Mary Lea Hill, FSP, has added a new book to her repertoire: The Church Rocks, an engaging and often amusing whirlwind tour of Church history. We caught up with the Crabby Mystic to ask her a few questions about it. Your new book, The Church Rocks, gives young people an overview of Church history in a delightful and entertaining way. But… why do we need to know about all this?We need to teach Church history to young people because it is our history, their history – it is a story...

If there’s one thing on which all Christians agree, it’s that the Gospels are at the heart of our faith. These are the stories of the Son of God: his birth, life, death, and resurrection. And if there’s one thing on which all Christians seem to disagree, it’s in how the Gospels should manifest in our lives, how we can live out their mandates. There’s a group of people who don’t seem to be concerned with the “how,” because, ...

With her new book, Thomas Aquinas, now available in the Saints By Our Sides series, Sr. Marianne Lorraine Trouvé, FSP, again shows her expertise in—and love of—this great saint. We caught up with her to find out more about it.  1) Everyone at the publishing house and in the convent knows to go to you for all things Thomas Aquinas. Why are you so interested in him?I've always loved Saint Thomas ever since I found out about him as a kid. I was a bookworm ...

This Sunday marks the World Day of Migrants and Refugees.Pope Francis delivered his message for 2018’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees back last summer. I didn’t notice the announcement; the news cycles were filled with other pressing stories, many of them frightening enough to claim all my attention. And I honestly didn’t realize that the Church has been observing this day since 1914.Most of the time, in the face of all the needs in the world today, I feel overwhelmed....

We all make them. “This year I’m going to lose weight… get a new job… save some money… be kinder…” And sometimes those resolutions actually take off. You join the gym. You open the savings account. But we all know what happens next: the pressure of adding so many obligations onto our already-overscheduled lives makes breaking those resolutions the first and easiest thing to do in January.Instead of making and breaking resolutions this year, here&rsqu...

I almost broke my tooth on it.It was the evening of Twelfth Night, the end of the Christmas season, and my parish church was celebrating as many churches and families do in France, with a galette des rois—what might be translated as a King’s Cake.We don’t just sit down and eat this cake, mind you. There’s an age-old protocol that needs to be followed having to do with the little charm that bakers hide inside the cake. The youngest child present must hide under the table a...

Imagine if God granted you visions… and then nobody believed that you had them!That was what happened to a French nun in the 1600s. Margaret Mary (Marguerite-Marie) Alacoque had promised herself to Jesus when she was a child, but she set aside this promise as a young woman in order to participate in social life. Jesus appeared to her again one night as she returned late from Carnival, reproaching her for forgetting him, and so she entered the local Visitation convent.She had a series...

“Lord, your poor little girl, your poor image is here before you, yearning for you with all the strength of her being.”The woman writing these words in 1945 was named Gabrielle Bossis. She wasn’t, in fact, a little girl: she was 71 years old. But that image, the image of a child coming—in trust and love—to listen to the words that would eventually become the spiritual classic He and I, is indicative of the heart and soul of this mystic who discerned and followed the...

I mean that literally. We know a couple of the Church’s liturgical seasons well—Lent and Advent come to mind right away. But what happened to Christmas?The truth is that it’s easy to make Advent into a sort of almost-Christmas season. There are gifts to purchase and wrap. There are carols and Christmas parties and Santas all over the place. Christmas trees and lights go up a month ahead of Christmas Day. So by the time Christmas Day actually arrives, it finds everyone a little ...

For St. John of the Cross, the mystical path meant living with an all-consuming desire to know and love God, completely and fully, abandoning everything that didn’t move him toward that goal.He believed that God illuminates the individual—who, because of that illumination, then has the desire and power to shed the illusions of this world. These illusions include the messages of the senses, which distort the reality of union with God.In his poem Dark Night, St. John of the Cross extol...