book review

7

When I first read the late Fr. John O’Malley’s survey text What Happened at Vatican II (2008), I was struck by a passage in the conclusion. O’Malley gave a tantalizing rundown of the “ghosts” present on the council floor—the popes, theologians, philosophers, and politicians whose lives and legacies had indelibly marked the Catholic world. These voices from the past had shaped, positively or negatively (sometimes both), the work of the council fathers:

The primary purpose of Lemna's masterful book The Apocalypse of Wisdom: Louis Bouyer's Theological Recovery of the Cosmos is to shed light on the "twists and turns of the path Bouyer charts in Cosmos" (xiii). 

The newest volume in the Birmingham Oratory’s Millennial Edition of Newman’s works published My Campaign Part I for the first time. 

Patricia O’Leary’s The Gentleman Saint (Gracewing, 2020) is a short and delightful introduction to John Henry Newman. 

The book Telling Stories that Matter: Memoirs & Essays is comprised of O’Connell’s late-in-life memoirs of how he became interested in the academic study of history, as well as some of his shorter essays and book reviews. 

Fr. Michael Collins, a priest of the Archdiocese of Dublin and graduate of University College of Dublin, which developed from John Henry Newman’s Catholic University, has composed an excellent short introduction to the life of John Henry Newman.