Whether you lead a monthly book club or want to host a stand-alone meeting to discuss a single book, we have some great options for Catholic mothers!

Here are some of my top book club picks for Catholic Moms:

Parents of the Saints: The Hidden Heroes Behind Our Favorite Saints

Patrick O’Hearn set out to discover the answer to a common question: How can we help our children get to Heaven?

Rather than coming up with his own formula or ideas, he went to the parents of great saints to see what they did to help their children pursue holiness!  

In Parents of the Saints: The Hidden Heroes Behind Our Favorite Saints, learn how over 100 parents formed their children into great Saints like Sts. Faustina, Giana Molla, Josemaría Escrivá, Pope John Paul II, Maximilian Kolbe, Padre Pio, Thérèse, and countless others. 

O’Hearn dives into the seven hallmarks associated with the success of these saintly parents: 

• Sacramental Life
• Surrender
• Sacrificial love
• Suffering
• Simplicity
• Solitude
• Sacredness of Life

Gather your friends to read and discuss this book that will encourage each mother to point their children to Heaven!

Made this Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues

Today, as our culture’s moral center continues to fly apart and with every form of deviance publicly aired and celebrated, we have no choice but to equip our kids to understand and to own the truth about such issues.

In Made This Way: How to Prepare Kids to Face Today’s Tough Moral Issues, Leila Miller and Trent Horn give parents crucial tools and techniques to form children with the understanding they need—appropriate to their age and maturity level—to meet the world’s challenges.

Their secret lies in an approach that begins not with the Bible or Church teaching but with the natural law. In kid-friendly ways, these authors help you communicate how the right way to live is rooted in the way we’re made. God’s design for human nature is a blueprint or owner’s manual for moral living that any child can grasp through reason and apply to modern controversies over sex, marriage, life… and the quest for human fulfillment.

Don’t worry–this is not some dense and difficult book to read! Instead, it is a straightforward and easy read for a busy mom who is struggling to navigate today’s world with her children.

Raising Chaste Catholic Men: Practical Advice, Mom to Mom

This is written by a mom for moms.

Anxiety among Catholic mothers is sky high. How do we teach our sons to be chaste when a sex-obsessed culture is ready to drag our boys into the pit at every turn? The snares of ubiquitous porn, hook-up sex, the LGBTQ+ juggernaut, and the devaluing of true manhood appear unavoidable. What’s a mother to do?

Relax, grab your beverage of choice, and flip open Raising Chaste Catholic Men. In this little heart-to-heart between us girls, Leila Miller will take your hand and calm your fears by giving you practical advice in simple terms, based on her 25 years of experience in raising eight children, six of them sons.

Some of the serious topics addressed with good humor and no fear include:

• Three basic rules for parenting
• What to do when boys are little
• Answering the culture’s TWO BIG ACCUSATIONS (this is HUGE for your kids!)
• Fear has a place (chapter 9!)
• Navigating pop culture
• What to do when things go wrong
• *Great Advice* from chaste young men (over 2 dozen young men speak up)

Plus much more, all of it is designed to bring your worried heart some peace by giving you a plan of action and the power tools to pull it off. So, trust God and dive in!

The Lost Art of Sacrifice

This is an important book to help you create a family culture of sacrifice when your children are young–before they establish habits they will take with them when they leave home.

In our materialistic and secular world, we have lost the art of sacrifice–an art that connects us with the very roots of our souls and is essential to our salvation. That is why this book is so vitally important today.

In these pages, Vicki Burbach (a convert, wife, and mother) explains that while Christ’s words are challenging, He isn’t asking us to pick up our crosses because He is hard-hearted, but rather because He is calling us to the highest manifestation of love.

In this book, you will learn:

• the difference between suffering and sacrifice,
• why life is not measured by what you get,
• the reason God prepared your soul for sacrificial love,
• how conquering your desires is critical to sacrificial love,
• and why sacrifice is not something that happens to you but is an act of will.

A great conversation starter for a group of mothers who are striving to lead their children to Heaven!

Don’t Forget to Say Thank You

Do you ever get tired of saying the same thing over and over to your kids?

What if we took the statements we repeat to our children and apply them to ourselves?

In Don’t Forget to Say Thank You, writer Lindsay Schlegel shares fifteen relatable phrases she frequently uses as a parent and how her faith and life changed when she envisioned God telling her these same things.

You can find an interview with Lindsay Schlegel about why she wrote this book on our blog!

Schlegel invites us to apply the same lessons she learned to our own lives as parents and as children of God through reflection questions and a prayer at the end of each chapter. She also suggests saints to whom we can look for inspiration and guidance, reminding us that we are not alone as we strive to more accurately reflect the image of our heavenly Father.

I hope that one of these books is a good fit for your group of Catholic Mothers! Whether you have a regularly scheduled book club or whether you wish to host a singular meeting, these books will help produce fruitful conversations with other Catholic mothers!

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