About Us

About Garden of Mary

The old Catholic Faith — lived, prayed, taught and remembered.

Garden of Mary is dedicated to preserving and handing on the Roman Catholic Faith as it was taught, believed, prayed and lived before the upheavals that followed the death of Pope Pius XII. It is placed under the patronage of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with the hope that those searching for the Faith in a time of confusion may find here something of the Catholic world that earlier generations knew without question.

This site was not created simply from a love of old books, beautiful churches, forgotten customs or traditional devotions, although all of these have their place here. It grew from a much more serious conviction: truth does not change, and the Catholic Faith was never ours to remake.

For centuries Catholics were taught that the Church founded by Jesus Christ was one in faith, worship and government; that her solemn teaching could not contradict itself; that what had once been handed down as Catholic doctrine could not later become error; and that the Deposit of Faith was to be guarded rather than adapted to the spirit of each succeeding age.

Yet the Catholic world that emerged from the Second Vatican Council was profoundly different from the one that preceded it. Doctrines formerly condemned were presented in new forms, worship was radically altered, ancient disciplines disappeared, and Catholics were increasingly expected to accept as legitimate developments things that earlier popes had warned against.

For our family, the question eventually became unavoidable: Can the Church of Christ teach one thing for generations and later teach its contrary?

We could not reconcile what Catholics had always been taught about the Church—her indefectibility, her teaching authority, her worship and her universal discipline—with the notion that the same Church could reverse herself in matters touching the Faith and hand the Catholic world a substantially altered religion.

Everything in the older Catholic books led us in the opposite direction. The Faith was received, not invented. It was guarded, not revised. The Church did not belong to one generation to alter for the next.

For that reason, the material preserved at Garden of Mary is drawn principally from the Catholic world as it existed before these changes. The sermons, catechetical works, prayers, devotions, theological writings and spiritual books found here are chosen so that Catholics may encounter the Faith as earlier generations received it.

Garden of Mary also exists because the Catholic Faith was never meant to remain confined to theological books. It belongs in the home.

It is found in the keeping of Sundays and feast days, in morning and evening prayer, in sacramentals and sacred images, in fasting and abstinence, in the lives of the saints, in family customs, in Catholic books read aloud to children, in prayers for the dead, in the observance of the liturgical year, and in countless small habits by which a household becomes recognizably Catholic.

That is why this site contains both serious study and very ordinary things.

Here you will find the saints and their feast days, traditional prayers and devotions, older Catholic writings, apologetics, family customs, children’s catechetical materials, coloring pages, games and printables, Catholic reading, seasonal observances, and resources intended simply to help the old Faith remain present in daily life.

We do not claim to possess an easy solution to the present crisis in the Church. Nor do we believe Catholics have the authority to manufacture one.

We do not want a new Church, and we do not want a new system of authority improvised because the old one is in eclipse. We want the Church Our Lord founded. Until God restores what has been lost, we believe the safest course is to hold fast to what the Church unquestionably taught when there was no dispute about where her authority lay.

And so, as far as we are able, we pray, teach our children, preserve the books and customs handed down to us, keep the feasts and fasts, honor Our Lady and the saints, and refuse to treat the Catholic religion as something that may be rewritten from generation to generation.

Garden of Mary is our small contribution to that work of preservation.

It is not a finished garden. New material will continue to be planted here: forgotten prayers, sermons, lives of the saints, old Catholic books, family traditions, children’s resources and studies of questions facing Catholics today.

Our hope is simply that what is preserved here may help another family discover something they thought had disappeared, teach something that might otherwise have been forgotten, or hold more firmly to a Faith that does not change.

Rooted in the Faith. Kept in the home. Handed on with love.

For those who wish to understand more fully where we stand concerning the present crisis in the Church, Vatican II, the question of authority, and why we presently remain at home, we have explained our position separately here:

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