A Beautiful Second Act: Saints and Soul Sisters Who Taught Me to Age with Grace

Review

Maria Morera Johnson opens *A Beautiful Second Act* not with an inspirational anecdote but with a stroke. At forty-nine, stress and stagnation caught up with her physically, and the warning shot across the bow — her words — became the unlikely catalyst for reinvention. It's a disarming beginning, and it sets the tone for everything that follows: honest, warm, occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and anchored in a Catholic faith that is lived rather than performed. The book's premise is straightforward. Women navigating the second half of life — the empty nest, retirement, aging parents, shifting identity, declining health — need companions for the journey. Johnson supplies twenty of them across ten chapters, pairing canonized saints and contemporary women two by two around a shared theme. Hildegard of Bingen accompanies Marie Curie in the chapter on keeping one's mind sharp. St. Jeanne Jugan walks alongside Rosalynn Carter in the chapter on caregiving. Dolores Hart, the Hollywood actress turned Benedictine nun, and the recently canonized Mama Antula anchor the chapter on unexpected trailblazers. The structure is nimble and the couplings are frequently surprising — which is precisely the point. Johnson is looking for the "What, you too?" moment of recognition, the C.S. Lewis phrase she borrows to describe that flash of kinship with someone whose circumstances mirror your own. The saints are handled with genuine affection and enough historical detail to feel substantive without becoming academic. Johnson has a gift for the telling detail: Hildegard of Bingen's "nerve cookies," formulated to "open your heart and impaired senses," or Elisabeth Leseur's secret diary in which a devout Catholic wife recorded a hidden interior life that would eventually convert her atheist husband after her death. St. Faustina and St. Josephine Bakhita anchor the chapter on spiritual vision; St. Elizabeth of the Trinity closes the book alongside Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, the centenarian chaplain who became a March Madness icon. The range — scientists, mystics, queens, artists, activists — resists the narrowing that sometimes afflicts books about women saints, which can default to martyrs and mystics and little else. The contemporary "soul sisters" are less uniformly successful. Hedy Lamarr and Marie Curie are compelling for their resilience and hidden genius, though neither was Catholic, and their inclusion sits somewhat uneasily alongside canonized women of heroic virtue. Johnson is transparent about her method — these pairings are about shared experience, not shared holiness — but the book is occasionally clearer about what it wants to do than it is at executing the distinction. Readers will draw their own conclusions about whether Lamarr's reinvention and Leseur's sanctity illuminate each other or merely coexist on the page. Where the book is most fully itself is in Johnson's personal voice. She writes about Eucharistic Adoration, the Daughters of Mary, and her husband's health challenges with the same self-deprecating candor she brings to quoting Kenny Rogers or admitting she deleted the email that would change her career. The result is a spiritual companion that feels like a friend — one who has read widely, suffered genuinely, and emerged with both her faith and her humor intact. The Catholic theology of suffering in Chapter 1 — "To suffer is an invitation from God to join our pain and suffering to those of Christ upon the cross" — is not a pious insert but the book's actual spine. The conclusion, titled *Tempus Fugit; Memento Mori*, is a small surprise: a sober, clear-eyed meditation on mortality that earns its place after 120 pages of encouragement. It lifts the book out of the self-help register it occasionally risks and into something more durable. *A Beautiful Second Act* will not satisfy readers seeking rigorous hagiography or deep theological formation. It is a devotional companion — accessible, inviting, spiritually grounded — and on those terms it succeeds with warmth and considerable grace. Sources Ave Maria Press. (2025). A beautiful second act: Saints and soul sisters who taught me to age with grace. https://www.avemariapress.com/products/beautiful-second-act Johnson, M. M. (2025). A beautiful second act: Saints and soul sisters who taught me to age with grace [Excerpt]. Ave Maria Press. Johnson, M. M. (2025). A beautiful second act: Saints and soul sisters who taught me to age with grace [Table of contents]. Ave Maria Press.

✓ Strengths

• ✓Published by Ave Maria Press, the book operates within an explicitly Catholic framework, offering a spiritually grounded account of personal renewal rather than a merely secular self-help narrative.
• ✓The 'second act' metaphor carries genuine anthropological weight: it presupposes that prior failure, loss, or stagnation is not the final word about a person — a claim consistent with the Redeemed state in the CCMMP.
• ✓Books oriented around life's second half typically engage memory and accumulated experience as sources of wisdom, which maps directly onto Aquinas's treatment of prudential memory as an integral part of practical wisdom (ST II-II, q. 49).
• ✓Ave Maria Press titles in this category tend to pair narrative witness with spiritual formation, giving readers both testimony and practical counsel — addressing both the affective and rational dimensions of the person.
• ✓The emphasis on beginning again honors the dignity of the person even in diminishment, resisting the cultural tendency to treat midlife crisis or failure as evidence of irremediable defect.
• ✓Rich engagement with the Communion of Saints. The book profiles twenty women across ten chapters, including canonized saints (Hildegard, Olga, Marianne Cope, Faustina, Josephine Bakhita, Jeanne Jugan, Mama Antula, Elizabeth of the Trinity), Blesseds, and Servants of God — actively inviting readers into intercessory friendship with the saints.

⚠ Considerations

• ⚠The word "badass" appears in the subtitle (struck through on the cover as a visual joke, but present — and it's the title of Johnson's earlier book My Badass Book of Saints). The tone is intentionally playful, but readers sensitive to coarse language in Catholic publishing should know what they're getting.
• ⚠Roughly half the "soul sisters" are not Catholic. Hedy Lamarr, Marie Curie, Grandma Moses, Queen Lili'uokalani, and Rosalynn Carter are included for professional or personal resilience, not holiness. This is Johnson's explicit method — pairing secular changemakers with saints — but readers expecting exclusively Catholic role models may be surprised.
• ⚠Pop-culture register throughout (Kenny Rogers lyrics cited approvingly in Chapter 1, casual asides). Not a doctrinal concern, but readers who prefer a more contemplative or traditionally devotional tone may find the breezy style a mismatch.