All

A new poll finds that most registered voters who are white Christians would vote for Republican Donald Trump over Democrat Joe Biden if the 2024 presidential election were held today. Most registered voters who are black Protestants or religious “nones” – those who self-identify as atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular” – would vote for Biden
 

The post Voters’ views of Trump and Biden differ sharply by religion appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

The recent pro-Palestinian student protests on elite university campuses across the country offer fascinating, if somewhat depressing, insights into the state of modern American culture. It is not so much that the lunatics have taken over the asylum as the kindergartners have taken over the nursery. But the protests are more sinister than childish because they are motivated by hatred of Jews, and by the Mephistophelean spirit of negation or, in religious terms, the spirit of desecration.
 

The post What the pro-Palestinian campus protests are really about appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

A criminal investigation into the Archdiocese of New Orleans is based on a suspicion that it may be linked to child sex trafficking, according to allegations presented in a search warrant granted to Louisiana State Police. That warrant alleges that multiple sex abuse victims provided statements that claim they were transported to other parishes and outside of Louisiana, where they were sexually abused. It further alleges a scheme within the archdiocese in which abused children were instructed to provide “gifts” to certain priests, which were meant to signal that the children were targets for sexual abuse. When the alleged events took place is unclear.

The post Archdiocese of New Orleans suspected of child sex trafficking, warrant shows appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

The duty of parents to children is to rule while avoiding exasperating severity on the one hand and excessive indulgence on the other. God gives parents a child as so much plastic material that can be molded for good or evil. What if God placed a precious diamond in the hands of parents and told them to inscribe on it a sentence which would be read on the Last Day and shown an index of their thoughts and ideals? What caution they would exercise in their selection! And yet the example parents give their children will be that by which they will be judged on the Last Day.

This tremendous responsibility never means that parents, when their children do wrong, should provoke them to wrath, for wrath leads to discouragement. Parents hold the place of God in the house. If they act as tyrants they will develop unconsciously anti-religious sentiments in their children. Children love approbation and can be easily cast down into despair when blamed excessively for trivial faults. With great difficulty can children ever be taught the Love and Mercy of God, if His vice-regents in the home act without and are so difficult to please. When good intentions are rated low, and children are put under the ban of dishonor, they are likely to show they are no better than their parents think they are.

Children came into their own with Christianity when its Divine Founder said: “Suffer the little children to come unto Me, and forbid them not for such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He consecrated childhood by becoming a child, playing on the green hills of Nazareth and watching the mother eagles stir among their young. From that day it became eternally true: “Train up the child in the way he should go; and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

As the twig is bent, so is the tree. It is interesting when one sees children, to speculate from the way they act as to the kind of homes from which they come. As one can judge the vitality of a tree from the fruit it produces, so one can tell the character of the parents from their children. One knows that from certain homes there will never be an errant child, while a glance at a mother or father will reveal a future full of fears for the child.

The present tendency is to shift responsibility to the school. But it must be remembered that education will make as much difference to a child as soil and air and sunshine do. A seed will grow better in one soil and climate than in another, but the kind of tree that grows depends on the kind of seed that is sowed. Then too, one must inquire if education is of the mind alone, or also of the will. Knowledge is in the mind; character is in the will. To pour knowledge into the mind of a child, without disciplining his will to goodness, is like putting a rifle into the hands of a child. Without education of the mind a child could be a stupid devil. With education of the mind, but not love of goodness, a child could grow up to be a clever devil.

The nation of tomorrow is the youth of today. They are the assurance of progress; the fresh arrows to a better future; the wings of aspiration. Even in war the strength of a nation is not in its bombs, but in the soldiers who defend it. In peace, it is not economics or politics that save, but good economists and good politicians—but to be that, they must be good children. To be that, there must in the first place be the grace of God; in the second place, in the hoe lessons of love and truth; in the schools knowledge and self-control.

Even in their early failures, the parents are not to be discouraged, remembering that fifteen centuries ago when the heart of a mother was broken for her wanton boy, St. Ambrose said to her: “Fear not, Monica; the child of so many tears cannot perish.” That vain and wanton boy grew up to be the great and learned St. Augustine, whose “Confessions” everyone ought to read before he dies. – from Way to Happiness (1953)

The post On educating children appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

For many years, according at least to the U.S. State Department and other Western diplomatic agencies, the “Palestinians” were wishing for a separate state. This is the “two-state” solution to the “Israeli” problem, said to be otherwise intractable. (I will be placing my scare quotes carefully.)

Most Americans, and probably most Catholics, have been willing to concede this as a diplomatic fix; it gives us something glib to say. Most Israelis are, also, willing to be glib. They offer, or used to offer, “land for peace.” This never worked for them.

I do not have the space or patience to rehearse the whole history of the Arab response to “Zionism,” from Ottoman times to the present. Since 1948, it has often been expressed with murderous violence, through aggressive wars and acts of terrorism. Repeatedly, neighboring Arab states have tried to wipe the “new” entity off the map.

This was unwise, on the part of the Arabs, because they lost every war, to an Israel fighting valiantly for survival; including at the beginning when the odds were entirely on the Arab side.

A fecund people, the Arabs in and around the old British mandate of Palestine had essentially two options. They could stay and become citizens (there are two million Arab Israelis now), or they could flee and become refugees. Half fled: voluntarily, unlike the Jews who were evicted from almost every Muslim country.

These hard facts will not be accepted by the enemies of Israel. They continue to wish Israel would go away; yet it won’t, and the genocidal fantasy has led them to a terrible fate.

Of course, the “Palestinian” leaders have earned the greatest punishment for this, because they established a vile, psychopathic “education” system over their refugees, with much supplementary propaganda. They have in effect brainwashed this population, to entrap their loyalties. That they have been successfully brainwashed can be demonstrated, for “Palestinian” views are not shared by the larger Arab world, who are even less welcoming to “Palestinians” than to Israelis.

It takes some effort to create a class of fanatic Jew-killers, such as we saw on October 7th. It is morally worse even than the corruption with which these leaders have enriched and armed themselves; and even than the specific acts of hostage-taking, savage torture, and gratuitous killing done to whoever comes their way. They have delivered their own people into the Hell that is Gaza.

By the concept of Intifada, they have spread their scheme of violent chaos wherever Arab emigrants can be found, and who have children who can be radicalized. For Muslims living away from the traditional Ummah are easily infected with the Islamist bacillus, a disease that invades and spoils Arab life and religion.

This is the reason why conversion to Christianity has become the only practical alternative for Muslims who find themselves at a dead end. For Christianity provides a path out of the quagmire (whereas atheism negates even Islam’s merits).

The Catholic Church could help, by welcoming the Muslim convert and caring particularly for his needs, in the spirit of a Holy Crusade. Her present attitude, of avoiding trespass into Muslim territory and showing timid, artificial “tolerance” for the very Islamic doctrines that are used to oppress Christians, is a failure of our obligation to the Muslim neighbor, and an abandonment of  Christ.

Instead, let’s grow spines.

The excuse for spinelessness is mostly fear. We think the Muslims might kill us if we make an evangelical approach, and sometimes they will. But Saint Francis did not hesitate in his journey to Damietta, or in his approach to the Sultan of Egypt, when he lovingly presented the basic Catholic truths.

(If God is on our side, who can be against us?)

From what I could follow in the news this week, events on the campuses of Columbia, Fordham, UCLA, and so on suggest a reversal of our pusillanimity in the face of Hamas rioting. We begin to see that a large majority of Americans – about three-quarters of those polled – understand the points I was making above, and that they believe the “Palestinians” are not victims, but have often got what they deserved.

The “beatdown” administered by blue-state police is thus a hopeful sign that Americans are not incurably stupid. Moreover, developments in the Sunni Arab world give hope, too, that they will stand with Israel in opposition to Iran and its proxies. Certainly, their sympathy with the “Palestinians” evaporated long ago.

We must be careful what we wish for. Under terrorist leadership for many decades, the “Palestinian” wish for freedom, “from the river to the sea,” and thus for the extinction of Israel, created a situation for them in which their only friends are malevolent crazies.

It is not just a question of prayer, for prayer is not always beneficial. As Christians ought to know, it matters what you pray for. Praying for peace, while setting conditions, is praying to the Devil. And it gets worse when the Devil sets out to reward our prayers.

We do not love with CONDITIONS. God makes His answers indifferently to them, and He helpfully ignores what is not good for us.

The Western peacenik thinks that peace and all good things can be advanced by dialogue, and in this case dialogue “between the faiths,” under rules written by those who have no religion at all. It is one of many propositions we might have hoped would have perished on October 7th, rather than so many women and children.

“Peace talks” have generally contributed to the occasion for war, and all the peace talks in which Israel ever participated, have ended poorly. The most promising, such as Oslo, cost them most dear.

Hamas was the anfractuous reward for the painful Israeli evacuation of Gaza in 2005, the product of some “peace process.”

For Israel has something to learn, too: that glib wishes bring the opposite result, in every case.

The post Careful What You Wish For appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Last week, Congress voted to send $95 billion in additional aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. The largest portion was to Ukraine – $61 billion – after the Congress had previously approved $114 billion, for a total of $175 billion. The total GDP of Ukraine in 2022 was $160.5 billion. In other words, we basically … Continue reading "Congress Passes Mega-Billions More For Ukraine"

The post Congress Passes Mega-Billions More For Ukraine appeared first on Antiwar.com.

Despite billions of dollars of military aid, equipment maintenance, training, intelligence, and planning from the United States and its partners in the political West, the war in Ukraine is going very badly. The Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, Oleksandr Syrskyi, says “the situation at the front has escalated.” He says that Russia has … Continue reading "Troops on the Ground: Biden’s Plan for Ukraine"

The post Troops on the Ground: Biden’s Plan for Ukraine appeared first on Antiwar.com.

The mass protests at dozens of US universities cannot be reduced to a stifling and misleading conversation about antisemitism. Thousands of American students across the country are not protesting, risking their own futures and very safety, because of some pathological hate for the Jewish people. They are doing so in a complete rejection of, and … Continue reading "American Intifada for Gaza: What Should We Expect?"

The post American Intifada for Gaza: What Should We Expect? appeared first on Antiwar.com.

The late Murray Polner wrote this article for Antiwar.com in 2000.  On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guardsmen killed four college students and wounded nine others – one of them, Dean Kahler, is paralyzed below the waist – on the campus of Kent State University. Nobody was found guilty of the bloodletting. On that awful … Continue reading "The May 4th Deaths: Kent State 54 Years Ago"

The post The May 4th Deaths: Kent State 54 Years Ago appeared first on Antiwar.com.

My dear friend Bruce Charlton – an Orthospherean from before our first days and indeed the moderator at his own site of the discussion in which we decided to call this blog “the Orthosphere,” a pen friend of mine for years beforehand, and an honored contributor here still (so far as WordPress is concerned, he can post here anything he likes) – has it seems taken my recent post on the difficulties that bedevil radical ontological pluralism as a philosophical challenge. It was not intended as such, but so be it. It would be cheap of me to ignore his response, so, here goes: a fisking, alas.

At his own site, far more influential than ours, he writes:

Kristor, of The Orthosphere, is very good at expounding his own metaphysical assumptions (which are essentially those of Thomistic Roman Catholicism); but when it comes to making a comparative evaluation of different metaphysical “systems”… well, he just doesn’t ever do it!

I used to do it. But after four decades of work on it I moved on to other problems, because it became clear to me on the basis of a wide ranging comparative evaluation of different metaphysical systems that the traditional, classical Platonico-Aristotelian system of the West, and so of the Church (Roman and Orthodox, and thus derivatively of Protestantism), simply works better than the alternatives (along the way I considered process metaphysics, Tychism (of Peirce and of later quantum thinkers), Bergsonian philosophy, advaita Vedanta, Taoism, Sufism, Spinozan and Eleatic monism, Democritean materialism, Deism, LaPlacean determinism, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Hermeticism, and a number of others (indeed, I even for a few weeks seriously entertained pagan polytheism of the Viking and Greek sorts (on account of my interest in nature mysticism and the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were both taken seriously by many serious people), and later of the Mormon sort; come to think of it, I suppose the only major systems I did not investigate were those of Gnosticism (which seemed silly prima facie, like New Age) and Neo-Platonism (which I figured was just Platonism, and I’d get around to it (I did))). The classical metaphysics of the West subsumes all the good bits of the other systems. After a while indeed it seemed to me that most of those other systems were either protoevangelia or partial quotations and borrowings from the mature Christian metaphysical tradition.

In a recent post; Kristor discusses the matter of whether reality is ultimately one (monism) or many (pluralism). By his argument, Kristor apparently supposes that he has logically rejected pluralism as in essence incoherent, therefore necessarily wrong.

On the contrary, I suppose that reality is both a Many and a One. It looks that way to me: I suffer at every moment a Many that is at One, so that many disparate things hang together coherently, indeed immaculately, and always. The difficulty then is to reconcile these two notions.

We run into trouble when we dully suppose – allured by an Ockhamian temptation to improper reduction – that reality is either simply pluralist or simply monist. Neither of those options can be correct, because they both founder immediately on our daily experience – on experience per se, so far as it has been ever vouchsafed to us. At every moment we all apprehend both a Many and a One. There’s no way around it.

Yet what he has done in his discourse is merely to demonstrate that when someone has accepted the assumptions of monism – then swapped out the assumptions that everything is one and replaced it with an assumption of pluralism, the result does not make sense.

I am not a monist. Monism is inadequate to experience. And it is logically incoherent; indeed, it refutes itself: on monism, there can be no such thing as an argument for monism. So, I have not accepted the assumptions of monism.

Kristor’s argument does not at all mean that pluralism is necessarily incoherent; for example when pluralism is one part of a different set of fundamental assumptions concerning the nature of reality.

On radical ontological pluralism, entities have nothing essentially to do with each other, as a matter of their common basic being. In that case, they cannot together form an integral cosmos, for there is no way to obtain a system of entities out of entities that can have nothing to do with each other. We find that there is an integral cosmos. Ergo, ¬ radical ontological pluralism. QED.

Bruce has not addressed this argument.

Perhaps he advocates something other than radical ontological pluralism as I have characterized it, so that my argument does not really touch his metaphysical opinions. Or perhaps he does think that radical ontological pluralism as I have characterized it is true, but has in mind metaphysical axioms that render it agreeable to our experience of an integral cosmos. At least in the conversation so far – three posts, now, counting this one – he has not been forthcoming about either of those alternatives.

Now if on the other hand plural entities *do* have something essentially to do with each other, why then they can well proceed to form together an integral cosmos – to have relations with each other, to exert causal effects upon each other, and so forth, and so together to form a world system, a cosmos. But if they do have this thing in common, the question then becomes, whence that thing? Is it in them essentially or necessarily? Why? How did it get into them in the first place?

Excursus: So we get to the familiar cosmological arguments.

NB: on radical ontological pluralism, none of the cosmological arguments can get underway; for, on that ontology, there can be no such thing as a cosmos, from which such arguments might proceed.

And perhaps Kristor regards his own assumptions as necessarily true because he does not acknowledge that they lead to any fundamental problems.

For example, I think he does not acknowledge the ineradicable depth of the problem of explaining genuine free agency for Men in a reality conceptualized as created from nothing by an “omni-God.”

Nah, this is easy. It is not logically possible to create actualities, that as actual can act, in any way other than as free, i.e., *as capable of action:* of decision among real options, thus also (to boot) of wicked decisions. Easy.

Nor do I think Kristor appreciates the ineradicable depth of the problem of accounting for the existence of evil in a reality wholly created by a wholly Good (and omnipotent) God.

Again, this is easy. If creatures are real, then they can really act; and if they can really act, then they can really choose between options, some of which are necessarily suboptimal. Their knowledge being finite and therefore imperfect, some of them are almost certain to choose unwisely and suboptimally. Some do, and catastrophe ensues. A sad situation, but unavoidable if you want actual and free creatures to begin with, who can do things like love, create, worship, enjoy …

Easy.

I think Kristor does not acknowledge the depth of these problems, because he is satisfied by those abstract and complex “answers” provided by Thomism.

Actually, I figured out theodicy on my own, before I began to read Aquinas seriously. I got started on it because I was personally and deeply engaged in a struggle to understand a massive horrid evil that permanently befell my innocent son, then just a boy. So far as I yet know, the solution is original with me. Once you see it, the solution is easy. So easy that it becomes obvious that there just is no Problem of Evil. There is rather only confusion about evil and actuality.

I limned the theodicy in a few sentences just supra. It took me a decade, and hundreds of pages of work, to figure it out.

And (to complete the circle) these are answers that themselves assume the metaphysical primacy of abstractions.

To talk of abstractions – indeed, to talk at all – is to employ abstractions. There is no way around it. So, never mind this objection: it tells with equal minuscule force against all language. If abstraction is bad per se, then the abstraction that abstraction is bad is itself bad. The notion that abstraction is bad per se refutes itself. Abstraction then is not eo ipso bad.

Kristor – following traditional RC teaching – assumes the fundamental and necessary truth of God’s omniscience / omnipotence / omnipresence (etc.) – and these are abstractions. Similarly; creation from nothing (ex nihilo) is assumed to be necessary, and that is an abstraction. More fundamentally; Kristor’s understanding of God as God, is an abstract one: his understanding of God is in terms of the definitional necessity of God having certain abstract attributes – such as those above.

Bruce on the other hand talks of God by using different abstractions. So, what? How is it possible to talk of God at all, pray – or of  anything else whatever, for that  matter – other than by employing abstract concepts? The question then is not whether this or that person uses abstract concepts, but rather whether the abstract concepts they use are both coherent and adequate to experience.

Radical ontological pluralism simply *cannot* adequate to experience, inasmuch as it proposes that the myriad entities of the Many are noncontingent; as such, they can have nothing to do with each other – this is just part of what it means to say that they are noncontingent – so that they *cannot* conspire to such a world as we experience.

Thus I propose something a bit less radical than radical ontological pluralism; namely, the traditional pluralist teaching of the Church, and of Western philosophy in the main stem from its root in Plato (who got his chops in the schools of Syria – of the Hebrews, i.e. (his Forms are the ancient Hebrew types, in terms of which – in types of which – the scriptures are written)), in which each one of the Many is supposed to be the providential fruit of an One, without at all escheating the actuality of each entity among the Many.

The reason this teaching is traditional is that it works better than the alternatives.

Although we can note that such a focus [on abstractions] seems to date from early in the history of Christianity (albeit there is no evidence of it in the contemporary eye-witness account of the Fourth Gospel) …

Even if there were no such evidence in John’s Gospel – a hard notion to square with his prologue thereto – no matter. We can see it in his students, Polycarp and Ignatius, and in the others of his school. Of course; for, it is not possible to communicate metaphysical or theological propositions in any way other than by employment of abstract concepts. Again, the idea that abstract concepts are by nature suspect is itself just such an abstract concept.

… we can still ask why is it that abstraction occupies such a fundamental position in Christian metaphysics?

OK, wait a minute here; how do you propose to discuss metaphysics without employing conceptual abstractions? Metaphysics *just is* a discourse about, and employing, conceptual abstractions. Dude, it isn’t even physics: it’s metaphysics.

For Kristor (and apparently for most Christians since some time after the ascension of Jesus) there can be no such thing as Christianity except from within the perspective of The Church (however that “The” is defined).

What does that tell you? We’ve got billions of Christians treating Christianity in the traditional way to which Bruce objects, for two thousand years. Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Coptic, and even all the churches of the East who rejected Chalcedon. Then Bruce shows up and has … himself. Not that Bruce is nothing. He’s a formidable guy. But, really? Really? Whom does he trust?

Think of it this way. The market, composed of millions of highly qualified and interested investors, traders, analysts, etc., all arrive together – against each other, NB – at a current valuation of Apple at $x. Bruce values it differently. Who is likely to be right? Bruce, or all of them? I mean, come on.

This is why Tradition is utile. It saves so much time and trouble, such as Bruce and I have engaged in.

For Kristor; Thomism is just true, the nature of Christianity derives from the truth and necessity of the RCC; and therefore all legitimately Christian futures must build upon these.

Sorry, this just isn’t so. Indeed, it’s backward. I’ve proceeded as an honest investigator, and have learnt thereby (not always altogether happily, given my initial preferences) that, after 2,000 years of careful investigation and conversation, the RCC just has it almost completely right, mirabile dictu. Who’d a thunk it? I sure didn’t, to begin with.

I didn’t decide that Aquinas was just right about everything before thinking about any of it. Rather, I thought about it, and eventually – often after much difficulty – figured out that Aquinas had been right about almost everything after all. With respect to the rest, the jury is still out. Still working on it …

For what it’s worth, I’m a Whiteheadian Thomist (so that lots of the ontological pluralism that Bruce loves is woven into my metaphysics). I’m sure that would scandalize Thomas, at least until he heard my arguments …

So! These apparently trivial interpersonal debates between myself and Kristor – or, failures to debate, as I regard them – are like the tip of an iceberg of differences; that I regard as ultimately sustained by a deep and long-term problem of wrong metaphysical assumptions about Christianity being instead regarded as necessary and true metaphysical assumptions.

OK, but then let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Which metaphysical principles are wrong?

NB:  Bruce has not in his response actually addressed the inherent difficulty of the radical ontological pluralism I noticed in my post the other day. Namely: does it really work to suppose that reality is at the most fundamental level constituted of many utterly independent and non-contingent – and, thus, utterly unrelated – entities?

Is radical ontological pluralism coherent – whether in itself, as a proposal for the construction of world systems, or in re our quotidian experience of just such a world system?

So far as I can tell, it is not. For, how does one go about constituting a coherent world out of utterly independent entities, that have nothing at bottom in common, or therefore to do with each other? How does one build an integral world out of mutually incommensurable entities?

This, NB, is the nub of the problem of the Many and the One. How do you get a coherent, integral universe out of a set of disparate events, that are all different from each other?

The traditional answer is that, while they are indeed disparate and different, each of the Many has something in common, in virtue of which they can find each other mutually intelligible, so that they can then accommodate themselves to each other in such a way as to constitute together an integral world. And the thing they have in common, according to tradition, is that they are all members of a communion with their common origin, and thus with each other.

No common origin, no common basis of communication, then no possibility of communion, or then of any common world. Rather, then, only islands of being, cut off from all others. Not a Many, then – not a set of members, not a group or genus – but rather just a Democritean chaos.

No One → no coordinate Many; no coordinate Many → no cosmos.

It is hard indeed to see how a coherent integral cosmos could be accomplished in any other way than in virtue of a prior One. It would be good to hear how it might be done. Until such an account has been provided, skepticism about the notion is bound to perdure.

It would be terrific to hear of such an account. Useful and possibly productive conversation on the topic could then proceed. Otherwise, not.

In this interview, historian and author Bronwen McShea joins contributing editor Nathaniel Peters to discuss her new book, Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know, co-published by Ignatius Press and the Augustine Institute.

Nathaniel Peters: St. John Paul II and other Christian leaders have written about a “feminine genius” that women bring to their lives and work. What is this, and how do you see it manifest in the lives of the women you studied?

Bronwen McShea: As an historian, I defer to what various popes and other Christian leaders have said, in a philosophical and theological way, on the subject of women’s special receptivity to God’s graces and to others and women’s special sensitivity toward, and ability to nurture, others. I also recommend the foreword that Patricia Snow wrote for Women of the Church. She has some good words on the feminine genius there. I’m grateful that she agreed to write the foreword for the book, as I admire her and have learned a lot from her, both as a writer and as a “woman of the Church,” over the years.

I will add, though, that the great variety of Catholic women and historical experiences and contributions that I cover in the book (and I barely scratch the surface of what is known by specialized scholars on different periods of Christianity’s history!) is sometimes inadequately reflected in what Catholic leaders say about women. For example, at a recent conference on the theme of “Women in the Church” in Rome, Pope Francis referred to the feminine genius exhibited by various saints who engaged in charitable, educational, and prayerful work “at times in history when women were largely excluded from social and ecclesial life.” Such words are well meaning. But they unintentionally erase vast amounts of historical female contributions to the life of the Church and wider societies over many centuries—centuries in which women were, at times, less excluded from positions of influence and power than various nineteenth and twentieth-century narratives that spotlighted activities and especially words by certain men (often clergymen) have led us to believe was the case.

I’m hopeful, therefore, that not just ordinary readers, but also readers at the higher levels of ecclesial leadership, will learn some new things about women and Church history from my book. I also hope that some might reconsider and refine what they say in connection to the past and present role of women in Christian ecclesial and social life.

NP: How did the women you studied exercise power inside and outside the Church? What can women—and lay people more generally—learn from them?

BM: Some of the women I cover in Women of the Church exercised considerable power within the Church of their time and in their wider societies. For example, prominent abbesses of the medieval period, such as Saint Hildegard of Bingen, shared certain powers of territorial ecclesial governance with abbots and bishops in their day. Some elite laywomen, too, wielded power and influence within and for the Church in ways that would seem strange to Catholics today. Indeed, the extent to which some did so was one of my entry points into writing this book in the first place. The project grew, in part, out of my work for my last book, La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France. That book is about one of the most powerful and influential Catholic leaders of the seventeenth century—recognized as such in her day by secular and ecclesiastical princes alike, including Pope Alexander VII, and deferred to by various eventually famous churchmen and religious whose careers she helped to make, including Saint Vincent de Paul. Among other powers that Vignerot exercised was the selection of various bishops of the Church, both within her country and overseas in new missionary dioceses in Asia and North America.

Vignerot is just one of a number of laywomen covered in my book who contributed to the governance, disciplining, and reform of the Church in diverse ways going back to the earlier centuries of Christian history. An example that might startle some readers is that of Irene of Athens, the Byzantine empress who convoked the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 that settled the iconoclasm controversy that was tearing the Church violently apart at that time. Others include better-known figures such as the controversial Isabella of Castile and Maria Theresa of Austria, as well as lesser-known figures such as Saint Adelaide of the tenth century. Adelaide was the first papally consecrated Holy Roman Empress. Co-ruling with her husband, Emperor Otto I, she employed her power to protect ecclesiastical institutions in a time of chronic warfare. She also helped facilitate the famous Cluniac reform, which restored spiritual and moral rigor to many monasteries and ecclesiastical leadership more generally, while serving as regent for her grandson, Otto III. 

Readers of my book will also learn about some powerful women who helped to establish the Jesuit order and various other religious congregations in various parts of Europe and across the globe. These women exercised patronage powers within and for the Church in ways possible for lay elites for many centuries but which were phased out in favor of more strict governance of the Church by bishops and popes alone, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. I hope that lay readers, male and female, might, after considering some of this history, look at their own callings within and for the Church in a new light. They might question more the idea that it is somehow not traditionally Catholic, or somehow only a progressive or “democratic” concept, that laypeople and women might, and perhaps should, have some genuine co-responsibility with the clergy in the governance as well as the disciplining and reform of the Church today. (And the Church certainly has grave needs in this regard, given the way the clerical hierarchy has handled the sexual abuse scandals, and sometimes related financial corruption scandals, in recent decades.)

NP: Some of these women remained faithful through times of cultural and political turmoil. Others helped lead a revival or renaissance in a nation or religious community after a time of great conflict or change. What do those women have to teach us today?

BM: My book covers numerous women who persisted in their faith and particular Christian callings, sometimes at the expense of their lives or at least their livelihoods and basic personal security, in the face of all manner of persecutions. Englishwomen such as Saint Margaret Clitherow, executed for protecting Catholic priests in the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s persecutions, and French nuns such as the Carmelites of Compiègne, who were guillotined during the revolutionary Reign of Terror, stand out in this regard. Some of the Church’s most honored, famous saints, such as Teresa of Avila who was declared a Doctor of the Church, faced fierce opposition at times from Catholic authorities when attempting to fulfill callings by God to reform their lax religious congregations or communicate important messages to the Church, sometimes in writings that were suppressed in their lifetimes. It’s tempting for Catholics today, accustomed to how much the Church has elevated such saints, to assume that their paths to sanctity and recognition by the Church were straightforward and even easy in some regards. But the study of such figures in historical context helps to shake us out of that false assumption. Hopefully, it can also help us to examine our own present-day struggles, confusions, and moments of being misunderstood or unjustly treated—both within and beyond our communities of faith—with new eyes, and with new determination to stay true to what the Lord asks of us. 

NP: George Eliot wrote that “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” The director Terrence Malick took this as the title and epigraph for his biography of Bl. Franz Jägerstätter, A Hidden Life. What “hidden lives” did you uncover in the course of your work?

BM: Well, insofar as each woman I cover in the book made it, one way or another, into written historical records, she engaged in “historical” acts, memorialized both by me and by scholars I depended upon for my own awareness of them. That said, there are some women in my book—including Native American and Asian women in past centuries, who worked alongside well-remembered missionaries and saints—whose names went unrecorded, whose stories are mostly hidden or misrepresented in existing written records. 

I also try to cover in the book a bit of what’s known in each period of Church history about ordinary women devoted to their families, local parishes, and wider communities who left behind legacies of service even though their names and fuller stories are mostly lost. Such women, indeed, can be said to have contributed—more than we can ever quantify, but in ways that do not have to be completely lost to memory—to “the growing good of the world.”

NP: Public Discourse has hosted numerous articles debating the nature of contemporary feminism: Is feminism inherently harmful to the dignity of women and society as a whole, or does modern feminism need correction from previous generations of feminists? Do the figures you studied shed light on this debate and the project of cultivating alternative forms of feminism?

BM: There indeed have been important discussions in this vein in recent years. I hope that my book will offer people on all sides of these debates some new data to work with, with respect to the sorts of experiences many women had, and the sorts of contributions many were able to make to the Church and their societies, both before and after modern feminism emerged. Some readers may learn from my book for the first time, for instance (although I’m not the first historian to bring it up), that various Catholic authors, who lived long before Mary Wollstonecraft and other Enlightenment-era feminists, argued in favor of the complete moral and intellectual equality of women and men.

As for whether feminism is inherently harmful to the dignity of women and society, there is plenty of evidence that certain kinds of feminism have been. As an historian, I’m reticent about wading into this subject in generalizing terms. But my book offers examples of how Christianity contributed over time to maturing understandings of the equal dignity of man and woman—sometimes radically, and in ways that were put into practice only in fits and starts. It shows how, too, forces outside the Church, such as revolutionary radicalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, violated the inherent dignity of spiritual gifts of women, sometimes in vicious ways. An example was when contemplative religious congregations were suppressed—with the prayers and sacrifices offered by veiled, consecrated virgins and widows treated as economically and socially “useless”—by centralizing, industrializing, and socially and politically democratizing nation states that explicitly excluded women from voting and holding public offices. Sadly, some Catholic leaders in Europe, not just post-Christian revolutionaries, contributed to that devastation where the once vibrant contemplative tradition of the Church was concerned. It may not be a coincidence that, as our Church has lost, more and more, her deeper sense of the complementarity between cloistered contemplatives and our more active, “secular” clergy, consecrated people, and laypeople, our societies increasingly have fallen prey to visions of gender equality that seek to erase, rather than safeguard and celebrate, deeper, complementary differences between men and women. 

NP: Did any of the figures you studied emerge as new favorites for you, or as especially compelling models of living a heroic life for Christ?

BM: I really can’t narrow things down to a few new favorites! I learned about so many women I had only vague ideas about before taking on this project, and I learned new things about figures that had been well known to me and already among my favorites. The latter include Saint Louise de Marillac and the first Daughters of Charity; the first women ever to venture across great seas and oceans to found charitable hospitals and schools; saints such as Teresa of Avila and Edith Stein who contributed great writings to the Church’s spiritual and intellectual treasury. As a laywoman and scholar, I’m drawn more to some of the women in my book than to others. But I’ll say that I appreciate to a new extent how critical to the Church’s development, and to the building up of more humane societies, consecrated women have been over so many centuries—cloistered and more active; saints, blesseds, and (in the case, for example, of several pioneering African-American religious sisters such as Mary Lange, Henriette de Lille, and Thea Bowman) not yet raised to the honors of the altar. 

Growing up long after Vatican II and the steep decline in women’s religious life that ensued, I’ve rarely encountered habited sisters over the years. When I started Women of the Church, I didn’t expect to fill as many pages as I did with remarkable stories about women vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience. But the legacy of such women jumped out from the pages of the specialized histories I consulted—a legacy that I hope my book will help more people appreciate.   

Image by Dave and licensed via Adobe Stock.

The "last post" if you will. 

Fr Hunwicke's Mutual Enrichment: Was Gueranger a Great Liturgist? (liturgicalnotes.blogspot.com)

May he rest in peace.

Fr. John Hunwicke - Medieval Liturgy and Society (youtube.com)