For Greater Things: The Story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka

Saint Stanislaus Kostka was barely seventeen when he walked out of Vienna with nothing but a rosary and an unbreakable resolve. His father, a powerful Polish nobleman, viewed his son's spiritual calling as a betrayal of family honor. His older brother Paul saw it as weakness and responded with cruelty. The Jesuits themselves, wary of offending Lord Kostka, had turned the boy away. So Stanislaus did the only thing left: he walked. Three hundred and fifty miles through winter mountains and bandit territory, sleeping in barns and relying on the charity of strangers, until he reached Rome on his seventeenth birthday and was accepted into the Society of Jesus as a novice. The two years remaining to him burned with a faith so fierce it startled everyone around him. He died at twenty-two, but the Church remembered. Beatified in 1605, canonized in 1726, he remains the patron saint of young people and impossible causes. This is the story of a teenager who chose God over his family's legacy, and changed the shape of heaven.