Most popular Catholic Female Saints

Saint Therese of Lisieux
"If God grants my desires, my Heaven will be spent on earth until the end of time. Yes , I will spend my Heaven doing good on earth... I will return! I will come down!"
St. Thérèse is one of the most powerful Saints of the Twentieth Century. We have never prayed for the intercession of another Saint who lived so close to our time. She died in 1897 at the age of twenty four, and was canonized in 1925. When she died, she was virtually unknown, even in her own Community.
Within two years of her death, the power of her intercession began to be felt all over Europe. Prayers and novenas were made to her for favors, which were answered in abundance, usually preceded by the reception of a flower. She called herself the Little Flower of Jesus, a name which has remained with her until today. The swiftness of time in which devotion to this Saint grew, would be called in secular terms, a phenomena. We call it a Miracle.
On March 15, 1907, Pope St. Pius X, in a private conversation, called her "The greatest Saint of modern times". This statement, made ten years after her death, from a man who would himself be raised to the Communion of Saints, is a great tribute to the little Carmelite that no one had known at the time of her death.

Saint Teresa of Avila
"At last, at last, a daughter of the Church."
Although she was close to all her family, her brother Rodrigo, near her own age, and she spent most of their time together. From the early age of seven, she studied the lives of the Saints, admiring them, wanting to live the life they had lived. She believed by doing so, she would one day know the Eternal Glory they had earned; "Forever they shall see God."
One day she and Rodrigo set out to gain Heaven by dying Martyrs' deaths, believing the torment and torture would be all too cheap a price to pay for eternal life. Telling no one, they began their journey to the land of the Moors, to die for their Faith. They had not ventured far when, at the four posts, they were apprehended by an uncle who quickly returned them to their mother. Their mother found her panic turn into anger which then exploded into punishment. Facing his mother's wrath, blame needing to be laid, Rodrigo did the normal thing; he pointed to Teresa.
This by no means stopped their quest for holiness. They gathered stones, starting hermitages of rocks, in their little garden, which they never quite finished. Teresa, from an early age, sought to be alone with Her Lord, so she made her room at home into a hermitage. She prayed and talked to a picture she had of our Savior conversing with the Samaritan woman at the well. Teresa pleaded over and over again, "Lord, give me of that water that I may not thirst."

Saint Catherine of Siena
"O Eternal God, accept the sacrifice of my life for the Mystical Body of Thy Holy Church."
In 1347, Catherine was born into a large, wealthy family, the 23rd child of a family of 25 children. Catherine's parents built their huge home, which you can visit till today, in the heart of the city on Via dei Tintori (Street of the Dyers). Their home included their Dye Works on the lower level and rooms above, where most of their surviving twelve children (thirteen having died at infancy), with their spouses, the family servant and dye workers lived and ate. It was, all in all, a very impressive home, with its courtyard and beautiful gardens, but not a very peaceful one. The hustle and bustle of the business, right there in the house, drowned out whatever quiet family life they might have enjoyed. The choking, putrid fumes from the dyes below, permeated all the rooms of the house, clinging to everything; the stench on their clothes following them, lingering long after they had ventured out into the streets.

Saint Rita of Cascia
Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow, Nun, Saint,
Woman of Faithfulness and Forgiveness
Saint of the Impossible
There is a tradition in Roccaporena that as an infant, while she slept in a basket, in the fields where her parents were working, white bees swarmed around Rita's open mouth. Not only did the bees not sting her, but it is said that they dropped honey into her mouth without her uttering a cry of warning to her parents. One of the farmers, seeing the swarm of bees, tried to disperse them with his arm that had been deeply wounded by a scythe. His arm stopped bleeding and he was immediately healed.
Almost two hundred years after she died, a strange thing began to happen. At the Monastery in Cascia, white bees came out of the walls of the Monastery during Holy Week of each year and remained until the feast day of St. Rita, May 22nd, when they returned to hibernation until Holy Week of the following year. Pope Urban VIII, learning of the mysterious bees which buzzed about the walls of the Monastery where St. Rita had lived, requested that one of the them be brought to him in Rome. After a careful examination of the bee, he tied a silk thread around it; then set it free, only to have it later discovered in its hive at the Monastery in Cascia, 138 kilometers away. And so the tradition of the bees began. The holes in the wall where the bees traditionally remain until the following year, are plainly in view for pilgrims journeying till today to the Monastery. Coincidence or miracle? We are believers in miracles! When we see the Lord's intervention in a physical way that would otherwise be considered unconventional or phenomenal, for us, it's just His way of letting us know that He is with us, watching over us. Since the very breath we breathe is a miracle, we think we can call the extraordinary miraculous.

Saint Clare of Assisi
Sister Moon to Francis' Brother Sun
"Always be lovers of God and your souls and the souls of your Sisters, and always be eager to observe what you have promised to the Lord."
Clare was born of the nobility of Assisi in 1193. At that
time, Francis was about twelve years old. He had not yet started any
trouble in Assisi. There was a great distinction in those days placed
on those who were nobility, and those who were rich. They were not always the same people. Clare's family was noble; Francis' family was rich. The nobility always looked down on the rich as being beneath them, while the rich knew they could very often buy and sell the nobility, but really wanted to be part of the club.
Clare had two sisters, Agnes and Beatrice. Her mother was Ortolana, and her father Faverone Offreduccio. There is not too much known about Clare's childhood and teenage years, but we see a similarity between Clare and Francis even as youths. We learn that Clare was a good and spiritual young girl, even before she gave her life over to Jesus through Francis. She was obedient to her parents, caring for the poor, loving to others, very unlike many young women of her station. Francis was a good boy. But he was a normal young man, involved in the world and its attractions. He loved to party. He learned to play five instruments. He wore the best clothes. He had to have the best suit of armor and horse to go off and fight in the wars. His conversion was not so much from evil to good, but from the treasures of the world to the treasures of the Gospel, from materialism to poverty for the love of Jesus. And so it was with Clare.

Saint Bernadette of Lourdes
The Visionary of Lourdes
"I cannot promise you happiness in this world, but in the next."
There are Saints among us whose greatest virtues have been their lifelong battles against their human nature. Those of us who are privileged to study their lives, have a tendency to ignore what we believe to be their shortcomings, in an effort to go directly to their source of sanctification. When we do this, we miss the teaching the Lord has to give us by the example of His suffering servant. We go for the dream, and miss the journey. The sanctification is in the journey.
St. Bernadette used to complain about the accounts she read on the Lives of the Saints, in that they all seemed too sugar coated. She said of the Saints, "They were human beings with faults and weaknesses, like all of us." Mother Angelica once said, referring to the authors of lives of the Saints, "They should all be given forty years each in purgatory, for making these Saints seem so perfect." Bernadette probably felt the same way.
To the little Saint of Lourdes, the many gifts she was given during her lifetime: one, that of beholding the presence of Mary, the Mother of God, eighteen times in the year 1858; another, her ecstasies during those Apparitions, were just that, gifts. She believed that these were aids from the good God to help her get through a sacrificial life amidst a barrage of attacks, and to suppress her own fiery inclination to fight those attacks. She prayed the gifts would offset her imperfections, which included a strong will, a fierce temper, and a stinging tongue. What she may never have known is how Our Lord Jesus and His Mother Mary were able to use these traits for their glory.