About Us

Garden of Mary started, really, because I kept finding things I did not want to lose: old prayers and feast-day customs, catechisms and books that explained things clearly, and little pieces of Catholic family life that used to be quite ordinary and now can take an astonishing amount of digging to find.

Over time I had folders on the computer, books marked with slips of paper, things I had printed for our family, notes for catechism, prayers I wanted to remember, and all sorts of things saved because I kept thinking, I am going to want this again someday. Eventually it seemed sensible to put some of it in one place.

We are a Catholic family, and the Faith is part of the ordinary life of our home. We follow the traditional liturgical year, keep the feast days as we are able, teach catechism, use the traditional prayers, and spend probably more time than most people would consider reasonable hunting through old Catholic books.

I am especially interested in what Catholics actually believed and practiced before everything became so confused. When I have a question, I want to know what an old catechism says, what the popes taught, or how Catholic writers explained it. I do not believe the Faith changes. “Jesus Christ, yesterday, and today; and the same for ever.” (Hebrews 13:8)

There is a great deal on this site simply because I thought it was beautiful, useful, worth remembering, or something I wanted my own family to have. Garden of Mary is not an academic project, and I am not a theologian. I am a Catholic wife and mother trying to keep hold of what was handed down and make sure the next generation knows it too.

Our Position in the Present Crisis

There is one thing I know some visitors will eventually wonder about, so I would rather explain it plainly. Our family keeps the Faith at home.

That probably sounds rather odd on a website filled with Catholic prayers, sermons, saints, catechism, and love for the traditional Mass. The oddness of it is not lost on us. It was not the situation we set out looking for.

For a long time I thought, as I imagine many Catholics do, that if things had gone terribly wrong in the Church, the obvious answer was simply to find somewhere that still had the Traditional Latin Mass and held to the true Faith. But the more I looked into it, the more questions I had, and they went beyond whether this was the traditional Mass. Who sent this priest, and by what authority was he acting? Where did his jurisdiction come from? What did the Church herself teach about mission and authority before the present crisis even existed? I kept reading, and some of the answers were not the ones I had expected or particularly wanted to find.

There have been plenty of times when I wished I could stop asking questions. It would be much easier to choose a chapel, go to Mass, receive the sacraments, and let someone else sort out the rest. But once I believed the questions were serious ones, I could not pretend they were not there. So we began keeping the Faith at home.

People sometimes call this the “home alone” Catholic position. I am not particularly fond of the term. It makes it sound almost like some sort of movement or preference, and for us it is neither.

We do not believe Catholics are supposed to be without Mass. We do not think the sacraments are optional, or that a family praying at home somehow takes the place of priests and bishops. If anything, one of the hardest parts of this position is knowing what Catholic life ordinarily ought to include and not having it.

In the meantime, Sunday still comes every week, and so do Advent and Lent, Christmas and Easter, the Ember Days, and all the great feasts. Children still need to know their Faith, and prayers need to be said. There are books to read, things to teach, and Catholic traditions worth keeping alive. That is what we try to do here at home, and it is part of how Garden of Mary came to be.

I know good people have reached different conclusions about the present crisis. I did not make this website to argue with them. But neither do I want to hide what we believe or give the impression that our family attends a traditional chapel when we do not.

For anyone who would like to know more about how we arrived at this position, I will be writing a fuller explanation:

Where We Stand — Why We Remain at Home in the Present Crisis →