Most if not all Wanderer readers can name at least one Catholic book that majorly impacted their lives. Many converts to the Catholic faith speak of how a seemingly chance encounter with a particular Catholic book set into motion their journey to the Catholic faith. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross’ (Edith Stein’s) discovery of the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila in a friend’s home is a great example of this.
Almost invariably, such an initial encounter with Catholic literature leads to the perusal of one book after another, for once the human soul has tasted perhaps for the very first time the “eternal verities” about God and the real meaning of life, it hungers and thirsts for more. Thus we speak of converts like St. John Henry Newman reading their way into the Catholic faith.
For cradle Catholics, a pivotal encounter with a good Catholic book can bring about a different sort of conversion — in some cases a return to the practice of the faith after years of being away from the sacraments, in other cases a transformation from a lukewarm living of the faith to a passionate pursuit of holiness.
It was while convalescing from a battle wound as a young soldier that Ignatius of Loyola was compelled to pass the time by reading the only two books that could be found for him where he was staying — a volume on the lives of the saints and Ludolph of Saxony’s spiritual commentary on the life of Christ. These books not only radically transformed his life by placing him on the path to sainthood, but they would ultimately change the course of the world for centuries to come through St. Ignatius’ founding of the Jesuit Order.
We are currently facing a crisis of Catholic illiteracy. With the internet providing in almost every Catholic home quick and convenient access to informative videos and blog postings on all the major topics of our faith, it can seem that reading all or most of a physical book is just a costly and inefficient waste of time. Yet the hunting and pecking method of learning that many of us resort to when using the internet leaves important gaps in our knowledge.
The reading of a physical book compels us to go beyond what we were planning to learn. I myself have experienced learning important things from books I had originally chosen to consult for an entirely different reason. A good book also helps to develop our minds, to develop an understanding of how all the different facts logically fit together, and it leaves a much deeper imprint upon the soul than any video or webpage can.
Many of the current battles and debates within the Church are driven in large part by starkly contrasting historical narratives. Who has the facts, and who doesn’t, we ask. A good book will document its historical claims with quotations and footnotes.
Of course, certain criteria must be met in judging whether a book is trustworthy or not. When it comes to Catholic books, fidelity to Church doctrine is essential. In addition to choosing authors specifically known for their fidelity to Church teaching, we can also gauge a book’s orthodoxy by looking through a book’s table of contents, since the titles of chapters can often be highly suggestive of where the author wants to lead the reader.
Heterodox authors tend to use certain buzzwords that can serve as a warning to the prospective reader. Taking a close look at the conclusions the author draws at the end of the book can be particularly revealing in this regard. Likewise revealing are the authors listed as sources in the book’s bibliography and the names of those who have endorsed the book on the back cover, or who have written the foreword to the book.
A telling indicator of where a book is likely to lead us is the publisher. A growing number of publishers have been founded for the very purpose of issuing orthodox Catholic books. In stark contrast to this are the publishers who for decades have been turning out heterodox literature; as our Lord has warned, “The tree is known by its fruit” (Matt. 12:33).
Before the Second Vatican Council, the presence of an imprimatur on the verso of the title page was a key indicator as to whether a book was safe to read in terms of its orthodoxy. When rummaging through old books, specifically those printed before around 1960, this remains an important guidepost.
As for the presence or absence of an imprimatur in books published from the 1960s onward, the picture gets very complicated. All too many books of the 1960s and 1970s received imprimaturs that they did not deserve, while on the other hand, especially from the 1970s onward, quite a few orthodox Catholic authors seemed to cease seeking imprimaturs for what they wrote.
As for books published more recently, my sense is that an imprimatur has begun to mean something again, that is, while heterodox authors have long since abandoned seeking imprimaturs for their writings, some orthodox authors are again seeing the acquisition of an imprimatur as a tangible way of expressing their submission to the judgment of Holy Mother Church.
Prospective Catholic authors ought to give serious consideration to requesting an imprimatur, albeit given the current doctrinal chaos in the Church they might want to check into the background of the priests who are delegated as the censors in their diocese. It is quite reasonable to be concerned that a heterodox priest serving as the diocesan censor might refuse an imprimatur to an orthodox book because of his own theological prejudices.
In terms of what to prioritize in our reading and in our selection of Catholic books, I would place books on the lives of the saints very high on the list. A book about a saint who particularly attracts us and inspires us can really transform our lives. The words and actions of the saint begin to permeate our thoughts in the course of the day, and we begin to see life through his eyes.
In addition to individual biographies of the saints, it is important also to have on hand an anthology of saints’ lives, such as an edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints. In this regard, I would recommend looking for an early edition of the Butler’s anthology, if you can find an affordable copy, in particular the editions edited by Fr. Bernard William Kelly (1872–?) and published by the London firm Virtue and Company from 1928 to 1961. Fr. Kelly’s version is an abridged edition of Fr. Alban Butler’s original work (first published in 1745) and is arranged in the form of daily entries that make it well suited for spiritual reading,
The Butler-Kelly daily biographical entries are written in a style intended to edify and inspire the reader, something I certainly experienced when I first began perusing this set as a teenager. The widely circulated edition of Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J., and Donald Attwater, first published in 12 volumes between 1926 and 1938, and later (in 1956) condensed into four volumes, is also valuable, providing a considerably larger selection of the lives of the saints and blesseds — over 2,500 entries. But there is a noticeable shift in style from edification to erudition, with the entries tending to read more like a historical treatise. In this it provides a very helpful service in clarifying what is genuinely known about each saint or blessed.
At times, however, the tone becomes rather harsh and hyper-critical in assessing the reliability of some of the early hagiographical accounts. This is not to deny that certain tales of dubious authenticity sometimes found their way into the early biographies of the martyrs and other saints. Yet there does seem to be an excessively applied criterion of erring on the side of skepticism in the Thurston-Attwater volumes. Nonetheless, it is totally orthodox when it comes to doctrine, and the most readily available of the earlier Butler editions, as it is still in print.
Returning to the topic of books devoted to the life of one particular saint, there can be clear differences from one biographer to another as to what is emphasized or highlighted. There has been an overall trend over the last century or so to try to make the reader see the saint as just like the rest of us in most ways, to take the saint “down from the pedestal” as it is often expressed.
Yes, I do enjoy learning about the everyday things that the saints had in common with us, but nonetheless I really want the focus to be on what made them so remarkably, amazingly different from us — what made them high achievers on the road to eternal life. There’s something so captivating about a saint spending long hours in church or the whole night in prayer. While most of us are not able to do anything quite so arduous, such exceptional acts of devotion can really spur us on to try harder to love and serve God in our own spiritual lives.
Many wonderful Catholic books on the spiritual life and other topics originally published many decades ago are becoming available anew in reprint editions. If you have a family, you might want to invest in building up a personal library of good Catholic books in your own home for you and your children. My late mother did an utterly amazing job in finding and purchasing a broad spectrum of Catholic classics to surround my late brother and me with a rich selection of Catholic literature as we were growing up, a collection I continue to rely on to the present day.
The earlier-mentioned Fr. Kelly edition of Butler’s Lives of the Saints was one of these priceless acquisitions, made at a time (the 1970s) when publishers were sadly eager to liquidate their unsold stocks of pre-Vatican II books. One of my late mother’s most remarkable acquisitions is a tiny four-volume set of the complete Latin Vulgate Bible printed in Italy for the Bruce Publishing Company of Milwaukee back in 1955, the unsold copies of which came into the possession of TAN Books and Publishers, one of the very first publishers and distributors of doctrinally sound books to arise in the post-Vatican II era.
We all know the old saying, “You are what you read.” So make time to read a great Catholic book — it just might make you a saint someday!
