Blessed Charles of Austria

Feast date: Oct 21

St. Ursula and the Virgins of Cologne

Feast date: Oct 21

In the fourth century the pagan Saxons began to invade England, intent on destroying the Catholic Faith and violating the purity of all young English virgins. It was in the midst of this that a group of remarkable English girls fled from England to the Continent. This group included Saint Ursula and ten of her friends, each having a thousand companions, making their number 11,011 in all. However, in the year 383 Saint Ursula and her 11,010 companions were all found slaughtered for their purity and their Faith.

This great martyrdom occurred in Cologne, at Germany, and a shrine has been erected to them there, containing as may of their bones as could be rescued.  A Religious Order of nuns in the Catholic Church was established by Saint Angela Merici in honor of Saint Ursula in the year 1535. They are known as the Ursulines.

The Order of Ursulines, founded in 1535 by St. Angela de Merici, which is especially devoted to the education of young girls, has also helped to spread throughout the world the name and the cult of St. Ursula.

Saint Ursula is the patroness of Catholic education (especially of girls), Cologne, Germany, educators, holy death, schoolchildren, students, and teachers. She is often represented in art and icons as a maiden shot with arrows, with a clock, and is often accompanied by a number of other companions who are being martyred in assorted, often creative ways.

The parents of two sixth graders filed suit against the district “after their children were invited by teachers to a Gender and Sexuality Alliance meeting,” the Religion Clause blog reported. “After the meeting, one of the students decided that she was transgender and the other started to suffer from suicidal ideations. The parents claimed that the school’s policy of discouraging disclosure to parents of a child’s transgender status violates parents’ substantive due process rights.”

While declining to hear the appeal, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that “petitioners tell us that nearly 6,000 public schools have policies ... that purposefully interfere with parents’ access to critical information about their children’s gender identity choices and school personnel’s involvement in and influence on those choices.... The troubling—and tragic—allegations in this case underscore the great and growing national importance of the question.”

“Just as the Sacrament of Penance invites physical expressions of contrition—making the sign of the cross, performing a penance, offering restitution—so too do acts of reparation in communal life require gestures of sincerity, and concrete actions,” said the retired Chicago auxiliary bishop, who added:

Authentic reparation demands more than regret or distancing ourselves from past wrongs. It requires communal courage, sincere acknowledgment, and a willingness to ask forgiveness...

To confront racism, we must begin with reparation. We must name the sin, seek forgiveness, and commit to healing, and concrete actions to correct past wrongs and present-day inequities.

“The Holy See has long called for renewed efforts to strengthen the international legal framework for the prevention and punishment of crimes against humanity,” the prelate said at a recent UN meeting. Negotiations, he said, “must remain focused and constructive” and should focus “more on existing customary international law than on progressive development.”

“In this context, the Holy See supports maintaining the customary understanding of gender ... which refers to the two sexes, male and female,” the prelate continued. “This language does not exclude any person or group from protection; rather, it affirms that every human being, regardless of status or characteristic, must be safeguarded from persecution and violence.”

The award was presented “in recognition of his lifetime of service, his witness of faith, Christian love, interreligious dialogue, and his dedication to peace and reconciliation,” said Cardinal Kurt Koch, prefect of the Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity.

Vatican News noted that the future archbishop was “kidnapped in 2015 by ISIS terrorists and tortured in a bid to make him renounce his faith, even subjected to a staged execution.” He “endured five months of captivity without denying Christ.”

Usury can affect “those who have to face difficult moments, such as for instance extraordinary medical treatment or unexpected expenses beyond their means or those of their families,” Pope Leo said during the October 18 audience, which took place in Clementine Hall of the Apostolic Palace. “And [this] even happens at the level of countries around the world. Unfortunately, usurious financial systems can bring entire peoples to their knees.”

“When the pursuit of profit prevails, others are no longer people, they no longer have a face, they are just objects to be exploited; and so we end up losing ourselves and our souls.” the Pope added. “The conversion of those who engage in usury is just as important as closeness to those who suffer from usury.”

The center “is called to embody the desire of the entire Communion and Liberation Movement to stand alongside the Successor of Peter in his mission of proclaiming and bearing witness to Christ,” said Cardinal Farrell.

Citing the movement’s founder, the Servant of God Father Luigi Giussani (1922-2005), Cardinal Farrell said that Communion and Liberation “must regard the Church as ‘the place of authentic realism,’ as well as ‘the place of permanent criticism of every ideology.’”

Founded in 1954, Communion and Liberation was recognized as an international association of the faithful in 1982.

Pope Leo XIV has appointed Bishop Carlos Tomás Morel Diplán as coadjutor archbishop of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic—a massive archdiocese that retained 2.54 million Catholics after it was recently split in two.

“Every loss of a loved one, every destroyed city and village, leaves in our hearts an irreparable emptiness that nothing can fill,” said Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk. “The whole world witnesses Ukraine’s tragedy: some with awe, others with indifference; still others raise their hands in helplessness and turn our pain and suffering into material for media battles and manipulations, using it to polarize their own societies and gain political advantage.”

The prelate added:

Today our nation endures its own crucifixion before the eyes of the world community, and it seems to us that the Apostle Paul speaks precisely about us when he says: “We have become a spectacle to the world, to angels and to mortals” (cf. 1 Cor. 4:9). Yet the power and glory of the Lord’s Cross are revealed in our sufferings—and in our word of hope, both for Ukraine and from Ukraine, to contemporary humanity.