Butler's Lives of the Saints: Concise Edition, Revised and Updated

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Father Butler's Lives of the Saints is an amazing book of devotion, arranged to follow the Catholic Church's calendar of feast days, and so is relevant every day of the year. It does not come with a cardboard sleeve of any kind to tuck the books together for on-shelf storage purposes, in case you might be wondering about this but I wasn't really expecting one. Saints, the popular heroes and heroines of every age, also have an importance beyond the inspiration they provide. Each year that I read this devotional, I found my self meditating on various saints lives and trying to find out more about them.

Each entry is approximately one page long and is complimented with a reflection on a particular saint. It was at Douai that he began his principal work The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints. Edward Sri In Into His Likeness, Dr Edward Sri provides an approachable but in-depth exploration of what it means to be a disciple of Christ. This work is a popular, but very scholarly, abridgement of the complete Butler's Lives published in twelve volumes in 1847.

It is found in the lives of the saints, for it is through their lives on earth, lived within the union of Christ’s mystical body, the Catholic Church, that we see the only history that truly matters for all eternity.

The drawbacks are that unless you have a very good grasp of history it can be hard to understand what was going in in the saint's life.He also prepared material for Richard Challoner’s Memoirs of Missionary Priests, a work on the martyrs of the reign of Elizabeth. The pontificate of Pope John Paul II has produced an unprecedented wealth of beatifications and canonizations. There is also in-depth historical and contextual background on major saints, and the inclusion of many new saints and the blessed from recent decades.

This book has also been extensively revised, altered, and updated since its original publication, with new editions, even 21st century revisions being made, that we feel the time is ripe for an original, unexpurgated, and unrevised print version to be made available. Father Alban Butler was born in 1710, at Appletree, Northamptonshire, the second son of Simon Butler, Esq. We have extensively proofread the text thus generated, and have made the layout “user friendly” as the moderns so succinctly state.

Some were frustrating -- vigorously condemning heresy is not my favorite reason to elevate someone to sainthood -- and some were great (I'm a huge fan of little Benedict the bridge builder). The final volume, December, includes an index to the series as well as a supplement of recent beatifications and an ecumenical calendar. For one thing, this work does not treat of any saint who was beatified or canonized since the early 19th Century. PRIDE/stinking pride who puts itself above the Creator and says "i will not kneel for baby Jesus asleep in the hay of a manger.