Fourteen short works. Forty years of Mother Mary Loyola's writing. One remarkable glimpse into the breadth of her apostolate.
Sursum Corda! is the fruit of many years of seeking. The relatively small size of the many booklets Mother Mary Loyola wrote—most of them for the Catholic Truth Society—seems to have led over the years to the disappearance of most copies. With the help of libraries and archives around the world, we were finally able to assemble the most complete collection possible: 13 of her 14 known pamphlets, together with a bonus selection discovered just before this volume went to press.
Taken together, these little works form something like a miniature portrait of Mother Loyola's entire writing life. Beginning around 1890 with How to Help the Sick and Dying, they accompany the Catholic through Confession, Confirmation, Holy Communion and the Holy Mass; they explain the Faith with her characteristic simplicity; they confront suffering and conformity to God's Will; they offer consolation amid the wounds of war; and they introduce the life and spirit of Mary Ward, the foundress of Mother Loyola's religious order.
Here, in concentrated form, are many of the themes that would occupy Mother Loyola throughout her long apostolate: the Sacraments, the formation of the interior life, suffering offered to God, fidelity to duty, preparation for eternity, and above all the continual effort to lift the heart from the circumstances of everyday life toward Him.
The collection closes, fittingly, with a little treasure discovered only as this anthology was being assembled: The Time of My Life, an essay on discerning one's vocation published in a school magazine just six months before Mother Loyola's death. In it, this prolific old nun who had spent forty years using her extraordinary gift for words to bring souls to God, turns at last to the question of how each of us is to discover and fulfill the work God has given us to do.
Sursum Corda—Lift up your hearts! It is difficult to imagine a more fitting title for a collection spanning a lifetime spent doing precisely that.
5.5" x 8.5" softcover 522 pages
