Fire & Roses: The Burning Of The Charlestown Convent, 1834 by Nancy Lusignan Schultz

Hardback: In the midst of a deadly heat wave during the summer of 1834, a woman clawed her way over the wall of a Roman Catholic convent near Boston, Massachusetts and escaped to the home of a neighbour, pleading for protection. 

When the bishop, Benedict Fenwick, persuaded her to return, rumours began swirling through the Yankee community and in the press that she was being held at the convent against her will, and had even been murdered. The imagined fate of the "Mysterious Lady," as she became popularly known, ultimately led to the destruction of the Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts on the night of 11 August 1834 by a mob of Protestant men.

After battering down the front door, the men destroyed icons, smashed pianos, hurled the bishop's library into a bonfire, ransacked the possessions of both sisters and students, and finally burned the imposing building to the ground. Not satisfied with this orgy of vandalism, they returned the following night and tore the lovely gardens up by the roots. 

The ruins sat on Mount Benedict, a hill overlooking Boston Harbor, for the next fifty years. The arsonists' ringleader, a brawny bricklayer named John Buzzell, became a folk hero. The nuns scattered, and their proud and feisty mother superior, Mary Anne Moffatt, who battled the working-class rioters and Church authorities, faded mysteriously into history.

Nancy Schultz brings alive this forgotten moment in the American story, shedding light on one of the darkest incidents of religious persecution to be recorded in the New World. The result of painstaking archival research, Fire & Roses (2000) offers a rare lens on a time when independent, educated women were feared as much as immigrants and Catholics, and anti-Papist diatribes were the stuff of bestsellers and standing-room-only lectures. 

Schultz examines the imagined secrets that led to the riot and uncovers the real secrets in a cloistered community whose life was completely hidden from the world. She provides a glimpse into nineteenth-century Boston and into an elite boarding school for young women, mostly the daughters of wealthy Protestants, vividly dissecting the period's roiling tensions over class, gender, religion, ethnicity, and education. Although the roots of these conflicts were in the Puritan migration to America, it was ultimately the mob's perverse fantasies about cloistered women - in an independent community - that erupted in a combustible night of violence.

By unearthing the buried truth and bringing alive these fascinating characters, Nancy Schultz tells a gripping story of prejudice and pride, courage and cowardice in early nineteenth-century America that not only restores a clouded chapter in the country's history but also has a poignant resonance for our own times.

About the author: Nancy Lusignan Schultz, PhD, is chairperson and professor of English, Salem State University, Salem, Massachusetts. In addition to her numerous published articles and reviews, she is the editor of Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture, a historical survey of fear and paranoia in American culture. She also wrote the introduction for Veil of Fear: Nineteenth-Century Convent Tales, a collection of popular nineteenth-century anti-Catholic novels.

Professor Schultz is the author of the acclaimed Fire & Roses: The Burning of the Charlestown Convent, 1834, published by Simon & Schuster which won the Lois Rudnick Prize from the New England American Studies Association, and received Honours in Non-fiction for the 2000 Massachusetts Book Award.  

Her book, Mrs Mattingly’s Miracle, was published by Yale University Press. The story of the miracle cure of Ann Mattingly in 1824, the book brings to light an early episode in the ongoing battle between faith and reason in the United States. Writing in the Washington Post, Daniel Stashower called the book, “…a gripping slice of history with fresh, often unsettling resonances for the modern reader.”

Her newest book, with Beth L Lueck and Sirpa Salenius, is Transatlantic Conversations: Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Encounters with Italy and the Atlantic World, published by the University of New Hampshire Press in 2017.  With Dane Anthony Morrison, she is the co-editor of Salem: Place, Myth, and Memory, and she is the editor of Fear Itself: Enemies Real and Imagined in American Culture and Veil of Fear: Nineteenth Century Convent Tales by Rebecca Reed and Maria Monk.

Three Sorts Of People

 

Too Narrow Or Too Wide

 

7-Day Reading Challenge

 

Eucharistic Miracles And Eucharistic Phenomena In The Lives Of The Saints by Joan Carroll Cruz

Paperback: The Jews therefore strove among themselves, saying: How can this man give us his flesh to eat? Then Jesus said to them: Amen, Amen I say unto you: Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath everlasting life: and I will raise him up in the last day. For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. - John 6:52-56

On many occasions throughout the history of the Catholic Church, God has provided visible proof of the invisible reality of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. 

In her book, Eucharistic Miracles (1987, 1991), Joan Carroll Cruz documents 36 such major miracles which occurred throughout history. She tells of consecrated Hosts which have turned to visible human flesh, which have bled, which have levitated, and which have become hard as flint when received by a person in mortal sin. 

She details the official investigations that have been made into these miracles, and tells readers where some can still be seen and venerated today. 

The author also describes miraculous Eucharistic phenomena in the lives of saints: Saints who lived on the Eucharist alone, who received Communication miraculously or experienced raptures, ecstasies, levitations, visions, locutions, and other extraordinary phenomena.

Eucharistic Miracles is a superb compilation of God's visible testimony of the truth of the Catholic Faith, proving the reality of one of its loftiest mysteries - the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist.

This book is dedicated to the School Sisters of Notre Dame with appreciation, affection and admiration. 

About the author: Joan Carroll Cruz (1931-2012) was the author of 15 Catholic books, all of which received the imprimatur. She was perhaps best known for her writings on miraculous occurrences of faith which she compiled through meticulous research of foreign shrines, churches, convents and monasteries. Some of her most popular titles include Eucharistic Miracles (TAN 1987), The Incorruptibles (TAN 1977), and Prayers and Heavenly Promises (TAN 1990). Cruz is a native of New Orleans, LA, and was educated by the School Sisters of Notre Dame. She was a member of the Discalced Carmelite Secular Order for 50 years and received the Mother Teresa Award in 2005. 

"Joan Carroll Cruz touched hundreds of thousands of people through her writings," said Saint Benedict Press publisher Robert M Gallagher. "Her books on apparitions and miraculous events provide powerful evidence for faith by reinforcing the teachings of the Church and making supernatural realities more real to each one of her readers."

"We are privileged to be her publisher and we look forward to maintaining her legacy by preserving her books and bringing them to new readers," said Gallagher.

The Prophecies And Revelations Of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden Volume 1 by Bridget of Sweden

Paperback: Bridget also known as Birgitta of Sweden received revelations from Almighty God and these are recounted in several books:

1. The Prophecies and Revelations of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden volume 1 (books 1-3) 

2. The Prophecies and Revelations of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden volume 2 (Book 4) 

3. The Book of Questions of Saint Bridget (Book 5) 

4. The Prophecies and Revelations of Saint Bridget (Birgitta) of Sweden volume 4 (Books 6*, 7, 8*, 9*) 

5. The Book of the Angel (Book 11) 

6. The Life and Prayers of Saint Bridget 

*indicates part of the book is missing.

This edition, Volume 1 (1656), is printed in Great Britain in 2014 by Amazon. 

About the author: St Bridget (Birgitta) (1303-1373) was born in Sweden and married Ulf Gudmarsson in 1316. It was a happy marriage and the devout couple brought up eight children, including St Catherine of Sweden. After Ulf's death in 1344, she founded a religious community (Bridgettines) and received a number of mystical revelations. She corresponded with European monarchs, promoting peace and the return of the papacy from Avignon to Rome. She made pilgrimages to Jerusalem and Rome, where she spent her final years.

The Labyrinth by Amanda Lohrey

Paperback: Erica Marsden’s son, an artist, has been imprisoned for homicidal negligence. In a state of grief, Erica cuts off all ties to family and friends, and retreats to a quiet hamlet on the south-east coast near the prison where he is serving his sentence.

There, in a rundown shack, she obsesses over creating a labyrinth by the ocean. To build it - to find a way out of her quandary - Erica will need the help of strangers. And that will require her to trust, and to reckon with her past.

The Labyrinth (2020) is a hypnotic story of guilt and denial, of the fraught relationship between parents and children, that is also a meditation on how art can both be ruthlessly destructive and restore sanity. It shows Amanda Lohrey to be at the peak of her powers.

The Labyrinth won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2021 and was longlisted for the ALS Gold Medal in 2021.

About the author: Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught Politics at the University of Tasmania and Writing and Textual Studies at the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. Amanda is a regular contributor to the Monthly magazine and is a former Senior Fellow of the Literature Board of the Australia Council. In November 2012, she received the Patrick White Award for literature.

Her books include Reading Madame Bovary (winner of two Queensland Literary Awards), Vertigo, Camille's Bread (winner of the ALS Gold Medal and a Victorian Premier's Literary Award) and The Morality of Gentlemen. 

Rating: 5/5

The Order (Gabriel Allon Series) by Daniel Silva

Paperback: Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into Venice for a much-needed holiday with his wife and two young children. But when Pope Paul VII dies suddenly, Gabriel is summoned to Rome by the Holy Father’s loyal private secretary, Archbishop Luigi Donati. A billion Catholic faithful have been told that the pope died of a heart attack. Donati, however, has two good reasons to suspect his master was murdered. The Swiss Guard who was standing watch outside the papal apartments the night of the pope’s death is missing. So, too, is the letter the Holy Father was writing during the final hours of his life. A letter that was addressed to Gabriel.

The book is a long-suppressed gospel that calls into question the accuracy of the New Testament’s depiction of one of the most portentous events in human history. For that reason alone, the Order of St Helena will stop at nothing to keep it out of Gabriel’s hands. A shadowy Catholic society with ties to the European far right, the Order is plotting to seize control of the papacy. And it is only the beginning.

As the cardinals gather in Rome for the start of the conclave, Gabriel sets out on a desperate search for proof of the Order’s conspiracy, and for a long-lost gospel with the power to put an end to two thousand years of murderous hatred. His quest will take him from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, to a monastery in Assisi, to the hidden depths of the Secret Archives, and finally to the Sistine Chapel, where he will witness an event no outsider has ever before seen - the sacred passing of the Keys of St. Peter to a newly elected pope.

Swiftly paced and elegantly rendered, The Order (2020) - the twentieth instalment in the superb and first-class Gabriel Allon series - will hold readers spellbound, from its opening passages to its breathtaking final twist of plot. It is a novel of friendship and faith in a perilous and uncertain world. And it is still more proof that Daniel Silva is his generation’s finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.

About the author: Daniel Silva is an American journalist and author of thriller and espionage novels. He is also the award-winning, #1 New York Times bestselling author of his long-running thriller series starring spy and art restorer Gabriel Allon. Silva's books are critically acclaimed bestsellers around the world and have been translated into more than 30 languages. He resides in Florida with his wife, television journalist Jamie Gangel, and their twins, Lily and Nicholas.

Rating: 5/5

Edith Stein: The Untold Story Of The Philosopher And Mystic Who Lost Her Life In The Death Camps Of Auschwitz by Waltraud Herbstrith OCD

Paperback: A powerful and moving story of the remarkable Jewish woman who converted to Catholicism, became a nun, achieved remarkable success in the male-dominated world of German philosophy, and was sent to a Nazi death camp when she refused to deny her Jewish heritage.

Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, declared Edith Stein the best doctoral student he ever had (even abler than Heidegger, who was also his pupil at the time). A prayerful woman of deep spirituality and authentic mystical experience, she remained an influential, active philosopher all her life. Though born and raised in a very religious Jewish family in Germany, she not only converted to Catholicism, but became a Carmelite nun and followed in the footsteps of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

Edith Stein vigorously opposed Nazism from the outset and urged Pope Pius XI to put the church on record against Hitler. A model Catholic, a brilliant intellectual, yet a profoundly humble soul, she affirmed her solidarity with her suffering Jewish people no matter the cost. Edith Stein was arrested by the Nazis at a Carmelite convent at Echt in Holland and sent to her death at Auschwitz.

Waltraud Herbstrith has fashioned a warm, memorable portrait of this woman who, as Jesuit philosopher Jan Nota points out in the introduction, "discovered in Christ the meaning of human existence and suffering...Edith Stein was one of those Christians who lived out of a hope transcending optimism and pessimism." Hers is a voice that speaks powerfully to all of us today, and a life that stands as testimony to the profoundest values of human existence, the significance of the individual, and the truths of faith that can reconcile Christian and Jew, philosophy and religion, oppressor and oppressed to heal a troubled world.

Edith Stein (1985; Second English edition, 1992) is translated from the German by Father Bernard Bonowitz OCSO. The German original, Das Wahre Gesicht Edith Steins, was first published with ecclesiastical approval in 1971.

About the author: Waltraud Herbstrith OCD (b 1929) is a Carmelite nun at the Edith Stein Carmel in Tübingen, Germany who has devoted her life to writing a full account of this modern martyr. She studied German and modern philology in Würzburg, Heidelberg and Freiburg. In 1953, Waltraud joined the Cologne Carmel and in 1962, worked at the Edith-Stein-Archive. In 1987, she co-founded the Edith-Stein-Karmel in Tübingen. Since 1964, she has been active as a journalist in the press and radio and an author of numerous books. She is a specialist in Carmelite spirituality.

Fallen by Mel O'Doherty

Paperback: When Michael Connolly was a child in the 1970s, his mother told him about all the things that happened to her in that place. All that the nuns had done. The doctors encouraged her to talk, and talk she did. She even tried to tell the public. She wrote letters to the newspapers. She made signs and picketed Mass. The good pious parishioners silenced her. The doctors told her she was delusional. Her husband didn't post her letters. Her son didn't believe her. 

Three decades later, still caught in the guilt from that time, Michael sits watching the news about the mother and baby homes unfolding, and realises, with his mother long gone, that she had been telling the truth all those years ago. 

Fallen (2021) is a stark and beautifully written debut novel about a fictitious woman who was held in Bessborough Mother and Baby Home; and the decades of secrecy, scandal and the devastating impact on a family in modern Irish history. But it is dedicated to all the real ones: to every woman and girl and baby who ever resided there. To the 923 infants who died there. To the 859 infants whose graves are unmarked there. 

About the author: Mel O’Doherty lives in Douglas, Cork, and teaches English and History. He was shortlisted for a Francis MacManus Short Story Award in 2019. Fallen is his first novel. He is currently writing a second novel. 

Rating: 5/5

Serial Killers Of Russia: Case Files From The World's Deadliest Nation (True Crime) by Wensley Clarkson

Paperback: For decades, it has been assumed that the United States of America was the serial killer capital of the world.

Now, criminologists believe that Russia (and previously the Soviet Union) has been, secretly, the biggest home of serial killers for almost a century.

In Serial Killers of Russia (2021), bestselling true crime author Wensley Clarkson reveals the inside stories and gruesome details behind the country's most notorious and previously unknown murderers. Using information from a vast range of new and archive sources, Clarkson tells stories of the dangerous, the devious and the truly shocking, and tackles why the nation has become a breeding ground for humanity's most evil.

These are the most horrifying cases from the darkest corners of Russia.

About the author: Wensley Clarkson is an English true crime writer, biographer, novelist, and television writer and producer. His books have been published across the world and sold more than two million copies. He has also written movie screenplays, TV drama and worked on numerous television documentaries in the UK, US and Spain. 

Wensley first covered crime as a national newspaper reporter thirty-five years ago. His numerous true-crime books include biographies of notorious criminals in the UK, Spain and US. His in-depth knowledge is based on his ability to speak directly to many of these characters. He has built these underworld contacts up over many years.

Between Summer's Longing And Winter's End (The Story of a Crime Series) by Leif G W Persson

Paperback: Stockholm The dead of winter. The temperature is already well below freezing.

A young man falls to his death from a window in Stockholm. The police want to write it off as an accident, or possibly a suicide, but superintendent Lars Johansson feels otherwise. Soon it is revealed that the young man was an American journalist, working on a project about his uncle, a CIA agent, who may have had ties to the highest reaches of Sweden’s political community. Johansson’s search for the truth will take him to New York and the FBI Academy in Virginia, and finally down into a dark web of international espionage, backroom politics, and greed, exposing the sheer incompetence that led to a devastating tragedy.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End (2002, 2010) is acclaimed as one of the greatest Swedish crime novels of all time created by a writer universally acknowledged as Sweden’s leading criminologist.

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is translated from the Swedish by Paul Norlén.

About the author: Leif G W Persson’s previous novels include Backstrom: He Who Kills the Dragon, Between Summer’s Longing and Winter’s End, and Another Time, Another Life. Born in 1945, Persson has had an extraordinary career. He is the Grand Master of Scandinavian crime fiction. He has served as an adviser to the Swedish ministry of justice and is Sweden’s most renowned psychological profiler. A professor at the Swedish National Police Board, he is considered the country’s foremost expert on crime and is regularly consulted by the media. He is the author of nine novels. His novel, The Dying Detective (2016), was awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers. 

About the translator: Paul Norlén is a freelance translator and editor. He was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize in 2004, and is currently President of STiNA (Swedish Translators in North America). 

Graduate of the department and Affiliate Assistant Professor, Paul Norlén PhD has been awarded the 25th annual American-Scandinavian Foundation Translation Prize for his English rendition of portions of A Toast to Your Ashes: The Life of the Poet Bellman from Beginning to End by the Swedish author Ernst Brunner.

The committee praised him for being “always accurate and extremely knowledgeable” and said “the English version is as entertaining and gripping as the Swedish original.” 

Rating: 5/5

Midweek Humour

 

Editors

The Golden Clasp

The Church Learned And The Revolt Of The Scholars by Philip Trower

Paperback: In this booklet, Philip Trower sets out in chronological order the ideas which form the basis of Modernism and neo-Modernism. He explores the origin of this heresy and its effect on the Church in our time. 

The ideas which Philip Trower developed in the later book Turmoil and Truth (2003) were first formulated and crystalised in The Church Learned and The Revolt of the Scholars (1979). It is vitally important in helping to disseminate Philip's ideas both in the secular world as well as to the many people who have dissented from orthodox Catholic teaching.

About the author: Philip Trower's (1923-2019) books on theology and history attracted considerable interest from a younger generation of Catholics, shaped by Pope John Paul II. A warm admirer of John Paul, he saw the years that immediately followed the Second Vatican Council as a time of turmoil that emerged into greater confidence and unity through the efforts of the Polish Pope.

 

Born on 16 May 1923 to Sir William Gosselin Trower and Joan Olivia Tomlin, John Philip Trower was educated at a preparatory school in Dorset and then privately with a family in France, followed by four years at Eton. He belonged to an Anglican family but took an early interest in Catholicism partly through the influence of his French governess.

 

Trower joined the Army in 1942, was commissioned into the Rifle Brigade in 1943, saw service in the Italian campaign and sustained a shrapnel wound in his arm in Rome during the Battle of Anzio. He later enjoyed recalling that he had acquired skills in basket-weaving and embroidery as part of compulsory occupational therapy while recovering. On returning to active duty he served in Egypt with an intelligence unit based in Cairo.

 

His writing career began after demobilisation the 1950s, when he became a regular contributor to The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement. His first novel, Tillotson, was published in 1951 by Collins and received a Book Society commendation at the instigation of the historian Veronica Wedgewood and novelist Rose Macaulay.

 

Another novel written at this time did not see the light of day until the 1990s when its existence was revealed in a casual conversation with a Catholic journalist and it was unearthed and sent to Ignatius Press in the USA. Published as A Danger to the State, it is centred on the suppression of the Jesuits and the tragedy following the destruction of their work in South America, and received favourable reviews and considerable popularity.

 

Trower became a Catholic in 1953 partly under the influence of his friend the poet Dunstan Thompson, whose literary executor he became after the latter’s death. Thompson had for some years abandoned his childhood Catholicism, but returned during a procession at the Catholic shrine at Walsingham in Norfolk which the two had gone to watch simply because they lived nearby. Trower had, as he would later write, long been fascinated by the Catholic faith and regarded it as intellectually more coherent and convincing than Anglicanism, as well as spiritually compelling in its Eucharistic doctrine.

 

He went on to become a noted contributor to Catholic newspapers and magazine in Britain, the USA, and Canada, frequently focussing on the tensions and controversies following the Second Vatican Council. He took a positive view of the Council, which he regarded as a necessary continuation of the First Vatican Council ( which took place in the 19th century) involving the developing understanding of the Church’s teaching. But he believed that in the postconciliar years, its message had been hijacked and that there had been a loss of intellectual coherence. His books Turmoil and Truth and The Catholic Church and the Counterfaith reflected his concern – and that of others, including leading figures of the Council such as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI) - about the ways in which the Council’s message was distorted.

 

Trower enjoyed a moment of fame in 2018 by finally attending his Oxford degree ceremony sixty years after graduating. Following a shortened wartime course at Oxford he gained a BA but by the time he received his exam results he was already in the Army. In the summer of 2018, his nephews decided that he should finally graduate and arranged for him to do so. The event received considerable media coverage, with Trower, arriving in a wheelchair, characteristically saying that his failure to graduate earlier was due to “sheer inefficiency on my part”.

 

Philip Trower was a strong supporter of FAITH magazine and contributed a number of features over the years. His funeral Mass, concelebrated by several priest friends, was held at Nazareth House, Cheltenham. Unmarried, he was close to his wider family and spent his last years living with or near them in Hertfordshire and Cheltenham. 

Empress Dowager Cixi (Biography/Memoir) by Jung Chang

Paperback: In this ground-breaking biography, Jung Chang vividly describes how Empress Dowager Cixi fought against monumental obstacles to change China. Under her the ancient country attained virtually all the attributes of a modern state: industries, railways, electricity, telegraph, and an army and navy with up-to-date weaponry. It was she who abolished gruesome punishments like ‘death by a thousand cuts’ and put an end to foot-binding. She inaugurated women’s liberation, and embarked on the path to introduce parliamentary elections to China. Jung Chang comprehensively overturns the conventional view of Cixi as a die-hard conservative and cruel despot.

Cixi reigned during extraordinary times and had to deal with a host of major national crises: the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, wars with France and Japan – and the invasion by 8 allied powers including Britain, Germany, Russia and the United States. Jung Chang not only records the Empress Dowager’s conduct of domestic and foreign affairs, but also takes the reader into the depths of her splendid Summer Palace and the harem of Beijing’s Forbidden City, where she lived surrounded by eunuchs – with one of whom she fell in love, with tragic consequences. The world Jung Chang describes here, in fascinating detail, seems almost unbelievable in its extraordinary mixture of the very old and the very new.

Based on newly available, mostly Chinese, historical documents such as court records, official and private correspondence, diaries and eye-witness accounts, this biography will revolutionise historical thinking about a crucial period in China’s – and the world’s – history. 

Packed with drama, fast-paced and gripping, it is both a panoramic depiction of the birth of modern China and an intimate portrait of a woman: as the concubine to a monarch, as the absolute ruler of a third of the world’s population, and as a unique stateswoman.

Empress Dowager Cixi (2013) is a New York Times Notable Book and an NPR Best Book of the Year.

About the author: Jung Chang is the author of the best-selling books Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (1991), which the Asian Wall Street Journal called the most read book about China; Mao: The Unknown Story (2005, with Jon Halliday), which was described by Time magazine as “an atom bomb of a book”; and Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China (2013), a New York Times “notable book”. Her latest book, Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister: Three Women at the Heart of Twentieth-Century China (2019), is regarded as “another triumph” (Evening Standard London).

Her books have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 15 million copies worldwide. She has won many awards, including the UK Writers’ Guild Best Non-Fiction and Book of the Year UK, and has received a number of honorary doctorates from universities in the UK and USA (Buckingham, York, Warwick, Dundee, the Open University, and Bowdoin College, USA). She is an Honorary Fellow of SOAS University of London.

Jung Chang was born in Sichuan Province, China, in 1952. During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) she worked as a peasant, a “barefoot” doctor, a steelworker, and an electrician before becoming an English-language student at Sichuan University. She left China for Britain in 1978 and obtained a PhD in Linguistics in 1982 at the University of York – the first person from Communist China to receive a doctorate from a British university.

Blessed Carlo Acutis: 5 Steps To Being A Saint by Mgr Anthony Figueiredo

Paperback: Carlo Acutis may have only been 15 when he died, but already he had learned how to live for Jesus. 

In this biography first published in 2021, discover the life of the computer geek who became the first millennial to be beatified by the Catholic Church. 

Throughout his life, Blessed Carlo Acutis used five simple practices to increase in holiness - practices which every Catholic can imitate in their own lives today. 

Unpack how this young man learned to live for God in this biography, which also features colour photos of Carlo and a selection of his most inspiring quotes.

"We make a choice in life: God or nothing. Blessed Carlo Acutis chose God - “Not I, but God” - in five simple practices. The Mass, Adoration, Confession and spiritual guidance, befriending the Blessed Mother and the saints, and charity. These daily “appointments” led Carlo to a life of intimacy with Jesus and love for neighbour that makes him today the first millennial Blessed. You can I can be saints by making our own Carlo's "five steps," which Monsignor Figueiredo expounds through his simple presentation of Blessed Carlo's captivating witness that shows it is achievable with desire and God's grace. I challenge you to read this booklet with the desire to be a saint. Share it with others, especially the young, in your homes, parishes, schools, universities, and along whatever path you tread. You will grow in love of God and neighbour, live life close to God, and meet Jesus, who awaits us, in this life and the next, as our most faithful friend." - Robert Cardinal Sarah, Prefect, Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

About the author: After assignments in the Vatican Curia, as Spiritual Director in various seminaries, and as a commentator for media networks, Monsignor Anthony Figueiredo is fulfilling a lifelong dream of immersing himself in the lives of the saints. In the Diocese of Assisi, where he is currently serving, he has followed the life of the first millennial Blessed, Carlo Acutis, whose witness, normal and holy, has inspired countless numbers of people from throughout the world and all walks of life to want to know this young saint of our times and follow his simple roadmap to holiness. 

A Dialogue Of Comfort Against Tribulation by Thomas More

Paperback: So it is a great comfort to every person who finds himself challenged and provoked by temptation. He sees that his time of battle has arrived, and unless he behaves like a coward or a fool, he has the prospect of gaining his eternal reward. - Saint Thomas More (1478-1535)

"I die the King's good servant, but God's first," declared Sir Thomas More from the scaffold upon his 1535 execution for treason. Condemned to death for his refusal to acknowledge Henry VIII as the Supreme Head of the Church of England and Henry's plan for divorce, More spent his final months in the Tower of London, writing this message of hope in the face of suffering.

Saint Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation is universally acknowledged as a masterwork both of Christian wisdom and of literature. Composed in the course of Saint Thomas More’s imprisonment in the Tower of London, the Dialogue is held between an uncle, Anthony, who knows Death is soon to claim him, and his nephew, Vincent, anxious in the face of looming invasion in sixteenth-century Hungary during the Ottoman conquests. Vincent poses a series of questions to his uncle regarding the source of comfort in the face of suffering, temptation, and persecution. 

Armed with the insights of scripture and the wisdom of old age, Anthony counsels his nephew, the noted Renaissance humanist, to put on the armour of light and enter the battle in which every Christian must fight. For: "Are we ready to suffer a measure of bodily pain for the one who suffered such great pains for us, or do we plan to run from him and utterly forsake him rather than suffer any pain at all?"

In A Dialogue of Comfort (1951, 2016) More offers a reflection of his own dire circumstances as well as a powerful statement of his conviction that God is a Christian's only comfort. It is a penetrating exploration of the fleeting nature of pleasure, the essence of worldly power, Christ's redemptive power and constitutes an enduring legacy of faith.

About the author: Saint Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English lawyer and philosopher. Serving as chancellor of England (second only to the king in power and authority), he refused to acknowledge King Henry VIII as head of the Church, an act for which he subsequently suffered martyrdom - dying, in his own words, “in the faith and for the faith of the Catholic Church, the king’s good servant and God’s first.” More is noted for coining the word "Utopia," in reference to an ideal political system in which policies are governed by reason. He was canonized by the Catholic Church as a saint in 1935, and has been commemorated by the Church of England as a "Reformation martyr."

Doris May Lessing CH OMG (1919-2013), British-Zimbabwean Novelist

Awful Disclosures By Maria Monk of The Hotel Dieu Nunnery Of Montreal by Maria Monk

Paperback: Maria Monk (27 June 1816 - summer of 1849) was a Canadian woman whose book Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, or The Hidden Secrets of a Nun's Life in a Convent Exposed (1836) claimed to expose systematic sexual abuse of nuns and infanticide of the resulting children by Catholic priests in her convent in Montreal. The book became a best-seller.

Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk was published in January 1836. In it, Monk claimed that nuns of the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph of the Montreal convent of the Hôtel-Dieu, whom she called "the Black Nuns", were forced to have sex with the priests in the seminary next door. The priests supposedly entered the convent through a secret tunnel. If the sexual union produced a baby, it was baptized and then strangled and dumped into a lime pit in the basement. Uncooperative nuns disappeared.

Monk's story contains inconsistencies. 

In her account, she stated that there were three convents in Montreal: "1st. The Congregational Nunnery. 2nd. The Black Nunnery, or Convent of Sister Bourgeoise. 3rd. The Grey Nunnery." The Congregational Nuns were the Congregation of Notre Dame of Montreal, founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys, not the Sisters of Charity, as Monk stated at the beginning of her text; the Religious Hospitallers of St Joseph, whose habits were balck but who were not typically called "Black Nuns", operated the Hôtel-Dieu, where Monk claimed that she entered and suffered, and it was not founded by "Sister Bourgeoise"; and it was the Sisters of Charity who were commonly known as the Grey Nuns.

It is known that Maria Monk lived in an asylum in her early years and that one of the nuns mentioned in her story was actually a fellow patient in the asylum. There is some evidence that Maria Monk had suffered a brain injury as a child. One possible result of this alleged injury could be that Monk might have been manipulated, and might not be able to distinguish between fact and fantasy. Another possible result of the alleged injury could be that Monk had little understanding of the devastating result of her claims. It has been suggested, though not proven, that Maria Monk was manipulated into playing a role for profit by her publisher or her ghost writers. 

The book has been described as a hoax by some scholars and one of the most formidable books against Nunneries ever published.

This edition (2020) is a reproduction of previous publication of this classic work.

About the author: Maria Monk was born in Dorchester (Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu), Lower Canada in 1816, daughter of William Monk and Isabella Mills and died in the summer of 1849 at New York.

Maria Monk was a difficult child. According to her mother, when she was about seven she stuck a slate-pencil into her ear, an accident that caused permanent brain damage. At an early age she began to show signs of dissolute conduct and to engage in prostitution. In November 1834, her mother had her confined in the Charitable Institution for Female Penitents, a home established and run by Agathe-Henriette Huguet, dit Latour. But far from improving, Maria’s behaviour led to her expulsion in March 1835; she was pregnant by then.

Maria ran off to the United States. There she found herself at the centre of an anti-Catholic nativistic controversy that had reached a peak when a mob set fire to the Ursuline convent in Charlestown (Boston) on 11 August 1834. In October 1835, a New York newspaper published a statement by Maria describing her life as a nun at the Hôtel-Dieu of Montreal. She claimed that on the order of the superior and of the auxiliary bishop, Jean-Jacques Lartigue, she had had to kill a companion who refused to submit to the revolting demands of the priests. The article announced the forthcoming publication of a “complete and detailed account” of the scenes at the Hôtel-Dieu.

In January 1836, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk, a work that she was supposed to have written, came out in New York. In it were described the infamous things she claimed to have suffered as a Catholic nun. On 13 February 1836, Alfred-Xavier Rambau, editor of the Montreal paper L’Ami du peuple, de l’ordre et des lois, noted the recent publication of the volume, which he termed “as dull as [it is] untruthful.” 

The immediate success of the publication brought out the truth about the real authors of this fabrication, for there was soon a dispute over the division of the profits. Evidence in court revealed that Reverend William K Hoyt, a determined foe of Catholicism, had helped Maria in her flight to the United States, and that the Awful disclosures had been written from Maria’s oral account by the Reverend John Jay Slocum, a Presbyterian minister, with the assistance of Hoyt, the Reverend George Bourne, and others, who had pocketed most of the profits from this best-seller.

In the autumn of 1836, another fugitive, Sister St Frances Patrick, who said that she too came from the Hôtel-Dieu, turned up in New York at just the right moment to substantiate these sensational revelations. She had been a nun at the same time as Maria and claimed to be able to corroborate each of her assertions. The two appeared at a public meeting and, after embracing effusively, conversed for some time about their stay together at the Hôtel-Dieu.

In 1838, Maria had a child by an unknown father, this time without attributing the paternity to a priest. Shortly afterwards she married, but through her habitual drunkenness and debauchery, she squandered her husband’s savings, and he soon left her. In 1849 she was arrested in a house of ill repute for having stolen money from the man she was entertaining, and she was incarcerated in a New York prison. Half mad, she died there in the summer of 1849.

Maria Monk remains the sad heroine of a volume that American historian Ray Allen Billington says was “important as sensational propaganda against Catholicism.” According to his estimate, 300,000 copies of Awful Disclosures were sold before the Civil War.

Know Thyself

Reading Takes Work

Confessions Of A Pagan Nun: A Novel (Religious Fiction) by Kate Horsley

Paperback: The truth has a volume much larger than one person's body and soul. I am small both in body and soul but will try to be like an ant who carries many times its weight... The truth will inevitably cause tremors in those who cling to power without honouring justice... Those who read these pages, have mercy on me. Beati immaculati in via. † - Gwynneve, Pagan Nun

Cloistered in a stone cell at the monastery of Saint Brigit, a sixth-century Irish nun secretly records the memories of her Pagan youth, interrupting her assigned task of transcribing Augustine and Patrick. She revisits her past, piece by piece - her fiercely independent mother, whose skill with healing plants and inner strength she inherited; her druid teacher, the brusque and magnetic Giannon, who introduced her to the mysteries of the written language.

 

But disturbing events at the cloister keep intervening. As the monastery is rent by vague and fantastic accusations, Gwynneve’s words become the one force that can save her from annihilation.

Confessions of a Pagan Nun (2001) is about a druid-turned-nun who writes of faith, love, loss, and religion in this “beautifully written and thought-provoking book” set at the dawn of Ireland’s Christian era at around AD 500 (Library Journal).

About the author: Kate Horsley is the pen name of Kate Parker, an American author of numerous works of historical fiction, three of which are rooted in the Old West. Parker is also a professor of English at Central New Mexico Community College in Albuquerque. Parker was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1952, the youngest of five children. As a teenager, Parker became active in the Civil rights movement and anti-Vietnam war activism. While writing her master's thesis, Parker relocated to the Laguna Pueblo to work with writer Leslie Marmon Silko. After completing her degree, she remained in New Mexico and earned a PhD in American studies from the University of New Mexico. 

Kate Horsley’s A Killing in New Town (La Alameda, 1996) won the 1996 Best Western States Book Award for Fiction. She is also the author of Crazy Woman and Pagan Nun. She published a collection of short works entitled "X&O." She won the Kenneth Patchen Award for Innovative Fiction for the novel Between the Legs, which was published in the fall of 2015. She lives in Albuquerque, NM.

Rating: 5/5

A Month With Mary - Daily Meditations for a Profound Reform of Heart in the School of Mary by Don Dolindo Ruotolo

Paperback: This little book, A Month with Mary (2006), was written by an Italian holy priest Father Dolindo Ruotolo (1882-1970). Originally written as spiritual thoughts to his spiritual daughter, the work is comprised of thirty-one meditations for the month of May.

Father Dolindo wrote A Month with Mary on pocket-sized pages joined into small fascicles of 8 to 12 pages. He sent them to Laura de Rosis every two to three days and later transcribed them with some modifications in volume III of his autobiography: The Story of My Life in the Plan of the Great Mercy of God. 

This work is from 1912: one of those years which passed in the life of Father Dolindo with the cadence of a "Way of the Cross." But he, serene as ever, loved Christ the more, loved Our Lady the more and reflected on this love in these few pages to which he wished to give the significant title: A Profound Reform of Heart in the School of Mary. 

These meditations are written in the style of the Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis to provide a profound reform of heart.

A Month With Mary is translated from the Italian by Msgr Arthur Burton Calkins.

About the author: Dolindo Ruotolo (1882-1970) - a diocesan priest and Franciscan tertiary - was, with Father Pio of Pietrelcina, a twentieth century spiritual cornerstone of the Catholic Church. Fr Dolindo received the gift of understanding from above, through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He devoted his best energies to studying and commenting Sacred Scripture so as to make it easy for everybody to understand. He was faithful to his priestly vocation, which cherished above all of God's gifts, spending himself heroically for the salvation of souls in humility before God and men.

Father Dolindo’s altar was a point of writing inspiration and his writing table his altar where he composed, in the minute writing characteristic of penetrating intelligence, innumerous pages of bible explanation. He knew that all the libraries in the world would never be big enough to contain all the works of Jesus and so he set his mind to become as Jesus and to serve him through lucid words and doctrine: enough to surprise whoever asked where he found the time, paper and ink.

His exegetic work takes up an entire library, a source and from such a source the soul drinks of bubbling water equal to that promised to the Samaritan by Jesus. The literary evaluation of the Word, of the up coming Vesper Mass, of the Fall of Communism, to the work of “a new Polish John”, these examples are only a small anthology of the prophecies testifying God’s presence. 

His works are many, as is true for all saints, John said of Jesus: even if we wanted to spread all his works, there would not be library grand enough to bear witness to all of them, because the activity of a saint is continuous and on-going and it is this which makes up the Church in its plan of celestial glory.

About the translator: Monsignor Arthur B Calkins is a native of Erie, Pennsylvania, and was ordained a priest in 1970 for the Archdiocese of New Orleans. He is one of the most prominent among contemporary mariologists, having broad experience in both pastoral and scholarly work. His doctoral study, Totus Tuus: John Paul II's Program of Marian Consecration and Entrustment (New Bedford, MA: Academy of the Immaculate), has gone into three printings. His articles on Mariology and spirituality have appeared in both popular and scholarly publications as well as in the acts of congresses and symposia. He was named a corresponding member of the Pontifical International Marian Academy in 1985 and a corresponding member of the Pontifical Roman Theological Academy in 1995. He has been an official of the Pontifical Commission "Ecclesia Dei" since 1991 and was named a Chaplain of His Holiness with the title of Monsignor in 1997. Msgr Calkins is the editor of Totus Tuus, the recently published anthology (in Italian) of the Marian texts of the late Pope John Paul II. This anthology was commissioned by the Archbishop of Bologna, Carlo Cardinal Caffarra. 

High Threshold For Humiliation

Seen In Knightsbridge

 

Padre Kino And The Trail To The Pacific by Jack Steffan

Paperback: This adventure-packed and inspiring story of the American Southwest is the true account of missionary and explorer Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino (1645-1711) who brings his message of fellowship and peace to the 17th century frontier as he encounters its dangers and violence.

Father Kino’s greatest wish was to be sent from his Italian mountain home to China as a missionary - to follow in the footsteps of his hero St Francis Xavier. 

Instead he was sent to Mexico where his great work was the mapping and exploration of Pimería Alta (now Sonora, Mexico and sourthern Arizona, US). 

He became father and hero to the Pima nations, building twenty-nine missions. 

He was tirelessly in pursuit of the kingdom of God, battling the forces of nature and the Spanish colonists for the dignity of the Pima people. 

His life was devoted to God and to his fellow man - a life, as he described it, full of Heavenly Favours. 

This revised edition (1960, 2014), published by the Kino Heritage Society, will introduce you to "the noblest Southwestern of all" - a man of action and of faith - whose life is revered to this day by the people of Arizona, Sonora and the Californias. It features illustrations by Anthony D'Adamo and a fold-out map entitled The Pimería Alta of Father Kino. The Pimería Alta is the name Padre Kino gave to the land where the O'odham (Pima) speaking people lived that we now know as Southern Arizona and Northern Sonora.

The Kino Heritage Society promotes the enduring legacy of Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino SJ. To learn more about Padre Kino and the Kino Heritage Society, visit its website at www.padrekino.com

The Roman Catholic Church has begun its consideration of the formal recognition of Kino as one of its saints.

About the author: Jack Steffan is the pen name of author Alice Jacqueline Steffan. Steffan brings alive Kino and his times in her engaging and historically accurate depiction of the key events in Kino's last thirty years in the Sonoran Desert. She was inspired to write about Padre Kino when she visited Tucson and saw its stunning and world renowned Mission San Xavier del Bac.