The Sinner's Guide
Louis of Granada stands without a peer among Dominican ascetical writers, and throughout the seventeenth century his writings were a constant source of inspiration and education for Christians throughout the civilized world. He reached his maturity during the Council of Trent and at the high point of the Golden Age of Spain. He died in 1588, when the imperial supremacy of Spain was beginning to wane.  Both as a preacher and a writer, Fray Louis dedicated himself assiduously to the indoctrination and spiritual formation of the common people. A contemporary writer stated: "Water girls carried his books under their arms and the market women read them as they waited to sell their merchandise". But another contemporary said of him with disdain that he wrote for the "wives of carpenters", forgetting, perhaps, that the wife of a carpenter was the Mother of God and the Queen of angels and saints.  Long before St. Francis de Sales appeared on the scene, Louis of Granada was preaching the traditional, orthodox doctrine of the universal vocation of all Christians to the perfection of charity. He was par excellence a theologian for the laity, but in addition to the rank-and-file Christians, the books of Fray Louis were read with great profit by some of the great saints of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We mention only the following: St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, St. Charles Borromeo, St. Peter Alcántara, St. Rose of Lima, St. Francis de Sales and St. Louise de Marillac.  The bibliography of Louis of Granada would run for several pages but we should at least make mention of four outstanding works: Book of Prayer and Meditation (Libro de Oración y Meditación), The Sinners' Guide (Guía de Pecadores), Memorial of the Christian Life (Memorial de la Vida Cristiana) and Introduction to the Creed (Introducción del Símbolo de la Fe). The first two books received the widest diffusion; in a short time they were translated into more than twenty foreign languages. For example, a modern Jesuit historian, Father Bayle, has stated that "The Sinners' Guide was one of the bulwarks that sustained a hidden but vital Christianity for two centuries [in Japan], while both in Europe and Japan it was believed dead".