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

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Beginning with the earliest martyrs and ending with the twentieth century, The Resilient Church offers a fascinating look at the trials and triumphs of the Catholic Church over the past two thousand years. Fast-paced sketches of critical periods in church history give readers perspective on the challenges faced by the church today. Short selections in each chapter highlight some of the great heroes who influenced the course of history. Mike Aquilina does not shrink from the realities of the past, including badly behaved leaders and those who betrayed the Lord. Yet he also leaves readers with well-founded hope for the future: God remains faithful in every circumstance and fulfills his promise to remain with his church always.

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This book presents a handful of episodes from Christian history. They are sketches of moments of crisis, and they illustrate how God remains faithful in every circumstance, even when his people have betrayed him and forgotten his covenant.. . . This book is not a chronicle or even, strictly speaking, a history. It covers only a sampling of years from just a few spots on the globe. I've tried to select the stories that enthusiasts of history have found most memorable. They are not always edifying stories, since Christians--and even Christian leaders and clergy--sometimes behave badly. But Christian history never shrinks from these realities. At the end of the nineteenth century, Pope Leo XIII said, quoting Cicero, "The first law of history is not to dare to utter falsehood; the second, not to fear to speak the truth."3 At the end of the twentieth century, Pope John Paul II apologized publicly for the sins of Christians in the long-ago past. None of this should shock us. We tell the Christian story in the same way that we live our Christian lives, with a critical and repentant eye on the past, but with well-founded hope for the future.

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Word Among Us Press (May 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1593251041
• ISBN-13: 978-1593251048
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #276,738 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A new standard for popular writing about the Catholic Church, June 21, 2007

By	David Scott (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Tells Stories with Perfect Amount of Detail, June 20, 2007

By	C. Sullivan - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Scenes from a Marriage, June 26, 2007

By	Penn Jacobs (Rutherford, NJ USA) - See all my reviews

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.