Papist detective lit, recommended

You know what it's like when you take the kids to the library by yourself and one of the darlings is at one of those ages: You speed through the aisles in hot pursuit, snatching randomly from the shelves at hand if you're to have any hope of taking home a book without pictures.

This meticulous method of book selection actually paid off on a recent trip: I snagged an old (checkout stamps dating back to 1945!) copy of G.K. Chesterton's The Father Brown Omnibus.

If you haven't encountered Fr. Brown before, these are short-story length whodunits, mostly murder mysteries, solved by the cleric in question. Some are better than others; I think some suffer a bit in the contemporary American rereading due to their antiquated, mostly European setting--but all display a pithy insight into human nature, much like that of C.S. Lewis (no wonder Lewis found him so persuasive). Definitely worth the read--especially since the short, stand-alone chapters make it convenient if you might have to put your book down and not get back to it for awhile...

A selection that seems rather appropriate for Lent:
In The Secret of Father Brown, the little cleric explains his "method" for solving baffling crimes:

"You see, it was I who killed all those people."
[Say what? his companion wonders.]

..."I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, commiting the murder. I didn't actually kill the men by material means, but that's not the point. Any brick or bit of machinery might have killed them by material means. I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realized that I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action. It was once suggested to me by a friend of mine, as a sort of religious exercise."
...
"No man's really any good till he knows how bad he is, or might be; till he's realised exactly how much right he has to all this snobbery, and in sneering, and talking about 'criminals,' as if they were apes in a forest ten thousand miles away; till he's got rid of the dirty self-deception of talking about low types and deficient skulls; till he's squeezed out of his soul the last drop of the oil of the Pharisees; till his only hope is somehow or other to have captured one criminal, and kept him safe and sane under his own hat."