NFP Saved My Health—Naturally!

by Brooke Paris Foley

When only seventeen, I experienced my period every other week. My greatly concerned mother took me to see her gynecologist who promptly prescribed the birth control pill. This, the doctor did, though she performed no tests to discover why the frequent menses.

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Saint Maria Goretti: Virgin, Martyr, Patroness of Youth

Fresco in the Church of Saint Nicholas in Valencia, of Saint Maria Goretti (1890 – 1902)

If we could have traveled to a poor sharecropping farm in central Italy early in the 20th century, we would have seen a humble building – formerly a cheese factory – sheltering two families of tenant farmers.

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Hearts of Jesus and Mary: Unfathomable Depths of Love

The heart that resembles that of Christ more than any other is without a doubt the Heart of Mary, His Immaculate Mother, and for this very reason the liturgy holds them up together for our veneration” (Pope Benedict XVI).

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Anthony of Padua ~ Saint of the Golden Tongue

Saint Anthony of Padua (1195 – 1231), whose feast we celebrate on June 13th, enjoys popular renown, of course, as the patron saint of finding lost articles. Two lesser-known facts about him, however, are that he was Portuguese and not Italian by birth, and that he began his life in religion as an Augustinian, not as a Franciscan friar.

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Our Lady at Pentecost ~ Prayer Personified

When they entered the city, they went to the upper room where they were staying, Peter and John and James and Andrew, Philip and Thomas, Bartholomew and Matthew, James son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, and Judas son of James. All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers” (Acts 1:13 – 14).

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The Holy Spirit and Mary: Lessons for Pentecost

by Kathleen Beckman

She, who at the start of the Redemption gave us her Son, now by her most powerful intercession obtained for the newborn Church the prodigious Pentecostal outpouring of the Spirit of the Divine Redeemer who had already been given on the Cross. Pius XII, Mystici Corporis, 29 June 1943

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