Victorious Exile - Softcover

When Echo Lewis was a young staff worker in Madonna Hosue she gave Catherine Doherty a couple short stories to read. Catherine wrote a note back saying, Never stop writing! Echo heeded her words, and has been writing fiction for children and young adults ever since. Neither Echo nor Catherine ever dreamed that Echo would proceed to spend over ten years researching and writing her first nonfiction book, the story of Catherine (Katya's) remarkable life.

Born in Lone Pine, California, Echo spent her first, formative, years in the middle of the Mojave Desert. She then moved with her family to the small railroad town of Garrett, Indiana, where she completed her basic education. After graduating from St. Francis College in Fort Wayne, Echo taught high school for a year, and then journeyed north to the unknown Canadian wilderness, where she visited the Roman Catholic community of Madonna House Apostolate. She planned on staying for the summer, but wound up joining the community, and has been there since 1970. Her middle grade mystery, A Long Way From Welcome, is set mostly in Paris, where the community has a mission house. Victorious Exile is her most recent book.

Among the biographies of Catheirne de Hueck Doherty, Echo Lewis' Katya is a shining star, giving us the heart of one of the most extraordinary lay apostles of our times-the child, the young woman, wife and mother, exile, writer, mystic, foundress, and mother to countless spiritual children who have come from her life poured out in total sacrifice. Rooted in her weakness and poverty, ennobled by a life of prayer, Catherine was a woman of Truth, a woman of Love, a woman of Peace-a sign of contradiction and a powerful sign of hope. Echo Lewis's biography has beautifully expressed it all. --Michael D. O'Brien, author of Father Elijah and many other classics