Church History

From award-winning scholar John Bergsma comes an intriguing book that reveals new insights on the Essenes, a radical Jewish community predating Christianity, whose existence, beliefs, and practices are often overlooked in the annuls of history. Bergsma...

The Fathers of the Church have been a vital source of wisdom and inspiration for countless saints, popes, peasants, and converts throughout the history of the Church. In this powerful one-volume library, Father Willis presents more than 250 selected...

"The world is too small," Saint Frances Cabrini (1850–1917) once declared. "I would like to embrace it all, to reach every corner." This compelling, authoritative biography chronicles the astounding life of a petite Italian-born religious sister...

One chilly November morning in 1927, a slender young priest stood before a firing squad in Mexico City. Five shots cracked through the air, and he fell lifeless on the ground. The man was Miguel Agustin Pro, S.J. His crime? Being a Catholic priest. As a...

Saint John of the Cross is the Church's premier teacher on contemplative prayer. Catholic tradition even calls him the Mystical Doctor. The sixteenth-century Carmelite priest not only wrote four massive treatises on the spiritual life, along with some of...

Is there anything in the New Testament about the need for priests in the Church? Many Protestants would argue no. And if you point out that there is a priesthood in the Old Testament, they are likely to say it was a feature of the Old Covenant that was...

On August 9, 1945, an American B-29 dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing tens of thousands of people in the blink of an eye, while fatally injuring and poisoning thousands more. Among the survivors was Takashi Nagai, a pioneer in radiology...

On June 14, 1921, a priest knocks at the convent in San Giovanni Rotondo. He is in his early forties and wears a simple cassock, but he is no ordinary priest. He is Bishop Raffaello Carlo Rossi, future cardinal and the Apostolic Visitor sent by the Holy...

The mystery of death strikes at the core of the human soul. We instinctively recoil at the pain of losing loved ones, and as we grapple, we are quick to seek remedies to console ourselves. There is no one better suited to assuage our grief than the...

Many Catholics have either left the Church or been scandalized by the errors or immorality rampant in her clergy. We’ve watched aghast as faithful Catholics have been restricted or punished without just cause, while those who confuse, contradict,...

After Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI resigned from the papacy in 2013, he never stopped thinking or writing. Near the end of his life, he and editor Elio Guerriero gathered together a whole volume of new material, dealing with the themes closest to his heart...

The Confessions of Saint Augustine is considered one of the greatest Christian classics of all time. It is an extended poetic, passionate, intimate prayer that Augustine wrote as an autobiography sometime after his conversion, to confess his sins and...