Words of Hope recounts the words of Christ spoken to four great saints—Saint Gertrude the Great, Saint Catherine of Genoa, Saint Teresa of Avila, and Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque—who dared to receive the eternal message of Our Lord.

They lovingly and faithfully listened to His message, repeated through the centuries. It is a message of suffering, and yet it is overflowing with hope. Through the words these four holy souls received, we can see Christ’s message of peace and hope born out of suffering written anew.

Through these intimate words of Jesus and the example of the saints within these pages, the reader will be renewed and rejuve­nated with the hope and comfort of Christ in times of suffering.

An excerpt

I will never forget the first time I heard that a person can hear the voice of God. In 1992, I was twenty-nine years old and in the midst of a major conversion experience that would lead me away from my strongly held atheistic convictions and into the Catholic Church. I had prided myself in my skills at debating and oratory, and had convinced some, perhaps many, that God was merely a figment of one’s imagination. I was so unschooled in the topic of religion during those early months of my conversion that I didn’t even know the meaning of the word “grace,” and was taught its meaning while sitting in the office of a holy priest, the first Catholic cleric I would meet as an adult. As my conversion took hold during the fall of that year, a good friend introduced me to the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, the renowned stigmatist who gave up everything he owned—including the clothes on his back, which he returned to his father—to be closer to God.

The story about Saint Francis that moved me is one that has been retold many times. The story began when Francis traveled along a worn path in the Umbrian hills of Italy to pray at the church of San Damiano, a crumbling relic of stone and mortar. The church was so dilapidated and poor, that the only adornments in the building were an altar and a crucifix. While inside the church, kneeling before the large Byzantine crucifix, he distinctly heard the words, “Francis, Francis, rebuild my church, for as you can see it is falling down.” Three times the youthful Francis heard this sentence in his heart, and when he came to himself after this experience, he first gave back to his father all he owed him, and then returned to rebuild the little decrepit church of San Damiano, overgrown with brambles and weeds. It was a difficult but glorious undertaking that took months to complete. Francis worked by day and slept in the evening on the stone floor of the church with a tattered roof, peering out through the missing timbers at the starry Italian sky before finally dozing off to sleep. When his work at San Damiano was complete, he continued to rebuild, but this time he took on the massive structure of the Catholic Church, considerably larger in both size and complexity. He worked in this vineyard until he died: the founder of a new religious order, a worker of miracles, and a bearer of the stigmata, the wounds of Christ.