ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER -- Mary Lea Carroll’s book Saint Everywhere: Travels in Search of the Lady Saints, describes her eight quests over 20 years of travels, to visit the shrines of the Lady Saints.
This mission took her as close to her hometown of Pasadena as Glendale, California, and as far away as Prague, Mexico City, Avila, and Bosnia. Carroll’s book is a chronicle of the lives of remarkable women like the Virgin Mother Mary, also known as Our Lady of Guadalupe; Elizabeth Ann Bayley Seton also known as St. Elizabeth Ann Seton; and Teresa Sánchez de Cepeda y Ahumada also known as St Teresa of Ávila.
Carroll’s life has been spent in Pasadena, except for time attending and graduating from San Francisco State. She worked in travel, the theatre and Hollywood, while helping her husband with his business and raising their children but her writing life was limited to a never-realized dream of writing sitcoms, stints teaching creative writing and the newsletter copy she wrote for her children’s schools.