Since the news about the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, has approved the first portion of the file assembled to make Dorothy Day a saint, and people are posting “it’s because Rome wants to promote socialism” I figured to do a write up on this as I just finished Bill Kauffman’s “Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Portch Anarchists” where he writes, at length, on Dorothy Day. She was hardly an enthusiast for state power.

There is a habit in modern political debate of taking every person who denounced the abuses of capitalism, cared for the poor, defended workers, or criticized great concentrations of wealth and calling that person a socialist. Dorothy Day is one of the most frequent victims of this lazy classification.

She spoke fiercely about the injustices suffered by workers. She lived voluntarily among the poor. She distrusted great corporations, opposed war, supported labor strikes, and spent her life attacking the complacency of comfortable Christians. She even moved in socialist circles as a young woman.

Therefore, we are told, Dorothy Day was a socialist.

But that conclusion does not follow. It confuses her youthful political associations with her mature convictions. More importantly, it ignores what Day actually wrote about socialism, Marxism, private property, class warfare, political power, and the modern state.

Dorothy Day was certainly a radical. She was not a defender of consumer capitalism or the American economic status quo. But the revolution she eventually embraced was Catholic, personalist, decentralized, voluntary, and profoundly suspicious of the state. She cannot honestly be enlisted as an advocate for the bureaucratic welfare state, state ownership, Marxist materialism, or the centralization of social responsibility in Washington.

Calling her simply a “socialist” does not clarify Dorothy Day. It conceals her.

The socialist beginning that should not be hidden

An honest defense of Dorothy Day must begin by admitting what is true. As a young woman, before entering the Catholic Church, Day joined the Socialist Party and worked among radicals. She read Jack London and Upton Sinclair, wrote for socialist publications, associated with members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and was deeply affected by the misery of workers and the poor.

Day never denied this history. In a 1971 interview, she said plainly: “When I came from college, I was a socialist.” She explained that she had joined the Socialist Party while at the University of Illinois after reading descriptions of poverty and urban exploitation. Yet she also said she was not greatly impressed by the party. Its program struck her as overly theoretical and lacking the religious devotion to the poor for which she was searching.[1]

Her early socialism testified to a genuine moral hunger. Day saw suffering and refused to accept the respectable excuses offered for it. That moral revolt remained with her for the rest of her life. But the philosophy through which she understood that revolt changed radically after her conversion.

She did not cease caring about workers when she became Catholic. She ceased believing that materialism, class warfare, party politics, or state power could save them.

Dorothy Day’s own answer

The clearest evidence comes from the pages of The Catholic Worker itself.

In May 1936, three years after Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the newspaper, Day published a restatement of the movement’s principles. Her distinction between communism and the Catholic Worker position could scarcely be clearer:

“Communists believe in State Socialism as a step to Communism. We believe in widespread private property, the de-proletarianizing of our American people. We believe in the individual owning the means of production, the land and his tools.”[2]

This is not state socialism. It is almost its direct opposite.

The socialist solution concentrates ownership in the state. The Catholic Worker solution distributes productive property among families, workers, farmers, and small communities. Day and Maurin wanted ordinary people to possess land, tools, workshops, and the means by which they could support themselves. Their complaint against industrial capitalism was not that too many people owned property, but that genuine ownership had become concentrated in too few hands while the majority had been reduced to dependence upon wages, corporations, banks, and government institutions.

This vision shared much with Catholic distributism, the economic tradition associated especially with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. Its goal was neither the capitalist monopoly nor the socialist state, but a social order in which productive property was widely held.

Day also explicitly rejected the communist doctrine of class war. The communist sought to defeat or liquidate the capitalist class. The Catholic Worker instead proposed persuasion, the works of mercy, houses of hospitality, farming communes, and the construction of a new social order through personal sacrifice.[2]

That difference is not a minor disagreement over tactics. It proceeds from two radically different understandings of the human person.

Marxism divides humanity according to economic class and places redemption within revolutionary conflict. Day saw every human being—including the communist, the banker, the industrialist, the poor man, and the political enemy—as a present or potential member of the Mystical Body of Christ. The answer to exploitation could never be the hatred or liquidation of the exploiter. It had to include his conversion.

Against the all-powerful state

Those who place Dorothy Day on the contemporary political Left often emphasize her criticism of capitalism while quietly passing over her equally fierce criticism of the state.

Day did not believe that Christians fulfilled their obligations to the poor by voting for a government program, paying taxes, or turning suffering people over to professional agencies. She feared that large institutions allowed individuals to escape personal responsibility. The larger and more impersonal the system became, the easier it was for everyone within it to say that helping the suffering person was someone else’s job.

In her 1971 interview, Day described the state as inherently inclined toward coercion. She observed that the promised “dictatorship of the proletariat” merely became another dictatorship. Rather than waiting for the state supposedly to wither away after a revolution, she wanted Christians to begin building a different order immediately—one formed from the bottom up through communities, voluntary associations, unions, credit unions, farms, and houses of hospitality.[1]

Her ideal was not an enormous government ministry managing poverty from a distant capital. It was one human person assuming responsibility for another.

This was the meaning of Catholic Worker “personalism.” If a man was hungry, the Christian could not merely demand that Congress feed him. If a woman needed shelter, one could not discharge the commandment of charity by directing her toward an office. The Christian must be willing to give food, open the door, surrender the spare room, and accept the inconvenience of love.

That is far more demanding than modern welfare politics. It does not allow us to outsource mercy.

Day expressed the principle in words that deserve to unsettle Christians of every political persuasion:

“God meant things to be much easier than we have made them. There is no need to have all these hospitals and insane asylums and so forth. There is no need for unemployment insurance or social security. There is no need for all this state care of the indigent if we assumed our own responsibility, if we practiced Christian charity.”[3]

One may question whether such a social order is attainable on a large scale. Day herself knew that her program would be called utopian. But no honest reader can turn those convictions into an endorsement of modern state socialism.

Nor did her distrust of government diminish with age. Addressing a Catholic audience in 1975, Day declared: “The greatest enemy of the Church today is the state.”[5] That sentence alone makes the modern attempt to enlist her as a patroness of state-directed social reform extraordinarily difficult.

Day was not claiming that every civil official was malicious or that every act of government was equally wicked. Her warning concerned the nature and trajectory of centralized power. The state promises to protect, organize, and provide; but to fulfill those promises it continually gathers authority that formerly belonged to persons, families, churches, local associations, and communities. People gradually lose both the freedom and the habit of acting for themselves. Responsibility moves upward, power accumulates at the center, and institutions created to serve human beings begin to supervise them.

This libertarian strain distinguished The Catholic Worker from much of the postwar Left. While American liberals increasingly accepted the administrative and national-security state as the indispensable instrument of progress, the Catholic Workers continued to ask what such an instrument would eventually do to liberty, conscience, local responsibility, and peace.

Catholic Worker editor Robert Ludlow offered a severe warning in 1951. America, he believed, was developing its own form of totalitarianism through secret policing, intellectual conformity, and an overpowering bureaucracy. Like every state, it would be controlled by people driven toward greater power and centralization. The fatal mistake was “attempting social reform through the State,” because every such attempt enlarged the very power capable of controlling every avenue of life.[5]

The dominant liberal response was essentially that this was the price of living in the modern world. Arthur Schlesinger Jr., writing in The Vital Center, treated distributist decentralization as a dream unable to withstand science, technology, the factory, and the modern state. These enormous institutions were supposedly inevitable; responsible people therefore had to capture and manage them before irresponsible people did.

Day rejected the premise. If the state and factory were treated as inexorable, the debate would concern only which experts should control them. The more fundamental Catholic Worker questions—whether human beings should live at such a scale, whether ownership should be restored, and whether the concentration of power was itself corrupting—would never be permitted.

Tragically, much of the postwar Right eventually accepted the same premise. Cold War conservatism opposed communist control while embracing military centralization, bureaucratic expertise, industrial gigantism, and permanent global intervention. Dispersion of property, recovery of the land, peace, nonintervention, and village-scale life were dismissed as impractical fantasies. The Left and Right disputed who should manage modernity while agreeing that modernity’s scale could not be questioned.

Dorothy Day continued to question it.

Bill Kauffman’s “front-porch anarchist”

The writer Bill Kauffman offers a better way of understanding Day. In Look Homeward, America, Kauffman places her among the nation’s “reactionary radicals” and “front-porch anarchists”—American dissenters who do not fit comfortably within the accepted boxes of Left and Right.[4]

The phrase captures something important. Day was radical because she rejected an economic and political order built upon war, mass production, consumerism, dispossession, and impersonal power. Yet she was reactionary in the literal sense that she looked backward toward older and more human forms of life: the family, the parish, the village, the farm, the workshop, the neighborhood, and the works of mercy.

Her anarchism was not the nihilistic destruction of all moral authority. Day was a faithful Catholic who attended Mass, prayed the Divine Office and the Rosary, went to confession, read the saints, and submitted her life to the demands of the Gospel. What she resisted was the identification of legitimate authority with the modern centralized state and its machinery of war, surveillance, taxation, imprisonment, and social management.

Kauffman’s Day belongs to an American tradition of localism, agrarianism, noninterventionism, and resistance to bigness. She was suspicious of corporate bigness and governmental bigness for much the same reason: both could reduce the person to an interchangeable unit and destroy the small communities in which human responsibility becomes real.

That is why neither today’s progressive Left nor the conventional Republican Right can claim her without qualification.

Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger: Who Was the Conservative?

Kauffman opens the question of Dorothy Day and the American Right with an extraordinary recollection from the Catholic historian John Lukacs.

Lukacs attended the lavish twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration of National Review at New York’s Plaza Hotel in December 1980. When Henry Kissinger was introduced, the room erupted in applause. Lukacs booed. Dorothy Day had died only shortly before, several miles—and in another moral universe—from the banquet hall.

The contrast led Lukacs to ask: “Who was a truer conservative, Dorothy Day or Henry Kissinger? Surely it was Dorothy Day.”[5]

His meaning deserves attention. Dorothy Day preserved what was ancient and enduring: the duties of ordinary life, the dignity of work, care for the stranger, reverence for the family, the Christian commandment of peace, and the moral traditions of nearly two thousand years. Her radicalism sought the roots of the human predicament. Kissinger, meanwhile, represented the managerial state, geopolitical calculation, centralized power, and the machinery of modern war.

If conservatism means conserving the national-security bureaucracy, corporate consolidation, and American power abroad, Day was no conservative. But if it means conserving those human associations that precede the modern state—the family, the household, the parish, the neighborhood, the village, and the moral law—then Lukacs’s answer becomes difficult to dismiss.

This also exposes a strange development within postwar conservatism. Too many conservatives learned to defend every concentration of private economic power while condemning every criticism of capitalism as socialist. They opposed the welfare state while embracing the warfare state. They praised property while accepting an industrial economy that steadily deprived families of productive property. They spoke of tradition while surrendering towns, farms, crafts, and local cultures to the demands of efficiency and scale.

Dorothy Day did not make those compromises. She was far more radical than the institutional Right because she wanted to conserve far more than it did.

Dorothy Day and I’ll Take My Stand

The most striking evidence offered by Kauffman may be Dorothy Day’s connection to the Southern Agrarians.

In 1930, twelve Southern writers published I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. The volume criticized industrialism not merely as an economic arrangement, but as a way of life. The Agrarians argued that an industrial civilization organized around production, consumption, speed, and efficiency would eventually subordinate culture, family life, religion, leisure, and the land to the demands of the machine.

The book was controversial then and remains so. Its contributors did not speak with one voice, and their treatment of the Southern past demands careful historical judgment. But their central attack upon industrialism—and their defense of rooted, agrarian, human-scale life—strongly attracted Dorothy Day.

Kauffman reproduces a remarkable 1936 letter from Allen Tate, the Catholic poet, man of letters, and contributor to I’ll Take My Stand, to fellow Agrarian Donald Davidson. Tate called The Catholic Worker “a remarkable monthly paper” and described Day as greatly excited by the Agrarians’ program. She had recently discovered I’ll Take My Stand, was commenting upon it editorially, and was prepared to promote their forthcoming work. Tate marveled at her energy, practical intelligence, and devotion to “the cause of the land.”[5]

This is important evidence. Dorothy Day’s ruralism was not an incidental hobby or a romantic ornament added to an essentially socialist program. She recognized a genuine kinship between the Catholic Worker vision and the Agrarian rejection of centralized industrial society.

At a Nashville meeting of Southern Agrarians and Distributists, the principles of this common program were expressed with admirable clarity:

• Individual freedom and security require the wide distribution of land and productive property.

• Population should be decentralized along with ownership.

• Agriculture must recover its proper place as the foundation of a secure culture.[5]

Every one of these principles contradicts the movement toward state socialism. The aim was not to eliminate ownership but to multiply owners; not to centralize population and administration but to disperse them; not to place agriculture beneath industrial planning but to restore the land as a basis of family and cultural independence.

Day soon gave the idea her own unmistakably Catholic formulation: “To Christ—to the land!” She opposed the wage system for a reason profoundly different from the communist one. The multiplication of permanent wage earners meant the disappearance of owners. The answer was not to make the state the universal employer, but to help workers recover land, tools, crafts, and productive property.[5]

This point cuts through much of the confusion surrounding Day. Socialism promises security through collective administration. Day wanted the responsibility and freedom that accompany ownership. The New Deal, in her judgment, promised “security for the worker, not ownership.” That was precisely the problem.[5]

Tradition, Ruralism, Handicrafts—and Not Socialism

In November 1936, The Catholic Worker placed the contrast in terms no modern interpreter has the right to erase. A proposed Farm-Labor Party was associated with progress, industrialism, machinery, bureaucracy, socialism, and organization. Against that program the paper placed its own commitments: tradition, ruralism, handicrafts, personalism, communitarianism, and organic social life.[5]

This was not a dispute between two varieties of socialism. It was a conflict between rival civilizations.

One civilization trusted mass organization, industrial efficiency, centralized expertise, and political administration. The other trusted persons, families, vocations, crafts, farms, small communities, and associations growing naturally from below. One offered people management by experts. The other sought to restore their capacity to govern their own work, property, households, and communities.

The Catholic Worker favored worker ownership of production and distribution rather than nationalization. It envisioned decentralized cooperatives, village economies, productive households, and federations of communities. Day called property sacramental—not because she worshipped possession, but because material things can become the means through which persons exercise responsibility, offer hospitality, support families, and cooperate with God’s creation.

Her question to American defenders of capitalism was piercing. Americans claimed to oppose communism because it abolished private property, yet the modern industrial system had already left great numbers of people without meaningful property of their own. A paper claim, a wage, or dependence upon a distant corporation was not what Day, Tate, Chesterton, or Belloc meant by ownership. They meant control of the farm, shop, tools, craft, or household upon which a family’s life rested.

This is why Day could oppose both communism and capitalism without contradiction. Both systems, in their concentrated forms, produced propertyless masses. They disagreed over whether the state or the corporation should control productive life, while Day asked why workers and families should not control it themselves.

“In the Face of Empire, the Way of Love”

Kauffman ultimately finds Day’s politics not in a party platform but in a Christian posture toward power. Peter Maurin’s anarchism, Day explained, rested partly upon the old principle that larger governments should not perform what smaller associations can accomplish. Unions, cooperatives, credit unions, parishes, families, and Saint Vincent de Paul societies should possess genuine room to act.

At its deepest level, however, this decentralism rested upon Christ washing the feet of His Apostles. Christ did not conquer through the machinery of empire. He came as one who served. Day’s answer to impersonal power was therefore not another seizure of impersonal power. It was what Kauffman beautifully calls “in the face of Empire, the Way of Love.”[5]

That way is local because love requires a person to love. Humanity in the abstract can become an excuse for neglecting the human being at the door. Great plans for distant populations can coexist with indifference toward one’s neighbor. Day chose the little way: people speaking with people, caring for people, forming communities, worshipping God, recovering work, and assuming responsibility for one another.

Her fidelity to decentralism was practical as well as theoretical. The Catholic Workers resisted the payment of federal taxes connected with war, yet Day distinguished federal power from genuinely local and regional obligations. The movement filed with the state, paid its modest fee, and reported its finances precisely because that regulation remained close enough to the community to be accountable. This was not a simplistic refusal of every civil duty. It reflected a hierarchy of social authority closely related to the Catholic principle of subsidiarity.

That principle holds that larger bodies should not absorb tasks that smaller bodies can responsibly perform. Day named unions, credit unions, cooperatives, and Saint Vincent de Paul societies as examples. A healthy society does not begin by asking what Washington can administer. It begins by asking what the person, household, parish, neighborhood, guild, cooperative, or town can accomplish—and then protects their freedom to accomplish it.

Day’s resistance to federal taxation therefore illuminates her entire social vision. Her goal was not social abandonment. It was the recovery of responsibility. She wanted the hungry fed, the homeless sheltered, workers protected, families supported, and property widely owned. But she denied that these ends required an omnipresent national bureaucracy. Indeed, she feared that bureaucratic provision would weaken the personal bonds and small institutions through which a truly Christian society must live.

This is also why she refused to concede that distributism had died with the older Agrarian movement. In 1956, when both political camps regarded centralized industrial society as permanent, Day insisted that “Distributism is not dead.” It could not be buried, she argued, because it conformed to human nature.[5]

The claim reveals the foundation of her economics. Distributism was not valuable merely because it might produce favorable statistics. It was valuable because it corresponded to the kind of beings men and women actually are: embodied persons born into families, dependent upon place, capable of craftsmanship, called to responsibility, and made for communities small enough to know and love their members.

Day explained her localism as a refusal of unreality. Others might seek corridors of influence from which they could make enormous decisions affecting millions. The Catholic Worker did not have to imitate them. Washington, she insisted, was not America’s moral capital. She wanted small communities in which people spoke directly, cared for one another, worshipped God, worked with their hands, and recovered the spirit of the rural towns and city neighborhoods from which so many ordinary Americans had come.[5]

What she mourned was not merely the disappearance of a picturesque past. It was the loss of community as a moral practice. When work, charity, education, welfare, and political judgment are transferred to distant institutions, neighbors no longer need one another. The person becomes a client, consumer, employee, taxpayer, or case number rather than a member of a living social body.

The Catholic Worker was an attempt to find that body again—not by imposing a national blueprint, but by beginning with the person directly in front of them.

That vision was never comfortably Left or Right. It was older than both, more demanding than either, and rooted in the Gospel.

She was not a conventional capitalist, either

Correcting the socialist label must not become an attempt to transform Dorothy Day into a spokeswoman for corporate capitalism.

She would have rejected that appropriation just as forcefully.

Day condemned an industrial system that separated workers from ownership, treated labor as a commodity, subordinated families to the demands of production, and concentrated enormous economic power in corporations and banks. She believed that capitalism could become materialistic, exploitative, and destructive of the human person. In the same 1936 statement in which she opposed state socialism, she also condemned “finance capitalism” and described the existing industrial order as materialistic.[2]

She supported striking workers, lived in voluntary poverty, and regarded comfort as a spiritual danger. Her critique of capitalism was not cosmetic. Many comfortable conservatives would find the actual Dorothy Day exceedingly uncomfortable.

But opposition to capitalism does not automatically equal socialism. Catholic social teaching has condemned both socialist collectivism and the abuses of liberal capitalism. Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno, distributism, the guild tradition, and the Catholic Worker movement all sought alternatives to the false choice between ownership by a capitalist oligarchy and ownership by the state.

Day and Maurin envisioned a society of smaller farms, workshops, cooperatives, credit unions, houses of hospitality, and communities in which work and property served the human person. This was neither laissez-faire capitalism nor state socialism. It was an effort—imperfect, experimental, and consciously radical—to embody Catholic teaching in daily economic life.

What about “Christian communism”?

Confusion also arises because Day occasionally used expressions such as “Christian communism.” Read without context, the phrase sounds like an endorsement of Marxist economics. It was nothing of the kind.

The model was the voluntary sharing of the first Christians recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. Believers freely held goods in common because charity had united them. No revolutionary party confiscated their possessions. No centralized state directed production. No secret police enforced equality. Their common life arose from conversion, communion, and voluntary sacrifice.

This distinction between voluntary community and compulsory collectivism is essential. The Catholic Worker’s houses and farms were not government programs. People entered them freely, gave freely, worked freely, and frequently failed freely. Day preferred the risks, disorder, and personal demands of small communities to the efficiency of great institutions precisely because love cannot be administered by bureaucracy.

The phrase “Christian communism” may be imprudent in our political climate, but its meaning in Day’s work was closer to monastic common life than to Soviet collectivization.

Beyond Left and Right—and under the Cross

Dorothy Day should not be protected from criticism. Catholics may reasonably question her judgments about particular wars, political movements, labor disputes, or revolutionary figures. Her attraction to certain radicals occasionally led her to speak too generously about people or movements whose records warranted greater skepticism. Opening a cause for canonization does not transform every political judgment she made into Catholic doctrine.

But criticism should be directed toward the real Dorothy Day, not a political caricature.

The real Day had passed through socialism. She carried forward its outrage at exploitation, but rejected its materialism, class war, centralization, and confidence in state power. She opposed both finance capitalism and state socialism because both threatened to strip the person of property, responsibility, freedom, community, and spiritual purpose.

Her mature program was unmistakably Catholic: the dignity of the person, widespread ownership, voluntary poverty, the works of mercy, nonviolence, local community, personal responsibility, and fidelity to Christ.

The Left is wrong to present her as an early advocate of today’s progressive administrative state. The Right is wrong when it assumes that anyone who denounces capitalism and stands beside striking workers must therefore be a Marxist. Both errors arise from accepting a political spectrum too narrow to contain the Catholic imagination.

Dorothy Day did not ask the state to become our mother, our father, our parish, and our neighbor. She asked Christians to become Christians.

That was her revolution.

And it was not socialism.

Notes and sources

1. Dorothy Day, “Dorothy Day Holds Forth,” interview originally published in the Catholic Agitator, December 1971, reproduced by the Catholic Worker Movement: https://catholicworker.org/dorothy-day-holds-forth/

2. Dorothy Day, “Catholic Worker Celebrates 3rd Birthday: A Restatement of C. W. Aims and Ideals,” The Catholic Worker, May 1936: https://catholicworker.org/300-html/

3. Dorothy Day, The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg. The passage is widely cited from her diary entry for February 1964; wording and page number should be checked against the edition used before print publication.

4. Bill Kauffman, Look Homeward, America: In Search of Reactionary Radicals and Front-Porch Anarchists (ISI Books, 2006). Publisher description and bibliographic record: https://books.google.com/books/about/Look_Homeward_America.html?id=VEC7AAAAIAAJ

5. Bill Kauffman, “The Way of Love: Dorothy Day and the American Right,” excerpted from Look Homeward, America and reproduced by the Center for a Stateless Society, September 28, 2015: https://c4ss.org/content/40644

In an age that rewards outrage, Dolly Parton chose a different way. She could laugh at herself without despising herself. She could disagree with people without treating them as enemies. She could succeed without resenting another person’s success. And when prosperity came to her, she repeatedly found ways to turn it outward, to children, families, and communities in need.

None of this is to canonize a celebrity or pretend that popularity is sanctity. It is simply to recognize something good when we see it. Dolly possessed a combination increasingly rare in public life: she knew who she was, but did not need to diminish anyone else in order to prove it.

That may be why so many people who agreed on almost nothing else could agree that they liked Dolly.

The Catholic priest and spiritual writer Father Frederick William Faber helps us understand why. In his beautiful little book Kindness, published by Sensus Fidelium Press, he writes:

“Kindness is the overflowing of self upon others. We put others in the place of self. We treat them as we would wish to be treated ourselves. We change places with them.”

That is more than politeness. It is Our Lord’s Golden Rule expressed as a habit of life: “As you would that men should do to you, do you also to them in like manner” (Luke 6:31).

Father Faber organizes his reflections around kindness in general, kind thoughts, kind words, and kind actions. Those same three forms of kindness can be seen throughout Dolly Parton’s public life.

(the lecture gets into Kindness around 22 min mark)

Kind Thoughts: Refusing to See a Rival

Perhaps the finest example came through the song “I Will Always Love You.” Dolly wrote and recorded it years before Whitney Houston transformed it into one of the most successful recordings of all time.

The world often assumes that one woman must resent another woman’s triumph, and especially a southern white woman must be upset at a black woman for ‘stealing her music’. Surely Dolly would be jealous. Surely Whitney had taken her song. Surely someone else’s greatness had reduced her own. No, and don’t call her Shirley.

Dolly refused to think that way. She celebrated Whitney’s extraordinary performance and received substantial songwriting royalties from its success ($10M worth). She then used some of that money to purchase a large office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Nashville. With affection and gratitude, she called it “the house that Whitney built.”

Notice what began this chain of good: Dolly interpreted another person’s success kindly.

Father Faber warns that we are often indefatigable judges, constantly placing our neighbors at the bar of our own private court. Because we cannot immediately stop every judgment from entering the mind, he urges us to cultivate “kind interpretations.” We do not know all another person’s motives. We do not see what God sees. Charity therefore resists the temptation to assume the worst.

Dolly could have interpreted Whitney’s success through envy. Instead, she received it through gratitude. Dolly wrote the song. Whitney gave it a magnificent new voice. Millions were moved by it. Dolly prospered from it. Then part of that prosperity was planted in a neighborhood connected to the woman whose voice had carried the song around the world.

One gift did not cancel another. It produced another.

Envy says that another person’s good is my loss. Kindness rejoices when another’s gifts flourish. Saint Paul tells us that charity “envieth not” and “thinketh no evil” (1 Corinthians 13:4–5). Dolly’s response to Whitney was not merely a kind action at the end; it began as a kind thought.

Kind Words: Humor Without Cruelty

Dolly built an unmistakable public image: towering hair, sparkling clothes, bright colors, and exaggerated country glamour. Yet the joke was never simply on her. She was in on it. When people mocked the “dumb blonde” image, she turned the insult around with the observation that she knew she was neither dumb nor naturally blonde.

That kind of humor requires security. Vanity cannot tolerate laughter because it is always afraid of being exposed. Humility, however, does not mean pretending we have no gifts or allowing others to trample us. It means seeing ourselves truthfully before God. A humble person can survive a joke because his identity does not depend upon winning every exchange.

Dolly often answered ridicule without bitterness and suspicion without retaliation. Instead of using wit as a weapon, she frequently gave people the best line herself. Her humor lowered the temperature. It let others laugh without requiring that someone be humiliated.

Father Faber calls kind words “the music of the world.” He says they can soften hard and angry hearts, dissolve prejudice, heal quarrels, and produce happiness in ways that cold logic often cannot. He makes an especially important observation for anyone engaged in Catholic media or apologetics: “Satire will not convert men.” He writes that geniality is essential to lasting reform because the genial man does not merely speak about Christ, he helps others see something of Christ.

This does not mean refusing to condemn error. Father Faber was no sentimentalist, and neither can Catholics be. Truth must be spoken. But truth can be delivered with the desire to save rather than the desire to crush. Kindness concerns not only what we give, Father Faber explains, but the manner in which we give it. That manner can itself be a greater gift than the thing offered.

We should never make light of sin or sacred things, but neither should we become so self-serious that every insult becomes a declaration of war. “A joyful heart is good medicine” (Proverbs 17:22). Humor at our own expense can keep pride from turning disagreement into hatred.

Kind Actions: Books in the Hands of Children

Dolly’s generosity was not confined to occasional checks or carefully staged appearances. In 1995, she founded the Imagination Library in honor of her father, who could not read or write. The program began in her home county in East Tennessee and grew into an international effort that mails an age-appropriate book every month to enrolled children from birth until age five. By the time of her death, it had distributed hundreds of millions of books.

The beauty of the project is its simplicity. A child receives a book bearing his or her own name, delivered directly to the home. Month after month, that gift says: you matter, your mind matters, and someone whom you may never meet wants you to have a better beginning.

Christian charity is personal in precisely this way. It does not love “humanity” as an abstraction while overlooking the person close at hand. It feeds this hungry man, clothes this cold child, teaches this student, visits this prisoner, and comforts this grieving mother. Dolly saw a wound that had touched her own family, illiteracy, and spent decades helping other families avoid it.

Father Faber writes that kindness is “coming to the rescue of others when they need it, and it is in our power to supply what they need.” This is what Dolly did. She possessed fame, money, business ability, and a personal understanding of rural poverty. Kindness meant placing those gifts at the service of people who did not possess them.

“These Are My People”

When Hurricane Helene devastated communities across the Southeast in 2024, including areas in East Tennessee and western North Carolina, Dolly personally pledged $1 million to relief efforts through the Mountain Ways Foundation. Her East Tennessee businesses and foundation joined in the response as well.

Her explanation was characteristically direct: these were her people.

There is an important lesson in those words. Love for one’s neighbor begins with a neighbor, not with a slogan. We have particular duties to our families, our communities, and those whom Providence has placed within our reach. Dolly never seemed embarrassed by where she came from. The poverty of the Smoky Mountains was not a costume she discarded after becoming famous. She remembered the people and the place that formed her, and when they suffered, she helped.

The Christian life requires this same fidelity. We cannot solve every tragedy in the world, but we can refuse to pass by the wounded man on our own road. We can ask: Who are “my people”? Who has God actually placed before me? What can I do for them today?

Kindness Never Stops With Itself

Father Faber offers an insight that seems almost written for Dolly’s story: “No kind action ever stopped with itself.” Kindness sends out roots. It inspires imitation. The person who receives kindness becomes more likely to show it to someone else. Its influence may continue invisibly for generations.

A father in the mountains of Tennessee could not read. His daughter remembered. That memory became a program. The program placed a book in a child’s hands. Perhaps that child became a reader, and that reader became a mother who read to her own children. One kindness became another, then another.

A young singer wrote a farewell song. Another singer carried it around the world. The song generated a fortune. The fortune purchased property. The property became an act of gratitude toward a neighborhood. Again, one gift became another.

A terrible storm left families without homes and communities without resources. A woman who had grown up among those mountains recognized the suffering of her people and came to their aid. Her donation encouraged businesses and ordinary people to give. Again, kindness did not stop with itself.

Father Faber goes even further: “An act of kindness never dies.” Its full history is known only to God.

The Catholic Apostolate of Kindness

Dolly Parton’s life was not a theological treatise and I do not pretend to know her thoughts on religion as I do not. Yes, the major black eye was the vaccine promotion, BUT, I would argue, the powers that be used her KNOWING that her kindness and desire to help others would be used against her and she would rise to the occastion thinking it was the way to help. Like every public figure, and every one of us, her life must be judged truthfully rather than sentimentally, but truth also requires us to acknowledge virtue wherever it appears. Her public example reminds us that kindness is not weakness, humor need not be cruel, gratitude is more fruitful than envy, and success carries a responsibility to serve.

Father Faber explains why this matters especially for Catholics. Kindness prepares the ground for grace. It can awaken self-respect in a person who has forgotten his dignity. It can soften the heart before the truth arrives. He even warns that if Catholics joined ordinary kindness to their extraordinary graces, they would convert far more souls.

That is a sobering thought for our time. We can defend every proposition correctly and still repel the person before us. We can expose every error while allowing bitterness to deform our own souls. We can claim to fight for Christ while speaking in a way that makes it difficult for others to recognize Him.

We live in a culture that encourages us to assume the worst, nurse every grievance, and treat people as disposable the moment they disappoint us. Christians must be different. We should be the first to defend truth, but also the first to show patience. We should be serious about God without being humorless about ourselves. We should rejoice when another person does something beautiful. And when God places resources in our hands, we should ask not merely what they can purchase for us, but what good they can accomplish through us.

Dolly once turned a song into a fortune, a fortune into a building, and a building into an enduring expression of gratitude: the house that Whitney built. She turned down presidental awards, from both sides, asked the Tennessee Assembly not to eract a statue of her because there were more important things in the world and maybe after she is dead go ahead (name anyone today that wouldn’t be jacked about that and want 100 selfies to post online with it?), Even with stances we would not agree with she would say “we have to treat people with respect”.

Father Faber tells us what was happening beneath it all: kindness was overflowing from self toward others. And once it began, it did not stop with itself.

May we do something similar with whatever God has entrusted to us.

Continue Reading

Father Frederick William Faber’s Kindness is available from Sensus Fidelium Press.

I grew up in South Carolina (Cowpens). I love Charleston and lived there for a few years as I went to College of Charleston for a few semesters. My ancestors fought for the South in Tennessee.

That does not mean I have any interest in turning history into mythology. Quite the opposite. If we love a place, we ought to want its real history, not a sanitized version written to flatter us, and not a caricature written to condemn everyone who came before us and Charleston is one of those places where the real story is almost always more interesting than the simplified one.

Walk down Broad Street today and you will eventually come to the brownstone Gothic tower of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. It is one of the great Catholic churches of the American South. Inside, tucked into the cathedral, is something many Catholics, even South Carolinians, have probably never heard of. A marble Madonna and Child called Our Lady of the South and, more provocatively, Our Lady of the Confederacy.

The latter is not an official title of the Church, and the historical evidence for precisely when that name came into use is less clear than internet retellings sometimes suggest. But the connection of the statue with the Confederacy is not imaginary. It comes through the remarkable man who obtained her: Bishop Patrick Neison Lynch, third Bishop of Charleston and diplomatic representative of the Confederate States to the Papal States.

That story deserves to be remembered.

Catholic Charleston Before the War

Catholicism was never the dominant religion of the South, but Charleston occupies a special place in American Catholic history. The Diocese of Charleston was established in 1820. Its enormous original territory encompassed South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. Its first bishop, the extraordinary Irish churchman John England, arrived the following year and began building something remarkably ambitious.

England founded schools and a seminary, established The United States Catholic Miscellany, ministered during epidemics, preached extensively, and attempted to give Catholicism a distinctly American footing while remaining completely Catholic. Charleston consequently became one of the intellectual centers of antebellum American Catholicism and it was also thoroughly Southern.

That is important.

Catholics did not live outside the political, cultural and economic world surrounding them. Southern Catholics shared many of the loyalties, assumptions, virtues and sins of Southern society. Slavery was part of that society (it was, also part of the northern society too. People forget all of these united States had slaves, south AND north and not everyone had them. Indians and blacks owned slaves too and most of the planet had it and it exists today in Africa, but only the south is the ‘evil’ people in history books), and Catholics participated in it. At the same time, Catholic life in the South cannot honestly be reduced to slavery any more than nineteenth-century Northern Catholic history can be reduced to Northern racism, anti-immigrant violence, industrial exploitation or the draft riots.

History becomes propaganda when one fact is permitted to swallow every other fact.

The South contained an actual Catholic civilization, small compared with the Protestant majority, but real, with parishes, religious orders, schools, orphanages, hospitals, missions, priests, sisters and families whose stories deserve to be recovered and at the center of that world in Charleston stood its cathedral.

Construction on the Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar began in 1850. It was consecrated in April 1854. Designed by Patrick Keely, it was a soaring Gothic Revival church and the pride of Charleston’s Catholic community and it would stand for only seven years.

A Cathedral in Flames

On December 11, 1861, only months after the opening shots of the War of Southern Independence had been fired at nearby Fort Sumter, an enormous fire swept through Charleston and the cathedral burned. So did other diocesan institutions and records. According to historical accounts of the disaster, Catholics and neighbors had actually placed valuables inside the cathedral because its construction was thought to offer protection from the flames. Obviously, it did not and the cathedral was gutted.

The catastrophe was made worse by an almost unbelievable detail: its insurance had recently expired. With Charleston entering wartime deprivation, there was no realistic prospect of simply rebuilding it. The ruins remained on Broad Street for years.

Photographs taken in the aftermath of the war are haunting. Gothic arches rise against the sky with no roof above them. Walls stand around a sanctuary that no longer exists. The photographs do not need embellishment. They show a Catholic Charleston that had quite literally gone through fire.

The present Cathedral of St. John the Baptist would not begin construction until 1890 and would not be dedicated until 1907 and between those two cathedrals stands the figure most important to our story.

Bishop Patrick Lynch

Patrick Neison Lynch was not an outsider who happened to receive an appointment in South Carolina. South Carolina formed him. He was born in Ireland in 1817 and Lynch came to America with his family as a small child and grew up in Cheraw, South Carolina. He studied under the Catholic institutions created by Bishop England before being sent to Rome, where he completed his theological education and was ordained a priest. He then became Bishop of Charleston in 1858 and three years later his diocese was engulfed by war.

Lynch’s sympathies were not ambiguous.

He supported Southern independence. Scholarly work on Lynch records that after the Confederate capture of Fort Sumter, he ordered a Te Deum sung in his cathedral. He publicly debated Archbishop John Hughes of New York over the Southern cause and praised Confederate soldiers and government. He also became known for ministry among wounded soldiers and prisoners.

This was not merely the action of a man caught geographically inside the Confederacy.

Lynch believed in the Southern cause.

He also defended slavery in a wartime tract written during his diplomatic work in Europe. That fact should not be hidden merely because we may admire other things about him. Serious history requires allowing historical figures to remain complicated instead of reshaping them to satisfy twenty-first-century political camps.

Then, in 1864, Jefferson Davis gave the Bishop of Charleston one of the strangest diplomatic assignments of the Civil War.

He sent him to Rome.

The Confederate Bishop Goes to the Vatican

On February 20, 1864, Jefferson Davis appointed Bishop Lynch Special Commissioner of the Confederate States of America to the States of the Church. The goal was diplomatic recognition, or at least greater sympathy for the Confederacy in Rome and Europe and Lynch was unusually well suited to the assignment. He had studied in Rome, spoke Italian, understood the Roman ecclesiastical world and had personal connections there. He crossed the blockade and traveled to Europe.

But an important distinction needs to be made here because this episode is frequently exaggerated in both pro- and anti-Confederate versions of the story: Pope Pius IX did not recognize the Confederate States of America. The Diocese of Charleston’s own archival history is explicit on the point. Lynch was received as a Catholic bishop, not formally accepted by the pope as an accredited ambassador of a recognized sovereign nation. His diplomatic mission ultimately failed but that does not make the episode insignificant. Quite the contrary.

Think about what it means.

In the middle of the Civil War, while Charleston endured blockade, bombardment and deprivation, its Catholic bishop crossed the Atlantic representing the Confederate government and entered the diplomatic world surrounding Pope Pius IX.

And somewhere in this Civil War story appears a Madonna.

The Madonna

The Blessed Virgin Mary Chapel in today’s Charleston cathedral contains an Italian marble statue of Mary and the Child Jesus, attributed to the German sculptor Ferdinand Pettrich and Pettrich was no obscure craftsman.

Born in Dresden in 1798 into a sculpting family, he studied in Rome under the celebrated Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. Pettrich later worked in the United States and Brazil and became particularly well known for portrait sculpture. His American subjects included prominent political figures and Native American leaders.

The Charleston Madonna is unusual.

Mary appears without the veil or head covering familiar in so much Catholic Marian imagery. Christ is not shown as a tiny infant but as a young child, a toddler, held close to His Mother. The cathedral’s Marian chapel is today generally identified as the Blessed Virgin Mary Chapel, but the Madonna has also been associated with the names Our Lady of the South and Our Lady of the Confederacy.

The surviving accounts say that Bishop Lynch purchased the statue during the Civil War and here caution becomes important. I have found good documentation establishing the statue, Pettrich, Bishop Lynch’s acquisition of it during the war, Lynch’s Confederate mission, and the later use of the titles Our Lady of the South and Our Lady of the Confederacy. I have not yet found a wartime primary document proving that Bishop Lynch himself formally bestowed the title “Our Lady of the Confederacy” upon the statue.

That distinction matters as it would make a better story simply to state it as fact but it would not make better history. The name may reflect a later Charleston tradition growing naturally from the statue’s association with Lynch and the Confederacy. Unless contemporary documentation establishes more, that is where we ought to leave the question.

The title Our Lady of the South, however, beautifully captures what the statue has come to represent and not a political canonization of every part of Southern history.

Something more interesting.

A Madonna carried into the story of a suffering Southern Catholic people.

A Diocese Brought to Its Knees

By the end of the war, the Catholic Church in the Carolinas was devastated as the cathedral was gone and Charleston had endured siege and bombardment. Catholic institutions elsewhere in the diocese had also suffered.

Lynch returned to a church burdened by enormous debt and spent the postwar years trying to preserve and rebuild Catholic life. According to the diocesan archives, after the war his financial difficulties were immense, and rebuilding became one of the defining burdens of his episcopate.

He never lived to see the present cathedral and Lynch died in 1882. The cornerstone of the new cathedral was not laid until 1890, and the building was finally dedicated in 1907 and yet the Madonna survived into that rebuilt Catholic world.

There is something deeply Catholic about that.

Buildings fall.

Governments fall.

Armies disappear.

Flags that once sent men charging across fields eventually hang silently behind museum glass.

But Our Lady remains.

The South That History Forgot

There is another reason this little chapel matters.

American history is frequently told as if Southern religious history were simply Protestant history. It wasn’t. Catholics were here and priests rode enormous mission territories. Religious sisters taught children and nursed the sick (the first target by Sherman’s burning of the south in Columbia, SC was the Ursaline Convent. They heard Sherman was coming and processed into the cemetary and hid waiting. Target #2 was the prisons. Why? Because that is where the Mass was said). Catholic families buried their dead in Southern soil.

Southern Catholic bishops wrestled with questions of war, slavery, political loyalty, national identity and ecclesiastical unity. The Catholic Church itself did not divide into Northern and Southern churches as several major Protestant denominations did. Whatever political sympathies individual Catholics held, sacramental communion remained.

That is an extraordinary piece of American history all by itself and Charleston stood near the center of it.

Bishop John England had already made the city nationally important to American Catholicism. Bishop Lynch then led its Catholics through perhaps the greatest catastrophe they had ever experienced and to discover that a Madonna connected with that story is still sitting quietly inside the cathedral seems almost unbelievable.

Yet there she is.

Neither Myth Nor Erasure

There is tremendous pressure now to approach the Southern past in one of two ways.

One is romantic mythology in which everything Southern was noble and the uglier realities are brushed aside.

The other is historical prosecution in which the past is summoned into a courtroom whose verdict has already been written y the ‘victors’.

Neither is adequate.

Slavery was real though, again, it wasn’t a south only issue. There was slavery after the war in the north and the south told European countries they would end it tomorrow if they would help. Lincoln tried the original 13th amendment, the Corwin Amendment, to make slavery perpetual if the south would stay. The South rejected it and you don’t read about that in high school classes. Read books from Shotwell Publishing, the Kennedy Twins and Abbeville Institute (which has quite a few Catholics on the board) for more on this topic and other Southern books.

Honor and loyalty, courage, sacrifice, faith, family, regional identity and grief was real.

A Confederate soldier could fight bravely without thereby making every political institution of the Confederacy righteous. Many families sacrificed everything to be free and that’s not counting Reconstruction and Sharecropping afterwards (they were punished with poverty).

Our Lady of the South

Perhaps that is why I find this Madonna so compelling, she’s ours. Sure there is Our Lady of Prompt Succor that is in New Orleans and Our Lady of Champion in Wisconsin and Our Lady of Guadalupe in the dead center of the Americas. (Just for an idea Our Lady of Champion is 990 miles from here and Guadalupe is 1,549 miles… I say that because most think just because Champion is inside the union of states that somehow that is a connection with us in Carolina. It’s in a foreign state to us. People in Carolina have nothing in common with Wisconsin, don’t take that as an offense it’s just that. Our culture, heritage, customs, language, people are different from there just like other states).

Call her Our Lady of the South.

Think of all the Southern mothers who watched sons leave home and never return. Think of the wounded men lying in hospitals while Catholic sisters tended them. Think of priests carrying the sacraments through war-torn communities. Think of Charleston Catholics standing before the ruins of their cathedral. Think of families facing hunger, occupation, economic destruction, death and the collapse of the only world they had known, and above all of that human suffering stands the Mother who once stood beneath another instrument of execution and watched her own Son die.

That is a Southern devotion worth recovering, because the Mother of God belongs wherever Christians suffer and call upon her.

She was with Catholics before Fort Sumter, she was with them during the war, she was with them when their cathedral became a ruin, she was with them while Charleston rebuilt and more than a century and a half later, her image remains.

Hidden in plain sight on Broad Street.

Our Lady of the South, pray for us.

A Note on the Name

The statue is located in what is officially the Blessed Virgin Mary Chapel of the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist. Sources identify the Madonna as a work of Ferdinand Pettrich purchased by Bishop Patrick Lynch during the Civil War. The titles “Our Lady of the South” and “Our Lady of the Confederacy” have both been associated with it, although the latter is not an official ecclesiastical title. I have deliberately not claimed that Bishop Lynch himself originated either title because I have not yet located a contemporary primary source proving that point.

That uncertainty is not a weakness in the story. It is part of doing history honestly.

Sources and Further Reading

The principal sources used for this article include the Diocese of Charleston Archives, particularly its material on Bishop Patrick N. Lynch and his Confederate diplomatic mission; the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist’s historical material; the South Carolina Encyclopedia; David C. R. Heisser’s scholarly study of Lynch’s Civil War writings; Library of Congress photographs of the ruined Cathedral of St. John and St. Finbar; and the surviving photographic documentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary Chapel.

The Diocese of Charleston’s archival account confirms Jefferson Davis’s appointment of Lynch as special commissioner and, importantly, states that Pope Pius IX did not recognize the Confederate government through Lynch’s mission.

The present cathedral dates from the rebuilding begun in 1890 after the original cathedral’s destruction in the Great Fire of 1861.

A high-resolution photograph of the Blessed Virgin Mary Chapel itself is available through Wikimedia Commons; the photograph specifically identifies the chapel and is licensed for reuse under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Every so often a quotation from the Church Fathers appears online that sounds almost unbelievable to modern ears. One currently making the rounds comes from St. John Chrysostom’s commentary on St. Paul’s First Epistle to Timothy:

“The woman taught once, and ruined all. On this account therefore he says, let her not teach.”

Yes, St. John Chrysostom really said it.

It is found in Homily 9 on First Timothy, where Chrysostom is commenting on one of the most disputed passages in the New Testament:

“Let a woman learn in silence with all submissiveness. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent.”
— 1 Timothy 2:11–12

It would be easy to do what modern people so often do with uncomfortable patristic passages: explain them away, insist that the Father could not really have meant what he appears to mean, and then reinterpret him until he sounds like a twenty-first-century theologian.

That would be dishonest.

But it would be equally dishonest to take one sentence from Chrysostom and conclude that he believed a woman could never teach a man anything about the Faith under any circumstances.

Chrysostom himself tells us otherwise.

And the distinction he makes sheds considerable light on a question the modern Church still struggles to articulate clearly: What kind of teaching did St. Paul forbid to women?

“Let Her Not Teach”

Chrysostom begins his treatment of 1 Timothy 2 by connecting the passage directly with St. Paul’s command in 1 Corinthians:

“Let the women keep silence in the churches.”
— 1 Corinthians 14:34

For Chrysostom, Paul is speaking about order within the ecclesiastical assembly. Women, he says, are not to assume the position of those who publicly teach the congregation but should instead “occupy the station of learners.”

Then comes the famous passage.

Paul appeals to the creation of Adam and Eve and to Eve’s deception. Chrysostom comments:

“The woman taught once, and ruined all.”

He then concludes that this is why Paul says she is not to teach. Chrysostom does not limit Paul’s reasoning simply to Eve as an individual. He understands Paul to be drawing a lesson concerning the relationship of the sexes and the order of the Church.

Those are strong words. There is no benefit in pretending otherwise as Chrysostom clearly did not believe that men and women were interchangeable with respect to public ecclesiastical authority, but now things become interesting.

What About Priscilla?

Elsewhere Chrysostom encounters an obvious biblical problem.

The Book of Acts tells us about the learned preacher Apollos. Although eloquent and knowledgeable in Scripture, his understanding of the Faith was incomplete. Aquila and his wife Priscilla took him aside and “expounded to him the way of God more accurately” (Acts 18:26).

Priscilla was therefore involved in instructing a man and Chrysostom knew it.

While commenting on Romans 16, he actually asks the question himself:

“In what sense then does he say, ‘I suffer not a woman to teach?’”

His answer is enormously important.

Paul, Chrysostom explains, intends to prevent a woman from publicly coming forward and occupying the teaching seat, not to prohibit every “word of teaching.” He specifically cites Priscilla instructing Apollos as evidence.

Chrysostom goes further. He considers the situation of a believing wife whose husband is less knowledgeable than she is. In such a case, he says, when the woman is wiser, Paul does not forbid her from instructing and improving him privately.

That changes the entire discussion. Chrysostom cannot be honestly summarized as teaching: “Women may never teach men.” His position is closer to: A woman may instruct, explain, admonish, evangelize, and communicate the Faith, even to a man in appropriate circumstances; but she does not assume the public teaching office over the assembled Church.

That distinction is not something modern scholars invented to rescue Chrysostom and Chrysostom himself makes it.

“But You Forbid a Woman to Teach”

There is an even clearer passage in Chrysostom’s Homily 4 on Titus.

St. Paul commands older women to be “teachers of good things” and to instruct younger women. Chrysostom immediately recognizes what appears to be a contradiction:

“And yet you forbid a woman to teach; how do you command it here?”

His answer again distinguishes different kinds of teaching.

Women, he says, are permitted to instruct in the home, while they are “nowhere permitted to preside.” He then distinguishes the older women’s instruction of younger women from Titus’s responsibility for instructing the men.

We therefore have three passages from Chrysostom pointing in the same direction. In 1 Timothy, he rejects women occupying the public teaching position in church. In Romans, he explicitly permits private instruction and cites Priscilla teaching Apollos. In Titus, he approves women teaching other women and instructing within the household while distinguishing this from presiding.

That is a much richer position than either side of the modern argument usually acknowledges.

Augustine Saw the Same Distinction

St. Augustine also treats St. Paul’s prohibition as specifically connected with speaking in the Church.

In his commentary on Christ and the Samaritan woman, Augustine recalls Paul’s instruction that women who wish to learn should ask their husbands at home. He explains that Paul was “forbidding [women] to speak in the Church.”

Yet Augustine immediately points to women personally receiving instruction from Christ. Mary sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to His word. Christ Himself taught the Samaritan woman directly.

Again, there is no suggestion that women are incapable of receiving theology, discussing theology, transmitting the Faith, or possessing profound spiritual wisdom and the restriction concerns order within the Church’s public assembly.

St. Jerome Was Not Ambiguous Either

St. Jerome likewise invokes Paul’s command that women remain silent in church.

In Against the Pelagians, Jerome criticizes the public display of religious instruction by women and explicitly appeals to the Apostle’s teaching that women “ought to keep silence in the churches.” At the same time, nobody familiar with Jerome’s life could reasonably maintain that he thought women should remain intellectually ignorant of theology.

Jerome corresponded extensively with extraordinarily learned Christian women. He encouraged women to immerse themselves in Scripture and played an enormous role in the spiritual and intellectual formation of women such as St. Paula and St. Eustochium.

Once again, the distinction is not between:

Men who know and teach the Faith

and

Women who know nothing and remain silent about it.

The distinction is between the broad Christian work of communicating truth and the public authoritative teaching order of the Church.

The Apostolic Constitutions Are Even More Explicit

Perhaps the clearest ancient statement comes from the fourth-century Apostolic Constitutions.

The text states:

“We do not permit our women to teach in the Church.”

It then makes an argument that would sound startlingly direct today.

Christ, it says, had numerous holy women among His followers: His Mother, Mary Magdalene, Martha, Mary, Salome, and others. Yet when He commissioned the Twelve to preach publicly and make disciples of the nations, He did not appoint these women to that apostolic office.

Whatever one thinks of that reasoning today, we should recognize its historical importance.

The early Christian objection was not: “Women aren’t holy enough.” as who could be holier than the Blessed Virgin Mary?

It was not: “Women cannot understand theology.” as the Church was filled with learned and spiritually formidable women.

Nor was it: “Women cannot evangelize.” as women played indispensable roles in spreading Christianity from the apostolic age onward. The question was one of ecclesiastical order and authority. Who stands before the assembled Church as its authoritative teacher? For these ancient Christians, that role was bound up with the apostolic and ministerial structure given to the Church.

Women Were Essential to the Apostolic Church

This also prevents us from creating a caricature of the early Church as Chrysostom’s commentary on Romans contains some of his most enthusiastic praise for Christian women. Speaking about the women who labored alongside the Apostles, he describes them as extraordinarily courageous and emphasizes their sacrifices, travels, financial assistance, service, and participation in the work of spreading the Gospel.

Photina converted her entire town.

St. Paul himself names women among his fellow laborers.

Priscilla helped instruct Apollos.

Phoebe served the Church at Cenchreae.

Lydia opened her home to the apostolic mission.

Women supported Our Lord during His earthly ministry.

Mary Magdalene announced the Resurrection to the Apostles.

Older Christian women were instructed to teach younger women.

Mothers were expected to form their children in the Faith.

None of this threatened the male apostolic ministry because the early Christians apparently did not view every act of speaking about God as an exercise of ecclesiastical authority.

That distinction may be precisely what we have lost.

We Have Collapsed Every Kind of Teaching Into One Category

Modern arguments often proceed as though only two possibilities exist. Either women may exercise every teaching function that men exercise, or women must never publicly speak about Christianity at all.

The Fathers do not fit comfortably into either position. For Chrysostom especially, several categories clearly exist. A mother teaching her son the Faith is teaching, Priscilla explaining Christianity more accurately to Apollos is teaching, an older woman instructing younger women is teaching. a Christian wife helping an unbelieving or poorly instructed husband is teaching, and a woman assisting missionaries in spreading the Gospel is participating in evangelization.

Yet Chrysostom can acknowledge every one of those things while simultaneously declaring that a woman should not ascend the public teaching seat and exercise authority over the congregation.

Why?

Because not every act of teaching is the ecclesiastical teaching office.

That distinction deserves serious consideration.

What Would Chrysostom Say About Today?

We must be careful here as the Fathers did not know what a podcast was nor did they have YouTube. They, also, did not have universities structured like ours, diocesan bureaucracies, livestreamed conferences, parish RCIA programs, Catholic publishing houses, or social media. We cannot simply point to 1 Timothy 2 and declare that Chrysostom has already supplied a detailed answer to every twenty-first-century question, but neither can we pretend his principles tell us nothing.

A woman discussing theology on a podcast is not obviously occupying Chrysostom’s bema nor is a mother catechizing her sons plainly fits within the kind of instruction he explicitly allows. A female scholar writing a book explaining Catholic doctrine is not obviously doing what Chrysostom condemns when he speaks about publicly presiding over the ecclesiastical assembly. A woman privately correcting a man’s theological misunderstanding has Priscilla herself as a biblical precedent, and Chrysostom explicitly cites her.

On the other hand, a woman assuming what functions as the authoritative preaching role within the liturgical assembly comes considerably closer to the specific activity Chrysostom and the other Fathers were restricting.

This is why questions about preaching at Mass cannot simply be lumped together with questions about women teaching at a Catholic school, publishing theology, appearing on a program, or instructing their children. They are not necessarily the same theological act and the Fathers did not treat them as though they were.

This Was Not Merely a Medieval Custom

Another important point emerges from these texts are the male character of authoritative ecclesiastical teaching cannot easily be dismissed as some late medieval cultural accident.

Chrysostom was writing in the fourth century. Augustine was writing in the fourth and fifth. Jerome lived in the same period. The Apostolic Constitutions preserve a fourth-century church order drawing upon still earlier Christian material and all of them are interpreting commands that already appear in St. Paul’s letters.

Whatever conclusions we draw about the exact boundaries of these passages, the underlying idea is plainly ancient as the first Christians did not regard sexual distinction as irrelevant to the ordering of the Church. That fact can make modern people uncomfortable as historical truth often does.

But Catholics should be particularly resistant to the temptation to remake the Fathers according to contemporary expectations. We are supposed to allow them to speak.

And We Should Let Chrysostom Finish His Sentence

This brings us back to the viral quotation.

“The woman taught once, and ruined all.”

Yes, Chrysostom said it.

One can dislike the rhetoric. One can discuss how much of his language reflects the rhetorical conventions and assumptions of late antiquity. One can debate precisely how his interpretation should be applied today, but we should not pretend he did not mean to exclude women from an authoritative public teaching role within the Church.

He did.

Yet we must also allow Chrysostom to speak when he tells us that Priscilla instructed Apollos and we must listen when he says Paul’s prohibition concerns publicly coming forward to the teaching seat rather than every possible “word of teaching.”

We must listen when he allows women to teach within the home and we must acknowledge the extraordinary praise he gives the women who labored alongside the Apostles for the Gospel. Taken together, the evidence gives us something more interesting than an internet meme.

The patristic position is neither: “Women cannot teach.”

Nor is it: “There is no meaningful distinction between men and women in the Church’s teaching order.”

It is closer to this: Women can possess, communicate, defend, explain, and transmit the Faith. They can instruct other women, their children, and even men under appropriate circumstances. They can evangelize and labor powerfully for the Gospel. But the authoritative public teaching and presiding office of the assembled Church belongs to the order Christ entrusted to men.

That distinction may sound foreign to modern ears, but it would not have sounded foreign to St. John Chrysostom, and perhaps before deciding that the ancient Church had nothing to teach us about the subject, we ought first to understand what it actually believed.

Primary Sources

St. John Chrysostom

• Homily 9 on First Timothy, on 1 Timothy 2:11–15.

• Homily 31 on Romans, on Romans 16 and Priscilla.

• Homily 4 on Titus, on Titus 2:2–5.

St. Augustine

• Tractate 15 on the Gospel of John, especially his discussion of John 4 and 1 Corinthians 14.

St. Jerome

• Against the Pelagians, Book I.

Apostolic Constitutions

• Book III, chapter 6, on women teaching in the Church.

Today is the feast of St. John Eudes, and one of his harsher sayings has been on my mind:

“The most evident mark of God’s anger and the most terrible castigations He can inflict upon the world are manifested when He permits His people to fall into the hands of clerics who are priests more in name than in deed, priests who practice the cruelty of ravening wolves rather than the charity and affection of devoted shepherds.”

Those are severe words. A priest, who gave a sermon on priests in name more than deed, mentioned shaking at the end of giving it. For us Catholics living through scandal, confusion, weak leadership, and at times outright betrayal from men entrusted with the care of souls, they are not difficult to apply.

The temptation, though, is to read St. John Eudes entirely as an indictment of them: The bad priest. The cowardly bishop. The compromised institution. The men who should have known better, spoken sooner, acted more courageously.

Sometimes that indictment is perfectly justified. Wolves really do exist, and calling a wolf a wolf is not a failure of charity, but there is another question worth asking: What sort of people produce good shepherds?

There is an old saying that we get the leaders we deserve. Taken too literally, it becomes unfair. A faithful Catholic does not somehow deserve an abusive priest because of his own sins, nor is every corrupt bishop a direct punishment for the shortcomings of the people under him, but there is something uncomfortable and true buried in the phrase.

Leaders do not fall out of the sky.

Priests come from families. Bishops first come from presbyterates. Vocations emerge from parishes, schools, friendships, homes, and communities. The men who eventually stand at the altar were once boys watching other men, learning what courage looked like, discovering whether sacrifice was admirable or foolish, and deciding whether the things of God were worth giving their lives to.

If a Catholic culture becomes soft, embarrassed by its own beliefs, afraid of conflict, allergic to sacrifice, and accustomed to mediocrity, we should not be entirely surprised when the same weaknesses eventually appear in its clergy.

We cannot spend a generation forming boys to seek comfort above all things and then act bewildered when heroic men become scarce.

We cannot spend decades treating the priesthood as somebody else’s concern and then complain about a shortage of worthy priests.(I once was in a men’s prayer group and one was a father of 11 and had zero vocations, yet he prayed for others to have vocations).

We cannot demand courage from our bishops while excusing cowardice in ourselves.

That does not mean the laity can fix the hierarchy. Much of what happens in the governance of the Church is simply outside our control. We do not appoint bishops. We do not run seminaries. We cannot remove every bad priest or correct every ecclesiastical failure, but helplessness can become a convenient excuse.

There is a great deal that remains within our control.

1. We can make our homes places where the Faith is taken seriously.

2. We can raise sons who understand that manhood involves sacrifice, duty, self-command, and responsibility for others.

3. We can speak about the priesthood as a noble vocation rather than treating it as something strange that other people’s sons might consider.

4. We can pray for priests, not vaguely, but by name.

5. We can fast for them.

6. We can encourage good priests when fidelity makes their lives difficult.

7. We can refuse to flatter bad ones simply because confronting error is uncomfortable.

8. We can learn the Faith well enough that confusion from the pulpit does not become confusion in our homes.

9. And we can pursue holiness ourselves.

That last point may be the most important.

It is easy to imagine that the crisis in the Church would be solved if only the right men occupied the right offices. Certainly good leadership matters enormously. But renewal in the Church has never come only from administrative competence. It comes from saints.

St. John Eudes did not spend his life merely cataloguing the failures of the clergy around him. He formed priests. He preached missions. He fought for reform. He built institutions. He gave himself to the work that was actually in front of him. That is a much more demanding response than outrage.

There will always be legitimate reasons to criticize bad leadership. Catholics should not pretend otherwise. But criticism alone does not produce the priests we wish we had, the bishops we wish we had, or the Church culture we wish existed: formation does, prayer does, sacrifice does, holiness does.

If we want better shepherds tomorrow, then part of our responsibility today is to become a better flock, and to raise the kind of men from whom good shepherds can be made.

ps - I haven’t unlocked this yet so you all are the first to see episode 2 of Saints in a Struggle series. This one is on Moses the Black that I did late last night for the darkness to be better.

ad Iesum per Mariam
Steve

There is one moment in Called to Compiègne that I have been unable to shake.

It isn’t the trial.

It isn’t the guillotine.

It isn’t even the final hymn that has echoed through Catholic history.

It happens quietly.

Almost unnoticed.

Hidden behind monastery walls while the world outside descends into chaos.

It is the moment when sixteen women freely offer themselves to God.

Not because anyone asks them to.

Not because they have already been condemned.

Not because they are certain death awaits them.

But because they believe love always offers itself.

That is the heart of this story.

Modern culture has taught us to think of sacrifice as something forced upon us.

We sacrifice because circumstances leave us no choice.

We sacrifice because life is unfair.

We sacrifice because someone else demands it.

The Gospel presents an entirely different picture.

Christ says,

“No man taketh it away from me: but I lay it down of myself.”
(John 10:18)

That sentence changes everything.

Love is never merely endured.

Love chooses.

As the Revolution intensified, Mother Teresa of St. Augustine and the sisters watched France unravel before their eyes.

Churches were closed.

Priests were hunted.

Religious communities were scattered.

Hatred seemed to spread faster than reason.

Violence answered violence.

The nation was consuming itself.

Faced with this darkness, the sisters made an astonishing decision.

They would offer their lives to God as a sacrifice, praying that peace might be restored to France and that the persecution of the Church might come to an end. It was not a gesture born of despair, but an act of hope rooted in their confidence that God could bring good even from suffering.

Think about that.

They did not pray,

“Lord, spare us.”

They prayed,

“Lord, use us.”

Those are two very different prayers.

I had to stop reading for a few moments after reaching this part of the story.

Because I realized how foreign that way of thinking has become.

Our instinct is self-preservation.

Theirs was self-offering.

Our first question is often,

“How do I survive this?”

Their first question became,

“How can God be glorified through this?”

That is not natural.

That is supernatural.

The more I reflected on it, the more I became convinced that this was the true victory of the Carmelites.

Their triumph did not begin on the scaffold.

It began here.

The moment they surrendered themselves completely to God’s will.

Everything after that was simply history catching up to a decision they had already made in prayer.

The Revolution could arrest their bodies.

It could never imprison souls that had already placed themselves entirely in God’s hands.

There is a profound difference between being a victim and becoming an offering.

Victims suffer because suffering is imposed upon them.

Offerings transform suffering into love.

That distinction lies at the very center of Christianity.

Christ was not merely executed.

He offered Himself.

The Mass is not simply a remembrance of violence.

It is the perpetual memorial of voluntary love.

The Carmelites understood this with remarkable clarity.

They did not seek death.

The Church has never glorified death for its own sake.

They sought fidelity.

If fidelity required suffering, then suffering itself became an offering.

Reading these pages, I found myself asking a difficult question.

What have I ever consciously offered to God?

Not merely accepted.

Offered.

There is a difference.

Many of us endure inconveniences.

Few of us place them upon the altar.

An illness.

A disappointment.

A betrayal.

A financial hardship.

A hidden sorrow.

The saints have an extraordinary habit of taking the very things we resent and presenting them to God as gifts.

Suddenly suffering is no longer meaningless.

It becomes Eucharistic.

It becomes an act of love.

This is one of the reasons the Carmelites continue to speak so powerfully to our own age.

We live in a culture determined to eliminate suffering at almost any cost.

And yet, despite all our technological advances, human suffering remains.

The saints propose something radically different.

They do not ask,

“How can every cross be removed?”

They ask,

“How can every cross be united to Christ?”

That question changes suffering from something merely endured into something redeemed.

History tells us that shortly after the Carmelites made their offering, the Reign of Terror reached its horrifying climax.

Day after day, the guillotine claimed more victims.

Suspicion poisoned friendships.

Fear governed the streets of Paris.

It seemed impossible that peace would ever return.

Yet the sisters continued praying.

Not because circumstances improved.

Because faith does not depend upon circumstances.

Faith depends upon God.

One detail struck me more than any other.

These women were not political revolutionaries.

They organized no resistance.

They sought no revenge.

They did not answer hatred with hatred.

Instead, they believed something almost incomprehensible to the modern world.

That hidden prayer could accomplish more than public violence.

What confidence that required.

And what humility.

It is tempting to dismiss such faith as naïve.

History suggests otherwise.

Within days of the Carmelites’ martyrdom, the Reign of Terror collapsed.

Robespierre himself was arrested and sent to the same guillotine that had consumed so many innocent lives.

Historians can debate political causes.

Catholics are free to notice providence.

The sisters had offered themselves for France.

Almost immediately afterward, the bloodshed began to end.

Whether one sees coincidence or divine intervention, their witness remains astonishing.

Perhaps that is why this chapter moved me so deeply.

Before the Carmelites ever climbed the steps to the guillotine...

Before they sang the Veni Creator...

Before the world learned their names...

They had already won.

Because the greatest battle was never against the Revolution.

It was against fear.

Against self-preservation.

Against the temptation to love their own lives more than Christ.

That battle was fought in silence.

Behind monastery walls.

On their knees.

The world often measures victory by survival.

The Gospel measures victory by fidelity.

The Carmelites understood that difference.

And because they did...

They entered history not as tragic victims of a revolution...

But as joyful witnesses to a kingdom no revolution could overthrow.

In 2021, a Catholic priest stood before his people and did something leaders rarely do.

He apologized.

Not the carefully constructed apology we have become accustomed to hearing from corporations, politicians, celebrities, and institutions.

There was no “mistakes were made.”

No “we regret that some people felt…”

No long explanation of circumstances designed to make responsibility disappear.

Instead, Fr. Sergio Muñoz Fita, pastor of St. Anne Catholic Church in Gilbert, Arizona, stood before his congregation at the Mass of the Lord’s Supper and took responsibility for what had happened during the COVID shutdowns.

He began:

“I feel the need to publicly apologize for the events of the past year.”

Then he explained why.

He was a priest. And because he was a priest, he represented something larger than himself.

When people encountered him, they encountered a representative of the Church. When they came to him for guidance, they weren’t merely asking Sergio Muñoz Fita for his personal opinion. They came to a priest.

And therefore, he believed, he had to answer for what had happened.

Then came the words that struck me:

“We failed you.”

During the pandemic, Catholics had been deprived of the Eucharist for weeks. Fr. Muñoz Fita believed he had participated in something terribly wrong.

He didn’t blame the government.

He didn’t blame his bishop.

He didn’t blame public-health officials.

He didn’t even hide behind obedience.

He took ownership.

And listening to his apology reminded me of a leadership principle from a very different world.

It reminded me of Jocko Willink.

Extreme Ownership

Jocko Willink spent twenty years in the Navy SEALs and commanded SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser during the Battle of Ramadi.

Later, with fellow SEAL officer Leif Babin, he wrote Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win.

The central principle of the book is brutally simple:

The leader owns it.

When something goes wrong under your leadership, your first instinct cannot be to find somebody else to blame.

Jocko describes Extreme Ownership as accepting responsibility for success and failure, acknowledging mistakes, and then developing a plan to correct them.

No excuses.

No blame.

Ownership.

That doesn’t mean a leader literally causes everything that happens.

It means he refuses to use circumstances outside his control as an excuse for neglecting what was within his control.

And that’s precisely what makes Fr. Muñoz Fita’s apology so remarkable.

“I Am a Priest”

Before Fr. Muñoz Fita admits what he did wrong, he establishes something even more important:

who he is.

He says:

“I am a priest, and therefore in a small way, I represent the Church.”

That’s where responsibility begins.

We tend to think of authority in terms of privilege.

The boss gets the office.

The officer gives the orders.

The father sets the rules.

The priest governs the parish.

But genuine authority works in the opposite direction.

The more authority you possess, the more you become responsible for.

A father doesn’t merely have authority over his children.

He is responsible for them.

A commander isn’t merely empowered to give orders to his men.

He answers for what happens to them.

And a priest isn’t simply given authority over a parish.

Souls have been entrusted to his care.

That’s the terrible weight hidden inside authority.

Authority means answering for someone other than yourself.

And that’s why the next part of the priest’s apology is so powerful.

“We Failed You”

Fr. Muñoz Fita recalled Catholics turning toward their spiritual fathers during one of the most frightening periods of their lives.

His description was biblical.

They asked for bread.

And their shepherds gave them a stone.

His conclusion was devastatingly simple:

“We failed you.”

Notice the pronoun.

We.

Not they.

He could easily have constructed an argument for why the responsibility belonged somewhere else.

He wasn’t the pope.

He wasn’t the bishop.

He wasn’t the governor.

He wasn’t the public-health official writing emergency regulations.

He was one parish priest caught in an extraordinary situation involving authorities above him and circumstances outside his control.

All of that could be true.

And all of it could become an excuse.

Extreme Ownership asks a different question.

Not:

Whose fault was this?

But:

What was my responsibility?

That question changes everything.

Because blame looks outward.

Ownership looks inward.

The Most Dangerous Words in Leadership

There are four words that can destroy a man’s sense of responsibility:

“I was just following…”

Following policy.

Following instructions.

Following precedent.

Following what everyone else was doing.

Sometimes following is exactly what we should do. No organization can function if every subordinate treats every instruction as optional. And Catholicism certainly does not teach that obedience is meaningless. Obedience is a virtue.

But obedience does not turn a human being into a machine.

A man still possesses reason.

He still possesses a conscience.

He still answers to God for his actions.

And this is where Fr. Muñoz Fita’s apology becomes uncomfortable.

Because he didn’t merely say he regretted what happened.

He said, in substance, that if obedience ever placed him in that position again, he would not participate in the same way.

Why?

Because what he had already done weighed upon his conscience.

That is a staggering thing for a priest to say publicly.

And whether you agree with his judgment or not, there is something here every man should confront:

You cannot outsource your conscience.

Not to your employer.

Not to the culture.

Not to an institution.

Not even to a legitimate authority.

Obedience may explain why you made a decision.

It does not automatically absolve you of responsibility for making it.

Remember the Mission

There’s another lesson from Extreme Ownership that applies here.

Leaders have to understand the mission.

Not merely the instructions.

The mission.

When chaos arrives, secondary concerns can quickly overwhelm the primary purpose for which an organization exists.

That’s especially dangerous during a crisis.

Suddenly everything is urgent.

Everything is uncertain.

Everyone is afraid of making the wrong decision.

And in that confusion, leaders can forget the fundamental question:

What are we here to do?

For a priest, that question has an extraordinary answer.

He exists to bring Christ to his people.

To preach the Gospel.

To forgive sins.

To administer the sacraments.

To feed Christ’s sheep.

Fr. Muñoz Fita looked backward at the decisions he had made and concluded that, whatever the intentions behind them, he had failed in that mission.

His people came looking for bread.

And he believed he had given them a stone.

There is a lesson here for every leader.

When the crisis comes, and eventually it will, remember what you are actually there to do.

Repentance Goes Beyond Extreme Ownership

This is where Christianity takes us somewhere Jocko cannot.

Extreme Ownership is a powerful leadership philosophy because it demands that the leader acknowledge failure and change what he does next. Jocko and Babin explicitly connect ownership with setting aside ego, admitting failure, learning, and developing a better plan.

But Christianity has an older word for something even deeper.

Repentance.

Christian repentance isn’t merely recognizing that a strategy didn’t work.

It means recognizing:

I did wrong.

Then:

Forgive me.

And finally:

I intend to change.

Those three things belong together.

Confession without amendment becomes empty.

Amendment without confession avoids responsibility.

And confession without asking forgiveness can remain nothing more than self-analysis.

Fr. Muñoz Fita did all three.

He named the failure.

He asked forgiveness.

And he said he would not do it again.

That isn’t public relations.

That’s an examination of conscience performed in public.

Why Leaders Have So Much Trouble Saying “I Was Wrong”

There is a paradox here.

Leaders often refuse to admit mistakes because they fear losing authority.

A father thinks his children won’t respect him if he admits he was wrong.

A boss thinks his employees will question his competence.

A priest fears his parishioners will lose confidence in him.

So the leader protects himself.

He explains.

Qualifies.

Contextualizes.

Deflects.

Eventually he produces an apology in which nobody actually seems to have done anything wrong.

And everyone listening knows exactly what happened.

Ironically, the attempt to preserve authority destroys it.

Because people can forgive a leader who makes a mistake.

What becomes much harder to forgive is a leader who makes a mistake and then treats his people as though they are too stupid to recognize it.

The leader who says:

“I was wrong.”

may temporarily make himself smaller.

But something strange happens.

People begin trusting him more.

Because now they know that when circumstances become difficult, protecting his ego isn’t his highest priority.

Truth is.

This Isn’t Really About COVID

People will continue arguing about the decisions made during the pandemic for a long time.

Some believe churches acted prudently.

Others believe they capitulated far too easily.

There are serious questions about civil authority, public health, prudence, sacramental theology, obedience, and what information was available to leaders at the time.

Those debates matter.

But that’s not ultimately what interests me about this priest.

I’m interested in what happened afterward.

A man examined his own actions.

His conscience troubled him.

And rather than beginning with everything everyone else had done wrong, he began with himself.

That is rare.

And it is desperately needed.

Fathers, Husbands, Priests, and Leaders

Most of us will never command Navy SEALs.

Most of us will never lead a diocese.

But almost every man will eventually have someone entrusted to him.

A wife.

Children.

Employees.

Students.

Players.

Parishioners.

A younger man asking for advice.

And when something goes wrong, there will almost always be an explanation available.

I was tired.

She shouldn’t have said that.

My boss told me to.

The kids weren’t listening.

Nobody explained it to me.

That’s how my father handled it.

Everyone else was doing it.

I didn’t know.

Maybe every one of those statements is true.

The question remains:

What was yours?

What belonged to you?

What could you have done?

Where did you fail?

What must you repair?

And what will you do differently when the situation comes again?

That’s Extreme Ownership.

And for the Christian, it is also something more.

It is humility.

It is repentance.

It is amendment of life.

Authority Without Ownership Isn’t Leadership

There is a temptation among men to desire authority because we imagine authority means other people answering to us.

Christian leadership reveals something much more frightening.

Authority means we answer for them.

The father answers for his family.

The shepherd answers for his flock.

The leader answers for those entrusted to him.

That doesn’t mean taking responsibility for sins you didn’t commit or pretending you control things you don’t.

It means refusing to hide from the responsibility that actually belongs to you.

Fr. Sergio Muñoz Fita could not undo what had happened.

But he could own his part in it.

He could say:

We failed you.

Forgive me.

I will not do it again.

Perhaps that’s the lesson.

The world doesn’t need leaders who never make mistakes.

There aren’t any.

It needs leaders capable of saying three extraordinarily difficult words:

I was wrong.

Then two even harder ones:

Forgive me.

And finally, proving that both statements were real by the way they live afterward.

Because responsibility doesn’t end with the apology.

That’s where it begins.

History remembers the sound of the guillotine.

The heavy blade.

The wooden frame.

The roar of the crowd.

The Revolution wanted those sounds to become the soundtrack of a new France.

Fear was meant to be heard.

Terror was meant to be public.

Every execution carried a message.

“This is what happens to anyone who stands in the way of the Republic.”

But on July 17, 1794, something unexpected interrupted that message.

The crowd heard singing.

I have tried to imagine that morning.

Paris had already grown accustomed to death.

Executions had become almost routine.

Men and women climbed the scaffold every day.

Some pleaded.

Some cursed.

Some collapsed in terror.

The crowd had seen it all.

No one expected sixteen cloistered Carmelite nuns to be any different.

Surely these women would tremble.

Surely they would break.

Surely they would beg for mercy.

Instead...

they prayed.

The sisters had already been arrested.

Separated from their monastery.

Questioned.

Condemned.

Their crime was not violence.

Their crime was fidelity.

The revolutionary tribunal regarded them as enemies of the Republic because they remained faithful to their religious vocation and refused to abandon the life to which God had called them.

How strange history can be.

Women whose entire lives had been devoted to silence were now considered a threat to a nation armed with soldiers, prisons, and political power.

The cart slowly made its way through the streets of Paris.

The sisters did not spend the journey in despair.

They prayed the Divine Office.

They sang hymns.

Witnesses remembered hearing the Veni Creator Spiritus, the Church’s ancient hymn invoking the Holy Ghost.

Imagine the contrast.

Outside the cart...

noise.

Confusion.

Anger.

Inside...

peace.

The Revolution could command the streets.

It could not command their hearts.

One image from this story has remained with me ever since I first encountered it.

The youngest novice.

Sister Constance.

She was little more than a young woman.

She had every human reason to fear what lay ahead.

Instead, tradition remembers her ascending the scaffold with remarkable serenity.

One by one, the sisters renewed their vows before Mother Teresa of St. Augustine.

One by one, they kissed a small statue of the Virgin.

One by one, they mounted the steps.

Not as criminals.

As brides going to meet the Bridegroom.

The ancient Christians had a word for this.

Martyr.

Today we often think it simply means someone who dies for the faith.

The Greek word means something deeper.

Witness.

The Carmelites were not trying to impress anyone.

They were bearing witness.

They were proclaiming with their lives that Christ is worth more than life itself.

That is why martyrdom has always frightened tyrants.

A martyr cannot be intimidated.

What leverage remains over someone who has already surrendered everything?

As each sister was executed, the singing grew quieter.

Not because courage failed.

Because there were fewer voices left to sing.

One voice disappeared.

Then another.

Then another.

Until only Mother Teresa of St. Augustine remained.

Can you imagine that silence?

She had watched every one of her spiritual daughters die before her.

Every promise she had helped nurture.

Every vocation entrusted to her care.

The world would have expected despair.

Instead, she remained faithful to the end.

Then she too climbed the scaffold.

And the singing ceased.

Or so it seemed.

The remarkable thing about Christian martyrdom is that death is never the final note.

The world hears silence.

The Church hears victory.

That is why the early Christians celebrated the anniversary of a martyr’s death as a heavenly birthday.

It was not the end of a story.

It was the beginning of eternal life.

The Revolution thought it had erased sixteen inconvenient women.

Heaven received sixteen victorious daughters.

One historical detail never fails to move me.

Within days of their execution, the Reign of Terror collapsed.

Robespierre, the architect of so much bloodshed, was arrested.

Soon he would stand beneath the very blade he had used to terrorize France.

Historians rightly point to political causes and shifting alliances.

Catholics may also see something more.

The Carmelites had offered their lives for France.

Not long afterward, the machinery of terror began to consume itself.

Providence often works quietly.

Sometimes it works with astonishing timing.

As I closed this part of Called to Compiègne, I realized that the Revolution had misunderstood power.

It believed power belonged to those who commanded armies.

Issued decrees.

Controlled courts.

Built prisons.

The Gospel reveals another kind of power.

The power to forgive.

The power to remain faithful.

The power to love unto death.

Rome possessed legions.

The apostles possessed the Cross.

Rome disappeared.

The Church remained.

The French Revolution possessed the guillotine.

The Carmelites possessed Christ.

History has already revealed which kingdom endured.

There is another lesson here for us.

Most of us will never walk to a scaffold.

Our witness will be quieter.

We will be asked to remain faithful when no one applauds.

To defend the truth when it is unpopular.

To raise children in the faith.

To forgive those who wound us.

To persevere in prayer when heaven seems silent.

Those hidden acts of fidelity may never appear in history books.

But neither did the daily lives of the Carmelites.

Until one day the world discovered that quiet holiness is stronger than loud ideology.

Perhaps that has always been God’s way.

I think that is why this story refuses to leave me.

The image that remains is not the guillotine.

It is the hymn.

Sixteen women walking toward death.

Not with panic.

Not with bitterness.

But with prayer on their lips and hope in their hearts.

The Revolution believed it was ending their story.

It was only writing the final page of a chapter that Heaven had already transformed into glory.

The blade fell.

The song did not end.

It simply continued where earthly ears could no longer hear it.

Some books entertain us.

Some books educate us.

A very small number change the way we look at the world.

Called to Compiègne belongs to that final category.

When I first opened its pages, I expected to read about sixteen Carmelite nuns who died during the French Revolution.

When I closed the book, I realized I had been reading about something much larger.

I had been reading about the human heart.

About courage.

About fear.

About freedom.

About the extraordinary things God can accomplish through people the world barely notices.

History often remembers the wrong people.

We remember generals.

Politicians.

Revolutionaries.

Presidents.

Kings.

The people whose names filled newspapers.

Meanwhile, hidden in monasteries, convents, village churches, and humble homes were souls quietly changing history through prayer and fidelity.

The Carmelites of Compiègne remind us that Heaven keeps a very different record than the evening news.

The world counted them as insignificant.

God counted them as faithful.

And that is the only verdict that ultimately matters.

One of the lasting gifts of this book is that it restores proportion.

Modern society constantly measures greatness by visibility.

Followers.

Subscribers.

Influence.

Recognition.

Reach.

The sisters possessed none of those things.

No social platform.

No political office.

No public acclaim.

Most people in France never knew their names.

Yet here we are, more than two hundred years later, still speaking about them.

How many of the revolutionary officials who condemned them can we name without opening a history book?

History has a way of exposing what was truly important all along.

The French Revolution believed it was creating a new humanity.

Its leaders imagined that once the Church had been pushed aside, reason alone would usher in an age of liberty.

Instead, the Revolution descended into suspicion, violence, and terror.

The Carmelites offered a different vision.

Not power, but prayer.

Not revenge, but sacrifice.

Not hatred, but charity.

Not self-assertion, but self-gift.

That contrast feels just as relevant now as it did in 1794.

Every generation has its revolution.

It may not involve guillotines.

It may not involve mobs in the streets.

But every age asks the same question:

“Will you remain faithful when faithfulness costs something?”

For some, the cost is reputation.

For others, employment.

For others, friendships.

For others, loneliness.

For others, ridicule.

The forms change.

The question never does.

Reading Called to Compiègne, I found myself thinking less about martyrdom and more about ordinary life.

Because that is where sanctity begins.

The sisters did not become holy on the day of their execution.

They became holy in the years before it.

By praying when no one was watching.

By forgiving small offenses.

By obeying in hidden ways.

By embracing silence.

By remaining faithful to ordinary duties.

The guillotine revealed what had already been formed.

It did not create it.

That lesson may be the most important one the book has to offer.

We often imagine courage as something that appears in a single dramatic moment.

The saints consistently teach another lesson.

Courage grows quietly.

One Rosary.

One confession.

One act of patience.

One hidden sacrifice.

One difficult act of forgiveness.

One morning of getting out of bed to pray when no one else knows.

Those ordinary choices shape extraordinary souls.

The Carmelites remind us that no act of fidelity is ever wasted.

There is another reason this story matters.

It reminds us that Christianity has never promised safety.

Our Lord never told His disciples that following Him would guarantee comfort.

He promised something far better.

His presence.

“I am with you always, even unto the consummation of the world.” (Matthew 28:20)

That promise sustained the apostles.

It sustained the martyrs.

It sustained the Carmelites.

It is enough to sustain us.

As I finished the final chapters, I found myself returning to a simple thought.

The Revolution believed it had won.

The sisters were dead.

The monastery was gone.

The Church seemed defeated.

Yet two centuries later...

Pilgrims remember the Carmelites.

The Church honors them.

Books continue to tell their story.

The hymns they sang are still sung.

The Republic that condemned them has become another chapter in history.

The witness of the martyrs has become part of eternity.

That is the paradox at the heart of Christianity.

The Cross looked like defeat on Good Friday.

It became victory on Easter Sunday.

The Carmelites simply followed the same path.

Perhaps that is why Called to Compiègne feels less like a history book and more like a mirror.

It quietly asks every reader:

What am I afraid of losing?

What compromise am I tempted to make?

What comforts have become chains?

What would faithfulness look like today?

Those questions linger long after the final page.

And that is the mark of a truly great book.

It does not merely tell us what happened.

It asks what we will do.

When I first began reading Called to Compiègne, I thought I was discovering sixteen forgotten saints.

Now I realize they were never forgotten.

Not by the Church.

Not by Heaven.

Only by a world that too often remembers power more readily than holiness.

This book gently corrects that mistake.

It restores their names.

More importantly, it restores their witness.

And in doing so, it reminds us of something every Christian eventually learns:

The world can silence a voice.

It cannot silence the truth.

It can destroy a building.

It cannot destroy a vocation.

It can take a life.

It cannot conquer a soul that belongs to Christ.

That is why the story of Compiègne still matters.

Not because it teaches us how sixteen women died.

But because it teaches us how Christians are called to live.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve followed this series from the beginning, thank you for making the journey with me. My hope is that these essays have done more than introduce you to a remarkable book. I hope they have introduced you to sixteen remarkable women whose lives still illuminate the path of Christian discipleship.

If you have the opportunity, read Called to Compiègne for yourself. Take your time with it. Let the sisters become more than names in a historical account. Let them become companions in the faith.

Because in the end, this is not merely their story.

It is the story of every Christian who must one day answer the same question:

When the moment of decision comes, will I choose comfort... or Christ?

History has a habit of compressing events.

We remember the explosion.

We forget the fuse.

Ask someone about the French Revolution, and they’ll likely picture the guillotine.

The tumbrils.

The Reign of Terror.

Crowds shouting beneath blood-red banners.

But revolutions rarely begin with executions.

They begin with paperwork.

With committees.

With legislation.

With reassuring promises that nothing essential will really change.

As I continued reading Called to Compiègne, that reality became impossible to ignore.

The Revolution did not first attack the bodies of the Carmelites.

It first attacked the idea that Carmel should exist at all.

There is a pattern that repeats itself throughout history.

Before a society destroys something, it first convinces itself that the thing has no value.

That is exactly what happened to contemplative religious life.

To many of the new revolutionary leaders, monasteries seemed useless.

The sisters produced no wealth.

Held no political office.

Commanded no armies.

Owned no businesses.

They disappeared behind walls to pray.

To the modern mind of the eighteenth century, that looked like wasted potential.

Surely these women could become “productive citizens.”

Surely they could contribute to the nation in more visible ways.

Prayer was dismissed as idleness.

Contemplation became “unproductive.”

The supernatural was judged by purely economic standards.

It is remarkable how contemporary that sounds.

The National Assembly eventually decreed the suppression of religious orders devoted solely to the contemplative life. Communities were informed that their corporate existence would end, their property would be seized, and their members expected to return to ordinary society. The language often appealed to liberty and the public good, yet the practical effect was the dismantling of centuries-old religious communities.

Imagine hearing that.

Not because you had committed a crime.

Not because you had harmed anyone.

Simply because your way of life was judged unnecessary.

What struck me most was the extraordinary calm with which the sisters received these developments.

There was no panic.

No frantic plotting.

No calls for revenge.

No secret stockpiling of weapons.

They did what Carmel had trained them to do.

They prayed.

Modern readers might mistake that for passivity.

It was anything but.

Prayer was not an escape from reality.

It was the deepest possible engagement with reality.

The sisters understood something the Revolution could never grasp:

Political power is never the highest power.

Kings rise.

Assemblies vote.

Empires collapse.

Christ remains.

That conviction gave them a stability no political upheaval could shake.

Reading these chapters, I found myself wondering how I would have responded.

Would I have trusted God’s providence?

Or would I have spent every waking hour consumed by fear?

It’s easy to admire the courage of martyrs after the story is over.

It’s much harder to imagine living through the uncertainty before the ending is known.

The Carmelites did not know how their story would conclude.

They only knew what faithfulness required that day.

Perhaps that is the real secret of perseverance.

God rarely gives us grace for next year.

He gives us grace for today.

The Revolution insisted that the sisters were now “free.”

Free to leave.

Free to marry.

Free to return to the world.

Free to choose another life.

But freedom imposed by force is not freedom at all.

There is a profound irony here.

A government claiming to liberate religious women was simultaneously forbidding them to remain what they freely desired to be.

One cannot compel liberty.

The very attempt destroys it.

One of the most moving moments in the early part of the story is the sisters’ response.

They do not cling to bricks and mortar.

They know the monastery itself is not their ultimate home.

What they refuse to surrender is their vocation.

Buildings can be confiscated.

A calling cannot.

The state could close a convent.

It could not extinguish the “yes” each woman had spoken to Christ years before.

That distinction is everything.

Christianity has never depended upon buildings.

It has always depended upon souls.

There is another lesson hidden beneath these events.

Persecution almost never announces itself honestly.

It rarely says,

“We hate your faith.”

Instead, it speaks the language of efficiency.

Progress.

Equality.

Public safety.

National unity.

Reason.

Those words can describe genuine goods.

History teaches they can also become masks.

Whenever a government begins deciding which religious lives are useful and which are disposable, something profoundly dangerous is already underway.

The danger is not merely political.

It is spiritual.

For once society begins measuring everything by usefulness, the Cross itself becomes incomprehensible.

What could be less “productive” than a dying Savior nailed to a tree?

And yet the salvation of the world came through precisely that apparent uselessness.

As I closed this section of Called to Compiègne, I realized the Revolution had not yet reached its most violent phase.

No guillotine stood before the sisters.

No death sentence had been pronounced.

Yet something decisive had already happened.

The line had been drawn.

The world had declared that God’s claims upon these women were secondary to the claims of the state.

The Carmelites quietly answered with their lives:

No earthly authority can revoke a vocation that God Himself has given.

That conviction would soon be tested in ways none of them could have imagined.

And yet, because they had spent years saying “yes” to Christ in small things, they were already preparing to say “yes” in the greatest trial of all.

“To know where the Church is going, one must first understand how she remembers.”

There is a strange irony in Catholic publishing.

Books of immense historical importance quietly disappear from public view, while countless new volumes recycle ideas that were settled generations ago by minds of extraordinary brilliance. Entire libraries are filled with commentaries on theology, apologetics, Church history, and biblical interpretation, yet some of the greatest theologians the Church has ever produced remain virtually unknown outside seminaries and academic circles.

One of those forgotten giants is Cardinal Johann Baptist Franzelin, S.J.

For many readers, his name means nothing.

Yet his influence reaches into the very foundations of modern Catholic theology.

His thought helped shape the First Vatican Council. His teaching formed generations of priests and bishops. His works were studied throughout the Catholic world. St. Pius X admired the theological tradition to which he belonged. Before the upheavals of the twentieth century, Franzelin stood among the foremost defenders of Catholic doctrine.

And perhaps nowhere is his genius more evident than in his masterpiece:

On Divine Tradition (De Divina Traditione).

This is not merely another theological treatise.

It is one of the clearest and most profound explanations ever written on how Christ continues to teach His Church.

If Catholics today read only one nineteenth-century theological work outside of St. John Henry Newman, Garrigou-Lagrange, or Cardinal Billot, this would be among my strongest recommendations.

We Live in an Age Confused About Tradition

Few words generate more misunderstanding than Tradition.

For some, Tradition means ancient customs.

For others, it means Gregorian chant.

Others think of lace vestments, incense, Latin, and Gothic architecture.

Still others imagine a collection of medieval practices that accumulated over centuries and somehow became “Catholic.”

Outside the Church, many Protestants reduce Tradition to human additions layered upon the purity of Scripture.

Even among practicing Catholics, explanations often remain vague.

Ask ten Catholics to define Sacred Tradition, and you may receive ten different answers.

Most will mention that Scripture and Tradition are “both sources of Revelation.”

Few can explain precisely what that means.

Still fewer can explain why.

Franzelin recognized this problem long before our own age.

He understood that confusion about Tradition eventually becomes confusion about Scripture.

Confusion about Scripture becomes confusion about doctrine.

Confusion about doctrine becomes confusion about Christ Himself.

Everything begins with understanding what Divine Tradition actually is.

(click the image to get the book from Fr. Ripperger’s site. Also available on Amazon here)

Before There Was a New Testament

One of Franzelin’s greatest achievements is that he forces the reader to think historically.

Imagine yourself standing in Jerusalem thirty years after the Resurrection.

The Apostles are preaching.

Thousands have been baptized.

The Eucharist is celebrated every Sunday.

Priests and bishops have already been ordained.

Missionaries are converting entire cities.

Martyrs are dying for Christ.

Yet something remarkable is missing.

There is no New Testament.

None.

The Gospel of John has not yet been written.

Many of St. Paul’s letters do not yet exist.

The canon has not been formally recognized.

Christians nevertheless possess the fullness of the Faith.

How?

Franzelin’s answer is beautifully simple.

Because Christianity did not begin as a book.

It began with a Person.

Jesus Christ entrusted His teaching to living Apostles.

Those Apostles preached before they wrote.

They taught before they published.

They established churches before there was a New Testament to distribute.

The Church existed before the New Testament because Christ founded the Church—not a publishing house.

That observation alone overturns countless modern assumptions.

The Church Did Not Produce the Bible by Accident

Many Christians unconsciously imagine the Bible descending from heaven complete, leather-bound, indexed, and self-authenticating.

History tells a different story.

For centuries Christians debated certain books.

Were Hebrews and Revelation inspired?

What about James?

What about Jude?

Which writings belonged in the canon?

Which did not?

Who answered those questions?

Not private individuals.

Not isolated congregations.

Not popular opinion.

The Church.

Guided by the Holy Ghost, she received, preserved, copied, defended, proclaimed, and ultimately recognized the inspired books that constitute the New Testament.

This realization profoundly affected me while reading Franzelin.

We often speak of defending Scripture.

Franzelin reminds us that Scripture itself is one of Tradition’s greatest achievements.

Without the living Church, there would be no universally recognized New Testament.

That is not an attack upon Scripture.

It is a defense of its historical reality.

Tradition Is Not a Collection of Old Customs

Perhaps the greatest misconception Franzelin destroys is reducing Tradition to antiquity.

Age alone proves nothing.

There are ancient errors.

Ancient heresies.

Ancient superstitions.

Something does not become true simply because it is old.

Nor does it become false because it is new.

Instead, Divine Tradition possesses a completely different character.

It is the continuous transmission of the revelation entrusted by Christ to His Apostles and faithfully preserved by the Church under the assistance of the Holy Ghost.

Notice what is absent.

No appeal to nostalgia.

No romantic attachment to previous centuries.

No archaeological fascination.

Tradition is alive because Christ is alive.

It is the living memory of the Mystical Body—not merely remembering events but faithfully transmitting divine truth through preaching, worship, sacramental life, episcopal succession, and the Church’s teaching office.

Franzelin helps us see that Tradition is not something standing beside the Church.

It is the Church living faithfully through history.

Scripture and Tradition Are Not Rivals

One of the unfortunate legacies of post-Reformation polemics is the habit of speaking as though Scripture and Tradition compete for authority.

The debate is often framed like opposing teams.

Choose Scripture.

Or choose Tradition.

Franzelin patiently dismantles this false dilemma.

Scripture itself belongs within Tradition.

The Apostolic preaching came first.

Some of that preaching was inspired to become Sacred Scripture.

The Church recognized those inspired writings.

The Church preserved them.

The Church proclaimed them.

The Church interpreted them.

Scripture is therefore not isolated from Tradition.

It exists within the life of Tradition.

As Pope Benedict XVI would later observe in another context, the Word of God is greater than the written text alone because it lives within the believing Church.

Reading Franzelin makes one realize that this was not a novel insight.

It had already been articulated with extraordinary precision generations earlier.

The Magisterium Is the Servant of Revelation

Perhaps no aspect of Catholic teaching is more misunderstood today than the authority of the Church.

Critics frequently imagine that popes create doctrines.

Catholics sometimes unintentionally reinforce this misunderstanding by speaking as though every papal statement automatically becomes new revelation.

Franzelin offers needed balance.

The Church possesses authority because Revelation has already been completed in Christ.

The Magisterium exists not to invent truth but to guard it.

Its task is preservation.

Clarification.

Defense.

Authentic interpretation.

Development in understanding without alteration of substance.

This distinction is absolutely essential.

The Pope is not the master of Revelation.

He is its servant.

The bishops are not owners of the Deposit of Faith.

They are its stewards.

The Church has authority precisely because she is bound to what she has received.

This is one of Franzelin’s greatest contributions—and one especially relevant in every age.

Development Without Corruption

One of the most fascinating sections of On Divine Tradition concerns doctrinal development.

Modern readers immediately think of St. John Henry Newman, whose Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine remains deservedly famous.

Franzelin approaches the same subject from a complementary angle.

Truth can mature in our understanding.

Definitions become more precise.

Language grows clearer.

Errors force the Church to explain what had always been believed.

Yet authentic development never contradicts previous revelation.

An oak tree is greater than an acorn.

It is not different in nature.

The mature tree reveals what was already present in seed.

So too with doctrine.

Development unfolds.

It does not replace.

This insight has enormous implications for Catholics navigating contemporary theological debates.

Reading Franzelin in the Twenty-First Century

Readers should know what they are undertaking.

This is not popular theology.

Franzelin writes with scholastic precision.

Definitions are exact.

Arguments proceed logically.

Every distinction matters.

There are moments when the prose feels dense.

That is not a weakness.

It is evidence of careful thought.

We inhabit an age of slogans.

Franzelin inhabits an age of argument.

He assumes readers are capable of sustained attention.

Strangely enough, that may be one of the book’s greatest gifts.

It forces us to slow down.

To think.

To follow reasoning rather than emotion.

To appreciate theology as a disciplined science ordered toward the contemplation of divine truth.

Why This Book Matters Right Now

Rarely has there been greater confusion among Catholics regarding authority, doctrine, continuity, and Tradition.

Questions once confined to theological faculties now appear daily across social media.

Can doctrine change?

What is the relationship between Vatican II and previous councils?

What constitutes authentic development?

How should Catholics understand continuity?

These are not new questions.

Franzelin addressed their underlying principles over 150 years ago.

His work does not answer every modern controversy directly.

Something more valuable occurs.

He provides the theological framework necessary to approach such questions correctly.

Instead of reacting emotionally, the reader learns to reason from first principles.

That alone makes the book extraordinarily relevant.

A Cathedral Hidden Behind a Dusty Cover

Some books impress.

Some books inform.

A very small number permanently reshape the reader’s intellectual landscape.

On Divine Tradition belongs among them.

Reading Franzelin feels less like reading an author and more like entering a cathedral.

At first you notice the architecture.

Then the harmony.

Then the astonishing craftsmanship holding everything together.

Eventually you realize the building was never constructed merely to be admired.

It was built to lift your eyes toward heaven.

That is precisely what good theology does.

It does not terminate in abstract concepts.

It leads the mind toward God.

Final Recommendation

There are books every Catholic should own.

There are books every Catholic should eventually read.

Then there are books every serious student of the Faith ought to wrestle with, return to, annotate, and revisit throughout life.

Cardinal Franzelin’s On Divine Tradition belongs firmly in that final category.

It demands effort.

It rewards patience.

It refuses shortcuts.

But in return, it offers something increasingly rare in our age: clarity.

The next time someone tells you that Tradition is merely “Catholic customs,” hand them Franzelin.

The next time someone claims Catholics place Tradition above Scripture, hand them Franzelin.

The next time you find yourself wondering how Christ’s teaching has remained one through twenty centuries of councils, saints, persecutions, schisms, heresies, missionaries, and martyrs, open Franzelin.

You may begin by reading a forgotten cardinal.

You will finish by seeing the Catholic faith with new eyes.

Further Reading

If On Divine Tradition captures your imagination, these works make excellent companions:

• St. Vincent of Lérins – Commonitorium: The classic exposition of preserving the apostolic faith “everywhere, always, and by all.”

• The First Vatican Council – Dei Filius: The council’s constitution on faith and reason, reflecting many of the theological concerns Franzelin helped articulate.

• St. John Henry Newman – An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine: A complementary exploration of how doctrine develops without changing its essential substance.

• St. Robert Bellarmine – On the Controversies: A monumental defense of Catholic doctrine during the Reformation. (Mediatrix Press has been translating this for years)

• Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange – The Sense of Mystery and Reality: Twentieth-century Thomistic masterpieces that continue the tradition of rigorous Catholic theology.

The Church has never lacked profound teachers. What she often lacks is readers willing to sit quietly at their feet.

There are moments in history when an entire civilization is built upon a single idea.

For the French Revolution, that idea was freedom.

It appeared everywhere.

On banners.

In speeches.

In newspapers.

On the lips of politicians.

The old order had to be swept away, they insisted, so that mankind could finally be free.

The monarchy was the enemy of freedom.

The Church was the enemy of freedom.

Religious vows were the enemy of freedom.

Tradition itself was the enemy of freedom.

It was an intoxicating message.

Who could oppose liberty?

Who would argue against freedom?

Yet as I continued reading Called to Compiègne, I found myself asking a different question.

If the Revolution was truly about freedom...

Why was it so afraid of sixteen cloistered nuns?

The women of Compiègne owned almost nothing.

They had surrendered wealth.

Position.

Inheritance.

Marriage.

Ambition.

Comfort.

Even their clothing belonged to the community.

By every modern standard, they appeared to be the least free people in France.

And yet they possessed something the revolutionaries desperately lacked.

Peace.

It radiates from the pages.

Not because they were unaware of danger.

Not because they ignored the gathering storm.

But because their peace rested on something no government could confiscate.

They belonged to Christ.

One of the quiet strengths of this book is that it allows history to unfold patiently.

The revolutionary decrees do not arrive all at once.

They come gradually.

Almost reasonably.

The National Assembly suppresses religious orders whose members take only simple vows. Soon afterward, even solemnly professed contemplative communities find themselves under increasing scrutiny. Civil authorities begin treating monasteries not as sacred places dedicated to God, but as institutions to be reorganized, inspected, or dissolved in the name of the new order.

That pattern felt strangely familiar.

Rarely does a society abandon its foundations overnight.

It usually happens one decree at a time.

One compromise.

One redefinition.

One law that sounds harmless enough.

Until suddenly everything has changed.

The Revolution insisted that the sisters were not truly free because they had chosen obedience.

That idea has never really disappeared.

We still hear it today.

“If you follow the Church, you aren’t thinking for yourself.”

“If you obey God’s commandments, you’re limiting your potential.”

“If you submit your life to Christ, you’ve surrendered your freedom.”

How often is freedom defined simply as the absence of restraint?

Do whatever you want.

Become whoever you wish.

Answer to no one.

It sounds liberating.

Until we ask one simple question.

Has it made us happier?

Our age enjoys more choices than any civilization in history.

We can choose careers, cities, entertainment, identities, opinions, even how we spend nearly every waking hour.

Yet anxiety, loneliness, addiction, and despair continue to rise.

Perhaps unlimited choice is not the same thing as freedom.

Christ offers another definition.

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, you shall be free indeed.”
— John 8:36

Notice what He does not promise.

He does not promise unlimited options.

He promises liberation from sin.

From fear.

From slavery to our passions.

From death itself.

That is the freedom the Carmelites possessed.

No revolutionary tribunal could grant it.

No revolutionary tribunal could take it away.

As I reflected on these chapters, I realized something that had never occurred to me before.

The revolutionaries were surrounded by weapons.

The Carmelites were surrounded by silence.

Yet it was the revolutionaries who seemed afraid.

They feared monasteries.

They feared habits.

They feared crucifixes.

They feared priests.

They feared women whose entire lives were hidden from public view.

What kind of government fears prayer?

Only one that senses there is a power greater than its own.

History repeatedly teaches the same lesson.

Tyranny always fears what it cannot control.

And there is nothing more difficult to control than a conscience wholly surrendered to God.

The irony is almost impossible to miss.

The Revolution proclaimed liberty while demanding conformity.

The sisters embraced obedience while remaining inwardly free.

One side possessed political authority.

The other possessed moral authority.

Only one of those has endured.

The decrees have faded into history books.

The witness of the Carmelites continues to inspire believers more than two centuries later.

Power is temporary.

Truth has a longer memory.

Perhaps that is why this story feels surprisingly contemporary.

Most of us will never stand before a revolutionary tribunal.

Our tests are quieter.

We remain silent when we should speak.

We soften difficult truths to avoid criticism.

We compromise convictions because we fear exclusion.

Sometimes the greatest prison is not built of stone.

It is built from the opinions of other people.

The Carmelites remind us that freedom begins the moment we stop asking, “What will everyone think?” and begin asking, “What does Christ ask of me?”

That question changes everything.

One sentence lingered with me long after I closed the book.

Not because it was printed on the page.

Because it seemed to emerge from the lives of these women themselves.

Freedom is not the ability to do whatever we desire.

Freedom is the ability to desire what is good.

That is a profoundly Catholic understanding of liberty.

It is also one our culture desperately needs to recover.

The Revolution believed freedom meant casting off every bond.

The saints understood that the greatest freedom comes from binding ourselves to the One who made us.

As the pressure on the monastery increases, the sisters will soon face a choice.

Leave.

Compromise.

Or remain faithful, whatever the cost.

History remembers their decision.

But before we reach the scaffold, we must first walk through the slow tightening of the net.

Because persecution rarely begins with executions.

It begins with small demands that seem easier to accept.

And that is where our story turns next.

Introduction

One of the greatest spiritual battles in Catholic history was not fought over the Trinity, the Eucharist, or even the papacy. It was fought over the character of God Himself.

Is God primarily a loving Father eager to save?

Or is He chiefly a stern Judge searching for reasons to condemn?

That question gave rise to one of the most influential, and spiritually devastating, movements in Church history: Jansenism.

Although officially condemned by multiple popes, its spirit survived for centuries. It shaped convents, seminaries, confessionals, and even family life. Its influence was so pervasive in France that St. Thérèse of Lisieux spent much of her short life offering what amounts to the Church’s greatest practical answer to it.

Ironically, the story begins not with obvious heretics, but with one of the most admired convents in Europe.

The Holy Beginning of Port-Royal

The Abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs, located southwest of Paris, was founded in the early thirteenth century as a Cistercian monastery.

By the late sixteenth century it had declined badly.

Into this situation came Mother Angélique Arnauld (1591–1661).

Originally appointed abbess as a child through noble family influence, Angélique underwent a profound conversion in 1608. She instituted authentic Catholic reforms:

• strict enclosure

• poverty

• fasting

• silence

• serious religious observance

• devotion to the Fathers of the Church

These reforms were admirable.

Even critics admitted the nuns lived lives of remarkable discipline and virtue.

Had history ended there, Port-Royal would simply be remembered as another successful Counter-Reformation convent.

Instead, another influence entered.

Saint-Cyran and the Arrival of Jansenism

Around 1635 the convent came under the spiritual direction of Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, better known as the Abbé de Saint-Cyran.

Saint-Cyran had become convinced that the recently deceased Bishop Cornelius Jansen had recovered the authentic teaching of St. Augustine on grace.

Unfortunately, he had not.

Jansen’s monumental work, Augustinus, emphasized:

• mankind’s utter corruption

• the rarity of saving grace

• predestination

• the small number of the elect

• extraordinary rigor before approaching the sacraments

Mother Angélique gradually embraced these ideas, and Port-Royal soon became the intellectual headquarters of what would later be called Jansenism.

Why Jansenism Was So Attractive

This is important.

Jansenism did not initially appear immoral.

It looked holy.

Its followers:

• fasted

• prayed

• studied Scripture

• revered St. Augustine

• sought serious confession

• rejected worldliness

Compared with the laxity found elsewhere, they appeared heroic.

This explains why many intelligent Catholics—including Blaise Pascal—were drawn toward them.

The danger was subtle.

Every error in history usually exaggerates one truth until it destroys another.

Jansenism exalted God’s justice at the expense of His mercy.

The Theology Behind the Error

Jansenists believed human nature after the Fall was so wounded that very few people actually received the grace necessary to cooperate with God.

They spoke constantly about:

• the fewness of the saved

• fear

• judgment

• divine severity

• human corruption

The practical result was devastating.

Communion became rare.

Confession became terrifying.

Many ordinary Catholics concluded:

“I am probably not among the elect.”

The Eucharist gradually ceased being viewed as medicine for sinners.

Instead it became a reward reserved for spiritual athletes.

Rome Intervenes

Rome responded repeatedly.

In 1642 Pope Urban VIII condemned Jansen’s Augustinus in In eminenti.

In 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned five propositions drawn from Jansenist teaching in the bull Cum occasione.

Later condemnations followed under Alexander VII and Clement XI.

Yet the movement refused to disappear.

Its supporters insisted:

“We accept the condemnation—but those errors aren’t really in Jansen.”

This became known as the famous distinction between questions of law and questions of fact, allowing many adherents to claim obedience while continuing to spread the same spirituality.

The Heroine—or Tragedy—of Port-Royal

The nuns themselves became legendary.

Many sincerely believed they were defending St. Augustine.

Many refused to sign the required formulary condemning Jansenism.

They endured:

• isolation

• loss of the sacraments

• pressure from bishops

• exile

• suppression

They appeared almost like confessors of the Faith.

But appearances can deceive.

The Church never condemned their austerity.

She condemned the theology that had slowly entered behind that austerity.

One of Satan’s oldest tricks is to mix genuine virtue with subtle theological error.

Blaise Pascal Joins the Fight

Perhaps the most famous defender of Port-Royal was Blaise Pascal.

His brilliant Provincial Letters attacked the Jesuits, accusing them of moral laxity while defending Antoine Arnauld and Port-Royal.

The irony is remarkable.

Pascal remains one of history’s greatest Christian apologists.

Yet in this controversy he found himself defending a movement that Rome repeatedly judged dangerous.

It reminds us that even brilliant minds can become entangled in theological imbalance.

The Destruction of Port-Royal

Louis XIV eventually determined the movement threatened both Church and kingdom.

Beginning in the 1660s the convent was progressively suppressed.

By 1709 the remaining nuns were expelled.

In 1710 the monastery itself was demolished.

Even the cemetery was emptied.

The French monarchy sought to erase Port-Royal from history.

Ironically, the buildings disappeared.

The mentality survived.

Jansenism Without the Name

This is where the story becomes relevant.

Official Jansenism declined.

Its psychology did not.

Across France Catholics increasingly believed:

“I should not receive Communion.”

“I am never good enough.”

“God is probably disappointed in me.”

“I will almost certainly be lost.”

The sacraments became sources of anxiety instead of confidence.

Spiritual direction often emphasized fear more than hope.

This climate persisted well into the nineteenth century.

Then Came St. Thérèse

When Thérèse Martin was born in 1873, France was still living with the aftereffects of centuries of Jansenist rigor.

Many historians note that nineteenth-century French Catholic spirituality continued to bear deep marks of Jansenist severity, even after the movement itself had been condemned.

Into this world came a little Carmelite who quietly overturned the entire mentality.

She did not deny sin.

She denied despair.

The Little Way

St. Thérèse realized something astonishing.

God is not waiting for us to become saints before He loves us.

He makes us saints because He loves us.

She famously wrote:

“It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love.”

That single sentence may be the greatest anti-Jansenist statement ever written.

The Little Way says:

• God’s mercy exceeds our weakness.

• Small souls can become great saints.

• Confidence pleases God.

• Weakness attracts grace.

• Holiness belongs to everyone.

This was revolutionary.

Pope St. Pius X Continues the Cure

Only a few years after Thérèse’s death, Pope St. Pius X took another decisive step against lingering Jansenist attitudes.

For centuries many Catholics had been taught to receive Communion only rarely.

Pius X encouraged:

• frequent Communion

• daily Communion for those properly disposed

• early First Communion for children

His reforms directly opposed the old rigorist mentality that had discouraged souls from approaching the Eucharist.

The Church once again emphasized that the Eucharist is medicine for the weak—not merely a prize for the perfect.

Neo-Jansenism Today

The name has disappeared.

The temptation remains.

You can still hear it.

“I missed one prayer today. God must be angry.”

“I had a distraction during the Rosary.”

“I confessed this already, but maybe I wasn’t sorry enough.”

“I should probably stay away from Communion.”

“I’ll never become a saint.”

That is not the voice of St. Thérèse.

Nor is it the voice of Christ.

It is often the lingering echo of Jansenism.

The Devil’s Favorite Counterfeit

The devil has two opposite strategies.

First:

“Sin doesn’t matter.”

Second:

“Your sins matter more than Christ’s mercy.”

The first leads to presumption.

The second leads to despair.

Jansenism chose the second.

The Gospel chooses neither.

The Enduring Lesson

Port-Royal began with genuine reform.

It sought holiness.

It desired seriousness.

Those were good things.

But once fear eclipsed confidence, and justice eclipsed mercy, the movement slowly drifted away from the heart of the Gospel.

St. Thérèse restored that balance.

She never minimized sin.

She maximized trust.

The Little Flower did not preach easy salvation.

She preached absolute confidence in the Heart of Jesus.

In an age increasingly marked by anxiety, perfectionism, and scrupulosity, her message is perhaps more urgent than ever.

As she herself said:

“It is confidence and nothing but confidence that must lead us to Love.”

Perhaps that is why Pope St. Pius X called her “the greatest saint of modern times.”

Not because she performed extraordinary works.

But because she reminded a fearful world that God’s mercy is greater than our misery.

Jansenists crafted their own crucifix to show their belief that Christ only died for the Elect. Normally, Jesus’s arms are stretched out horizontally on the crucifix, showing how Christ welcomes all to receive His grace. The Jansenist crucifix, though, shows Jesus’s arms more vertically, signaling the idea that he only died for a few.

Every martyr has a moment that history remembers.

A courtroom.

A prison.

A scaffold.

A final confession.

A last prayer.

But martyrdom does not begin there.

It begins years earlier.

Quietly.

Almost invisibly.

Long before a sword is raised or a sentence is pronounced, a soul has already learned how to die.

That is perhaps the greatest lesson I have taken so far from Called to Compiègne.

When we hear the word martyr, we instinctively picture the dramatic ending.

The Church, however, has always looked first at the hidden beginning.

The women of Compiègne did not wake up one morning and suddenly become heroes.

They spent years becoming saints.

That distinction matters.

Heroism can happen in a single moment.

Holiness almost never does.

It is built one ordinary day at a time.

One prayer.

One sacrifice.

One act of obedience.

One hidden victory over self.

That is the real story of Carmel.

Modern readers often imagine monasteries as places where life stands still.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

The monastery is not an escape from reality.

It is a training ground.

Every hour has purpose.

Every silence teaches something.

Every interruption becomes an opportunity to grow in charity.

The Carmelite life was demanding. Prayer ordered the day. Work filled the hours between the Divine Office. Reading, meditation, fasting, silence, and obedience formed the rhythm of daily life. Poverty was embraced not as misery, but as freedom from attachment.

To the world, it looked repetitive.

To the sisters, it was the slow shaping of a soul.

There is a temptation in every age to believe that greatness comes from extraordinary experiences.

The saints consistently teach the opposite.

Great souls are usually formed by ordinary fidelity.

When I was reading the author’s descriptions of the individual sisters, I found myself smiling.

He refuses to flatten them into religious stereotypes.

One sister had a gift for philosophy and delighted even Queen Marie Leszczyńska with her conversation. Another possessed remarkable discernment about vocations. Another never seemed to lose the humility of a novice despite decades in religious life. One had once loved dancing before an unexpected event turned her heart completely toward God. Another entered Carmel only after the devastating loss of her husband.

These details may seem incidental.

They are not.

They remind us that sanctity does not erase personality.

Grace perfects nature.

Each woman remained herself.

Christ simply transformed that self into something radiant.

Perhaps the most beautiful surprise was discovering how much joy lived behind those cloister walls.

Too often the religious life is imagined as gloomy.

The Carmelites would hardly recognize that caricature.

They laughed together.

They celebrated feast days.

They wrote poetry.

They encouraged one another.

Even their sacrifices were embraced with remarkable serenity.

This joy did not come from comfort.

Their life was anything but comfortable.

It came from certainty.

They knew why they were there.

And that certainty gave them peace.

One sentence from St. Teresa of Ávila echoes throughout these pages:

“Thank God for the things that I do not own.”

At first glance, that sounds almost impossible to modern ears.

Our culture spends enormous energy convincing us that happiness lies just beyond the next purchase, promotion, experience, or achievement.

The Carmelites believed precisely the opposite.

Every possession surrendered became another chain removed.

Every comfort relinquished made more room for God.

That is a radical idea in any century.

It is almost incomprehensible in ours.

The silence of Carmel fascinated me as I read.

Silence is not simply the absence of noise.

It is the presence of Someone.

The modern world fears silence because silence refuses distraction.

It exposes the soul.

It confronts us with ourselves.

The Carmelites sought it.

Not because they hated conversation.

Because they loved communion with God even more.

How different our lives might become if we stopped treating silence as an inconvenience and began treating it as a sanctuary.

One of the most striking themes in the early chapters is obedience.

That word has become deeply unpopular.

To many modern ears, obedience sounds like weakness.

Submission.

Loss of identity.

The saints understood it differently.

Obedience was not the surrender of personality.

It was the surrender of pride.

It was an act of trust.

Every small act of obedience became practice for the day when much greater sacrifices would be required.

They could not have known where history was heading.

But God knew.

And every hidden sacrifice was preparing them for a public witness they could never have imagined.

As I closed this section of the book, I found myself wondering whether we misunderstand courage.

We admire dramatic acts because they are visible.

God often admires hidden fidelity because it produces those dramatic acts.

No one suddenly becomes fearless before a revolutionary tribunal.

Fearlessness is cultivated in the chapel.

In the choir.

In the refectory.

In the laundry.

In the kitchen.

In the countless unseen moments when no one is watching except God.

The scaffold is simply where everyone else finally notices.

That may be why the story of Compiègne feels so relevant.

Most of us will never be called to physical martyrdom.

But every one of us is called to daily martyrdom.

To die to pride.

To impatience.

To vanity.

To resentment.

To selfishness.

Those hidden deaths are not separate from heroic sanctity.

They are its beginning.

The Carmelites did not become saints because they died well.

They died well because they had already spent years learning how to live.

And now, as the Revolution begins closing in around the monastery walls, we are about to discover what happens when a world built on power collides with souls built on prayer.

When most Americans think of the Confederacy, they imagine Protestant ministers blessing regiments, revival meetings in military camps, and famous Southern generals.

Few realize that there was also a vibrant Catholic presence throughout the Confederate States.

Irish immigrants marched in gray uniforms. French Creoles filled the pews of New Orleans. German Catholics worshipped across Texas. Jesuit priests served as chaplains. Religious sisters staffed hospitals. Bishops struggled to shepherd their flocks through one of the darkest periods in American history.

Although Catholics remained a minority in most of the South, they were far from insignificant. Their story has too often been overlooked.

A Forgotten Chapter of American Catholic History

One of the best modern studies of Southern Catholic life during the Civil War is historian Gracjan Kraszewski’s Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South.

Kraszewski argues that many Southern Catholics did not see themselves as outsiders living within the Confederacy. Instead, they identified deeply with their states and communities, viewing their Catholic faith and their Southern loyalties as compatible. He describes this process as the “Confederatization” of Southern Catholics—a perspective that helps explain why Catholic clergy, religious, and laypeople participated so fully in Confederate society.

His work challenges the common assumption that the Civil War was solely a Protestant story.

A Minority Church in a Protestant South

The Confederacy was overwhelmingly Protestant, but important Catholic centers flourished.

Louisiana remained one of America’s oldest Catholic strongholds, rooted in its French and Spanish heritage. Along the Gulf Coast, cities such as Mobile and Savannah supported active Catholic communities, while Texas and parts of Virginia contained growing Catholic populations through immigration and missionary work.

Elsewhere, Catholics often lived as small minorities surrounded by Protestant neighbors.

Anti-Catholic prejudice existed in both the North and the South, though its character varied from place to place. Yet despite these challenges, Southern Catholics established churches, schools, orphanages, and charitable institutions that became vital parts of their communities.

Priests in the Camps

When war erupted in 1861, Catholic priests accompanied Confederate soldiers as chaplains.

They celebrated Mass beneath trees and canvas tents.

They heard confessions before battle.

They carried the Blessed Sacrament to the dying.

They buried the dead.

Among the most remarkable was Fr. John B. Bannon, S.J., an Irish-born Jesuit serving in the Western Theater. His ministry eventually took him far beyond the battlefield, leading to audiences with Pope Pius IX in Rome and a diplomatic mission through Ireland intended to discourage enlistment in the Union Army.

His extraordinary story illustrates how even a minority Church could exercise influence far beyond its numbers.

Sisters of Mercy

While priests ministered to soldiers, religious sisters became indispensable in Confederate hospitals.

The Sisters of Mercy, the Daughters of Charity, and other religious communities cared for wounded soldiers regardless of rank or denomination.

They dressed wounds, comforted the dying, battled epidemics, and often remained at their posts under dangerous conditions.

Many Protestant soldiers who had grown up suspicious of Catholicism encountered these sisters for the first time in military hospitals. Their charity helped soften old prejudices and earned lasting respect.

Bishops During the War

Southern bishops faced immense challenges.

Churches were damaged.

Supplies became scarce.

Priests were called to military service as chaplains.

Families were divided by war.

Yet the Church continued her ordinary mission.

Bishops preached, ordained priests, confirmed children, and encouraged the faithful to persevere through suffering. Their primary concern remained the salvation of souls, even as political events transformed the nation around them.

Pope Pius IX and the Confederacy

Perhaps no episode has generated more discussion than Pope Pius IX’s correspondence with Jefferson Davis.

Following Fr. John B. Bannon’s mission to Rome, Pius IX sent Davis a pastoral letter expressing his hope for peace and assuring him of his prayers.

Confederate newspapers hailed the letter as a diplomatic success.

Most historians, however, distinguish this pastoral correspondence from formal diplomatic recognition. The Holy See never officially recognized the Confederate States as an independent nation.

Even so, the episode demonstrates that the Vatican closely followed the American conflict and that Catholic diplomacy formed a small but fascinating part of Civil War history.

More Than a Footnote

As Catholic Confederates demonstrates, Southern Catholics were not passive observers of the Civil War.

They fought in the ranks.

They served as chaplains.

They staffed hospitals.

They led dioceses.

They buried the dead.

They rebuilt churches after the conflict ended.

Their story reminds us that the Civil War was also a Catholic story—one that has too often been overshadowed by broader narratives focused almost exclusively on Protestant America.

Recovering these forgotten histories does not require romanticizing the past. Rather, it invites us to see the Civil War more fully, recognizing the diverse communities that lived through it and the ways in which faith shaped their experience.

The Catholic Church did what she has always sought to do in times of upheaval: administer the sacraments, care for the suffering, proclaim the Gospel, and remain present amid war and peace alike.

Recommended Reading

• Gracjan Kraszewski, Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South

• Philip Thomas Tucker, The Confederacy’s Fighting Chaplain: Father John B. Bannon

• David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray: The Irish in the Confederate States of America

• Randall M. Miller & Jon L. Wakelyn (eds.), Catholics in the Old South

• James Hennesey, S.J., American Catholics: A History

Every now and then a book surprises you.

You pick it up expecting to learn a little history, perhaps fill in a few gaps in your knowledge, and then place it back on the shelf alongside the dozens of other books you’ve read.

But occasionally a book does something entirely different.

Instead of informing your mind, it quietly begins examining your soul.

That was my experience with Called to Compiègne.

When I first opened its pages, I assumed I knew the story.

After all, like most people, I had learned about the French Revolution in school. I knew the famous slogans. Liberty. Equality. Fraternity. I knew about the storming of the Bastille. I knew about the guillotine and the execution of King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette.

I thought I understood that chapter of history.

I was wrong.

Not because what I had learned was false, but because it was incomplete.

There was another story unfolding beneath the headlines of kings, politicians, and revolutions, a quieter story that history books rarely linger over. It was the story of sixteen cloistered Carmelite nuns living in the small French town of Compiègne.

They possessed no political influence.

They commanded no armies.

They wrote no constitutions.

Most people outside their monastery never knew their names.

Yet in the end, they would accomplish something extraordinary.

They would expose the emptiness of an entire revolution simply by remaining faithful.

That realization did not come all at once.

It began with the opening pages.

Most historians begin with dates.

This author begins with Christ.

A young Carmelite named Sister Elizabeth awakens in the middle of the night to an astonishing vision. Before her stands Our Lord—not in glory, but marked by the Passion. His body bears the wounds of the scourging. His brow is pierced by thorns. At first she suspects a deception and reaches instinctively for holy water, testing the apparition before daring to believe what she sees.

Then something remarkable happens.

She is shown her community clothed in heavenly glory.

She sees sisters she does not yet know.

She sees the Lamb.

She sees that these hidden women are destined for something beyond ordinary religious life.

Only later do we discover that this vision occurred nearly a century before the French Revolution. Long before anyone imagined guillotines or revolutionary tribunals, Providence was already preparing souls for a witness that would echo through the centuries.

At that moment I realized this book wasn’t going to be another chronological account of historical events.

It was going to tell the story from Heaven’s perspective.

One of the greatest strengths of Called to Compiègne is that it refuses to rush.

Modern writers often hurry toward the dramatic scenes.

The author does the opposite.

He slows down.

He introduces us to the monastery before introducing us to the Revolution.

And that changes everything.

Instead of meeting martyrs, we first meet women.

One had loved dancing before God called her into Carmel.

Another was a young widow whose grief eventually led her to religious life.

One possessed such wisdom that queens sought her conversation.

Another had an infectious cheerfulness despite decades in the cloister.

One entered as a convert.

Another was barely more than a girl.

An elderly sister had spent nearly sixty years in religious life.

A novice had only just arrived.

They were not marble statues.

They laughed.

They struggled.

They comforted one another.

They had distinct personalities, histories, and gifts. The author carefully sketches each sister so that, before persecution ever arrives, they become real people rather than anonymous names in a martyrology.

That is where the book quietly wins your heart.

Perhaps the greatest surprise for me was realizing how ordinary their lives appeared.

There were no spectacular miracles every chapter.

No dramatic speeches.

No political plotting.

Their days revolved around prayer, work, silence, obedience, and charity.

In an age obsessed with influence, they embraced hiddenness.

In a culture that celebrates self-expression, they practiced self-forgetfulness.

In a world that measured success by power, they measured it by fidelity.

At first glance, it almost seems uneventful.

Then you remember what year it is.

France is changing.

The ground is beginning to shake beneath them.

The world outside the monastery walls is preparing to declare war, not merely on a monarchy, but on the Church herself.

The reader knows what is coming.

The sisters do not.

And that creates a quiet tension that grows stronger with every chapter.

As I continued reading, something unexpected happened.

The French Revolution stopped being an abstract event from a history textbook.

It became deeply personal.

The slogans no longer floated above the page as noble ideals.

They began taking concrete form through laws that closed monasteries, confiscated Church property, demanded oaths of allegiance, and slowly tightened the noose around faithful Catholics.

History suddenly had faces.

Not the faces of politicians.

The faces of nuns.

That may be the greatest accomplishment of this book.

It restores names to people who had become footnotes.

Too often we remember the men who built the guillotine more readily than those who died beneath it.

We know the revolutionaries.

We forget the saints.

Called to Compiègne gently corrects that imbalance.

It reminds us that while governments rise and fall, Heaven keeps a different record of history.

Before I reached the middle of the book, I realized I had stopped reading merely to learn what happened.

I was reading because I cared what happened.

I wanted these women to be spared.

I hoped history might somehow change.

Of course it wouldn’t.

History never changes.

But sometimes it changes us.

And I suspect that is exactly what this book intends.

The Revolution is coming.

The monastery walls cannot keep it out forever.

Soon these hidden daughters of Carmel will be asked the question every Christian must eventually answer in one form or another:

What is worth giving everything for?

That is the journey we will begin together in this series.

Because Called to Compiègne is more than a story about sixteen Carmelite nuns.

It is a story about courage.

About fidelity.

About freedom.

And, ultimately, about the triumph of souls that the world believed it had conquered.

Every July 14, fireworks illuminate the skies over France. Military parades march down the Champs-Élysées. Politicians praise liberté, égalité, fraternité as the foundation of the modern republic.

For many, Bastille Day is simply France’s Independence Day.

It is nothing of the sort.

As historian Dr. Alan Fimister argues in his remarkable lecture, the French Revolution was not merely the overthrow of a monarchy. It was something far deeper: the deliberate overthrow of Christendom itself.

A Revolution Against an Entire Civilization

Most modern histories explain the French Revolution in terms of economics.

Bread shortages.

Government debt.

An unfair tax system.

The extravagance of Versailles.

These factors mattered. But they do not explain why a nation that had been called “the Eldest Daughter of the Church” would soon begin destroying churches, executing priests, abolishing the Christian calendar, and enthroning the “Goddess of Reason.”

Material hardship alone does not produce ideological revolutions.

Ideas do.

Dr. Fimister argues that the Revolution was the culmination of centuries of intellectual and spiritual decay beginning with the Protestant Reformation and accelerating through the Enlightenment. By 1789, the foundations of Christian civilization had already been badly weakened.

From Luther to Rousseau

One of the most compelling arguments of the lecture is that history did not suddenly erupt in Paris.

Rather, the Revolution unfolded in stages.

First came the Protestant Revolt against the authority of the Church.

Next came the rise of absolutist states, where temporal rulers increasingly subordinated spiritual authority.

Finally came the Enlightenment, which no longer sought merely to reform Christianity—but to replace it altogether.

Reason became detached from Revelation.

Political authority was detached from God.

Society itself became detached from Christ.

By the time the Estates-General met in 1789, the philosophical revolution had largely been won before the political revolution even began.

France’s Forgotten Constitutional Crisis

Contrary to popular imagination, Dr. Fimister argues that France’s problems were not simply caused by monarchy.

Rather, they were rooted in a poorly constructed constitutional system.

Unlike medieval England, whose rulers traditionally required parliamentary consent for taxation, the French monarchy developed into an increasingly centralized absolute state.

Ironically, this weakened rather than strengthened France.

Heavy taxation discouraged productivity.

Noble tax exemptions shrank the tax base.

Debt mounted.

Credit collapsed.

By the late eighteenth century, France was paying more in interest on its debt than it received in revenue—a financial disaster that forced Louis XVI to summon the Estates-General for the first time in 175 years.

The Forgotten Role of the Sacred Heart

Perhaps the most moving portion of the lecture concerns the apparitions received by St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.

In 1689, Our Lord requested that the King of France consecrate himself and the nation to His Sacred Heart.

The request was ignored.

Exactly one hundred years later, in June 1789, the Third Estate proclaimed itself the National Assembly.

For Catholics devoted to the Sacred Heart, this chronology has long carried profound significance.

Even more striking is the account of Louis XVI’s prison vow.

After the Revolution had destroyed his kingdom, imprisoned his family, and stripped him of authority, the king privately composed an act of consecration to the Sacred Heart, promising that, should he regain his throne, he would publicly dedicate France to Christ.

It was too late.

The vow remained hidden until long after his execution.

When Revolution Turns on Religion

Political revolutions often promise liberty.

The French Revolution quickly demonstrated that liberty could become tyranny.

The Church’s property was confiscated.

Religious orders were suppressed.

Priests were compelled to swear loyalty to the revolutionary state.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy effectively attempted to create a national church independent of Rome.

Thousands refused.

Many paid with their lives.

The Revolution eventually devoured not only the monarchy but also many of its own architects, as factions competed beneath the ever-present shadow of the guillotine.

The Vendée: France’s Catholic Counter-Revolution

While Paris embraced revolutionary ideology, much of rural France remained deeply Catholic.

Nowhere was this more evident than the Vendée.

Farmers, laborers, craftsmen, priests, and ordinary families rose in defense of their faith and king.

Their resistance was answered with extraordinary brutality.

Entire villages were destroyed.

Mass executions became commonplace.

Modern historians increasingly recognize the campaign against the Vendée as one of the earliest examples of ideological mass extermination in modern Europe.

For many Catholics, the Vendée remains one of history’s greatest testimonies of fidelity amid persecution.

Fatima’s Chilling Parallel

Dr. Fimister concludes by drawing attention to another remarkable historical connection.

In 1931, Sister Lúcia recorded Our Lord’s warning concerning the delayed consecration of Russia:

“They imitate the King of France. They will follow him into misfortune.”

The comparison is striking.

Just as the French monarchy delayed obedience to Heaven’s request concerning the Sacred Heart, so too modern leaders delayed Heaven’s request at Fatima.

Whether one accepts this interpretation or not, it underscores a central theme running throughout Catholic history:

Nations rise and fall not merely because of economics or military strength, but because of their relationship to God.

The French Revolution Never Truly Ended

Perhaps Dr. Fimister’s most provocative claim is that the French Revolutionary Wars never really ended.

Their battlefields simply changed.

Instead of muskets and cannon, today’s conflicts are fought through education, law, culture, media, and memory.

The central question remains the same:

Will society be ordered toward God, or away from Him?

That question still shapes debates about family, religious liberty, education, morality, and the place of Christianity in public life.

The Revolution continues because the ideas behind it continue.

Final Thoughts

Whether one agrees with every conclusion Dr. Alan Fimister reaches, his lecture offers a profound reminder that history cannot be understood solely through economics, politics, or personalities.

Ideas matter.

Religion matters.

The French Revolution was not simply the collapse of a government—it marked the collapse of an entire vision of civilization.

To understand the modern West, we must first understand what was lost in 1789—and why many continue to celebrate it while others continue to mourn it.

Further Watching

If you found this article helpful, you may also enjoy:

• Hidden Rebellion – The award-winning documentary on the Catholic resistance of the Vendée

• Michael Davies: The Rise of the Vendée lecture series

• Additional historical lectures by Dr. Alan Fimister exploring Christendom, the French Revolution, and the development of modern secularism.

What are your thoughts? Was the French Revolution primarily a political event, an economic crisis, or—as Dr. Fimister argues—a spiritual revolution whose effects are still with us today? Let us know in the comments.

(Check out the Book “Idol of a Nation” for more on the problems of modern centralization aka 19th century Nationalism)

Every July 14, France celebrates its national holiday with military parades, fireworks, flags, public dances, and official ceremonies. To most observers, Bastille Day commemorates the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and the triumph of liberty over tyranny. (Sound familiar?)

That explanation is true, but incomplete.

Bastille Day is not merely a remembrance of one revolutionary afternoon in Paris. It became the symbolic feast of a much larger transformation: the creation of a centralized French nation-state in which loyalty to the nation and the Republic increasingly displaced older allegiances to province, dynasty, parish, and Church.

The holiday did not itself centralize France. Armies, administrators, legislators, schoolteachers, railways, and bureaucrats accomplished that work. But July 14 provided the new centralized order with something equally important: a shared national story.

Bastille Day became, in effect, the annual civic liturgy of modern France. (Chris Ferrara writes about the religion of the modern state in his book “Libery the God that Failed”)

France Before the Revolution

Before 1789, France was already one of the great kingdoms of Europe, but it was not yet a completely uniform nation-state in the modern sense.

The kingdom consisted of provinces and territories that had entered the French crown at different times and under different conditions. They retained varying legal customs, tax arrangements, judicial traditions, local privileges, dialects, and political memories.

A person might be a subject of the King of France while identifying strongly as Breton, Provençal, Burgundian, Gascon, Norman, or Alsatian. Local communities were bound together through family, parish, guild, province, and customary law.

This did not mean that France lacked royal centralization. The Bourbon monarchy, especially under Louis XIV, had already concentrated considerable power at Versailles. The monarchy maintained royal officials, a standing army, and an increasingly extensive administration.

Nevertheless, the kingdom remained an organic and historically layered society. It was not organized according to a single rational plan imposed uniformly from the center.

The French Revolution attempted to change that.

From the King’s Realm to the Sovereign Nation

The most important revolutionary change was not simply the removal of a king. It was the redefinition of sovereignty.

Under the old order, political authority was embodied in the crown and understood within a Christian conception of kingship, law, custom, and inherited obligation. The Revolution declared instead that sovereignty resided essentially in the nation.

That shift transformed the meaning of France.

France was no longer merely the realm governed by the King of France. It was becoming an abstract national body composed of equal citizens under a uniform law.

The famous revolutionary principles of liberty and equality therefore had centralizing consequences. If all citizens were equal before the law, then provincial privileges, separate legal customs, corporate rights, and inherited jurisdictions appeared increasingly irrational or unjust.

The National Assembly abolished the old provincial structure and divided France into departments. These new units were designed to be more uniform and administratively manageable than the historic provinces they replaced.

The names of the departments were often drawn from rivers, mountains, and geography rather than from ancient provincial identities. The effect was symbolically significant. Burgundy, Brittany, Languedoc, and other historically rooted territories were being reorganized according to a rational national design.

The Revolution proclaimed liberation from privilege, but liberation and centralization frequently advanced together.

The Bastille as a National Symbol

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, quickly became one of the founding events of the revolutionary imagination.

Militarily, the taking of the fortress was not the decisive conquest later mythology sometimes made it appear. Symbolically, however, it was extraordinarily powerful. A royal fortress and prison had fallen before the people of Paris.

The event could therefore be presented as the moment when the people entered history as the sovereign political actor.

One year later, on July 14, 1790, the Fête de la Fédération presented a somewhat different image. Rather than celebrating insurrection alone, it celebrated national reconciliation and the unity of the French people under the new constitutional order.

Both meanings would eventually become associated with July 14:

• revolt against arbitrary power;

• unity of the French nation.

This dual symbolism made the date especially useful. Radicals could celebrate the destruction of the old regime, while moderates could emphasize patriotic unity.

The modern holiday consequently contains both the memory of revolution and the promise of national cohesion.

Napoleon: Heir and Master of the Revolution

The revolutionary governments proved unstable, but many of their centralizing reforms survived. Napoleon Bonaparte did not simply destroy the Revolution. In many respects, he consolidated it.

Napoleon created a remarkably powerful administrative state. He established prefects to represent the central government in the departments, strengthened national ministries, standardized legal administration, reorganized education, and promulgated the Civil Code.

The prefect became one of the most important instruments of centralized France. Appointed by the government rather than organically rooted in the locality, he carried the authority of Paris into every department.

Napoleon thereby combined revolutionary uniformity with authoritarian efficiency.

The Revolution had removed many of the older institutions that stood between the individual and the state. Napoleon built the machinery that allowed the state to govern those individuals more directly.

The result was one of the central paradoxes of modern political history: a revolution undertaken in the name of liberty helped create one of Europe’s most centralized administrative systems.

The Revolutions of 1830 and 1848

The nineteenth century did not move in a straight line from monarchy to republic. France passed through empire, royal restoration, constitutional monarchy, republic, another empire, and finally a more durable republican regime.

Yet each upheaval renewed the political language of 1789.

The Revolution of 1830 overthrew Charles X and established the July Monarchy under Louis-Philippe. The very name “July Monarchy” linked the new regime to revolutionary memory.

The Revolution of February 1848 then overthrew Louis-Philippe and established the Second Republic. Universal male suffrage greatly expanded political participation, turning millions of ordinary men into voters.

This expansion of citizenship strengthened the need for national political institutions. A centralized state would now administer elections, communicate political programs, educate citizens, collect information, and integrate rural populations into national life.

The revolutions of 1848 did not create the centralizing process, but they broadened the meaning of the nation. The people were no longer merely governed by France; they were increasingly told that they themselves constituted France.

That democratic idea could be liberating. It could also strengthen the state’s claim to speak in the name of everyone.

The Third Republic and the Invention of a National Tradition

The decisive moment for Bastille Day came not in 1789 but in 1880.

After France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and the collapse of Napoleon III’s Second Empire, the Third Republic struggled to establish its legitimacy. Monarchists remained politically powerful, and French society was deeply divided over religion, education, revolution, and the meaning of the nation.

The republican regime therefore needed symbols, ceremonies, heroes, and public rituals.

On July 6, 1880, France officially established July 14 as its annual national holiday. The date’s ambiguity was politically useful. Republicans could invoke the storming of the Bastille in 1789, while those uncomfortable with revolutionary violence could emphasize the more conciliatory Fête de la Fédération of 1790.

The new national celebration was accompanied by flags, military reviews, patriotic speeches, public festivities, and municipal ceremonies.

France’s villages and cities were now invited to perform the same national identity on the same day.

This was centralization at the level of memory.

Citizens might live hundreds of miles from Paris and possess little direct connection to the Bastille, but every July 14 they were brought symbolically into a national drama whose center was Paris and whose founding event was the Revolution.

The Republic was giving the French people a common calendar.

The Schoolteacher and the Soldier

Bastille Day could reinforce national identity once a year, but the Third Republic required institutions that would form citizens every day.

The public school became perhaps its most important instrument. (Just like in the states)

The Jules Ferry laws made primary education free in 1881 and compulsory and secular in 1882. These reforms helped establish the republican school as a central institution of French national life. (this was a German idea and a product of the ‘48ers who were Marxists)

Children throughout France increasingly encountered the same curriculum, the same historical narrative, the same national language, and the same civic ideals.

Regional languages and dialects often came to be treated as obstacles to national unity. Whether a child came from Brittany, Provence, Alsace, or the Pyrenees, the school was expected to make him French.

The Republic’s teachers were sometimes called the “black hussars” because of their dark clothing and their role as disciplined missionaries of republican citizenship.

The army performed a similar function. Military service brought young men from different provinces together, taught them standardized French, subjected them to national authority, and instructed them in common patriotic duties.

The school taught the national story.

The army embodied the national state.

Bastille Day celebrated both.

This explains why the military parade became such an important element of July 14. The celebration was not only about revolution against authority. It was also about the strength, unity, and legitimacy of the centralized national government.

Railways, Language, and the Reach of Paris

Political symbols became more effective as material centralization increased.

Railways connected the provinces more closely to Paris. Newspapers spread national political debates. Conscription mixed regional populations. Standardized education weakened linguistic isolation. Bureaucratic regulations increasingly touched ordinary life.

Paris was not only the political capital. It became the center from which national culture, administration, fashion, ideology, and political memory radiated outward.

The process was never complete. France retained powerful regional cultures and local loyalties. Resistance to Parisian centralization remained particularly strong in places such as Brittany, the Vendée, the Basque country, Corsica, and parts of southern France.

Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, millions of people who might once have lived primarily within a local or provincial world had been incorporated into the institutions and imagination of the French nation.

Bastille Day helped make that national abstraction visible.

The Replacement of a Sacred Order

From a Catholic perspective, the rise of Bastille Day also reveals a deeper transformation.

The old French monarchy understood the kingdom in explicitly Catholic terms. France was traditionally called the “eldest daughter of the Church.” Its kings were consecrated at Reims, and the public calendar was ordered around the feasts, fasts, saints, and seasons of Christianity.

The Revolution did not merely alter the government. It challenged the religious foundations of public life.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy subordinated the Church in France to the revolutionary state. Religious communities were suppressed, Church property was confiscated, and priests were required to swear allegiance to the new order. In the Revolution’s more radical phases, churches were closed or desecrated, and attempts were made to replace Christian worship with revolutionary civic cults.

Although the Church later recovered, the struggle between Catholic France and revolutionary France continued throughout the nineteenth century.

The Third Republic’s centralizing project was therefore not religiously neutral. Republican leaders frequently regarded the Catholic Church as a rival source of authority, loyalty, education, and social organization.

The school laws of the 1880s were consequently part of a wider secular and anticlerical campaign. Republican education sought to form citizens whose primary public allegiance was to the nation and its institutions rather than to the Church. The conflict eventually contributed to the 1905 separation of Church and State.

In this context, Bastille Day functioned almost as a substitute feast.

It possessed:

• a founding event;

• civic martyrs and heroes;

• public processions;

• ceremonial music;

• sacred symbols in secular form;

• a national creed;

• an annual renewal of collective identity.

The tricolor replaced the royal standard. The Marseillaise supplied the hymn. Marianne personified the Republic. The Revolution provided the founding narrative.

France had not ceased to possess a public religion. The object of public veneration had changed.

Centralization in the Name of Liberation

The relationship between revolution and centralization should make us cautious about overly simple political categories.

The Revolution attacked inherited authority in the name of liberty. Yet by destroying provinces, corporations, customary jurisdictions, religious institutions, and local privileges, it removed many of the bodies that had once stood between the individual and the central state.

The citizen was declared free and equal, but also increasingly alone before the nation.

This does not mean that every local privilege was just or that the old regime should be romanticized. France before 1789 contained genuine injustices, arbitrary inequalities, and serious political failures.

But the revolutionary solution produced its own concentration of power.

The modern state did not centralize France merely through coercion. It centralized France by persuading people to imagine themselves as participants in a common national mission.

That is where Bastille Day mattered.

The Civic Liturgy of Centralized France

Bastille Day did not create France’s departments, appoint Napoleon’s prefects, enact the Civil Code, construct the railways, conscript soldiers, or establish compulsory schooling.

Its role was symbolic, but symbolism is not superficial.

A political order cannot survive by administration alone. It requires stories that explain why its institutions are legitimate and why citizens should offer them loyalty.

July 14 provided that story.

It taught that modern France had been born when the people overthrew the fortress of tyranny. It united the violence of 1789 with the national reconciliation of 1790. It connected village celebrations with the authority of Paris. It joined republican citizenship to military power, public education, and national memory.

Bastille Day therefore became more than a recollection of the French Revolution.

It became the annual ceremony through which centralized France celebrated itself.

The deepest historical irony is that the storming of a prison in the name of liberty eventually became the founding feast of one of the most centralized states in Europe.

That paradox remains essential to understanding modern France, and perhaps modern politics itself.

“A picture is worth a thousand words.” Few people proved that more effectively than Thomas Nast.

Today, Thomas Nast (1840–1902) is celebrated as the father of the American political cartoon. He created, or at least popularized, the Republican elephant, the Democratic donkey, the modern image of Santa Claus, and the enduring symbol of Uncle Sam. He courageously exposed the corruption of New York City’s infamous Tammany Hall political machine, earning praise as one of America’s greatest illustrators.

Yet another side of his legacy has largely faded from public memory.

For nearly three decades, Nast produced some of the most vicious anti-Catholic imagery ever published in the United States. His cartoons reached millions of Americans through Harper’s Weekly, one of the nation’s most influential magazines, helping shape public opinion during an era of unprecedented Catholic immigration.

His drawings did not merely criticize individual Catholics or political figures. They portrayed the Catholic Church itself as an existential threat to the American Republic.

America in the Midst of a Catholic Immigration Boom

Between 1845 and 1900, millions of Catholics arrived in America from Ireland, Germany, Italy, Poland, and other parts of Europe.

They built churches.

They founded hospitals.

They established schools.

They created orphanages and charitable institutions.

But their rapid growth alarmed many native-born Protestants.

To opponents, Catholic immigrants represented more than newcomers. They were seen as agents of a foreign power, the Pope.

Rumors spread that Catholics intended to overthrow American democracy, seize public schools, and place the nation under papal control.

Into this atmosphere stepped Thomas Nast.

“The American River Ganges” (1871)

No single image better illustrates nineteenth-century anti-Catholic prejudice than Nast’s famous cartoon The American River Ganges, published in Harper’s Weekly on September 30, 1871.

In the illustration, bishops wearing miters emerge from the sea as crocodiles. Their mouths are open, revealing sharp teeth as they crawl toward innocent schoolchildren playing on the shoreline.

Behind them stands a massive warship bearing the Vatican’s symbols.

American politicians cower while public schools appear under attack.

The symbolism is unmistakable.

The bishops are not portrayed as shepherds.

They are predators.

Catholic schools are not presented as educational alternatives.

They are depicted as weapons in a foreign invasion.

For readers in 1871, the message was unmistakable: Rome intended to devour American liberty through Catholic education.

It remains one of the most influential, and inflammatory, political cartoons in American history.

The Public School Wars

To understand Nast’s cartoons, one must understand the conflict over education.

Most nineteenth-century public schools were not religiously neutral.

Students commonly read from the King James Bible.

Protestant prayers were routine.

Protestant hymns were often sung.

Catholic parents objected, arguing that public education reflected Protestant theology while forcing Catholic taxpayers to finance institutions hostile to their faith.

Catholics therefore established an extensive network of parish schools where children could receive both academic instruction and Catholic formation.

To Nast and many of his readers, however, these schools represented something entirely different.

He portrayed Catholic education as an organized conspiracy against the Republic itself.

The Pope as a Political Conspirator

Again and again, Nast returned to the same themes.

The Pope appeared as a foreign monarch.

Priests were drawn as political manipulators.

Bishops became military commanders.

The Vatican resembled an invading empire.

His cartoons suggested that faithful Catholics could never truly be loyal Americans because their ultimate allegiance belonged to Rome.

These images reinforced suspicions already widespread among members of the Know-Nothing movement and other nativist organizations.

Rather than seeing Catholics as fellow citizens, many Americans came to view them as political infiltrators.

Anti-Irish Prejudice

Nast’s hostility often extended beyond the Church itself.

Irish immigrants were frequently portrayed as violent, ignorant, drunken, or incapable of republican self-government.

These stereotypes appeared throughout nineteenth-century journalism.

While Nast sometimes defended African Americans against racist attacks, he could simultaneously caricature Irish Catholics using crude ethnic stereotypes that today are recognized as overtly prejudicial.

His work reminds us that reformers themselves were not immune from the prejudices of their own age.

Santa: Why did Nast draw Santa?

Nast’s original purpose was largely patriotic.

• During the War for Southern Independence, he drew Santa visiting Union soldiers to boost morale.

• His first famous illustration, “Santa Claus in Camp” (1863), showed Santa handing gifts to Union troops. Santa even wore stars and stripes, emphasizing support for the Union cause.

• Over the next two decades, Nast expanded Santa’s mythology by illustrating:

  • Santa’s workshop.

  • The North Pole as Santa’s home.

  • Santa’s “naughty and nice” list.

  • Elves assisting Santa.

  • A larger, bearded, grandfatherly appearance.

These images became enormously influential because Harper’s Weekly had a wide national readership.

The Blaine Amendment

The same fears reflected in Nast’s cartoons soon entered politics.

In 1875, Congressman James G. Blaine proposed a constitutional amendment prohibiting public funding for sectarian schools.

Although the language appeared neutral, virtually everyone understood its target, Catholic schools.

The federal amendment narrowly failed.

However, dozens of states later adopted similar provisions in their constitutions.

These “Blaine Amendments” restricted aid to religious schools for generations. Historians widely acknowledge that anti-Catholic sentiment played a significant role in their adoption.

The Forty-Eighters and Revolutionary Anti-Clericalism

Thomas Nast did not emerge in a vacuum.

He was born in Germany in 1840 and immigrated to the United States as a child. His formative years coincided with the aftermath of the Revolutions of 1848, when thousands of politically active German refugees, the Forty-Eighters, settled in America.

Many of these immigrants were principled advocates of constitutional government and opponents of slavery. Others brought with them the militant anti-clericalism that had characterized much of the European revolutionary movement. To many revolutionaries, the Catholic Church symbolized monarchy, aristocracy, and resistance to modern political reform.

Authors Walter D. Kennedy and Al Benson Jr., in Lincoln’s Marxists, argue that this current of European anti-clericalism profoundly influenced American political culture after the Civil War. While historians debate the breadth of that influence, there is little dispute that many Forty-Eighters were outspoken critics of the Catholic Church and became active in journalism, education, politics, and public life.

Nast’s cartoons fit comfortably within this broader cultural climate.

Lessons for Today

Thomas Nast’s career reminds us that prejudice often comes dressed in the language of patriotism.

One generation’s accepted stereotype becomes the next generation’s embarrassment.

The anti-Catholic cartoons that once appeared in America’s most respected magazines now stand as historical evidence of how fear, propaganda, and political conflict can distort public perception of an entire religious community.

Studying Nast today is not merely an exercise in history.

It is a reminder that liberty requires vigilance, not only against corruption and tyranny, but also against the temptation to deny our neighbors the very freedoms we claim to defend.

Suggested Primary Sources for Further Reading

Harper’s Weekly archives (1860s–1880s), containing Thomas Nast’s original political cartoons.

Thomas Nast, The American River Ganges (September 30, 1871).

Thomas Nast, The Protectors of Our Industries.

Thomas Nast, The Political Roman Catholic.

Philip Hamburger, Separation of Church and State.

Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800–1860.

John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism.

Walter D. Kennedy & Al Benson Jr., Lincoln’s Marxists (formerly Red Republicans and Lincoln’s Marxists).

“Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace.” — Mark 5:34

There are few saints whose name is so universally recognized, yet whose life is so little understood, as St. Veronica (Feast Day 12 July). To millions of Catholics throughout the centuries, she is remembered as the compassionate woman who stepped from the crowd on the road to Calvary to wipe the blood and sweat from the face of Our Blessed Lord. In return, Christ miraculously left the image of His Holy Face upon her veil, giving the Church one of her most treasured devotions.

Ancient Christian tradition also identifies Veronica, known in Greek as Bernice, with the woman who suffered from an issue of blood for twelve years and was healed by touching the hem of Christ’s garment. While the Gospels do not record her name, this identification appears in early Christian tradition and has been cherished for centuries, especially in the East.

Whether we contemplate Veronica kneeling in faith to touch Christ’s garment or standing courageously before Him on the road to Calvary, we find the same lesson: a soul completely devoted to Jesus Christ.

Twelve Years of Darkness

St. Mark paints one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the New Testament.

A woman had endured a hemorrhage for twelve years. During that time she had consulted physician after physician. She spent every coin she possessed searching for relief.

Instead of becoming better, she became worse.

The physical suffering was immense, but the spiritual burden was equally heavy.

According to the Mosaic Law, continual bleeding rendered a person ceremonially unclean. She would have lived with constant embarrassment, isolation, and exclusion from much of ordinary religious life. Every day was a reminder of her weakness.

How many nights had she prayed?

How many disappointments had she endured?

How many times had hope been raised, only to be crushed again?

Yet she never gave up.

One Touch of Faith

When Jesus entered her town, she did not seek attention.

She did not demand a miracle.

She did not even ask Him directly.

Instead she quietly said within herself,

“If I shall touch only His garment, I shall be healed.” (Matthew 9:21)

The crowd pressed tightly around Our Lord.

Slowly she reached forward.

Her fingers touched the fringe of His cloak.

Immediately twelve years of suffering vanished.

The miracle happened in an instant.

Yet an even greater miracle followed.

Jesus stopped.

Turning around, He asked,

“Who touched My garments?”

The Apostles were confused. Everyone was pressing against Him.

But Our Lord distinguished between those who merely brushed against Him and the one who touched Him with supernatural faith.

“Daughter”

The frightened woman fell before Him and confessed everything.

Christ did not rebuke her.

He did not criticize her boldness.

He did not question her worthiness.

Instead He spoke one of the tenderest sentences in Sacred Scripture:

“Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be healed of thy affliction.” (Mark 5:34)

Notice what healed her.

Not merely touching cloth.

Not superstition.

Not magic.

Faith.

The garment was holy because it belonged to Christ.

Her healing came because she trusted completely in the One wearing it.

Veronica’s Gratitude

According to ancient tradition preserved by St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain, Veronica was from Paneas (Caesarea Philippi).

Filled with gratitude, she erected a statue of Christ before her home.

At its base sprang up a remarkable medicinal herb that was said to possess healing properties, drawing many people to remember the mercy Christ had shown His faithful servant.

After Pentecost she joined the early Church and spent the remainder of her life following the Savior who had restored both her health and her dignity.

The Veil of Compassion

Centuries later another beloved tradition became attached to the name of St. Veronica.

As Our Lord carried His Cross through the streets of Jerusalem, surrounded by soldiers, mockery, and hatred, very few dared approach Him.

One woman did.

Moved entirely by compassion, Veronica stepped forward carrying a linen veil.

Ignoring the danger to herself, she gently wiped the blood, sweat, and dust from the suffering face of Jesus.

In return, Christ rewarded her charity with an extraordinary gift.

When she unfolded the cloth, the image of His Sacred Face had been miraculously impressed upon it.

This cherished relic became known as the Holy Face of Veronica or the Veil of Veronica, inspiring countless generations of Christians to meditate upon the Passion of Our Lord.

Whether every historical detail can be verified is secondary to the profound spiritual truth expressed by the tradition: those who lovingly console Christ receive His image within their own souls.

The Holy Face Devotion

The devotion to the Holy Face flourished throughout the centuries and reached a remarkable renewal in the nineteenth century through Venerable Leo Dupont of Tours, often called the Holy Man of Tours.

Inspired by the revelations received by Sister Marie of St. Peter, Dupont encouraged continual reparation for blasphemy, sacrilege, and the profanation of Sundays.

Oil burning before an image of the Holy Face became associated with numerous reported healings, and devotion spread rapidly throughout France and beyond.

Later, Blessed Maria Pierina De Micheli received the Holy Face Medal, encouraging the faithful to make acts of reparation to the Face of Christ, so often wounded by the sins of mankind.

The Holy Face devotion is not merely about contemplating an image.

It is about contemplating the suffering love of God Himself.

Every wound speaks.

Every bruise reveals His charity.

Every drop of Precious Blood proclaims the price of our redemption.

The Face We Are Called to Seek

King David prayed,

“Thy face, O Lord, will I seek.” (Psalm 26:8)

This has always been the longing of the Christian soul.

St. Veronica sought His Face first in faith.

Later tradition remembers her seeking His Face again in compassion.

In both cases she found Christ.

The saints teach us that the Holy Face is not merely something to admire.

It is something that transforms us.

As St. Paul writes,

“We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory unto glory.” (2 Corinthians 3:18)

The more we contemplate Christ, the more we become like Him.

Veronica’s Lesson for Our Age

Modern society spends enormous effort trying to hide suffering.

Christ embraced it.

Modern society seeks comfort above all else.

Veronica sought Christ above all else.

Modern society turns away from wounded faces.

Veronica stepped toward the wounded Face of God.

That is authentic Christian love.

She teaches us to approach Jesus when others flee.

To trust Him when earthly help has failed.

To console Him when He is mocked.

To love Him not only in His glory, but especially in His Passion.

A Prayer to St. Veronica

O glorious St. Veronica, whose unwavering faith obtained healing from Christ and whose compassionate love has long been associated with the Holy Face of our Savior, obtain for us the grace to seek Jesus above every earthly consolation.

Teach us to persevere when suffering seems endless, to trust in Christ when all human help fails, and to contemplate His Holy Face with love, gratitude, and repentance.

May the image of Christ be impressed not merely upon a veil, but upon our hearts, so that by His grace we may become living reflections of His mercy in the world.

Pray that we may one day behold forever the glorious Face of Jesus in Heaven, where every tear shall be wiped away and every wound shall be healed.

St. Veronica, pray for us.