THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 106

WINTER 2020

NO. 1

A Right No Power Can Take Away:
Religious Freedom and the Fight for
Catholic Schools Among the Osage
KATHLEEN HOLSCHER*
During the 1870s both Euro-American Catholics and leaders of the
Osage Nation fought against federal restrictions on Catholic schools in
Indian Territory. During this fight, Native and non-Native advocates
argued that the Osage had a right to Catholic schools. For each group,
however, the freedom to establish Catholic education in Indian Territory
cohered differently; as a right it derived from different sources of authority. On both sides, these sources existed in complex relation to the sovereignty of the U.S. nation-state. Among the Osage, anger over the absence
of Catholic schools, and demands for them as a treaty right, speak to
Catholicism’s importance to the tribe—not as a belief system, but as a site
of political possibility amid the crisis provoked by U.S. colonialism.
Keywords: Catholic Education, Indian Missions, Colonialism,
Religious Freedom, Church and State

I

n March 1874 a delegation of a dozen men from the Osage Nation,
including the tribe’s governor, Joseph Pawnee-no-pah-she, traveled
twelve-hundred miles east from Indian Territory to Washington DC.
Their purpose was to ask President Ulysses S. Grant to return Catholic
missionaries and schools to their reservation. “Religion among the whites
is a matter of conscience and voluntary choice,” the delegation wrote. “It is
so throughout all Christendom; and why should it not be so among the
* Dr. Holscher is associate professor of religious studies and American studies, and
holds the endowed chair of Roman Catholic studies, at the University of New Mexico, email:
kholscher@unm.edu. She would like to thank the membership of the American Catholic
Historical Association for the opportunity to serve as president during 2019.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

Osages?”1 The visitors objected to the Bureau of Indian Affairs decision to
maintain a Quaker agent to oversee Osage affairs, instead of Jesuit priests.
During the “Peace Policy” era of U.S. Indian administration, which lasted
between 1870 and the early 1880s, the federal government delegated decision-making authority over tribes to Protestant denominations. As a result,
Catholic missions were restricted across much of Indian Country, including
among tribes like the Osage for whom the Jesuits and other Catholic orders
had historically operated schools and churches. In response, Osage tribal
leadership acted throughout the 1870s, alongside other tribes like the
White Earth Ojibwe, to protest the government’s actions.2
The Osage tribe’s objections to the religious effects of U.S. Indian
policy happened in tandem with furious complaints from Euro-American
Catholics, including missionaries, bishops, the leadership of the newly
formed Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (BCIM), and concerned laity
across the United States. “Sectarian fanaticism, Protestant bigotry, and
anti-Christian hatred have been called into play [through the policy],”
announced an 1877 essay in The Catholic World. “The arm of the government has been made the instrument for the restriction, and even the abolition, of religious freedom among many of the Indian tribes.”3
This essay assesses the Osage fight to restore Catholic missionaries and
schools to their territory, as it happened alongside the U.S. Catholic objections to the religious bias of the Peace Policy. This article departs from a historiography that has treated Euro-American Catholic responses to nineteenth-century U.S. Indian policy as a binary historical contest between
(Catholic) church and (U.S.) state, and instead considers claims to Catholic
education made by both white and Native Catholics inhabiting the frontlines of a live colonial project.4 Contrary to the myth of one-to-one relationality sustained by the language of “church and state,” the United States
1. Reprinted in Letter from the Office of the Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions to
the Secretary of the Interior Regarding the Administration of the Osage Indians, October 19, 1874,
Series 4–3, Box 1, Folder 4, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, Special Collections
and University Archives, Marquette University, 3.
2. See for e.g. Ignatius Hole–in–the–Day to Ulysses S. Grant, October 1, 1874, Series
1–1, Box 1, Folder 18, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records.
3. W.T. Sherman, “Our New Indian Policy and Religious Liberty,” Catholic World, 26,
no. 151 (October 1877), 90–108, here 90.
4. See especially Peter J. Rahall, The Catholic Indian Missions and Grant’s Peace Policy,
1870–1884 (Washington, 1953); Francis Paul Prucha, American Indian Policy in Crisis: Christian Reformers and the Indian, 1865–1900 (Norman, OK, 1976); Francis Paul Prucha, The
Churches and the Indian Schools, 1888–1912 (Lincoln, NE, 1979).

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

3

during the 1870s was, as it still is, a settler colony—one encompassing multiple polities, settler and Native, colonizing and colonized, suspended in
devastatingly asymmetrical relations of power.5 With this in mind, the following study starts with a question: How does one tell the history of
Catholicism on soil claimed by the United States not as that of “American
Catholicism,” but rather as a Catholicism in relation to these multiple polities, U.S. and Native, and in relation to these colonial relations of power?
Approaching history in this way requires abandoning the premise of a
Catholicism dialectically engaged with U.S. institutions and discourses, in
order to open space for other Catholic possibilities. The Osage fight for
schools is a case in point. In the face of Peace Policy restrictions, EuroAmerican Catholics and Osage tribal leaders alike defended the right of
Catholic schools and teachers to inhabit Osage territory. For each group,
however, the freedom of and to a Catholic education cohered differently; as a
right it derived from, and reinforced, different configurations of religious and
political authority. On both sides, these sources existed in complex relations
to the sovereignty of the U.S. nation-state. Both Euro-American and Osage
appeals for Catholic schools—albeit in mutually dissonant ways—registered
discomfort with U.S. sovereignty as a source for and site of freedom.
During the 1870s, the federal government was invested in an enterprise of territorial expansion and settlement, the success of which
depended upon the extension of its sovereignty over non-consenting
Native populations. Liberal in character, U.S. sovereignty manifests itself
across the second half of the nineteenth century in paradoxical interplays
of control and freedom: in the exercise of plenary power over tribes, on the
one hand, and the extension of rights to individuals therein, on the other.
Discussing the Canadian-First Nations context, legal scholar John Burrows (Anishinaabe/Ojibway) describes this sort of spreading colonial sovereignty as the stuff of “conjure” and “alchemy.” “Political and legal ascendancy are conveyed to those who can conjure fictions that vindicate their
claims of authority,” he writes.6 Sovereignty was and is the spell amid
which rights—including tribal rights to land, but also freedoms enjoyed by
tribal members—“crystallize.” “Sovereignty is pretty powerful stuff,” Burrows concludes. “Its mere assertion by one nation is said to bring another’s
[. . .] rights to “definite and permanent form.”7
5. Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991), 33–40.
6. John Borrows, “Sovereignty’s Alchemy: An Analysis of Delgamuukw v. British
Columbia,” Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 37 (1999), 537–96, here 559.
7. Borrows, “Sovereignty’s Alchemy,” 558.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

Across this period, Catholicism had a complicated relationship with
both the U.S. nation-state and the rights it conjured for its citizens and—
increasingly—its colonial subjects. John McGreevy has shown how EuroAmerican Catholicism existed in ambivalent relation to freedom as a value
tethered to the liberal nation-state, in Europe and the United States,
through the second half of the century.8 During the 1870s that ambivalence inflected arguments Euro-American Catholics made against Peace
Policy restrictions; while they frequently mined U.S. “religious freedom
talk” to bolster their cause, they simultaneously showed unease over the
U.S. government’s expanding power, including over Indian tribes, and its
accompanying claims of authority to form moral as well as political citizens
from them.9 Euro-American Catholic appeals to religious liberty, made on
behalf of church actors as well as Natives to whom the Church wanted to
minister, reflected corresponding uncertainty about the source of authority
that produced that right. Occasionally Catholic critics of the Peace Policy
were so bold as to imagine the cogency of freedom apart from the sovereignty of the U.S. state.
If Euro-American Catholics demonstrated unease about freedom,
religious or otherwise, tethered to the U.S. nation-state, the leadership of
the Osage nation located its own right to Catholic schools elsewhere,
within the framework of guarantees produced via nation-to-nation treaties.
This made Osage claims to Catholic schools different too, in important
ways, from claims to religious freedom as a right reconcilable to the sovereignty of the nation-state. Talal Asad has described how modern human
rights get imagined and deployed in ways that confirm the sovereignty of
secular states and legitimate their policing activities. “The universal character of the rights-bearing person is made the responsibility of sovereign
states, each of which has exclusive jurisdiction over a limited group within
the human family,” he writes. “This limited population is [. . .] at once the
object of the state’s care and the means of securing its own power.”10 By
the end of the nineteenth century, religious freedom as a civil right was
beginning to function in this way, as the government made early consider-

8. John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York,
2003).
9. Tisa Wenger uses “religious freedom talk” to describe a discourse bound up with
U.S. politics of race and empire during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—see
Tisa Wenger, Religious Freedom: The Contested History of an American Ideal (Chapel Hill,
2017).
10. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA,
2003), 137.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

5

ations to extend it (however unevenly) to Native individuals, as part of the
project of U.S. colonization in its “citizen-making” dimension.11
For the Osage who demanded Catholic schools, preserving tribal sovereignty in the face of a state actively dispossessing them of self-rule was
paramount, and both their appeal for missions, and their invocation of
rights as part of it, needs to be understood in this vein. For the Osage leadership, the right to Jesuit missions was a freedom guaranteed not primarily
by the U.S. constitution—a document of governance internal to the colonizing state—but rather by their own nation-to-nation treaties with that
state. In other words, the Osage bid for Catholic schools resembled that of
their Euro-American counterparts, insofar as both pushed back against
accumulating sovereignty of the nation-state. Unlike Euro-American
Catholics who concerned themselves with Indian missions, however, the
Osage understood the fight as one to determine their own future. Catholicism was relevant to them in that fight.
For the Osage as a tribe, as for other Native nations in the latter part
of the century, the problem of self-determination was profound. It shaped
not only how Osage leadership defined the right to Catholic schools, but
also how it assessed Catholicism’s place, substance, and value in the community. For Joseph Pawnee-no-pah-she (Figure 1) and other prominent
Osage, Catholic institutions and actors carried embedded possibilities—real
and substantial, even as they were also flawed and limited—for self-rule
amid the dispossessing trajectory the Peace Policy represented. Historians
have described the tribe’s embrace of Catholicism, as it occurred on these
terms, as strategic rather than sincere; as the Osage “wrapping themselves
in the Catholic flag” as a means of protesting U.S. interference upon tribal
life and governance.12 Accounts like these presume belief, and by extension
conversion, as standards for measuring Catholicism, and for figuring historically who has (or has not) met its threshold. As a result, the Osage fight for
schools in the 1870s is legible as politics, but remains illegible as a struggle
of religion. This study argues that appreciating the Osage, rather than relegating them to marginal inclusion within an “American Catholic history,”
11. On the mixed consequences of religious freedom, as a right extended to Native
communities by the U.S. government in the 1920s, and strategically invoked by those communities, see Tisa Wenger, We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy
and American Religious Freedom (Chapel Hill, 2009). On the long relationship between freedom, citizenship, and colonial exclusion, see Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom
(Cambridge, 2010).
12. James D. White, Getting Sense: The Osages and Their Missions (Tulsa, OK, 1997), 85.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

FIGURE 1. Joseph Pawnee–no–pah–she (1837–83), Star Chief, Governor of the
Osage Nation (1869–82), wearing bear-claw necklace and peace medal, and holding a pipe-tomahawk, possible photograph by Alexander Gardner, taken in 1874,
produced from a glass plate negative, NAA, INV 01001203, Photo Lot 4420,
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution [http://collections.si.
edu/search/detail/edanmdm:siris_arc_38233]

demands (re)consideration of Catholicism in terms that mattered to the
tribe. To study the Osage fight for a Catholic education as the stuff of
Catholic history will mean measuring the Catholic in that fight differently.
The Peace Policy and Colonial Subject-Making
In December 1870, in his annual message to Congress, Ulysses S.
Grant announced he was turning over management of all U.S. Indian
agencies to “such religious denominations as had hitherto established missionaries among the Indians and perhaps to some other denominations
who would undertake [. . .] missionary work.13 Under the Bureau of Indian
Affairs, Indian agencies were entities responsible for overseeing the day-to13. Qtd. in Rahill, Catholic Indian Missions, 36; Francis Paul Prucha The Great Father:
The United States Government and the American Indians, abridged edition (Lincoln, NE,
1984), 161.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

7

day affairs of tribes on the government’s behalf. Now under Grant’s “Peace
Policy” Christian denominations acquired authority over all agencies the
government delegated to them. This gave churches enormous power,
including power to select Indian agents, as well as to determine the teachers and missionaries who would, or would not, work among the tribes.14
Under the policy, approximately ninety percent of agencies were soon delegated to Protestant churches and organizations.15
Writing in 1976, Catholic historian Francis Paul Prucha argued that
under Grant’s policy the federal government “abdicated [. . .] its responsibility
in Indian administration [. . .] to church groups.” “The ‘peace policy’ might
just as properly have been labeled the ‘religious policy,’” Prucha observed.16
From another vantage point, however, the policy represents a transitional
chapter in the expansion of the U.S. settler colonial project, and of the federal
government’s exercise of power over peoples it colonized. In 1831, U.S.
Supreme Court Justice John Marshall had coined the term “domestic dependent nation” to describe the relation of Native peoples to the United States.17
By the 1870s this legal-political model was ascendant in the United States,
and had begun to set the course for Indian policy, the Peace Policy included.
Across the nineteenth century, Joanne Barker (Lenape) explains, this gradual
“reconceptualization of tribes [. . .] assumed a radical repositioning of Native
peoples within a colonial order.” “Outside the purview of foreign or international relations,” Barker writes, “Indian tribes were said to be positioned
within the domestic boundaries of a dominant nation-state as dependents.”18
During this same period, reservations came to be understood not as independent, if diminished, tribal land bases but rather as gifts made from “the
public domain of the United States” and given to internal beneficiaries.19
By assigning Christian churches the work of managing Native peoples
into good subjects, if not yet full citizens, of the United States, the Peace
Policy became a means by which the state secured its governance over
those people it now categorized as its “wards” or internal beneficiaries.20
14. Prucha, The Great Father, 152–64.
15. Prucha, American Indian Policy, 53.
16. Prucha, American Indian Policy, 33, 32.
17. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1 (1831).
18. Joanne Barker, Native Acts: Law, Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Durham,
NC, 2011), 32.
19. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, reprint
ed. (Boston, 2015), 11.
20. The U.S. Congress extended citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United
States in 1924.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

This long push toward domestic subject-making, which was also marked by
the transfer of Indian affairs from the War Department to the Department
of the Interior in 1849, by Congress’s decision to no longer enter into
treaties with tribes in 1871, and later by the General Allotment Act (or
Dawes Act) of 1887, was driven by advocates inside and outside government who proposed assimilation and eventual inclusion of Native peoples
into the U.S. body politic as benevolent alternatives to the violent eradication of tribes. Under Grant’s policy, trustworthy churches would assist the
state in the “civilizing” process necessary to achieve that settler future.21 As
Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano put it in 1873, “through the
instrumentality of the Christian organizations, acting in harmony with the
Government” [the Peace Policy] would provide churches and schools
where the Indians “would be made to understand and appreciate the comforts and benefits of civilization, and thus be prepared ultimately to assume
the duties and privileges of citizenship.”22
The U.S. Catholic Fight for Schools in Indian Territory
Through the 1870s the U.S. Catholic Church, and its priests and religious who worked across Indian Country, maintained an ambivalent position in all of this. Although Catholic missionaries also did work they understood as “civilizing,” their uneasy fit with the U.S. project of colonial
subject-making was evident both in the restrictions placed upon the Catholic
Church under the Indian policy, and in the Catholic outcry against those
restrictions. By 1872, Protestant churches (and one Protestant missions
organization) controlled sixty-six of seventy-three U.S. Indian agencies.
Orthodox and Hicksite Quakers led this group with a combined sixteen
agencies, Methodists followed with fourteen agencies, and Presbyterians and
Episcopalians were also favorably represented in the mix. Despite their historical prevalence across much of Indian Country, Catholics were reduced
under the policy to managing a mere seven agencies.23
This distribution provoked a struggle that lasted throughout the
decade. Among Euro-American Catholics, the effort to restore missions
was spearheaded by Charles Ewing, a Civil War general and attorney, who
in 1873 became the first Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions,
21. See Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous SelfDetermination (Durham, NC, 2017).
22. Report of the Secretary of the Interior, Being Part of the Message and Documents Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress, vol. 1 (Washington, 1873), iv.
23. Prucha, American Indian Policy, 53.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

9

upon appointment by Archbishop J. Roosevelt Bayley of Baltimore.24
Ewing’s main job was to represent the interests of the U.S. bishops to the
federal government. The bishops “feel that they have suffered great injustice at the hands of the Government in connection with [the] missions,”
Bayley explained.25 By the year following his appointment, Ewing was
directing an office in Washington specially established to “regain the agencies over which the Church once had supervision.” In 1879, this Office of
the Catholic Commissioner would change its name to the Bureau of
Catholic Indian Missions.26
Anger over the Peace Policy’s implementation fueled Catholic pamphlets, and denunciations of it peppered the Catholic press. Stories circulated about priests prohibited from carrying altar wine, and having their
vestments and altar furniture removed by U.S. troops. In one frequently
repeated incident, a priest working among the tribes of California refused
to relinquish his position, and was beaten by the local Indian agent as a
result.27
Both inside and outside the Catholic commissioner’s office, the fight
to fix these injustices took shape through the language of rights, and especially the right to religious freedom or liberty. In their appeals, EuroAmerican Catholics invoked the right of the institutional church and its
missionaries to minister freely among the tribes. “Every Christian Church,
wherever it is engaged in the exercise of its ministry in this country, has the
constitutional right to remain their unmolested and untrammeled,” argued
a pamphlet published in 1874.28 Sometimes, though not always, these
appeals named in addition the right of Natives themselves to “the full
enjoyment of liberty of conscience.”29

24. Rahill, Catholic Indian Missions, 85.
25. J. Roosevelt Bailey, “Indian Missions,” January 2, 1874, Series 4-3, Box 1, Folder
3, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records.
26. Rahill, Catholic Indian Missions, 119, 285.
27. Charles Ewing to unknown, September 24, 1874, Series 1-1, Box 1, Folder 9,
Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records; John Gilmary Shea, “What Right Has the Federal Government to Mismanage the Indians?,” American Catholic Quarterly Review, 6 (July–
October 1881), 520–41, here 530.
28. “Address of the Catholic Clergy of the Province of Oregon to the Catholics of the United
States on President Grant’s Indian Policy, in Its Bearing upon Catholic Interests at Large (Portland, 1874), 11.
29. Address of the Catholic Clergy- of the Province of Oregon, 12. For other Catholic
appeals to religious liberty during the Peace Policy fight, see Sherman, “Our New Indian
Policy.” See also Rahill, Catholic Indian Missions, 45, 47, 53, 99.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

On one level, these appeals are episodes in a long history of American
Catholics affirming religious liberty as a political value, especially at
moments when to claim it has protected the interests of the Church and
its institutions on U.S. soil.30 But the fight to restore missions at the same
time demonstrated discomfort with the power of the liberal nation-state,
and corresponding hesitation at celebrating freedom as something tied to
that state’s governing authority. Simply put, at the same moment the
United States was expanding its sovereignty over Native “wards” via its
Peace Policy, the Catholic cause for missions toed the line—at least at
times—to question the imperial reach of state power.
John McGreevy has traced the dynamic relationship of U.S. Catholics
to the liberal concept of freedom, and to the authority of the state that has
extended freedom as a political right to its citizens. McGreevy discusses
the post-Civil War decades—which he considers in terms of southern
Reconstruction, but not in terms of the colonial dispossessions that also
characterized the era—as one marked by federal control aggrandizing
under the spirit of liberal nationalism. This political climate became the
backdrop for a new generation of American concern about the Catholic
Church: concern that translated to articulations of Catholicism as a destabilizing threat to the “foundations of the nation-state,” to that state’s
benevolent sovereignty, and to the liberal freedoms it extended to those
whom it governed.31 Across Europe during this era, the ultramontane
Church seemed a competitor to liberal nationalism; one that, as an American observer put it, insisted on “a virtual share of sovereignty as a condition of its allegiance.”32 In the United States similar concerns distilled
around the Church’s interest in supporting its own institutions. “Theorists
of American nationalism in the 1860s and 1870s,” McGreevy writes,
“instinctively mistrusted Catholicism. Both the nation and its administrative arm, the state, seemed vulnerable to attack from an international
church determined to establish and control its own hospitals, orphanages,
and especially, schools.”33
American Catholicism did harbor real objections to this climate of
expansive nationalism. Euro-American Catholics, who during the 1860s
30. For a brief history of U.S. Catholics affirming religious freedom as a practical political tool, see Bernard Noone, “Expediency or Conviction? The American Catholic Acceptance of the First Amendment, U.S. Catholic Historian, 1. no. 3 (1981), 73–86.
31. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 96, 98.
32. Ibid., 102
33. Ibid., 100.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

11

had worried about “exercises of federal power” in the context of the Civil
War, turned their attention in the 1870s to the implications of “an expanding federal state” in other dimensions, including both public education and
Indian affairs.34 Leading the charge was New York Freeman’s Journal and
Catholic Register editor James McMaster. Throughout the 1870s McMaster
used his platform to lambast developments in U.S. educational policy, and
especially “the monstrous proposition” that education might transfer to the
hands of the federal government versus those of the states.35 He also regularly printed pieces critical of U.S. Indian policy, which he described as in
violation of the rights of missionaries and Natives alike.36
In July 1881 John Gilmary Shea (Figure 2) offered his own take on
federal power and Indian affairs in an essay in American Catholic Quarterly
Review. For Shea the U.S. colonial project was a space where the liberal
state revealed its tendencies toward despotism. “A monstrous and unauthorized power has grown up, mischievous, fruitful in difficulties, ruinous
to the Indians,” Shea wrote. “It is monstrous in that it assumes exclusive
jurisdiction over a quarter million of people, whom it has assumed to
govern without laws, [. . .] without any but the most despotic system, confining people to prescribed limits.”37 Under the Peace Policy, Shea went on
to observe, each Indian agent is “installed as a grand lama in his little territory” and “has absolute power over the Indians.”38 “If the Indians ever
learn to read the Declaration of Independence,” he concluded, “they can
bring heavier charges against our government than our forefathers did
against George III.”39
To be clear, neither McMaster nor Shea nor any other Euro-American Catholic who publicly objected to federal power exercised over Native
34. Ibid., 75. On Catholic opposition to Reconstruction during this period see ibid.,
111.
35. “The Old Question of Who Can Teach Children,” New York Freeman’s Journal and
Catholic Register, 31, no. 48 (February 18, 1871), 4.
36. In April 1871 McMaster complained that the United States had disregarded both
the “indisputable right of Catholics to Indian agencies” and, in the case of Catholic Indians,
“the most sacred of all rights, that of liberty of conscience” (untitled, New York Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, 32, no. 5 (April 22, 1871), 3. Rahill observes that McMaster “had
long been critical of the government’s treatment of the Indians. Because they and not the
white men were the original inhabitants of the United States, [he] believed that they possessed inalienable rights which were unjustly being snatched away” (Catholic Indian Missions,
172–73).
37. Shea, “What Right Has the Federal Government,” 524.
38. Ibid., 525–26.
39. Ibid., 534.

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12

FIGURE 2. John Gilmary Shea (1824–92), taken from ”Historical Picture Gallery,”
Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia, Volume VIII, no. 4
(1897), 515. Inscription: “Your ob[e]d[ient] Serv[an]t, John Gilmary Shea. Courtesy of the Catholic Historical Research Center of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.

peoples during this period was advocating for anything resembling Native
self-rule; Shea concluded his essay by calling for the relinquishment of federal power “over the tribes in States and Territories to the local governments, to whom they properly belong.”40 What these Catholic observers
did share was a conviction that the state was not absolute or uncontestable
in its sovereignty, particularly when that sovereignty came to infringe (as it
did in execution of the Peace Policy) upon the God-given authority of the
Church to minister among Native communities. If the federal government
had initiated policy conforming to a logic that posited Natives as future
U.S. citizens, these Catholic critics held onto the knowledge that—in relation to Catholicism—even such citizenship could never be absolute. An
1886 piece in The Catholic World laid this out:
The government looks upon the Indian, or should look upon him, as a
man with the duties of a possible if not actual citizen of the republic at
no distant day. The priest does not overlook this, but considers it as not
40. Ibid., 540.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

13

the one thing necessary nor the primary object of their civilization; for
with the eyes of faith he sees in them “the citizens of a better country,
even one to come.” [. . .] He does not endeavor to give them a distorted
and exaggerated estimate of the benefits of civilization.41

The calls for freedom that went along with critiques of federal power,
in Catholic objections to Indian policy during the 1870s, carried similar
ambivalence about unbridled sovereignty claimed by the U.S. nation-state.
While religious freedom or liberty was invoked at every turn amid the
Peace Policy fight, Euro-American Catholics were less consistent about
equating that liberty—as it rightfully extended to both missionaries and
Natives—with a political right tied to membership in the nation. Though
these settler Catholics did frequently fall back upon the logic that religious
freedom was a guarantee of the U.S. Constitution, and thus something
related to actual or potential citizenship (i.e., one’s political status as “an
American”), at other times they moved outside U.S. political and legal
frameworks to defend “the religious rights of the Catholic Indians.”42
In 1874 a pamphlet attributed to the Catholic clergy of the Province
of Oregon was published for wide distribution among U.S. Catholics. The
pamphlet’s authors framed the Peace Policy as first and foremost a problem
of religious liberty. They discussed religious liberty as a political right of
Catholics living in the United States, and they asked their readers to consider how the right’s denial to Native Catholics might come to affect their
own lives. Although government administrators “have selected their field
of experiment beyond the confines of civilization,” they wrote, “the Indians
have a right, under the Constitution, as much as any other person in the
Republic, to the full enjoyment of liberty of conscience.”43 American (i.e.
Euro-American) Catholics should remain vigilant of the present situation,
the authors advised, lest their own rights be compromised next:
After the Indians, will come the inmates of all our public institutions; our
jails, penitentiaries, insane and orphan asylums, schools of reform, and
public schools. [. . .] Then will come laws regulating the relations of
church and State and giving unlimited power to the State to control the
public conscience.

41. “A Plea for the Indian,” The Catholic World 42, no. 252 (March 1886): 848–53, here
849. See also “Bishop Gilmour’s Pastoral Letter—Catholics First, Citizens Next,” New York
Freeman’s Journal and Catholic Register, 34, no. 8 (May 10, 1873), 7.
42. Catholic Grievances in Relation to the Administration of Indian Affairs: Report to the
Young Man’s National Union, Boston, MA (Richmond, VA, 1882), 21.
43. Address of the Catholic Clergy of the Province of Oregon, 12.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

“Is it not our own interest and that of all the Catholics of this country,” the
authors pressed their reader, “to meet this scheme of State-Churchism in
the Indian Country, and defeat it there at its beginning and before it has
time to spread through the country and take root in the American mind?”44
The theme of U.S. Indian policy as an indicator of danger to the liberties of American Catholics was taken up too by Charles Ewing during
his time as Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions.45 As Ewing
worked throughout the 1870s to fight the restrictions created by the Peace
Policy, he regularly invoked religious liberty to justify his arguments. His
invocations, however, reveal a Catholic unease with relying on the United
States as the primary framework for locating liberty. While at times Ewing
indulged in the language of religious liberty as a political right, he also (and
sometimes in the same sentence) invoked it as a natural right, in ways that
flirted with bypassing—if not directly challenging—the sovereignty of the
state in favor of a superior source of authority.
In 1874 Ewing submitted a twenty-five page petition to Secretary of
the Interior Columbus Delano on behalf of the Chippewa (Anishinaabe/
Ojibway) of Lake Superior to reassign the agency responsible for their
affairs to the Catholic Church. As he made the tribe’s case, the commissioner described how the government had mishandled a policy that—he
assured the secretary—would be a just one, were it correctly interpreted.
Here Ewing moved between referencing rights the Catholic Church was
entitled to, by virtue of policy and the U.S. Constitution, and what the
Chippewa were entitled to by virtue of their natural rights. “If [the president’s] policy is correctly interpreted and is adhered to,” he assured the secretary, “the constitutional equality of Christian churches in the United
States, and Indian’s natural right of freedom of conscience, will not be interfered with.” On the other hand, he cautioned Delano, “if [. . .] the oldest
successful missions are driven from the agencies or oppressed, then there
would be an interference with both natural and constitutional rights.”46
Ewing added a sentence clarifying the relationship, as he saw it,
between religious freedom as a right granted under the U.S. Constitution
and the Peace Policy itself, and religious freedom as a natural right derived
44. Address of the Catholic Clergy of the Province of Oregon, 14.
45. See Circular of the Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions to the Catholics of the
United States (Baltimore, 1874), Series 4-3, Box 1, Folder 5, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, 14.
46. Petition of the Catholic Church for the Agency of the Chippewas of Lake Superior (Washington, 1873), Series 4-3, Box 1, Folder 1, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, 14.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

15

from God. “If they [those rights extended under U.S. law] are not recognized and granted, other and higher rights will be taken from the churches
of the United States and from the Indians.”47 His hierarchical language
here is telling: religious freedom as an American right was relevant and just
insofar—and only insofar—as it conformed to and supported the “higher
rights” of both the Church and Native peoples. Those rights had everything to do with God’s sovereignty and nothing to do with the sovereignty
of the U.S. nation as such.
The Peace Policy’s restrictions persisted, and four years later Ewing
found himself editing a compilation of laws applicable to Catholic missionaries serving on U.S. Indian agencies. The publication’s purpose, the commissioner explained, was pragmatic—to help Catholics “deal with the facts
as they exist,” rather than to arbitrate “whether the Statutes [. . .] are in
derogation of any natural or constitutional right.”48 The commentary Ewing
wrote to accompany the compilation mainly adhered to that purpose. In the
concluding paragraph, however, Ewing could not resist returning briefly to
consideration of the relationship between rights guaranteed by U.S. law and
a human obligation to what he described now as “the New Law”:
It must be said that no American can admit that the Government has
the right to prescribe a form of worship for any tribe or nation under the
sun, no matter what its condition or relation to the Government may be,
nor has it the right to prevent, directly or indirectly, any community from
worshipping Almighty God according to the forms it may hold to be
necessary. Under our free Government a man has one right that he
cannot, under any conditions, forfeit to the law, even though by his crime
he has forfeited all else, and that is, the right to receive the sacraments of
the New Law according to the forms that his conscience dictates.49

Again Ewing’s language is telling; religious freedom as a right “under our
free Government” is relevant because it recognizes (or should recognize)
the right of humans to bypass secular law in order to conform to the contours of “the New Law.” While U.S. law has limits, this New Law applies
to “any tribe or nation under the sun.”50
47. Petition of the Catholic Church for the Agency of the Chippewas, 14.
48. Compilation of Statutory Law As It Affects Indian Reservations, and Confidential Comments Thereon for the Guidance of Indian Missionaries (n.p., 1877), Series 4-3, Box 1, Folder 7,
Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, 8.
49. Compilation of Statutory Law, 9.
50. Upon reading Ewing’s compilation, the new U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs
Ezra A. Hayt was impressed enough that he offered to publish it under the auspices of the
federal Indian Bureau, provided his Catholic counterpart remove the concluding reflection.

16

A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

The Osage Demand for Catholic Schools
The ambiguity of Catholicism vis-à-vis the expansive nationalism of
the Peace Policy era is important for situating the Osage Nation’s fight to
restore Jesuit missionaries and Catholic schools. This ambiguity inflected
the triangular relationship between Native people, U.S. Indian agents, and
Catholic actors. It registered to Osage leaders, as they confronted a crisis
of tribal sovereignty in the face of U.S. dispossession. For the Osage as a
tribe in the nineteenth century, as for colonized peoples at other times and
in other places, the problem of sovereignty—or of holding onto the
authority to self-govern, and more broadly to self-determine a tribal future,
over-and-against authority asserted by the state—was paramount. The
tribe named and claimed this authority through its appeal for Catholic
schools. The Osage asserted tribal sovereignty as a premise for the nationto-nation treaties from which the tribe claimed its right to Catholic education. That sovereignty was also the measure by which the tribe’s leaders
assessed Catholicism’s substance. It was a matter of ultimate concern, and
it established the fundamental terms by which they knew Catholicism as
present within, or painfully absent from, their community.
The Osage nation’s fight for Catholic schools was also a fight for its
treaties. During the early 1870s the tribe, under pressure from white squatters and a federal government hardwired to appease them, had sold the last
of its lands in Kansas and removed south to Indian Territory.51 When it
did, the federal agent assigned to the tribe, a Quaker lay person by the
name of Isaac Gibson (Figure 3), moved with the Osage and set up a new
agency. At the same time, this relocation physically separated the tribe
from Jesuit priests who had worked among them in Kansas. The senior
member of this group, Rev. John Schoenmaker, had acted as superior of
the Osage mission there for a quarter century.
When the tribe relocated to Indian Territory in 1872, Schoenmaker
and his fellow Jesuits stayed in southeastern Kansas. They did so because
their school there sat on land the Catholic order held by virtue of an 1865
treaty between the Osage and the U.S. government.52 As a condition of that
1865 treaty, in exchange for the tribe agreeing to sell an initial portion of
their Kansas lands, the Osage had stipulated “that one section of [. . .] land
Ewing refused, and the compilation was released only by the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions (Rahill, Catholic Indian Missions, 275–76).
51. Willard Hughes Rollings, Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance to the Christian
Invasion, 1673–1906 (Albuquerque, 2004), 167–68.
52. Rollings, Unaffected by the Gospel, 168.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

17

FIGURE 3. Isaac T. Gibson (1831–1915), U.S. Indian Agent (1869–76), Detail
from a group photograph. Courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society Photograph Collection, OHS, no 6002.

[. . .] shall be granted in feesimple to John Schoenmaker, in trust, for the
use and benefit of the society sustaining said mission.” In its eighth article,
the treaty further “agreed and provided” that Schoenmaker might “select
one section of land within their diminished reservation, [which] shall be set
apart to [him] and his successors, upon condition that the same shall be
used, improved and occupied for the support and education of the children
of said Indians during the occupancy of said reservation by said tribe.”53
This nation-to-nation treaty became the foundation for Osage
demands for Catholic schools in Indian Territory during the 1870s.54 The
53. “Treaty between the United States of America and the Great and Little Osage Indians, concluded, September 29th, 1865,” reprinted in Treaties and Laws of the Osage Nation As
Passed to November 26, 1890, compiled by W.S. Fitzpatrick (Cedar Vale, KS, 1895), 22–24.
54. The Osage appeal of the 1870s had precedence going back to the 1840s, when the
tribe first petitioned the federal government for Catholic missionaries to teach in their territory. See White, Getting Sense, 51.

18

A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

treaty and its guarantee of Jesuit education for Osage children, the tribe
argued, remained a valid governing document for Osage life in the tribe’s
new location. In other words, unlike Euro-American Catholics, who
engaged regularly, if ambivalently, with religious freedom as a civil right—
an extension of the rights due to Catholics and others as actual or potential
U.S. citizens—the Osage articulated their own claim to Catholic schools
and missionaries as a treaty-derived right. This distinction is important,
particularly at a moment when the U.S. government was intending to strip
tribal self-rule, by placing Native peoples “outside the purview of foreign
or international relations as sovereign nations who could treat.”55
In the face of this trajectory, tribes continued, as they do today, to
assert treaty rights. In 1965 Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) turned
to treaties to sum up the distinctive status of tribal nations in relation to a
U.S. citizenry comprised of immigrants and their descendants: “We were
here as independent nations, and treaties were made with us.”56 Historian
Nick Estes (Lower Brule Sioux) unpacks the implications of this for the
character of Indigenous rights. For Deloria, Estes explains:
the difference between “civil rights” and Indigenous rights was that settlers ‘came over as individuals’ and earned citizenship by converting
Indigenous lands into private property. Indigenous peoples, on the other
hand, had been brought into the US constitutional framework as separate
nations through treaties—not by way of individual or civil rights.57

During the 1870s, the Osage nation insisted on the relevance of its treaties,
and it framed its rights—including the right to Catholic missionaries—as
emerging from those treaties, rather than as civil rights.
When the Osage delegation visited Washington in 1874, its members
carried with them a communication addressed to Ulysses Grant. The letter
was to remind the president that he had neglected a petition, “signed by
55. Barker, Native Acts, 32. By 1903, this “trust doctrine” had foothold enough that the
U.S. Supreme Court would rely on it to justify its decision in Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock (187 U.S.
553) that Congress had the right to alter treaties without the consent of tribes (See Barker,
Native Acts, 34).
56. Vine Deloria, Jr., “We Were Here as Independent Nations,” Say We Are Nations:
Documents of Politics and Protest in Indigenous American Since 1887, ed. Daniel M. Cobb
(Chapel Hill, 2015), 137. See also Deloria, “The United States Has No Jurisdiction in Sioux
Territory,” The Great Sioux Nation: Sitting in Judgment on America, ed. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
(New York, 1977), 141–46.
57. Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline,
and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (New York, 2019), 174.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

19

the representatives of the entire Osage people,” the previous summer. In
the 1873 petition, the tribe had asked “that their former Catholic Missionaries and school teachers be restored to them and allowed to [. . .] resume
their Christian labors among the Osage people.”58 The follow-up letter justified the earlier request. The right of the Osage to Catholic missionaries,
it explained, was a gift from God—a “great privilege [. . .] that no earthly
power has any right to take away.”59
Although Charles Ewing (Figure 4) insisted this letter had been
drafted by the Native delegation “without suggestions or assistance,” its language is unusual for Osage-authored texts, in that it posits religious liberty
as a God-given or natural right—using language similar to that which
Ewing himself relied upon to justify Catholic schools.60 More often, Osage
arguments centered on treaties as the source of the tribe’s right to Jesuit
missionaries and schools. An 1874 letter to James McMaster at his Freedman’s Journal, signed by Osage representatives Anthony Del Orier, William
H. Tinker, and Louis E. Reveard, began in these terms. “When we made
our treaties with the Government in 1865 and 1869, we begged the Commissioners to let us retain our Catholic schools, and missionaries,” the
authors explained. “This was the expectation of the whole Osage Nation.”61
Three years later in 1877, a second petition to Washington—this time
addressed to President Rutherford B. Hayes, and again signed by more than
a hundred Osage chiefs and counselors—similarly explained the tribe’s
grievances as treaty violations. “Since our treaty with the Government [. . .]
we have been treated like minors,” the tribe’s complaint began. The petition
reproduced the language from the 1865 treaty relevant to the provision of
Catholic education. “The Osages [. . .] adhere unanimously to their stipulation as made by the eighth article of the treaty,” the petition explained.62
The invocation of treaty rights in Osage appeals for Catholic education
resonates with the character of the tribe’s dismay over the religious situation—
or lack thereof—on its new reservation. Just as sovereignty was primary to the
58. Qtd. in Letter from the Office of the Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions to the
Secretary of the Interior, 2.
59. Ibid., 3.
60. Ibid., 2.
61. Anthony Del Orier, Wm. H. Tinker, and Louis Reveard to Editor of the Freeman’s Journal, April 16, 1874, Series 1-1, Box 1, Folder 14, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records.
62. “Petition of the Governor, Chiefs, and Counselors of the Osage Nation of Indians,
Asking for Catholic Schools, Missionaries, and Teachers,” May 15, 1877, Series 4-3, Box 1,
Folder 17, Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Records, 3.

20

A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

FIGURE 4. Charles Ewing (1835–83), Brigadier General, United States Army,
Catholic Commissioner for Indian Missions, Courtesy of the National Archives.

Osage sense of why the tribe had a claim to Jesuit missionaries, so the problem of sovereignty also formed Osage desire for those missionaries and anger
about their absence.63 The lack of Catholic missionaries and schools from the
reservation, as the Osage leadership presented it, was a powerful and painful
problem because it was tantamount to a crisis in self-rule.
This crisis had taken shape through the early 1870s in the person of
Indian Agent Isaac Gibson. Upon his appointment in 1869, the Quaker
agent had, in the words of Osage historian Louis Burns, “set out to
destroy” preexisting structures of Osage governance, by ensuring that the
tribe’s traditional system of dual division chiefs was replaced by a single
head chief along with appointed council.64 “The selection of the governor
and council in this manner,” Burns wrote, “broke forever the power of the
Ne ke A Shin ka and the Ah ke ta (Chief Protectors). Never again would the
63. Priests continued to visit the reservation two or three times a year during this
period, but faced restrictions not only on running a school but on saying Mass (White, Getting Sense, 83).
64. Louis F. Burns, A History of the Osage People (Tuscaloosa, AL, 2004), 315.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

21

Osages select their leaders in the traditional way, nor would they ever again
govern themselves free from outside interference.”65 Significantly, the new
Osage head chief, selected by the Osage people but under parameters set
forth by Gibson, was Joseph Pawnee-no-pah-she—the same man who
would soon prove to be a fierce public critic of the Indian agent, and advocate for Catholic schools.
In addition to restructuring Osage governance, Gibson fulfilled his
charge to make good future citizens of the Osage by reforming their
lifestyle, including by turning the tribe from hunting to farming. Upon the
creation of the agency in Indian Territory, he oversaw the cultivation of
fields, and the erection of cabins and a sawmill, in addition to a new school.
Gibson also reportedly began denying annuity payments, or money due to
tribal members as a treaty guarantee, to “those who would not work for a
living.”66
These initiatives provoked Osage leaders to fight for Gibson’s removal,
and that fight was the same as their fight to return Catholic schools.
Despite the fact that Pawnee-no-pah-she—or Governor Joe as he was
known—held the position of sole head chief as a result of Gibson’s work
to dismantle traditional governance, by 1874 he was leading the Osage
offensive on both fronts. Remembered as “huge” and “better educated than
the average Euro-American of his time,” Pawnee-no-pah-she (also known
by the traditional name Wa tse ke he ka or Star Chief) was the last hereditary
Grand Hun ka Chief of the Osage.67 Like his father, he had attended
Catholic schools.68 Writing in 1932, Osage historian John Joseph Mathews celebrated Pawnee-no-pah-she’s ability to carry a room. “No one
spoke better Osage and few orators excelled him,” Mathews recalled. “His
words seemed to live when he wished to impress his audience, but at other
times he was blunt, and the expression given to his thoughts were like
hammer blows, smashing, merciless, unadorned by simile.”69
In August of 1875 Pawnee-no-pah-she applied his skills to explain to a
group of white visitors to his territory why the Osage fought for Catholic
65. Burns, A History of the Osage, 316.
66. White, Getting Sense, 80–81. See also Burns, A History of the Osage, 348.
67. Burns, A History of the Osage, 134, 55. Traditionally the Osage system of dual leadership was comprised of heredity chiefs from both the Grand Tsi shu and Grand Hun ka lines.
68. Burns, A History of the Osage People, 228.
69. John Joseph Mathews, Wah’Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man’s Road
(Norman, OK, 1932), 220–21.

22

A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

schools.70 In his speech—preserved in eleven handwritten pages—the governor emphasized treaties as the basis for tribe’s right to have Catholic missions
on their reservation. Going beyond a simple invocation of treaties, he
demanded his visitors return to Washington and remind the U.S. president
both of the United States’ treaty obligations to the Osage, and of the bilateral
nature of those treaties. “Tell him we have agreed in all our treaties [. . .] that
we should have Catholic schools and Catholic missionaries, and that he will
not find in any of them that we have asked for Quaker missionaries or
Quaker schools,” the governor instructed.71 “Ask him if it is honest for the
United States to make the Osages do all they agree to do in the treaty, and
then itself refuse to do what it is bound to do by the same treaty.”72
Pawnee-no-pah-she devoted most of his words that day to discussing
“what our troubles are and how to do us justice.” To convey why the
absence of Catholic missionaries was troubling, and why their return was
important to the tribe, the governor did not elaborate on the faith of tribal
members, nor their need for moral or spiritual edification. Rather the governor detailed the unhappiness that his tribe felt toward its Indian agent.
“It would take us many days to tell you all about the troubles we have had
with this agent,” he explained, “for nearly every one in this nation has
something to say.”73
For Pawnee-no-pah-she, the presence of the Quaker agent and the
absence of Catholic missionaries were two parts of the same problem, and
that problem was a crisis of governance. The Quaker agent’s mismanagement of money that belonged to the Osage was an especially painful theme
for the governor, and he characterized that mismanagement, along with
Gibson’s other missteps, as infringement upon the tribe’s ability to run its
own affairs. “The Osage have always been governed by a principle chief,
other chiefs, councilors and headmen,” Pawnee-no-pah-she explained.
These men are selected by the Osages to govern them, and they have
always obeyed them; these leading men hold councils and decide the
business of the nation, and all who belong to the nation have looked up
to their councils [. . .]. No agent has ever interfered with the authority of
70. This delegation included Charles Ewing. See Rahill, Catholic Indian Missions, 134
fn. 47.
71. “Speech of Joseph Paw-ne-no-pashe, Governor of the Osages, delivered before the
Osage Commissioners,” August 16,1875, Series 1-1, Box 1 Folder 14, also Box 353, Bureau
of Catholic Indian Missions Records, 9.
72. Ibid., 11.
73. Ibid., 2.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

23

our chiefs, disturbed their councils, or [. . .] tried to appoint chiefs or
councilors, until this man came here to act as our Agent.74

Pawnee-no-pah-she explained to his visitors that Gibson had recently
attempted to replace him as governor, despite the fact he had been chosen
for the position by the tribe. The agent “said publicly that he would not
recognize me as their Governor, and that he intended to make another
man Governor in my place.” Gibson was “the worst enemy that the Osage
[. . .] ever had in their country,” Pawnee-no-pah-she concluded. “He
wants, himself, to have all the power in the nation and will not allow
anyone to be free.”75
Other Osage who publicly advocated for the return of Catholic missionaries shared Pawnee-no-pah-she’s anger over compromised tribal governance. The authors of the 1874 Freedman’s Journal letter, for example,
similarly explained their fight for Catholic missionaries as a fight against
the “absolute authority” of their Indian agent. Agent Gibson “began to
exercise Despotism,” they complained.76 While in Kansas, tribal chiefs had
made decisions while consulting the Jesuit priests “on all important affairs.”
But in Indian Territory, the trio alleged, things had changed. “Our Osage
Chiefs were no longer consulted, and their complaints [. . .] have been and
are disregarded.”77 Like Pawnee-no-pah-she, the authors moved back and
forth between the trouble of a government agent who destabilized tribal
authority, on the one hand, and the “privation of Catholic schools and missionaries,” on the other. The Osage authors assured McMaster and his
Euro-American Catholic readers that the denial of these Catholic entities
“surpasses all other evils.”78 But like the Osage governor, the authors clearly
understood the problem of religion and the problem of governance that
Gibson represented as inseparable.
“Wrapped in the Catholic Flag”
“There are 3000 Osages,” Anthony Del Orier, William Tinker, and
Louis Reveard reminded McMaster. “If all are not Catholic, all have a
predilection for Catholic schools for Osage children.” “The cry for
74. Ibid., 3. The full import of Pawnee-no-pah-she’s inclusion of “principle chief” in
this list, which otherwise disputes the agent’s interference with the appointment of Osage
leadership, is unknown.
75. Ibid., 4, 5.
76. Del Orier, Tinker, and Reveard to Editor of the Freeman’s Journal, 4, 2.
77. Ibid., 1, 2.
78. Ibid., 2.

24

A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

Catholic schools,” they assured him, “is universal.”79 Whether or not the
authors embellished Osage enthusiasm, the distinction they raise—
between tribal members who asked for Catholic missions and those who
“were Catholic”—would have made sense to McMaster and his EuroAmerican Catholic audience. It is also a distinction historians of the
Osage have retained and tried to interpret, usually by positing a strategic
outward acceptance of religion, coupled with disinclination of tribal
members to convert. In his book Unaffected by the Gospel: Osage Resistance
to the Christian Invasion, Willard Hughes Rollings elevated this difference
to offer the Osage as an exemplar of Native refusal. “The Osage were cordial and polite to the missionaries,” Rollings noted, “but refused to participate in any meaningful way in the conversion efforts of the good Jesuit
Fathers.” “While there were some sincere spiritual conversions,” he conceded, “very few Osage people became converts.”80 Rollings concluded
that the tribe “shared enough form with the Catholic culture to make [the
Jesuits] welcome, but not enough substance to make them Roman
Catholics.”81
In Getting Sense: The Osages and Their Missions, James D. White, historian for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Tulsa, presented the reception
of the Jesuits among the tribe during the nineteenth century as a paradox
of “eagerness” and “strange wariness”—the fact that “the Osages wanted
missionaries, but they did not want to be converted.”82 For White,
Pawnee-no-pah-she’s own attitude toward Catholicism exemplified this
paradox. White recalled how the governor’s fight for Catholic schools happened despite Pawnee-no-pah-she’s boast, upon finishing at the Jesuits’
school as a youth, that “it took [the missionaries] fifteen years to make a
white man out of me, and it will take just fifteen minutes to make an Osage
out of myself.”83 According to White, Pawnee-no-pah-she and his peers
demanded Catholic education, but they remained “far from being absorbed
into the Catholic community of believers.”84
79. Ibid., 3–4.
80. Rollings, Unaffected by the Gospel, 155.
81. Rollings, Unaffected by the Gospel, 133.
82. White, Getting Sense, 2.
83. Qtd. in White, Getting Sense, 81. In a similar vein, priests hardly appear in John
Joseph Mathews’s history of his tribe during this period, with the exception of a story about
Oh Hunka Moie (Walks on Earth). According to Mathews, Oh Hunka Moie had been educated by the Jesuits in Kansas, and later dressed as a priest to avoid detection by the Wichitas
after killing their chief. In addition he “sometimes went into “the States” and said mass,”
Mathews recalls (Mathews, Wah’Kon-Tah, 242–44).
84. White, Getting Sense, 123.

KATHLEEN HOLSCHER

25

White determined that the Osage fight for missions was not to
defend religion, but to defend governance: “the Osages’ insistence that
they had a right to live their own lives free from white interference.”85 As
further evidence that the tribe’s demand for Jesuits did not amount to
endorsement of Catholicism, White recounted an observation by Isaac
Gibson that the “Blanket Osage” (i.e. those members considered “full
blooded”) were those who argued most strongly that their school “be
occupied by Catholics.”86 “It is interesting,” White pointed out, that
“Gibson should fault the fullbloods [sic] for their allegiance to the
Catholic faith.” “The experience of the Jesuits,” he noted, “was that the
fullbloods were largely indifferent to Christianity.”87 In White’s telling,
indifference to Christianity coincided with the Native-led struggle to
restore Catholic missions. The Osage “under Governor Joe’s leadership,”
he concluded, “were wrapping themselves in the Catholic flag in order to
protest the policies of the agent.”88
That the Osage wanted, above all else, to defend self-governance and
self-determination is born out by Pawnee-no-pah-she’s speech, and by
Osage texts in the Peace Policy fight. The suggestion that the Osage
“wrapped themselves in the Catholic flag” as a tactic in this, however,
would seem to suggest that, by extension, the tribe’s dealing with Catholicism remained superficial, and that Osage affinity for Catholic schools
amid the Peace Policy misses the mark for serious religion.
Appreciating (rather than diminishing) the tribe’s care for Catholicism demands new ways of conceiving of the Catholic. Rather than fall
back upon categories that are familiar components of religion in the United
States—categories like belief and conversion, but also those like worship
and practice—as essential to Catholic people and things, we should remain
with sovereignty and governance. For the Osage during the 1870s,
Catholicism did matter, and it mattered relative to problems of sovereignty, and possibilities for governance, rather than to something individual and interiorized like belief. Vincent Lloyd and Joshua Dubler write
about how religion in the United States gets determined in ways that foreclose these possibilities. “Religion’s ‘concern’ may be ultimate, but religion’s sovereignty is subordinate to that of the state, and as the state would
have it, to be political, to posit and actively pursue an alternative social
85. Ibid., 81.
86. Qtd. in Ibid., 84.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid., 85.

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A RIGHT NO POWER CAN TAKE AWAY

order, is to be essentially not religious.”89 “A life lived in ultimate fidelity
[. . .] to a flag, to a political party, to a piece of land, or to a revolutionary
social project,” they remind us, “is judged implicitly to be a life wanting of
adequate concern.”90
Recognizing the problem of sovereignty as profound, and recognizing
Catholic missions as important to the Osage as the tribe faced that problem, changes this equation. The collective desire for Catholic schools
among the tribe might not have been rooted in faith, but the efforts of
Pawnee-no-pah-she and others who traveled to Washington to fight for
them suggest it was deeply held. The categories that register as integral to
Catholicism across Euro-American Catholic contexts do not sync with the
historical experiences of colonized nations like the Osage. Attention to
nineteenth-century Catholicism in the United States, and also to the
Catholic-ness of the Osage and other tribes living in relation to the United
States—and amid the world-shaking problems created by that relationship—moves us beyond a U.S. framework for assessing Catholicism as a
religion that matters in, and in relation to, communities.

89. Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd, Break Every Yoke: Religion, Justice, and the Abolition of Prisons (New York, 2019), 170.
90. Dubler and Lloyd, Break Every Yoke, 171. The authors gesture toward the broad
adoption of a Tillichian definition of religion as “ultimate concern” by the U.S. state and its
institutions of governance and policing. “For [Paul] Tillich,” they write, “to mistake a subordinate concern like politics for an ultimate concern is nothing less than ‘idolatry.’” A similar
standard runs through scholarship assessing the “sincerity” of Catholicism performed by
Indigenous communities like the Osage in the U.S. context.

The Body of the Priest:
Eunuchs in Western Canon Law and
the Medieval Catholic Church
ARNAUD FOSSIER*
Historiography has shown great interest for many decades in eunuchs
and their role in premodern societies. But scholars of medieval Europe
have not paid a great deal of attention to the clerics whose genitals were
amputated. Drawing upon the example of men who had mutilated
themselves and sought to become deacons, priests or bishops, this paper
shows how their exclusion from the sacred sphere has been shaped in
medieval canon law and what were the possible exemptions to the general rule. The pope himself and more especially the Apostolic Penitentiary played an eminent role in their integration, since they granted
special authorizations and dispensations to all priests or aspiring
priests who were lacking their virilia. Finally, we try to explain why
this prohibition addressed to eunuchs reflects the Catholic Church’s
broader conception of masculinity.
Keywords: Eunuchs; canon law; Apostolic Penitentiary; papacy;
masculinity

H

istoriography has shown great interest for many decades in eunuchs
and their role in premodern societies. The book by German Jesuit
Peter Browe about emasculation, published in 1936, was groundbreaking,1
but since then, many academic works have been published on the subject,2
more particularly on the eunuchs at the imperial Byzantine court.3 There has
also been fascinating research by Aline Rousselle on the links between chil-

*Arnaud Fossier is an Associate Professor in Medieval History at the Université de
Bourgogne (Dijon, France). His email address is arnaud.fossier@u-bourgogne.fr. He would
like to thank warmly Sara McDougall and the anonymous reviewers of the Catholic Historical
Review, but also the editors of the Journal of the History of Sexuality for their help with the
paper. Any remaining errors are the author’s.
1. Peter Browe, Zur Geschichte der Entmannung: eine Religions- und Rechtsgeschichtliche
Studie (Bresslau, 1936).
2. Susan Tuchel, Kastration im Mittelalter (Düsseldorf, 1998); Piotr O. Scholz, Eunuchs
and Castrati: A Cultural History (Princeton, 2001); Matthew S. Kuefler, The Manly Eunuch.
Gender Ambiguity and Christian Ideology in Late Antiquity (Chicago, 2001).
3. Shaun F. Tougher, The Eunuch in Byzantine History and Society (London, 2008).

27

28

THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

dren’s sacrifices and men’s castration within the framework of religious cults
venerating Saturn in North Africa, during the first centuries of Christianity.4
Despite the lack of material evidences for such a ritual, there is no doubt that
the loss of virility was fundamental in the beliefs of ancient religions—
including the Cybele and Attis cults with their self-castrated priests (the
galli)5—and was an important component of the the social boundaries of
gender and sexuality.6 As recently shown by Matthew S. Kuefler, the Christians themselves who were driven by their ideal of chastity during Late
Antiquity were also confronted to the problem of self-mutilation.7
Disability studies could have offered new perspectives on the phenomenon of eunuchism, but the book by Irina Metzler published fourteen years ago
on disability in medieval Europe sticks to the literary, theological, medical and
hagiographical representations of bodily and sensory disabilities, and does not
take into account diseases like leprosy or epilepsy nor of mutilations like castration.8 This choice is surprising since we know that in the Middle Ages,
there is no Latin concept for what we call disability. The words “defect” (defectus), “disease” (infirmitas), “weakness” (debilitas) or “difformity” (difformitas)
can all mean something akin to disability. And in canon law, castration—
which only concerns testicles—and emasculation—which is the removal of
penis and testicles—are qualified as “bodily deficiencies” (defectus corporis)
since Innocent III (1198–1216), but also as “impediments” (impedimenta),
because they can deprive an individual of the right to become a priest.
While disability studies have stressed the cultural and social impact of
disability, but without considering in any detail the place of emasculated men
in the Catholic Church, masculinity studies have treated eunuchs as a borderline case of masculinity which illuminates the gender norms of a society.9
4. Aline Rousselle, Porneia. De la maîtrise du corps à la privation sensorielle (II e–IV e siècles
de l’ère chrétienne) (Paris, 1983), 139–64.
5. Matthew S. Kuefler, “Physical and Symbolic Castration and the Holy Eunuch in
Late Antiquity, third to sixth centuries CE” in Celibate and Childless Men in Power. Ruling
Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World, ed. Almut Höfert, Matthew M. Mesley and
Serena Tolino (London, 2018), 177–92, here 178.
6. Shaun F. Tougher ed., Eunuchs in Antiquity and Beyond (London, 2002).
7. Kuefler, “Physical and Symbolic Castration,” 180.
8. Irina Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe. Thinking about Physical Impairment
during the High Middle Ages, c. 1100–1400 (New York, 2006).
9. Matthew S. Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages,” in Handbook
of Medieval Sexuality, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York, 1996), 279–
306; Valeria Finucci, The Manly Masquerade. Masculinity, Paternity and Castration in the
Italian Renaissance (Durham, 2003); Jacqueline Murray, “Sexual Mutilation and Castration
Anxiety: A Medieval Perspective,” in The Boswell Thesis. Essays on Christianity, Social Toler-

ARNAUD FOSSIER

29

Shaun F. Tougher for example has shown that in Byzantium, disdain for
eunuchs reflected the strong misogyny of that time. As a result, the same
“defects” (like slyness) were attributed to women and eunuchs alike, who also
were considered effeminate.10 They still could be in charge of imperial
administration or carry out some prestigious court functions (such as protovestiarios) since they were supposed to represent an earthly manifestation
of the hierarchy of angels and lead the visitors toward their master’s throne.11
Therefore they have had a great political influence during the Middle Ages,
to such an extent that members of the aristocracy made themselves eunuchs
in order to be promoted to these honorific functions.12
Kathryn M. Ringrose has stressed that
castration was [also] relatively common among monks and churchmen of
the Byzantine world. The lives of Byzantine saints talk about children
destined for the religious life who were castrated at their parents’ request
in preparation for entering monasteries or special schools that trained
them to serve as musicians or church functionaries. Several important
leaders of the eastern church were eunuchs. The hagiographical writings
associated with this tradition make it clear that, despite legal prohibitions, castration in preparation for a religious career had become an
accepted practice by the ninth century in Byzantium.13

But scholars of medieval Europe have not paid a great deal of attention to the clerics whose genitals—genitalia or virilia in Latin—were
amputated, with the exception of the famous case of Abelard who was castrated around 1117–18 because of his secret liaison with Heloïse.14 Of
ance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew S. Kuefler (Chicago, 2006), 254–72. More recently,
about metaphorical castration as a foundation of Renaissance masculinity, see Kenneth
Gouwens, “Emasculation as Empowerment: Lessons of Beaver Lore for Two Italian Humanists,” European Review of History/Revue Européenne d’histoire 22, no. 4 (2015), 536–562.
10. Shaun F. Tougher, “Images of Effeminate Men: The Case of Byzantine Eunuchs,”
in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Dawn M. Hadley (London, 1999), 89–100.
11. Kathryn M. Ringrose, “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective,” History Compass 5,
no. 2, (2007), 495–506, here 501–02: “Eunuchs played liminal roles in society. (. . .) At court
they controlled the regalia that defined imperial authority, thus mediating between the physical and spiritual signs of an emperor’s ruling power. (. . .) Eunuchs inevitably served as guardians of these imperial spaces.”
12. Kathryn M. Ringrose, The Perfect Servant: Eunuchs and the Social Construction of
Gender in the Byzantine Empire (Chicago, 2003).
13. Ringrose, “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective,” 500.
14. Martin Irvine, “Abelard and (Re)writing the Male Body: Castration, Identity and
Remasculinization,” Becoming Male in the Middle Ages, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Bonnie
Wheeler (New York, 1997), 87–106; Tuchel, Kastration, 187–202; Larissa Tracy, “A History
of Calamities: The Culture of Castration,” in Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages,
ed. Larissa Tracy (Cambridge, 2013), 1–28, here 12–19.

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THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

course, there has been the outstanding research of Jacqueline Murray on
“mystical castration”15 and some other studies about the castration motif in
hagiographic and literary sources,16 but no scholar has studied the legal
status of real eunuchs in the medieval Catholic Church, even in the recent
publication from Patricia H. Cullum and Katherine J. Lewis about religious men and masculine identity,17 and in the book published in 2018 by
Almut Höfert, Mathew M. Mesley and Serena Tolino.18 As Larissa Tracy
writes: “Much has been done on medieval masculinity, but very little has
been done specifically on medieval castration, except as it reflects on or carries over the ideas of Antiquity into the Renaissance.”19
Nevertheless, Robert N. Swanson argued almost twenty years ago that
emasculation in the Church was “metaphorical” since the Gregorian
Reform had required celibacy and chastity for all ordained as priests, in
opposition to the emphasis on marriage and procreation as defining features of masculinity.20 From the middle of the eleventh century on, the
Church developed a new gender identity, a kind of “third gender,” which
made the sacred clergy “males” (because of their genitals), but not “men.”21
Not only are we inclined to believe that the question of a “third gender” or
a “third sex” is not valid when studying the medieval society, but the present paper argues strongly against the idea of a clerical “asexuality.”22 Draw15. Jacqueline Murray, “Mystical Castration: Some Reflections on Peter Abelard,
Hugh of Lincoln, and Sexual Control,” in Conflicted Identities and Multiple Masculinities: Men
in the Medieval West, ed. Jacqueline Murray (New York, 1999), 73–91.
16. Ryan D. Giles, “The Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim: Hagiographic Visions of Castration in the Liber Sancti Jacobi and Milagros de Nuestra Señora,” Neophilologus 94 (2010),
439–50; Ellen L. Friedrich, “Insinuating Indeterminate Gender: A Castration Motif in
Guillaume de Lorris’s Romans de la rose,” in Castration and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed.
Larissa Tracy (Cambridge, 2013), 255–79.
17. Religious Men and Masculine Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Patricia H. Cullum and
Katherine J. Lewis (Woodbridge, 2013).
18. Celibate and Childless Men in Power. Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre–Modern
World, ed. Almut Höfert, Matthew M. Mesley and Serena Tolino (London, 2018).
19. Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 3.
20. Robert N. Swanson, “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian to
Reformation,” Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Dawn M. Hadley (London, 1999), 160–78.
21. Ibid., 161: “Emasculinity means that all members of religious orders and secular
clergy above the rank of subdeacon engaged in cross–gender behavior.” About the “third–
gender” concept, see also Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the
Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities. Regarding Men in the Middlae Ages,
ed. Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis, 1994), who asserts that chastity tended to erase differences
between men and women.
22. Like Jennifer D. Thibodeaux has recently showed, even chastity was “sexualized” in
the clerical and monastic world from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Jennifer D.

ARNAUD FOSSIER

31

ing upon the example of real eunuchs, made such accidentally or voluntarily, who sought to become deacons, priests or bishops, we would like to
show that virility was a criterion required by the Catholic Church when
recruiting its servants, and from a very early date. Then, even when celibacy
and continence became obligatory after the Gregorian Reform, all priests
or aspiring priests who were lacking their virilia had to seek special authorization or a papal dispensation. What is at stake here is to understand why
voluntary eunuchs were rejected from the sacred sphere, on what textual
and anthropological grounds, how this exclusion then has been shaped in
canon law and what were the possible exemptions to the general rule. We
will finish by trying to interpret, on the one side, this rejection of eunuchs
from the Church and, on the other side, the role played by the pope in
their integration.
Eunuchs in the Early Christian Church
Pollution or Sanctity?

In the Book of Leviticus, which contains a compilation of the ritual
prescriptions of the Hebrews, we can read that
no one (. . .) who has a blemish may approach to offer the food of his
God. For no one who has a blemish shall draw near, one who is blind or
lame, or (. . .) a man with a blemish in his eyes or an itching disease or
scabs or crushed testicles.23

That is to say eunuchs were not allowed access to the altar nor to rise to the
priesthood in Ancient Israel. This exclusion and this stigmatization are also
made clear in the Book of Deuteronomy, the famous code of the civil and
religious laws of the Hebrews: “No one who has been emasculated by
crushing or cutting may enter the assembly of the Lord.”24
Irina Metzler recently stressed that in the Torah, disability is very
often used as a metaphor for sin or even as a sign of divine punishment.25
During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church conceives disability both as
Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest: Clerical Celibacy, Masculinity and Reform in England and Normandy (1066–1300) (Philadelphia, 2015), 33–34.
23. Leviticus 21:17–20: “Qui habuerit maculam non offeret panes Deo suo nec accedet
ad ministerium eius si caecus fuerit, si claudus (. . .) si albuginem habens in oculo, si iugem
scabiem, si inpetiginem in corpore vel hirniosus.”
24. Deuteronomy 23:1: “Non intrabit eunuchus adtritis vel amputatis testiculis et
absciso veretro ecclesiam Domini.”
25. Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe, 43.

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THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

a symptom of sin and as a gift from God allowing special access to sanctity.
At the time of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), for example, disability
is defined as a consequence of sin. As such, it can be cured only if the soul
has been healed.26 As for the bodily resurrection, it is described as a resurrection of perfect bodies, except for the saints and martyrs who will keep
their difformities and disabilities.27 But in the Gospels, disability is interpreted positively, since the healing of the disabled ranks among the chief
miracles of Jesus Christ. That said, Jesus never heals eunuchs (nor any other
amputated person), perhaps because the lack of testicles was not regarded
neither as a disease nor as a grave impairment.
In the Gospels, eunuchs seem to be included within the Christian
community as demonstrated by the story of an eunuch from Ethiopia who
is baptized by Philip, one of the first deacons of the church of Jerusalem.28
Furthermore, Jesus seems to praise those who have made themselves
eunuchs to experience continence and chastity: “For some are eunuchs
because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and
others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The
one who can accept this should accept it.”29 This mysterious call to chastity
would be interpreted too litteraly by some ascetics like Origen of Alexandria (c. 185–c. 254) who decided to mutilate himself when he was twenty.
According to Eusebius of Caesarea in his great Ecclesiastical History, this
priest coming from Alexandria went into exile and taught in Caesarea after
facing persecutions and voluntarily enduring castration. Peter Brown has
shown that this surgical operation’s purpose—a “routine operation” at the
time—was certainly not to make Origen immune to carnal temptation, but
more likely to make his body genderless.30 Yet, some of the Early Church
26. Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta, II/1. The General Councils of Latin
Christendom, from Constantinople IV to Pavia–Senia (869–1424), ed. Antonio Garcìa y Garcìa et
al. (Turnhout, 2013), 178–79, Lateran IV (1215), can. 22: “Cum infirmitas corporalis nonnumquam ex peccato proveniat dicente Domino languido quem sanaverat ‘Vade et amplius noli
peccare ne deterius aliquid tibi contingat’, presenti decreto statuimus et districte precipimus
medicis corporum ut cum eos ad infirmos vocari contigerit, ipsos ante omnia moneant et inducant
quod medicos advocent animarum, ut postquam infirmis fuerit de spirituali salute provisum, ad
corporalis medicinae remedium salubrius procedatur, cum causa cessante cesset effectus.”
27. Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe, 56–61.
28. Acts 8:27–40.
29. Matthew 19:12: “Sunt enim eunuchi, qui de matris utero sic nati sunt; et sunt eunuchi,
qui facti sunt ab hominibus; et sunt eunuchi, qui seipsos castraverunt propter regnum caelorum.”
About the exegesis of this verse, see Walter Bauer, “Matt. 19, 12 und die alten Christen,” in Neutestamentliche Studien: Georg Heinrici zu seinem 70. Geburtstag (Leipzig, 1914), 235–44.
30. Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early
Christianity (New York, 1988), 168–69.

ARNAUD FOSSIER

33

Fathers will condemn the gesture of Origen, perhaps because of its similarities with pagan rituals like saturnalia whose climax was self-castration.31
Mystical Rather Than Physical

Even if we must not “stop with such condemnations and consider the
opinions of these churchmen as reflecting broader opinion,” since “a much
more positive perspective is provided by the several eunuchs revered as
saints in late antiquity,”32 self-injury is explicitly condemned by Christian
authors such as Lactantius (c. 250–c. 325), Ambrose of Milan (c. 340–
397), Jerome (347–420), Augustine of Hippo (354–420), John Cassian
(c. 360–435), and above all by the first great council of the Church. In 325,
the first canon of the Nicene Council says that while an accident requires
mercy, self-castrating men should be refused admission to the clergy.33
What comes across through this canon is the distinction between selfinflicted and involuntary “deformity” and this will remain a central point.
Even if Origen becomes a model for Abelard, who needs to refer to
castrate men like him to justify his own fate and consider his horrible mutilation as a purification or as a liberation insofar as it allows him to teach to
women without being suspected of fornication,34 some of the most
reknowned theologians, preachers and canonists will warn in a very explicit
way that eunuchism mentionned in the Gospels is purely metaphorical.
The whole medieval hagiography, from the Dialogi of Gregory the Great
(c. 593–594) to the Dialogus miraculorum of Caesarius of Heisterbach
(c. 1219–1223), contributes to discredit real and physical self-castration—
which could only be inspired by the devil—and to increase metaphorical
amputation through mystical dreams and visions.35 Canon lawyers are also
very severe on self-castrated men. For example, in 1159, Rufinus, one of
the first glossators and commentators of Gratian’s Decretum, mentions the
case of Origen of Alexandria with harsh words. According to him and to
the Ordinary Gloss to Gratian’s Decretum (c. 1210), Origen clearly misun31. Kuefler, “Physical and Symbolic Castration,” 78–79.
32. Ibid., 180.
33. Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta, I. The Oecumenical Councils from
Nicaea I to Nicaea II (325–787), ed. Giuseppe Alberigo et al. (Turnhout, 2006), 20: “Si quis a
medicis per languorem desectus est aut abscisus a barbaris, hic in clero permaneat. Si quis
autem se sanus abscidit, hunc et in clero constitutum abstinere conveniet et deinceps nullum
debere talium promoveri. Sicut autem hoc claret, quod de his qui rem hanc affectant
audentque se ipsos abscidere, dictum est, sic eos quos barbari aut domini castraverunt, inveniuntur autem alias dignissimi, ad clerum regula tales admittit.”
34. Tuchel, Kastration, 198–202; Murray, “Mystical Castration.”
35. Ibid.; Giles, “The Miracle of Gerald the Pilgrim.”

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34

derstood when he believed that the verse from the Gospel of Matthew
concerning eunuchs was encouraging self-castration.36
Enemies to the Creation of

God

A few decades after the First Nicene Council, Pope Innocent I (401–
417) explains to the bishop Felix of Nocera that the involuntary amputation
of a finger deserves mercy and compassion, but self-mutilation can not be
forgiven.37 As for the canonical texts from the fourth century that we find
in Book 8 of the Apostolic Constitutions compiled in Syria at the beginning
of the fifth century, they come to the same conclusion about eunuchs:
21. Let an eunuch be made a bishop, if he is such by the injury of men,
or if his virilia were taken away in the persecution, or if he was born such,
and yet if he is worthy of episcopacy.
22. Let not him who has disabled himself be made a clergyman; for he is
a self-murderer and an enemy to the creation of God.
23. If anyone who is of the clergy disables himself, let him be deprived,
for he is a murderer of himself.38

These three canons make a clear distinction between, on the one hand,
emasculation caused by external aggression or defect from birth, which

36. Rufinus, Summa Decretorum, ed. Heinrich Singer (Paderborn, 1902; repr. Aalen,
1963), 147, ad Grat. 55: “De Origine quoque in sexto libro ecclesiastice ystorie legitur, cum esset
adhuc adolescens, quod semetipsum eunuchizavit, ut, quia persecutionis tempore tam in publico
quam in secreto viris et feminis verbum Dei predicabat, omnis occasio detrahendi infidelibus
excluderetur. Procedente vero tempore, dum Achaiam pro convincendis qui ibi erant hereticis
pertingeret et per Palestinam necessario iter ageret, ab illius provincie episcopis apud Cesaream
presbiter est ordinatus. Sed, sicut in eodem libro narratur, pro huiusmodi facto tam ipse Origenes quam illi, qui eum ordinaverunt, episcopi a Demetrio Alexandrino episcopo notantur: nec
imitandum eum credimus, quem fuisse hereticum ex scriptis Ieronimi non dubitamus.” See also
Glossa ordinaria ad Decretum Gratiani (Venice, 1487), ad Grat. 55, 4, v. clericus.
37. Innocentii I Epistola et Decreta, in Patrologia cursus completus, ed. Jacques–Paul
Migne, Series Latina, 1. Series, vols. 1–79 (Paris, 1841–64), hereafter cited as PL, 20: 603–
04, Ep. 37, cap. I: “Qui igitur partem cujuslibet digiti sibi ipse volens abscidit, hunc ad clerum
canones non admittunt. Cui vero casu aliquo contigit, dum aut operi rustico curam impendit,
aut aliquid faciens, se non sponte percussit, hos canones praecipiunt et clericos fieri, et si in
clero fuerint reperti, non abjici. In illis enim voluntas judicata est, quae sibi ausa fuerit ferrum
injicere, quod scilicet et alii id facere dubitare non possit: in istis vero casus veniam meruit.”
38. The Apostolic Constitutions 8.47.21–23, ed. James Donaldson (Edinburgh, 1880),
267: “Eunuchus, si per insidias hominum factus est, vel si in persecutione eius sunt amputata
uirilia, vel si ita natus est, et est dignus, fiat episcopus. Si quis absciderit semetipsum, (id est,
si quis amputauerit sibi virilia), non fiat clericus, quia suus est homicida et Dei condicionis
inimicus. Si quis, cum clericus fuerit, absciderit semetipsum, omnino dampnetur, quia suus
est homicida.”

ARNAUD FOSSIER

35

does not prevent the eunuch from rising to episcopal dignity (that is, from
becoming a bishop); and, on the other hand, self inflicted injury (si quis
absciderit semetipsum), which is likened to homicide, or even to a crime
against God and nature, and, as such, is strictly condemned, even if the
mutilation has happened after the priest’s ordination.39 As stressed by
Murray, witches will also be accused at the end of the Middle Ages to go
against nature (contra naturam) and against God (heresis or crimen laesae
maiestatis) by giving men the illusion of being deprived of their genitals
and rendering them “sexless.”40 But what is striking here is, once more, the
clear distinction between self-inflicted and involuntary castration that we
will find in all of the medieval canon law.
Eunuchs in Medieval Canon Law
Intent and Nature

The three Eastern canons from the fourth century, the first canon of
the first Council of Nicene (325), and the letter of Pope Innocent I (402)
are fundamental for legal catholic doctrine because they form the basis of
the distinctio of the canonist Gratian (writing in the early 1140s) on the
topic of physical impediments to entering major ecclesiastical orders.41
And for all subsequent medieval canon law, the distinctio 55 from Gratian’s
Decretum will be the “heart of the matter” (sedes materiae) of bodily
“defects” which constitute “impediments” to the priesthood, even if the
two notions of defectus and impedimentum are not used by Gratian.42 The
39. Anna Ravà, “Automutilazione (diritto canonico),” in Enciclopedia del diritto (Milan,
1959), 4:345–349, shows that the canonists were also marked by the roman legal principle
according to which “nobody is the master of his own members” (D.9.2.12: “Nemo debet esse
dominus membrorum suorum”).
40. Murray, “Sexual Mutilation,” 266: “Through diabolical machinations, then, the victim’s very humanity is threatened by the disappearance of his genitals. He is both desexed and
rendered sexless, in defiance of the order of creation and the order of nature. (. . .) There was
no place in this world or the next for a sexless aberration, and no possibility that a man whose
genitals had been stolen by a witch might be confused with a ‘eunuch for God.’”
41. Grat. 55, 4, 6, 7 and 8, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig,
1879–1881; repr. Graz, 1959), 1:216–217, hereafter cited as (ed. Friedberg, 1).
42. Since the fifth and sixth centuries, councils and popes such as Gelasius I (492–96)
or Gregory I (590–604)—both quoted in Gratian’s Decretum—refered to “vicia corporis” more
than “defectus corporis.” Actually, the qualification of “defect” first appears in the decretals of
Pope Innocent III as a generic concept which includes several kinds or causes of defects, such
as birth (defectus natalium, or illegitimate birth), age (defectus aetatis) or body (defectus corporis),
while the notion of “impediment” (impedimentum) is more often used to point out obstacles
to marriage than the legal impossibility of obtaining holy orders.

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THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

canon law master quotes the three canons about eunuchs which allow those
whose “defect” is from birth or by accident to be ordained.
If anyone has been mutilated by barbarians or by physicians to a surgical
operation, let him remain among the clergy. (. . .) As it is clear that (. . .)
those who have been made eunuchs by barbarians or by their masters,
and should otherwise be found worthy, should be admitted to the clergy
by Catholic Church.43

On the other side, the same distinctio includes canons which forbid
men who inflicted the injury upon themselves entrance into the clergy. We
read for example in canon 9:
The one who is healthy but believed that he could resist carnal temptation
by castrating himself—but by doing so, he in fact mutilated the body
God gave him instead of following the discipline of religion and asceticism—, will not be authorized to enter the clergy. And if anyone already
enrolled among the clergy has castrated himself, he should cease from his
ministry.44

The leading criterion here, distinguishing acceptable and unacceptable
cases of castration, is that of intent. If the castration had been deliberately
self-inflicted, entrance to the priesthood was strictly prohibited. From this
point of view, it is not surprising that Gratian, like Burchard of Worms
and Ivo of Chartres before him, quotes Pope Innocent’s I letter which
makes a distinction between voluntary and involuntary finger’s amputation.45 A few years after Gratian, the above cited Rufinus argues that only
the one whose virilia have been accidentally amputated may keep his clerical charge and become a bishop.46 Stephen of Tournai, another commentator on Gratian writing around 1164–1165, also states that a mutilated
43. Grat. 55, 7 (ed. Friedberg, 1:216–217): “Si quis a medicis propter languorem desectus est aut a barbaris abscisus, hic in clero permaneat. (. . .) dictum sit, sic eos, quos aut barbari, aut domini castraverunt, inveniuntur autem alias dignissimi, tales ad clerum suscipit
ecclesia.” See also Grat. 55, 8 and 9 (ed. Friedberg, 1:217).
44. Grat. 55, 9 (ed. Friedberg, 1:217): “Si quis autem sanus non per disciplinam religionis et abstinentiae sed per abscissionem a Deo plasmati corporis, existimat, posse a se carnales concupiscentias amputari, et ideo se castraverit, non eum admitti decernimus ad aliquod
clericatus offitium. Quod si iam ante fuerit promotus ad clerum, prohibitus a suo ministerio
deponatur.” See also Grat. 55, 7 (ed. Friedberg, 1:216–217): “Si quis autem se sanus abscidit,
hunc in clero constitutum abstineri conveniet, et deinceps nullum talium debere promoveri.”
45. Grat. 55, 6 (ed. Friedberg, 1:216).
46. Rufinus, Summa, 146, ad Grat. 55: “Cum autem casu aliquis membrorum concisionem patitur, si utique secretiora membra fuerint, tunc nec ordinatus degradabitur nec ordinandus etiam ab episcopatu prohibebitur.”

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cleric is able to be promoted to major orders, “unless his mutilation is voluntary (voluntate)” or “unless his amputated member is essential (to liturgy)
(principale) as are the tongue or the hand.”47
Liturgical Matters and Visible Deformities

The amputation of the tongue, of the fingers or an eyes’ deformity
could raise problems for the ability of priests to perform their duties that
canonists from the 1160–70s could not ignore: being able to see, hear,
touch, and speak, was absolutely necessary to Christian liturgy. But it is
more difficult to understand why voluntary eunuchs were prohibited from
becoming priests and why priests who turned out to be eunuchs were dismissed, since male reproductive organs were not directly involved in Christian liturgy. . . . An answer could be found in the theological argument of
the physical integrity of the priest as image of the perfect Christ’s body, but
it does not explain the legal differenciation between voluntary and unvoluntary eunuchs. Likewise, Paolo Ostinelli is too evasive when he asserts
that “such a deficiency was hardly acceptable from someone who was supposed to consecrate the Body of the Christ.”48
Among the papal decretals gathered in the title “de corpore vitiatis
ordinandis vel non” from Book I of the Liber Extra (1234), six letters confirm that physical deformities, mutilations and serious bodily defects could
bar an individual from promotion to holy orders.49 One of them, written
by Pope Alexander III (1159–1181), states that no one may celebrate the
mass if afflicted with a visible deformity or mutilation because it would
provoke a “scandal” within the Christian community.50 In a decretal from
47. Stephen of Tournai, Die Summa über das Decretum Gratiani, ed. Johann Friedrich
von Schulte (Giessen, 1891), 83: “Si voluntate id fecerunt, siquidem ante ordinationem, non
debent ordinari; si autem ordinati fuerant, debent deponi. (. . .) Qui ab aliis abscisi sunt, ut a
barbaris vel a medicis; nisi principale membrum amiserint, ut linguam vel manum, poterunt
ordinary.”
48. Paolo Ostinelli, “I chierici e il defectus corporis. Definizioni canonistiche, suppliche, dispense,” in Deformità fisica e identità della persona tra medioevo ed età moderna: atti del
XIV Convegno di studi organizzato dal Centro di studi sulla civiltà del tardo medioevo (San Miniato, 21–23 settembre 2012), ed. Gian Maria Varanini (Florence, 2015), 3–30, here 7: “una
carenza difficilmente ammissibile in colui che è chiamato a consacrare il corpo di Cristo.”
49. X, 1, 20, 1–6, in Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879–
81; repr. Graz, 1959), hereafter cited as (Friedberg ed., 2), 2:144–46.
50. X, 1, 20, 1 (Friedberg ed., 2:144): “. . . quum ipse non perdiderit tantum de digito
quin sine scandalo possit solemnitates celebrare, satis potes (. . .) permittere eum in suo ordine
ministrare.” About the meaning of “scandal” in canon law, see Arnaud Fossier, “Propter vitandum scandalum. Histoire d’une catégorie juridique (XIIe–XVe siècle),” Mélanges de l’École
Française de Rome. Moyen Âge 121, no. 2 (2009), 317–48.

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THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

Lucius III (1181–1185), Christians are also said to be “scandalized” by the
visible symptoms of leprosy.51 But eunuchs were never said to be provoking
“scandal” since their deformity was neither visible nor frightening.
A few years before, Rufinus had introduced a distinction between visible members (evidentes) and hidden members (occulta or secreta) like virilia. The canonist argued that only the lack of “visible” members such as
feet, eyes, hands or nose made impossible the ordination of a priest.52 We
can suggest that the case of eunuch priests allowed popes and canonists to
strengthen the opposition between “occultum” (like genitals or missing genitals) and “scandalum” (like visible deformities or diseases).53 So, in such
secret cases of deformity or disability, authorizations and dispensations
could be granted without any “scandal” to those who sought ordination.
What To Do with Eunuchs?
Authorizations or Dispensations?

If canon law had become very clear about the physical requirements
for ordination, the question of possible exemptions to the general rule
remains unresolved until the end of the twelfth century. Neither Gratian
nor his commentators mention the possibility of “dispensations” in cases of
self-mutilation, although dispensations had been previously defined by Ivo
of Chartres in his Prologus (c. 1095) as exceptions made to the law.54 The
term was also later used by Rufinus who proposed a more precise definition
of “dispensation” as a measure that suspends a legal rule in a single
51. X, 3, 6, 3 (Friedberg ed., 2:482): “De rectoribus ecclesiarum leprae macula usque
adeo infectis, quod altari servire non possunt nec sine magno scandalo eorum qui sani sunt,
ecclesias ingredi.”
52. Rufinus, Summa, p. 146, ad Grat. 55: “Cum autem casu aliquis membrorum concisionem patitur, si utique secretiora membra fuerint, tunc nec ordinatus degradabitur nec ordinandus etiam ab episcopatu prohibebitur (. . .). Si vero membrum evidens fuerit, aut minimum aut magnum erit; magnum autem decore vel corpulentia dicimus, ut oculus, pes, manus,
nasus. Si minimum itaque membrum casu absciderit, tam poterit ordinari quam ordinatus
non poterit removeri.”
53. About the “occultum,” see Jacques Chiffoleau, “Ecclesia de occultis non iudicat?
L’Église, le secret et l’occulte du XIIe au XVe siècle,” Il segreto nel Medioevo, in Micrologus,
Nature, Sciences and Medieval Societies 13 (2006), 359–481; Wolfgang P. Müller, “The Internal
Forum of the Later Middle Ages. A Modern Myth?,” Law and History Review 33, no. 4
(2015), 887–913.
54. The whole Prologue can be read as a treatise about dispensation, but we found the
most precise definition of it in Ways of Mercy. The Prologue of Ivo of Chartres, ed. Bruce Brasington (Münster, 2004), 123–27.

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instance.55 It generally consisted of authorizing someone to accomplish an
action or obtain a status that the law theoretically forbids him, given that
individual’s situation.56
In the decretals compiled by Raymond of Peñafort in his Liber Extra
(1234) and regarding bodily defects and disabilities, we find the word dispensatio only once. It does not concern amputation of virilia, but eye’s
infirmity.57 A simple “authorization” seems to be enough (licentiam indulgemus) in the decretal of Clement III (1187–1191) which stipulates that a
eunuch may be promoted to episcopal dignity if he has been made such by
accident or from birth.58 On the contrary, if the castration was the result of
a self-inflicted injury, then the cleric must ask for a “dispensation,” as specified in a gloss of Bernard of Botone (c. 1245)59 about a decretal which still
did not mention any “dispensation.”60 In addition, we know thanks to an
English chronicler from the thirteenth century that William of Ashby, one
of the first Franciscan priests to come to England, had to beg the pope for
a “dispensation” because of his self-mutilation (around 1224). He would
have been unable to celebrate the mass without such a papal dispensation.61
Letters Formularies

We still have traces of the papal dispensations and authorizations
which were granted to eunuchs, first of all in papal letters of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, and more specifically in the letters of the Apos55. Rufinus, Summa, 234, ad dictum ante Grat. 1, 7, 6: “Est itaque dispensatio, justa
causa faciente, ab eo cuius interest, canonici rigoris casualis facta derogation.”
56. Johannes Brys, De dispensatione in iure canonico praesertim apud decretistas et decretalistas usque ad medium saeculum decimum quartum (Wetteren, 1925); Alphonse Van Hove, De
privilegiis. De dispensationibus (Malines, 1939), 293–302; Josef Lederer, Dispensbegriff des
kanonischen Rechts (Munich, 1957); Charles Leben, “Impératif juridique, dérogation et dispenses. Quelques observations,” Droits. Revue française de théorie juridique 25 (1997), 33–45.
57. X, 1, 20, 2 (Friedberg ed., 2:145).
58. X, 1, 20, 3 (Friedberg ed., 2:145): “Cognoscenti itaque de substantia veritatis, si
precibus eius noveris veritatem inesse, et alias dignus inveniatur, maxime quum diu in ordine
perseveraverit monachali, ipsum in presbyterum promovendi licentiam auctoritate praesentium indulgemus.”
59. Decretales domini Gregorii IX cum glossis (Lyon, 1584), ad X, 1, 20, 4: “Idem sancivit
Innocentius in sua epistola ad Felicem Nucerianum episcopum (. . .) et concordat concilium
Nicaenum (c. 1), sed hic additus dispensatio.”
60. X, 1, 20, 4 (Friedberg ed., 2:145).
61. Thomas of Eccleston, Tractatus fr. Thomae vulgo dicti de Eccleston, De adventu fratrum minorum in Angliam, ed. Andrew G. Little (Paris, 1909), 6: “Hic aliquando tentatus a
carne amputavit sibi genitalia zelo pudicitiae; quo facto papam petiit et ab eo graviter correptus celebrandi divina meruit dispensationem.”

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THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

tolic Penitentiary. This papal office was instituted at the very beginning of
the thirteenth century for the purpose of granting absolutions, dispensations and authorizations to those who applied for special grace.62 The poenitentiarius “receive[d] confessions” from pilgrims and penitents63 but also
responded to supplications addressed to the pope. Unfortunately, the
papacy did not registered these supplications until the Council of Pisa
(1409). Nor did the Penitentiary retain copies of the letters it sent out in
response to the requests of supplicants.64 It saved only seven letters formularies composed between the 1220s and the 1390s, which help us to understand how the Penitentiary worked and what kind of absolutions, exemptions or authorizations this office was granting.65
These formularies compiled written answers to supplicants asking for
dispensations for various issues such as illegitimate birth, bigamy, consanguineous marriage, clerical homicide and so on. Once the supplicant
obtained his dispensation, he could marry (or stay married to) one of his relatives or be promoted to holy orders. The first known letter formulary of the
Apostolic Penitentiary has been attributed to the magister and papal viceChancellor Thomas of Capua (c. 1185–1239), but it is more likely written
between 1220 and 1270. Among the letters about mutilation or disability
62. About the origins of the Apostolic Penitentiary, see Emil Göller, Die päpstliche
Pönitentiarie von ihrem Ursprung bis zu ihrer Umgestaltung unter Pius V, 2 vols. (Rome, 1907–
11); La Penitenzieria Apostolica e il sacramento della penitenza. Percorsi storici, giuridici, teologici
e prospettive pastorali, ed. Manlio Sodi and Johan Ickx (Vatican City, 2009); and more
recently, Arnaud Fossier, Le Bureau des âmes. Écritures et pratiques administratives de la Pénitencerie apostolique (XIII e–XIV e siècles) (Rome, 2018), chap. 1.
63. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. John Sherren Brewer (London, 1861), 1:188–89, “De
invectionibus,” lib. VI, c. 26: “Erat autem cardinalis, qui confessiones pro papa tunc recipiebat, responsio talis: ‘Iohannes de S. Paulo, titulo S. Prisce card., nobili viro Philippo de Barri
salutem…”
64. About the first supplications registration by the Apostolic Penitentiary, see Emil
Göller, “Das alte Archiv der päpstlichen Pönitentiarie,” Römische Quartalschrift für christliche
Altertumskunde und für Kirchengeschicht, Suppl. 20 (1913), 1–19; Filippo Tamburini, “Il primo
registro di suppliche dell’Archivio della Sacra Penitenzieria Apostolica,” Rivista di storia della
Chiesa in Italia 23 (1969), 384–427; Monique Maillard–Luypaert, Les suppliques de la Pénitencerie Apostolique pour les diocèses de Cambrai, Liège, Thérouanne et Tournai (1410–1411) (Bruxelles,
2003); Patrick N. R. Zutshi, “The Origins of the Registration of Petitions in the Papal Chancery
in the First Half of the Fourteenth Century,” in Suppliques et requêtes. Le gouvernement par la
grâce en Occident (XII e–XV e siècle) (Rome, 2003), 177–91; Arnaud Fossier, “Tra burocrazia
papale e casi particolari: uno studio delle suppliche della Penitenzieria Apostolica al tempo del
Concilio di Pisa (1410–1411),” in L’archivio della Penitenzieria Apostolica: stato attuale e prospettive future, ed. Krzysztof Nykiel and Ugo Taraborrelli (Vatican City, 2017), 39–55.
65. About each of these formularies and all the manuscripts in which they are contained, see Fossier, Le Bureau des âmes, chap. 3.

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kept in this formulary, there is the case of a man who, while an infant and
still being nursed by his mother, has been attacked and castrated or emasculated (perhaps by a pig). Once he become an adult, he appealed to the
pope because he was afraid he would not be allowed to become a priest.66
This case brings to mind a decretal of Pope Clement III regarding
Barthelemy, a monk who asked for a dispensation because he had been
emasculated in his cradle by an unnamed aggressor.67 In response to the
supplication of Barthelemy, the pope had quoted canon one of the first
Nicene Council (325) allowing involontary eunuchs to be promoted to
priesthood.68 The aforementioned letter kept in the formulary of the Apostolic Penitentiary is perhaps a rewriting of the papal decretal to serve as a
model for all similar cases of accidental mutilation.
Dispensations from the Apostolic Penitentiary

Looking beyond this example, there are two main patterns of involuntary castration in the Apostolic Penitentiary letters: first, acts of violence
committed by unknown enemies (generally cases of revenge perpetrated by
laymen upon fornicating clerics),69 and, second, surgical emasculation
66. A Formulary of the Apostolic Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, ed. Henry Charles
Lea (Philadelphia, 1890), p. 29, 18/3: “Episcopo Bergamensi, Thomas cardinalis salutem in
Domino. Habet assertion Albertini latoris presentium, quod olim, dum matris penderet ab
ubere, nutricis incuria dubio relictus eventui rapide suis aggressui patuit et corporis partes
inferiores amisit, in illum incidens circa pudenda pudorem quod in ipso inferior regio femine
coniecturam non habet quam natura non dedit et viri probationem non exhibet quam casus
ademit. Cum autem prefatus Albertinus religioni desiderium applicet, cui eum aptiorem fecit
eventus, auctoritate domini pape [paternitati vestre committimus], quatenus super hoc eiusdem Albertini proposito prestet optatum manus vestra subsidium, et ad ordines sacros ascendendi, si aliud canonicum non obsistat, tribuat benigna licentia facultatem.”
67. X, 1, 20, 3 (Friedberg ed., 2:145): “Ex parte Bartholomaei monachi et diaconi petitorium fuit nostro apostolatui praesentatum, quod, quum ipse in cunabulis sectus fuerit, postmodum sub regula et abbate devote Deo militans in diaconatus ordinem est promotus, unde
suppliciter petiit facultatem sibi a sede apostolica indulgeri, ut sit ei licitum in presbyterum
ordinari.”
68. Ibid.: “Sane quum secundum statuta Nicaeni concilii illi ad clericatus ordinem prohibeantur accedere, et si etiam in clero fuerint, cessare debeant, qui se ipsos sani absciderint,
vel affectaverint, ut ab aliis abscindantur, non credimus ei aliquod impedimentum afferre, quo
minus possit provehi, qui in cunabulis sectus fuit; quia non videtur hoc eo tempore affectasse,
quo iudicium animi non habebat, praesertim quum in canonibus Apostolorum sit manifeste
sancitum, quod eunuchus, si per insidias hominum factus, vel ita natus sit, aut etiam in persecutione sint ei amputata virilia, et dignus est, possit in episcopum promoveri.”
69. A Formulary of the Apostolic Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, p. 30, 18/5:
“Quidam Dei timore postposito irruentes in ipsum nulla culpa sua penitus precedente uasa
seminaria ei ausu sacrilegio amputarunt, ipsum iurare nichilominus facientes quod ipsos de

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THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

wherein the goal was certainly therapeutic (most physicians from that time
thought that such an amputation could cure a hernia or leprosy70). Sometimes, both of these two patterns feature in the same case:
We have the case of a priest named A(ndrew), whose one testicle has
been crushed by an enemy and the other one by a surgeon. As he was
complaining of both injury and bad surgical treatment, he humbly
appealed to the Apostolic See for the authorization to keep and execute
his ministry.71

As the castration here is not the result of a self-inflicted injury, dispensation is in fact not necessary. The supplicant just needs an authorization
to legally remain a priest.
But when castration was voluntary, the supplicant had to justify himself if he wanted to obtain a papal dispensation. He then often argued that
he was ignorant of the law (ignorantia iuris), in other words that he did
not know that the law prohibited the self-mutilated from joining the
priesthood.72 We found one of these cases in a letter formulary which
contains more than 500 letters composed between 1335 and 1338 by the
major penitentiary Gaucelme de Jean. Unfortunately the written answer
from the Penitentiary does not give any details concerning the circumstances of the self-amputation and we cannot know how the supplicant
justified his request. But it seems that he amputated himself because he
wanted to “eradicate lust.” He humbly asked for promotion to holy orders
despite his impairment (non obstante deffectu), and the Apostolic Penitenhoc apud aliquos nullatenus accusaret, propter quod idem, sine licencia speciali, noluit officio
ministrare. Super quo supplicavit etc. Nos autem etc., committimus quatenus, si dictis veritas
suffragetur aliudque canonicum non obstet, ipsum in executione suorum ordinum dimittatis,
ne penam quam culpa non meruit ex injuria sentiat violentie aliene.”
70. Laurence Moulinier-Brogi, “La castration dans l’Occident médiéval,” in Corps
outragés, corps ravagés de l’Antiquité au Moyen Âge, ed. Lydie Bodiou, Véronique Mehl and
Myriam Soria (Turnhout, 2011), 89–216.
71. A Formulary of the Apostolic Penitentiary in the Thirteenth Century, p. 29–30, 18/4:
“Habet hoc casus A. presbiteri latoris presentium quod ei de genitalibus alterum viri inimica
precidit et reliquum manus medici non dimisit et sic et illo injuriam et in isto curam deplorans, humiliter petiit sibi super executione officii apostolice sedis providentia subveniri. Quia
vero in talibus impetus aliene malitie vel casus ingruentia repentini aut necesserie curationis
utilitas quoad susceptum officium affere non consuevit obstaculum, committimus quatenus si
predicti sacerdotes suffragio veritatis innititur et aliud canonicum etc., ipsius desiderium ad
exauditionis gratiam admittatis.”
72. Ninon Dubourg, “Emasculations cléricales. Itinéraires particuliers pour aborder
l’identité du clerc émasculé (XIIe–XVe siècle),” Encyclo. Revue de l’école doctorale ED 382, 4
(2014), 89–101, here 97.

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tiary then charges the diocesan bishop to dispense him, if “his merits plead
for him.”73
Why Be so Hard on Eunuchs?
A Playground for Papal Power

In the letters of the Apostolic Penitentiary, accidental emasculation is
rarely qualified as “defect” (defectus) and all the cases of castration are classified under the “mutilations” (mutilationes) rubric of the formularies. But
they are also defined as “casus qui inducunt irregularitatem et impediunt promotionem”74 and listed in some of the manuscripts which contain the formulary of Gaucelme de Jean (1335–38).75 Such a list certainly was
intended for the penitentiaries in order to make clear to them what kind of
exemptions they could provide. It includes 43 cases barring promotion to
holy orders which require dispensations, either from the pope himself—in
some particular cases called “reserved cases”76—or from a bishop.
In the case of self-mutilation, the pope had to suspend the rule prohibiting ordination for eunuchs and remove in that way the canonical impediment caused by the defect.77 The logic underlying papal dispensations was
73. Avignon, Bibliothèque Municipale, 336, fol. 17r: “Episcopo. P. diocesis vestre
[petitio monstravit] quod ipse olim affectans incentivos (…) lubricitatis extingere et conatus
ipsius multiplic[is] hostis exterminare rigorem, ext[im]ans per hoc virtutum domino suum
impendere famulatum, ausu sacrilego vasa seminaria sibimet ipsi propriis manibus presumpsit
temere amputare. Verum quia super ceteris inferioribus de dispensationis numere sibi asserat
olim esse provisum, supplicavit humiliter quod ad presbiteratus ordines huiusmodi, non
obstante deffectu, promoveri et in eo ministrare licite valeat per sedem apostolicam de misericordia salubriter provideri. Nos autem etc. et eius speciali mandato etc., committimus
quatenus, si est ita et sibi alia merita suffragentur, ad huiusmodi dispensationis gratiam obtinendam, aliudque canonicum non obstare, secum super petitis misericorditer dispensetis.”
74. The notion of “irregularity” (irregularitas) denoted the status of a person who could
not become a priest because of a criminal act (ex delicto) or because of a defect (ex defectu). See
Paul Hinschius, System des katholischen Kirchenrechts mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Deutschland
(Berlin, 1869), 1:7–63; Franz Gillmann, “Zur Geschichte des Gebrauchs der Ausdrücke irregularis und irregularitas,” Archiv für katholisches Kirchenrecht 91 (1911), 49–86, here 52–53.
75. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Ott. Lat. 333, fols. 98v–100r.
76. Arnaud Fossier, “Le droit d’absoudre. Concurrences juridictionnelles et communication des fors (v. 1130–v. 1320),” Revue de droit canonique 65, no. 2 (2015), 265–292; Véronique Beaulande–Barraud, Les péchés les plus grand. Hiérarchie de l’Église et for de la pénitence
(France, Angleterre, XIII e–XV e siècle) (Rennes, 2019).
77. Ott. Lat. 333, fol. 99v: “Qui mutilatus sponte et sine causa parvo vel magno
membro, fuerit repellatur a promotione et deicietur promotes… sed si iusta causa scilicet
propter lepre periculum amputari facit sibi virilia vel aliud parvum membrum, non repellitur
vel deicitur. Idem intelligatur in casu fortuito vel infantia fuit sectus nisi ut in magno membro

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both that of equity—since he was “moderat[ing] the rigor of the law” (juris
rigorem temperare)78—and exception. Granting authorizations and dispensations was one of the most important ways for the papal theocracy and the
centralization of the Church, from the middle of the twelfth century
onwards, to function with any success. Within that framework, defectus corporis turned out to be a crucial question for the papacy and dispensation
became a powerful medium to assert its power. Nevertheless, the centralization of the Church and the instrumentalization of dispensation as a tool reinforcing papal power cannot explain why the ablation of testicles that some
clerics inflicted upon themselves was understood as disqualifying them.
Infamous Men

We may recall here that even the apparently tolerant law regarding the
involuntary eunuchs who wanted to become priests most likely concealed a
certain repugnance for them—exactly as they inspired a strong distaste in
Byzantium79—, if not “anxiety,” insofar as manliness drew upon the fact to
have and keep his genitals.80 In addition, throughout the Middle Ages castration has been conceived of as an ignominious mark because it was one of the
main corporal penalties that might be applied to sexual crimes such as adultery
and sodomy. The story recounted by John Malalas, a famous Byzantine
chronicler from Antioch (491–578), tells us how the bishops of Rhodes and
Diospolis were punished by castration in 528 for being suspected of sexual
intercourse with other men.81 Thirty years later, the emperor Justinian will
prohibit punishment by castration in a Novella,82 but this terrible amputation
quod difformitatem generet vel scandalum [D. 55, c. 7 and 9; X, 1, 20, 1 and 2]. Qui in
membro quod generet difformitatem vel si amiserit oculum, non potest promoveri sine dispensatione pape.”
78. About the links between equity and dispensation in the doctrine of canon law, see
Charles Lefebvre, Les pouvoirs du juge en droit canonique (Paris, 1938); Eduard M. Meijers,
“Le conflit entre l’équité et la loi chez les premiers glossateurs,” Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 17 (1941), 117–35; David L. d’Avray, Medieval Religious Rationalities. A Weberian Analysis (Cambridge, 2010), 27 and 155–58.
79. Kuefler, “Castration and Eunuchism in the Middle Ages.”
80. Jacqueline Murray, “‘The Law of Sin That Is in My Members’: The Problem of
Male Embodiment,” in Gender and Holiness: Men, Women, and Saints in Late Medieval Europe,
ed. Sam J. E. Riches and Sarah Salih (New York, 2005), 9–22. Gouwens, in “Emasculation
as Empowerment,” shows that this masculinity paradigm comes to a turning point when
some Italian humanists choose to make the beaver (castor) the symbol of their manliness and
doing so “to gender themselves discursively as men.” (554)
81. Ioannis Malalae Chronographia 18.18, ed. Ioannes Thurn (Berlin, 2000), 364–65.
82. Corpus juris civilis, 3. Novellae, ed. Rudolf Schoell (Berlin, 1892–95), Novella 142:
“Sancimus igitur ut qui in qualicumque rei publicae nostrae loco qualemcumque personam
castrare audent vel ausi fuerint…”

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would remain one of the main corporal and ignominious penalties during the
Middle Ages in Western Christendom.83 It would be inflicted both inside
(and outside) the judicial courts upon men who were guilty of abduction, fornication or adultery. The underlying logic was to purify the social body from
the crime by making the “instrument” of the crime disappear.84
In Germanic law (like in Alaric’s Breviary, at the beginning of the
sixth century), castration seems to be deemed the appropriate punishment
for homosexuals. Even the Church declares through canons and councils
that the penalty for such sexual crimes should be castration (Braga in 572,
and Toledo XVI in 693).85 In thirteenth century Spain, in Portugal, in
Orléans and even in the whole Kingdom of France from 1270 onward, castration is the stated punishment for those who have committed sodomy.86
But in the middle of the thirteenth century, the penalty of castration was
also applied to men who had committed adultery in some italian communes like Perugia, or to the bigamists who had not paid the fines they
were condemned to (in Belluno, Emilia-Romagna).87
Except for the anglo-norman cases of political treason punished by
emasculation88 and for some famous cases like the one of Hugh Despenser,
the lover of King Edward II (1307–1327) who had his genitals cut and
burned before his beheading, it is difficult to know how often people were
actually castrated as punishment.89 But what matters here is that castration
was associated with the idea of punishment and with homosexuality. In
this respect, eunuchs in medieval Western Europe were commonly equated
to homosexuals who had been caught and punished. As castration was a
corporal penalty reserved for scandalous crimes, that could also explain why
Catholic Church did not so easily accept eunuchs as priests, even when
their eunuchism was surgical or accidental.
83. Tuchel, Kastration, 73–89; Klaus Van Eickels, “Gendered Violence: Castration and
Blinding as Punishment for Treason in Normandy and Anglo-Norman England,” in Violence,
Vulnerability and Embodiment. Gender and History, ed. Shani D’Cruze and Anupama Rao
(Blackwell, 2005), 94–108; Ringrose, “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective”; Murray, “Sexual
Mutilation”; Moulinier-Brogi, “La castration dans l’Occident médiéval.”
84. Moulinier-Brogi, “La castration dans l’Occident médiéval,” 210.
85. James A. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago,
1987), 149.
86. Moulinier–Brogi, “La castration dans l’Occident médiéval,” 208–11.
87. Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society, 540.
88. Van Eickels, “Gendered Violence,” has shown that castration was the most “political” penalty in the Anglo-Norman kingdom since it consisted in depriving those who committed treason of their masculinity and of their warrior status.
89. Tracy, “History of Calamities,” 19–24.

THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

46

Bene pendentes

Yet, the question for us is not only the social and cultural representation of the eunuch, but also who could become a priest and under which
conditions they could hold sacred power and provide the sacraments.
From this point of view, the legend of the bene pendentes which the
Church never denied before the middle of the fifteenth century is very
interesting. In the thirteenth century, the Dominican Jean de Mailly
invented the story of a woman named Jeanne who managed to become
pope as “John,” in 855.90 Since then, according to this Dominican, a ritual
had been set up which consisted of verifying that every pope, once elected,
had his testicles (genitalia).
This legend suggests that sacred power in Catholic Church was seen
as intrinsically masculine, and that masculinity, even virility, was expected
from priests, whatever their position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. It could
be interesting to look at the bishops’ letters and registers of canonical visitations to see if there were physical examinations of candidates to priesthood. In the supplications registers of the Apostolic Penitentiary from the
fifteenth century, there is only five per cent of the supplicants who request
a dispensation and/or an absolution because they have hidden their bodily
deficenciy.91 It could show that physical examinations were conducted
before the ordination of a priest, in order to detect any potential impediment. Besides, the “executors” of the Penitentiary letters of dispensation
were responsible for giving the supplicant a test, to verify if his disability
was a serious impediment to the mass or could provoke a scandal.92
But this does not explain why voluntary mutilations were canonical
impediments to the priesthood, while the accidental one did not require
dispensations. Beyond the conception of self-mutilation as a crime against
God and nature, which was adopted in the Church law from the fourth
century, we should look carefully at the legal grounds of the Gregorian
Reform and more precisely at the ecclesiastical celibacy.
Celibacy and Virility

After a first and unsuccessful attempt during the Council of Elvira
around 305, which banned priests from having sexual intercourse with
90. Alain Boureau, La papesse Jeanne (Paris, 1988).
91. Ostinelli, “I chierici e il defectus corporis.”
92. Ibid., 18–21.

ARNAUD FOSSIER

47

their wives and laid down the rule of continence,93 the Catholic Church
really began to prohibit the cohabitation and fornication of priests in conciliar decrees and canon law collections from the middle of the eleventh
century to the end of the twelfth century.94 We know thanks to the work
of Jennifer D. Thibodeaux and others that many Anglo-Norman treatises
between the first great councils of the Gregorian Reform around 1050 and
the Council of Lateran I (1123) had advocated for the marriage of the
priests.95 Some letters, for example the famous one sent by the canons of
Cambrai to those of Noyon in 1077, even used the virility of priests as an
argument against the ideology of the monks who urged celibacy. Their
ideal was absolutely not that of an antique ascetism grounded on continence, but on the contrary a “masculinity that incorporate[d] procreative
sexuality.”96 They vigorously stood up for their right to marry, all the more
since they feared being deprived (metaphorically) of their virility and thus
to be mocked and humiliated by laymen.
The Gregorian Reform was a legal bulldozer that definitively toppled
this ideal of virile masculinity in favor of celibacy. But while ecclesiastical
celibacy was promoted and required by monks and reformers in treatises or
93. Carl Joseph Hefele, Histoire des conciles (Paris, 1907), 1:238, Council of Elvira
(c. 305), can. 33: “Placuit in totum prohibere episcopis, presbyteris et diaconibus vel omnibus
clericis positis in ministerio abstinere se a conjugibus suis et non generare filios: quicumque
vero fecerit, ab honore clericatus exterminetur.” About the patristic and conciliar grounds of
this rule of celibacy, see Roger Gryson, Les origines du célibat ecclésiastique du premier au septième siècle (Gembloux, 1970); Christian Cochini, Origines apostoliques du célibat sacerdotal
(Paris, 1981). The two scholars do not agree about the origins of the ecclesiastical celibate:
Cochini thinks that it goes back to the apostolic times, while Gryson takes the Council of
Elvira as a starting point.
94. Alfons M. Stickler, “L’évolution de la discipline du célibat dans l’Eglise en Occident de la fin de l’âge patristique au Concile de Trente,” in Sacerdoce et célibat. Etudes historiques et théologiques, ed. Joseph Coppens et al. (n.p., 1971), 373–442; Filippo Liotta, La continenza dei chierici nel pensiero canonistico classico da Graziano a Gregorio IX (Milan, 1971); Jean
Gaudemet, “Le célibat ecclésiastique. Le droit et la pratique du Xe au XIIe siècle,” Zeitschrift
der Savigny-Stiftung. Kan. Abt., 68 (1982), 1–31; Brundage, Law, Sex and Christian Society,
214–22; Medieval Purity and Piety. Essays on Medieval Clerical Celibacy, ed. Michael Frassetto
(New York, 1998); and more recently, Uta-Renate Blumenthal, “The Prohibition of Clerical
Marriage in the Eleventh Century,” in Chastity: A Study in Perception, Ideals, Opposition, ed.
Nancy van Deusen (Leiden, 2008), 61–75.
95. Brigitte Meijns, “Opposition to Clerical Continence and the Gregorian Celibacy
Legislation in the Diocese of Thérouanne: Tractatus Pro Clericorum Conubio (c. 1077–1078),”
Sacris Erudiri: A Journal of Late Antique and Medieval Christianity, 47 (2008), 223–90; Elisabeth Van Houts, “The Fate of Priests’ Sons in Normandy,” The Haskins Society Journal, 25
(2013), 57–105; Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest.
96. Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest, 98.

48

THE BODY OF THE PRIEST

conciliar texts, the Church continued to be wary of eunuchs and above all
of voluntary eunuchs. The belief that a castrated man felt no sexual urgings97 implied that such a man did not renounce much when he swore to
live as celibate, which suggests that self-mutilation of the genitalia was seen
as a kind of “cheating”: this mutilation artificially deprived the priest of the
spiritual fight he had to undergo in his flesh.98 The priesthood was based
on the ability of the priests not just to be celibate, but to be able to resist
their libido. It is because reformers believed that a priest had to be subject
to and able to resist carnal temptation and that doing this was the price of
achieving moral purity. In that sense, one could not agree more with Thibodeaux when she writes:
The man who chose spiritual castration was able to abstain by sheer will.
He fought constantly against sexual temptation, which made him
stronger and more manly than those who never experienced sexual
desires. The manly eunuch, thus, became the monk who embodied the
ideal of spiritual castration.99

That makes a complete difference with Byzantium and Eastern
Church, where voluntary eunuchs could become priests despite the
enforcement of the canon law. The idea that physical castration would be
“a way of leaving the material world and accessing the power of the spiritual world,” and that eunuchs would be able “to cross the boundary
between the material and spiritual worlds” was very important in the Eastern ascetic tradition, but was not a part of Catholic doctrine.100 What
allowed the access to the spiritual world was on the contrary a good fight
against carnal desire and sexual temptation (and this is precisely why the
hagiographic sources addressed to monks or priests all stress the metaphorical meaning of self-castration).

97. Ruth Mazo Karras, Sexuality in Medieval Europe. Doing unto Others (New York,
2005), p. 39; Kuefler, “Castration and eunuchism in the Middle Ages,” 285 and 299.
98. Tracy, “A History of Calamities,” 11: “Autocastration was (in one sense) an easy
way out because spiritual salvation came from overcoming sexual temptation through sheer
force or will (. . .), whereas castrating oneself metaphorically was a constant battle.” See also
Almut Höfert, “Introduction. Celibate and Childless Men Placed into a Shared Focus,” in
Celibate and Childless Men in Power. Ruling Eunuchs and Bishops in the Pre-Modern World, ed.
Almut Höfert, Matthew M. Mesley and Serena Tolino (London, 2018), 1–40, here 20: until
the ninth century at least, it was believed that Byzantine priest and bishops who were also
eunuchs “did not need to master their sexual appetites or strive for chastity, and as such were
not afforded any further spiritual merit.”
99. Thibodeaux, The Manly Priest, 33.
100. Ringrose, “Eunuchs in Historical Perspective,” 504.

ARNAUD FOSSIER

49

To conclude, the encounter of the history of the slowly obtained
requirement of clerical celibacy with the history of authorizations and dispensations granted to eunuchs shows that the dialectic between chastity
and virility of the priests was a founding principle of the priesthood. That
is maybe the reason why it seems that the abolition of clerical celibacy in
Catholic Church, which would give the priests the same rights to marry
and procreate as held by laymen, is unlikely, despite the recent statements
of Pope Francis calling for discussions in this matter.

The Keys of Heaven in the Hands of Women:
History, Hierarchy, and Gender in
Early Modern Catholicism
KILIAN HARRER*
This article analyzes a legal struggle that occurred in 1745–50 between
Montivilliers Abbey and the Archbishopric of Rouen. The conflict concerned rare jurisdictional privileges exercised by the abbesses of Montivilliers, but the arguments made by both sides illuminate much larger issues
of gender, Gallicanism, and the ambiguities of change in the Church. The
nuns successfully defended a monastic Gallicanism that has escaped scholarly attention even though it crucially informed struggles over church
hierarchy in early modern France and fostered solidarity between monks
and nuns. Moreover, by contesting the relationship between church discipline and doctrine, the opponents in the lawsuit laid bare a major
faultline in the struggles of the religious Enlightenment.
Keywords: Gallicanism; Monasticism; Episcopacy; Women in the
Church; Religious Enlightenment

P

osterity has drowned the name of Madeleine-Éléonore Gigault de
Bellefonds in oblivion, yet she exercised greater spiritual authority
than almost any other woman in eighteenth-century Europe. As abbess of
Montivilliers, she governed a convent of Benedictine nuns, situated in a
small town near Le Havre in Normandy, from 1741 until her death in
1763. She benefited from the unusual privileges of Montivilliers Abbey: far
beyond the cloister walls, in a territory known as the Exemption of Montivilliers, she held the status of ecclesiastical superior. This exemption consisted of sixteen parishes and formed an enclave within the diocese of
Rouen between the Middle Ages and the French Revolution (Figure 1).
Bellefonds’s predecessor had once even called herself “la curée primitifve”
[sic] of the Saint-Sauveur parish of Montivilliers.1 In fact, the abbess of

*Mr. Harrer is a doctoral student in History, University of Wisconsin–Madison. His
email address is kharrer@wisc.edu.
1. Archives départementales de Seine-Maritime (hereafter ADSM), G 5360, mémoire
of Abbess Kadot de Sebville.

50

KILIAN HARRER

51

FIGURE 1. The Diocese of Rouen and the Exemption of Montivilliers in the MidEighteenth Century. Map produced by the author. Diocesan boundaries based on
a map published in Nadine-Josette Chaline, ed., Le diocèse de Rouen-Le
Havre (Paris, 1976), 328. Location of exempt territories and parishes based on
indications in Marc Venard, “Les visites pastorales de l’exemption de Montivilliers
du XVIe au XVIIe siècle,” in Recueil de l’Association des Amis du Vieux Havre, 46
(1988), 85–106, here 99.

Montivilliers successfully claimed to govern souls, whether directly or—
outside the cloister—indirectly through her official (ecclesiastical judge)
and vicar general. In a world of spiritual shepherds, Madame de Bellefonds
was one of a few shepherdesses with what canon lawyers have called
“quasi-episcopal jurisdiction.”2
2. For the most thorough overview and exploration of cases similar to that of Montivilliers, see Michael von Fürstenberg, „Ordinaria loci“ oder „Monstrum Westphaliae“? Zur kirchlichen Rechtsstellung der Äbtissin von Herford im europäischen Vergleich (Paderborn, 1995), 206–
331. Fürstenberg lists five female monastic houses with exempt parishes in the Kingdom of
France: Bourbourg, Faremoutiers, Fontevraud, Jouarre, and Montivilliers (pp. 275–87).
Among these five, the Exemption of Montivilliers was the second most important one after
that of Fontevraud. Still a good starting point for understanding early modern and modern
terminologies of “quasi-episcopal jurisdiction” is Léo Muller, “La notion canonique d’abbaye
nullius,” Revue de droit canonique, 6 (1956), 115–44.

52

THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

The special status of Montivilliers Abbey and its exempt parishes had
slowly taken shape in the High and Late Middle Ages.3 The monastery’s
founding charter granted in 1035 by Robert I, Duke of Normandy, became
an origin moment to early modern practitioners of ecclesiastical erudition,
but the decisive papal bull confirming the existence of the Exemption was
issued centuries later, in 1384 by the Avignonese antipope Clement VII
(1378–94).4 Throughout the early modern period, the abbess of Montivilliers successfully claimed and exercised the right to have her own ecclesiastical court (officialité) whose judge, the official, dealt with marriage cases and
crimes committed by local clergy. Under her authority, her vicar general
gave canonical investiture to new curés in the exempt parishes. Her official in
turn summoned the curés once or twice a year to participate in an ecclesiastical synod at the abbey, while her vicaire général regularly conducted pastoral visits. The abbess also approved extraordinary confessors and preachers
for those sixteen parishes, and she issued dimissory letters attesting to the
qualifications and good morals of any of her spiritual subjects who wished
to receive priestly ordination. Although in the 1630s Abbess Louise de
L’Hospital clashed with Archbishop François II de Harlay, one of the most
vigorous Catholic reformers to occupy the see of Rouen, the Exemption of
Montivilliers emerged intact even from that confrontation.5
The abbess’s privileges, however, seemed outrageous to many, including most prominently a later archbishop of Rouen, Nicolas de SaulxTavannes (Figure 2). His family possessed great prestige, resources, and
political clout—perhaps even more than Madame de Bellefonds’s family,
who also belonged to the high nobility.6 Monseigneur de Saulx-Tavannes
would eventually accede to the cardinalate (in 1756) and to the position of
grand aumônier de France (in 1757), the king’s chief ecclesiastical office3. For the most recent summary of how the abbey’s jurisdictional privileges developed,
see Tyler Lange, Excommunication for Debt in Late Medieval France: The Business of Salvation
(Cambridge, UK, 2016), 145–48.
4. It is worth noting that Clement VII’s status as an antipope was not a prominent issue
in the legal struggle analyzed in this article. This status was mentioned, but was not given
much significance, especially because the Kingdom of France had, in the fourteenth century,
supported Clement VII. See ADSM, G 5370, Requête au roi et à ses conseillers de la part de
l’archevêque, April 27, 1748, [7v].
5. See Gilbert Decultot, L’abbatiat de Louise de L’Hospital, 1596–1643 (Fécamp, 1975);
and on Louise de L’Hospital’s own distinguished place in the Catholic Reformation, Barbara
B. Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris
(Oxford, 2004), 99–100. Moreover, on the abbess’s privileges, see ADSM, G 5370, Requête
de l’archevêque, [16r].
6. Robert Forster, The House of Saulx–Tavanes: Versailles and Burgundy, 1700–1830
(Baltimore, 1971).

KILIAN HARRER

53

FIGURE 2. Cardinal Nicolas de Saulx de Tavannes (1690–1759), Bishop of
Châlons-en-Champagne (1721–33), Archbishop of Rouen (1733–59), cardinal
(1756–59). Engraving by Pietro Antonio Pazzi (1706–70), printed in Rome by the
Chalcographia R. C. A. apud Pedem marmorem. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

holder. Long before then, starting in 1745, he engaged in escalating litigation to strip the abbess and convent of Montivilliers of their exceptional
privileges. But he failed. Despite some initial procedural successes, SaulxTavannes abandoned the lawsuit in 1750, faced with the unflagging resistance of the abbess and her allies. The documents produced by that legal
struggle form the main source base for this article and enable some unusual
glimpses into the gendered stakes of pastoral power and church hierarchy
during the early modern period.
The case of Montivilliers sheds light on three interrelated and previously neglected ways in which nuns defended their place in the post-Tridentine Church. First, they collaborated with monks and other abbesses to
defend what may be called monastic Gallicanism. Second, faced with the
gendered overtones of the archbishop’s arguments, they embraced Thomist
and other scholastic—rather than Jansenist—ideas to emphasize the dignity
of the female monastic vocation.7 Third, they deployed the ecclesiastical his7. This distinction between Thomist and Jansenist arguments will further be elaborated
below; see fn. 44.

54

THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

toriography of their time to show that, as abbesses, women could legitimately govern parts of the Church. The first point may require some immediate conceptual clarification: monastic Gallicanism means a perspective on
the Church that stressed not only the relative independence of the French
clerical estate from the papal center of authority, but also the distinct and
distinguished place of monks and nuns in the Church. Many protagonists
of the Enlightenment worked to diminish or erase that place, and recent
studies have tended to focus on episcopal, royal, and lay Jansenist rather
than on monastic varieties of Gallicanism.8 Such scholarly preferences may
help explain why cases such as that of Montivilliers have gone unremarked.
A threefold analysis will show that the conflict between the abbey and
the archbishopric occurred on the boundary between church doctrine and
church discipline. Doctrine featured as the ecclesiological interpretation of
eternal divine law, the teaching about what shape of church hierarchy was
prescribed by God and who should hold the keys of heaven. Discipline, by
contrast, denoted the realm regulated by canon law, a body of ecclesial regulations that contemporaries could recognize as the mutable work of
human beings. This distinction between doctrine and discipline dates back
much further than the eighteenth century. In early modern Catholicism, it
already governed the difference between two types of decrees issued at the
Council of Trent: on the one hand, doctrinal or de fide decrees that demarcated orthodoxy and heresy from a Catholic perspective, and on the other
hand, disciplinary or de reformatione decrees that made changes to canon
law.9 To pick the example of the Council’s thirteenth session, the doctrinal
decree on the Eucharist clarified the Church’s teaching on issues such as
8. Symptomatically, Catherine Maire does not include monastic Gallicanism in her
recent long list of potential or actual Gallicanisms: “gallicanisme politique, royal ou parlementaire, gallicanisme ecclésiastique, épiscopal, richériste ou presbytérien, laïciste voire multitudiniste,” Catherine Maire, “Gallicanisme et sécularisation au siècle des Lumières,” Droits.
Revue française de théorie, de philosophie et de culture juridiques, 58, no. 2 (2013), 133–66, here
133. On Enlightenment criticisms of contemplative (but also mendicant) religious orders:
Dale K. van Kley, “Conclusion: The Varieties of Enlightened Experience,” in God in the
Enlightenment, ed. William J. Bulman and Robert G. Ingram (New York, 2016), 278–316,
esp. 303. In Bruno Neveu, Érudition et religion aux XVII e et XVIII e siècles (Paris, 1994), there
is much first-rate analysis of the Gallican erudition pursued by monks, but little on how their
position as monks shaped their agendas of learning and writing. On how, especially after 1750,
enlightened Frenchmen pushed female monasticism to the margins of their country’s political
culture, see Mita Choudhury, Convents and Nuns in Eighteenth-Century French Politics and
Culture (Ithaca, NY, 2004). Finally, Dale K. van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French
Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560–1791 (New Haven, 1996) on lay Jansenism and its eighteenth–century Gallican turn.
9. Jean Gaudemet, Église et Cité: Histoire du droit canonique (Paris, 1994), 615.

KILIAN HARRER

55

transubstantiation, while the disciplinary decree of the same session
detailed the canon law rules for appealing judgments rendered by episcopal
courts. This example is initially instructive because it offers a relatively clear
difference between a doctrinal and a disciplinary topic.
But in the conflict between Montivilliers and Rouen, that difference
was not only much less clear but even became the crux of the struggle.
While the archbishop claimed that the abbey’s privileges needed to be
approached—and eliminated—primarily from a doctrinal angle, Bellefonds
and her allies declared those very same privileges a matter of discipline and
tried to prove their legitimacy on that basis. In the fierce contestation over
where to place the dividing line between doctrine and discipline, the Montivilliers case reflects an essential theme of the “religious Enlightenment”
and especially the Enlightenment in Catholic Europe.10
The Lawsuit and the Archbishop’s Arguments
To understand the stakes of the litigation between Montivilliers and
Rouen, it will be helpful first to underline further the remarkable scope of
the abbey’s privileges. Montivilliers (Figure 3) falls into a category of abbeys
with full-fledged quasi-episcopal jurisdiction over nearby (though usually
scattered) parish territories. These monastic houses formed a select but by
no means tiny group, since roughly 25 abbesses and many more abbots
belonged to it at least temporarily in medieval and early modern Europe.11
The most immediate background to the conflict examined here dates
to the late seventeenth century. In 1688, Archbishop François Rouxel de
Médavy, a predecessor of Saulx-Tavannes, simultaneously attacked the
exemptions of Montivilliers and of Fécamp, the latter of which included no
less than three dozen parishes.12 The Royal Council pronounced an évoca10. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from
London to Vienna (Princeton, 2008). For a more recent scholarly landmark focused on
Catholicism, see Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a
Global Movement (New York, 2016).
11. An important recent contribution on female quasi–episcopal jurisdiction is Hubert
Wolf, Krypta: Unterdrückte Traditionen der Kirchengeschichte (Munich, 2015), 45–59. A broad
overview focusing mostly on male abbeys was given by Philipp Hofmeister, “Gefreite Abteien
und Prälaturen,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte. Kanonistische Abteilung,
50 (1964), 127–248. Hofmeister’s long list was still far from complete, as shown, e.g., by
Nikolaus Grass, “Gefreite Abteien in Tirol,” in Ex aequo et bono: Willibald M. Plöchl zum 70.
Geburtstag, ed. Peter Leisching (Innsbruck, 1977), 67–106. See also above, fn. 2.
12. The exemption of Fécamp stretched across 36 parishes, three hospitals, and eight
priories: Dominique Aubin, “Réforme catholique et privilège d’exemption: Les dépen-

56

THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

FIGURE 3. Apse of Saint-Sauveur, the church of Montivilliers Abbey until the suppression of the abbey in the French Revolution. Sketch by Alexandre Evariste
Fragonard, 1821. Bibliothèque nationale de France. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/
12148/btv1b77406920/f1.item.

tion sur requête (or évocation de grâce), meaning that it decided to consider
the legal complaints that Rouxel de Médavy and his coadjutor were formulating.13 The monks of Fécamp mounted fierce legal resistance and eventually reached an agreement with the archbishopric that left their abbey’s
Exemption virtually unaltered.14 Meanwhile, the conflict with Montivilliers came to a halt temporarily; apparently the royal commissioners for this
dances de l’abbaye de Fécamp au XVIIe siècle” (Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Rouen,
1981), 103.
13. For this requête (petition) of 1688, see ADSM, G 5370, Requête de l’archevêque, [4v–
5r]. The legal mechanism of évocation has been elucidated by Michel Antoine, Le Conseil du
Roi sous le règne de Louis XV (Geneva, 1970), 292–96, 515–19.
14. Georges d. Beaurepaire, “Conflit entre l’archevêque de Rouen et les religieux de
Fécamp au XVIIe siècle sur l’Exemption et la Juridiction de l’Abbaye,” in Précis analytique des
travaux de l’Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Rouen pendant l’année 1931 (Rouen,
1932), 99–118, here 114–8.

KILIAN HARRER

57

FIGURE 4. Madeleine-Laurence Kadot de Sebville, Abbess of Montivilliers from
1682 to 1741. Photography and copyright: Ville de Montivilliers.

case died and Rouxel de Médavy decided not to press for the appointment
of new ones. The abbess at that time was Laure-Madeleine Kadot de
Sébeville (1682–1741) (Figure 4). In early 1746, however, Saulx-Tavannes
revived the litigation before the Royal Council after a project of conciliation with Montivilliers had foundered in 1745. The new abbess Madame
de Bellefonds had rejected this conciliation plan, presumably because it
offered her few compromises and would have given the archbishop ultimate authority in all matters of spiritual jurisdiction throughout the
exemption. Had his plan worked, the ecclesiastical court and synods of
Montivilliers would have lost most of their institutional independence and
the abbey’s honorific privileges would have turned into empty shells.15
Instead of submitting to a quick and humiliating extralegal solution,
Madame de Bellefonds took the risk of a prolonged lawsuit—and after
15. For the relevant royal arrêt of 1746, see ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production
adressée au roi et à ses conseillers de la part de l’abbaye de Montivilliers, September 12, 1747, [2v].
On the projet de conciliation of 1745, see ADSM, 54 H 37, Mémoire sur le projet de conciliation
entre l’archevêque de Rouen et l’abbaye de Montivilliers.

58

THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

almost five years, time would prove to be on her side. First, a new royal
arrêt of 1746, requested by the archbishop, summoned the abbey to produce the legal titles on which it founded its exercise of quasi-episcopal
jurisdiction. The abbess and nuns of Montivilliers met this obligation with
their petition (requête de production) no earlier than on December 9, 1747.
The Archbishopric of Rouen replied with an equally lengthy petition of its
own. It set out to refute the validity of these privileges, targeting especially
the ducal charter of 1035 and the papal bull of 1384. Although the abbey
addressed an even more detailed petition to the king and his council in
September 1749, striving in turn to rebut the archbishop’s arguments,16
Monseigneur de Saulx-Tavannes scored a preliminary victory in early June
1750: the Royal Council received him as appellant comme d’abus against the
papal bull of 1384.17 Yet he failed to pursue the case any further after the
abbey sent a third petition in September 1750.18 It seems the nuns, the official of Montivilliers, and their attorney chose the right strategy: they practiced legal foot-dragging until the royal chancellor Henri François
d’Aguesseau—who happened to be the archbishop’s uncle—stepped down
in late 1750 (he died in 1751).19 Since 1717, d’Aguesseau had led the judicial affairs of the Royal Council in the name of the king, and SaulxTavannes may well have counted on his uncle’s influence.20 Partly due to
the chancellor’s old age, the Abbey of Montivilliers thus won out and kept
its privileges intact until the French Revolution.
16. ADSM, 54 H 37, Deuxième requête adressée au roi et à ses conseillers de la part de l’abbaye de Montivilliers, September 22, 1749.
17. ADSM, G 5370, Arrêt du Conseil d’État sur la requête adressée au Roy par le Sieur
Nicolas de Saulx Tavannes, May 6, 1750. The appel comme d’abus was a legal mechanism that
allowed litigants to appeal to a secular court against an ecclesiastical sentence they considered
abusive. On French bishops’ frequent complaints about and occasional use of such appeals,
see Alison Forrestal, Fathers, Pastors and Kings: Visions of Episcopacy in Seventeenth-Century
France (Manchester, 2004), 151.
18. For this petition, see ADSM, 54 H 37, Troisième requête de l’abbesse de Montivilliers
au conseil du roi, September 26, 1750. On the archbishop’s subsequent inactivity, ADSM, G
5369, Inventaire de pièces concernant l’exemption de Montivilliers produites au Conseil du Roi:
“cette derniere pièce du 26 septembre 1750 est demeurée sans Replique de la part de M. l’archevêque qui n’est mort qu’en 1759.”
19. For evidence that the Montivilliers party understood from the beginning the strategic interest of spacing out each step of the lawsuit as much as possible, see ADSM, G 5375,
Lettre de Toussaints du Plessis à Mme de Bellefonds, Paris, October 17, 1745: “M. l’archevêque
ne peut pas toujours vivre; encore moins M. le chancelier, qui certainement prendroit parti
pour lui contre vous.”
20. On the family connection between d’Aguesseau and Saulx-Tavannes, see Forster,
The House of Saulx-Tavanes, xii. On d’Aguesseau’s preeminent position in the Royal Council:
Isabelle Brancourt, “Aguesseau, Henri François d’: 1668–1751,” in Écrivains juristes et juristes
écrivains: Du Moyen Âge au siècle des Lumières, ed. Bruno Méniel (Paris, 2015), 40–46, here 42.

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59

Yet legal strategies necessarily revolved around the substance of arguments as well as around timing, so it is important now to consider SaulxTavannes’s main line of attack. Both sides were addressing this basic issue:
what had Robert I meant in 1035 when granting the privilege of freedom
and immunity “from all episcopal custom” to the Abbey of Montivilliers
(ab omni episcopali consuetudine absolutam, immunem et omnino liberam constituimus) while including its attendant parishes?21 Saulx-Tavannes gave
one clear answer to this question: “‘consuetudo episcopalis’ by no means
signifies spiritual jurisdiction.”22 Instead, he argued, the duke had merely
freed the abbey and the parishes from the temporal obligation to pay certain customary fees to the archbishop of Rouen.
In his quest to support this understanding of consuetudo, the archbishop
focused on the articles of faith that seemed to prove his case better than anything else did. “Our principles are quite certain,” his petition reads: “Jesus
Christ himself has endowed the bishops with the power to bind and to
loose. They are accountable to God for the care of souls He has conferred
upon them and for the spiritual power He has given them, and this authority is not just acquired through custom but founded on divine law and the
common law.”23 To be sure, according to the Gospels, Jesus had given the
keys of heaven—the power to bind and to loose—to the apostles.24 But
Saulx-Tavannes drew upon the doctrine of apostolic succession to equate
implicitly apostolic and episcopal powers.25 Only theological aberration, he
argued, could push the meaning of consuetudo far enough to construe the
ducal charter of 1035 as a transfer of spiritual jurisdiction. When an abbess
pretended that such a transfer had taken place, when she wielded pastoral
power and used the keys of heaven, was she not violating divine law?
21. A critical edition of the charter of 1035 in Jean-François Lemarignier, Étude sur les
privilèges d’exemption et de juridiction ecclésiastique des abbayes normandes, depuis les origines jusqu’en 1140 (Paris, 1937), 235–46.
22. ADSM, G 5370, Requête de l’archevêque, [22v]: “Consuetudo Episcopalis ne signifie
point jurisdiction spirituelle.”
23. ADSM, G 5370, Requête de l’archevêque, [17v]: “Nos Principes sont bien certains
c’est de Jesus Christ même que les Evêques tiennent le pouvoir de lier et de delier. C’est à
Dieu à qui ils doivent rendre compte du soin des ames qu’il leur a confié et de la puissance
spirituelle qu’il leur a accordée, et cette autorité n’est pas seulement acquise par la Coutume,
mais fondée sur le droit divin et sur le droit commun.”
24. Primarily Matt. 18:18.
25. In the twenty-third session of the Council of Trent, for example, the decree on the
sacrament of order described bishops as those “who have followed in the place of the apostles”
(episcopos, qui in apostolorum locum successerunt). “Decrees of the Council of Trent. 1545–
1563,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils: Volume Two. Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman P.
Tanner (Washington, DC, 1990), 657–799, here 743.

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

In other words, according to Saulx-Tavannes, immutable ius divinum
demanded that the power of the keys belong to bishops alone; at any rate,
it was a power “which presumably no one ever had the intention of putting
in the hands of une fille.”26 There was nothing disrespectful about a bishop
talking to an abbess as ma fille (my daughter), but Saulx-Tavannes belittled
Bellefonds by talking about her as une fille (a girl or a nun) and not as an
abbess. To drive home the point that her pastoral oversight contradicted
the doctrine of hierarchy, he asked: “Is there anything more monstrous in
hierarchic order, or anything more indecent, than seeing une fille preside
over synods and assemblies of curés?”27 From his perspective, no woman
could ever partake in the kind of spiritual jurisdiction exercised by bishops.
The power of such claims resided partly in their very familiarity: throughout the seventeenth century, the bishops of France had worked to impose
the notion of exclusive episcopal jurisdiction by divine right (iure divino)
on the entire Gallican Church.28
The Response from Montivilliers, Part One: Gallicanism
While the archbishop of Rouen thus relied overwhelmingly on ecclesiological doctrine to decide the lawsuit in his favor, the nuns of Montivilliers combined ecclesiology, canon law, and history. More specifically, to
counter Saulx-Tavannes’s assertions, the Montivilliers party needed to
demonstrate three interlocking claims. They needed to show first that
“episcopal” jurisdiction could legitimately be exercised by persons other
than bishops; second, that abbesses counted among these potentially competent other persons; and third, that the Abbess of Montivilliers had truly
received that kind of jurisdictional authority in 1035. The first two points
straddled the boundary between theological and legal argument, while the
third called above all for historical reasoning. To explain how the nuns
could make those points and move across those genres of discourse, it is
helpful to have recourse to the concept of monastic Gallicanism.
This concept gives a name and clearer contours to early modern
monastic concerns that the established scholarship on Gallicanism has
26. ADSM, G 5370, Requête de l’archevêque, [22v]: “le droit de lier et de delier accordé
aux Eveques par Jesus Christ et qu’il est à présumer que l’on n’a jamais eu intention de mettre
entre les mains d’une fille.”
27. ADSM, G 5370, Requête de l’archevêque, [73v]: “Y a-t-il rien de plus monstrueux
dans l’ordre hierarchique, ni rien de plus indécent que de voir une fille présider aux Synodes
et aux assemblées des Curés.”
28. Forrestal, Fathers, Pastors and Kings, 118–20, 217–23.

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61

viewed only through the prism of episcopal attempts to marginalize those
concerns.29 Such attempts typically targeted exemptions in the broadest
sense—not just exempt territories like that around Montivilliers, but all
privileges by virtue of which members of religious orders (the clergé
régulier) escaped the local bishop’s formal control. At first glance, this
would mean that control was instead exercised directly by the Holy See, in
which case it would have made sense for monks and nuns to appeal for protection to Rome, and thus to elaborate ultramontane rather than Gallican
arguments. But in the early modern period, the French king as outside
bishop (évêque du dehors) and protector of the Church of his realm played
at least as important a role in the guarantee of exemption rights as did the
papacy. The crown’s influence played out in part through patronage, as the
king nominated the abbots and abbesses of the country’s more prestigious
and wealthy monastic houses, the so-called abbayes royales.30 More broadly,
however, by the seventeenth century, all parts of the French clergy risked
losing much if they failed to make their interests sound compatible with
the ambitions of an increasingly powerful monarchy and hence with political Gallicanism.31
The nuns of Montivilliers tapped into this royal Gallican current to
make the first of their three necessary points: that a temporal ruler could,
in principle, have legitimately diminished a bishop’s jurisdictional territory.
Consider first how the archbishop’s petition emphasized the limits of
princely prerogatives: “Sovereigns, however respectable their power, have
29. Crucial contributions in this context include Michel C. Péronnet, Les évêques de
l’ancienne France, 2 vols. (Lille, 1977) on the supposedly overbearing alliance of episcopal and
royal Gallicanism; Forrestal, Fathers, Pastors, and Kings as well as Joseph Bergin, Crown,
Church and Episcopate under Louis XIV (New Haven, 2004) on how French bishops largely
succeeded in imposing their view of church hierarchy on the rest of the clergy (including
monastic and other orders) during the reign of Louis XIV; and Frédéric Meyer, “L’autorité
du bureau épiscopal sur les réguliers en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles,” in Les personnes
d’autorité en milieu régulier: Des origines de la vie régulière au XVIII e siècle, ed. Jean–François
Cottier, Daniel-Odon Hurel, and Benoît-Michel Tock (Saint-Étienne, 2012), 435–47, on
how the framework of episcopal control developed into the eighteenth century.
30. John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Volume 1: The
Clerical Establishment and Its Social Ramifications (Oxford, 1998), 492; Robert Lemoine,
L’époque moderne 1563–1789: Le monde des religieux, Histoire du droit et des institutions de
l’Église en occident, 15,2 (Paris, 1976), 2.
31. On the difference and the uneasy dance between “political” (i.e., first and foremost
royal) and “ecclesiastical” Gallicanism, see the recent helpful overview by Stefania Tutino,
“Ecclesiology/Church-State Relationship in Early Modern Catholicism,” in The Oxford
Handbook of Early Modern Theology, 1600–1800, ed. Ulrich L. Lehner, Richard A. Muller, and
A. G. Roeber (New York, 2016), 150–64.

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

never had any authority over what is purely spiritual; hence it is untenable
to say that Duke Robert wanted, by his charter of 1035, to grant the nuns
of Montivilliers a purely spiritual right, which was not in his power at
all.”32 By contrast, the nuns insisted “that everything that regards jurisdiction is not at all of divine law, and can therefore be ceded and even become
subject to legal prescription.”33 According to them, therefore, jurisdiction
in the Church could have a human legal history rather than depending on
the divinely instituted origin that underlay apostolic succession. As the
abbey’s second petition reminded the archbishop, he, too, was turning to
the king’s councilors to reclaim his “pretended spiritual rights.”34 SaulxTavannes’s choice to interest the temporal ruler in an alleged violation of
church hierarchy appeared self-defeating as the case threatened to slip
from a matter of divine law to one of human law, a slippage that Bellefonds
and her allies pointed out and amplified.
Insofar as the matter at hand concerned human law according to the
Montivilliers party, it could therefore fall under the purview of the temporal
sword—wielded in 1035 by Duke Robert and in the 1740s by King Louis
XV. Temporal sovereigns “claim the right to limit the exercise of episcopal
rights by separating from a bishop’s territory those whom they [i.e. the sovereigns] wish to exempt from episcopal jurisdiction. This maxim has been
adopted and supported by several secular princes and approved by the
popes.”35 In this passage, the abbey’s second petition simply neglects to
address episcopal consent, and even papal approval functions only as an
afterthought. The nuns carefully foregrounded the royal Gallican aspect of
their case, while shutting down any ultramontane implication their
counter-attack on episcopal Gallicanism could have raised.

32. ADSM, G 5370, Requête de l’archevêque, [17v–18r]: “Les Souverains quelque
respectable que soit leur puissance n’ont jamais eu aucune autorité sur ce qui est purement
spirituel, ainsy l’on ne peut donc pas soutenir que le Duc Robert ait voulu par sa Charte de
1035 accorder aux Religieuses de Montivilliers un droit purement spirituel et qui n’etoit point
en son pouvoir.”
33. ADSM, 54 H 37, Deuxième requête, [20r]: “que tout ce qui est de jurisdiction n’étant point de droit divin, peut être cédé et même se prescrire.”
34. ADSM, 54 H 37, Deuxième requête, [86r]: “prétendus droits spirituels.”
35. ADSM, 54 H 37, Deuxième requête, [80v]: “Quoique les Souverains n’aient aucune
autorité immediate sur ce qui est purement spirituel, ils prétendent avoir droit de limiter l’exercice des droits des Evêques, en retranchant de leur territoire ceux qu’ils veulent exempter de
leur jurisdiction. Cette maxime est adoptée et soutenue par plusieurs Princes Séculiers, et
approuvée par les Papes.”

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63

The Response from Montivilliers, Part Two: Gender
They also embraced a female monastic perspective to make the second of
the three points outlined above. In addition to demonstrating that spiritual
jurisdiction could legitimately be transferred away from the episcopate, they
needed to convince the royal councilors that this jurisdiction could specifically fall into an abbess’s hands. In this respect, Bellefonds went far beyond
seeking compatibility with royal Gallicanism and described her own pastoral power with great self-confidence. The requête de production from Montivilliers offered a formidable opening salvo: “If simple female religious are
admitted into the état ecclésiastique, there can be no doubt that abbesses
must enjoy a much more distinguished rank. The canons include the abbatial dignity among the prelacies. Abbesses have often even been designated
by the titles of antistita, archimendritissa, episcopa.”36 These titles referred to
the ancient female equivalents of antistes (leader of an early Christian conventicle), archimandrite (an Eastern Christian office of high abbot), and
bishop.37 Indeed, the petition continued, the benediction or consecration of
abbesses amounted to a form of ordination, as indicated by the famous early
medieval pope Gregory I and by the liturgical formulae of “the Pontifical.”38
Thanks to their ordination, during which abbesses received the Holy Spirit,
they could wield “a full and free power to govern their monastery and everything that depends on it, whether spiritual or temporal; to instruct, edify,
govern souls, use censures against their nuns; in a word, to regulate and lead
the Church of God, regere ecclesiam Dei.”39 Here the abbess presented herself as a shepherdess40 (Figure 5).
36. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [7r–7v]: “Si les simples religieuses sont
admises dans l’etat Ecclesiastique, il n’est pas douteux que les abbesses doivent y tenir un rang
beaucoup plus distingué. La dignité abbatiale est mise par les canons au nombre des prélatures. Les Abbesses ont même été souvent désignées par les noms de antistita, archimendritissa, episcopa.”
37. On late antique and early medieval episcopae, see Gary Macy, The Hidden History of
Women’s Ordination: Female Clergy in the Medieval West (Oxford, 2008), esp. 68–76. The
Montivilliers party’s argument illustrates a broader point made by Macy: there is a long and
rich history of initiatives to define (and often defend) the dignity of women’s place within the
Church as a matter of Tradition.
38. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [7v]. The requête does not specify which
Pontificale might be meant. For an influential medieval Pontificale that used the expression
“Ordinatio abbatisse” to describe the rite of installing an abbess, see Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, eds., Le Pontifical romano–germanique du dixième siècle, 3 vols. (Vatican City, 1963–
72), here 1:76.
39. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [7v–8r]: “Dans la cérémonie de cette bénédiction ou ordination, l’Evêque leur impose les mains, invoque sur elles le Saint Esprit, et
suivant les expréssions des prieres que l’on y récite, leur donne un plein et libre pouvoir de

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

FIGURE 5. Portrait of Éléonore–Madeleine Gigault de Bellefonds, abbess of Montivilliers (1741–63), by an unknown painter. The abbess’s crozier—a sign of her
status as a spiritual shepherdess—is visible on her left–hand side. Copyright and
photography: Muses d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville du Havre.

The Montivilliers party’s mention of état ecclésiastique further undercut
the dichotomy between an exclusively male, ordained clergy and the laity
to which all women supposedly belonged. J. Michael Hayden has insisted
on the early modern ambiguity of clerical rank that offered female religious
a remarkable and consequential recognition of privileged status: especially
in Gallican contexts, Hayden suggests, “clergy” would often serve as a synonym of état ecclésiastique and thus cut across gender lines.41 In this way,
régir leur monastere et ce qui en dépend, pour le Spirituel, et le temporel, d’instruire, édifier,
gouverner les ames, user de censures à l’egard de leurs religieuses, en un mot de régler et conduire l’Eglise de Dieu, regere ecclesiam Dei.”
40. Far beyond extraordinary cases such as Montivilliers, the self–understanding of
early modern abbesses as true governors of their convents seems to have been rather common.
Marie-Élisabeth Henneau, “Le supériorat au féminin au temps de la Réforme catholique:
Conception et exercice du pouvoir dans quelques couvents de religieuses à vœux solennels,”
in Femmes de pouvoir et pouvoir des femmes dans l’Occident médiéval et moderne, ed. Armel
Dubois–Nayt and Emmanuelle Santinelli (Valenciennes, 2009), 341–60, here 357–60.
41. J. M. Hayden, “States, Estates and Orders: The Qualité of Female Clergy in Early
Modern France,” French History, 8, no. 1 (1994), 51–76, here 53, 71.

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65

Madame de Bellefonds could remind the king’s council that she and her
convent very much belonged to that Gallican church establishment on
which the archbishop’s argumentation also centered.
This article argues, though, that the Montivilliers party were not
making a feminist point here, unlike the Jansenist nuns of Port-Royal,
whose clashes with Louis XIV and the archbishop of Paris Daniella
Kostroun has recently studied in detail.42 Kostroun demonstrates that the
nuns of Port-Royal acted as feminists by placing a gender paradox at the
center of their self-defense: if, as women, they were neither allowed to
engage in theological discourse nor were even supposed to understand the
stakes of the Jansenist controversy, then why would the king and the archbishop try to force them explicitly to submit to anti-Jansenist theological
formulae? By contrast, the nuns of Montivilliers tried to counter SaulxTavannes’s attack not by revalorizing the female condition per se, but by
singling themselves out as nuns: “By their solemn consecration, female religious are elevated above other persons of their sex and lawfully become part
of the état ecclésiastique.”43 This response seems much closer to Thomism
than to the neo-Augustinianism of Jansenius and his followers. Saint
Thomas himself had written that woman “naturally” lived in subjection to
father or husband (in statu subiectionis) but that nuns escaped this state in
some sense, because their consecration brought them in a spousal relationship with Christ.44
More generally, to defend the abbey’s privileges, the Montivilliers party
relied on the cognitive resources of scholasticism more heavily than on those
offered by Jansenism, despite the latter’s vitality in the eighteenth century.
To be sure, some of Bellefonds’s collaborators during the lawsuit had a
Jansenist history, most notably the Benedictine scholar-monk Toussaints
Du Plessis, with whom the abbess corresponded in 1745.45 He had initially
supported the resistance against the papal bull Unigenitus (1713), the document against which eighteenth-century Jansenists defined themselves, and
42. Daniella Kostroun, Feminism, Absolutism, and Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port–
Royal Nuns (Cambridge, UK, 2011).
43. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [7r]: “que les Religieuses sont élevées au
dessus des autres personnes de leur sexe par leur consécration solemnelle, et que suivant les
loix elles font partie de l’Etat Ecclesiastique.”
44. On this point and its implications for the spiritual jurisdictional authority of
abbesses, a seminal contribution came from Haye van der Meer, Priestertum der Frau? Eine
theologiegeschichtliche Untersuchung (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1969), 131–58.
45. ADSM, G 5375, Lettre de Toussaints du Plessis à Mme de Bellefonds, Paris, September 19, 1745.

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

had only declared his acceptance of the bull in 1727. It was from scholastic
and indeed Jesuit theology, however, that Bellefonds and her allies borrowed the major distinction with which they hoped to undercut the archbishop’s position: the distinction between a power of orders and a jurisdictional power (potestas ordinis vs. potestas jurisdictionis).46 Even if abbesses
were ordained, their ordination could not carry the same weight as the consecration of a bishop, and Bellefonds did not claim to wield any specifiable
sacramental powers as an abbess.47 Yet, as the Montivilliers party argued,
there existed a crucial difference between those rights of a bishop “which are
essentially attached to the episcopal character, and those which are not
essentially tied to it, or in other words the power of orders and the power of
jurisdiction.”48 Consequently, as a jurisdictional activity, the abbess’s government of her exempt territory did not impinge on the essence of episcopacy.
This distinction between a rather narrowly construed episcopal ordo and a
less exclusive domain of jurisdictio had roots in medieval scholasticism. But
it had above all gained prominence after being skillfully defended at the
Council of Trent by the Jesuit superior general Diego Laínez, whose order
subsequently became the Jansenists’ favorite enemy.49
Finally, the defense of Montivilliers involved solidarity across gendered boundaries—a point that applies beyond the exchange just mentioned between Bellefonds and Toussaints Du Plessis. The abbess’s most
active and helpful collaborator was Jacques Pinand, the ecclesiastical judge
(official) for the Exemption of Montivilliers. As such, Pinand possessed
expertise in canon law and French ecclesiastical law, and the stakes were
46. Damien Blanchard, “Dom Toussaints Du Plessis et l’érudition mauriste,” in Dom
Toussaints du Plessis (1689–1764), un érudit de la Congrégation de Saint-Maur: Actes de la table
ronde de Meaux, 23 octobre 1999, ed. Damien Blanchard (Meaux, 2002), 19–39, here 38. On
Maurist erudition as an eclectic appropriation of “lights” beyond the dualism of Jesuit and
Jansenist positions, see most recently the suggestive remarks in Jeffrey D. Burson, The Culture
of Enlightening: Abbé Claude Yvon and the Entangled Emergence of the Enlightenment (Notre
Dame, Ind., 2019), 19.
47. According to Mario Righetti, Manuale di storia liturgica, 4 vols. (Milan, 1959), IV:
I sacramenti, i sacramentali, indice generale dell’opera, 483–84, the laying on of the bishop’s
hands on an abbess during the rite of her installation indeed did not imply a conferral of sacramental power.
48. ADSM, 54 H 37, Deuxième requête, [19v–20r]: “il falloit distinguer dans les droits
spirituels des Evêques ceux qui sont essentiellement attachés au caractere épiscopal, et ceux
qui n’y sont pas essentiellement liés, ou autrement la puissance d’ordre, et la puissance de
jurisdiction.”
49. On Laínez’s Tridentine intervention and its afterlife, see Laurent Villemin, Pouvoir
d’ordre et pouvoir de juridiction: Histoire théologique de leur distinction (Paris, 2003), 199–240,
and Giuseppe Alberigo, La Chiesa nella storia (Brescia, 1988), 163–75, 188–90.

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67

high for him: if the Exemption of Montivilliers disappeared, his own job
as official would do so, too.50 Moreover, both Bellefonds and Pinand
received information and advice from other monks of the Benedictine
Congregation of Saint-Maur. These other allies included such relatively
prominent scholars of their time as Charles-François Toustain and RenéProsper Tassin.51 In the fall of 1745, Bellefonds also exchanged several letters with Pierre Boucher, the Maurist prior of Fécamp—whose exempt
territory formed the biggest enclave in the diocese of Rouen.52 Boucher’s
letters indicate that Saulx-Tavannes was initially threatening both abbeys
at the same time, and rather logically so, since his exclusivist interpretation
of episcopal rights ultimately accommodated neither abbots nor abbesses.
At some point in early September 1745, Pinand even made a trip to
Fécamp to strategize with the Maurist prior, who mentioned the meeting
in a letter to Bellefonds.53 In fact, many endangered Exemptions in France
belonged to Maurist abbeys, namely those of Saint-Florent-le-Vieil in the
Loire Valley, Cerisy-la-Forêt and Saint-Étienne at Caen in Lower Normandy, Corbie in Picardy, and Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Denis
near Paris.54 For this reason, the Montivilliers party and the Maurists had
a shared interest in pooling their resources of learning and in discussing the
meaning and authenticity of the documents that undergirded their privi50. The scope of Pinand’s efforts is most clearly documented in his copious correspondence with Pierre Restaut, the Montivilliers party’s Parisian lawyer who pled the case before
the Royal Council and activated useful connections, among others with the librarian of the
Sorbonne. See ADSM, G 5374, e.g. Lettre de Restaut à Pinand, Paris, December 24, 1747:
“Je dois d’un autre côté aller dîner après ces fêtes avec M. le curé de St. Sauveur chez M. l’avocat Bibliothecaire de Sorbonne qui veut me charger de revoir un de ses ouvrages, et qui en
revanche me promet de me fournir des instructions pour notre affaire.”
51. See several letters in ADSM, G 5374–5375.
52. Dom Boucher was an important man within the congregation. He would go on to
become prior of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the Maurist motherhouse, in 1751 and again in
1763: Yves Chaussy, Les bénédictins de Saint-Maur, 2 vols. (Paris, 1989–1991), 2:113.
53. ADSM, G 5375, Lettre de Dom Bouchet à Mme de Bellefonds, Fécamp, September
15, 1745. Bouchet did not, however, include any discussion of what exactly had resulted from
his face-to-face discussion with Pinand, relying instead on Pinand to convey these results to
the abbess in another oral conversation. Gaps of this kind prevent the historian from specifying what information flowed through which channels in the collaboration between Montivilliers and the Maurists.
54. On Saint-Florent-le-Vieil, see Lemarignier, Étude sur les privilèges, 90–110, 288.
On Cerisy-la-Forêt and Saint-Étienne, Marc Venard, “La pratique des visites pastorales dans
les paroisses sous juridiction monastique,” in Moines et monastères dans les sociétés de rite grec et
latin, ed. Jean-Loup Lemaître, Michel Dmitriev, and Pierre Gonneau (Genève, 1996), 361–
86, here 362–3. On Corbie and Saint-Denis: Hofmeister, “Gefreite Abteien,” 189–93.
Finally, Jacques Bouillart, Histoire de l’abbaye royale de Saint-Germain-des-Prez (Paris, 1724),
c–ci, 262.

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

leges. Madame de Bellefonds’s struggle inscribed itself in much broader
early modern tensions between episcopal and monastic Gallicanism.
The Response from Montivilliers, Part Three: History
The Maurists were—and still are—most famous for their historical
scholarship, which leads to the third point addressed by Bellefonds and her
collaborators: did the available documents show that the Abbess of Montivilliers had actually received in 1035 the privilege of governing an
Exemption? The abbey’s petitions gave two main reasons why, in Duke
Robert’s charter of 1035, “the term consuetudo here means jurisdiction and
spiritual rights and can have no other signification.”55 First, in the eleventh
to thirteenth centuries, the abbesses of Montivilliers had already understood consuetudo as spiritual jurisdiction. Historical context mattered
because “in that time period there must have been a more precise and more
certain knowledge about the nature of this exemption.”56 Fortunately for
the abbey, this context was amply documented in medieval charters, some
of which tended to confirm the convent’s uninterrupted exercise of its
jurisdictional privileges after 1035.57
Second, other texts from the same period likewise seemed to use consuetudo as a synonym of spiritual jurisdictional rights. The Montivilliers
petition included many examples, but the strongest support came from the
work of the Maurist Guillaume Bessin, who in his Concilia Rotomagensis
provinciae of 1717 had annotated the acts of a council held in Rouen in
1096 as follows: “Episcopal customs are customary rights of bishops, both
spiritual and temporal.”58 Custom, however, had long been subordinated
by theologians and canon lawyers to Truth: customary right could never
stand on the same level as divine law.59 Thus, Bellefonds and her allies drew
55. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [16r]: “le terme consuetudo exprime ici la
jurisdiction et les droits spirituels, et ne peut pas avoir d’autre signification.”
56. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [17v]: “C’etoit dans cet intervalle de tems
que l’on devoit avoir une connoissance plus précise et plus certaine de la nature de cette
exemption.”
57. The lengthy requête de production presents authenticated copies of these documents
in its appendix.
58. Guillaume Bessin, Concilia Rotomagensis provinciae accedunt dioecesanae synodi, pontificium epistolae, regia pro Normanniae clero diplomata, necnon alia ecclesiasticae disciplinae monumenta (Rouen, 1717), 79: “Consuetudines Episcopales sunt consueta Episcoporum jura, sive
spiritualia, sive temporalia.” Quoted in ADSM, 54 H 37, both Requête de production, [19r]
and Deuxième requête, [87r].
59. On how truth trumped custom in the Christian imaginary, requiring especially the
reform of customs not in accordance with truth, see the ground-breaking work on early

KILIAN HARRER

69

quite a different boundary between church doctrine and church discipline
than did Saulx-Tavannes. While the archbishop sought to ground his
jurisdictional authority in doctrine, the nuns tried to expose that same
authority as historically contingent—a custom, certainly endorsed by the
Church’s jurists, but leaving just as much room for exemptions as did any
merely human law.
Under the umbrella term “episcopal jurisdiction,” the most hotly contested specific prerogative concerned the canonical institution of priests as
parish curés, and on this point the nuns repeated their move to de-doctrinalize the issue. They claimed that “it is necessary to distinguish two sorts
of institution, the one called collative institution and which is nothing else
than collation, and the other that may be called the institution of order and
which is nothing else than ordination.” On the one hand, they easily conceded that, by divine right, only a bishop could ordain priests in that
second sense, and that according to the current droit commun, bishops were
responsible for collation as well. On the other hand, “since collation is not
of divine right, and since in the eleventh century it was not necessary that
it be given by the bishop, the Church, which has changed its discipline on
this point, has also had the option of dispensing from it under certain circumstances.”60 Again, by framing the matter as one of discipline rather
than doctrine, the Montivilliers party tried to keep open a space that the
archbishop wanted to close down—the space within which it was possible
to recognize the legitimacy of historically contingent dispensations and
other privileges within the Church.
Bellefonds and her collaborators thus engaged history in a quest for
“the preservation of the particular,” to quote the subtitle of Simon Ditchfield’s important inquiry into early modern ecclesiastical historiography.
For the Italian context, Ditchfield has shown that defenders of church parChristianity by Gerhart B. Ladner, The Idea of Reform: Its Impact on Christian Thought and
Action in the Age of the Fathers (Cambridge, MA, 1959); Jean Gaudemet, “La coutume en
droit canonique,” Revue de droit canonique, 38 (1988), 224–51; and Christopher M. Bellitto
and David Z. Flanagin, “Introduction,” in Reassessing Reform: A Historical Investigation into
Church Renewal, ed. Christopher M. Bellitto and David Z. Flanagin (Washington, DC,
2012), 1–13, here 9.
60. ADSM, 54 H 37, Requête de production, [11r–11v]: “il faut distinguer deux sortes
d’institution, l’une que l’on appelle institution collative et qui n’est autre chose que la collation:
l’autre que l’on peut appeler institution d’ordre et qui n’est autre chose que l’ordination même.
[…] Mais comme la collation n’est pas de droit divin et qu’il n’etoit pas nécessaire dans
l’onzieme siecle qu’elle fût donnée par l’Evêque, l’Eglise qui a pu changer de discipline sur ce
point, a pu également en dispenser dans certaines circonstances.”

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

ticularisms wrote hagiography and other genres of historia sacra to validate
their cherished local traditions within a regularizing Tridentine framework. These historiographical efforts culminated in Ferdinando Ughelli’s
monumental Italia sacra, whose nine volumes first appeared in the midseventeenth century.61 Tellingly, the Montivilliers party used Ughelli’s
work to learn about the most remarkable Italian example of an abbess with
quasi-episcopal jurisdiction. In 1748, Bellefonds referenced the Italia Sacra
in a letter to the Abbess of Conversano, written in hopes of obtaining further helpful information and documentation on that abbey’s privileges and
the history of their defense.62 The Abbess of Conversano replied in 1749,
sending along a notarized act that explained and confirmed the jurisdictional privileges of her convent; she and her predecessors had gathered at
least as much experience as the abbesses of Montivilliers in justifying the
existence of their exemption.63
The phrase “preservation of the particular” also seems worth pondering
because it runs counter to a powerful historiographical current that has
described the writing of ecclesiastical history as a corrosive rather than conservative activity in the early modern period. In his seminal intellectual history of the notion of doctrinal development, Owen Chadwick argued that
Maurist scholar-monks in particular conceived the study of history “as an
end in itself.” They therefore developed “a practical, working recognition of
change” that ended up weakening the idea of the Catholic Church as semper
eadem. This idea expressed a claim to doctrinal continuity: in the fight against
Protestantism, the Church’s legitimacy needed to rest on its unwavering
faithfulness to Christ’s message.64 Michel de Certeau similarly believed that
historical scholarship had undermined such theologically grounded legitimacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: he summed up his argument in a quip on the “subtle terrorism exercised by erudition on theology or
apologetics.”65 More recently, Brad Gregory has described eighteenth- and
61. Simon Ditchfield, Liturgy, Sanctity and History in Tridentine Italy: Pietro Maria
Campi and the Preservation of the Particular (Cambridge, UK, 1995), 328–60 on Ughelli.
62. ADSM, G 5372, Lettre de Mme de Bellefonds à l’abbesse de Conversano, Montivilliers,
November 30, 1748. Bellefonds pursued a similar exchange with the abbess of Las Huelgas
(letters in ADSM G 5372).
63. The response letter from Conversano is in ADSM, G 5372. On the protracted legal
struggles around the privileges of that Italian abbey, see e.g. Sante Montanaro, Vescovi, badesse
e conti di Conversano a difesa del proprio potere (Bari, 2006), 573–617.
64. Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development
(Cambridge, UK, 1957), 60–66 (quotes on 62 and 66).
65. Michel de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire (Paris, 2002 [1975]), 170: “le terrorisme
subtil qu’exerce l’érudition sur la théologie ou l’apologétique.”

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71

nineteenth-century “black-hole historicism” as a major factor in the
“dethroning of theology” that occurred in the process of secularization.66
These analyses do not apply to cases such as that of Montivilliers: the
nuns marshalled historical facts to defend themselves, not to terrorize the
archbishop. Indeed, it was Saulx-Tavannes whose doctrinal—rather than
historicist—framing of jurisdiction exercised a not-so-subtle terrorism on
Bellefonds’s authority. What is more, in countless other early modern conflicts around privileges of exemption, bishops used the theology of episcopal jurisdiction iure divino against canon chapters, monasteries, and convents, often with great success.67 The prominent German church historian
Hubert Wolf has even suggested that, within Catholicism, theology
durably marginalized church history by the nineteenth century. As Wolf
puts it, “dogma defeats history” when a council enshrines a theological
claim whose historical falsehood is undisputed. This happened at the First
Vatican Council, which proclaimed the dogma of papal infallibility even
though everyone acknowledged historically that at least one pope, Honorius
I. (625–638), had been condemned for heretical theological statements by
the Sixth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople.68 In sum, the current
state of scholarship poses the puzzle sharply and intriguingly: just how
conservative was the respective main thrust of historical and theological
writing among Catholics between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries?
Before concluding this article, some reflections based on the Montivilliers
case might help clarify that puzzle.
Montivilliers, Rouen, and Change in the Church
The struggle between the abbey and the archbishopric facilitates such
reflections because it showcases a direct confrontation between two modes of
arguing about what the Church should—and should not—change about
itself and the world. On the one hand, Saulx-Tavannes employed a doctrinal mode. He argued that change needed to happen, that the spiritual jurisdiction exercised at Montivilliers needed to disappear, because the status
quo was impossible to reconcile with the doctrine of apostolic succession:
66. Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA, 2012), 345, 348.
67. E.g. Bergin, Crown, Church and Episcopate, 346–52. But see also, on the limits of
the episcopal iure divino strategy, Linda Lierheimer, “Gender, Resistance, and the Limits of
Episcopal Authority: Sébastien Zamet’s Relationships with Nuns, 1615–55,” in Episcopal
Reform and Politics in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jennifer M. DeSilva (Kirksville, MO, 2012),
147–172, here 169–70.
68. Wolf, Krypta, 202.

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

only bishops could legitimately wield the jurisdictional authority at stake.
On the other hand, the petitions from Montivilliers minimized doctrinal
implications and instead foregrounded the disciplinary mode: things could
and should stay the same because the abbey’s privileges founded an exemption from prevalent church discipline in matters of spiritual jurisdiction.
Zooming out from the Montivilliers case, however, it quickly becomes
clear that there was no consistent affinity between the doctrinal mode and a
push for change, or between the disciplinary mode and “conservative”
agendas in early modern Catholicism. For instance, the Council Fathers
assembled at Trent crafted a doctrinal statement on the Mass to justify a
comparatively conservative approach to this act of worship.69 Meanwhile,
popes and bishops fought a centuries-long battle to change nuns’ lives by
enforcing strict enclosure primarily with recourse to canon law, which corresponds to the realm of church discipline.70 On each side of the doctrine/
discipline dyad, many other examples and counter-examples can be found
and weighed according to how they fit into the histories of change and
stasis within Catholicism. This issue deserves much scholarly inquiry. But
here, the Montivilliers case can be investigated a bit further, because it illuminates three general differences between the doctrinal and the disciplinary
mode of argument. These differences concern diachronic flexibility, synchronic flexibility, and the locus of decision-making.
By diachronic flexibility is meant the willingness to concede that guiding precepts of church life might legitimately change over time. In the
Montivilliers case, the archbishop’s doctrinal mode of argument entailed
minimal flexibility in that respect: as analyzed above, his claims implied
that ever since the very beginnings of the Church, bishops were the only
legitimate successors of the apostles and, more specifically, the only persons authorized to wield the power of the keys. Hence, Saulx-Tavannes
concluded, the Exemption of Montivilliers could never have amounted to
more than an instance of abuse, and the text of the 1035 ducal charter
needed to be read accordingly. By contrast, Bellefonds insisted on changes
that had occurred in church discipline between the eleventh and eighteenth
centuries. She hoped that the King’s Council would recognize the meaning
and legitimacy of the abbey’s medieval privileges if knowledge of these
changes informed the interpretation of the ducal charter. More generally,
69. “Decrees of the Council,” ed. Tanner, 735.
70. Literature abounds on the enclosure of nuns; the most pertinent contribution here
is Elizabeth M. Makowski, Canon Law and Cloistered Women: Periculoso and Its Commentators,
1298–1545 (Washington, DC, 1997).

KILIAN HARRER

73

because it was easy to acknowledge that canon law—a human construct
after all—could undergo great change over time, the disciplinary mode
allowed for much diachronic flexibility. The doctrinal mode did not,
because church doctrine was (and is) supposed to convey the essentially
immutable truth of divine law. Flexibility in theory remained almost completely unthinkable until the mid-nineteenth century, when John Henry
Newman reconciled Catholic thought with the idea that some doctrinal
development could legitimately take place over time.71
For similar reasons, a more rigid doctrinal and a suppler disciplinary
mode diverged in terms of synchronic flexibility as well. From Bellefonds’s
perspective, synchronic flexibility on the side of church discipline meant
that ecclesiastical law made it possible at the same time for some abbesses,
such as herself, to exercise certain rights and for most others not to enjoy
those rights. Dispensations and privileges, including exemptions, provided
that flexibility within the medieval and early modern Church. Meanwhile,
the archbishop tried to make the privileges of Montivilliers Abbey seem
abusive by emphasizing the doctrine of the keys of heaven, which had to
be universally true by definition—not only at all times between Christ’s
First and Second Coming, but also in all places at the same time. To some
readers, rigidity may connote conservatism or institutional sclerosis. To
forestall misunderstandings, “rigidity” here only qualifies a mode of argumentation, and the case of Montivilliers exemplifies how a “rigid” doctrinal
approach could serve a push for change within the Church rather than
preservation of the status quo.
The doctrinal and disciplinary modes also differed in the locus of decision-making because the official guarantors of church discipline were not
identical to those of doctrinal orthodoxy. This difference points back to the
contested triangle of monastic, episcopal, and royal Gallicanism. One key
moment in the history of this triangle dates to 1695, when Louis XIV
issued an important edict on ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The edict not only
presented the king as supreme guardian of ecclesiastical discipline in
France, but also reaffirmed episcopal control over the secular (parish)
clergy as well as over pastoral activities of the regular clergy (mendicants,
Jesuits, etc.).72 On the one hand, the crown thus designated more clearly
71. Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 85–95.
72. “Édit du roi concernant la juridiction ecclésiastique, donné à Versailles au mois
d’avril 1695,” in Documents relatifs aux rapports du clergé avec la royauté, ed. Léon Mention, 2
vols. (Paris, 1893–1903), 2:113–34, e.g. 114 (“la Discipline Ecclésiastique, dont nous [= Louis
XIV] sommes les protecteurs”).

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

than ever before “its episcopal partners in absolutism,” to borrow a phrase
from Dale van Kley.73 On the other hand, as the case of Montivilliers
shows, religious orders were sometimes better able than bishops to present
their concerns in ways that strongly acknowledged the king’s power in all
disciplinary matters concerning the Gallican Church. It is worth remembering that Saulx-Tavannes needed to foreground the limits of princely
authority in order to minimize the scope of the privileges Duke Robert had
granted the abbey in 1035. More generally, the doctrinal mode of argument exalted the Church’s teaching authority, exercised by bishops first
and foremost, as the locus of decision-making. By contrast, in the disciplinary mode, the locus of decision-making depended on jurisdictional
arrangements—including the appel comme d’abus that brought the lawsuit
between Montivilliers and Rouen before the King’s Council.
Finally, by exploring the dualism between doctrine and discipline, historians may better understand an irony that characterizes the eighteenthcentury trajectory of monasticism—the irony of first contributing to the
Enlightenment and then becoming its favorite target. Religious orders suffered a massive crisis in the second half of the eighteenth century, from the
expulsion and suppression of the Jesuits to the commission des réguliers
under Louis XV and Louis XVI, to the radical reforms enacted in the Habsburg lands under Joseph II, to the even more radical measures taken by the
French revolutionary assemblies. Except for the suppression of the Jesuits,
all the relevant decisions were made by temporal authorities; thus, they
derive from the “state nexus” of church reform in the religious Enlightenment.74 Initially, however, monks and nuns may have willingly strengthened
that nexus by employing and defending the disciplinary mode of argument,
as Bellefonds and the Maurists did in the Montivilliers case.75 On the one
hand, in the doctrinal mode, there was little to work with from a monastic
perspective after Trent. The Council had confirmed the principle of
monastic exemption in its disciplinary decrees, whereas one of its doctrinal
decrees described church hierarchy only as “consisting of bishops, priests
and ministers,” omitting abbots and abbesses.76 On the other hand, arguments in the disciplinary mode not only dovetailed with Maurist historical
73. Van Kley, The Religious Origins, 41. For a similar assessment of the edict of 1695,
see Joseph Bergin, The Politics of Religion in Early Modern France (New Haven, 2014), 225.
74. Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment, 18.
75. On monastic contributions to the Enlightenment, see above all Ulrich L. Lehner,
Enlightened Monks: The German Benedictines, 1740–1803 (Oxford, 2011).
76. “Decrees of the Council,” ed. Tanner, 744 (hierarchy), 780 (exemption and quasi–
episcopal jurisdiction).

KILIAN HARRER

75

erudition thanks to this mode’s diachronic flexibility, but also facilitated
alliances between monastic houses and the royal Gallican locus of decisionmaking. The ironic twist occurred when the dynamic of the state nexus
took a sharply anti-monastic turn in the late eighteenth century. At that
point, temporal authorities employed the disciplinary mode to reform the
Church according to criteria of “usefulness” that marginalized most forms
of monastic life.
Conclusion
This study has approached the struggle between Montivilliers Abbey
and the Archbishopric of Rouen in ways that bring together the intellectual, the religious, and the political. To defend the Exemption of Montivilliers, the nuns ventured deep into the borderlands of history, theology, and
the law. They crafted sophisticated explanations for why an abbess could
exercise jurisdictional rights that resembled those of bishops, and why such
female authority could constitute a legitimate product of church history
rather than a doctrinal monstrosity. These arguments unfolded within a
Gallican monastic framework that fostered solidarity across gender lines,
primarily between the Maurist monks of Fécamp and the nuns of Montivilliers. Together, nuns and monks emphasized the importance of church
discipline, while their archiepiscopal opponent, Monseigneur de SaulxTavannes, based his claims primarily on an interpretation and assertion of
doctrine. Hence, the story of Montivilliers showcases a clash between two
ways of thinking about the history and hierarchy of the Catholic Church—
two ways of thinking whose differences matter to scholarly narratives about
Gallicanism and the religious Enlightenment.77
Today, monastic Gallicanism is long gone, and so is the phenomenon
of abbesses governing exempt territories—since 1873, when the papal bull
Quae diversa abolished the Exemption of Las Huelgas in northern Spain.78
The contested boundary between doctrine and discipline continues, how77. The issue of doctrine and discipline mattered beyond the Gallican context of
France, too. For example, protagonists of the Italian Catholic Enlightenment and CounterEnlightenment hotly debated the relative mutability of doctrinal and disciplinary elements
throughout the eighteenth century. See Paola Vismara, “Dogma e disciplina nell’Italia del
Settecento: Da Lodovico Antonio Muratori alla Auctorem Fidei,” in Papes, princes et savants
dans l’Europe moderne: Mélanges a la mémoire de Bruno Neveu, ed. Jean-Louis Quantin and
Jean-Claude Waquet (Geneva, 2007), 123–42.
78. Colette Friedlander, “Les pouvoirs de la Supérieure dans le cloître et dans le monde
du Concile de Trente à nos jours,” in Les religieuses dans le cloître et dans le monde des origines
à nos jours (Saint-Etienne, 1994), 239–47, here 246.

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THE KEYS OF HEAVEN IN THE HANDS OF WOMEN

ever, to shape discussions on the place of women in the Church. For example, in May 2018, Luis Ladaria, the Prefect of the Congregation for the
Doctrine of the Faith, reiterated the papacy’s stance according to which the
exclusion of women from the priesthood constitutes “not a disciplinary, but
a doctrinal element,” that is, “a truth belonging to the deposit of faith.”79
In this situation, the interest of the Montivilliers case may reside elsewhere
than in its rather weak implications for the issue of ordination. The confrontation between the abbess and the archbishop points to a different
arena instead: what about the roles that women could assume to participate
increasingly in the governance of the Church, whether as abbesses or in
other imaginable functions such as that of women cardinal-deacons?80 The
story of Madame de Bellefonds shows what was possible and what sophisticated arguments were available in the eighteenth century to those men
and women who worked together to defend this kind of governmental
female authority within the Church.

79. Luis Francisco Ladaria Ferrer, “Il carattere definitivo della dottrina di ‘Ordinatio
sacerdotalis’: A proposito di alcuni dubbi,” L’Osservatore Romano, May 29, 2018. Retrieved on
January 30, 2019, from http://www.osservatoreromano.va/it/news/il-carattere-definitivodella-dottrina-di-ordinati#. See also Stephanie Kirchgaessner, “Pope Francis says women will
never be Roman Catholic priests,” The Guardian, November 1, 2016. Retrieved on January 30,
2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/01/pope-francis-women-neverroman-catholic-priests-church; John Paul II, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis: Apostolic Letter to the
Bishops of the Catholic Church on Reserving Priestly Ordination to Men Alone, Vatican City, May
22, 1994. Retrieved on January 30, 2019, from https://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paulii/en/apost_letters/1994/documents/hf_jp-ii_apl_19940522_ordinatio-sacerdotalis.html.
80. The question of whether the Second Vatican Council has made it impossible to
create female cardinals is discussed by Wolf, Krypta, 57–59.

Devout Catholics, Devoted Confederates:
The Evolution of Southern Catholic Bishops from
Reluctant Secessionists to Ardent Confederates
GRACJAN KRASZEWSKI*
There remains, to the present day, a paucity of literature concerning
Southern Catholics and, especially, Catholics and the Civil War. This
essay treats the above in tandem. The focus is on bishops and their
responses to secession and the first year of the War. Questions of allegiance are central. How did the bishops balance allegiance to the faith
with secular/political issues? Could bishops—and by extension all
Southern Catholics—be both devout Catholics and devoted Confederates? In addressing these questions, this essay presents the “Confederatization thesis,” providing a corrective to false assumptions concerning
a lack of Catholic political and social activity in the American South,
in general, and during the Civil War in particular.
Keywords: Civil War, Confederacy, Southern Catholics, Bishops,
Secession.

I

n the immediate aftermath of South Carolina’s secession from the
Union in December 1860, Patrick Lynch, Bishop of Charleston,
declared the state to be “henceforth not only our Mother but our only Sovereign, who has sole right to our allegiance.”1 South Carolinians should
give a “whole, undivided loyalty” to this new nation, even to the point of
taking up arms if necessary.2 That same month the Archbishop of Balti* Dr. Kraszewski is Director of Intellectual Formation at the University of Idaho’s St.
Augustine Center and teaches in the Washington State University School of Design and
Construction. He previously taught in the history department at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. His email address is intellect@vandalcatholic.com. For more information on Catholics in the South during the Civil War, please see the author’s upcoming book
Catholic Confederates: Faith and Duty in the Civil War South (The Civil War Era in the South)
(forthcoming from Kent State Press in April 2020).
1. United States Catholic Miscellany, Charleston, South Carolina, “South Carolina,”
December 22, 1860. University of Notre Dame Archives (hereafter cited as UNDA), Sisters
of Charity of Nazareth, Kentucky (hereafter cited as MNEW), U.S. Catholic Miscellany collection (microfilm).
2. United States Catholic Miscellany, Charleston, South Carolina, “South Carolina,”
December 22, 1860. UNDA, MNEW, U.S. Catholic Miscellany collection (microfilm).

77

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DEVOUT CATHOLICS, DEVOTED CONFEDERATES

more, Francis Patrick Kenrick, at the helm of the prime American see and
metropolitan with jurisdiction over a variety of Southern dioceses, commented that it would be “suicidal” for the South to leave the Union.3
Martin John Spalding, Bishop of Louisville, hoped the crisis might yet be
resolved as late as April 1861: “God grant us peace!”4 For him, this was no
platitude. Spalding wanted peace even if the Southern Confederacy he
supported failed to gain its independence (Figure 1).
Catholic bishops joined their voices to the growing public discourse,
as did Catholic priests, soldiers, and those on the home front, all of whom
proved themselves to be dedicated Southern partisans throughout the War.
Nonetheless, the relationship between Roman Catholics and the Confederacy remains something of a mystery. As recently as 2001, historians
expressed frustration that the study of Confederate religion has retained an
almost exclusively Protestant focus.5 A few books published within the last
decade have begun to redress this omission.
Of notable works, Mark Noll’s 2006 The Civil War as a Theological Crisis,
Michael Pasquier’s 2010 Fathers on the Frontier, and Andrew H.M. Stern’s
2012 Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross immediately come to mind.6 So too
does David T. Gleeson’s 2013 The Green and the Gray, David Heisser’s 2014
biography of Lynch, and William Kurtz’s 2015 Excommunicated from the
Union, a comprehensive evaluation of Northern Catholics during the War.7
And no work, to date, has rendered so complete a treatment of Civil War
religion as George Rable’s 2010 God’s Almost Chosen Peoples.8
3. Francis Patrick Kenrick, Archbishop of Baltimore, to John McGill, Bishop of Richmond, December 1, 1860, UNDA, Microfilm, Diocese of Richmond records (hereafter cited
as MDRI), p. 2.
4. Martin John Spalding, Civil War Journal, as Bishop of Louisville (April 5, 1860–March
27, 1864), April 26, 1861, UNDA, MNAZ,3/12.
5. Michael Bedout Chesson and Leslie Jean Roberts, eds. Exile in Richmond: The Confederate Journal of Henri Garidel (Charlottesville, 2001), p. 6.
6. Mark Noll, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (Chapel Hill, 2006); Michael
Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier: French Missionaries and the Roman Catholic Priesthood in the
United States, 1789–1870 (New York, 2010); Andrew H.M. Stern, Southern Crucifix, Southern
Cross: Catholic-Protestant Relations in the Old South (Tuscaloosa, 2012).
7. David T. Gleeson, The Green and the Gray (Chapel Hill, 2013); David C.R. Heisser
and Stephen J. White, Sr. Patrick N. Lynch, 1817–1882: Third Catholic Bishop of Charleston
(Columbia, 2014); William Kurtz, Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America (Fordham, 2015) and Max Longley’s For the Union and the
Catholic Church (Jefferson, NC, 2015).
8. George C Rable, God’s Almost Chosen Peoples: A Religious History of the American Civil
War (Chapel Hill, 2010).

GRACJAN KRASZEWSKI

79

FIGURE 1. Patrick Neeson Lynch (1817–82), Bishop of Charleston (1857–82).
Courtesy of Wikipedia.

While all of these recent works are most welcome, none offer a truly
comprehensive investigation of Southern Civil War Catholics.9 Noll dedicates one chapter to Catholics, North and South. Pasquier briefly discusses Confederate Catholics, but French missionaries are the prime focus
of his book, one that begins in the immediate post-Revolutionary Era.
Stern’s work is set in the antebellum period. Kurtz’s book is about the
North. Gleeson’s analysis is restricted to Irishmen. James Woods’ recent
work, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, while covering
the Civil War, is too broad in scope (his analysis spanning four centuries)
to be classified as a “Civil War book.”10 Thanks to these scholars a more
9. For the purpose of clarity, “Southerner” is defined by the author in this essay as
anyone from the eleven Confederate States of America and, additionally, those from the often
pro–Southern border states of Kentucky and Maryland (both of which remained in the Union
during the War). Maryland—ancient Catholic colony—was home to the American Rome,
Baltimore, whose Archdiocesan umbrella extended southward over the Dioceses of Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah, the latter covering all of Georgia and the Vicariate Apostolic of Florida. See: Michael V. Gannon, Rebel Bishop: The Life and Era of Augustin Verot
(Milwaukee, 1964), 60.
10. James Woods, A History of the Catholic Church in the American South, 1513–1900
(Gainesville, 2011); see pp. 289–95 for Woods’ section on Catholic bishops.

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nuanced and plenary picture of Civil War religion has been and is being
constructed. However, Randall Miller and John Wakelyn’s assertion in
Catholics in the Old South (1983, rev. 1999) remains in force, albeit with an
addendum: “Too little has been written about [Southern] Catholics and the
Civil War.”11
Rather than attempting to tell this whole story here, this essay takes a
finer focus. The bishops and the secession crisis, in a timeframe spanning
an approximate one-year period from the fall of 1860 through the late
summer of 1861, constitute the analytical scope, investigating how the
bishops viewed the coming conflict and how they sought to balance politics
and religion. The essay traces the evolution of the bishops’ Confederate
allegiance from a natural, although reticent, endorsement early in the
secession crisis to, when the War began, ardent support.
Catholics, throughout the conflict, brazenly demonstrated their Confederate allegiance in defying Union loyalty oaths and prayer requests,
authoring pamphlets defending the South’s “peculiar institution,” and
serving as state-sponsored diplomats abroad.12 The phenomenon by which
Southern Catholics became involved in the Confederate nation is here
termed “Confederatization.” The Confederatization thesis challenges the
assertion that unassimilated and outsider nineteenth-century Catholics did
not join American society until long after the Civil War. The opposite is
true: Southern Catholics were involved in Confederate society and politics.
That Americanization had its fulfillment in the postwar (as in World War
II) era should be no license to skip over the nineteenth century, assuming
that Catholic social and political involvement is not to be found there. This
essay clearly demonstrates that it was found in the nineteenth century and
in a region long neglected by scholars of American Catholicism: the South.
Confederatization provides a window into the mindset of men who, while
devout Catholics and prelates first, were deeply devoted to the Confederate
cause, holding their spiritual and secular allegiances in a symbiotic harmony, while prioritizing their religious duties above all else.
11. Randall M. Miller and Jon L. Wakelyn, eds. Catholics in the Old South: Essays on
Church and Culture, 2nd ed. (Macon, GA, 1999), xiv.
12. Chaplain James Sheeran refused to take an oath of allegiance to the U.S., stating he
was a citizen of the South, and risking death from malnourishment and languishing in prison
before being let go without having to comply. Bishop William Henry Elder’s refusal of a
prayer request for President Lincoln in 1864 was the defining “Catholic moment” of the War,
North or South. The bishops Augustin Verot and Patrick Lynch each authored tracts defending domestic slavery. Lynch and Father John Bannon served as Confederate envoys to Europe
and the Vatican, 1863–64. All of these events are discussed in detail in Catholic Confederates.

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The bishops’ responses to secession differed, as briefly detailed above.
But all, with one debatable exception,13 were sympathetic to the South.
Spalding, arguably the most peace-minded bishop, was a thoroughly
Southern man even if he did not express this as forcefully as Lynch or John
Quinlan (Bishop of Mobile). But even Spalding had his moments of passionate Confederatism, as when, upon the issue of Lincoln’s Emancipation
Proclamation, he blasted the document, claiming, “Puritan hypocrisy never
exhibited itself in a more horrible or detestable attitude.”14 Because
Catholics were a part of the Southern social fabric at the start of the Civil
War, not outsiders relegated to the societal fringe, it should be unsurprising that they acted in kind with the preponderance of Southerners in
opting for the Confederacy.15
Catholic involvement in the Confederacy is still, to varying degrees,
either misunderstood or unknown. Professional historians, and the general
public alike, are well versed in the history of Catholic immigration to the
Northern U.S. during the mid-nineteenth century, the establishment of
ethnic Catholic neighborhoods in Northern cities, and the reciprocal picture of the U.S. South as a Protestant “Bible Belt.” Yet it is important to
13. The one exception is James Whelan (O.P, 1823–78), the Bishop of Nashville, Tennessee from February of 1860 until February of 1864. Whelan is the only member of the
Southern episcopate who did not fully support the Confederacy. He was accused of Northern
sympathies and even of perhaps passing along important information to the Union Army.
This, presumably, was the reason why he was removed from his Nashville post later in the
War. He died in Ohio. Historical opinion on Whelan is both sparse and hazy. James Woods,
in his recent book A History of the Catholic Church in the South, labels Whelan a “Unionist,”
adding that his relationship with Union General William Rosencrans “damaged his relationship with Tennessee’s Catholics” (291). Whether Whelan’s friendship with Rosencrans was
primarily because of the former’s supposed “pro-Union views” or simply because the General
was himself a devout Catholic is not made clear. Earlier works take a less forceful view of
Whelan’s supposed Unionism. Randall Miller and Jon Wakelyn, in their edited volume
Catholics in the Old South, only say that Whelan was “at odds with his flock,” see 65, while Fr.
James Pillar—The History of the Catholic Church in Mississippi, 1837–65 (New Orleans,
1964)—and Michael V. Gannon—Rebel Bishop—seem to exonerate him fully from charges
of outright Union sympathy. They claim that Whelan did not support the Confederacy as
“wholeheartedly” as the other Southern bishops (Pillar, 166) and that he was “reluctant” to
support the South (Gannon, 62).
14. Spalding, Civil War Journal, January 1, 1863, UNDA, MNAZ,3/12, p. 35.
15. This essay sides with Michael Pasquier and Andrew Stern concerning CatholicProtestant cooperationism and Catholic integration into Southern culture versus the conflict
theses of R. Laurence Moore and Jon Gjerde. See: Pasquier. Fathers on the Frontier, 187;
Stern, Southern Crucifix, Southern Cross, 2, 37; Moore, Religious Outsiders and the Making of
America (Oxford,1989) 205–10; and Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth Century
America (Cambridge, 2012), viii, x, xv.

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remember that Southern Catholicism was not an immigrant faith but a
congenital one, brought to the Florida peninsula, the Gulf Coast, and up
the Mississippi River by Frenchmen and Spaniards around the time
Calvinist Puritans were landing at Plymouth Rock. Considered this way,
Catholicism is as natural a part of the American religious landscape as any
Protestant denomination, and especially so in the South.
As Southerners viewed their nascent nation as the true heir to the
Constitutional principles of 1776, so too did Southern Catholics. Southern
Catholics were constantly citing the past in order to defend and help
develop the Confederate nation. Perhaps in its success or failure they saw
the success or failure of their religion in America. This connection between
between Southernism and Catholicism remains, while not lost on all scholars,16 underappreciated.
Many Southern Catholics saw in the South the “most Catholic” part
of America, a section that while claiming but a tiny Catholic population
by statistical measure, possessed values in consonance with their own and
was a contrast to an increasingly materialistic, secular, and urban North.
The American Civil War provided the opportunity for the fashioning of
a new national identity. Southern Catholics jumped at the opportunity to
become committed Confederates. This commitment began with the
bishops.
The Bishops Confront Secession and War
As 1860 drew to a close, the United States stood at the precipice of
war. The Southern bishops shared in the nervous atmosphere. In November, Spalding wrote to Cincinnati Archbishop, and staunch Unionist, John
Baptist Purcell. “The South is assuming a very menacing attitude, & this
16. Thomas Haddox challenges the idea that Catholicism did not fit within Southern
culture. He even goes beyond this, demonstrating that some believed it was the ideal Southern religion. See: Thomas F. Haddox Fears and Fascinations: Representing Catholicism in the
American South (Bronx, 2005), 3, 10. Haddox claims that the faith was attractive to many in
the South because of its immutable dogma, use of symbol and ritual, and otherworldly feel
(58, 81). Southerners, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase, were or wanted to be, citizens
of an imagined community where agrarian values, the family, religion, and honor were given
preeminent status, especially in contrast to what they believed to be a materialistic and secular
North, all points raised and expounded upon by the above Southern nationalism scholars
Thomas, Faust, Potter, et al. See: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983). Perhaps Catholicism, Haddox argues, a
faith “congenial to Southern conservatism,” could provide the spiritual outlines of a feudal
society, to which some in the South wished to return (58, 126).

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FIGURE 2. William Henry Elder (1819–1904), Bishop of Natchez (1857–80), Co–
adjutor Archbishop of Cincinnati (1880–83), Archbishop of Cincinnati (1883–
1904). Courtesy of Wikipedia.

time I fear these men are in earnest, & disunion is imminent. The Lord
deliver us! The whole world seems to be getting out of joint.”17 On December 1 Kenrick wrote to Richmond Bishop John McGill. Fearing secession
would cause irreparable damage, he still believed the Union could be preserved and hoped “conservative men should step forward at this crisis, to
save the country.”18
Other bishops took a similar approach to the developing situation;
treading with caution, focused on doing whatever they could to help forestall calamity. Bishop William Henry Elder, of Natchez, Mississippi,
issued a circular letter to his parish priests on November 25 (Figure 2).
Elder, who later in the War would show himself to be a clear-cut Southern
partisan, here refrained from politicization. Priests should simply lead their
congregations in the “first duty of the Christian Patriot;—which is to beg
17. Martin John Spalding, Bishop of Louisville, to John Baptist Purcell, Archbishop of
Cincinnati, November 12, 1860, quoted in Thomas W. Spalding, C.F.X. Martin John Spalding: American Churchman (Washington, D.C., 1973), 131.
18. Kenrick to McGill, December 1, 1860, UNDA, MDRI 2.

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DEVOUT CATHOLICS, DEVOTED CONFEDERATES

for the light and protection of Him, in whose hands are the hearts of men
and the destinies of nations.”19
Elder, who wrote that the “present condition of our political affairs
calls urgently for the most fervent supplications to Almighty God,” cautioned his priests that it was “not for us here to discuss the question connected with our situation.”20 He instructed them to encourage their congregants to “offer up to God Prayers, Fasting and Alms Deeds, for His
merciful guidance and protection.”21 Priests should invite parishioners to
“assist at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass as often as possible, and to recite
every day in addition to the usual prayers, at least once the Our Father, the
Hail Mary, and the Glory be to the Father [his emphasis].”22
Elder asked his priests to hold a public Triduum. He wanted recitation
of the Rosary and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. He urged all to
approach the sacraments as frequently as possible, and to fast and give
alms. Elder closed his letter saying, “the most effectual means to obtain
God’s favor is to purify the soul from sin, and to receive worthily the Sacrament of the Blessed Eucharist: and no Catholic should imagine he has
done his duty to himself and his fellow-citizens on this occasion, so long
as these duties to God are left undone.”23
Elder then requested all the faithful to unite in one general Communion on December 9th, within the Octave of the Immaculate Conception of
the Blessed Virgin Mary (Patroness of the United States of America), for
“our Holy Mother is by excellence the Help of Christians.”24 Elder’s first
response to a possible war was a return to Catholic fundamentals. This formula—seeing temporal events through the prism of faith, prioritizing spiritual matters while navigating political issues pragmatically—would be
Elder’s rudder throughout the War.
While clergymen were the primary recipients of Elder’s letter, the prescriptions were not exclusively for them. This letter was for the laity, too.
Elder expected the same men who could become soldiers, the Mississippi
19. William Henry Elder, Bishop of Natchez, Circular Letter to Parish Priests, given
in Bay St. Louis, MS, November 25, 1860, in Pillar, The History of the Catholic Church in Mississippi, 1837–65, 158–59.
20. Elder, Circular Letter to Parish Priests, November 25, 1860.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.

GRACJAN KRASZEWSKI

85

Catholics of his parishes, to join him and their priests in praying and fasting for peace. Elder desired the same religious prioritization from lay Mississippians as he did from his clergy because he believed faith should preempt, inform, and direct political decisions. The statements of the bishops
as a group were not just private reflections, but calculated to have public
effects, to serve as guidance for their congregants. Above all, Elder hoped
that war could be avoided by a combined prayerful effort of all the men and
women under his care.
If Elder had other, larger things on his mind in the fall of 1860, such
as the vacant metropolitan post in New Orleans, open since the death of
Archbishop Blanc in June and being temporarily administered by Vicar
General Étienne Rousselon, he kept these to himself preferring to focus,
as in the above letter, on the immediate tasks at hand. The man who
would succeed Blanc, then Bishop of Galveston Jean-Marie Odin, did
have the open post on his mind, but not for himself. In three letters to
Rousselon that fall, Odin—a Southern sympathizer in the mold of Spalding, committed yet not ardent like Lynch or Quinlan—explained that he
did not feel up to the task.25 Who did Odin envision as best suited to
becoming the next Archbishop of New Orleans? William Henry Elder,
Bishop of Natchez.26
On December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to
secede from the Union. Charleston reverberated with delirious excitement.
Bells rang, artillery was discharged, houses were adorned with candles and
lamps, and impromptu parades marched through the streets accompanied
by music.27 The United States Catholic Miscellany, organ of the Diocese of
Charleston and edited by Bishop Lynch (which throughout the War would
change its name to the Catholic Miscellany and then the Charleston Catholic
Miscellany), gleefully declared:
After years of patient endurance, of energetic yet friendly protest
and remonstrance, South Carolina has, at last, in solemn convention of
her people, resumed the portion of her sovereignty which she surrendered in 1789; and now stands before the world, a free independent Sovereign State. . . . South Carolina is henceforth not only our Mother but
our only Sovereign, who has sole right to our allegiance. The whole,
undivided loyalty of our heart and conscience, (we speak not only as a

25. Patrick Foley, Missionary Bishop: Jean-Marie Odin in Galveston and New Orleans
(College Station, TX, 2013), 153.
26. Ibid.
27. Ralph S. Henry, The Story of the Confederacy (Old Saybrook, CT, 1931), p. 22–23.

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DEVOUT CATHOLICS, DEVOTED CONFEDERATES
Carolinian, but as a Catholic theologian) must be hers and hers only.
May the God of Peace guide her counsels and bless her with ever growing prosperity!—May the Lord of Hosts shield her, if need be, and bless
with victory her arms, if they must be used to maintain her honour and
her independence as a sovereign commonwealth!”28

Lynch’s deeply held partisanship was on display long before the official
commencement of hostilities. Lynch believed the South, led by South Carolina’s example, would recapture the lost ideals of the American Revolution and the Founding Fathers. Ideals that he maintained had been
betrayed by a wayward Union. As with many Southerners then pledging a
new allegiance to the bourgeoning Confederate nation—at first in piecemeal fashion via loyalty to one’s own state—Lynch thought that a war
would be a restoration, not a revolution. Catholicism, in its own traditional
character, would fit seamlessly within a project designed to reclaim the
authentic design of American independence.
Lynch concluded that the Union had failed, but that the Confederacy
might yet succeed. It would triumph as a new nation, underpinned by a
commitment to “traditional values”: agrarianism, not industrialization;
elitism, not egalitarian republicanism. Most importantly, the South would
remain committed to Christianity, rejecting the secularism Southerners
like Lynch believed was endemic in the North.
Bishop Augustin Verot, shortly after the New Year on January 4,
released a tract on slavery (Figure 3). It was significant for two reasons.
First, it was an overt political statement, public Catholic support for the
South’s social mores. It showed the highly visible nature of Catholic Confederatization and that the bishops’ Confederate support was not restricted
to the private sphere. The tract was also a distillation of previous Southern
Catholic thought concerning slavery, serving as bridge from the antebellum
slavery writings of John England (the first Bishop of Charleston) and Archbishop Kenrick to Lynch’s wartime treatise. Lynch, while on his diplomatic
mission in 1864, and on the request of Pius IX, authored a pamphlet
explaining slavery in the South that was influenced by Verot’s tract.
Verot began referencing St. Augustine’s City of God, arguing that
Rome’s prosperity flowed from justice. He claimed that the South would
rise and fall along similar lines. For him, a just society included human

28. United States Catholic Miscellany, Charleston, South Carolina, “South Carolina,”
December 22, 1860. UNDA, MNEW, U.S. Catholic Miscellany collection (microfilm).

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87

FIGURE 3. Jean Marcel Pierre August Verot, P.S.S. (1805–76), Vicar Apostolic of
Florida (1857–70), Bishop of Savannah (1861–70), Bishop of St. Augustine
(1870–76). Courtesy of Wikipedia.

bondage.29 “Slavery, [has] received the sanction of God,” Verot wrote, a
typical view amongst Southern apologists and one seconded by Augustus
Marie Martin, bishop of Natitoches (LA) and the most extreme pro-slavery Southern prelate, who likewise did not see the contradiction in championing slavery while telling his congregants “our first and most irreconcilable enemy is sin, however designated, arrayed, or disguised.”30
Slavery supporter that he was, Verot was no James Henry Hammond.
Echoing Pope Gregory XVI’s 1839 condemnation of the slave trade (In
Supremo Apostolatus31), Verot forbid participation in the practice, calling it
29. Augustin Verot, “A Tract for the Times, Slavery and Abolitionism, Being the Substance of a Sermon,” St Augustine, Florida, January 4, 1861, day of public humiliation, fasting, and prayer (New Edition. New Orleans: Printed at the “Catholic Propagator” Office, 122
Chartes Street, 1861) accessed and sourced online: https://archive.org/details/tractfortimessla01vero
30. Verot, “A Tract for the Times”; Augustus Marie Martin, Bishop of Natitoches,
Pastoral Latter on the War, August 21, 1861, originally published in the Charleston Catholic
Miscellany’s September 28, 1861 issue. UNDA, MNEW.
31. Pope Gregory XVI, In Supremo Apostolatus, Rome, December 3, 1839 in Kenneth
J. Zanca, ed. American Catholics and Slavery: 1789–1866 An Anthology of Primary Documents

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DEVOUT CATHOLICS, DEVOTED CONFEDERATES

immoral and unjust. He argued that slaves held a range of inalienable
human rights. A master could not make a claim upon a slave’s life or soul,
only his labor. Masters could not exploit their slaves sexually. Slave marriages were legitimate and had to be unconditionally respected. On this
issue, Verot said “Our Saviour’s word on this cannot pass away: ‘What God
has joined together, let no man put asunder.’”
Slave families were sacrosanct. “Families ought never to be separated,
when once established,” Verot wrote. “It is unreasonable, unchristian, and
immoral to separate a husband from his wife and children and to sell the husband North, and the wife South, and the children east and West.” Masters’
other duties included providing slaves with lifelong food and housing, medical care, and according to Verot the most important duty of “the means of
knowing and practicing religion.” “This is a sacred, indispensible, burden of
duty of masters,” Verot wrote, cautioning “the neglect of which alone, if they
had committed no other fault, would expose them to eternal damnation.”32
Verot’s tract was a continuation of the arguments Kenrick had made
in his Theologica Moralis: the master owning a slaves’ work, not his body or
soul, and the myriad obligations of the master towards the slave.33 According to Verot, slaves were equal before God. They possessed the same
human rights that any person did, including the right to religion, marriage,
family, and security. The glaring hypocrisy is that of all the rights slaves
were to be given, they were to be denied the fundamental right of freedom.
Two days after Verot’s tract, on January 6, 1861, Lynch wrote to the
Archbishop of New York, John Hughes, concerning secession. “If we are
not now in a state of war,” Lynch wrote, “we are very like it and very near
it.”34 Lynch argued that secessionists were not to blame, for South Carolina’s Ordinance was not directed to war. The delegates wished to proceed
in a way that would avoid conflict, settling matters by a peaceful “dissolu(Lanham, MD, 1994), 27–29. The pope “vehemently admonish[ed] and adjure[d] in the
Lord all believers in Christ, of whatsoever condition, that no one hereafter may dare unjustly
to molest Indians, Negroes, or other men of this sort; or to spoil them of their goods; or to
reduce them to slavery . . . all the aforesaid actions as utterly unworthy of the Christian name
. . . [and] by the same apostolic authority, do strictly prohibit and interdict that any ecclesiastic or lay person shall presume to defend that very trade in Negroes as lawful under any pretext or studied excuse.”
32. All citations from paragraph: Verot, “A Tract for the Times.”
33. Pasquier, Fathers on the Frontier, 180.
34. Patrick Neeson Lynch, Bishop of Charleston, to John Hughes, Archbishop of New
York, January 6, 1861, Charleston Diocesan Archives (hereafter CDA), Lynch Administration
Papers, 1858–66, Item 25Y2.

GRACJAN KRASZEWSKI

89

tion of a partnership.”35 Lynch believed other states would soon join South
Carolina. Were this to transpire, “such a disruption could never be
healed.”36 Lynch proceeded to argue that the South’s permanent separation
from the North was justified by four factors: a deep hatred of abolitionism,
the Union’s violation of constitutionally protected state-sovereignty, the
inflammatory and disunion-catalyzing speeches of Northern senators, and
because it was economically beneficial for the South.37
Lynch said that while he did “not claim to be a Union man myself,”
he would, nonetheless, regret to see “this government [the Union], after a
glorious, though brief ascent, burst like a rocket, and leave only . . . some
fragments.”38 “I fear too,” Lynch wrote, “future civil wars, strifes, and miseries . . . I hope the truth is, that the Constitution will be saved and the
infractions of it will be addressed.”39 Here, Lynch sounds like Kenrick, but
with a twist. The Archbishop of Baltimore was wholly for peace whereas
Lynch did not want the Union saved if certain “infractions” went unaddressed. For Lynch, these many transgressions were gaping wounds growing more infected by the day, leaving separation and civil war the only
course of action. Apparently, others had come to the same conclusion. On
January 26, Odin, then Bishop of Galveston, opined “. . . the election of
Lincoln, abolitionist candidate, to the presidency, has put all the states of
the South in a state of anxiety. . . . Civil War is expected.”40
Lynch’s prediction that other states might soon join South Carolina
came true only three days after his letter to Hughes. Mississippi seceded
from the Union on January 9. By the end of the month, four other states
had joined the first two: Florida (January 10), Alabama (January 11), Georgia (January 19), and Louisiana (January 26). Texas made it a total of seven
on the first of February.
On February 4, Bishop McGill issued a pastoral letter. On the eve of
Lent, the Richmond prelate reminded his congregation that the upcoming
season was a time of “rendering satisfaction for our many sins.”41 McGill
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid.
40. Foley, Missionary Bishop, 160–61.
41. John McGill, Bishop of Richmond, Pastoral Letter, issued February 4, 1861, in
Richmond, reprinted and published in the Charleston Catholic Miscellany’s February 23, 1861
issue. UNDA, MNEW.

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DEVOUT CATHOLICS, DEVOTED CONFEDERATES

encouraged the faithful, especially at the present time when “the displeasure of God seems to weigh heavy upon the nations,” to undertake their
duty to humble themselves and by “prayer, penance and good works” make
atonement for their faults.42
Nothing in McGill’s letter spoke of secession or politics. McGill never
mentioned a militaristic obligation to take up arms. His sole focus was getting Catholics to place their faith in God and to seek spiritual remedies for
preventing war. “The fortunes and fate of our beloved country are now
trembling,” McGill wrote, “we know not what ruins and disasters may be
impending.”43 Yet, McGill reminded his congregation, “the Redeemer
came to bring peace on earth to men of good will. Let us pray for union
and peace.”44
The same day McGill published his pastoral letter, Elder wrote to the
editor of the New Orleans newspaper Le Propagateur Catholique, Father
Napoléon-Joseph Perché.45 Elder, at another time, had written a response
to an article entitled “Les Catholiques de Sud,” asking the editors not to
generalize about Catholic commitment to the Southern cause.46 In this
letter to Perché, Elder outlined what he believed to be the motives for
secession. It was only three months since his apolitical counsel to his priests
in November 1860. In February 1861, Elder was beginning to identify
with the Confederate cause.
“I have heard three distinct grounds given for our separation from the
Union,” Elder wrote. “Some say the Union was a kind of free association,
which any state had the right to forsake whenever she judged it conducive
to her interests—the right of secession.”47 Secondly, Elder contended that
while the Union had been a perpetual compact, not a free association, it
had been rendered null and void by “other parties” (Northern states and
abolitionism).48 Thus, the South was free to go. Finally, Elder wrote that
perhaps there was no violation that required a fracturing of the states. Even
if this were true, the South had “the right of self-preservation,” giving it

42. Ibid.
43. Ibid
44. Ibid.
45. Future Archbishop of New Orleans, 1870–83.
46. Willard E. Wright, “Bishop Elder and the Civil War,” The Catholic Historical
Review, Vol. 44 (1958–59), 290–306, here 292.
47. Elder to Father Napoléon-Joseph Perché, February 4, 1861, quoted in Pillar, The
Catholic Church in Mississippi, 1837–1865, 162.
48. Elder to Perché, February 4, 1861, Pillar, The Catholic Church in Mississippi, 162.

GRACJAN KRASZEWSKI

91

license to live outside the established nation for “it was impossible for us to
live in the Union.”49
Elder did not go beyond stating “what he had heard.” However, the
man who later became famous for his public refusal of a prayer request for
Abraham Lincoln, was a natural Confederate who became more ardent
over time. Elder believed the Confederacy was the only legitimate government in Mississippi. He counseled his congregants to be good citizens and
to support this government, while simultaneously demanding that they
place spiritual matters before politics.
Kenrick, on February 14, wrote to McGill that he was still “full of
hopes for the Union.”50 “Much is due to Old Virginia,” he wrote, referring
to the state remaining in the Union.51 If Virginia stayed put there would
be no war, such was the conventional thinking. In the meantime, Kenrick
hoped for peace for the simple reason that “folks need to be kept from
doing themselves and others harm.”52
Folks doing one another harm became a distinct probability after February 18 when, in Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated
as president of the Confederate States of America provisional government.
Davis, in his first presidential address, compared the Southern Confederates to the American revolutionaries of 1776. In his view, the South separating from the Union was the exact same, and equally patriotic, action the
colonists had undertaken in removing themselves from British dominion.
Seceding from the Union, Davis said, was merely the exercise of a right
“which the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776 defined to be
‘inalienable,’” namely that the consent of the people is the crux upon which
all legitimate government rests.53
In comparing the language of Davis’ First Inaugural with Lynch’s
reaction to South Carolina’s secession, one can see the ideological congruity between Southern Catholics and non-Catholic Confederates, each
group rationalizing the rebellion with similar formulae. This was the case
49. Ibid.
50. Kenrick to McGill, February 14, 1861, UNDA, MDRI 2.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid.
53. Jefferson Davis, “Inaugural Address of the President of the Provisional Government,” February 18, 1861 in James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers
of the Confederacy, Vol. I (Nashville, 1905), 32–36.

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because Southern Catholics, while differing from their non-Catholic
fellow citizens in religion, were nearly identical in their Confederatization.
On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln—like Davis born in Kentucky,
a mere hundred miles from the Confederate president and only eight
months apart—was inaugurated as the sixteenth president of the United
States of America. Two days beforehand, a pastoral letter that the Bishop
of Mobile John Quinlan had penned on January 1 appeared in the
Charleston Catholic Miscellany. Quinlan began the letter in step with his
brother bishops’ call for peace and unity. “The Catholic principle,” he
wrote, called for “obedience to the highest recognized authority, and
assent, without appeal to its decisions.”54 This was the only method by
which “States rights and Congressional power can move in harmony
together.”55
Quinlan blamed society’s ambivalence towards Catholicism as a main
reason for the crisis. Had more people listened to the Church, there would
be no threat of war. But Quinlan was not as determined for peace, no
matter what, as were some of the other Southern bishops. He was an
ardent Confederate. The Alabama bishop rejected any unity that left the
South, as he saw it, in a subservient and dependent position. “Better that
the instrument of confederation should be rent in pieces and scattered to
the winds,” Quinlan wrote, “than that it should become a cloak of malice
or a bond of iniquity.”56 Quinlan’s assent to the reactionary quality of
Southern nationalism is clear: better the Union be completely blown up
than continue in its current course. For Quinlan, the only remaining
options for Southerners were a persecuted existence in a wayward Union
or, as he preferred, the complete and utter destruction of America so that
the South could begin anew on its own; even if this meant rebuilding out
of the rubble.
Elder, writing to the Bishop of Chicago, James Duggan, on February
19, claimed that since the Confederacy was the only “. . . government
which exists here [Mississippi] de facto [his emphasis]” it was the duty of
Catholics as “good citizens . . . not only to acquiesce in it but to support it
& contribute means & arms & above all to avoid weakening it by division
54. John Quinlan, Bishop of Mobile, Pastoral Letter, issued January 1, 1861 on the
Feast of the Lord’s Circumcision (today January 1 is celebrated as the Solemnity of Mary, the
Holy Mother of God), Mobile, Alabama, reprinted and published in the Charleston Catholic
Miscellany’s March 2, 1861 issue. UNDA, MNEW.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.

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of counsel without necessity.”57 Here, the Bishop of Natchez announced a
positive position on the Confederate war effort. It was a direct recommendation that Catholics should fight if needed, that duty demanded it.
While Elder’s words are striking, this was different from what he, and
the other bishops, usually said. The bishops’ usual discourse implied that
Catholics could fight, that they were permitted, but not required to do so.
In another letter to Duggan on March 5, Elder stated his agreement with
Jefferson Davis that labeling the Confederates “rebels” was incorrect, and
that “disloyalty” was not an appropriate term.58 Elder’s move from cool
support for the Confederacy to clear advocacy—typical of the Southern
episcopate as whole—shows how early, in March of 1861 before the War,
Southern Catholic bishops Confederatized.
Elder, in an undated letter to Kenrick around the same time, the
spring of 1861, returned once more to the “usual method” of counsel. He
focused on what Catholic teaching allowed without endorsing the Confederate war effort outright. “My course, & I believe the course of my clergy,
has been not to recommend secession—but to explain to those who might
enquire, that . . . their religion did not forbid them to advocate it.” 59 Elder
then echoed what he had said to Duggan, noting “since secession had been
accomplished,—I have advised even those who thought it unwise still to
support our State government and the new Confederacy—as being the
only government which exists here de facto.”60
In Mississippi, and throughout the South, not everyone supported the
new nation. There were many Souths within the Confederacy, factions
large and small, and these fissures took on many forms: the poor versus the
rich, the hill country versus the coast, women versus men (e.g., the Southern Bread Riots of 1863). As Stephanie McCurry writes, “the Confederate
war ripped liked an earthquake through the foundation of southern life.”61
This true, numerous historians argue—in their number Gary Gallagher,
57. Elder to James Duggan, Bishop of Chicago, February 19, 1861, quoted in Wright,
“Bishop Elder and the Civil War,” 291.
58. Pillar, The Catholic Church in Mississippi, 162–63.
59. Elder to Kenrick, undated letter, quoted in Wright, “Bishop Elder and the Civil
War,” 293.
60. Elder to Kenrick, undated letter, quoted in Wright, “Bishop Elder and the Civil
War,” 293.
61. Stephanie McCurry, “Women Numerous and Armed: Gender and the Politics of
Subsistence in the Civil War South,” in Gary Gallagher and Joan Waugh, eds., Wars Within a
War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2014), 1–19, here 1.

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Anne Sarah Rubin, and Aaron Sheehan-Dean, with this essay in agreement—that while contradictions did exist in the Confederacy, they were
sufficiently smoothed over to engender a strong national identity and one
adequately resolute to wage four years of war.62
Southern Catholics contributed to this process, to the crystallization
of the Southern nation. The bishops brought their faith into the public
square, and their pastoral letters, penned in Catholic periodicals, along
with daily advice to priests and parishioners, shaped Southern Catholics’
approaches to the questions of the time, especially for those men who journeyed from the pew to the battlefield. Catholic bishops joined Confederate
Protestants in a religiously tinged nation building process. As the vast
majority of white Mississippians and white Southerners were committed
Confederates, internal divisions notwithstanding, Elder’s point about
“existing governments” was largely, almost wholly, true as corresponded to
reality; a reality where many viewed the Confederacy as Mississippi’s sole
extra-state authority.
On April 11, Spalding wrote prophetically to Purcell saying, “If a blow
be struck at Charleston or Pickens [a fort in Pensacola], we will all be compelled to go out of the Union in less than three months.”63 The next day,
Confederate forces led by General Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard, a
Louisiana Catholic famous for his military skill and savoir-faire, fired upon
Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. It surrendered the following day.
Charleston, many of its citizens watching the bombardment from a variety
of vantage points, erupted into jubilation at the decisive victory. “We write
these lines amidst the booming of cannon all over our harbor,” the
Charleston Catholic Miscellany (meaning Lynch) wrote on April 13. “May
God in his mercy protect our homes, avenge a righteous cause, and put to
speedy flight the hirelings who already occupy, or are on the point of
invading, our soil!”64
Lynch ordered a Te Deum, the classic Christian hymn of thanksgiving,
sung in the Cathedral of St. John and St Finbar after the fall of Sumter; in
gratitude for both the Confederate victory and because no life had been
62. Gary Gallagher, “Disaffection, Persistence, and Nation: Some Directions in Recent
Scholarship on the Confederacy,” Civil War History 55, no. 3 (2009), 329–53, here 340–41;
Anne Sarah Rubin, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861–1868
(Chapel Hill, 2005), 7, 246; Aaron Sheehan–Dean, Why Confederates Fought: Family and
Nation in Civil War Virginia (Chapel Hill, 2007), 187.
63. Spalding to Purcell, April 11, 1861, quoted in Spalding, Martin John Spalding, 131.
64. Charleston Catholic Miscellany, April 13, 1861, UNDA, MNEW.

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lost, North or South, during the bombardment.65 There is no reason to
doubt that Lynch was grateful that a Confederate victory had been attained
without bloodshed. It is also clear that his prime reason for thanksgiving
was the Confederate victory itself, a victory won by the side he believed was
favored by God and providentially guided.
The Catholic Mirror, organ of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, took a
somber tone. It reprinted an excerpt from the Richmond Whig entitled, “The
Horrors of Civil War.” This dire warning would prove true over the coming
four years when more than six hundred thousand men lost their life, not to
mention the multitudinous other tragedies beyond the scope of statistical
analysis. “Those who are investing in epaulettes and swords, and, for the
sport they expect from a civil war, are sparing no pains or effort to get one
up,” the Whig wrote.66 But should people get what they want, they would
find “civil war abounds more in horror than in pastimes, and that blood and
misery, [rather] than pleasure and profit, are its horrible fruits.”67
On April 16, Kenrick wrote to Lynch. “We [in Baltimore] all feel
intense anxiety, and pray that God may spare the country, and grant
peace.”68 Intense anxiety was not restricted to the South. James Frederick
Wood, the Bishop of Philadelphia, wrote to Lynch on April 18 saying,
“All we can do is pray to God to save us from the dreadful . . . consequences
of civil war.”69 On April 21 Spalding wrote to Purcell, “The times are truly
awful. I trust no border excitement will occur to precipitate matters—precipitate is the watchword of the Southern Confederacy.”70 “Wars &
rumours of wars,” Spalding wrote in his journal on April 26, “the country
is on the verge of dissolution and ruin.”71 “Dona Nobis Pacem!”72 JeanMarie Odin probably shared Spalding’s exact sentiments at this time,
although more in the realm of personal angst. Odin had just been named
65. Heisser and White, Patrick N. Lynch, 78; There was a final, and unfortunate, parting
note from Fort Sumter. Major Anderson, upon surrender, asked permission to fire a onehundred-gun salute as the U.S. flag was lowered. The Confederates obliged the request.
Midway through a gun burst, wounding five Union soldiers and killing Private Daniel
Hough. The first casualty of the War was suffered not in battle, but during a ceremony. See:
Henry, The Story of the Confederacy, 32–33.
66. The Catholic Mirror, April 13, 1861, reprint of “The Horrors of Civil War,” originally in the Richmond Whig, UNDA, MNEW.
67. Ibid.
68. Kenrick to Lynch, April 16, 1861, CDA, 26B4.
69. Wood to Lynch, April 18, 1861, CDA, 26B6.
70. Spalding to Purcell, April 11, 1861, quoted in Spalding, Martin John Spalding, 131.
71. Spalding, Civil War Journal, April 26, 1861, UNDA, MNAZ, 3/12.
72. Ibid.

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the late Blanc’s successor as Archbishop of New Orleans. He was shocked
and overwhelmed by the news. “I have been unable to eat or sleep,” Odin
wrote to Rousselon, “. . . Impossible.”73
While Fort Sumter was devastating for those hoping for peace, an
equally important step towards all-out civil war was Virginia’s secession
from the Union on April 17, 1861. The tipping point for Virginia’s secession was Lincoln’s call for 75,000 volunteers immediately following
Anderson’s surrender. No less crucial was Robert E. Lee’s famous decision
to turn down the American president’s offer to command the army called
into the field to “enforce the Federal law.”74 The basis of Archbishop Kenrick’s hope for the preservation of the Union, “Old Virginia” refusing to
join the seceded states, was now dashed.75
Bishop Lynch received three letters in six days from his fellow
Southern bishops in May of 1861, written in light of the events at
Sumter. On the 9 Elder wrote to Lynch saying, “We are continually
offering up our prayers for peace. God grant it to us.”76 In this letter, the
Bishop of Natchez was as desirous of peace as Kenrick and Spalding.
“The times are evil,” Elder wrote. 77 As such, he believed the remedy was
“only in the hands of God.”78 The “best thing we can do for our country
is to go forth to work to sanctify ourselves and our flocks.”79 Elder
assigned equal blame to the North and South for the breakdown of the
country. Had there been “more Saints among us there wd. have been
more charity, patience & wisdom & more guidance from God,” he wrote,
speculating that maybe the country would have been spared a coming
chastisement.80
Elder blamed spiritual laxity as a main cause of the war. It was the lack
of saints that was a root cause of the conflict. Elder believed, because part
of the conflict’s origins lies in the religious realm, that religion could most
effectively repair the damage by the active prayer and sanctification of the
faithful, as he put it. Three days later on, May 12, Lynch received a letter
from Kenrick in which the Archbishop of Baltimore claimed, “public spirit
73. Foley, Missionary Bishop, 153.
74. Douglas Southall Freeman, Lee: an Abridgement (New York, 1935), 110.
75. Kenrick to McGill, February 14, 1861, UNDA, MDRI 2.
76. Elder to Lynch, May 9, 1861, CDA, 26D2.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Ibid.

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is completely crushed.”81 Perhaps at this time Kenrick too had abandoned
hope for peace, believing that it was impossible, that the Union could not
be saved, and that prolonged war was inevitable.
The third letter Lynch received, on May 15, from Bishop McGill, was
of a different tone. McGill asked for Lynch’s advice on the crisis. “This is
all entre nous,” McGill wrote, “and a mere expression of thoughts which
force themselves on my mind.”82 The letter was very partisan, a stark contrast to McGill’s politics-free February pastoral. The War’s unfolding
chronology was certainly the cause for the differentiation. In February, it
had not yet begun. In May, it was time to take sides. McGill was now
Confederatized and this evolution, from watchful reticence as events
unfolded to full fledged support, was typical of the Southern episcopate.
McGill began his letter demanding Lynch to “give me your views on
some of the moral questions presented by the present circumstances of our
poor country!”83 The Bishop of Richmond then posed three questions. Was
not justice on the side of the South, was not the North acting unconstitutionally, and, could a person volunteer in Lincoln’s army without this constituting a sin?84 It is unclear at first why McGill would think enlisting in the
Union army could be sinful. The Church took no official position on the
War. But it becomes clear why McGill would say this when viewed from the
perspective of his rapidly developing, now blossomed, Confederate loyalty.
McGill argued it was immoral to furnish the Union with Catholic
chaplains from the pool of Southern priests because the North came as “an
invading enemy.”85 Virginia was under attack, he claimed, and “I cannot be
blind as to which side seeks to domineer and oppress, and which presents
just claims.”86 McGill’s assertion that “we are praying for peace, or at least
a peaceful arrangement,” might have been a sincere Christian hope for
peace yet, owing to the context of his comments, it is unlikely.87
McGill, by “peaceful arrangement,” was not speaking of Kenrick or
Spalding’s peace.88 His arrangement was more in the vein of Lynch or
81. Kenrick to Lynch, May 12, 1861, CDA, 26D3.
82. McGill to Lynch, May 15, 1861, CDA, 26D4.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.

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Quinlan’s thought: a peace where the Union would allow the South to go
its separate way and begin to chart its own national destiny. Around this
same time (on May 11), Elder published a statement in the Charleston
Catholic Miscellany chastising those who would preach politics from the
pulpit. The letter foreshadowed his own defiance of a prayer request for
Lincoln later in the War.
No Catholic, no Irishman of the South need vapor or make a fool
of himself to prove his loyalty; and the Catholic priest or Bishop who
would read political harangues or military proclamations from his pulpit,
or display the Confederate Flag from his steeple, would be suspected of
unsound mind. Were any foolish mob to make such a demand, neither
priest nor person amongst us would comply it.89

Peter Richard Kenrick, the Bishop of St. Louis and brother of the
Archbishop of Baltimore, held similar views. When asked to fly the U.S.
flag over his Cathedral, Kenrick demurred saying, “No other banner may
be placed there, for already there stands one which alone shall stay, the
banner of the Church.”90 These attitudes are crucial to understanding the
religious prioritization inherent to Catholic Confederatization. As devout
Catholics and devoted Confederates, Southern Catholic bishops could
seem, at times, to have an equal dedication to both causes. But while a
prelate might be conspicuous in his support for the Confederacy, there was
a spiritual boundary that this political devotion did not cross.
The bishops additionally showed the prioritization of their faith by
being able to, even in the midst of such troubled times, focus solely on spiritual matters. One such example concerns Odin, the newly installed Archbishop of New Orleans, who delivered a pastoral letter to his new congregation in May of 1861. The Archbishop made clear that his first priority
would be to his congregants’ spiritual needs. This fits well with Odin’s profile throughout the War. Odin—a Southern sympathizer who, even if indirectly, catalyzed Catholic-Confederate diplomacy91 with his ad limina visit
to Rome in 1862, which prompted Pope Pius IX to write a joint peace
letter to him and Archbishop Hughes, which in turn prompted Jefferson
Davis to interpret the papal letter as a sign of friendship and convinced him
to send Catholic envoys to the Vatican, and who is additionally well known
89. William Henry Elder, Bishop of Natchez, published in the Charleston Catholic Miscellany’s May 11, 1861 issue. UNDA, MNEW.
90. Benjamin Blied, Catholics and the Civil War (Milwaukee, 1945), 37.
91. The fourth chapter of Catholic Confederates is exclusively dedicated to CatholicConfederate diplomacy. See above footnote 13.

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for his oversight of the cause célèbre mid-War Father Claude Maistre affair,
which touched upon questions of ecclesiastical obedience, schism, wartime
loyalty, and abolitionism92—was primarily concerned with ecclesial matters, preferring to hope and work for peace, while cleaning up perceived
laxity in liturgical matters and in wedding celebrations and funeral rites.93
“Our first duty is to our flock,” Odin said in his May pastoral, “and we
will have no sweeter enjoyment . . . [than] to go through your towns and villages, announcing the word of Salvation, to communicate to them the gifts
of the Holy Ghost.” Odin promised to solicit the aid of local pastors for the
purpose of “procuring the glory of God and the salvation of souls.” Odin
concluded his letter asking the congregation to pray to Jesus Christ, and to
pray for the intercessions of the patron of New Orleans, Saint Louis, and the
Blessed Virgin Mary.94 He did not mention secession, war, or politics.
By the end of May, many Southern Catholic clerics were assigning
war guilt solely to the North. Bishop Quinlan, who had written in his January 1 pastoral letter that dissolution would be preferable to a Union that
acted as “a cloak of malice or a bond of iniquity,” now called for the South
going its separate way, permanently.95 “We must cut adrift from the
North,” Quinlan wrote to Lynch on May 18, “we of the South have been
too long on ‘leading strings.’”96 Perché wrote to Elder the following day,
saying it was the duty of Southern Catholics to rebuke what he termed the
fanatical and abolitionist Catholic clergy of the North and West.97
Elder, too, eventually came to hold this position. On July 16, the feast
day of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, he wrote to Lynch that Southern clergymen should do “. . . anything we of the South can & ought to . . . to abate
the war fever among the clergy & Catholic laity of the North.”98 Elder
echoed Perché’s analysis of two months prior almost verbatim. By this time
92. See: Foley, Missionary Bishop, 163–64. Or, for an even more complete treatment,
see: Stephen J. Ochs, A Black Patriot and a White Priest: Andre Cailloux and Claude Paschal
Maistre in Civil War New Orleans (Baton Rouge, 2000).
93. Foley, Missionary Bishop, 157.
94. All citations in paragraph: Jean–Marie Odin, Archbishop of New Orleans, Pastoral
Letter issued May 19, 1861 on the Feast of Pentecost, New Orleans, reprinted and published
in the Charleston Catholic Miscellany’s June 15, 1861 issue. UNDA, MNEW.
95. John Quinlan, Bishop of Mobile, Pastoral Letter, January 1, 1861, UNDA,
MNEW.
96. Quinlan to Lynch, May 18, 1861, CDA, 26D7.
97. Perché to Elder, May 19, 1861, CDA, 26E1.
98. Elder to Lynch, July 16, 1861, quoted in Wright, “Bishop Elder and the Civil
War,” 293.

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in the War only two Southern bishops—Spalding and Whelan of
Nashville—still clung to any vestiges of neutrality, uncertainty, caution, or
the desire for unconditional peace that had characterized much of the episcopate in late 1860. Ardent Confederates like Lynch and Quinlan had long
been outspoken advocates of the Southern cause. Moderates like McGill
and Elder were Confederatized. And even the largely pacific Kenrick,
closely aligned to Spalding, had given up hope for a resolution.
On July 21 , Union and Confederate forces met near Manassas Junction in northern Virginia, close to Washington, D.C. Known alternately as
“First Manassas” (by the South) and “First Bull Run” (by the North), it was
the first major land battle of the Civil War. The Confederate victory—in a
battle remembered for Thomas Jackson earning the famous sobriquet,
“Stonewall,” for stymieing droves of attacking Union forces and ultimately
turning the tide of the fight—was celebrated as a monumental triumph in
the South. 99 In truth, the battle’s psychological effects outweighed all else.
There could no longer be any doubt that the War would be long and bloody.
“The details of the battle fought on Sunday last are full enough to
enable us to judge its result,” the Catholic Mirror reported on July 27, “we
now see that the war which we are waging is one which will task our
utmost strength and . . . we cannot hope to escape from it.”100 The Mirror
did not view the future with hope. “We now see that it is destined that the
people of this once happy country should agree together to cast into this
fearful fire of civil war, their own lives and the lives of their children. . . .”101
The Mirror did not see the war as a righteous struggle for independence,
but as a horrible calamity that would bring great devastation to all parties.
In August of 1861, an important debate took place between Bishop
Lynch and Archbishop Hughes. Lynch instigated the argument with his
“Letter of the Bishop of Charleston,” published on August 4. “All the
hopes cherished last spring of a peaceful solution have vanished before the
dread realities of war,” Lynch began, before asking, “What is still before
us?”102 He predicted a massive, all out war, with the two belligerent sec99. General Thomas J. Jackson, Report of the Battle of First Manassas, July 23, 1861,
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate
Armies (hereafter cited as OR), Vol. 2, 481–82.
100. The Catholic Mirror, July 27, 1861, UNDA, MNEW.
101. Ibid.
102. Patrick Neeson Lynch, Bishop of Charleston, “Letter of the Bishop of
Charleston,” August 4, 1861 in John Tracy Ellis, Documents of American Catholic History (Milwaukee, 1962), 347–56.

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tions “marshaling hundreds of thousands of men” against one another.103
Who was to blame? Lynch argued “responsibility falls, should fall, on those
who rendered the conflict unavoidable.”104
“The South years ago, and a hundred times, declared that the triumph
of the abolition or anti-slavery policy would break up the Union,” Lynch
said.105 According to him, most grievous was the “dogged obstinacy of the
Black Republicans at Washington [who] last winter made all the South
secessionists.”106 Lynch, referring to the popular Southern position that
secession was forced upon the South by inflammatory abolitionist rhetoric,
then moved his argument into the economic realm. “Even a child could see
the vast benefits to all from this [North-South economic] cooperation,” he
stated, adding that Southern production of cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice,
coupled with Northern manufacturing and grain generation produced a
system of mutual harmony and prosperity.107 Here is a good example of
historian David Potter’s argument in Impending Crisis, that Northern and
Southern antebellum differences need not be antagonistic; they could be,
as Lynch argued, mutually beneficial.108
Lynch opined that the Union, “taking up anti-slavery, making it a religious dogma, and carrying it into politics,” had caused disunion and war.109
“What could the South do but consult its own safety by withdrawing from
the Union?” Lynch asked, in the face of “unconstitutional laws and every
mode of annoying and hostile action,” the culmination of which was Lincoln’s election.110 Lynch claimed that secession was forced upon the South,
the only other option being “tame submission” to what he viewed as
Northern oppression.111 The South “desired to withdraw in peace,” but the
war had been thrust upon them.112 And this war, “unnecessary in the
beginning, will only bring ruin to thousands in its prosecution. It will be
fruitless of any good.”113 Lynch finished, saying:

103. Ibid.
104. Ibid.
105. Ibid.
106. Ibid.
107. Ibid.
108. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848–1861 (New York, 1976), 31.
109. Lynch, “Letter of the Bishop of Charleston,” August 4, 1861.
110. Ibid.
111. Ibid.
112. Ibid.
113. Ibid.

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At its conclusion [the war] the parties will stand apart exhausted
and embittered by it; for every battle, however won or lost, will have
served but to widen the chasm between the North and South, then to
render more difficult, if not impossible, any future reconstruction. This
mode of attacking the South can effect nothing beyond the loss of life it
will entail, and the temporary devastation that will mark the track of the
armies. . . . The separation of the Southern States is un fait accompli. The
Federal Government has no power to reverse it. Sooner or later it must
be recognized. Why preface the recognition by a war equally needless and
bloody? Men at the North may regret the rupture as men at the South
may do. The Black Republicans overcame the first at the polls, and would
not listen to the second in Congress, when the evil might have been
repaired. They are responsible. If there is to be fighting, let those who
voted the Black Republican ticket shoulder their muskets and bear the
responsibility. Let them not send Irishmen to fight in their stead, and
then stand looking on at the conflict, when, in their heart of hearts, they
care little which of the combatants destroys the other.114

Lynch’s final remarks are a standard defense of the Southern position
with a tiny Catholic addition at the end, one that speaks to the spiritual unity
of Catholics North and South. Lynch made clear that the North was fully to
blame for the war and that the war itself was pointless because the Union
would only add to—rather, create—a mounting toll of death and destruction
in prolonging resistance to an inevitability: permanent separation. The
proper course of action was to allow the South to go in peace. Should the
North fail to see what he believed was common sense, and decide to fight the
war anyway, Catholics would be among the primary sufferers, in particular
Northern Irishmen who would be sent to their deaths by the thousands in
the name of a hostile Republican ideology. Father John Bannon, while on a
state-sponsored diplomatic mission to Ireland in 1863, employed the same
argument: the North, a land replete with anti-Catholic and anti-Irish bigotry, wanted Irishmen simply for cannon fodder, to serve as the avant-garde
in winning a war that would simultaneously eliminate them.
Archbishop Hughes’ reply came three weeks later, on August 23. The
Archbishop thanked Lynch for his letter, surprised that the mail routes had
remained intact, as they did “during happier years, when all the States,
North and South, found their meaning in the words, ‘E Pluribus Unum.’”115
Hughes met Lynch on common ground. He claimed to be an advocate for
114. Ibid.
115. John Hughes, Archbishop of New York, “Letter of the Archbishop of New York,”
August 23, 1861, in Frank Moore, ed. The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events (New
York, 1866), 381–84

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states’ rights, giving, as an example, that neither South Carolina nor Massachusetts had any right to interfere with the other’s internal affairs.
Yet, Hughes added, those same sovereign states gave consent to a Federal government and its laws by signing the Constitution. This was a free
choice, uncoerced. No state, Hughes argued, had the right to secede on a
whim, and certainly not under the arbitrary reasons, Lynch stated. It was “a
great mistake,” Hughes wrote, for the South to assume “the Federal Government and the people of the North are determined to conquer and subjugate”
the seceded states.116 The South was acting in open rebellion and employed a
manufactured victimization as a rationale for their actions. “I would say that
the mind of the North looks only to the purpose of bringing back the seceded
States to their organic condition,” Hughes concluded, “ante bellum.”117
The exchange between Lynch and Hughes is a good example of how
American Catholic bishops understood allegiance. Just as the Church did
not split over slavery, the Church hierarchy did not differ in their spiritual
allegiances. Both Lynch and Hughes equally, indiscriminately, and consistently discharged the religious duties of their episcopal station. As Catholic
bishops, in their Catholicism, they were practically indistinguishable from
one another. Politically, they were at odds. Both of these men’s conceptions of peace were anchored to their respective sides’ ideological goals.
Lynch justified Southern independence in a manner typical of Southerners.
Hughes defended the Union in a manner typical of Unionists. Both men
made it clear that they were, even if in an implied sense, okay with a war
deciding these questions.
The following month, on September 9, Bishop Verot presented a pastoral letter. “We feel it a duty incumbent on us to exhort you to earnest and
frequent prayer,” he wrote, “in view of the calamitous times which have
come upon us.” The whole country had been plunged into “grief, distress,
misery, and intense suffering.” Verot encouraged his congregation to “pour
fervent supplications to the throne of grace, that the Almighty may shorten
the days of our affliction, quell the waves that have risen against us and
threaten to engulph us, and grant to us once more the blessings of an honorable, lasting peace.”118
116. Ibid.
117. Ibid.
118. All citations in paragraph: Augustin Verot, Bishop of Savannah and St. Augustine, Pastoral Letter, issued September 9, 1861, given in Charleston, reprinted and published
in the Charleston Catholic Miscellany’s September 14, 1861 issue . . . UNDA, MNEW.

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For Verot, the War was a just punishment for a people gone astray.
Sin was the primary issue. In this vein, he argued in kind with many
Protestant Christians who believed the same. And these Southerners,
Catholic and Protestant alike, wholly differed from Northerners in their
understanding of what sins were to blame for the war’s outbreak. For the
North, Southerners’ societal cornerstone (as Confederate Vice President
Alexander Stephens infamously put it119) was the primary sin and many
were coming to believe that without this issue being finally and forever
resolved there would be no peace. For Verot—as for Lynch, McGill,
Quinlan, Elder and the majority of the Confederatized Southern episcopate—“honorable” was as important, if not more so, than just “peace.”
Peace was a constant hope for Catholics in the North and the South.
The nuances dealt with what kind of peace this should be. Even American
Catholics living overseas, with news of the war trickling over to them with
great delay, hoped for peace. Thomas Sim Lee, a nineteen-year old Marylander who was studying at the North American College in Rome (he
would be ordained a priest in 1866), wrote to his father in November of
1861 with this in mind. Lee began his letter in high spirits, explaining that
Rome was “a very good place” for someone studying for the Church as “the
richest marbles and the finest paintings” adorned the churches and art and
culture was in the air he breathed.120 But, as Lee noted, Rome and America
were enveloped in peril and this pervaded his thoughts. “When I came here
nine months ago,” Lee wrote, “Rome was in as much danger as Washington is at present. . . . God send a speedy peace to America!”121
Being far removed from the centers of political and military influence
did, in some cases, create a desire for full detachment, if not apathy. Such
was the case in New Mexico, a territory the Confederates failed to control
after defeat at the hands of Union Major John M. Chivington at the Battle
of Glorieta Pass in March of 1862.122 Chivington’s victory effectively
ended any hopes of a “Confederate New Mexico,” forcing the rebels to
retreat into Texas and, more importantly, preventing Confederate access to
119. In March of 1861, Stephens remarked: “Its [the Confederate government’s] foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the
white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition.” Quoted in James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford, 2003), 244.
120. Thomas Sim Lee to his father, from Rome, November 21, 1861, Thomas Sim Lee
Papers, Collection #259, Box #1, Col. 292, 1, F1, Catholic University of America Archives
(hereafter cited as CUA).
121. Ibid.
122. Paul Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe: His Life and Times (New York, 1975), 293.

GRACJAN KRASZEWSKI

105

California gold and ports via Colorado.123 This development was most
likely welcomed by the Catholic Archbishop of Santa Fe, Jean-Baptiste
Lamy, a missionary from France more interested in growing his congregation and building its houses of worship than war. In this way, Lamy was
much more like Odin than Lynch or Quinlan. As St Louis was ravaged by
massacres in May 1861, the visiting Lamy, having arrived for a provincial
council of bishops that never took place, understatingly noted that tension
was high and “we are in a very dangerous time.”124
Most telling of Lamy’s focus is the content of a postwar letter he wrote
to the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in 1870. In a full report on
the state of his diocese, a type of looking back over the nearly two decades
of his episcopal tenure, Lamy gushed about the expedited travel that came
with the transcontinental railroad, New Mexico’s excellent climate, the
growth of Catholicism in America, Protestant conversions playing a major
role, and the majesty of New York cathedrals relative to the much more
humble, frontier style churches of his diocese: “. . . et aucune eglise
catholique du Nouveau-Mexique ne pourra lui etre compare.”125 Lamy,
installed as Archbishop of Santa Fe in 1853, did not mention the Civil
War even once.
The Southern Catholic bishops’ responses to the secession crisis
varied. Much of the Southern episcopate watched the unfolding events of
late 1860–early 1861 with something like spiritual detachment.
Although the Southern episcopate was Confederate in sympathy from
the outset, it was peace, regardless of political outcome, which was the
initial priority. Once the War began and the battle lines were drawn, the
bishops joined in supporting the Confederacy. While all of the Southern
bishops counseled their congregations to perform Catholic actions (personal prayer, public prayer like novenas and special Masses, fasting, and
almsgiving) for the goal of God’s blessings and a peaceful solution to the
growing conflict, this peaceful solution more often than not meant a proConfederate settlement.
Catholic bishops within the Confederacy remained deeply involved
in the politics and cause of their new, nascent country throughout the
123. Ibid.
124. Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe, 287–88.
125. Jean-Baptiste Lamy, “Missions D’Amérique: États-Unis, Diocese de Sante-Fe
(Noveau-Mexique), Annales de la propagation de la foi. Paris, May 1, 1870. 385–97 online:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5448392t/f388.image.r=Nouveau-Mexique%20Lamy

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DEVOUT CATHOLICS, DEVOTED CONFEDERATES

War. The bishops’ commentary during the secession crisis and early part
of the War was but a foretaste of an even more involved, and more publically visible Confederatization climaxing with Lynch and Bannon’s diplomatic missions and Elder’s refusal of the Union prayer request. Catholics,
a part of the Southern religious landscape prior to the founding of the
American nation, were involved members of a new nation, the Confederacy, and supported their country’s war and politics as much as any nonCatholic Southerner.

Argentine Catholic Democratic Scientists and
Their Projects for a Research University (1932–59)
MIGUEL DE ASÚA*
This paper considers the ideas and activities of a group of highly-qualified
Catholic scientists in Argentina who supported Christian democracy
during the decades of authoritarian governments and the presidency of
Juan D. Perón. The physiologists Juan T. Lewis and Eduardo Braun
Menéndez, disciples of Nobel Prize winner Bernardo Houssay, and
engineer Augusto J. Durelli, who would develop much of his career in the
United States, sought to set up in the country facilities for advanced scientific research which they saw as the basis of a new Catholic university.
This paper pays particular attention to the conflicts built around their
proposals for the creation of private confessional universities in the face of
strong opposition by those sectors of society that considered that the secular
state should have the control of higher education.
Keywords: Catholicism in Argentina; Juan T. Lewis; Eduardo
Braun Menéndez; Augusto J. Durelli; Catholic universities

T

wo groups of Catholic scientists with high public profile can be identified in Argentina since the late 1920s and early 1930s. On the one
hand, those who adhered to integral Catholicism and far-right nationalism: they supported Franco in the Spanish Civil War and defended Argentine neutrality or showed sympathy for the Axis during the Second World
War. On the other hand were those committed to Christian democracy,
who did not consider that the Spanish Civil War was a Catholic crusade
and from the start sided with the Allies.1 Juan Traherne Lewis, Eduardo
* Miguel de Asúa, is Professor of the History of Science and Medicine, Universidad
Nacional de San Martín and a member of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas
y Técnicas (Argentina). His email address is mdeasua@retina.ar. This paper is part of an ongoing research project on “Science, Catholicism, and Secularization in Argentina,” in which
the author engaged as a member of Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
(Argentina); papers already published are mentioned in the footnotes under the author’s name.
1. For the role of scientists akin to integral Catholicism in the period, see Miguel de
Asúa, “Science and Religion in Interwar Argentina,” Church History and Religious Culture, 99,
no. 3 (2019), 1–19. For democratic Catholics in Argentina, see José Zanca, Cristianos
antifascistas. Conflictos en la cultura católica argentina (Buenos Aires, 2013).

107

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

Braun Menéndez, and Augusto J. Durelli belonged to the latter group.
Lewis and Braun were physiologists and associates of Nobel Prize winner
Bernardo Houssay; Durelli was an engineer who spent the largest part of
his professional career in the U.S.A. The three of them were politically
active during the years of the ascendancy of Juan D. Perón (1943–46), his
first and second presidential terms (1946–55), and the period following his
demise (1955–59).2 The ambiguous and in the end conflictive relationships
between the Catholic Church and Perón has been the subject of many
studies.3 While adopting many themes of Catholic social doctrine in his
first programmatic years, Perón eventually tried to subject the Church to
state control. The violent confrontation between the government and the
Catholic Church in the last two years of his second presidency (1954–55)
is generally recognized as one of the motives that contributed to his fall. As
members of the intelligentsia that opposed Peronism, prestigious Catholic
scientists marginalized from state-controlled universities participated in
the creation of privately funded centers of scientific research while refloating proposals for the creation of a Catholic university.4 These plans would
materialize in the founding of the Catholic Institute of Sciences (1953–
54). Braun would play a leading role during the protracted conflict that
developed in the post-Peronist era over the proposals for the creation of
private confessional institutions of higher learning. With their plans of creating Catholic centers of advance research and teaching, Lewis, Braun, and
Durelli challenged the entrenched view that saw science as the secular turf
of liberals and socialists.

2. Braun Menéndez, Durelli, and Lewis were among those who signed the February
1946 “Manifesto of Christian Democrats” supporting the candidates of the Democratic
Union in the presidential elections. See “Manifiesto de los demócratas cristianos en auspicio
de la fórmula presidencial Tamborini-Mosca,” Orden Cristiano, no. 104 (February 1946),
412–15.
3. The question of the relationships between Perón and the Catholic Church in
Argentina lies beyond the scope of this article. See John J. Kennedy, Catholicism, Nationalism,
and Democracy in Argentina (Notre Dame, 1958); Robert McGeagh, Relaciones entre el poder
politico y eclesiástico en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1987), 23–115; Lila Caimari, Perón y la iglesia católica (Buenos Aires, 1994); Austen Ivereigh, Catholicism and Politics in Argentina, 1810–
1960 (New York, 1995), 143–82; Michael A. Burdick, For God and the Fatherland. Religion
and Politics in Argentina (New York, 1995), 45–109; Roberto Bosca, La iglesia nacional peronista. Factor religioso y poder politico (Buenos Aires, 1997); Loris Zanatta, Perón y el mito de la
nación católica (Buenos Aires, 1999); and Susana Bianchi, Catolicismo y peronismo. Religión y
política en la Argentina, 1943–1955 (Tandil, 2001).
4. This question (particularly as regards Braun and Durelli) has been explored from a
different viewpoint in Diego H. de Mendoza and Analía Busala, Los ideales de Universidad
“científica” (1931–1959) (Buenos Aires, 2002). The author remains indebted to Analía Busala
for her critical comments on this paper.

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Lewis: An Early Proposal for “Free” Universities
In the 1930s, Bernardo A. Houssay was at the head of the indisputably
leading scientific research group in Argentina5 (Figure 1). As a result of his
work on the role of the pituitary in sugar metabolism, he would be granted
the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1947. Juan T. Lewis (1898–1976) was the
second author of Houssay’s standard textbook of physiology, which he and
his wife Olive Mary Lewis née Thomas, a graduate of the London School
of Medicine for Women, had translated into English.6 Lewis’s early
research focused on the physiology of adrenal glands, the action of insulin,
and the regulation of blood sugar, but his original articles covered a wide
range of physiological topics.7 Born in Argentina to a family of Welsh
descent, he had studied medicine in the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires. While a student, he worked as research assistant in the
Bacteriological Institute of the National Department of Hygiene, where he
would later be the head of the Section of Pharmacology (1924–28). After
graduating in 1921, Lewis joined Houssay’s recently created Institute of
Physiology; he was named substitute professor of physiology in 1930.8 Supported by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, Lewis spent the months
from April through November 1925 as a research fellow in Harvard working under Walter B. Cannon, who had trained several young promising
physiologists from Latin America.9 Cannon told Houssay that he “had
never had any advanced student come to the laboratory who was better prepared for research, because of knowledge, insight, and technical skills than
Dr. Lewis.”10 Diagnosed with tuberculosis in late 1925, Lewis spent some
time in the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake, New York, and later in
5. For Houssay, see Frank Young and V. G. Foglia, “Bernardo Alberto Houssay,
1887–1971,” Biographical Memoirs of the Royal Society 20 (1974), 246–70; Marcos Cueto,
“Laboratory Styles in Argentine Physiology,” Isis 85 (1994), 228–246.
6. A. J. Carlson, review of Human Physiology by Bernardo A. Houssay et al.; trans. by
Juan T. Lewis and Olive M. Lewis (New York, 1951), Science 113, no. 2946 (June 15, 1951),
700.
7. Juan T. Lewis, Antecedentes, títulos y trabajos presentados a la Universidad Nacional del
Litoral al hacerse cargo de la Cátedra de Fisiología de la Escuela de Medicina de Rosario (Buenos
Aires, 1929).
8. Juan T. Lewis, Antecedentes; “Lewis, Juan T.,” in Quién es quién en la Argentina, 7th
ed. (Buenos Aires, 1958), 443–444; Jimmy Lewis, “El doctor Juan T. Lewis,” Rosario. Su historia y región no. 83 (March 2010), 8–10.
9. Marcos Cueto, “The Rockefeller Foundation’s Medical Policy and Scientific
Research in Latin America: the Case of Physiology,” Social Studies of Science 20 (1990), 229–
254; idem, “Laboratory Styles,” 236–237.
10. Walter Cannon to Bernardo Houssay, February 4, 1926, file 8044 “Lewis, Juan T.,”
Archive of the Faculty of Medicine, University of Buenos Aires (henceforward cited as AFM).

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

FIGURE 1. Dr. Bernardo Houssay. Courtesy of Dr. Damasia Becú-Villalobos and
IBYME, Institutional Communication Team.

Chamonix, Switzerland. Once discharged, he took the opportunity to visit
research institutes in that country, France, and the United Kingdom.11
When in 1928 he traveled to England from Argentina to marry his cousin
Mary, he took opportunity to meet his father’s cousin, the physiologist Sir
Thomas Lewis at University College, London and the pharmacologist Sir
Henry H. Dale, then at the National Institute for Medical Research, with
whom he had planned to work supported by his Rockefeller fellowship
before falling ill.12 Upon returning to his country in 1929, Lewis founded
the Institute of Physiology in the medical school of Rosario, the third
largest city in Argentina, which harbored a large British colony.
During the 1930s and 1940s there was a steady growth and consolidation of integral Catholicism in Argentina.13 Politically liberal Catholics,
never more than an influential minority, entered the limelight with the
controversies triggered by Maritain’s visit to the country in 1936 and man11. Lewis, “El doctor Juan T. Lewis.”
12. Lewis, “El doctor Juan T. Lewis”; Clifford W. Wells to John T. Lewis, October 1,
1925, file 8044, AFM.
13. Ivereigh, Catholicism and Politics, 103–142; Loris Zanatta. Del estado liberal a la
Nación católica: Iglesia y ejército en los orígenes del peronismo; 1930–1943 (Buenos Aires, 1996).

MIGUEL DE ASÚA

111

aged to maintain visibility through publications such as the bimonthly
Orden Cristiano (1941–48).14 Lewis met Maritain presumably when the
latter lectured in Rosario.15 When interviewed by Orden Cristiano in 1945,
Lewis declared that the publication had contributed to counter the views
of “those who have tried to identify the Church with reactionary politics”
in a context in which “Catholic democrats will have to fulfil the duty of
defending the Church.”16 In that year, Lewis joined the Social Democratic
Action in Santa Fe, one of the several political groups inspired by the ideals
of Christian Democracy, which arose in several large cities in Argentina in
opposition to Peronism.17 During February 1946, he campaigned actively
in Rosario against the candidature of Perón, whom he thought had slim
chances of winning.18 Two days after the presidential elections in which
Perón had a sweeping victory, Houssay, Braun, and others sent a letter to
Lewis declaring their sympathy with him, “at a time of injustice for you
and shame and sorrow for the country.”19
Since early in his professional life, Lewis wrote about medical research
and his conception of what universities in Argentina should be in pages at
times informed by his religious beliefs. In a lecture on the occasion of
Houssay’s reception of the Nobel Prize, he described science teachers and
their “influence on the spiritual formation of human beings” with terms
evocative of monastic life.20 A few years later, he portrayed the intellectual
vocation as based “upon an asceticism” which brings with it the cultivation
of virtue.21 Lewis pictured himself as a demanding teacher “who has tried
to be fair, with that kind of justice informed by charity, which is a profound
love of the neighbor resulting from the love of God.”22

14. Zanca, Cristianos antifascistas, 55–128.
15. As a consequence, Lewis organized a reading group of Humanisme intégral (1936).
Lewis, “El doctor Juan T. Lewis.”
16. Juan T. Lewis, [Answer to a survey] in Orden Cristiano 5, no. 97 (October 1,
1945), 22.
17. Ricardo G. Parera, Democracia Cristiana en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1967), pp.
62–63; Enrique Ghirardi, La Democracia Cristiana (Buenos Aires, 1983), 75–77.
18. Juan Lewis to Bernardo Houssay, February 20 and 25, 1946, box 4, 08-6, Archive
Bernardo Houssay, Buenos Aires (henceforward ABH).
19. Bernardo Houssay et al. to Juan Lewis, February 26, 1946, box 4, 08-6, ABH.
20. Juan T. Lewis, “El hombre de ciencia,” Revista de la Asociación Médica Argentina 62,
no. 631–632 (June 15 and 30, 1948), 279–280.
21. Juan T. Lewis, “La vocación intelectual,” Criterio 25, no. 1201–1202 (December
24, 1953), 990–993.
22. Juan T. Lewis, “La Universidad no debe callar,” Mundo Médico 10, no. 108 (1945),
21–23.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

Lewis’s religious commitments were far from those of integral
Catholicism. On the contrary, he defended civil freedom and felt comfortable to use that freedom to proclaim Catholic values. This is evident in his
defense of the creation of “free universities,” by which he meant private
institutions of higher learning. An early attempt at the creation of a
Catholic university in the second decade of the twentieth century (1909–
1920) had failed because the UBA refused to allow a private institution the
granting of professional degrees.23 In May 1932, under the presidency of
Gen. Agustín P. Justo (a liberal conservative who came to power through
rigged elections), the government launched a proposal for a new law regulating the functioning of state universities.24 Lewis criticized the project
and made a proposal of his own inspired by the kind of schools he had
known in the English-speaking world. A major failure of the government’s
plan, according to Lewis, was that it did not provide for the creation of free
universities, which “cannot admit of any control other than that necessary
for the attainment of their ends.”25 They should be allowed to exist “in
order to open the way to private initiative” and because measures that
“grant freedom and space to the intellectual activities of the persons” are
never in excess.26 Houssay and those around him were of a mind that the
country needed private schools created along the lines of those in the
United States and the United Kingdom.27
While Lewis’s defense of “free,” private schools was in line with the principle of subsidiarity of Catholic social teaching, his idea of a university rested
upon the Aristotelian notion that the distinctive characteristic of the human
being is an “imperious necessity of knowing.”28 The university is the sphere
where that quest for knowledge takes place; its goal is “the cult of truth.”29
23. Juan C. Zuretti, “La fundación de la primera Universidad Católica,” Universitas 9,
no. 38 (July–September 1975), 89–101; Hebe C. Pelosi and Geraldine Mackintosh, “El
ensayo de Universidad católica (1909–1920),” Archivum 16 (1994), 185–195.
24. Ministerio de Justicia e Instrucción Pública, Ley Universitaria. Mensaje y proyecto de
ley (Buenos Aires, 1932); Richard J. Walter, Student Politics in Argentina: The University
Reform and Its Effects, 1918–1964 (New York, 1968), 87–98.
25. Juan T. Lewis, Comentarios sobre el proyecto ministerial de ley universitaria. Un
anteproyecto de ley universitaria (Rosario, 1932), 10.
26. Lewis, Comentarios sobre el proyecto ministerial, 31.
27. Bernardo Houssay, “Universidades, alma y cuerpo,” La Nación, October 23, 1939,
reproduced as “Concepto de la Universidad,” in idem, Escritos y Discursos (Buenos Aires,
1952), 41–64, here 45.
28. Lewis, “Objeto y fin de la Universidad,” Universidad [Universidad del Litoral] 1
(October 1935), 37–63, here 47. Cf. Juan T. Lewis, La investigación científica (Buenos Aires,
1934).
29. Lewis, “La Universidad no debe callar,” 21.

MIGUEL DE ASÚA

113

Lewis’s ideals were obviously influenced by his personal experiences in Harvard and England and also by his readings of Abraham Flexner, John H.
Newman, Alfred Whitehead, and Bertrand Russell—a reading list quite alien
to the French model of higher education prevalent in Argentina. In his comments on the 1932 government’s bill for a university reform law, Lewis also
criticized the insistence upon discipline and nationalism proclaimed by the
then recently nominated rector of the University of Buenos Aires, Ángel
Gallardo—a prominent Catholic naturalist and minister of foreign affairs
during the presidency of Marcelo T. de Alvear (1922–28)—for that approach
implied that universities would be just “departments of the State and subjected to its policy.”30 While Lewis distrusted any kind of state intervention in
the universities, he also disliked that students participated in the government
of those institutions, a state of affairs sanctioned by the 1918 University
Reform movement and which he found “not only unnecessary in theory but
also uncalled for.”31 Students’ unions, according to him, “should have nothing
to do with political action, be it national or international.”32
Braun Menéndez: Research Institutes as the Basis of the University
The Army coup that took power in Argentina in June 1943 inaugurated a three-year authoritarian and nationalistic regime which strove to
maintain the country’s neutrality in the world conflict. Gen. Pedro P.
Ramírez (June 1943–March 1944) was succeeded by Gen. Edelmiro J.
Farrell (March 1944–June 1946). Democracy was restored when Col. Juan
D. Perón, the strong man in Farrell’s government, triumphed in the general elections of February 24, 1946.33 He would lead the country in two
successive presidencies from June 1946 to September 1955. On October
14, 1943 Gustavo Martínez Zuviría (a far-right Catholic writer, author of
anti-Semitic novels) was put in charge of the Ministry of Justice and Public
Instruction. That same day a group of academics and politicians published
a declaration demanding the return to democracy and “Latin American
solidarity” (which meant the breaking of diplomatic relations with the Axis
powers).34 Houssay and Lewis were among those who signed the declara30. Lewis, Comentarios sobre el proyecto, 11.
31. Lewis, Comentarios sobre el proyecto, 15. For the 1918 Reform movement, see
Walter, Student Politics in Argentina, 39–62.
32. Lewis, Comentarios sobre el proyecto, 29.
33. David Rock, Argentina, 1516–1987. From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsín (Berkeley, 1987), 214–261.
34. For the international context of the period, see for example Harold F. Peterson,
Argentina and the United States, 1810–1960 (New York, 1964), 428–445; Joseph A. Tulchin,
La Argentina y los Estados Unidos. Historia de una desconfianza (Buenos Aires, 1990), 185–205.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

tion.35 As a result, both were dismissed from their positions in the School
of Medicine of the UBA.36 Houssay gave a last lecture (it the event, it turn
out not to be so) before a multitudinous auditory of local medical celebrities.37 The Catholic daily El Pueblo limited itself to reproducing the official
decree and published the list of professors expelled from the national universities; the liberal newspaper La Nación run an editorial on “The apostolate of science.”38 Lewis was also discharged from his position as professor
in the School of Medicine in Rosario.39 The affair had repercussions in the
broader scientific community, to the point of reaching the pages of Science.40 It is perhaps ironic that two months before, Lewis had written to
Houssay telling him that he was “convinced of the honesty and good intentions” of the government.41 Houssay was alarmed by the shift towards
extreme nationalism of the military and feared that the support of the
clergy could eventually result in an anti-clerical backlash.42
Braun Menéndez (Figure 2), at that time associate professor of physiology in Buenos Aires, was not among those dismissed in 1943, but he
resigned in solidarity alleging “personal reasons.”43 Eduardo Braun

35. “Una Declaración sobre democracia efectiva y solidaridad Americana,” La Prensa,
October 15, 1943; “Una manifestación de anhelos respecto a la situación política,” La Nación,
October 15, 1939.
36. [Pedro P. Ramírez, Gustavo Martínez Zuviría], Decree 12.743, October 28, 1943,
Boletín Oficial, November 5, 1943, 3–4; A. Labougle to Juan Bacigalupo, October 20, 1943,
in file 8044, AFM (letter from the deputy rector of the university to the dean of the School
of Medicine ordering the discharge of Lewis and other four teachers); “Comunicóse la cesantía a cuatro profesores de la Facultad de Medicina,” La Nación, October 21, 1943; “En la Universidad comunicóse la cesantía a varios profesores,” La Nación, October 22, 1943; “Comunicóse la cesantía de otros profesores de la universidad local,” La Prensa, October 21, 1943.
37. “Una memorable hora científica vivió el viejo anfiteatro de fisiología,” La Nación,
October 20, 1943.
38. “Fueron dispuestas cesantías de funcionarios y profesores,” El Pueblo, October 21,
1943; “Diéronse a conocer las cesantías de profesores de la Universidad,” El Pueblo, October
22, 1943; “El apostolado de la ciencia,” La Nación, October 25, 1943.
39. Juan Lewis to Bernardo Houssay, October 18, 1943; Houssay to Lewis, October
18, 1943, box 4, 08-6, ABH.
40. E. S. H., “Declaration of Citizens of Argentina,” Science 98, no. 2552 (November
26, 1943), 467–468; the note refers to Houssay, Lewis, and Orías; Philip Bard, C. H. Best et
al., “The Argentine Citizens Declaration,” Science 99, no. 2565 (February 25, 1944), 166 (this
note expressed the concern of the American Physiological Society); Kirtley F. Mather, Harry
Grundfest, “The Argentine Citizens Declaration,” Science 99, no. 2566 (March 3, 1944), 176.
41. Juan Lewis to Bernardo Houssay, August 5, 1943, box 4, 08-6, ABH.
42. Bernardo Houssay to Juan Lewis, August 24, 1943, box 4, 08-6, ABH.
43. Eduardo Braun to Juan Bacigalupo, October 20, 1943, file 18173 “Braun Menéndez, Eduardo,” AFM.

MIGUEL DE ASÚA

115

FIGURE 2 Eduardo Braun Menéndez. Courtesy Dr. Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry
(personal archive).

Menéndez (1903–1959), born in Punta Arenas (Chile), was raised in
Buenos Aires; his family was among the wealthiest in the country at that
time, owning immense estancias in southern Patagonia.44 After he graduated as a physician from the University of Buenos Aires in 1929, he joined
the cardiology department of one of the city hospitals and began his
research work in the Institute of Physiology under Houssay on the influence of the hypophysis in hypertension, which resulted in his dissertation
presented in 1934. By the end of 1937, he joined the Department of Physiology of University College, London, in order to work with Charles
Lovatt Evans on heart metabolism. He stayed there until June 1938 and
during the next three months visited several centers of physiological
research in the United Kingdom.45 His work was well received and his
book on heart sounds was soon translated into English.46 Upon his return
44. For his life and work, see I. Pena and Guillermo Jaim Etcheverry, eds., Eduardo
Braun Menéndez. Ciencia y conciencia (Buenos Aires, 2015).
45. Letter from C. Lovatt Evans (no addressee), September 29, 1938; Eduardo Braun
Menéndez to the Dean of the School of Medicine, October 8, 1938, file 18173, AFM.
46. Oscar Orías and Eduardo Braun Menéndez, The Heart-Sounds in Normal and
Pathological Conditions (Oxford, 1939).

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

to Buenos Aires, Braun joined one of Houssay’s teams (Juan Fasciolo and
Alberto Taquini) who were looking for a humoral factor in hypertension.
Together with Juan M. Muñoz and future Nobel Prize Luis F. Leloir, they
were able to discover the mechanism of nephrogenic hypertension simultaneously with the American Irvine H. Page. Using the ligature of the
renal artery, they isolated the substance “hypertensina” afterwards called
angiotensin by an agreement with Page, reached “after two Martinis.”47
Braun and his group identified an enzyme (renin) produced by the kidney,
which transforms a protein in the blood in angiotensin, a substance which
causes hypertension. The book summarizing all this work was also translated into English.48 Braun was invited to give the May 1942 Hersztein
lectures sponsored by the University of California and Stanford; he
embarked on a lecture tour delivering 15 lectures in the course of a month
and a half in the West Coast, the Midwest, and the East.49
As a result of continuous unrest in Argentine universities, in February
1945 President Farrell sought to bring some calm and quietly reinstated
the professors dismissed by his predecessor.50 On the occasion of Lewis’s
reincorporation to his chair in Rosario, he proclaimed his conviction that
universities should not be “an organ of the state.”51 Against the backdrop
of the statist policies of the nationalistic military regime, Houssay and his
associates, notably Lewis and Braun, fostered the creation of a number of
research institutions supported by private local and international funding.52

47. Eduardo Braun Menéndez, Irvine Page, “Suggested Revision of Nomenclature–
Angiotensin,” Science 127, no. 3292 (January 31, 1958), 242. Nidia Basso and N. Terragno,
“History about the Discovery of the Renin-Angiotensin System,” Hypertension 38 (2001),
1246–1249.
48. Eduardo Braun–Menéndez, I. C. Fasciolo, L. F. Leloir et al. Renal Hypertension
(Springfield, Ill., 1946).
49. Besides several conferences in California, he lectured in Michigan, Western
Reserve University, Chicago, Columbia, the Rockefeller Institute, Harvard, and Yale.
Eduardo Braun Menéndez, Report to the School of his trip to the United States, April 17,
1942, file 18173, AFM.
50. [Edelmiro Farrell], Decree 3157-45, February 10, 1945, Boletín Oficial, February
20, 1945, 4.
51. Lewis, “La Universidad no debe callar.” Cf. Robert A. Lambert, “The Argentine
Declaration,” Science 101, no. 2629 (May 18, 1945), 502. Lewis was professor in Rosario and
substitute professor of physiology in Buenos Aires, which put him into a difficult position for
the School of Medicine in Rosario would not grant him leave to substitute Houssay when the
latter travelled abroad. “Informe de la Pro–Secretaría sobre la actuación docente del Prof.
Lewis en esta Facultad,” September 27, 1946, file 18173, AFM.
52. Miguel de Asúa, Una gloria silenciosa. Dos siglos de ciencia en la Argentina (Buenos
Aires, 2010), 199–201.

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FIGURE 3. Founders of Instituto de Biologia y Medicina Experimental. Front row,
from right to left: Juan T. Lewis, Bernardo Houssay, Oscar Orias (not mentioned
in this paper), and Eduardo Braun Menéndez. Courtesy of Dr. Damasia BecúVillalobos and IBYME, Institutional Communication Team.

The first and largest of them was the Institute of Biology and Experimental
Medicine (IBYME) in Buenos Aires, founded in 1944, into which Houssay’s group moved en masse53 (Figure 3). It was at that time that Braun
Menéndez, Lewis, and Durelli (see below) launched a campaign in favor of
the establishment of private universities on the basis of one or more
research institutes.
From April 1945 through December 1946, most of the editorials of the
journal of the Argentine Association for the Progress of Science (AAPC)—
created in 1933 under Houssay’s leadership—discussed the nature of universities, scientific research, and the importance of private institutes of sci53. “The Institute of Biology and Experimental Medicine at Buenos Aires,” Science 99,
no. 2575 (May 5, 1944), 360–361; Virgilio Foglia, “The History of Bernardo A. Houssay’s
Research Laboratory, Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental: The First Twenty
Years, 1944–1963,” Journal of History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 35, no. 4 (1980), 380–396.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

entific research.54 The notes were not signed, but their style suggests that
they were written by Lewis; Braun could also have had a hand in them. In
any case, they express the common concerns of the group to secure institutions of higher learning and research free from the encroachment of the
government. The title of Houssay’s March 1946 editorial “Science needs a
climate of freedom” aptly summarizes the opinions of the group.55
In a conference for the general public given on September 5, 1945,
Braun made explicit his vision of the future of university research in
Argentina; his model was Daniel Coit Gilman’s Johns Hopkins.56 He
admitted that private universities faced the risk of turning into mere professional schools for lack of financial support. The best way out of this was
to establish small scientific research centers analogous to those of the
Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, “institutes with complete freedom of
research and associated to teaching.”57 The recent creation of the IBYME
surely contributed to this idea. Universities should be “free,” which meant
“freedom from the intromission of the governments, the onslaught of politics, ideological violence, and sectarian narrowness.”58 Braun distinguished
the granting of academic diplomas from the granting of professional
degrees; he considered the latter an undeniable responsibility of the state.59
In September 1946, the inaugural year of Perón’s presidency (he had
accessed to power in June), Houssay was again relieved from his post with
the specious excuse of having reached retirement age.60 His disciples, among
them Braun Menéndez and Lewis, resigned in solidarity from their positions
in the University of Buenos Aires.61 By the end of 1946, about 1200 teachers
54. See Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, “Los primeros años de la AAPC (1933–1945),”
Ciencia e investigación 56, no. 2 (2004), 35–40.
55. Bernardo Houssay, “La ciencia necesita un ambiente de libertad,” Ciencia e Investigación 2, no. 3 (March 1946), 97–98.
56. Eduardo Braun Menéndez, Universidades no oficiales e institutos privados de investigación (Buenos Aires, 1945).
57. Braun Menéndez, Universidades no oficiales, 24.
58. Braun Menéndez, Universidades no oficiales, 16.
59. Braun Menéndez, Universidades no oficiales, 19.
60. “Plan progresivo de cesantías,” La Nación, October 3, 1946; “Respecto del límite de
edad para ejercer la cátedra universitaria,” La Nación, September 4, 1946; “Comunicóse al Dr.
Houssay que ha cesado en su cátedra,” La Prensa, September 7, 1946; “Universities of the
Argentine: Retirement of Prof. Bernardo A. Houssay, For. Mem R.S.,” Nature 158, no. 4021
(November 23, 1946), 739.
61. For Braun, see letter of resignation, Eduardo Braun Menéndez to Carlos Bergara,
September 7, 1946, file 18173, AFM. Cf. “Los alumnos del Dr. Houssay abstuviéronse de
asistir ayer a clases,” La Prensa, September 10, 1946; “Motivó protestas la cesantía del profesor
Bernardo A. Houssay,” La Nación, September 10, 1946. For Lewis, see Juan Lewis to Carlos

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had quit their university positions (around one third was dismissed and the
rest resigned).62 Just as the first dismissal of Houssay had resulted in the creation of the IBYME, this time an analogous institution was created in
Rosario by Lewis in 1948: the Institute for Medical Research.63
In November 1947, Congress approved a new legislation for the universities, which in the eyes of the opposition transformed them in something very much like state dependencies.64 The journal of the AAPC
answered with an editorial piece in all likelihood written by Lewis, which
rehearsed his ideas about the creation of “free universities” as “associations
devoted to the search and propagation of knowledge, supported and regulated by the state, but not subjected to the government;” they should be
supervised by the national academies.65 A second editorial note, probably
authored by Braun Menéndez, came back with the idea of creating free
universities on the basis of small institutes of scientific research which
should also provide post-graduate teaching and whose sole purpose should
be “the disinterested pursuit of truth.”66
Durelli
Augusto J. Durelli (1910–2000) was born in Buenos Aires to a family
of comfortable means—his father owned a building company (Figure 4).
He received his Degree of Engineer from the University of Buenos Aires
where he had been strongly involved in student politics. During the last
months of Gen. José F. Uriburu’s de facto rule and the first months of Gen.
Agustín P. Justo’s accession to the presidency (1931–32), Durelli was the
elected leader of the engineering students union, whose course he steered,
he says, under a “dictatorial government and university authorities servile
to that government.”67 In the police files he was identified as “a communist
Bergara, September 10, 1946, file 8044, AFM; “Renunció otro profesor solidarizándose con
el Dr. Bernardo Houssay,” La Prensa, September 13, 1946.
62. Pablo Buchbinder, Historia de las universidades argentinas (Buenos Aires, 2005),
149–150. See the list in Federación de agrupaciones para la defensa y progreso de la universidad democrática y autónoma, Avasallamiento de la universidad argentina (Buenos Aires, 1947).
63. Juan T. Lewis, “El Instituto de Investigaciones Médicas de Rosario,” Ciencia e
Investigación 5, no. 1 (January 1949), 1–2 and 37–39.
64. “Ley 13.031. Régimen universitario,” Boletín Oficial 55, no. 15905, November 4,
1947, 2–6.
65. “Las universidades libres,” Ciencia e Investigación 3, no. 1 (January 1947), 1–2.
66. “La iniciativa privada en los estudios superiores,” Ciencia e Investigación 3, no. 2
(February 1947), 45–46.
67. Augusto J. Durelli, Discursos al iniciar y dar término al período presidencial 1931–32
en el Centro de Estudiantes de Ingeniería (Buenos Aires, 1932), 5.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

FIGURE 4. Augusto J. Durelli. Courtesy of Cesar Sciammarella (personal archive).

and a professional agitator” although it is quite clear that he was a Catholic
student without party allegiances of any sort.68 After graduation he went to
Paris, where by 1936 he obtained a doctor’s degree in engineering from the
University of Paris and a second doctor’s degree in social and political sciences from the Institut Catholique.69 His return to Buenos Aires coincided
with Jacques Maritain’s visit to Argentina (August–September 1936),
which opened a cleft between integral Catholics and those who sided with
the French philosopher’s ideas of a democratic and pluralistic society
inspired by Christian values. The polemic, fueled by Maritain’s open
defense of the Jew people and his negative to ascribe to Franco’s side in the
Spanish Civil War, resulted in the publication of his articles in Sur, the liberal literary review directed by the woman of letters and socialite Victoria
Ocampo.70 Following the steps of his master, between 1936 and 1938
68. Augusto J. Durelli, Carta abierta al Sr. Decano de la Facultad de Ciencias Exactas,
Físicas y Naturales. Sobre el concepto de Patria (Buenos Aires, 1931), 3.
69. Both dissertations were published: Augusto J. Durelli, Contribution à l’étude du béton
traité. Essai photoelastique (Saint-Amand [Cher], 1936); Essai sur les “mentalités” contemporaines:
bourgeoisisme, capitalisme, nationalisme, christianisme, communisme, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1939).
70. For Maritain in Argentina, see Olivier Compagnon, Jacques Maritain et l’Amérique
du Sud (Villeneuve-d’Ascq, 2003), 109–136 and Zanca, Cristianos antifascistas, 37–109. For
the magazine, see John King, Sur. A Study of the Argentine Literary Journal (Cambridge, Engl.,
1986).

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Durelli published four articles in Sur, in the first of which he protested
against “the horrible ‘nationalist’ conception of Catholicism.”71 These articles brought upon him the accusation of publishing Catholic material in a
liberal magazine, levelled by one of the contributors to Criterio, the
Catholic cultural magazine whose editorial line, laid down by Msgr. Gustavo Franceschi, was openly on the side of Franco.72 This period in
Durelli’s life was closed by the publication of a critique of Fascism and
rightist nationalism.73
With the support of a Guggenheim fellowship, Durelli spent a year at
MIT (1941–1942), upon which he obtained a position as visiting professor
at Polytéchnique Montréal, where he remained until 1944. In that year, he
published his last book on Christian social philosophy, much influenced by
Emmanuel Mounier’s personalisme.74 He returned to Buenos Aires with his
wife and child during Gen. Farrell’s government. Reliving his years of student activism, Durelli authored a pamphlet denouncing the brutal police
repression of a students’ strike in October 1945 at his former school, which
had resulted in some casualties.75 Durelli’s remaining year in Argentina
was signed by his political anti-Peronist activism.76 By the beginning of
1946 he was exonerated from his position at the Laboratory for the Testing
of Materials of the Municipality of Buenos Aires, on account of his opposition to the government.77 By then he felt identified with the Catholic
Popular Party, the Argentine version of Luigi Sturzo’s Italian movement.78

71. Augusto J. Durelli, “La unidad entre los católicos,” Sur 8, no. 47 (August 1938),
72–80.
72. Héctor A. Llambías, “Límites de la libertad,” Criterio 11, no. 554 (October 13,
1938), 171–72; Augusto J. Durelli, “Toma de posición,” Criterio 11, no. 554 (October 13,
1938), 217–220. The editor, Gustavo Franceschi added two and a half pages of notes to
Durelli’s article, backing Llambías’s position, here 220–223.
73. Augusto J. Durelli, El nacionalismo frente al cristianismo (Buenos Aires, 1940).
74. Augusto J. Durelli, La libération de la liberté (Montreal, 1944). On Durelli’s personalist ideas, see Antonio Pavan, ed., Enciclopedia della persona nel XX secolo (Naples, 2009), s.v.
“Durelli, José Augusto” (article by J. Zanca).
75. Augusto J. Durelli, Forma y sentido de la resistencia universitaria de octubre de 1945
(Buenos Aires, 1945). See Robert A. Potash, El ejército y la política en la Argentina, 1928–1945
(Buenos Aires, 1985), 341–401.
76. One of his books became a small classic of anti-Peronist literature: Augusto J.
Durelli, La mochila del coronel (Buenos Aires, 1946).
77. Augusto J. Durelli, “La relación entre el estado y los empleados,” Orden Cristiano 5,
no. 105 (March 1946), 532–534.
78. Augusto J. Durelli, “Democracia y cristianismo,” Orden Cristiano 5, no. 103 (January 1946), 352–362. See Diego Mauro “I popolari en la Argentina. Luigi Sturzo y el antifascismo católico de entreguerras,” Anuario IEHS no. 29–30 (2011), 267–288.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

His adieu to Houssay, with whom he had kept strained relations, was of a
formal kind.79 Leaving his country for good, he obtained a position at the
Illinois Institute of Technology supported by the Armour Foundation. He
then moved to the Catholic University of America where he developed an
outstanding career in the area of stress and strain analysis, a field in which
he became a leading world expert.80
Around the mid-forties, Durelli published a number of articles in
Argentina, which he collected in two books, on technological and scientific
research and on the nature and goals of universities.81 Against was is the
case in “Hegelian” states, he envisages an ideal situation in which the state
favors research but room is left for the action of individuals.82 Durelli seconds Braun’s ideas for the creation of very small institutes with highly
qualified scientists financed by private philanthropy.83 His proposal is to
send 15 to 20 graduates to the United States to be trained so that they
could come back and establish a research institute in technology.84 Durelli
denounces Perón’s universities, in which the teachers are employees of the
state bureaucracy but he also argues against the traditional state monopoly
of higher education in Argentina. He propounds a plan for the creation of
private universities, one for each “spiritual family.”85 Granting of professional degrees should be carried out by each professional association and
the state should award a subsidy to each student, who could decide where
to enroll.86 When compared with Lewis and Braun’s proposal, Durelli’s
project, couched in the language of French personalist philosophy, strike as
more politically embittered and less in touch with local circumstances—
perhaps an expression of the author’s ambivalent sense of belonging.

79. Augusto Durelli to Bernardo Houssay, Chicago, July 10, 1946; Houssay to Durelli,
Buenos Aires, August 10, 1946, box 4, 08-6, ABH.
80. V. J. Parks, “Professor August J. Durelli: A Short Biography,” in idem, ed., Progress
in Experimental Mechanics. Durelli Anniversary Volume. Contributions in Honor of the SixtyFifth Birthday of Professor A. J. Durelli (Washington, D.C., 1975), ix–xi; see list of papers and
books xiii–xxvii; César A. Sciammarella, “Augusto J. Durelli,” Experimental Techniques 25 (4)
(July–August 2001), https://sem.org/Files/about/sem_history25_4.pdf; Patricio Laura,
“Augusto J. Durelli,” Anales de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales 39
(1987), 247–255.
81. Augusto J. Durelli, La investigación científico–técnica (Buenos Aires, 1945); Del universo de la universidad al universo del hombre (Buenos Aires, 1947).
82. Durelli, La investigación, 30–35.
83. Durelli, La investigación, 36–39.
84. Durelli, La investigación, 87–95.
85. Durelli, Universo del hombre, 50.
86. Durelli, Universo del hombre, 99–102.

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The Catholic Institute of Sciences
Braun’s Catholic Institute of Sciences (from now on ICC after its
name in Spanish) was inaugurated on June 9, 1953 in the presence of the
archbishop of Buenos Aires Msgr. Santiago L. Copello.87 It was a very
modest affair: a few classrooms in the facilities of the Catholic Institute of
Culture of Buenos Aires (ICCBA), then in charge of Father Luis Maria
Etcheverry Boneo.88 The ICC was conceived as one of the schools of the
ICCBA; there were also a Professorship of Religion and Morals, a School
of Social Sciences, a School of Philosophy, and a Higher School of Organ
Music. The whole constituted a blueprint of a future Catholic University.
Braun was accompanied in the board of directors by Venancio Deulofeu
(who had been dismissed in 1952 from his position as professor of organic
chemistry in the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences of the UBA) and
Emiliano MacDonagh, a nationalist Catholic naturalist who had been
director of the Museum of La Plata in the period 1946–49.89 Most of the
members and students in the ICC were opponents to Perón, to the point
that the Institute was surrounded by a “subversive climate.”90 Braun was
persuaded that the Institute should count with the best the country could
offer in terms of science and disregarding political allegiances had invited
to lecture the party-liner director of the National Institute of Endocrinology, Dr. Rodolfo Pasqualini.91 The objectives of the ICC were the establishment of laboratories, the organization of conferences and lecture series
by recognized experts in each field, and the teaching of courses for students
and young graduates. This structure of labs, research seminaries, and general courses was consistent with Braun’s project of founding a research university.92 It was hoped that the institute would be financially supported by
course fees and donations, either institutional or from individuals.

87. “Instituto Católico de Ciencias,” Ciencia e Investigación 9, no. 6 (June 1953), 278;
see also Criterio 25, no. 1190 (June 1953), 486.
88. That year, the ICCBA under the direction of Father Luis Etcheverry Boneo had
replaced the Courses of Catholic Culture. Etcheverry Boneo would play a role in the creation
of the Catholic University of Argentina. Cayetano Bruno, Vida y acción del Padre Luis María
Etcheverry Boneo (Buenos Aires, 1996), 43–47 and 65–69.
89. For MacDonagh, see Miguel de Asúa, “Science and Integral Catholicism.” For
Deulofeu, see Rosa M. de Lederkremer and Eduardo G. Gros, “Venancio Deulofeu, 1902–
1984,” Advances in Carbohydrate Chemistry and Biochemistry 46 (1988), 11–15.
90. Marcelino Cereijido, La nuca de Houssay (Buenos Aires, 1990), 41.
91. Other member of the ICC held less conciliatory positions. See Guillermo Jaim
Etcheverry, ed., Retratos. Eduardo Braun Menéndez (1903–1959) (Buenos Aires, 1989), 38–39.
92. Jaim Etcheverry “La concepción universitaria de Eduardo Braun Menéndez,”
Medicina 60 (2000), 149–154.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

Braun believed that it was absurd to affirm “a Catholic science as
opposed to non-confessional science. . . . Science cultivated in the Institute
should be like that which is cultivated in any authentic scientific institute”.
He explains that the Institute is called “Catholic” for it is supported by the
hierarchy and at least initially, financed by Catholics. Braun claimed that
“any deviation from the objective search for scientific truth” would lead to
“the denial of the scientific spirit, to the negation of the meaning of the
term ‘catholic’ which means universal, and to the negation of the spirit of
charity, which is the very essence of Christianity.”93 Many of those who
taught in the ICC were non-Catholics who had been forced to leave their
positions in the UBA due to political reasons.94 During its ephemeral existence, the ICC offered a large number of courses in all the fields of science
and even some of technology; the teachers were certainly the best available
in Buenos Aires. There was a concentration on biomedicine, biochemistry,
and physiology, but mathematics, physics, engineering, inorganic and
organic chemistry, agronomy, biology, and zoology, were also covered.95
The last courses were announced in September 1954; in 1955, with the
worsening of the relationships between Church and state, the ICC did not
offered courses.
The First Catholic Universities
Very soon after the fall of Perón, Braun was reinstated to his position
as associate professor of physiology.96 By then, he authored a series of editorial notes criticizing the massive number of students in the universities,
particularly in the School of Medicine of the UBA.97 In early December
1955, Braun participated in a meeting in the city of Tucumán convened
to discuss the future of universities in post-Peronist Argentina. He
defended that “free” universities could grant diplomas but should neither
habilitate (license) the exercise of the liberal professions nor receive funds
93. “El Instituto Católico de Ciencias,” Ciencia e Investigación 9, no. 9 (August 1953),
337–338.
94. Lila Caimari, Perón y la Iglesia Católica, 298, note 21.
95. Miguel de Asúa and Analía Busala, “Instituto Católico de Ciencias (1953–1954).
Más en la leyenda que en la historia,” Criterio 84, no. 2368 (2011), 40–44.
96. Nerio Rojas to Eduardo Braun Menéndez, October 24, 1955 and Braun Menéndez
to Nerio Rojas, October 26, 1955, file 18173, AFM.
97. Eduardo Braun Menéndez, “¿Se cumplen los fines de la universidad?, Ciencia e
investigación 11, no. 9 (September 1955), 385–387; idem, “Una facultad monstruosa,” Ciencia
e investigación 11, no. 12 (December 1955), 529–31. The deposed government had introduced
free admittance to higher education, which had increased enormously the number of university students.

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from the state.98 On December 23, president Gen. Pedro E. Aramburu
and his minister of education, the Catholic intellectual Atilio Dell’Oro
Maini, signed a decree that granted autonomy to the state universities, so
far under the control of the government; the resolution included a clause
(the much discussed “article 28”) that allowed the creation of private universities with the power of granting degrees habilitating the practicing of
professions such as medicine, law, and engineering.99 The initiative was
the beginning of a long battle over the issue between those who defended
the state’s exclusive control of higher education and the principles of
laicism (the student movement, the various strands of the left, liberal
politicians) and Catholics, who aspired to wrestle from the government
the right to establishing confessional schools.100 Braun sought a middle
ground, along the lines he had first expounded a decade ago: “I am an
advocate of the creation of private universities but I am talking of universities, not of professional schools.”101
In February 1956, the government named an advisory commission to
regulate article 28. The commission was headed by Houssay and included
Braun Menéndez and Lewis among a small number of prominent scientists.102 Lewis was established in Rosario, but he was eager to participate in
the commission; Houssay obliged keeping him abreast of the events.103 For
all practical purposes, the commission remained dormant, for Houssay was
not willing to sanction the creation of universities which could grant pro98. Comisión Organizadora, Jornadas Universitarias de Tucumán (San Miguel de
Tucumán, 1957), pp. 94–117, here 94 and 100.
99. “Organización de las universidades nacionales. Decreto Ley 6403,” Boletín Oficial,
January 3, 1956, 1–2; see Fernando Devoto, “Atilio Dell’Oro Maini,” Prismas. Revista de historia intelectual 9 (2005), 187–204. For “article 28,” see Virginia W. Leonard, Politicians,
Pupils, and Priests. Argentine Education since 1943 (New York, 1989), 177–186.
100. See Leonard, Politicians, Pupils, and Priests, pp. 189–218; Horacio Sanguinetti,
“Laica o libre. Los alborotos estudiantiles de 1958,” Todo es Historia no. 80 (January 1974),
8–23; José A. Zanca, Los intelectuales católicos y el fin de la cristiandad, 1955–1966 (Buenos
Aires, 2006), 85–135; Damian Nemirovsky, “Laica o libre: The 1958 university reforms and
the fight over the identity of the Argentine nation,” PhD diss., University of California at
Santa Barbara, 2015. For the role of the Communist Party, see Isidoro Gilbert, La Fede.
Alistándose para la revolución. La Federación Juvenil Comunista 1921–2005 (Buenos Aires,
2009), 368–370.
101. Eduardo Braun Menéndez, “Los títulos habilitantes y la universidad,” Ciencia e
investigación 12, no. 1 (January 1956), 1–4.
102. Ministerio de Educación y Justicia, Antecedentes sobre reglamentación legal de las
universidades privadas (Buenos Aires, 1958), 5–6; Leonard, Politicians, Pupils, and Priests,
202–204.
103. Juan Lewis to Bernardo Houssay, March 5, 1956; Houssay to Lewis, May 23,
1956 and May 26, 1956, box 4, 08-6, ABH.

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fessional degrees. Braun took every opportunity to defend his vision of
confessional research universities. He set himself against the projects of
those who planned to build up from a cluster of professional schools and
revitalized his old idea of setting up advance centers of research in which
“the teachers and intellectual creation should occupy the first place.”104 A
year later, he expounded again his compromise solution: neither the state
monopoly of higher education nor the creation of massive professional
schools that would pass as universities. At this time, he suggested the creation of technical state boards for the granting of professional titles, with
representatives from professional associations, the ministry of education,
and the scientific academies.105
In September 1956, Lewis resigned from his position as associate professor of physiology in Buenos Aires.106 One month later Braun was
designed full professor of physiology.107 In June of 1957 he lectured at the
University of Michigan in a symposium on renal hypertension.108 By then,
Durelli paid a visit to Buenos Aires, to teach a course on experimental elasticity in the School of Engineering of UBA.109 In November 18 of that year
Houssay renounced to the chair of the advisory commission, for he felt his
attributions were constrained.110 On April 1, 1958, the minister confirmed
him in his post.111 Two weeks later, the commission finally issued its pronouncement, which recommended that graduates of private universities in
the professional careers should take an exam administered by the state.112
The Catholic journal Criterio criticized this view as “Pharisaic,” for the state
lacked the competence to judge on university issues; the note claimed that
the licensing should be in the hands of each professional association.113
Arturo Frondizi took charge of the presidency of the country on May
1, 1958. For political reasons, he was determined to allow the creation of
104. Eduardo Braun Menéndez, “Las etapas para la creación de una universidad privada,” Ciencia e investigación 13, no. 3 (March 1957), 97–99.
105. Eduardo Braun Menéndez, “La ley universitaria,” Ciencia e investigación 14, no. 7
(July 1958), 289–290.
106. Juan Lewis to Nerio Rojas, September 15, 1956, file 8044, AFM.
107. Eduardo Braun Menéndez to Nerio Rojas, October 18, 1956, file 18173, AFM.
108. John M. Sheldon to Braun Menéndez, April 26, 1957, file 18173, AFM.
109. “Ingeniero Augusto J. Durelli. Su visita a nuestro país,” Ciencia y Técnica 124, no.
620 (July 1957), 234.
110. Ministerio de Educación y Justicia, Antecedentes, 15–16
111. Ministerio de Educación y Justicia, Antecedentes, 17–18.
112. Ministerio de Educación y Justicia, Antecedentes, 25–26.
113. “En torno al artículo 28,” Criterio 31, no. 1307 (May 8, 1958), 332.

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private, confessional universities and he succeeded, but the road was
harsh.114 In September of that year, the streets of Buenos Aires were the
scene of demonstrations, riots, and at times violent confrontations between
the supporters of private (i. e. Catholic) universities and those who wished
to continue with the usual way of things (i. e. the state holding the monopoly of university education). In a massive demonstration on September 19,
José L. Romero, former president of UBA in the months that followed the
fall of Perón and one of the leaders of the cause against the creation of confessional universities gave a speech. In three passages he referred with
indignation to “clerical” forces allied to the “oligarchy,” to “anti-Argentine”
interests, and to “reactionary” and “anti-popular” sectors of society.115
Risieri Frondizi, by then rector of the University of Buenos Aires and
brother of the president of the nation, talked of “dark forces,” of private
universities “ascribed to certain sects,” and of “the empire of dogmatism.”116 It is telling that in his speech he appropriated Braun’s rhetoric and
arguments. But it is quite clear that Braun’s position was not that of Risieri
Frondizi’s. In an article published in a liberal newspaper, Braun decried the
aspiration of many Catholic groups “to obtain the privilege of licensing
professional practice” but he also complained about “the anti-Catholic secularist campaign” and accused the authorities of the University of Buenos
Aires of participating in public demonstrations “which involved attacks on
freedom of teaching and on religion.”117 The day after this note was published, Braun departed for a tour that took him to Rome, Brussels, and
London.118 Parliament discussed the bill and in the teeth of bitter opposition passed the corresponding legislation in the last week of September,
which involved a modification of article 28 broadly along the lines of Braun
and Houssay’ ideas.119 An editorial article in Criterio by its director Father
(later Cardinal) Jorge M. Mejía exposed the deepest layers of the conflict.
The state monopoly of education, he claimed, turned it into a “church”
114. Leonard, Politicians, Pupils, and Priests, 202–218.
115. “El acto de la F.U.A. en Plaza del Congreso,” La Nación, September 20, 1958.
116. Risieri Frondizi, “La Enseñanza libre,” en FUBA, La Reforma Universitaria,
1918–1958 (Buenos Aires, 1959), 257–65.
117. “Del Dr. Braun Menéndez,” La Nación, September 7, 1958.
118. Eduardo Braun Menéndez to Florencio Escardó, October 20, 1958, file 18173,
AFM.
119. Congreso Nacional, Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de Diputados. Año 1958
(Buenos Aires, 1959), vol. 7, 5128–5139, 5178–5179, and 5342–5345; cf. Horacio C.
Domingorena, Artículo 28. Universidades privadas en la Argentina. Sus antecedentes (Buenos
Aires, 1959), 75–83. “Universidades. Ley 14.557,” Boletín Oficial, October 24, 1958, 1. The
law was approved by Congress on September 30 and promulgated by the president on October 17, 1958.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

which imposed its own dogmas upon the citizens. Those who were claiming for secular education did not mean a neutral attitude of the state with
respect to religion; they meant “a contempt of the religious phenomenon
as such and its overcoming by the power of ‘science.’”120
On January 12, 1959, Braun was received by the nuncio Msgr.
Umberto Mozzoni who wished to hear his opinions about the creation of
the Catholic university, which was already in operation. An account of that
interview has survived.121 Msgr. Mozzoni recognized that the Catholic
university had begun on the wrong foot and asked Braun whether he saw
any possibility of correcting its course. The intention of the former was to
ask Braun to organize an Institute for Basic Scientific Research and it
would seem he understood and even approved his idea of university. Braun
abandoned the residence of the nuncio in a hopeful mood, thinking that it
was “possible to obtain the ‘Great Change’ necessary” for things to
improve. His projects came to nil: a few days later, on January 16, Eduardo
Braun Menéndez died in a plane crash.
At that time, there had been a more or less open confrontation
between Dell’Oro Maini, the former minister responsible for the fateful
wording of article 28, and the Commission presided by Houssay, who felt
that a clean new legislation was needed.122 But it is evident that Dell’Oro
was not averse to implementing a system controlling the licensing of professional titles by the state.123 He as well as Braun Menéndez wished that
the Archdiocesan Catholic University could begin as a graduate school
with a focus on research.124 Things turned out otherwise. The Catholic
University of Argentina “Santa María de los Buenos Aires” was formally
established by the episcopate on March 7, 1958 (this should not be con120. Jorge M. Mejía, “Educación y libertad,” Criterio 31, no. 1316 (September 25,
1958), 683–687. Mejía’s take on this issue is better understood in the light of the role of scientific discourse in the secularization of education in late nineteenth-century. See Miguel de
Asúa, “Draper, the ‘Conflict Thesis,’ and Secularising Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century
Argentina,” Journal of Religious History 43, no. 3 (2019), 305–327.
121. Eduardo Braun Menéndez to Rafael Braun, January 16, 1959. A transcription of
Eduardo Braun’s letter to his son was generously given to me by the late Father Rafael Braun
in July 2011.
122. See Dell’Oro’s note of April 23, 1958 in Ministerio de Educación y Justicia,
Antecedentes, 27–31.
123. See his radial speech on March 2, 1956 in Ministerio de Educación y Justicia, La
Revolución Libertadora y la Universidad, 1955–1957 (Buenos Aires: Ministerio de Educación
y Justicia, 1957), 166–173.
124. Emilio F. Mignone, Política y Universidad. El estado legislador (Buenos Aires,
1998), 43–44.

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129

fused with the previous attempt at creating a Catholic University in the
second decade of the twentieth century).125 Its Higher Council (Consejo
Superior) had begun its meetings in that same month. Braun Menéndez
had been appointed to it but he refused the nomination.126 In the first preliminary meeting, Dell’Oro pointed out that “the episcopal documents are
quite clear that we should do science and that should be the starting point
of the schools”; implicitly referring to Braun, he also manifested the
importance of creating institutes for “there is a movement of persons
devoted to the sciences who have volunteered their collaboration.”127 On
April 11, the Higher Council decided to create two institutes, one of
Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering (more on this below) and another
of Biology; the direction of the latter would be offered to Braun Menéndez
by Msgr. Derisi, the rector of the university.128 There is not further reference to Braun in the proceedings.
Lewis’s house, situated in the neighborhood of Fisherton, Rosario,
had been the cradle of the Christian Democratic Party, which took form
in meetings held from July 8 through 10 in 1954, 14 months before the fall
of Perón. Lewis was member of the National Committee of the party for
the period 1956–1957 and the delegate from the province of Santa Fe to
the 1957 Constitutional Convention convened by the revolutionary government which had deposed Perón.129 He was involved in politics to the
point that by July 1959 he lamented he was not able to finish on time the
translation of Houssay’s speech for the International Congress of Physiology to be held in Buenos Aires that year, for he had been campaigning and
“visiting those little towns, to which you [Houssay] at one time referred
contemptuously.”130 Lewis died in 1976. In the homage the Senate of the
Nation paid him, one of the orators quoted him as affirming the “necessity
of political commitment of those devoted to science.”131

125. See bibliography in note 23.
126. Octavio M. Derisi, La Universidad Católica Argentina en el recuerdo: a los 25 años de
su fundación (Buenos Aires, 1983), 34.
127. Libro de Actas del Consejo Superior de UCA, fols. 3–4 (meeting of March 14, 1958).
Archive Universidad Católica Argentina, Buenos Aires (henceforward AUCA).
128. Libro de Actas, fol. 26 (meeting of April 11, 1958), AUCA.
129. Parera, Democracia Cristiana en la Argentina, 62–63 and 82–83; Ghirardi, La
Democracia Cristiana, 75–77 and 85.
130. Juan Lewis to Bernardo Houssay, July 15, 1959, box 4, 08-6, ABH.
131. José A. Allende, “Homenaje a Juan T. Lewis,” Diario de sesiones de la Cámara de
Senadores. Año 1975 (Buenos Aires, 1976), vol. 6, 3878–79.

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

A Final Word
Braun Menéndez became a high-profile personality in the post-Peronist polemics surrounding the creation of private confessional universities
before his tragic demise in 1959. By that time, Durelli was Professor in the
Department of Civil Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology; in
1961 he would become Professor of Civil Engineering and Head of Stress
Analysis Laboratories in the Catholic University of America.132 Lewis, the
senior of them all, lived in Rosario and was much engaged in the organization of the Christian Democratic Party. Despite the striking resemblance of
their views and their belonging to the same social, academic, and political
circles, these figures never attempted at the creation of an advocacy group;
they were individualist personalities who shared a Catholic identity, a scientific vocation, and an anti-Peronist position associated to a Christian liberal-democratic view of society. Did their ideas impinge on the creation of
the Catholic universities allowed by the 1958 legislation?
Engineering was the only area concerned with science and technology
in the first years of the Catholic University of Argentina. The distinguished
mathematician Agustín Durañona y Vedia, recently retired from the University of Buenos Aires and member of the Higher Council of UCA,
accepted to head the Institute of Mathematics, Physics, and Engineering.
This was the core of the School of Engineering which began teaching
courses in 1960; the plan foresaw sections of physics and mathematics,
applied mechanics, electricity, and engineering. The new school soon incorporated some bright young faculty, among them engineers Hilario Fernández Long (future president of the University of Buenos Aires, 1965–1966)
and Horacio C. Reggini.133 Trained in Columbia University’s Watson Scientific Computer Laboratory (1959), the latter organized UCA’s Computing Department, which in 1962 acquired an IBM 1620, the first large transistor computer in the country—as a result of which the university stood
briefly at the head of computer research in Argentina.134 Durelli was not
connected with these developments, which can be seen as part of the wave
of modernization that swept over the Argentine system of science and tech-

132. Parks, “Professor August J. Durelli,” ix.
133. The Institute of Mathematics, Physics and Engineering absorbed the Institute of
Applied Mechanics, of the Corporation of Catholic Engineers. Libro de Actas, fols. 26, 46,
and 68–69 (meetings of April 11, May 2, and May 23, 1958), AUCA; Luis A. Santaló,
“Agustín Durañona y Vedia,” Anales de la Academia Nacional de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y
Naturales 33 (1981), 315–17.
134. Nicolás Babini, La informática en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1991), 96–99.

MIGUEL DE ASÚA

131

nology between 1956 and 1966.135 In 1958, Emiliano MacDonagh, also a
member of UCA’s Higher Council, volunteered to organize an Institute of
Natural Sciences as a substitute of the failed Institute of Biology (see above);
the undertaking did not prosper for he died shortly after (1961).136
Briefly, there were institutional scientific and technological initiatives in
UCA, but the (in view of the circumstances perhaps utopic) projects of
Lewis, Durelli, and Braun Menéndez of founding an institution of higher
learning upon the basis of a number of advanced research centers did not
determine the design of the newly created Catholic universities, which for
reasons of expediency chose to set up soon a small number of professional
careers. 137 The issue of scientific research versus teaching was hotly debated
in the first crucial meetings of UCA’s Higher Council. As discussed above,
ideas akin to those of Lewis, Durelli, and Braun were forcefully defended by
Dell’Oro Maini and Durañona y Vedia, against the opposition of Faustino
J. Legón (the first dean of the Law School) and those who urged the immediate opening of the courses over the plan of first consolidating institutes of
scientific or scholarly research. In his memories, Msgr. Derisi recalled that
“There were those who wished to make of the university an advanced institute of pure research, but the majority of the council saw, in accord with the
declaration and intentions of the bishops, that the university should be first
a teaching institution without necessarily abandoning research.”138 Derisi’s
“teaching first” position triumphed but the creation of the Institute of Engineering (which in any case also became a professional school) suggests that
the “research first” position did not go entirely unheeded.139

135. Asúa, Gloria silenciosa, 243–251.
136. Libro de Actas, fol. 33 (meeting of April 18, 1958), AUCA.
137. The other large Catholic institution created in that period in Buenos Aires was the
Jesuit Universidad del Salvador (1959). See Julio R. Lascano, Los estudios superiores en la historia de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1981), 273–290. After 1958, there was a proliferation of
Catholic universities in Argentina (by 1962, seven of them had been created), with the result
of “watering down standards . . . they chose the path of least resistance and set up institutions
that offered courses in the humanities and social sciences, programs less costly than those in
physical sciences” (Leonard, Politicians, Pupils, and Priests, 259–260). See also Juan C. Del
Bello, Osvaldo Barsky and Graciela Giménez, La Universidad privada argentina (Buenos
Aires, 2007), 91–92 and 121–132.
138. Derisi, La Universidad Católica Argentina en el recuerdo, 35. Father Guillermo
Blanco (first dean of the School of Philosophy) and Canon Luis M. Etcheverry Boneo (in
charge of the Institute of Culture and Extension Courses) followed Msgr. Derisi’s position.
139. Libro de Actas, fols. 4, 8–10, and 12–13 (meetings of March 14 and 19, 1958),
AUCA. Besides the institutes of engineering and natural sciences, there were the Institute of
Culture and Extension Courses and the Institute of Linguistic and Literature, but these were
essentially geared to the teaching of courses. Other authors have already called attention to the

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ARGENTINE CATHOLIC DEMOCRATIC SCIENTISTS

Paradoxically, the message of Lewis, Durelli and Braun Menéndez
might have had broader repercussions ad extra, outside the Catholic world,
in the militantly secular circles that since the fall of Perón were becoming
strong in the universities and institutions of scientific research supported
by the state. Scientists with staunch anti-Catholic positions still respected
and admired Braun Menéndez for his ideas and his moral integrity.140
Since the battles of the late nineteenth-century over secularization,
science in Argentina had become a symbol and an instrument of the secularist ideology of progress, with anti-clerical resonances. The tide began to
turn with the “Catholic Renaissance” of the 1920s and the slightly earlier
coming onto the public scene of the first Catholic scientists: the naturalist
Ángel Gallardo and the astronomer Father (later Msgr.) Fortunato
Devoto.141 With their impeccable scientific credentials and their articulated projects of higher education, Lewis, Braun, and Durelli further confirmed the it was possible for Catholics to carry out sound science while
contributing to call into question the myth of science as a secular pursuit,
which was getting a new lease of life with the post-1955 secularist
onslaught against the creation of confessional universities.142

polemics between teaching and research in the origins of UCA. Emilio Mignone, a leading
and experienced Argentine Catholic authority on universities, affirmed: “Dell’Oro Maini as
well as other Catholic intellectuals and scientists of those times (among them the distinguished
physiologist Eduardo Braun Menéndez. . .) promoted the idea that the Catholic University
should begin as a graduate school, concentrating on research. . . . But the Catholic hierarchy
opted for Msgr. Derisi’s project oriented toward a massive, conventional, and tidy undergraduate education” (Mignone, Política y universidad, 43–44; I stumbled upon this quotation in Del
Bello et al., La universidad privada argentina, 91). For an institutional history of UCA, see Florencio Hubeñak, Historia de la Universidad Católica Argentina (Buenos Aires, 2016).
140. See the testimonies in Jaim Etcheverry, Retratos and Cereijido, La nuca de Houssay.
141. Miguel de Asúa, “Three Centuries of Scientific Culture and Catholicism in
Argentina: A Case Study of Long Trends,” in Bernard Lightman, ed., Rethinking History,
Science, and Religion: An Exploration of Conflict and the Complexity Principle (Pittsburgh,
2019), 37–49; idem, “Science, Catholicism, and Politics in Argentina, 1910–1935,” British
Journal for the History of Science 53 (2020) (in press).
142. The opposition to the creation of private confessional universities alienated
Catholics from liberals, socialists, and communists contributing to further dislocate in the
cultural sphere the unstable political alliance that had toppled Perón. For the “conflict thesis”
between science and religion, see Jeff Hardin, Ronald L. Numbers, and Ronald A. Binzley,
eds., The Warfare Between Science and Religion: The Idea That Wouldn’t Die (Baltimore, 2018).
For the historiography of this question in Argentina, see Miguel de Asúa, “The ‘Conflict
Thesis’ and Positivist History of Science. A View from the Periphery,” Zygon. Journal of Religion and Science 53, no. 4 (2018), 1131–48.

Book Reviews
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
Synodicon Hispanum XIII: Ager (Abadía), Barcelona, Lérida, Segorbe-Albarracín y
Urgell. By Francisco Cantelar Rodríguez, Antonio García y García (†), Luis
A. García Matamoro, Jaime Justo Fernández, and Benigno Marquès Sala.
(Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos. 2017. Pp.748. €37,50. ISBN 97884-220-1992-3.)
Until now never reviewed in the CHR, Synodicon Hispanum is a monumental
project of conciliar research conceived four decades ago by the unforgettable Father
Antonio García y García, O.F.M. († 2013; see obituary ante, 100 [Winter, 2014],
193–94). Having already produced seven volumes by 2000, he was forced by a malignant disease to leave the mangement of the ongoing series to his student and collaborator, Francisco Cantelar Rodriguez († 2019), followed recently by Jaime Justo
Fernández, both trained at the renowned Faculty of Canon Law of the Universidad
Pontificia de Salamanca. Whereas it is all but granted that medieval research projects
can be carried on smoothly over three generations, the unusual success in this case
is due to the farsighted organization of Father García and demonstrates the scientific suitability and importance of his project. The general purpose of the series is to
cover all provincial councils and diocesan synods celebrated between the Fourth
Lateran Council (1215) and the conclusion of the Council of Trent (1563) in the
more than fifty dioceses of Spain and Portugal. The editorial concept, meanwhile
solidly established and appreciated, consists in critical editions of the complete
textual output of the assemblies, examining the entire manuscript as well as the
printed tradition. This necessitates dealing with different materials from case to
case to be traced and investigated with research which proves extremely laborious
and tiring, but is occasionally rewarded by surprising discoveries (example below).
The individual texts are presented in a convenient layout with reasonably arranged
apparatuses for sources and textual variants. Short historic introductions comprising the bibliographical essentials make of the work a welcome up-to-date guide
through Iberian diocesan geography. Among the carefully compiled indices special
attention may be given to the „Índice temático“ leading to the flood of specific matters dealt with by the sinodal fathers, e.g., „barba‚“ „concubinato,“ „judíos,“ „limosnas,“ „supersticiónes,“ etc. Indeed the edited texts unfold a rich and colorful panorama of ecclesiastical regulation on the intermediate level between the universal
legislation of the papacy and the general councils on one side and the real world of
the priests and their flocks in the local parishes on the other who need guidelines
for a Christian life and against all kinds of perils and abuses. Maintaining the well
established format, the volume under review as the most recent one in the series
presents the councils and synods of the Catalan dioceses Barcelona, Lérida (Latin
133

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BOOK REVIEWS

Ilerda, Catalan Lleida), all suffragans of Tarragona, Albarracín/Segorbe (Valencia),
formerly suffragan of Zaragoza, plus the exempt Abbey of San Pedro de Ager
(thirty kilometers north of Lérida), which had episcopal prerogatives and therefore
could convoke synods for its territory. All in all the volume presents the documentation of eighty-two assemblies, mainly from Barcelona (27) and Lérida (25) (see
table of distribution at p. XIII). As a striking example of the surprising findings
may be mentioned a list (pp. 624–34) of no less than 1,500 clerics of the diocese of
Urgell, each identified by name and location, who in 1542 had been required by
their bishop, Francisco de Urríes, to buy a recently printed breviary. Strangely
enough a thorough search by the editors could not discover a single surviving copy
of this book; however: „Quizá en ninguna diócesis exista para este tiempo una guía
ecclesiástica tan completa de pueblos y de clérigos“ (p. XIV). Two further volumes
covering the dioceses of Aragón and the rest of Catalonia and Mallorca are promised to be published shortly. The international community will be grateful that the
editors managed to resist presumable pressure to publish in the Catalan language
allowing scholars all over the world to appreciate this important achievement for
conciliar research.
Hamburg

MARTIN BERTRAM

Connected Struggles: Catholics, Nationalists, and Transnational Relations between
Mexico and Quebec, 1917–1945. By Maurice Demers. (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2014. Pp. xii, 290. $100.00. ISBN 978-0773-543560.)
Connected Struggles is about Québécois nationalists and their relations with
Mexican Catholics during the decade of the 1940s. From the outset, Demers plays
with the unlikely pairing these two groups might seem to make. They found themselves at opposite ends of a North American cultural and geographical expanse, but
found affinity and forged friendship against the backdrop of the fall of France to
Nazi Germany and the “neo-colonial” powerhouses of Great Britain and the
United States of America.
The author sets out a historical context that ranges broadly, signaling out the
importance of social revolution and religious rebellion in Mexico during the 1920s
and 1930s, as well as the often tense and uncomfortable relationship between
Anglophone Canada and its Francophone minority. This makes for a challenging
and complex argument that spends equal time examining the internal politics of
two sovereign nations and international relations as imagined, constructed, and
played out between subaltern groups within each country.
These histories are connected on several levels. First of all, as a study of international relations it consciously shifts the focus from government to organized
groups in civil society that crafted policies at the margins of the state with an eye
toward the advancement of their own political interests. Demers characterizes
French Canadians as Catholics in a nation where Protestant faith and English language were hegemonic in state and society. Similarly, Mexican Catholics were sub-

BOOK REVIEWS

135

ject to, or subjects of, a post-revolutionary state that was actively, at times radically,
anticlerical in its politics. These two groups built an unlikely friendship and alliance
in the 1940s with the dual objective of achieving greater influence at home and
channels of cultural diplomacy that might strengthen each one.
Chapters 1 and 2 cover the general history of each country during the generation leading up to World War II. This background is crucial because most readers
will be familiar with only one national history. The two chapters do a good job of
laying out the key moments and figures, as well as a basic historiography for each
side. The following three chapters tell separate but intertwined stories about how
the two groups forged international bonds of friendship and political alliance with
the goal of strengthening their lot domestically. Chapter 3 covers the Union des
Latins d’Amérique as it developed a Pan-American Hispanism that relied on
Roman Catholic identity and the general idea of a Latin tradition. Latinité might
appeal to Quebec and Mexico as a shared “civilization” distinct from and opposite
to Anglo-Saxon culture. Chapter 4 tells the story of student exchanges that brought
Canadians, particularly young women, to visit Mexico City and its national university, as well as some Mexicans to visit Montreal between 1943 and 1945. Chapter
5 is about the 1945 crowning of Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe as patron saint of
the Americas. Canadian Catholics sent a large diplomatic delegation to the jubilee,
and the week-long event played out as a test of the relations of good faith between
the Catholic Church and Mexico’s post-revolutionary state.
All these events are meant to tell a more general story about the construction
of the modern public sphere in secular society. They show political minorities in
both nations as they attempt to practice citizenship in an expanding public sphere.
Demers sees them as “stakeholders” who actively play diverse roles in civil society
through the lens of identity politics, be it Canadian Franco-Nationalism or Mexican Catholicism. The concept of stakeholder is insufficiently parsed and problemetized. However, it serves Demers as a primary organizing concept to explain the
faces of modern citizenship across two nations, languages, and cultures. It also provides a way of explaining the affinities between these groups as they built bridges
of friendship and informal channels of diplomacy across the continent during the
Second World War.
Arizona State University (Emerita)

ROBERT CURLEY

Liberty in the Things of God: The Christian Origins of Religious Freedom. By Robert
Louis Wilken. (New Haven: Yale University Press. 2019. Pp. x, 236. $26.00
hardcover. ISBN 978-0-300-22663-8.)
Wilken begins, “Religious freedom rests on a simple truth: religious faith is an
inward disposition of the mind and heart and for that reason cannot be coerced by
external force” (p. 1). His sweeping survey chronicles the history of religious liberty
in the West, from its geneses to Thomas Jefferson.
Wilken finds the origins of religious liberty in patristic authors such as Lactantius and Tertullian, who coined the term libertas religionis. While other scholars

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BOOK REVIEWS

have also noted the importance of Tertullian, Wilken underscores Tertullian’s
emphasis upon communal practice and not simply private belief. Wilken also warns
against reading modern political notions of “natural right” into Tertullian’s language of naturalis potestas, which merely entailed the innate power of choice (p. 14).
After the Constantinian turn, the patristic emphases were largely muted. It was one
thing to call upon religious liberty while enduring persecution, “quite another when
holding the reigns of power” (p. 24).
With chapter three, Wilken moves into the Reformation. He tells the fascinating story of the Sisters of St. Clare in Nuremberg, who contended for their
“spiritual freedom.” When they insisted that they could do nothing “against the
faith, against reason, or against our conscience,” they sounded similar to Luther’s
plea at the Diet of Worms in 1521. Also in Nuremberg, a small band of Anabaptist
brethren tested Martin Luther’s dictum that “faith is a free act, to which no one can
be forced” (p. 57). The Lutheran theologian Andreas Osiander countered that the
authorities could not rule the heart, but they could still regulate public expressions
of belief (p. 60).
The fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters focus upon Switzerland, France, and the
Netherlands. The Swiss Reformers spoke the language of individual conscience, yet
expected everyone to fall in line. An intrinsic tension naturally resulted (p. 71). In
Calvin’s Geneva, matters came to a head with the execution of Miguel Servetus. In
France, the Huguenots made up 10% of the population by 1560. French society
was on a church-state collision course, crashing into the St. Bartholomew Day’s
massacre (1572), followed by the brief reprieve embodied in the Edict of Nantes
(1598).
Chapters seven and eight examine the quest for religious freedom in England.
In the decades following the Act of Supremacy (1534), both Catholics and Protestants appealed to freedom of conscience, because religious bloodshed was not a
one-sided affair. Progressing into the seventeenth century, Wilken highlights the
distinctive work of the early English Separatists and Baptists, especially Thomas
Helwys, Leonard Busher, and John Murton. Their views of religious liberty intertwined with their ecclesiology, which emphasized voluntarily covenanted “gathered
fellowships of true believers” (p. 140). In the colonies, Roger Williams temporarily
attached himself to the Baptists and wrote The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution against
John Cotton. Wilken interprets the conflict between Williams and Cotton as
caused by the two leaders seizing different aspects of Calvin’s thought (p. 146).
The closing chapters investigate the roles of John Owen, William Penn, and
John Locke. In his conclusion, Wilken acknowledges, “Of the many persons who
make an appearance in this book, as I looked back, one who stands out is Thomas
Helwys, the English Baptist” (p. 180). Other defenders of religious toleration
(including John Locke) were not willing to grant full religious liberty to all, especially to Roman Catholics. Such leaders “had set limits on how far toleration could
be extended” (p. 181). On the other hand, Helwys (followed by Roger Williams in
the New World) proclaimed a religious liberty for all, including “Turks” (Muslims).

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137

Wilken is an erudite intellectual and a masterful narrator, combining a scholarly rigor with a readable style. Those who are familiar with his patristic scholarship alone may be surprised how facilely he strolls through the medieval and
modern terrains. He does stumble slightly on page 137, declaring that “Smyth and
Helwys drifted apart as Smyth developed ties with the Anabaptists and took the
radical step of rebaptizing himself” (p. 137). In reality, Smyth had already baptized himself and had also baptized Helwys, and he later came to question this sebaptism (self-baptism), thus submitting himself to the Dutch Anabaptists to be
baptized by them. Helwys and his followers refused to be baptized by the Anabaptists and returned to England.
Observant readers of Wilken’s provocative work will note several takeaway
lessons. Wilken contrasts religious liberty and religious toleration. He opposes the
notion that religious freedom is a gift from the Enlightenment. He also emphasizes
that religious liberty is not merely a matter of private belief, but the freedom to
worship corporately and to live faithfully in the public square. Wilken successfully
argues all three cases.
As a corollary, Wilken elucidates a connection between religious liberty and
ecclesiology. He describes a growing trend in early modernity toward viewing
churches as “voluntary associations” with shared confessions of faith. “The idea that
churches are voluntary associations had far-reaching implications for religious freedom: it explicitly recognized that there could be several churches within a Christian
society, each with its distinctive presence” (pp. 176–77). One senses an implicit
tension between this “voluntary” ecclesiology and the practice of paedobaptism, an
issue that Wilken touches upon only briefly (pp. 37–38, 182).
Finally, the volume also highlights the importance of a principled support for
religious liberty applicable in a universal manner. Many groups who defended religious freedom shouted from the penalty box, but once they skated back into the
game, they disregarded their previous objections. The plea for religious liberty is
often the cry of the underdog. Becoming the leader of the pack tends to manifest
whether one’s desire for religious liberty was a lasting love or a temporary infatuation. Leaders had to learn the language of religious freedom as a “natural right.”
“With the introduction of natural right, the winding path of Christian thinking on
religious freedom begins to straighten” (p. 110).
PAUL HARTOG

Faith Baptist Theological Seminary

ANCIENT
Monastic Education in Late Antiquity: The Transformation of Classical ‘Paideia.’
Edited by Lillian Larsen and Samuel Rubenson. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 2018. Pp. x, 399.)
One of the marks of the lasting success of Athanasius of Alexandria is that he
created an impression that the early monks of Egypt—specifically, Anthony the

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Great—were unlettered and unlearned, experts in the warfare against demons and
heretics, but innocent of rhetoric and philosophy. Athanasius’ romantic hagiography, The Life of Anthony, has enjoyed centuries of readers as a testimony to his art—
including the monastic aspirant Augustine of Hippo. Generations of undergraduates in the modern world have enjoyed the colorful tale of Anthony’s rejection of
parental wealth and fraternal duty to his sister to undertake his prophetically
inspired exodus into the “desert” of northern Egypt, even as numerous scholars
have tried to demolish the historicity of Athanasius’ portrait.
One of the two editors of this volume, Samuel Rubenson, has dedicated much
of his scholarly career to rebutting the impression created by Athanasius’ biography. Initially, his study of Anthony’s letters dispelled the myth that their author
was illiterate and unacquainted with philosophy, and Rubenson’s description of the
system of education in late ancient Egypt, to which both Origen and Anthony were
witnesses and of which they were products, confirms his reinterpretation. Anthony
was neither unlettered nor unschooled, the romantic Copt of Athanasius’ imagination and the example of piety to counteract the older and more independent urban
asceticism he tried to rein in. Rather, he was one in a line of Christian ascetics who
were highly literate, and who attracted followers who were similarly equipped—
students of his thought as much as of his way of life. The co-editor, Lillian Larsen,
has examined the genres of late ancient education to show how they persisted in
monastic texts, reproducing the form and substance of their Hellenic—that is to
say, pagan and urban—origins in a Christian, allegedly rural culture.
Athanasius was not alone in his idealization, however. Jerome’s Life of Paul the
Hermit, imagined a predecessor to Anthony, but one who shared in his rejection of
books. The Historia Monachorum in Aegypto downplayed monastic learning to
emphasize the Egyptian monks’ role as champions of the poor Egyptian villagers
near whom they lived, and the Apophthegmata Patrum, purporting to be an accurate
record of the sayings of the early monks or “fathers” of the idealized Egyptian
countryside, also rejected learning, and made examples of those Christians who had
arrived in the desert to pursue the monastic life with too much of that learning. For
learning signified urbanity and, in the minds of these authors, contradicted the holy
simplicity required of monks—the ground on which they could display their power
over the forces of Satan and the enemies of Christ and the Church. This frequently
repeated portrayal of monks as liminal beings, outside the power structure of a later
Roman empire that depended upon learned men, enjoyed a long afterlife in the
works of numerous scholars, from Henri Marrou to Peter Brown, who brought an
anthropological framework to the texts he largely took at their word.
The project exemplified in this book moves in the other direction—it reinserts
monastic literature into the educational system of late antiquity. This system rarely
drew Christian criticism, because, first, Christian authors used the language and
reasoning of their adversaries in their own apologetic responses; and, once installed
with legitimacy in imperial offices, they moved among literate men with whom
they had to communicate as equals or superiors.

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The book focuses upon Greek paideia in Egypt, and its investigations move
among the various genres that testify to the ascetic life: documentary texts, ostraca
and papyri, ancient translations, and literary texts. Its contributors limit their investigations to Egypt, which country has yielded the widest variety of monastic texts.
It is divided into five parts: “The Language of Education,” including the contemporary, late-ancient understanding of monasticism; “Elementary Education and
Literacy,” which examines methods and content in various literary forms; “Grammar and Rhetoric,” covering the more philosophical monastic authors Didymus,
Evagrius, and Rufus of Shotep; “Philosophy,” comparing monastic authors with
their philosophical predecessors, of whom they were aware; and “Manuscript and
Literary Production,” on the evidence for monastic institutions as generative of
libraries, from the fifth to the seventh centuries.
Immensely useful in its documentation of monastic literacy and its results—
philosophy, on the one hand, and book production on the other, this book invites
further studies: how are the developments traced here related to monastic institutions and self-portrayal in other areas such as Syria, Palestine, and Asia Minor?
How did later generations carry the habits acquired in Egypt into major urban areas
like Constantinople or Antioch? And finally, monks in the western provinces of
Italy, Gaul, and North Africa regarded themselves as descendants of Egyptian
monastic pioneers, but did their patterns of education and book production derive
from their Egyptian forebears’? Now that the older pattern of interpretation has
been replaced, similar work will need to be undertaken to re-examine these men
and women who, in their ascetic lives, claimed to be heirs of the Egyptian monks.
The Catholic University of America

ROBIN DARLING YOUNG

In the Eye of the Animal: Zoological Imagination in Ancient Christianity. By Patricia
Cox Miller. [Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion.] (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press. 2018. Pp. viii, 271. $79.95. ISBN 978-0812-5035-0.)
A conundrum both lies at the heart of, and drives the analyses in, this book.
The author identifies that conundrum in the preface: “while there is no doubt that
ancient Christian theology was aligned with Western philosophy’s ratification of
the boundary between human and animal and the positioning of the human as
superior to the animal, there is also the curious fact that, again and again, ancient
Christian texts think both about and with animals, especially in terms of their emotional, ethical, psychological and behavioral continuities with human beings.”
Readers of early Christian theology know that most of its pages reflect the
rhetorically-driven controversies reflecting philosophical problems that quickly
rocketed from the problematic to the destructively divisive: how could one and
three be configured as the same (Trinity); a divine-human metamorphosis achieve
stable distribution (Christology); or a vast, differentiated and self-contradictory
book be corralled into a repository of stable and self-consistent meaning (biblical

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exegesis) suitable for preaching or rational reflection? The mixed success of the
third project would always compromise the success of the first two, because they
required consistent testimony not to be found in the Bible.
On the other hand, there were theological discourses in early Christianity
that allowed both for variety and extravagant self-contradiction—for instance, the
elaboration of the afterlife, the related question of angelic or demonic populations,
or the unregulated production and expression of the cult of the saints. Thinking
about animals belongs in this second category. Early Christians appropriated the
library of Greek and Latin works about the lives and significance of animals, and
they had many scriptural passages that allowed for symbolic or literal interpretation. In addition, they had their own experience of living with all kinds of animals
in much closer quarters than their modern interpreters. They remained curious
about the creatures with whom human beings shared the world; sometimes, as in
the case of ascetic practitioners, they were said to have returned to Edenic harmony with those creatures.
This book explores, in five chapters, early Christian curiosity, investigation,
and metaphorical interpretation of animals. The first chapter introduces the book
by discussing “figuration,” and how birds figure as metaphors of human states. The
second, on zoomorphism, explores “anthropocentrism and its discontents.” The
early Christian concentration on the human being and its woes led them often to
make invidious comparisons between humans and animals, projecting onto animals
the worst qualities of the human. The third chapter, “anthropomorphism,” shows
how early Christian authors drew animals close, to become the measure of human
goodness or its opposite. The fourth and fifth study, respectively, the way in which
animals become companions for ascetics, at least in the imagination of their chroniclers; and insects, worms, flies, and other tiny animals feature in the reflections of
early Christian authors.
No summary of this book’s rich chapters can do justice to the complex and
polyphonic reflections on the human-animal divide that the author elegantly has
assembled for this book. Not only has she explored the perplexity of ancient Christian writers in the face of the host of animals with whom they shared the world. It
would be enough to have decentered the topics in which their works more typically
feature. But Professor Cox Miller has gone far beyond that; she has put ancient
authors in a dialogue with modern authors, also perplexed at their interactions with
animals. Because each perspective is not only similar (human) but different—in the
wake of eighteenth-century legislation against cruelty to animals—ancient and
modern authors illumine each other’s reflections. They do not cease to share, however, a wonder at how they, human beings, look “in the eye of the animal” that
uncannily looks back.
The Catholic University of America

ROBIN DARLING YOUNG

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141

Magie im antiken Christentum. Eine Studie zur Alten Kirche und ihrem Umfeld. By
Marco Frenschkowski. [Standorte in Antike und Christentum, Band 7.]
(Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann Verlag. 2016. Pp. xiv, 338. €88.00 paperback.
ISBN 978-3-7772-1602-7.)
The book under review is a fine, rather comprehensive, and very useful contribution to an adequate understanding of magic in the days of ancient Christianity.
Marco Frenschkowski, situated in Leipzig at the Institut für neutestamentliche
Wissenschaft, is a scholar with an astoundingly broad knowledge in diverse fields
of religious and cultural studies, of fantastic and arcane literature, and of the phenomenon “magic.” Consequently, he was predestinated to write a handbook-like
survey of magic in the first centuries of Christianity that involves inter-religious,
non-Christian, and even modern approaches alike. The monograph is mainly based
on a general encyclopedia article (“Magie,” in Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, 23 [2010], 857–957), the profile of which Frenschkowski enhanced according
to the focus on ancient Christianity for the present book. Repeatedly, he asserts his
lack of understanding for scholars who were and still are not fascinated by ancient
magical texts and to this day have prejudices against that sort of literature. Besides,
he underlines his penchant for the “classic” and thus, “older” literature in that field
of research (see p. xiii and often elsewhere), something that motivated and attracted
him to plunge deeper into that field of research.
All in all, the book is divided into nine main chapters of rather uneven page
lengths, starting with a discussion of abstract terms, concepts, and general methodical issues (chapter I) and a history of concepts and basic approaches to developing
a theory of magic (chapter II). The thematic main body consists of chapters III to
VI with clear focusses on (a) a survey of magic in Greek and Roman antiquity and
(b) magic in the New Testament and in early Christianity (integrating Christian
writers and special and/or splinter groups as well), with an aside to ancient Near
Eastern, Old Testament, and Jewish traditions of magic. The final three main
chapters just occupy a few pages and are specialized on the legal history in the Constantinian and post-Constantinian period or provide very short reflections on the
relations between ancient and modern concepts of magic and on the attitude of the
Ancient Church toward magic. An appendix contains three interesting ancient
texts (by Theocritus, Pliny, and Proclos) whose inclusion, however, appears arbitrary. A selective bibliography and two useful indices of modern authors and
names/subjects help readers to navigate through the book and swiftly find essential
pieces of information.
Although, experts in ancient magic and associated areas of research will not
find much new in this book and regret that in principle Frenschkowski refrains
from phrasing his own definitions and drawing critical conclusions from the plentitude of information, other scholars, post-graduates and people with a certain
interest, will certainly profit from the richness, the rather comprehensive and
always reliable survey of magic in ancient Christianity, which itself is embedded
into Greek and Roman culture and interrelated with Jewish and other traditions by

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the author. Marco Frenschkowski is to be thanked and congratulated for this fine
presentation of a topic that still is a victim of ideologies and prejudgments. As a
matter of course, informed or even just interested readers will certainly find it hard
to stop reading due to the fascinating topic and the fluent and attractive style in
which the German text is written.
THOMAS J. KRAUS

University of Zürich

MEDIEVAL
Her Father’s Daughter: Gender, Power, and Religion in the Early Spanish Kingdoms.
By Lucy K. Pick. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 2017. Pp. xvi, 274.
$65.00. ISBN 978-1-5017-1432.0.)
With the publication of Her Father’s Daughter, scholars of history and of religion can no longer ignore the crucial role of royal women in shaping the political
worlds of the Middle Ages. In her study of the formation of the Christian realms
of northern Iberia, Lucy Pick joins a growing group of scholars rethinking the
notion that any medieval woman with power—and particularly political authority—was “exceptional.” Pick has mastered a significant historiography pertaining to
medieval gender, monarchy, and religion, and a chastening array of feminist and
cultural theory to reinterpret the roles of some inarguably powerful women. Religious roles were their sources of power as women participated in political systems
and kinship networks.
In 1071, Urraca Fernández, the oldest child of Fernando I and Sancha of
León re-founded the see of Túy, which had suffered Viking depredations. Why
and how did Urraca, a consecrated virgin, have the power and authority to accomplish this? Urraca’s action, recorded in an extraordinary charter, serves as a touchstone in Pick’s study about the gendered features of political and religious power
and authority in tenth and eleventh-century Iberia. Four lengthy chapters, as well
as an introduction and epilogue make a strong case. Pick begins by examining
matrilineal inheritance and the inheritance principles of Visigothic law. Royal
daughters were reserved for the help and status they could supply their male relatives. These consecrated virgins were neither nuns nor abbesses: neither cloistered
nor poor, they moved freely and effectively in the political world, controlling
numerous monastic communities.
Women’s appearances in tenth- and eleventh-century charters prove their significant networks. Pick walks the reader through the structure and meaning of
these remarkable charters: the protocols, the invocations, the probable singing and
performance of these texts—and the networks revealed by the confirmants and witnesses, providing a veritable clinic in how to read a charter. A brilliant reading of
Urraca Fernández’s 1071 charter restoring the see of Túy demonstrates its
extremely special relationship to liturgy, to performance, and to Christian texts
such as Paul Albar’s carmina. The charter expressed Urraca’s power within her
family and within Galicia, where she controlled significant property. Urraca and

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her sister Elvira exercised their spiritual power as women, collaborated with their
brother, Alfonso VI of León-Castilla, and built the networks which they carefully
displayed and exploited, and they were not alone. Elite women such as Elvira
Ramírez, Abbess Guntroda Gutiérrez, and Countess Muniadomna prefigure the
activity of Urraca and Elvira, even a century and a half earlier (p. 123), as they competed over the relics of the virgin martyr Pelayo and the introduction of and control
of his cult in northwestern Iberia.
Finally, “Gift-giving and memory” were “always allied to power” (p. 19).
Pick’s fluent engagement with material culture is couched in a sophisticated analysis of scholarship on the medieval gift and counter-gift. Royal daughters were “at
the nexus of memory, gift, and death” (p. 175), as a kind of gift themselves, but also
charged with giving, preserving memory, and caring for the dead. In possibly the
most enjoyable section of the book, Pick carefully reads a variety of artifacts, from
the bronze candelabra of Abbess Mathilda of Essen to the reliquary of Saints
Adrian and Natalia, now at the Art Institute of Chicago, which Pick persuasively
identifies as Urraca’s gift to Eslonza (pp. 186–188.) The theme of virginity is pursued as an analytical tool—these reliquary boxes and other containers physically
represented donors’ virginity. Similar claims are developed throughout the book:
from Ambrose, to Leander, to Urraca’s charter, to the foundation of San Martiño
de Pazó, the aula regis puderis, the “royal hall of chastity” repeatedly frames and
articulates the connection between virginity, gender, and royalty (pp. 64, 85, 111,
142). Other cultural artifacts under examination include cloth goods, prayer books,
and above all Urraca’s famous and controversial chalice. Chalices and their representations featured prominently in women’s donations: as containers, but also a way
for women to interject themselves in the Mass (p. 204). Pick understands donors
as operating in a realm of penitence and memorialization, and urges us to take the
language of penance and confession seriously (p. 221).
Power derived from multiple factors and was deployed through networks. Perhaps Pick’s most significant claim regarding how the entire monarchy functioned
is that it was “a system in which powerful women’s relationships with each other
changed history” (p. 104). Pick invites us to look with a fresh eye at charters, donations, chronicles, liturgies, architectural detail, and so on, understanding how
gender operated in the milieu that produced them. Truly engaging gender as a category of analysis not only shifts perspectives but helps us make better sense of old
truths. One of the book’s great strengths is the comparative nature of Pick’s
research across time and place. She concludes with an invitation to think comparatively, suggesting fruitful work to be done in the study of English, French, and
Imperial worlds as well as later realms of Castilla-León.
Ohio University

MIRIAM SHADIS

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Political Society in Later Medieval England: A Festschrift for Christine Carpenter.
Edited by Benjamin Thompson and John Watts. Rochester (NY: The Boydell
Press, an imprint of Boydell & Brewer. 2015. Pp. 280. $99.00. ISBN 978-17832-7030-9.)
The theme taken for this collection is one which has been central to the
honorand’s work over the years, broadly defined here as the interface between the
state and the upper levels of society: primarily, but not quite exclusively, taken to
mean the landed nobility and gentry. This, as the introduction by John Watts
spells out, locates her within what has been regarded by late medievalists as the
apostolic succession from K. B. McFarlane to Gerald Harriss, to her, and now to
her students. It is a theme which, especially if interpreted more generally as the
relationship of center to locality (or of private to public), can embrace a wide
range of manifestations, and the eleven essays, with a couple of exceptions, possess an underlying unity of purpose not always attained by Festschriften. The
chronological range is broadly from Henry III to the early Tudors, although one
of the outliers (by Jenny Wormald) takes as its starting point the death of the
Scottish fifth earl of Huntley in 1576. This apart, the emphasis is firmly on England. Tony Moore explores how gentry and free tenants came to look to the royal
courts, rather than county courts, in the first part of the thirteenth century and
the impact this had on the development of the common law. At the other end of
the period, John Watts’s paper “‘New Men,’ ‘New Learning,’ and ‘New Monarchy’” (all three elements are thus problematized), fruitfully and pragmatically
revisits the questions contested now for well over a century about their chronology and inter-connection. Medieval law, which is a strand within several of
papers, is foregrounded in the paper by Ted Powell on the legal position of the
duchy of Lancaster which discusses its shifting public/private status across the
fifteenth century and its implications.
Andrew Spencer takes as his subject the royal coronation oath and in particular the implications of the requirement that the king should uphold the laws that
the community of the realm shall have chosen as this played out across the later
Middle Ages. The clause was deployed both by kings and their critics, and royal
critics are also the focus of Theron Westervelt’s paper on manifestos for rebellion,
although this covers more well-trodden ground. The relationship of medieval kings
with their subjects is developed in two other papers, each largely confined to a
single reign but offering interesting cross-references. Caroline Burt considers local
government in Warwickshire and Worcestershire in the reign of Edward II, offering a study of the connections (or, increasingly, the lack of them) between king,
magnates, and local gentry. A different (but complementary) emphasis is provided
by Richard Partington’s study of noble service to Edward III, which stresses the
extent to which the leading aristocracy should be seen as hard-working servants of
the Crown rather than as the recipients of (unearned) royal favor to “buy” their support. The stated ability of Edward III (along with Edward I and Henry V) to command this level of service here becomes a tacit condemnation of all the other latemedieval kings, although this is not developed.

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Two papers turn to ecclesiastical issues. Andrea Ruddick deploys the published fifteenth-century letter collections to consider the ecclesiastical patronage
deployed by gentry families, with the Pastons’ well-documented dispute with the
duke of Suffolk at its heart. Advowsons, the right to present to a living, were classed
as property, and the right to them was thus worth defending to maintain local
influence. Benjamin Thompson’s paper makes a related, but broader, point in
exploring various facets of the integration of the late-medieval Church into secular
society, specifically the jurisdictional overlap whereby both secular and clerical litigants might deploy either lay or spiritual courts as best suited their case, offered
here as the context for the ultimate assumption by Henry VIII of the position as
Supreme Governor. Although readers will naturally find some papers here that
speak to their interests more strongly than others, there are intriguing resonances
to be heard across the collection.
ROSEMARY HORROX

University of Cambridge

EARLY MODERN
On Christian Iconography: Selections from The Art of Painting (1649). By Francisco
Pacheco. With an introduction and the Spanish text translated by Jeremy Roe
with Carles Gutiérrez Sanfeliu; Latin text translated by José Solís de los
Santos. [Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, Volume 16.]
(Philadelphia: Saint Joseph University Press. 2017. Pp. xxv, 340. $75.00.
ISBN 978-0-91610-189-3.)
In 1638, at age seventy-four, the learned Sevillian painter Francisco Pacheco
completed his life’s work, the Arte de la Pintura (Art of Painting), a treatise published posthumously in 1644. A monumental text, the Arte consists of three books
on the nobility, theory, and practice of painting, with a particular emphasis on
sacred images. Scholars have long valued the Arte for the light it sheds on intellectual life in early modern Seville and especially on the career of Pacheco’s most illustrious pupil, Diego Velázquez. Until now, however, only fragments of the Arte have
been available in English. The translation under review is therefore most welcome
for making Pacheco’s treatise more widely accessible to students and scholars of
early modern art history. As indicated by the book’s title, Jeremy Roe and Carles
Gutiérrez Sanfeliu have chosen to focus on the ample sections of the Arte devoted
to decorum in religious painting. This decision follows the precepts of Pacheco
himself, who affirmed that it was by representing Christian subjects with both
“majesty” and historical accuracy that painters fulfilled their ultimate purpose: to
create images that “serve[d] as truthful books” for the faithful (p. 46).
In his introduction, Roe provides a nuanced perspective on the relationship
between Pacheco’s artistic theory and his practice as a painter of sacred subjects.
Building upon Bonaventura Bassegoda’s critical edition of the Arte (1990), he highlights Pacheco’s close engagement with writings by Sevillian churchmen and by
post-Tridentine figures of international renown, among them Gabriele Paleotti

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and Johannes Molanus. He also emphasizes Pacheco’s commitment to establishing
new sacred iconographies, as illustrated by the artist’s paintings and codified in his
text. Like other Catholic Reformers, Pacheco opposed the invention of novel religious iconography for its own sake, but at the same time he sought to abandon pictorial conventions that failed to adhere to the letter of scriptural truth. In an example well known to specialists, Pacheco thus used historical evidence to affirm that
Christ’s crucifixion should be depicted with four nails, rather than the usual three.
He also sought to correct the “improprieties” seen in versions of the Last Judgment
by Michelangelo and others (p. 56); according to a cleric quoted in the Arte,
Pacheco rejected images of a “terrible and fearful” Christ and, in his own Last Judgment, instead depicted the Lord as “merciful and joyful,” in keeping with biblical
evidence of God’s “delight” in saving the just (p. 66). Yet as Roe contends,
Pacheco’s portrayal of a gentle Christ benignly delivering judgment means that his
painting lacks the very narrative clarity and emotional impact that he and other
post-Tridentine painters sought to achieve. Roe also explores how this painstaking
search for historical precision distinguished Pacheco from other artists of the day,
among them his rival in Madrid, the Florentine-born Vicente Carducho, who
ridiculed ongoing “disputes over . . . how Christ our Lord was crucified” and
affirmed that pious painters should simply focus on representing “the essential”
aspects of sacred history (quoted on pp. 28–29).
For the translation itself, Roe and Gutiérrez have included chapters from the
Arte dealing with “Order, Decency, and Decorum” and the Last Judgment (chapters
2–4 of Book Two) as well as Pacheco’s lengthy appendix on the iconography of various Christian themes, the Adiciones a algunas imágenes (Further matters raised by a
number of images; appendix to Book Three). They have rendered Pacheco’s often
unwieldy Spanish prose into lucid English, and have included English translations
by José Solís de los Santos of Pacheco’s quotations from Latin. Accompanying the
text are 123 reproductions of works either discussed by Pacheco or illustrative of his
arguments, including prints, paintings, and polychrome sculptures, which are shown
here in vivid color. Given its scholarly rigor and high production value, On Christian
Iconography will be a fundamental resource for students and specialists alike. Indeed,
one hopes that it will prompt scholars to undertake full English translations of the
Arte and other seventeenth-century Spanish treatises on painting.
University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

TANYA J. TIFFANY

Dévotion et légitimation. Patronages sacrés dans l’Europe des Habsbourg. Edited by
Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux. [Collection Religions, 8.] (Liège: Presses Universitaires de Liège. 2016. Pp. 265. €23,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-87562-106-1.)
This anthology focuses on the fabrication of saints and holy patrons in Baroque
Europe. It studies the reason for their multiplication, but also the limits of their official recognition and the failure of many cults. It explores how the devotion towards
holy patrons helped to legitimize earthly institutions. Among others, it explores how
cults were used to strengthen the links between dynasties and territories.

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The title of this collective volume is somewhat misleading because the book
explores the history of sacred patronages not only in Habsburg territories, but also
in Poland-Lithuania and in non-Habsburg Italian principalities and republics. The
main emphasis lies on Baroque Bohemia, an area on which the editor, Marie-Elisabeth Ducreux, is an eminent specialist.
The volume raises a number of issues. First, it studies sanctity in its different
dimensions. According to Ducreux, much has been written recently on “state
saints,” but holy patronages often had also other functions: they legitimated dynasties, local identities, religious orders, and moral conceptions, among others. To pick
out one example in the volume, Sara Cabibbo and Magdalena Jacková show the plurality of functions that the cult of John of Nepomuk fulfilled in Sicily and Bohemia.
Second, the editor and several authors react against the view according to
which the posttridentine Catholic Church was a homogeneous and highly centralized institution. They highlight the local character of many patronages and the
fragmentation of the sanctity landscape (among others Cécile Vincent-Cassy and
Paolo Cozzo). Even if the dynamics leading to the instauration of holy patronages
were local, actors on the spot often tried hard to persuade Rome to recognize officially some cults and rituals. Yet local practices often existed through centuries
without an official approval from Rome, and liturgy was far from being homogeneous across Europe.
Third, the articles highlight the uncertainties and opacity of procedures in Rome.
The decision-making process was usually very slow, unpredictable, accompanied by
many hesitations, and dependent on patronage and, not least, on chance. It is not
always easy for historians to understand why some procedures led to an approval, and
others did not, and the authors of this volume often confess their ignorance.
What is sure: we cannot say that there was a general and centralized campaign
of the Catholic Church in order to assert sanctity against the ideas of “heretics.” On
the contrary, Rome blocked many demands coming from across Europe. The
volume shows that east-central European Church officials had great difficulties in
obtaining the recognition not only of new saints, but also of saints considered as
such for centuries and of corresponding rites. However, it is not totally right to
assert that “with the exception of [. . .] Josaphat Kuncewycz [. . .], no request to
beatify contemporaries from this region [. . .] was successful in Rome in the 17th
and 18th centuries” (p. 24); was Stanislaus Kostka not a Pole?
As a consequence, uncertainties about the status of venerated figures were very
common, as Ducreux and several authors point out. If we take into consideration that
even saints whose cult was both old and very common were often not recognized as
such before the nineteenth century, it is no wonder that historians have sometimes
great difficulties in deciding whether a figure was actually considered a saint or not.
The volume presents interesting case studies whose numerous results cannot
be summarized in the framework of this review. They show that modern historiog-

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raphy about sanctity and holy patronages has lost its apologetical character and presents a complex picture of the fabrication of the saints and the interactions between
religion and politics in the early modern times.
Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg

DAMIEN TRICOIRE

A Christian Samurai: The Trials of Baba Bunkō. By William J. Farge, SJ. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2016. Pp. xxviii, 300.
$34.95 paperback. ISBN 978-0-813-228-518.)
Since Martin Scorsese’s Silence was released in 2016, and the hidden Christian
sites in the Nagasaki region were registered as a World Cultural Heritage site in
2018, the history of the Catholic Church in early modern Japan has received much
attention within and without the country. Pope Francis’ visit to Nagasaki,
Hiroshima, and Tokyo in 2019 spurred this momentum.
Prior to the recent upsurge of the general attention to the early Christian history in Japan, we had already begun to see stimulating new perspectives applied to
its studies—women’s history, art history, and history from below, among others—
beyond the area’s traditional and conventional scopes and methods based mainly on
primary sources left by European missionaries.
In William Farge’s Christian Samurai: Trial of Baba Bunkō, we can see another
new approach to the study of Christianity in early modern Japan. His work is innovative in terms of the subject to explore and the method to apply. His defense of
approach is convincing in historical as well as historiographical senses.
Farge focuses on Baba Bunkō (1718–59), a former samurai who, after
renouncing his samurai status, wrote and lectured critiques of contemporary politics, society, and religions, but especially of the Tokugawa government. Bunkō was
eventually arrested to be executed for his activities. No other historians have discussed Bunkō as Christian (or hidden Christian), nor has he ever appeared in the
history of Christianity in early modern Japan. He has been an unknown figure for
Western scholars; his studies in Japanese are very limited.
Farge tries to explore this little-known figure—his personal history, his writings, and his “Christian” nature. Why did he have to do so? He attempted “to take
a fresh look at the history of Christianity in early modern Japan and to re-evaluate
the long-term impact of Catholic missionary activity in the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century” (p. xvii). In particular, he challenges the conventional
assumption that there were no Christian writings in the eighteenth century due to
the persecution by the Tokugawa government. Generally speaking, the most convincing way to challenge a historical assumption is to present evidence that cannot
be explained by the assumption. Baba Bunkō was nothing but such evidence for
Farge to overturn the old view and introduce new one.
This is not an easy thing, however. For, first and foremost, written materials
to show Bunkō was Christian are limited. Bunkō never explicitly confessed his

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Christian faith; there were instead several words in his writing that were “unfamiliar to anyone who was not a Christian” (p. 12). Relying on these words and carefully disclosing their associated implications, Farge delicately yet boldly constructs
the foundation of his thesis that Baba Bunkō was indeed Christian and all of his
works must be read in Christian context.
Farge explains as follows. Bunkō criticizes the “coat-of-arms” of the emperor
and the shogun as concrete causes for the moral decline of the time, saying, “Such
crests are pointless, and they look foolish. Both crests should be abolished and the
designs for them redone. They have brought unexpected misfortune rather than
protection” (p. 31). Then Bunkō proceeds to claim there is another crest that is
“more worthy of respect,” “that shows the body of a person” which he calls “the
crest of the Christian Champion” of the uprising in Shimabara (1637–38) (p. 31).
That crest was also “the principal image of the Christian Lord of Heaven” (ibid.).
Farge maintains that the crest to which Bunkō refers is “the battle flag of the
Shimabara rebellion,” and continues,
This battle flag does not literally show the figure of the body of a person,
as Bunkō indicated. It is rather the representation of a chalice and a
round “host,” or wafer of bread—the objects of the sacrament of the
Eucharist used in the Catholic Mass. . . . To the eyes of a non-Catholic
the chalice and bread on the banner would not have actually been “the
body of a person.” For Bunkō, however, the crest of the Shimabara rebellion depicted “the body of a person” who was the “Christian Lord of
Heaven.” He obviously has a Catholic understanding of the meaning of
the chalice and the host on the Shimabara banner (p. 32).
After he thus defined Bunkō to be Christian, Farge examines many of Bunkō’s
works that offer very critical views vis-à-vis different facets of contemporary society
and politics. Farge’s depiction, explanation, and analysis of Bunkō’s writings
include plenty of careful references to surrounding materials and historical background. Continuing to read, however, one would notice that except the part quoted
above, Bunkō hardly gives mention to Christianity.
Yet for Farge this does not undermine the Christian nature of Bunkō’s works.
For, “Christian literature that is written during a time of repression cannot be
restricted to literature that is directly related to the propagation of a Christian message. Christian literature must also encompass those works that bear the marks of
Christian influence and exhibit a Christian perspective” (p. 229). In this connection, Farge also says, “In general, Catholic writers see humanity struggling in a
fallen world and have a deep sense of human imperfection” (p. 228). Needless to
mention, Bunkō’s works apply to this case.
Farge’s interest in this nearly unknown figure in the field is based on his own
historiographical concern to shed a new light on the field. To this end, he not only
introduces unknown materials but also skillfully interprets them to construct stimulating historical accounts of the time. Such historiographical challenge is espe-

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cially impressive because it always requires a critical review of conventional or
established approaches along with the ability to explore supporting materials for
that purpose. Unfortunately, not all historians share the significance of such
methodological discussion, but we need to engage it if the field is to advance. Farge
has shown it.
IKUO HIGASHIBABA

Tenri University, Japan

LATE MODERN EUROPEAN
Castle and Cathedral in Modern Prague. Longing for the Sacred in a Skeptical Age. By
Bruce R. Berglund. (Budapest and New York: Central European University
Press. 2017. Pp. xvi, 372. $60.00 clothbound; $25.95 paperback. ISBN 978963-386-157-8; 978-963-7326-43-1.)
Scholars of Czechoslovakia (and its predecessor and successor states) have
highlighted the country’s unique religious history. A proto-Protestant movement
led by Jan Hus emerged in the fifteenth century, launching Bohemia into religious
wars and inspiring widespread conversions to “Hussitism.” The Habsburg CounterReformation following the Thirty Years’ War reasserted Roman Catholicism in the
region. By the late twentieth century, the Czech Republic had become one of the
most secular countries in the world.
Historian Bruce Berglund seeks to understand this complex religious history
and thought by narrowing in on the interwar Czechoslovak Republic. He explores
the philosophical and theological ideas of three important Prague leaders—President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, his daughter and social activist Alice Garrigue
Masaryková, and the Prague-based Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik. His study
offers a counternarrative to the theory that Europe was secularized in a steady
decline from the Enlightenment through the twentieth century. This modernization theory proposes that religion became incompatible with “industrialization,
urbanization, the embrace of rationalism and empiricism” (p. 13). Instead,
Berglund uses Masaryk, Masaryková, and Plečnik to argue that some intellectuals
sought to develop a “new religion” (p. XII) that combined spiritual and scientific
truth. Rather than viewing modernism as an obstacle to religion, these thinkers
considered it a new approach to religion. Berglund quotes Masaryk in 1906, over a
decade before he became President of the new Republic: “I did not speak against
Catholicism. I did not speak against religion. I spoke against the contradiction of
theology and science” (p. 30).
Berglund offers a readable and engaging approach to intellectual history. The
book is organized in two parts. Part I offers intellectual biographies of Masaryk,
Masaryková, and Plečnik. The chapter on Masaryk focuses on the philosopherpolitician’s integration of religion, spirituality, and the nation. Masaryk located
Czech history’s apex in the Bohemian Reformation. Berglund notes, “For Masaryk
. . . care for the soul was not simply an individual matter. He held that the nation,
like a person, also had spiritual and material parts” (p. 47).

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Jože Plečnik similarly sought a modernist spirituality and aesthetic. A devoted
Catholic and proud Slovene, Plečnik respected Masaryk’s search for spiritual meaning in the modern nation-state. In turn, Masaryk—a convert from Roman Catholicism to an individualistic Protestantism—embraced Plečnik’s artistic vision, which
combined spiritual simplicity and democratic symbolism. He chose Plečnik, much
to the chagrin of Czech nationalists, to renovate Prague Castle as the modern seat
of government. Masaryková, who served as First Lady following her mother’s
death, was a formidable leader in the new Czechoslovakia. She earned a doctorate
in history in Germany and studied social work in Chicago. As head of the
Czechoslovak Red Cross, she viewed providing public health and education as a
modern approach to traditional religious service work.
Berglund effectively characterizes Masaryk and his followers’ intellectual contributions, and he discusses the conservative Catholic intellectual opposition, especially by the writer Jaroslav Durych. However, the reader would benefit from a
deeper exploration of how citizens received these intellectual debates. While the
book briefly addresses the religious practices of ordinary Prague citizens, it does not
venture far beyond the capital, the state’s most secular area. Berglund acknowledges
that Czech church attendance declined even before the Communist Party’s attacks
on religion in the 1950s. Yet, Berglund contends that most Czechs today still
believe in “something.” Their secularism, even atheism, maintains an element of
Masaryk’s conviction that spirituality and modernity were not incompatible.
Berglund’s book is a scholarly contribution to Czechoslovak intellectual history as well as debates about European secularism and modernity. Scholars and
advanced students in these fields will find much to engage with in this well
researched and engagingly written monograph.
The College of New Jersey

CYNTHIA PACES

Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland. By Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J. (Dublin: Four
Courts Press. 2016. Pp. 247. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-84682-583-5.)
The essays collected in Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland interrogate
the tension between the political sensibilities of the bulk of Ireland’s Catholic faithful and the theological and practical defense of the state that was so much a part of
Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As will be
clear to those familiar with the works of Oliver P. Rafferty, S.J., the author has
wrestled with such concerns for decades now. In bringing together eight previously
published essays with two new pieces, this welcome volume sheds light on the
myriad tensions of those dynamics on an island united politically—in whole and
then only in part—to the British state with its distinctly Protestant ethos.
Unsurprisingly, Cardinal Paul Cullen looms large in several essays, including
an extended look at his ultramontanism. Readers familiar only with his imperious
oversight of Irish Catholicism in the mid-nineteenth century will benefit from this

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sympathetic judgment that “one cannot but be struck by the essentially religious
nature of his outlook on life, and on what was happening in Ireland and the Europe
of his day. At the very least, this is what one expects from a cardinal.” Sympathy
does not equate to fawning, as that religious outlook had, Rafferty points out, an
“almost apocalyptic tenor, with the forces of light ranged against the forces of darkness.” One sidelight of that conclusion was that God intervened to punish sin,
which Rafferty notes, included His meting out of a “just punishment” to Abraham
Lincoln “for his having attended the theatre on Good Friday” (pp. 122–23).
Readers will come to appreciate three overlapping potential conflicts: those
between Irish Church leaders who sought to carve out a more respected (and
respectable) place for their flocks in a state that many of those same parishioners
sought to undermine; those between the competing yet complementary empires of
Britain and Rome in an era of unprecedented imperial expansion; and those
between Irish and British Catholic leaders, whose sense of loyalty to Rome was colored by their loyalty to their flocks. At specific points in time—especially during
the twentieth century when the Catholic dioceses in Ireland straddled two states,
one of which viewed its large Catholic minority as alien and potentially threatening—the third set of these tensions became acute. Figures, including the leader of
English Catholicism Cardinal Francis Bourne, could question Irish loyalties during
the Great War (1914–18), while Irish chaplains heroically ministered to soldiers at
the front, offering sacramental care in the most dangerous of circumstances (pp.
134–62). At the same time, Rafferty carefully delineates that an individual’s personality and background shaped his actions alongside theological training, high
office, and circumstance. Thus, one finds the Cardinal Joseph MacRory of Armagh
could act as a go-between for the IRA with the government of neutral Ireland in
the 1940s, while Bishop (later Cardinal) Cahal Daly refused to meet with representatives of Sinn Féin, the party associated with the Provisional IRA’s campaigns
in the 1970s–1990s, which Daly considered “morally evil” (pp. 167–72, 208).
Based on thorough grounding in diocesan and Roman archives, as well as in
the contemporary press, this work is very much a study of Catholic leaders—which
is to say men in positions to shape Irish Catholicism. With that understanding, it
can be read in whole or in parts with great profit.
TIMOTHY G. MCMAHON

Marquette University

AMERICAN
Turning Points in the History of American Evangelicalism. Edited by Heath W.
Carter and Laura Rominger Porter. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2017. Pp. xviii, 297. $28.00 paperback. ISBN
978-0-8028-7152-7.)
For good or for ill, during the last half-century the growth of the historiography on American evangelicalism has far out-paced scholarship focused on almost
any other topic. While Jon Butler has called on historians to remember the major

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denominations and Catherine Albanese wants us to center our analysis on the
enduring metaphysical traditions, the story of American religion is predominantly
the story of American evangelicalism. There is, perhaps, no one who has done more
to make this true than self-professed evangelical Mark Noll. A brilliant historian,
a clear writer, and a prolific publisher, Noll has filled historians’ shelves with over
fifty books. In addition, he has generously supported, read, and critiqued the work
of many other historians, inadvertently ensuring that his ideas ripple through the
scholarship of subsequent generations.
Turning Points serves as a Festschrift that celebrates Noll’s career. Twelve essays
written by colleagues and friends of Noll highlight and mostly celebrate important
events in the history of American evangelicalism. They emphasize the “significant
transitional moments of American religious history, each with a distinct ‘before’ and
‘after’” (p. xvii). Turning Points includes many smart and insightful pieces. Harry
Stout returned to his older work to make the case that the work of George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards launched a truly “great” awakening. Catherine Brekus
uses the lives of three individuals to explain how “evangelicalism” became a definable
movement, and Richard Carwardine shows how evangelicals shaped reform in the
early republic. Jon Butler, in a brilliant essay, did what Jon Butler does best—seemingly ignores the purpose of the collection and its focus on evangelicals to argue for
a different kind of turning point. He contends that the creation of the First Amendment and not evangelicalism represents the most important “turning point” in
American history. In perhaps the most provocative and original essay, Luke Harlow
demonstrates how the hermeneutics of Antebellum, pro-slavery theologians directly
shaped fundamentalist readings of and approaches to the Bible. George Marsden,
Edith Blumhofer, and Grant Wacker explain the rise of fundamentalism, pentecostalism, and evangelicalism respectively, and Dennis Dickerson and Marguerite
Van Die remind readers that we must take race and gender seriously when we study
evangelicalism. Mark Hutchinson explains the “global turn” in the history of evangelicalism, and Darren Dochuk, in a smart and compelling essay, shows readers
what this means through the lens of the 1974 Lausanne conference.
These essays demonstrate how the history of American evangelicalism is
growing and broadening. Scholars are paying more attention than ever before to
issues of race, gender, and sexuality. To date, however, they have not paid enough
attention to issues of class, which is apparent in these essays. Interestingly, however, especially for the purposes of this journal, the essays in this book make few
mentions of American Catholics. Butler highlights their significance in interpretations of the First Amendment, and Carwardine and Dochuk mention them in
passing. None of the essays explains how the long, difficult, and evolving evangelical-Catholic relationship has been central to defining American evangelicals’
understandings of religion, church, state, and/or themselves. Nevertheless, no collection of essays can be exhaustive. This book is a fitting tribute to one of the best
historians this nation has produced.
Washington State University

MATTHEW AVERY SUTTON

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LATIN AMERICAN
Las redes sociales de sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. By Guillermo Schmidhuber and Olga
Martha Peña Doria. (Mexico City: Bonilla Artigas Editores. 2018. Pp. 190.
250 pesos paperback. ISBN 978-607-8636-04-4.)
The stated purpose of this formidable work on the family genealogy of the
famous seventeenth-century Mexican nun writer is to dispel all misinformation
about Sor Juana’s family and to clarify her own social provenance. The authors,
faithful to their intention, have left no stone unturned or archive unvisited to follow
all members of her family several generations before their arrival in Mexico, the
facts relevant to her immediate family marriages and descendants, and even some
information about some of her friends and distant relatives.
Since the discovery of her out-of-wedlock birth early in mid-twentieth century, academicians have puzzled about Sor Juana’s father’s identity and her mother’s
unusual decision to live freely with two men; her connections with the vice-regal
court despite her lack of a clear pedigree; the fate of her siblings and their connections with the nun throughout her life. This work has laid all those issues to rest.
With photos to complement the transcription of all documents, the authors follow
all the members of the family since their migration to Mexico in the late sixteenth
century. Her father’s family came from the Canary Islands and her mother’s from
Andalucía. Her half-sisters married men well connected in the bureaucracy and
social elite, and this explains her ability to enter the vice-regal court.
The authors provide data on other well-known friends and contemporaries of
Sor Juana, including another poet connected to her, Alonso Ramirez de Vargas, and
her friend, the savant Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. There is also information on the
nuns who professed ten years before and ten years after her in the convent of San
Jeronimo. Doubtless, the rich information furnished by this work erases forever most
of the misconceptions about the poet’s family, her age, and even the circumstances of
her death, This dedication to rediscover all the relevant exact information on the basic
facts of the poet’s life deserves thanks from all historians and literary critics who up
to very recently had to navigate a sea of incertitude and some erroneous assumptions
about this notable woman’s life. Genealogical research may be somewhat dry, but in
this case, the reading is exciting because it finally solves all the puzzles about Sor
Juana’s family, leaving the reader with a sense of relief and satisfaction.
Arizona State University (Emerita)

ASUNCIÓN LAVRIN

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. La resistencia del deseo. By Francisco Ramírez Santacruz.
(Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra. 2019. Pp. 217. €22,00 paperback. ISBN 97884-376-3971-0.)
Few scholars have attempted to write a biography of the illustrious Sor Juana
Ines de la Cruz since Octavio Paz published his version in 1982. Thirty-seven years
later, Francisco Ramírez Santacruz has taken the challenge of writing a dispassionate but comprehensive narrative of her life, taking into consideration new data on

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her life, new analyses of her literary work, and the greater number of studies about
conventual life published in the last three decades.
A literary scholar by training, Ramírez Santacruz has a great sensitivity for historical research and the ability of intertwining the nun’s writings with verified facts
about her life and the social context of her times. Unlike Paz he does not interpret
any aspect of her life by using psychoanalytical theories; neither does he advance
hypotheses about her character or her activities based on thin cloth spun by fictional
imaginations. In other words, this is an honest attempt to have a straightforward and
fluid biographical narrative constructed with the literary tools of persuasion, but
respecting the codes of verifiability established by history. Whenever the occasion
demands it, Ramírez ponders on the several possibilities behind the nun’s behavior,
choosing to explain probabilities rather than making a statement when there is no
clear evidence about some situations or facts. He makes it clear what his position is
in regard to alternative ones upheld by other academicians.
Ramírez has the rare ability of putting together different pieces of information
skimmed from writings, current affairs, legislation, etc., and incorporating them in
the biography of the nun, making sense of her life in her own historical context. He
has treated the major events in the nun’s life with discretion, aiming at elucidating
them as part of her own experience as a person, and judiciously posing questions that
reflect the nuances of seventeenth-century Mexico. This line of enquiry and response
guides us to the complexities of her life and her relations with people who were also
complex in their relations with the nun-poet. Particularly appealing are the passages
discussing the reception of her Carta Atenagórica among friends and enemies and her
own Response, her best known quasi-personal and intellectual autobiography.
Since Sor Juana’s life abounds in silences as much as in eloquent expressions
of her inner self through her own writings, the analysis and assessment of all evidence is necessary to make sense of what appears puzzling on its surface. This work
navigates such challenges well. For example, her complicated relationship with the
Bishop of Puebla and her decision to sell some of her books and retreat into a more
private life toward the end of her life receive thoughtful attention and offer new
angles of interpretation that are reasonably logical for her times and circumstances.
The author leads us to consider the angst that must have accompanied Sor Juana
throughout her life and revealed itself after the success of her printed work.
Out of these pages emerges a very human Sor Juana: neither the victim of
ecclesiastical persecution, nor the self-assured feminist and yet, someone who
embodied “intellectual freedom and a unique way of being a woman.” Ramírez has
successfully injected into his work an evenness in judgment that is very helpful and
definitely necessary to understand Sor Juana’s life as that of a brilliant but constantly
challenged woman. In this fine-tuned narrative there is fairness in the judgment of
her character, her achievements and her doubts, as well as her emotional quandaries
and intellectual depths. This new biography of the renowned poet nun is highly
commendable and obligatory reading for her numerous readers and admirers.
Arizona State University (Emerita)

ASUNCIÓN LAVRIN

Report of the Editor
Volume 105 of the journal consisted of 780 pages of articles, addresses, essays,
book reviews, and the quarterly sections Notes and Comments, Periodical Literature, and Other Books Received, with an additional seventeen pages of preliminary
material and thirty-four pages of the general index. In all, volume 105 contained
831 pages. Subsidies from authors and contributions from others made directly to
the journal allowed for the addition of pages above those budgeted. Dr. Paul F.
Grendler of Chapel Hill, NC (emeritus of the University of Toronto) and Cardinal
Timothy M. Dolan, Archbishop of New York, have made generous contributions.
Of the twenty-two essays published, eighteen were articles, two were
addresses, plus one review essay and a forum essay. Of the articles, one treated an
ancient topic, three medieval, three early modern European, one late modern
European, eight American, and two were on an African theme. Eleven of their
authors came from American institutions, two from Belgian, and one each from the
countries of Cape Verde, Canada, Ireland, Portugal, and Tanzania. In addition,
there was a Forum Essay dealing with a book on the early modern period that had
contributions by scholars from American and German institutions.
In 2019, the journal published seventy-five book reviews. The book reviews
can be subdivided into the following categories: general and miscellaneous (6),
ancient (2), medieval (23), early modern (19), late modern (7), American and
Canadian (12), and Latin American (6). Their authors came mostly from institutions in the United States (49 or 65%), but those in other countries were also represented: in the United Kingdom (10 or 13%), Italy (3 or 4%), The Netherlands (3
or 4%), two each in Canada, France, Germany, and Ireland, and one each in
Mexico and Poland. Please see Table 1.
TABLE 1. Book Reviews Published in 2019
Area

Winter

Spring

Summer

Autumn

TOTAL

General
Ancient
Medieval
Early Modern
Late Modern
American/Canadian
Latin American

2
1
1
2
3
5
2

2
1
9
14
2
3
3

2
0
11
2
2
2
0

0
0
2
1
0
2
1

6
2
23
19
7
12
6

TOTAL

16

34

19

6

75

156

REPORT OF THE EDITOR

157

The editors received twenty-four new submissions of articles in 2019. They
came primarily from the United States, but also from Argentina, Belgium, France,
Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United Kingdom. Table 2 shows the current disposition of these submissions. During the year 2019, eighteen articles earlier
accepted were published.
TABLE 2. Manuscripts Submitted in 2019

Area

Rejected or
Conditionally Withdrawn
Published
Accepted
Accepted
(W)
Pending in 2019 TOTAL

General
Ancient
Medieval
Early Modern
Late Modern
American
Latin American
Asian
TOTAL

1

1

0

1
1
1

4
4
4
4
3
1

3

20

0
0
6
5
5
4
3
1
0

24

The Nelson H. Minnich Prize for the best article published in 2019 has gone
to Dr. Martina Saltamacchia for her study “A Button, an Egg, a Piece of Cheese:
Gifts and Donations for the Cathedral of Milan” (pp. 617–644).
Up until mid-August, Dr. Joseph M. White graciously edited the journal
while Dr. Nelson H. Minnich was on sabbatical. We are all grateful to him to
taking on this difficult task. Mr. Thomas Deutsch functioned as his copy editor
until the fall semester, when Mr. Jack Lake took on the responsibilities. Ms. Katya
Mouris, who has skillfully served the journal over the years, primarily by assisting
Msgr. Robert Trisco with the book reviews, is nearing completion of her doctoral
program. In the spring semester we envision some changes in the staffing of the
journal. We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding during this period of
transition. The editor is most appreciative of their services and those provided by
the associate editors Msgr. Robert Trisco and Dr. Jennifer Paxton and for the sage
advice given by the advisory editors. The journal could not function without their
continued dedicated services.
NELSON H. MINNICH
Editor

Notes and Comments
ASSOCIATION NEWS
The Spring Meeting of the Association will be held at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania on April 17 and 18, 2020. The deadline for submission of proposals for individual papers, panels, and roundtables is February 3. They should be
submitted via the ACHA website (achahistory.org). For further information,
please contact Professor Robert Shaffern at robert.shaffern@scranton.edu.
The 2021 Annual Meeting will be held in Seattle, Washington, on January 7
to 9, 2021. The ACHA solicits papers and panels on the following topics: Catholicism and missions, Pacific-rim Catholicism, Catholicism in the western United
States, Catholicism and the environment, Catholicism and public scholarship,
communities traditionally marginalized in the field of Catholic history, and premodern or early modern Catholicism. Proposals for papers, panels, roundtables,
book discussions, and site visits should be submitted via the Association’s website.
For joint AHA-ACHA panels the deadline is February 15, for ACHA panels it is
March 16, 2021. Joint panels with affiliated societies such as the American Society
of Church History are encouraged. For further information, please contact Professor Anthony B. Smith at asmith1@udayton.edu.
At its annual meeting in New York on January 4, 2020 the following awards
were announced:
2 0 1 9 J o h n G il m a r y S h e a P r i z e
The John Gilmary Shea Prize is given annually to the author of a book, published during a preceding twelve-month period, which is judged by a committee of
experts to have made the most original and distinguished contribution to the knowledge of the history of the Catholic Church. Any author who is a citizen or permanent resident of the United States or Canada is eligible. The prize consists of $1500.
The Shea Prize committee of the American Catholic Historical Association
for 2019 was comprised of three members: Professor Una Cadegan (University of
Dayton), Professor Stephen Schloesser, S.J. (Loyola University Chicago), and Professor A. Katie Stirling-Harris (University of California at Davis).
C i t a t i o n : The American Catholic Historical Association awards the 2019
John Gilmary Shea Prize to Karin Vélez for her book The Miraculous Flying House
of Loreto: Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2019; published December 2018).
158

NOTES AND COMMENTS

159

This boldly conceived monograph examines the global spread of early modern
Catholicism through the prism of a Marian devotion and by means of an innovative
methodology. Vélez initially challenges readers by approaching her topic as mythohistory, a sympathetic position that takes “miracles and religion not as categories of belief
but as historical records of reality” (26), a reality of believers’ lived experience and
memory. Turning away from conventional approaches that require scholars to peel
away devotional layers accumulated over time, Vélez instead views religion as a continuous flow of motion, migration, accretion, and hybridization, and fortuitously lands
on the Virgin of Loreto’s flying house as the portable embodiment of Catholicism’s
expansion. As a result, Loreto’s global Catholicism is “powerfully accretive: it is always
in flux and reinvention, never frozen or static” (33). Drawing especially on reports sent
to Jesuit authorities in Rome from Spanish colonies in the Americas as well as the published Jesuit Relations from New France, Vélez utilizes a variety of sources including
mission accounts, travelogues, sermons, and cultic “histories.” However, even while
using such sources largely composed by clerics, Vélez expands the category of “author”
by blurring boundaries between “authorized” missionaries and less authoritative (usually anonymous) missionized. This lets Vélez reimagine authorship as an organic, fluid
process and a complex interweaving of migrants and indigenous: Italian, French,
Spanish, Portuguese, Slav, Jesuit, Huron, Moxos, Monquí, Inka—and their invited
guests. Avoiding both wholly top-down and bottom-up models of religious transmission and change, Vélez draws attention to multiple voices, haphazard and chance
events, and a “jumbled” geography transcending customary center-periphery divisions.
As a result, Vélez finds participation and contributions in places that more conventional methodologies might never have identified: “unofficial authors, inadvertent pilgrims, unlicensed architects, unacknowledged artists, and unsolicited cataloguers” (7).
In sum, this path-breaking study of the constructions, transformations, and expansions
of a Marian devotion in early modern global Catholicism offers an array of innovative
approaches. They will stimulate further research into the spread of Catholic belief and
institutions throughout the wider world. For these original and challenging methodological prospects, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto richly deserves recognition
with the 2019 John Gilmary Shea Prize.
2 0 1 9 H ele n a n d H o w a r d R. M a r r a r o P ri z e
The Helen and Howard R. Marraro Prize is given annually to the author of a
book, published during a preceding twelve-month period, which is judged by a
committee of experts to have made the most original and distinguished contribution to the knowledge of Italian history or Italo-American history or relations. The
prize consists of $1500.
This year’s Marraro Prize committee was comprised of Daniel Boornstein
(Washington University, St. Louis) and two scholars named by the AHA and the
Society for Italian Historical Studies.
C i t a t i o n : Pamela O. Long (Independent Historian), for Engineering the Eternal City: Infrastructure, Topography, and Culture of Knowledge in Late SixteenthCentury Rome (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018)

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Based on a vast array of archival material, Pamela O. Long’s original study
recounts the urban development of Rome’s infrastructure in the late Renaissance,
telling the story of the engineers, artisans, mapmakers, bureaucrats, and antiquarians who addressed its daunting urban, hydraulic, and engineering problems. Her
clear prose brings these figures—some famous, some unknown—vividly to life,
showing that our concepts of “architect,” “engineer,” “humanist,” or “craftsman”
have been siloed by modern categorization.
2 0 1 9 J o h n T r a c y E lli s D i s s e r t a t i o n A w a r d
The Msgr. John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award is given annually to a graduate
student in the final stage of a degree program, who has demonstrated excellence in
their dissertation research and writing to date. The prize consists of $1500.
This year’s Ellis Award committee was comprised of Sandra Yocum (University of Dayton), John Farina (George Mason), and Robert W. Shaffern (University
of Scranton).
C i t a t i o n : The American Catholic Historical Association awards the 2019
Ellis Dissertation Award to Fr. Stephen Koeth, CSC, a doctoral candidate at
Columbia University. His dissertation is entitled: “The Suburban Church: Catholic
Parishes and Politics in Metropolitan New York, 1945–1985.”
Fr. Koeth’s dissertation examines the impact of suburbia on the Catholic
Church in metropolitan New York. As Fr. Koeth notes in his overview of the dissertation project, “historians of urbanity, religion, and politics” have given little
attention to the impact of suburbia on twentieth-century U.S. Catholic life. Importantly, Fr. Koeth grounds this analysis in the historical realities of Catholic parish
life. His political interests are contextualized with a sensitivity to the impact of religion. Koeth’s research promises to make an important contribution to Catholic
Studies and deserves the ACHA’s support through the John Tracy Ellis Dissertation Award.
2 0 1 9 H a rr y C. K o e nig A w a r d
The Msgr. Harry C. Koenig Award has been given annually to the author of
a biographical article or book of a Catholic figure from any time period or region
of the world. The prize consists of $1500.
This year’s Koenig Award committee was comprised of Daniel Boornstein
(Washington University, St. Louis), Nick Rademacher (Cabrini University), and
Anne Klejment (University of St. Thomas).
C i t a t i o n : The American Catholic Historical Association presents the 2019
Koenig Award to Fr. Richard Gribble CSC for his Spring 2017 article in American
Catholic Studies, entitled: “The Press at Vatican II: The Contribution of Father
Edward Heston, CSC.”

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161

The award committee found Fr. Gribble’s article the most meritorious example
of Catholic biography. It brings to the fore a relatively unknown figure, Edward
Heston, CSC, who, as Gribble demonstrates convincingly, played an instrumental
role in shaping public understanding of the Second Vatican Council, the pivotal
event in the history of the Catholic Church and Catholicism in the twentieth century. Illuminating the behind-the-scenes workings of the Council and its press coverage, the article contributes the international dimension of Heston’s influence. The
exceptional quality of Heston’s reports and their use by members of the Englishlanguage press and others confirm the significance of Heston’s fulfillment of his
assignment, therefore making this article the winner of the 2019 Koenig Award.
2 0 1 9 R e s e arc h Gra nts for Gra d u ate Stu d e nts
Tim Dulle, Fordham University
Corinne Gressang, University of Kentucky
Mitchell Oxford, The College of William and Mary
Cole Volman, West Virginia University
2 0 2 0 P r e si d e n ti a l ( C o n f e r e n c e ) T r a v e l G r a n t s f o r G r a d u a t e S t u d e n t s
Alexandria Griffin, Arizona State University
Conor Donnan, University of Pennsylvania
Richard Todd Yoder, Penn State University
A C H A D is ti n g u is h e d S c h o l a r
C i t a t i o n f o r E l l e n S k e r r e t t : read by Kathleen Cummings (University of Notre
Dame)
Ellen Skerrett published her first book, Chicago: City of Neighborhoods with
Loyola University Press in 1986. She has since established herself as the preeminent historian of Chicago and a renowned scholar of Irish America. She has
authored or edited six books, most notably Born in Chicago, the first published history of Loyola University Chicago, and is presently writing the history of St.
Ignatius College Prep, where the Jesuit mission in Chicago began in 1857, for the
school’s 150th anniversary.
Ellen is fiercely committed to public history and has developed, curated, or led
numerous Chicago-based exhibits, including Loyola University Museum of Art’s,
“Crossings and Dwellings: Restored Jesuits, Women Religious, American Experience, 1814–2014,” the Chicago History Museum’s Chicago Literary Tour in 2013,
and the permanent installation at the National Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
in Chicago in 2012. She is also known for her legendary tours of Chicago, including one for the 2012 meeting of the American Catholic Historical Association, “In
the Shadow of Hull-House: Catholic Church Architecture on Chicago’s Near
West Side,” as well as bus and walking tours of James T. Farrell’s Washington Park
neighborhood and the Hull-House neighborhood.

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Skerrett has been the Chicago-based researcher for the Jane Addams Papers
Project at Ramapo College of New Jersey and also worked on the second and third
volumes of The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, 1881–1900 (University of Illinois
Press). From 2000 to 2003, Skerrett served as project coordinator and associate
editor of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Web site, “Urban Experience in
Chicago: Hull-House and Its Neighborhoods, 1889–1963.”
Ellen Skerrett possesses what can only be described as archival superpowers.
No matter how deeply a document or artifact is buried, she will find it. More
remarkably, she will readily share it eagerly with colleagues. Legions of historians,
from doctoral students to senior scholars, have experienced how a chance conversation with Ellen generated dozens of subsequent emails, in which she exuberantly
explicates the source she has scanned and attached just for them, often the source
that had proved most elusive or that one never imagined existed.
In addition to her books Ellen has published numerous articles and book
chapters in an astonishing range of publications, such as the Journal of Urban History, Chicago History, the Irish Times, the American Catholic Studies Newsletter, U.S.
Catholic Historian, and Commonweal.
Ellen Skerrett’s stellar record of publication is all the more admirable considering she has compiled it as an independent scholar. That she accomplished so
much without first the promise and later the protection of tenure, and without the
research and travel budgets that those of us attached to universities rely on, is a testament to her tenacity, her talent, and above all, her love for the past and her commitment to interpreting and preserving it. For the breadth and depth of her contribution to the history of Chicago, the history of the Irish in America, and the
history of the Catholic Church, for her generosity to the students she has mentored
and influenced, for all her efforts to educate both her fellow scholars and the wider
public, the American Historical Association presents its 2020 Distinguished
Scholar Award to Ellen Skerrett.
A C H A D is ti n g u is h e d T e a c h e r
C i t a t i o n f o r J a m e s O ’ T o o l e : read by Peter Cajka (University of Notre Dame)
In the winter of 2010, I called a friend, already a graduate student at Boston College, and excitedly relayed the news I had been accepted into the PHD program in
history: without taking a breath, he said I was lucky to be working with Jim
O’Toole, who was always around the department and whose door was always open.
The introduction foretold what was to come. Jim is always there for his many students: undergraduates, master’s students, and PhDs. In his lecturing in the classroom and discussions in his graduate seminars, Jim makes the tough balance of
teacher-scholar look easy. He always models for his students what it means to be
rigorous, to write with clarity and depth, and to be fair and judicious to the people
of the past. He does all of this while being a really smart and reasonable person.
The door to his office is frequently open, but enter with a bit of caution: you go in

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163

with an idea, you have a conversation, you realize Jim’s idea is better than yours,
and you get closer to writing something better. A mark of a good teacher is a generosity to spread the intellectual wealth.
Jim burst onto the scene in 1992 with his publication of Militant and Triumphant: William Henry O’Connell and the Catholic Church in Boston. The book is
American Catholic History Classic. It announced the characteristics that would
define his long career: it carried O’Toole’s signature mixture of excellent writing,
deep social contextualization of religion in American culture, deep dives into the
archives (Jim was archivist), and a bravery to write with candor about American
Catholics. He went on to edit and write four other books, including Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth Century America and The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America. The social history revolution begun by Jay Dolan in the
1970s and 1980s—I remember Jim holding The Immigrant Church in his hands and
saying “this is the revolution”—had a more than capable follower in Jim. Our field
owes him a great debt for the ways his archiving and writing has recovered the social
worlds of the laity. In 1998, Jim moved from the University of Massachusetts at
Boston, where he was an associate professor, to Boston College, where he became
the Clough Millennium Professor of History. Jim’s achievement—he returned to his
undergraduate alma mater as an endowed chair—was a real victory for the field of
American Catholic Studies. One of our own, a historian who told tough truths
about religious institutions, got a position equal to his intellectual capabilities.
Jim, as a friend and a teacher, has made important contributions to American
Catholic History. He has advised projects on all layers of the American Catholic
experience: the laity, the devotional, the institutional, the political, and the theological. His students have written dissertations on Jesuit education, Catholic volunteering, Catholic manhood, Catholic childhood, the Catholic theology of conscience and grassroots pro-life politics. Jim has also overseen the production of
dissertations on Congregationalists, original sin, ethnicity, museums, and memory.
The writings of his students reflect the intellectual depth and breadth of the advisor.
He has taught his students, his friends, and his colleagues a great deal about
Catholics, and what it means to be a historian. Thanks, Jim!
A C H A D is ti n g u is h e d S e r v i c e
C it a ti o n f o r t h e A r c h i v e s o f t h e A r c h d i o c e s e o f L o s A n g e l e s ( M s g r. F r a n c is
W e b e r ( d i r e c t o r e m e r i t u s ) a n d K e v i n F e e n e y ( d i r e c t o r ) ( a n d r e s p o n s e ) read by
Kathleen Holscher (University of New Mexico)
Monsignor Francis J. Weber is considered the Dean of California Catholic historians and has published well over 200 books on California Catholic History,
including works on all the California missions, St. Junipero Serra, Bishops Amat,
Mora, Manning and others, a history of the archdiocese, works on many archdiocesan institutions and personalities, and his two-volume magnum opus, His Eminence
of Los Angeles: James Francis Cardinal McIntyre (1997). His memoir, Memoirs of an Old
Country Priest, has gone through three editions. He began serving as the archivist for

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the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in 1962. He was sent to study at the Catholic University of America where he studied with the great John Tracy Ellis. Upon his return,
besides administering the archives, he began writing a column for The Tidings, the
Los Angeles archdiocesan newspaper, entitled “California’s Catholic Heritage,”
which ran for thirty-three years. The accumulation of so much research and writing
culminated in his massive Encyclopedia of California’s Catholic Heritage, published in
2000. Almost single-handedly Monsignor Weber brought order to the important
historical collections of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. In 1981, he spurred the construction an impressive new building, the Archival Center of the Archdiocese of Los
Angeles, which included an archive, a historical library, and a historical museum, providing a suitable repository for archdiocese’s valuable collections. The Center’s location, adjacent to Mission San Fernando, which he has served as administrator for
many years, added to the Center’s charms. Monsignor has built an impressive collection and repository, of limitless value to researchers, scholars, and the general public.
He has assisted literally thousands and thousands of researchers and guests. When
Monsignor stepped down to assume the position of archivist emeritus, his long-time
associate archivist, Kevin Feeney, was there to continue the tradition begun by Monsignor Weber. Kevin is a very fine archivist, professionally trained, who continues to
maintain the high standards of the Archival Center.
Th e N e l s o n H . M i n n i c h P r i z e
The prize committee consisted in Drs. Jennifer Paxton, Joseph White, and
Robin Darling Young.
C i t a t i o n : The Nelson H. Minnich Prize for Best Article in the Catholic Historical Review in 2019 is awarded to Martina Saltamacchia, associate professor of
medieval history, University of Nebraska at Omaha. Her article, “A Button, an
Egg, a Piece of Cheese: Gifts and Donations for the Cathedral of Milan” appeared
in the Autumn issue (Volume 105, No. 4).
In this highly original article, Professor Saltamacchia addresses fundraising for
construction of the Milan cathedral in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. The author surveys cathedral financing elsewhere in northern and central
Italy that relied on taxes, tithes, or a single great benefactor. For the Milan cathedral, the “Fabbrica” or administrative board in charge of constructing, financing,
and managing the works for the cathedral, decided to rely on voluntary popular
support for the enterprise. This board comprised overwhelmingly of laymen maintained its independence in decision-making even when faced with losing the partial
support of Milan’s ruler, Gian Galeazzo Visconti. Hence in contrast to other cathedral building efforts financial records reveal “it was only in Milan that the combination of popular religious fervor was symbiotically channeled with civic pride to
produce a voluntarily financed cathedral” (626).
“Myriad hopes moved the Milanese to finance cathedral construction.” The
author finds in financial records, “the voices of the faithful expressing gratitude for
abundant harvests, pleas against deadly epidemics, desire for pardon, search for fame

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in the community and need for expiation” (634). In light of a current trend, indulgences came to be granted for specific acts deemed charitable and meritorious,
including material and financial contributions to the construction, maintenance of
religious institutions. Indulgences served as an important means of fundraising for
the cathedral’s construction. Milan’s archbishops played an important role in granting indulgences and securing them for special jubilees and privileges from the pope
to encourage donations. (635) The foregoing efforts created a complementary means
of securing donations from collection boxes, fundraising missions, and parades and
fulfilled two objectives: collecting as many offerings as possible and thereby assuring
continuation of construction work and engaging all in Milan thereby instilling pride
and unity in a grand work regardless of their means or status.
On account of the depth of research in records that touched the religious
behavior of ordinary believers as related to a great religious undertaking and its
originality of design, and quality of writing, “A Button, an Egg, a Piece of Cheese:
Gifts and Donations for the Cathedral of Milan” deserves recognition of the
Nelson H. Minnich Prize for 2019.

CAUSE OF SAINTS
On December 7, 2019 Brother James Miller, a De La Salle Christian Brother,
who was born of a farm family in Stevens Point, Wisconsin, and died as a martyr
while repairing a wall of the De La Salle Indian School in Huehuetenango,
Guatemala, was beatified at a ceremony in the cathedral of Our Lady of the
Immaculate Conception in Huehuetenango.
On December 11, 2019 Pope Francis authorized the promulgation of a
decree acknowledging a miracle through the intercession of the Venerable Servant
of God Maria Luisa (née Maria Velotti, 1826–86), foundress of the Franciscan
Sister Adorers of the Holy Cross. The decree also testified to the martydom during
the Spanish Civil War of the following Servants of God: Ángel Marina Álvarez
(1890–1936) and nineteen companions of the Order of Friars Minor; Fructuoso
Pérez Márquez (1884–1936), lay member of the Third Order of Preachers; and
Ascensión de San José (née Isabella Sánchez Romero, 1860–1937), professed religious of the Order of Preachers. The decree also declared the heroic virtues of the
following Servants of God: Vincenzo Maria Morelli (1741–1812), Theatine and
archbishop of Otranto; Carlo Angelo Sonzini (1878–1957), founder of the Congregation of the Handmaids of Saint Joseph; Américo Monteiro de Agular (1887–
1956), Portuguese diocesan priest; Giulio Facibene (1884–1958), Italian diocesan
priest; Gregorio Tomas Suárez Fernández (1915–49), Spanish professed priest of
the Order of Saint Augustine; and María de los Ángeles de Santa Teresa (née
Dinah Amorim, 1917–88), Brazilian professed religious of the Sisters of Pious
Schools.
On February 21, 2020, Pope Francis approved the promulgation of eight
decrees concerning three miracles, three martyrs and four new “Venerables.”

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The miracles were attributed to the intercession: of Blessed Lazarus, also
known as Devasahayam (1712–52), an Indian layman and martyr; of Blessed Mary
Frances of Jesus (in the world known as Anna Maria Rubatto [1844–1904]), the
Italian founder of the Capuchin Tertiary Sisters of Loano and missionary in
Uruguay; and of the Venerable Carlo Acutis, lay youth who was born in England
and died in Italy (1991–2006).
Their status as martyrs was recognized for three persons in El Salvador: Rutilio
Grande Garcia (1928–77), a Jesuit priest, and two lay companions: his parish assistant, Manuel Solorzano (1905–77), and Nelson Rutilio Lemus (1961–77), who all
died in “hatred of the faith,” on March 12, 1977.
Recognition of their heroic virtues was given to Father Emilio Venturini
(1842–1905), Italian diocesan priest, founder of the Congregation of Sisters
Handmaids of Our Lady of Sorrows; to Father Pirro Scavizzi (1884–1964), Italian
diocesan priest; to Father Emilio Recchia (1888–1969), a religious of the Congregation of the Sacred Stigmata of Our Lord Jesus Christ; and to Mario Hiriart
Pulido (1931–64), Chilean layman of the Schoenstatt Movement who died in the
United States.

FELLOWSHIPS
On May 26–29, 2020, the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program and the Project on History and Strategy and the Center for Strategic and
International Studies will sponsor in cooperation with George Washington University in Washington, D.C., a four-day seminar, the 2020 Summer Institute on
Conducting Archival Research. It welcomes applicants who are PhD candidates
who have defended their dissertation proposal and are working on policy-relevant
historical research agenda on topics related to international history, national security, diplomacy, and the military. The deadline for application is March 8, 2020.
Applications should include the application cover sheet, curriculum vitae, and a one
to two page (12 pt. font, double spaced, 1 margins) proposal outlining how the
dissertation research would benefit from participation in SICAR. One letter of recommendation should also be submitted directly by the recommender. All application materials should be submitted via e-mail to sicar@wilsoncenter.org. The
Wilson Center will make an effort to confirm receipt of all application materials.
On July 6–31, 2020, the Center for Renaissance Studies at the Newberry
Library in Chicago will host the 2020 Mellon Summer Institute in French Paleography, taught in the French language by Marc Smith of the École Nationale des
Chartes, Paris. To apply for one of the fifteen positions reserved for advanced graduate students and junior faculty from American and Canadian institutions and for
qualified independent scholars, please visit: https://www.newberry.org/070620202mellon-summer-institue-french-paleography. Successful applicants will receive
stipends to defray the expenses of travel, housing, and food. The application deadline
is March 2, 2020.

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167

On August 3–14, 2020, the 44th International Wolfenbüttel Summer Course
will be held at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. The
theme of the course is “Early Modern Visual Data: Organizing Knowledge in
Printed Books.” It will be led in English by Stephanie Leitch. The course will study
how images functioned in conjunction with text, how images visualized knowledge.
The fifteen successful applicants will have their accommodations and breakfast
expenses paid and receive a 100 euro stipend for living costs, but they are expected
to pay for their own travel. To apply, please email forschung@hab.de and complete
the application by March 15, 2020.
The Warburg Institute sponsors Frances A. Yates Fellowships. Dame Frances
Yates, who died in 1981, generously bequeathed her residuary estate to found
research fellowships in her name at the Institute. Fellows’ interests may lie in any
aspect of cultural and intellectual history but, other things being equal, preference
will be given to those whose work is concerned with those areas of the medieval and
Renaissance encyclopedia of knowledge to which Dame Frances herself made such
distinguished contributions. A number of two-, three- and four-month short-term
fellowships are available each year, as well as an annual long-term research fellowship for nine to twelve months. Candidates domiciled in the U.K. may apply for
three or four-month fellowships only. For more information, please see https://
warburg.sas.ac.uk/research/fellowships/funded-research-fellowships/frances-yatesshort-term-research-fellowships, or email warburg@sas.ac.uk.
The Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte in Mainz is offering fellowships beginning in September 2020 in support of international doctoral students
engaged in historical research using Digital Humanities methods on topics related
to “Negotiating Differences in Europe.” Proficiency in English and German languages and residence in Mainz are required. To apply, please send a pdf letter of
application, a maximum five-page description of one’s project, a curriculum vitae,
and university certificates testifying to one’s language proficiency—all to be sent
electronically to application@ieg-mainz.de. The letter of recommendation from
one’s academic advisor should be sent to fellowship@ieg-maninz.de. For questions
regarding Digital Humanities, please email Thorsten Wübbena (wuebbena@iegmaniz.de); for questions regarding the fellowship program, please contact Barbara
Müller (fellowship@ieg-mainz.de).

CONFERENCES
Originally scheduled for March 5 and 6, 2020, but now indefinitely postponed,
the Pontifical Gregorian University and the University of Notre Dame will sponsor
in Rome a conference entitled “The Holy See and the US in Pius XII’s Archives: The
State of the Question and the Archives.” Just a few days after the opening of the Pius
XII Archives, the conference will address the historiographic issues and present the
archives and their record series. It will evaluate if the opening of the archives has
really changed the perspective on the relationship among the Holy See and the US.
Among the speakers are: Gerald P. Fogarty SJ, “The Holy See and the US, 1939–

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1952: From Mere Toleration to Open Embrace”; Susanna de Stradis, “The Holy See
and the United States in the Pacelli Era: New Sources, New Perspectives”; Roberto
Regoli, “La Curia e gli Stati Uniti”; Nina Valbousquet, “Beyond Silence:Humanitarian Diplomacy and Jewish-Vatican Relations”; Liliosa Azara, “Il Vaticano, gli
Stati Uniti e le organizzazioni internazionali”; Philippe Chenaux, “Il Vaticano, gli
Stati Uniti e l’Europa”; Paolo Valvo, “Il Vaticano, gli Stati Uniti e l’America Latina”;
András Fejérdy, “Accademia ungherese delle Scienze: La Santa Sede, gli Stati Uniti
e la Guerra Fredda”; Deirdre Raftery, “The Holy See and Catholic Sisters: Questions for the Pacelli Era”; Matteo Sanfilippo, “Rome: refugees and migrants.” Presenting the archival materials available are: Sergio Pagano, Prefetto Archivio Apostolico; Alejandro Cifres, Congregazione per la dottrina della fede; Luis Manuel
Cuña Ramos, Archivio della Congregazione di Propaganda Fide; Gianpaolo Rigotti, Archivio della Congregazione per le Chiese Orientali; Ugo Taraborelli,
Archivio del Tribunale della Penitenzieria Apostolica; Martín Morales SJ, Archivio
della Pontificia Università Gregoriana; and Giovanni Terragni CS, Archivio Generale Scalabriniano.
On March 30, 2020, the German Historical Institute in Rome is sponsoring
a conference “Early Modern Antitrinitarianism and Italian Culture: Interdisciplinary Perspectives” led by Riccarda Suitner. The papers in English and Italian will
investigate what influences humanist philology, prophetism, and other trends may
have played in shaping the ideas of the Antitrinitarians, Nicodemites, controversies, and later developments. Among the scheduled speakers are Emese Balint,
Anne Overell, Sven Grosse, Riccarda Suitner, and Stefano Brogi.

WORKSHOP
On June 22–26, 2020, the Sangalli Institute of Florence is sponsoring a
summer institute in Rome devoted to the theme “The Archives of the Religious
Orders: A New Perspective on Global Catholicism.” This workshop will focus on
the central archives of some of the important religious orders and on their materials, providing especially, but not only, to young scholars in the Humanities a new
perspective on global Catholicism from the early-modern period until the contemporary age. The workshop will offer a multi-disciplinary approach to the role played
by the religious orders and their impact from an historical, ethno-anthropological,
and art historical point of view, and on a global scale. This workshop will be particularly useful for any students enrolled in graduate and Ph.D. programs in history,
but also for archivists, museum curators, anthropologists, and established scholars
who are currently working on global missionary history and global Catholicism.
The seminar will consist of morning lectures on the history of some crucial Catholic
religious orders, archival research, and palaeography. Participants will be encouraged to explain their current or future research projects in order to have useful feedbacks from the archivists and professors involved in the seminar. The afternoon sessions will be devoted to visiting a selected group of archives of the same religious
orders. During the seminar the following archives will be visited: 1) Historical
Archives of the Franciscan Friars; 2) General Archives of the Capuchin Friars; 3)

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Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu; 4) General Archives of the Missionaries of
Saint Charles Borromeo (Scalabrinians); and 5) Central Archives of the Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus (Combonians). The seminar’s list of lectures will include:
Introduction to Archival Research in Rome; The Historical Archives of the Franciscan Friars: Brief History and Structure; Archival Research in the General
Archives of the Capuchin Friars; The Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu: Brief
History and Structure; Archival Research in the General Archives of the Missionaries of Saint Charles Borromeo (Scalabrinians); Archival Research in the Central
Archives of the Missionaries of the Heart of Jesus (Combonians); and Laboratories
on Manuscripts and Documents: Language, Scripts, Conventions, Dating, and
Documentary Typologies. The lectures and the laboratory instruction will be given
by Professors Matteo Binasco (University for Foreigners of Siena); Giuseppe
Buffon (Pontifical University Antonianum of Rome); Michele Camaioni (University of Roma Tre); Sabina Pavone (University of Macerata); Matteo Sanfilippo
(University of Viterbo); and Massimo Zaccaria (University of Pavia). A basic
knowledge of Italian is recommended, but no previous archival and palaeographic
experience is required. Students will be encouraged to develop and improve their
current researches by meeting with the archivists and the professors in order to plan
future research-trips to Rome, and more broadly to Italy. Perspective applicants
should send to the following email address: segreteria@istitutosangalli.it 1) a onepage CV; 2) a brief statement letter (no more than one A4 page) in which they
explain how this seminar will improve their research. The above email address
should also be used for any queries pertaining to administrative details, course
tuition, and general information. Information about possible accommodations in
Rome will also be provided. Cost of the seminar (including the morning lectures
and visit to the archives): 1.000,00 € (one thousand euros). Up to a maximum of
three registrations amounting to € 600,00 (six hundred euros) each will be reserved
to master students, not yet graduated nor enrolled in a Ph.D. program. The selection will be made on the basis of their motivations to participate in the workshop
and the relevance of their research projects. Registrations will be closed as soon as
the number of twelve participants has been reached. We invite, therefore, those
interested to send their applications as soon as possible, in order to book ahead
flights and accommodations in Rome during that week. Deadline for application is
March 31, 2020.

PUBLICATIONS
Holiness is the theme of all the articles published in the fourth issue for 2019
(Volume 167) of the Theologisch-praktische Quartalschrift. The historical articles are
“Franz von Assisi—Heiligkeit zwischen Christusrepräsentation und Martyriumssehnsucht,” by Volker Leppin (pp. 370–77); “Zwischen Alexandrien und St.
Radegund,” by Andreas Schmoller (pp. 378–87); and Allerheiligen—Entstehung
and Bedeutungswandel eines Hochfestes,” by Benedikt Karnemann (pp. 388–95).
“Oito séculos de presença franciscana em Portugal: Memória e Vivência” are
commemorated in Volume LXV (2019) of Itinerarium (published in Lisbon by the

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

Franciscans of Portugal). Noteworthy among the articles are “La geopolitica
francescana della frontiera portoghese,” by Giuseppe Buffon (pp. 37–54); “Os franciscanos—800 anos na Terra Santa: Uma epopeia de amor e de serviço 1217–
2017,” by João Duarte Lourenço (pp. 55–64); “A presença franciscana nas periferias
urbanas de Portugal nos primeiros tempos da Ordem,” by Saul António Gomes
(pp. 65–73); “Os Franciscanos na África Oriental—Moçambique,” by Álvaro Cruz
da Silva (pp. 75–86); “A Ordem Franciscana na África Ocidental (1219–2018),” by
Henrique Pinto Rema (pp. 87–100); “Notas para a Historia da Província de S. João
Evangelista das Ilhas dos Açores,” by Duarte Nuno Chaves (pp. 101–18); “O Convento de S. Francisco de Setúbal na Idade Media: dinámicas e vivências urbanas,”
by Ana Cláudia Silveira (pp. 119–63); “’Que as irmãs estejam continuadamente no
mosteiro encerradas’: Entre a observância e o abandono da clausura no Mosteiro de
Nossa Senhora de Aracoeli de Alcácer do Sal,” by Maria Teresa Lopes Pereira (pp.
165–84); “O Colégio de Santo António de Tuy (1917–1943) e outros Centros de
refúgio de Franciscanos portugueses na Galiza,” by António de Sousa Araújo (pp.
185–234); “O convento de Varatojo,” by António Montes Moreira (pp. 235–40);
and several others.

OBITUARIES
K o nra d R e p g e n

( 1 9 2 3 –2 0 1 7 )
While Konrad Repgen died three years ago, it is fitting to commemorate his
life and service particularly in this journal. Konrad Repgen (1923–2017) was a
highly influential German historian who contributed much to the development of
Catholic contemporary history during the latter half of the twentieth century. He
was one of the six foreign scholars appointed as Corresponding Fellows of the
American Catholic Historical Association in 1984. Repgen served as professor of

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171

early modern and modern history, first at the University of the Saarland, then at his
alma mater, Bonn University, from 1962 to 1988. He remained an active scholar
long after achieving emeritus status. In 2002, he contributed to the Catholic Historical Review an incisive review article “Connecting the Church and the Shoah” on
Michael Phayer’s book The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Catholic
Historical Review, LXXXVIII [July, 2002], 546–553).
Repgen grew up in a devoutly Catholic household. In 1933, the newly
installed National Socialist regime dismissed his father, an engaged Center Party
politician, from his position as school teacher. Repgen, nonetheless, was able to
complete his Abitur. Drafted in 1941, Repgen served on the Eastern Front and
ended the war as a prisoner of war. He was eventually released and began his university studies. In 1950, Repgen defended his doctoral dissertation on the revolution of 1848 in the Rhineland. For three years, a fellowship permitted him to study
at the German Historical Institute in Rome and in the Vatican Archives. This work
led to his 1958 Habilitation on the Treaty of Westphalia. Having demonstrated the
required scholarly breadth, Repgen began his tenure as university professor in 1962.
He mentored many of the scholars in Catholic contemporary history whose work
has shaped the field in the decades since Repgen’s retirement.
In fact, while Repgen’s work in early modern German history has stood the test
of time, his most important contributions occurred in Catholic contemporary history. Repgen was one of the founders of the Catholic Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, whose goal was to research and present the history of twentieth–century
German Catholicism, in particular its engagement with National Socialism, based
on thorough archival study and with an understanding of Catholic Weltanschauung.
Together with his close colleague Rudolf Morsey, Repgen long guided the commission’s publications, the famous “blaue Reihe” that are indispensable to the field.
From the commission’s origins, at the time Hochhuth’s play “The Deputy” debuted
and the German Constitutional Court reaffirmed the continued validity of the 1933
Concordat, Repgen saw himself as a scholarly defender of German Catholicism.
Repgen also participated publicly in debates that crossed from the scholarly to
the political. In 1970, he joined the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft, an organization of scholars and public intellectuals who embraced reforms of the German university system, but rejected what they perceived to be the intolerant domination of
the student reform movement by radical left-wing individuals and groups. In the
1980s, Repgen spearheaded Bonn University’s efforts to retain its preparation programs for secondary school teachers against the wishes of the state government.
Repgen’s most important intervention occurred in the 1970s, when Repgen
and Protestant church historian Klaus Scholder conducted a very public debate
about the role of the German Catholic hierarchy and the German Center Party in
the passage of the Enabling Act of 1933. In an article in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Scholder argued that the Catholic Church had a particular affinity for
authoritarian regimes with whom one could negotiate more easily than with parlia-

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NOTES AND COMMENTS

mentary democracies. He also believed that the Church was glad to rid itself of the
Center Party in return for a Reich Concordat, which the Holy See had sought since
the early 1920s. Scholder based part of his argument, however, on a misreading of
an article by the Center Party’s leader, Monsignor Ludwig Kaas, in which Kaas
argued that in Italy the Church seemed to cooperate well with the fascist regime.
Scholder overlooked a passage in which Kaas stated that this model was suitable for
Italy only, not for Germany. Scholder also based his argument on scholarly knowledge of a series of meetings between leaders of the National Socialist regime and
Center Party leaders. For most of these meetings, no minutes or other records of
their contents survived.
In the same journal, Repgen countered Scholder’s arguments by emphasizing
the absence of any documentation of a quid pro quo between the Church or the
Center Party on the one hand and the regime on the other. Repgen argued that the
absence of evidence made it highly likely there was no secret arrangement. The
debate between these two eminent scholars while factually exacting always
remained characterized by respect and civility.
As both rigorous and generous teacher, thorough scholar, and conservative
German Catholic public intellectual with consistently clear positions against all
extremes, Repgen left behind not only a laudable body of work, but also a generation of productive younger historians and an active research institution.
MARTIN MENKE

Rivier University

B ri a n T i e r n e y

(photograph courtesy of Ken Pennington)
(1 9 2 2 – 2 0 1 9 )
Brian Tierney was a shopkeeper’s son, born on May 7, 1922, in Scunthorpe,
Lincolnshire, England, of an Irish-Catholic family. He moved to Bristol for a job
when he was sixteen. After his home in Bristol was destroyed in an air raid, Tierney
enlisted in the Royal Air Force in July 1941. He was trained as a navigator in
Canada, and flew thirty missions on Wellington bombers and another sixty on

NOTES AND COMMENTS

173

Mosquitoes with the 105th Squadron of the Pathfinder Force. In the final months
of the war he flew a number of missions to Berlin. He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and a few months later a Bar for “utmost fortitude and
courage.” Tierney left the RAF with the rank of Flight Lieutenant. After the war,
he was accepted by Pembroke College at Cambridge for a shortened undergraduate
degree for veterans and graduated in 1948 with First Class Honors. He then continued his graduate studies at Cambridge to take a degree in medieval history. He
studied with Walter Ullmann and received his Ph.D. in 1951.
At Ullmann’s suggestion, Tierney wrote a dissertation that explored the legal
foundations of the conciliar movement. Stephan Kuttner was an outside examiner
for his thesis and helped Tierney get a position in the history department of The
Catholic University of America, where Kuttner served on the canon law faculty. In
1959, he moved to Cornell University, where in 1969 he became the Goldwin
Smith Professor of Medieval History and in 1977 was appointed the first Bryce and
Edith Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies. Tierney became president of the
American Catholic Historical Association in 1965 and was elected a Fellow of the
Medieval Academy of America in 1973 and later won the Academy’s Haskins
Medal. He received the Johannes Quasten medal from Catholic University for
Excellence in Scholarship and Leadership in Religious Studies in 2003. He retired
in 1992 from teaching but not from scholarship. He died on November 30, 2019.
In 1955 Tierney published his dissertation with the title Foundations of the
Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great
Schism. He had begun his research with no thought as to its relevance for the twentieth century. He examined the arguments put forward at the Council of Constance
about the constitution of the Church. Tierney demonstrated that the arguments of
the conciliarists were not aberrations but had their source in medieval canonical
jurisprudence. When Pope John XXIII announced in January, 1959, that he
intended to convene Vatican Council II, Tierney’s book became a quarry for ideas
about the structure of the Church and the relationship of the pope to the cardinals
and to other members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, especially when they sat
together in a papal council. The book provided an historical dimension to the constitutional issues discussed at the council. Tierney became a major figure in the
debates at the council. He published an enlarged edition of the book in 1998. In
his introduction to the new edition, he wrote that his book opened up two important paths of research that he and other scholars have followed. The first path led
to his book, Origins of Papal Infallibility 1150–1350 (1972) in which he argued that
papal infallibility did not derive from canonical jurisprudence but from the theological literature surrounding the controversy over Franciscan concepts of poverty
in the thirteenth century. His book sparked vigorous exchanges of opinion in the
pages of The Catholic Historical Review. The second path led to a less controversial
question of whether conciliar theories influenced the development of Western constitutional thought in the secular realm. In 1979 he delivered a series of lectures at
Belfast’s Queen’s University entitled Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional
Thought 1150–1650 (1982) in which he traced four important elements of medieval

174

NOTES AND COMMENTS

and early modern legal thought that were essential elements of all modern constitutions: consent, popular sovereignty, corporate theory, and electoral theory.
Medieval canon law contributed greatly to three of the four.
In the late 1980s, Tierney returned to issues that had first engaged him thirty
years earlier, theories of natural and civil rights. While writing on conciliarism,
infallibility, and constitutional thought, he had noted that the jurists frequently
cited ius naturale when discussing many aspects of a person’s place in the world. He
first explored this topic in 1956 when the School of Social Welfare at the University
of California, Los Angeles invited him to give four lectures that were published as
Medieval Poor Law: A Sketch of Canonical Theory and Its Application in England
(1959). In these lectures, he presented a remarkable and radical discovery (for coldwar America) that the medieval jurists unanimously concluded that in times of
necessity ius naturale dictated that all property must be shared. As Tierney put it,
“the poor had a right (his emphasis) to be supported.” As he began to explore the
issue of natural rights and natural law in the 1980’s, resulting in The Idea of Natural
Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law 1150–1625 (1997),
he explored the various meanings of natural law and rights for women, clergy,
indigenous peoples, and many other areas in which the idea of natural rights
occurred. From that work, there was a natural progression to his last book, published when he was ninety years old, Liberty & Law: The Idea of Permissive Natural
Law, 1100–1800 (2014). Natural law was considered permissive when one of its
principles conflicted with human customs. For example, medieval doctrines of natural law dictated that all property was to be held in common and that all persons
were free. These principles conflicted with the institutions of property and slavery.
As the dates embedded into the titles of his books indicate, Tierney was not, as he
liked to say, a splitter, but a lumper. Although always centered in the Middle Ages,
he stretched out far beyond their chronological boundaries to follow the paths of
ideas that captivated him.
Tierney was a superb teacher and delivered lectures that matched his writing:
clear, organized, and pellucid. In his seminars, he always demanded that his graduate students plunge into the sources and guided many students through the thickets
of dissertation research and writing and on to successful careers inside and outside
academia. Undergraduates far beyond Cornell knew him and his work through his
textbooks. The Crisis of Church and State 1050–1300 with Selected Documents (1964)
discussed a key issue of medieval history and is still in print and used widely. He
revised and rewrote Sidney Painter’s Western Europe in the Middle Ages 300–1475
(1974, 1992) which went through four editions. At Cornell, he knew how to keep
the attention of undergraduates. One of his favorite lecture lines when talking about
the Celts was, “If you are curious about what a Celt looked like, just look at me!”
The Catholic University of America-Emeritus

KENNETH PENNINGTON

Periodical Literature
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
Lettera Decretale di Canonizzazione di Paolo VI. Notiziario dell’Istituto Paolo VI,
78 (Dec., 2019), 19–26.
A history of Christian pilgrimage. Paul Severn. International Journal for the Study of
the Christian Church, 19 (4, 2019), 323–39.
The Globalization of Franciscan Poverty. Julia McClure. Journal of World History,
30 (Sept., 2019), 335–62.
Représentation ecclésiale des laïcs et eucharistie dans l’Église d’Angleterre. NatachaIngrid Tinteroff. Cristianesimo nella storia, 40 (2, 2019), 349–76.
L’Évolution des éloges des martyrologes des fêtes de martyrs inscrites au calendrier
romain préconciliare pour le mois de février. Philippe Beitia. Ephemerides
liturgicae, CXXXIII (July–Sept., 2019), 296–329.
Réflexion sur un siècle d’histoire sociale. Entretien avec un observateur. Joseph
Goblin and Renè M. Micallef. Gregorianum, 100 (4, 2019), 933–55.
Die Gärten des Stiftes Wilhering und ihre Geschichte. Regine Jungwirth. Analecta
Cisterciensia, LXIX (2019), 3–140.
Rev. Walter J. Ciszek, SJ: An Icon of the Catholic Russian Mission. Michaela A.
Guzik. Polish Review, 64 (4, 2019), 28–43.
The Angelic Doctor in the Twenty-First Century: Thomas Aquinas’ Quest for
Truth. William R. Clough. Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies, 31 (1–2, 2019),
33–54.

ANCIENT
The Earliest Eucharist: Saturday or Sunday? Paul F. Bradshaw. Ecclesia orans,
XXXVI (2, 2019), 225–40.
Christians and the Codex: Generic Materiality and Early Gospel Traditions. Matthew
D.C. Larsen. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 27 (Fall, 2019), 383–415.
Vom Jordan an den Tiber. Wie die Jesusbewegung in den Städten des Römischen
Reiches ankam. Benjamin Schliesser. Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 116
(1, 2019), 1–45.
A Jew for Roman Tastes: The Parting of the Ways in Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with
Trypho from a Post-Colonial Perspective. Maren R. Niehoff. Journal of Early
Christian Studies, 27 (Winter, 2019), 549–78.
175

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PERIODICAL LITERATURE

I confessori della fede nel cap. XXI del De catholica ecclesiae unitate di Cipriano di
Cartagine. Stefaniam Miscioscia. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXXII (May–Aug.,
2019), 311–26.
Opening the Canon of Martyr Narratives: Pre-Decian Martyrdom Discourse and
the Hypomnēmata of Hegesippus. David J. DeVore. Journal of Early Christian
Studies, 27 (Winter, 2019), 579–609.
Tertullian’s Precarious Panopticon: A Performance of Visual Piety. Emily R. Cain.
Journal of Early Christian Studies, 27 (Winter, 2019), 611–33.
Dying to Live Forever: Identity and Virtue in the Resurrection of the Martyrs.
Candida R. Moss. Irish Theological Quarterly, 84 (2, 2019), 155–74.
“One Would Not Consider Them Jews”: Reassessing Jewish and Christian
“Heresy.” Mathijs Den Dulk. Journal of Early Christian Studies, 27 (Fall,
2019), 353–81.
Athanase a-t-il rédigé l’encyclique d’Alexandre d’Alexandrie? Xavier Morales.
Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4, 2019), 541–58.
La incorporación de Occidente al conflicto entre eusebianos y antieusebianos: el
concilio romano de 340/341. Josep Vilella Masana. Cristianesimo nella storia,
40 (2, 2019), 257–85.
Penitential Degrees in the Byzantine Church. Part II. Reception of Basil’s Penitential System in the Byzantine Church. Frans van de Paverd. Ostkirchliche
Studien, 68 (2019), 69–190.
Las Confesiones de San Agustín, paso a paso (I, II). Modesto García Grimaldos. La
Ciudad de Dios, CCXXXII (May–Aug., 2019), 261–91; (Sept.–Dec., 2019),
505–40.
Pastoral Physicians and Communal Health in Late Antique Antioch. Lisa D.
Maugans Driver. Orientalia Christiana periodica, 85 (1, 2019), 23–44.
Priscillien contaminé par un conformisme paranoïaque. Sylvain Jean Gabriel
Sanchez. Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, CXXI (Jan.–Mar., 2019), 79–96.
The Debate over the Repetition of Baptism between Homoians and Nicenes at the
End of the Fourth Century. Marta Szada. Journal of Early Christian Studies,
27 (Winter, 2019), 635–63.
Lay Aristocrats and Ecclesiastical Politics: A New View of the Papacy of Felix III
(483–492 C.E.) and the Acacian Schism. Michele Renee Salzman. Journal of
Early Christian Studies, 27 (Fall, 2019), 465–89.
Algunos problemas del uso de Gregorio Magno por Isidoro de Sevilla. Joel Varela
Rodríguez. Revue d’études augustiniennes et patristiques, 65 (1, 2019), 135–64.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

177

MEDIEVAL
De disciplina principum in ecclesia. Ein karolingischer Traktat über das Königsamt.
Gerhard Schmitz. Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 75 (1,
2019), 19–38.
Understanding Scotland’s medieval cartularies. Joanna Tucker. Innes Review, 70
(Nov., 2019), 135–70.
The Miracle in Peter Damian. The Flexibility of a Concept. Caterina Ciccopiedi.
Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4, 2019), 590–613.
Humbert of Silva Candida as a Liturgical Source for the Eleventh-Century Byzantine Rite. Nicolas D. Kamas. Ecclesia orans, XXXVI (2, 2019), 305–30.
Conquests, family traditions and the First Crusade. Lars Kjaer. Journal of Medieval
History, 45 (5, 2019), 553–79.
Pierre le Vénérable et les chartreux. Christophe Vuillaume. Collectanea Cisterciensia, 81 (4, 2019), 374–91.
L’art cistercien comme lieu théologique (1, 2). Christophe Vuillaume. Collectanea
Cisterciensia, 81 (2, 3, 2019), 168–78; 274–290.
Bernard of Clairvaux, material and spiritual order, and the economy of salvation.
Giles E.M. Gasper. Journal of Medieval History, 45 (5, 2019), 580–96.
Les collégiales de Coimbra dans le context des collégiales médiévales portugaises.
Typologie des institutions et organisation des chapitres (12e–15e s.). Maria
Amelia Álvaro de Campos. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4, 2019),
615–43.
Per un profilo storico e culturale della città di Roma fra XII e XIII secolo. Dario
Internullo. Antonianum, XCIV (Sept.–July, 2019), 517–45.
Die Forschungskontroverse um die Dekonstruktion des südfranzösischen
Katharismus. Yannick Pouivet. Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 75 (1, 2019), 41–54.
Presencia política y participación militar de las mujeres en la Cruzada Albigense.
Martín Alvira. Revista de Historia Jerónimo Zurita, 94 (Spring., 2019), 27–66.
La Cancelleria di Onorio III: alcuni spunti dalle lettere apostoliche ai nuovi Ordini
mendicanti. Annarita de Prosperis. Antonianum, XCIV (July–Sept., 2019),
587–608.
Note sul privilegio di Onorio III Religiosam vitam diretto a Domenico e ai suoi
fratelli (22 diecembre 1216). Attilio Bartoli Langeli. Antonianum, XCIV
(July–Sept., 2019), 609–32.
Come studiare un pontefice? Considerazioni in margine ai nuovi studi su Onorio
III. Raimondo Michetti. Antonianum, XCIV (July–Sept., 2019), 633–72.
Liturgical Veneration of the Holy Face of Christ in Late Medieval France. Uwe
Michael Lang. Ephemerides liturgicae, CXXXIII (July–Sept., 2019), 330–41.

178

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

The Ordo processus Narbonensis: the Earliest Inquisitor’s Handbook, Lost and
Refound. Lucy J. Sackville. Aevum, XCIII (May–Aug., 2019), 363–95.
«Rege Francorum supplicante». Retroscena politici della canonizzazione di Pietro
del Morrone. Paolo Vian. Antonianum, XCIV (Oct.–Dec., 2019), 787–808.
La lettera Qui facit di Clemente V per la canonizzazione di san Pietro del Morrone.
Marco Guida. Antonianum, XCIV (Oct.–Dec., 2019), 809–32.
Santità eremitica e Pietro del Morrone. Umberto Longo. Antonianum, XCIV
(Oct.–Dec., 2019), 833–38.
«Quare duxistis huc mulierem?». Celestino V et la donne. Felice Accrocca. Antonianum, XCIV (Oct.–Dec., 2019), 841–79.
Matrimoni contrastati nella Valle di Susa trecentesca: le cause matrimoniali discusse presso il tribunale di S. Giusto di Susa. Livia Orla. Bollettino storicobibliografico subalpino, CXVII (1, 2019), 57–104.
Malaquías Mónaco, alias Anonymus Aristotelicus: filosofía, ciencias y exégesis bíblica
en la Constantinopla de la controversia palamita. Teresa Martínez Manzano.
Aevum, XCIII (May–Aug., 2019), 495–558.
Das Konzil von Ferrara/Florenz (1438/39) im Dienst der Kircheneinheit. Einheit
der Kirche in Verschiendenheit. Ernst Christoph Suttner. Ostkirchliche Studien, 68 (2019), 327–41.
Voicing Dissent: Heresy Trials in Later Medieval England. John H. Arnold. Past
& Present, No. 245 (Nov., 2019), 3–37.
Parish Books in the Southern Low Countries in the Late Middle Ages. Xavier
Hermand. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4, 2019), 645–85.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY
The Protestant Reformation through Arab Eyes, 1517–1698. Nabil Matar. Renaissance Quarterly, 72 (Fall, 2019), 771–815.
Le maître des jacobins de Troyes. Frédéric Elsig. Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, LXXXI (3, 2019), 447–55.
Le guerre di religione di Francia, gli esuli protestanti e la crisi della Riforma italiana. Simone Maghenzani. Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, LV (1,
2019), 51–76.
Héraldique et Bible en dialogue. Trafiquer-transcender la littérature entre Venise
et Nicosie (documents de Venise, 1558–1563). Evelien Chayes. Rivista di
Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, LV (1, 2019), 147–80.
La fin du rêve? La circulation des œuvres d’Érasme après le Concile de Trente dans
les anciens Pays-Bas et en Principauté de Liège. Renaud Adam. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4, 2019), 715–49.
I Ratti di santa Caterina de’ Ricci nell’archivio delle Domenicane di San Vincenzo
di Prato. Chiara Vasciaveo. Vivens homo, XXX (July–Dec., 2019), 379–97.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

179

Constructing a religious identity one convent at a time: troubled memories of
Venetian Counter-Reformation female convent founders. Isabel Harvey.
Studi Veneziani, LXXV (2017), 125–53.
Las cinco Custodias de la Sagrada Forma del Escorial y sus vicisitudes históricas.
José Rodríguez Díez. La Ciudad de Dios, CCXXXII (Sept.–Dec., 2019), 569–
98.
La educación del Príncipe Felipe (III). Apuntes para la Historia de la Música en el
Monasterio del Escorial en el siglo XVI. José Sierra Pérez. La Ciudad de Dios,
CCXXXII (Sept.–Dec., 2019), 599–625.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
(EASTERN HEMISPHERE)
Enjeux multiples d’une «science des apparitions» après 1580: autour des Discours des
Spectres de Pierre Le Loyer (1550–1634) et de la polémique religieuse contre
Pomponazzi et Lavater. Deborah Miglietta. Rivista di Storia e Letteratura
Religiosa, LV (1, 2019), 103–44.
La Luna di Cigoli a S. Maria Maggiore (Roma) e il laboratorio progettuale dei
fratelli Bozio. Gennaro Cassiani. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4,
2019), 751–76.
Galilei und Trient. Die Auseinandersetzung um Galileis Schrifthermeneutik
(1614–1616) aus «tridentinischer Perspektive». Patrick Bahl. Zeitschrift für
Theologie und Kirche, 116 (1, 2019), 46–76.
En jouant avec les poupées russes: 88 manuscrits grecs de Gabriel Naudé, dont 50
de Guillaume Sirleto, dont certains de Marcel Cervini, dont 2 d’Ange Colocci.
Giacomo Cardinali. Journal des savants, Jan.–June, 2019, 3–89.
Le Bernin et Michel-Ange. Une lecture eucharistique du bel composto de la chapelle
Cornaro. Hélène Gaudin Mazzariol. Revue des sciences religieuses, 93 (July–
Sept., 2019), 225–55.
Hobbes, the “Natural Seeds” of Religion and French Libertine Discourse. Gianni
Paganini. Hobbes Studies, 32 (2, 2019), 125–58.

NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
(EASTERN HEMISPHERE)
Lacordaire et la Vie de Saint Dominique. Anne Philibert. Bulletin de littérature
ecclésiastique, CXXI (Jan.–Mar., 2019), 99–122.
Sectarianism and Separatism in Colonial Port Philip. Valerie Wallace. Journal of
Colonialism and Colonial History, 20 (Winter, 2019).
Transcendental Materialism in the German Free Religious Movement: Science,
Nature, and Theology in Kirchliche Reform, 1846–52. Peter J. Ramberg. Journal of the History of Ideas, 80 (July, 2019), 409–31.

180

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

P. Mauro Ricci, Vicario General (1884–86) y 30° Prepósito General de las Escuelas
Pías (1886–1900). José P. Burgués. Archivum scholarum piarum, XLIII (2019),
93–184.
Island Networks and Missionary Methods: Locating Charles E. Fox and Frederick
G. Bowie in the History of Pacific Archaeology. Eve Haddow. Journal of
Pacific History, 54 (Sept., 2019), 330–53.
Priesterbild und Seelsorgeverständnis in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Zur Pastoral im
Raum Saarbrücken 1913–1935. Frederik Simon. Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift,
128 (3, 2019), 222–33.
Diocesi e Grande Guerra. Nuove prospettive di ricerca tra storia locale e “global
history.” Maria Paiano. Cristianesimo nella storia, 40 (2, 2019), 379–410.
Liturgie und Einheit—Die Ritenfrage der katholischen Kirchen Äthiopiens als
Ausdruck der Frage nach Identitat. Thomas Fornet-Ponse. Ostkirchliche Studien, 68 (2019), 287–306.
La fondation des Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses (1922–1925). Acteurs,
lieux et logiqes de construction du savoir théologique au début du 20e siècle.
Martin Dutron and Jean-Paschal Gay. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 114 (3–4,
2019), 779–814.
El Grupo Militar «San Sebastián»: una actividad pastoral específica (1923–1943)
en San Pantaleo, según el Diario del P. Giuseppe Del Buono. José P. Burgués.
Archivum scholarum piarum, XLIII (2019), 191–218.
Gli studi sul clero secolare italiano in età contemporanea. I parte: Dalle origini agli
anni Sessanta del Novecento. Giuseppe Battelli. Cristianesimo nella storia, 40
(2, 2019), 287–347.
I Montini e i primi passi del Partito Popolare Italiano. Michele Busi. Notiziario dell’Istituto Paolo VI, 78 (Dec., 2019), 60–82.
Presbyterianism, unionism, and the Second World War in Northern Ireland: the
career of James Little, 1939–46. Matthew Houston. Irish Historical Studies, 43
(Nov., 2019), 252–68.
Il ven. card. Elia Dalla Costa e gli ebrei. Gilberto Aranci. Vivens homo, XXX (July–
Dec., 2019), 447–57.
Schuld und Verantwortung. Rückblicke deutscher Bischöfe auf die NS-Zeit im
Jahr 1945 und das Problem einer historischen Urteilsbildung. Bernhard
Schneider. Trierer Theologische Zeitschrift, 128 (3, 2019), 181–203.
Paolo VI e la FAO. Dalle relazioni con la Santa Sede agli indicatori per uno
sviluppo socio-economico integrale. Vincenzo Buonomo. Notiziario dell’Istituto Paolo VI, 78 (Dec., 2019), 43–59.
Ein rumänisch-orthodoxer Mönch beim Zweiten Vatikanum. André Scrima und
seine Vision von der kirchlichen Einheit. Ioan Moga. Ostkirchliche Studien, 68
(2019), 36–51.

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AMERICAN
Unholy Communion: Colonial Virginia’s Deserted Altars and Inattentive Anglicans. Jacob M. Blosser. Virginia Magazine of History & Biography, 127 (4,
2019), 266–99.
“Distinguishing ourselves from the other Religions”: Confessional Conflicts and
Their Influence on the Early Moravian Danish West Indies Mission. Frank
Marquardt. Journal of Moravian History, 19 (Fall, 2019), 133–55.
Healing Body and Soul in Labrador: The Practice of Medicine by Early Moravian
Missionaries. Thea Olsthoorn. Journal of Moravian History, 19 (Fall, 2019),
156–80.
“As on the day of Pentecost”: Revivalism, John Greenfield, and the Memory of
August 13, 1727. Janet S. Burkholder. Journal of Moravian History, 19 (Fall,
2019), 182–210.
Prejudice for Profit: Escaped Nun Stories and American Catholic Print Culture.
Kara M. French. Journal of the Early Republic, 39 (Fall, 2019), 503–35.
Women’s Rights Advocates and Abortion Laws. Faye E. Dudden. Journal of
Women’s History, 31 (Fall, 2019), 102–23.
Race, Town, and Gown: A White Christian College [Wheaton] and a White
Suburb Address Race. Brian J. Miller and David B. Malone. Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 112 (Fall, 2019), 293–316.
Seeking Solace: Lyndon B. Johnson Turned to the Catholic Church. Claudia
Wilson Anderson. Catholic Southwest, 30 (2019), 3–32.

L ATIN AMERICAN
Colonial Fault Lines and the Ruptures of Chilean Independence: Earthquakes,
Reason and Religion in the Polemic between Camilo Henríquez and Tadeo
Silva. Quinn P. Dauer. The Latin Americanist, 63 (Dec., 2019), 425–52.