Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History

Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History.  By Rodney Stark, Templeton Press, 2016.

 

Everything you know is wrong.  That may be an exaggeration.  A better way to describe the presentation of history in Rodney Stark’s Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History is to say that the lens through which much of society views world history is horrifically flawed and distorting.  In this book, Stark takes aim at several assumptions about history and the role that the Catholic Church played in major events.

 

Stark opens his book by pointing out that he is not a Catholic himself– he claims that his primary concern is with the truth, and with stopping the spread of lies and misconceptions.  In his introduction, he writes:

 

“While growing up as an American Protestant with intellectual pretensions, I always wondered why Catholics made such a fuss over Columbus Day.  Didn’t they see the irony in the fact that although Columbus was a Catholic, his voyage of discovery was accomplished against unyielding opposition from Roman Catholic prelates who cited biblical proof that the earth was flat and that any attempt to reach Asia by sailing West would result in the ships falling off the edge of the world? 

 

Everybody knew that about the Catholics and Columbus.  We not only learned it in school, the story of Columbus proving the world to be round also was told in movies, Broadway plays, and even in popular songs.  Yet, there they were every October 12: throngs of Knights of Columbus members accompanied by priests, marching in celebration of the arrival of the “Great Navigator” in the New World.  How absurd.

 

And how astonishing to discover many years later that the whole story about why Catholic advisors opposed Columbus was a lie.”

 

Stark points out that in 1492, all educated individuals in Europe already knew that the world was round.  Dante’s Divine Comedy, completed over a century and a half before Columbus’s famous voyage, clearly describes the Earth as a sphere.  This was common knowledge, as was a roughly accurate estimate of the circumference of the world.  What was not known was the existence of the Americas.  The authorities of the time were concerned that a long journey between Europe and Asia (a stretch that was not known at the time to contain any other land) would lead to the deaths of the crew, since insufficient provisions and fresh water could be brought along for the journey, and there was no guarantee that a location for replenishing supplies could be found along the way.  Resistance to Columbus’s journey was therefore based on a justifiable concern that such a journey was a suicide mission.

 

Stark explains the true state of affairs further, writing that:

 

“Amazingly enough, there was no hint about Columbus having to prove that the earth was round in his own journal or in his son’s book, History of the Admiral.  The story was unknown until more than three hundred years when it appeared in a biography of Columbus published in 1828.  The author, Washington Irving (1783-1859), best known for his fiction– in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow– he introduced the Headless Horseman.  Although the tale about Columbus and the flat earth was equally fictional, Irving presented it as fact.  Almost at once the story was eagerly embraced by historians who were so certain of the wickedness and stupidity of the Roman Catholic Church that they felt no need to seek any additional confirmation, although some of them must have realized that the story had appeared out of nowhere.  Anyway, that’s how the tradition that Columbus proved the world was round got into all the textbooks.”

 

Columbus’s voyage is not the only myth that is debunked in this book.  Other topics Stark addresses include the following issues:

 

1.     Anti-Semitism– While Stark acknowledges that anti-Semitism has long been a problem in Christian history, the reality is more complex and that there are many instances of the Catholic Church looking out for Jewish people through its two-millennia history.  Stark also cites examples of anti-Christian bias by Jews to argue that bigotry was not a one-way street.

 

2.     The Suppressed Gospels– Some scholars of antiquities have discovered manuscripts that purport to be alternative accounts of Jesus’s life and the history of early Christianity.  Stark illustrates the evidence that these documents are not unvarnished truth suppressed by a censorious Church, but in fact these writings are fictions and frauds.

 

3.     Persecution of Pagans– There is a widespread perspective that the ancient Romans were a tolerant group, that accepted the mysterious new monotheistic Christian sect, but their kindness was repaid with nastiness when the Christians took control.  Stark rejects the theory that the pagans were open-minded towards religion, and argues that accusations of Christians attempting to annihilate remaining pagans are blown out of proportion.

 

4.     The Dark Ages– Everybody knows that for centuries, a superstitious Church blotted out all scientific and intellectual achievement, right?  Wrong!  Stark and many other historians contend that the Dark Ages is a misnomer and an utter misrepresentation of the past, citing many intellectual advancements, and noting that this smearing of the era is the work of so-called “Enlightenment” figures who built themselves up by tearing people from the past down.

 

5.     The Crusades– Stark attacks the contention that the Christians were the villains of the Crusades, pointing out that much of the conflict was a form of self-defense.

 

6.     The Spanish Inquisition– During the Inquisition, the Church and the State were at odds– and the Church was fighting the violent evils and excesses of the state.  To turn the Monty Python skit on its head, nobody expects to learn the real complexities of the Inquisition!

 

7.     Science and Heresy– If you think you know the story of Galileo, think again.  The canard that the Church and science have been at loggerheads is utterly evaporated by the historical evidence.

 

8.     Slavery– The Church has long been one of the major forces in the fight against slavery, as opposed to the common assertion that the Church actually perpetuated the slave system.

 

9.     Authoritarianism– Stark rejects the contention that the Church was a leading partner in fascism.

 

10.  Protestant Modernity– The thesis that Protestantism brought about everything good in the modern world is utterly demolished by Stark.

 

Stark is quietly disgusted by the fact that so many seemingly reputable scholars (dubbed “distinguished bigots”) have spread these false statements and perpetuated a warped vision of the past, and traces the ways that figures in high intellectual places shaped popular interpretations of history:

 

“But it wasn’t only angry Protestants who invented and embraced these tales.  Many of the falsehoods considered in subsequent chapters were sponsored by antireligious writers, especially during the so-called Enlightenment, whose work was condoned only because it was seen as anti-Catholic rather than what it truly was– although more recently such scholars have paraded their irreligion as well as their contempt for Catholicism.  In his day, however, Edward Gibbon (1737-94) would surely have been in deep trouble had the bitterly antireligious views he expressed in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire not been incorrectly seen as applying only to Roman Catholicism.  But, because in the days of the Roman Empire Catholicism was the only Christian church, Gibbon’s readers assumed his attacks were specific to Catholicism and not aimed at religion in general.

 

Although Gibbon was one of the very first “distinguished bigots,” he is in excellent company– the list of celebrated, anti-Catholic scholars (some of them still living) is long indeed.  We will meet scores of them in subsequent chapters, some of them many times.  Worse yet, in recent years some of the most malignant contributions to anti-Catholic history have been made by alienated Catholics, many of whom are seminary dropouts, former priests, or ex-nuns, such as John Cromwell, James Carroll, and Karen Armstrong.  Normally, attacks originating with defectors from a particular group are treated with some circumspection.  But, attacks on the Church made by “lapsed” Catholics are widely regarded as thereby of special reliability.”

 

If Stark’s revisionist history is accepted, then that means that the history of Western Civilization needs to be substantially revised.  The Church’s history is not perfect, but as the evidence from historians from many different perspectives and beliefs shows, many of the allegations against the Church’s behavior are either false, distorted, or missing relevant information that can put certain events in perspective.  Stark’s book is emblematic of a paradigm shift that indicates that the Catholic Church is one of the most unjustly maligned institutions in history.

 

–Chris Chan

Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism.  By Robert Barron, Word On Fire, 2016.

 

Auxiliary Bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles Robert Barron has spent much of the last several years using new media to reach out to the faithful and evangelize Catholicism, much in the way that Archbishop Fulton Sheen did decades earlier.  Bishop Barron has produced many short YouTube videos, as well as a number of short essays that explain Church teachings, inform readers of historical events, or comment on the culture, among other topics.

 

Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism is an anthology of some of Bishop Barron’s short essays, most of which are only a few pages long.  Bishop Barron uses clear, informal language to get his points across, which makes for far easier reading than many apologetics.  This is commentary that all laypeople, including non-Catholics, can study and digest, and Bishop Barron manages to allow his essays to create the sense that is he is talking with his audience, rather than talking down towards others.

 

Most of these essays have been released over the last several years, though some may have been edited or otherwise revised for this volume.  They are arranged by general subject: “Sin and Mercy,” “Reason and Faith,” “Matter and Spirit,” “Freedom and Discipline,” and “Suffering and Joy.”  Of course, there is a good deal of overlap amongst the topics of these essays, and often it seems like one piece might fit just as well in multiple sections.

 

Throughout these essays, Bishop Barron consistently argues that Catholicism is more complex, nuanced, inspiring, and interesting than is generally presented in the mass media, popular culture, and even in circles of other believers.  Often, behaving well is equated as “being nice,” which is not necessarily the same as “behaving virtuously.”  In “Why Having a Heart of Gold is Not What Christianity Is About,” Bishop Barron writes,

 

“Many atheists and agnostics today insistently argue that it is altogether possible for non-believers in God to be morally upright. They resent the implication that the denial of God will lead inevitably to complete ethical relativism or nihilism. And they are quick to point out examples of non-religious people who are models of kindness, compassion, justice, etc. In point of fact, a recent article has prop osed that non-believers are actually, on average, more morally praiseworthy than religious people. In this context, I recall Christopher Hitchens remark that, all things considered, he would be more frightened of a group of people coming from a religious meeting than a group coming from a rock concert or home from a night on the town. God knows (pun intended) that during the last twenty years we’ve seen plenty of evidence from around the world of the godly behaving very badly indeed.

 

Though I could quarrel with a number of elements within this construal of things, I would actually gladly concede the major point that it is altogether possible for atheists and agnostics to be morally good. The classical Greek and Roman formulators of the theory of the virtues were certainly not believers in the Biblical God, and many of their neo-pagan successors today do indeed exhibit fine moral qualities. What I should like to do, however, is to use this controversy as a springboard to make a larger point, namely that Christianity is not primarily about ethics, about “being a nice person” or, to use Flannery O’Connor’s wry formula, “having a heart of gold.” The moment Christians grant that Christianity’s ultimate purpose is to make us ethically better people, they cannot convincingly defend against the insinuation that, if some other system makes human beings just as good or better, Christianity has lost its raison d’etre.”

 

Bishop Barron always writes clearly and confidently.  Each essay gets straight to the point, and always gives the impression that the truth of the Church can be made understandable to everybody.  The brevity of the essays has already been noted, but they say a lot in a short space.  Short pieces make for easy reading, though I believe that Bishop Barron is trying to subvert what I call the “memefication” of discourse even while he works within the system.  Increasingly, detailed arguments with solid evidence are abandoned in favor of emotional appeals and Facebook memes– a catchy one-liner with a picture, so a point is digested quickly, though the accuracy of the meme is not necessarily wholly truthful.

 

Bishop Barron’s use of social media and the Internet illustrates his realization that in order to reach the laity, one must use the current forms of mass communication.  His essay “The Joy of Evangelizing” illustrates the necessity of using every means necessary to be witnesses for the Faith.

 

“An emergency tends to focus one’s mind and energies and to clarify one’s priorities. If a dangerous fire breaks out in a home, the inhabitants thereof will lay aside their quarrels, postpone their other activities, and together get to the task of putting out the flames. If a nation is invaded by an aggressor, politicians will quickly forget their internal squabbling and put off their legislative programs in order to work together for the shared purpose of repulsing the enemy. 

 

Christianity is grounded in what its earliest proponents called “good news,” euangelion. There is, therefore, something permanently fresh, startling, and urgent about the Christian faith. It is not a bland spirituality or generic philosophy; it is news about something amazing and unprecedented, namely, that a carpenter from Nazareth, who declared himself the Son of God, has been raised from the dead. This is why there is a “grab you by the lapels” quality about the early Christian witness: the authors of the New Testament are not trading in generalities and abstract principles; they are telling the world about a revolution, an earthquake, an emergency. Jesus is risen from the dead, and therefore he is the king. And because he is the king, your whole life has to be rearranged around him.”

 

Numerous essays address popular culture, ranging from viral YouTube videos to larger cultural phenomena.  The essay “Woody Allen’s Bleak Vision” addresses an interview with Allen, where the famous director, actor, and screenwriter expounds upon the perceived meaninglessness of life and art.  Bishop Barron makes it clear that while one may enjoy watching Allen’s films, one does not need to embrace the filmmaker’s worldview.

 

I was chagrined, but not entirely surprised, when I read Woody Allen’s recent ruminations on ultimate things. To state it bluntly, Woody could not be any bleaker in regard to the issue of meaning in the universe. We live, he said, in a godless and purposeless world. The earth came into existence through mere chance and one day it, along with every work of art and cultural accomplishment, will be incinerated. The universe as a whole will expand and cool until there is nothing left but the void. Every hundred years or so, he continued, a coterie of human beings will be “flushed away” and another will replace it until it is similarly eliminated. So why does he bother making films—roughly one every year? Well, he explained, in order to distract us from the awful truth about the meaninglessness of everything, we need diversions, and this is the service that artists provide. In some ways, low level entertainers are probably more socially useful than high-brow artistes, since the former manage to distract more people than the latter. After delivering himself of this sunny appraisal, he quipped, “I hope everyone has a nice afternoon!” 

 

Woody Allen’s perspective represents a limit-case of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls “the buffered self,” which is to say, an identity totally cut off from any connection to the transcendent. On this reading, this world is all we’ve got, and any window to another more permanent mode of existence remains tightly shut. Prior to the modern period, Taylor observes, the contrary idea of the “porous self” was in the ascendency. This means a self that is, in various ways and under various circumstances, open to a dimension of existence that goes beyond ordinary experience. If you consult the philosophers of antiquity and the Middle Ages, you would find a very frank acknowledgement that what Woody Allen observed about the physical world is largely true. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Aquinas all knew that material objects come and go, that human beings inevitably pass away, that all of our great works of art will eventually cease to exist. But those great thinkers wouldn’t have succumbed to Allen’s desperate nihilism. Why? Because they also believed that there were real links to a higher world available within ordinary experience, that certain clues within the world tip us off to the truth that there is more to reality than meets the eye. 

 

A few of the later essays address how many prominent atheists use sneering and condescension as means of evangelizing– by making religion appear “uncool” and an object of mockery, they expect to drive people away from the Church.  It is to Bishop Barron’s credit that he never stoops to their level.  Bishop Barron always attacks ideas and not people.  The high road may be harder to walk, but in the long run, it’s worth it.

 

 

–Chris Chan

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem

How Dante Can Save Your Life: The Life-Changing Wisdom of History’s Greatest Poem.  By Rod Dreher, Regan Arts, 2015.

 

Dante’s Divine Comedy is one of the greatest epic poems of all time, the story of a man who travels through hell and purgatory, concluding his journey in Heaven.  In Dante’s poem, hell is depicted as as descending pit of rings where the damned face eternal punishment depending on the nature of their personal sins, purgatory is a tiered mountain where the flawed but saved are tested in order to cleanse themselves of their sins before they move on to paradise, and Heaven is a series of spheres where the virtuous are centered around God.

 

The Divine Comedy is a staunchly moral work.  Dante selected various figures from history to place in the three worlds of the afterlife, explaining why certain people deserved to wallow forever in filth, or be frozen up to their necks in ice, or any of numerous other graphic punishments.  For centuries, readers have come across Dante and been inspired by him.  If the phrase “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here” is meant to strike terror into the damned entering hell, Dante’s work has served to provide hope to those who study his cosmology and defenses of the eternal rewards for virtuous actions.

 

One contemporary writer to be deeply inspired and comforted by Dante is Rod Dreher.  Rod Dreher describes his personal tribulations– mental, spiritual, and physical– and explains how Dante helped him through a very difficult situation.  Dreher elaborates upon his challenging and frustrating family situation, caused in part by estrangements and complex relationships with certain family members.  He was also suffering from ill-health, and some professional frustrations as well.  In the midst of a personal dark period, Dreher found Dante (though he initially considered The Divine Comedy to be one of those classic works that people only read when they’re assigned it in school, and which nobody actually enjoys), found his work to be far more inspirational, insightful, and timely than he could possibly have imagined, and used Dante to lift himself out of a mental abyss.

 

Describing the effects of Dante on his psyche, Dreher writes:

 

 “Little did I know that Dante Alighieri, the failed Tuscan politician beggared by exile, knew me better than I knew myself.  La Divina Commedia, as his poem is called in the original Italian, is radical stuff.  You will not be the same after reading it.  How could you be?  All of life is in there.

 

Dante’s tale is a fantasy about a lost man who finds his way back to life after walking through the pits of hell, climbing up the mountain of purgatory, and ascending to the heights of heaven.  But it’s really a story about real life and the incredible journey of our lives, yours and mine.”

 

This book is more of a personal spiritual memoir than literary criticism.  Dreher discusses how he was raised in a Protestant household, eventually converted to Catholicism, lost his faith in the Catholic Church as he researched the sex abuse scandal, and then embraced Orthodoxy.  Much of the book discusses why Dreher made the religious decisions he did, and approximately half of the book is autobiographical.

 

Dreher contends that The Divine Comedy has spiritual curative powers, and that people of all religions can find solace and inspiration from it.  He writes:

 

“The Commedia is a seven-hundred-year-old poem honored as a pinnacle of Western civilization.  But it’s also a practical guide to living, one that promises rescue, restoration, and freedom.  This book, How Dante Can Save Your Life, tells the story of how the treasures of wisdom buried in the Commedia’s 14.233 lines gave me a rich new life. 

 

Though the Commedia was written by a faithful Catholic, its message is universal.  You don’t have to be a Catholic, or any sort of believer, to love it and be changed by it.  And though mine is a book that’s ultimately about learning to live with God, it is not a book of religious apologetics; it is a book about finding our own true path.  Like the Commedia it celebrates, this book is for believers who struggle to hold on to their faith when religious institutions have lost credibility.  It’s a book for people who have lost faith in love, in other people, in the family, in politics, in their careers, and in the possibility of worldly success.  Dante has been there too.  He gets it.”

 

At times Dreher’s frank and revealing forays into his own personal life make for difficult, even distressing reading as he reveals his personal anguishes and heartbreaks.  Some of these heartbreaks are centered around relationships and professional concerns, but family issues loom largest in the narrative.  The heart of the book centers around Dreher’s difficult relationship with his father.  Clearly, Dreher has a deep and powerful love for his father, and is staunchly grateful for his father’s influence on his life; but Dreher also harbors some resentment for his father’s occasional moments of coldness or a refusal to exhibit some much-desired understanding.  An early hunting excursion proved to have lasting traumatic effects, and Dreher repeatedly implies that his father seemed incapable of providing much-needed flexibility of imagination or encouragement.

 

“I tell you all this because Ray Dreher brought into this world a lone son, an heir to his kingdom who was ambivalent at best about the role tradition assigned to him.  I was a bookish child who preferred to get lost in my storybooks instead of the swamp.  My father has said many times that he did not know how to deal with me.  Most boys in the rural South could only dream of having a father like mine, one who loved sports, hunting, and fishing, who knew how to build anything, and who was loving.  His father had been on the road for much of his childhood and emotionally distant when he was at home.  Daddy was determined to give his son the paternal love and attention he had been denied.”

 

Of course, Dreher’s interpretations and reactions to The Divine Comedy are quite different from those of other major commenters on Dante.  Dreher only focuses on selected portions of the epic poem, and touches upon just a handful of the real-life sinners and saints featured in the poem.  Other critics naturally focus on other characters, and often draw other lessons.  For example, Dorothy L. Sayers discovered Dante during WWII, and drew great inspiration and resilience from it.  Sayers even abandoned mystery writing to focus on writing Christian dramas and working on her own English translation of The Divine Comedy into English.  Sayers’s commentary and lessons learned from Dante were significantly different, but it is notable that Dante served a similar role in rescuing her from a difficult situation, namely the immense spiritual devastation and mental strain caused by a prolonged war, and the help that Dante provided by bringing a moral compass to the increasingly chaotic and mentally devastating violence.

 

The personal spin that Dreher puts on Dante is inspired in part by some of the many similarities he sees between their lives:

 

“This is a book about exile.  What does it mean to know you can never go home?  This was Dante’s dilemma– and in a different sense, it was mine.  Three years ago, when I returned after nearly three decades to live in my Louisiana hometown, I thought I had ended a restless journey that had taken me all over America, searching for a place where I could be settled and content.  To my shock and heartbreak, I was wrong.  The most difficult journey lay ahead of me: the journey within myself.  Dante showed me the way through.  He can do the same for you.”

 

It is important to remember that The Divine Comedy is the story of a journey.  As Dante’s fictionalized version of himself travels through the depths of iniquity, through a mountain of redemption, and towards the light of God.  All too often, certain literary critics argue that great literature must be bleak or depressing, but Dante’s example shows that perhaps the purpose of literature is to help us through the difficult aspects of life and to make us better people.  The line between inspirational and didactic may be a difficult one to detect, but Dante seems to have been instrumental in rescuing Dreher from despair, and it is certainly possible that Dante may save even more people in the future.

 

 

–Chris Chan

The Kiss of Jesus: How Mother Teresa and the Saints Helped Me to Discover the Beauty of the Cross

The Kiss of Jesus: How Mother Teresa and the Saints Helped Me to Discover the Beauty of the Cross.  By Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle, Ignatius Press, 2015.

 

Donna-Marie Cooper O’Boyle’s The Kiss of Jesus is a personal spiritual memoir, covering her life from the present day.  It is an incredibly revealing book, exposing some horrific events, as well as some disturbing truths about our divorce courts, as well as the beneficial effects of placing one’s faith and trust in Jesus and prayer.  O’Boyle’s uses her personal life to explain the primary role that prayer and her Catholicism play in her life, along with how they helped her through some particularly crushing ordeals.

 

In the early pages of her book, O’Boyle describes her public image as a religious figure, saying that:

 

“What you see is not always what you get.  Allow me to explain.  I have lived a colorful life dappled with some overwhelming struggles but also brimming with amazing joy.  Most people don’t know the whole story.  They might have seen me on my television shows on EWTN, appearing all put together (I hope!), or they might have heard me on the radio.  Others know me by reading my numerous books and articles.  Many have told me that they are exceedingly thankful because my message has made a positive difference in their lives.”

 

The subtitle of the book mentions “The Beauty of the Cross.”  When people talk of “carrying a cross,” the connotations generally present this action as a burden, a crippling weight that makes movement difficult and requires a great deal of strength to carry.  Yet while the initial reaction might be to avoid carrying a cross, O’Boyle makes it clear that she believes that a cross is a means of support.  The cross, in O’Boyle’s opinion, is not a gigantic mallet used for pounding people down into the ground, but instead it is a buttress one can use to support one’s life.  One puts one’s own weight the cross, the cross does not weigh one down– if one knows how to use it properly.

 

The book takes the form of an autobiography, beginning, as is often the case, with an overview of O’Boyle’s childhood and early family life.

 

“Growing up in the Cooper clan, we always knew when it was Sunday.  The day was occupied with attending Mass, going on family outings, and visiting with relatives, either at their homes or ours.  We enjoyed a special dinner together in the afternoon, even if pickings were slim.  My mother creatively churned out great meals from scratch.  At night we gathered again at the table to eat a lighter meal, and then we watched family shows on television while delighting in our ritual Sunday night ice cream.”

 

The relatively happy childhood O’Boyle enjoyed was occasionally punctuated by bursts of turbulence, such as the occasional angry argument between her parents.  Everybody who ever worried about the state of their parents’ marriage can understand how young O’Boyle felt one night when her mother stomped out of the house after a particularly heated exchange with her father, and the relief that she felt when she saw her mother returning and realized that her mother had only left the house momentarily for a quick walk around the block in order to settle her thoughts and cool her emotions.

 

There are frequent mentions as to how O’Boyle’s religious education and background prepared her for the travails she would endure later in life.  O’Boyle’s example indicates how religious instruction in youth can affect one’s future behavior and attitude in later life.  When discussing the role that her early family affected her prayer life, O’Boyle writes:

 

“My mother, grandmother, and the religious sisters planted seeds of goodness in my heart and soul and taught me to make time for prayer.  Necessity drew the yearning to pray out of me too.  There were times that I knew I had to pray– there was no other way.  I followed my heart and got on my knees often, usually by the side of my bed, whenever I needed help.  I also prayed regularly to keep up a communication with God.  It was a practice that brought me deep comfort.  I prayed a lot in the car too, sitting in the back seat while my father was driving, sometimes a bit erratically, worrying that we would get into an accident because he had had too much to drink.  At such moments, many Our Fathers and Hail Marys were silently offered up from my little girl’s heart and soul.  I somehow had the grace to know that I could run to prayer whenever I was scared or in need of any help.  I expected results and they were delivered.”

 

Mother Teresa makes a brief appearance late in the book, when O’Boyle met her at an event.  Mother Teresa responded to O’Boyle’s correspondence over the following years, including advice on how to bear spiritual burdens and face challenges.  There are a few interesting facts about Mother Teresa’s uncomfortable relationship with her own celebrity, such as the revelation that she hated having her picture taken, but so many people insisted upon it that Mother Teresa “made a deal” with God that for every photograph taken of her, one soul would be released from Purgatory and sent straight to Heaven.

 

“After praying and pondering about this experience I realized that God wanted me to share more of myself with others.  I decided to open the book of my personal journey– the good and the bad, the crazy, the ugly, the scary, and the redemptive– so that with God’s grace I could offer hope, especially to those who are struggling on the sometimes precarious or crooked path that leads to heaven. 

 

I hope and pray you will enjoy this book and that by God’s grace it will deeply inspire you to follow God’s holy will in your own life.”

 

Unfortunately, O’Boyle’s early adulthood was often difficult, even traumatic.  A good deal of the book is rather difficult to read, due in part to the horrible things that happen to the author.  On two occasions, O’Boyle is sexually assaulted.  Though these rapes are horrible, they are brief.  A A horrific act committed by a stranger is in some ways less horrific than extended acts of cruelty by those closest to one.  The most disturbing moments come from the times when O’Boyle’s life is torn apart by the men who are supposed to be loving and protecting her.  O’Boyle has been married three times (her first two marriages were dissolved by Church-approved annulments).  An early relationship led to her being isolated from her family thanks to a very controlling and violent man.  Her first two marriages both started out happily enough, but her first husband’s increasingly erratic behavior led to years of strain and then an abandonment in one of the most unlikely and symbolic of places.  

 

The breakup of her second marriage was more protracted and ultimately more threatening to O’Boyle’s family structure.  After her husband, a lawyer, decided he wanted a divorce, he proceeded to use his insider’s knowledge of the legal system to make life exceptionally difficult for his estranged wife, and to threaten her with the loss of all of her children, including those from her first marriage.  After reading these difficult chapters, one can be quite understandably unnerved by how the American legal system can put lots of innocent people through undeserved strain and terror (not to mention enormous financial expense, coupled with a steep loss in time and a massive amount of worrying).  

 

Throughout the book, O’Boyle comes across as a loving mother and a woman of unshakeable faith, though this is not a Pollyannaish take on religion, where a simple embrace of religiosity is all it takes to find happiness and comfort.  Faith does not lead to success and happiness, and as O’Boyle’s personal crises illustrate, prayers are a means of finding one’s way through a difficult situation rather than a guaranteed solution.

 

 

–Chris Chan