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Saints Behaving Badly: The Cutthroats, Crooks, Trollops, Con Men, and Devil-Worshippers Who Became Saints
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About Saints Behaving Badly: The
Product Description Saints are not born, they are made. And many, as Saints Behaving Badly reveals, were made of very rough materials indeed. The first book to lay bare the less than saintly behavior of thirty-two venerated holy men and women, it presents the scandalous, spicy, and sleazy detours they took on the road to sainthood. In nineteenth- and twentieth-century writings about the lives of the saints, authors tended to go out of their way to sanitize their stories, often glossing over the more embarrassing cases with phrases such as, “he/she was once a great sinner.” In the early centuries of the Church and throughout the Middle Ages, however, writers took a more candid and spirited approach to portraying the saints. Exploring sources from a wide range of periods and places, Thomas Craughwell discovered a veritable rogues gallery of sinners-turned-saint. There’s St. Olga, who unleashed a bloodbath on her husband’s assassins; St. Mary of Egypt, who trolled the streets looking for new sexual conquests; and Thomas Becket, who despite his vast riches refused to give his cloak to a man freezing to death in the street. Written with wit and respect (each profile ends with what inspired the saint to give up his or her wicked ways) and illustrated with amusing caricatures, Saints Behaving Badly will entertain, inform, and even inspire Catholic readers across America. From Publishers Weekly The stories Catholics often hear about the saints can give the impression these people emerged from the womb with halos. Craughwell, a well-respected Catholic diocesan newspaper columnist, provides the rest of the story. His semi-irreverent collection assembles 29 sinners-cum-saints from Christian history in an enjoyable and riveting account of their lives and times. The table of contents reads like a most-wanted list: thieves, embezzlers, murderers, cardsharps, and even a warmonger. Some, such as the apostle Matthew, a former tax collector, will be familiar to readers. The brief biographies of the more obscure saints, however, are often the most fascinating to read. Craughwell introduces us to intriguing figures like St. Moses the Ethiopian, a violent gang leader who embraced a life of fasting and prayer after seeking shelter with monks in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century. St. Alipius, a student of another notorious sinner, St. Augustine, was "obsessed with blood sports." Craughwell does not dilute his belief that it is only through divine grace that these women and men were able to overcome their self-centeredness and redirect their lives for a greater purpose. His tone is occasionally patronizing, but the take-home point is vital: while we are all sinners, there is always hope. (Sept. 19) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist Saints aren't born they're made; out of, as Craughwell's sketches of 28 of them demonstrate, oh-so-imperfect human beings, some well-known--St. Augustine, St. Patrick, St. Columba, St. Thomas Becket, St. Francis of Assisi--many others not. They include all manner of thieves (St. Dismas), bigamists (St. Fabiola), egotists (St. Ignatius of Loyola), and even the occasional Viking conqueror (St. Olaf). Craughwell provides biographical detail and, of greater interest, discussion of how particular saints have appealed to a collective sense of right and wrong and notice of how some saints have entered pop culture in modern guise (such as the St. Dismas-like hero of the movie The Hoodlum Priest). The saint among these 28 whose story is the most moving is probably the Venerable Matt Talbot (1856-1925), a chronic alcoholic from Dublin who quit drinking cold turkey to pursue a truly saintly, humble life thereafter. June Sawyers Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Review “Finally a book that reveals the saints as they truly were before grace intruded. Here are all your favorite intercessors with their venal, cranky, obnoxious, mu
