About the book: Readers who have enjoyed Conchita: A Mother's Spiritual Diary will not want to miss this remarkable collection of her letters to her family.
Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida (Conchita) lived all of the states of life possible for a Christian woman: she was a single young woman, a wife, the mother of nine children, a widow and a professed religious (at the hour of her death, by special permission of the Pope).
Her life of continuous and intimate relationship with the Lord was expressed in a remarkable number of ways. She inspired the five Works of the Cross:
1) the Apostleship of the Cross and the Covenant of Love with the Sacred Heart of Jesus (both for laity),
2) the Fraternity of Christ Priest (for priests and bishops),
3) the Sisters of the Cross of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (a contemplative congregation), and
4) the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit (priests and brothers).
In addition, she wrote one remarkable book after another, expressing her profound religious insights and her devotion to the Eucharist.
But Conchita was not a cloistered religious or hermit writing in tranquillity. She was a busy wife, mother, and grandmother who lived during one of the most turbulent times in Mexican history - an age of religious persecution, revolution and economic depression.
These letters to her large and extended family express not only her spiritual wisdom but also her warm, human side as she lovingly guides, advises, and rejoices with the members of her family in good times and bad.
A Mother's Letters: A Vision of Faith In Everyday Life (2004, 2022 current printing) is compiled and annotated by Sister Dolores Icaza Conrey, RCSCJ. Originally published in Spanish under the title Cartas de una madre de familia - Concepción Cabrera de Armida (1986), it has been translated into the English by Mary McCandless.
A Mother's Letters: A Vision of Faith In Everyday Life is dedicated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
About the author: Blessed Concepción Cabrera de Armida, better known as Conchita, was born in San Luis Potosi on 8 December 1862 and died in Mexico, DF, on 3 March 1937.
As a writer, she often aimed to show her readers how to love the Catholic Church:
"To love the Church is not to criticize her, not to destroy her, not to try to change her essential structures, not to reduce her to humanism, horizontalism and to the simple service of a human liberation. To love the Church is to cooperate with the work of Redemption by the Cross and in this way obtain the grace of the Holy Spirit come to renew the face of this poor earth, conducting it to its consummation in the design of the Father's immense love."
Wife, mother, widow, lay apostle, Catholic mystic and writer, Conchita was beatified in Mexico City on 4 May 2019 as the first Mexican laywoman to receive this recognition.
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