Mary Lea Carroll - Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints

Advance Praise

What would it mean to live with the faith of a sainteither on a grand scale or in our own modest lives? With the effortless, heartfelt wit of Annie Lamott, Mary Lea Carroll whisks us along on a series of lively, serendipitous pilgrimages that leave us laughing, amazed, and ready to set off on our own miraculous adventures.

PERDITA FINN, co-author of The Way of the Rose

Saint Everywhere is a gem of a bookdelightful storytelling, factually fascinating, and spiritually uplifting. The right book for this moment in time when so many are on their own journey looking for the good in the everyday. Im a fan of the lady saints, and now Im a fan of Mary Lea Carroll. Saint Everywhere is a comfort and an inspiration.

LIAN DOLAN, Satellite Sister and author of Elizabeth the First Wife and Helen of Pasadena

Faith is a journey, and as Mary Lea Carroll shows in her delightful, insightful book, that journey can be both external and internal all at once

RICK HAMLIN, author of Pray for Me and executive editor of Guideposts

Charming, funny, informative, moving and spiritually profound, this little book delights the soul.

MICHELLE HUNEVEN, author of Off Course, Blame, and Round Rock

Saint Everywhere

TRAVELS IN SEARCH OF THE LADY SAINTS

MARY LEA CARROLL

Copyright 2019 by Mary Lea Carroll

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution www.cbsd.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file with the Library of Congress. The following is for reference only:

Names: Carroll, Mary Lea, author.

Title: Saint Everywhere : travels in search of the lady saints / by Mary Lea Carroll.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045632 (print) | LCCN 2018050371 (ebook) | ISBN 9781945551574 (Ebook) | ISBN 9781945551567 (hardback)

Classification: LCC BR1713 (ebook) | LCC BR1713 .C37 2019 (print) | DDC 270.092/52--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045632

Subjects: Memoir / women saints / Christian shrines / travel

Illustrations by Joe Rohde

Cover design by David Ter-Avanesyan

Page design & layout by Amy Inouye, Future Studio

Printed in the United States of America

For Bill

To reach something good, it is very useful to have gone astray, and thus acquired experience.

ST. TERESA OF AVILA

Bizarre travel plans are dancing lessons from God.

KURT VONNEGUT

Contents

These stories go back and forth over eighteen years of my life, the years I spent raising children and helping my husband build his businesses. They reflect my growing desire to understand some of the reasons for being here, alive, on earth. When the book Lean In came out, urging women to step up their leadership in professional life, my initial response was, Oh brother! Women are already doing everythingnow we also have to lean in? But all the talk about leaning in got me thinking about women who have had tremendous effects on this world, and yet, like so many, havent gotten their due.

I decided to adopt a hobby: Wherever I was lucky enough to travel, if a shrine dedicated to a female saint was nearby, I would take myself there and make of it what I could. From my grandfather Cassidys side of the family, my Catholic heritage goes back more than a thousand years. That is not an easy ship to jump from when the waters get rough, which they have been lately. In turning my eyes toward the women saints, I have found some fun, a lightness to the landscape where questions sprout everywherequestions such as: So her body hasnt decomposed? And she did what? With no money? And everybody said, no, no, no to her, but she did it anyway?

I didnt pre-select these lady saints. In a way, they selected meI made the trek to see their shrines or miraculous sites only if my travels had brought me nearby. These treks to go see became enchanting alternatives to the repetitive realities of regular life. I could let my mind trip around between the seen and unseen worlds. These little adventures built up a fire in me for something Id always had, but now have in infinitely richer ways: a love of God. These travels have taken me deep into Gods world, coloring every aspect of my day. Its gorgeous and its weird. And I have my time with the lady saints to thank for that.

A saint is a person who, when alive, did extraordinarily amazing things forwell, us all, really. Bestowing sainthood on someone is the Churchs way of acknowledging this. And as Ive gotten to know some of these women of history whose works live on, Ive found the Churchs acknowledgments to be more than deserved.

Solets take an adventure together and wonder over the strange and inspiring achievements of gals who not only leaned in and broke glass ceilings, they actually bent reality.

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Siena, Italy

How the trail of the lady saints opened up:

What if you and Bill came with me to Italy? my father-in-law asked cheerfully over the phone one Saturday morning. Im going with my veterans group. John was eighty. The year was 2000, a new millennium was starting, and World War II veterans were passing away at a rate of a thousand a year. Bill never took vacations, being the owner of a Hollywood company that makes trailers, the coming attractions for movies. But even he knew that this took precedence over work. We decided to bring our oldest daughter, twelve-year-old Glenn Mary, along with us, leaving her two younger sisters home in good care. We would be visiting battle sites, village to village, in the hills around Florence. Wed learn how the 10th Mountain Division finally drove the Germans out from what is, today, a lot of pretty Italian ski towns. Pretty ski towns with new buildings and hotels, because there was little left but wreckage after the war. The medieval stone-on-stone look of these hill towns was forever erased.

Before long there we were, packed into a bus full of veterans and their families, motoring among the lovely hills. Our group archivist gave us historical background: Okay, around the next bend, on February 19th of 45, the 10th advanced up Mt. Belvedereright over therebefore dawn.