Pius, the first of that name, the son of Rufinus, was from Aquilia, and was a priest of the holy Roman Church when he was made Supreme Pontiff.  He lived under the Emperors Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius.  He held five ordinations in the month of December, wherein he ordained twelve bishops and eighteen priests.  There remain several eminent ordinances of his, notably that which ruleth that the Resurrection of the Lord be not observed upon any day of the week save Sunday.  He turned the house of Pudens into a church, and on account of its eminence above the other churches, as being that where the Bishop of Rome dwelt, he dedicated it under the name of the Shepherd.  Here he often celebrated, and baptized and numbered among the faithful many converts to the faith.  While he strove to do the work of a good shepherd he shed his blood for his sheep, and for the chief Shepherd Christ.  He was crowned with martyrdom upon the 11th day of July, and buried upon the Vatican Hill.

Elisabeth, of the royal race of Aragon, was born in the year of Christ 1271, and it was an omen of her saintly life, that her father and mother, contrary to the usual custom, caused her to be baptized, not by the name of her mother or grandmother, but by that of her mother's aunt, the holy Lady Elisabeth of Thuringia.  As soon as ever she was born, her destiny of being a peacemaker between kings and kingdoms began to appear, for the joy of her birth put an end to the ruinous quarrels of her father and grandfather.  As she grew up, her father, delighted with her disposition, was used to foretell that his Elisabeth would in herself excel all the daughters of the kingly house of Aragon, and that the happiness of his own home and kingdom was all owing to this one damsel, whose heavenly life he venerated for her indifference to bodily finery, her abstinence from pleasures, her many fasts, her instancy in prayer to God, and her activity in doing works of charity.  This illustrious maiden was sought in marriage by many princes, and was wedded with Christian rites to Denis, King of Portugal.

As a wife, she gave herself up as much to the education of her children, as to her own improvement, striving in all ways, next to God, to please her husband.  For nearly half the year, she was used to live on bread and water, and once, when she was ill, God changed the water into wine, which the physicians had ordered her to drink, but which she was unwilling to take.  Once when she kissed a disgusting ulcer in a poor woman, it was immediately healed.  One winter-time when she was giving some money to the poor, and was fain her husband should not see her alms, the coins changed into roses.  She gave sight to a maiden who had been born blind, and healed many other persons of grievous sicknesses by the Sign of the Cross.  The miracles of this kind, which she worked, were many.  She not only built, but richly endowed convents, schools, and churches.  She had a wonderful skill in making peace between kings, and toiled unweariedly to lighten all suffering, whether public or private.

King Denis died and Elisabeth, who in her maidenhood had been a pattern to virgins, and in her married life to wives, now, in her loneliness, was an ensample to widows.  Clad in the raiment of the nuns of St. Clare, she faithfully attended at the King's funeral, and soon after went to Compostella, where she offered many precious gifts, of silk and gold, and silver, and precious stones, for the benefit of his soul.  Thence she returned home, and spent in holy and godly uses everything that remained to her that was dear and costly, eager to relieve every kind of suffering.  She lived, not for herself, but for God, and to be useful to mankind.  She finished the convent for nuns, right worthy of a Queen, which she had founded at Coïmbra.  She fed the poor, defended widows, protected orphans.  A war being lighted up, between her son Alphonsus IV, King of Portugal, and her grandson Alphonsus XI, King of Castile, she resolved to set out to reconcile them, and went to the famous city of Estremoz.  On the journey she caught a violent fever, of which, after a vision of the Virgin Mother of God, she died a saintly death on the 4th day of July, in the year 1336.  She became illustrious for miracles after her death, especially for the sweetness of the savour of her body, which hath now remained uncorrupt for well-nigh three hundred years, and she hath always been spoken of as the Holy Queen.  At length, in the year of our salvation 1625, which was that of the Jubilee, Urban VIII, all Christendom gathered together and approving, formally enrolled her name among those of the Saints.

The brethren Cyril and Methodius were born in an honourable position at Thessalonica.  As they advanced in years they went to Constantinople to study letters in the capital of the Eastern world.  Both made quick progress, but most chiefly Cyril, who gained such learning that he was called for excellency The Philosopher.  Methodius became a monk, but the Empress Theodora, on the recommendation of the Patriarch Ignatius, deemed Cyril worthy of receiving the task of teaching Christianity to the Khazar who dwelt beyond the Crimea.  By the grace of God he so taught them that they laid aside their many superstitions and were joined to Jesus Christ.  After properly establishing the new community of Christians Cyril hastened back to Constantinople, where he entered the monastery of Polychron, whither Methodius had already withdrawn himself.  Rastilaus, Prince of Moravia, having heard tell of the good deeds beyond the Crimea, sent to Constantinople to the Emperor Michael III to obtain some Gospel labourers.  Cyril and Methodius were sent to him, and gladly received in Moravia, and applied themselves with such power and industry to the work of Christianising souls that it was not long before that nation also joyfully submitted to Jesus Christ.  To this end Cyril found of great use the knowledge of the Slavonic language, which he had already acquired, and much effect was produced by the translation of holy Scripture which he made into the language of the people.  Cyril and Methodius were the inventors of the alphabet in which the language of the Slavs is characteristically expressed, and for this reason they have been not unjustly termed the fathers of Slavonic literature.

When the happy tidings of what they had done reached Rome, the Supreme Pontiff the holy Nicholas I, commanded these excellent brethren to come to Rome.  When they started for Rome they brought with them the relics of the supreme Pontiff the holy Clement I which Cyril had discovered at Cherson.  On hearing of their approach Adrian II, who had succeeded to the Papacy upon the death of Nicholas, went forth to meet them accompanied by the clergy and people with every sign of honour.  Then Cyril and Methodius gave to the Supreme Pontiff in the presence of the clergy an account of the Apostolic office which they had discharged in so holy and toilsome a manner.  When it was made blame to them by some enviers that they had used the Slavonic language for the purposes of public worship, they stated their reasons with such clearness and force that the Pontiff and clergy praised and approved them.  When they had both taken an oath that they would remain in the faith of blessed Peter and of the Roman Pontiffs, they were consecrated bishops by Adrian, but it was the Will of God that Cyril, old in grace rather than in years, should close his life at Rome.  His dead body received a public funeral, and was laid in the tomb which Adrian had built for himself, but it was afterwards brought to St. Clement's and buried hard by the ashes of that martyr.  As it was carried through the city with joyful psalm-singing, it seemed as though the procession were rather that of a triumph than that of a funeral, and that the Roman people were offering heavenly honour to some eminent saint.  Methodius went back to Moravia, and there became from his whole soul a pattern to his flock, and from day to day more zealous in the service of Catholicism.  He confirmed the Pannonians, the Bulgarians, and the Dalmatians in the Christian religion, and laboured much to bring the Corinthians to the worship of the one true God.

Methodius was again accused before John VIII, the successor of Adrian, of unsoundness in faith, and transgression of the traditions of the elders; he was summoned to Rome, and there easily proved, in the presence of John and of some Bishops and clergy of the city, that he had himself always firmly held the Catholic faith, and had carefully taught it to others, and that as regarded the use of the Slavonic language for public worship, he had acted lawfully from certain reasons, and the permission of Pope Adrian, and in nowise contrary to holy writ.  The Pontiff therefore in this matter concurred with Methodius, and confirmed even in writing his archiepiscopal authority and his mission among the Slavs.  Methodius therefore went back to Moravia and resumed more earnestly than before the task committed to him, for the which also he cheerfully suffered exile.  He converted the Prince of the Bohemians and his wife, and spread the Christian name far and wide among that people.  He carried the light of the Gospel into Poland, and according to some writers, after establishing the see of Lemberg, went into Muscovy properly so called and established the see of Kiev.  At the last he returned into Moravia, and when he felt that he was about to go the way of all flesh he named his own successor, exhorted the clergy and people for the last time to good living, and then calmly departed that life which had been to him a path to heaven.  As Rome had honoured Cyril in his death, so did Moravia honour Methodius.  The festival of these Saints, which had long been observed among the Slav nations, the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII observed to be kept throughout the Universal Church with a special office and Mass.

    Anthony Mary Zacharias was born of a noble family, at Cremona, on the Pau.  Even in his childhood marks of his future holiness became manifest.  There shone brightly in him, signs of excellent graces of childlike love toward God and the blessed Virgin, and more especially of tenderness toward the poor, for the relief of whose needs he was ready more than once to strip off his own costly dress.  He studied arts at his own home, philosophy at Ticino, and medicine at Padua, and as he excelled all others in goodness, so did he surpass all his companions in intellectual power.  After taking his degree he returned home, and there understood from God that his call was to the healing of souls rather than to that of bodies.  He therefore began earnestly to study theology while he continued in the meantime to visit the sick, to teach Christian doctrine to children, to excite godliness among the young, and oftentimes even to exhort the aged, to amend their ways.  It is said that when he first said Mass after his ordination a light broke from heaven, and he seemed to the astonished bystanders to be surrounded by a circle of angels: from that time forth he laboured more earnestly for the salvation of souls, and the struggle against evil living.  His fatherly love for strangers, for the needy, and for the afflicted, and the godly exhortations and alms wherewith he entertained them, made his house to become a refuge for the wretched, and earned for himself from his fellow-citizens the title of father of the fatherland of angels.

    While he was at Milan he bethought him that greater Christian good might be done if he gathered round him some fellow-labourers in the Lord's vineyard, and when he had conferred thereon with those noble and holy men Bartholomew Ferrári and James Morigia, he founded the brotherhood of Clerks Regulars, to whom on account of his own great love for the Apostle of the Gentiles he gave the name of Clerks of St. Paul.  Under the approbation of the Supreme Pontiff Clement VII and the confirmation of Paul III this brotherhood was in a short time widely spread abroad.  The Congregation of nuns who are called Angelicals also regard Anthony Mary as their Father and Founder.  His own thought of himself was so lowly that he never would be at the head of his own Order.  In great long-suffering he bore with patience the violent storms which were raised against his Institute.  In the greatness of his charity he never ceased to enkindle the members of religious orders to love toward God, to exhort priests to live Apostolic lives, and to found guilds of married men, to the bringing forth of much fruit.  Somewhiles he and his disciples would walk through the streets and squares with a Cross carried before them, and there by burning and vehement harangues call to salvation the wandering and the wicked.

    It is to be remembered that in his burning love for Jesus Crucified he reminded all men of the Mystery of the Cross by the sound of a bell every Friday evening, and himself as a true disciple of Paul always bore about in his body the dying of the Lord Jesus.  The holy Name of Christ is found everywhere in his writings and was ever in his mouth.  He was moved by a singular love toward the Holy Eucharist.  He established a custom of receiving it often, and is said to have brought in the practice of exposing the same upon a lofty throne for three days' adoration.  Of his earnest modesty the appearance of life which was seen even in his dead body seemed a witness.  Together with all these things he possessed the gifts of trance, of tears, of knowledge of things to come, of reading the thoughts of the heart, and of power against the enemy of mankind.  He was worn out with toil when he was seized with his last illness at Guastalla, whither he had been called as a peacemaker.  He was carried to Cremona amid the tears of his brethren and the embrace of his devoted mother, whose imminent death he foretold.  He was comforted by a vision of the Apostles above, and predicted the increase of his Brotherhood.  On the 5th day of July, in the year 1539, he died a holy death at the age of thirty-six.  Christians forthwith began to honour him for his eminent sanctity and the number of his signs and wonders, which honour the Supreme Pontiff Leo XIII approved and confirmed, and on the Feast of the Lord's Ascension in the year 1897 solemnly enrolled his name among those of the Saints.

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