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.
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 enemys 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 Moslems 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 revolutions three year Reign of Terror. A nation which prided itself on being the Churchs 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 blades 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.
. . . 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
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.
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.
A remarkable survey of the ability of the Catholic Church to surmount crises posed by civil society while maintaining its nature unchanged. Kurth, a leading Belgian historian of the late 19th and early 20th century, condenses 2,000 years of peace, turbulence, and resolve into a fast-paced, afternoon read.
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.
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.
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.
Bishop David Arias
This is an American history book written from the Spanish perspective. The author, Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Newark, NJ, David Arias, is a church historian, born and educated in Leon, Spain. This magnificent chronological itinerary through the history of the USA from 1492 to the present should be read in American history class and in every Catholic American home. Without it you are missing a very large part of the true picture of our nation's history. This is a great book for Catholic homeschoolers and highschool students.
