When writing the first volume of With the Church, Mother Loyola took care to focus on the “meat” of the Church Year. Bedridden after a serious hip fracture and suffering one illness after another, she could not take for granted that she would live to finish both volumes. How grateful we are that God allowed her the time to complete not only this book, but one more—her swan song, Trust.
Volume II continues the Liturgical Year from the Ascension to Advent, following the Church through Pentecost, Corpus Christi, the Sacred Heart, the feasts of Our Lady and the Saints, All Souls, and finally the closing weeks of the Church's year. But while these meditations focus no less upon what Our Lord has done for us, they return again and again to a burning question: what have YOU done for HIM lately?
Perhaps nowhere else does Mother Loyola write with such personal immediacy. Grace has been given—but have we corresponded with it? We have been made children of God—but have we loved and served Him as children should? The Holy Ghost has come with His Gifts—but what use have we made of them? The Saints have finished their work—but what are we doing with the time and opportunities that remain to us?
These questions had particular urgency for Mother Loyola herself. Her reflections increasingly reveal a soul readying itself for death, while affectionate memories turn toward those who had helped shape her own life and apostolate: her early mentor Fr. John Morris; Frank Sheed and Maisie Ward and the work of the Catholic Evidence Guild; and especially Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J., her longtime friend and editor. In the brief Foreword to this volume she gives him touching credit for thirty years of encouragement and revision, attributing to him whatever good her writing had accomplished.
Thus the closing of the Liturgical Year becomes something more: a meditation upon the closing of life itself. From the Ascension and the birth of the Church, Mother Loyola leads us at last through All Saints and All Souls to the cry, “Behold the Bridegroom cometh!” and finally, “Go forth, Christian soul!”
It is difficult to read these final meditations without sensing that Mother Loyola was preparing not only her readers, but herself, for the journey home.
5.5" x 8.5" paperback 340 pages
