Today, September 23rd, is the feast of St. Pio of Pietrecina, my spiritual father and favourite saint.

As the day now approached on which she was to depart this life (which day Thou knewst, we did not), it fell out - Thou, as I believe, by Thy secret ways arranging it that she and I stood alone, leaning in a certain window, from which the garden of the house we occupied at Ostia could be seen; at which place, removed from the crowd, we were resting ourselves for the voyage, after the fatigues of a long journey.

Almost from the moment Jacques Maritain introduced himself to Raissa Oumansov they became inseparable.

When a true genius is born, nothing in the family or its circumstances allows us to predict the new arrival.