Welcome! Holy Communion Before & After

By Mother Mary Loyola, with a preface by Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J. Most of us know how to receive Our Lord. Fewer of us know what to do with the quarter of an hour on either side of it — and that, Mother Loyola argues, is where a fervent Communion and a lukewarm one part company.

The single word Welcome holds the disposition she is after, and she arranges the book around the different ways a soul may offer it: the Welcome of Mary, of Faith, of the Creature, of the Child, of the Sinner, of the Friend, of the Patient, of Trust, of the Toiler, of Love, of the Cross-bearer, and the Last Welcome of all.

Each section gives pages of thoughts and prayers for the time before and after Communion — partly prayer, partly the soul talking to itself, and never mechanical. A book for First Communicants and for anyone who has been receiving for fifty years.

360 pages, paperback, 4⅜" × 7". St. Augustine Academy Press. ISBN 978-1-936639-35-9.