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In The Church Speaks to the Modern World, Etienne Gilson presented for the first time the basic encyclicals of Leo XIII arranged in the order expressly indicated by the Pope himself. Gilson's sparkling introduction provides the proper perspective for the encyclicals; his notes brilliantly clarify obscure points; his summaries provide an immediate grasp of each encyclical; and his study of the variant translations is invaluable. In short, here is the definitive collection of the most important and far-reaching papal pronouncements of the modern age.

This is a story about a coming, slowly creeping, once in a millennium climatological disaster event. Yet the residents of a small Pacific Northwest town, especially their Mayor, seem more concerned with the taking up of a homeless man and his cohort in downtown, a development threatening to ruin their idyllic self-perceptions. Even as the storm readies to deliver a direct hit, many view the homeless men as the true "plague" rather than a dust storm, acid spitting, Tornado funnel-front that has reduced Syracuse and Chicago to utter ruin. Ultimately, it is a story about what it means to love one's neighbor, what it means to sacrifice, what it means to trust in God's providential, often unseen, plans.

Don Giuseppe Pace, a Salesian priest, who originally wrote this novel under the pseudonym Walter Martin, takes on the excesses and inversions of the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council in this novel, with its host of lovable and infuriating characters and often surprising storyline. The new leader of the Church, a relative unknown who has been elected as a mere transitional pope, upsets the entire process of Reform that held sway over the Church up to his election. Opposed on almost all sides by shrewd careerists, he prudently selects a principled group of supporters, many of whom had been coldly thrown aside in the furor to overturn centuries of Tradition and Faith. Against all odds, they end up reigniting Tradition.

Gracchus is a grand opera that tells of an unforgettable human drama set to soaring music. The whole unfolds according to the principles of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), incorporating perennial human themes while embracing music, poetry, dance, scenography, and philosophical reflection in a spectacle of emotional power whose purpose is to entertain and to edify. Besides the dialogue and lyrics, the libretto contains summary descriptions of the music for each scene giving the reader a substantive taste of the score. Though the plot has a historical basis being set in the late Roman Republic and centered on the life of Gaius Gracchus, a tribune of the people, the story uses that period to create a socio-political allegory of contemporary times. The text and score of Gracchus do not, finally, just combine but merge to produce a single aesthetic phenomenon inspired by the roots of opera, epic literature, and the dramatic tradition of classical tragedy.

It is to the credit of Fr. Ralph Weimann, a theologian who lives in today's world and is particularly attentive to the current challenges of the Church, but at the same time deeply rooted in the great tradition of the Church, to have made a valuable contribution in this regard with this book. The purpose of this book is to offer a guide to show the way to Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God. To this end, in a first step, the common prejudices that supposedly speak against the faith and the Church are outlined in each chapter. In a second step, they are given an answer, based on Sacred Scripture and Tradition. Therefore, this book is a valuable help especially for disoriented believers and is also useful for every Catholic who wants to be prepared to "explain" his faith.

The Hippo Lectures is a book of essays that were first given as live audience, public talks. Catholicism being a "both/and" faith, this work is both fiction and non-fiction; speech and story; serious and absurd; broadly maximal and microscopically focused. It's singular glue, however, is the Catholic Faith. All the essays-whether about the environment, beauty, athletics, beer, sex, economics, film, or American politics, to name but a few-are viewed through a Catholic lens. Now nearly past the first quarter of the 21st century, deep into postmodernity, Catholics need books that take societal challenges head on, resisting the temptations to accommodate error, look the other way, or seek answers in the 13th century. Head on, and using postmodern tools and techniques, as we are meant to use all things, for the glory of God. This is that book.

Voce Mea, the fourth volume of the first ever English translation of the Commentary on the Davidic Psalms by Denis the Carthusian (1402-1471), continues with Denis's literal, allegorical, tropological and analogical traversal through the entire 150 Psalms. This volume covers Psalms 76 through 100. St. Jerome exclaimed that "ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ," and Denis heartily agreed. Indeed, outside of the Gospels, Denis maintains that the voice of Christ, the vox Christi, is found most strongly in the Psalms, though moderns, for a variety of reasons, appear to have developed a tin ear to it. Denis is the perfect antidote to this auditory malaise. Armed with a keen spiritual ear which is only sharpened by his contemplative spirit and his love for God, Denis identifies Christ's voice for us in the Psalms and amplifies it in his Commentary so that we might hear it above the din of those things which distract or deafen us to it, and might say with Samuel: "Speak, Lord, for your servant hears." (1 Sam. 3:10)

We are victims of a contagious amorphism which dilutes the mysteries of faith into a current of humdrum uniformity. We have lost the form, the principle that determines the essence of a thing, distinguishing it from all others. The invitation to become perfect is open to everyone, but we have forgotten that there is a hierarchy of levels in the states of Christian life. Consequently, both marriage and the consecrated life are going through a profound crisis, having been flattened into the same level to ease the universal call to holiness. It is a crisis that also afflicts the celibate life, which has for a long while been subjected to the epicurean transformation of our times. A solution is found in looking to the Virgin Mary. Her perpetual virginity is the original form that molded Christ and, in Him, every Christian and every Christian vocation. In her unsullied virginity we have the beginning and the fulfillment. The mystery of Mary's virginity is the assurance of God's primacy in the world. It is the confirmation that the Kingdom that Christ brought forth does not begin in the flesh but in the spirit-"God is spirit" (Jn 4:24) -whereby the flesh is ennobled, and man elevated into a higher dimension: that of the Kingdom in its plenitude, where God "worketh all in all" (1 Cor 12:6). Mary is the virginal womb in which the mystery of Christ and of the Church are safeguarded, enshrined, and treasured.

When confronted with the message of the Gospel, the Jews on the day of Pentecost were cut to the heart and said, "Brethren, what shall we do?" (Acts 2:37) Catholics today are asking themselves the same question. Phillip Campbell's The Way of Life offers a response. Drawing on the spiritual heritage of the Church, the essays in this book call us to refocus our sight on the Lord, cultivating "eyes to see" that we might have confidence in God's providence. Covering a host of subjects ranging from the practical to the mystical, The Way of Life challenges us to rise above the darkness of our times, armed with a lively awareness of God's grace.

We are victims of a contagious amorphism which dilutes the mysteries of faith into a current of humdrum uniformity. We have lost the form, the principle that determines the essence of a thing, distinguishing it from all others. The invitation to become perfect is open to everyone, but we have forgotten that there is a hierarchy of levels in the states of Christian life. Consequently, both marriage and the consecrated life are going through a profound crisis, having been flattened into the same level to ease the universal call to holiness. It is a crisis that also afflicts the celibate life, which has for a long while been subjected to the epicurean transformation of our times. A solution is found in looking to the Virgin Mary. Her perpetual virginity is the original form that molded Christ and, in Him, every Christian and every Christian vocation. In her unsullied virginity we have the beginning and the fulfillment. The mystery of Mary's virginity is the assurance of God's primacy in the world. It is the confirmation that the Kingdom that Christ brought forth does not begin in the flesh but in the spirit-"God is spirit" (Jn 4:24) -whereby the flesh is ennobled, and man elevated into a higher dimension: that of the Kingdom in its plenitude, where God "worketh all in all" (1 Cor 12:6). Mary is the virginal womb in which the mystery of Christ and of the Church are safeguarded, enshrined, and treasured.

Orpheus and the Maenads A Traditional Play in Blank Verse The preternaturally great poet Orpheus has responded to the loss of his wife Eurydice to the Underworld by forsaking the society of his fellow men in Thrace, where he was a poet-king, and endlessly wandering through field and forest, using his poetic genius to lament his loss. Apollo, the god of poetry, urges him to give up his excessive mourning and return to Thrace and once more sing the deeds of the great heroes of Greece. He warns him that in the wild he inhabits there lurk the young god of wine Dionysus and his super-human followers the Maenads, who themselves eschew the ordinary society of men and give themselves to mad ecstasies brought on by wine and who would like nothing more than to recruit Orpheus to their number. Unwilling to give up his devotion to the memory of Eurydice, Orpheus rejects the Maenads and their Master with unmeasured words of scorn, sealing his own doom. Dionysus devises a fiendish plot of revenge that goes well beyond the ancient myth.

This book, which is now in its second edition, expels the confusion surrounding the distinction between the ordinary and the extraordinary magisterium of the Church by exposing the ambiguity inherent in the term 'ordinary magisterium'. A detailed analysis of the origins of this terminology in the writings of Joseph Kleutgen, a nineteenth century neo-scholastic theologian, provides the historical and theological context for understanding its intended sense in the documents of Pope Pius IX and the First Vatican Council. The main lines of historical development are then traced from the end of the First Vatican Council up through the teaching of the Second Vatican Council with special attention given to the question of an ordinary magisterium of the pope and to the extension of the extraordinary magisterium to the secondary object of the magisterium and to the confirmation or re-affirmation of doctrines already infallibly taught by the Church. This latter question has serious implications for the interpretation of doctrinal declarations such as those found in Evangelium vitae, Ordinatio sacerdotalis, and several of the documents of Vatican II. The study concludes by considering the approach to these questions taken by the Second Vatican Council in the constitution on the Church Lumen gentium.

If Christ came to "bring a sword" into history, it was a sword that was meant to fight on behalf of the personal and common good of individual human beings and the communities through which they work to perfect themselves. Everywhere that sword cut, it did so to fashion a true, good, and beautiful civilization in which men could live with a freedom and a dignity that surpasses all purely natural understanding. The enemies of the Incarnation and its central "practical" consequence for the temporal history of the world-the establishment of the Social Kingship of Christ-have sought in a myriad of ways to bring the construction and maintenance of a truly Catholic Christendom capable of leading fallen man away from sin and towards eternal salvation to naught. Revolutionary "modernity," with its emphasis upon the "liberation" of the individual and society both from the easy yoke and light burden of the Incarnate God, as well as from their mutual complementarity, has led to nothing other than the enslavement of the human person and community life to the triumph of the strongest wills. This volume of essays seeks to bring the full meaning of the "sword" of Christ in history to life, but in mortal combat with a diabolical modern revolutionary ideology that works to blunt it, break it, and, in C.S. Lewis' words "abolish mankind" in the process.

The startling assertion that "the laity must be apostolic" requires unpacking as the Church becomes more and more confined in modern society. But, as Fr. Francis Wendell shows in this short book, there is a transformative "philosophy of presence that can be exercised only by lay people since they are present in and are of the world." In this short work, Fr. Wendell shows how:- the laity must avoid a purely external living of Christianity- how there is no one-size-fits-all program for the laity- that the gifts and talents of each person provide an opportunity for unique holiness- how formation for a profession must not overshadow the formation of laity in their common role as members of the Mystical Body of Chris.While some of his particular advice is better suited to the time period in which he lived, he highlights the timeless truth that the most important part of the lay apostolate is holiness. We participate in God's life through grace, and must share this life with others. Whether you are a layman wishing to better understand your role as an apostle, or a priest looking to help your flock evangelize the world, this book is insightful food for thought.