A Catholic Quest for the Holy Grail by Charles A. Coulombe (Review, Roger Buck)

I reviewed this book here, Sort of a Review of 'A Catholic Quest for the Holy Grail', by Chevalier Charles Coulombe, back in January. However, my good friend, Mr Roger Buck, has returned to Ireland from the Continent, and he recently posted his review. I thought I'd share it, so my readers can get a second opinion.

From Cor Jesu Sacratissimum

“Christianity is boring” – this, alas for humanity, is what so many people think today …

The reasons are not hard to find. Partly they lie in the media, partly in the Protestant Reformation and the more recent Protestantization of Catholicism – as a result of which the Church is now frequently associated with all that is dull, literalist, deprived of living mystery.

And it is thus, I think, that many today search out New Age “mysteries”. For in the arid lands of soulless materialism, many souls thirst for the living Mystery.

If only they would read Charles A. Coulombe’s latest book: A Catholic Quest for the Holy Grail! For the glory of this luminous new work is that the author knows – with every fibre of his being – that Christianity is NOT boring.

Rather, it is filled with magic.

Every page of this book bears testimony to this – the author’s vivid sense of how rich, how miraculous Catholic Christianity truly is.

Now, ostensibly, this book concerns the legends and traditions surrounding the Holy Grail, along with its links to devotion to the Precious Blood, the Eucharist and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

But I say ‘ostensibly’ because truly it strikes me as all this – and so much more. For the book concerns not only the Grail, but Catholic chivalry and monarchy.

In a word: CHRISTENDOM.

And Coulombe takes us on a marvellous tour of medieval and even modern Europe where miracles – Eucharistic and otherwise – happen still …

As such, the book offers witness to just how astonishing the Mystery of the Catholic Church has been as its effects have rolled out across the planet for the last two thousand years.

Really, it is fascinating. Even profoundly knowledgeable and traditional Catholics may yet catch their breath in wonder at all the author invokes here.

For me, then, this book is pure joy. Now, I have raved about this author in previous reviews – but I think this is possibly his finest book yet (although it is hard to beat his enormous epic Puritan’s Empire – which I reviewed here).

Written in a popular, easy to read style, A Catholic Quest for the Holy Grail has something for anyone interested in restoring Christendom.

Buy it, read it, steep yourself even deeper in the miracles of Catholicism.