In this episode of Everyday Saints, a Catholic podcast about the real lives of the saints, host John O'Connor tells the story of St. Paul — one of the most recognizable names in all of Christianity, and one of the most misunderstood.

Before he wrote half the New Testament, he was dragging Christians out of their homes and throwing them in prison. He stood and watched the first Christian martyr get stoned to death — and approved.

Then a blinding light knocked him off his feet on a road outside Damascus. And everything changed.

What you'll hear in this episode:
— Who Saul of Tarsus actually was before Damascus — and why he was so dangerous
— The three days of blindness — and what was really happening in that darkness
— Why nobody in the early Church trusted him at first — and what changed that
— Thirty years of beatings, shipwrecks, imprisonments, and still going
— The letters that shaped Western civilization — written from prison
— How the man who watched Christians die ended up dying as one
— What Paul's story says about the energy you have been using in the wrong direction

Everyday Saints is a weekly Catholic podcast telling the real, human stories of the saints in plain language — for regular people with real jobs, real doubts, and real lives. No theology degree required.

New episodes every Thursday.

Host: John O'Connor

In this episode of Everyday Saints, a Catholic podcast about the real lives of the saints, host John O'Connor tells the story of St. Margaret of Castello — one of the newest saints in the Catholic Church, canonized by Pope Francis in 2021, and one of the most overlooked.

She was born blind, severely disabled, and a dwarf. Her own wealthy parents were so ashamed of her that they sealed her into a small room beside a chapel when she was six years old. When a pilgrimage they took her on didn't produce the miracle they were hoping for — they left her there. In a city she had never been to. Among people she did not know.

What she became in the years after that moment is one of the most unexpected things you will ever hear.

What you'll hear in this episode:
— The child born into privilege who was hidden from the world
— A decade sealed in a stone cell — and what she built inside it
— The pilgrimage, the missing miracle, and the moment her parents walked away
— The poor people of Castello who took her in — and what they found
— The nuns who couldn't handle her — and why
— The joy that made no sense given everything she had been through
— What Margaret's story says about the condition you have placed on your own peace

St. Margaret of Castello is the patron saint of the unwanted, the disabled, the abandoned, and the homeless. Her incorrupt body still lies beneath the altar of Saint Dominic's Church in Città di Castello, Italy — seven hundred years after her death.

Everyday Saints is a weekly Catholic podcast telling the real, human stories of the saints in plain language — for regular people with real jobs, real doubts, and real lives. No theology degree required.

New episodes every Thursday.

Host: John O'Connor

In this episode of Everyday Saints, a Catholic podcast about the real lives of the saints, host John O'Connor tells the story of St. Thomas Aquinas — and it is nothing like what you learned in school.

His own brothers kidnapped him. His family locked him in a tower for a year to stop him from becoming a friar. They sent a woman into his cell to break his vows. And none of it worked.

The man who came out the other side wrote one of the most influential works in the history of Western thought — and then stopped writing completely after a single mystical experience, calling everything he had ever written "straw."

You have been shaped by this man's mind your whole life. You almost certainly didn't know his name.

What you'll hear in this episode:
— Born into nobility: what his family actually wanted for him
— The Dominican friars who changed everything — and what his family did to stop it
— A year locked in a tower by his own brothers
— The "Dumb Ox" who made the whole world bellow
— The Summa Theologica — and why he suddenly stopped writing it
— "All I have written seems like straw" — what that means for everything you are building
— What Thomas Aquinas is quietly asking you today

Everyday Saints is a weekly Catholic podcast telling the real, human stories of the saints in plain language — for regular people with real jobs, real doubts, and real lives. No theology degree required.

New episodes every Thursday.

Host: John O'Connor