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Delving Between the Covers of Some Good Reading

Christ is risen!

Let’s continue on looking at books (mainly Catholic, mostly old as in pre-1970).

A Seal Upon My Heart: Autobiographies of Twenty Sisters, [Fr.] George L. Kane (ed.) (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1957, 1956 imprimatur, cloth). This is simultaneously a joyful and a tragic book. Joyful, because of the stories told by the sisters regarding heir conversion and their falling in love with Jesus, the True Spouse; tragic, because in only a decade’s time many of these communities would be weakened, depleted, or tending to extinction. (These are all active orders.) The sisters are without exception skilled writers, and they make one reading in 2025 yearn for a return of a Catholic culture and habited nuns. (Thank you, Sister Wilhelmina!) Time and again the writers (one wonders what happened to those who were alive during the upheavals post-council and whether they stayed in the religious life—I am reminded of the uncertainty present at the end of Rumer Godden’s In This House of Brede) tell of seeing sisters in action and about the attraction or not to the habit. There are often descriptions of joy and peace, even within the drudgery of daily life in the active apostolate.

Robert Bergin, This Apocalyptic Age (Coconut Grove, FL: Fatima International, 1973, pb). This is a succinct exposition of modern troubles and the remedy: God’s call at Fatima. Many of the troubles described are only worse today. The writer does not spend much time looking at the confusion in the Church or problems with the new Mass, but otherwise this is still a timely book.

Paul Horgan, Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History (NY: Rinehart, 1954, cloth). This is a two-volume set, with volume one pertaining to pre-history and Spanish rule. Volume two concerns the American expansion in to the region. This book won a Pulitzer for History in 1954. Horgan is both a skilled novelist and meticulous historian. He obviously loves this region, and he also deftly weaves in the important fact of Catholicism in its development. The beginning of the book was for me the weakest, dealing with the region’s pre-history, but after that it gained solidity and narrative power. Horgan has an eye for important characters as well as the development of themes. (I have read Volume one so far.) This is he sort of historical telling that neither shrinks from the sinfulness of man nor his goodness and heroism. The maps are helpful.

The story of the Spanish conquest is one I had known little about, but Warren Carroll’s Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness (Front Royal, VA: Christendom, 1983) is a great place to start. Carroll, like Horgan, is skilled at presenting history in the light of the truths of the Faith. In this small but packed book, he shows how the Spanish conquest ended the horrors of human sacrifice and demonstrated God’s power. That was part of the foundation for the apparition of Our Lady of Guadalupe to Saint Juan Diego. (For more of the foundation, see the utterly fascinating Guadalupe and the Flower World Prophecy by Joseph Julian Gonzalez and Monique Gonzalez—I’ll be writing more on this after I finish that book.)

Frederick Justus Knecht, A Practical Commentary on Holy Scripture (N.P.: St. Austin Press, 2021, 1929 imprimatur, cloth). This is a reprint of a book originally from…decades ago. It is partly Scripture quotation and partly paraphrase. It seems to have been intended partly for catechetics; the commentary sections are written at a much higher level than would be found in today’s dumbed-down catechesis. There are also brief reflection sections on how the readings apply to one’s life. This is a useful way to study scripture in an expedited but still meaty manner.

I am reading, among other things, the following: Belloc, A Biographical Anthology; The Nine Days of Father Serra by Ziegler; and, Twain’s novel about Joan of Arc.

Happy and fruitful reading to you.

P.S.: An article I wrote appeared at Catholic Exchange this past Friday (5/2/25). Here is the link. I was slated to do some media interviews to promote the piece, and I was…well, I was ambivalent about that, to tell the truth, but I was preparing to do it. But that will not be happening, and here’s why. The same day CE published a piece about yet another set of mysteries for the Rosary (I will NOT link to it) approved by a diocese in Florida. I informed the editor that I am traditional and do not even pray the Luminous mysteries proposed by Pope John Paul II. I can’t affiliate with an outlet that promotes such an effort. The previous editor at CE was on the same page as me on matters liturgical, etc.