The Vatican Cookbook: 500 Years of Classic Recipes, Papal Tributes and Exclusive Images of Life and Art at the Vatican by the Pontifi￾cal Swiss Guard. (Sophia Institute Press, 204 pages, $41.45 on Amazon.ca)

During an era in which coffee￾table books collect dust while handheld social media consumes idle time, there seems little need for another large hardback to join the lot on bookstore discount shelves. But The Vatican Cookbook stands out as an extraordinary and remark￾able collection holding within its pages 500 years of recipes, histor y and photographs.

VATICAN CITY - Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet was third on every ballot during the five rounds of voting that ended with then-Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio becoming Pope Francis, according to a new book.

Single, engaged, married and ordained Catholics share stories of their faith life in a new book by Faith Connections and the Sisters of St. Joseph Toronto.

As one of the 20th century’s pre-eminent Christian spiritual voices, the Catholic priest and missionary Henri Nouwen touched millions of people worldwide with his moving lectures and 39 published books.

What does the Bible have in common with Fifty Shades of Grey or one of John Green’s best-selling young adult novels?

ROME - The Catholic Church, under scrutiny for its response to clergy sex abuse scandals, is backing the publication of an Italian nun’s shocking account of her rape as a teenager and years of subsequent abuse by her parish priest in Milan.

Christmas is a time of sharing, and what better thing to share than our faith? The following are some of the books suitable for Christmas giving that can teach youngsters some of the tenets of the Catholic faith.

Editor’s note: Launched almost 30 years ago as a project at Toronto’s St. Michael’s College School, the Out of the Cold program is a remarkable story of Christian outreach that last winter provided food and shelter to more than 12,000 homeless men and women. That success is celebrated in a just-released book by Catholic Register associate editor Michael Swan. In this excerpt from Out of the Cold: A history of caring, Swan recounts how the program found a home in one downtown Toronto church.

The Catholic Register’s Youth Speak News team has put together a list of faith-based youth titles we recommend for your summer reading.

To read the first installment of YSN Reads, click here.

The Catholic Register’s Youth Speak News team has put together a list of faith-based youth titles we recommend for your summer reading.

For years the outdated library in the basement of the Bathurst diocesan offices saw more mice and rats than readers, said Bishop Daniel Jodoin. But when pipes burst during the spring thaw, new doors were opened to our nation’s past.

The Canny Scot: Archbishop James Morrison of Antigonish, by Peter Ludlow (McGill-Queens University Press, 352 pages, hardcover, $34.95).

For those of us interested in how Church social action really happens, Peter Ludlow has written a fascinating, accessible, full-length biography of Archbishop James Morrison, one of the most important Canadian bishops of the 20th century.

Irish Beth Maddock says she gets a lot of calls from God late at night or early in the morning. It is during these quiet hours of the night she “downloads” the ideas God plants in her mind.

The pressures of work and ministry, unfortunately, limit the time I have available to read as widely as I would like.

Still, addicted as I am to books and knowing that without the insight and stimulation that I draw from them I would forever stagnate spiritually and creatively, I scrupulously carve out some time most days to read. As well, given my ministry and personality, I like to read various genres of books: novels, biography, critical essays and, not least, books on Scripture, theology and spirituality.

Here’s my bias apposite reading: In my freshman year at university, I was introduced to good novels. I realized then how impoverished I’d been without good literature in my life. Since that time, more than 40 years ago, I’ve never been without a novel lying open somewhere within my reach. Good novelists often have insights that psychologists and spiritual writers can only envy, firing the imagination and the emotional intelligence in a way that academic books often cannot. As well, always lying open somewhere within reach too will be a good biography or a book of essays. These serve to stretch my horizons, as these perennially constrict both my imagination and my heart. Finally, there are theological and spirituality books which, given both my temperament and my vocation, I read with passion, but which also serve as a source of professional development for me.

So given these particular appetites, what are the best 10 books that I read in 2014?

Among novels, I particularly recommend these four:

- Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. This isn’t just one of the top books that I read this past year, it is, making an exception for the great classics of English literature, one of the best novels I’ve ever read. This is simply a great book; not quite the Diary of Anne Frank, but a story which moves the heart in a similar fashion.

- Marilynne Robinson, Lila. Robinson picks up some of her characters from Gilead, inserts a lost, young woman named Lila and, through her voice, gives us a near poetry of loneliness and faith. Aside from her emotional depth and perfect prose, Robinson also offers an apologia for the compassion and mercy of God that can help make faith more credible to many of its skeptics today.

- Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings. This is a powerful historical novel about both the evil of slavery and of sexism. Mirroring the Christian story of redemption, good ultimately triumphs, but not before someone has to sweat some blood in martyrdom. Kidd is always worth reading, but this book stands out, even for a novelist of her calibre.

- Jhumpa Lahire, The Lowland. Like many of Lahire’s novels this story also sets itself within the particular trials of emigrating from India to America, but the flashlight that it shines into human relationships helps lay bare some very universal struggles.

Among biographical essays, two books stood out.

- Trevor Herriot, The Road is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul. The flow of the book follows its title. Herriot does a walking pilgrimage across part of Saskatchewan’s prairies, a land roamed for centuries by the buffalo, and lets nature and desire speak to his soul. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book about nature, human nature, sexuality, faith and desire.

- Nancy Rappaport, In Her Wake, A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide. In this book, Rappaport does what all of us should do if we have lost a loved one to suicide, namely, work through that person’s story and find the threads to cleanse and redeem his or her memory.

Among theological and spirituality books, I recommend:

- James Martin, A Pilgrimage. Martin at his best, offering a good, balanced, healthy Christology, presented in a reader-friendly way. Scholarship accessible to everyone.

- Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark. She made the cover of Time magazine for this book, deservedly. Taylor offers an insight into the dark night of the soul for those who can’t, or won’t, read more technical theological literature.

- Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth, What He Wanted, Who He Was. This is more of a scholarly book, though still pretty accessible to the non-professional. It combines solid scholarship, creative insight, good balance and committed Christian faith.

- Christian Salenson, Christian de Cherge, A Theology of Hope. De Cherge was the abbott of the community of Trappist monks who were martyred in Algeria in 1996. This book collects his key writings, particularly as they pertain to the question of the relationship of Christianity to other religions, especially to Islam. Faith, it is said, is built upon the blood of martyrs. Future interreligious dialogue can be built on both the blood and the writings of this martyr. An exceptional book, though hardly surprising, given the exceptional faith and character of de Cherge.

(Fr. Rolheiser can be reached at www.ronrolheiser.com,)

VATICAN CITY - The third volume of Pope Benedict XVI's book on Jesus of Nazareth should be published before Christmas, the Vatican said.

The volume, focusing on the Gospel accounts of Jesus' infancy and childhood, will be the third and final volume in the series of books the Pope has written "to make known the figure and message of Jesus," the Vatican said in a statement Sept. 21.

The statement announced a Vatican publishing house agreement with the Italian publisher Rizzoli to handle sales of the rights to the book in languages other than Italian and the German original. Herder, the Pope's longtime German publisher, will handle the original German-language text.

The Vatican's plan is to release the book simultaneously in the world's major languages, including English, in time for Christmas.

The first volume of Jesus of Nazareth, covering the period from Jesus' baptism to His Transfiguration, was published in 2007. The second volume, looking at His passion and death, came out in 2011.