Stephen F Auth’s The Missionary of Wall Street (Sophia Institute Press, 184pp, £14.40/$15) is subtitled From Managing Money to Saving Souls on the Streets of New York. It reads as if one were watching a particularly gripping film with a traditional storyline: the cops fighting robbers with all the attendant dangers of a game of life and death. Indeed, this is what it is. In ordinary life it is easy to forget what Auth’s book reminds readers again and again: that our lives are a spiritual battle in which victory is not a foregone conclusion and that Satan’s whole strategy is to keep us from heaven. The author, a successful investor, regularly participates with other missionaries from the lay apostolate Regnum Christi in asking New York pedestrians if they are Catholic, and following this up with an invitation to go to Confession in a church nearby with priests already waiting in the confessionals. Apart from lapsed, too-busy, frightened and defensive Catholics, the group talks to atheists, those who call themselves “spiritual but not religious” and those from other religions. Their main thrust, however, is to rekindle the fire of faith in lukewarm members of the Church. Missions take place particularly during Holy Week and Advent, in order to focus their interviewees’ minds on the forthcoming feasts and how well prepared they are to celebrate them. Auth includes some eerie stories which remind one that miracles – not simply coincidences – do occur. Sometimes they meet someone walking a dog and trying to avoid them: the dogs have been known to lie down on the pavement and refuse to budge until their owners have agreed to walk into the church (where helpers are ready to hold dog leads during Confession). Could such a mission be effective on the streets of London? St Patrick’s, Soho Square, does engage in a form of pavement missionary activity with its regular Nightfever apostolate. Perhaps readers of the book will discover this dramatic, American-style, friendly form of hard-sell is worth trying out – even in our more buttoned-up secular society.