Growing Up Catholic: The Millennium Edition: An Infinitely Funny Guide for the Faithful, the Fallen and Everyone In-Between - Softcover

The authors of Growing Up Catholic have fully 16 names among them. Here goes: Mary Jane Frances Cavolina, Jeffrey Allen Joseph Stone, Maureen Anne Teresa Kelly and Richard Glen Michael Davis. If this merits a smirk, you'll love Growing Up Catholic. First published in 1985, this classic collection of essays, games, lists, quizzes, drawings and photos inspired two sequels (More Growing Up Catholic and Still Catholic After All These Years) and has now been updated for the millennium. ("After all, let's not forget where this whole millennium thing came from", the Introduction explains.) The many new features of this edition include "Que Sera, Sera: Who Will Be the Next Pope?" and "Ansubstantiation-tray: Can't Anybody Here Speak Latin?" Growing Up Catholic is bubbly but never blasphemous--just irreverent enough to be interesting but not so irreverent as to be an inappropriate confirmation gift. --Paul Power

Mary Jane Frances Cavolina was born in 1954 and grew up in the Bayside section of Queens, New York, where she attended Sacred Heart School. A model student, Jane once received a prayer book for never turning her head during Mass. She attended St. Mary's Girls' High School, where she perfected her understanding of the concept of purgatory, and went on to receive a B.A. Honors degre from Hunter College. Jane is the coauthor, with her sister Ellen Cavolina, of How to Really Watch The Godfather. She lives in Lambertville, New Jersey.

Jeffrey Allen Joseph Stone was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1966 and grew up in Westbrook and Gorman, Maine. He was baptized at an Italian parish in Providence, despite the fact that an associate pastor contended that neither "Jeffrey" nor "Allen" was a saint's name. Among his coauthors, Jeff is the only "public"--a public school student who attended CCD classes at a Catholic school on Saturdays and was accused, along with his fellow CCDers, of messing up the parochial kids' desks. Jeff graduated magna cum laude from Brown University in 1977. Now living in New York City, he is a coauthor of Treasures of the Aquarians and What Color Is Your Toothbrush?

Maureen Anne Teresa Kelly was born in 1957 and was baptized at Most Precious Blood Church in Denver. Her first confession was said at St. Pius X Church in Dallas, and she received her first Holy Communion at Holy Ghost Church in Houston. In parochial school she won a glow-in-the-dark plastic Madonna for selling Holy Childhood Christmas Seals and was a member of the Junior Altar Rosary Society, an organization of young Catholic girls dedicated to straightening church pews and dusting kneelers. She went on to St. Agnes Academy in Houston and Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg, Virginia. A coauthor of Working in France, she lives in Pittsburgh.

Richard Glen Michael Davis was born in 1953 and was baptized at St. Valentine's Church in Cicero, Illinois. After attending Sacred Heart, St. Elizabeth of Hungary, Mary Queen of Heaven, and Christ the King schools, he graduated from Montini High School--Montini being the surname of Pope Paul VI--and went on to receive a B.A. from the University of Illinois. Richard, who lives in Glendale, California, is a coauthor of Treasures of the Aquarians and What Color Is Your Toothbrush? He has written for the Los Angeles Times magazine, the Los Angeles Times and other publications.