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.Our Glorious Popes
$12.95
by Sr. Catherine M.I.C.M. A powerfully written history of the Church as illustrated in the challenging pontificates of ten of her more illustrious champions of orthodoxy. As one reads through the first forty-two pages, one is virtually taken on a journey through some four hundred years of tempus ecclesiae, from the momentous entrance of Saint Peter into the fearsome capitol of Satan's doomed empire, to the triumph of the last Christological Council, Chalcedon, held under the pastoral eye of Leo I, the first Pope that Catholic posterity dared to call "the Great." Sister Catherine vividly brings to life the painful and virile maturation of the Church Militant from its infancy in Jerusalem to its full manhood as expressed by the Toma of Leo solemnly read at Chalcedon in 451. The remaining bulk of information dovetails into the major periods of religious crises and tells of those heroic Popes who steered the Church through these gravest trials. For example, see how the little known Greek Pope Saint Zachary fought the Moslem influence which generated eastern Iconoclasm; see the Gregorys form the temporal city of God into the vibrant and monolithic power that Jesus intended; and see how the two Pius's re-establish orthodoxy with one sword and humiliate the brazenly open anti-Christian forces with the other - burying them - for a time. This is a book that can restore hope and confidence in the might of the papacy.

 

This is the shadow that follows us through life, because only if we are in the light of faith, living in hope and charity, can we see truly the sad effects of our sins, our shadow. The higher the light of Christ is in our lives, the more directly we let it shine upon us by our embrace of suffering, the more the shadow of past transgressions is reduced. Our goal, the will of God, is that this shadow disappear altogether. In some sense this is a very practical book, for it has a foolproof game plan that, if followed well, will cut short dramatically our time of purgation in the next life. But, it is much more than that. This magnificent analysis of suffering, as to its cause, its value, and its ultimate effect (i.e., conformity to Christ, the Man of Sorrows) will give us more strength to bear not only our own cross, but to willingly share in the suffering Jesus endured for all men by accepting, as joyful victims, crosses vicariously borne for sinners within our own family, for our wayward friends, for the crimes of our nation, and for those dear to us who are languishing in Purgatory.