Murder In The Graveyard: A Brutal Murder. A Wrongful Conviction. A 27-Year Fight for Justice. by Don Hale

Paperback: Murder In The Graveyard (2019) is a gripping true crime investigation into the longest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

In September 1973, Stephen Downing was convicted and indefinitely sentenced for the murder of Wendy Sewell, a young legal secretary in the town of Bakewell in the Peak District. Wendy was attacked in broad daylight in Bakewell Cemetery. 

Stephen Downing, the 17-year-old groundskeeper with learning difficulties and a reading age of 11, was the primary suspect. He was immediately arrested, questioned for nine hours, without a solicitor present, and pressured into signing a confession full of words he did not understand.

21 years later, local newspaper editor Don Hale was thrust into the case. Determined to take it to appeal, as he investigated the details, he found himself inextricably linked to the narrative. He faced obstacles at every turn, and suffered several attempts on his life. 

All of this merely strengthened his resolve: why should anyone threaten him if Downing had committed the crime?

In 2002, Stephen Downing was finally acquitted, having served 27 years in prison.

Immerse yourself in this masterful account of Hale’s long, dedicated and often dangerous campaign to rescue a long-forgotten victim of the British legal system; the longest miscarriage of justice in British history.

About the author: Don Hale is a British author and journalist known for his investigative work. He has been National Journalist of the Year on three occasions. His campaign to free Stephen Downing won the National Campaign of the Year Award and helped force a change in British and European law allowing any prisoner in denial of any offence the right to appeal for parole. 

In 2002, Don Hale was made an OBE for his efforts and campaigning journalism in this case. His OBE was nominated by Prime Minister Tony Blair and endorsed by the Queen and Prince Phillip. Following the Stephen Downing case, he was asked to help on several other high profile cases, including the re-trial of the Jill Dando case, which ultimately found Barry George innocent.

The Gift (2015) by Mary Oliver

Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman

Hardback: We are obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, the struggle against distraction, and the sense that our attention spans are shrivelling. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks.

Four Thousand Weeks (2021) is an uplifting, engrossing and deeply realistic exploration of the challenge. 

Rejecting the futile modern obsession with 'getting everything done,' it introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing rather than denying their limitations. And it shows how the unhelpful ways we have come to think about time are not inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we have made, as individuals and as a society. Its many revelations will transform the reader's worldview.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman sets out to realign our relationship with time - and in doing so, to liberate us from its tyranny.

Might it be the perfect gift for busy people this Christmas?

About the author: Oliver Burkeman is the author of The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, and for many years wrote a popular weekly column on psychology for the Guardian, 'This Column Will Change Your Life'. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Psychologies and New Philosopher. He has a devoted following for his writing on productivity, mortality, the power of limits, and building a meaningful life in an age of bewilderment.

Under The Sun Of Satan by Georges Bernanos

Paperback: Like no other Christian writer of our times, Bernanos is the minstrel of grace. - Hans Urs von Balthasar

Under the Sun of Satan (1926, 2017), Georges Bernanos’s powerful debut novel, throws the reader headlong into the mystery of evil and the drama of salvation. 

Saturated with dramatic intensity and marked with Bernanos’s inimitable fitful style, the novel follows young Fr Donissan, a man of fervent faith but limited intelligence, striving to serve the Lord in his rural ministry. 

The priest’s ability to plumb the depths of his flock’s inner lives, along with his awareness of Satan on the prowl, grant him formidable opportunities of grace - with a girl fallen prey to prostitution, with a child on the cusp of death, and with his fellow priests struggling with doubt.

Meditative, keenly insightful, at times alarming, Under the Sun of Satan displays the masterful scope of Bernanos’s artistic vision, a vision which only grew in clarity with his later works.

Under the Sun of Satan is translated from the French by Harry Lorin Binsse.

The cover image is Vincent van Gogh's 1889 Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun, oil on canvas.

About the author: Georges Bernanos (1888-1948) was a French novelist and essayist. Author of such acclaimed works as Diary of a Country Priest and Joy, he was a contemporary and influence of Flannery O’Connor. His works have been adapted into film with great critical success, and he remains one of France’s most respected authors.

The St Gallen Mafia: Exposing The Secret Reformist Group Within The Church by Julia Meloni

Hardback: What is the Gallen agenda? Communion for the divorced and 'remarried', abolition of priestly celibacy, priesthood for women being the ultimate aim, and lastly, unification with the Protestants. A national German church, independent of Rome, together with all the Protestants.

In the mid-1990s, a clandestine group of high-ranking churchmen began gathering in St Gallen, Switzerland. Opposed to Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the circle plotted a revolution in stealth.

 

By 2015, their secret ached to be told. 

Before an audience, Cardinal Godfried Danneels joked of being a part of a “mafia.” But as explosive as Danneels’s confession was, a thick cloud of mystery still enshrouds the St Gallen mafia.

 

In this compelling book, Julia Meloni pieces together the eerie trail of confessional evidence about the St Gallen group. The St Gallen Mafia sheds light on:

• The mysteries of the 2005 conclave, where mafia members grew divided over a plan to back Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope.

• The war against Benedict XVI by the mafia’s Cardinal Achille Silvestrini - and the mysterious “confessions” believed to be linked to him.

• The enigmatic, complicated relationship between the mafia’s Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini and Benedict XVI.

• The mafia writings that presaged a new Francis - and the 2013 conclave that elected him.

• Martini’s enduring role as an “ante-pope” - a precursor for Pope Francis.

 

Copiously researched and grippingly narrated, The St Gallen Mafia (2021) exposes a long-simmering plan to dramatically reshape the Catholic Church.

 

About the author: Julia Meloni holds degrees in English from Yale and Harvard. Her articles have appeared in Catholic publications such as Crisis Magazine, OnePeterFive, and LifeSiteNews.  

Meet Me In Malmö (Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery Series) by Torquil MacLeod

Paperback: Second-rate British journalist, Ewan Strachan, is invited to interview an old university friend, Mick Roslyn, who is now a leading film director in Sweden. 

On arrival in Malmö, Strachan is in for a terrible shock when he discovers the dead body of Roslyn's glamorous film star wife. The growing list of suspects includes a celebrity stalker, the director's business partner and the men behind the murder of Swedish premier Olof Palme in 1986. 

Among the investigating team is the attractive Inspector Anita Sundström, who soon captivates Strachan. Then Strachan's world is turned upside down when Anita arrests him for the crime. However, she is not sure whether he is the real murderer or has been set up. Anita battles to find the answers amid the antagonism and animosity of her colleagues. The exciting trail leads to death on Scandinavia's highest building before one final, unexpected twist in the first Anita Sundström Malmö mystery.

Meet Me In Malmö (2010) is the first instalment in the excellent Inspector Anita Sundström Mystery series set in Malmö, Sweden. There are currently eight books in this series, the latest being Mammon in Malmö released on 18 June 2021.

About the author: Torquil MacLeod was born in Edinburgh and brought up in the north east of England. His family hails from the Isle of Skye, where his Viking ancestors settled after one of their many raids from Norway. Hence the name Torquil, which is Scandinavian.

After a brief spell as a teacher in Worcestershire and a failed insurance salesman in the Midlands, he worked as a copywriter in advertising agencies in Birmingham, Glasgow and Newcastle; in 2000, he became a freelance writer. He lives in Cumbria with his wife Susan. They have two sons and four grandchildren, spread evenly between Essex and southern Sweden. He came up with the idea for his Malmö Mysteries after visiting the elder of his two sons in southern Sweden in 2000. 

Rating: 5/5

Think Often, Think Critically, Think Independently

 

Why Everything Became Cancel Culture

Continue! Continue!

Mary Ward: Pilgrim And Mystic by Margaret Mary Littlehales

Hardback: Mary Ward, foundress of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, was born in Yorkshire in 1585, twenty-nine years after the death of St Ignatius Loyola. Her background is the England of divided loyalties, of civil wars, of faith made steadfast by trial and persecution. To seek and to know God's will was the touchstone of her life. 

Step by step, she discovered her vocation taking shape along the lines envisaged by St Ignatius. For her Institute, as for his Order, there was to be no enclosure: the structures were to work for a new liberty for the service of Christ. Mission was to be the purpose. 

She was in advance of her time and was imprisoned by the Inquisition and condemned by the Church as a heretic and rebel. She allowed her work to be destroyed like the grain of wheat dying for a future growth.

It is to Mary Ward that women religious owe their freedom to work outside their cloister walls as teachers, nurses, missionaries, and any other of the multifarious vocations open to women today. 

Worldwide, Mary Ward's daughters witness to this, from Africa to Siberia, from North America to Korea. She was a pioneer in her concern for the education of girls - a new concept in her time. Nor did she differentiate between rich and poor, a watershed in the history of education. She could not have accomplished all this except out of a deep spirituality and complete trust in God. The popes of the twentieth century have recognised her as one of the pioneers of the Church. Pius XII referred to her as "that incomparable woman whom England, in her darkest and most bloodstained hour, gave to the Church."

In the 1870s, Burns & Oates published a Life of Mary Ward in two volumes. Since then, no full biography has been attempted in the English language, while a great deal of new material concerning her has been brought to light, and interest in her has grown steadily. 

At a time when the IBVM is, like many religious orders struggling to redefine its purpose in the modern world and at a time when Mary Ward may herself be canonised by the present Pope, this book is particularly relevant. 

The work of the order is also controversial and often criticised - indirectly in the novels of Antonia White and the writings of former pupils such as Marina Warner.

Mary Ward: Pilgrim and Mystic is Sr Margaret Mary's most notable work. It was begun in 1975 and took 23 years to complete. Published in 1998, it was an instant best seller and introduced the general public to Mary Ward.

About the author: Sister Margaret Mary Littlehales was a much-loved nun, author and teacher. She was born into a bilingual (English and French) family on 5 April 1907. Sister Margaret Mary became a nun in 1926 aged 19 when George V was on the throne, Stanley Baldwin was Prime Minister and the country was going through the trauma of the General Strike. She served an astonishing 83 years as a member of the Congregation of Jesus (CJ) and lived out her final years in St Joseph's, a house belonging to York's Bar Convent where she lived to see the new extension built. 

She went on to become a gifted English Literature teacher, teaching hundreds of children in many CJ schools, including 26 years at the Bar Convent between 1954 and 1980, until her retirement in 1999. She also taught Latin and Greek and in later years, German. Alongside her teaching, Sister Margaret Mary assisted in the restoration of the Bar Convent, arranging for the convents archives to be professionally catalogued. It was her writing on Mary Ward - the North Yorkshire woman who in 1609 founded the order of nuns that live at the Bar Convent - which gave her most pleasure. 

Writing as Adrienne Gascoigne, she has had a number of poems published, mainly in the Spectator.

One of her sisters and a cousin, Sisters Scholastica and Magdelen, joined her as members of the Mary Ward Institute. In 1999 at the age of 92, Sister Margaret Mary retired from St Joseph’s and in September 2006, she celebrated the 80th anniversary of taking her religious vows. She celebrated her 100th birthday in April 2007 with a quiet Mass and received over 100 cards from family and friends as well as a personal card from The Queen.

Sr Margaret Mary died peacefully in May 2009 aged 102. 

(Excerpt taken from The York Press, 9 May 2009)

A Note on the Name of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary: The official title of the Institute as recognised by the Church is Institutum Beatae Mariae Virginis. Except in England, the members write after their names IBMV. As the English rendering contracts to IBVM, the English members use that form, which is how they are referred to by most people in England. On the Continent, they are often known by the name given to the first Sisters: in Belgium and the Netherlands, Les Dames Anglaises; in Italy, Le Dame Inglese or Gentildonne Inglese; in Germany, they are widely known as Die Englische Fräulein.

Hanif Abdurraqib (b1983) American Poet, Essayist And Cultural Critic

What Is A Modern Poet?

The Dark Hours (Renée Ballard Series) by Michael Connelly

Hardback: There is chaos in Hollywood at the end of the New Year’s Eve countdown. 

Working her graveyard shift, LAPD detective Renée Ballard waits out the traditional rain of lead as hundreds of revellers shoot their guns into the air. 

Only minutes after midnight, Ballard is called to a scene where a hardworking auto shop owner has been fatally hit by a bullet in the middle of a crowded street party.

 

Ballard quickly concludes that the deadly bullet could not have fallen from the sky and that it is linked to another unsolved murder - a case at one time worked by Detective Harry Bosch. 

At the same time, Ballard hunts a fiendish pair of serial rapists, the Midnight Men, who have been terrorizing women and leaving no trace.

 

Determined to solve both cases, Ballard feels like she is constantly running uphill in a police department indelibly changed by the pandemic and recent social unrest. It is a department so hampered by inertia and low morale that Ballard must go outside to the one detective she can count on: Harry Bosch. 

But as the two inexorable detectives work together to find out where old and new cases intersect, they must constantly look over their shoulders. The brutal predators they are tracking are ready to kill to keep their secrets hidden.

The Dark Hours (2021) is the fourth and latest book in the superb Renée Ballard series set in Los Angeles. The other three are The Late Show (2017), Dark Sacred Night (2018) and The Night Fire (2019).

About the author: Michael Connelly was born in Philadelphia, PA on 21 July 1956. He moved to Florida with his family when he was 12 years old. Michael decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing - a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat.  In Fort Lauderdale, he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

Michael is the bestselling author of thirty-five novels and one work of non-fiction. With over seventy-four million copies of his books sold worldwide and translated into forty foreign languages, he is one of the most successful writers working today. His very first novel, The Black Echo, won the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award for Best First Novel in 1992. In 2002, Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the movie adaptation of Connelly’s 1998 novel, Blood Work. In March 2011, the movie adaptation of his #1 bestselling novel, The Lincoln Lawyer, hit theatres worldwide starring Matthew McConaughey as Mickey Haller. His most recent #1 New York Times bestsellers include Dark Sacred Night, Two Kinds Of Truth, The Late Show, The Wrong Side Of Goodbye, The Crossing, The Burning Room, The Gods of Guilt, and The Black Box. Michael’s crime fiction career was honoured with the Diamond Dagger from the CWA in 2018.

Michael is the executive producer of Bosch, an Amazon Studios original drama series based on his bestselling character Harry Bosch, starring Titus Welliver. Bosch streams on Amazon Prime Video. He is the creator and host of the podcast Murder Book. He is also the executive producer of the documentary films, Sound Of Redemption: The Frank Morgan Story and Tales of the American. He spends his time in California and Florida.

Rating: 5/5

Armistice Day

Dog-Eared

 

Seen At Old Brompton Road, London

 

Red Roulette: An Insider's Story Of Wealth, Power, Corruption And Vengeance In Today's China by Desmond Shum

Hardback: Better to speak out and die than keep silent and live. - Fan Zhongyan (989-1052)

Red Roulette (2021) is a unique and incendiary memoir from an entrepreneur who rose to the highest realms of power and money in China and whose wife was disappeared. Red Roulette reveals the truth of what is really happening inside the country's wealth-making machine.

After the 1949 Communist revolution, Desmond Shum's grandfather was marked as belonging to a despised 'black category' that included former landlords and rich peasants - meaning the Shums would be stigmatised and impoverished. As Desmond was growing up, he vowed that his life would be different.

Through hard work and sheer tenacity, Shum earned a degree from an American university and returned to China to establish himself in business. There, he met his future wife, the highly intelligent and equally ambitious Whitney Duan who was determined to make her mark within China’s male-dominated society. 

Whitney and Desmond made an effective team and, aided by relationships they formed with top members of the red aristocracy, vaulted into China’s billionaire class. 

Soon they were developing the massive air cargo facility at Beijing International Airport, and followed that feat with the creation of one of Beijing’s premier hotels. They were dazzlingly successful, travelling in private jets, funding multi-million-dollar buildings and endowments, and purchasing expensive homes, vehicles, and art.

But in 2017, their fates diverged irrevocably when Desmond, while residing overseas with his son, learned that his now ex-wife Whitney had vanished along with three coworkers.

This is both Desmond’s story and Whitney’s, because she has not been able to tell it herself.

About the author: Desmond Shum, who was born in Shanghai and raised in Hong Kong, developed the largest air cargo logistics facility in China, the Beijing Airport Cargo Terminal. He also led the development of the Bulgari Hotel in Beijing. In addition, starting in the early 2000s, he was an early pioneer of philanthropy in China, gifting extensively both domestically and internationally. Desmond holds a Bachelor's degree in Finance and Accounting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States, and is a graduate of the joint-EMBA program of Northwestern University (US) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

Definition: Catchfart

 

A Voice In The Wilderness: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò on the Church, America, and the World by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò

Paperback: “To restore the beauty of holiness to the face of the Bride of Christ, which is terribly disfigured by so many abominable crimes, and if we truly want to free the Church from the fetid swamp into which she has fallen, we must have the courage to tear down the culture of secrecy and publicly confess the truths we have kept hidden.” 

These bold words from the pen of an archbishop in exile - part of a bombshell exposé published in August 2018 concerning Theodore McCarrick and his circle - catapulted the ecclesiastical diplomat Carlo Maria Viganò to international prominence. 

In a steady stream of interventions from that time onward, Archbishop Viganò has not only supplied further incriminating details on the current Vatican regime but has extended his critique to the neo-modernism and worldly accommodation that officially entered the Church through the Second Vatican Council. 

He argues, moreover, that just as there is a “deep state” of wealthy and powerful international elites who exercise enormous sway over political affairs and cultural vectors, so too there is a “deep church” that retains for its advantage the external trappings of religion while pursuing an agenda of error and moral corruption. These pseudo-sovereignties closely collaborate as they work for the same goals, which are, at this point, an open secret.

A Voice in the Wilderness collects for the first time all the major writings of Archbishop Viganò from August 2018 to January 2021, with explanatory introductions and notes by the editor, Brian M McCall. Finally available in one place to allow for easy access, assimilation, and debate, it is the definitive edition of an extraordinary body of pronouncements that have stirred up vehement controversy on all sides. 

Regardless where one stands in its regard, Viganò’s arresting message cannot be ignored. 

Ultimately, it is one of conversion to Christ the King, the Truth in person, who sets us free from the accumulating slaveries of our time.

About the author: Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò was born on 6 January 1941 in Varese, Italy. He was ordained a priest on 24 March 1968 and incardinated in the Diocese of Pavia (Italy). He has a doctorate in both canon and civil law (utroque iure). His Excellency started his service in the Diplomatic Corps of the Holy See as Attaché in 1973 in Iraq and Kuwait. In 1976, he was transferred to the Apostolic Nunciature in Great Britain, and from 1978 until 1989 worked at the Secretariat of State of Vatican City. On 4 April 1989, he was nominated Special Envoy with the functions of Permanent Observer to the European Council in Strasbourg. He was consecrated an archbishop on 26 April 1992 and made Titular Archbishop of Ulpiana. He was nominated Apostolic Pro-Nuncio in Nigeria, on 3 April 1992. On 4 April 1998, he was nominated Delegate for the Pontifical Representations. 

Archbishop Viganò served as Secretary General of the Governorate of the Vatican City State from 16 July 2009 until 3 September 2011. On 19 October 2011, Pope Benedict XVI appointed him Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, a post he held until his retirement in April of  2016. He speaks Italian, French, Spanish and English.

About the editor: Brian M McCall holds the Orpha and Maurice Merrill Chair in Law at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. With degrees from Yale, University of Pennsylvania, and Kings College University of London, he is the author of five other books - Contracts: Modern Pacts (Kindle, 2019); The Architecture of Law (Notre Dame University Press, 2018); La Corporación como Sociedad Imperfecta (Marcial Pons, 2015); To Build the City of God: Living as Catholics in a Secular Age (Angelico Press, 2014); and The Church and the Usurers: Unprofitable Lending for the Modern Economy (Sapientia Press of Ave Maria University, 2013) - and dozens of articles. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of Catholic Family News since 2018. He and his wife, Marie Elaina, have six children.

The Spiritual Life Of Cardinal Merry del Val by Reverend Jerome dal Gal

Paperback: "All for God!" - Cardinal Merry del Val

In the early part of the 21st century, because of the incessant and often strident media attention to the doings and mis-doings of many highly placed Churchmen, it is good to reflect upon how much good can be accomplished for the greater glory of God and the advancement of religion by even one man of deep holiness who has been placed in a position of great authority and responsibility in the Church.

Such a man was Cardinal Merry del Val. He was born into an aristocratic family of Irish, English, and Spanish parentage (oh happy combination!) in the city of London. His parents were the Marquis Raphael Merry del Val and the Countess Josephine de Zuletta. Among the family of his forebears was a martyr of the Church, St Domenguito del Val, a child of barely seven who was crucified to a wall in the Cathedral of Saragossa in 1250 by the enemies of Christianity. 

He is of course best known as the architect and executor of St Pius X’s war against Modernism, for which great service to God he acquired numerous enemies in his lifetime, and for which we can be sure that he gained many friends in Heaven. But his life was not one of merely temporal greatness. He was a profoundly humble and virtuous man as well.

In 1931, a year after the death of this illustrious Cardinal, the famous French scholar René Bazin made the following observation: “Judgment was passed in many different ways on Cardinal Merry del Val while he was living. This was due largely to the part he played in the political and religious affairs of his time. But now that he is dead people are getting to know him better, for with death has come the unveiling of the well-guarded secret of his extraordinary spiritual life.”

The Spiritual Life of Cardinal Merry del Val (2014) reveals the hidden depths of spirituality which strengthened him and perfected him in his quest for perfection and union with God. The testimonies of those who knew him, his letters of direction to souls, his diaries and personal notes are woven into a profoundly stirring revelation of a soul completely dedicated to God.

The Spiritual Life of Cardinal Merry del Val is translated from the Spanish by Reverend Joseph A McMullin PhD, DD.

Definition: Malversation

Definition: Spuddle

The Vision Of La Salette: The Children Speak by Fr Emile A Ladouceur MS

Paperback: Well, my children, you will make this known to all my people. - Our Lady of La Salette to Melanie and Maximin.

On 19 September 1846, a “beautiful lady" appeared to two young cowherds - Melanie Calvat, a girl of fourteen and Maximin Giraud, a boy of eleven - on a mountain slope in the hamlet of La Salette in southeastern France where they were pasturing their cattle. 

Subsequent questioning of the children by both civil and church authorities established their integrity and the accuracy of their report, which led to affirm and widespread conviction that they had witnessed an Apparition of the Blessed Virgin. 

The site of the Apparition, set atop a mountain in the Alps has become a vibrant international Shrine to which hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have made their way since that heavenly visit. 

From the event of the Apparition, the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette were founded and have heeded Mary’s call to make known her message of conversion and reconciliation to all her people.

The Vision of La Salette: The Children Speak (1956, 2016) details the Vision of La Salette as the first of three major Marian manifestations during a cold, skeptical age, which marked the span of a century. The Message it brought to people was developed and emphasized in the later Visions of Lourdes and Fátima. 

May this book, dedicated to Our Lady Reconciler, make known afar her Merciful Apparition, which rightly has been called the Grace of a Century.  

About the author: In this book Fr Emile Ladouceur tells the story of the Apparition in marvellous detail. He has incorporated translated parts of Abbé Bossan's report, “The History of the Apparition”, written in 1868 after Fr Bossan’s personal interrogation of the children and a thorough investigation of the surrounding facts.

Fr Ladouceur, who was widely received as a leading authority on the La Salette Apparition, has examined and studied all extant literature, printed and in manuscript, on the Apparition. He has written the fascinating back story of the children and the apparition and expanded it with an illuminating analysis and commentary of his own, making this book an enjoyable and inspiring exploration of the event, message and mission of the La Salette Apparition.