A Mother who nurtures, empathizes, and heals... a Warrior who defends, empowers, and resists oppression... the Virgin Mary plays many roles for the peoples of Spain and Spanish-speaking America. Devotion to the Virgin inspired and sustained medieval and Renaissance Spaniards as they liberated Spain from the Moors and set about the conquest of the New World. Devotion to the Virgin still inspires and sustains millions of believers today throughout the Americas. This wide-ranging and highly readable book explores the veneration of the Virgin Mary in Spain and the Americas from the colonial period to the present. Linda Hall begins the story in Spain and follows it through the conquest and colonization of the New World, with a special focus on Mexico and the Andean highlands in Peru and Bolivia, where Marian devotion became combined with indigenous beliefs and rituals. Moving into the nineteenth century, Hall looks at national cults of the Virgin in Mexico, Bolivia, and Argentina, which were tied to independence movements. In the twentieth century, she examines how Eva Perón linked herself with Mary in the popular imagination; visits contemporary festivals with significant Marian content in Spain, Peru, and Mexico; and considers how Latinos/as in the United States draw on Marian devotion to maintain familial and cultural ties.

The apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary on Tepeyac Hill northeast of Mexico City on December 12, 1531, when she left her image imprinted on the cloak of an Aztec Indian named Juan Diego, continue to fascinate believers and nonbelievers alike the world over. She came from heaven with the tenderness of a mother to invite all those who, even in the centuries to come, would dwell on the American continent, to a life of holiness, prayer and peace by following Jesus, her divine Son. Details of the apparitions, the miracle of the roses, the amazing discoveries regarding Mary's image on the tilma, and the import of her message for the world today are set forth with uncommon clarity and devotion in this highly readable and fully illustrated book.

Our Lady’s appearances to young Bernadette Soubirous in Lourdes, France, in 1858 are well known and well documented. Just one year later, a lesser-known but still important Marian apparition took place in an American frontier settlement. Based on historical documents, testimonies, personal interviews, and expert analysis, America’s Mary: The Story of Our Lady of Good Help chronicles for the first time the United States’ only Church-approved Marian apparition. In 1859 on the Door County Peninsula of northeast Wisconsin, Mary appeared three times to a young Belgian woman named Adele Brise. She identified herself as the Queen of Heaven and gave Adele instructions to teach the children their catechism, pray, do penance, sacrifice, and receive the sacraments frequently. Adele was initially met with skepticism, and during her lifetime she experienced many trials, including persecution. Still, she maintained that she was telling the truth and courageously carried on the mission the Blessed Mother had given to her. Although the local community accepted Adele’s story as real, and popular piety built up around Mary’s appearances and messages, it was more than 100 years before the Church conducted a thorough investigation. In 2010, the apparition was approved. Since then, thousands of pilgrims each year have visited the National Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion, WI, seeking the Queen of Heaven’s intercession for peace, healing, and help.

"Catholic literature in this country is not yet rich in works of a historical character; and though not a few have appeared evincing great research, and worthy of a high place, there was still wanting a popular element which genius alone could supply by lending its charm to the often dry details of the historian. The devotion to the Blessed Virgin in this country, from its settlement to the present day, was a theme which had been briefly touched upon by one or two writers. Still, it was a field which the late lamented author of the following pages entered with all the zeal and devotion of his arden[t] and impassioned character, and as a necessary consequence he gave his work the stamp of his particular genius. Few more gifted writers have appeared among us than Xavier Donald Macleod; and in undertaking his work, material was contributed by his numerous friends. The writer of this, one who had enjoyed that friendship from boyhood, rejoicing to see him about to take up a subject so worthy of his talents, furnished him an abundant material which he had collected, and feels now, perhaps too great a pleasure in his privilege in having contributed to so noble a work as that here presented to the Catholic public."--

A provocative imagining of the later years of the mother of Jesus finds her living a solitary existence in Ephesus years after her son's crucifixion and struggling with guilt, anger, and feelings that her son is not the son of God and that His sacrifice was not for a worthy cause.

Archbishop Jos Gomez has written a personal, passionate and practical contribution to the national debate about immigration - pointing the way toward a recovery of America's highest ideals.""Immigration is a human rights test of our generation. It's also a defining historical moment for America. The meaning of this hour is that we need to renew our country in the image of her founding promises of universal rights rooted in God. Immigration is about more than immigration. It's about renewing the soul of America.""- Archbishop Jos H. Gomez Archbishop Jos H. Gomez is one of the leading moral voices in the American Catholic Church. He is the Archbishop of Los Angeles, the nation's largest Catholic community and the Chairman of the United States Catholic Bishops' Committee on Migration and a papal appointee to the Pontifical Commission for Latin America. Archbishop Gomez is a native of Monterrey, Mexico and a naturalized American citizen.

Throughout this memoir that describes how a five-year-old girl could charm Nazi soldiers and then later experience the joy of winning scholarships, beauty pageants, and elected office--Mary's inner beauty will shine through and touch your heart.

"The moment to savor [Mary Sully]. . . has arrived." —New York Times Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America’s first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill). Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. And like her great-grandfather Sully was fascinated by celebrity: over two decades, she produced hundreds of colorful and dynamic abstract triptychs, a series of “personality prints” of American public figures like Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein. Sully’s position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully’s work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures—within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

OUR LIFE WITH OUR LADY'S INFLUENCEFor the first time in the history of Marian writing, here is a book that co-ordinates and integrates the dogmatic truths underlying devotion to Mary with a solid, unsentimental, and balanced application of these truths to the life of the soul.The author lucidly demonstrates that, since God has given Mary an all-pervading place in His scheme for the redemption of man, it follows that if we wish to grow in love of God-the goal of all spiritual striving-we will give Mary a corresponding place in our soul-life.This book shows us how to achieve such fusion of God-centered and Mary-informed spirituality. It provides a basic orientation in ascetic principles and explains the classic steps in spiritual and mystical growth, drawing always on the texts of Scripture, the Fathers and Doctors of the Church, the great commentators, and the modern papal pronouncements.OUR LADY'S PART IN OUR SPIRITUAL LIFEThis is a fundamental text of Marian spirituality, for private study, for class and study-club use, for aid in spiritual direction. It is at once simple, clear, and logical, yet fortified by rich documentation and reference material. With Index and questions for discussion.

In the late nineteenth century, as Americans debated the "woman question," a battle over the meaning of biology arose in the medical profession. Some medical men claimed that women were naturally weak, that education would make them physically ill, and th