that animates the pro-abortion movement.
Recent events in Massachusetts have put me in mind of one of the state’s most honorable sons, though now I am sure that both a majority of her people and a near unanimity of her politicians would wish he had never been born.
In the January 1859 issue of The North American Medico-Chirurgical Review, an article appeared which would be the first salvo in a campaign, soon to be led by the American Medical Association, to criminalize abortion in the United States. The author was Horatio Storer, M.D., a graduate of Harvard Medical School, taught by Quakers in his early years and as yet a Unitarian, though he would enter the Roman Catholic Church 20 years later. If you turn to the Wikipedia page on Dr. Storer, you will find almost nothing on his foundational work to establish gynecology as an important field of American medical study. You will find nothing at all about his Catholic faith, other than that he became a Catholic because of the Church’s strictness on the matter of abortion—an invidious and, I think, absurd reduction because Storer was a man of careful and precise thought.
You will find evil motives attributed everywhere, including racism, though Storer had been an abolitionist—we find him late in life writing to the city fathers of Newport, Rhode Island, where he lived, urging them to forbid the staging of the play The Birth of a Nation, whose purpose he said was to “fan the flames of race prejudice.” Dr. Storer pointed toward the source of the playwright’s ideas:
The real author [Thomas Dixon], a peculiar kind of clergyman, is through his reprehensible books The Clansman, The Leopard’s Spots, etc., said to have become a millionaire. Who can estimate the harm these have done to us all in a national way? Who can compute the mental suffering and the check to their enliftment they have caused to our colored brethren?
Storer goes on to recall that Newport had, only a few years before, forbidden a similar play and refused to buy Dixon’s books for its public library, thereby making some small but just gesture of reparation for the city’s central role in the old slave-and-rum trade, a part of her “old inglorious and most regrettable history.” And now, he says, “Every cent paid for admission would be to further encourage the worst negro hater in this country, and be a tribute to his prolonged defiance of all Christian precept.”
Storer was a moralist to the core. He opposed abortion because he saw that it was simply wrong. Here are the moral conclusions he arrives at in that 1859 article, after he has demonstrated by scientific fact that so-called “quickening” (the word means “coming to life” but refers to the time when the mother can feel the baby’s movement) corresponds to nothing important in fetal development:
We need not…consider that the movements of the fœtus in utero, and its consequent attitude and position, are signs of an already developed and decided sentience and will, nor is it requisite to suppose them the effect of an almost rational instinct. But that they are wholly independent of the will and the conscience of the mother, and…decidedly animal [that is, not vegetable] in their character; that they are not explainable by gravity…nor on any other supposition save that of a special and independent excito-motory system, distinct from that of the mother, brings us directly down to this—the existence of as distinct and independent a nervous centre, self-existing, self-acting, living.
We set aside all the speculations of metaphysicians regarding moral accountability of the fœtus, the “potential man,” and its “inanimate vitalities,” as useless as they are bewildering. If there be life, then also the existence, however undeveloped, of an intellectual, moral, and spiritual nature, the inalienable attribute of humanity, is implied.
If we have proved the existence of fœtal life before quickening has taken place or can take place, and by all analogy, and a close and conclusive process of induction, its commencement at the very beginning, at conception itself, we are compelled to believe unjustifiable abortion always a crime.
And now words fail. Of the mother, by consent or by her own hand, imbrued with her infant’s blood; of the equally guilty father, who counsels or allows the crime; of the wretches who by their wholesale murders far out-Herod Burke and Hare; of the public sentiment which palliates, pardons, and would even praise this so common violation of all law, human and divine, of all instinct, of all reason, all pity, all mercy, all love,—we leave those to speak who can.
And now we come to the present. Maura Healey, governor of Massachusetts and at least nominally a Roman Catholic, has signed into law a measure that would permit abortion up to the last tick of the clock before birth. As she did so, she was surrounded by beaming women, not one of them, apparently, thinking of the specifics of the deed and of the fellow human being made to suffer it.
Meanwhile, hundreds of cheering women showed up near the courthouse in Plymouth in support of Lindsay Clancy, who, after sending her husband out of the house to pick up some food for lunch, strangled her three small children. The erstwhile Mrs. Clancy’s defense was that she was suffering from postpartum psychosis.
Massachusetts law requires that the prosecution, against such a plea, prove beyond reasonable doubt that the accused was not insane. I do not know, practically, how that can be done, since it would require full knowledge of someone’s state of mind, inaccessible except to God alone. Be that as it may, why would you cheer someone who has done so ghastly a thing? Where is the sense of sobriety or even of terror before a deed so dark?
Dr. Storer attributed the commonness of abortion more to ignorance than to malice. People actually did believe that the child was not yet alive before the mother felt the baby’s flutter in the womb, for that is what the word “quickening” means, “becoming quick,” “becoming alive”—see the old phrase “the quick and the dead,” meaning “the living and the dead.” But Storer showed that that was biological nonsense. He assumed that once people knew that the child was alive—and a self-existing, self-acting, and developing human being—they would draw the inevitable moral conclusion: the child should not be murdered, which is what we call it when someone kills an innocent human being directly and intentionally.
But just as we have retreated from that high and clear moral sense, so we have deliberately fuddled the biology itself, resorting to scientific nonsense, calling the embryo a “clump of cells”—as if it were not a developing and unitary and complete organism at an early stage of development; or a “parasite”—as if it were an invader of a different species and not the healthy and natural result of reproductive action. Meanwhile, as the mood fits, we apply veils of scientistic and pseudo-intellectual gauze over what we do not want to see, making ourselves, especially in matters regarding human sexuality, deliberately stupid.
As always, the Church must stand up for reality. She might also try to remember that true nobility entails a high moral standard; low standards debase and corrupt. Mercy is for sinners, and since we are sinners all, we all need mercy.
But the moral law is what it is, independent of our opinions or feelings, which so often are but selfishness in fancy dress. For the sake of mankind, she must stand up for that law, which no one can violate with impunity—no more than can one ingest aconite and pretend that the poison will not have its effect regardless of what we call it.
St Joseph of Cupertino, Confessor
From Dom Prosper Guéranger's Liturgical Year:
While, in France, the rising spirit of Jansenism was driving God from the hearts of the people, a humble son of St. Francis, in Southern Italy, was showing how easily love may span the distance between earth and heaven. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself, said Our Lord (John 12:32); and time has proved it to be the most universal of his prophecies. On the feast of the holy Cross, we witnessed its truth, even in the domain of social and political claims. We shall experience it in our very bodies on the great day, when we shall be taken up in the clouds to meet Christ, into the air. (1 Thessalonians 4:16) But Joseph of Cupertino had experience of it without waiting for the resurrection: innumerable witnesses have borne testimony to his life of continual ecstasies, wherein he was frequently seen raised high in the air. And these facts took place in what men are pleased to call the noonday of history.
Let us read the account of him given by Holy Church.
Joseph was born of pious parents at Cupertino, a town of the Salentines in the diocese of Nardo, in the year of salvation one thousand six hundred and three. Prevented with the love of God, he spent his boyhood and youth in the greatest simplicity and innocence. The Virgin Mother of God delivered him from a long and painful malady, which he had borne with the greatest patience; whereupon he devoted himself entirely to works of piety and the practice of virtue. But God called him to something higher; and in order to attain to closer union with him, Joseph determined to enter the Seraphic Order. After several trials he obtained his desire, and was admitted among the Minor Conventuals in the convent called Grotella, first as a lay-brother, on account of his lack of learning; but afterwards, God so disposing, he was raised to the rank of a cleric. After making his solemn Vows he was ordained Priest, and began a new life of greater perfection. Utterly renouncing all earthly affections and everything of this world almost to the very necessaries of life, he afflicted his body with hairshirts, chains, disciplines, and every kind of austerity and penance; while he assiduously nourished his spirit with the sweetness of holy prayer, and the highest contemplation. By this means, the love of God, which had been poured out in his heart from his childhood, daily increased in a most wonderful manner.
His burning charity shone forth most remarkably in the sweet ecstasies which raised his soul to God, and the wonderful raptures he frequently experienced. Yet, marvelous to tell, however rapt he was in God, obedience would immediately recall him to the use of his senses. He was exceedingly zealous in the practice of obedience; and used to say that he was led by it like a blind man, and that he would rather die than disobey. He emulated the poverty of the seraphic patriarch to such a degree, that on his deathbed he could truthfully tell his superior he had nothing which, according to custom, he could relinquish. Thus dead to the world and to himself Joseph showed forth in his flesh the life of Jesus. While in others he perceived the vice of impurity by an evil odor, his own body exhaled a most sweet fragrance, a sign of the spotless purity which he preserved unsullied in spite of long and violent temptations from the devil. This victory he gained by strict custody of his senses, by continual mortification of the body, and especially by the protection of the most pure Virgin Mary, whom he called his Mother, and whom he venerated with tenderest affection as the sweetest of mothers, desiring to see her venerated by others, that they might, said he, together with her patronage, gain all good things.
Blessed Joseph’s solicitude in this respect sprang from his love for his neighbor, for he was consumed with zeal for souls, urging him to seek the salvation of all. His love embraced the poor, the sick, and all in affliction, whom he comforted as far as lay in his power, not excluding those who pursued him with reproaches and insults, and every kind of injury. He bore all this with the same patience, sweetness, and cheerfulness of countenance as were remarked in him when he was obliged frequently to change his residence, by the command of the Superiors of his Order, or of the holy Inquisition. People and princes admired his wonderful holiness and heavenly gifts; yet, such was his humility, that, thinking himself a great sinner, he earnestly besought God to remove from him his admirable gifts; while he begged men to cast his body after death in a place where his memory might utterly perish. But God, who exalts the humble, and who had richly adorned his servant during life with heavenly wisdom, prophecy, the reading of hearts, the grace of healing, and other gifts, also rendered his death precious and his sepulcher glorious. Joseph died at the place and time he had foretold, namely, at Osimo in Picenum, in the sixty-first year of his age. He was famous for miracles after his death; and was enrolled among the Blessed by Benedict XIV, and among the Saints by Clement XIII. Clement XIV, who was of the same Order, extended his Office and Mass to the universal Church.
While praising God for the marvelous gifts he bestowed on thee, we acknowledge that thy virtues were yet more wonderful. Otherwise, thy ecstasies would be regarded with suspicion by the Church, who usually withholds her judgment until long after the world has begun to admire and applaud. Obedience, patience, and charity, increasing under trial, were incontestable guarantees for the divine authorship of these marvels, which the enemy is sometimes permitted to mimic to a certain extent. Satan may raise a Simon Magus into the air: he cannot make a humble man. O worthy son of the seraph of Assisi, may we, after thy example, be raised up, not into the air, but into those regions of true light, where far above the earth and its passions, our life, like thine, may be hidden with Christ in God!
St Joseph of Cupertino – Proof God Chooses the Humble
A sermon for today. Please remember to say 3 Hail Marys for the Priest.
St Ferréol, Martyr
From Fr Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints:
ST. FERREOL was a tribune or colonel, lived at Vienne in Gaul, and was secretly a Christian. St. Julian of Brioude, a native of that city, and a person of high birth, lodged in his house, and made public profession of the Christian faith. When the persecution began to rage, St. Julian withdrew into Auvergne, and lay some time concealed in the house of a widow at Vinicelle near the town of Brioude, upon the banks of the Allier. Certain pursuivants having got information about him, the servant of Christ discovered himself to them, that the widow who had concealed him might not be brought into danger. The soldiers cut off his head upon the spot, and carried it back with them to Vienne that his execution might strike a terror into the rest of the Christians. Crispin, governor of that part of Gaul, caused St. Ferreol to be apprehended upon suspicion. Finding him refuse to offer sacrifice, he told him, that as he had the honor to serve his country in so eminent a station, it became him to set to others an example of obedience. The martyr answered: “I do not so much overrate the honors and riches which I enjoy. If I may be allowed to live and to serve God, I am well satisfied; if even this seem too much, I am willing to resign my life itself rather than to abandon my religion.” The judge commanded that he should be scourged, and then laid in the dungeon loaded with chains. On the third day after this, his chains fell off his hands and legs, and seeing the door of the prison open, and his guards asleep, he made his escape, and went out of the city by the gate which led to Lyons. He swam over the river Rhone, and was got as far as the river Geres which falls into the Rhone two leagues above Vienne, when he fell again into the hands of the persecutors, who tied his hands behind his back, and led him part of the way with them, till being seized with a sudden fit of savage cruelty, they cut off his head near the banks of the Rhone, about the year 304. The Christians of Vienne interred his body with great veneration near the same river, and the citizens experience his protection by frequent benefits which they receive from God, through the prayers which they put up at his tomb, says the author of his acts. The relics of St. Ferreol are kept in the great church which is built in his honor near the river, at Vienne: those of St. Julian are preserved in the stately church which bears his name at Brioude, in the diocess of Clermont in Auvergne. St. Julian is commemorated on the 28th of August. St. Mamertus, bishop of Vienne, discovered the head of St. Julian, about the year 474; and the first church of St. Ferreol, which was built over his tomb, out of the city, being in a ruinous condition, he about the same time translated his relics into a new church which he built within the walls, where it now stands. See the acts of St. Julian of Brioude, which were read in the church in the time of St. Gregory of Tours, whose second book, On the Glory of Martyrs, contains nothing but a history of miracles wrought by the merits of this glorious martyr. Their acts are published by Bosquet, Hist. de l’Eglise Gallic. t. 2, p. 176. The acts of St. Ferreol, though not original, are nevertheless authentic, and conformable to the relation given by St. Gregory of Tours,1. 2, de Glor. Mart. c. 1, &c. See these in Ruinart, Act. Sincer. p. 462. Ceillier, t. 3, p. 526. Tillem. t. 5, p. 282. These acts of St. Ferreol and those of St. Julian were written before St. Mamertus discovered St. Julian’s head, or had translated the relics of St. Ferreol into the city. The larger acts of St. Ferreol, which place his martyrdom at Brioude, published by du Sausay are of no authority. See Dom. Rivet, Hist. Lit. t. 2, pp. 420, 422.
St Joseph of Cupertino, Confessor
From Fr Alban Butler's Lives of the Saints:
JOSEPH DESA was born the 17th of June, 1603, at Cupertino, a small village of the diocess of Nardo, between Brindisi and Otranto, six miles from the coast of the gulf of Tarento. His parents were poor, but virtuous. His mother brought him up in great sentiments of piety; but treated him with great severity, punishing him frequently for the least fault, to inure him to an austere and penitential life. From his infancy he gave signs of an extraordinary fervor, and everything in him seemed to announce that he already tasted the sweets of heavenly consolations. He was very attentive to the divine service, and in an age when the love of pleasure is generally predominant, he wore a hair shirt, and mortified his body by divers austerities. He was bound apprentice to a shoemaker, which trade he applied himself to for some time.
When he was seventeen years of age he presented himself to be received amongst the Conventual Franciscans, where he had two uncles of distinction in the Order. He was nevertheless refused because he had not made his studies. All he could obtain was to be received amongst the Capuchins in quality of lay-brother; but after eight months he was dismissed as unequal to the duties of the Order. Far from being discouraged he persisted in his resolution of embracing a religious state. At length the Franciscans, moved with compassion, received him into their convent of Grotella, thus called from a subterraneous chapel dedicated to God under the invocation of the Blessed Virgin. This convent was situated near Cupertino. The saint having finished his novitiate with great fervor, he made his vows, and was received as lay-brother amongst the Oblates of the Third Order. Though employed in the meanest offices of the house, he performed them with the most perfect fidelity. He redoubled his fasts and austerities; he prayed continually, and slept only three hours every night. His humility, his sweetness, his love of mortification and penance, gained him so much veneration, that in a provincial chapter held at Altamura in 1625, it was resolved he should be admitted amongst the Religious of the Choir, that he might thus qualify himself for holy orders.
Joseph begged to go through a second novitiate, after which he separated himself more than ever from the company of men, to unite himself more closely to God by prayer and contemplation. He looked upon himself as a great sinner, and imagined it was through mere charity that the religious habit was given him. His patience made him bear in silence and with joy the severest rebukes for faults which he had not committed: and his obedience was such that he executed without delay the most difficult duties enjoined him. So many virtues rendered him the object of universal admiration. Being ordained priest in 1628, he celebrated his first mass with inexpressible sentiments of faith, of love and respect. He chose a retired cell that was dark and incommodious. He would often go to pray to the most unfrequented oratories, that he might give himself up more freely to contemplation. He divested himself of everything that was allowed him by his rule, and when he saw himself thus naked, he cried out, prostrate before his crucifix: “Behold me, O Lord, bereft of all earthly things: be thou, I beseech thee, my only good: I look upon every other thing as a real danger and as a loss to my soul.”
After having received the priesthood he passed five years without tasting bread or wine; during which time he lived only on herbs and dry fruits; and even the herbs that he ate on Fridays were so distasteful that only himself could use them. His fast in Lent was so rigorous that for seven years he took no nourishment but on Thursdays and Sundays, except the holy eucharist which he received every day. His countenance in the morning was extremely pale, but after the communion it became florid and lively. He had contracted such a habit of fasting, that his stomach could no longer bear any food. His desire of mortification made him invent different instruments of penance. During two years he suffered many interior trials which tormented him exceedingly; but to this storm a profound calm succeeded.
A report being spread that he had frequent raptures, and that many miracles were wrought by him, the people followed him in crowds as he was travelling through the province of Bari. A certain vicar-general was offended at it, and carried his complaints to the inquisitors of Naples. Joseph was ordered to appear; but the heads of his accusation being examined, he was declared innocent, and dismissed. He said mass at Naples in the church of St. Gregory the Armenian, which belonged to a monastery of Religious. The holy sacrifice being finished, he fell into an ecstasy, as many eye-witnesses attested in the process of his canonization.1 The inquisitors sent him to Rome to his general, who received him with harshness, and ordered him to retire to the convent of Assisium. Joseph was filled with joy at this news, on account of the great devotion he had to the holy founder of his Order. The guardian of Assisium treated him also with roughness. But his sanctity shone forth more and more: and persons of the highest distinction expressed an ardent desire to see him. He arrived at Assisium in 1639, and remained there thirteen years. At first he suffered many trials, both interior and exterior. His superior often called him hypocrite, and treated him with great rigor. On the other hand, God seemed to have abandoned him; his religious exercises were accompanied with a spiritual dryness that afflicted him exceedingly; the impure phantoms which his imagination represented to him, joined to the most terrible temptations, cast him into so deep a melancholy, that he scarce dare lift up his eyes. His general being informed of his situation, called him to Rome, and having kept him there three weeks, he sent him back to his convent of Assisium.
The saint, on his way to Rome, experienced a return of those heavenly consolations which had been withdrawn from him. At the name of God, of Jesus, or of Mary, he was, as it were, out of himself. He would often cry out: “Vouchsafe, O my God, to fill and possess all my heart. O that my soul was freed from the chains of the body, and united to Jesus Christ! Jesus, Jesus, draw me to yourself; I am not able to live any longer on the earth.” He was often heard to excite others to the love of God, and to say to them: “Love God; he in whom this love reigns, is rich, although he does not perceive it.” His raptures were as frequent as extraordinary. He had many, even in public, to which a great number of persons of the first quality were eye-witnesses, and the truth of which they afterward declared upon oath. Amongst those, John Frederick, duke of Brunswick and Hanover, was one. This prince, who was a Lutheran, was so struck with what he had seen, that he abjured his former tenets, and embraced the Catholic faith. Joseph had also a singular talent for converting the most obdurate sinners, and quieting the minds of such as labored under any trouble. He used to say to some scrupulous persons who came to consult him: “I neither like scruples nor melancholy; let your intention be right, and fear not.” He explained the most profound mysteries of our faith with the greatest clearness; and this sublime knowledge he owed to the intimate communication he had with God in prayer.
His prudence, which was remarkable in the conduct of souls, drew to him a great concourse of people, and even of cardinals and princes. He foretold to John Casimir, son of Sigismund III. king of Poland, that he would one day reign for the good of the people, and the sanctification of souls, and advised him not to engage in any religious Order. But this prince having afterward entered among the Jesuits, took the vows of the scholars of the society, and was made cardinal by pope Innocent X. in 1646. Joseph dissuaded him from the resolution he had taken of receiving holy orders. What the saint foretold came to pass; for, Uladislas, eldest son of Sigismund, dying in 1648, John Casimir was elected king of Poland; but after some time resigned his crown and retired into France, where he died in 1672. It was this prince who himself afterward disclosed all the circumstances of the fact which we have here related.
His miracles were not less remarkable than the other extraordinary favors he received from God. Many sick owed their recovery to his prayers. The saint falling sick of a fever at Osimo, the 10th of August, 1663, foretold that his last hour was near at hand. The day before his death he received the holy viaticum, and after it the extreme unction. He was heard often to repeat those aspirations of a heart inflamed with the love of God: “Oh! that my soul was freed from the shackles of my body, to be reunited to Jesus Christ! Praise and thanksgiving be to God! The will of God be done. Jesus crucified, receive my heart, and kindle in it the fire of your holy love.” He died the 18th of September, 1663, at the age of sixty years and three months. His body was exposed in the church, and the whole town came to visit it with respect; he was afterward buried in the chapel of the Conception. The heroism of his virtues being proved, and the truth of his miracles attested, he was beatified by Benedict XIV. in 1753, and canonized by Clement XIII. in 1767. Clement XIV. inserted his office in the Roman Breviary. See the Life of St. Joseph of Cupertino, written in Italian, by count Dominic Bernini in 1722, and dedicated to Innocent XIII. Agelli has given an abridgment of it in 1753, with an account of twenty-two new miracles. We have another abridgment of the life of this saint by Pastrovicchi, also in 1753. See also F. Suysken, Comment. et Not. p. 992.
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