St. Óscar Romero (El Salvador, 1917-1980, March 24)

Listen to the story of St. Óscar Romero while getting a behind-the-scenes view of the creation of his picture:

St. Martha Wang Luo Mande (China, 1802 -1861, July 29)

-Martha WAHNG lwoh MAHN-DEUH (“DEUH” like the French “de” or if you said “wonDERful” with a British accent)

St. Martha Wang Luo Mande mostly just did housework. She didn’t preach or write or pray for hours and hours. She was pretty ordinary. But it turns out Jesus can do amazing things with ordinary people.

Martha and her husband were farmers and the parents of two adopted sons. But having a lovely mother doesn’t always make you a lovely person, and Martha’s sons were not kind. They spent all her money and when they grew up, they left their mother’s house and didn’t come back, even though their dad had died and their mom was all alone.

So Martha began running an inn. She hosted guests, cleaned rooms, did laundry, and cooked—especially steamed buns. She was quiet and busy, and anyone would have expected that to be the whole story of Martha Wang.

But a missionary had come to town, and Martha was amazed to hear about Jesus, who wouldn’t abandon her, who would give her rest. On Christmas Day, she was baptized and given the name Martha, after a Saint who had also been hard-working and hospitable. Soon Martha moved to a town where there were more Christians, taking along a spear for the journey. “As long as there are only two or three bandits,” she said, “I can spear them like soybean paste.”

Martha became cook and laundress at a convent. Later she took care of children in a nursery school, loving them like they were her own. Finally, she was a cook at a seminary, feeding young men who were hoping to become priests.

People might have thought Martha was just a cook or just a cleaning lady, just a widow or just a quiet woman who never wanted much attention. But no person is unimportant and no work is unimportant. And when the government decided to ban Catholicism, Martha went to visit seminarians in prison. She brought them food and did their laundry, but she also smuggled letters in and out. And when they were finally sentenced to death, a soldier saw the quiet laundrywoman and tried to scare her by threatening to kill her, too. “Ah, well, that’s fine,” St. Martha Wang Luo Mande said, as simply as always. “If they can die, so can I.” And the ordinary lady who nobody much noticed became a martyr and a Saint.

St. Martha is wearing simple clothes as she prepares to go visit the prison, with a basket full of her famous steamed buns (and secret messages buried beneath them). She’s standing beside a traditional Chinese window. Propped in the corner are the broom she used in her housework and the spear she used to protect herself on her travels.

Bl. Benedict Daswa (South Africa, 1946-1990, February 1)

-BEN-uh-dict das-WAH

It’s awfully easy to care too much about what other people think. And when we do, sometimes we find ourselves doing things we never wanted to do, just so people won’t make fun of us.

Bl. Benedict Daswa didn’t have that problem. He did the right thing his whole life. Even when people made fun of him. Even when they killed him.

Benedict was born in a small village in South Africa. His family wasn’t Christian, but when Benedict was a teenager, he met a Catholic man and learned about Jesus for the first time. After hearing how God loved him and died for him, Benedict knew he had to become Catholic. It wasn’t easy, in a village where almost nobody was Catholic yet, but Benedict always did what he knew was right.

When he grew up, Benedict became a teacher, a soccer coach, and eventually a school principal. He got married and had eight children. He was a pretty ordinary dad.

Benedict also cooked and changed diapers. He did laundry and worked in the garden. He hugged his kids. That probably also sounds like ordinary dad stuff to you, but the people in Benedict’s village thought only women should do those things.

Do you think Benedict cared? Of course not! He loved his wife and he loved his kids and he wanted to serve them, whatever other people thought.

Benedict had bigger problems than just people saying ugly things about him, though. Many people in his tribe believed in witchcraft. They asked witches to help them and they blamed witches when things went wrong. And when they tried to make him give them money to find and kill a witch, Benedict refused. It was only about $2, but he knew it was wrong to kill people and he wasn’t willing to do evil just to make other people happy.

It didn’t just make them unhappy, though. It made them furious. They ambushed Benedict and killed him. And while his wife and his children were very, very sad, they were also very, very proud of how good and brave he had been. His whole life, Bl. Benedict Daswa had done what was right, no matter what other people said or did, and that made him a hero.

Bl. Benedict is holding one of his children in one arm and a soccer ball in the other. He’s wearing a tie, which he called “the rope of honor” and required of all his male teachers. He’s surrounded by fruit trees: bananas, mangoes, and oranges, all of which he grew so successfully that people actually accused him of using witchcraft.

St. Dulce Pontes (Brazil, 1914-1992, August 13)

-DUL-see POHN-cheess

You would think that a woman who broke the window of a crashed bus to pull a dozen people to safety before the bus burst into flames must be some sort of superhero, right? Well, I suppose she was—a superhero Sister whose powers helped save the poor.

St. Dulce Pontes didn’t set out to be a hero. She just wanted to help suffering people. So when she was young she told the poor they could come to her house if they needed a snack or a haircut or some medicine. Even when she became a Sister she didn’t have big plans to change the world. No, Sr. Dulce just wanted to do small things with great love. So she fed one child. Found a home for one family. Taught one man to read.

Pretty soon, all Sr. Dulce’s small things began to add up to some really big things. She started a school for the poor, an orphanage, and a nursing home. And she found homes for a lot of different people. The trouble was, the homes Sr. Dulce found weren’t exactly hers to give away and her friends kept getting kicked out. Sr. Dulce moved them from one abandoned building to another until she finally brought them all home to her convent. They lived in the chicken yard at first, but over time Sr. Dulce built up a whole hospital that’s still there today.

Sr. Dulce wasn’t very strong. She had a really hard time breathing. But she didn’t let that stop her. If she found a man on the street who was too weak to walk, Sr. Dulce would pick him up and carry him to her hospital. If she found children who were sad and lonely, she would play soccer with them or play her accordion. And when she saw that bus crash, she didn’t stop to think about herself. She just ran outside, broke the window, and started dragging people out. Sr. Dulce had become a hero without even noticing!

By the end of her life, everyone knew how wonderful Sr. Dulce was. Pope St. John Paul II came to visit her. So did the president of Brazil. She was even nominated for a Nobel Prize! And all because the little things she did built her up into a hero and a Saint.

St. Dulce is wearing the habit of the Missionaries of the Immaculate Conception. She’s visiting her young friends in a favela, a Brazilian shanty town that was built out of whatever discarded materials were available, even old tires. She brought her accordion to play for the people she was visiting and her soccer ball to play with them. The chickens remind us of the chicken yard that Sr. Dulce once turned into a hospital for the poor.