History

Thomas B. Costain - 508 pages Paperback

Thomas B. Costain was a Canadian journalist and author who became a US citizen in 1920 and rose to international fame in the 1940s as a historical novelist and author of such works as The Silver Chalice and The Black Rose. The White and the Gold was one of his best works and is not a novel, but rather a history of the founding of New France from its discovery in 1497 until the early 1700s when the war with England for the domination of New France began in earnest.
Although this is a factual history and not fiction, the writer has applied the arts of stylistic narrative that he practiced so well as a novelist and the result is a book that will capture the attention of the reader from the first pages and hold it until the end. Indeed, the characters who founded and built a Catholic civilization in the wilderness of North America, both saints and sinners, who are the real subject of this work are so colorful and majestic in their lives and exploits as to be anything but the object of intense interest and sympathy on the part of the reader.
This is one of the finest works of historical scholarship that we have ever read, and Loreto is pleased to make this great work available once again sixty years after its original publication and almost 500 years after the first serious explorations of New France began.

Fr. Clement Raab, OFM - 136 pages PB

The Church is essetiay coservative. Her conservatism is not merely a measure of prudence and good judgment; it is an intrinsic necessity. No matter what she may consider, decide, or undertake, she always harks back to the beginning.
After twenty [one] centuries the “pillar and ground of truth” has not moved a whit from her primitive position, while all other human foundations have either crumbled to dust or have been driven headlong by the maelstrom of this fast changing world. To these, the ideal looms hazily in the distant future; to the Church, it stands firmly in the distant past. The closer she aligns herself with Christ, the surer she is of ultimate success and victory, being “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone”
(Eph. II:20).
The present volume is designed to serve as a ready survey and reference book on the history of the councils. It is to serve as an aid, primarily to the cleric or lay student who has neither the time nor the opportunity to delve into, and analyze sources and controversies, but who is satisfied to learn the outstanding facts and findings concerning which Church historians generally agree. This brief and positive sketch of the twenty great events in history, so vibrant with life and so far-reaching in their consequences, will afford him, we trust, a very definite and appreciable knowledge of the nature and history of Holy Mother Church.
Originally published in 1937, this re-issue of Fr. Raab’s classic work on the history of the Ecumenical Councils did not include anything about Vatican II, because its convocation still lay in the future. We have not added to his work since so much has already been written of the newest Council elsewhere.

The Papal Plan for Restoration: Restoring the Catholic Priesthood

A Study Guide for Catholic Laity, Seminarans, and Clergy - By Robert Wolfe

Large 8.5" by 11" format 200 pages - paperback

As the title suggests, this book describes a plan taken from key papal encyclicals that engendered and safeguarded the vitality of the Catholic Faith in the prospering pre-Conciliar Church. That plan is still being followed by small traditional Catholic communities around the world today, producing that same vitality in their members. The families in these communities, particularly the heroic mothers in these large families, produce many priestly vocations. Shepherded by the traditional orders that serve them, these families seed the restoration of the Catholic priesthood.
In the Book:

• A wake-up call for Catholics.
• Modern popes quoted acknowledging the crisis in the Church.
• Extensive statistics on problems currently facing the Church.
• A thorough study guide on the problems and their proposed solutions.
• More than twenty papal encyclicals quoted.
• Six key encyclicals studied in detail.
• Six elements of the Plan developed from the encyclicals.
• Ten cause-and-effect relationships developed, statistically linking the crisis with the 
implementation of changes subsequent to Vatican II.
• Statistical evidence that the current crisis could have been prevented had the bishops at Vatican II not ignored the quoted warnings of pre-Conciliar popes.
• A logical, defendable, statistical estimate of the abundance of Catholic priests the Church would have today if pre-Conciliar Church growth had continued.
• Statistical evidence that the current shortage of priests has a proven remedy not being seriously 
considered by our bishops.
• Statistics on vital Catholic communities successfully implementing the Plan.
• New seminaries ordaining many traditional priests for the Extraordinary Form Mass.
• Integral to the study guide is an extensive survey questionnaire on the Faith, the Mass and The Plan.

Hilaire Belloc

In The Last Rally, Belloc narrates with clarity and vigor a central episode in the decline of the English Monarchy. Restored to the throne following the interlude of Cromwell’s “Commonwealth,” Charles II devoted his life as King of England to maintaining the integrity of the throne against all the forces arrayed against it: the power of the great landowners who worked through the Parliament; the influence of the Lawyer’s Guild; and the irresistible mercantile and financial strength of the City of London. The story that Belloc brings to life is thus one of survival: the story of a ship of state brought “through peril and storm under a great captain.” It is also the story of manhood and determination in the face of overwhelming odds; as such it is a story that Hilaire Belloc was eminently qualified to write.

“If kingship would have remained, the Peasantry would have been saved. Also there would have been a considerable and well-organised traditional Catholic body, which might have been a quarter of the nation, or at least a sixth . . . As it was, with the fall of the Stuarts, the Catholic Church in England was utterly crushed out. “ — Hilaire Belloc, 1939

Rev. G. E. Phillips

This history of the Holy House of Loreto is the most decisive work in English defending the authenticity of this most hallowed shrine in all Christendom. Our Lady’s Holy House at Nazareth was taken by angels to Dalmatia (Croatia) in 1291 to prevent its desecration by the infidels. Three years later it took flight again to rest in Loreto, Italy, where it remains. Rev. Phillips provides the facts, and excitement behind the story. Many cures, apparitions, and miraculous conversions, have happened within the limestone walls of the Santa Casa.

Pio Nono:A Study in European Politics and Religion in the Nineteenth Century

by E. E. Y. Hales  - PB - 378 pages

At the time of his death in 1878 Pope Pius IX had served as pope longer than any pope besides Saint Peter. His papacy, from 1846 until 1878, was the political and religious pivot-point of the nineteenth century.
He was elected pope as the candidate of the politically “liberal” party in the College of Cardinals. By liberal here we mean those who were sympathetic generally towards the new republican and anti-monarchical leanings of so many leaders and thinkers in those post-enlightenment years; but the violent revolutions of 1848 convinced him that the liberals had far more than merely political ends in mind. In fact, he now believed that the destruction of the Church was their ultimate goal, and for many of the leaders, it was. Because of that, he became, although not by his choice, a political as well as a religious warrior.
Because the position that Pio Nono inherited as Pope was that not only of the universal shepherd of the faithful and vicar of Christ, but also that of a temporal Prince and sovereign, the task of leadership before him was inextricably intertwined with political and revolutionary affairs. The great battles of church and state that dominated that century were, by the grace of God, his to fight. Mr. Hales beautifully and faithfully tells us the story of that battle and Blessed Pio Nono’s part in it.

Also Available as Ebook

By Dom Prosper Guéranger - PB - 404 pages

In the nineteenth century there was a concerted effort on the part of liberal revisionists to undermine the Church’s history by challenging the veracity of the Acts of the Martyrs. Some miraculous events associated with the lives of very popular saints, whose names were canonized in the Roman Missal, were treated with ridicule by scholars more concerned with documents than the living evidence of common tradition.
It was righteous indignation that moved Abbot Dom Guéranger to defend the cause of Saint Cecilia, whose holy celebrity had spanned fifteen centuries. The abbot’s strategy was to validate the traditional accounts of all the martyrs’ lives by exonerating just one. He achieved this in the holy virgin Cecilia’s case by presenting in book form every morsel of factual evidence available, especially that which modern archeological excavations offered.  As a result of his labor, there arose a refreshing new devotion to the young martyr, and – at least for a time — the cynical scoffs of the proud were silenced. This particular biography was written in response to the request of his co-reformer and friend, the Benedictine Abbess Cécile Bruyère.

Prospér Louis Pascal Guéranger was born in France, in 1805, at Sablé-sur-Sarthe. In the Napoleonic era, 1827, during the continued anti-clerical aftermath of the French Revolution, he was ordained a parish priest.  As a young curé he authored several works on church-state relations. In 1836, having purchased an abandoned priory that was for sale in Solesmes, he and five other parish priests took solemn vows as Benedictines, with the intention of restoring the monastic life in France according to the ancient rule of Saint Benedict. Until his death there in 1875, Abbot Dom Guéranger devoted himself to restoring the cenobitical life as originally cultured thirteen centuries earlier by the father of western monasticism. He did much by his writings and prayers to keep the church in France loyal to the person of the Sovereign Pontiff and away from the dangers of both Gallicanism and Jansenism.

G. K. Chesterton - PB 220 Pages

Edited and Published posthumously by Frank Sheed
In 1933 Hitler came into power. In 1936, G. K. Chesterton died. In between, Chesterton kept his eyes steadily on the Nazi movement, seeing and foreseeing everything—even to the agreement of Germany and Russia to divide Poland.

Week after week he came back to one aspect or another of the danger: Prussianism as a spirit poisoning Germany, Hitlerism as Prussianism, the special peril (unique in human history) that lies in racism, the Jewish roots of Hitlerism, the vital function of Poland, and the elements among ourselves that made for the increase of Hitler’s power—especially the pacifism that made war inevitable. It is not too much to say that this inevitablility of war was the dominating theme of the last years of Chesterton’s  life. Certainly it was never far from his pen.