
Al Smith’s autobiography, in fact, Up to Now, was the club’s selection for October 1929. A holy card and a yellowed newspaper clipping about Al Smith are inserted between its pages, perhaps as bookmarks. I read it just a few years ago while doing research on Jesuits who had been incarcerated for their faith. History books were also popular in the club’s early years, and one shelf down is Francis Kelley’s Blood-Drenched Altars (1935)-a thick volume, bound in red, about the persecution of the Catholic Church in Mexico during the first few decades of the 20th century. Willa Cather’s work has survived, but Lucille Borden is now all but forgotten. Side by side on the same shelf with The Way It Was With Them are two other novels, both selections for 1931-Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock and Lucille Borden’s Silver Trumpets Calling. Talbot.įar more than in later years, the early selections favored novels. Whose hand might this have been? Perhaps that of the then-editor in chief, Wilfred Parsons, S.J., or a member of the club’s seven-member editorial board, whose editorial secretary was another Jesuit, Francis X. Inside the front cover of that first selection someone has written in heavy black ink, “October 1928 1st book of Catholic Club”. It has the kind of simple but pleasing black and white woodcut illustrations that were popular in the 1920’s and 30’s. It deals with a poor fishing family, headed by a widow with 12 children, trying to survive on an island off the west coast of Ireland. According to the yellowing pages of the Catholic Book Club Newsletter for October 1928-remarkably, we have all the newsletters, from the beginning-he was a young man in his 30’s when he wrote this his first novel, which was immediately accepted by the first publisher to whom he sent it. He is still listed among the authors in the current edition of Books in Print, a circumstance suggesting that the book club often chose writers of lasting reputations. The very first selection was a novel, The Way It Was With Them, by the Irish writer Peadar O’Donnell. Falling victim to competition from online sellers like, as of midnight on July 6 it ceased to exist as a book-of-the-month club and was resurrected as online monthly recommendations from America’s editors.Īfter lunch, I occasionally browse among the shelves’ contents, especially those that hold the earliest volumes.

The club is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, but the word “celebrating” is something of a misnomer. No, these are not my own books, which are few, but the collection of the Catholic Book Club, a longtime adjunct operation of the magazine. Over 1,000 of them, on eight rows of gray metal shelves that stretch from one end of the room to the other. A "must-have" for college libraries with a focus on criminal law and justice.Books line one whole wall of my office at America.
Catholic audio book club pdf#
pdf documents), an abridged audio CD version, and an unabridged audio CD version.

The Philadelphia Report is available in three versions: an unabridged one on two MP3 CDs (with an accompanying CD of. Hamilton, The Philadelphia Report is disturbing because it is true - and because it reveals a tremendous wrong saturated in the fabric of modern American society. Narrated by a group of voice professionals, and featuring a foreword by report co-author and professor of law Marci A. The investigation, led by District Attorney Lynne Abraham, stretched over four years and involved scrutiny of over 60 abusing priests as well as church cover-ups that spanned decades. The Philadelphia Report is the audiobook presentation of Philadelphia Investigating Grand Jury's 2005 report concerning the Catholic clergy's sexual abuse of minors in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Honorable Lynne Abraham, District Attorney Here's a review of The Philadelphia Report by the Midwest Book Review: Now that report is available as an audio book from Cherry Hill Publishing under the title: The Philadelphia Report.

The grand jury concluded that two former archbishops orchestrated a systematic cover-up spanning four decades that managed to successfully shield from prosecution 63 priests who had sexually abused hundreds of children. In 2005, a Philadelphia grand jury released a 418-page report of a three-year investigation into the Philadelphia archdiocese and the sexual abuse of minors.
