For Chesterton fans this collection of articles written over eighty years ago are vintage G. K. The author arranged the articles in book format by sections and chapters giving to the whole the salient title: The Outline of Sanity. Accused by thickheaded social "progressives" of wanting to push society back into an antiquated agrarian provincialism, these insightful socio-economic indictions ought rather to have heralded the Catholic thinker as today’s prophet for social sanity. The perennial truths of the principles making up these critical commentaries will surely be even more evident in today’s restless age of stroboscopic consumerism. Master of paradox that he is, Chesterton, the philosopher, exposes the enslaving and dehumanizing aspects of an economy dependent upon monopolistic plutocrats and their so-called "labor saving" machines of mass production. With his penchant for balancing satire with humor, this literary giant provides a common sense solution to this age’s fast pace trek to nowhere. Modern man must be weaned gradually, he argues, back away from the imperialistic megalith corporation as a statistical wage earner and be productive on his own terms, on his own land. In order for man to achieve happiness, his true end, he must not build his life around some ephemeral retirement plan, but live each day for his real end: eternal retirement with God. Taking the original sense of the word economy as domestic harmony the ideal which the author champions is simply called Distributism. It is the very antithesis of Monopoly.
By Fanchon Royer - PB - 304 pages
Miguel Pro was born in 1891. He was the third of eleven children, four of whom had died as infants or young children. He entered the Jesuit novitiate at El Llano on August 15, 1911, was ordained in 1925, and executed in 1927. In 1952—just 25 years later—his cause came up for beatification and he was beatified by Pope John Paul II on September 25, 1988. At the time of Padre Pro’s death, Mexico was under rule of the fiercely anti-clerical and anti-catholic President Plutarch Elias Calles who had begun what writer Graham Greene called the “fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth.” During those years of the Masonic-Communist persecution, the Mexican people rose up in a great war to defend their nation and the rights of the Church and of Christ the King. Their battle-cry was Viva Christo Rey! Blessed Padre Pro’s martyrdom came at the height of the war and it typifies the period of the Cristero rebellion and its heroes. He took no part in the war, but spent his life ministering to the poor and faithful Mexicans.
He was one of the earliest combatants of communism and a pioneer “priest worker.” While observing the Mexican miners’ needs as assistant to his father, a mine operator, he first recognized his vocation. After entering the Society of Jesus, and spending time in Belgium and Spain for studies, he fell into the company of priests and seminarians who were preparing the way for the apostolate to the worker. When he returned to Mexico at the height of the anti-Catholic persecution, his was a mission to the laborers and to the poorest Mexicans.
By Fanchon Royer - PB - 304 pages - EBOOK - PDF, Kindle, & EPUB
Dom Prosper Guéranger Abbot of Solesmes Translated from the French Third Edition by Michael J. Miller
When nineteenth century Christendom shifted its allegiance from a divine vertical authority to the horizontal revolutionary ideals of egalitarian democracy and false liberty, Dom Guéranger’s erudite polemical masterpiece contributed more than any other contemporary work to uphold the papal monarchy in all of its divinely ordained prerogatives. This labor of the holy abbot helped to restore in Catholic Europe the spiritual sword, as well as the magisterial cathedra, to the Vicar of Christ the King. And he did so, not by any clever manipulative abuse of language, but simply by appealing to the simplicity and clarity of the gospels, universal Christian tradition, and the common consensus fidelis. The brilliant hypothetical scenario, drawn by the author, of a college of a dozen apostles, called by Christ, but without a “Cephas” (a Rock) in Peter and his successors, presents even the infant “collegial” church in such an unenviable plight that one might pity them even more than one might pity the Methodists or Seventh Day Adventists, had any of them been at the marriage feast of Cana.
Richard Clarke, S.J. - Small booklet - 32 pages
Patience, although neither the highest, nor the most fundamental virtue (those would be charity and humility) is first of all a first-fruit of humility and a bridge to charity. It is a first-fruit because those who are possessed of humility know the fragility of their own nature and accomplishments and how they are totally dependant upon God’s grace in all things and are therefore patient with their own failings. This leads to their learning how to be patient with other things, the so-called physical sufferings of life, and patient with others, since they know how to suffer patiently within themselves and for God, thus acting as a bridge to the fruitful practice of charity, the highest of virtues.Patience and suffering go hand in hand, and since the most important work that we do in this life is to suffer well and in offering that suffering in union with the redemptive sufferings of Our Blessed Lord and his most Sorrowful Mother, patience—that which makes suffering rational, bearable, and fruitful—is one of the most important virtues to acquire and practice magnanimously.Father Clarke makes this, and so much else clear and understandable in this short but potent explication of patience.
By John Haffert - PB - 176 pages
Saint Nuño of Portugal: The Founder of the Braganza Dynasty and Father of Modern Portugal was Beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1918 and Canonized by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009. Don Nuño Alvarez Perreira went to war, in defense of his country. He fought, he killed, and he received many decorations. He was wounded, but he was “lucky” enough to come home. Five hundred years after he fought his battles, the Blessed Virgin made what was perhaps her most spectacular appearance on earth—her appearance on October 13, 1917, at Fatima, on the very ground on which Nuño fought, and holding in her hands the very symbols under which Nuño led his troops in that place, five hundred years before. This amazing Nuño—Our Lady’s Knight—led a life bridging centuries, stranger than fiction, fraught with the mystery of war and evil, gold-touched by the sun of the promise made in 1917 by Our Lady at Fatima: “In the end my Immaculate Heart will triumph and there will be peace.”
By John Haffert -Audio Book - Read by Celia Lynn - 5 Audio CD discs
