Can you introduce yourself to our readers? Tell us a bit about your background with Fr. Bradley and what led you to editing this book?
I have been helping Fr. Bradley with editorial work since 1982 when he asked me to edit a long article he was writing that he believed had language too complicated for the average person to understand, the people he called “the guards and tackles of the Church.” His older brother, Fr. Richard Bradley, S.J. constantly told him that he needed to stop focusing on the scholarly quarterbacks because it was the average guards and tackles who needed to hear what he was teaching about the Holy Eucharist and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Since I was then the managing editor of weekly newsletters for criminal justice personnel, Father liked my writing style and the simplicity of the articles and asked me if I would volunteer to be his editor.
I’m a retired criminologist with a doctorate in police administration. Fr. Bradley convinced me to earn a Master of Arts degree in theology/catechetics from the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome as he believed this would help me understand what he was trying to communicate in his articles, books and retreat conferences. He was right. I am also a secular Franciscan and for six years was spiritual formation minister at Sacred Heart Fraternity in Austin, Texas.
This book came about solely because of Jesus and serving on an adoration team in my parish. Before he died in late 2013, Fr. Bradley asked me to promise I would find a publisher for his book, Our Lady’s Psalter, which contains 150 meditations on every bead of the Traditional Rosary. He was convinced that the Holy Spirit gave him these meditations to help bring souls to Jesus through the Blessed Mother and set these souls on the pathway to eternal life in Heaven. Angelico Press Publisher John Riess saw the value in making this book available to everyone. Once it was launched in March 2025, he asked me if there was another book. Yes, Fr. Bradley left me three large crates of his writings, retreat talks on cassettes, sermons and theology books, going back to 1941 when he entered the Society of Jesus. I am convinced this wealth of knowledge about our Catholic Faith should be shared with all who are interested in learning the Truth that has been handed on to us by the Apostles and the Magisterium of the Church for 2,000 years.
I asked Jesus what I should do for a second book, and He told me it should be the primary thing Father taught all his life: leading people to live within His Sacred Heart through the Holy Eucharist and a lifestyle that trudges up the narrow pathway to Heaven. Thus, the book The Pathway to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: A Rule of Life, was born in the Adoration Chapel at Emmaus Catholic Church in Lakeway, Texas, in April 2025. Jesus showed me what to include in the book from the large amount of materials I had: retreat talks on cassettes that needed to be transcribed for chapters, written articles to include in the book, and the materials Father had prepared as a Rule of Life for the Laity. It was a long journey, but I had Jesus guiding me along the way, even telling me, when I thought I finished the manuscript, that a chapter on Penance and another on Salvific Suffering were needed in the book as both are crucial to finding our way to living within His Sacred Heart.
Who is this book for and what do you hope readers will gain from it?
This book is for all members of the laity, including teens, who want to grow in holiness and find their way to Heaven by embracing the Holy Eucharist and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is also very helpful for diocesan priests, deacons and seminarians who are seeking a clear path to formulating their own Rule of Life.
To help everyone grow in holiness, Fr. Bradley developed a Rule of Life in three stages to help us mature in the spiritual life. Each Catholic who wishes to adopt a Rule of Life can use this framework to make the Rule personal based on his or her state in life. The Rule of Life provides guidelines for spending daily time with God in accordance with the Great Commandment: To love God with our whole heart and soul and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
In assembling this book from Fr. Bradley’s sermons, essays, retreat talks and conferences over the years from 1943 until his death in 2013, my goal was to listen to what Jesus was telling me He wanted souls to learn, especially to understand His Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist and to find the time in our busy days to visit Him in the Tabernacle and Monstrance in adoration chapels. He wants souls to become more devout and fervent in their practice of the Faith that has been given as a gift to them through Baptism, to live a life in union with Him, and to be prepared to enter eternal life in Heaven when our Father calls them to their forever home. He wants each of us to know how to fight the temptations of the Evil One daily by following the pathway to live within His Most Sacred Heart. His Heart is wide open and welcomes each one of us to enter and dwell within it right here and now in our present lives.
What is the central message you most want readers to take away?
It is the message Fr. Bradley taught throughout his 58 years of priesthood: That we can enter into the Sacred Heart of Jesus and live there here on earth, and the pathway to enter His Heart is through belief that the Holy Eucharist is really His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, the Real Presence. To live within His Sacred Heart is to live a life of joy, peace of soul, and unending love that He pours out on us. By living this life with Him, we then pour out His love on everyone we encounter in this earthly journey of ours. There is no better way to live.
Were there any surprising discoveries you made while assembling this book of Fr. Bradley’s work?
Yes, I learned things about Father and what he taught that I didn’t know even after so many years spent assisting him. My first discovery was that I didn’t know as much about the Holy Eucharist as I thought I did and the importance of a devout and quiet thanksgiving after receiving Holy Communion.
Second, it was a discovery to me to learn about Pope John Paul’s essay on salvific suffering and Fr. Bradley’s explanation of it. In high school the sisters always told us to “offer it up” when something bad happened, like walking into a wall and getting a bloody nose, but I wasn’t quite sure what this really meant. Once I worked my way through Father’s essay on salvific suffering, I then knew exactly that every single thing that causes us pain, worry, or distress needs to be offered to Jesus, and we then obtain grace and blessings for participating with Him in His suffering as He carried the Cross and died on it for us.
Third, there was some of Father’s humorous side showing up in even the most serious writing. In Chapter Four, The Eucharist—From Holy Communion to Adoration, he mentions that when the second millennium began “God had some good heretics lined up” and “I think we can thank God for these heretics…” I couldn’t believe that Father was praising the need for heretics, but he did it to prove a point. That was worth an unexpected, good laugh.
What was the most challenging part of assembling this book and editing it?
Satan did NOT want this book to be published! He did everything he could think of to harass me and delay the work. The most difficult part of the work for me was transcribing the old cassette tapes and getting every single word written down by hand first so I could then enter the chapters into the computer. In the process, the Evil One destroyed three cassette recorders. I had to keep buying new ones and I now have cassette recorder #4 to begin work on a new book of Father’s retreat talks and writings.
Then there were the attacks on my computer, twice, and I had to call the young man who takes care of it to come fix it. One day, when I planned to finish the chapter on the Sacred Heart, my cell phone mysteriously broke while turned off and in my purse during morning Mass. It simply did not even turn on. That day there was no work done on the Sacred Heart chapter as I spent four hours at the cell phone company while a young tech worked to fix it, telling me twice that I probably had to buy a new phone. But I sat there praying one Rosary after another and finally the tech said: “I fixed it!” Yes, everything was back to normal with the phone. But my work that day was postponed.
Then there were the continuous avalanches of spam calls, like 27 to my landline in one day. Each time I had to get up from my work area where I was transcribing tapes and go to the phone in my office to press Block. And there were the spam calls to the cell phone, every 15 minutes to interrupt my work. It was an endless harassment.
The worst attack came when I was transcribing the final tape of nine for a retreat Father gave in the 1980s on the Sacred Heart. Midway into Side A of the tape, the recorder snapped it. There was no way to fix it. I cried and prayed myself to sleep that night. At 3 a.m. I awoke to hear Jesus telling me to go into a box of Father’s tapes in my office closet and I would find another copy of the cassette. I looked through the box. There were 49 tapes and none of the first 48 were about the Sacred Heart. There at the bottom of the box was tape 9 of the Sacred Heart retreat, in new condition. I was able to finish transcribing it as soon as I had a new cassette recorder delivered to me.
The lesson learned is that if Satan does not want any work accomplished to benefit Jesus and help souls, he will do everything he can think of to stop the work in its tracks. But stay with the work and Jesus will help defeat Satan’s destructive plans. The Pathway to the Sacred Heart of Jesus: A Rule of Life is now published.
What was the research process like?
It was not as difficult as I first thought when I began considering a new book after Our Lady’s Psalter was published. Even though I had two big boxes of cassette tapes to choose from and piles of folders with Father’s various writings to look through, Jesus made it easy by telling me what He wanted and exactly which folders and crates contained the materials for the new book. When He said He wanted a chapter on the Sacrament of Penance in the book, after I thought I had finished the book, He told me there was a folder in one of the crates with everything Fr. Bradley had published on Penance and that one of the articles was the perfect chapter for the book. Sure enough, when I found the folder, there it was.
The only real research I did was making sure every Latin word and phrase was correct, checking Scripture verses, reading through some of the documents of Vatican II that Father cited, and preparing the materials for the Resource Section in the back of the book. Most of the Resource items were those Father used as handouts for a graduate school course he taught on the Rule of Life, but I had to condense the encyclical of Pope Leo XIII that is included as a Resource. That was a little difficult as I asked myself: How do I boil down a Pope who is a little on the wordy side?
How long did completing the book from initial concept to publication take you?
It was 14 months from prayerfully listening to Jesus guiding me on what He wanted, first giving me the title, and then showing me the written essays and the retreat conferences, talks to Catholic groups, and sermons on the cassette tapes that I should use to compose the book. The difficult work of transcribing the tapes and videos word for word took several months, along with proofreading and finally reading through the typeset copy Angelico Press sent me on a deadline so that it could be released on the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart, June 12, 2026.
What was the reception like for the earlier Fr. Bradley book you worked on, Our Lady’s Psalter?
Our Blessed Mother has seen to it that this marvelous book, which Fr. Bradley called “his love letter to Our Lady,” was exceptionally well received by those who love the Rosary and pray it frequently, if not daily. I was surprised when one of my fellow Franciscans who traveled to Ireland sent me photos of Our Lady’s Psalter on display in the gift shop at Our Lady of Knock Shrine. That was due to my interview with Catholic podcaster Robert Nugent in Ireland, who is also very popular here in the United States. Because of his podcast, I began hearing from priests around the USA whose vocations were inspired when they served as altar boys for Fr. Bradley at various parishes where he lived in Seattle, the New York City area, the Diocese of Arlington, Virginia, and the Diocese of Austin, Texas. In my own parish, the book has become very popular amongst the daily Mass attendees and several of them have bought copies for other parishioners and family members. I am also grateful to Michael Hichborn of the Lepanto Institute, who hosted a podcast about Our Lady’s Psalter and brought it to the attention of many Catholics who pray the Rosary daily and lead Rosary teams in their parishes.
This book, the only one of its kind in the history of the Church that has long meditations on all 150 beads of the Traditional Rosary, will live on as more and more people read it and recommend it to others. It’s not a book to be read through all at once, but instead is a book to take to Adoration, to pray with before Mass, and to use for meditation on each of the mysteries. It took 10 years for Father to write, as he was inspired by the Holy Spirit as he prayed the Rosary in front of the Tabernacle. The meditations from the Holy Spirit did not come to him daily but instead arrived slowly over those 10 years. This is a book that people are telling me is a genuine treasure for the Church and anyone who wants to grow in a deeper love of Our Blessed Mother as she leads souls to her Son Jesus.
Can we expect more Fr. Bradley publications in the future?
Yes, as Jesus has already let me know that He wants me to work on a book He has titled Behold Your Mother. Sure enough, when I looked through the files and cassette tapes, there are the chapters. Now the long journey to assemble the book begins. Father’s writings and talks on Our Blessed Mother are beautiful and I hope to remain in good health so that I can bring this book forward to publication. Please, everyone, keep me in your prayers as I accept this new project that God has assigned to me.
