Saints pictures and biography
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St. Clare of Assisi was born into the nobility of Assisi on July 16, 1194. She was known by members of her household to be a sensitive child, prayerful and kind. After hearing St. Francis preach, she confided in him her desire to live for God. On the evening of Palm Sunday, in the year 1212, Clare secretly left her stately home with her cousin Pacifica, and never returned. In the Church of ‘Our Lady of the Angels’, Francis, clothed Clare in sackcloth and cut off her hair, signaling her renunciation of the world. She took the veil of religious life from Francis and from that moment vowed to live her life entirely in the service of Jesus, her heavenly spouse.
St. Clare followed her path unwaveringly, adopting the rule of St. Benedict tempered with Francis’s preaching of poverty. She soon gathered a large female following at San Damiano and Francis urged her to set up a convent there. She did so and became abbess of the new community known as the Poor Clares. Clare’s mother and sister
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Biography of Saint Maximilian Kolbe
Saint Maximilian Kolbe was a Polish Conventual Franciscan Friar. During the German occupation of Poland, he remained at Niepokalanów a monastery which published a number of anti-Nazi German publications. In 1941, he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where in terrible circumstances he continued to work as a priest and offer solace to fellow inmates. When the Nazi guards selected 10 people to be starved to death in punishment, Kolbe volunteered to die in place of a stranger. He was later canonised as a martyr.
Early Life
Raymund Kolbe was born on 8 January 1894 In Zdunska Wola, in the Kingdom of Poland (then part of the Russian Empire). His father was an ethnic German and his mother Polish. His parents were relatively poor, and in 1914 his father was captured by the Russians and hanged for his part in fighting for an independent Poland.
Raymund developed a strong religious yearning from an early life. He recounts an early childhood v
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