Church History
101 Surprising Facts about Church History
The Catholic Church is the longest-standing and the most universal of all institutions. The contributions made by Catholic men and women over the past 2000 years are most impressive, from a properly functioning calendar to the inventions of many things that we all take for granted today.
In 101 Surprising Facts About Church History, Fr. Meconi, SJ walks readers through the most amazing achievements of Christ's Body on earth. From economic and mercantile developments to scientific and astronomical advances, from the cataloging of zoological and botanical species to the cherishing of beautiful music and fine arts, Fr. Meconi shows you why the Catholic Church stands as the greatest promoter of human culture and knowledge.
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101 Surprising Facts about St. Peter's and the Vatican
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16 Marriages That Made History
When we think of famous persons in history, we usually remember their great deeds in the areas of science, politics, art, etc. But for some, their greatest achievement in life was not played out before the public, but rather took place within the private sphere of their marriage. The world may remember them for their extraordinary gifts and accomplishments, but they, at the end of their lives, were most mindful of their greatest love: their spouse. This book honors the hidden love adventures of several famous persons in history. It offers concrete examples of marriages that transformed these well-known individuals in deep and personal ways. These are not fairy tales of marriages "made in heaven;" they are stories of real people with real struggles, who, through their marriage, were challenged, strengthened, and encouraged to grow in their capacity for love. In this book, you will learn: How marriages can grow stronger through time, how marriage can provide tremendous strength for facing life's difficulties, how people with very different personalities can be completely united in marriage, how one woman's selfless love saved her marriage, how a queen learned to put her husband and her marriage ahead of power, how one couple's united search for truth led them to embrace the Catholic Faith. This book will help to restore your confidence in the power of marriage. It is recommended for those just starting out on their marriage journey, as well as for those already well advanced along the path. Gerard Castillo is a professor of Education at the University of Navarra, Spain, where he teaches courses in education, marriage, and family. He is the author of over thirty books on these subjects.
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AA-1025: Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration Into the Church
In the 1960's, a French nurse, Marie Carre, attended an auto-crash victim who was brought into her hospital in a city she purposely does not name. The man lingered there near death for a few hours and then died. He had no identification on him, but he had a briefcase in which there was a set of quasi-autobiographical notes. She kept these notes and read them, and because of their extraordinary content, decided to publish them.
The result is this little book, AA-1025 Memoirs of the Communist Infiltration Into the Church, a strange and fascinating account of a Communist who purposely entered the Catholic priesthood along with many others, with the intent to subvert and destroy the Church from within. His strange yet fascinating and illuminating set of biographical notes, tells of his commission to enter the priesthood, his experiences in the seminary, and the means and methods he used and promoted to help effect from within the auto-dissolution of the Catholic Church.
No one will read this book without a profound assent that something just like what is describer here must surely have happened on a wide scale in order to have disrupted the life of the Catholic Church so dramatically.
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Africa and the Early Church: The Almost-Forgotten Roots of Catholic Christianity
When we survey the history of the Faith, it is undeniable that the lands of northern Africa were profoundly influential in the development of early Christianity. The faith arrived early in Ethiopia, Sudan, Egypt, Libya, and the territories we now call Eritrea, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. African Christians made decisive contributions in theology, liturgy, biblical studies, and culture. With the Arab invasions of the seventh and eight centuries, much of this history was lost to Europe, though the marks of ancient influence remained.
Africa and the Early Church: The Almost-Forgotten Roots of Catholic Christianity uncovers that lost history for interested modern readers, telling the story as much as possible in the words of the great figures in antiquity. To acknowledge these Christians and their churches is to complete the historical picture—and to remember what was once common knowledge.
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Apostles and Their Times
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Bad Shepherds: The Dark Years in Which the Faithful Thrived While the Bishops Did the Devil's Work
Shocked to find corruption widespread in the ranks of their shepherds today, too many good Catholics are tempted to leave the Church, unaware that ever since the days when Jesus' own treasurer, Judas Iscariot, had his hand in the till, the Good Shepherd and His faithful followers have regularly been betrayed by bad shepherds.
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Bedrock of Christianity: The Unalterable Facts of Jesus' Death and Resurrection
2020 The Gospel Coalition Ministry Honorable Mention for Evangelism & Apologetics
Can we all agree on some things about Jesus, regardless of our belief--or unbelief?
Perhaps surprisingly, there is a lot upon which all scholars can agree. When surveying historical scholarship, there are certain truths about Jesus that Christians, agnostics, and skeptics must affirm.
In The Bedrock of Christianity, Justin Bass shows how--regardless of one's feelings about Christianity--there lies a bedrock of truths about Jesus's life and ministry that are held by virtually all scholars of religion. Through an examination of each of these key facts, readers will encounter the unalterable truths upon which everyone can agree. Useful for both Christians and non-Christians alike, this study demonstrates what we can really know about the historical truth of Jesus' death and resurrection.
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Catholic Church Through the Ages: A History; Second Edition (Revised)
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Catholicism and Evolution: A history from Darwin to Pope Francis
Fr. Michael Chaberek is a Polish Dominican who has studied creation doctrine from Old and New Testament accounts to the Church Fathers, to the Medieval Scholastics (especially St. Thomas Aquinas), to the Vatican's internal and public papers of the 19th and 20th centuries--and on into our own times and the pronouncements of recent popes. His new book gathers all doctrinal statements on evolution and presents the history of the engagement of Catholicism with natural science since Darwin presented his theory in 1859. What he finds is a clear path that gradually became twisted and over-grown. His exploration of that path is both scholarly and engrossing.
"Finally, a book that tells the full story of Catholic reflections and Magisterial statements down through the centuries on issues of creation and evolution. From the meditations of the ancient Church Fathers to the statements of Popes Pelagius I and Leo XIII, there are many hidden treasures to be found here. Fr. Chaberek combines historical, philosophical, and theological scholarship in a book that is both comprehensive and engaging. This book will be an eye-opener for many, and will quickly become the standard and essential work on the subject."--ROBERT STACKPOLE, director, John Paul II Institute of Divine Mercy
"In Catholicism and Evolution, Fr. Michael Chaberek surveys perennial Catholic teaching, plumbs the depths of Catholic philosophy and historical theology, and analyzes the best scientific evidence to date. In the process, he shows that certain elements of Darwinian evolution are not only incompatible with Catholic belief, but largely lacking in evidence. He shows also that despite her clear historical teaching, the contemporary Church lacks an unambiguous statement of how Catholics should understand this question. I expect this to become the definitive book on Catholicism and evolution."--JAY W. RICHARDS, co-author of The Privileged Planet; editor of God and Evolution
"Darwin and his contemporaries thought the cell was a simple blob of jelly, protoplasm. Modern science has discovered the exact opposite, that astoundingly sophisticated technology undergirds life. Father Michael Chaberek probes the implications of this and other surprising developments in his erudite study of Catholicism's collision with Darwinism."--MICHAEL BEHE, author of Darwin's Black Box
"Catholicism and Evolution is a thorough exposition of the history of the debate over evolution, especially the theory's proponents and opponents within the Catholic Church. This book should be on the shelves of any concerned with this subject, or indeed any who would like to fully grasp the controversy's roots in the Church."--ANN GAUGER, Senior Research Scientist, Biologic Institute
"Fr. Chaberek has done Catholics and all Christians a great service by describing the progression of the present controversy over creation, intelligent design, and theistic evolution from the Bible and early days of Christianity until today. His book will open eyes."--BRUCE CHAPMAN, Founding Fellow, Discovery Institute
FR. MICHAEL CHABEREK O.P., S.T.D. is a member of the Polish Dominican Province, with a Doctorate in Fundamental Theology from Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw.
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Catholics Confronting Hitler: The Catholic Church and the Nazis
Written with economy and in chronological order, this book offers a comprehensive account of the response to the Nazi tyranny by Pope Pius XII, his envoys, and various representatives of the Catholic Church in every country where Nazism existed before and during WWII.
Peter Bartley makes extensive use of primary sources - letters, diaries, memoirs, official government reports, German and British. He manifestly quotes the works of several prominent Nazis, of churchmen, diplomats, members of the Resistance, and ordinary Jews and gentiles who left eye-witness accounts of life under the Nazis, in addition to the wartime correspondence between Pius XII and President Roosevelt.
This book reveals how resistance to Hitler and rescue work engaged many churchmen and laypeople at all levels, and was often undertaken in collaboration with Protestants and Jews. The Church paid a high price in many countries for its resistance, with hundreds of churches closed down, bishops exiled or martyred, and many priests shot or sent to Nazi death camps.
Bartley also explores the supposed inaction of the German bishops over Hitler's oppression of the Jews, showing that the Reich Concordat did not deter the hierarchy and clergy from protesting the regime's iniquities or from rescuing its victims. While giving clear evidence for Papal condemnation of the Jewish persecution, he also explains why Pius XII could not completely set aside the language of diplomacy and be more openly vocal in his rebuke of the Nazis.
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Christ Unfurled: The First 500 Years of Jesus's Life
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Christian Cosmic Narrative: The Deep History of the World
If you’re looking for a great love story, for an adventure that pits a noble fighter against the darkest of villains and wins through to a mighty victory, then look no further than The Christian Cosmic Narrative: The Deep History of the World. Written in a way that captivates the imagination, come inside this book and discover the greatest story ever told from the pages of the Bible. Foreword by Fr. John Riccardo.
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Church and the Modern Era (1846-2005): Pius IX, World Wars, and the Second Vatican Council
Lourdes and Fatima, war, Vatican I and II, Fulton Sheen, St. John Paul II, and the clerical sex abuse crisis: These are just a few of the people and events that helped define the Catholic Church in the modern era, the period between 1846 and 2005.
The call to live the fullness of our faith has not changed since the time of the first disciples, but in The Church and the Modern Era (1846-2005), author David Wagner explores how the Catholic Church met the challenges of the industrial age, world wars, the sexual revolution, and technological advancement in an increasingly secular world.
The "modern era" of the Catholic Church began with the election of Blessed Pius IX in 1846 and ends with the death of St. John Paul II in 2005, the last pope to have served as a council father at Vatican II. With monarchies falling, nation-states rising, and industrialization and mass migration underway, the world in which we live changed more during this period than any other, David Wagner contends. While the Church may feel more user-friendly and less formal than ever before, what we believe has been handed down from the beginning.
Wagner will reintroduce you to some of the era's most powerful examples of virtue and faith such as St. John Henry Newman, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Josephine Bakhita, St. Faustina, and St. Maximillian Kolbe. He will also dispel some of the long-held misconceptions about the Church that span the 160-year period.
In The Church and the Modern Era, you will learn:
The Church and the Modern Era includes a map and chronology.
Books in the Reclaiming Catholic History series, edited by Mike Aquilina and written by leading authors and historians, bring Church history to life, debunking the myths one era at a time. This volume includes a series epilogue by Aquilina that examines the decades since the death of St. John Paul II and provides a look ahead.
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Church and the Roman Empire (301-490): Constantine, Councils, and the Fall of Rome
Winner of a 2020 Catholic Press Association book award (first place, best new religious book series).
Suspense, politics, sin, death, sex, and redemption: Not the plot of the latest crime novel, but elements of the true history of the Catholic Church.
Larger-than-life figures such as Athanasius of Alexandria, Augustine, and Constantine played an important part in the history of the Christianity. In The Church and the Roman Empire (AD 301-490): Constantine, Councils, and the Fall of Rome, popular Catholic author Mike Aquilina gives readers a vivid and engaging account of how Christianity developed and expanded as the Roman Empire declined.
Aquilina explores the dramatic backstory of the Council of Nicaea and why Christian unity and belief are still expressed by the Nicene Creed. He also sets the record straight about commonly held misconceptions about the Catholic Church.
In this book, you will learn:
Books in the Reclaiming Catholic History series, edited by Mike Aquilina and written by leading authors and historians, bring Church history to life, debunking the myths one era at a time.
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Church of God in Jesus Christ
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Church of Spies: The Pope's Secret War Against Hitler
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Church Under Attack
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Columbus and the Crisis of the West
But is this a legitimate assessment of Europe's inevitable western expansion?
In Columbus and the Crisis of the West, Dr. Robert Royal carefully examines the mind and motives of Christopher Columbus, distinguishing him as the greatest explorer of his age, whose courage and vision extended Christian Europe and inspired the American spirit.
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Compact HIstory of the Catholic Church revised
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Conciliar Octet: A Concise Commentary on the Eight Key Texts of the Second Vatican Council
A lively debate continues in the Roman Catholic Church about the character of the teaching provided by the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Did it represent a decisive rupture with previous doctrine, or the continuation of its earlier message under new conditions? Much depends on whether the Council texts are read in the light of subsequent events, which shook and sometimes smashed the life, worship and devotion of traditional Catholicism - rather than considered for themselves, in their own right as documents with a pre-history that historians can know.
In this work Dominican scholar and writer Aidan Nichols maintains that the Council texts must be interpreted in the light of their genesis, not their aftermath. They must be seen in the light of the public debates in the Council chamber, not the hopes (or fears) of individuals behind the scenes. On this basis, he provides a concise commentary on the eight most significant documents produced by the Council, documents which cover pretty comprehensively all the major aspects of the Church's life.
Nichols describes the Council as a gathering where the Conciliar minority - guarded, prudent, and concerned for explicit continuity at all points with the preceding tradition - played a beneficial role in steadying the Conciliar majority, enthused as the latter was by the movements of biblical, patristic and liturgical 'return to the sources' and a desire to reach out to the world of the (then) present-day in generosity of heart. The texts that emerged from this often impassioned debate remain susceptible to a reading of a classically Christian kind. That is precisely what Nichols offers in this book.
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Continental Achievement, Volume 2: Roman Catholics in the United States-- Revolution and the Early Republic
In this second volume of acclaimed historian Kevin Starr's masterful work on Catholics in America, he picks up where he left off in his Continental Ambitions, which traced the stirrings of independence among the colonists of New England.
Starr shows how Catholics participated in the American Revolution and the founding of the United States. He then traces the establishment of the first Catholic dioceses in the new republic. In his captivating style, Starr dramatizes the representative personalities in this formative period.
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Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America: The Colonial Experience
Kevin Starr has achieved a fast-paced evocation of three Roman Catholic civilizations--Spain, France, and Recusant England--as they explored, evangelized, and settled the North American continent. This book represents the first time this story has been told in one volume. Showing the same narrative verve of Starr's award-winning Americans and the California Dream series, this riveting--but sometimes painful--history should reach a wide readership.
Starr begins this work with the exploration and temporary settlement of North America by recently Christianized Scandinavians. He continues with the destruction of Caribbean peoples by New Spain, the struggle against this tragedy by the great Dominican Bartolomé de Las Casas, the Jesuit and Franciscan exploration and settlement of the Spanish Borderlands (Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Baja, and Alta California), and the strengths and weaknesses of the mission system.
He then turns his attention to New France with its highly developed Catholic and Counter-Reformational cultures of Quebec and Montreal, its encounters with Native American peoples, and its advance southward to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. The volume ends with the founding of Maryland as a proprietary colony for Roman Catholic Recusants and Anglicans alike, the rise of Philadelphia and southern Pennsylvania as centers of Catholic life, the Suppression of the Jesuits in 1773, and the return of John Carroll to Maryland the following year.
Starr dramatizes the representative personalities and events that illustrate the triumphs and the tragedies, the achievements and the failures, of each of these societies in their explorations, treatment of Native Americans, and translations of religious and social value to new and challenging environments. His history is notable for its honesty and its synoptic success in comparing and contrasting three disparate civilizations, albeit each of them Catholic, with three similar and differing approaches to expansion in the New World.
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Crucifixion of Jesus: a Forensic Inquiry
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Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ
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Crusades: The World's Debate
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Desert Fathers Vintage Spiritual Classics
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Divine Plan: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Dramatic End of the Cold War
"John Paul II and Ronald Reagan both understood that they were preserved through this suffering for a high purpose.
And I don't think you'll understand either one of them without understanding that."
--Bishop Robert Barron in The Divine Plan
Just six weeks apart in the spring of 1981, Pope John Paul II and President -Ronald Reagan took bullets from would-be assassins.
Few realized at the time how close both men came to dying.
Surviving these near-death experiences created a singular bond between the pope and the president that -historians have failed to appreciate.
When John Paul II and Reagan met only a year later, they confided to each other a shared conviction: that God had spared their lives for a -reason.
That reason? To defeat Communism.
In private, Reagan had a name for this: "The DP"--the Divine Plan.
* * *
It has become fashionable to see the collapse of the Soviet empire as inevitable.
Hardly.
In this riveting book, bestselling author Paul Kengor and writer--director Robert Orlando show what it took to end the Cold War: leaders who refused to accept that hundreds of -millions must suffer under totalitarian -Communism.
And no leaders proved more important than the pope and the president.
Two men who seemed to have little in common developed an extraordinary bond--including a spiritual bond between the Catholic pope and Protestant president. And their shared core convictions drove them to confront Communism.
To tell the full story of the dramatic closing act of the Cold War, Kengor and Orlando draw on their exhaustive research and exclusive interviews with more than a dozen experts, including well-known historians Douglas Brinkley, H. W. Brands, Anne Applebaum, Stephen Kotkin, John O'Sullivan, and Craig Shirley; the leading biographer of John Paul II, George Weigel; close Reagan advisers Richard V. Allen and James Rosebush; and Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Bishop Robert Barron.
You can't understand Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan--or how the Cold War came to such a swift and peaceful end--without understanding how much faith they put in the Divine Plan.
Don't miss the Divine Plan motion picture!
thedivineplanmovie.com
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Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World
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Doors to the Sacred, Vatican II Golden Anniversary Edition: A Historical Introduction to Sacraments in the Catholic Church (Updated)
Doors to the Sacred has endured as an indispensable account of the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Used in hundreds of university and seminary courses and full of critical acclaim, it details their historical and cultural evolution and the rituals and practices associated with them. This Vatican II Golden Anniversary Edition explains the liturgical changes found in The Roman Missal, Third Edition, and provides extensive resources for students and seekers alike, including:
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Early Church (33-313): St. Peter, the Apostles, and Martyrs
Winner of a 2020 Catholic Press Association book award (first place, best new religious book series).
Church history is a lot like the tale The Emperor's New Clothes, according to Catholic historian James L. Papandrea: No one wants to seem unenlightened, so they pretend to see what's not there.
In The Early Church (33-313): St. Peter, the Apostles, and Martyrs, Papandrea refutes fourteen fashionable "mythconceptions" about early Christian history and enables believers to make sense of the Church's beginnings.The first Apostles spread the message of Jesus Christ and were willing to suffer and die for their faith. The next generations of believers followed their example with zeal, producing inspiring martyrs including Sts. Justin and Perpetua, and great thinkers such as Irenaeus, and Tertullian.
In this book, you will learn:
Books in the Reclaiming Catholic History series, edited by Mike Aquilina and written by leading authors and historians, bring Church history to life, debunking the myths one era at a time
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Early Church Was the Catholic Church
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