Amazon Picks

St. Thomas Aquinas

Summa Theologica (5-Volume Set)

The complete masterwork of Catholic systematic theology — every article, every objection, every reply.

Pope John Paul II

Catechism of the Catholic Church (2nd Edition)

The authoritative summary of everything the Catholic Church teaches, promulgated by Pope St. John Paul II.

Pope St. John Paul II

Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body

129 Wednesday audiences that rebuilt the entire Catholic theology of the human person, love, and sexuality.

St. Augustine

The City of God

Augustine's masterwork: a sweeping theology of history, written in response to the sack of Rome.

Edward Sri

Men, Women and the Mystery of Love

The Theology of the Body made accessible — what JPII's teaching actually means for dating, marriage, and sexual ethics.

Christopher West

Good News About Sex and Marriage

Answers to the toughest questions about sex, contraception, pornography, and NFP — rooted in Theology of the Body.

Frank Sheed

A Map of Life

The most compact and clear overview of the Catholic worldview ever written — 170 pages that cover everything.

Frank J. Sheed

Theology and Sanity

The case that theological ignorance is not humility but intellectual disorder — and that understanding the Faith is a duty.

Karol Wojtyła

Love and Responsibility

The philosophical foundation of Theology of the Body — written by John Paul II before he was pope.

Romano Guardini

The Lord

The greatest meditative life of Christ in the twentieth century — 600 pages of sustained theological contemplation.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

The Spirit of the Liturgy

The theological case for the Roman Rite — written by the man who would become Benedict XVI.

Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

The Three Ages of the Interior Life (2-vol. set)

The comprehensive Dominican account of the spiritual life from beginner to mystical union — the standard seminary treatise.

Pope St. John Paul II

Veritatis Splendor

The encyclical on moral theology that answered proportionalism and consequentialism with the full weight of the tradition.

Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson

Lord of the World

The prophetic novel that Pope Francis called "the book of an apocalypse" — written in 1907, increasingly accurate.

U.S Catholic Church

Catechism of the Catholic Church: Second Edition

St. Augustine

The Confessions

The greatest spiritual autobiography in history — the story of a brilliant, tortured intellectual who found rest in God alone.

St. Athanasius

On the Incarnation

The fourth-century masterwork that defined the theology of the Incarnation — written when Athanasius was a young deacon.

Ed. Michael W. Holmes

The Apostolic Fathers (Holmes Edition)

The complete writings of the generation who knew the Apostles — Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, the Didache, and more.

St. Irenaeus of Lyons

Against Heresies

The second-century refutation of Gnosticism — and the first systematic account of Catholic doctrine.

Jimmy Akin

Fathers Know Best

A topical guide to the Church Fathers — what they taught on 100 controversial questions that still divide Christians.

St. Augustine of Hippo

Confessions (Sheed Translation)

The Hackett critical edition of the Confessions with Frank Sheed's celebrated translation and scholarly apparatus.

Various (ed. Maxwell Staniforth)

Early Christian Writings

The affordable Penguin Classics entry point to the Apostolic Fathers — Ignatius, Clement, Polycarp, Didache.

Scott Hahn & Curtis Mitch

The Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: New Testament

The most thorough Catholic study Bible in print, with detailed commentary rooted in the Fathers and the Magisterium.

Various (Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)

The Ignatius Bible (RSV-2CE, Compact Edition)

The RSV-2CE: the translation that preserves "thou" in prayers and "virgin" in Isaiah 7:14 — the Bible scholars and liturgists prefer.

University of Navarre Faculty of Theology

The Navarre Bible: New Testament Expanded Edition

The New Testament with three columns: RSV text, Vulgate, and the full patristic and magisterial commentary.

Scott Hahn

A Father Who Keeps His Promises

Typology made accessible: how the Old Testament is a covenant family story that culminates in Christ and the Church.

St. Thomas Aquinas

Commentary on the Gospel of John (3-vol. set)

Aquinas's verse-by-verse commentary on John — the finest single work of medieval biblical theology.

Scott Hahn

Ignatius Catholic Study Bible: Old and New Testaments

St. Francis de Sales

Introduction to the Devout Life

The most practical guide to Catholic holiness ever written — specifically for laypeople living in the world.

St. Thérèse of Lisieux

Story of a Soul

The Little Way: holiness not through great deeds but through small ones done with great love.

Thomas à Kempis

The Imitation of Christ

Second only to the Bible in Catholic circulation for six centuries — four books on contempt of the world and union with Christ.

St. Teresa of Ávila

Interior Castle

The map of the interior life — seven mansions from the outer courts of prayer to transforming union with God.

St. John of the Cross

Dark Night of the Soul

The classic account of spiritual desolation — why God withdraws consolation, and what it means when He does.

Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, S.J.

Abandonment to Divine Providence

The spirituality of the present moment: every circumstance of life is the "sacrament of the present moment" in which God acts.

St. Maria Faustina Kowalska

Diary: Divine Mercy in My Soul

The mystical diary of the Polish visionary who gave the Church the Divine Mercy devotion.

Thomas Merton

The Seven Storey Mountain

The most influential Catholic autobiography of the twentieth century — a Columbia intellectual's conversion and entry into a Cistercian monastery.

Brother Lawrence of the Resurrection

The Practice of the Presence of God

A seventeenth-century kitchen monk's method for living in constant union with God through the ordinary actions of each day.

St. Teresa of Ávila

The Way of Perfection

Teresa's practical manual for the nuns of San José — written before the Interior Castle, more accessible and immediately useful.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius

The thirty-day retreat programme that formed the Jesuits and reshaped Western Christianity — the most influential retreat manual ever written.

Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.

Fire Within: Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross and the Gospel — on Prayer

The definitive guide to the Carmelite tradition of prayer — explains both Teresa and John of the Cross without diluting either.

St. Louis de Montfort

True Devotion to Mary

The Marian consecration classic — John Paul II read it as a seminarian and called it transformative; he took "Totus Tuus" from it.

Caryll Houselander

The Reed of God

An eccentric English laywoman's meditation on Our Lady — one of the most original and beautiful books of Marian theology in the twentieth century.

St. Alphonsus Liguori

Uniformity with God's Will

The Doctor of Prayer's short masterwork — 40 pages that teach the single most important habit of the spiritual life.

Stratford Caldecott

Beauty for Truth's Sake

The theological case for liberal education — how mathematics, music, and the arts belong within a Catholic vision of the cosmos.

G.K. Chesterton

Orthodoxy

A journalist reasons his way from agnosticism to orthodoxy through pure logic, wit, and the paradoxes of the modern world.

G.K. Chesterton

The Everlasting Man

The sweeping reply to materialist history: humanity is not an animal that evolved religion, and Christ is not a myth.

Scott & Kimberly Hahn

Rome Sweet Home

A Presbyterian theologian reads his way to Rome through the Bible alone — and takes his reluctant wife with him.

Thomas E. Woods Jr.

How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization

The historical case for the Church as the founding institution of universities, hospitals, science, law, and the arts.

C.S. Lewis

A Grief Observed

The rawest honest account of grief in modern Christian writing — Lewis's journals after his wife died of cancer.

C.S. Lewis

The Problem of Pain

The intellectual account of suffering: why a good God permits it, and what it accomplishes in a human soul.

Bishop Robert Barron

Letter to a Suffering Church

A contemporary bishop addresses the crisis in the Church with clarity, anger, sorrow, and hope.

Peter Kreeft

Fundamentals of the Faith

Sixty-three short essays answering the most common objections to Catholic Christianity — accessible, precise, occasionally brilliant.

Ed. Patrick Madrid

Surprised by Truth

Eleven conversion stories from Protestants who entered the Catholic Church through Scripture and history alone.

Scott Hahn

Reasons to Believe

Scott Hahn answers the core objections to Christianity from science, philosophy, and history with scholarship and accessibility.

St. Francis de Sales

The Catholic Controversy

The leaflets Francis de Sales distributed in Calvinist Geneva as he tried to re-evangelize the region — gentle, precise, devastating.

Mark Shea

By What Authority?

Why "Scripture alone" cannot work — the convert's guide to Catholic authority and Sacred Tradition.

Liz Kelly

The Rosary: A Path Into Prayer

A warm and serious guide to praying the Rosary as a form of contemplation rather than mere vocal repetition.