The Resilient Church: The Glory, the Shame, & the Hope for Tomorrow

by Mike Aquilina

Book Overview

"To thousands of young people, emigration has been the golden bridge by which they have passed from an apparently hopeless childhood to lives of useful service and assured comfort, in this new land."... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1593251041
• ISBN13: 9781593251048
• Release Date: May 2007
• Publisher: Word Among Us Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

An Engaging History

This pint-sized page-turner hits point after point of Church history and at the same time successfully invites the reader to view something of a Catholic family album. Aquilina's style is beautifully descriptive and reads like a script for the history channel. The breadth of topics make a great starting point for further investigation--not intimidating, but very satisfying.

Good Overview

Quick overview of the trials of the Church and how they were overcome. A good reminder that the Church has always had sinners who drag her down and also the saints provided by God in his faithfulness ... who keep her going and provide our hope for the future.

Scenes from a Marriage

Mike Aquilina's books on Catholic culture and history (e.g., The Fathers of the Church, Expanded Edition) are not to be missed. The Resilient Church is an effortless, respectful look at a number of episodes in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. Not a comprehensive history (or even an attempt at a concise one), this book offers readers a number of vignettes from the life of the Church, through its encounters with heresy and holiness, scandal and salvation. Political events find their way in, but Aquilina's focus is on the Church as exemplifying one particular virtue: perseverance. Inasmuch as all Christian history is the story of a divine marriage, Christ and his Church, consider this book as an honest and sometimes humbling memoir of how that, as yet not fully consummated, marriage plays out in the lives of the faithful across millennia. It's an excellent read, and while not scholarly, the reader is bound to find something of interest. I particularly enjoyed the treatment of the Crusades. Inasmuch as the history of the West largely cannot be understood outside the history of the Church, this book is recommended for all.

A new standard for popular writing about the Catholic Church

This book sets a new standard for popular writing about the Catholic Church--smart, brightly written, faithful. Mike's a great storyteller and he weaves the story of the Church against the backdrop of world history. We see how popes, saints, and ordinary clergy and laypeople lived and spread the faith in the face of Caesars, czars, revolutionaries, fuhrers, dictators, and all manner of fanaticism, heresy, and false ideology. His chapters on the rise of the early Church, the Reformation, and the Crusades are brilliant and reflect the best of recent scholarship. If you think you know what these events were really all about, think again. Mike's clear-eyed about the failures of Catholics over the centuries. But he's also intelligent and faithful enough to remember that the Church is no ordinary human institution--that it's the family of God, the sign and instrument of our Father's plan for the world. "The Resilient Church" should be required reading for every pastor and everyone who works for the Church. Not to mention every Catholic who wants to know his birthright and family heritage.

Tells Stories with Perfect Amount of Detail

I read this over the course of two days waiting around on jury duty. After each chapter, I'd call up my wife and say, "did you know...?" and repeat the whole chapter to her from memory. The writing is that good--the sketches from church history stick in you head and make you want to tell someone else. I never made the connection that the Cure of Ars was the Church's answer to Napoleon. Or that anti-Catholicism was so bad in the U.S. that in 1844 the mayor of Philadelphia, John Morin Scott, lead a group to prevent St. Augustine's Church from being burned down. Instead he was beaten senseless and the church was burned anyway. And they mayor wasn't even Catholic--he was Protestant. Or the Vatican had blank baptismal certificates printed up during WW2 to help save the lives of Jews. It is estimated that the Church saved 800,000 Jews in Italy. and on and on. A fantastic book.