Michael E. Gaitley, MIC, author of the popular book "Consoling the Heart of Jesus," comes an extraordinary 33-day journey to Marian consecration with four giants of Marian spirituality: St. Louis de Montfort, St. Maximilian Kolbe, Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta, and Blessed Pope John Paul II. Father Michael masterfully summarizes their teaching, making it easy to grasp, and simple enough to put into practice. More specifically, he weaves their thought into a user-friendly, do-it-yourself retreat that will bless even the busiest of people. So, if you've been thinking about entrusting yourself to Mary for the first time or if you're simply looking to deepen and renew your devotion to her, "33 Days to Morning Glory" is the right book to read and the perfect retreat to make.

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    Now, the story continues… Thomas Travis had always thought the toughest streets in the ghettos of Atlanta were next door to hell. But he didn’t know just how close they were until the threat of racial violence sent him fleeing down the stairs of an abandoned building…only to fall headlong into a tortured realm of fire and ice, the place of the damned. The only chance of escape was to trust the strange elderly woman who met him there and insisted on being his guide. She claimed to know the way out, but it would lead through all the terrifying circles of divine judgment, each one deeper and more tormenting than the last. In the lowest pit, the Lord of Darkness himself lay in wait. Thomas had lived a godless life, and now there was hell to pay. If his soul could be purged on the journey, he just might make it. But the odds were against him. In hell, the only guarantee is justice…and the only way out is down. About the AuthorPAUL THIGPEN, PhD, is an award-winning journalist and the best-selling author of more than twenty-five books, including A Dictionary of Quotes from the Saints, Blood of the Martyrs, and Seed of the Church. He is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale University and also holds a doctorate in historical theology from Emory University.

    Jesus gave his members a new way to deal with offenders, with violence, with money, with leadership, with a corrupt society. He gave them a new pattern of relationships between man and woman, and an enlarged understanding of what it means to be human.This is the original revolution: the creation of a distinct community with its alternate set of values and its coherent way of incarnating them. Such a group is not only a novelty, but is also, if lived faithfully, the most powerful tool of social change.

    Some develop very quickly, but do not achieve significant depth; while others develop quite slowly, but seem to be almost unending in the depth of wisdom, trust, hope, virtue, and love they engender. The best way of explaining this is to look at each of the pillars individually.Before doing this, however, it is indispensable for each of us to acknowledge (at least intellectually) the fundamental basis for Christian contemplation, namely, the unconditional Love of God. Jesus taught us to address God as Abba. If God really is Abba; if His love is like the father of the prodigal son; if Jesus' passion and Eucharist are confirmations of that unconditional Love; if God really did so love the world that He sent His only begotten Son into the world not to condemn us, but to save us and bring us to eternal life (Jn 3:16-19); if nothing really can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus (Rm 8:31-39); and if God really has prepared us "to grasp fully, with all the holy ones, the breadth and length and height and depth of Christ's love, and experience this love which surpasses all understanding, so that we may attain to the fullness of God Himself" (Eph 3:18-20), then God's love is unconditional, and it is, therefore, the foundation for unconditional trust and unconditional hope. There can be nothing more important than contemplating, affirming, appropriating, and living in this Unconditional Love. This is the purpose of contemplation; indeed, the purpose of the spiritual life itself.

    Best-selling French author Nicolas Diat set out to find what their deaths can reveal about the greatest mystery faced by everyone—the end of life.How to die? How to respond to our fear of death? To answer these and other questions, Diat travelled to eight European monasteries including Solesmes Abbey and the Grande Chartreuse. Through extraordinary interviews with monks, he learned that their death experiences are varied and unique, with elements of peace, pain, humility, sorrow, and joy.These monks have the same fears, torments, and sorrows as everyone else, Diat discovered. What is exemplary about them is their humility and simplicity. When death approaches, and its hand reveals its strength, they are like happy and naïve children who wait with impatience to open a gift. They have complete confidence in the mercy of God.

    Chesterton's brilliant sketch of the life and thought of Thomas Aquinas is as relevant today as when it was published in 1933. Then it earned the praise of such distinguished writers as Etienne Gilson, Jacques Martain, and Anton Pegis as the best book ever written on the great thirteenth-century Dominican. Today Chesterton's classic stands poised to reveal Thomas to a new generation. Chesterton's Aquinas is a man of mystery. Born into a noble Neapolitan family, Thomas chose the life of a mendicant friar. Lumbering and shy -- his classmates dubbed him "the Dumb Ox" -- he led a revolution in Christian thought. Possessed of the rarest brilliance, he found the highest truth in the humblest object. Having spent his life amid the vast intricacies of reason, he asked on his deathbed to have read aloud the Song of Songs, the most passionate book in the Bible.As Albert the Great, Thomas's teacher, predicted, the Dumb Ox has bellowed down the ages to our own day. Chesterton's book will enlighten those who would consign Thomas to the obscurity of medieval times. It will confound those who would use Thomas to bolster arid schemes of Christian rationalism. Rather, it will introduce the wondrous mystery of the man who, after a life of unparalleled genius, was seized by a vision of the Unknown and said, "I can write no more. I have seen things which make all my writings like straw."

    Drawing heavily on poignant anecdotes from his own experience as a life-long Catholic born in 1960s, Madrid offers readers a way of looking at the Church--its members, teachings, customs, and history--from perspectives many may have never considered.Growing up Catholic during a time of great social and theological upheaval and transition, a time in which countless Catholics abandoned their religion in search of something else, Patrick Madrid learned a great deal about why people leave Catholicism and why others stay. This experience helped him gain many insights into what it is about the Catholic Church that some people reject, as well as those things that others treasure. Drawing upon Madrid's personal experiences, Why Be Catholic? offers a deeply personal, fact-based, rationale for why everyone should be Catholic or at least consider the Catholic Church in a new light.

    In poetic terms, it clarifies the underlying principles and existential implications of the belief that when Christians join in the Eucharist and other liturgical celebrations, they do so not as discrete individuals but as interconnected members of the one People of God.

    Published at Mother Teresa's personal request to share her message with the world, it contains personal stories, revealing insights and never-before-seen letters from Mother Teresa.

    This essay is an attempt to contribute effective strategies to engage our own time and culture once more with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and – for a weary world – to awaken the Catholic imaginative vision.

    This inspiring and fascinating memoir, subtitled, “The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist,” The Long Loneliness is the late Dorothy Day’s compelling autobiographical testament to her life of social activism and her spiritual pilgrimage.A founder of the Catholic Worker Movement and longtime associate of Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day was eulogized in the New York Times as, “a nonviolent social radical of luminous personality.” The Long Loneliness recounts her remarkable journey from the Greenwich Village political and literary scene of the 1920s through her conversion to Catholicism and her lifelong struggle to help bring about “the kind of society where it is easier to be good.” (Description from Amazon.)

    This book first appeared just over fifty years ago. It is the pilgrimatic work of one of the 20th century's greatest theologians. Deeply rooted in tradition, it breaks ground and sows seeds which will bear their fruit in the Second Vatican Council's central documents on the Church. Here, de Lubac gathers from throughout the breadth and length of Catholic tradition elements which he synthesizes to show the essentially social and historical character of the Catholic Church and how this worldwide and agelong dimension of the Church is the only adequate matrix for the fulfillment of the person within society and the transcendence of the person towards God. Ignatius Press is reprinting it, with a preface by Cardinal Ratzinger, because it is a classic that deserves to be read and reread by every educated

    Francis de Sales' heroic efforts to bring Calvinists back to the Faith comes this succinct, eloquent defense of the age-old Catholic practice of making the Sign of the Cross, which 16th century Calvinists denounced as a Popish invention and many Protestants scorn even today. Along with St. Francis's other lucid explanations of the Catholic Faith and his undaunted love even for those who hated him, this modest book helped restore to their native Catholic faith tens of thousands of people who not long before were intent on killing him.As they did for the Calvinists in St. Francis's day, so in our day these ably translated pages will bring you a better understanding of and a renewed love for the Sign of the Cross, that brief and lively exterior prayer by which, from time immemorial, God has been invoked by serious Christians before all of their endeavors.

    With unprecedented cooperation from John Paul II and the people who knew and worked with him throughout his life, George Weigel offers a groundbreaking portrait of the Pope as a man, a thinker, and a leader whose religious convictions defined a new approach to world politics—and changed the course of history. As even his critics concede, John Paul II occupied a unique place on the world stage and put down intellectual markers that no one could ignore or avoid as humanity entered a new millennium fraught with possibility and danger.The Pope was a man of prodigious energy who played a crucial, yet insufficiently explored, role in some of the most momentous events of our time, including the collapse of European communism, the quest for peace in the Middle East, and the democratic transformation of Latin America. With an updated preface, this edition of Witness to Hope explains how this “man from a far country” did all of that, and much more—and what both his accomplishments and the unfinished business of his pontificate mean for the future of the Church and the world.