Our Lives in His Hands: An Ordinary Couple’s Path to Holiness

According to the famous opening line of Anna Karenina, happy families are all alike while every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Tolstoys lack of interest in ordinary family life seems to be widely shared among authors of literary classics. Even romantic novels usually come to an end when the couple marries, leaving thereader to wonder how happily ever after might have unfolded as the couple began to confront the joys and sorrows that every family experiences. In Olga Marlins true story of the Alvira family, by contrast, the charming romance of Toms and Paquita is only the beginning of an account of how this remarkable pair lived the vocation of marriage in such an exemplary way that the cause for their beatification is currently pending in Rome.1