Paraclete announces new children’s series by Jon M. Sweeney: “The Pope’s Cat”

Paraclete Press
Orleans, Massachusetts
September 29, 2017

For Immediate Release

As part of its growing children’s book program, Paraclete Press has signed author Jon M. Sweeney and illustrator Roy DeLeon to a three-book series for children ages 6-9. Both the series and the first book are titled The Pope’s Cat. According to the description, these books “tell the story of a stray born on the Via della Conciliazione in Rome, how she’s adopted by the Pope, and the ways in which she then runs the Vatican from museum to floorboard!” It is unclear if the Pope of this series is Pope Francis but there is definitely a resemblance. The Queen of England also makes an appearance in book one, on an official visit to the Vatican.

The Pope’s Cat (March 2018 / Paraclete Press / ISBN 978-1612616568 / trade paperback / black & white illustrations / $9.99) by Jon M. Sweeney, illustrated by Roy DeLeon, is to be followed six months later by Margaret’s Night Alone in St. Peter’s (A Christmas Story).

The Pope’s Cat is a heartwarming tale, which gives the papacy a human touch, along with a taste of life in Rome. Jon Sweeney has done an excellent job in opening up the world of the Vatican to youngsters, while cat lovers will be charmed by this story. I read it to my two children and they both loved it!” –Christopher Lamb, Vatican correspondent for The Tablet (UK)

About the author: Jon M. Sweeney’s popular history, The Pope Who Quit: A True Medieval Tale of Mystery, Death, and Salvation, has been optioned by HBO. He’s the author of two dozen other books including The Complete Francis of Assisi, When Saint Francis Saved the Church, winner of a 2015 award in history from the Catholic Press Association, and The Enthusiast: How the Best Friend of Francis of Assisi Almost Destroyed What He Started. This is his first book for children.

About the illustrator: Roy DeLeon is an Oblate of St. Benedict, spiritual director, yoga instructor, graphic designer, and professional visual artist. He is also author of Praying with the Body. This is his first book for children.

For more information, contact Sr. Antonia Cleverly, srantonia@paracletepress.com(508) 255-4685 x 329

Paraclete Signs Two Industry Veterans to Big Books for 2018

Paraclete Press
For Immediate Release
September 22, 2017

Paraclete Press has signed Bert Ghezzi, bestselling author, popular editor, and author of more than twenty books, to a new edition of a book first published a generation ago. The Angry Christian sold 60,000 copies in its original run twenty-five years ago, and is set to be reissued in April of next year, with a foreword by Brandon Vogt. 

Bert Ghezzi

Phrases such as “culture of anger” have come to describe much of our world today. Both Press and author suspect that Ghezzi’s book is much needed. Early endorsers for the new edition include Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap, Archbishop of Philadelphia; Dr. Ray Guarendi; and Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who writes, “In this practical and pastoral little book, Bert Ghezzi walks us through a guidebook on anger, showing how anger is God’s blessing not his curse. When the energy of anger is directed properly, God’s power to heal and transform ourselves and our world is unleashed.” Says Ghezzi, “I placed The Angry Christian with Paraclete because I knew that they would get it into the hands of many readers.”

Paraclete has also inked a deal with Henry L. Carrigan, Jr. for Fifteen Spirituals that Will Change Your Life. Carrigan has worked in publishing for more than twenty years, including at Publishers Weekly and Continuum, before his current work as a music journalist. As Carrigan says, “Music touches people’s hearts in deep and enduring ways that words often fail to do.” Paraclete saw in this title an antidote to the uncertainty and anxieties that many face today. The faith, hope, and love that these songs evoke will carry readers to a place beyond themselves where they connect with others and with God. Carrigan says, “I am excited to be working with Paraclete again: I am grateful for the vision they have of publishing thoughtful books.” Fifteen Spirituals will publish in September 2018.

For more information, contact Sr. Antonia Cleverly, srantonia@paracletepress.com(508) 255-4685 x 329

The Good Fool

The St. Francis Holy Fool Prayer Book
Excerpted from the Introduction

The Good Fool
For those who try to live the Gospel, and by doing so, feel like fools

Here we are, fools for Christ’s sake, while you are the clever ones in Christ; we are weak, while you are strong; you are honored, while we are disgraced. To this day, we go short of food and drink and clothes, we are beaten up and we have no homes; we earn our living by laboring with our own hands; when we are cursed, we answer with a blessing; when we are hounded, we endure it passively; when we are insulted, we give a courteous answer (1 Cor. 4:10–13).

Otherwise known as holy fools.

This can be confusing and for good reasons. Even the Bible seems to contradict itself about fools. A fool for Christ’s sake is altogether different from the kind of person the psalmist describes when he or she begins, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Ps. 14:1–3). That’s not a foolishness to emulate! Nevertheless, St. Paul’s foolishness is. The Bible speaks about both kinds of fools—good and bad—but for the most part, the good sort has been lost.

The foolishness praised by St. Paul is a way of living out Jesus’s teachings in the Beatitudes. “Beatitude” comes from a Latin word that means happiness. These are ways to true happiness, and of course they aren’t what you might expect. Who is blessed? The poor in spirit, the meek, the hungry and thirsty, people who are peacemakers—not the powerful. Even the “pure of heart”—and the phrase means pretty much what it implies, and that is, those who are simple or willingly naive—are singled out as blessed. Do you want to sign up for this sort of blessedness, happiness? Not many do. That’s why we call them fools. Holy fools.

A Christian can point to Jesus’s foolishness as the exemplar, just as Jesus sometimes pointed to the Hebrew prophets as his inspiration for defying others’ expectations. Like Jeremiah, Jesus dressed simply. Like Isaiah, Jesus often walked around barefoot, and he didn’t know where he was going to sleep at night. Contrary to what religious leaders thought appropriate, Jesus chose a strange mix of people as his followers and friends (women, the poor, despised tax collectors, the untouchable sick). Occasionally, he went against societal norms and theological expectations with an attitude of naiveté. No matter if someone thought he was “dumb.”

Even Jesus’s own family thought he was a fool at times—and not the good kind. Just after he appointed his twelve disciples, the Gospel of Mark says: “He went home again, and once more such a crowd collected that they could not even have a meal. When his relations heard of this, they set out to take charge of him; they said, ‘He is out of his mind’” (Mk. 3:21). In twenty-first-century language, that sounds like they staged an intervention! They wanted to set him straight. Perhaps he was embarrassing the family.

Later, when Jesus was teaching Torah—good rabbi that he was—he invariably shocked his listeners, ratcheting up the expectations of God on those who seek to truly follow him. He said, for example: “You have heard how it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I say this to you, if a man looks at a woman lustfully, he has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matt. 5:27–8). Seriously?! What was once a law of Moses, easy to track in one’s life, just got a whole lot tougher. Who would even know if one was observing a law such as this? The religious leaders of the day thought he was nuts.

Jesus was a holy fool in his not worrying about the outcome or result of his teaching. Most important of all, he was a holy fool for allowing himself to be misunderstood, and later, mocked. He didn’t defend himself when the meaning and purpose of his life was questioned by Pontius Pilate. He was willing to stand physically humiliated before crowds. In these ways alone, without any other agenda, there have been saints throughout history who have sought to imitate our foolish Lord.

I give you the end of a golden string; Only wind it into a ball, It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate, Built in Jerusalem’s wall. —William Blake, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion

There is a perfect line, an uncut thread, “a golden string” throughout history that connects the foolishness of Christ with holy fools who have lived in every generation since his death and resurrection. They all have understood how being reviled can be a sign of blessedness or holiness, a true mark of God’s Spirit alive inside of someone. When people witnessed this foolishness in Francis of Assisi eight hundred years ago, they called him pazzo. That’s Italian for “crazy”—so, I guess, we can’t avoid the term! The adjective, however, made Francis happy, in the sense that he knew: if they call you crazy or a fool, you must be doing something right!

The first instances of the crazy foolishness in Francis were outpourings of the Spirit in him. In other words, they are difficult to explain if you use only rational or pragmatic ways of understanding: Like when he stripped naked in front of a crowd in order to give everything back to his father that was rightfully his. Or when he began preaching to birds after people didn’t seem to pay much heed to his words. Or when he scolded some of those birds for not listening carefully enough and chirping too loudly during Mass. Or when he joined a friend and disciple in deliberately humiliating himself—Francis had punished his friend by holy obedience (he was, by then, the friend’s religious superior) for refusing to preach the Good News. The punishment was: go and preach, then, in your underwear. But a few minutes later, Francis chastised himself for being too severe— and decided to repent by stripping down to his breeches himself and joining the friend in the pulpit.

Why would someone do these things? They don’t exactly make sense, do they? And yet, somehow, they did, and do.

Here’s another bit of context: At the time that Francis and Brother Juniper, one of his closest friends and first followers, were becoming fools for Christ, there were professional fools—hired in noble and royal courts, as well as traveling from town to town—acting as entertainers but also as truth-tellers. They were often regarded as possessing a strange sort of wisdom that comes from being detached from the normal ways of the world. They never stopped reminding their audiences that the world will lie to you, deceive you with false appearances; that it may seem rational but actually it is mad. You see such a troupe in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, for instance (act 5, scene 1). They are the grave diggers who appear after Ophelia’s suicide, bantering about death, love, and the meaning of life.

Remembering Mother Teresa

Paraclete Press
September 8, 2017

Twenty years after the death of Mother Teresa, I Loved Jesus in the Night: Teresa of Calcutta, A Secret Revealed (Paraclete Press) has broken 20,000 copies in sales and was excerpted this past week on the Fox News website (Opinion) with a very personal account by author Fr. Paul Murray, OP of meeting Mother Teresa: “What struck me at once was something which has been remarked on many times over the years by those fortunate enough to meet Mother Teresa, and that is the radiant joy which shone in her face, a joy which, from moment to moment, seemed to illumine her every expression.”

Paraclete initially published a hardcover edition of I Loved Jesus in the Night in 2009 and subsequently published a paperback edition in 2016. Sales of the hardcover and paperback combined now exceed 20,000 copies. Last year the press also added a sideline product of a wristband with the tagline Doing Something Beautiful for God (over 45,000 sold) which was marketed primarily to Catholic Church Religious Educators. For this ecumenical press, it is a privilege to publish and distribute products about Mother Teresa, one of the spiritual giants of the last century whose life inspires people of all faiths.

For more information, contact Sr. Antonia Cleverly, srantonia@paracletepress.com(508) 255-4685 x 329

The St. Francis Holy Fool Prayer Book

Excerpted from the Introduction

HOW IT IS GOOD TO BE A FOOL
For those who try to live the Gospel, and by doing so, feel like fools

I will always remember the day I decided to introduce my preschool-age daughter to one of my favorite movies, Singing in the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. We sat and watched it together on the couch. She didn’t wiggle much and laughed at the right places. I knew she was enjoying it.

But then we got to the title song and dance number. There was Gene Kelly, blissfully enjoying a rainstorm. You probably remember how he runs back and forth across a city street at nighttime in the pouring rain, singing at the top of his lungs, tap-dancing by stomping in puddles, grinning at a cop on patrol, becoming completely drenched in his business clothes. He is wearing a suit—and even gives away his umbrella!

As my daughter and I watched, I laughed out loud and was grinning ear to ear. That’s what I always do when I watch that scene. She watched carefully, and was smiling, but to my surprise, she then turned to me in the middle of the scene and said, “That’s kind of stupid, Dad.”

She was only four at the time, but I was sort of offended. I don’t know for certain why. Forget that she said the word “stupid” for a moment; we’ll deal with that another day. Why was I bothered by her reaction? It isn’t as if the movie has anything intimately or immediately to do with me, but I wanted her to like it as I did. “Why?” I implored. Then I suddenly realized that I probably knew what she meant by what she said. So I revised. “Do you mean . . . because he’s getting all wet?”

“Yeah,” she replied, still smiling, looking at the screen. The puddle-stomping continued even as we talked, and she was still trying to figure out the meaning of the scene. “But he’s being kind of stupid,” she added, yet again.

How do I answer this? I thought. How do I get her to understand what this means?

Adults easily understand that what Gene Kelly is doing is anything but stupid. But can his spirit be communicated in words? I at least gave it another try. “Not stupid, honey,” I said. “Maybe he’s just being . . . foolish.”

Maybe.

A child can’t really appreciate what “foolish” means, nor how being a fool can be a virtue, a really good thing. Nor can she appreciate how foolishness might be a healthy sign that something good is happening, or able to happen, in your life. After all, how could someone who is still innocently carefree most of the time—without real responsibilities or stress—understand the absolute delight that can come when we allow ourselves to “let loose” others’ expectations? That’s what Gene Kelly is doing by singing and dancing in the rain: allowing his joy to overcome his decorum. We adults know this, and that’s why we love watching him do it. Probably, we are wishing, deep down, that we could do that too.

  1. K. Chesterton wrote in Orthodoxy, “Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly.” We’d all like to fly like angels—or at least like Gene Kelly.

I might have communicated better with my daughter that day as we watched the movie together if I’d said that Gene Kelly was being “crazy.” She sometimes likes to be “crazy” with her friends. They seem to know and appreciate that word for its sense of nonconformity and playfulness. But as an adult, “crazy” is a word that doesn’t seem appropriate. I know how it means a lot of things, some clinical, and how sometimes it might be perceived as an insult, or at least out of place. That’s why I quickly decided it wasn’t the way to go when I was trying to explain why singing in the rain isn’t necessarily “dumb.”

I used the word “fool” instead, but then again, “fool” is also an insult to many. The word was even used that way—as a kind of insult—in the Hebrew Scriptures, as we will see in a second. But to many Christians throughout history, foolishness has been a goal, a spiritual occupation, even a badge of honor. They have gone out of their way to earn the name fool, even when they knew that those who were saying it never intended it as a compliment. They have been “fools for Christ’s sake,” to quote St. Paul, who says it like this:

Here we are, fools for Christ’s sake, while you are the clever ones in Christ; we are weak, while you are strong; you are honored, while we are disgraced. To this day, we go short of food and drink and clothes, we are beaten up and we have no homes; we earn our living by laboring with our own hands; when we are cursed, we answer with a blessing; when we are hounded, we endure it passively; when we are insulted, we give a courteous answer (1 Cor. 4:10–13).

Otherwise known as holy fools.

This can be confusing and for good reasons. Even the Bible seems to contradict itself about fools. A fool for Christ’s sake is altogether different from the kind of person the psalmist describes when he or she begins, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ They are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good. The Lord looks down from heaven on all mankind to see if there are any who understand, any who seek God. All have turned away, all have become corrupt; there is no one who does good, not even one” (Ps. 14:1–3). That’s not a foolishness to emulate! Nevertheless, St. Paul’s foolishness is. The Bible speaks about both kinds of fools—good and bad—but for the most part, the good sort has been lost.