The best e-library of Catholic books on the planet! Thomas Jefferson, eat your heart out.
There are over 1,100 volumes available for your perusal, so kick your shoes off and stay awhile. I’m still trying to figure out how to get a cappuccino machine installed for you, but I can promise you this: all books are available in full view, at no charge, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You won’t want to leave. But if you do, you can always come back.
Patricia Cornell, proprietor of St. Theodosia’s Icon Shop writes,
The Pantocrator on your website is one of my favorites! The text in the Book Jesus is holding is a combination of two Biblical texts on “judge not lest you be judged in the same way” (my paraphrase). It is one of my favorites and I handcraft this image, as well.
In Christ,
Patricia
Thanks Patricia! Actually, when Christ holds an open book, this is a variant of the Pantocrator and is called “Christ the Teacher.” I went to the link she provided to see her work and found the following information on the scripture verses on the icon(which whisks readers to the treasures contained on the YIMCatholic Bookshelf in the right sidebar),
John 7:24–“Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgement.” Matthew 7:2–“For with the judgement you pronounce, you will be judged and the measure you give will be the measure you get.”
I knew I liked it for multiple reasons!
Sheesh! I wonder if the video below was done before or after the allegations of problems with the staff of Real Catholic TV came to light. It is so far off the deep end, as you’ll see. Anyone with access to books can refute this asserted notion in under two minutes.
That the Priscillianists were heretics is undisputed. But alas, Priscillian and his staff were excommunicated (and executed, by the way) not because they were “taking communion in the hand,” as alleged in this video. Unless, that is, you mean they took Our Eucharistic Lord by the hand and carted Him home with them, which was (and is now) an abuse. You see, Priscillianists wouldn’t communicate inside church at all, had weird ascetic practices, orgies at night, and assorted other troubling routines. Take a look,
The doctrines held by the Priscillianists were a mixture of Manicheism and Gnosticism.. They denied the Trinity of Persons and advocated Dualism and Docetism. They held the use of flesh-meat and marriage to be unlawful, but permitted sexual intercourse, on condition that generation should be prevented. They celebrated their orgies with great debauchery, and principally at night. For the suppression of this abominable sect, stringent laws were enacted by the Synods of Astorga and Toledo, in 446 and 447. Even as late as the year 563 the second Council of Braga found it necessary to adopt measures against the Pricillianists. After that, the sect disappears from history.
And there is this, and this, and this.
This would seem to me to be spinning an erroneous narrative from out of a tiny thread of truth. Isn’t that some new word that Stephen Colbert coined? Yes. Truthiness. And as everyone knows, books are the sworn enemy of truthiness, as Stephen explains here (forgive any commercials please).
Go with your gut—not! And seriously, once again, stuff like the RCTV video at the top of this post leads folks, who presume that what Mr. Voris is saying is factual, to doubt their appointed leaders. I’ve already covered that topic once before, remember? Follow your bishop.
This is where the YIMCatholic Bookshelf earns it’s keep, see? Because if what I found there supported Mr. Voris’s assertions, this post would have been written to reflect that. But, as my research shows in this particular matter, the Priscillianist heresy has nothing whatever to do with what he purports it has to do with. So this latest video, then, is much ado about nothing. Zilch. Nada. Zippo.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Using the search window of the YIMCatholic Bookshelf will bring you at least 27 books explaining this heresy in varying detail. Want to see what St. Alfonso Maria de’ Liguori has to say about them? Please do! While you’re there, look up assorted other information alluded to, like the Council of Sarragossa, etc. And then, there is Google.
Got reference questions? Want to do some fact checking? Fight “truthiness!” Stop in to the YIMCatholic Bookshelf. It’s open 24/7 and all at the low, low, price of “free.”
Yesterday I published the Music for Mondays post early. Therein, I commented that Catholicism is so deep and so wide, that ideas for writing about it will never be exhausted. But the fact of the matter is, folks like the shiny new stuff better than the old, moldy stuff already sitting in the libraries of the world.
Not me. I’m the weirdo contrarian, remember? And you know what else? Lately I’ve been bumping into fantastic stuff written by long dead Jesuit priests whom I’ve never heard of. My buddy Blaise Pascal hated the Jesuits with a passion. He’s not alone with that opinion either. But I like them. Guys like Wu Li, SJ for example. And François Nepveu, SJ. Remember Wilhem Wilmers, SJ, torpedoing Ayn Rand’s “originality?” And who could forget Henry Morse, SJ?
Oh, folks love John Hardon SJ, for example, and I picked up a copy of his The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism at a used book sale. I haven’t cracked it open yet though. At the same sale, I also picked up Mission and Grace, Volume 1 written by Karl Rahner, SJ, and We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition, by John Courtney Murray, SJ. I’m reading that selection currently and frankly, it is top notch. I promise to post on it soon.
Aside for Fr. Hardon though, I have never heard of any of these guys. It turns out they are modern giants of the Society of Jesus. See? I’ve got a lot to learn. I hadn’t heard of the Jesuit who wrote this neat little book I just added to the YIMCatholic Bookshelf either.
It’s called, The Catholic’s Ready Answer: Popular Vindication of Christian Beliefs and Practices Against the Attacks of Modern Criticism , and looking over it I can say that it will be very useful even to Catholic of today. It was written by Michael P. Hill, SJ and started off as an English translation of a German book written by Franz X. Brors, SJ. Sure, it was published in 1914, but seriously, the modernist tenor of that time was very similar to modernist thoughts encountered nowadays. Don’t believe me? Just check the contents:
AGNOSTICISM > An Agnostic Query—”Why trouble ourselves about matters such as Gods existence, of which, however important they may be, we do know nothing?” (Huxley)
THE BIBLE AND MODERN THOUGHT Objection—The Bible is for many reasons deserving of veneration, but it is quite out of harmony with modern thought. The science, the aspirations, and the general point of view of the modern world are at the opposite pole from the contents of the Bible.
EUGENICS An Accusation—Every human being should love his kind, and a love of his kind should awaken in his breast an interest in the future of his race. The improvement of the race is the object of eugenics, and a want of sympathy with the present eugenic movement betrays either selfishness or an unenlightened conservatism.
HELL Objection—God is good and merciful; but a good and merciful God would not condemn a soul to eternal torments; therefore the eternity of hell is a contradiction of our belief in His goodness and mercy.
MARRIAGE A SACRAMENT, Ultra-Protestant View— “Marriage is an outward, material thing, like any other secular business. Marriage, with all that appertains to it, is a temporal thing and does not concern the Church at all, except in so far as it affects the conscience.”—Luther
See what I mean? The whole book is full of great, modern, controversial, questions and answered briefly from the viewpoint of Catholic tradition. If nothing else, it will get you jump started on learning more about the faith. Here are several examples for you to try out: Thoughts on Tolerance and Tradition.
TOLERANCE
An Accusation. —Tolerance is the first duty of the citizen as regards religious matters; but “the Roman Catholic Church, if it would be consistent, must be intolerant.”—Tschackert.
The Answer. —According to Christ’s teaching, the first duty of a man living in a community is not tolerance, but love of his neighbor. A pharisaical doctor of the law once “asked Him, tempting Him: Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said to him: Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, and with thy whole soul, and with thy whole mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment. And the second is like to this: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments dependeth the whole law and the prophets” (Matt. xxii. 35-40).
Justice and love are the two first duties of a man to his fellow-men. Tolerance is nowhere mentioned in the law. Mere tolerance does not go far enough. The Catholic Church does not merely tolerate her erring brethren She loves them with a divine charity—and that is more than tolerance. “Tolerance” is the catchword of genuine liberalism, which manages to put up with an obnoxious fellow-citizen, but knows nothing of charity.
But a distinction must be made in the matter of tolerance. Catholics are not intolerant of the erring, but toward their error there can be no such thing as tolerance. We can not compromise with error. What is false we can not call true, any more than we can call black white. When, therefore, the Catholic Church combats error and champions truth, she only follows the example of Christ and does what every right-thinking man will acknowledge to be just.
Dogmatic tolerance is self-contradiction. How can a Church that professes to be a teacher of truth say to the thinking world: “If you believe in the Trinity, in the divinity of Christ, and in the sacrament of Penance, well and good. If you don’t believe in them—again well and good—for I can’t be intolerant”? A Church which is the custodian of revealed truth can not compound with error; and any church—no matter what elements of truth it may retain, or what good it may do to men—any church which is seen to throw the mantle of a false charity over all vagaries of opinion within its pale is proved thereby not to have the hall-mark of Christian orthodoxy. In this connection the Catholic Church stands quite alone—and is thereby proved to be the one faithful eustodian of the doctrine revealed by Christ.
TRADITION AS A RULE OF FAITH
Objection. —Tradition can not be a source of true knowledge. There is nothing so unreliable as an old story that has passed from mouth to mouth and is subject to change at every telling. Even written documents are not safe from alteration. Every new copy made is likely to contain fresh errors.
The Answer. —Many who urge this objection are believers in Christianity; and yet what guarantee can be had for the truth of Christianity except in reliable tradition? Perhaps such guarantee is furnished by the Bible; but how can we know that the Bible is the word of God save by tradition?
Doubtless there are matters of secular interest about which neither writing nor tradition can afford any security from error; but there are also matters regarding which all fear of error is reasonably absent. No sensible man doubts about the existence of such historical characters as Csesar, Napoleon, or Luther. So, too, in the religious domain, there is a body of truth which is sealed as such by the continuous and unfailing witness of God’s Church; and what is this but tradition?
The Gospels can be proved to be genuine and reliable historical documents. And it may be proved from the Gospels that Christ, who was sent from on high, established an infallible Church—a fact which is plain from His having commissioned the apostles to preach the Faith to all nations and from His having declared that whosoever would not believe them would be condemned (Matt. xxviii. 19, 20; Mark xvi. 15, 16). The Church as represented by the apostles must be infallible, for otherwise no one would be condemned for not accepting the apostolic teaching. Now the Pope and the other bishops are the successors of the apostles; and they must be supposed to teach with the same infallible authority as the apostles, for otherwise we are forced to the very unchristian conclusion that Christ must have meant that all authoritative teaching should cease with the apostles! It follows that once the Pope and the bishops proclaim anything to be a truth of the Faith, it must infallibly be such.
Now tradition is nothing else but the continuous and uninterrupted teaching of God’s Church. God has it in His power to provide for the continued infallibility of His Church—just as of old He provided for the preservation of the writings of the evangelists and the other sacred writers from errors of fact and of doctrine.
In the Catholic Church there is every possible guarantee that the tradition on which Catholics rely is not of a loose, haphazard sort, containing a large admixture of hearsay and legend. The communion of all parts of the Church with the Apostolic See of Peter and Peter’s successors has been the one great source of unity and continuity of teaching in the Church. The decrees of the Popes, and of councils presided over by the Popes, are written in broad characters on the pages of history; but, even if there were no such record of them, the unfailing continuity of the Church’s life makes her a witness to apostolic truth in every succeeding age. It is to Catholic tradition as thus understood that Protestants owe such elements of pure Christianity as they retain in their several creeds.
Have a look at the rest of the book over on the YIMCatholic Bookshelf.
It is the time of the year when those who are curious about the Catholic Church can seek answers to their questions in a setting that is non-threatening. This is done by means of the Rites of Christian Initiation for Adults, aka the RCIA program.
Back in 2007, I made my second sojourn through the RCIA program as a Candidate. That is the term given to those who enter the RCIA process and have already been baptised in another Christian faith community outside of the Catholic Church. You can learn more about RCIA from any local parish or from other resources on-line.
Speaking of other resources on-line, that is why I’m writing this post. I want to remind everyone of the handy, dandy YIM Catholic Bookshelf. Introduced back in May, the bookshelf now is up to over 355 volumes of solid Catholic reference material. These books are all available in full view from Google books, and all are completely searchable.
I was a strike-out at my first attempt up at the RCIA plate. I had other excuses too, but lack of knowledge by the catechist at the parish I was in was a big one. If only I would have been able to research some of my questions, maybe I would have become a Catholic in 1990 instead of 2008. Alas, the possibility of quick, yet in-depth, research wasn’t possible then. But it is now.
Enter the YIM Catholic Bookshelf as a part of the solution. Just click on the portrait of Our Lord in the side-bar, and presto (!) you are in our electronic study. Certainly candidates and catechumens have a lot of questions. And as Cardinal Newman said once, “Catholicism is a deep matter—you cannot take it up in a teacup.” So I hope that the YIM Catholic Bookshelf can be used as a resource for both catechists and catechumans (and candidates) alike.
Here are a few examples for you to consider. By entering the following search terms into the search blank (right below the portrait of St. Joan of Arc)on the shelf, our reference librarian at Google will locate a number of volumes that can help you answer a question, or find an answer to one. Give it a try!
Search Term – Number of Books Found
Penance 180
Confession 243
Reconciliation 165
Mary 118
Veneration of Mary 73
Communion of Saints 151
Doctrine 191
Confirmation 201
Purgatory 165
Primacy of Peter 53
Canon of Scriptures 55
By no means is this an exhaustive list. And clearly, this is not a circumvention of the two main catechetical published works out there: the Bible, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church. I’m just suggesting that if you have a couple of hard-boiled, skeptical, candidates (like I was!) who need a deeper bibliography, send them our way. Come and see.
You’ll be glad you did.
Back in January, I wrote a post named Because of the Pleasure of Finding Things Out, a title I borrowed from a book written by physicist Richard Feynman. The photo you see here accompanied that post. As I wrote then, finding things out about Catholicism is a pleasure for me.
It was probably late 2007 when I discovered Google Books. There you will find previews of books, what they call “snippet views” or “limited previews” that have a clock running on them (I guess?) and missing pages. But there is also a category called “full view.” I really liked that because I could read the whole book for free!
That and the fact that I’m frugal (cheap, broke, or stingy depending on who I’m dealing with). I hear Kindle is great and there is even an i-Phone Kindle application too. But I have neither device, so they might as well not exist. I also don’t have an unlimited budget for buying books either (stingy, er, frugal) whether hardbound, paperbound, or electronic.
To make a long story short, I noticed that I could “add” books to an electronic shelf over at Google Books. So I starting building it and promptly named it the YIM Catholic Bookshelf. I sent the link to Webster and in a split second, he put it in the sidebar as a “value-added” resource for those who happen to stop by our humble blog.
Here are a couple of things to share about the Bookshelf:
A) Only books available in “full view,” with every single page available for you to read, will ever rest on our shelf. So far there are over 300 volumes awaiting your perusal. And I am constantly adding to it as well (like just now during my lunch break).
B) The “library” is fully searchable. This is a handy feature that I used when I was doing the Divine Mercy Novena posts. Want to know about purgatory? Plug the word in the “search my library” box under the portrait of our patron, St. Joan of Arc, and instantly 60 books appear with a reference to “purgatory.” Within each book there may be as few as one citation or as many as 40 in any given volume. Give it a try!
C) You can search for a person, a place, or a thing in the entire library as well as individually in any single volume. Interested in converting to Catholicism? Search “Catholic converts” and thirty (count ’em, 30!) volumes will pop up. Or maybe you are interested in the Rosary (40 volumes!), Augustine, Belloc, Baring, Benson, or Chesterton—all the way to Utopia. All points in between are at your disposal as well. Come and see! Just click on the portrait of Our Lord on the sidebar and find a comfy chair.
D) For the books that are no longer protected by copyright, you can click the “view plain text” button on any volume and cut and paste passages into your posts, e-mails, love letters, etc. Just don’t forget your footnotes! You can also send a link to the the book, page, and even an exact paragraph of any book on the shelf to anyone with an e-mail address. Send it to someone around the world at the speed of light. Just fasten your seatbelt first!
Which leaves me wondering: What if there had been Google Books when I was going to college? Sheesh! And note this: I haven’t read every book that sits on the shelf. But I intend to spend a lifetime trying. And you can join me too, because at the YIM Catholic Bookshelf, the light is always on and we never charge “over-due” fees.
Now, if I could just figure out how to put a free Starbucks in here, it would almost be heaven.
During my 40 years in the wilderness, reading was a mostly desultory pursuit. I went through a Dickens kick, a Civil War period, a David Foster Wallace frenzy, and a time of pure adoration for Norman Maclean. But there was no aim, no theme to my reading. It was like belonging to a Book-of-the-Month Club in which each season’s selections are chosen at random. By contrast, in the two years since I entered RCIA, I have read almost nothing but Catholic subjects. I’m pretty sure I will spend the rest of my life doing more of the same.
I certainly never imagined it would be like the most exciting week in my life, the week I still dream about frequently: my first week as a freshman in college. All those books, and all the time in the world to read them! Forget Scripture, the Church Fathers, or the latest essay in First Things. What I love is, all that Catholic fiction! Some I have read: Kristin Lavransdatter, the Father Brown mysteries of Chesterton, selected stories by Flannery O’Connor, Mariette in Ecstasy. But so many I still have left to read: anything by Graham Greene, Death Comes for the Archbishop, The Chronicles of Narnia, and until today at lunchtime, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited.
Webster Discovers America! I know I am probably one of the last adult Catholics in the old British Empire who had neither read nor watched Brideshead Revisited until today. I finished the book at one o’clock. Tomorrow the DVDs arrive from Amazon.
A book like Brideshead makes me tickled to be a Catholic. Several readers of this blog suggested it to me, as had a couple of Catholic friends previously, but somehow I associated it with everything overly serious about Masterpiece Theater. Jeremy Irons never appealed to me, although he was pretty funny as Klaus von Bulow in Reversal of Fortune. (“You’re a very strange man, Mr. von Bulow!” “You have no idea.”) It was finally George Weigel’s writeup in Letters to a Young Catholic that sent me out to Borders looking for Brideshead. Like Kristin Lavransdatter, it is a “Catholic novel” that I wanted to begin re-reading the moment I had finished the last page. Though I’m lazy enough to wait for the DVDs.
What kind of Catholic novel is Brideshead Revisited? A very sneaky one. You’re nearly a quarter of the way through it before Waugh offers any details about the religion of the family at the heart of the novel, the Marchmains, whose country seat is known as Brideshead. On page 86 in my edition, the narrator says of his Oxford chum Sebastian Marchmain, “Often, almost daily, since I had known Sebastian, some chance word in his conversation had reminded me that he was a Catholic, but I took it as a foible, like his Teddy-bear.”
If Waugh was in any sense evangelizing why did he ever pick such an unorthodox family as Catholic exemplars? Sebastian—a confirmed drunk who carries a stuffed animal around Oxford with him—is not only the most eccentric but, for narrator Charles Ryder, the most compelling of the Marchmains. It is Ryder’s love for Sebastian (love, apparently, in all its forms) that leads him to Brideshead and his encounter with Catholicism. Though he doesn’t realize that this is what he is encountering until almost the very end of the novel—after he has fallen in love with Sebastian’s sister Julia and the two have divorced their respective spouses in order to marry. By this time, Sebastian has died of disease somewhere in Africa, tended by monks who refused him admission as anything other than a menial laborer. His younger sister, Cordelia, who may still end in a convent, reports that Sebastian ended his life somewhere between an alcoholic stupor and spiritual ecstasy.
In the final chapter of the narrative (a prologue and epilogue frame the main story), Lord Marchmain, father of the family, comes home to die. Here—for the three other English-speaking Catholics who have not read Brideshead—I will leave off telling the tale and beg you to read it for yourself. The love between Charles and Julia must bow to a greater Love, and there is perhaps a suggestion in the epilogue that, despite a deep skepticism flashed throughout the novel, Charles himself may be on his own winding road to Rome. There are better, deeper surprises.
I suspect that the majority of those who have loved this novel have not even been Catholics. George Orwell was one of them, calling Waugh “as good a writer as it is possible to be while holding untenable positions.” But for the Catholic minority of readers, few books could be as entertaining, thought-provoking, or pride-inducing. At least that’s how I felt: seriously amused, perplexed, and proud.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton died on this day in 1936. A few years back, I had no idea about this fact for several reasons. A) I don’t know everything; B) he isn’t an official saint, so there is no feast day on the calender; C) he died long before I was born.
But I can truthfully say that one of the reasons why I am Catholic today is because of G.K. Chesterton. (more…)
“And he said to me: Son of man, dost thou think these bones shall live? And I answered: O Lord God, thou knowest.”—Ezekiel xxxvii, 3
I’ll be the first to admit that I have the faith of a child. I don’t have the faith of a novelist, or of a science-fiction writer. Nor do I have the faith of a philosopher, or a poet, or one blessed with flights of imagination that lead me to probe the heavenly mysteries exhaustively.
Have I been blessed with visions of the 7th heaven? Ridden on the wings of angels to mystical union with God, who supplies my need for specifics on how we will be when eternity arrives for me?
Nope. (more…)
I didn’t know it at the time this was originally written, but the Little Sisters of the Poor were our other secret weapon, aside from prayer. Their stand against the Administration was the ultimate “soft tactic” in a hard war. In a nutshell, see, of all of the groups that filed suit against the HHS Mandate, they were the target that could fell the giant.
Here’s the post published on June 4, 2012 in which I described the way that we could win the day against the HHS Mandate. As I recall, it wasn’t very popular among the armchair Catholic warrior types. C’est le guerre.
Here’s the original post. It’s long, so you might want to linger over it with your favorite adult beverage…
Currently, the bulk of our forces are still in the Assembly Area, marshalling troops, building logistics trains, and communication networks, etc. The dozen lawsuits that were launched a few weeks ago? Probes, really, looking for areas of strength and weakness. They crossed the line of departure a few weeks back as a reconnaissance-in-force.
Over at NRO Online, Mark L. Rienzi gives a recap of what we know so far. Basically, it’s the tale of a media blackout, which we are all familiar with, (more…)
Why I Am Catholic
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In