Pathways to Peace
Google the Serenity Prayer, and take it all to heart.
Charity begins at home, and so does peace, one person at a time. Practice random acts of kindness.
Forgive others for their sake and for your own. Most people are doing the best they know how to do.
Try to understand others. Listen; don’t shout. We have two ears and one mouth.
We all have a center of stillness surrounded by silence. Give yourself a rest every day.
There is no peace without justice. Support the common good always and all ways.
“Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, and as long as ever you can” (John Wesley).
— Nicholas Ayo, CSC, ’56, ’62M.A. is a professor emeritus of Notre Dame’s Program of Liberal Studies.
10 Best Catholic Novels of All Time
in no particular order
Heinrich Böll: Billiards at Half-Past Nine
A single day in the life of a former German soldier trying to make sense of his nation’s role in World War II, and his own.
Ignazio Silone: Bread and Wine
Posing as a priest to escape detection in fascist Italy, a leftist agitator comes to experience both the futility and the holiness of protest.
Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited
Young Englishmen cavort with champagne, jazz and art until, finally, they must acknowledge tradition and faith’s purifying fire.
Georges Bernanos: The Diary of a Country Priest
A solitary priest ministers to a village sunk in ignorance and superstition. Beneath his sadness and sense of failure we discern beauty and hidden grace.
Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
An incisive condemnation of imperialism. At the headwaters of an African river, a European who had become like a god faces the truth at last.
Sigrid Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter
A trilogy of novels set in 14th century Norway. A woman’s saga of love, hardship, family dysfunction and the tug of vocation.
Shusaku Endo: Silence
A Jesuit missionary in 17th century Japan. Captured, he must renounce his faith to save his life. But the choice is more complicated than that.
Flannery O’Connor: Wise Blood
Preachers, con artists and madmen inhabit the grotesque landscape of O’Connor’s Deep South. In her world of charlatans, belief abides.
François Mauriac: *The Woman of the Pharisees *
A self-righteous woman bent on enforcing perfection manages to drive away nearly everyone. Bereft in the end, she reconsiders. But is it too late?
Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory
An alcoholic priest, unfaithful to his vows and riddled with guilt, hides from the police in anticlerical Mexico. Greene’s great paean of sin and redemption.
11 books also considered
Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Crime and Punishment
Willa Cather: Death Comes for the Archbishop
François Mauriac: Vipers’ Tangle
Graham Greene: The End of the Affair
J.F. Powers: Morte d’Urban
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer
Marilynne Robinson: Gilead
Edwin O’Connor: The Edge of Sadness
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings
Ron Hansen: Mariette in Ecstasy
C.S. Lewis: Narnia Chronicles
— Don Brophy ’56 is the author of One Hundred Great Catholic Books.