She has inspired the greatest artists, poets and composers for two-thousand years. Armies have fought under her banner, while entire cities and nations have placed themselves under her patronage and protection. Every day, she is called upon by countless men, women and children to help them in their necessities: "Hail Mary, Full of Grace." She is the Mother of Jesus Christ . . . The Mother of God.
Devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is, perhaps, the most instantly recognizable manifestation of the Roman Catholic Faith. Those outside the Church are hard-pressed to explain it, and they too often view Marian devotion as either a "distraction" from the adoration due to Jesus Christ, or as something "acceptable," but only to a severely limited extent. In reality, the Church's Marian heritage is an integral part of the ancient Faith, and there can be no proper understanding of the Person of Jesus Christ, True God and True Man, without a proper appreciation of, and respect for, the Catholic Church's Marian teachings.
It was only eight years after our Sorrowful Mother appeared to the shepherd children in the south of France, that Bishop Ullathorne took up his pen to defend the authenticity of the visitation. With Rome's permission, the author writes as a contemporary chronicler of the events, conducting interviews with the seers and with ecclesiastics who were involved.
Warren Carroll Since the earliest days of the Church, there has been no date more crucial to universal Christendom than the year 1917. We are still living the horror of the aftermath of the Communist rebellion; and, on the other hand, we are still living under the hope, yet to be fulfilled, of Our Lady of Fatima's promises. 1917: Red Banners, White Mantle introduces these two principal world events of that year one heavenly, one diabolical; the consequences under which we still live. On the one side we see the unholy, Rasputin and Lenin, on the other we see the marshaling of the holy, under Mary, the enlisting of whose troops began with three shepherd children of Portugal. The scourge, in all its historical force and brutality, is vividly related against the backdrop of the healing remedy, the old serpent spitting against the heel of the Woman about to crush his head. Few readers will put this book down before the story reaches its conclusion.
Saint John EudesOne of the most prolific ascetical writers of the seventeenth century, Saint John Eudes was an inexhaustible reservoir of holy wisdom and devotional fervor. Loreto Publications considers it a foremost priority to help make the spiritual doctrine of this great apostle of devotion to the Sacred and Admirable Hearts of Jesus and Mary more widely known. Perhaps no book of his better exemplifies that profoundly incarnational doctrine than The Admirable Heart of Mary. Eudes reveals to his disciples this most pure and maternal of all hearts both in its corporal and spiritual pulsations, while demonstrating with a dozen unforgettable natural and scriptural analogies, how this human heart was so inexhaustibly divinized by the one Divine Heart of God the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Admirable Heart of Mary was given to us from the Cross by Jesus Christ. Truly this heart was the first-fruit of His Passion, given to all of Marys children, that it might be honored, cherished, invoked and, ultimately, with that of her Son, reproduced in them. This is the essence of the spirituality of Saint John Eudes.
BEING THE SUBSTANCE OF ALL THE SERMONS FOR MARY’S FEASTS THROUGHOUT THE YEAR
By Bishop Jaques Benigne Bossuet
PB 164 pages
Translated by F. M. Capes
With an Introduction by Rev. William T. Gordon - Priest of the London Oratory
The great and learned Jacques Benigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux in France, was the author of many works, most prominent among them the Continuity of Religion, a compact history of the world from a Catholic perspective. This book is a translation of his sermons given on all of the principal feasts of Our Lady throughout the year. His profound knowledge of the scriptures and his excellent theological training combined with a deep love for the Mother of God was productive of these powerful insights and thoughts about the Theotokos. From Bossuet’s teaching we learn that, to quote Cardinal Manning’s words, “the titles of honor given to Mary are not metaphors but truths—they express, not poetical or rhetorical ideas, but true and living relations between her and her Divine Son and between her and ourselves.”
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.”
Composed by an Archbishop, this praiseworthy tribute to our Saviors holy Mother was actually written the very same year that Pope Pius IX defined the dogma of Our Ladys Immaculate Conception. Beginning where all great works on Our Lady should, with her exalted office and dignity, the author educates the reader that he or she might see the congruity, even the necessity, of Marys divine prerogative in the eternal plan of redemption, and also see the Immaculata as the fulfillment of the highest possible degree of excellence God could establish in a creature, perfecting through her the crowning glory in the gradation of all being outside of God. Archbishop Ullathorne is not original, but masterful, in his explanation of Marys royal relationship with the angels as well as men, for she it was who gave the Incarnate God the flesh and blood by means of which all the elect achieved their salvation. A true gift of charity for a Protestant friend in search of truth!