History

Fr. John Hugo - 422 Pages - PB

Fr. Onesimus Lacouture was a Jesuit who had the great gift of being a masterful director of souls. Being a Jesuit formed in the old mold of true Ignatian spirituality and deeply affected by the so-called “French School” of Cardinal Berulle, St. John Eudes, and St. Louis Marie de Montfort, his retreats, given to over 6000 American and Canadian priests, produced extraordinary results. His most well known disciple and good friend, Fr. Hugo, has produced for posterity, the Notes from those Ignatian retreats as given by Fr. Lacouture and subsequently by himself and many other priests.
A Sign of Contradiction is Fr. Hugo’s apologia for the work of Fr. Lacouture and the “spiritual movement” that grew spontaneously from the ardent, enlightened, and effective preaching of the retreats. He describes the movement, its opponents and its supporters as well as the revelatory doctrines so convincingly presented by Fr. Lacouture.
This book is spiritually motivating, historically informative, and powerfully illuminating in regard to the condition of the Church and the faithful in North America during the mid-twentieth century. The Gospel of Peace, and Applied Christianity (the retreat notes of Fr. Lacouture) by Fr. Hugo are also available from Loreto Publications.

Ireland, in its halcyon years, was commonly called the land of saints and scholars by a grateful Christendom. And, although the emerald isle, like other Catholic nations, had not only its peaks of sanctity but its lows of spiritual tepidity (as we see manifest everywhere today), the land of the Gaels has rarely, if ever, been without her martyrs. Be it at the hands of pagan Viking marauders, Puritan savages or the rapacious imperialists of perfidious Albion, Ireland has drunk from the Lord’s chalice deeply and often. This stirring account of a very crucial period in Irish history was written by historian Timothy T. O’Donnell, a worthy son of the illustrious O’Donnell clan, who now serves as president of Christendom College. With that Catholic reverence that only a filial piety nurtured in the holy Faith can generate, the author brings to life a somewhat obscure slice of Irish history that ought to stand out prominently in the annals of heroic struggles against draconian injustice. This is the story of the Catholic uprising of the three Hughs: Hugh O’Donnell, Red Hugh, his valiant son, and Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, master dissembler and cunning diplomat, whom Queen Elizabeth preferred to call "Beelzebub." Beginning in 1595, the war for liberty and the reign of Christ the King grew in strength victory by victory, such wise that by 1599 all of Ireland was ruled by native Irishmen as an independent Catholic Kingdom. It was to be a short-lived independence ending with the pathos of the "Flight of the Earls" in 1603 and the toxic murder in Spain of Red Hugh, "the son of prophecy," by an English spy. The battle cry of the mighty warriors of "The O’Donnell," Red Hugh, may now be silent, though not ever silenced: "Papa Aboo!" (The Pope to victory!) For in Gaelic hearts "the visible King" of the isle will forever be the Vicar of Christ.

Isabel of Spain has always captivated historians, pro and con. According to historian Warren Carroll, she was not only the greatest woman monarch to rule in Christendom, but she is also eminently canonizable. A woman of prayer and courageous action, she was also a devoted wife and mother. Spain was far from a great Catholic country when Isabel came to full power in 1474. After eight hundred years of Moslem occupancy, much of the country was still under the enemy’s yoke. Even before she had married Prince Ferdinand of Aragon and united the country, the Princess of Castile had managed to restore order and discipline to her own morally dissipated province. After the reconquest of Granada, the Moslem’s last stronghold, she had the liberty to finance the expedition of Columbus. Many of her other virtues are chronicled by Doctor Carroll: her patience in suffering, her endurance of betrayals, and, most importantly, her unmitigating support for, and oftentimes her personal initiation of, ecclesiastical reform.

Never have you seen in print a book in the English language which captures so gloriously the triumphs of a chastised Church during the height of the French revolution’s three year Reign of Terror. A nation which prided itself on being the Church’s “Eldest Daughter” had nearly lost the Faith in the wake of the “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century. A just king, Louis XVI, and his pious queen, Marie Antoinette, went bravely and separately to the scaffold with a prayer for their enemies on their lips, while a howling mob of twenty-thousand deranged libertarians cheered on the regicide. Among the forty-thousand Catholic victims of the revolution were sixteen Carmelite nuns, who sang the Veni Creator Spiritus as they consummated the final stage of a heavy blade’s ravenous conflict with the Cross. In The Guillotine and the Cross, Doctor Carroll not only presents the dark side of the bloodbath, but the inspirational as well.

In the late fifteenth century, Satan reigned in all his unmitigated cruelty in the very heart of what was to be the Americas. Only thirty some years later, the Queen of Heaven crushed his head, taking away his bloody government, and establishing in perpetuity the merciful reign of her very maternal and Immaculate Heart. Garnering his information from the best authentic sources, contemporary as well as modern, Warren H. Carroll weaves his tapestry of the true birth of Mexico in dramatic style.

“. . . Once [Gustavus Adolphus] took the field, Richelieu found that he had called up the devil, and that the devil was too much for him.” Hilaire Belloc, 1930

Hilaire Belloc

Belloc has written elsewhere that the victory of the Reformation in England led to its victory in much of the rest of Europe. That victory unleashed the forces of social disintegration, Protestantism, Capitalism, and anti-Catholicism and let them to challenge the tradition of Monarchy on the field of battle. This book tells the story of how Charles I came to face those forces, manipulated by the Money Power, and how and why he failed. Charles I reads like "a ripping yarn", but it explores the personalities, the issues, the clashes, and the circumstances as they were. Thus it is not "acceptable orthodoxy." But it is real history.