By Ricky McRoskey

Dr. Drew Peterson is about to sit down to breakfast. It's a humid February morning in Port-au-Prince, and the orthopedic surgeon from San Diego is steeling himself for another day in which he'll operate on people with crushed bones from the massive earthquake that leveled the Caribbean city weeks earlier. He has already finished a set of pushups and a three-mile run before the sun has risen.

Like the many other doctors in Haiti now, Dr. Peterson is here to serve. Over the course of 10 days, he and a group of other surgeons, nurses, and anesthesiologists from San Diego's Scripps Medical Response Team will perform hundreds of operations on wounded Haitians in a packed Catholic hospital. At his disposal are surgical tools, medications, and decades of experience in the operating room. But he needs more. To manage the week's toil—the rigors of surgery, the stench of dead bodies, and the sight of crippled children—he needs to rejuvenate. Constantly. "You need to take care of the body," he says, "especially at a time like this."

It's why, each morning, after he's exercised, showered, and gone to Mass, he and the doctors will convene for a hearty breakfast of eggs and cheese, rice, mangos, cantaloupe, grapes, slices of ham and salami. It's why, to provide for the much-needed energy at the hospital, he will pack himself dried apricots and figs, nuts, PowerBars, powdered Gatorade and bottled water. They came to Haiti on a mission to heal the wounded, and to do it right they need the energy and strength to sustain themselves. In other words, in a land of hunger and death, you need life. You need hope. You need strength.

And, in a land of hunger and death, you need food.

In 2009, Pope Benedict XVI welcomed five new saints to the Catholic Church, saints who had lived in times of hunger and death—ages of physical, emotional, and spiritual longing. Three of them lived through Italy's 19th-century Industrial Revolution, which brought greater efficiency to the nation's businesses, but also longer working hours, sordid factories, and exhausted families. One saint led Portugal in the midst of war. Another lived in medieval Italy during the plague. Throughout their lives, they fought battles, worked in spinning mills, studied law, helped cholera victims, contracted disease, went blind, lost children, and withstood family rejections and heresy accusations.

Yet they succumbed to none of it. Instead of lamenting the circumstances of their lives, we remember them for their endurance. We remember the monastery that St. Bernardo Tolomei founded, or the order of St. Caterina Volpicelli, or St. Nuno's courage on the battlefield and in the convent. We remember St. Arcangelo's advocacy for working women, and St. Geltrude's ministry to poor Italian families. But what is perhaps most fascinating about these five saints is not their different accomplishments, but what unequivocally united them, the singular source of all energy, strength, and nourishment from which they made their societies better: the Eucharist.

In his homily canonizing these five last April, Pope Benedict said, "Nourished with the Eucharistic Bread, the Saints we are venerating today brought their mission of evangelical love to completion."

That's the common thread: they all loved the Eucharist, the true, actual body and blood of Christ. It was the mystery, the spiritual "food," that kept them going. Each of them spent countless hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament and received it frequently at Mass. In doing so, they embraced a strange, remarkable paradox—that we as Catholics derive our strength by remembering and participating in an instance of unimaginable suffering, in which the most powerful person to have ever walked the Earth was punched, spat on, whipped, bloodied, ridiculed, condemned, stripped naked, punctured, and murdered. It's baffling: That's our nourishment? That's supposed to give us strength? That's our hope?

It's hard to believe, until we consider the rest of the story. Because embracing the Eucharist, as these five saints show, means embracing the fact that the story doesn't end at Christ's death. He rises, comes back, and fills his believers with a sense of hope and inspiration that impels them forward. For these five, the Eucharist taught them that every battle for good is worth fighting. You just need to have the strength, the bread—indeed, the spiritual food—to confront it. And, as Catholics, it's something that we have access to, in every church, every day—just as they did.

The Italians of the Industrial Age
Three of the saints came of age in an Italian society that was being wildly transformed. Geltrude Comensoli, Caterina Volpicelli, and Arcangelo Tadini were all born within eight years of one another, in the mid-1800s, just as Italy was joining the Industrial Revolution. Previously rural societies began to morph into technological nations, manufacturing everything from clothing to machinery. But with new opportunity came new dangers. Workplace accidents became prevalent. The poor lived in disease-ridden cities. Children worked long hours, and women had to balance work life with family time. That's when these three made their mark.

Fr. Arcangelo Tadini, a northern Italian priest known for his powerful preaching and zeal, was a workhorse. One gets the sense from his biography that this was a man of incredible grit. While in the seminary, he injured his leg badly—and limped the rest of his life. When he was out of the seminary, he contracted a serious illness—and recovered. He started a soup kitchen, rebuilt a church, and constructed a spinning factory. He never seemed to stop. And how, again, did he have the energy? The Vatican explains: "His parishioners would see him for hours in front of the Blessed Sacrament, despite his disability."

Where others saw work as dismal, he saw it as an opportunity to grow in faith. He founded several Catholic organizations devoted to improving the lives of the working poor. One of them, the Congregation of Worker Sisters of the Holy House of Nazareth, featured sisters who, under his direction, devoted their lives to working alongside other women in Italian factories, encouraging them and offering them hope despite aching joints and acrid air. The organization exists to this day.

If Arcangelo was tireless, Geltrude Comensoli was resilient. In 1880, the 33-year-old Italian nun had the chance to directly ask Pope Leo XIII what he thought of her launching an organization devoted to (what else?) Eucharistic adoration. Good, he said, but it wasn't enough in this new society. There were too many women whose spiritual lives were suffering from too much work, he thought; she needed to minister to female factory workers in the process. One can imagine her frustration, like that of an architect who spends years painstakingly sketching a building's design, only to have the master builder say, "It looks good. Now make it twice as big, with more windows."

So she went back to the drawing board, and to the Blessed Sacrament, and spent the next two years forming the Congregation of the Sacramentine Sisters of Bergamo with the bishop's support. It was a resounding—albeit arduous—success. Through the order's example of perpetual adoration and its emphasis on the primacy of family over work, it brought perspective to a nation hypnotized by industry. As for St. Geltrude, her life ended where she spent much of it: in the midst of adoration.

Meanwhile, to the far south in Naples, Caterina Volpicelli grew up with wealth, shielded from the indignity of the factory. Early life centered not on the spinning mill, but theaters, ballet, literature, and music. That is, until she decided these things had become too much of a priority. At 15, at the recommendation of a spiritual advisor, she left it all behind, embracing instead the religious life.

It prompts an interesting question: What's more difficult—staying focused on the important things despite work, or despite luxury? Caterina ultimately established—among other things—the Handmaids of the Sacred Heart, an order that emphasized the importance of the family. The Handmaids also focused on care for those suffering from cholera, a debilitating intestinal disease that left its victims weak, nauseous, and dehydrated. It was also extremely contagious, requiring a patience and love that was otherworldly.

Not surprisingly, the Vatican says Caterina was motivated by an "ardent love of the Eucharist," something that prompted her to build a shrine to the Sacred Heart in Naples, for the purpose of Eucharistic adoration.

The Warrior
In 1385, an army of 30,000 Castillians invaded modern-day Portugal, seeking to seize the country. Standing in the Castillians' way was an army less than a quarter its size, led by a 25-year-old Portuguese general named Nuno de Santa Maria Alvares Pereira. A devout Christian, Nuno led his troops in an epic battle that drove out the Castillians, secured a long period of peace, and brought the underdog general great notoriety and riches.

It's not hard to imagine the scenes that followed, of doting women and obsequious friends hoping to bask in the glow of his fame. But what's most incredible about Nuno is that the fame and riches didn't go to his head. He realized, as Pope Benedict said, that "in any situation, even of a military and warlike nature, it is possible to act and live out the values and principles of Christian life." He fasted three days a week. He built churches and monasteries. And after his wife and two sons had died, he gave up his wealth and spent the rest of his life in a Carmelite convent, where he prayed, nurtured a deep love for the Eucharist (there it is again!), and distributed bread to the poor.

The Monk
Then there's Bernardo Tolomei. A 13th-century knight and law scholar who suffered from partial blindness, he retreated from society at age 41 to work and pray in solitude on his family's farms. He eventually established a Benedictine monastery there in Tuscany, where he would serve as abbot for 27 straight years and live what Pope Benedict called "the Eucharistic life." The monastery, the Abbey of Mt. Oliveto, still stands in the middle of the lush fields today, where its monks work as Bernardo did, cultivating wheat, barley, beans, vineyards and olives for the community.

This begs the question: What sort of person with wealth and an education decides, at age 41, to retreat into the fields and pray, to hunch over the ground and pull weeds, plant seeds, and farm under the Italian sun—while blind? Or, perhaps more importantly, what sort of person, accustomed to this life of prayer and solitude, leaves the monastery at age 76 to help plague-ridden monks at another monastery? And then catches the plague himself and dies?

The answer: a person that is called to it by love. What is most striking about St. Bernardo is that each of the decisions of his life—as strange as they may have appeared to others—came from a humble conviction. Also striking is that this strength of conviction and perseverance, by some remarkable coincidence, has the very same source as that of three other Italians and a Portuguese general who were canonized on the same day.

Ricky McRoskey writes for a New York-based financial firm. A 2006 Notre Dame alumnus, he recently graduated from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and has written for Business Week, Silicon Alley Insider and the San Diego Daily Transcript.