Teen Sports, Inspiration

The saints are not myths or legends, they were people just like us who lived lives of ­epic virtue.

If the saints have never made you laugh or drop your jaw, they will in this book. Bestselling author Shaun McAfee (Reform Yourself!, Filling Our Father's House) and guest writers illustrate how the saints were not just stone-faced old men. Some of them had quirky habits, outrageous personalities, and did breathtaking deeds...but they all had epic faith.

Their lives were filled with events that push our understanding of charity with intrepid virtue, but at certain points, they lacked common sense and were uproariously funny, too.

Discover the time:

- A young man known for his spiritual perfection almost blew himself to bits with a cannon.
- The saint of the Cristero War became a master of disguises to save Christians and hilariously taunt his persecutors.
- Twin saints conjured dragons and tempests just to preserve vocations of novices.
- The founder of the Oratorians joked about his own death, just moments before he died.
- A famous cardinal rejected guaranteed conclave votes to make him pope.
- A magnificent preacher was-- understandably--accused of being insane.

You'll be filled with faith and laughter as you discover that God truly sends the lowly to do his will on earth, but that over time and with God's graces, the lowly are lifted the highest--even if they are a little wild, weird, and epically wonderful.

In each generation, heroes of the Faith, whom the Church recognizes as saints, emerge. There are many characteristics that they have in common, but none thus far have used cell phones, played PlayStation video games, or searched for information on Google.

That is about to change.

A young "computer geek" named Carlo Acutis, who created a website cataloguing every reported Eucharistic miracle in the world and died of leukemia a year later at age fifteen, was beatified in November 2019, after a healing miracle in Brazil was attributed to his intercession. Since the beatification ceremony one year later, solemn crowds have been filing past the exposed relics of the blessed youth in Assisi's Church of Santa Maria Maggiore.

Carlo is a sign of contradiction in the modern world who serves as a heroic model for today's young people--a teenager who programmed computers and enjoyed films and comics yet lived as an authentic and sincere disciple of Christ. In these pages, you'll discover how he embraced the Faith as a boy and developed the virtues necessary to live a Christ-centered life in a secular society, how he overcame the vices that plagued him, and how he gracefully dealt with heartaches he could not divulge even to his parents.

When he developed leukemia, he offered his suffering both for Pope Benedict XVI and for the Catholic Church, saying: "I offer all the suffering I will have to undergo for the Lord, for the Pope, and the Church." In this surprising and inspiring book, you'll also learn: