Catholicism

What Does the Pope Do?
Conclave: The Politics, Personalities, and Process of the Next Papal Election
by John L. Allen, Jr.
Conclave is a fascinating look at the election process and at what this headline-making occasion will mean to the world. John L. Allen, Jr., takes readers behind the scenes to reveal the issues, parties, and people most likely to determine the outcome.

Making Peace with Yourself, Solitude
Living Peace: A Spirituality of Contemplation and Action
by John Dear
A few years before his death in 1999, the great Latin American advocate for the poor, Brazil's Archbishop Dom Helder Camara, was speaking at a crowded church in Berkeley, California. He was asked, 'After facing death squads, would-be assassins

A Catholic Dark Age

This is the darkest time in Catholic history ... the collapse of religious life, the dearth of vocations, the lowering of ecclesiastical discipline, particularly vis-à-vis false teaching and moral teaching, the general confusion, the apostasy

Chapter One
Becoming a Father: The Real Work of a Man's Soul
by John L. Hart, Ph.D.
In an age when men's roles in the lives of their children are under fire, the book may well become the touchstone to a new wave of hands-on, emotionally present, conscious fathering. John Hart focuses on the synergistic tenets that a father is crucial

Mother Antonia's Journey from Beverly Hills to a Life of Service in a Mexican Jail
The Prison Angel
by Mary Jordan, Kevin Sullivan
In early 2002, we asked a young woman on Islas Marías, a prison in the Pacific Ocean about 100 miles off the Mexican coast, how she liked being an inmate there. She bubbled on about the beautiful ocean setting and the fresh air

Part 1
Sister Genevieve: A Courageous Woman's Triumph in Northern Ireland
by John Rae
On a January morning in 1956 a sister wearing the blue habit and distinctive white collar and cornette, or headdress, of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul left Clonard Convent in the heart of Roman Catholic West Belfast to walk the short

Vatican 101
All the Pope's Men : The Inside Story of How the Vatican Really Thinks
by John L. Allen, Jr.
All the Pope's Men is a lucid, in-depth guide to the sometimes puzzling, often incomprehensible inner workings of the Vatican. It reveals how decisions are made, how papal bureaucrats think, and how careers in the Roman Curia are shaped.

The Source of My Vocation
Rise, Let Us Be on Our Way
by Pope John Paul II
I set off in search of the source of my vocation. It is beating there … in the Upper Room in Jerusalem. I thank God that during the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000 I was able to pray-precisely there-in the Upper Room (Mark 14:15)

Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois
by Anonymous
Every one knows that America is called the New World because, until the close of the 15th century, it was unknown to the other nations of the earth - at least it was then unknown to Europe. Until quite near the end of that century

Thomas Aquinas
A Concise Encyclopedia of the Philosophy of Religion
by Anthony C. Thiselton, M.Th., Ph.D., D.D.
Born into an aristocratic family in the region of Naples, Thomas was educated first in a Benedictine monastery and then at the University of Naples (1239-44). He then became a Dominican friar, and from 1248 to 1254 studied under Albert the Great.

Jesus
A Concise History of the Catholic Church
by Thomas Bokenkotter
The Catholic Church has always claimed Jesus of Nazareth as its founder, and nearly everyone is familiar with the basic facts about this dynamic Jewish preacher and healer who was born around the turn of the first century a.d.

Receiving the Holy Spirit
Contact with God
by Anthony De Mello
I wish to situate this retreat in the context of the Church and the world today. We have assembled here for a period of silence and prayer and withdrawal at a time when the Church is in crisis and the world in desperate need of peace and development

Father Geoghan
Betrayal: The Crisis in the Catholic Church
by The Investigative Staff of the Boston Globe
This groundbreaking book provides a detailed, devastating account of the Catholic Church's decades-long cover-up that has left millions of American Catholics shocked, angry, and confused. Betrayal brings into sharp focus the scores of abusive priests

Invitation, Identity
The Questions of Jesus : Challenging Ourselves to Discover Life's Great Answers (Challenging Ourselves to Discover Life's Great Answers)
by John Dear
What are you looking for? The first question Jesus asks does not address our sins, failures, or infidelity. It is not accusatory or hostile. Rather, it is a question rooted in compassion and love, calling upon our deepest desires, the best within us.

Before Orders
Our Fathers: The Secret Life of the Catholic Church in an Age of Scandal
by David France
Based on hundreds of interviews, private correspondence, unpublished scientific probes and secret Vatican documents, and tens of thousands of pages of court records, David France shows how the church's institutional suspicion of human sexuality ironically

Who or what is a Catholic?
The Reformation: A History
by Diarmaid MacCulloch
This Greek word has become one of the chief battlegrounds in western Latin Christianity, for it is used in different ways that outside observers of Christian foibles find thoroughly confusing.

History of the Rosary
The Rosary
by Garry Wills
In order to say the rosary, one does not need to know much if anything about the history of the practice. It was for a long time shrouded in legend. But it may help one's devotion to know what deep roots the practice has in the biblical, conciliar

Behind Closed Doors
Virgins of Venice: Broken Vows and Cloistered Lives in the Renaissance Convent
by Mary Laven
Venice in the late Renaissance was a city of fabulous wealth, reckless creativity, and growing social unrest. It was also a city of walls and secrets, ghettos and cloisters. In this captivating book, Cambridge historian Mary Laven uncovers the long-hidden

Before John

Pope John XXIII opens with a concise but sweeping history of the Catholic Church and the papacy, culminating in the brief but unforgettable reign of Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, in the mid-twentieth century.

Saint Thérèse

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, largely unknown when she died in a Carmelite convent at the age of twenty-four, became-through her posthumously published autobiography-one of the world's most influential religious figures.