You might not have thought much about angels, or your guardian angel, or the angels in scripture. Now’s your chance!In Angels: Help From on High, Sr Marianne Lorraine Trouvé, FSP, writes, “Angels have gotten some bad press. Artists often depict them as chubby babies with wings, flying lazily around clouds dotting a blue sky. But who would ever turn to such creatures for protection or help? Wouldn’t that be like asking a two-year-old to balance your checkbook or chan...

“It is the business of the artist to uncover the strangeness of truth.”Flannery O’Connor It’s often said that truth is stranger than fiction. Nobody is more familiar with this reality than Fr. Damian Ference, who, as a priest, is often witness to life’s most dramatic and mysterious events. In his new book, The Strangeness of Truth, meditations on the incarnation and resurrection are presented alongside scenes from his own life: a midnight call to the ICU t...

It’s always something of a relief to me when I learn a saint struggled with a behavior or an inclination because it makes them more human, more approachable, even more understandable. The saints were real people, of course, but many of them seem to have lived so perfectly that it's discouraging to even try to emulate them. So when I read about a saint struggling to overcome human weaknesses—just as the rest of us struggle—I’m more inclined to view that perso...

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...

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...

Many parents and educators don’t look at comic books and graphic novels as “real” literature. There’s a reluctance to see anything as a real book when it contains fewer words and more pictures. But there are a lot of good reasons for your children and students to read them—and those reasons can hold true for adults, as well!The best way to think about a graphic novel is that it is a format, not a genre, with a far longer and richer history in countries like Japan (m...

For the Daughters of St. Paul, founded only two years before the Fátima apparitions, the answer to that question is profound. Our Lady of Fátima appeared to three obscure Portuguese children at an important, even crucial, time in world affairs. World War I was going on, of course; but sadly there’s rarely a time when there’s a war not going on somewhere. Fátima's Distinctive Context: the Media ExplosionNo; what’s particularly distinctive to us is t...

Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is an ancient practice honoring Christ as the Merciful One who is Love. More than just a way of prayer, this devotion is based on the essence of the Gospel: to take on the heart of Jesus so as to live in his love and bring it to others. No matter what stage of spiritual growth you are experiencing, this book can help you grow more deeply in love with Jesus and experience the love of his Sacred Heart in your life.The Sacred Heart of Jesus Prayer Book covers a...

 Do you think Church history is dull? It's okay to admit it! But here are a few facts that might liven it up a little: Feeling pent up in the Vatican, Pope John Paul II used to sneak out to ski and hike in the Italian Alps. He did it over a hundred times before being discovered by a 10-year-old boy who pointed at him and shouted, "The pope! The pope!" The only Christian church in existence for the first 1,000 years of Christian history was the Roman Catholic Church. Most ...

It’s sometimes easy to believe that we’re not measuring up to what God wants of us. Oh, we try to live good lives, but we often fall short of even our own expectations. We snap at our children. We forget a commitment we made. We have unpleasant thoughts about our next-door neighbor.When that happens, a lot of us feel that we’re the only people who have ever fallen short of doing what we should. We think that people in the early Church somehow lived better lives, purer lives, ho...