Church History

Born into a black Catholic slave family, Fr. Augustine Tolton (1854-1897) conquered almost insurmountable odds to become one of the very first black priests in the United States. By his early death at 43, this pioneer black priest left behind a shining...

In this second volume of the Called Out of Darkness trilogy, Father Robert Spitzer, S.J., draws together some of the best advice given by Catholic spiritual masters across the ages and brings it into harmony with modern scientific research, offering...

Though today a devout Catholic priest, when he was a teenager, becoming a priest was the very last thing anyone ever would have expected of Donald Calloway. In his teens he was a heavy drug and alcohol abuser, a high school dropout who had been kicked...

Louis Bouyer examines the underlying principles and teachings of the 16th century Protestant reformers. These topics include Scripture alone as source of Christian belief, justification by faith alone, God's free gift of unmerited salvation, the...

The Papacy explains that without the Pope's divinely guided leadership, the Church would suffer the contradictions and the divisions that many Christian groups know firsthand. The teaching passed down from the apostles would be subject to arbitrary,...

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...

St. Faustina was a relatively uneducated Polish nun, but this diary captures the extraordinary visitations and revelations that released a potent, enlightening, and spiritually refined formulation of Divine Mercy into the world. In honor of the first...