Why Books?
Screens ask for your attention. A book asks for your presence.
The difference is small, and it changes everything. These books do not shout.
They sit beside the soul and wait to be noticed.
Open the first one as you would open a quiet room.
That is how they were meant to be entered.
Living the message of St Faustina between the dishes, the ward, and three o'clock
These pages are not another life of Saint Faustina, and they are not a collection of promises taken out of the Diary and left on a shelf. They are written for the person who already knows the name of the devotion and still wonders what it looks like on a wet Tuesday — in a kitchen, a ward, a parish, or a parked car.
The book walks through trust, through mercy in deed and word and prayer, through home and work and sickness and old hurts. It explains the Chaplet, the three o’clock hour, the image, and the Sunday after Easter in language that does not need a retreat. Along the way it tells how the devotion was restricted in 1959 and breathed again in 1978, and why a cuckoo clock on a wall can be as useful as a shrine when the Passion needs remembering.
A new chapter describes a simple work coordinated from a small parish in South Wales: the SOS Divine Mercy Chaplet Association. Members give about seven minutes a day for one dying person, by first name. The invitation is at soschaplet.com. No one is asked to join before they have thought whether they can keep the minutes.
The book is meant to be opened for a quarter of an hour, and then lived. There is no charge for reading.
Accompanying the sick and the dying
with faith and mercy
This is not a manual of last rites, and it is not a book of answers about suffering. It is a book about sitting down.
Written from hospital chaplaincy and ordinary parish sick calls in South Wales, these pages walk with the reader from the first knock on a ward door to the quiet days after a funeral.
They explain, in plain language, what to say and what to leave unsaid; how the Sacrament of the Sick is not only “the last rites”; why viaticum means food for the journey; how Saint Camillus organised hourly vigils so that no dying person — and no carer — would be left destroyed; and how the Chaplet of Divine Mercy can be said in a lift, a car park, or a four-bed bay.
The rooms are composite and anonymised. The history is checked. Each chapter ends with a short prayer. You can open it for a quarter of an hour before a visit and still have something you can use when the curtain is drawn.
Why the Catholic priesthood is reserved to men — said plainly, without contempt for women
The Church says she has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women. That is not the same sentence as “women do not matter.”
This book keeps those sentences apart. It is written by a priest who has watched parishes that would stop functioning if the women left, and who has seen an archbishop’s week held together by a secretary who is not ordained and is not therefore small.
Mary was not a priest. Magdalene carried the first Easter news. Four women are Doctors of the Church. None of that rewrites the sacrament. All of it rewrites the habit of treating the stole as a ranking of souls.
For readers who want the doctrine without a sneer, and the women of the Church without a consolation prize.
St Thérèse of Lisieux, the Little Way, and why a priest still thanks her
This is not another short life of the Little Flower. It is a priest’s thanksgiving to the saint he loves, trusts, and follows.
The reader meets the real girl first: the ninth child over a shop in Alençon, the house after Zélie died, Christmas night 1886, the prayer for Pranzini, the Roman pilgrimage that taught her priests were not made of crystal, the cold Carmel, the three copybooks, the fog in which heaven felt absent.
Then the teaching is opened without slogans: the elevator that is the arms of Jesus, spiritual childhood that is not childish, love in the heart of the Church, the Child and the Holy Face held together, the small hour that looks like chores.
Only then does the author speak as a priest. He does not claim visions. He believes, as the Church allows, that the communion of saints is a living friendship, that she leads him toward Christ, and that she prepares places where he is sent by praying there before he arrives.
The book ends as it began: thank you.
Caldey, the Anglican monks who came home, and the Cistercians who stayed
A short boat leaves Tenby, and an island appears in the water. Most people go for the view and the chocolate. Behind both stands a much stranger Catholic story.
Monks prayed on Caldey in the sixth century. Medieval Benedictines kept a priory there until Henry VIII closed it. For nearly four hundred years the psalms stopped. In 1906 Anglican Benedictines built the white abbey that still startles visitors. In 1913 most of them were received into the Catholic Church by the Bishop of Menevia — one of the rare times a whole monastery came over together. The money later failed. Cistercians came from Belgium in 1929. They are there still.
This is not a dry history. It is a small pilgrimage book: the boat, the old stones, the crisis of obedience, the shops, the silence, and Holy Mass on an island with a complicated Christian past. It explains, in ordinary language, what monks are for, why they pray the Hours, why reservation and Benediction mattered in 1913, and why a visitor may arrive for chocolate and leave having stood in a house whose timetable belongs to God.
Catholic Wales beside a ruined abbey, and the church that still answers to Mary
The Cistercians named this ground for Mary in 1147. Four hundred years after their house was closed, a small Catholic parish on Margam Road took the same title and began again — in a stable, in a library, in an upstairs hotel room.
This book is the long sentence between those two dates. It walks from the early stones on the mountain to Clairvaux’s white monks, from Gerald of Wales at the abbey gate to the last eight brothers of 1536, from the martyrs arrested at Sker to the Irish mission in Aberavon, and from a promised field called Maesgwyn to a church opened in 1972. Much of the modern parish story is taken from notes gathered for the people who live here, so that a community would not have to invent its own beginning.
It is a priest’s book, not a guidebook, though you can walk the ruins with it. The empty chapter house still has twelve sides.
The living parish still answers to the old name.
That is the whole argument.
Bernadette, the child still learning her catechism, and why the Lady spoke her language
In 1858 Bernadette Soubirous was fourteen. The family mill had failed. They were living in a former lock-up in Lourdes. She was behind with school and with formal catechism. She had not yet made her First Communion. At home she spoke the language of Bigorre, not the French of officials and textbooks.
This was the child the Lady spoke to.
When the Lady finally gave her name — Que soy era Immaculada Councepciou — Bernadette could repeat the words. She could not explain them. She took them to the priest as she had heard them.
This book tells that story in ordinary spoken English: the Cachot, Bartrès, the first morning at Massabielle, Fr Peyramale’s caution, the mud before the spring, the questions she was asked, the First Communion she was waiting for, and the quiet years at Nevers. Later she was remembered as saying that Our Lady had used her like a broom, and then put her back in her place.
Catechism still mattered. Intelligence is not the same as schooling. An approved apparition does not add a new Gospel. Bernadette would not enlarge what she believed she had seen.
