Blessed is She Who Believed:

Blessed is She Who Believed: Mary's Pilgrimage of Faith by: Juan Jose Bartolome SDB
Non-fiction: Religion, E-book
E-book Count: 24
Book Count: 39

I thought for Christmas a book on Mary would be interesting.  As I read this book there were many times that I stopped reading the book for a moment to double check that this book was not written by a Protestant.  (Not that I would be against reading a book on Mary by a Protestant or haven't before, just that a number of the things in the book sounded like the author was Protestant.)  As you might see there are letters after the author's name, they are for the Salesians of Don Bosco, so the author is probably a monk or priest, making some of the things in this book even more confusing.   

The main idea of the book is about Mary's faith journey and how it connects the the journey that all Christians are called to.  A sort of, what Mary did in her life physically all believers are called to do spiritually, idea.   It is broken up into sections based on only events recorded in the Bible.  So it starts at the beginning of Luke and ended in the Acts of the Apostles.  It also mostly only uses what was written in the Bible for their ideas on the events, (hence, part of my thoughts on it being written by a Protestant,)  so in this book Mary thought that once she gave birth to the Savior she was done and could go back to the "normal" life that she had planed out with Joseph because that was all the the angel asked of her, and that because she wasn't noted as following Jesus around, she in the rest of His family didn't see his vision, etc.   There is also a section which implies that most Catholics do all the Mary worshiping things that Protestants accuse people of, followed by the statement that you could be as great as Mary.  This is followed by a chapter on how one needs Mary to get to Jesus which would seam expected in a book of this type, but not after a chapter on how you all use Mary as a way to not get to Jesus.  At that point in the book I was going to finish it, just to finish it, so when it got to it's ideas on Jesus telling John to treat Mary like his mother, (who in this book is just the unnamed disciple that Jesus loved, because that was what the Bible said literally,)  I was not surprised that this wasn't a touching moment of a son providing for his mother, or a symbol of the Church and how we are all brothers and sisters, but just God once again giving Mary a new job with out asking her first.