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He ranked the schoolmasters below his own valet — then spent the rest of his life proving himself wrong. The canon who gave away a fortune, moved in with the men he despised, and accidentally invented the modern classroom.
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She nearly drowned at 7 and feared the sea all her life, then crossed it more than 20 times. Dom Bettinelli tells how Mother Cabrini turned 2 convents’ rejections and an archbishop’s “go home” into 67 institutions for immigrants.
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He walked 250 miles rather than ride a horse, and begged mercy for his friend’s killers. He also signed off on whippings. Dom Bettinelli doesn’t let either half of Junípero Serra’s record disappear.
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Stranded on a becalmed orange boat off Sicily, a sick Anglican clergyman wrote six lines that would outlive his career. Dom traces John Henry Newman’s path from Oxford star to disgraced convert to Doctor of the Church.
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Locked in a freezing Italian quarantine house with a dying husband, a young widow named Elizabeth started asking questions about the Eucharist. Dom Bettinelli traces her path from teenage despair to America’s first native-born saint.
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A cannonball ended his career at 30. Stuck in bed with a ruined leg, Iñigo López de Loyola noticed which daydreams left him empty and which left him happy. Dom Bettinelli traces how that one habit of attention built the Jesuits.
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He couldn’t stand the sight of a leper. The smell made him physically sick. Then one afternoon he got down off his horse and kissed one, and that was the day Francis of Assisi became a saint. Dom Bettinelli tells the story without the birdbath.
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He walked out of Rome at 17 and hid in a cave for three years. Dom Bettinelli traces Benedict of Nursia from Subiaco to Monte Cassino, where he wrote 73 chapters that have outlived the empire, the Lombards, the Saracens, and Allied bombs.
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A married fisherman walks off his boat, denies his Lord three times, and dies upside-down in Rome. Dom Bettinelli traces Simon Peter from the Sea of Galilee to the bones beneath St. Peter’s high altar. The saint who broke and was put back together.
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