The Catholic Table, by Emily Stimpson Chapman, Emmaus Road Publishing, £18.99
This book should be read by everyone who has ever thought about food or cooking. Even abstemious people, who have never over-indulged or become fixated on a new faddish diet, should read it, simply because it offers a profoundly Catholic vision of what eating (and drinking) should mean.
The author’s subtitle is “Finding Joy Where Food and Faith Meet”, and her theme is simple: the deeper our response to our faith, the more we will understand how to celebrate mealtimes, including times of fasting and feasting enjoined by the Church.
Chapman came to her understanding the hard way. She spent six years, from 1994 to 2000, struggling with anorexia followed by binge eating. At the same time, not surprisingly, she lost her faith. Aged 26, she returned to the Church and rediscovered a sacramental worldview. This came with the revelation that “God comes to us as food.” Food, the author realised, “isn’t just about calories … It’s about God. It’s about community. It’s about life.”
Cookery and food programmes abound on television. At the same time, we are constantly told that too many of us eat unhealthily and are overweight. There is even a new category of food pathology: orthorexia nervosa, or an unhealthy obsession with healthy (“clean”) eating. Thus Chapman’s book – with its God-centred vision, its common sense, its practical tips on nutritious and economical recipes, entertaining and hospitality – has never been more relevant.
One of the author’s insights is that we have to care for our bodies, not control them. Another is: “You are not good or bad because of what you eat.” It is also useful to be reminded that “All the healthy eating in the world won’t keep us alive forever.”
As well as several recipes, Chapman includes a bibliography, including books she has discovered that discuss food within a Christian perspective. She also recommends certain films in which food is a vital element, such as Babette’s Feast.
If, like me, you could live happily on lattes and cheese sandwiches, buy the book for someone you know, for whom eating and food are not joyful but problematic.
I Met Paul VI, by Rino Fisichella, Gracewing, £7.99
Archbishop Fisichella presented the evidence to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints that led to Pope Paul VI being declared Venerable. His wish is that this slim book, reflecting the accounts of those who had known Paul VI, “will help many people know better the holiness of a pope who had such an enormous impact on the world in the 20th century”.
The late pope does emerge from these pages as a living personality, but it is rather hard to find the man beneath the very respectful reminiscences of those who had been close to him. Some of this is probably to do with the pope’s own nature: he was shy, introverted and thrown into a situation (the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council after the death of Pope John XXIII) which called for vast reserves of energy and leadership. He then suffered a martyrdom of the spirit when he stood firm against the enormous worldwide pressure to ease the Church’s teaching on birth control.
Some of the author’s defensive comments, made without properly discussing their context, such as that Paul VI “was not a Hamlet figure, incapable of decision”, or that, although he endured times of sadness, “sadness is not opposed to sanctity”, make one wonder if he is protesting too much.
Despite these reservations, the pope emerges as man of enormous courage (particularly in his encyclical Humanae Vitae), of dedication to the Church “at a moment of great difficulty” (withstanding false interpretations of the Council), and of great personal charm. St John Paul II commented of his predecessor: “His life stands as proof that there can be no ‘transformation’ [within the Church] without personal sanctification.”
I also learnt that the pope often wore chains underneath his clothing “to remind him that Christ had carried the Cross to redeem the world”, that “he always carried within him the thought of death” and that he died, as he had wished, on the feast of the Transfiguration.
A Test of Faith by Fr Benedict Groeschel, CTS, £2.50
This booklet, abridged from Fr Groeschel’s book Arise from Darkness, first published in 1995, is hugely encouraging for those for whom “life doesn’t go to plan” – in other words, everyone. Only 76 pages, it can be read in an evening, but I recommend that you take it slowly.
The late author, the founder of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal who was in great demand as a retreat leader and spiritual director, has distilled his lifetime’s experiences in his wise advice.
His theme is how to cope in times of darkness and when we feel crushed by the Cross. He is by turns realistic, consoling, bracing and humorous. As he observes, “In a wounded world marked by the mystery of the original fall of the human race, life cannot always be beautiful, but it can be filled with meaning.” This is a booklet to help one ponder – and then pray.
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