Today's first reading at Mass is the story of Susanna, found in Daniel chapter 13. If you don't have a Catholic Bible, you will not find this inspiring story of lust, sin, false witness, virtue, and justice. It is quite inspiring, and reminds one (just a bit) of St. Maria Goretti.
One of the great treasures I gained upon my conversion was the gift of the books titled Deutero-Canonical ( or labelled by some apocryphal, a term I prefer to reserve for such as the Gospel of Thomas or the Proto-Envangelion of James). For a long time, I was uneasy with the book of Tobit, the Book of Judith, the Wisdom of Solomon, but I have come to appreciate the value of their contents. I was recently leafing through my copy of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer (the old Anglican equivalent to the Roman Missal) and found that many of the first readings for Morning and Evening Prayer were taken from these books. I also recently learned that the original King James Bible included these books integrated into the Bible (not segregated out as they usually are in the rare cases where they are included in a Protestant translation of the Bible), and that it was not originally the intent of the Protestant movement to delete these books from the Canon. Anyhow, If you have not read or heard the story of Susanna, please read it.
