There are many Catholic heroes of the Holocaust. Poland, a country which suffered grievously under the Nazis in the Second World War, for instance, alone produced more than 4,000 people who have been recognised as Righteous Among Nations by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority in Jerusalem.

Some of these inspirational figures have become world-famous because of their heroism. We only have to think of St Maximilian Kolbe, for instance, or Edith Stein or even Oskar Schindler.

Just over a year ago Pope Benedict XVI declared his predecessor, Pope Pius XII, to be Venerable, meaning the Church believes he lived a life of heroic virtue. Much of this was played out in the war years when the Catholic Church saved nearly a million Jewish people from the Holocaust, more than all the other international relief organisations put together.

Our Lady of Quito prophesied that in the 60s there would be spiritual catastrophe in the Church; then, through the faith of the just, a ‘complete restoration’. But first, there would be a total corruption of morals in society; this would affect the Church, too.

I was leafing through the current issue of The Flock, the newsletter of Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice, (available here) when I came across an article by the redoubtable Mrs Daphne McLeod about Our Lady of Quito—otherwise known as Our Lady of Good Success—who appeared several times to Mother Mariana, Abbess of the convent of the Immaculate Conception in Quito, Ecuador, at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries.

“Speedskating was such a huge part of my life,” Holumn said in a telephone interview with Yahoo! Sports. “I still loved the sport, but I had this incredibly strong calling that it was time to move on and take a different path in life.”

There is no television and no internet at St. Joseph’s Convent in Leeds, England, meaning Holum won’t get to watch the Winter Olympics where she was supposed to become a star.

The peaceful surrounds of the convent is where Holum, now known as Sister Catherine, devotes her life to religious service as a Franciscan nun. That calling had begun on a trip to Our Lady of Fatima, a holy site in Portugal famed for a series of religious visions that appeared nearly a century ago. It was outside the Fatima basilica where Holum decided that a path of religious dedication, not frozen skating lanes, would be her destiny.