From Riches to Rags

St. Joan of the Cross

Today’s Catholic calendar includes a female saint who would find her pre-conversion self right at home in our consumer driven culture.  She owned and operated a successful family business with an attitude of selfishness and greed.  She was known for turning away beggars and keeping her shop open on Sundays to maximize profits.

One Pentecost she was visited by Francoise Fouchet, a poor beggar who came to St. Joan with a message directly from God.  The tattered, needy messenger predicted that this career shop owner would one day care for the needy with all her heart.

Eventually St. Joan of the Cross went on to care for orphans and found a community of sisters which is now named Congregation of St. Anne of Providence

St. Joan’s story reminds me of the conversion of a career woman who follows the call to religious life by entering a Benedictine convent in In This House of Brede by Rumer Godden.  I am almost 99% sure we have not read this book yet, although we have read titles by Godden.  As it was made into a movie it would surely make an excellent book/movie combo at some future time!

I found this wonderful post about St. Joan of the Cross by Christine McCarthy on a blog called Ladies of our Lady and they are based in Denver!  What a coincidence!

H/T to American Catholic.org Saint of the Day!

A Good Author Can Be Hard To Analyze

Oh my yes.  As a book club reading Catholic women authors only, we have definitely read Flannery O’Connor.  Twice.

In 2002 we read Wise Blood.  We are actually a Book and Occasional Movie Club, so we watched the Wise Blood movie in that same year.  In 2007 we read a Good Man is Hard to Find, a collection of short stories.  We also watched the movie Displaced Person which is based on a story from that collection.  It has been so long since I’ve read her books that I can’t make specific comments but I’m sure someone will have something to say once I put it in the Books section!  However I do remember many articles and analysis were consulted and our members were all over the Love or Hate Flannery scale.

Gina sent out the link to this fantastic correspondence between O’Connor and a college literature class.  It was posted today at Letters of Note, which I am now thinking I should check out for more possible letters by authors we’ve read.  The letter published today comes from The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor.

I love that here we have the professor’s admission that, “we are not convinced that we are missing something important which you intended us to grasp.” I am not convinced that we did not say something to the same effect at our discussion night!!  Hopefully I can get commenters to post some of our collective memories.

What Should We Read Next Month?

What We Read

We read books by Catholic women.  It’s just a theme we began when we started to meet regularly.  We first read the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, which was written by a Norwegian Catholic author named Sigrid Undset,  before we were actually a book club. Then when we decided to become a book club it seemed like a novel yet logical idea to go ahead and read more books by Catholic women, partly just to see what we could find.

Books by Catholic Women are Not Always Religious

Many of our books have a Catholic or Christian or spiritual theme and quite a few don’t.  That’s because our only criteria is that the author be a female Catholic.  So we’ve read some very diverse themes and genres.

A Very Resilient Book Club Theme

I’m glad we decided to stick with this idea through thick and thin.  Really, it never has been very “thin.”  We have almost always had multiple ideas about what to read and if we didn’t we’ve had a steady stream of sources from which to glean.  Plus, it provides a handy framework for that perpetual book club question, “What should we read next month?”

Where We Find Books by Female Catholics

Without a doubt two of our top sources would be classics by saints and spiritual writers and leads from other books and periodicals.

A Few Good Sources

We take titles from the Book sections of the National Catholic Register and Our Sunday Visitor because a few of us read those weekly newspapers often.  I’d say the number of titles by men outweighs those by women but that’s not a bad thing for us, because like I said we usually have plenty of ideas floating around.  We certainly do read the Denver Catholic Register, being in Denver and all, and have found a few titles there over the years.

I am sure we’ve taken some ideas from First Things, a monthly journal.

One ongoing source of an amazing amount of reprinted and new fiction and non-fiction is the Ignatius Press catalog.

Resourceful Book Lovers

We have a couple of members like Amy and Dianne who collect far more than the average amount of used books and Gina who checks out more library books in a week than some people do in a year.  They are bound to run across unique and fresh reading material by all sorts of authors.  Sometimes we can tell by the material if our author is Catholic.  Other times we have to dig a little online or by skimming a biography.  Many times we infer that the author was baptized a Catholic (if not still practicing); for instance a woman writing about her devout Catholic mother was probably brought up Catholic.

A Great Idea

If you have a women’s book club and you’re not quite satisfied after a few years of the classics or you’re annoyed by picking a best seller out of a hat only to have it turn out badly I’d recommend you give our idea a try.  I will soon have a more comprehensive list of the titles we’ve read over the past 12 years, and I estimate it is more than 60 so far.  It is an amazingly fun way to learn about people (past and present), places, redemption and spiritual growth, history, politics and tons of other topics!!

7 Things You Probably Don’t Know About Mary O’Hara (Flicka’s Author)

• Mary began writing music before she moved to Wyoming.  She wrote teaching pieces for instructional books

• Her second marriage was probably never legal, because Helge Sture-Vasa (his fake name; his real name was Thurston Lonning) didn’t obtain his divorce to his first wife before marrying Mary

• Mary was named Mary Alsop.  Her grandmother’s last name was O’Hara (not the famous Irish musician).  She named her daughter O’Hara

• The first version of My Friend Flicka was a short story which was unveiled in a Columbia University Short Story class

• Mary’s daughter O’Hara was a deeply spiritual girl who converted to Catholicism at the Ramona Convent Boarding school where she lived

• Mary claims to have flown in an airplane with Orville Wright

One of Orville’s early planes

• Mary O’Hara joined the Catholic Church after “devouring” the books of the Early Church Fathers, St. John of the Cross, St. Augustine, St. Teresa of Avila and St. Thomas Aquinas.