"Catholic" is the newspaper produced by the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer whose monastery is on the island of Papa Stronsay in the Orkneys. You can susbscibe at their blog Translapine Redemptorists. For £10 a year, you get four issues of "Catholic" and a substantial supplement with each issue.With the latest issue comes "Gerardo": a biography of St Gerard Majella, which I have just enjoyed reading. It was written by Fr William Frean C.SS.R. in 1971 and the story of its publication is of interest:
In its day this beautiful little work has caused considerable controversy because of its fidelity to continuity while those in power thought in terms of rupture - but it has survived to see a new era in the Church. Due to opposition from Redemptorist superiors it was never published and was given to us by the late Fr A.J. Cummins C.SS.R. for this purpose.
"Gerardo" is an affectionate and edifying life of the humble brother who was sought after by Bishops and by the poor. He sometimes had to rush past the Blessed Sacrament a little hurriedly in order to avoid going into ecstasy when he had important work to do.The book also includes a novena to St Gerard with daily meditations written by Fr Ramon Sarabia C.SS.R. in 1924 and translated from the original Spanish for this publication. I have been using it for my own meditation each morning - it is in the traditional redemptorist style which I find very helpful.
Don't forget that St Gerard Majella, among his many other thaumaturgical accomplishments, is invoked particularly for expectant mothers. (My own mother prayed to him during her pregnancies and had six of us safely enough.)
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Fr Tim,
I hope the book the Redemptorists published is something like the 300 pp biography we recently purchased through ABE booksellers, To Heaven Through a Window, or its German predeccessor of 450 pp available on line here:
http://tiny.cc/C8HwF
I had thought these books could never see print today, since they are too full of intense devotion, incredible obedience, unbelievable penance, outrageous miracles. The thing that makes it most interesting and credible is that it is so well sourced, as well sourced or better sourced than the life of any other public figure of the time.
My wife and I just finished To Heaven Through a Window. I wonder what might happen in any religious community today where that book was made the refectory reading. My guess would be either outright revolt or a sudden lifting of the entire tone of the place-no matter how devout they had been before.
I have heard religious speak somewhat bemusedly of the early fervor of novices as a kind of stage through which all good religious pass.
And yet, here are the last hours of St. Gerard:
"As the night drew on, he said to Br Stefano: “Brother, I am to die tonight. Dress me, for I wish to recite the office of the dead for my own soul.” Landi writes, ‘The fervour and humility with which he prepared to appear before his divine Judge cannot be described. His purity of conscience was extreme, and he had preserved his baptismal innocence unspotted; and yet, seven or eight hours before his death, sitting up in bed, he began to recite the Miserere with such fervour and humility as to move deeply the brother who was nursing him. He would recite a verse first slowly and with great earnestness and then make an act of contrition, while tears streamed from his eyes. Then, after every other verse, he would repeat, with a pause: "Tibi soli peccavi et malum coram te feci…” He uttered the words plaintively, sighing profoundly and weeping, and moved with such a lofty idea of God and of His infinite sanctity that the Brother infirmarian was siezed with a holy dread."
Who can read that without wondering what he has been playing at his whole life?
Wow, this looks very good. Thanks, Father!
Lee - TAN Books, the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer and many other of good will are indeed publishing these older devotional works. I think that the rise of "print on demand" and the enthusiasm of good people in making pdfs available on the internet free of copyright means that, thank God, the Christian faithful will circumvent the censorship that has deprived them of such edifying works for so long.
Fr Tim,
As far as the pdf files go, Google had a public offering a few years ago and raised far more money than they know what to do with. And so it is that they have people at major libraries of the world such as Harvard and Balliol copying everything.
For example, there was a wonderful biography of St. Stanislaus Kostka that I discovered in a seminary library several years ago, but have not been able to find on ABE booksellers for purchase. Now this is aalrming, because as they say, if they haven't got it, it probably doesn't exist. However, Google captured it at Balliol.
Here it is: http://tiny.cc/gXi2K
When it comes to lives of the saints, I really don't want a devotional work per se, but rather a solidly grounded historical work that follows the person from infancy through death in an ordered well documented way, rather than the approach of taking the saint's life and dividing it up with a chapter on each of his virtues.
Or a book that consists entirely of miracles and wonders from end to end.
I think it may have been TAN that had a relatively short book on St. Gerard that had him as a baby refusing his mother's breast in a kind of precocious asceticism.
Having read his subsequent life in full in a solidly grounded biography, I find myself wondering now if that may have been true. Yet at the time I picked up that TAN biography I found the idea sickening and incredible. What good to me is a life of a saint that starts off on such a lofty unreachable plane? I put the book down.
The thing that kills me is that so much is pouring out of Catholic publishers having to do with the controversies of the day while many, many Catholic classics remain unpublished. And yet it is these very classics that could go a long way toward righting the wrongs of the day by firing the imaginations of our young people and, with God's grace, thereby creating the saints we need, filling our Catholic schools with religious women once again, etc.
Baptizing the imagination of our young people is a very neglected spiritual work of mercy.
Of course, I am thinking of this in terms of "Family Evenings Together" -90 minutes of good secular reading, lives of the saints and catechism. A few miles from here in Portland is a wonderful, unique bookshop, Exodus, that serves the Christian homeschooling movement throughout the country and from there I could find enough wonderful, uplifting secular literature to totally satisfy that aspect. The lives of the saints remain a problem and I don't know where to point parents.
In my opinion these lives should be long, readable and not historical fiction. No invented dialogue. The Cure of Ars by Trochu fits the bill and to our mutual enjoyment and edification we read it to our children when they were ten and twelve.
Maybe I should take another look at the Tan and Ignatius catalog. It's been a while.
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