Averil Cameron
Malcolm Morgan Photographers, Hatch End, Middlesex.

THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 107

WINTER 2021

NO. 1

An Accidental Scholar
AVERIL CAMERON*
In this essay I reflect on my development as a scholar of late antiquity
and Byzantium over many decades. I was a Classics undergraduate at
Oxford in the late 1950s, and my subsequent history took me first to
Glasgow, then to London as a professor and back to Oxford as the head
of a college and a pro-vice-chancellor, with several stays in the United
States along the way. I have been lucky enough to be able to follow my
intellectual curiosity in numerous directions, but always as a historian,
and especially as a historian curious about the history of religion.
Keywords: Oxford; late antiquity; Byzantium; orthodoxy; discourse

O

ur small terraced house in Leek, North Staffordshire, did not go in for
books. We had a red one-volume encyclopaedia with a few color illustrations (I remember Raphael’s Sistine Madonna), but the only history book
I remember was A Child’s History of England by Charles Dickens, a deeply
Protestant narrative peopled by Good Queen Bess and Bloody Mary. I was
sent by my parents to Sunday School at the local Church of England parish
church, St Edward’s, and later I used to play the piano there for hymns, and
sometimes the organ at church. Like many of my generation I stopped
going to church as a student, and it was the readings and music of the
Christian year that stayed with me and left an abiding mark. But there was
no church history in what we learned, and when much later I began to discover the actual history of early Christianity, it came as a revelation.
At my grammar school, a small local girls’ high school with only three
hundred pupils, I remember studying the Tudors, the French Revolution,

* Averil Cameron retired in 2010 as Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine History
and Warden of Keble College, University of Oxford.

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AN ACCIDENTAL SCHOLAR

and nineteenth-century British history, but history was not one of my
choices for A levels, the final school examinations. Instead I took English
literature, Latin, and Music, all three through the influence of their respective teachers. Music was taught as an academic subject, with set works that
included Brahms’ Fourth Symphony and The Magic Flute, and the teacher
was also my piano teacher, and tried to persuade me to go to music college
like her. It was Muriel Telfer, the impressive head teacher, who came
unannounced to our house and told my parents that I must go to university. My Latin teacher had been teaching me Greek during the lunch hour,
and she also broadened my mind by lending me her own books; it was natural therefore to apply for Classics. No one from my family or my school
had gone to Oxford, but the same teacher took me to a summer school in
Greek led by John Pinsent of Liverpool University, and he told me I must
go to Oxford and to Somerville College, so that is what I did. For all I
knew about either, they might as well have been the moon.
In 1958 all Oxford colleges including Somerville were single sex, and
women amounted only to a tiny proportion of the overall undergraduate
body. The results of the entrance exam came by telegram, or rather, two telegrams, for I was offered a scholarship by Girton College, Cambridge as well
as an exhibition by Somerville. An exhibition was less good than a scholarship, but influenced by John Pinsent’s advice, I accepted it. I was entirely
unaware of the uniqueness of the Oxford Classics course, officially called Literae Humaniores, but usually referred to as Greats. It was and is a four-year
course, and it then consisted of five terms spent solely on classical languages
and literature, followed by a tough set of exams known as Mods (Honour
Moderations), after which ancient history and philosophy were studied
together for seven more terms, with another tough set of examinations at the
end. No concessions were made to those who like me had to catch up with
the required standard of Greek. The male undergraduates who had come
from public schools, that is, exclusive private boys’ schools, were streaks
ahead in their language skills and could often walk through Mods with virtually no extra work. Just as well I did not realise that at the time.
There were only four of us reading Classics at Somerville in my year,
and the main mode of teaching was the weekly tutorial with two students
and the tutor. We had to read all of Homer, all of Virgil, much of Cicero,
and more, all in the original. Unseen translation was also important, and
composition from English into Latin and Greek even more so. Literary critique of Latin and Greek texts played a far smaller part, and we were never
given reading lists, as we were actively discouraged from reading secondary
literature. Lectures (open to all students) were not compulsory and not

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3

always relevant; most assumed the high importance of textual criticism, and
when they did cover our set texts, they were often peppered with disparaging references to earlier editors, or still worse, ignorant Byzantines. I was
sent by my tutor to the seminar held by Eduard Fraenkel, the Professor of
Latin, which was uncompromising in this regard and very frightening, but
which I now see acted as a marriage bureau not only for myself and Alan
Cameron but also for the classicists Martin and Stephanie West, and Jasper
and Miriam Griffin. I recognised that Fraenkel was the real thing and spent
much time poring over his commentary on the Agamemnon and his book on
Horace. I also learned everything I knew about Greek metre from his metre
class, during which he would give extraordinary one-man performances of
choruses from The Frogs and other plays of Aristophanes. One of the reasons I became and have remained a fan of Horace’s Odes was because of
their use of the complex Greek lyric metres we learned from Fraenkel.
For examinations we had to dress in subfusc (academic gown, and for
women, cap, black jacket and skirt, white blouse, black tie, and black stockings), and after Mods we divided our time between ancient history with
Isobel Henderson and philosophy with Elizabeth Anscombe and Philippa
Foot. Philosophy included large amounts of Plato and Aristotle in the
original, but also moral philosophy and logic, or perhaps better, epistemology, including the later works of Wittgenstein (Elizabeth Anscombe had
translated his Philosophical Investigations from the German and was also his
literary executor). As before, the teaching consisted of weekly essays discussed in tutorials, now usually two a week. Ancient (i.e. Greek and
Roman) history was divided into periods, with essays focusing on specific
problems such as the nature of Athenian imperialism or the reforms of the
Gracchi. No teaching was offered for the sole examination paper containing wider questions, and I never studied any Hellenistic history, or Roman
history before the second century BC or after the reign of Nero. I had little
conception of wider historical methodology as such. I could in theory have
gone to the History lectures being given on other periods, but that was not
presented as an option, and instead the lectures that I did attend and that
made the biggest impact on me were those given by the art historian Edgar
Wind in the Oxford Playhouse, in which he talked about Michelangelo’s
sculptures and Raphael’s School of Athens (curiously a large copy of which
hung in the upstairs drawing room in the Lodgings at Keble when I arrived
there in 1994). But I became extremely good at the critical analysis of specific texts, including historical sources, and indeed at Greek and Latin.
There were few openings in ancient history in the UK the time, and
for a woman in Oxford only if a fellow in ancient history in the few

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AN ACCIDENTAL SCHOLAR

women’s colleges were to retire. In any case I never imagined myself as an
academic, and my impression is that many of my contemporaries at
Somerville married after graduating and went into professions such as
school teaching. I married Alan Cameron, a fellow Greats student and a
very accomplished classicist, in the summer of 1962 after finals and went
to live in Glasgow where he had taken up a lectureship in Latin (known
there as Humanity). Somehow Glasgow University offered me a graduate
scholarship of £400 a year to start a PhD, and I followed Alan in thinking
that working on a later writer rather than a mainstream classical subject
would be a good idea. Isobel Henderson suggested I consult the Byzantine
historian Robert Browning, who was then a lecturer at University College
London. He pointed me towards the late sixth-century Greek historian
Agathias, and I started work on his Histories, drawing (in the then complete absence of any graduate classes or training) on my undergraduate
experience of working on Thucydides and Herodotus. Henry Chalk was
assigned to me as supervisor, as he had worked on the later Greek poet
Nonnus, and he was kind, although we did not have a great deal to say to
each other. Little had been written on Agathias’s work, but Rudolf Keydell
was working on the first critical edition, published in 1967, and I could
find most of the relevant nineteenth-century dissertations in Glasgow’s
University library. Without distractions, I did much of the work within the
first two years and finished it during 1964–65 in London when Alan
moved to Bedford College in the University of London.
Being in Glasgow was a strong experience. Christian Fordyce, the
Professor of Humanity, was a powerful figure in the University and lived
with his wife in a large house with the address 2 The University, Glasgow.
He had two collections, one of postmarks and the other of railway tickets,
to which members of the department were expected to add when they
could. As the wife of the newest lecturer I had a lowly status at Mrs
Fordyce’s tea parties and was positioned furthest from the fire, the only
source of heating. Nor was Glasgow used to graduate students, especially
female ones, as its best (male) classics graduates usually went on to Balliol
with a Snell exhibition. But Classics at Glasgow was a lively environment,
and there were visits to Edinburgh and meetings with classicists from other
Scottish universities. We also got to know the Trossachs and the beautiful
scenery near Glasgow, as well as the MacBrayne steamers that took us to
the western isles and north to Oban and Fort William. I also had a role
model close to home. Alan published his first articles in 1963, and the first
of several major papers in the Journal of Roman Studies in the following
year, when we also published our first joint article—an indication of the
kind of conversations we were evidently having at home in our basement

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flat in Athole Gardens.1 Agathias composed classicising Greek epigrams as
well as history, and collected epigrams by his friends in his Cycle, which
was later incorporated into the Greek Anthology; given the expertise in
Greek verse which Alan had developed since his schooldays we wrote
about this too.2
Places and people have been my greatest influences, and I was to spend
more than thirty years in London, from 1964 until 1994. Once there I met
Arnaldo Momigliano for the first time. Despite having given me a scholarship, Glasgow University declared that I could not submit my PhD in
absentia, and I had to reregister as a student in London. Momigliano had
already been in contact with Alan and now indicated that he would be
interested in being my supervisor. My experience as a student of
Momigliano was the same as that of Anthony Grafton and others; we did
not talk much about Agathias, but I too came to share the loyalty of those
who attended the weekly seminars he gave at the Warburg Institute from
1967 onwards.3 He and I would meet in the common room at University
College, where he was always solicitous as to whether I was eating enough
oranges or yoghourt. His conversation ranged from earlier scholarship
unfamiliar to me to whatever historical problem he happened to be thinking about, and from there to personal impressions and observations. He
was forthright in his opinions, and he wanted to know mine. Later there
were regular letters from his London mansion flat in Hammersmith, where
I visited him towards the end of his life, and blue airmail forms from Pisa
or Chicago. He sent me to see Henry Chadwick in Oxford, though I was
not sure at that stage what questions to ask him, and helped me to publish
1. Alan Cameron, “The Roman Friends of Ammianus,” Journal of Roman Studies, 54
(1964), 15–28; Alan and Averil Cameron, “Christianity and Tradition in the Historiography
of the Late Empire,” Classical Quarterly, 14 (1964), 316–28.
2. “The Cycle of Agathias,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 86 (1966), 6–25 (with Alan
Cameron); “Further Thoughts on the Cycle of Agathias,” Journal of Hellenic Studies, 87
(1967), 131 (with Alan Cameron); cf. also “Anth. Plan. 72: A Propaganda Poem from the
Reign of Justin II,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 13 (1966), 101–04 (with Alan
Cameron); and Averil Cameron, “Erinna’s Distaff,” Classical Quarterly, n.s.19 (1969), 285–
86. Alan’s interest in the Greek Anthology and Greek epigrams (which also dated back to his
schooldays) led to his books Porphyrius the Charioteer (Oxford, 1973) and The Greek Anthology
from Meleager to Planudes (Oxford, 1993).
3. Anthony Grafton, “Arnaldo Momigliano: A Pupil’s Notes,” The American Scholar,
60.2 (1991), 235–41; and see Michael Crawford, “L’insegnamento di Arnaldo Momigliano
in Gran Bretagna,” in: Lellia Cracco Ruggini, ed., Omaggio ad Arnaldo Momigliano. Storia e
storiografia sul mondo antico (Como, 1989), 27–41. See also Anthony Grafton, “Tell me a
Story,” Tablet Magazine, 1 September 2020; and Peter Brown’s moving memoir, “Arnaldo
Dante Momigliano, 1908–1987,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 74 (1988), 405–42.

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1970 Byzantine Studies Symposium "Byzantium and Sasanian Iran" Group Photo:
Back row (standing) from left to right: Professor Irfan Shahid, A.D.H. Bivar,
Averil Cameron, Philip Grierson, Professor Andrew Alföldi, Richard Ettinghausen, Professor Elias J. Bickerman; Front center (seated): Professor Richard
Frye. Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection.

my two long articles on the Sasanians and the Merovingians and my first
book with the Clarendon Press, as well as putting me in the way of an invitation to speak at the annual Byzantine symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in
1970, where I was the only woman and the youngest speaker by several
decades.4 I submitted the thesis in 1966, and my examiners were
Momigliano himself and Peter Brown, who was then a fellow of All Souls,
Oxford; this was my first meeting with him, in the year before the publi4. “Agathias on the Sassanians,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 23–24 (1969), 1–150;
“Agathias on the Early Merovingians,” Annali della Scuola Normale di Pisa, II.37 (1968), 95–
140; Agathias (Oxford, 1970).

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cation of his book on Augustine. The viva was held with just the three of
us in a rather dismal classroom with old school desks and was more of a
chat than an examination.
By then I had become an assistant lecturer in classics at King’s College
London, teaching classical languages and literature, but no ancient history
and certainly nothing on the later Roman empire. In 1970, however, I was
appointed as Reader in ancient history, succeeding the sole ancient historian, Howard Scullard, a gentle man who patiently endured the lack of
appreciation for ancient history in the Classics Department. My teaching
changed accordingly, and I now belonged to the History Department as
well as Classics. I taught ancient history according to the University of
London history syllabus, which meant long periods (until as late as AD
400 for Roman history, recently revised from AD 641) and lectures on
political thought from Cicero to Augustine, with St. Paul and Eusebius
along the way. It was during the years that followed, and especially through
having to teach the Roman empire, that I really developed into a historian.
Before this something had happened that seems extraordinary in retrospect. Both Alan and I were invited to spend a year teaching in graduate
school at Columbia University, New York, while Gilbert Highet—as it
happened, himself a Scot who had gone from Glasgow University to Balliol College on a Snell exhibition in the early thirties—was on sabbatical.
Both our departments agreed, even though I had joined King’s College
only two years before. The invitation was for the academic year 1967 to
1968, which proved to be the year of student strikes and anti-Vietnam
protests, and the shootings of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
My first baby was also due just before we would need to travel and was late
in coming. Gilbert Highet himself and the ultra-conservative William
Calder III wrote to dissuade us from bringing him with us (Calder suggested leaving him with a “compliant aunt”), but I took him to New York
at only four weeks old and began teaching very soon after. I taught graduate classes on Tacitus and Petronius, and one of my students was Froma
Zeitlin, later of Princeton, who had returned to graduate school as her children started to grow up.5 It was a momentous year. Anti-Vietnam war
protests were going on, and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)
were very active; Columbia students were protesting about the university’s
5. This resulted in two articles by myself, “Petronius and Plato,” Classical Quarterly, n.s.
19 (1969), 367–70; “Myth and Meaning in Petronius: Some Modern Comparisons,”
Latomu,s 29 (1970), 397–425; a paper by Froma Zeitlin followed: “Romanus Petronius: A
Study of the Troiae Halosis and the Bellum Civile,” Latomus 30 (1971), 56–82.

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policies and blockading the main buildings, and we had to teach our graduate classes in our apartment. I also encountered the early stages of secondwave feminism at the annual meeting of the American Philological Society
in Atlanta, at which women classicists were talking of forming a women’s
caucus to press for inclusion on speakers’ panels. We returned to England
in the summer of 1968, soon after the May events in Paris, and when the
Women’s Liberation Movement in the UK was beginning to take shape.
Living in New York and being in the U.S. had been a mind-bending experience and a challenging introduction to teaching in a very different university system.
The 1970s were a crucial decade for me. Arnaldo Momigliano retired
from University College and was succeeded by Fergus Millar in 1976, and
Keith Hopkins was professor of sociology at Brunel University just outside
London. The weekly ancient history seminar at the Institute of Classical
Studies brought ancient historians together from across London and outside. It was a fixture every Thursday (and still is), and under Fergus Millar
it included graduate students and anyone who happened to be visiting and
interested, but interventions by Hopkins sometimes transformed it into a
gladiatorial contest. I had become interested in the four books of Latin
hexameters written in Constantinople by the North African poet Corippus
in praise of the Emperor Justin II, justifying his succession to Justinian in
565, and was working on an edition, translation, and commentary.6 This
work had been neglected by historians and also turned out to be extremely
important for Byzantine art historians, for example with its description of
the triumphal ceiling decoration in the palace and that on Justinian’s
funeral pall; it is also central for understanding the working of late antique
panegyric. Alan was then working on his book on circus factions, and
Corippus’ poem contains a long section on the four factions and the ceremonial of the hippodrome and the consulship. It also contains a lengthy
prayer to the Virgin put into the mouth of the Empress Sophia, and this
set me off exploring the cult of the Virgin in the sixth century and earlier.7
6. Corippus, In laudem Iustini minoris libri quattuor (London, 1976). I probably knew
about Corippus because Frank Goodyear, of the Latin Department at Bedford College and
known to me through Alan, and his friend David R. Shackleton Bailey were working on a
critical edition of Corippus’s other poem, the Iohannis; published in 1970, it approached the
poem entirely as an opportunity for clever conjectures.
7. Alan Cameron, Circus Factions: Blues and Greens at Rome and Byzantium (Oxford,
1976); Averil Cameron, “Corippus’s Poem on Justin II: A Terminus of Antique Art?,” Annali
della Scuola Normale di Pisa, III.5 (1975), 129–65; “The Empress Sophia,” Byzantion, 45
(1975), 5–21; “The Early Religious Policies of Justin II,” in: The Orthodox Churches and the
West, ed. Derek Baker [Studies in Church History, 13] (Oxford, 1976), 51–68; “Early

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However my teaching was focused on the Roman empire up to AD 400.
A. H. M. Jones’s The Later Roman Empire had come out in 1964, and the
very different The World of Late Antiquity by Peter Brown in 1971. I
reviewed The World of Late Antiquity and was not then sure about what was
evidently a very original way of writing about the later Roman empire; I
had not yet done enough wider historical reading to realise just how new it
was, but I found it exhilarating.8 The book almost completely bypassed the
standard questions, demolished the issue of imperial decline by demonstrating the vibrancy of late antique culture, and introduced a far wider
geographical perspective. It also drew on visual as well as textual evidence
and invited readers to draw on their imagination to an extent that was
completely unfamiliar.
I was by now reading major modern works including M. I. Rostovtzeff
on the social and economic history of the Roman empire. Perry Anderson’s
Marxist Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism came out in 1974, and Keith
Hopkins’s insistence on the use of sociological and quantitative models and
comparative history, especially the comparison between the Roman empire
and Han China,9 offered a further alternative to the standard interpretations.
These differences led to culture wars between Keith Hopkins and Fergus
Millar when Hopkins published a scathing review-article about Millar’s large
book, The Emperor in the Roman World (1977) in the Journal of Roman Studies
for 1978, accusing it of piling up facts and lacking the kind of larger-scale
sociological thinking he advocated himself. By then I was a member of the
editorial committee for the Journal of Roman Studies, and Millar himself was
the Editor; I did not think the review article should have been published, but
Millar felt he ought not to intervene. He in turn had written an article in the
Times Literary Supplement in 1977 which seemed to cast aspersions on the
work of Momigliano, whom he had succeeded only months before, for
which Momigliano never forgave him. All this was painful to watch and
illustrated the deep differences that could exist between historians committed to competing ways of doing history. Some years later I became the Editor
of the Journal of Roman Studies myself, and my years of involvement with the
Journal both as Editor and as a member of the committee were among the

Byzantine Kaiserkritik: Two Case Histories,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 3 (1977),
1–17; “The Theotokos in Sixth-century Constantinople,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s. 29
(1978), 79–108.
8. English Historical Review, 88 (1971), 116–17.
9. See his two books, Conquerors and Slaves (Cambridge, 1978) and Death and Renewal
(Cambridge, 1983), especially the first. Hopkins had previously spent some time teaching at
Hong Kong University.

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most educative of my life. My duties also extended to overseeing the Roman
Society’s new monograph series, including Charlotte Roueché’s Aphrodisias
in Late Antiquity (1989), which was followed a few years later by Performers
and Partisans at Aphrodisias (1993). Between them they covered ground
directly relevant to circus factions in late antiquity and to the wider issue of
cities and the changing nature of urbanism which was central to the historical questions in which I was now engaged.
Late Roman archaeology had been developing since the 1970s, especially with the work of Italian archaeologists led by Andrea Carandini. John
Hayes’s Late Roman Pottery, published in 1972, now provided a secure
dating system for the many thousands of pottery sherds found on Roman
sites and made reliable stratigraphy possible. The UNESCO Save Carthage
project of the 1970s brought seven teams of international archaeologists to
the site of ancient Carthage, near the modern city of Tunis, among them
one from the University of Michigan led by John Humphrey. He invited
me, unusually, to visit while the excavations were going on with a view to
writing about them from a historian’s perspective at an early stage. This
resulted in two visits to Tunisia during which I drove myself in the dig’s old
Peugeot to late Roman sites all over the country and got to know Edith
Wightman and Colin Wells, who were leading the Canadian team. During
my work on Agathias I had necessarily spent time on Procopius, whose history Agathias continued,10 and as well as his account of the campaigns of
Belisarius and his successors in the Wars, his Buildings has a detailed section
on Carthage and the building activity that followed the Byzantine reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals in 534. I was able to explore the
sites and the topography at first hand and could see for myself the signs of
transition and remodelling in what had been typical Roman provincial cities
as public buildings and spaces were built over or turned into churches, or
where small settlements were fortified against attack. It was also an important lesson in how far textual sources can and cannot be used by archaeologists, particularly when as here with the Buildings the main text in question
is actually a panegyric. Corippus’s other lengthy hexameter poem was on the
campaigns in North Africa of the Byzantine general John Troglita in the
late 540s, and while this is much less rich in detail than the panegyric on
Justin II, it was also useful for its topographic indications. I was also struck
by the way in which the Justinianic reconquest was followed by the introduction of the Greek language and the gradual arrival in North Africa of the
cults of eastern saints. My direct experience of excavation had otherwise
10. My first publication was an abridged translation of Procopius with introduction:
Averil Cameron, Procopius (New York, l967).

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been limited to a very brief (and wet) spell at Verulamium (St. Albans)
while still an undergraduate, and even though what I wrote at the time was
necessarily provisional, these visits to Tunisia were important for me as well
as memorable in themselves.11 They stood me in very good stead later when
I was involved, as I frequently was, as editor or author in dealing with urban
change in the late antique period.
Hayden White’s Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in NineteenthCentury Europe was published in 1973, and unlike Momigliano I was
drawn to the idea that history-writing was less a matter of finding objective
truth about the past than of understanding the narratives created by historians themselves. By the time that White’s collection, The Content of the
Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation, appeared in 1987,
I had been further influenced by discussions with others in Princeton and
by historical and anthropology seminars there, and by reading the earlier
publications of Michel Foucault. Consciousness of the power of discourse
and literary strategies to influence history lay behind my book on Procopius
when it was published in 1985 and my Sather lectures in Berkeley in 1986.
It has been an ongoing driver of much of my work since.
My interest in the role of the Virgin Mary in public and private piety
in late antiquity led me to argue that this became more obvious during the
later sixth century. Although Justinian’s Hagia Sophia, finished in 537, had
11. The immediate result was my article “Byzantine Africa: the Literary Evidence,” in:
University of Michigan, Excavations at Carthage VII, ed. John Humphrey (Michigan, 1982),
29–62, followed by “Corippus’s Johannis: Epic of Byzantine Africa,” Papers of the Liverpool
Latin Seminar, 4 (1983), 167–80; “Gelimer’s Laughter: the Case of Byzantine Africa,” in:
Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity, ed. Frank M. Clover and R. Stephen Humphreys
(Madison, Wisc., 1989), 171–90; and “The Byzantine Reconquest of North Africa and the
Impact of Greek Culture,” Graeco-Arabica, V (1993), 153–65. John Humphrey’s own book,
Roman Circuses. Arenas for Chariot Racing (London), was published in 1986. I returned to
some of the theoretical issues much later in “Ideologies and Agendas in Late Antique Studies,” in: Late Antique Archaeology 1: Theory and Practice in Late Antique Archaeology, ed. Luke
Lavan and William Bowden (Leiden, 2003), 3–21; to Vandal and Byzantine North Africa in:
“Vandal and Byzantine Africa,” in: Cambridge Ancient History XIV, ed. Averil Cameron,
Bryan Ward-Perkins, and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge, 2000), 552–69; and to Procopius’s
Buildings in: “Conclusion, De Aedificiis: le texte de Procope et les réalités,” Antiquité tardive,e
8 (2000), 177–80. Yvette Duval’s Loca sanctorum Africae. Le culte des martyrs en Afrique
du IVe au VIIe siècle, 2 vols. (Rome) also came out in 1982, and see Yves Modéran, Les Maures
et l’Afrique romaine, IVe–VIIe, Bibliothèque des Ecoles françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 314
(Rome, 2003). The discussion about the physical changes in late antique cities in North Africa
and elsewhere has been ongoing: see Anna Leone, Changing Townscapes in North Africa from
Late Antiquity to the Arab Conquest (Bari, 2007); The End of the Pagan City. Religion, Economy
and Urbanism in Late Antique North Africa (Oxford, 2013).

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no figural mosaics, the importance of Mary in the sixth-century liturgical
hymns of Romanos, her depiction in apse mosaics, and the stories that
attached to her in relation to the siege of Constantinople in 626 pointed to
my mind in the same direction as the early indications of devotion to
icons.12 It has been argued in the past that the Akathistos hymn addressed
to Mary that is still sung today in the Orthodox church was composed by
Romanos, and its present opening is connected with the siege of 626, but
I was persuaded by the argument of Leena Mari Peltomaa that the hymn
itself belongs to the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451,13 and
I was intrigued by the epithets for the Virgin so amply demonstrated there
and in other Greek texts from the fifth century onwards.14 My arguments
about a religious change in the late sixth century were taken much further
by Mischa Meier although countered by Cyril Mango. I continue to
believe, against Leslie Brubaker, that it was from then onwards rather than
a century later that icons became important.15 The rise of icons also seemed
12. “The Theotokos in Sixth-century Constantinople,” Journal of Theological Studies, n.s.
29 (1978), 79–108; “A Nativity Poem from the Sixth century AD,” Classical Philology, 79
(1979), 222–32; “The Virgin’s Robe,” Byzantion, 49 (1979), 42–56; these came together in
“Images of Authority: Elites and Icons in Late Sixth-century Byzantium,” Past and Presen,t 84
(1979), 3–35. Later I supervised the PhD thesis of Niki Tsironi dealing in particular with the
ninth-century Marian homiletics of George of Nicomedia, on which see Niki Tsironi, “From
Piety to Liturgy: the Cult of the Mother of God in the Middle Byzantine Era,” in: The Mother
of God: Representations of the Virgin in Byzantine Art, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Milan and Athens,
2000), 91–102, and I wrote more on Mary myself, especially in connection with conferences and
exhibitions, where I became familiar with the important work of art historians including Maria
Vassilaki and Annemarie Weyl Carr: see “The Early Cult of the Virgin,” in: The Mother of God,
3–15; “The Cult of the Virgin in Late Antiquity: Religious Development and Myth-making,”
in: The Church and Mary, ed. Robert Swanson [Studies in Church History 39] (Woodbridge,
2004), 1–21; “Introduction,” in: Images of the Mother of God: Perceptions of the Theotokos in Byzantium, ed. Maria Vassilaki (Aldershot, 2004), xxvii–xxxii; ”The Mother of God in Byzantium:
Relics, Icons, Texts,” in: The Cult of the Mother of God in Byzantium: Texts and Images, ed. Leslie
Brubaker and Mary Cunningham (Farnham, 2011), 1–5. On Romanos, see now Thomas
Arentzen, The Virgin in Song: Mary and the Poetry of Romanos the Melodist (Philadelphia, 2017),
and more widely The Reception of the Virgin in Byzantium: Marian Narratives in Texts and Images,
ed. Thomas Arentzen and Mary B. Cunningham (Cambridge, 2019).
13. Leena Mari Peltomaa, The Image of the Virgin Mary in the Akathistos Hymn (Leiden,
2001).
14. Stephen Shoemaker has taken me to task and argued for earlier devotion to the
Virgin, but the apocryphal texts on which he relies are hard to date securely; see for instance
Stephen Shoemaker, Mary in Christian Faith and Devotion (New Haven, 2016).
15. Mischa Meier, Das andere Zeitalter Justinians: Kontingenzverfahrung und Kontingenzbewältigung im 6. Jahrhundert n. Chr. (Göttingen, 2003), he has published a lot more
recently with a similar argument; Cyril Mango, “Constantinople as Theotokoupolis,” in:
Mother of God, pp.17–25; Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era,
ca. 680–ca.850. A History (Cambridge, 2011).

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to me to be intimately connected with language and with the expression of
theology in contemporary texts; I did not see texts and images as contrasting with each other, still less in conflict, and for me they went together.16
It was logical for me if perhaps surprising to others that when my attention
was caught by Procopius’s failure to mention a miraculous image at Edessa
whose discovery during the siege of 544 was described by Evagrius, I
should devote my inaugural lecture as professor of ancient history at King’s
in 1980 to arguing against the persistent attempts to identify this (lost)
object with the Shroud of Turin.17 I soon found out that nothing would
persuade the true believers in the Shroud’s authenticity.
When I had the chance of a year’s stay as a Visitor at the Institute of
Advanced Study in Princeton in 1977–78 I gave as my subject the book on
Procopius that logically followed from the work I had done during my
PhD,18 but in practice I was thinking much more about the cult of the
Virgin and gave the expected lecture on that subject instead. I had opted
for the Institute over Dumbarton Oaks, with its wonderful library on
Byzantium, because by now I was a single parent with two school-age children, and the Institute is ideal for visiting families.19 It was an important
stay. My horizons were broadened by Clifford Geertz’s anthropology seminar and the Davis seminar in the History Department of the university,
and I got to know and love the Firestone Library. It was to be the first of
many later visits to Princeton. I also became aware of Michel Foucault and
read The Order of Things as well as Discipline and Punish, though not yet the
first volume of the History of Sexuality, published in French in 1976. In the
end my book on Procopius was not published until 1985, and it was hard
to finish as I was by then more interested in other issues.20
16. “The Language of Images: Icons and Christian Representation,” in: The Church and
the Arts, ed. Diana Wood [Studies in Church History 28] (Oxford, 1992), 1–42.
17. The Sceptic and the Shroud (King’s College London, 1980); see “The History of the
Image of Edessa: the Telling of a Story,” Okeanos. Festschrift I. Sevcenko [Harvard Ukrainian
Studies, 7] (1984), 80–94; and “The Mandylion and Byzantine Iconoclasm,” in: The Holy Face
and the Paradox of Representation, Papers from a Colloquium held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana,
Rome and the Villa Spelman, Florence, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Gerhard Wolf [Villa Spelman Colloquia, 6] (Bologna, 1998), 33–54.
18. As in: “The ‘Scepticism’ of Procopius,” Historia, 15 (1966), 6–25.
19. As described recently by the French mathematician and winner of the Fields Medal
Cédric Villani, in: The Birth of a Theorem. A Mathematical Adventure (Eng. trans. London,
2015). During their stay he and his family lived like us in Van Neumann Drive on the edge
of the Institute housing complex.
20. Procopius and the Sixth Century (London, 1985). In some ways it certainly belongs
to its time, for instance in its insistence on genre and as some might say its classicising
approach, but the recent deluge of publications on Procopius has shown that the work I did

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On my return I reviewed the two books on Constantine and his time
by Timothy Barnes and wrote about Eusebius in a volume in honour of
Arnaldo Momigliano.21 Both Constantine and Eusebius proved to be continuing preoccupations: teaching Constantine as a special subject led to a
long engagement with the subject and the period;22 my later translation
and commentary on Eusebius’s Life of Constantine with Stuart G. Hall, my
colleague in the Theology Department at King’s College, took shape from
an informal seminar with other London colleagues and was enriched by the
experience of giving several lectures and other seminars in Berkeley and at
the Collège de France in Paris during the 1980s.23 I was also working with
Judith Herrin on a publication arising from another seminar held at King’s
with Alan Cameron in 1974–76, and this came out in 1984.24 Though the
seminar was held in the Classics Department, this was a more Byzantine
project. The Parastaseis is a puzzling text, seemingly a collection of notes
(parastaseis) on places and monuments in Constantinople including late
antique statuary, which we dated to the eighth century and which became
part of the later work known as the Patria. It reveals a world in which the
historical Constantine had become the subject of legend, and when people

in the main more than fifty years ago still remains basic: see “Writing about Procopius Then
and Now,” in: Procopius of Caesarea: Literary and Historical Interpretations, ed. Christopher
Lillington-Martin and Elodie Turquois (Milton Park, 2017), 13–25.
21. Timothy D. Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius (Cambridge, MA, 1981); The New
Empire of Diocletian and Constantine (Cambridge, MA, 1982); see “Constantinus christianius,” Journal of Roman Studies, 73 (1983), 184–90; and “Eusebius of Caesarea and the
Rethinking of History,” in: Tria Corda. Scritti in Onore di Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. Emilio
Gabba (Como, 1983), 71–88.
22. “Form and Meaning: the Vita Constantini and the Vita Antonii,” in: Greek Biography and Panegyric in Late Antiquity, ed. Tomas Hägg and Philip Rousseau (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 2000), 72–88; “The Reign of Constantine, AD 306–337,” in Cambridge Ancient History XII, ed. Alan Bowman, Averil Cameron, and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge, 2005). 90–109;
“Constantine and the Peace of the Church,” Cambridge History of Christianity I, ed. Margaret
Mitchell and Frances Young (Cambridge, 2006), 538–51; “Constantius and Constantine: An
Exercise in Publicity,” in: Constantine the Great: York’s Roman Emperor, ed. Elizabeth Hartley,
Jane Hawkes and Martin Henig (York, 2006), 18–30; “Constantine and Christianity,” ibid.,
96–103; “Il potere di Costantino. Dimensioni e limiti del potere imperiale,” in: Costantino I.
Enciclopedia Costantiniana sulla figura e l’immagine dell’imperatore del cosidetto Editto di Milano
313–2013 (Rome, 2013), I, 105–15.
23. “Eusebius’s Vita Constantini and the Construction of Constantine,” in: Portraits:
The Biographical in the Literature of the Empire, ed. Simon Swain and Mark Edwards (Oxford,
1997), 245–74; Eusebius, Life of Constantine [Clarendon Ancient History Series] (Oxford,
1999) (with Stuart G. Hall).
24. Constantinople in the Eighth Century. The Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai, ed.
Averil Cameron and Judith Herrin, in conjunction with Alan Cameron, Robin Cormack, and
Charlotte Roueché [Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition, 10] (Leiden, 1984).

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could often provide only fanciful identifications of the late antique statuary
that still stood in the city and which they invested with malignant powers.
Our choice of subject fitted both the interest I had had in the city of Constantinople and Alan’s work on chariot-racing and the hippodrome. He
moved to a chair at Columbia University in New York in 1977, and the
work on publication was undertaken by myself and Judith Herrin, but the
idea that the Parastaseis was the work of a group of uneasy officials was his.
We were insistent on the need to distinguish evidence from the Parastaseis
from the later Patria, and our choice of text was prescient, in that Gilbert
Dagron and Alexander Kazhdan each separately addressed the issue of the
developing legends about Constantine in 1984 and 1987.25 In the 1980s
Alexander Kazhdan was grappling with the intellectual chasm between his
previous academic life in Soviet Russia and the new conditions of Dumbarton Oaks and America.26 He reviewed our book in detail in 1987;27 subsequent publications have also moved the discussion on in various ways,
but ours remains the only commentary on the Parastaseis.28
At the same time I was preparing my Sather lectures, due to be delivered
at Berkeley in the spring semester of 1986 on the theme of Christianity and
the rhetoric of empire.29 I wanted to argue that the huge mass of writing produced by Christians especially from the fourth century onwards played an
important role in the process of the gradual Christianization of the Roman
empire. It was often said that few contemporaries would have been aware of

25. Gilbert Dagron, Constantinople imaginaire (Paris, 1984); Alexander P. Kazhdan,
“‘Constantin imaginaire’: Byzantine Legends of the Ninth Century about Constantine the
Great,” Byzantion, 57 (1987), 196–250.
26. “In Search for the Heart of Byzantium,” Byzantion, 51 (1981), 330–32; Alexander
P. Kazhdan and Giles Constable, People and Power in Byzantium: An Introduction to Modern
Byzantine Studies (Washington, DC, 1982); Alexander Kazhdan and Anthony Cutler, “Continuity and Discontinuity in Byzantine History,” Byzantion, 52 (1982), 429–78. I was struck
already by the aura of exoticism with which Byzantium was often surrounded: “Byzantium.
The Exotic Mirage,” Times Higher Education Supplement, 933, September 21, 1990, 13–15.
27. Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 40.2 (1987), 400–03.
28. Albrecht Berger, Untersuchungen zu den Patria Konstantinupoleos (Bonn, 1988); Liz
James, “‘Pray Not to Fall into Temptation and Be on Your Guard’: Pagan Statues in Christian
Constantinople,” Gesta, 35, no. 1 (1996), 12–20; Benjamin Anderson, “Classified Knowledge:
the Epistemology of Statuary in the Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai,” Byzantine and Modern
Greek Studies, 35 (2011), 1–19; Paolo Odorico, “Du recueil à l’invention du texte: le cas des
Parastaseis Syntomoi Chronikai,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift, 107.2 (2014), 755–84; Paroma
Chatterjee, “Viewing the Unknown in Eighth-century Constantinople,” Gesta, 56.2 (2017),
137–49.
29. Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire. The Development of Christian Discourse
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991).

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it, but I was struck by its sheer quantity,30 as well as by the impact of regular
preaching, and argued that it had effect because the writers attuned themselves to the rhetorical world of their time and were thus able to be persuasive.
I also argued that the many apocryphal narratives and the mass of hagiographic writing and ascetic literature spoke to a thirst for stories and opened
new imaginative possibilities in a society in the process of change. Imagination and fiction were as important as argument in the many-sided religious
world of late antiquity and the Christian tendency towards stories, figurality
(and indeed fiction) fitted well with my argument. I approached the subject
chronologically and had to start by getting to grip with New Testament scholarship. I saw Christian writing as deeply connected with its social and political
context, although my use of the term “totalizing discourse” in relation to the
sixth century needed increasing modification as I began to concern myself
with the seventh century and later. This fascination with Christian literature
has continued to occupy me throughout my career.31
Arriving in Berkeley in a mild January from a cold grey England was
a revelation, as were its coffee and sandwich culture, the urbanism of San
Francisco, and the beauty and grandeur of the Pacific coastline. My graduate seminar on Eusebius’s Life of Constantine included several members
who went on to become well known academics themselves, but I missed
overlapping with Peter Brown, who was then in Princeton. Nevertheless
my book on Procopius had been published in the previous year in his then
new series with the University of California Press, The Transformation of
the Classical Heritage.32 Our lives have gone in parallel or overlapped at
different times, always in ways that were important for me.
In 1981 I had been a Summer Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in steamy
Washington and met Elizabeth Clark in one of the places on Wisconsin
30. See also “Education and Literary Culture,” in: Cambridge Ancient History, XIII , ed.
Averil Cameron and Peter Garnsey (Cambridge, 1997), 665–707.
31. “New Themes and Styles in Byzantine Literature, 7th-8th Centuries,” in: Averil
Cameron and Lawrence I. Conrad, eds., The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems
in the Literary Sources (Princeton, 1992), 81–105; “New Themes and Styles in Later Greek
Literature—a Title Revisited,” in: Greek Literature in Late Antiquity. Dynamism, Didacticism,
Classicism, ed. Scott Fitzgerald Johnson (Aldershot, 2006), 11–28; “New Themes and Styles
Revisited Again: Literature, Theology and Social and Political Change,” in: New Themes, New
Styles in the Eastern Mediterranean, Christian, Jewish and Islamic Encounters, 5th–8th Centuries,
ed. Hagit Amirav and Francesco Celia [Late Antique History and Religion, 16] (Leuven,
2017), 1–18.
32. Procopius and the Sixth Century (London and Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1985); see
also “History as Text: Coping with Procopius,” in: The Inheritance of Historiography, 350–900,
ed. Christopher Holdsworth and T. Peter Wiseman (Exeter, 1986), 53–67.

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Avenue. This proved the beginning of another lifetime friendship. In the
next few years she published her early books on Jerome, Chrysostom and
Friends (1982), Women in the Early Church (1983), and the Life of Melania
(1984). I had first become attuned to the theme of ancient women in 1967
during our year at Columbia, and in 1989 Amélie Kuhrt and I edited a
volume arising from the ancient history seminar at the Institute of Classical
Studies and containing chapters on women in a number of different
ancient societies.33 Elizabeth Clark’s work reinforced my view of the centrality of discourse in forming attitudes and linked early Christian writings
about the Virgin Mary with general attitudes to women in early Christianity. To this were added the tales about female saints like Thecla in the
second- and third-century apocrypha and the often exotic lives of late
antique female ascetic heroines like Pelagia or Mary of Egypt.34 I was less
interested in finding out about the actual lives of Christian women than in
the sometimes extreme language used about them, which was itself connected with the broader issue of Christian asceticism. The same period saw
the publication in English of the first three volumes of Foucault’s History
of Sexuality,35 and Peter Brown was at work on The Body and Society: Men,
Women and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity, published in 1988.
All this formed the background to my Sather lectures in 1986. I was drawn
towards critics who were exploring asceticism in terms of the discourses of
deconstruction and postmodernism,36 and published an article on the textual representation of early Christian women in a collection I edited with
the title History as Text.37

33. Images of Women in Antiquity (London, 1989). Another seminar at King’s College
was on the Life of the patriarch Eutychius by Eustratius, an important source for the sixth
century: “Eustratius’s Life of the Patriarch Eutychius and the Fifth Ecumenical Council,” in:
Kathegetria: Essays Presented to Joan Hussey on her 80th Birthday, ed. Julian Chrysostomides
(Camberley, 1988), 225–47; “Models of the Past in the Late Sixth century: The Life of the
Patriarch Eutychius,” in: Reading the Past in Late Antiquity, ed. Graham Clarke (Canberra,
1990), 205–23.
34. Pierre Petitmengin, Pelagie la pénitente: metamorphoses d’une légende, 2 vols. (Paris,
1981–84); Benedicta Ward, Harlots of the Desert (London, 1987); and Sebastian P. Brock and
Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Holy Women of the Christian Orient (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1987)—all belonged to the 1980s.
35. See “Redrawing the Map: Christian Territory after Foucault,” Journal of Roman
Studies, 76 (1986), 266–71.
36. “Ascetic Closure and the End of Antiquity,” in: Asceticism, ed. Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York, 1995), 147–61.
37. “Virginity as Metaphor: Women and the Rhetoric of Early Christianity,” in: History as Text, ed. Averil Cameron (London, 1989), 184–205; and see “Early Christianity and
the Discourse of Female Desire,” in: Women in Ancient Societies. An Illusion of the Night, ed.
Susan Fischler, Leonie Archer, and Maria Wyke (Basingstoke, 1994), 152–68 (repr. with an

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By now I was becoming interested in the emergence of Islam38 and
wanted to look more closely at the transition from the sixth century to the
seventh and eighth; I was able to do so during a Wolfson Research Readership from the British Academy in the early 1990s during which I was able
to visit many of the late antique sites in Israel and travel to Cyprus (Jordan
was to come later). I was also reading the textual evidence on icons, much
of it difficult to disentangle. Given my preoccupation with the power of discourse I was struck by the violence of the language used against rival Christian groups and Jews, not only in theological texts but also in chronicles and
other writing; it raised broader questions of intolerance, 39 which have since
been much taken up by others, and was a thread that ran through much of
my work thereafter, extending to the nature of heresiological works as well
as to an ongoing interest in how the Byzantines tried to establish and
enforce orthodoxy.40 This reading of Greek Christian texts also lay behind
a contribution on dialogues and disputations in 1991. I was becoming more
aware of the mass of late antique material in Syriac and already argued that
“Afterword” in: The Religious History of the Roman Empire. Pagans, Jews and Christians, ed.
John A. North and Simon R.F. Price [Oxford Readings in Classical Studies] (Oxford, 2011),
505–30).
38. Especially after the conference held in Madison, Wisconsin in 1984, published as
Tradition and Innovation in Late Antiquity (n. 11). I went on to start the series Studies in Late
Antiquity and Early Islam together with Lawrence I. Conrad and Geoffrey King, published
by the Darwin Press, Princeton, and co-edited or edited three volumes of workshop papers:
The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East I: Problems in the Literary Sources (Princeton, 1992)
(with Lawrence I. Conrad); The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East II: Land Use and Settlement Patterns (Princeton, 1994) (with Geoffrey R. D. King); The Byzantine and Early
Islamic Near East III: States, Resources and Armies (Princeton: 1995). The sceptical Hagarism
by Patricia Crone and Michael Cook had been published in 1977, and we were much engaged
with the source problems for early Islam; a key later publication in the series was Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: A Survey and Analysis of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian Writings on Islam (Princeton, 1997).
39. “Apologetics in the Roman Empire—a Genre of Intolerance?” in: “Humana sapit”.
Études d’Antiquité tardive offertes à Lellia Cracco Ruggini, ed. Jean-Michel Carrié and Rita
Lizzi Testa [Bibliothèque de l’Antiquité Tardive, 3] (Paris-Turnhout, 2002), 219–27.
40. “The Jews in Seventh-century Palestine,” Scripta Classica Israelica, 13 (1994), 75–93;
“Texts as Weapons: Polemic in the Byzantine Dark Ages,” in: Literacy and Power in the
Ancient World, ed. Alan Bowman and Greg Woolf (Cambridge, 1994), 198–215; “Byzantines
and Jews: Some Recent Work on Early Byzantium,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 20
(1996), 249–74; “Blaming the Jews: the Seventh-century Invasions of Palestine in Context,”
Travaux et Mémoires, 14 (Mélanges Gilbert Dagron) (2002), 57–78; “Jews and Heretics—a
Category Error?,” in: The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the
Early Middle Ages, ed. Adam H. Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed (Tübingen, 2003), 345–
60; “How to Read Heresiology,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 33.3 (Fall
2003), 471–92; also in The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies. Gender, Asceticism and Historiography, ed. Dale Martin and Patricia Cox Miller (Durham, NC, 2005), 193–212.

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the Adversus Iudaeos “debates” should be read in the context of a wider study
of dialogues in Greek, to which I turned in earnest much later.41
I had often attended the annual Byzantine symposia founded by
Anthony Bryer at Birmingham in 1967, and by 1983 I was chair of the
British National Byzantine Committee. Bryer and I founded the Society
for the Promotion of Byzantine Studies in 1983 on the model of the Hellenic and Roman Societies, with Bryer as secretary, myself as chair, and
Steven Runciman as President. I was happy enough to use the term Byzantine in my publications, and I wrote on the tenth-century Book of Ceremonies in 1987,42 but I was not seen as a Byzantinist, for example by
Donald Nicol, the Koraes Professor of Byzantine History, Language and
Literature and head of the tiny department of Byzantine and Modern
Greek at King’s College. At the same time I had been impressed by the
structuralist approach to late antiquity in Evelyne Patlagean’s Pauvreté
économique et pauvreté sociale à Byzance, 4e–7e siècle (Paris, 1977), which I
had reviewed in Past and Present,43 and was identifying myself more and
more with the field of late antiquity as it developed after Peter Brown’s
World of Late Antiquity.
Both these concerns—late antiquity and Byzantium—carried forward
into the 1990s, but the focus of my teaching changed for two reasons: first,
the move away from the restrictive University of London syllabus taught
until then in all its large constituent colleges, King’s College included, and
second, a decision at King’s to develop the teaching of Byzantium. I
became the founding director of the new Centre for Hellenic Studies and
oversaw the establishment of the digital Prosopography of the Byzantine
Empire at King’s College. For the first time I began to teach courses on
later periods and gave a second inaugural lecture on popular and academic
attitudes to Byzantium.44 As with late antiquity, I was interested in the
41. “Disputations, Polemical Literature and the Formation of Opinion in the Early
Byzantine Period,” in: Dispute Poems and Dialogues in the Ancient and Mediaeval Near East, ed.
Gerrit J. Reinink and Herman L. J. Vanstiphout [Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 42]
(Leuven, 1991), 91–108.
42. “The Construction of Court Ritual: The Byzantine Book of Ceremonies,’” in: Rituals
of Royalty. Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. David Cannadine and Simon R.
F. Price [Past and Present Publications] (Cambridge, 1987), 106–36
43. “Late Antiquity: the Total View,” Past and Present, 88 (1980), 129–35.
44. The Use and Abuse of Byzantium, Inaugural Lecture, King’s College London (1992);
see “Byzance dans le débat sur l’Orientalisme,” in: Byzance et l’Europe, XVIe–XX siècle, ed.
Marie-France Auzépy (Paris, 2003), 227–42; and “Byzantium between East and West,” in:
Présence de Byzance, ed. Jean-Michel Spieser (Lausanne, 2007), 112–33.

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ways in which Byzantium has been seen, and viewed it through the lens of
Edward Said’s conception of Orientalism. The question of how to
approach Byzantium has been a continuing preoccupation ever since, and
in 2008, after a lecture I had given at Princeton, I set out my feeling that
when not exoticized, Byzantium tends to be absent or at least side-lined.45
This provoked lively responses, and later I went on to set out some of the
difficulties in approaching Byzantium and Byzantine culture in Byzantine
Matters.46 Moving into Byzantium proper from late antiquity took me into
a very different academic milieu, and, although there are now many more
Byzantinists, one which remains underdeveloped and prone to inherited
and nationalist biases; I argued at the end of Dialoguing in Late Antiquity
that Byzantinists would do well to pay more attention to late antiquity, and
indeed the relation of late antiquity to that of Byzantine studies has
become a key issue.47 I have been more relaxed about periodization and
nomenclature than some others because Byzantium was necessarily a
hybrid. It grew out of the Roman empire, but with its very long history it
was also medieval and had an inherited Greek culture and language. No
state can stay the same for hundreds of years—Rome itself did not and neither did Byzantium nor the world around it.
Moving back to Oxford in 1994 to be the head of a college was a
change of a different order altogether. From then until 2010 I was the
Warden of Keble College, one of the largest colleges in the University of
Oxford, and a college with an interesting history. I was its first woman
head and one of the first three women elected in the same year to head
former men’s Oxford colleges. In my first year there was only one woman
fellow, and I did my best in the next few years to bring in more. Being
Warden was an absorbing and rewarding role that brought me close to the
actual working of the University (which now has twenty-four thousand
students, half of them graduates) in ways of which I had been entirely
unaware as an undergraduate. It also gave me access to the extraordinary
riches of the Bodleian Library and daily contact with academics and students in an equally extraordinary range of disciplines. The same curiosity
45. “The Absence of Byzantium,” Nea Hestia, January 2008, 4–59 (in English and
Greek).
46. Byzantine Matters (Princeton, 2014); “Thinking with Byzantium,” Transactions of
the Royal Historical Society, 21 (2011), 39–57; “Seeing Byzantium: A Personal Response,” in:
Wonderful Things: Byzantium through its Art. Papers from the Forty-first Spring Symposium of
Byzantine Studies, Courtauld Institute of Art and King’s College, London, March 2009, ed. Liz
James and Antony Eastmond (Farnham, 2013), 311–18.
47. See “Late Antiquity and Byzantium—an Identity Problem,” Byzantine and Modern
Greek Studies, 40.1 (2016), 27–37.

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that drove me to continue thinking and writing also now led me to seek to
understand and where possible to influence the practices of an extremely
complex institution. I was closely involved in the running of the University
overall and in the relations between the central University and its then
thirty-eight colleges. Being one of the three or four judges for the Wolfson
History Prize, given for a significant but also accessible contribution to history, for which we had to assess up to two hundred books every year in all
types and periods of history, was also an enjoyable and educative experience. In addition, I chaired the national committee dealing with changes
to the fabric of English cathedrals and led a controversial review of the
“Royal Peculiars” (Westminster Abbey, St George’s Chapel, Windsor, the
Chapel Royal, and the Chapels in the Tower of London and Hampton
Court Palace).
Some Oxford roles I was assigned related to the way in which the history of the University was intertwined with that of the Church of England,
for instance chairing the committees appointing “Select Preachers” to
deliver the University Sermons,48 or deciding who should be invited to give
the regular Bampton lectures, founded in 1780 “to confirm and establish
the Christian Faith, and to confute all heretics and schismatics.” Keble
College itself was founded in 1870 to promote the aims of the Oxford
Movement, which began from the Assize Sermon preached by John Keble
in 1833 in the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, and portraits of
John Keble and his friend John Henry Newman hang in its senior common
room.49 The Chapel at Keble is a masterpiece of Victorian Gothic architecture and decoration, and its greatest treasure is the original of The Light of
the World, painted by the young Holman Hunt in 1853 and given to the
College in 1873 by one of its many Tractarian benefactors. Keble’s formal
religious affiliation ended when it adopted new Statutes in 1969, but
Oxford’s remaining religious links are complex, and Keble College’s role in
the history of the Church of England is an important one. The College is
still the patron of some sixty-five livings in the Church of England, and my
duties sometimes included participating in the appointments of incumbents. I was surprised that no history of the College had been written, and

48. I gave the Sermon on the Grace of Humility, endowed in 1684 together with one
on the Sin of Pride, and discussed the phenomenon of false humility: Averil Cameron, “On
the Grace of Humility,” Theology, March/April (1999), 97–104.
49. Newman “went over” to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845 and was the most
prominent of several highly placed Tractarians to convert; this was a bitter blow to John
Keble, and afterwards the only occasion on which he and Newman met was in 1866, when
Keble was dying.

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with Ian Archer I later set about editing an illustrated volume, Keble Past
and Present, which came out in 2008. It was indeed a loss that after the
move I did little course teaching, and it was often frustrating when committees and other duties kept me from seminars I really wanted to attend,
but new interests and the outstanding doctoral students I was able to
supervise were an ongoing joy.
The power of language to change history continued to intrigue me
after I moved to Oxford. I was still struck by the vast amount written by
Christians in the name of trying to establish correct belief and now also by
the problem of reconciling written authorities and visual depictions (in arthistorical terms the problem of text and image), the ways in which Byzantine religious art itself acted as an authoritative language, and the manner
in which these habits of thought and language carried over into late
antique and Byzantine thinking and writing about Judaism and Islam.
Recent years have seen one of the great achievements of the last decades,
the publication of new critical editions, translations, and commentaries on
the acts of the major ecumenical councils, and this also raises the question
of the relation of historical scholarship on late antiquity and Byzantium to
traditional patristics. That was the theme of the lecture I gave at Duke University in 2002 in connection with the journal Church History, and of my
address to the North American Patristic Society in Chicago in 2009, and
I made it the subject of my Ptarmigan Lecture to the Faculty of Theology
and Religion (formerly simply Theology) at Oxford in 2018.50 I continued
to insist on the need for historians to address the role played by Christian
literature, to interpret this broadly, and to develop a better methodology
for integrating it into historical writing on late antiquity and (especially)
Byzantium. I see the often difficult reception of Byzantium within this
frame: Byzantium is an idea, even a mirage, the term I used many years ago
(above, n. 26), as we see in the many narratives constructed round it.51 They
50. “Christian Literature and Church History,” Duke University, 2002; “Not the End
of the Affair: Discourse and Resistance in Late Antiquity,” North American Patristic Society,
Chicago, 2009; it was also the theme of my lecture on “Late Antiquity and Literature: What’s
the Problem?” at Elizabeth Clark’s retirement conference at Duke in 2014; these remain
unpublished, but see “Christian Literature and Christian History,” in: Enrico Norelli, Markion
und der biblische Kanon, Averil Cameron, Christian Literature and Christian History, Hans-Lietzmann-Vorlesungen 11/15 (Berlin, 2016), 29–53; and “Late Antiquity and Patristics: Partners
or Rivals?,” Journal of Early Christian Studies, 28.2 (2020), 283–302.
51. “Byzantinists and Others,” in: Byzantium in Dialogue with the Mediterranean, ed.
Daniëlle Slootjes and Mariette Verhoeven (Leiden, 2019), 6–23; “Byzantium Now—Contested Territory or Excluded Middle?” Scandinavian Journal of Byzantine and Modern Greek
Studies, 6 (2020), 91–111.

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rely heavily on assumptions based on its visual art and the persistent appropriation of Byzantium in poetry and literature, including works by Yeats,
French dramatists, and the prose of Edward Gibbon.
Can religion in late antiquity be reduced to ”culture”?52 That is a worry
I have had about the way that the field of late antiquity has developed,
especially in the United States. It was a breakthrough when in the 1960s
Peter Brown chose to write a psychological and contextual study of St
Augustine, and when a few years later Timothy Barnes wrote his (very different) Oxford doctoral thesis in ancient history on Tertullian, but without
ever being a theologian myself I am convinced that historians cannot
ignore theology; indeed Christian “theology” was itself the result of a historical process in which writing and interpretation were critical. I see the
formulation of what was considered to be orthodox as part of this process,
and the identification of heresy as a gradual exclusion of unacceptable or
losing views. I do not take Christian dogma or patristic statements as
given, and I believe that historians dealing with religious texts and religious
developments in late antiquity must recognize that theology and theological scholarship cannot be regarded as wholly separate from what they are
doing themselves. In 2015 Elizabeth Clark published a thoughtful paper in
this journal with the title “From Patristics to History in the Catholic Historical Review,” in which she surveyed the coverage of book reviews in the
journal over its century of history and documented the changes in the study
of early Christian history that they represent. She distanced herself from
theology, on the grounds that her article was focusing on history,53 and she
reviewed the shifts in approaches to the period of early Christianity and
late antiquity, as well as the changes within the Roman Catholic church,
especially in recent decades. Rhetoric makes only a brief appearance, but in
an earlier contribution she pointed to a move in late antique or “late
ancient” studies from the 1980s onwards from an approach based on social
theory to one focusing on discourse and attention to literary theory,54 an

52. “Culture Wars: Late Antiquity and Literature,” in: Libera Curiositas. Mélanges
d’histoire romaine et d’Antiquité tardive offerts à Jean-Michel Carrié, ed. Christel Freu, Sylvain
Janniard, and Arthur Ripoli [Bibliothèque de l’Antiquité Tardive, 31] (Turnhout, 2016),
307–16.
53. Elizabeth A. Clark, “From Patristics to History in the Catholic Historical Review,”
The Catholic Historical Review, 101.2 (2015), 27–71, on 32.
54. “From Patristics to History,” 65–66; cf. Elizabeth A. Clark, “From Patristics to
Early Christian Studies,” in: Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Studies, ed. Susan Ashbrook
Harvey and David G. Hunter (Oxford, 2008), 1–39; Clark herself made such a move with her
books Reading Renunciation (Princeton, 1999) and History, Theory, Text (Cambridge, MA,
2004).

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approach that has been termed “the new intellectual history.”55 Yet when a
historian moves from the analysis of a particular text or text to broader
issues of historical change and the formation of a mainly Christian society,
theology has to be part of the story. This is why for instance the phenomenon of iconoclasm in eighth- and ninth-century Byzantium (and its
reappearance in the twelfth century) cannot be reduced simply to social
factors or for that matter seen as only a matter of discourse.56
When I retired from Keble College in 2010 I accepted the invitation
to become the chair of a new research centre, the Oxford Centre for
Byzantine Research, with the aim of raising funds to extend and consolidate the coverage of Byzantine studies in the University. At its inauguration I spoke on the theme “Was Byzantium an Orthodox Society?” questioning the assumptions that are routinely made and calling for a more
critical approach. It was a theme that had already occupied me.57 Rather
than being a given, Byzantine Orthodoxy was painfully constructed over a
long chronological period from early Christianity to late Byzantium, with
many setbacks and false starts, and through highly contested processes.
This was what I wanted to convey when in 2015 I accepted the challenge
of writing a very short history of Byzantine Christianity (published in 2017
by SPCK). It was aimed at non-specialists, some of whom are attracted to
Orthodoxy for romantic and often mistaken reasons, and while topics such
as lay piety and daily life are indeed crucial, I wanted to explain the tortuous steps by which contemporaries formulated Orthodox doctrine as well
as the highly political issues that remain today. Doctrine and verbal definitions were important in Byzantine Christianity, and the ecumenical councils were at their heart. Everyone was affected directly or indirectly by the
outcomes and by the way they carried through into law, administration,
and daily life.

55. Review forum on Clark, History, Theory, Text: Historians and the Linguistic Turn, in:
Church History, 74 (2005), 812–36, especially the comments by Mark Vessey.
56. Contrast Brubaker and Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (above, n. 15) with
Jaś Elsner, “Iconoclasm as Discourse: from Antiquity to Byzantium,” The Art Bulletin, 94.3
(2012), 368–94.
57. “Enforcing Orthodoxy in Byzantium,” in: Discipline and Diversity, ed. Kate Cooper
and Jeremy Gregory [Studies in Church History, 43] (Woodbridge, 2007), 1–24; “Byzantium
and the Limits of Orthodoxy,” Raleigh Lecture in History, Proceedings of the British Academy,
154 (2008), 139–52; “The Violence of Orthodoxy,” in: Heresy and Identity in Late Antiquity,
ed. Eduard Iricinschi and Holger Zellentin [Texte und Studien zum antike Judentum, 119]
(Tübingen, 2008), 102–14; “The Cost of Orthodoxy,” Second Dutch Annual Lecture in
Patristics, 2011, Church History and Religious Culture, 93 (2013), 339–61; Byzantine Matters,
87-111.

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I had been intrigued since the early 1990s by the choice of the dialogue
form for polemical and catechetical works including the Christian “dialogues” with Jews known as the Adversus Iudaeos literature, and the related
collections of questions and answers.58 Such dialogues cover a vast range of
literature in Greek (as well as Syriac and Latin) that continued until after
the fall of Constantinople in 1453, and which had never been studied
together. I reacted against the idea expressed in Simon Goldhill’s book The
End of Dialogue in Antiquity (2009) and elsewhere that Christianity somehow shut down real dialogue and decided to approach these issues more
directly, first by collecting the relevant material—not so simple a task as it
may seem, since many of the Byzantine examples still require basic study,
or even critical editions, and others are known only indirectly through
other mentions, refutations, or translations into other languages. This led
to lectures in Budapest, Princeton, Dumbarton Oaks, and Oxford. Dialoguing in Late Antiquity (Washington DC, 2014) resulted from the
Haecker Lecture, a series of four given in Heidelberg in 2011.59 Arguing it
Out (Budapest, 2016), which drew on the part of this work that related to
the twelfth century, in which I considered the debates between Latins and
Orthodox, as well as Byzantine discussions with Jews and Muslims,
resulted from my Natalie Zemon Davis lectures at the Central University,
Budapest in 2014, given in the presence of Natalie herself, whom I had
met and admired years before in Princeton.60 There is still much to do, but
meanwhile the Adversus Iudaeos texts and the questions and answers have
received attention from other scholars, while a conference on dialogues
held at Keble College in 2014 that ranged over the whole period from late
antiquity to the end of Byzantium and beyond resulted in a comprehensive
volume co-edited with Niels Gaul.61 We opened up a vast field of mostly
neglected writing in Greek and Syriac, and our conference and the collected volume attracted welcome attention to the subject and produced
some original and important contributions.62 These ostensibly sober
58. Above, n. 41; and see “Dialogues: A World of Imagination,” in: Dialogues and Disputes in Biblical Disguise, ed. Peter Tóth (in press).
59. Published in German as Dialog und Streitgespräch in der Spätantike, The Haecker
Lecture, Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg 2011 [SpielRäume der Antike, 3] (Stuttgart,
2014).
60. I had visited the Central European University several times, and become friends
with many people there; my former student Volker Menze is Associate Professor in the
Department of Medieval Studies.
61. Dialogues and Debate from Late Antiquity to Late Byzantium, ed. with Niels Gaul
(Milton Park, 2017).
62. Alberto Rigolio and Foteini Spingou, who worked with me on the project, have
both published excellent studies: Foteini Spingou, “A Platonizing Dialogue from the Twelfth

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records of actual conversations in fact took many different forms, from the
highly literary or philosophical to the mundane, and are yet another example of the power of language to shape history.
Conclusion
As I look back, I see the importance of my early background at Oxford
and in Classics. I had no clear pathways when I started out, and I realise
that I have been lucky to have been able to follow where my curiosity led.
It drew me towards late antiquity and then to Byzantium, and from classicising Greek texts to the Roman empire, literary theory, archaeology, art
history and reception, and more.63 Perhaps in retrospect I have gone in too
many directions, but common threads are to be found not in data gathering
but in the critical analysis of texts, a continuing interest in religion as a historical force, and the theory and practice of history.
While I have certainly written a good deal about Christianity in those
periods and I have been President of the Ecclesiastical History Society and
chair of the Directors of the Oxford Patristic Conference, I see myself as a
historian of late antiquity and Byzantium in a wider sense. The historical
role and development of religion, especially Christianity, have indeed
occupied me since very early in my career, and as I moved forward chronologically into Byzantium I was confronted with more such issues. Nevertheless, I have seen them in a wider historical context rather than as discrete subjects in themselves;64 it worries me that so many of the huge
number of current publications on late antiquity focus almost exclusively
on Christian texts.

Century. The Logos of Soterichos Panteugenos,” in: Dialogues and Debate, 123–36; Alberto
Rigolio, Christians in Conversation: A Guide to Late Antique Dialogues in Greek and Syriac
(Oxford, 2019).
63. The Festschrift that I received in 2006 has the happy title From Rome to Constantinople (ed. Hagit Amirav and Bas ter Haar Romeny (Leuven, 2006).
64. Broader reflections on historical method: “History and the Individuality of the Historian: the Interpretation of Late Antiquity,” in The Past before Us: The Challenges of Historiographies of Late Antiquity, ed. Carole Straw and Richard Lim [Bibliothèque de l’Antiquité
tardive, 54] (Paris, 2004), 23–31; “Nazaten van Byzantium,” Nexus, 69 (2015), 126–40 (in
Dutch) and “The Present in the Past and the Past in the Present,” in: The Past as Present: Essays
in Honour of Guido Clemente, ed. Giovanni Cecconi, Rita Lizzi Testa, and Arnaldo Marcone
[Studi e Testi tardoantichi, 17] (Turnhout, 2019), 133–50; and see also “Christian Conversion in Late Antiquity—Some Issues,” in: Conversion in Late Antiquity: Christianity, Islam and
Beyond, ed. Arietta Papaconstantinou and Neil McLynn, with Daniel Schwartz (Oxford,
2015), 3–21.

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I belong to the academic system of the UK rather than that of North
America, but my exposure to the latter has been an important influence. I
did not have the experience of North American graduate school described
by other contributors to this series, but of the places that have influenced
me most I would place Columbia, Berkeley, Dumbarton Oaks and Princeton65 alongside London and Oxford, and among my key personal connections Peter Brown (who also had an Oxford background, though very different from mine, and who shares in my debt to Arnaldo Momigliano) and
Elizabeth Clark. Almost equally important have been the places and
people I have got to know in lecture and conference visits over the years.
An invisible hand has clearly also been at work at various points in my
career. It has been a rich experience as step by step I pursued my curiosity
where it led, and it is a main part of who I am.

65. Including further stays in Princeton, in 2005 as a Visiting Fellow in the Program in
Hellenic Studies, in 2014 for the Faber lecture, and in 2018 to give the keynote lecture at the
retirement conference for John Haldon.

Who Wrote the Lives of the Popes?
Permutations of a Renaissance Myth
STEFAN BAUER*
Since the fifteenth century, scholars have wondered about the authorship of the anonymous series of papal biographies from St. Peter
onwards, now known as the Liber pontificalis. Bartolomeo Platina
(ca. 1421–81) and Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68) were responsible for
the false notion that “Anastasius the Librarian” was the book’s principal author. This article reconsiders why the myth of Anastasius was created and how it was passed on. It rejects the thesis by Girolamo Arnaldi
that Platina created this myth on purpose, with the intention of furthering his own career. Rather, Platina produced the myth more or less
accidentally. Yet this myth proved so powerful that it was not completely dispelled until the late nineteenth century.
Keywords: Liber pontificalis, papacy, Anastasius Bibliothecarius,
Bartolomeo Platina, Onofrio Panvinio
Introduction

I

n 1860, Ferdinand Gregorovius published the third volume of his monumental History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages. After dealing with
the death of Pope Stephen V (891), Gregorovius included a touching
salute to the Liber pontificalis (Book of Pontiffs):
And here I say goodbye forever to the Liber pontificalis as if it were an old
friend; for this book lay on my table in Rome for years and helped me
describe the history of the city over half a millennium.1

*Dr. Bauer teaches in the Department of History at the University of Warwick, UK,
email: stefan.bauer@warwick.ac.uk. He delivered a version of this paper at the conference on
the Liber pontificalis organized by Klaus Herbers and Matthias Simperl in the Vatican in
2018. The author thanks the anonymous reviewers of the Catholic Historical Review for their
comments on this article, as well as Jill Kraye for her help and advice.
1. Ferdinand Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom im Mittelalter, 8 vols. (Stuttgart,
1859–72), 3:235: “Und hier nehme ich für immer vom Liber Pontificalis Abschied, wie von
einem Freunde. Denn Jahre lang lag dies Buch auf meinem Tisch in Rom, und diente mir für
die Geschichte eines halben Jahrtausends der Stadt, die ich nun beschrieben habe.” For an

28

STEFAN BAUER

29

Gregorovius, an explorer of the Roman Middle Ages, recognized the
Liber pontificalis as a fundamental source not only for papal history but
also for the history of the city. He—and other scholars interested in
Rome—knew that the Liber, an anonymous collection of papal biographies from St. Peter onwards, contained an unrivaled wealth of information about politics, diplomacy, doctrine, liturgy, art, and architecture,
among many other fields of interest. Without the Liber pontificalis, Gregorovius noted, “the history of the papacy, as of the city, for long centuries
would have been hidden in darkness.”2
The long and convoluted textual history of the Liber pontificalis has,
however, posed challenges for scholars since the fifteenth century. By
examining the reception of this key text for the history of the church, the
aim here is to shed new light on how sixteenth-century humanist historians developed and advanced the research methods of their fifteenth-century predecessors, Biondo Flavio (1392–1463) and Bartolomeo Platina (ca.
1421–81), but were also led astray by their faulty suppositions. As is well
known, the fifteenth century marked a departure in critical method and
attitudes to the past. Humanist historiography was “born fully grown”
when Leonardi Bruni’s Florentine Histories introduced a revolution in historical thought.3 Petrarch (d. 1374), Bruni (d. 1444), Lorenzo Valla (d.
1457), and others introduced the notions of the historical contingency of
law, philosophical propositions, and political institutions. Although a critical mindset existed since that time, it informed subsequent historical writing only partially and selectively.4 Bruni himself used archival evidence for
polemical purposes; and as the Reformation ignited the confessional strugEnglish translation of this work, see Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle
Ages, trans. from the 4th German ed. by Annie Hamilton, 8 vols. (London, 1894–1902), repr.
with an introduction by David S. Chambers (New York, 2000–04).
2. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, 3:166: “Die Kenntniß des Papsttums und
auch der Stadt Rom in langen Jahrhunderten wäre ohne sie [i.e., the biographies in the
Liber pontificalis] in völligem Dunkel geblieben”; Engl. trans., History of the City of Rome,
3:149.
3. Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), 3.
For what follows, see also Donald R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship:
Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970); Daniel Woolf, A
Global History of History (Cambridge, UK, 2011); Gary Ianziti, Writing History in Renaissance
Italy: Leonardo Bruni and the Uses of the Past (Cambridge, MA, 2012).
4. Margaret Meserve, Empires of Islam in Renaissance Historical Thought (Cambridge,
MA, 2008). For reflections on ecclesiastical historiography from Valla to Jean Mabillon, see
Anthony Grafton, “Past Belief: The Fall and Rise of Ecclesiastical History in Early Modern
Europe,” in: Formations of Belief: Historical Approaches to Religion and the Secular, ed. Philip
Nord, Katja Guenther, and Max Weiss (Princeton, NJ, 2019), 13–40.

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WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

gle within Christianity from 1517 onwards, historical research and polemical goals became ever more thoroughly intertwined.5 In addition, there
was a widespread desire among Renaissance humanist historians to imitate
ancient models, in which the refinement of language was of great importance. Sources written in medieval Latin posed a problem; when using
these, humanists had to transform any information derived from them into
elegant language. Therefore, when Bartolomeo Platina recast the Liber
pontificalis into humanist Latin (1475), he was more concerned with elegance of presentation than with historical criticism.6
Sixteenth-century ecclesiastical historians such as Onofrio Panvinio
(1530–68) learned some of the tools of philology from their predecessors,
but felt less bound by their rules of elegant Latinity.7 In a treatise from
1554 on the vice-chancellor of the Church, Panvinio apologized for writing “in a style which is clearly plain and, as the subject demands, in scholastic terminology which smacks of a monk rather than a man of letters.”8
Whereas Bartolomeo Platina used just enough sources as he thought were
necessary to construct a readable account of papal lives, Panvinio’s research
was more systematic and aimed at comprehensiveness. By his own account,
Panvinio visited over fifty archives. These included archives of cathedrals as
well as of monasteries, religious orders, and other churches all over Italy.9
Among the best-known results of his research was his refutation of
medieval fables such as that of the female pope (Pope Joan), which he
5. The Uses of History in Religious Controversies from Erasmus to Baronio, ed. Stefan
Bauer, Special issue of Renaissance Studies, 35, no. 1 (2021); Bauer, “Theology and History,”
in: The Cambridge History of Reformation Era Theology, ed. Kenneth G. Appold and Nelson H.
Minnich (forthcoming). On Bruni, see Ianziti, Writing History.
6. For this aspect, the reader is referred to Stefan Bauer, “The Liber pontificalis in the
Renaissance,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 82 (2019), 143–58.
7. On Panvinio, see Jean-Louis Ferrary, Onofrio Panvinio et les antiquités romaines
(Rome, 1996); Stefan Bauer, “Panvinio, Onofrio,” in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 81
(Rome, 2014), 36–39; Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic Reform (Oxford, 2020). On humanist philology, see, e.g., Salvatore I.
Camporeale, Christianity, Latinity, and Culture: Two Studies on Lorenzo Valla, ed. Patrick
Baker and Christopher S. Celenza (Leiden, 2014); Ianziti, Writing History.
8. Panvinio, De vicecancellario (1554), MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana
(hereafter cited as BAV), Chig. H II 24, fol. 39v: “stilo plane tenui et iuxta rei exigentiam sermone scholastico et qui monachum potius quam litteratum redoleat.” As Eric Cochrane
quipped about the simplicity of his own style, “my prose more often reads like an imitation of
Panvinio rather than of Bruni” (Historians and Historiography, p. xx).
9. Onofrio Panvinio, “Auctores quibus tum in hoc Chronico sive Fasteis, tum in Historia ecclesiastica conscribenda usi sumus,” in his Chronicon ecclesiasticum a C. Iulii Caesaris
dictatoris imperio usque ad Imperatorem Caesarem Maximilianum II (Cologne, 1568), sigs. *3r–
A2v, here sigs. *4v–A1r (“Variarum ecclesiarum archivia a nobis visa”).

STEFAN BAUER

31

proved, once and for all, was a medieval invention.10 Another result was his
conception of a genealogy of papal historians, in which he demonstrated
the composite character of the authorship of the Liber pontificalis.
Nonetheless, Panvinio also helped to propagate a new myth created by a
fifteenth-century humanist historian.
The myth was Bartolomeo Platina’s attribution of the medieval Liber
pontificalis to Anastasius Bibliothecarius. In what follows, this article
rejects the suggestion by Girolamo Arnaldi that Platina created this myth
on purpose to further his own career.11 Instead, it will argue that it should
be assumed that Platina produced the myth more or less accidentally.
Platina’s aspirations to good style precluded any rigorous precision in his
references to sources. This is the main reason for his imprecise statement
that Anastasius had written about popes, without indicating which work
by Anastasius he was referring to. Moreover, it was probably Platina’s confusion about the authorship of the Liber pontificalis that led him to mention
Anastasius at all.
At any rate, what is certain is that, over the succeeding decades, the
vague notion that Anastasius had written about papal history grew into the
more precise idea that he was the author of a part of the Liber pontificalis.
Permutations of this idea can be traced both through a notice in an encyclopedia from 1506 and through the borrowing registers of the Vatican
Library from 1526. In 1557, Onofrio Panvinio, too, found the implications
of Platina’s incorrect assumption powerfully convincing. As there was no
counter-proof to call into question the implication that Anastasius was the
Liber’s author, Panvinio accepted and built on what he doubtless regarded
as a traditional attribution.
The complex history of the Liber pontificalis was eventually unraveled
only in the late nineteenth century. It is now known that the first part of the
Liber pontificalis was written by an anonymous author in the sixth century,
based on earlier archival documents.12 Various anonymous authors contin10. Alain Boureau, The Myth of Pope Joan, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 2001),
245–47; Bauer, Invention of Papal History, 148–49.
11. Girolamo Arnaldi, Come nacque la attribuzione ad Anastasio del Liber Pontificalis
(Rome, 2001) (hereafter cited as Arnaldi, La attribuzione). This article was first published in
Bullettino dell’Istituto storico italiano per il medio evo, 75 (1963), 321–43.
12. For editions, see: Liber pontificalis nella recensione di Pietro Guglielmo OSB e del cardinale Pandolfo, glossato da Pietro Bohier OSB, ed. Oldřich Přerovský, 3 vols. (Rome, 1978); Le
Liber pontificalis, vols. 1–2, ed. Louis Duchesne (Paris, 1886–92; 2nd ed., 1955), vol. 3 (corrections and additions) ed. Cyrille Vogel (Paris, 1957). On the Liber, see also Duchesne,

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WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

ued the collection until the end of the ninth century, which marked the end
of the so-called old redaction, to which Ferdinand Gregorovius referred.
This redaction ended with a fragmentary life of Pope Stephen V (breaking
off in 886) and included 112 biographies. Twelfth-century redactions
brought the Liber pontificalis up to date again. Cardinal Pandulphus
updated the collection up to the death of Pope Honorius II (1130). This
new redaction was known only from a single manuscript, a revision written
in 1142 by Petrus Guillermus, a librarian at the Benedictine Abbey of
Saint-Gilles in France.13 After having been brought to Rome, this manuscript (Vatican Library, Vat. lat. 3762) formed the basis for all other copies
of the Liber pontificalis that contained papal lives from after the ninth century.14 Lives from 1130 onwards were successively added from the works of
authors such as Martin of Troppau (d. 1278) and Bernard Gui (d. 1331).
Lastly, a “new” version was compiled in the fifteenth century, with papal
lives from Urban V (1362–70) to the death of Martin V in 1431; these biographies were appended to modified copies of Vat. lat. 3762.
This article quotes the Liber pontificalis from the twelfth-century
redaction (Vat. lat. 3762, published by Oldřich Přerovský), which provides
a good idea of the text that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers had in
front of them. In addition, this article refers to Louis Duchesne’s standard
critical edition of the Liber pontificalis because it is more easily available
than Přerovský’s text. For illustrative purposes, it also cites a sample fifteenth-century manuscript, Vat. lat. 3763.15 As regards the title of the
“Introduction” to his edition, 1:I–CCLIX and 2:I–LXXIV; Rosamond McKitterick, Rome
and the Invention of the Papacy: The Liber pontificalis (Cambridge, UK, 2020); Das Buch der
Päpste, Liber pontificalis: ein Schlüsseldokument europäischer Geschichte, ed. Klaus Herbers and
Matthias Simperl (Freiburg im Breisgau, 2020); for further bibliography, “Liber pontificalis,”
in Geschichtsquellen des deutschen Mittelalters (consulted via www.geschichtsquellen.de/
werk/3363, 18 August 2020).
13. Oldřich Přerovský, “Introduzione,” in his edition of the Liber pontificalis, 1:1–130;
Carmela Vircillo Franklin, “History and Rhetoric in the Liber Pontificalis of the Twelfth Century,” Journal of Medieval Latin, 23 (2013), 1–33; Franklin, “Ab Urbe in Franciam: Local
Topographies and the Papal Tour in the 12th century Liber pontificalis of Petrus Gulielmus,”
Acta ad archaeologiam et artium historiam pertinentia, 26 (2013), 71–90.
14. See Duchesne, “Introduction,” 2:XXIV–XXXVII. Petrus Guillermus’s autograph
manuscript can be consulted via digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3762 (accessed 18 August
2020). For an edition, see Liber pontificalis, ed. Přerovský. On the fortuna of this manuscript,
see Giuseppe Billanovich, “Gli umanisti e le cronache medioevali: il Liber pontificalis, le Decadi
di Tito Livio e il primo umanesimo a Roma,” Italia medioevale e umanistica, 1 (1958), 103–37.
15. MS BAV, Vat. lat. 3763 (15th c.) (available via digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.
3763, accessed 18 August 2020) was first owned by Cardinal Pietro del Monte, then by Cardinal Pietro Barbo; it seems to have entered the papal collection when the latter became
pope as Paul II (1464–71). See David Rundle, “A Renaissance Bishop and His Books: A

STEFAN BAUER

33

entire collection, it can be argued, pace Duchesne, that the term Liber pontificalis should not be applied either to the lives written after the end of the
old redaction or to those after the twelfth century. For practical reasons,
however, this article retains Duchesne’s title for the entire series until 1431.
Attempts at Discovering the Authorship of the Liber pontificalis
Since the fifteenth century, it was believed that a part of the Liber pontificalis had been written by Anastasius Bibliothecarius. Anastasius (d. ca.
879) was a papal secretary, librarian, and diplomat. As is known now, he
made translations from Greek, including the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council (Nicaea II, 787) and the lives of several saints. In the field of
church history, Anastasius produced the Chronographia tripertita, a compilation based on the Byzantine historians Nicephoros of Constantinople,
George Syncellus, and Theophanes the Confessor, which covered the
period up to 813.16 Anastasius also may have contributed the biography of
Pope Nicholas I (or sections of it) to the Liber pontificalis.17
It is worth reviewing how the notion of Anastasius’s authorship of a
part of the Liber pontificalis may have come about. As the medievalist Girolamo Arnaldi has shown, it was Bartolomeo Platina (ca. 1421–81), in his
Lives of the Popes, who was initially responsible for the erroneous assumption
that Anastasius had composed the old redaction of the Liber pontificalis.18
In what follows, this article examines Arnaldi’s suggestions about Platina’s
intentions and motives by taking additional evidence into consideration.
Platina rewrote and continued the Liber pontificalis in humanist fashion in 1475.19 He presented his Lives of the Popes (Vitae pontificum) to Pope
Preliminary Survey of the Manuscript Collection of Pietro del Monte (c. 1400–1457),” Papers
of the British School at Rome, 69 (2001), 245–72, here 248, 271. On the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century manuscripts of the Liber pontificalis, see also Duchesne, “Introduction,”
2:XLV–XLIX, 447–48; Giacinto Gaida, “Prefazione,” in his edition of Platina, Liber de vita
Christi ac omnium pontificum (Città di Castello, 1913–32), pp. III–C, here p. XLII; Bauer,
“Liber pontificalis in the Renaissance,” 145.
16. Girolamo Arnaldi, “Anastasio Bibliotecario,” in: Enciclopedia dei papi, 3 vols.
(Rome, 2000), 1:735–46; Giulia Cò, Vescovi, re, imperatori: Anastasio bibliotecario tra Occidente
e Oriente (Bologna, 2019); “Anastasius Bibliothecarius,” in: Geschichtsquellen des deutschen
Mittelalters (www.geschichtsquellen.de/autor/502, accessed 18 August 2020).
17. Klaus Herbers, “Das Ende des alten Liber pontificalis (886): Beobachtungen zur
Vita Stephans V.,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung, 119 (2011),
141–45.
18. Arnaldi, La attribuzione.
19. Bauer, “Liber pontificalis in the Renaissance.” On Platina (whose original name was
Bartolomeo Sacchi), see also Stefan Bauer, The Censorship and Fortuna of Platina’s Lives of the

34

WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

Sixtus IV, stating in his preface that this pope had ordered him to produce
the work. No doubt, he hoped to ingratiate himself with Sixtus IV after
having fallen out with previous pope, Paul II, who had imprisoned Platina
in 1468 on charges of a conspiracy against his life.20 Platina achieved his
full rehabilitation in 1475 when Sixtus IV, on receiving the Lives,
appointed him as the head of the Vatican Library. The act of nomination
was depicted in a famous fresco by Melozzo da Forlì, now kept in the Vatican Museums.
In composing his Lives, Platina availed himself both of the Liber pontificalis and of a variety of other sources. He believed that Pope Damasus I
(366–84) had written the lives of the popes up to his own time and sent
these to St. Jerome.21 Platina believed this because a forged exchange of
letters between Damasus and Jerome had been misleadingly placed at the
beginning of the Liber pontificalis, implying that Damasus had written the
first part of the collection at Jerome’s request.22 Later in his text, Platina
cited an unnamed librarian as one of his sources. This bibliothecarius
appears twice in his life of Hadrian I (772–95) and, again, twice in his life
of Paschal I (816–24). Platina took this information from the apostolic secretary Biondo Flavio’s Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii
Decades (Decades of History from the Decline of the Roman Empire)—a
book which he usually consulted in the abbreviated version by Pius II
(Enea Silvio Piccolomini).23 As will be explained below, when citing a bibliothecarius, Biondo was referring to the Liber pontificalis.
Crucial for the attribution of parts of the Liber pontificalis to “Anastasius the Librarian,” however, was Platina’s life of Pope John VIII (872–82).
In his biography of this pope, Platina wrote about the baptism of the Viking
chief Godfrey in the presence of Emperor Charles III (The Fat) (882):
[Charles], marching against the Normans, then infesting Francia and
Lotharingia, defeated them, so that their king, Godfrey, was forced to
Popes in the Sixteenth Century (Turnhout, 2006); Bauer, “Sacchi, Bartolomeo, detto il Platina,”
in: Dizionario biografico degli italiani, 89 (Rome, 2017), 472–75.
20. Anthony F. D’Elia, A Sudden Terror: The Plot to Murder the Pope in Renaissance Rome
(Cambridge, MA, 2009).
21. Platina, Liber, 65 (life of Damasus I): “Vitas pontificum omnium, qui ante se fuere,
conscripsit easque ad Hieronymum misit.”
22. For the letters, see Liber pontificalis, ed. Přerovský, 2:3–4; ed. Duchesne, 1:117; Vat.
lat. 3763, fol. 1r. See also Bauer, “Liber pontificalis in the Renaissance,” 146–47.
23. Platina, Liber (Hadrian I, Paschal I), 136, 142–43; Pius II, Abbreviatio supra
Decades Blondi (Rome, 1481), bk. 2, chap. 1, fol. 53v, and chap. 2, fols. 59v–60r. See also
Arnaldi, La attribuzione, 28–29.

STEFAN BAUER

35

sue for peace and to become a Christian. The emperor took him into
favor and lifted him out of the baptismal font, as writes Anastasius, the
librarian of the Roman Church, who was then highly esteemed. He was
so skillful in both languages that he translated from Greek into Latin the
Seventh Ecumenical Council and the [Celestial] Hierarchy of Dionysius
the Areopagite; and, for Charles’s sake, he translated the lives of many
saints into elegant and learned Latin.24

Platina obtained the material about Godfrey from Biondo.25 Rather than
indicating Biondo as his source, however, Platina said that he had acquired
the information from Anastasius: “as Anastasius writes” (“ut scribit Anastasius”). Next, he inserted the biographical notice about Anastasius taken
from Petrus Guillermus’s twelfth-century redaction of the Liber pontificalis—a notice that listed works that Anastasius had translated from Greek
into Latin.26 That Anastasius translated these works may have earned him
Platina’s approval, as such translations were among the main scholarly
activities of his own fifteenth-century learned friends. Platina thus linked
a piece of historical information, taken from Biondo, to Anastasius’s
output as a scholar.
It is an unresolved question whether, with his remark “as Anastasius
writes,” Platina intended to indicate that Anastasius was the principal
24. Platina, Liber (John VIII), 156–57: “[Karolus III] in Normannos movens, Franciam
et Lotharingiam vastantes, ita eos perdomuit, ut Rhotifredus eorum rex pacem petere et fidem
Christi suscipere coactus sit: quem imperator in gratiam recipiens e baptismatis fonte levavit,
ut scribit Anastasius, qui tum in precio erat, Romanae Ecclesiae Bibliothecarius, vir sane ita
utraque lingua doctus, ut e Graeco in Latinum et septimam universalem synodum et Hierarchiam Dionysii Areopagitae et vitas multorum sanctorum Karoli gratia in Latinum eleganter
et docte transtulerit” (italics added by the author of this article); trans. adapted from Platina,
Lives of the Popes, ed. Paul Rycaut, 2 parts (London, 1685), 1:171. See also Walther Vogel,
Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich bis zur Gründung der Normandie (799–911) (Heidelberg, 1906), 292–93.
25. For the passage, see Pius II, Abbreviatio supra Decades Blondi, fols. 61v–62r; Biondo
Flavio, Historiarum ab inclinatione Romanorum imperii decades, in his De Roma triumphante . . .
(Basel, 1559), separate page numbering (hereafter cited as Decades), bk. 2, chap. 2, pp. 176–
77. See also Arnaldi, La attribuzione, 28.
26. Liber pontificalis, ed. Přerovský (Petrus Guillermus’s life of John VIII), 2:641–42:
“Huius etiam temporibus floruit Anastasius, Romane aecclesiae bibliothecharius, qui tam
Greco quam Latino eloquio pollens, septimam universalem synodum de Greco in Latinum
ipso [i.e., Iohanni VIII] iubente transtulit. Transtulit etiam de Greco in Latinum Yerarchyam
Dyonisii Ariopagite Athenarum episcopi scriptam ad Thimotheum episcopum Ephesi, et
direxit Karolo imperatori filio Hludovici. Transtulit etiam de Greco in Latinum Passionem
Sancti Petri Alexandrini archiepiscopi et Passionem Sancti Acatii sociorumque eius et Vitam
Sancti Iohannis helemosinarii”; ed. Duchesne, 2:222; Vat. lat. 3763, fol. 92r. There was no contemporary life of John VIII in the old redaction of the Liber pontificalis.

36

WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

author of a part of the Liber pontificalis. If Platina was, in fact, deliberately
misleading his readers about Anastasius’s authorship, he did so in a clever
way, which could not easily be discovered because few of his readers would
have had access to manuscripts of the work. It might also be, however, that
Platina was misleading his readers in another way—that is, by creating the
impression that he had used a larger number of primary sources than he
actually had in order to make his work appear more trustworthy. According to one estimate, Platina had read only one-third of the authors whom
he quoted; most of the others he cited indirectly from other sources, creating the impression that he had consulted them and, thus, adorning himself
with borrowed plumes.27 It should also be considered that Platina’s
humanist style of writing did not allow for precise references to authors and
texts. Fleeting and imprecise mentions of authors were typical of his writings and probably seemed both elegant and appropriate to him and his
readers. Often, he simply used phrases such as “sunt qui scribant” (“some
authors write”) to refer to texts including the Liber pontificalis.28
Girolamo Arnaldi argued that Platina inserted “as Anastasius writes”
with a specific purpose: to underline the notion of a traditional link
between the role of a librarian (bibliothecarius) and the task of writing papal
lives. Platina, in Arnaldi’s view, intended to draw a parallel between his
own situation—he was hoping to become the prefect of the Vatican
Library—and the role of earlier bibliothecarii who had been papal historians.29 This is a highly speculative claim, for several reasons. First, because
it ascribes an intentionality to Platina’s remark that is difficult to prove as
there is no independent evidence for it; second, because we do not know
whether Platina was aware that a papal bibliothecarius, in the Middle Ages,
was not simply a librarian, but was primarily the head of the papal
chancery. If Platina was aware of this fact, then he would have compared
himself to someone with a different role.30
27. Georg Julius Schorn, “Die Quellen zu den Vitae Pontificum Romanorum des Bartolommeo Platina,” Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte,
27 (1913), 3*–19*, 57*–84* (also published separately, Rome, 1913), here 74*; Gaida, “Prefazione,” pp. XXXV–XXXVI.
28. See, e.g., Platina, Liber, 55, 122. He also used phrases such as “ut quidam volunt”
or simply “ferunt.”
29. Arnaldi, La attribuzione, 32–36. Arnaldi stated that he felt to some degree unsure
about his own thesis (36).
30. This difference was well known to Panvinio. See Panvinio, “De Bibliotheca Vaticana,” in De regia Sancti Laurentii Bibliotheca, De Pontificia Vaticana, De expungendis haereticorum propriis nominibus, ed. Juan Bautista Cardona (Tarragona, 1587), 37–49, here 44;
Paul Nelles, “The Renaissance Ancient Library Tradition and Christian Antiquity,” in: Les

STEFAN BAUER

37

Platina could have gathered more precise information about the
authorship of the Liber from another passage in Biondo’s Decades, which
Arnaldi did not cite but which can be found not far below Biondo’s
account of Godfrey the Viking. This passage was not contained in the
abbreviated version, but only in the complete edition of Biondo’s Decades.
While Platina generally showed a preference for the epitome, it seems that
he also sometimes consulted the complete edition for his Lives of the
Popes.31 So, it is possible that Platina knew this passage, in which Biondo
complained that twenty-one of the papal biographies written by the “Lateran librarian,” from Stephen V (885–91) to Agapitus II (946–55), were
exceedingly concise and arid.32 As Biondo explained, this sixty-year period
was a desolate and ruinous time for Italy; consequently, writers ceased to
use any diligence at all in their works. This development provided Biondo
with an explanation for the end of the old redaction of the Liber (after
which the Liber pontificalis was filled not with proper biographies, but with
short tables called catalogues).33
Biondo noted with approval that, in general, the “Lateran librarian”
was the “first and most diligent” of all papal biographers.34 The author
whom Biondo meant was Petrus Guillermus, the twelfth-century librarian
and editor of the Liber pontificalis; for some reason, Biondo believed that
Petrus was a librarian not in France but at the Lateran Palace, which was
the main papal residence in Rome. Unbeknownst to Arnaldi, Biondo had
read and extensively annotated Petrus’s autograph manuscript of the Liber
pontificalis, in which Petrus, as an editor and scribe, had identified himself
as “Petrus Guillermus, librarian, at Aceium (Acey), while he stayed there
in the year of the incarnation of the Lord 1142.” This inscription, which
may be fragmentary, is spread out across the top margins of several
humanistes et leur bibliothèque/Humanists and their Libraries, ed. Rudolf De Smet (Leuven,
2002), 159–73. The use of the term bibliothecarius for the head of the chancery ended in the
twelfth century; see Andreas Meyer, “The Curia: The Apostolic Chancery,” in A Companion
to the Medieval Papacy: Growth of an Ideology and Institution, ed. Keith Sisson and Atria A.
Larson (Leiden, 2016), 239–58, here 248.
31. Chiara Di Fruscia, “Platina scrittore di storia: le fonti e l’edizione di Gaida,” in:
Roma e il papato nel Medioevo, ed. Amedeo De Vincentiis and Anna Modigliani, 2 vols.
(Rome, 2012), 2:157–65; Gaida, “Prefazione,” p. LVI.
32. Biondo, Decades, bk. 2, chap. 2, p. 176: “Lateranensis ecclesiae Bibliothecarius
viginti unius summorum pontificum qui per eos fuerunt ad sexaginta annos gesta adeo nude
scribit, ut vix parentum patriaeque pontificum illorum nomina et quot in pontificatu fuerint
vel annis vel mensibus vel diebus ponat. . . .” See also Paul Buchholz, Die Quellen der Historiarum Decades des Flavius Blondus (Naumburg, 1881), 39–42, 74.
33. For the catalogues, see Duchesne, “Introduction,” 2:IX–XX.
34. Biondo, Decades, 177: “omnium primus diligentissimusque.”

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WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

pages.35 In another passage, contained in both the complete edition and
the abbreviated version of the Decades (and therefore surely known to
Platina), Biondo stated again that Petrus Guillermus, “Lateran librarian,”
was “the most ancient” of all authors of papal lives.36 In the complete edition of the Decades, he went on to criticize the “absurdities” (“ineptiae”)
contained in some of Petrus’s eighth-century lives. Regarding the identity
of Petrus Guillermus, it is unclear how Biondo interpreted “Aceium” (did
he know it referred to Acey in France?) and how he reconciled this with
his idea that Petrus was librarian at the Lateran.
Nor is it evident what precisely Biondo meant by “the most ancient”
author. In Biondo’s reconstruction of ancient Roman topography (Roma
instaurata), the life of Felix IV (526–30) was unambiguously attributed to
Petrus Guillermus.37 In the same work, however, Biondo confessed that he
did not know whether the biographies covering the first centuries were written by Damasus, Jerome, or Petrus Guillermus.38 This was clearly not a great
concern for him, however, in the Decades, which began only in the fifth century—when Damasus was already dead and could not have written any lives.
Manuscripts of the fifteenth-century redaction of the Liber pontificalis,
which Arnaldi does not cite, added to the confusion. An introductory note
in these manuscripts read:
This book is entitled “Damasus, On the Deeds of the Popes”; but since
Damasus could have written only up to his own time, what was added

35. Vat. lat. 3762 (accessible online, see above, n. 14), fols. 91v–92r, 93v–95r: “– –
Petrus Guillermus, bibliotecharius – – apud Aceium, dum ibi moraretur anno dominice incarnacionis MCXLII – –.” (I have added the dashes to indicate where the inscription might be
incomplete.) For Biondo’s numerous own marginalia in Vat. lat. 3762, see Ottavio Clavuot,
Biondos “Italia illustrata”: Summa oder Neuschöpfung? (Tübingen, 1990), 253–59, 348–49, and
figs. 7c/1–2.
36. Biondo, Decades, bk. 1, chap. 10, p. 140: “Petrus Gulielmus Lateranensis ecclesiae
bibliothecarius omnium est antiquissimus quos de rebus gestis ecclesiae et Romanorum pontificum ordine videmus scripsisse”; Pius II, Abbreviatio supra Decades Blondi, fol. 45v: “Petrus
Guilelmus Lateranensis ecclesiae bibliothecarius, inter eos qui de Romanis pontificibus scribunt senior.” For other references by Biondo to Petrus, see Buchholz, Quellen der Historiarum
Decades, 41.
37. Biondo Flavio, Roma instaurata, in his De Roma triumphante, pp. 218–72, here bk.
2, chap. 31, p. 245.
38. Biondo noted in his Roma instaurata, bk. 2, chap. 20, p. 243: “Thermarum, quas
ultimo loco Novatianas appellari diximus, meminit Petrus Lateranensis ecclesiae bibliothecarius, sive ille scriptor Beatus Hieronymus, sive Beatus Damasus Papa fuit, in Vita Pii Papae [ca.
142–ca. 155].” See also bk. 2, chap. 111, p. 258: “in Damasi Papae vita, sive illam idem ipse
pontifex, sive Beatus Hieronymus, sive Petrus bibliothecarius scripsit.”

STEFAN BAUER

39

after him is by another author whose name I do not have. To be sure, in
the Life of Pope Gelasius II a certain ostiary Pandulphus affirms to have
written it, which can be understood as referring either to the whole work
up to his own time or only to the Life of Gelasius.39

Biondo referred to Pandulphus, “Lateran librarian,” only as the author
of the lives of the popes from the eleventh and twelfth centuries.40
Platina, on the other hand (though he surely saw this introductory note,
as well as Pandulphus’s name in the life of Gelasius II), avoided any reference to him.
In sum, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that Platina knew
about both Petrus Guillermus (from Biondo) and Pandulphus. Nonetheless, the vagueness of his reference suggests that Platina remained unsure
as to who wrote which parts of the Liber pontificalis. One cannot know for
certain why Platina mentioned Anastasius Bibliothecarius; but, in light of
the considerations adduced above, one should be extremely cautious about
attributing any motives to Platina’s reference to him. Therefore, Arnaldi’s
thesis that Platina pursued precise careerist intentions by associating himself with Anastasius as a previous papal biographer should be regarded as
highly speculative.
The Myth of Anastasius’s Authorship in the Sixteenth Century
Bartolomeo Platina’s vague reference to Anastasius had important
consequences for later beliefs about the authorship of the Liber pontificalis.
In the sixteenth century, the false notion that Anastasius was the author of
the book first gained traction within the Roman Curia, and then spread
out from there. The apostolic scriptor Raffaele Maffei (1451–1522) listed
Anastasius, again rather vaguely, among the writers of papal history in his
humanist encyclopedia Commentaria Urbana—a work first published in
Rome in 1506 and later widely diffused through reprints in France and
39. Duchesne, “Introduction,” 2:XLVII: “Liber iste intitulatur Damasus de gestis pontificum; sed cum non potuerit nisi usque ad sua tempora scribere, quod superadditum est alterius
est auctoris cuius nomen non teneo. Verum in Vita Gelasii Pape II quidam Pandolfus hostiarius affirmat se ista scripsisse, quod intelligi potest vel de toto opere usque ad sua tempora vel
de Vita Gelasii tantum”; Vat. lat. 3763, fol. 1r. For Pandulphus’s reference to himself as “Pandulfus ostiarius, qui haec scripsi,” see Liber pontificalis (Gelasius II, 1118–19), ed. Přerovský,
2:737; ed. Duchesne, 2:315; Vat. lat. 3763, fol. 117r. An ostiary or porter was the lowest of
the minor orders that led to the priesthood; see Přerovský, “Introduzione,” 116.
40. For references from the Decades, see Buchholz, Quellen der Historiarum Decades,
85–88.

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WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

Switzerland.41 Through these reprints the notion of Anastasius as a writer
of papal history found its way into Conrad Gessner’s Bibliotheca universalis
(1545)—this Swiss scholar suggested that Anastasius’s writings on popes
were included in his Church History (Chronographia tripertita).42 In some
humanist circles in Rome, the identification of Anastasius as the author of
a part of the Liber pontificalis seems to have been settled by 1526. In this
year, Angelo Colocci (1474–1549), who worked in the Apostolic Camera,
wrote “Anastasius Bibliothecarius” in the Vatican Library registers when
he borrowed the Liber pontificalis.43
The myth of Anastasius’s authorship was both modified and perpetuated by Platina’s most important successor as an historian of the papacy,
Onofrio Panvinio (1530–68) (Figure 1). A member of the Order of
Augustinian Hermits, Panvinio at a young age moved from Verona to
Rome, where he received the extraordinary permission to live and conduct
research outside of his Augustinian house. From 1556, with financial support by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Panvinio became one of the few fulltime historians of his day, working on both ancient Rome and ecclesiastical
history. Among his writings on church history, the most notable are his
short history of popes and cardinals (Romani pontifices, 1557); his two
updated editions of Platina’s Lives of the Popes (1562 and 1568); his unpublished history of papal elections (De varia creatione Romani pontifices) in ten
books; and his Church History (which was left unfinished at his death).44
41. Raffaele Maffei, Commentaria Urbana (Rome, 1506), “Anthropologia,” bk. 22, fol.
302r: “Pontificum Romanorum seu temporum eorum historiam scripsere imprimis Damasus
Pontifex, Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Paulus Diaconus Aquiliensis, Guido Ravennas presbyter ab hinc annos sexcentos, Sigisbertus Monachus usque ad annum MCXXXI. . . .”
Reprints were made in Paris, 1511, 1515, and 1526; Basel, 1530, 1544 and 1559; and Lyon,
1552. On Maffei see also John F. D’Amico, “Papal History and Curial Reform in the Renaissance: Raffaele Maffei’s Breuis Historia of Julius II and Leo X,” Archivum historiae pontificiae, 18 (1980), 157–210.
42. Conrad Gessner, Bibliotheca universalis (Zurich, 1545), fol. 37r: “Raphael Volaterranus . . . historiam pontificum ab hoc authore conscriptam ait, sed ea nimirum in [historia]
ecclesiastica continetur.” Gessner owned the Basel 1530 edition of Maffei’s Commentaria: see
Urs B. Leu, Raffael Keller, and Sandra Weidmann, Conrad Gessner’s Private Library (Leiden,
2008), 168. Anastasius’s Chronographia was first printed as Historia ecclesiastica sive Chronographia tripertita, ed. Charles-Annibal Fabrot (Paris, 1649).
43. Cited by Arnaldi, La attribuzione, 5: “Ego A. Colotius habui Anastasii bibliothecarii Librum de pontificibus a custodibus bibliothece Vaticane.”
44. O. Panvinio, Romani pontifices et cardinales Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae ab eisdem a
Leone IX ad Paulum Papam IV per quingentos posteriores a Christi natali annos creati (Venice,
1557); Platina, Historia de vitis pontificum, ed. Panvinio (Venice, 1562; Cologne, 1568) (the
expanded and revised edition of 1568 contains Panvinio’s papal biographies from Sixtus IV,
1471–84, to Pius V, elected 1566); Panvinio, De varia creatione Romani pontificis, MSS

STEFAN BAUER

41

FIGURE 1. Onofrio Panvinio. Engraving by Jacob Franquart. From Cornelius Curtius, Virorum illustrium ex Ordine Eremitarum Divi Augustini elogia (Antwerp,
1636). Courtesy of Ghent University Library.

Panvinio was regarded as the greatest expert on ecclesiastical history in
Rome during his short lifetime (1530–68)—that is, before the publication
of Cesare Baronio’s Annales ecclesiastici (Ecclesiastical Annals), which came
out from 1588 onwards. Taken together, Panvinio’s works constitute the
first ever effort to put together a critical, comprehensive, source-based
papal history.
In his short history of the papacy of 1557, as well as in other works,
Panvinio stated that Anastasius had authored all biographies up to Nicholas
I.45 He explained further that, although Anastasius was the author of all
Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 147–52; Panvinio, Ecclesiastica historia pontificum
Romanorum, MS Madrid, Biblioteca del Monasterio de El Escorial, f-I-16. On the editions
of Platina’s Lives, see also Bauer, Censorship and Fortuna.
45. Panvinio, Romani pontifices (1557), “Amico lectori salutem,” sig. **3v: “eam partem,
quae est a Beato Petro ad Nicolaum Papam I, ideo primam appellavi atque a caeteris seiunxi,
quod ipsa perpetuum quendam habeat scriptorem, Anastasium videlicet Monachum et
Bibliothecarium, qui tenore uno, eoque continuo, omnes Romanorum pontificum vitas usque
ad sua tempora descripsit.” For further brief statements maintaining that Anastasius wrote
papal lives from St. Peter to Nicholas I, see: Panvinio, Epitome pontificum Romanorum a Sancto
Petro usque ad Paulum IV (Venice, 1557), 44; Panvinio, Fastorum libri V (Venice, 1558),

42

WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

these lives, he had excerpted material from Damasus’s original text to cover
the first four centuries. To illustrate this point, Panvinio cited the first part
of the Liber pontificalis, which the Franciscan scholar Petrus Crabbe had
published in his edition of the church councils in 1538.46 Panvinio believed
that Crabbe’s edition contained only excerpts made by Anastasius from
Damasus’s original; these, for Panvinio, could not be equated with Damasus’s book, which—as Panvinio claimed—Jerome had referred to as “outstanding” (“egregius”).47 Panvinio argued, consequently, that Damasus’s
original was lost: “Where is Pope Damasus’s book?” he asked.48 Despite his
maintaining that the book was lost, however, Panvinio stated that he had
used it himself as one of his principal sources. This apparent paradox can be
explained by looking at his edition of Platina’s Lives of Popes.49
In 1562, Panvinio produced a detailed genealogy of papal historians,
which he published in a note (on St. Peter and the four succeeding popes)
to his edition of Platina.50 What he listed at the beginning of this historiCommentarii, 432; Panvinio, Notes on Pope Joan and Nicholas I, in Platina, Historia de vitis
(1562), fols. 102v, 106v.
46. For Petrus Crabbe’s edition, see “Liber pontificum a Petro Papa usque ad Nicolaum
Papam I, in quo eorum gesta describuntur, primorum per Damasum Papam, reliquorum
autem per alios veteres ac fide dignos,” in Concilia omnia tam generalia quam particularia
(Cologne, 1538), vol. 1. On Crabbe and other sixteenth-century editors who copied from him
(such as Luigi Lippomano and Laurentius Surius), see Louis Duchesne, Étude sur le Liber
pontificalis (Paris, 1877), 115–16, 121; Duchesne, “Introduction,” 1:CLXXIV, 2:LV–LVI;
Theodor Mommsen, “Prolegomena,” in his edition of the Gesta pontificum Romanorum
(Berlin, 1898), vol. 1 (no more publ.), pp. VII–CXXXIX, here p. CVII (who points out that
Crabbe was a very diligent editor).
47. For Jerome’s characterization of the man Damasus as “egregius,” which Panvinio
mistook as a reference to Damasus’s book, see Jerome, Letter 49.18, in his Epistulae, ed. Isidor
Hilberg, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Vienna, 1996), 1:382.
48. Panvinio, Romani pontifices (1557), “Alexandro Farnesio . . . S.P.D.,” sig. **1r: “Ubi
. . . Damasi Papae liber, quem de Romanorum pontificum, qui ante se fuerunt, actibus rebusque gestis scripsit quemque egregium fuisse testatur Divus Hieronymus? Omnia prorsus
eorum hominum qui superioribus saeculis vixerunt negligentia, vel etiam persequutionum
immanitate, interiisse, abolita atque obliterata esse summopere est ingemiscendum. Nam eum
libellum, qui Damasi Papae titulo vulgatus in Conciliorum tomo primo excusus est, non est
verisimile esse librum illum, de quo scripserit Hieronymus, qui adeo non meretur “egregius”
dici, ut ne libri quidem appellatione ob parvitatem dignus sit; ex Damasi tamen libro illum
esse ab Anastasio Monacho et Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Bibliothecario, qui vitas Romanorum pontificum usque ad Nicolaum Papam I scripsit, excerptum existimo.”
49. Panvinio, Romani pontifices, 19: “Auctores quibus praecipue in hoc opere usi sumus:
Damasus Papa Hispanus et ii qui eum supplerunt, videlicet Anastasius. . . .”
50. Panvinio, Note on St. Peter and the four succeeding popes (“In vitam Beati Petri
Apostoli et quattuor sequentium pontificum annotationes”), in his ed. of Platina, Historia de
vitis pontificum (Venice, 1562), fol. 8r.

STEFAN BAUER

43

ographical line of descent were the component parts of the Liber pontificalis
along with their presumed authors. According to Panvinio, it was Pope
Damasus (366–84) who wrote the lives of the popes from St. Peter up to
his own time. These were supplemented by Anastasius Bibliothecarius with
lives from Damasus to Pope Nicholas I (858–67); by Petrus Guillermus,
another “librarian of the Apostolic See,” with lives from Hadrian II (867–
72) to Alexander II (d. 1073); and by Pandulphus with lives from Gregory
VII (1073–85) to Honorius II (d. 1130). Additional lives, which were
appended to the series, were excerpted from the works of Martin of Troppau, Dietrich of Niem, and others. An unknown author finally brought
Damasus’s book up to date with biographies from Urban VI (1378–89) to
Martin V (d. 1431).
This genealogy appears to deepen the paradox of how Damasus’s book
could be both lost and available to Panvinio. He did not mention his belief
that Damasus’s portion of the text was lost; in fact, in subsequent notes in
the same book, he cited “Damasus’s book” and “Damasus’s lives” as a
source. In other notes, however, he mentioned that Anastasius had made
many interpolations in Damasus’s text, and, finally, that Anastasius himself
had actually written all the lives up to Nicholas I.51 Panvinio seems to have
believed that Anastasius, in composing the lives of the first four centuries,
had excerpted and, in this way, preserved Damasus’s original material to
some extent. The lives of the first four centuries could therefore be regarded
as works of both Damasus and Anastasius.
In his genealogy from 1562, Panvinio set himself apart from his fifteenth-century predecessor Platina with regard to research methods. Panvinio, recounting Platina’s achievements, remarked that when Platina put
together his papal lives up to Eugenius IV (1431–47) he had taken material
from all the papal historians cited above “almost literally,” although he had
rendered the citations in “a slightly more painstaking style.”52 To the material gathered from these texts, Platina had added extracts from the Church
History of Ptolemy of Lucca (d. 1327) as well as from some “external” and
51. For references to “Damasi liber” and “Damasus in vitis. . . ,” see, e.g., the Notes to
Platina, Historia de vitis (1562), on: Clement I, fol. 11v, Hyginus, fol. 16v, and Cornelius, fol.
26r. For Anastasius as the author of all the lives up to Nicholas I, see the Notes on Pope Joan,
fol. 102v, and Nicholas I, fol. 106v. For the statement about the interpolations made by Anastasius, see the Note on Felix II (355–65), fol. 41v; see also Panvinio, De primatu Petri et Apostolicae Sedis potestate (Verona, 1589), 221: “Bibliothecarius . . . caute legendum est, quum
multa aliena Damasi libello interposuerit.”
52. Panvinio, “In vitam Beati Petri . . . annotationes,” fol. 8r: “ad verbum fere, stylo
paululum elaboratiore.”

44

WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

profane sources. Panvinio concluded, somewhat condescendingly, that
Platina had been “for the conditions of his time, quite diligent and erudite,” but he also noted that other scholars had discovered many new
things after Platina.53 Placing Platina into an even wider context, in 1568
Panvinio published an even more detailed list of papal historians, which he
published at the beginning of his Chronicon ecclesiasticum (Ecclesiastical
Chronicle; a long table in whose parallel columns he synchronized the histories of Church and Empire).54
Panvinio’s genealogies of papal historians were perceptive in several
respects. First, they described Platina’s working methods in a nutshell.
Second, they recognized the composite nature of the Liber pontificalis
(though many of the details Panvinio provided were inaccurate). Like
Biondo, Panvinio was sensitive to the problems which discontinuity caused
for historical research, as he demonstrated in another annotation to
Platina’s Lives. In his note on Nicholas I (858–67), Panvinio raised awareness that the biographies after the end of the old redaction of the Liber
pontificalis (886) were not written continuously by contemporaneous
authors until the eleventh century; thus, information about the ninth-century papacy, in particular, was sketchy and unreliable.55 Lastly, like the
modern editor of the Liber pontificalis, Louis Duchesne, Panvinio concluded that the final redaction ended in 1431.
Panvinio’s ideas about the authorship of the old redaction remained
engrained in scholarly discourse. For example, between 1565 and 1586, the
English recusant Thomas Harding, the Italian historian Carlo Sigonio, the
Austrian Jesuit Georg Scherer, and the French former Jesuit Papire
Masson (all familiar with Panvinio’s work) repeated that Anastasius had
written the lives up to Nicholas I.56 Some scholars, such as the Benedictine
53. Panvinio, “In vitam Beati Petri . . . annotationes,” fol. 8r–v.
54. Panvinio, “Auctores quibus tum in hoc Chronico sive Fasteis, tum in Historia ecclesiastica conscribenda usi sumus,” in his Chronicon ecclesiasticum, sigs. *3r–A2v, here sig. *3r. In
this genealogy, Panvinio extended Anastasius’s authorship to Hadrian II (d. 872), but this
extension was largely ignored by later scholars.
55. Panvinio, Note on Nicholas I, in Platina, Historia de vitis (1562), fol. 106v: “Porro
autem cum sequentes pontifices usque ad Clementem II neque perpetuum quendam habeant
scriptorem et maiorem suorum actorum partem amiserint, tempora adeo incerta et obscura
habent, ut neque quo loco neque quo ordine aliquot Romanorum pontificum nomina
reponerentur satis liqueat. Quibus stante maxime historiae veritate et temporum ratione locus
in hac serie esse non potest.” See also Panvinio, Romani pontifices, “Amico lectori salutem,”
sigs. **3v–**4r, and p. 47. For Biondo, see above, n. 32.
56. Thomas Harding, A Confutation of a Booke Intituled “An Apologie of the Church of
England” (Antwerp, 1565), fol. 164r; Carlo Sigonio, De regno Italiae (Venice, 1574), 209;

STEFAN BAUER

45

Gilbert Génébrard (Chronographia, 1580), followed Panvinio’s genealogy
of papal historians in more detail and stated that the Liber pontificalis was
first written by Damasus and then continued by Anastasius.57 The Dominican Alfonso Chacón (Lives of the Popes, 1601) reproduced in full Panvinio’s
note on Nicholas I—which identified Anastasius as the author of the old
redaction of the Liber pontificalis up to Nicholas.58
The Liber pontificalis in Print
As a result, three decades after his death, it was Panvinio who was
largely responsible for the fact that the old redaction of the Liber pontificalis
was published under Anastasius’s name. In line with Panvinio’s views, the
first printed edition (1602) was titled Anastasii Bibliothecarii Historia de
vitis Romanorum pontificum (Anastasius Bibliothecarius’s History of the
Lives of the Popes) (Figure 2).59 The editor was the Dutch Jesuit Johannes
Busaeus (de Buys), a professor of theology in Mainz. For his edition,
Busaeus used a manuscript from the library of Markus Welser in Augsburg
and received additional help from Marquard Freher in Heidelberg. The
manuscript was a copy based on a twelfth-century codex (Vat. lat. 3764),
which had been rediscovered a few years earlier. This codex, probably originally from Farfa, was found by Antonio d’Aquino in the Benedictine
abbey of La Trinità della Cava near Salerno; the historian Cesare Baronio
had it transferred to Rome in 1593.60 There was great interest in this codex:
Francisco Peña, an auditor of the Roman Rota, for example, transcribed it
Georg Scherer, Ob es war sey, das auff ein Zeit ein Bapst zu Rom schwanger gewesen (Vienna,
1584), sigs. B1v–B2r; Jean-Papire Masson, De episcopis Urbis qui Romanam ecclesiam rexerunt
(Paris, 1586), p. 140. On Masson’s papal history, see Jean-Louis Quantin, “Érudition gallicane et censure romaine au tournant des XVIe e XVIIe siècles: Papire Masson devant l’Index,”
in Hétérodoxies croisées: catholicismes pluriels entre France et Italie, XVI e–XVII e siècles, ed. Gigliola Fragnito and Alain Tallon (Rome, 2015), Web, books.openedition.org/efr/2849 (accessed
18 August 2020).
57. Compare Gilbert Génébrard, Chronographiae libri IV (Paris, 1580), p. [225] note n,
with Panvinio, “In vitam Beati Petri . . . annotationes” (1562), fol. 8r.
58. Compare Alfonso Chacón, Vitae et gesta summorum pontificum a Christo domino
usque ad Clementem VIII necnon Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae cardinalium cum eorundem
insignibus, 2 vols. (Rome, 1601), 1:245, with Panvinio’s note on Nicholas I (1562), fol. 106v.
59. Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Historia de vitis Romanorum pontificum a Beato Petro
Apostolo usque ad Nicolaum I, ed. Johannes Busaeus (Mainz, 1602).
60. For the manuscript, see digi.vatlib.it/view/MSS_Vat.lat.3764 (accessed 18 August
2020). See also Duchesne, “Introduction,” 1:CLXXIV, CXCI–CXCVI, 2:LVI; Detlef Jasper,
“Die Papstgeschichte des Pseudo-Liudprand,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 31 (1975), 17–107, here 52–54; Carmela Vircillo Franklin, “Reading the Popes: The
Liber pontificalis and Its Editors,” Speculum, 92 (2017), 607–29, here 608–9.

46

WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

FIGURE 2. The first printed edition of the Liber pontificalis: Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Historia de vitis Romanorum Pontificum a Beato Petro Apostolo usque ad Nicolaum I, ed. Johannes Busaeus (Mainz, 1602).

and collated it with other copies.61 Vat. lat. 3764 became the common
foundation for subsequent editions by Giovanni Vignoli and Francesco
Bianchini (see below). This manuscript was probably attractive to editors
both because of its age and its legibility—it was written in a clear Roman
version of Carolingian minuscule. Busaeus’s edition of the Liber pontificalis
contained the old redaction from St. Peter to Stephen V. Citing Panvinio’s
note on Nicholas I from 1562, Busaeus believed that the text up to
Nicholas had been written by Anastasius Bibliothecarius, and that the last
two lives (Hadrian II, 867–72, and the fragment on Stephen V, 885–86)
had been added by Petrus Guillermus.62
61. Bauer, Invention of Papal History, 193.
62. Panvinio is cited in Busaeus’s edition in the “Praefatio ad amicum lectorem,” sig.
(:)4v, and on p. 328; cf. also Panvinio, Note on Nicholas I (1562), fol. 106v. There were no
lives between Hadrian II and Stephen V in the old redaction.

STEFAN BAUER

47

Busaeus cited the passage from Platina containing the phrase “as
Anastasius writes”; but presumably because Platina’s statement was far
from clear, Busaeus used Panvinio as his principal authority to confirm
Anastasius’s authorship. Through this edition, Anastasius’s authorship
became even more widely accepted. Between 1603 and 1613, the prominent Jesuits Antonio Possevino and Robert Bellarmine, for example,
declared that Anastasius had written the lives of the popes from St. Peter
to Nicholas I.63
There were also doubters. In 1602, the most respected historian in the
Catholic Church, Cesare Baronio, asserted that Anastasius had been “a
compiler rather than a writer” of papal biographies; Anastasius had composed only contemporary lives, such as that of Hadrian II (867–72).64
Doubts became more widespread in the mid-seventeenth century: Fioravante Martinelli, a scriptor in the Vatican Library, showed that concrete
evidence for Anastasius’s authorship was lacking.65 Although the Catholic
theologian Emmanuel Schelstrate comprehensively refuted the myth of
Anastasius’s authorship in 1692, the false attribution was difficult to dispel.
Anastasius was named as the book’s author in several different editions of
the Liber pontificalis up to the early eighteenth century.66
Only in 1724 did the work finally come out under the title Liber pontificalis. The editor who made this breakthrough was Giovanni Vignoli
(1667–1733), a custodian of the Vatican Library.67 In his preface, Vignoli
wrote that he did not want to follow other scholars who had published the
book under an author’s name, because the oldest manuscripts contained no
attribution. Nor did he express an opinion as to which lives had been written by Damasus and which by Anastasius. Vignoli was certain that several
63. Antonio Possevino, Apparatus sacer, 3 vols. (Venice, 1603–06), 1:78; Robert Bellarmine, De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (Rome, 1613), 77, 163.
64. Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 12 vols. (Rome, 1588–1607), vol. 10 (1602), ad
AD 867, p. 391: “collectorem potius quam scriptorem vitarum praeteritorum pontificum
Romanorum affirmamus.”
65. Fioravante Martinelli, Roma ex ethnica sacra Sanctorum Petri et Pauli apostolica praedicatione profuso sanguine publicae venerationi exposita (Rome, 1653), 409–15.
66. Emmanuel Schelstrate, “De antiquis Romanorum pontificum catalogis,” in his
Antiquitas ecclesiae dissertationibus, monimentis ac notis illustrata, 2 vols. (Rome, 1692–97),
1:327–400, here 375–82. On the edition published by Francesco Bianchini under the title
Anastasius Bibliothecarius, De vitis Romanorum pontificum, 4 vols. (Rome, 1718–35), see Vircillo Franklin, “Reading the Popes.”
67. Liber pontificalis seu De gestis Romanorum pontificum, ed. Giovanni Vignoli, 3 vols.
(Rome, 1724–55) (the latter two volumes were completed by Pietro Giuseppe Ugolini).
Vignoli was second custodian 1712–30.

48

WHO WROTE THE LIVES OF THE POPES?

authors had written the book, but he declined to speculate about their
identities.68 He left this question—along with the title Liber pontificalis,
which became standard—as a challenge for future researchers to confront.
In 1859, Ferdinand Gregorovius, who was quoted at the beginning
of this article, praised Vignoli for providing the most reliable edition of
the Liber pontificalis.69 Even so, speculation about Anastasius’s role continued. Like Baronio, Gregorovius thought that Anastasius had written
a few lives himself, but had compiled the previous biographies and put
the Liber pontificalis together as its editor. Gregorovius went along with
this belief because “at least . . . the general tradition” attached Anastasius’s name to the work.70 In later editions of his History of the City of
Rome, however, Gregorovius changed his mind, stating explicitly that
Anastasius’s name had become associated with the Liber “without justification.” Louis Duchesne’s extensive research on the textual history of
the Liber, published in 1877, had left no room for Gregorovius to continue to accept that Anastasius had edited the book.71
Conclusion
As is argued in this article, one should treat with considerable skepticism the claim that Platina intentionally identified Anastasius the Librarian as the author of the Liber pontificalis. Girolamo Arnaldi’s suggestion
that Platina made the attribution to elevate his own standing as a papal historian—in the tradition of Anastasius—should be regarded as highly speculative. Rather, it seems most likely that Platina created the myth more or
less accidentally. Whether or not he consciously aimed to falsify history,
however, Platina was responsible for creating the myth of Anastasius. It

68. Vignoli, “Praefatio” to his edition of the Liber pontificalis, vol. 1, sigs. c1v–c2r.
69. Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, 1:82 n.1: “die correcteste Ausgabe.”
Nonetheless, Gregorovius also remarked (2:437 n.1) that many of Vignoli’s explanatory notes
were less useful than those provided by Bianchini.
70 Gregorovius, Geschichte der Stadt Rom, 3:165: “wenigstens hat die allgemeine Tradition seinen Namen dieser Arbeit angeheftet.”
71. Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome, 3:148: “with his name is generally associated the Book of the Popes, although without justification”; 4th German ed. (Stuttgart,
1886–96), 3:144: “dem Buch der Päpste überhaupt ist sein Name angeheftet worden, obwol
ohne Grund.” Gregorovius referred to Duchesne’s Étude sur le Liber pontificalis (1877) in a
note on the same page. On Duchesne, see also Carmela Vircillo Franklin, “Theodor Mommsen, Louis Duchesne, and the Liber pontificalis: Classical Philology and Medieval Latin
Texts,” in Marginality, Canonicity, Passion, ed. Marco Formisano and Christina Shuttleworth
Kraus (Oxford, 2018), 99–140.

STEFAN BAUER

49

was by no means clear to his successors as papal historians (such as Onofrio
Panvinio) that there was no evidential basis for this attribution; so, they
adopted and built on Platina’s incorrect attribution of the Liber pontificalis
to Anastasius. More broadly, this episode illustrates how sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century church historians, while improving the research practices and methods of fifteenth-century humanists, as well as applying them
more rigorously and thoroughly, were nevertheless misled at times by their
predecessors’ false assumptions.

Père Merklen’s War:
Editing France’s Catholic Newspaper
During the Dark Years
RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE*
Examining how the daily newspaper La Croix and its editor-inchief, Father Léon Merklen, negotiated the Dark Years of the Occupation, this article addresses common categories of resistance and collaboration as they pertain to the French Catholic Church during World
War II. Resistance and collaboration are both necessary but problematic terms. We need to account for the complexity and fluidity of the
experiences of the majority of Catholics, including clergy, who do not
fall easily into one of these categories. Merklen’s story introduces us to
an ineliminable grey area at the heart of Catholic responses to Vichy,
Nazism, and the Holocaust.
Key Words: Vichy France, La Croix, Léon Merklen, Dark Years of
Occupation, resistance, collaboration

T

his article invites the reader to rethink common categories of resistance and collaboration as they pertain to the French Catholic Church
during World War II. To do so, it will examine France’s Catholic daily
newspaper, La Croix, and its editor, the Assumptionist Father Léon
Merklen, during the Dark Years of the Occupation. In France, the period
between the Nazi victory in June 1940 and the liberation of Paris in August
1944 is remembered as les années noires, a time of uncertainty, hardship,
collaboration, atrocity, and, sometimes, resistance.1 With the northern and
western three-fifths of the country under German occupation, an authoritarian rump state appeared in the southern zone libre at Vichy. This state,
led by Marshal Philippe Pétain, along with Premier Pierre Laval, sought
to collaborate with the Third Reich and find for France a place within
Hitler’s Europe. Having fled the capital, a number of the country’s leading
*The author is professor of history at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas. His
email address is: rcrane@benedictine.edu. He wishes to thank Drs. Brenna Moore and Philip
Rolnick, as well as this article’s anonymous peer reviewers, for their helpful comments and
suggestions.
1. Jean Guéhenno, Journal des années noires, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1947).

50

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

51

FIGURE 1. The front page of the June 26, 1940 issue of La Croix, 61 année, No.
17614; source: Gallica.bnf/Bibliothèque nationale de France

newspapers, including La Croix, re-established themselves in the unoccupied zone as the authorized press of the new regime.
The ensuing Dark Years, which among other things saw the deaths of
approximately 80,000 of France’s Jews, still comprise an open wound in
French national memory, as well as a contentious field in the historiography of World War II France, including religious history.2 For decades,
2. Jacques Semelin, The Survival of the Jews in France, trans. Cynthia Schoch and
Natasha Lehrer (Oxford, 2018), 1; Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in
France since 1944, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA, 1991); Richard J. Golsan,
Vichy’s Afterlife: History and Counterhistory in Postwar France (Lincoln, NE, 2000); and Pierre
Laborie, Le Chagrin et le venin. Occupation. Résistance. Idées reçues, 2nd ed. (Paris, 2014).

52

PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

scholars have examined how the French Catholic Church conducted itself
during the 1940–44 period, with the Catholic hierarchy’s support for
Pétain and its seeming indifference to the fate of France’s Jews, “a subject
that is nowadays still a matter of harsh debate, a subject that can rankle!”3
In recent years, some historians have sought to revise what Vesna Drapac
refers to as a standard “argument [that] presents us with the institution of
the Church as overwhelmingly accommodating and quiescent in the face
of Vichy and the threat posed by the Nazi presence.”4 Drapac and others
have challenged a regnant historiography that draws a stark contrast
between “lucidity and courage” on the one hand, and “cowardice and compromise, conformism and surrender” on the other, when comparing
Catholic resisters with the rest of the Church.5
While criticizing a “Manichaean” division of the French Church
into courageous (dissident) and cowardly (establishment) elements, these
revisionist historians have also reached further, seeking to broaden the
very definition of “spiritual resistance.”6 Jean-Louis Clément allows for
“a notion of spiritual resistance” in which engagement in the world
“becomes secondary in respect to the proclamation of the Gospel, in all
times and all places.” He further identifies this perspective with prioritizing the interior life as well as Catholic Action, a prioritization of the spiritual life endorsed by the episcopate and supported by the clergy as a
3. “. . . c’est encore de nos jours un sujet d’apres discussions, un sujet qui peut facher!”
Bernard Joassart, “Une Église dans la tourmente. À propos de livres récents,” Nouvelle Revue
Théologique, 128, no. 3 (September 2006), 444–49, here 448.
4. Vesna Drapac, War and Religion: Catholics in the Churches of Occupied Paris (Washington, DC, 1998), 2.
5. “Mais, à côté de lachetés et de compromissions, de conformismes et d’abandons, que
de témoignages de lucidité et de courage, combien de fidélités jusqu’au sang!” François and
Renée Bédarida, “Une Résistance spirituelle: aux origines du «Témoignage chrétien» (1941–
1942),” Revue d’histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale 16, no. 1 (January 1966), 3–33, here 4.
6. Isabelle de Gaulmyn, “Les évêques de France face à la persecution des juifs,” La
Croix, May 30, 2012. Retrieved on December 15, 2019, from https://www.la-croix.com/
Culture/Livres-Idees/Livres/Les-eveques-de-France-face-a-la-persecution-des-juifs-_NG_2012-05-30-812487. “Spiritual resistance” denotes non-violent resistance motivated primarily by religious rather than political considerations, thus distinguishing between Christians
in the Resistance and Christian resisters. Jacques Maritain first drew the distinction between
“agir en chrétien” and “agir en tant que chrétien” in “Structure de l’Action” in the April 12,
1935 issue of Sept. Limore Yagil traces “spiritual resistance” to four sources: the primacy of
conscience, the primacy of the spiritual (Jacques Maritain), the primacy of the human person
(Emmanuel Mounier), and Christian democracy. Chrétiens et Juifs sous Vichy (1940–1944).
Sauvetage et désobéissance civile (Paris, 2005), 105.
7. “. . . une notion de résistance spirituelle dans laquelle l’engagement dans le siècle
devient secondaire par rapport à l’annonce de l’Évangile, en tous temps et en tous lieux.” Jean-

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

53

whole.7 And more controversially, given the debates surrounding Pope
Pius XII’s public stance during the Holocaust, Sylvie Bernay goes so far
as to identify a papal doctrine of spiritual resistance: “Spiritual resistance
according to the pontifical doctrine consisted, therefore, of keeping
intact the faith in Jesus Christ, born of a Jewish mother and son of God.
It found expression in non-violent action, rejecting the paganism of these
ideologies [both Nazism and communism], and putting itself at the service of the human person.”8
Étienne Fouilloux assails revisionist historians on several fronts.9 First,
he insists that the adherence of the French bishops (and thus the institutional Church) to Vichy was markedly more intense and sincere than their
previous acceptance of the laic Third Republic. These two iterations of
political theology should not be equated in order to downplay the Church’s
support for Pétain. Second, he charges the revisionists with an essentially
conservative ecclesiology that puts the 1997 French bishops’ Declaration of
Repentance (for their predecessors’ moral failures during the Occupation
and Holocaust) into question.10 Finally, he demonstrates that if “the simple
maintaining of a traditional religious life in a totalitarian environment is
promoted to the rank of spiritual resistance par excellence,” then the term
“spiritual resistance” has been denuded of any real meaning.11
Fouilloux makes a powerful case for these revisionist studies having
failed to demolish a historiographical “consensus” about the failings of the
institutional Church.12 But does this consensus school—a veritable “vulgate” to borrow Fouilloux’s word—not have its own blind spots, or at least
Louis Clément, “La notion de «Résistance spirituelle»: une étude de concept à partir des cas
français et italien,” in: La Résistance et les Français. Enjeux stratégiques et environnement
social, ed. Christian Bougeard and Jacqueline Sainclivier (Rennes, 1995), 85–94. Retrieved
(unpaginated format) on November 23, 2019, from https://books.openedition.org/pur/
16358#text.
8. “La résistance spirituelle selon la doctrine pontificale consiste donc à conserver
intact la foi en Jésus-Christ, né d’une mère juive et fils de Dieu. Elle se traduit par une action
non-violente en refusant le paganisme de ces idéologies et en se mettant au service de la personne humaine.” Sylvie Bernay, “La Résistance spirituelle catholique dans la France occupée,”
Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique, 115, no. 4 (2014), 27–46, here 32.
9. Étienne Fouilloux, “Église catholique et seconde guerre mondiale,” Vingtième siècle.
Revue d’histoire, 73, no. 1 (2002), 111–24.
10. Michèle Cointet, L’Église sous Vichy (1940–1945): La repentance en question (Paris,
1998).
11. “. . . le simple maintien d’une vie religieuse traditionelle est promu au rang de résistance spirituelle par excellence.” Fouilloux, “Église catholique,” 121.
12. Fouilloux cites Jacques Duquesne, Les catholiques français sous l’Occupation (Paris,
1966) as the progenitor of this consensus. Ibid., 111.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

rhetorical excesses? 13 Was it really only the “magnificent exception,” as
W.D. Halls calls spiritual resisters, who clearly perceived Nazi barbarism
and Vichy’s complicity therein?14 Toward the end of his life, Cardinal
Henri de Lubac, himself a onetime Resistance member, pointedly warned
against this kind of simplification: “The rigid distinction between an official
Church and the underground world of ‘Resistance workers’ offers the historian a convenient framework, but in many cases this does not correspond
to the much more complex and fluid reality.”15
De Lubac’s caveat can help us question the consensus school in at least
two respects. First, does a preponderant focus on heroic resisters not sometimes lead historians to offer a rhetorical flourish (like “magnificent exception”) rather than reasoned judgment? For example, Olivier Wieviorka
writes in a history of the French Resistance the following about an article
in the premiere issue of the clandestine publication Cahiers du témoignage
chrétien: “Thanks to that opinion column, for four years the Christian world
would be able to counter Nazism and Pétainism with the force of its
word.”16 Never mind that Cahiers only first appeared in November 1941, a
year and a half into the Occupation, assuming Christians were ignorant of
the evil of Nazism and the danger of collaboration beforehand. But Wieviorka’s exclusivist judgment also displays a triumphalism that vastly oversimplifies the issue of French Catholic public opinion during this time. At
the very least, in this case moral edification has been substituted for historical precision.
A second problem involves a sometimes teleological, rather than historical, connection between Catholic resistance and the reforms of the
Second Vatican Council. Certainly, historians such as Piotr Kosicki and
Sarah Shortall have rightly identified important currents of “change from
below” within the Church, including a more expansive vision of human
rights and a new and vital role for the laity.17 And others have focused on
13. Ibid., 111.
14. Wilfred D. Halls, “French Christians and the German Occupation,” in: Collaboration in France: Politics and Culture during the German Occupation, 1940–1944, ed. Gerhard
Hirschfeld and Patrick Marsh (Oxford, 1989), 72–92, here 90.
15. Henri de Lubac, Christian Resistance to Anti-Semitism: Memories from 1940–1944,
trans. Sister Elizabeth Englund, O.C.D. (San Francisco, 1990), 127.
16. Olivier Wieviorka, The French Resistance, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Cambridge, MA,
2016), 63.
17. Piotr Kosicki, Catholics on the Barricades: Poland, France, and “Revolution,” 1891–
1956 (New Haven, 2018); Sarah Shortall, “Theology and the Politics of Christian Human
Rights,” Journal of the History of Ideas,79, no. 3 (2018), 445–60.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

55

the wartime roots of the Church’s eventual rejection of antisemitism.18 But
in some cases, historians have extracted Catholic resisters from the complexity and contingency of their wartime situation to emphasize their
suprahistorical role as clear-eyed “pioneers of the intellectual and spiritual
springtime that would open up twenty years later upon the Second Vatican
Council.”19 This inevitable triumph of the “prophetic” part of the Church
over the institutional one would lead not just to a new dawn for the
Church, but in Fouilloux’s words, to its very “salvation” (“son salut de Vatican II”).20 In short, it is not only the revisionist historians who display a
particular, historically-situated, ecclesiology.
In the vexed situation of wartime France, La Croix, the “semi-official
organ of Catholicism,” played a significant role in shaping Catholic opinion. It not only reported the news, but applied Church teachings to contemporary issues, while also reprinting homilies, pastoral letters, and papal
documents.21 It therefore merits inclusion in the ongoing debates about
French Catholicism during the Dark Years. To understand Merklen and
his newspaper, that arguably was part of the oft-criticized institutional
Church, generalizations and oversimplifications should be avoided.22
Hard-and-fast distinctions can be problematic when looking at the
prophetic and institutional parts of the Church on the one hand, and on
the other, the phenomena of resistance and collaboration.23 This article
18. John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the
Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Richard Francis Crane and Brenna Moore,
“Cracks in the Theology of Contempt: The French Roots of Nostra Aetate,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations, 8, no. 1 (2013), 1–28.
19. “Sans tomber dans l’exagération, on peut considérer les rédacteurs des Cahiers
comme des pionniers du printemps intellectuel et spirituel qui débouchera vingt ans plus tard
sur le concile Vatican II.” François and Renée Bédarida, La Résistance spirituelle, 1941–1944:
Les Cahiers clandestins du Témoignage chrétien (Paris, 2001), 17.
20. Fouilloux, “Église catholique,”118.
21. Wilfred D. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity in Vichy France (Providence,
1995), 170.
22. Sociologist Aliza Luft examines the French Catholic Church as an intermediate, or
meso-level, institution. Among other conclusions, she posits that the Catholic hierarchy facilitated Vichy’s antisemitic legislation by its support for Pétain, yet ironically, thereby preserved
its power as an actor in public life, something that allowed it to offer forceful and influential
protests against the deportations of Jews. In short, “it was because the episcopate rallied to the
regime in its first two years of rule that their defections in August 1942 mattered.” See “Religion in Vichy France: How Meso-Level Actors Contribute to Authoritarian Legitimation,”
European Journal of Sociology, 61, no. 1 (2020), 1–35, here 13.
23. Bernard Comte offer a slightly nuanced version of this thesis, contrasting the “will
to prophetic witness on the part of some” (la volonté de témoignage prophétique des uns) with
“others’ concern to ensure the mission of the Church by maintaining and developing its usual

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

FIGURE 2. Photo of Père Pierre-Fourrier (Léon-Félix) Merklen (1875–1949); in
the public domain, from the Assumptionist provincial website: https://www.
assumption.us/about-us/portraits/prominent-assumptionists.

does not offer a morally-edifying tale of heroic resisters, but instead
explores the grey area between resistance and collaboration. It analyzes
how a journalist-priest and his colleagues ostensibly supported Vichy,
while developing consciously-defensive, sub rosa approaches to subverting
the messages of Nazism and collaborationism.
1940: Annus horribilis
The 1940 fall of France provides the mis-en-scène for La Croix’s coverage of the Dark Years.24 In June and July, La Croix relocated first to Bordeaux and then to Limoges, joining the exodus that saw millions of French
civilians take to the roads ahead of the Wehrmacht. Long before its flight
from Paris, however, La Croix had been trying to distance itself from its
anti-republican and antisemitic past. To this end, Merklen’s leadership
activities” (souci des autres d’assurer la mission de l’Église en maintenant et développant ses activités
habituelles). See: L’honneur et la conscience: Catholiques français en résistance (1940–1944) (Paris,
1998), 277.
24. See Yves-Marie Hilaire, “Les manchettes de «La Croix» de Paris pendant l’été
1940,” in: Églises et Chrétiens dans la IIe Guerre Mondiale: La France, ed. Xavier de Montclos,
Monique Luirard, Francois Delpech, and Pierre Bolle (Lyon, 1982), 129–31; and Richard
Francis Crane, “La Croix and the Swastika: The Ambiguities of Catholic Responses to the
Fall of France,” The Catholic Historical Review, 90 (2004), 45–66.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

57

proved crucial.25 He had been appointed chief editor of the paper in
December 1927 through the direct intervention of Pope Pius XI, after the
latter’s condemnation of the extreme nationalist Action française movement
that had strained the allegiance of many French Catholics.26 Réné Rémond
states that Merklen helped lead La Croix’s readers “from Action française to
Christian democracy.”27 Some historians question the depth and sincerity
of La Croix’s, as well as the French bishops’, embrace of the Republic, but
in the 1930s Merklen often condemned Nazism, and refused to see it as a
lesser evil than communism.28 He therefore earned a place on the enemies’
25. Merklen was born in 1875 in Mirecourt, Lorraine. Initially planning to follow in
his father’s footsteps as a lawyer, he entered the seminary in Nancy, and requested admission
to the Assumptionist novitiate in 1896. After ordination in Rome in 1899 and the completion
of his doctorate in theology, he assumed the directorship of the Assumptionist house of studies in Louvain, establishing the Revue augustinienne. At the height of the modernist controversy, the journal was suppressed (1910) and the faculty dispersed (1912), with Merklen himself “sent across the Channel in disgrace” (envoya en disgrâce au delà de la Manche). Appointed
chaplain to a community of nuns, Merklen made important contacts in Great Britain, and
would later play a role in the ecumenical conversations between Cardinal Désiré-Joseph
Mercier and the Anglican Lord Halifax. After his exile ended, he was appointed professor of
philosophy at the Assumptionist college in Nîmes in 1919, followed by his elevation to the
editorship of the influential Documentation catholique in 1923. Pierre Limagne, Journaliste sous
trois républiques (Paris, 1983), 54. Louis Le Bartz, “Le P. Merklen,” La Croix, September 11,
1949. “PROMINENT ASSUMPTIONIST Pierre-Fourrier (Leon-Felix) MERKLEN
(1875–1949).” Retrieved December 10, 2020, from https://www.assumption.us/aboutus/portraits/prominent-assumptionists/1547-fr-pierre-fourrier-leon-felix-merklen-aa-18751949. Jean-Paul Périer-Muzet, “Les travaux des Assomptionnistes sur Augustin, de la
légende à l’histoire.” Retrieved on December 10, 2020, from https://www.assomption.
org/fr/mediatheque/revue-itineraires-augustiniens/la-joie/iii-augustin-dans-l-histoire/lestravaux-des-assomptionnistes-sur-augustin-par-jean-paul-perier-muzet.
26. Jacques Prévotat, “La Croix dans la crise de la condemnation de l’Action française,”
in Cent ans d’histoire de «La Croix,» ed. Réné Rémond and Émile Poulat, (Paris, 1988), 227–
42, here 239. According to Merklen, he was appointed editor-in-chief a few weeks after
Assumptionist Supérieur général Gervais Quénard published a short, unsigned article in La
Croix about a “reconciliation” between the papacy and Action française. Papal nuncio Luigi
Maglione notified Pius XI, and La Croix was ordered to publish a retraction or be “suppressed.” Maglione knew Merklen as the editor of Documentation catholique. The nuncio
accompanied the new chief editor when he introduced himself to the staff. Merklen diary,
February 18, 1941, J 502, 34–36.
27. Réné Rémond, “L’évolution du journal «La Croix» et son rôle auprès de l’opinion
catholique (1919–1939),” Bulletin de la Societé d’histoire moderne, 57 (1958), 3–10, here 10.
28. Oscar Arnal, “The Ambivalent Ralliement of La Croix,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
31 (1980), 89–106; Frédéric Le Moigne, Les évêques français de Verdun à Vatican II. Une génération en mal d’héroïsme (Rennes, 2005); Rémond, “L’évolution du journal,” 9; Alain Fleury, “«La
Croix» devant la marée brune,” Vingtième siècle, revue d’histoire, 9, no. 1 (1986), 53–66, here 63;
idem, “La Croix” et l’Allemagne, 1930–1940 (Paris, 1986), 204. See also Léon Merklen, “Le
«magnifique message» de Noël du cardinal Verdier,” La Croix, December 29, 1937.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

lists of both Action française and the Nazis.29 Alain Fleury states that “for
years the German authorities considered Father Merklen to be a dangerous
enemy of National Socialism, and thus, of Germany.”30
Before 1940, La Croix also had made notable progress toward repudiating its hateful fin-de-siècle attitude toward Jews.31 In November 1938, La
Croix responded to Kristallnacht with a rejection of racist antisemitism and
an invocation of shared suffering. The paper quoted Pius XI’s recent pronouncement that “spiritually we are Semites,” and declared that Christian
love was more powerful than race hatred. La Croix also extolled a “spiritual
solidarity which must unite all men against the crimes of sectarianism and
persecution.”32 Since La Croix had once proudly called itself “the most antiJewish newspaper in France,” its turnaround is remarkable. During the
Dreyfus Affair, it termed French Jewry a “cancer,” and urged its readers to
help drive out the Jewish “vampires.”33 Four decades later, its editor was
urging Catholics to stand fast with the Jewish victims of Nazi violence.
Nonetheless, in the pages of La Croix, forthright opposition to racial
antisemitism cohabitated with persistent anti-Judaic stereotypes. Merklen’s
September 1938 article “The Jewish Problem and the Universality of the
Redemption” depicted Jews as living under God’s curse (“frappé de malédiction”). In the late-1930s, antisemitic legislation east of the Rhine was
endemic. Merklen, to his discredit, also stipulated that “[t]he Church accepts
Christians taking defensive measures against [the Jews’] invasion of civil and
political life,” including “the numerus clausus in the universities” and quotas
on the number of Jews “in official positions or in the liberal professions.”34
29. Eugen Weber, Action Française: Royalism and Reaction in Twentieth-Century France
(Stanford, 1962), 248.
30. “. . . le P. Merklen était considéré depuis des années par les autorités allemandes
comme un adversaire dangereux du nationale-socialisme, donc de l’Allemagne.” Fleury, «La
Croix» et l’Allemagne, 395.
31. Pierre Sorlin, «La Croix» et les Juifs (1880–1899). Contribution à l’histoire de l’antisémitisme contemporaine (Paris, 1967).
32. “. . . la solidarité spirituelle qui doit unir tous les hommes contre les crimes du
sectarisme et de la persécution.” “L’Église et les juifs,” La Croix, November 11, 1938.
33. Robert Michael, A History of Catholic Antisemitism: The Dark Side of the Church (New
York, 2008), 135.
34. “L’Eglise accepte que les chrétiens prennent des mesures de défense contre leur
envahissement dans la vie civile ou politique. Elle n’a jamais condamné le numerus clausus
dans les Universités de l’Europe orientale ni fait obstacle aux projets des Etats qui veulent
proportionner à leur nombre la participation des juifs aux charges officielles ou aux professions
libérales.” Léon Merklen, “Le problème juif et l’universalité de la Rédemption,” La Croix,
September 1, 1938.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

59

Such ambivalence regarding the persecution of European Jewry faithfully replicated papal doctrine at the time. Even Pius XI’s never-promulgated encyclical Humani Generis Unitas, while it condemned antisemitism, referred to Jews as a people “doomed, as it were, to perpetually
wander over the face of the earth.” Pius, exhibiting his own ambivalence,
accepted that states might enact anti-Jewish laws, asking only that they
remember the “laws of justice and charity.”35 After the 1940 defeat, the
French bishops of the southern zone would follow the prewar papal lead
in envisioning a “double protectorate”: France should protect itself from
supposedly predatory Jews; and legal measures should avoid brutal
excesses.36
In 1940, Action française leader Charles Maurras saw the collapse of
the Republic as a “divine surprise.”37 Likewise, France’s Catholics, according to historians like Halls, also saw something providential in the defeat:
“It was almost as if they regarded the Nazis—surely more corrupt than any
leaders of France under the Third Republic—as God’s avenging angels.”38
But these historians are mistaken if they focus on politique d’abord, or politics above all, without adequate attention to what Fouilloux calls “mentalités religieuses.”39 A close reading of La Croix during this time reveals soulsearching and spiritual questioning rather than rejoicing and revenge.
Merklen and others constructed a theodicy of national disaster, as evidenced by titles such as “Has God Punished France?,” “Punishment or
Sacrifice?,” “The Passion of France,” and “Where Are We Headed?”40 Even
a year later, after Vichy had enacted legislation against various scapegoats,
La Croix’s contributors rejected the simplistic idea that the disaster could
35. Quoted in Georges Passelecq and Bernard Suchecky, The Hidden Encyclical of Pius
XI, trans. Steven Rendall (New York,1997), 249, 251, 256–57.
36. Sylvie Bernay, L’Église de France face à la persecution des Juifs, 1940–1944 (Paris, 2012),
90–91, 131–135. See also Jacques Adler, “The French Churches and the Jewish Question: July
1940–March 1941,” Australian Journal of Politics and History, 46, no. 3 (2000), 357–77.
37. Raymond Garreau, “Maurras, 1940 et la ‘divine surprise’,” Le Monde, December 4,
1975. Retrieved on December 19, 2019, from https://www.lemonde.fr/archives/article/
1975/12/04/maurras-1940-et-la-divine-surprise_2587710_1819218.html.
38. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity, 40; John Hellman, “The Anti-Democratic
Impulse in Catholicism: Jacques Maritain, Yves Simon, and Charles de Gaulle During World
War II,” Journal of Church and State, 33 (1991), 453–71.
39. Étienne Fouilloux, Les chrétiens français entre crise et liberation, 1937–1947 (Paris,
1997), 103.
40. Henri-Dominique Noble, “Dieu a-t-il puni la France?” La Croix, July 16, 1940;
Georges Piot, “Punition? . . . ou sacrifice?. . . ,” La Croix, July 10, 1940; Robert d’Harcourt,
“Passion de la France,” La Croix, June 26, 1940; Léon Merklen, “Où allons nous?” La Croix,
July 5, 1940.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

be laid at the feet of the Popular Front and alleged “enemies of France,”
especially Jews.41
Then what had left France beaten and prostrate before Nazi Germany?
Secularism and materialism had wrought sin and selfishness, with the
resulting lack of national vitality already evident in dénatalité, or a declining
birth rate.42 Liberated women and public school teachers (instituteurs)
numbered among the main villains in this narrative of decadence, decline,
and disaster.43 But they were only the most obvious characters in the story.
A sense of collective guilt inspired what Jacques Duquesne describes as a
“rage de pénitence.”44 La Croix called it an opportunity for “atonement and
renewal.”45 How could the fall of France be seen as a spiritual opportunity?
Archbishop of Toulouse Jules-Géraud Saliège explained it to his flock: “To
what use did we put the victory of 1918? To what use would we have put
an easy victory in 1940? My very dear brothers, know thus that the good
Lord loves us.”46 This kind of self-flagellating pedagogy can also be seen in
Jesuit Albert Bessières’ dire conclusion that only God’s mercy had spared
the French from a victory that would have sealed their doom: “Would not
another victory of arms have meant a new and definitive defeat of souls?”47
Shortly before the Armistice, Pétain spoke to the nation. Offering his
people “the gift of my person” to help ease their pain, he intentionally
struck a chord with millions of Catholics steeped in a theology of sacrifice
and redemptive suffering. As Michèle Cointet argues, “[t]he adhesion of
Catholics to Pétainism drew as much on memories of the Catechism as it
did on the seduction of a political doctrine.”48 Nonetheless this adhesion
had political consequences, and for the Catholic hierarchy, hopefully political benefits, especially the restoration of Catholicism’s key role in educa41. Abbé Charles de Lestang, “La tâche urgente,” La Croix, June 12, 1941.
42. As Saliège put it, “a people of only children (fils uniques) is finished as a people.”
“Comment donner à la France une âme nouvelle,” La Croix, July 13, 1940.
43. Andrée Butillard, “Pourquoi en sommes-nous là?” La Croix, August 29, 1940; Marcellin Lissourges, “Une oeuvre de libération,” La Croix, October 24, 1940.
44. Duquesne, Les catholiques français, 31.
45. Abbé Charles Thellier de Poncheville, “De Profundis clamavi ad te Domine,” La
Croix, June 27, 1940.
46. “Quel usage avons-nous fait de la victoire de 1918? Quel usage aurions-nous fait
d’une victoire facile en 1940? Mes très chers Frères, comprenez donc que le bon Dieu nous
aime.” “Nos malheurs présents,” La Croix, June 28, 1940.
47. “Une nouvelle victoire des armes n’eût-elle pas marqué une nouvelle et définitive
défaite des âmes?” “Sois fier!” La Croix, July 30, 1940.
48. “L’adhésion des catholiques au pétainisme tient autant aux souvenirs du catéchisme
qu’à la séduction d’une doctrine politique.” Cointet, L’Église sous Vichy, 60.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

61

tion and public life. Philippe Burrin puts it thus: “In defeated France, the
Church felt it had wind in its sails, in the early days at least. The political
and social forces hostile to it had disappeared, removing much sorely felt
competition.”49 And indeed, at least initially, Catholics were well represented in Vichy’s halls of power.50
So spiritual hope and temporal opportunism coincided. But at what
moral cost? On the nineteenth of October, the same day that La Croix
printed Vichy’s first Jewish Statute without commentary, Merklen wrote
the following: “The conduct of the Church demonstrates with what openmindedness of views it accepts all regimes and adapts to them loyally, as
long as they have as their goal the common good.”51 Five days later, Pétain
shook hands with Hitler at Montoire, sealing the new policy of collaboration with the Reich.
1941: Diary of a Wartime Priest
Merklen probably began his war diary in February 1941 for a variety
of reasons: Great Britain having held out, the European war continued;
with no peace settlement, France was still divided between a Germanoccupied north and a Vichy-administered south; and La Croix’s temporary
relocation to Limoges had become indefinite. But Merklen also was motivated, perhaps predominantly, by the fact that he believed he was about to
die. A few weeks later, he recalled that “I was unable to write and it was
extremely fatiguing to speak . . . in dictating these words. . . . I might have
been stopped that week, the following day, or even that day: Dr. Lory had
said death was imminent.” Merklen saw his journal de guerre as “an obligation to fulfill as quickly as possible under the eyes of God.”52 In his late sixties, and suffering from heart disease, hypertension, and debilitating bouts
49. Philippe Burrin, France Under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise, trans.
Janet Lloyd (New York, 1996), 217.
50. Nicholas Atkin, “Ralliés and résistants: Catholics in Vichy France,” in: Catholicism,
Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century France, ed. Kay Chadwick (Liverpool, 2000), 97–
118, here 103–04.
51. “La conduite de l’Eglise nous montre avec quelle largeur de vues elle accepte tous
les régimes et s’y adapte loyalement, du moment qu’ils ont pour objectif le bien commun et
qu’ils respectent la vie chrétienne, individuelle et sociale, privée et publique, de ses enfants.”
Léon Merklen, “Une économie contrôlée,” La Croix, October 19, 1940.
52. “. . . j’étais dans l’incapacité d’écrire et je parlais avec une fatigue extrême. . . . en
dictant ses propos . . . j’aurais arrêté dans la semaine, le lendemain ou le jour même: le Dr
Lory m’annonçait la mort comme imminente. . . . une obligation à remplir au plus vite et sous
le regard de Dieu. . . .” Pierre-Fourrier (Léon-Félix) MERKLEN, Journal de guerre, Assumptionist Archives, Rome (henceforth “Merklen diary”), April 11, 1941, J 506, 25.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

of depression, La Croix’s editor-in-chief saw himself struggling with
Vichy, the Nazis, his own religious order, and his encroaching mortality.53
Merklen’s voluminous, unpublished diary provides an essential source
for understanding what La Croix produced during the Dark Years. Rarely
cited, and even more rarely quoted, it complements other sources that
scholars have long utilized, including the newspaper itself. La Croix published 1,216 issues during its four years in Limoges.54 But the distortions
of Vichy censorship also require recourse to political editor Pierre
Limagne’s three-volume Éphémérides, a 2,194-page repository of unpublished or truncated pieces, and inside accounts of the editorial process, as
well as a verbatim reprinting of 1,570 consignes—or directives—emanating
from the central and regional censors.55 Merklen’s own journal de guerre is
held in the Assumptionist archives in Rome. It comprises over 4,000 pages
of private reflections and painstakingly copied personal correspondence, as
well as a press digest ranging from the extreme right to the clandestine
Resistance. Most importantly, it offers a mind’s-eye view of the editorial
process at La Croix during the Dark Years.
Why has Merklen’s diary received so little attention? One can offer a
couple of reasons. First, in contrast to Limagne’s highly-organized, typed
manuscript, published shortly after the war, Merklen’s thousands of pages
were written in an almost indecipherable minuscule and distributed among
dozens of small notebooks. They were only transcribed years after
Merklen’s death and the resultant typed sheets were consigned to a basement. Second, whereas Limagne wrote Les Ephémérides as a systematic
daily record of Catholic journalism under Vichy, Merklen’s diary mixes
details about La Croix, Vichy, the Church, and the unfolding war with
extensive and usually unrelated passages about the Assumptionists. These
passages range from reminiscences of Merklen’s early years in the order
(including having been tainted as a “modernist”), remembrances of
Assumptionists on the anniversaries of their deaths, and his conflicted relations with his Superior General.

53. Merklen could recall six previous “états de dépression terribles” in which he could
neither speak nor eat for several hours or even days. Merklen diary, April 2, 1941, J 505, 50.
54. July–December 1940, 154 issues; January–December 1941, 308; January-December
1942, 310; January–December 1943, 302; January–June 1944, 142. La Croix typically
appeared six times a week, with a combined Sunday–Monday edition.
55. Pierre Limagne, Éphémérides de quatre années tragiques, 1940–1944 (Paris, 1945–
48). This work is divided into three large volumes, with continuous page numbering; citations
will refer to page numbers only: Limagne, Éphémérides, x.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

63

However, a patient reading of Merklen’s diary provides the key to
understanding how an authorized newspaper in Vichy France both complied with and sought to subvert the mission of an authoritarian, collaborationist state. As Merklen started his journal de guerre, the successive governments of Laval (dismissed by Pétain in December 1940, though later
reinstated under German pressure in April 1942) and Pierre-Étienne
Flandin gave way to that of Admiral François Darlan, who outshone most
of the other luminaries at Vichy in political cunning and ambition. Julian
Jackson describes him as a “devious figure” whose “only principle was
opportunism,” and who oversaw “the apogee of the policy” of collaboration.56 Darlan’s minister of information, Paul Marion, had high expectations for newspapers like La Croix: “Simply put, it is a matter of replacing
a liberal and capitalist press with a press that resembles the Italian and
German ones, that is to say, one that, without being positively a presse
d’État, is always at the disposal of the State.”57
Censorship and Propaganda
Merklen and the other editors coped with a constant barrage of censorship and propaganda emanating from Vichy as well as the censor’s
bureau in Limoges. On a daily basis, censors relayed directives and restrictions to the press with notes d’orientation and consignes. An example of the
former can found in the November 22, 1940 missive that all newspapers
must support the Marshal’s policy of collaboration as part of the regime’s
work of national “salvation,” and that each issue must demonstrate a “personal contribution” to this endeavor.58 Consignes were detailed directives
that stipulated what could and what could not be printed, often specifying
how many columns a given piece could use, particularly on the front page.
For example, an October 1940 address by President Roosevelt could
receive no more than a column of coverage.59 A November 1940 consigne
forbade devoting more than two columns to the anniversary of the 1918
Armistice, while a late-April 1942 instruction mandated at least three
front-page columns for a speech by Hitler.60 With even the number of
56. Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years (Oxford, 2001), 178.
57. “Il s’agit, en deux mots, de substituer à la presse de type capitaliste et liberale une
presse qui ressemble aux presses allemande et italienne, c’est-à-dire qui, sans être positivement
une presse d’État, soit toujours à la disposition de l’État.” Quoted in Denis Peschanski,
“Vichy au singulier, Vichy au pluriel. Une tentative avortée d’encadrement de la société
(1941–1942),” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 43, no. 3 (1988), 639–61, here 642.
58. Limagne, Éphémérides, 52.
59. Ibid., 36.
60. Ibid., 46, 523.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

columns for an article strictly mandated, La Croix’s freedom of movement
was indeed narrow.
Yet Merklen and his staff constantly sought to circumvent the censors
and sabotage what he referred to as the “tendentious” news items “concocted (confectionnées) in the propaganda dispensaries (officines) of Vichy
and Berlin.”61 Quotation marks, italics, prefacing a title with “according
to,” following an imposed piece with “Havas-OFI” (Office français d’information) were some of the tactics, as well as placing “N.C.” at the bottom
of an article, which either meant “note communiqué” or “non conformiste,”
depending on the perceptiveness of the reader.62 La Croix could also couch
otherwise unacceptable sentiments of dissent in dogmatically Catholic
terms, as Merklen did on the eve of the Feast of the Assumption in August
1941: “The poor little Jewess, unknown and lowly, whom the Angel of the
Lord greeted as the Mother of the Savior of the world, and who, having
shared the sorrows and humiliation of her Son at Calvary, became the
Mother, without exception, of all men, is today glorious and triumphant:
she is Our Lady, the Queen of Heaven and of earth.”63 Merklen’s elevation
of the “poor little Jewess” did not go unnoticed by the censor in Vichy, who
issued a warning and cited Merklen’s article as a “provocation.”64
For La Croix’s daily reports on the global conflict, Vichy dictated that
the Soviet Union and France’s erstwhile ally Great Britain be portrayed as
enemies. By early 1942 the words “Russia” and “Russians” could no longer
be used—only “Soviet” and “Red” were to be employed.65 The British must
be depicted as aggressors and assassins. In March 1942, when the RAF
bombed the Renault works at Boulogne-Billancourt, a major source of
trucks for the Wehrmacht, Vichy imposed a large five-column headline:
“Paris Suburb is the Target of a Murderous Bombardment (Unspeakable
61. “Du Père Merklen,” September 30, 1944, Assumptionist Archives, Rome, SM 72.
62. Marie-Geneviève Massiani, “La Croix et la censure de Vichy (juillet 1940 à decembre 1942),” Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 184 (October 1996), 109–27, here 115–
16; Merklen diary, n.d. March 1941, J 504, 44. Merklen periodically received letters from
readers who either did not know that N.C. after an imposed article mean “non conformiste,”
or who could not detect “le ton ironique” in an article by one of La Croix’s own writers.
63. “La pauvre petite Juive, inconnue, méprisée, que l’Ange du Seigneur a saluée
comme la Mère du Sauveur du monde et qui, après avoir partagé au Calvaire les humiliations
et les douleurs de son Fils, est devenue la Mère, sans distinction, de tous les hommes, est
aujourd’hui glorieuse et triomphante, c’est Notre-Dame, la Reine du Ciel et de la terre.” Léon
Merklen, “L’Heure de Marie,” La Croix, August 14, 1941.
64. Limagne, Éphémérides, 230.
65. Ibid., 379.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

65

English Aggression).”66 In May, La Croix received verbal orders from the
censor to whip up popular indignation by creating preposterous stories of
a (by now starving) nation united in outrage over the British seizure of a
faraway outpost of empire. The editors were expected to utilize the following titles: “All of France is Standing Up Against the Aggression in Madagascar” (May 12) and “New Demonstrations of Popular Indignation Following English Aggression” (May 14).67 Merklen received pressure from
two sides: from French patriots, inevitable letters of complaint after publishing such “nouvelles tendancieuses”; from the Vichy censor, La Croix was
threatened with “pitiless sanctions” if it did not adopt a still more antiBritish line.68
La Croix found itself repeatedly charged with Anglophilia, and faced
accusations of supporting General Charles de Gaulle’s London-based
resistance movement. The local censor, Marcel Pays, used this cudgel in
March 1942 to intimidate one of the staffers:
Anyway, I can confirm to you that every day you are gaining new readers
because of your pro-Anglo-Saxon and pro-Soviet leanings. I could name
two people, non-Catholics, in one little village in the Haute-Garonne,
who subscribed to Le Courrier and La Dépêche, which they found too conformist, so they subscribed to your newspaper. These people are Gaullists,
and many of these are your readers.

The threat that followed was hardly a surprise: “Believe me, you’d better
watch out or else you will disappear.”69 Had Pays known that during the
previous year, immediately after parachuting into France, a Free French
agent had been welcomed into La Croix’s offices “with open arms,” he
likely would have sought to implement his threat.70
66. “La banlieue de PARIS est l’objet d’un bombardement meurtrier (inqualifiable
agression britannique),” La Croix, March 5, 1942.
67. “Toute la France se dresse contre l’agression de Madagascar,” and “Nouvelles manifestations d’indignation populaire à la suite de l’agression anglaise.” Éphémérides, 545, 547.
68. Merklen diary, n.d. May 1942, J 526, 9; Ibid., May 4, 1942, J 524, 67–68.
69. “Quoi qu’il en soit, je puis vous affirmer que chaque jour vous gagnez de nouveaux
lecteurs et cette en raison des vos tendances favorables aux Anglo-Saxons et aux Soviets. Je
pourrais vous citer deux personnes, non catholiques, qui, dans un petit village de la Haute
Garonne, ont abonné le Courrier et la Dépêche, qu’ils trouvaient trop conformists pour s’abonner à votre journal. Ces personnes sont gaullistes et beaucoup de ceux-ci sont vos lecteurs.
Croyez-moi, soyez prudente ou alors vous disparaîtrez.” Merklen diary, March 28, 1942, J
521, 65–66.
70. Maurice Schumann, “Bienvenue à «La Croix»,” L’Aube, January 30, 1945, reprinted
in Limagnes, Éphémérides, xxv. Schumann was the wartime “voice of France” on the BBC,
and later became French Foreign Minister.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

Merklen also complained in his diary about how the censor “fearing the
Germans,” sought to suppress any reference to “papal teachings, whether
those transmitted via Vatican Radio or through papal encyclicals concerning
problems of a general and social order.”71 Vatican transmissions were routinely jammed in southern France, and even when they could be heard, La
Croix received the censor’s rebuke for trying to publish the content of what
the authorities deemed foreign radio broadcasts to which the public was forbidden to listen (interdit d’écouter).72 Merklen saw papal guidance as vital in
the face of Nazism and collaboration, and wanted to relay Pius’ words to the
wider public, even if he privately questioned their adequacy:
The Pope has just delivered his address Urbi et Orbi on the radio. It is very
beautiful and, at heart, very courageous. But it does not have the forthright tone, much less concrete applications, that one could have expected
from Pius IX, Pius X, or Pius XI. The French public will comprehend
nothing . . . as for the ongoing religious persecution, he says nothing precise, though it is not difficult to read between the lines.73

Even a staunch supporter of Pius XII could be dissatisfied with his merely
oblique references to Nazi atrocities.74 Yet Merklen’s frustration with Pius’
reticence paled in comparison with his resentment at the harassment routinely doled out by the censors.
La Croix, like other papers, found itself continually cited for offenses
great and small. Thus the regional censor could call to complain that a tran71. “. . . par crainte des allemandes veut supprimer toute allusion à ces enseignements
pontificaux transmis soit par la Radio vaticane soit par les encycliques conçernant les problèmes d’ordre général et social.” Merklen diary, February 18, 1941, J 502, 31; Limagne,
Éphémérides, 105.
72. Ibid., February 27, 1941, J 504, 4.
73. “Le Pape vient de prononcer par radio son allocution Urbi et Orbi. Elle est très belle
et au fond très courageuse. Mais ce n’est pas le ton direct, encore moins les applications concrètes, comme on aurait pu attendre de Pie IX, Pie X, de Pie XI. Le public français ne comprendra rien . . . sur la persécution religieuse qui existe: il ne précise rien, mais il n’est pas difficile de lire entre les lignes.” Ibid., April 13, 1941, J 506, 27. See also Pius XII, Urbi et Orbi.
Retrieved on November 21, 2019, from https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pope-pius-xiis-easter-message-in-vatican-city-april-1941.
74. Recent Pius XII scholarship concludes that “the pope was not silent during the war”
but did fail “to speak out forcefully to condemn directly Nazism and its manifest crimes
throughout Europe.” Pius believed he was following the “principle of avoiding greater evil”
and preserving the institution of the Church. Robert A. Ventresca, Soldier of Christ: The Life
of Pope Pius XII (Cambridge, MA, 2013), 170. Jacques Kornberg assesses this policy: “The
consequence was a papacy engaged in calculated acquiescence in the fate of systematic atrocities, even state-sponsored destruction of whole peoples.” The Pope’s Dilemma: Pius XII Faces
Atrocities and Genocide in the Second World War (Toronto, 2015), 301.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

67

script of a Vatican Radio broadcast (on collaboration) constituted a “personal affront” to the Marshal, or could block a fundraising appeal for a
storm-damaged church, citing a prohibition against publicizing “meteorological intelligence.”75 Maintaining good relations with the censors fell
under the purview of administrator-director Alfred Michelin. Despite
Michelin’s efforts, La Croix received its first suspension in November
1941—for twenty-four hours—after reporting that, under German pressure, Vichy had dismissed its delegate-general in North Africa, General
Maxime Weygand, and that the United States government objected to this
act.76 Conflict between La Croix and the censor continued throughout the
Occupation and other suspensions would follow.
Conflict within the Church
Merklen also found himself in frequent conflict with right-wing members of the clergy, including avid supporters of the extremist journal and
movement Action française (the papal ban having been lifted by the end of
the thirties). As mentioned above, Merklen’s appointment to the chief
editor’s desk happened in the wake of the condemnation of Action française
and its integral nationalist message. As a result, Merklen, along with other
supporters of the condemnation, such as the philosopher Jacques Maritain,
had found himself on a sort of Action française enemies’ list.77 Now, as
Merklen wrote in his diary, “[t]he A.F. spirit openly reigns at Vichy; and
one is more or less conscious of this in France in the [clerical] milieus that
are sympathetic to this movement.”78 Other far-right journals lambasted
La Croix not only for “criticizing . . . the directives of the Marshal” but also
serving as an apologist for the “Anglo-Russo-Americans.”79 Even worse,
this “official Catholic organ La Croix,” like the bishops, allowed itself to be
duped by “the underhanded maneuvers of the Jews and the Gaullists.”80

75. Limagne, Éphémérides, 104, 117.
76. Merklen diary, November 26, 1941, J 516, 25–27; Limagne, Éphémérides, 312.
77. Weber, Action Française, 248.
78. “. . . l’esprit A.F. regne pleinement à Vichy; et on en a plus ou moins conscience en
France dans les milieux sympathiques à ce mouvement.” Merklen diary, May 2, 1941, J 506,
60. See also February 10, 1941, J 501, 40.
79. Au Pilori, November 5, 1942, quoted in Merklen diary, November 17, 1942, J 539, 12.
80. “Mais il est bon, croyons-nous, de rappeler comment le haut clergé de France s’est
laissé abuser par les manoeuvres sournoises des Juifs et des gaullistes.” [. . .] “À ces paroles stupides et sincères, il faut ajouter les declarations d’autres grands hommes d’Eglise tels que Mgr
[Jean] Calvet et les mettre en opposition avec les curieuses lignes que l’on pouvait lire dans
l’organe officiel catholique, La Croix.” Paris-Soir, October 23, 1942, quoted in Merklen diary,
n.d. late October 1942, J 537, 55–56, underlining in original.

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One collaborationist weekly found a simple title for its exposé of La Croix:
“Stupidity and Treason.”81 Numerous clergy shared this assessment. While
Merklen took note of collaborationist clergy like the Abbé Louis Sorel,
who believed that short of aligning itself with Nazi Germany, the best that
France could hope for was a return to a “Judeo-Masonic republic,” the
editor also saw a threat from some of his fellow Assumptionists, especially
from the community at Agen, who he believed were agitating for his
ouster. The consequent change of direction for the paper would likely
involve a return to Paris.82
Despite periodic “invitations” from the Germans to bring the newspaper back to Paris, Merklen saw La Croix’s return to the capital as impossible as long as the Nazi occupation lasted. As a well-known prewar opponent of Nazism, he was wanted by the Gestapo, and several of his close
associates in the European Catholic press ended up in concentration
camps.83 Nor did Merklen think that any editor could maintain La Croix’s
independence in the German-occupied capital. Moreover, he feared that if
La Croix ceased to publish in Limoges, a pro-Nazi “La Croix” would take
its place in Paris. His insistence on keeping La Croix in Limoges received
the formal support of the archbishops of the southern zone, as well as the
nuncio, Archbishop Valerio Valeri, though not the head of his order,
Father Gervais Quénard.84
Merklen considered Quénard very pro-German, and, perhaps betraying his own insecurity, suspected the Père Général of wanting to oust him
and elevate his own nephew, also an Assumptionist, to the post of editorin-chief or even to the directorship of the Bonne Presse publishing house.85
Merklen drafted a letter on February 14, 1941 to Vatican Secretary of State
81. “On se demande comment des hommes atteint d’une telle déficience cérébrale peuvent être des guides de consciences.” L.B., “Stupidité et trahison,” L’Emancipation Nationale
(Marseille), February 14, 1942, quoted in Merklen diary, n.d. April 1942, J 523, 52–53.
82. Sorel quoted in Merklen diary, n.d. late October 1942, J 537, 45; on the Agen
Assumptionists, Ibid., July 19, 1942, J 508, 13–16.
83. As president of the Permanent International Commission of Editors of Catholic
Newspapers, Merklen mourned his colleagues Dr. Hein Hoeben of the Dutch Katholieke
Wereldpost, Friedrich Funder of Vienna’s Reichspost, and Monsignor Jean Origer of the Luxemburger Wort. Limagne, Éphémérides, xiv. The censor cut from Hoeben’s March 1942 obituary in La Croix any mention of how he had died. Limagne, Éphémérides, xiv, 488. See also
“Permanent International Commission of Editors of Catholic Newspapers.” Retrieved on
October 20, 2020 from http://www.lonsea.de/pub/org/1159.
84. Merklen diary, February 5, 1941, J 503, 38. Gerlier later told Michelin to tell
Merklen that La Croix was “perfect” where it was. Ibid., January 25, 1942, J 518, 33.
85. Ibid., n.d. early February 1941, J 501, 4–13.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

69

Cardinal Luigi Maglione (whom he had known since the 1920s when
Maglione was nuncio in France) sharing his fears about Quénard, “who has
always dreamed of playing at politics” and now wanted to instill at the
Bonne Presse a new, more “realistic” spirit, in other words, “one quite collaborationist in respect to the occupying power.”86 He reserved an even
harsher assessment for his diary, writing the following in November 1942,
shortly before he left Limoges and went into hiding:
At the beginning of the German occupation in Paris, the Père Général did
not hide his ultra-germanophile feelings; he was convinced of Germany’s
definitive victory, of the great role Hitler would play, even from a religious point of view, in the world, and he himself dreamed of acting as an
intermediary in the rapprochement between Hitler and the Holy See.87

Perhaps Merklen’s greatest argument against Quénard and others who
urged a return to Paris was that La Croix, at least in its circulation, continued to flourish, even in provincial Limoges.
Even though La Croix—like other relocated national newspapers—
could only be distributed in the southern zone, it continued to have tens of
thousands of subscribers, who could look upon it as a reliable indicator of
the doctrinal stance of the Pope and the bishops.88 Merklen drew a connection between maintaining La Croix’s credibility and its subscription list.89
He wanted to avoid the dependence on government subsidies experienced
by other national journals that had relocated from Paris to the south, such
as Le Temps and Le Figaro, both of which could now be considered “the
press of the Marshal.”90 The wartime rationing of paper, and lapses in its
86. “Le P. Quénard, qui a toujours rêvé de faire de la politique, veut organizer à Paris,
sous le couvert de son neveu, une Bonne Presse d’esprit nouveau, plus réaliste, dit-il, assez collaborationiste avec le pouvoir occupant et moins soucieux d’Action catholique.” Ibid., May 4
1942, J 525, 4. Merklen did not send the letter, but later added it to his diary.
87. “Au début de l’occupation allemande à Paris, le Père Général ne cachait pas ses sentiments ultra-germanophiles; il était convaincu de la victoire définitive de l’Allemagne, du
grand rôle qu’Hitler allait jouer, même au point de vue religieux, dans le monde et il rêvait
d’être lui-même un intermédiare dans la rapprochement entre Hitler et le Saint-Siège.” Ibid.,
19 November 1942, J 539, 14.
88. Laurent Martin, La Presse écrite en France au XX e siècle (Paris, 2005), 104.
La Croix had a circulation of 56,400, according to Vichy: Merklen diary, n.d. early September
1942, J 532, 89. Massiani offers a figure of “a little less than 40,000,” but she is referring to
subscribers only. “La Croix et la censure,” 109.
89. Merklen diary, n.d. May 1942, J 625, 4.
90. Martin, La Presse écrite, 110–11; Philippe Jian, “La Révolution nationale impossible, Le Temps et Le Figaro à l’épreuve du regime de Vichy,” Histoire@Politique: Politique, culture et société, 23 (2014), 178–90, here 184.

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availability, also provided constant concerns.91 And Merklen and his staff
nearly always worried about getting the evening paper finished to the censors’ satisfaction and going to press without missing the 4:30 trains.92
La Croix and the National Revolution
Reading La Croix’s response to Marshal Pétain’s promise of national
regeneration primarily from a political perspective would be a mistake: spiritual considerations were equally if not more important. Still, leading figures
in the Church gave a crucial early endorsement to the new regime’s emphasis on travail, famille, patrie and its rejection of liberal individualism. In
November 1940, Cardinal Pierre-Marie Gerlier, archbishop of Lyon and
primat des Gaulles, declared to his fellow Catholics: “Work, family, fatherland—these words are ours.”93 The following month, Cardinal Emmanuel
Suhard of Paris assured Pétain that “God is using you, Monsieur le maréchal,
to awaken France.”94 Merklen, like the bishops, looked hopefully to the
octogenarian Marshal to spur national recovery, but La Croix’s fulsome
praise of Pétain (at least in the beginning) also served to offset its lack of
support for Vichy policymakers such as Laval.95 As a proponent of social
Catholicism, Merklen also was increasingly skeptical about what the
Church would gain from its alliance with Vichy, fearing an anticlerical
backlash that would compromise its mission of rechristianizing the nation.96
Looking beneath the Marshal’s stolid and benevolent cult of personality, Merklen worried about Vichy becoming a totalitarian state. Born to
an Alsatian father and a mother from Lorraine, Merklen saw as an ominous precedent the repression of the Church in Germany and these
annexed territories.97 He considered La Croix the journal of Action
catholique, the Church’s initiative to mobilize the laity and penetrate
modern society.98 By early 1941, he feared “the accentuation of a totalitar-

91. Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral, and Fernand Terrou, Histoire
générale de la presse française. Tome 4 (Paris, 1975), 7–8, 32.
92. The editorial staff totaled three priests and twenty-one laymen. Merklen diary,
September 2, 1942, J 532, 61. The 4:30 departure is noted by Massiani, “La Croix et la censure,” 112.
93. Quoted in Luft, “Religion in Vichy France,” 22.
94. Quoted in Ibid., 16.
95. Massiani, “La Croix et la censure,” 119.
96. Merklen diary, May 1, 1941, J 506, 58.
97. Ibid., October 25, 1941, J 514, 25–36.
98. Agnès Rochefort-Turquin, “L’Identité catholique du journal,” in: Rémond and
Poulat, Cent ans, 127–33, here 129. While Catholic Action existed before the war, now the

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

71

ianism very dangerous for the Church and for all Catholic organizations,”
especially those for France’s young people.99 The bishops shared this concern, fearing a French organization akin to the Hitler Youth, which in the
Reich had led to the suppression or absorption of all other movements.100
By August 1941 Merklen’s private view of the Marshal comprised anything but admiration: “On the contrary, I am arriving at the opinion that
the Chief of State, like numerous old men who think themselves clever, is
a habitual liar.” Where Merklen saw lies, he did not mean the harmless tall
tales of an old fogey, but rather “ambition accompanied by a little bit of cunning and a great deal of demagogic spirit.”101 Any newspaper publishing at
the pleasure of Vichy could only criticize the chief of state at its peril, but
Merklen could damn him with faint praise, as seen in his front-page New
Year’s greetings. Whereas he wished a happy 1941 to the “providential
Chief,” and invoked Vichy’s motto of work, family, and fatherland, a year
later his tone shifted to one of respectful pity, praying for “the illustrious
soldier placed at [France’s] head in particularly cruel circumstances.” In
1943, Merklen merely prayed for “France, its leader and its government,”
and at the start of 1944, he failed to mention the leader at all.102
No authorized journal could reject outright Vichy’s avowed policy of
collaboration with Germany, but La Croix’s contributors only supported
collaboration between Church and State, not with the Reich. A January
1941 pastoral letter by the archbishop of Carthage, Charles-Albert
Gounot, devoted twenty-three paragraphs to extolling the Christian duty
to obey legitimate civil authority, offered the obligatory paeans to the
“heroic” and “clairvoyant” Marshal, but never once mentioned Germany.
Indeed, Monsignor Gounot pointedly reminded his flock where true alleFrench episcopate developed new initiatives to minister to and evangelize the nation, even
beyond France’s borders: “To provide for the spiritual health of the workforce [deported to
Germany], Suhard approved the dispatch of clandestine priests, the beginnings of the Mission
de France and the worker-priest movement.” Atkin, “Ralliés and résistants,” 109.
99. “. . . l’accentuation d’un totalitarianisme fort dangereux pour l’Église et pour toutes
les oeuvres catholiques.” Merklen diary, n.d. February 1941, J 503, 35.
100. Halls, Politics, Society and Christianity, 280.
101. “J’arrive au contraire à la conviction que le chef de l’État, comme de nombreux
vieillards qui se croient habiles, ment habituellement. [. . .] Cela donne un peu l’impression
d’une ambition de vieillard, ambition qui s’accompagne souvent d’un peu de fourberie et de
beaucoup d’esprit démagogique.” Merklen diary, August 23 1941, J 510, 43–44.
102. Léon Merklen, “Bonne année à tous,” La Croix, December 31, 1940. “Nous
prierons pour notre bien-aimée patrie et le soldat illustre placé à sa tête dans des circonstances
particulièrement cruelles.” Idem, “L’année 1942,” La Croix, December 31, 1941. Idem, “1er
janvier 1943,” La Croix, January 2, 1943. Idem, “1944,” La Croix, December 31, 1943.

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giance lay: “Do not hesitate, my very dear brothers, to offer lovingly your
collaboration to the Church of Jesus Christ.”103 That June, Merklen had his
article “The Reconstruction of Europe” rejected by the censor for insisting
that the “resurrection” of Europe could only be possible “if the collaboration envisioned . . . accepts as its basis some shared principles, if not the
teachings of the supernatural religion revealed by Christ, at least the fundamental points of a Christian order.”104
Despite the risk of sanctions, on rare occasions La Croix dared to contradict the dictum that national salvation lay solely in the hands of the
Marshal. In September, an imposed piece authored by a collaborationist
abbot almost went to press with the following phrase unnoticed: “You are,
Monsieur le maréchal, the way, the truth, and the life of the country.”
According to Limagne, the offending (if not blasphemous) sentence was
only noticed—and cut—“at the last minute.”105 But probably the most blatant challenge to Pétain’s claim to savior status came after Merklen’s departure, in a July 1943 article by the Abbé Charles Thellier de Poncheville.
Thellier drew a parallel between the Service du Travail Obligatoire, the
forced labor draft sending young men to Germany, and Satan standing at
a pagan altar, adoring himself, and obtaining, as in pre-Christian times, a
blood sacrifice.106 Not surprisingly, this comparison got La Croix a fifteenday suspension.107 One can assume that the regime would have shut down
the paper altogether if not for its need to preserve a supposedly independent press as a sign of Vichy’s myth of normality and legitimacy. Of course,
by then the État français was complicit not only in the mass deportation of
workers but also tens of thousands of Jews.
1942: The Final Solution in France
La Croix’s prewar ability to balance anti-antisemitism and antiJudaism would be tested during les années noires and found wanting. Vichy
103. “N’hésitez pas, mes biens chers Frères, à offrir avec amour votre collaboration à
l’Église de Jésus-Christ.” Archbishop Charles-Albert Gounot, “Le devoir de la collaboration,”
La Croix, January 4, 1941 (emphasis in original).
104. “Mais cette résurrection n’est possible que si la collaboration envisagée, passant du
champ temporel à l’ordre spirituel, accepte à sa base des principes communs, sinon les
enseignements de la religion surnaturel révélée par le Christ, du moins les points fondamentaux de l’ordre chrétien.” Merklen diary, June 21, 1941, J 507, 53–58.
105. “Vous êtes, Monsieur le maréchal, la voie, la vérité, la vie du pays.” Unnamed
abbot quoted in Limagne, Éphémérides, 256.
106. Abbé Charles Thellier de Poncheville, “On demande des volontaires du sacrifice,”
La Croix, July 12, 1943.
107. Limagne, Éphémérides, 1334, 1340–41.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

73

mandated the publication of the 1940 and 1941 anti-Jewish statutes.108
Neither the newspaper nor the French episcopate publicly criticized this
legislation.109 As Vichy implemented discriminatory measures, La Croix
continued to alert readers to the Jewish question, at least from a theological
standpoint. In his September 1941 article, “The Conversion of the
Israelites,” Father Jean-Marie Sédès assured his readers that even a “deicide” people had hope of redemption. Catholics should pray for the “salvation of Israel.”110 In late March 1942 another priest privately asked that La
Croix “take a public stand on behalf of persecuted Jews,” but Merklen
insisted that “this is not our affair and the censor would block it.”111 Then,
on July 16–17, the Paris police arrested at least 13,000 foreign-born Jews,
collecting them in the Vélodrome d’Hiver, before sending many of them to
the internment camp at Drancy, the “antechamber of Auschwitz.”112 The
commencement of the Final Solution finally led to public protests by several bishops in the southern zone, starting with Archbishop Saliège in
Toulouse.113 La Croix remained mute, but Merklen was not blind. While
his diaries mention anti-Jewish persecution only twenty-five times over the
year and a half before the Vel d’Hiv roundup, he wrote sixty-five detailed
entries in just the four months thereafter. Merklen may have felt powerless
to help Jews, but he was not unconcerned.
La Croix compiled a mixed record in its compliance with Vichy’s antiJewish directives. The government sought to blunt the impact of episcopal
108. Marie-Geneviève Massiani “La Croix sous Vichy,” in Rémond and Poulat, Cent
ans, 301–21, here 319. The first Statut des juifs comprised a combination of “autochthonous”
antisemitism and a desire to anticipate German demands and thus preserve the image of
Vichy as a sovereign power. Laurent Joly, L’État contre les juifs: Vichy, les Nazis et la persécution
antisemite (1940–1944) (Paris, 2018), 39.
109. “Declaration of Repentance by the Roman Catholic Bishops of France (September 30, 1997).” Retrieved on December 21, 2019, from https://www.sacredheart.edu/faithservice/centerforchristianandjewishunderstanding/documentsandstatements/declarationofrepen
tancebytheromancatholicbishopsoffranceseptember301997/.
110. Jean-Marie Sédès, “La conversion des Israélites,” La Croix, September 17, 1941.
While one is struck at the apparent insensitivity of such a piece being printed during a time
of persecution, it should also be noted that this article was the latest in a monthly series of
papal prayer intentions for the conversion of various groups of people. For examples, see “La
conversion des hindouistes,” on March 7, and “La conversion des bouddhistes,” on April 3.
111. “Le P. Faure voudrait qu’on prenne publiquement parti en faveur des juifs persécutés et que la Croix crée un mouvement en ce sens: ce n’est pas notre affaire et la censure s’y
opposerait.” Merklen diary, March 29, 1942, J 522, 31.
112. “The Vel d’Hiv Roundup.” Retrieved on January 25, 2020 from https://www.yadvashem.org/holocaust/france/vel-dhiv-roundup.html.
113. Pierre Laborie, “Sur le retentissement de la lettre pastorale de Monseigneur Saliège,” Bulletin de Littérature Ecclésiastique, 108 (2007), 37–50.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

protests with propaganda arguing that the “Jewish question” was a strictly
political—not religious—matter.114 In late September 1942, La Croix
received what Merklen described as a “grave” directive to reprint as a front
page item an Action française editorial titled “Still the Invisible Conductor
of an Orchestra” (Encore le chef d’orchestre invisible). As he confided to his
diary, “[i]f we refused to insert [the piece] this would have meant La
Croix’s disappearance.”115 Four paragraphs appeared in quotation marks
under the slightly more anodyne title “The Jewish Problem.”116 But La
Croix stood on firmer ground earlier that month when Vichy demanded
that it publish a theological essay penned by a “Saint Julien,” contrasting
the “hypocritical lamentations” of the bishops who had protested with “the
sure doctrine of Saint Thomas [Aquinas] and the popes.”117 Merklen and
Michelin carefully drafted a letter to the censor refusing to publish the
piece. They could not contradict the Holy See and the bishops without
facing “justified reproaches,” perhaps even ecclesiastical censure. This time
they succeeded: the consigne was revoked.118
Behind the scenes, Merklen fervently rejected antisemitism. In the
pages of his diary, he referred to the The Jew Süss, then being shown in
France, as an “abominable film of German origin . . . that has aroused the
righteous anger of all decent people.”119 He also admired and agreed with
Jesuit theologians in Lyon who were rethinking Christianity’s fraught relationship with Judaism. He credited Henri de Lubac in particular with writing “articles of an extraordinary vigor proving that what Hitler is attacking
in Judaism is essentially the Jewish doctrine that is central to our faith as
Christians.”120 As Jews were deported from the southern zone, Merklen
and Michelin both met a number of times in August and September 1942
with Germaine Ribière, a member of the Témoignage chrétien network.
114. Limagne, Éphémérides, 795.
115. “Si nous avions refusé d’insérer c’était la disparition de La Croix.” Merklen sought
to replace the title with “L’Action française écrit. . .” but the local censor refused. Merklen
diary, September 26, 1942, J 535, 26–27.
116. “Le problème juif,” La Croix, September 25, 1942.
117. “Il convient d’opposer à d’hypocrites lamentations la sûre doctrine de Saint
Thomas et des Papes.” “Saint Julian” quoted in Merklen diary, September 7, 1942, J 533, 40.
118. Ibid., September 7, 1942, J 533, 39–42. See also de Lubac, Christian Resistance, 160.
119. “On sait qu’un film abominable d’origine allemande contre les juifs, intitulé
«Le Père Suze», a suscité la juste colère de tous les honnêtes gens.” Ibid., August 2, 1941,
J 509, 6.
120. “. . . articles d’une vigueur extraordinaire pour prouver que ce que Hitler attaque
dans le Judaïsme c’est essentiellement la doctrine juive qui s’impose à notre foi de chrétiens.”
Ibid., n.d. late September 1942, J 535, 37.

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75

Ribière came to discuss possible places of refuge and to ascertain which
priests could be trusted.121
Merklen, like so many other Catholics, still held Jews accountable for
their supposed “traditional failings.” And he also wondered if their travails
had an eschatological significance, perhaps their conversion en masse.122
Even some of the most courageous and forward-looking Catholics at this
time, including the Témoignage chrétien group, could only offer a critique
of antisemitism based “on the prospect of the eventual conversion of the
Jews.”123 There is no indication that Merklen ever drew a connection
between an age-old “teaching of contempt” and widespread indifference to,
or acceptance of, Nazi antisemitism.124 Merklen’s revulsion at antisemitism
was more reflexive than reflective. Certainly his sympathy lay with those
who were hunted. And soon he too would have to flee.
Epilogue
In November 1942, following the Anglo-American invasion of North
Africa, the Wehrmacht crossed the Line of Demarcation and occupied the
southern zone. When the Allied landings began, Merklen was away at
Clermont-Ferrand, but Limagne, anticipating the Nazi invasion, “arrived
like a bomb at the cathedral,” unsuccessfully urging him to go into
hiding.125 Although German forces soon arrived in Limoges, Merklen’s
main worry was about running out of paper.126 But he was now under surveillance, and finally he submitted to the authority of the Père Général, who
had been warned by a German officer that Merklen’s arrest was imminent.
In early December, without notifying most of his staff, Merklen slipped
away from Limoges.127 Hiding in the Lozère, he barely evaded capture in
July 1943, remaining at large until August of 1944. In the meantime,
Limagne and five other editors entered the Resistance, four of them joining guerilla, or maquis, units.128
121. Ibid., August 8, 1942, J 531, 42; August 23, 1942, J 532, 14; September 9, 1942,
J 533, 45; n.d. between 9–12 September 1942, J 533, 50–51.
122. Ibid., August 29, 1942, J 532, 50.
123. Shortall, “Theology and the Politics of Christian Human Rights,” 455.
124. Jules Isaac, L’Enseignement de Mépris (Paris, 1962).
125. “. . . Limagne arrivait comme une bombe à la cathédrale de Clermont. . . .”
Merklen diary, n.d. November 1942, J 538, 44.
126. Ibid., 12 November 1942, J 539, 68.
127. Ibid., n.d. December 1942, J 540, 9.
128. Limagne, Éphémérides, xiv; Harry Roderick Kedward, In Search of the Maquis:
Rural Resistance in Southern France, 1942–1944 (Oxford, 1993), 247.

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PÈRE MERKLEN’S WAR

Despite Merklen’s flight, the presses still ran at the newspaper under
Michelin’s guidance until June 1944. After the Liberation, La Croix, like
other newspapers that continued to appear under the Germans, was
banned from publication and subject to legal proceedings for “intelligence
with the enemy.”129 Merklen, to the disappointment of Limagne and
Michelin, refused to get around the law by resurrecting the paper under a
different name (Le Monde) in the fall of 1944.130
In its defense against post-Liberation accusations, La Croix received
numerous testimonials from the Limoges community, ranging from the
president of the Comité départemental de libération to the local communist
paper. The CDL president, Pastor Albert Chaudier, stated that La Croix had
served as a “post office” for the clandestine press, its editors handling and
passing on correspondence for “les Étoiles, les Lettres Françaises, Témoignage
Chrétien, le Médecin Français, l’Université libre, Valmy, etc. . . .”131 The case
was dismissed in January 1945, and de Gaulle later wrote that he himself had
“pronounced the nihil obstat in the case of La Croix,” which reappeared on
the first of February.132 Merklen died in 1949.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, La Croix was a daily newspaper, not a resistance
cell. And Père Merklen was a prudent, persistent priest, not a heroic résistant. But he also despised collaboration. He saw it as his duty to prevent his
newspaper from becoming a mouthpiece for Vichy and the Third Reich.
His editorial policy comprised a strategy of circumventing and confounding
the censors while instructing and informing the faithful. He counted on the
public to read “between the lines” to get the full story. Merklen saw himself
in opposition against “a press that repeated to us every morning that we
were beaten, propagandists who, under the guise of realism, relentlessly
sought to warp public consciousness, [and] the venom of the Nazi philosophy seeping day after day into the minds of French people.”133

129. Limagne, Éphémérides, xv.
130. Limagne, Journaliste sous trois républiques, 123–26.
131. Limagne, Éphémérides, xvi, xxiv.
132. Charles de Gaulle, War Memoirs: Salvation, 1944–1946, trans. Richard Howard
(New York, 1960), 130; Martin, La Presse écrite, 131–32.
133. “. . . une presse qui nous répétait tous les matins que nous avions été battus, des
propagandistes qui s’acharnaient, sous prétexte de réalisme, à déformer la conscience
publique, le venin de la philosophie nazie s’infiltrant jour après jour dans les intelligences
françaises. . . .” Léon Merklen, “Optimistes envers et contre tout,” La Croix, February 1, 1945.

RICHARD FRANCIS CRANE

77

For all that, Merklen did not see himself as a prophetic voice. Nor
should we. He was neither an outsider nor a nonconformist within the
Church. Closely associated with key figures in both the French episcopate
and the Holy See, he should be considered part of the “institutional
Church” that has so often been taken to task by historians for its failings
during the Dark Years. The reader is free to make his or her own moral
judgment about whether Merklen and La Croix managed to constitute a
force for good during a time of evil, including genocide. But what is clear
is that Merklen’s story introduces us to an ineliminable grey area at the
heart of French Catholic responses to Vichy, Nazism, and the Holocaust.
And this grey area merits further exploration.

A Marxist Catholic in Cold War America:
Grace Holmes Carlson and the Catholic Left
Reconsidered
DONNA T. HAVERTY-STACKE*
Examining the life of Grace Holmes Carlson (1906–1992), particularly during the years after she returned to the Catholic Church in
1952, invites a reconsideration of the American Catholic Left during
the Cold War. Although she left the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party
behind in 1952, Carlson found ways to reconcile her Marxism with
her Catholic faith and activism. Unlike well-known figures of the
Catholic Left, like Dorothy Day, Carlson did not embrace personalism,
nor did she believe in individual acts of witness as resistance as did
Fathers Daniel and Phillip Berrigan. Carlson’s story reveals the
diversity of the American Catholic Left and provides a heretofore
largely unheard voice in that movement: that of an Old Left critique
articulated in the Vatican II and Cold War eras that speaks to the presence in the United States of a synthesis represented more familiarly in
Britain by the Catholic Marxists of the Slant movement.
Keywords: Grace Holmes Carlson, American Catholic Left,
Catholic Marxism, lay apostolate, social justice

M

ost people have not heard of Grace Holmes Carlson (1906–1992),
but her activism after her return to the Catholic Church in 1952
constituted a vital and unique facet of the American Catholic Left. Carlson
was born and raised a Catholic in St. Paul, Minnesota, but left the Church
in the late 1930s to pursue a career as an organizer in the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (SWP). When she returned to the Church in 1952,
Carlson did not shed her Marxist understanding of the need to eliminate
exploitative capitalism. She viewed her commitment to pursuing social justice through that Marxist lens, but, as a Catholic once again, she also
understood that commitment as a gospel mandate to involve herself in
worldly affairs to “restore all things to Christ.” Carlson engaged in this
* Donna T. Haverty-Stacke is a Professor of History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her email address is: dhaverty@hunter.cuny.edu.

78

DONNA T. HAVERTY-STACKE

79

dually conceived work as an active lay woman in her parish, where she
penned progressive prayers of the faithful, as an educator at St. Mary’s
Junior College, where she not only co-wrote the institution’s mission statement and curricular plan but also educated generations of students, and as
public speaker, who delivered innumerable addresses on the duties of the
Catholic lay apostolate to engage with the world. Carlson’s activism thus
had structural change as its aim, but an Old Left-style educational and
organizational approach as its tactic. Unlike well-known figures of the
Catholic Left, like Dorothy Day, Carlson did not take a personalist
approach to faith and social reform.1 Nor did she believe in individual acts
of witness as resistance that invoked the “dangerous memory of Jesus”—
recalling “Jesus’ personal stance with and for the poor and against the religious and political leaders of his day”—as famously engaged in by Fathers
Daniel and Philip Berrigan.2 Indeed, Carlson voiced sharp critiques of
these two paths. Both in her different forms of activism and in her criticism
of these more familiar faces of the Catholic Left, Carlson provides a
heretofore unrecognized but important presence in that movement.
The history of the American Catholic Left has mostly been focused on
the stories of the activists, like the Berrigans, who during the late 1960s
engaged in radical forms of witness against America’s war in Vietnam by
destroying draft board records. Most studies of the Catholic Left situate
this activism within both the immediate social, economic, and political
context of the United States in the 1960s and the changes to the Church
brought by Vatican II. They emphasize how these figures were motivated
by both the civil rights and anti-war movements to engage in their witness
1. Day was influenced by Peter Maurin’s understanding of personalism, which he drew
from the French Catholic intellectual Emmanuel Mounier who “decried almost everything
about modern life,” especially the subordination of the individual to capitalism and centralized authority. Mounier argued that it was only in “faith-affirming, personalist context” that
society could save itself through a “revolution in thought.” Maurin (and Day) interpreted this
revolution as their “following the perfectionist social ethic of the radical Gospel” to “undermine the value system underlying capitalism and other secular ideologies.” For them, that
meant living out Jesus’ call in the Beatitudes to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and shelter
the homeless, which they did through the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality. On
Mounier see, John Loughery and Blythe Randolph, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century (New York, 2020), 138–40. On Maurin and Day’s interpretation, see: Mel Piehl,
Breaking Bread: The Catholic Worker and the Origins of Catholic Radicalism in America (Philadelphia, 1984), 97 and 102.
2. Mark S. Massa characterizes the actions of the Catonsville Nine in this way, applying the concept of the “dangerous memory of Jesus” that was first articulated by the German
political theologian Johann Baptist Metz. See: Mark S. Massa, The American Catholic Revolution: How the ‘60s Changed the Church Forever (New York, 2010), 124–127.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

in the draft board actions. Securing equal rights and racial justice for
African Americans and bringing an end to the bloody war in Vietnam were
the struggles these Catholic radicals embraced (and saw as intertwined)
because they were among the pressing issues of the day that called out to
them as Christians who had a moral duty to respond. Doing so as priests,
women religious, and lay people motivated by their Catholic faith—by
what they understood as their obligation as brothers and sisters in Christ
to side with the poor and oppressed and take action against injustice in the
world—was also at once boosted by and directed at the Catholic Church
itself. Vatican II reforms, which emphasized the Church as the people of
God in pilgrimage and the need for engagement with the world, encouraged these radicals in their actions; those actions were then also aimed at
further reforming the Church in the United States, particularly with
respect to its position on civil rights and the war in Vietnam. These studies
have primarily emphasized the ruptures brought about by the secular
upheavals of the 1960s and by the impact of Vatican II that birthed the
American Catholic Left.3
Studies of this movement have also considered the continuity within
the Church’s teachings that informed these activists, specifically that of a
prophetic Christian tradition that had deep roots in various monastic
expressions as well as in more recent manifestations in the personalism of
Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker movement.4 In addi3. See, for example: David J. O’Brien, The Renewal of American Catholicism (New York,
1972); James Hitchcock, “The Evolution of the American Catholic Left,” The American
Scholar, 43.1 (Winter, 1973-74), 66–84; Marian Mollin, “Communities of Resistance:
Women and the Catholic Left of the Late 1960s,” The Oral History Review, 31.2 (SummerAutumn, 2004), 31–37; and John T. McGreevy, “Racial Justice and the People of God: The
Second Vatican Council, the Civil Rights Movement, and American Catholics,” Religion and
American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 4.2 (Summer, 1994), 221–254. On the impact of
Vatican II and the secular events of the 1960s on American Catholicism more broadly, see:
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, American Catholics: A History (New Haven, 2020), 297–301 and
319–322.
4. See, for example: Charles A. Meconis, With Clumsy Grace: The American Catholic Left
1961–1975 (New York, 1979); Massa, The American Catholic Revolution; and, Shawn Francis
Peters, The Catonsville Nine: A Story of Faith and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (New York,
2012). Massa emphasizes the continuity of the prophetic tradition. But he also argues that it
ultimately constituted a form of rupture from older definitions of American Catholic identity.
That older identity included an uncritical acceptance of mainstream American cultural values.
The prophetic tradition in the Church functioned as a rupturing force by advancing a “profoundly destabilizing vision of the reality that viewed the very ideas of political compromise,
economic success, and even family stability as, at best, irrelevant to the message of Jesus, and
as, at worst, tending to sell out Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God to the forces of darkness.”
Quote from Massa, The American Catholic Revolution, 115.

DONNA T. HAVERTY-STACKE

81

tion to the prophetic tradition that these scholars see informing the actions
of the Catholic radicals in the 1960s, there is the pacifism, too, that was
central to Day’s work. They trace such pacifism to the tradition espoused
by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton and later extolled by Pope John
XXIII in his encyclical Pacem in Terres. These scholars have noted the
influence of all three fonts of pacifism (Day, Merton, and Pacem in Terres)
on the thinking and tactics of the American Catholic Left.5
Some of these studies of the Catholic Left have uncovered more fully
the stories of the many activists in the movement (going beyond Day and
the Berrigans) and have situated their motivations and actions in a broader
context, specifically that of the struggles of the poor in Latin America and
Africa. These works weave together the influences of the more familiar setting of the American civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements and the
impact of Vatican II with the evolution of liberation theology and revolutionary guerilla fronts in the global south. They explore the lives and experiences of other activists, including Mary Moylan, John Hogan, Thomas
Melville and Marjorie Melville and, in so doing, also engage with the stories of the many women who were a part of the American Catholic Left
during the 1960s and early 1970s. These works stand as a corrective to the
contemporary press coverage (and to some of the subsequent scholarship
on the Catholic Left) that focused attention mostly on the exploits of the
Berrigans as masculine heroes.6 This corrective has included an interrogation of the gendered assumptions inherent in both the movement itself and
the representations of the movement since.7
It is in this vein of appreciating the diversity of the American Catholic
Left that Grace Holmes Carlson’s story finds a meaningful home. The
Catonsville Nine, for example, were not the only ones in that broader
movement who, as Mark S. Massa has shown, “pluralized how, and in
what ways, one could be a good American Catholic.” Those activists did so
by embracing the prophetic Christian tradition and the “dangerous
memory of Jesus” in which they saw it as both a political and “Christian
moral duty” to actively oppose power structures that caused human suffering. In so doing, they severed what Massa defines as a “century-old and
5. On the pacifist influences see: Meconis, With Clumsy Grace, 1–7; and Peters, The
Catonsville Nine, 23–26, 86, 162.
6. An early work that includes some of this global focus is Hitchcock, “The Evolution of
the American Catholic Left,” 72–84. A more fully developed engagement with this theme, as
well as a deeper treatment of the various activists, can be found in Peters, The Catonsville Nine.
7. See, for example, Mollin, “Communities of Resistance,” 41–51.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

carefully woven cord that tied being a ‘good’ Catholic to respect for law and
order and an unhesitating support of U.S. foreign and military policy.”8
But, as Carlson’s life demonstrates, there were other ways of severing that
cord and of defining a new identity as a dissenting and good American
Catholic. Carlson grappled with the same forces that shaped the betterknown corners of the Catholic Left, including the social and political
upheavals of the 1960s, the anti-war movement, and the impact of Vatican
II. Like Day and the Berrigans, her radical consciousness had deep roots
in her Catholic faith; Carlson, too, appreciated the “dangerous memory of
Jesus.” Her approach to effecting social change and pursing social justice
was not one of personalism or individual action, however, but of carefully
educating the masses to build a movement that would ultimately overthrow
capitalism. Unlike Day, Carlson still believed in politics and in unions and
remained a Marxist. As such, she brought a strong critique of the American Catholic Left from the left, condemning it, for example, for what she
saw as its bourgeois and anarchistic tendencies. Carlson’s story is thus an
important, if heretofore less familiar, one: that of an Old Left critique
voiced in the Vatican II and Cold War eras that speaks to the presence in
the United States of a synthesis represented more familiarly in Britain by
the Catholic Marxists of the Slant movement.9 It also represents the pluralism of Catholic reform impulses that made up the Catholic Left in the
United States during these years.
Although Carlson could not single-handedly bring about the spiritual
and social revolution for which she advocated, she worked tirelessly
throughout her life after her return to the Catholic Church in 1952 to do
so. Her story also exemplifies the fundamental significance of religious faith
in shaping the political consciousness and actions of individuals in the past,
in particular members of the working class. Until relatively recently, however, stories like Carlson’s have remained untold because U.S. labor historians have generally overlooked the role that religion has played in workers’
lives. As numerous scholars have argued, taking religion seriously as a force
in workers’ lives is vital for a better understanding of both working-class and
religious history.10 Their scholarship serves as a corrective to the position of

8. Massa, The American Catholic Revolution, 124 and 113.
9. On Slant, see: Jay P. Corrin, Catholic Progressives in England After Vatican II (Notre
Dame, 2013), 4 and 216–245. On some of the continuities between the Old Left and the
New Left, see: Van Gosse, Rethinking the New Left: An Interpretive History (New York,
2005), 19–29.
10. See, for example: Elizabeth Fones-Wolf and Ken Fones-Wolf, Struggle for the Soul
of the Postwar South: White Evangelical Protestants and Operation Dixie (Urbana-Champaign,

DONNA T. HAVERTY-STACKE

83

most U.S. labor historians who have either ignored religion or have
approached it negatively as “one of the causes for the failure of a mass-based
radical movement to take root among American workers.” But it has not
just been labor historians who have contributed to the general oversight of
faith as a force in history. They note how historians of Catholicism, who
have until recently focused mostly on developing their subfield, unintentionally isolated themselves from “historians outside the Catholic history
fold.”11 Encouraging scholars to situate the Catholic experience within the
broader currents of American history has been the goal of the Cushwa
Center Studies of Catholicism in 20th Century America Series. Under its
imprint, several historians have published works that have demonstrated the
centrality of Catholicism to the lives of their respective subjects.12
Grace Holmes Carlson’s story can be appreciated within this recent
trajectory of scholarship too. The Catholic faith that Grace came to know
as a child and that deepened in her young adulthood contributed to the
development of her political consciousness. When she left the Church in
the late 1930s to devote herself fulltime to the Socialist Workers Party as
an avowed Trotskyist, Carlson’s externally abandoned Catholicism provided her with an elective affinity for Marxism.13 When she returned to the
Church in 1952, her lived Catholicism supported a continued Marxist take
on her political activism. Her story thus not only demonstrates the vitality
of Catholic faith in her life, but also the complexity of that faith as a lived
experience over many decades.14 This article will briefly look at the roots of
2015); William Hal Gorby, Wheeling’s Polonia: Reconstructing Polish Community in a West Virginia Steel Town (Morgantown, 2020); James P. McCartin and Joseph A. McCartin, “Working-Class Catholicism: A Call for New Investigations, Dialogue, and Reappraisal,” Labor:
Studies in the Working-Class History of the Americas, 4.1 (2007), 99–110.
11. McCartin and McCartin, “Working-Class Catholicism,” 101–102. On the gulf
between the fields of American labor and Catholic history, see also Leslie Woodcock Tentler
“On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly, 45.1
(March, 1993), 104–127.
12. On the Cushwa Center Studies of Catholicism in 20th Century America, see:
https://cushwa.nd.edu/publications/books/cushwa-center-sudies-of-catholicism-in-20thcentury-america-series/ (accessed November 13, 2019). Publications include: Leslie Woodcock Tentler, Catholics and Contraception: An American History (Ithaca, 2004); Mary Lethert
Wingerd, Claiming the City: Politics, Faith, and the Power of Place in St. Paul (Ithaca, 2001);
and Evelyn Savidge Sterne, Ballots and Bibles: Ethnic Politics and the Catholic Church in Providence (Ithaca, 2003).
13. Steven Rosswurm has drawn my attention to the Max Weber’s concept of elective
affinity as a useful concept in this context.
14. For a complete discussion of Carlson’s entire life, including her political career and
her feminism that are not addressed in this article, see Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, The Fierce
Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist (New York, 2020).

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Carlson’s Catholicism, but will focus mainly on the period after she
returned to the Church in 1952 to examine her Marxist Catholic positions
and how they contribute to our understanding of the diversity of the
American Catholic Left.
* * * * *
Grace Holmes was born into an Irish and German Catholic workingclass family in St. Paul on November 13, 1906. Her father, a boilermaker on
the Great Northern Railroad, and her mother, a grocery store clerk who
remained at home after having two children, sacrificed and drew on scholarship aid to send their children to Catholic school. Grace was educated at St.
Vincent’s School, at the selective Saint Joseph Academy high school, and at
the College of St. Catherine where, under the instruction of the Sisters of St.
Joseph of Carondelet at all three institutions, she developed a commitment
to social justice understood as a gospel mandate. The Josephites’ dedication
to serving the poor and the dispossessed informed Carlson’s devotion to serving God by serving others.15 Carlson’s faith was shaped not only by the
Josephites, but also by her exposure at school to the Church’s social teachings: Rerum Novarum was required reading in high school and college. And
in the Archdiocese of St. Paul, then under the leadership of Archbishop John
Ireland, Carlson was introduced through the preaching of her parish priests
(who most likely had been educated by Reverend John Ryan at the St. Paul
Seminary) to the Church’s arguments in favor of the dignity of workers and
their right to a living wage.16 By the time she graduated from St. Catherine’s
in 1929, Carlson had developed a Catholic faith that was compatible with
her growing concern for the rights of workers. Indeed, she had come to see
the two as intimately connected. When her father was forced to cross the
picket line out of economic desperation near the end of the 1922 shopmen’s
strike, Carlson, whose mother made her accompany him back to the shop
that day, later went to confession because she felt that undermining workers’
solidarity was a sin. She also identified the conditions that put her father in

15. On Grace’s childhood, see: Interview with Grace Holmes Carlson, by Carl Ross,
July 9, 1987, transcript pp. 1–5, 20th Century Radicalism in Minnesota Project, Minnesota
Historical Society. On the Josephites, see their founding directives quoted in Carol K.
Coburn and Martha Smith, Spirited Lives: How Nuns Shaped Catholic Culture and American
Life, 1836–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1999), 23.
16. On studying the social teachings of the Church, see: Mary Jo Richardson, “School
to Remember. St. Joseph’s Academy: The Legacy Lives On,” Ramsey County History (2012),
27. On Ireland, see: Wingerd, Claiming the City, 57–62. On Ryan, see: Laura Murphy, “‘An
Indestructible Right’: John Ryan and the Catholic Origins of the U.S. Living Wage Movement, 1906–1938,” LABOR: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, 6.1 (Spring
2009), 57–86.

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that position as something evil: scabbing was a sin, an offense against God,
as was the capitalist exploitation that drove men to such desperate measures.17 Carlson had thus developed a working-class identity in her childhood
through these various formative experiences that reinforced her sense of solidarity with and concern for the fate of workers and was understood through
the lens of her Catholic faith.
Carlson’s concern for workers deepened after she graduated from the
University of Minnesota with a PhD in psychology in 1933, but its connection to her Catholic faith gradually loosened at the same time. Carlson
became drawn into an orbit of leftist economic professors and activist students on campus during the years she worked as a teaching assistant immediately after her graduation. The context of the deepening Depression
informed much of this activism and increased the appeal of socialism for
many people, including Carlson, who was coming to believe that capitalism
was incapable of meeting society’s needs.18 At first, she did not feel a conflict
between her faith and her deepening commitment to leftist politics. She and
her sister, Dorothy (who also attended the University), sometimes even
attended Mass and a socialist meeting on the same day.19 The two became
active in the University’s Social Problems Club, which invited public speakers to campus to discuss solutions to the economic crisis.20 They also began
attending the weekly Sunday Forums of the local branch of the Workers
Party, what was, by late 1934, the home of the Communist Left Opposition.
As Carlson expanded the reach of her political activism beyond the
campus, she found herself smack in the middle of the sectarian disputes
then running rampant on the political left. By the early 1930s, deep splits
existed not only between the Socialist Party of America (SP) and the Communist Party (CPUSA), but also between those who remained affiliated
with the Communist Party and those who had been ousted and formed the
Communist Left Opposition in 1929. Most of the SP’s members (particularly its “Old Guard”) denounced the Communists’ links to Moscow,
condemning what they saw as the CPUSA’s devotion to its priorities over
the needs of America’s workers. After the death of Lenin in 1924, Stalin’s

17. Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, pp. 1 and 2.
18. Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, p. 25. Grace Carlson to Bill Morgan,
1973, f. Misc. info. on SWP, box 1, Grace Holmes Carlson Papers, Minnesota Historical
Society (hereafter cited CP, MHS).
19. Mary Lethert Wingerd, Interview with Dorothy Holmes Schultz, August 31, 1995,
summarized in: Wingerd, Claiming the City, 314–15, n.7.
20. Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, p. 25 and July 14, 1987, p. 30.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

rise to power included “tightened dictatorial controls” and an assertion of
the Russia-first policy of “revolution in one country” that then also triggered factional splits within the international communist movement. Some
communists were ousted from the Communist Party in 1928 because of
their loyalty to Leon Trotsky’s critique of Stalinism and their adherence to
revolutionary internationalism that put them at odds with those who
remained within the Communist Party’s ranks. In the U.S., people like
James Cannon, Rose Karsner, and Antoinette Konikow formed the Communist League of America, Left Opposition (CLA) in 1929.21 The Trotskyists, as they became known, had a significant presence in New York, but
also in Minneapolis where many members of the Left Opposition came to
communism from the leftist trade union ranks of the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW). Many now worked in the coal yards or as truck drivers
affiliated with Teamsters Local 574.22
Carlson’s exposure to Marxism in the Workers Party’s Sunday Forums
and through her campus activism gradually became a commitment to the
radical politics of this Left Opposition. That commitment was also influenced by the bloody 1934 Minneapolis Teamsters strikes that were led by
the Trotskyists. She and Dorothy, as members of the Social Problems
Club, brought funds that they had collected from campus to the strike
headquarters and witnessed the Trotskyists, whom they had come to know
in the weekly forums, leading the drivers in the strike.23 Carlson and her
sister forged additional personal ties to men active in the struggle. Carlson
married her fiancé, Gilbert Carlson, a lawyer whom she met while the two
were still studying at the University who provided legal assistance to the
Trotskyist organizers during the strike. Dorothy met, and later married,
Henry Schultz, a railway trainman who was assigned to the dispatcher’s
function, helping send out pickets around the city.24 Even if Carlson and

21. Paul LeBlanc, “Trotskyism in the United States: The First Fifty Years,” Trotskyism
in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, eds. George Breitman, Paul
LeBlanc and Alan Wald (Chicago, 2016), 12–16; Fraser M. Ottanelli, The Communist Party
of the United States: From Depression to World War II (New Brunswick, 1991), 9–48; and Bryan
D. Palmer, James P. Cannon and the Origins of the American Revolutionary Left, 1890–1928
(Urbana, 2007).
22. Palmer, James P. Cannon, 334–349; Constance Ashton Myers, The Prophet’s Army:
Trotskyists in America, 1928–1941 (Westport, CT, 1977), 32 - 41.
23. Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, pp. 5 - 6.
24. On Gilbert, see: Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, p. 7 and July 14, 1987,
p. 30. On Henry, see: “Grace Carlson, New York” (New York: Paris/Ram Productions, 1987)
Avery Fisher Center, New York University Library, New York University, New York, New
York (hereafter, AFC, NYU); and Farrell Dobbs, Teamsters Rebellion (New York, 2004), 164.

DONNA T. HAVERTY-STACKE

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her sister did not have these personal ties to the struggle taking place in
their city’s streets that summer, they would have taken sides as had everyone in the community at that time because of the deep class divisions that
the strike manifested. The Teamsters were not just fighting for union
recognition and higher wages in what had been a notoriously repressive
open shop town, but also for an end to the tyranny that such employer control represented in the lives of all of Minneapolis’ workers. Their fight was
supported by other workers in the city, many of whom also went on strike
in sympathy. In May, some 30,000 workers took to the streets. In July,
when the Teamsters were viciously attacked by police after trying to stop a
scab truck in the market district, resulting in the murder of two and injury
of over sixty strikers, some 40,000 workers came out in the streets for the
funeral of one of the fallen men.25
Bloody Friday, as the attack in July became known, “polarised classalignments in the city” as Bryan Palmer has argued, “proving beyond any
doubt that ‘a class battle did exist . . . it made Minneapolis people take sides
either actively or in their hearts.’”26 Carlson had already taken sides with the
workers since her father’s experience with the 1922 shopmen’s strike. But
now, as a young woman who was becoming increasingly drawn to Trotskyism, the 1934 strikes, and Bloody Friday in particular, showed her just how
violently and intensely capitalists were willing to hold on to power. Carlson,
who was not in the city that day but away on her honeymoon with Gilbert,
read about the events and was “horrified.”27 Her heart was with the cause of
the workers, and soon, she would take action beyond her volunteer work
with the Social Problems Club, attending more of the Trotskyists’ Sunday
Forums to further her education in socialism. Her experiences in her career
as a vocational rehabilitation counselor for the Minnesota Department of
Education that she began in 1935 led her to the same conclusion: socialism
was the only solution to the oppression of workers.28
Carlson thus officially joined the Left Opposition sometime in the late
1930s, when its members had entered the Socialist Party, and remained
with them when they formed the independent and Marxist revolutionary
25. On the 1934 Minneapolis Teamster strikes, see: Philip A. Korth, The Minneapolis
Teamsters Strike of 1934 (East Lansing, MI, 1995) and Bryan D. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (Chicago, 2013).
26. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters, 164.
27. “Grace Carlson, New York,” AFC, NYU.
28. Grace Carlson to Sarah Colvin, September 29, 1939, f. Pre-SWP Correspondence,
box 1, CP, MHS. “Grace Holmes Carlson,” Saint Catherine’s Alumnae News, (Spring 1986),
12 (magazine hereafter cited as SCAN).

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party, the Socialist Workers Party, in 1938.29 At this founding convention
the delegates, which included Carlson, adopted the party’s Declaration of
Principles in which they laid out the fundamental beliefs and goals of the
Trotskyists and the reason for the SWP’s creation. The first section of the
declaration articulates general tenets of Marxism, denouncing the evils of
capitalism and advancing the liberating power of socialism. The route to
establishing socialism is described as “placing that ownership and control
[of natural resources and the means of production] in the hands of society
itself, to be used for the fulfillment of human needs and not for profit.”
Central to this process is the working class, who “can carry out socialization only through the conquest and maintenance of political power” by the
“overthrow of the capitalist state” and “transfer of sovereignty from it to
their own Workers’ State—the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” But that
workers’ state is presented as a “temporary political instrument making
possible the transition to the class-less socialist society.” In that socialist
society “the entire population will be transformed into a community of free
producers owning and controlling the total productive wealth and
resources of society, and freely and consciously working out their own destiny.”30 Carlson subscribed to these principles, especially the SWP’s
emphasis on the “conquest and maintenance of political power” and the
need to overthrow the capitalist state in the transition to socialist society.
Carlson also maintained a commitment through her years in the SWP
(and to a certain degree even after she left its ranks) to its particular brand
of communism. In part two of the declaration, the Trotskyists explain the
role of the revolutionary party in the process of ushering in the socialist society and they make the case for their particular position among other parties
on the left. Trotskyists, like other communists, believed that “without an
adequate, firm, and strong revolutionary party, the magnificent heroism,
militancy and self-sacrifice of the workers lead and can lead only to sporadic
and unconnected battles for partial aims which achieve no lasting conquests.” But unlike the communists in the CPUSA, for example, who followed Moscow and supported Stalin’s plan for establishing socialism in one
country, the Trotskyists believed that the SWP “together with the revolutionists of all countries united in the Fourth International, will achieve the
29. LeBlanc, “Trotskyism in the United States,” 12–16. Carlson interview with Ross,
July 9, 1987, p. 6.
30. “Declaration of Principles and Constitution of the Socialist Workers Party,” pp. 3–
10, f. 41, box 169, Collection of Communist and Socialist Serials, Tamiment Library and
Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, New York, N.Y. (hereafter,
CCSS, Tamiment).

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89

FIGURE 1. Grace Carlson speaking during her run for vice president of the United
States on the Socialist Workers Party ticket in 1948. Photo of Grace at podium, f.
1948 Presidential Campaign—Aug. 1948, box 1, Grace Carlson Papers, Minnesota
Historical Society. Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota.

victory of the International revolution and of world socialism.”31 Remaining
true to what they understood as the original international revolutionary
vision of Marx and Lenin, the Trotskyists in Chicago situated their new
party within this global struggle.32 Carlson, as one of the delegates to the
party’s founding convention, pledged herself to this position.
By 1940 Carlson left her job at the Department of Education to work
fulltime as an organizer for the SWP. She threw herself into this work
completely and it became the focus of her life for the next twelve years. She
served as a state party organizer in Minnesota. She became a perennial
SWP political candidate, including a run for the U.S. Senate in 1940 and
in 1946, for the U.S. Congress in 1950, and for vice president of the
United States in 1948 on a ticket with the party’s presidential candidate,
31. “Declaration of Principles,” 10–11 and 19, f. 41, box 169, CCSS, Tamiment.
32. George Breitman, “The Liberating Influence of the Transitional Program: Three
Talks,” Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and Reconsiderations, eds. George Breitman, Paul LeBlanc, and Alan Wald (Chicago, 2016), 134.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

Farrell Dobbs. Carlson was also the only woman member of the SWP’s
National Committee before 1950.33 So committed was she to Trotskyism
and her comrades in the SWP that she served just over a year in federal
prison in Alderson, West Virginia in 1944 after her conviction under the
Smith Act in 1941 for advocating the violent overthrow of the government
in her work for the party.34
During her years in the SWP Carlson identified herself as having no
religion and did not participate in the life of the Church.35 Her break with
the Church came sometime in the late 1930s as she became more committed
to the Trotskyist movement. When she had decided to commit herself fully
to the SWP, a priest told her husband, Gilbert, that one could not be a
Catholic and a socialist at the same time. Gilbert, a liberal lawyer who was
active in labor defense cases, chose to stay in the Church. Grace left the
Church and became more deeply involved with the party. The two separated
but did not divorce; they would later reunite when Grace left the SWP and
returned to the Church in 1952.36 In the late 1930s, however, when she left
the Church, Carlson believed that she had to decide between her Catholic
faith and her Marxist politics and chose the latter. It would not be until after
her return to the Church in 1952 that Carlson realized her faith and her politics, far from being conflicting and mutually exclusive commitments, were
ultimately complementary and mutually reinforcing. Carlson’s Catholic
Marxism informed her activism during this phase of her life and demonstrates the diversity of the American Catholic Left of which she was a part.
* * * * *
In almost all of the accounts she gave about her reasons for leaving the
SWP and returning to the Church in 1952, Grace discussed the death of her
father, James Holmes, who passed away in September 1951.37 She later
explained how when Holmes died “it made me think about the meaning of
life. My father had worked hard and he had a lot of problems and I was one
33. Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, pp. 7–10.
34. Donna T. Haverty-Stacke, Trotskyists on Trial: Free Speech and Political Persecution
since the Age of FDR (New York, 2015), 75–180.
35. Grace Carlson to Dorothy Schultz, February 13, 1944, f. 3 box 1 and April 9, 1944,
f. 5, box 1, CP, MHS.
36. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, p. 28.
37. Minneapolis Morning Tribune, July 1, 1952, 8. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14,
1987, p. 38. She does not mention her father’s death in her official resignation letter sent to
Cannon on June 18: Grace Carlson to James P. Cannon, June 18, 1952, micro 2050 reel 15,
Socialist Workers Party Records, Wisconsin Historical Society (hereafter SWP Records,
WHS). Minnesota Department of Health, Division of Vital Statistics, Certificate of Death:
James A. Holmes, September 3, 1951, registered no. 26926.

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of them. And now he was dead, and there would be no one to make up to
him for all he had missed in life. I thought about how people have disappointments in love and disappointments in their children, and how Marxism
can’t really help those things.”38 Although she never clarified what it was she
thought Holmes had missed in his life, Carlson was coming to realize that
something was missing from hers: a connection with God.39 Her return to
the Church thus was driven, in part, by an emotional need for something
more than what Marxist ideas could provide. That need seems to have risen
to the surface after her father’s death, which triggered the period of introspection that led Carlson back to her faith. But her return was also driven by
an intellectual quest. With Holmes’s death, Carlson began reading Catholic
literature again, coming to the works, including those of St. Thomas
Aquinas, with what she described as a “new understanding.”40 In this combined emotional and intellectual pursuit of faith, Carlson’s conversion was
somewhat akin to Dorothy Day’s. Day was drawn to prayer by a inexplicable
desire to “communion with a power that was mysterious and greater” than
her, an emotional pull represented by the rosary beads given to her by a
friend and the interiors of St. Joseph’s Church in Greenwich Village and St.
Louis Cathedral in New Orleans; but, she also found her faith by reading
books, including works by William James.41 Like Day, Carlson also struggled with her feelings as she found herself being called to the Church.
In May 1952, Carlson began meeting with Father Leonard Cowley.
After his ordination in 1938, Cowley was assigned to St. Andrew’s parish
in St. Paul; in 1949 he was named pastor of St. Olaf’s parish in downtown
Minneapolis.42 Cowley was considered an ideal choice. He had over a
decade of experience working with a variety of people as a priest at St.
Andrew’s. He also had executive experience in his capacity as director of
the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota, a position to which
he was appointed in 1945. Cowley was a “gifted counselor” and St. Olaf’s
38. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, p. 38. “Grace Holmes Carlson,” SCAN
(Spring 1986), 14.
39. James Holmes was in good standing with the Church when he died and was buried
in Calvary Cemetery in St. Paul on September 6, 1951. Linda K. Radtke, Calvary and St.
Mary’s Cemeteries, email to author, May 8, 2019.
40. Minneapolis Morning Tribune, July 1, 1952, 1 and 8.
41. Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social
Activist (1952; rept. New York, 1997), 106–07, 132–33, and 138–51. Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day, 108–10.
42. Minneapolis Morning Tribune, July 1, 1952 8. “Carlson,” SCAN (Winter, 1986), 25.
On Cowley, see: Pauline Lambert, In the Heart of the City: The Story of Saint Olaf Catholic
Church Minneapolis, Minnesota 1941–2001 (Minneapolis, 2001), 17–18.

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was a parish that “became a magnet for people in need [of material assistance] because of its downtown location.” It also drew many others who
“came for counseling . . . including a number of non-Catholics.”43 It was
there where Carlson found her way back to the Catholic Church.
But Carlson did not make her intentions known to anyone other than
Cowley until June 18, when she officially resigned from the party in a letter
to James Cannon, National Secretary of the SWP. Cannon was a revered
senior member of the Socialist Workers, one of the founders of the Left
Opposition after he and other followers of Trotsky had been expelled from
the Communist Party in 1928. He also was a close friend of Carlson, a
friendship that had been forged over the many years they spent as comrades together in the SWP. Prior to Carlson’s writing Cannon in June, she
carried on her business as usual in the party.44 She even had been nominated to run once again for the vice presidency of the United States in the
1952 election.45 But in the letter to Cannon, Carlson wrote, “This is to
announce my decision to resign from the Party and to ask that my name
be withdrawn as the Vice-Presidential candidate. I am planning to return
to the Catholic Church and it will be immediately clear to you and to the
other National Committee members that I would be unable to serve as a
candidate.” She then hinted at the months-long struggle she had just
endured, telling Cannon, “I hope that you will believe that this was not an
easy decision to reach. One does not break with comrades of sixteen years
standing for light reasons but I believe this is the only path for me to
take.”46 Cannon spoke with Carlson over the phone and then flew out to
Minneapolis to try to change her mind, but to no avail.47
Although Cannon was disappointed at what he described as the SWP’s
loss of a once deeply committed comrade, he was reassured by the fact that
Carlson had not left the party in a factional split and that she had promised
not to inform on her former comrades to the FBI.48 Father Cowley, who
43. Lambert, In the Heart of the City, 17–18 and 22.
44. See, for example: Grace Carlson to James P. Cannon, March 18, 1952 and Morris
Stein to Grace Carlson and Vincent Dunne, March 24, 1952, micro 2050 reel 15, SWP
Records, WHS.
45. Militant, September 10, 1951, 1 and 3; February 11, 1952, 1 and 2; February 18,
1952, 1.
46. Carlson to Cannon, June 18, 1952, micro 2050 reel 15, SWP Records, WHS.
47. Minneapolis Star, June 30, 1952, 1 and 10.
48. Minneapolis Star, June 30, 1952, 1 and 10. Notes from telephone call from Cannon
in Minneapolis, June 20, 1952, micro 2050 reel 15, SWP Records, WHS. James P. Cannon,
“How We Won Grace Carlson and How We Lost Her,” Militant, July 7, 1952, 1.

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had become Carlson’s confessor during her return to the Church, explained
his understanding of her motives. Cowley noted how he had “been seeing
Mrs. Carlson for the past six weeks,” and insisted that he could “affirm that
her return to the church has been determined completely on ideological and
theological grounds.” He thus recognized the intellectual side to Carlson’s
conversion. Cowley acknowledged “she is undoubtedly a liberal and so will
remain,” explaining that she had “deviated from the church’s time-honored
teachings only because she was rightly concerned with the most liberal ideas
of humanitarianism and wrongly concerned with the notion that the
Catholic church censured these concepts.” Cowley’s interpretation was only
partly correct however. Carlson was more than just liberal and the Church
had certainly censured socialism. That condemnation, no doubt, had influenced her earlier choice to leave the Church. For Cowley, who was concerned with helping Carlson redeem her soul by her returning to what he
understood to be the one true Church, she had merely erred temporarily
and would be welcomed back by a loving and forgiving God. Hinting at the
emotional component of her reawakening her argued, “Her faith has
glowed like an ember throughout the past 16 years and has recently broken
into a flame,” he said. “I am happy that she has returned to her God.”49
Like Cannon’s interpretation of Carlson’s return to the Church, in
which Grace was portrayed as a victim who caved under the pressure of the
political repression of the Second Red Scare, Cowley’s contained a kernel
of truth. Carlson not only had experienced the reactionary forces of American politics during her career in the SWP (including opposition to her
getting on the ballot for her 1950 senate run), but also had moments when
her faith flickered as she confronted those challenges.50 The pull of Carlson’s faith was particularly noticeable during her year in prison for her conviction under the Smith Act. Acknowledging these ties is not to diminish
her time out of the Church, but rather to reveal the complexity of her political and spiritual consciousness. In June 1944, Carlson wrote her sister
Dorothy from Alderson prison noting how “It really took a special effort of
the will not to pray when I was alone here, feeling frustrated at not being
able to do anything positive toward helping” with Dorothy’s husband’s
recovery from a near fatal ruptured appendix.51 Two months earlier Carlson sent a note to Gilbert in which she recognized the pull of the Catholic
faith on her, explaining:
49. “Priest, Party Clash on Mrs. Carlson,” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, July 1, 1952, 8.
50. Grace Carlson to M.J. Myer, November 9, 1950, micro 2050 reel 15, SWP
Records, WHS.
51. Grace Carlson to Dorothy Schultz, June 25, 1944, f. 7, box 1, CP, MHS.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA
You will be surprised to learn that I attended High Mass this morning.
Don’t attribute this to any sudden conversion, though. I was invited to
go to hear the Easter singing by the choir director who also teaches the
music appreciation class which I attend. Except for a few funeral masses,
this was the first mass which I’ve heard for seven years. There is a terrible
lag between a human being’s intellectual convictions and her emotions
and feelings! Although I no longer have any belief, I was deeply moved
by the service this morning—the more so, of course, because I was lonesome and the music brought back memories of far, far happier days.52

Chalking up her spiritual stirrings to “emotions and feelings” that were distinct from her “intellectual convictions,” Carlson resisted any solace they
might bring her as she reasserted her lack of religious belief. Years later,
when she began to reflect on her father’s death and how Marxism was no
longer providing her with all the answers—when she then opened herself
up to the “emotions and feelings” that she had previously felt the need to
suppress—Carlson rediscovered her faith.
Perhaps drawing on her readings of Aquinas, she found ways to reconcile that faith with her intellectual convictions.53 This reconciliation had
become all the more significant for Carlson in the context of her soul
searching in late 1951 and early 1952 because of the position she found
herself in since the Church issued its Decree Against Communism in
1949. Up until that point, Carlson’s decision to leave the Church had been
her own. She walked away in the late 1930s and defined herself as someone
with no religion. But, as her correspondence from the intervening period
shows, her faith “glowed like an ember” despite that self-identification.
And so, in that state she remained, outside of the Church pursuing her
career in the SWP until 1951 when her father’s death triggered her soul
searching. But by then her relationship with the Catholic Church had been
fundamentally altered. When the Holy Office published the Decree
Against Communism in 1949, “indicating that members or supporters of
the Communist party, or those who publish, read, write or disseminate
printed materials in support of communist doctrine and practice, would be
excommunicated,” Carlson, as a Trotskyist, was technically subjected to
52. Carlson to Schultz, April 9, 1944, f. 5, box 1, CP, MHS.
53. Thomistic theology was revived in Catholic academia during the 1880s and peaked
during the 1930s and 1940s; as one student observed, it taught “reason worked with faith, not
against it.” See Russell Conners, Joyce K. Dahlberg, Catherine Litecky, CSJ, Mary Lou
Logsdon, and Thomas West, “Theology Fit for Women: Religious Wisdom, St. Catherine’s
Style,” Liberating Sanctuary: 100 Years of Women’s Education at the College of St. Catherine, eds.,
Jane Lamm Carroll, Joanne Cavallaro, and Sharon Doherty (New York, 2012), 128–30.

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95

this most severe penalty.54 She was now no longer someone who had left
the Church on her own, but was excommunicated. That reality may have
weighed quite heavily on her when she began to think about returning to
the Church; indeed, the pain of that separation may have been too much
for her to bear and may have contributed to her decision to leave the SWP
as she grappled with the meaning of her father’s death in September 1951
and engaged in the emotional and intellectual work of her conversion in
subsequent months.
The day after Carlson formally resigned from the SWP “the ban of
excommunication, automatically placed on Trotskyites by the Church
then, was lifted . . . and on Friday she went to communion for the first time
in 16 years.”55 But, despite this most important restoration, Carlson
emphasized “that I hadn’t changed my political ideas, and it is still very
important to me that people understand that I changed my religious attitude, not my politics.”56 As she later explained, “I did remain a Marxist in
my own mind.”57 She had officially left the SWP and would no longer have
contact with her many comrades in that movement, nor take part in its
organizing or electoral work. But Carlson believed that, in so doing, she
had found a way to reconcile her faith with her politics. In her extensive
conversations with Father Cowley, he explained to her that she did not
have to choose between her God and her “opinion on social problems so
long as it doesn’t conflict with moral principle.”58 And with that pastoral
clarification she concluded that she could not but return to the Church.
It was not an easy reconciliation at first. Carlson found herself back in
a Church that contained many right-wingers, but she had not abandoned
her Marxist principles. She recalled how when she returned to the Church
“it was the McCarthy period and a lot of the Catholics that I met made me
sick to my stomach.” Carlson remembered one evening at her cousin’s
house where she “couldn’t take much of any part in the conversation” and
“just sat there thinking to myself, ‘What am I doing with these people?’”59
54. Peter C. Kent, The Lonely Cold War of Pope Pius XII: The Roman Catholic Church and
the Division of Europe, 1943–1950 (Montreal, 2002), 242.
55. “Carlson,” SCAN, (Winter, 1986), 25.
56. “Carlson,” SCAN, (Winter, 1986), 25.
57. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, p. 39.
58. Minneapolis Morning Tribune, July 1, 1952, 8. Cowley became actively engaged
with various social issues becoming, for example, one of the organizers of the Minnesota
Council of Religion and Race and its program “Project Equality.” See: Lambert, In the Heart
of the City, 44–45.
59. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, p. 39.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

She not only had to contend with political conservatives in the Church
whose positions alienated her, but also had to navigate the waters of her
renewed faith community in the context of the on-going Second Red
Scare. With the eruption of the Cold War during the late 1940s came a
series of anti-communist measures on the federal and local level, along
with the chilling effect they had on leftist political dissent, that made up
the Second Red Scare. These measures included continued investigations
conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC),
Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings launched in 1950, the application of
the 1947 Federal Employee Loyalty Program and loyalty oaths at the state
level, and the creation of the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations.60 Carlson was a target of such anti-communist measures even after
she left the ranks of the SWP. As a former Trotskyist, she was subjected
to harassment by the FBI for years. Despite the Bureau’s many attempts to
persuade her otherwise, she refused to inform on her old comrades.61 As
she explained at the time she returned to the Church in 1952, she
remained a Marxist in her own mind. That made for a difficult transition
to life after the SWP in general, but especially as she sought to reconnect
with the Church. As her experience with her cousin demonstrates, many
Catholics continued to espouse very staunch anti-communist politics and
thereby remained in step with the reactionary temper of the era.62
But Carlson stuck it out and quickly found more comfortable corners
within the Church where she could pursue her spiritual and political convictions together. Not all Catholics were McCarthyites. First, there was
her parish at the time of her conversion, St. Olaf’s in Minneapolis, where
she began attending Mass daily. Over the years, Carlson also became good
friends with priests there, including Father Michael McDonough, with
whom she shared progressive political opinions.63 In addition to St. Olaf’s,
there was the Newman Center on the University of Minnesota campus
where Grace found initial support. In 1952 Father Cowley was the
60. Geoffrey R. Stone, Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime From the Sedition Act of
1798 to the War on Terrorism (New York, 2004), 342–426.
61. Minneapolis Star, June 30, 1952, 1. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, 38.
“Report of Investigation, INS,” St. Paul, Minn., 4-13-54 and Redacted heading, St. Paul,
Minn., 4-13-54, f. Misc. info. on SWP and FBI reports, box 1, CP, MHS.
62 On Catholic anti-communism, see: Steve Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church,
1935–1962 (Amherst, MA, 2010), 133–79 and 226–73.
63 Father McDonough to Grace Carlson, March 24 1959; McDonough to Carlson, no date
(Christmas note in which he pokes fun at “conservatives in Washington and Rome”); McDonough to Carlson, June 16, 1969; McDonough to Carlson, no date (re. shared progressive
interests), f. General Correspondence and Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.

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Newman Club chaplain. After Carlson left the SWP her only friends were,
as she noted, “the few I had around the Newman Club.”64 And it was the
Newman Club that gave her a job when she was no longer drawing a paycheck from the party. She was hired “to catalog its library” and worked
there from June until November 1952 earning $175 a month.65
In providing Carlson with her first job after she left the SWP, the
Newman Club was functioning in a way that was not unusual for organizations associated with the Catholic Church. As Ellen Schrecker has
argued, the Church “operated an economic and institutional safety net for
repentant former Communists” during the Cold War years.66 But in welcoming Carlson, the Newman Club was somewhat different from other
institutions affiliated with the Church that embraced converts because
those former communists tended to be “repentant” and Carlson was not.
She remained a self-identified Marxist. This difference also made her stand
out from more well-known Cold War era figures, like Louis Budenz and
Elizabeth Bentley.
Budenz joined the CPUSA in 1935 and became managing editor of
the Daily Worker, but then broke with the party in 1945 and returned to
the Catholic Church with the spiritual guidance of the then famous radio
priest, soon to be television sensation, Monsignor Fulton Sheen. Budenz
initially took a teaching position at Notre Dame. He cooperated with the
FBI (which had been tipped off to his reconversion by Sheen) and began a
long career “as an anti-Communist speaker, writer and government witness.” His testimony during the 1949 Smith Act trial of eleven CPUSA
leaders was essential to the success of the government’s case.67 Unlike
Budenz, Elizabeth Bentley was not raised a Catholic. She joined the Communist Party in 1934 after her graduate study at Columbia University and
by 1938 she had moved into the party’s underground to become a courier
in a Soviet spy ring. After the death of the ring’s leader, and because she
feared for her life as she became a liability to the Soviets, she walked in to
the FBI’s field office in New York in November 1945 and began talking.
The information she provided during that interview and before HUAC in
1948 fueled government investigations into numerous alleged Communist
64. Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, p. 39.
65. Minneapolis Star, June 30, 1952, 1. FBI 73-HQ-14643, 3 and 7, FOIA in author’s
possession.
66. Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, 1998), 74.
67. Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic Church, 83–86. Schrecker, Many are the Crimes,
74, 192–97, 248.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

spies in the federal government, including Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter
White, and Nathan Silvermaster. Bentley also testified in the Rosenberg
case. As she struggled to rebuild her life after the CPUSA she was encouraged by Budenz, whom she had known in the party, to convert to Catholicism, which she did in November 1948, also with the aid of Sheen.68 So
although Carlson, like Budenz and Bentley, came back to the Church
during the height of the Cold War, she resisted the pressure to inform.
Also, unlike Budenz and Bentley, Carlson had never engaged in espionage
and, although she left the SWP, she did not fully refute her political
beliefs. In addition, she did not believe there was anything criminal about
those beliefs or her comrades’ behavior that warranted her informing in the
first place.
Despite Carlson’s continued identification as a Marxist, she was
assisted in her readjustment to life after the SWP by certain Catholics and
Catholic organizations that were willing to give her a second chance
because of her clear devotion to her renewed faith. In these years Carlson
attended Mass daily, but as a blacklisted former communist during the
height of the Second Red Scare, she “had a hard time getting a job and,”
as she noted, “tried several little things” to stay afloat at first. With the help
of Father Cowley she managed to secure a more permanent position in
November 1952 as a clerk “in the pediatrics department over at St. Mary’s
Hospital” in Minneapolis.69 Cowley had put Carlson in touch with Sister
Rita Clare Brennan, “the newly named personnel director of St. Mary’s
Hospital in Minneapolis.” Sister Rita Clare gave Carlson a chance because
she had spoken with fellow Josephites who had known Grace from her
years at St. Catherine’s and vouched for her.70 Those women religious, who
had been such a formative influence on Carlson earlier in her life, again
became important figures in what was becoming her life’s second act. They
extended to her not only kindness and acceptance, but also employment
and spiritual kinship.
Carlson worked in the secretarial position in the pediatrics department from November 1952 until August 1955 when “she was transferred
to the Training Division of the School of Nursing” at the hospital. There
she served as the school’s social director. Mary Liber, assistant director of
68. Kathryn S. Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel
Hill, 2002); Schrecker, Many are the Crimes, 172; and Rosswurm, The FBI and the Catholic
Church, 83.
69. Carlson interview with Ross, July 9, 1987, p. 11.
70. “Carlson,” SCAN (Winter, 1986), 25.

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FIGURE 2. Grace Carlson (in white) with Sister Rita Clare Brennan, administrator
of St. Mary’s Hospital in Minneapolis. Grace Carlson with S. Rita Clare Brennan,
f. Photographs and Snapshots, 1930s–1970s, box 2, Grace Holmes Carlson Papers,
Minnesota Historical Society. Courtesy of Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul,
Minnesota.

the Training Division, told FBI agents in 1963 that when Carlson first
began working at the nursing school she was not afforded a teaching
position because of her “known and publicized communist background.”71 But by 1957 Carlson had demonstrated by her actions that she
had definitively severed her ties with the SWP. She was building a new
life for herself that centered on the Catholic Church, attending Mass
daily at St. Olaf’s and dedicating herself to her job at St. Mary’s
Hospital.72 As a result, she was invited to teach classes in social studies
and psychology. As one FBI agent noted “It is reported that the general
feeling at the hospital is willingly to accept her for what she is now and
not to be concerned overly much with her past.”73 On April 20 Carlson
signed her first annual contract to teach in the Department of Nursing at
71. FBI 73-HQ-14643, 7 - 8, FOIA in author’s possession.
72. See, for example: FBI 73-HQ-14643, 9, FOIA in author’s possession; Peter
D’Heilly, email to author, October 4, 2018; and George Garrelts to Grace Carlson, August
31, 1951, October 14, 1958, November 3 and April 28 (no years), f. General Correspondence
and Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.
73. FBI 73-HQ-14643, 7–8, FOIA in author’s possession.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

the College of St. Catherine, which had taken over the full degree program from the hospital’s school in the 1940s.74
Shortly after Carlson was hired to teach, the nursing school’s full
degree program was moved again from St. Catherine’s into a reorganized
St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing and she transferred over with other
faculty members. There, Carlson became a close colleague of Sister Anne
Joachim Moore, who was assigned to be the first director of the new school.
Before she joined the Josephites in 1949, Moore had earned a three-year
diploma in nursing from the original St. Mary’s Hospital nursing program
in 1937 and served as a nurse in England during World War II. On the GI
Bill, she earned her BA in nursing in 1946 and, after joining the Josephites
in 1949, finished a law degree in 1950. As she took up the directorship of
the new St. Mary’s Hospital School of Nursing in 1957, Moore also completed a master’s degree in education from the University of Minnesota. She
implemented her new credentials immediately on the job as she and the faculty reorganized the school’s curriculum “away from the apprentice-type
training of the hospitals and toward a broader education for nurses.” 75
Moore called on Carlson to work with her on the founding plan for
what became St. Mary’s Junior College (SMJC) in 1963. Their idea for the
new junior college was to be one in which the “students in technical programs are urged to develop a sense of social responsibility.”76 Ultimately
Moore and Carlson’s vision was expressed in the St. Mary’s Plan that they
issued in 1964. Through the technical and general educational requirements of the new college they planned to prepare nurses for their “immediate goal” of a career in a health field, but that goal was also “presented as
an opportunity [for the student] to develop his God-given talents and to
utilize them in the service of man.”77 Thus, as she carved out a new professional career for herself alongside Moore, Carlson drew from her renewed
74. St. Mary’s provided the clinical training for nurses after CSC took over the degree
in the 1940s until the two institution split again in 1958. Jane Lamm Carroll, “Extravagantly
Visionary Leadership: The Irelands and Sister Antonia McHugh,” Liberating Sanctuary, 18.
“The College of St. Catherine, Department of Nursing Instructor’s Contract, Grace Carlson,”
April 20, 1957, f. S9A Alumnae Awards, Carlson, Grace, box 93, Alumnae Awards, St.
Catherine University Archives and Special Collections, St. Paul, Minnesota (hereafter cited,
SCUA-SC).
75. Deborah Churchill and Thelma Obah, “Opening Doors: Sister AJ and the Minneapolis Campus,” Liberating Sanctuary, 57–59.
76. “The St. Mary’s Plan,” f. St. Mary’s School of Nursing, box 3, St. Mary’s School of
Nursing Materials, SCUA-SC.
77. Sister A.J. Moore, “A Bit of Background Chronology re. the Minneapolis
Campus,” f. SMJC, Faculty, Grace Carlson, box 4, SMJC Collection, Sisters of Saint Joseph

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FIGURE 3. Grace Carlson with Sister Anne Joachim Moore during a student
reunion at St. Mary’s Junior College in 1981. Grace Carlson with Sister Anne
Joachin Moore, 1981, St. Mary’s School of Nursing, Series 8, Photographs, box 11,
Archives and Special Collections, St. Catherine University. Courtesy of Archives
and Special Collections, St. Catherine University, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Catholicism, particularly the values she had learned as a young woman
from the Josephites to serve others as a way of serving God.
* * * * *
It was during the years when she taught at SMJC when Carlson found
a personally fitting mode of engagement between her faith commitments
and her political activism that demonstrate a strain of continuity with her
Trotskyist past. She became a Catholic activist who continued to embrace
elements of her Marxist beliefs as she took advantage of opportunities at St.
Mary’s to “teach and practice social justice.”78 She called for a Catholic lay
apostolate that engaged, as a Christian duty, with the pressing issues of the
day. Echoing facets of the pre-conciliar liturgical and Catholic Action
of Carondelet & Consociates, St. Paul Province Archives, St. Paul, Minnesota (hereafter
cited as CSJ Archive). “The St. Mary’s Plan,” f. St. Mary’s School of Nursing, box 3, St.
Mary’s School of Nursing Materials, SCUA-SC.
78. Grace Carlson, “Our Share in the Building,” 1981, f. SMJC Programs 3, 1980–84,
box 2, CP, MHS.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

movements, Grace made the case for that active Catholic lay apostolate
before the reforms of Vatican II. Like Dorothy Day had done, Carlson was
developing a uniquely Catholic approach to her activism that drew on these
pre-conciliar elements.79 But Carlson was quite unlike Day (and later the
Berrigans) in a number of ways because of her Old Left perspective. Echoing her Marxist past, which she never fully shed, Carlson remained critical
of what she saw as misdirected individualistic acts that did not strike at the
center of economic and political power or that alienated the masses. She
also did not interpret the Christian prophetic tradition through personalism
and the need for a revolution in thought alone. Carlson still believed in the
importance of traditional political engagement and mass movements and
the need for a revolution in the socio-economic power structure. She communicated her particular brand of Catholic Marxism through her speeches
and correspondence in the years after her return to the Church.
In the many speeches she delivered from the late 1950s through the
early 1960s, in the period immediately before Vatican II, Carlson repeatedly
called for a Catholic lay apostolate that engaged with the concerns of the secular world. Beginning as early as 1957 she spoke about the “general agreement” in the Church “that every one should be a lay apostle,” but recognized
that this goal remained a challenge for many. The “feeling of responsibility—
of community—of oneness with members of the Mystical Body [was] not
deeply felt,” she noted. Referring to the “theology of the laity” that she had
been reading, she told her audience of Catholic nurses, “the Incarnation
sanctified human affairs. To do God’s work in the world.” She called on the
nurses to “participate fully in parish life” at the same time as they focused on
their careers.80 Urging them to “lead a life of grace” in which they “dare to
be different” by avoiding gossip and entering into substantive conversations
about pressing political concerns instead, she called on the students to be
“propagandists for Christ.” In a similar speech she delivered to students at St.
Andrew’s Hospital School of Nursing in 1958, Carlson argued that, “Everyone in every group in which you work and play should know that you are a
Catholic. And not just a Catholic, but a Catholic apostle.”81
79. On the pre-conciliar liturgical and Catholic Action movements see, for example:
Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, eds., Empowering
the People of God: Catholic Action before and after Vatican II (New York, 2014), 1–118, and
Tentler, American Catholics, 228–35. On Day, see: Piehl, Breaking Bread, 85, and Loughery
and Randolph, Dorothy Day, 161 and 169.
80. Carlson, “Nurse and the Parish,” October 10, 1957, f. SMJC Speech and Lecture
Notes 1, box 1, CP, MHS.
81. Carlson, “The Lay Apostle,” January 20, 1958, f. SMJC Speech and Lecture Notes
2, box 1, CP, MHS.

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FIGURE 4. Grace Carlson preparing to deliver one of her many speeches after her
return to the Church in 1952. Grace Carlson academic gown (no date), University
Archives Photograph Collections, Archives and Special Collections, St. Catherine
University. Courtesy of Archives and Special Collections, St. Catherine University,
St. Paul, Minnesota.

In these speeches, Grace was grappling with an understanding of the
Catholic faith that was at once focused on the transcendent and the temporal—on loving and serving and uniting with God and with mankind.
Drawing from notes she had taken on Edward I. Watkin’s 1944 study,
Catholic Art and Culture, she acknowledged the “tension between vertical
movement toward God and horizontal movement of human interest and
natural knowledge,” and identified a resolution of that tension in lay
Catholic activism.82 Carlson made this argument in a speech titled “Christianity and Communism in the World Today,” which she delivered first at
St. Thomas College in November 1958, then in Fargo in January 1959, and
82. Carlson, “Christianity and Communism in the World Today,” Note cards for
speech delivered on November 1958, January 1959 and February 1960, f. SMJC Speech and
Lecture Notes 2, box 1, CP, MHS.

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104

again before the Catholic Guild in February 1960. In this version of the
speech (according to her extant note cards) she approached the topic as
someone who had been a “participant for many years” in a communist
movement and who now came to speak about what most Americans at the
time saw as a struggle between two political systems, that of the West and
that of the Soviet bloc. Carlson argued that Christianity and communism
needed to be considered, instead, in terms of a struggle between two ideologies. She acknowledged that her comments were not always welcomed
because some viewed them as too communistic (and perhaps those listeners
made assumptions about her given her Trotskyist past), but what Carlson
ultimately called for was a renewed Christianity.83
Carlson envisioned this renewal as one that would meet the challenges
of the modern world and pull Catholics out of what Watkin’s had identified as the modern period’s “winter of Christianity” into a spring of new
hope that would render useless communism as it existed abroad. For example, in the version of this speech that she delivered between 1958 and 1960,
Carlson drew on Pope Pius XI’s teachings in his 1937 encyclical Divini
Redemptoris (Atheistic Communism) to remind her listeners that the Holy
Father had exhorted “to charity and detachment from worldly goods” and
for “justice and charity to underprivileged people.” She called on American
Christians to truly “practice Christianity” by engaging in this work through
“a spiritual revival.” Elaborating on the need for that revival she quoted
Jacques Maritain’s recognition that “modern civilization is a worn-out garment” that required a “substantial recasting” that included an emphasis on
the “vital primacy” of “the common service of human persons over the
State’s covetousness of unlimited power.”84 Carlson thus made the case for
a Christianity that included a lay activism in the pursuit of social justice as
that which would succeed in the struggle against Soviet-style communism
in the modern world.
In a later version of her “Christianity and Communism in the World
Today” speech that she delivered to the students at St. Cloud Hospital
School of Nursing in November 1960 and to those at the Academy of the
Holy Angels High School in Minneapolis in April 1963, Carlson called
once again for this “spiritual revival” among Catholics who needed “to show
forth Christ in our lives” when ministering to the poor in the world as a just
alternative to acquisitive capitalism as well. Bringing in more of a global

83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.

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view of this revival, with examples from Latin America as well as Europe,
and reflecting on the many postcolonial changes then taking place in the
world, Carlson argued that Christian capitalists had lost ground to communism in certain poor countries because they had been “more capitalist than
Christian” and were not responding to the needs of the people.85 She thus
remained as critical of capitalism as she was of Soviet-style communism. In
yet another speech, this one titled “Confrontation between Communism
and Christianity” that she gave at the Newman Club in 1965, Carlson clarified her position further. In this presentation, she argued that when it came
to “contest for minds of men . . . atheism must be opposed,” but “as to
Marxist economics” there could be a more “complex approach” in which
there could be a “union and communion with God and with each other.”
She made the case for an incarnational Christian response to the needs of
the people by quoting Rev. Peter Riga, a professor of theology at St. John
Vianney Seminary in East Aurora, New York, concluding that “To be a
Christian is not purely to serve God, but it is also a dynamic social ethic, a
service to mankind; it is not merely a theology, but also an anthropology.”86
Carlson (and Riga) were expressing ideas about the Catholic faith that
had been in development during the decade leading up to the Second Vatican Council. In the context of the United States, those ideas were rooted,
in part, in changes in the makeup and posture of the Church during the
early to mid twentieth century. Beginning in the 1920s, the Church in the
U.S. moved from the enclave status of its immigrant phase, with a separatist mentality that had developed in the face of Protestant hostility, to a
more assimilated, middle-class, educated Catholic community. By the
1930s the faithful of this Church were participating more fully, not just in
the liturgy, but also in broader society as evidenced in their New Deal-era
involvement in or creation of organizations like the Association of
Catholic Trade Unionists (ACTU) and the National Catholic Welfare
Conference (NCWC).87
85. Carlson, “Christianity and Communism in the World Today” November 1960 and
April 1963, f. SMJC Speech and Lecture Notes 3, box 1, CP, MHS.
86. Grace Carlson, “Confrontation between Communism and Christianity,” November 1965, f. SMJC Speech and Lecture Notes 3, box 1, CP, MHS. On Riga, see: “Priest Criticizes Catholics’ Indifference to Social Ills,” The Catholic Advocate, 12.16 (April 11, 1963): 5.
On Riga and the incarnational approach to the temporal order, see: O’Brien, The Renewal of
American Catholicism, 217–18.
87. Jeremy Bonner, Christopher D. Denny, and Mary Beth Fraser Connolly, eds.,
“Introduction,” in: Empowering the People of God, 1–2; Christopher D. Denny, “From Participation to Community: John Courtney Murray’s American Justification for Catholic Action,”
in: Empowering the People of God, 112–13.

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The drive for greater participation both in the Mass and in the secular
world was fueled by the impact of the liturgical movement, the Catholic
Action movement, and the concept of the Mystical Body of Christ. The
liturgical movement emerged in the late 1920s out of the writings of Virgil
Michel, OSB and other Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. It was also communicated around the country by
priests who embraced the movement’s message of promoting “forms of
parish worship that emphasized congregational participation over contemplation.”88 The movement translated into greater lay participation in the
Mass, even before the switch to the vernacular after Vatican II, with the
aid of missals and the introduction of the dialogue Mass, in which the congregation joined in the liturgy by singing and reciting certain prayers
(albeit in Latin) rather than sitting in passive silence.89 This increased participation in the Mass drew from and dovetailed with Pope Pius X’s 1905
call for Catholics to receive communion more frequently (weekly, even
daily), and embraced the notion that through the consumption of the body
of Christ in the Eucharist Catholics became part of the Mystical Body of
Christ. With that understanding of connectedness to the Church and to
one’s brothers and sisters in the Church came a related sense of duty to act
in the world. It was in this context in 1931 that Pope Pius XI defined
Catholic Action as “‘the participation of the laity in the apostolate of the
hierarchy.’” That movement “invited Catholics to engage in their faith in
socially oriented ways,” albeit still under the direction of the bishops. But
this spirit of action also inspired the plethora of Catholic organizations
that mushroomed in subsequent years and decades, including the Catholic
Worker Movement, established in 1933 by Dorothy Day. In advancing a
social apostolate for the laity, the pope and the religious and lay intellectuals who promoted it always emphasized its theological basis: as Katherine
E. Harmon explains, “One could draw ‘all things to Christ,’ the central
message of Catholic Action, only by committing the self to Christ in the
heart of Catholic life, the sacrifice of the Mass.”90

88. Bonner et al, “Introduction,” 3.
89. James P. McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American
Catholics (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 61–62. It would not be until the liturgical reforms of Vatican II that all Masses would be dialogue Masses and in the vernacular. See Tentler, American
Catholics, 301–05.
90. On Catholic Action and the liturgical movement, see: Bonner et al, “Introduction,”
8; Katherine E. Harmon, “The Liturgical Movement and Catholic Action: Women Living
the Liturgical Life in the Lay Apostolate,” in: Empowering the People of God, 48–52; and
Tentler, American Catholics, 228–35. On the Catholic Worker movement, see: Piehl, Breaking
Bread, 95–143.

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Before Carlson left the Church in the late 1930s she was exposed to
some of these ideas through the faith formation she had received under the
Josephites in St. Paul as a girl and young woman during the 1910s and
1920s. When she returned to the Church in 1952, she became familiar
with these concepts in a new way, especially because of the more progressive Catholics she associated with at St. Olaf’s and the Newman Club. By
the early 1950s the idea that each person was part of Christ’s Mystical
Body had already begun to “pervade popular spirituality.” The focus on the
Mystical Body that became especially prevalent by the 1940s and 1950s
supported lay people’s attempts to witness their faith in the world.91 The
logic of a “spirituality in harmony with contemporary life” was also popularized by the activities of Day in the Catholic Worker movement that
became even more well known among the laity with the publication in
1952 of her autobiography, The Long Loneliness. For more intellectually
inclined Catholics, like Carlson, there were also the writings of the Jesuit
priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that inspired many during
the late 1950s. He too emphasized the connection between faith and
action in the world and Grace, who had several of his books on her shelves
at home, referred to his works in her speeches during the early 1960s.92
After her return to the Church in 1952 Carlson also made direct connections with Benedictine monks at St. John’s Abbey and St. John’s University in Collegeville who were promoters of the liturgical movement. Her
initial contact with the monks may have been made through Benedictines
who came from St. John’s to assist with the weekend Masses at St. Olaf’s
in Minneapolis, which was Grace’s parish at the time she returned to the
Church. Or it may have stemmed from her speaking engagements at St.
John’s University in the mid-1950s. There may have also been points of
contact between Carlson and some of the Benedictines in their shared
work in support of African American civil rights during the 1950s and
1960s. However it was initiated, Carlson soon established a correspondence with Godfrey Diekmann, OSB, and Emeric Lawrence, OSB. With
Fr. Emeric she forged closer ties, as her more frequent and detailed letters
with him between the late 1950s and early 1980s attest.93

91. McCartin, Prayers, 97.
92 McCartin, Prayers, 96–97. Carlson, “Confrontation Between Communism and
Christianity” 1965, f. SMJC Speech and Lecture Notes 3, box 1, CP, MHS. Peter D’Heilly,
email to author, May 18, 2019.
93. Lambert, In the Heart of the City, 42. On correspondence with Diekmann and
Lawrence, see, for example: Carlson to Lawrence, Feast of St. Teresa 1968 and Diekmann to
Carlson, April 6, 1959, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc., box 2, CP, MHS. Carlson had

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Carlson had thus tapped into broader currents flowing in the Catholic
Church before Vatican II that stressed the importance of the laity as brothers and sisters in Christ who had a mandate to do God’s work in the world.
Those currents “sowed the seeds for the frenzied activity that followed the
Second Vatican Council.”94 The Council, which was held at the Vatican
from October 11, 1962 to December 8, 1965, was convened by Pope John
XXIII to bring the Church into the modern era. Two of the decrees issued
by the Council that had a direct impact on expanding the activism of the
laity within and outside of the Church were Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution of the Church) and Gaudium et Spes (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World Today). Lumen Gentium “stressed that
the church is a pilgrim people, not an unchanging institution.” It developed the notion of the Church as the People of God based on the belief
that “by virtue of baptism, every Christian is called upon to minister in the
name of Christ.”95 Gaudium et Spes stressed that the faithful had to “decipher authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose” in the world and
become “witness to Christ in the midst of human society.”96
By 1965, when the Council concluded its business, there were many
areas in human society where Christians felt the need to bear witness to
their faith. Those in the American Catholic Left were particularly inspired
by the Church’s new decrees and responded in various ways. One of the
things Carlson did was to use her voice as a layperson in her new parish,
St. Leo’s in St. Paul, to educate her fellow parishioners about questions of
social and racial inequality. She and Gilbert, with whom she had reconciled in the early 1950s after her return to the Church, had moved from
Minneapolis to St. Paul during the mid-1960s and made St. Leo’s their
new spiritual home. In February 1969 Carlson wrote a letter to a parish
priest responding to his criticism of the “alleged ‘negative’ character of the
Prayers of the Faithful” that she had been writing as a member of St. Leo’s
liturgy committee. Arguing that the intercessions that the priest had written over the past few years tended towards “too much of a ‘my country right
or wrong’ approach to be comfortable for me,” Carlson refuted his critique
of her contributions. “To refer to the ‘negatives’ about our society—racial

been a member of the St. Paul NAACP for decades and Diekmann actively supported
African American civil rights. On Diekmann, see: McGreevy, “Racial Justice and the People
of God,” 243, and Kathleen Hughes, The Monk’s Tale: A Biography of Godfrey Diekmann,
O.S.B. (Collegeville, MN, 1991), 278–81.
94. Bonner et al, “Introduction,” 17.
95. Chester Gillis, Roman Catholicism in America (New York, 1999), 86–90.
96. Gaudium et Spes quoted in McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful, 114.

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prejudice, poverty, undemocratic practices—and to pray that we may overcome them seems more honest. It also seems like a better teaching method
for upper middle class parishioners, who might be happy enough to forget
the ‘negatives’ in this country.”97 In this remarkable letter, Carlson challenged a priest’s authority in a manifestation of the lay activism that was
becoming one characteristic of the post-Vatican II era. She also expressed
her continued commitment to social justice that she understood as intricately connected to her Catholic faith. In so doing, Carlson referenced her
equally strong commitment to education as an important means to advance
such causes. For her, it was—as it had been during her years in the SWP—
the slow groundwork of educating and agitating that would usher in
change; now, one of the ways she pursued this work was as a laywoman in
her parish.
For Carlson and many other Catholics, calling for an end to America’s
involvement in the war in Vietnam became another important way to witness their faith in the world. The movement that developed to oppose the
war was diverse in its makeup and tactics. Pacifists from organizations like
the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Committee for Non-Violent
Action found common ground with Old Leftists in the SWP and younger
activists in the party’s Young Socialist Alliance, along with members of
civil rights groups, like the Congress for Racial Equality and the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, and groups emerging from the
New Left, like Students for a Democratic Society and the Student Peace
Union. College campuses, including that of the University of Minnesota,
became hotbeds of the teach-in movement that began in March 1965. But
protestors also coordinated marches in Washington, D.C. beginning in
April 1965, that included 30,000 people, and demonstrations that
expanded to cities around the country, including San Francisco and New
York in 1968 with upwards of 400,000 people turning out in Manhattan.98
Although Carlson no longer belonged to the SWP and did not belong
to any of the New Left organizations that had come out against the war,
she opposed America’s involvement in Vietnam. In a commencement
address she delivered in August 1965, Carlson addressed the growing antiwar movement as a place where Catholics could demonstrate their faith.
97. Carlson to Father David, February 23, 1969, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc.,
box 2, CP, MHS.
98. Simon Hall, Rethinking the American Anti-War Movement (New York, 2012), 4–11
and 12–28. On the anti-war movement’s diversity and evolving shape, see: Gosse, Rethinking
the New Left, 85–109.

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Arguing that “student participation in anti war demonstrations are legitimate” as long as they remained peaceful, she called on the graduates to
think about such civic engagement as flowing from their own moral code.
Carlson urged the students to “bear witness to the everlasting truth of these
values not because someone else says that they are right but because you
believe that they are right. This internalization [is] the authentic morality.”
She then reminded them, as they went into the world to begin their careers
as nurses, that they “may dare to be different” by evincing their Christian
faith in whatever they did.99
Exactly how to bear witness to one’s faith while opposing the war
became a bone of contention among those on the American Catholic Left
and Carlson found herself taking sides in this debate in her personal correspondence with her friend Fr. Emeric Lawrence. After the U.S. bishops
came out in support of the war in 1966, many disappointed liberal
Catholics looked elsewhere for moral leadership on the issue. By 1967
some in the Catholic left came to believe that marches and demonstrations were not sufficient to stop America’s war machine. They began to
take direct action by targeting draft boards and destroying draft records to
impede the functioning of the Selective Service. By pouring animal blood
over the files or by burning them with homemade napalm the activists
engaged in what they believed was a symbolic protest of the violence of
the war itself. Catholic left members engaged in such “actions” around the
country, with major ones taking place in Baltimore in 1967, in Catonsville
in 1968, in Milwaukee in 1968, and in Chicago in 1969. Among those
involved in some of these bigger actions were the Berrigan brothers,
Philip and Daniel, who were both priests.100 While some championed
them as heroic, others had qualms about their tactics including Thomas
Merton, who believed that even the destruction of property crossed the
line and abandoned the commitment to nonviolence.101 Of concern, too,
was the activists’ brief manhandling of one of the draft board clerks during
the Catonsville raid as they attempted to get access to the files. Dorothy
Day shared Merton’s pacifist concerns. Although she supported the
Catonsville Nine, turning up in Baltimore at the time of their trial and
speaking at a rally organized to support them, she expressed her “discomfort with the tactics” that they had used. Day insisted, “we must hang on
to our pacifism in the face of all violence” even as she acknowledged that
99. Carlson, “Commencement Address” N.D. Nursing School, 8/1/65, f. SMJC
Speech and Lecture Notes 3, box 1, CP, MHS.
100. Meconis, With Clumsy Grace, 15–60.
101. Meconis, With Clumsy Grace, 36–38.

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pacifism was “the most difficult thing in the world” and “the one that
requires the most faith.”102
Carlson, too, had her concerns about the direct action tactics of the
radical Catholic Left, but for different reasons. She expressed her position
in an exchange with Fr. Emeric Lawrence. In August 1970, shortly after
Fr. Daniel Berrigan was captured by the FBI, Lawrence wrote to Carlson
expressing his feelings of admiration for his brother priests who had put
themselves on the line in their fight against the war and his sense of guilt
for not doing enough himself. Carlson wrote a lengthy response to
Lawrence in which she revealed her take on the direct action protestors.
“Now as to the Berrigans and their tactics,” she wrote, “It’s all right for you
to be ‘a little envious of their courage,’ but you should be knowledgeable
enough to be critical of their mistaken, individualistic, petit bourgeois
approach to social problems. The enclosed clipping, recording a 91% opposition to draft office break-ins as a method of demonstrating against the
war, offers solid evidence of the futility of their tactics.” Carlson argued
that if one believed in advancing change with support of the majority of the
population then one’s tactics needed to match one’s goal. “Terrorist tactics,
even if utilized by a poet-priest, alienate the majority. They win support
only among the small minority who want to believe that gifted individuals
can effect social change by individual acts of daring, rather than through
the more laborious process of educating and propagandizing.”103
As the newspaper clipping Carlson included in her response to
Lawrence showed, she was not alone in condemning the “terrorist tactics”
of the Berrigans. But her critique neither stemmed from a conservative
reaction against such actions as unpatriotic, nor from a pacifist one like
Merton’s and Day’s. Instead, she articulated a Marxist critique, arguing for
the importance of having an organized movement through which the
working-class majority would secure and maintain political power to effect
systemic change, in this case to end the war. Continuing to make her case
for the need for more disciplined tactics that won the masses to the ranks,
she ended her letter by arguing:
Daily propaganda about the need for social change, winning hearts and
minds to the Movement, and at the appropriate time, helping to organize
the socialist forces—these are the important tasks, even if they seem

102. Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day, 325–26, and Peters, The Catonsville
Nine, 128.
103. Carlson to Emeric Lawrence, August 31, 1970, f. Gen. Correspondence and
Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA
unglamorous. To feel guilty about not doing enough is commendable,
but to make invidious comparisons between the role of a teacher-monk
and that of an individualistic political activist is wrong. One can be an
avant-gardist without going to jail!104

In response to Carlson, Fr. Emeric brought up her past, specifically her
Smith Act conviction and the time she served at Alderson. “Re: the Berrigans. O.K. You win, at least the first round,” he wrote, “But I’d still like to
argue a little. If you don’t get mad at me, I recall to you that someone else
went to jail for an ideal. Was there a difference?”105 Carlson’s response was
sharp and repeated her core critique of the draft board actions. “As to the
Berrigans and going to jail for an ideal—there was a difference between our
case and theirs,” she insisted. “In our case we stressed the free speech aspect
and won wide support among trade unionists, civil libertarians etc. We
could not be charged with a bizarre example of deliberate lawbreaking—
pouring blood over draft records—so bizarre and esoteric in its symbolism
that workers would be turned away.”106 For Carlson, the radical Catholic
anti-war activists had failed because she believed their tactics alienated the
masses that were necessary for effecting ultimate change (ushering in a
socialist state that would end all capitalist wars). Even if she, as a Catholic,
appreciated the Biblical significance of their use of blood or the Pentecostal
significance of their use of fire, Carlson, an Old Leftist at heart, still considered such tactics irrelevant at best and harmful at worst.107
In the notes for her speech, “Review of Catholics and the Left,” that
she delivered in November 1968, Grace articulated many of the ideas that
she later expressed in her exchange with Fr. Emeric in 1970. She took aim
at the broader New Left, including the activists in the Catholic Left, and
carved out her position as a Catholic radical with an Old Left approach. In
so doing, Carlson demonstrates the diversity within the American Catholic
Left during this period. She defined herself as a “Christian against capitalism” who was “a propagandist for Christian socialism.” And she explained
that, as such, she was “prejudiced against those who muddy the waters by
individualistic acts: demand dialogue in churches undemocratically; offend
104. Carlson to Emeric Lawrence, August 31, 1970, f. Gen. Correspondence and
Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.
105. Emeric Lawrence to Grace and Gilbert Carlson, September 21, 1970, f. Gen.
Correspondence and Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.
106. Carlson to Emeric Lawrence, October 12, 1970, f. Gen. Correspondence and
Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.
107. On the symbolic nature of the draft board protests see Peters, The Catonsville Nine,
34 and Massa, The American Catholic Revolution, 105–07.

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sensibilities by vulgar language; burn draft records or pour blood on them.”
Her differences with the Berrigans and their comrades were thus clear. But
Carlson also took aim at the wider movement. In her denunciation of the
younger generations’ vulgarity she found common ground with Day, who
also disliked “the rage and obscenities, the irreverence and smugness, the
lack of humility” of many of the anti-war protestors. Day, however, made
her objection on moral grounds: she saw spiritual weakness in such characteristics.108 For Carlson, it was a political objection. She argued that the
“basic error of New Left—Catholic or not is anti-intellectualism. . . . ‘I feel
therefore I am,’” and contrasted that new movement to the Old Left of
which she had been a part in which “not to ‘do your thing’ but to do the
thing that will advance the movement” was the focus in order to bring “an
end to racial and social and economic oppression of man by man.”109 For
Carlson, social reform—indeed a revolutionary reordering of the existing
socio-economic system—was the paramount concern. By contrast, Day
(influenced by Maurin) focused on the little way, in which it was not about
success or failure but about “the intention, the effort, and the love” in
bringing about a “revolution in thought, not an adjustment of an economic
system, as the Marxists claimed, or the right leadership from above, as all
politicians claimed.”110 The difference here was not just that Day’s activism
was rooted in her pacifism and the Church’s prophetic tradition geared
ultimately to an eschatological end, but that Carlson’s was still so grounded
in Old Left Marxism. They both believed in changing hearts and minds;
but, for Day that was the revolution, whereas, for Carlson, it was the application of that change to the social and economic system that was so needed
in the modern world.
Carlson’s Old Left perspective blended with her Catholic activism to
produce the hybrid Catholic Marxist approach that she took to contemporary issues during the 1960s and beyond. Those included her reaction
to Catholic lay activists within the Church itself. In May 1968 she
declined an invitation by Dr. Robert Breitenbucher to join the Association of Christians for Church Renewal (ACCR), explaining that
although she supported renewal in the Church she believed that it was
something that lay people, priests, and sisters needed to do together.111

108. Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day, 316.
109. Carlson, “Review of Catholics and the Left,” November 13, 1968, f. SMJC
Speech and Lecture Notes 3, box 1, CP, MHS.
110. Loughery and Randolph, Dorothy Day, 139.
111. Carlson to Breitenbucher, May 29, 1968, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc., box
2, CP, MHS.

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

The ACCR was founded in St. Paul and Minneapolis in 1967 and in
March of that year had “produced for Archbishop Leo Binz . . . an unsolicited report that recommended the convening of a lay congress and the
division of parishes into ‘neighborhood church communities’ with greater
lay oversight.” Most of its members came from the middle class.112 Carlson wrote to Breitenbucher with her concerns over the “petty bourgeois”
profile of the ACCR’s membership. Admitting that she found herself to
be a “petty bourgeois element these days” she argued, “I am enough of a
Marxist to believe that you can’t make a revolution without the support
of the workers.” She also complained about the ACCR’s targeting of the
bishop. “I am not primarily interested in taking power away from Bishops, but away from the big economic interests in the country—and their
government.”113
She made this same argument in two other letters. In one, to Fr.
Emeric in 1968, she denounced “lay people and religious, who have just
discovered social action and demand that all resources and energy of the
Church be immediately translated into bringing a program of ‘love’ into
social relations. Then with clenched fists and tightened jaws, they picket
the Chancery office and demand of the bishops what they never had the
guts to ask for from their own bosses in the Bar Association or the Medical
Association or the Chamber of Commerce.”114 In the other, to Mary
Berres, the executive secretary of the Catholic Interracial Council (CIC),
Carlson responded to a letter from the CIC to her parish social action
committee asking for help with the Archbishop’s annual charity appeal.
Carlson explained that she shared the CIC’s concern for the poor, “but I
think that it is very naïve to think that the Catholic Church can solve the
problem of poverty in this archdiocese or in any diocese. The Bishops of
the Church do not have any real economic power in this country. Such
power is in the hand of the ‘economic royalists’, as the old phrase goes.”
She argued, “If the CIC members who are in the Chambers of Commerce,
Manufacturers Associations, etc., would make an all-out demand on these
organizations, I should see more sense to their protests. Although the
Bishops are irritating to some of us, they are really just two-bit opponents
in the basic struggle for social, political and economic justice—and some,
112. Jeremy Bonner, “Who Will Guard the Guardians: Church Government and the
People of God, 1965–1969,” in Empowering the People of God, 238–39.
113. Carlson to Breitenbucher, May 29, 1968, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc., box
2, CP, MHS.
114. Carlson to Lawrence, (nd) 1968, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc., box 2, CP,
MHS.

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115

like Bishop Shannon, are allies.”115 Carlson was thus uninterested in targeting the Church directly for reform, unlike the Berrigans and other
activists in the Catholic Left who saw the promotion of such change as
integral to their witness. For Carlson, the Church had provided her a home
after she left the SWP and through the support of priests, like Father
Cowley, and women religious, like Sister Rita Clare and Sister AJ, she was
able to do the work of social justice from her parish and at St. Mary’s
Junior College. Once again she had her sites on what she perceived as the
bigger fish to fry: exploitative capitalism.
Instead of joining the ACCR, Carlson told Breitenbucher that she was
thinking of setting up a Slant group, like the one in England. “I hope we
can study the application of Marxism to Christianity and perhaps engage in
some united-front efforts with other radical groups,” she told him. This was
not the only time Carlson spoke admiringly about Slant. She also referenced
the organization and its manifesto in her “Review of Catholics and the Left”
speech that she gave in November 1968 and in her “Contemporary Atheism” speech from April 1967. In the former speech, she spoke of Slant as an
example of Christians against capitalism, and in the latter as a movement
within the Church that gave her “new hope” as a radical Catholic.116
Slant was a movement that was formed in 1964 among “a group of
undergraduates at Cambridge University and their clerical advisors” who
launched a journal of the same name in which contributors examined traditional Catholic theology “to promote the social goals of the Gospel.”
Among the clerical advisers was Herbert McCabe, O.P. Born in Yorkshire
in 1926, the grandchild of Irish immigrants, McCabe was like many
Anglo-Irish who “harbored republican and socialist sentiments” and grew
up in what Eugene McCarraher describes as a “mélange of Catholic orthodoxy and leftish politics.”117 McCabe entered the Dominican order in
1949, the English Province of which “had a history of radicalism” mani115. Carlson to Mary Berres, nd, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc., box 2, CP, MHS.
Patrick Shannon was an auxiliary bishop of St. Paul and Minneapolis who spoke out against
the war in Vietnam and in support of civil rights. In 1968 he resigned as bishop because of
his opposition to Humane Vitae. See https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2003-sep13-me-shannon13-story.html (accessed November 23, 2019). Carlson does not comment
anywhere in her extant papers on Humane Vitae.
116. Carlson, “Review of Catholics and the Left,” November 13, 1968 and “Contemporary Atheism,” April 14, 1967, f. SMJC Speech and Lecture Notes 3, box 1, CP, MHS.
117. Eugene McCarraher, “Radical, O.P.: Herbert McCabe’s Revolutionary Faith,”
Commonweal, October 4, 2010. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/radical-op (accessed
January 27, 2020).

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A MARXIST CATHOLIC IN COLD WAR AMERICA

fested in a sympathy with distributism, pacifism, and the French workerpriest movement. He became radicalized after his ordination in 1955 when
he spent “three years as a priest in an inner-city parish in the industrial city
of Newcastle.” McCabe then became chaplain at De La Salle College
where he met Terry Eagleton. He was also “a regular participant at Spode
House events,” a Dominican conference center in Staffordshire that
became a sort of salon for Catholic Marxists.118
McCabe spoke there and elsewhere around England on philosophy
and theology and became the editor of New Blackfriars, expressing ideas
that were, as Jay Corrin argues, “decidedly radical, in drawing imaginative
connections between Christian theology and revolutionary Marxism.” For
McCabe “a revolutionary politics could be linked to a vibrant theological
orthodoxy.”119 As McCarraher explains, McCabe “advocated revolutionary
change in terms of orthodox theology not as its repudiation, but rather as its
fulfillment.” Perhaps Carlson took a page from McCabe’s book when she
criticized liberal Catholics? McCabe “boldly asserted that liberal Christianity was theologically naïve and even a perversion of the Gospels, because
it promoted the illusion that the evils of capitalism could be attenuated by
nice people ‘talking round a table and exercising . . . free choices at elections’—a notion based on the liberal assumption that if people could ‘only
talk together it would be all cleared up.’” According to McCabe (and Carlson), what was needed was revolution. For McCabe, however, Marxism
was “insufficiently revolutionary” because what he believed was needed was
a Christian revolution that went deeper “‘to the ultimate alienation that is
sin and to the ultimate transformation which is death and resurrection.’”120
McCabe’s influence on the students in the Slant movement included
his assertion that “Christians must engage in political struggle, but not on
the same terms as other radicals.” For the members of Slant the social goals
of the gospel “implied a socialist revolution.” These young members of the
Catholic left in England, including Terry Eagleton who became editor of
the Cambridge journal Slant from which the group took its name, were
among the first cohort from the working class to gain access to their country’s elite educational institutions as a result of post-World War II reforms,
and they brought their class-based experiences with them to “fill in what
118. Corrin, Catholic Progressives in England, 224, and McCarraher, “Radical O.P”
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/radical-op.
119. Corrin, Catholic Progressives in England, 224.
120. McCabe’s focus was thus both temporal and eschatological. See McCarraher,
“Radical O.P.” https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/radical-op

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117

[they] felt was the missing political dimension of Christian renewal.” As
Corrin explains, their definition of Christianity “required an understanding
of its historical roots. And if it can be recognized that Christianity is a revolutionary movement of liberation rather than a belief in abstract doctrinal
statements—that is, a religion primarily concerned about a change in
humanity’s actual condition, which is, of course, possible only through
political means—then it can be seen that Christianity is not incompatible
with Marxism in the broadest sense” in its concern for the liberation of
man and the creation of a community based on equality. Those in Slant
rejected liberal models of reform and embraced Marxism because, for
them, “It is only the political left that works against the status quo, which
is promoted by undemocratic elitist social and economic forces that militate against the radical promises of a Christian transformation.”121
For Carlson, this approach to her Catholic faith and her activism in
the world made complete sense. It also explains why she found Dorothy
Day’s movement “a little sappy” and of no interest to her in its personalized
and decentralized approach to social ills, particularly its experiments with
rural communities.122 Grace found ideological and spiritual brethren in
Slant instead, with its focus on Marxist political opposition. Wedding the
temporal goal of ending capitalist oppression to the transcendent charge of
advancing the Kingdom of God was an attractive approach for her. Carlson even began “a discussion with a number of selected students” and initiated a branch of Slant at SMJC among them and some faculty members.123 In so doing, she practiced what she had preached to Fr. Emeric:
working to effect social change “through the more laborious process of
educating and propagandizing.”124 In her own way, through her lectures,
correspondence, and campus organizing work, Carlson attempted to bring
something to the American Catholic context that was, according to David
J. O’Brien, largely missing: a way “to develop the social and political
dimensions of the [then] present revolution in the church.”125

121. Corrin, Catholic Progressives in England, 216–17 and 228.
122. On her criticism of Day, see Carlson interview with Ross, July 14, 1987, 39. David
O’Brien leveled a similar criticism of the Catholic Worker when he argued, “their stress on
the works of mercy and personal responsibility, together with a dose of agrarianism, limited
their immediate impact on social and political issues.” See O’Brien, The Renewal of American
Catholicism, 216–17.
123. On Slant at SMJC, see: Good News, 5.4 (Summer 1979), 1, and D’Heilly, email to
author, May 18, 2019.
124. Carlson to Lawrence, August 31, 1970, f. Gen. Correspondence and Misc., box 2,
CP, MHS.
125. O’Brien, The Renewal of American Catholicism, 213.

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* * * * *
Carlson continued in her work of educating and propagandizing for
social change in her role as a professor and mentor at SMJC until she
retired from teaching in 1979. She found ways to continue that slow and
steady work as an alumna officer at SMJC until 1984. In that role she not
only celebrated the professional achievements of the college’s women graduates in a column in the alumna magazine, but also provided moral support
as a counselor and, through a specially designed fund set up in her name,
financial support to students so that they could graduate.126 Through her
efforts she hoped to effect social change one life at a time, particularly for
the women students whose professional advancement she had for so long
championed as a part of her own evolving feminism.127 Carlson also
remained active in her parish and at the Newman Center. And she never
stopped arguing with her friends and comrades about the need to change
the system and overthrow capitalism, now as a Marxist Catholic instead of
a member of the SWP. By examining Carlson’s long life, especially in the
decade or so after her return to the Church in 1952, the centrality of
Catholicism to her political consciousness becomes clear. That connection
serves as a reminder that faith matters in understanding the lives of those
in the past. And the specific contours of her activism reveal some of the
diversity that existed in the American Catholic Left during the Cold War
era, specifically Marxist Catholic alternatives that at once eschewed violence and vulgarity while demanding, as a gospel mandate and manifestation of spiritual renewal, revolutionary social and economic change.

126. “Grace Holmes Carlson,” SCAN (Winter, 1986), 25; Good News 5.4 (Summer
1979), 1; “Grace Carlson: Forever an Activist,” Good News, 8.2 (Winter, 1988), 5; and
D’Heilly, email to author, October 4, 2018.
127. Grace’s feminist commitments are beyond the scope of this paper. See: HavertyStacke, The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson.

Festival Threads:
Khipu Calendars and Mercedarian Missions
in Rapaz, Peru (c. 1565–1825)
SABINE HYLAND*
The introduction of the Christian calendar into Spanish American missionary zones often led to novel forms of calendrical record-keeping as
pre-Christian methods of time-keeping were adapted to the Christian
festival cycle. Yet while indigenous Christian calendars for Mesoamerica have been well studied, their Andean counterparts remain virtually
unknown. This article examines a set of khipus (Andean cord texts)
from highland Peru that, according to local ritual specialists, served as
annual festival calendars. Research in diocesan archives and the Sixth
Lima Provinial Council’s unpublished reports (1772) reveals the
episodic and intermittent nature of the liturgical worship in colonial
Rapaz recorded on these khipu calendars.
Key words: Peru; Khipu; Catholic missions; Mercedarians; Sixth
Lima Provincial Council
I. Introduction

T

he introduction of the Christian calendar into missionary zones in
Spanish America often led to novel forms of calendrical record-keeping as pre-Christian methods of time-keeping were adapted to the newly
imposed festival cycle. Yet while indigenous colonial calendars have been
examined for Mesoamerica, their Andean equivalents remain relatively
unknown.1 During the Inka Empire (AD 1400–1532), calendrical infor-

*Sabine Hyland, Professor of World Christianity, University of St Andrews, Scotland.
The research was funded by grants from the National Geographic Society; the John Simon
Guggenheim Foundation; and the Leverhulme Trust. Her email address is: sph@standrews.ac.uk.
1. E.g. David Tavárez, “Zapotec Time, Alphabetic Writing, and the Public Sphere,”
Ethnohistory, 57, no. 1 (2010), 73–85; John Justeson and David Tavárez, “The Correlation
Between the Colonial Northern Zapotec and Gregorian Calendars,” in: Skywatching in the
Ancient World, eds. Clive Ruggles and Gary Urton (Bolder, CO, 2007), 17–81. Puente Luna
has analysed a recent description of a khipu calendar from the Republican era in: José Carlos

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mation was kept on khipus—the knotted cords that served in the place of
writing.2 In colonial Peru, members of the Mercedarian religious order
oversaw the creation of khipu calendars in which the feasts of the Roman
Catholic calendar were knotted onto a “large cord” (“cordel grande”).3 No
actual Christian calendrical khipu has been identified until now; the discovery of such an artifact would reveal how calendrical information was
represented on khipus and provide emic insights into how Andean peoples
experienced and understood Christianized time during the colonial era.
In 2011, the ritual specialist in San Cristóbal de Rapaz, Peru, told the
author that the khipus preserved in the village ritual precinct were a “computes,” a term derived from Latin denoting an annual calendar of religious
feasts held on different dates each year; in other words, that these are khipu
calendars indicating festivals that varied annually. The Mercedarian order,
who had charge of Rapaz in the colonial era, promoted the use of khipus
in their missionary efforts in the Andean countryside; by analysing diocesan archives, along with the unpublished reports of the Sixth Lima
Provincial Council, we can understand how Christian festivals were celebrated in Rapaz throughout the colonial period on a highly variable yearly
schedule, a moveable timetable that is reflected in the khipus’ structure.
This article will also present new evidence about the use of the term “computus” in conjunction with khipus and changeable yearly cycles of offerings
in Central Andean Spanish. Colonial ledgers from the native confraternity
in Rapaz that paid the friars for saying Mass will be presented to reveal the
accounting gap fulfilled by khipus; the khipus will be examined to suggest
how they represented the number and different kinds of Masses offered
each year. This analysis concludes with a consideration of what the Rapaz
khipu calendars can tell us about conceptualizations of time, the ancestors,
and the sacred landscape.

Puente Luna, “Calendars in Knotted Cords,” Ethnohistory 66, no. 3 (2019), 437–64. The existence of Christian khipu calendars has been noted in: John Charles, Allies at Odds: The Andean
Church and its Indigenous Agents (Albuquerque, 2010) and in: Galen Brokaw, The History of the
Khipu (Cambridge, 2010).
2. Brokaw, History of the Khipu, 230; Gary Urton, “A Calendrical and Demographic
Tomb Text from Northern Peru,” Latin American Antiquity, 12, no. 2 (2001), 127–47; Reiner
Tom Zuidema, “‘Hacer calendarios’ en quipus y tejidos,” in: Sistemas de notación inca: Quipu
y Tocapu, ed. Carmen Arellano (Lima, 2014), 395–445.
3. Martín de Murúa, OM, Códice Murúa: Historia y geneología de los reyes incas del Perú
del padre mercedario Fray Martín de Murúa, ed. Juan M. Ossio (Madrid, [1590], 2004), 77v.

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II. The Khipus of San Cristóbal de Rapaz
Khipus, multicolored cords that encode information, are one of the
longest-lasting Native American forms of inscription, having been utilized
in the Andes for over a millennium, from the Wari Empire (600–1100
AD) to the 20th century.4 Khipus have taken a variety of forms during
their one thousand year history; however, the best known khipu type is that
referred to as the “standard Inka khipu.” This consists of a main cord, held
horizontally, from which hang multiple pendant cords. The pendants often
display different colors, and may contain knots representing numbers in a
base ten system. Figure 1 shows a colonial Andean adminstrator holding a
standard Inka khipu in one hand, and a book for accounting in another.
During the early colonial era, it was not unusual for khipus to be integrated
with Spanish ledgers in local highland accounting systems.5
The Peruvian anthropologist, Arturo Ruíz Estrada, first disclosed the
existence of the Rapaz khipus to the outside world in 1982.6 San Cristóbal
de Rapaz, an isolated community with a population of approximately 700,
sits at 4040 meters in elevation in the Central Andean province of Oyón.
Mercedarians served Rapaz during the colonial period, constructing a village church whose magnificent interior murals were recently conserved by
the World Monuments Fund and Patrimonio Perú.7 Several streets away
from the church stands a walled ritual enclosure containing two adobe
buildings—the “Pasa Qulqa” storage house and the “Kaha Wayi” which
holds the khipu (Figure 2).
Ruíz Estrada believed that the Rapaz artefact was one giant khipu.
Frank Salomon and his team discovered that, unlike standard Inka khipus,
it consisted of approximately 267 separate and independent cords simply
draped over a suspension stick, rather than tied to a main cord.8 Most of
4. Sabine Hyland, “Khipu Historiography,” L’Encyclopédie des historiographies. Sources et
genres. Afriques, Amériques, Asies, Volume 1, eds. Pierre Ragon, Nathalie Kouamé, Eric Paul
Meyer, and Anne Viguier (Paris, 2020), 964–72; Sabine Hyland, “Khipus,” in: Information:
A Historical Companion, eds. Ann Blair, Paul Duguid, Anja Goeing, and Anthony Grafton
(Princeton, NJ, 2021), 534–37.
5. José Carlos de la Puente Luna, “That Which Belongs to All: Khipus, Community,
and Indigenous Legal Activism in the Early Colonial Andes,” Americas, 72:1 (January, 2015),
19–54.
6. Arturo Ruíz Estrada, Los quipus de Rapaz (Huacho, 1982).
7. Arturo Ruíz Estrada, “El Arte Colonial de Rapaz,” Boletin de Lima, no. 28, (July,
1983), 43–52; Frank Salomon, At the Mountain’s Altar, 194 (New York, 2018).
8. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 173.

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FIGURE 1. A native Andean adminstrator holding a “standard Inka khipu” in one
hand and an account book in the other. Image courtesy of the Danish Royal
Library, GKS2232 kvart: Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c.
1615), 814v.

the khipus are single woollen cords up to fifteen meters in length, onto
which are tied a variety of tufts and other items, including ten cloth figurines (Figure 3). Although there is similarity between the cords, there are
no duplicates, and they vary in the number, kind, and sequence of attachments. Next to the khipus is a small altar for offerings (Figure 4), while
additional ritual gifts hang from the rafters. Salomon’s team also found a
straw cross inside the ceiling.9
Prior to his investigatons in Rapaz, Salomon revolutionized khipu studies through fieldwork in Tupicocha that demonstrated that Central Andean
peoples continued to create complex khipus well into the modern era.10
9. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 165–67.
10. Frank Salomon, The Cord Keepers: Khipus and Cultural Life in a Peruvian Village
(Durham, NC, 2004).

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FIGURE 2. The author studying the Rapaz khipu, which is in a museum case in the
Kaha Wayi, 2019. Photograph courtesy of William Hyland.

Before his research, it was thought that, except for relatively simple herding cords, khipu use died out in the early colonial period. In Rapaz,
Salomon developed an ideal model for conducting research on sacred artefacts in remote communities.11 Working closely with village leaders, he
and his team cleaned and repaired the Rapaz khipus, which were in danger
of decay through infestations of mold and insects.12 He also studied the rituals conducted in the Kaha Wayi in honor of plants and mountain
“deities,” the presence of the khipus is considered essential to the success
of these rites.
Salomon initially speculated that each cord represented a yearly calendar to “record interactions with the divine mountain peaks.”13 This is what
he was told by the primary ritual specialist in Rapaz and “other elders
strongly attached to Kaha Wayi’s sacred regimen,” who themselves learned
11. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 148–182.
12. Carrie J. Brezine, Dress, Technology and Identity in Colonial Peru (PhD Thesis, Harvard University, 2011); Frank Salomon and Renate Peters, “Governance and Conservation of
the Rapaz Khipu Patrimony,” in: Intangible Heritage Embodied, eds. Helaine Silverman and
Dede Fairchild Ruggles (Frankfurt, 2009), 101–25.
13. Brezine, Dress, Technology and Identity, 13.

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FIGURE 3. Some of the figurines in the Rapaz khipus, 2019. Photo by author.

this as a tradition passed down from their ancestors.14 However, Salomon
rejected this as an explanation of the cords’ origin because, he reasoned, any
calendar of ritual activities would have to follow a regular sequence from
year to year, leading “to a pattern of recording that was less variable” than
that seen on the cords.15 In 2011, Salomon and his team hypothesized that
the khipus recorded information about the animals provided to General
Juan Antonio Alvarez de Arenales’ pro-Independence armies in the
1820s.16 However, in his 2018 book about Rapaz religion and the role of
the khipus therein, Salomon does not repeat his earlier theory about the
cords as a record of livestock contributions to the Independence armies. In
this most recent analysis, he treats the khipus simply as multivalent symbols that are interpreted in various ways by different constituencies in the
community. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that for the ritual specialists who
conduct ceremonies involving the khipu, the cords “record how particular
people served the mountains with ritual duties.”17
14. Frank Salomon, Carrie J. Brezine, Reymundo Chapa, and Victor Falcón Huayta,
“Khipu from Colony to Republic: The Rapaz Patrimony,” in: Their Way of Writing, eds. Elizabeth Hill Boone and Gary Urton (Washington DC, 2011), 353–78, here 363.
15. Brezine, Dress, Technology and Identity, 14.
16. Salomon, et. al., “Khipu from Colony to Republic,” 319–52.
17. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 171–80.

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FIGURE 4. Altar with coca leaf offerings, a ritual bag (walki), and ceramic containers for liquid libations, 2019. Photograph courtesy of the author.

III. The “Computus” of Rapaz
In 2011, Melecio Montes, the bendelhombre (ritual specialist) in Rapaz
explained to the author that the khipu was a “computus that orders everything, that determines all that happens” (“un computus que ordena todo, que
determina todo lo que pasa”). Computus is a Latin derived term for the calendar of Easter and the other Roman Catholic feasts, such as Corpus
Christi, whose dates change every year based upon the date of Easter.
Throughout the colonial era, computus tables typically were found at the
beginning of the Roman Missal, the liturgical book containing the rubrics
for celebrating Mass. An unpublished inventory of the Rapaz church from
1774 lists “a Missal with its lecturn” (“un Misal con su atril”) among the
church possessions.18 Eighteenth century missals provided the dates for
each year as a horizontal line which listed the year, the Sunday letter (to
determine the date of Sundays for the year), the golden number (to determine the full moon dates), the epact, followed by dates for Septuagesima
Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Easter, Ascension, Pentecost, Corpus Christi,
and the first Sunday in Advent, color coded in red and black (Figure 5).
18. Antonio de León, “Visita Pastoral de San Juan de Churín,” Ms. Obispado de
Huacho, May 8 (1774) British Library EAP333/1/2/139.

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FIGURE 5. The first page of a table of moveable feasts; the remaining feasts for each
year are continued on the facing page. From an 18th century missal in Ancash,
Peru. Photograph courtesy of the author.

Since the computus established when the most important annual rituals
occurred—ceremonies upon which the entire well-being of the community
depended—it could indeed be considered to “determine all that happens.”
The term “computus” also appears in the Entablo, a sacred ritual
manuscript from the Andean community of San Pedro de Casta.19 Written
primarily in 1921, the Entablo describes how the annual water festival
should be conducted. The title, Entablo, is a pun meaning “agreement” as
well as the khipu-alphabetic texts called “Entablos” in regional eighteenthcentury pastoral visitations. Until the 1950s, these Entablos, or “khipu
boards” structured the ritual activities of each day of the festival.20 Each
khipu cord on the Entablo was associated with the name of a villager; the
19. El Entablo. Ms. 57 pages, Comunidad de San Pedro de Casta, Huarochirí, Peru, 1921.
20. Sabine Hyland, Sarah Bennison, and William P. Hyland, “Khipus, Khipu Boards
and Sacred Texts: Towards a Philology of Andean Knotted Cords,” Latin American Research
Review, 56: 2 (2021), [in press, 1–41].

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khipu cords encoded information about the various contributions—labour,
food, drink, and ritual items—that the associated person had to provide.
During the water ceremony, a special khipu board of “twenty pitchers”
tracked the amount and type of alcohol (and possibly food) that women
from each moiety were required to give. According to the text, before the
khipu board of “twenty pitchers” was set up, “two very judicious persons”
(“dos personas muy juiciosos”) first arranged a computus by setting kernels of
maize in a line on the floor to show the distribution of women by moiety
along with the quantity of alcohol that each women had to give.21 The
computus varied from year to year as the population and individual circumstances changed.22 In this context, “computus” refers to an annual line of
items or objects that indicates contributions that are different every year.
Neither the sequence nor the quantities of items on the “computus” are the
same from year to year. “Computus” is one of several Latin words in the
Entablo, whose Central Andean Spanish retains many colonial usages.23
The use of the term “computus” to describe the Rapaz khipus would
suggest that each cord, as a line, represents a year, with the tufts and other
attachments symbolising the different feasts or festival offerings of that
year. But if this is the case, why should the khipu cords vary as much as
they do? Even with the annual changes in the dates of the moveable feasts,
one would expect there to be a similar sequence of festivals each year,
repeated year after year, cord after cord. Why is the sequence of attachments on the Rapaz khipus so irregular from one cord to the next? Moreover, why would the ritual specialist state the cords represented offerings to
the mountain deities rather than to Roman Catholic saints?
IV. Festival Calendars in Remote Villages
The archival evidence described below reveals that the Mercedarians in
charge of Rapaz and other doctrinas (“native parishes”) in the Central
Andes generally did not observe the major feasts of the church like Christmas and Easter in remote villages like Rapaz. Instead the friars concentrated on celebrating local saints who lacked a set feast day and whose
21. Entablo, 7v.
22. This process is similar to the tradition of interpreting khipus in conjuction with
pebbles or maize kernels on the ground; however, for this the kernels were arranged in a
mathematical grid pattern, and were set up to interpret the khipu cords, not to help determine
them. See Marco Curatola and José Carlos Puente Luna, “Contar concertando,” in: El Quipu
Colonial, eds. Marco Curatola and José Carlos Puente Luna (Lima, 2013), 193–244.
23. The author is indebted to Dr. Sarah Bennison for her insights into “computus” and
the unusual Latin derived terms in the Entablo.

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veneration was easily conflated with that of the local mountain peaks and
other huacas, probably intentionally so.24 Moreover, as the evidence will
demonstrate, the Mercedarians said Mass in remote annexes with irregular
frequency from year to year, responding as much to changing personnel
issues and to demands for funds from their Lima house, as to their parishioners’ needs. In the 1770s, when Diego Antonio Parada, archbishop of
Lima (1762–79), tried to force the Mercedarians to stick to a fixed calendar
of festivals to celebrate every year, the Mercedarians refused to comply. In
this situation, it is easy to understand why the Rapaz khipus would vary
from year to year, with different attachments indicating diverse offerings,
such as the structured fees for different types of Masses, candles, incense,
alcohol, etc., for the saints/divine mountains.
By the eighteenth century, the Mercedarians administered a large
number of rural highland doctrinas in the Viceroyalty of Peru, second only
to the Dominicans among the religious orders.25 Detailed information about
the Mercedarians’ internal administrative affairs in the Central Peruvian
Andes can be found in the Huacho diocesan archives preserved in the British
Library (British Library EAP333). These archives contain 152 unpublished
reports of episcopal visitations of the doctrinas between 1613 and 1794, as
well as dozens of lawsuits, confraternity ledgers, baptismal records, etc. Of
the twenty-seven doctrinas in the Huacho diocese for which there exist pastoral visitations, nine were originally Mercedarian, including the Churín
doctrina, where Rapaz is located. Many of the reports in the archive, especially from the late eighteenth century, contain detailed information about
the Mass stipends and tithes that were paid in each native parish.
Colonial doctrinas in the Andean highlands generally consisted of a
“head” town and church whence priests administered to a number of more
remote annexes. So, for example, the Mercedarians in the doctrina of San
Juan Bautista de Churín lived in the head town of Churín, whence they
served thirteen other communities, many of which, like Rapaz, were at
considerable distances from Churín over difficult terrain.26 Only one or
24. On huacas, see Bill Sillar, “The Social Agency of Things,” Cambridge Archaeological
Journal, 19:3 (2009), 367–77; Bruce Mannheim and Guillermo Salas Carreño, “Wak’a:
Entifications of the Andean Sacred,” in: The Archaeology of Wak’as, ed. Tamara Bray (Boulder,
CO, 2014), 46-72.
25. Allan James Keuthe and Kenneth J. Andrien, “Clerical Reform and Secularization
of the Doctrinas de indios,” in: The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Allan
J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien (Cambridge, 2014), 167–93.
26. Severo Aparicio OM, La Orden de la Merced en el Perú, Tomo I (Cuzco, Peru,
2001), 105–06.

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two priests staffed most highland doctrinas; the question of how to celebrate major Christian feasts in remote annexes with such inadequate personnel remained an enduring problem throughout the colonial period. The
matter was much debated, for example, during the Sixth Lima Provincial
Council.27 One solution was to compel natives in distant villages to travel
to the head community to participate in Mass on major holidays; another
strategy was to sub-contract with unemployed priests to offer Mass in
remote annexes on Easter and other obligatory feasts. The Mercedarians
chose instead to emphasise the celebration of saints’ feasts and Masses for
the dead in annexes like Rapaz, leaving the priests free to offer Mass on
major holidays in the head town.
A typical example of the Mercedarian’s strategy can be found in the
Lampián doctrina’s annex of San Pedro de Carac, where the Mercedarians
appear to have celebrated only one major liturgical holiday—Corpus
Christi. We can gain an understanding of the celebrations that the Mercedarians conducted in Lampián from a pastoral visitation carried out in
1770.28 In this report, the inspector listed the Masses that took place in
Lampián and each of its annexes. Although the Mercedarians had lost
control of the doctrina in the 1760s, the priest in 1770 insisted that the
feasts he offered were based on those celebrated by the Mercedarians in the
year prior to his arrival, and which he had fixed into an annual calendar.
Besides Corpus Christi and the Nativity of the Virgin (September 8), the
Masses were mainly for feasts whose dates varied considerably. The Exaltation of the Cross, whose official feast day was May 3, was observed on
June 30 in Carac, and on June 26 in a neighbouring annex, Cotos. The feast
of Blessed Magdalena of Seville, a Mercedarian saint, was celebrated on
September 10 in Carac, but on June 25 in Lampián. In Cotos, St. Rose of
Lima was honoured on her official feast day, August 30, but in Carac her
Mass was said on September 9. In every annex, the Mercedarians also said
Masses for the dead and special Requiem Masses which could be offered
on almost any day of the year. A pastoral inspection from the Huamantanga doctrina in 1770 reveals a similar situation.29 The Mercedarians had
27. See Gerónimo de Aumente, Informe 15, Ms. Sixth Lima Provincial Council, (1772);
Marques de Casa Concha, Informe 35, Ms. Sixth Lima Provincial Council, (1772); Pedro
Falcón, Informe 36, Ms. Sixth Lima Council. (1722); Thomas de Arrantia and Manuel de
Concha OM. Informe 37, Ms. Sixth Lima Council, (1772); and Manuel Arroniz OM, Informe
45, Ms. Sixth Lima Council, Box 10, Ms 25, Duke University Special Collections, (1772).
28. Francisco de Echevarría, Visita Pastoral hecha por Echevarría contra Fermín Salmón,
Ms. Lampián, Peru, May 26, (1770). British Library, EAP333/1/2/126.
29. Francisco de Echevarría, Visita Pastoral hecha por Echevarría contra Antonio Sancho
Dávila, Ms. Huamantanga, Peru, June 13 (1770). British Library EAP333/1/2/127.

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been stripped of this doctrina in the 1760s; in 1770 the priest, Father
Sancho Dávila, explained to the inspector that his Mercedarian predecessor, Fray Juan de Castañeda, had established all the feasts that Dávila continued to say in each village. Masses for Corpus Christi, Holy Week,
Easter and Christmas were said only in the head town of Huamantanga.
In the annexes, the inspection report shows the same pattern of celebrating
feasts on different days: the Exaltation of the Cross in January in the village
of Hama, in September in Huamantanga, in October in Rauma, and in
December in Puruchuco and Quipan. Blessed Magdalena, who was celebrated in September and June in the Lampián doctrina, was observed on
different July days in Puruchuco and Marco. The Nativity of the Virgin,
whose feast is September 8, was honored in October in Rauma, while St.
Rose was celebrated on her feast day in August in Huamantanga, but in
December in the Puruchuco annex.
These pastoral inspections suggest that the Mercedarians greatly
varied the days for celebrating relatively minor Catholic feasts; however,
these reports reveal only how priests who succeeded to Mercedarian doctrinas fixed the Mercedarian practices into a static calendar. On September
30, 1772, Archbishop Parada sent instructions to all the priests in the Lima
archdiocese that they must prepare catalogues—“margesí”—of all the feasts
that they observed in each parish.30 Priests were ordered to make wooden
tablets which listed the Masses that would be said in the parish every year,
along with the requisite Mass stipends. These tablets were affixed to the
church door, and priests were not supposed to earn any extra income by
saying additional Masses.31 Archival reports reveal that during each diocesan visitation after 1772, the inspector made the priest bring all the margasí
physically to the head town, where the inspector interrogated native
parishioners about whether they were ever forced to pay for additional
Masses not listed on the margesí. The inspectors’ primary concern was
whether the Catholic priests celebrated extra Masses not on the fixed calendar. Although the Mercedarians would be at the forefront of resisting
Parada’s program of rationalizing the ritual calendar, other religious orders
in the highlands apparently had similar practices of saying Mass on an
irregular schedule with extra Masses added at the last minute, necessitating
the Archbishop’s legislation.

30. E.g. Antonio de León, “Visita Pastoral de San Domingo de Ocros,” Ms. Obispado
de Huacho, June 3 (1774), British Library EAP333/1/2/133.
31. Casa Concha, Informe 35; Falcón Informe 36; Rubén Vargas Ugarte, SJ, Concilios
Limenses (1551–1772), Tomo II (Textos) and Tomo III (Historia) (Lima, 1954), II, 62–65.

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In May 1774, when the episcopal inspector, Don José Antonio de
León, appeared in the Churín doctrina where Rapaz was located, the Mercedarian Fray Pedro Salazar absolutely refused to comply with the demand
that he show the inspector their calendar of feasts.32 The friar brought out
the wooden boards (“padrones”) that listed the members of every family in
each village and allowed the inspector to make inventories of all the goods
in each of the doctrina’s thirteen churches. Yet Salazar simply denied the
inspector access to any records of the Masses and Mass stipends from each
community, including Rapaz.
Similarly, when inspector Nicolas de Aspur visited the Mercedarian
doctrina of Concepción de Baños (now the Baños district of Lauricocha
province), Fray Manuel Garro refused to show Aspur the actual records of
Masses said in each village with the associated stipends.33 Instead, Garro
prepared what he called a “payroll” (“planillo”) based off of these concealed
accounts. The payroll showed which Masses were said in Baños and in each
of its annexes, but without any breakdown by month or date. Garro listed
the stipends for each Mass, ranging from 13 pesos, 4 reales for a sung High
Mass to 2 pesos, 2 reales for an octave low Mass. More populous annexes
celebrated more feast days; the highest number of Masses was offered in
Baños (population 495), and the lowest in Cosma (population 20). The
inspector ordered Garro to reduce the number of annual Masses in
Chuquis (population 276) from twelve to six because the villagers could
not afford to pay the Mass stipends. Garro did show his expense ledger to
the inspector, which revealed the amount of money that he had to send
annually to support the Mercedarian house in Lima: one thousand four
hundred pesos, a very sizeable sum.
Fray Manuel Arroniz explained the Mercedarians’ justifications for
their refusal to adhere to a fixed festival calendar in his formal report, De celebratione missarum, which he presented to the Sixth Lima Provinial Council
in 1772.34 The Sixth Lima Provincial Council has been little studied; it is
known primarily for its debates over probabalism, a type of moral theology

32. León, “Visita Pastoral de San Juan de Churín,” Ms. May 8 (1774).
33. Nicolás de Aspur, Visita pastoral hecha por Aspur contra Fray Francisco de la Fuente
OM, Concepción de Baños, (1774) British Library EAP 333 1/2/141.
34. Arroniz, Informe 45, Ms, 1772. Duke University’s Special Collections contains the
original manuscripts of all 56 unpublished reports that were prepared for the conciliar deliberations. Because the Sixth Lima Provincial Council is so little studied, it was necessary to
consult the original reports to understand the Mercedarian response to the Archbishop’s
attempts to regularlize how often Mass was celebrated in the countryside.

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associated with the Jesuits.35 However, if one reads through its reports and
regulations, it becomes apparent that Archbishop Parada intended the
council to achieve a widespread reform that would bring the Peruvian
church into line with Pope Benedict XIV’s legislation, which is cited repeatedly. Benedict XIV’s numerous bulls and apostolic constitutions included
attempts to “purify” Christian practice from any trace of pagan rituals or
beliefs.36 So, for example, in Ex quo singulari and Omnium solicitudinum he
outlawed the custom of accommodating non-Christian words and usages to
express Christian ideas, as had been done extensively in the Indian and Chinese missions.37 Likewise, Benedict XIV reformed the Church’s calendar of
feasts, restricting the number of and emphasis on saints’ feasts, which he
thought served all too often as vehicles for European pre-Christian celebrations to survive within the Church. Therefore, he reduced the number of
saints’ day festivals in countries like Spain and Austria, and tried to purge
public saints’ celebrations of behaviors he deemed unseemly and unchristian.38 The influence of Benedict XIV’s reforms are visible in Parada’s rationalizaton of the religious calendar and in his insistence that doctrina priests
adhere to a fixed and stable annual calendar of feasts. Under Parada’s leadership, the Sixth Lima Provincial Council also condemned non-Christian
festivities such as bullfights—which included the Andean yawar fiesta contests between bulls and condors—and “idolatrous” Andean drinking bouts
during Christian celebrations; this was in keeping with Benedict XIV’s policies for the universal church, although similar legislation had already been
enacted in previous Lima Provincial Councils.39
The Council chose Mercedarian Fray Manuel Arroniz to prepare a
report on the Archbishop’s proposed legislation about how Mass should be
offered.40 In Arroniz’s analysis, which he sent for approval to the head of
the Mercedarian Order in Spain,41 he discussed several issues relating to
the frequency and timing with which Mercedarians could celebrate Mass.
35. The decrees of the Sixth Lima Provincial Council can be found in Vargas Ugarte,
Concilios Limenses, vol. 3.
36. Renée Haynes. Philosopher King: The Humanist Pope Benedict XIV (London, 1970);
David E. Mungello, The Chinese Rites Controversy (Nettethal, 1994); and Rebecca Messbarger,
Christopher Johns, and Philip Gavitt, Benedict XIV and the Enlightenment (Toronto, 2017).
37. Mungello, Chinese Rites Controversy, 31–64.
38. Haynes, Philosopher King, 81–121.
39. Vargas Ugarte, Concilios Limenses, II, 64–66.
40. Arroniz, Informe 45, Ms, 1772.
41. Manuel Arroniz, OM, “Carta de fray Manuel Arroniz, a Don Antonio Manuel
Artalejo, padre general de la Orden de la Merced,” Ms. March 12 (1773), Lima. Archivo
Histórico Nacional, Diversos colecciones, 37, n. 79.

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Although officially he was not charged with addressing the question of
making a fixed catalogue of Masses, he nonetheless presented arguments
to support the Mercedarian’s right to say Masses whenever and as often as
they wished, with no prior scheduling or fixed margesí. At the heart of
Arroniz’s disquisiton on why the Mercedarians should be free to say Mass
as frequently as they were able, without a fixed yearly calendar, was Alexander V’s fifteenth-century papal bull, Venerabilibus fratribus, which asserted
that no prelate had the right to forbid the collection of alms to ransom
Christian captives held as slaves. The Mercedarians had been founded
explicitly for the purpose of ransoming Christian captives of the Moors,
and continued to devote themselves to this cause in the eighteenth century.
Thus, according the privileges granted by Alexander V, no bishop had the
authority to hinder the Mercedarians’ collection of fees or alms in any way
whatsoever, since these funds ultimately supported the Mercedarians’ purpose of ransoming enslaved Christians in Africa. A fixed margesí of Masses
would limit the Mercedarians’ ability to raise funds, and therefore was forbidden by papal bull as Arroniz interpreted it.
Furthermore, Arroniz addressed the Archbishop’s desire to restrict the
veneration of the Eucharist to a permanent, fixed schedule written on a
board. The Mercedarian theologian argued that this was impossible
because priests needed to have the freedom to “extend or restrict this [this
worship] . . . as they see fit or deem convenient,” and therefore could not
make a set schedule for Eucharistic veneration.42 Additionally, Parada
wanted to limit priests to saying one Mass per day; Arroniz responded by
stating that, according to the decrees of Pope Benedict XIII, the archbishop lacked the authority to legislate on this matter. In fact, the Mercedarians in the highlands frequently offered two Masses in the same day,
celebrating an octave Mass immediately after a feast’s high Mass, or saying
a Mass for the Dead after a patronal Mass. Arroniz clearly wanted to
ensure that the Mercedarians would be allowed to continue this practice.
The ongoing process of secularization of the doctrinas throughout the
eighteenth century had severely affected Mercedarian finances in Peru,
along with that of the other mendicant orders.43 In 1751, Viceroy Manso
42. “ampliar o restringuir . . . según mejor les pareciese o tubieren por conveniente,” Arroniz,
Informe 45, Ms.
43. Kenneth Andrien, “The Coming of Enlightened Reform in Bourbon Peru: Secularization of the Doctrinas de indios, 1746–1773,” in: Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe
and its Atlantic Colonies, ed. Gabriel Paquette (Farnham, 2009), 183–202, here 190–99;
Keuthe and Andrien, “Clerical Reform,” 167–93.

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de Velasco began to implement a royal policy of removing native doctrinas
from the regular orders and putting Andean parishes under the control of
secular priests directly responsible to a bishop.44 The Mercedarians lost
considerable revenue as their doctrinas slowly were given over to secular
priests. Doctrina priests received generous salaries as well as tithes which,
if they were members of a religious community, they turned over to their
Order. Arroniz’s defense of the Mercedarians’ rights allowed them to maximize the income from Mass stipends in the face of their declining presence in the countryside. Both salaries and tithes represented fixed sums;
Mass stipends, however, were more flexible and provided a way to increase
revenues as long as the friars were not required to stick to a fixed, permanent schedule of Masses.
The Mercedarian strategy of offering Masses on a changing schedule
from year to year could explain the variation in the Rapaz khipu cords, in
which attachments that represented offerings, such as tassels and tufts of
wool, are repeated in variable sequences and inconstant numbers. The bendelhombre’s testimony that the Rapaz khipu is a “computus”—that is, a set
of yearly calendars of changeable feasts—fits with the archival evidence
concerning how Mercedarians celebrated saints days and other religious
festivals in remote communities like Rapaz.
V. Syncretism: Saints and Mountain Gods
Understanding Mercedarian pastoral history explains the variety of
Masses said in remote villages like Rapaz from year to year; however, the
question remains: why does the current ritual specialist and his inner circle
believe that offerings recorded on the Rapaz khipu computus were presented to the mountain peaks and not to Roman Catholic saints? It is likely
that this is due to the long tradition of syncretism in the Andes, in which
traditional local deities continued to be worshipped in the guise of reverencing saints. In Miguel de la Rinaga’s report on the veneration of the
saints that he prepared for the Sixth Lima Provincial Council, the Franciscan friar explained that Andean people continue to worship their local
deities during the Christian Mass.45 He described how images, such as the
Sun, and objects representing the native huacas were often placed near the
Tabernacle in highland churches so that all of the worship offered to the
saints would also be given to the autochtonous gods. Rinaga’s description
44. Kuethe and Andrien, “Clerical Reform,” 179.
45. Miguel de la Rinaga. Informe 48. Sixth Lima Council. Box 10, Ms 25, Duke University Special Collections (1772).

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indicates the extent to which the syncretism between Christianity and
Andean belief remained present in the eighteenth century, despite over a
century of efforts to suppress worship of native huacas.46
It must be noted that attempts to suppress Andean religious practices
were not shared equally among the religious orders in colonial Peru. The
Mercedarians enjoyed a much more accepting policy toward indigenous
Andean customs and people as demonstrated by their eagerness to welcome men of native descent into the order in Peru as full members, unlike
the Dominicans, Augustinians, and Franciscans. While the question of
ordaining men of native descent in Peru was a complicated issue, one of
the primary reasons that so many orders refused to do so was because of
fears that priests with an indigenous heritage would spread paganism.47
Prominent Mercedarians, such as the author Melchior Hernández, and the
Commander of the Lima house, Blas de Atienza, were well known to have
had native Andean mothers. The Mercedarian order was the only religious
order to advocate for the ordination of men of mixed descent during the
deliberations of the Third Lima Provincial Council in 1582. In contrast to
the Jesuits, who stopped accepting men of mixed native and Spanish
parentage once the Society became convinced that such men perpetuated
“idolatrous” customs, the Mercedarians were untroubled by accusations
that friars of indigenous descent supported Andean practices in highland
doctrinas. The Mercedarians’ relaxed attitudes toward syncretized religion
is also apparent in their hostility to the “extirpation of idolatry” campaigns
in the Peruvian viceroyalty.
Throughout the colonial period, periodic episcopal campaigns to extirpate “idolatry”—that is, the Andean traditions honoring the beings who
controlled the natural universe—shook the highlands.48 Extirpators rooted
out and destroyed images of the so-called Andean “idols” while punishing
those natives who maintained the huaca cults. The extirpation campaigns
enjoyed widespread support within the Church, especially among the
46. For an analysis of how this syncretism developed in the colonial period, see Peter
Gose, Invaders as Ancestors: On the Intercultural Making and Unmaking of Spanish Colonialism
in the Andes (Toronto, 2008).
47. Sabine Hyland, The Jesuit and the Incas: The Extraordinary Life of Padre Blas Valera
SJ (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003), 183–95; Sabine Hyland, “Illegitimacy and Racial Hierarchy in
the Peruvian Priesthood: A 17th Century Dispute,” Catholic Historical Review, 84.3 (1998),
431–54.
48. Nicholas Griffiths, The Cross and the Serpent (Norman, OK, 1996); Kenneth Mills,
Idolatry and Its Enemies (Princeton NJ, 1997); Joseph de Arriaga, SJ., The Extirpation of Idolatry in Peru, Translation and introduction by Louis Clark Keating (Lexington, KY, 2015).

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Jesuits, the secular clergy, the Dominicans, and to a lesser extent, the
Augustinians. Extirpators, outraged at the continuing presence of Andean
practices in Mercedarian doctrinas, often targeted Mercedarian friars,
whose missionary practices fostered syncretism. For example, in 1626
Archbishop Gonzalo de Campo conducted a visitation of the diocese of
Lima that led him to write a blistering report attacking Mercedarian practices in numerous doctrinas including Churín, Lampián, and Baños.49 The
Archbishop claimed that the natives in Mercedarian parishes knew little
about Christianity and practiced their ancient faith with scant interference
from the Mercedarian friars. He even excommunicated a Mercedarian in
Bombón who dared to defend his native parishioners against the Archbishop’s extirpators.
The Mercedarian provincial, Gaspar de la Torre, defended his Order’s
pastoral practices, explaining that the Archbishop had failed to distinguish
between actual idolatry and mere superstitions, which were found everywhere.50 The native practices were of little consequence, he asserted, and in
no way detracted from the belief in Christianity. The provincial’s attitude
echoed the sentiments expressed in one of the documents that distilled Mercedarian mission practice in the Andes: Friar Diego de Porres’s “Instructions,” written in the 1580s.51 Porres had served for years as a missionary in
Churín, in neighbouring Andajes, and elsewhere in the Central Andes; his
tract expressed his experience in these regions and included references to the
many ways in which khipus should be used within doctrinas. He concluded
by reminding his confreres that Christianity can be distilled into two concepts: the love of God and the love of neighbour, and that teaching these two
ideals should be the focus of their missions. In Porres’s theology, where these
ideals formed the fundamental focus of Christianity, any possible equivalence between the saints and sacred mountain peaks would be of minor concern. Within a theology that embraces syncretism, the costs associated with
the Mass, such as Mass stipends, the purchase of incense and candles, etc.,
can be seen as redounding to the glory of the huacas and the community’s
well-being. Moreover, villagers would be more likely to comply with paying
these stipends when each Mass focused on native entities and, therefore, the
prosperity of the entire community was at stake.
49. Dino León Fernández, Evangelización y control social en la doctrina de Canta, siglos
XVI–XVII (Thesis, University of San Marcos, Peru 2008), 137–38.
50. León Fernández, Evangelización y control, 138.
51. Diego de Porres, “Instrucciones . . . para los sacerdotes,” in: Los mercedarios en el
Perú en el siglo XVI, ed. Victor Barriga, OM, Volume 4 (Arequipa, 1954), 174–83; for a discussion of khipus in Porres’ Instrucciones, see Charles, Allies at Odds, 75–80.

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In general, the Mercedarians, with their inclusive approach and dedication to liturgical worship, seem to have built up a reservoir of good will
within the doctrinas. For example, in 1770, Alberto Yraso, a native alcalde
in Huamantanga, and eleven other indigenous authorities penned a letter
to the inspector, Francisco de Echevarria, complaining about the greed and
violence of their new secular pastor compared to the Mercedarian, Fray
Juan de Castañeda, who previously ministered to them. Now that the doctrina was no longer under Mercedarian control, they wrote, they were mistreated, mocked as “infidels” (“ynfieles”), and rarely had Mass.52 Positive
views of the Mercedarians were also expressed by the native official, Don
Manuel Joseph de Tello, in Atavillos Bajos in 1775. During Echevarría’s
inspection, Tello criticized the secular priest who had been assigned to
them, explaining that he visited only once a year to collect his tithes.
Therefore, Tello explained, the community had asked the Mercedarians in
Huamantanga to send someone to serve as their pastor; they were very
grateful to have Friar Ignacio de Escobar living among them, saying Mass
and serving their needs.53 This was not mere rhetoric; the Andean villagers
paid Escobar’s salary themselves and provided him with food and lodging
just so that they would have the friar available to minister to them.
VI. Khipus and Mass Stipend Accounting
Porres’s sixteenth-century instructions for how Mercedarians should
administer their rural doctrinas included a description of how to use khipus
attached to flat boards to indicate tithes and other obligations.54 This
device, the khipu board, spread throughout the Andes, to Ecuador to the
north and as far south as Chile; the Entablo, mentioned above, described
its presence in San Pedro de Casta in the Central Andes.55 The Mercedarian khipu board tradition continued into the twentieth century in San
Pedro de Pari (Ondores), which was founded as a Mercedarian doctrina in
the sixteenth century. In 1958, Federico Kaufmann Doig observed two
khipu boards hanging in the sixteenth-century colonial church in the village.56 Villagers’ names are inscribed on these large rectangular wooden
52. Echevarría, Visita Pastoral, Ms. Huamantanga, Peru, June 13 (1770).
53. Francisco de Echevarría, Visita Pastoral hecha por Echevarría contra Sebastián
Otarola, Atavillos Bajos, Ms. September (1775) British Library EAP333 1/2/161.
54. Porres, Instrucciones. 1953 [1572–1579].
55. On the Mercedarian use of khipu boards, see Sabine Hyland, Gene A. Ware, and
Madison Clark, “Knot Direction in a Khipu/Alphabetic Text from the Central Andes,” Latin
American Antiquity, 25:2 (2014), 189–97; and Hyland, Bennison, and Hyland, “Khipus,
Khipu Boards, and Sacred Texts,” (2021), forthcoming.
56. Federico Kaufmann Doig, Manual de Arqueología Peruana (Lima, 1983), 60-61.

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boards; next to each name is a hole through which a khipu cord hangs. Pastoral visitations in Pari in 1770 and 1775 mention the presence of similar
khipu boards in the doctrina at that time, suggesting the vital role that
these khipus played in the religious life of this Mercedarian parish.57
The evidence reveals that the Mercedarians also encouraged villagers to
employ khipus to record Mass stipends. In Andajes, the Mercedarian doctrina adjacent to Churin and Rapaz, khipus were used to record how many
Masses were offered along with the stipends owed.58 It appears that khipus
served a similar function in Rapaz and some of the other annexes in Churin.
In several instances, the diocese of Huacho archives preserve transcriptions
of the colonial ledgers that recorded the payment of Mass stipends. As
described below, an analysis of these ledgers reveals the existence of an
accounting gap in the Rapaz ledger book, in which crucial information
about which Masses were being said and for what price was never recorded
in writing. Yet in similar ledgers from more urban doctrinas, this data was
entered every time Mass was offered. The accounting gap in the Rapaz
ledger indicates some of the information that would have been kept on the
khipu computus, including very specific data about which Masses were said
in the community along with the stipends that the community paid.
It is worth noting that according to canon law the payment of fees for
Mass should be voluntary. In 1772, the theologians Juan Negrón and Ignacio de Ribera examined this issue for the Sixth Lima Provincial Council.59
While the two men agreed it would be undesirable to compel Indians to
pay Mass stipends under normal circumstances, they argued that there
were some conditions in which the payment of Mass stipends could be
made obligatory. One of these was when the compulsory payment of such
stipends already existed as a well-established custom; this, they asserted,
was the situation in Peru. In fact, the Lima archdiocese had determined set
stipends for different types of Masses, although individual doctrinas often
had their own customary stipends that predated the diocesan attempts at
regulation.60 The Baños “payroll” of Mass stipends for a typical Mercedarian doctrina shows four different levels of payments depending on the type
of Mass: 13 pesos, 4 reales; 9 pesos; 6 pesos; and 2 pesos, 2 reales.61
57. Huacho diocesan archives, EAP333/1/2/124 and EAP333/1/2/165.
58. Puente Luna, “Calendars,” 458–460.
59. Juan Negrón and Ignacio de Ribera, Informe 42. Ms. Sixth Lima Council. Box 10,
Ms 25, Duke University Special Collections, (1772).
60. Kydalla Young, Colonial Music, Confraternities and Power in the Archdiocese of Lima
(PhD thesis, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, 2010), 212–15.
61. Aspur, Visita pastoral, Ms. Concepción de Baños, (1774).

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By the eighteenth century, most Mass stipends in the countryside
were paid by native confraternities (“cofradías”), such as Our Lady of the
Nativity in Rapaz. The confraternities were endowed with livestock in
order to provide for all of the costs associated with Christian worship—
Mass stipends, candles, incense, wine, bread, oil, vestments, mules for
transporting goods, etc. Cofradías were required to keep a book containing
the confraternity constitution as well as a single entry running ledger listing
income received and income spent. In the doctrina of Ticllos, for example,
which was run by secular priests, the seventeenth-century confraternity
ledger survives for the rural village of San Miguel de Corpanqui.62 The
book states that don Cristóbal Suntur Machagua and other indigenous
officials founded the brotherhood in honour of Our Lady of Candelaria,
whom the “natives” (“naturales”) revere “for her protection and advocacy”
(“su proteción y abogada”). In the ledger portion of the book, there is an
entry for each time Mass was said, stating the amount of money that was
paid to the priest. A typical entry for the year 1665 says, “Received from
Alonso Culla and Martín de Quintana, mayordomos of Our Lady of the
Candelaria of this pueblo of Corpanqui, two pesos, two reales for a sung
Mass that I said . . . April 13, 1665, [signed] Father Juan de Salazar Montesinos.”63 A separate entry was made for each Mass that was celebrated,
interspersed with entries for other expenses, such as candles, and for
income from the sale of agricultural products. Other surviving confraternity ledger books record the Mass stipends in the same way, with a single
entry for each time Mass was offered with the amount paid to the priest.64
This reflects the single entry accounting found in hacienda ledgers and
other local financial records.
The confraternity records for Our Lady of the Nativity in Rapaz, however, contain a curious gap. In 1693 the Mercedarian in charge of the doctrina, Fray Nicolas Gutiérrez Solano, together with don Gonzalo Quispi
Huaman, the leading native authority (“indio principal”) in Rapaz, petitioned the courts for 500 pesos that a local landowner owed the confraternity.65 In the course of this complicated legal fight, the cofradía ledger
62. Libro de la cofradía de Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, San Miguel de Corpanqui, Ms.
(1653–1720) British Library. EAP333/1/1/15.
63. Ibid., “Recibí de Alonso Cullo y Martín de Quintana, maierdomos de N S de la Candelaria deste puo de Corpanqui dos pesos y dos reales de una Misa cantada que dixe,” Libro de la cofradia de Corpanqui, p. 18.
64. E.g. Libro de la cofradía de las Benditas Ánimas, San Cristóbal de Roca. Ms. (16671720) British Library. EAP333/1/1/25.
65. Nicolas Solano and Gerónimo Quispi Huaman, Autos sobre la recaudación de las
manadas. . .” Ms. (1693–1697), British Library. EAP/333/1/1/67.

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book was entered in full into the legal record. These records reveal just one
entry per year for all the Masses said in 1695: “I, Captain Diego Gamarra,
am obliged to give and to pay the Father Curate of this doctrina, Fray
Nicolas Gutiérrez Solano, one hundred and forty three pesos and three
reales for the Masses . . . for the year ’95 . . . [signed] Diego Miguel de
Gamarra.”66 This was a lump sum for all the Masses that Solano said that
year, including requiem Masses, Monday Masses and feast days with their
second Masses. There was no breakdown detailing each Mass said,
although such information would have been absolutely crucial so that the
cofradía would know what was owed to the priest. The Rapaz khipu cords,
described as yearly calendars of festival offerings, would have contained this
information, which was then recorded as a lump sum in the confraternity
ledger book at the annual settling of the accounts.
According to khipu expert Mariano Pumajulka, who described how
khipus were used in the Central Andean village of Anchucaya in the early
twentieth century, khipu accounts were settled at the end of the year in a
ritual called the “watancha,” a “ceremony that was done once a year and
whose principle purpose was to render the accounts, services, communal
labours given during the year.”67 When the author spoke with Mecias Pumajulka, Mariano’s grandson, Mecias explained that khipu accounts had to be
made “clean” (“limpia”) at the end of every year. By this he meant that all the
debts knotted onto the cords had to be settled at the end of the year so that
there was a “clean” cord for the New Year. Since communities that kept
khipu accounts settled them once a year, it makes sense that this is how the
Mass fee accounts would be paid when the fee information was recorded on
khipus; the annual lump sum payment of Mass stipends in colonial Rapaz
was in keeping with the nature of khipu accountancy in the Central Andes.
Khipus played an important role in local record-keeping in the Churín
doctrina and neighbouring regions throughout the period when the Mercedarians were present. For example, in 1725 diocesan inspectors interviewed a khipu expert from the Churín diocese—possibly from Rapaz
66. Ibid., “Digo yo, el Capitan Diego Gamarra, que me obligo de dar y pagar al Padre Cura
desta doctrina, Fr Nicolas Gutierrez Solano, ciento y cuarenta y tres pesos y tres reales procedidos de
las missas . . . del año de ‘95.” Solano y Quispe Huaman, p 37.
67. “ceremonia que se realizaba una vez al año y cuyo objeto principal era la rendición de las
cuentas, servicios, tareas comunales prestados durante el año.” Julio C. Tello, “Información suministrada por Mariano Pumajulka,” Ms. Archivo Tello, Centro Cultural de la Universidad de
San Marcos, Lima, Peru. Kipus, Paquete XXXIV (1935). See Sabine Hyland, “How Khipus
Indicated Labour Contributions in an Andean Village,” Journal of Material Culture, 21.4,
(2016), 490–509.

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itself. This individual possessed a khipu with detailed information about
every member of his kin group (“panaca”), including their names, status,
livestock, property, and communal labor obligations.68 Likewise, in nearby
Ambar in 1662, a pastor named Joseph Quispi kept all the accounts of the
church’s flocks on a khipu.69 Quispi’s khipu recorded both sheep and cattle,
including information on sex, age, how many were sold at what price, how
much money was used to pay the priest’s tithes, and that six reales came
from selling dried meat that Quispi prepared from cattle killed by pumas.
Khipus also appear to have been employed in an annex of Rapaz called
Huacho, (not to be confused with the coastal city of Huacho) to keep track
of confraternity livestock as well as Mass stipends. As part of Quispi
Huaman’s Rapaz lawsuit described above, Joseph Ticsi Huaman of
Huacho petitioned the bishop for relief from the tithes they owed.70 Ticsi
Huaman emphasized that his confraternity owned no account books whatsoever, yet he presented detailed accounting information about the cofradia
flocks, data that echoed Joseph Quispi’s khipu records in their categories
and detail. In his list of the confraternity’s assets and debts, Ticsi Huaman
included the Mass stipends that they had to pay—3 pesos 3 reales for their
patronal feast, plus 3 pesos 3 reales for the second Mass. The Andean
leader did not state explicitly that this data was derived from khipus, but in
the absence of any written accounts, it seems certain that this financial
obligation would have been knotted onto khipus.
The evidence shows that Mercedarians promoted the use of calendrical
khipus in doctrinas to indicate the Christian festivals that they celebrated,
as a way of ensuring the proper collection of Mass stipends. This was the
situation, for example, in Oyón, another rural annex of Churín, where the
ledger for the local confraternity reveals that Mass stipend entries were
written down only once a year. In this case, the Masses were grouped by
price. So, for example, in 1746, there is one entry for 13 sung Masses costing 3 pesos 3 reales each for a total of 30 pesos 3 reales, followed by another
entry for “daily Masses” at 3 pesos 2 reales each for a total of 40 pesos 5
reales, followed by other expenses.71 It is highly likely that the Oyón cofradia maintained khipu cords indicating each time Mass was said and for

68. Carlos Radicati di Primeglio, Estudios sobre los quipus (Lima, 2006), 303.
69. Juan Sarmiento de Vivero, Visita pastoral, Ambar, Peru, Ms. (1662), British Library,
EAP333/1/2/42, pp. 16–17.
70. Solano and Quispi Huaman, Autos, 23.
71. “Autos contra Fray Félix de Celis,” Ms. (1748–1750), British Library.
EAP333/1/1/93, pp. 80, 128–29.

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what price; these sums then were written into the ledger at the watancha,
revealing an integration of knotted and alphabetic accounting. If we examine the Rapaz khipus’ structures, can we gain insights into how such
stipends/offerings may have been coded on khipus, and what this would
reveal about the ancestors and the mountains?
VII. Khipu Calendars, Time, and the Ancestors
Writing at the close of the sixteenth century, the Mercedarian chronicler Martín de Murúa described how an Andean lord in Capachica had
created a khipu calendar of Catholic saints feasts at the request of a Mercedarian friar many years previously: “An old Indian kuraka had on a large
cord all of the Roman calendar and all of the saints and festivals they
kept.”72 This appears similar to the bendelhombre’s description of the large
single cords of the Rapaz khipus as a “computus” of annual feasts. Understanding the Mercedarian pastoral practices in remote annexes like Rapaz
during the colonial era would explain why the offerings recorded on the
Rapaz khipus varied so much from year to year; this history also suggests
the extent to which Rapaz villagers wanted to preserve their own records
of the expenses incurred throughout the festival year in the accounting
medium with which they were most familiar.
The Rapaz computus is not the only known post-Inka khipu calendar.
Historian José Carlos de la Puente Luna uncovered a written description of
calendrical khipus from 1857 created by native Andeans on a cattle ranch in
the Cuzco region.73 These khipu cords recorded information on the baptismal fees owed to the local Catholic priest. According to the actual
description, the calenders were single cords that each represented a month,
with each day shown by a knot, and special feast days indicated by extra
threads tied into the knot. This invaluable testimony reaffirms the idea that
calendrical khipus could be single cords, with added inclusions to indicate
festivals. An early twentieth-century Araucanian khipu calendar consists of
a single cord with knots indicating units of time.74 On Taquile island, the
twentieth-.century khipu expert, Nieves Yucra, created a khipu that
denoted the ten festivals of the annual calendar.75 The calendar was found
72. “[U]n indio curaca y viejo tenía en un cordel grande destos todo el calendario Romano y
todos los sanctos y fiestas de guarder,” Murúa, Códice Murúa, 77v.
73. Puente Luna, Calendars, 437–449.
74. Swedish Museum of Cultures, Quipu Knutkalender, 1929.24.0001.
75. Carol Mackey, “Nieves Yucra Huatta y la continuidad en la tradición del uso del
quipu,” in: Quipu y yupana, ed. Carol Mackey (Lima, 1990), 157–64.

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on a single pendant cord that formed part of a larger, Inka style khipu. The
calendrical khipu cord had ten knots to denote yearly festivals, with tassels
to signify the most important: Holy Cross = a white tassel; St John the Baptist = a purple tassel; Santiago = a red and white tassel. It is uncertain the
extent to which Catholic missionaries may have modified Andean khipu
traditions when the cords were adapted to the Christian calendar; Catholic
record-keeping practices may have adapted a pre-existing single cord
Andean calendar tradition, or may have altered khipu calendars in a more
fundamental way. Nonetheless, it seems clear that throughout the colonial
and Republican periods there existed a tradition of single cord khipu calendars in the Andes in which the Rapaz khipus apparently took part.
Research by Salomon and his team reveals that each of the Rapaz
khipus is comprised of a single cord made from alpaca or llama fibres, with
one group fashioned from sheep wool.76 Every khipu carries small objects
attached in varied sequences along their length, which is up to 15 meters
long. While the khipus are predominantly brown and/or white, some contain plies of blue and yellow. Salomon notes that the knots are limited to
overhand knots for attaching things; the meanings reside in the attached
objects themselves, not the knots. Attachments include: leather tags; pieces
of animal pelt; tufts of unspun animal fibre; and pompoms or tassels of
animal fibres.
The ritual specialist indicated to Salomon that the khipus represent
interactions with the divine mountain beings. Typically in the Andes such
interactions are expressed by humans giving offerings to huacas or “earth
beings” in an act of reciprocity. The attachments, therefore, appear to
record the offerings given throughout a calendar year. This certainly seems
to be the significance of the pieces of animal pelt. A similar tally of offerings—in this case presented to an estate owner rather than to the mountain
beings—comes from the Island of the Sun in Lake Titicaca, where ear tips,
with the fur still clinging to the hide, were attached to a single cord as a
record of the owner’s animals.77 Colonial ledger books indicate that
Catholic priests sometimes were paid in livestock rather than cash. Tufts
of unspun wool presumably signified offerings as well, with different Mass
stipends being indicated by tufts of different sizes and shapes. Other
attachments would indicate other expenses; ledger books from native confraternities record the purchase of candles, wine, hosts, linen, palm fronds,
76. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 148–83.
77. Smithsonian Museum, #E554325-0. The author is indebted to Dr. Christine Lee
for bringing this to her attention.

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FIGURE 6. The “soldier” in the Rapaz khipus. Photograph courtesy of the author.

and so forth, with most of these items being bought at irregular intervals,
and not always every year. Offerings, accompanied by songs and invocations, form a special kind of interaction that, as Salomon described, cause
“water, the stuff of life, [to] flow down the mountains to the ocean and up
again via the Milky Way to renew the cycle. Life emerging from the moistened surface of the earth gives of itself and its vital tokens to prime the circuit and attract flow toward itself. . . . Kaha Wayi [with its khipus] is the
pump house for Rapaz’s share of this system.”78
Ten human figurines are tied onto different cords, a unique feature of the
Rapaz khipus.79 Among them are little herdsmen carrying bags of coca for use
in sacred rites, an infant, a soldier in a blue coat, and a lady with a flowing
white skirt. The current ritual specialist considers each one to be “a humanlike avatar of a specific mountain,” gathered together on the khipus as a governing council.80 Earth-beings such as mountains are known to take human
form, appearing in dreams and visions. Given the high degree of syncretism
78. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 159.
79. Brezine, Dress, Technology and Identity, 75–122.
80. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 179.

SABINE HYLAND

145

FIGURE 7. Male figure with ritual coca bag under his poncho. Photograph courtesy
of the author.

in Andean Christianity, it is possible that each doll depicts a Catholic saint
who is also a mountain spirit or other sacred huaca. For example, the Virgin
of the Nativity, a major object of veneration in colonial Rapaz and the confraternity’s patroness, is often shown as an infant, while St. Martin of Tours,
hugely popular in colonial Peru, is pictured as a soldier (Figure 6).
By the eighteenth century, Rapacinos also enjoyed a special devotion
to St. Joseph, who is presented in the Christian nativity story as a powerful
mystic and dreamer not unlike Andean ritual specialists (Figure 7).
Other saints revered in eighteenth-century Rapaz include St. Christopher, St. Rose of Lima, and St. Anne, Christ’s grandmother.81 The lady in
white could be St. Anne, often shown in white as a sign of purity, who protects the childless, the pregnant, and the widowed (Figure 8).
Within Rapaz, Roman Catholic traditions and celebrations meld
seamlessly with belief in the power of the mountain peaks and the other
81. León, Visita, May 8, 1774.

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FESTIVAL THREADS

FIGURE 8. White skirt of the “Lady.” Photograph courtesy of the author.

huacas. As Salomon has written, “Andean ritual tradition . . . coexists easily
with Catholic Christianity.”82 The village church, visible from the Kaha
Wayi, maintains images of saints such as St. Christopher and St. Rose,
who are held in deep veneration and respect by Rapacinos. The feast of St.
Rose remains an annual highlight, celebrated with a pageant in which villagers dress as Inka emperors accompanied by their entourages of Andean
princesses (“pallas”) and soldiers. Embossed on the front of the Tabernacle
is an image of the sun, a symbol that perfectly blends the Christian token
of the Sun as Christ with Andean solar reverence, an example of syncretism
against which Rinaga warned in 1772.
As tangible proof of centuries of interaction between the ancestors
and the gods, the khipus of Rapaz physically manifest the central relationship that maintains human harmony with the sacred environment.
82. Salomon, Mountain’s Altar, 143.

SABINE HYLAND

147

Through the khipu calendars, time is no longer ineffable—it can be
seen, touched, and remembered, as proof of the continuing ties between
humans and the mountains. Even today, most homes in this region are
sanctified with old calendars that display photos of previous ceremonies
and village rituals, hung on the walls amidst crosses and images of
Christ and the Virgin. In the ritual space of the Kaha Wayi, such calendars live on, a corded computus “that orders everything, that determines
all that happens.”
VIII. Conclusion
The custodians of the Rapaz khipus in the Kaha Wayi have preserved
an oral tradition that claims that the cords are calendars detailing their
ancestors’ interactions with divine beings. The variation in the sequence of
attachments from cord to cord does not refute the idea that they are calendars. Rather, the changeable sequences fit the way that Mass was celebrated in the colonial past by Mercedarians in Rapaz, as revealed by documents from Huacho diocesan archives and the Sixth Lima Provincial
Council. The Mercedarian chronicler, Martín de Murúa, testified to how
members of his order created khipu calendars, which appear to have been
long single cords with attachments indicating the festivals that the native
people celebrated. Evidence from other khipu calendars suggests that the
Rapaz khipus may perhaps exemplify an established khipu tradition within
the colonial and Republican Andes.
In the Rapaz khipus, time is made tangible, an assurance of continuity
between the past and the future, humanity and the mountains. Instead of
representing a static delineation of sacred time, the calendars served as a
record of actual offerings, revealing in their varied structures the episodic
and intermittent nature of liturgical worship during the colonial era.

Book Reviews
LATE MODERN
Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the
Shaping of African Industrial Education. [Studies in World
Christianity] By Andrew E. Barnes (Waco, Texas: Baylor University
Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 205. $49.95 hard cover. ISBN 978 1481 3039.)
Pioneered by scholars such as Paul Gilroy and building on the work of
those focused on the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the examination of the
Atlantic as a geographical space of cultural exchange, identity construction,
and socio-political contestation has become one of the most significant loci
of study across disciplines. Andrew E. Barnes’ monograph, Global Christianity and the Black Atlantic: Tuskegee, Colonialism, and the Shaping of African
Industrial Education, participates in that conversation by analyzing the connections between Christian communities in primarily the U.S. with those
of Africa and their debates over the appropriate strategies for the improvement of the lives of African Americans and Africans. Ethiopianist Christianity became an arena in which the idea of industrial education was
adopted as a programmatic objective by which “racial uplift” would be
achieved on both sides of the ocean. Moreover, Barnes argues, “The industrial education movement served as a leading edge of the African challenge
to European conquest of Africa” (p. 6).
Barnes draws upon newspapers published in the British colonies of
Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Ghana (Gold Coast), and the sovereign country of
South Africa as his evidentiary base. He argues that Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute became models (real and imagined) that
would produce the kind of people leading to the recovery of African sovereignty and the development of fully modern African societies. As such,
Washington’s example proved that Africans (including in the diaspora) not
only could, but should lead the regeneration of African people. Barnes
aptly demonstrates that for brief moments the Tuskegee model was much
debated among European-educated Africans and efforts to transpose that
institution onto African soil were made by leading figures among the colonized intelligentsia, nearly all of which failed to even get off the ground.
Barnes also hints at a notable shift in the emergent nationalist conscious148

BOOK REVIEWS

149

ness of Western-educated Africans as they became unmoored from Christianity as an intellectual and organizational framework for envisioning the
future and contesting European power to one that was secular by the
1920s. However, Barnes ends his study at just that moment so the trajectory is not fully developed and we do not get insight into what happened
to the Ethiopianist communities after that point. Did Ethiopianists fade
from politics entirely and retreat into purely theological matters? Did they
accommodate with the colonial state in opposition to the secular nationalist movements? Some of these questions are explored by other scholars
such as James Patrick Daughton and Elizabeth Foster.
Throughout the book’s six chapters Barnes seems to make the case for
the need to focus on industrial or technical education as opposed to
“humanist” or liberal arts instruction. While this was one of the threads of
dispute within the Ethiopianist community of the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the author attempts to recover Washington’s legacy
and position him as a potential inspiration for anti-colonial resistance. I
remain unconvinced based on the evidence presented and knowing what
the colonial system actually did in Africa. The kind of technical training
pushed by Washington and others was largely embraced by the imperial
rulers to exploit the population and preclude the emergence of political
challenges to their domination. This outcome was precisely what William
Edward Burghardt Du Bois among others warned against and why they
pushed for a well-rounded education wherein students developed critical
thinking abilities, analytical skills, and intellectual flexibility that would
provide them with the capacity to adapt to changing circumstances and
understand the nature of the world in which they lived. Perhaps it is not so
tragic that the Tuskegee model was not transposed into Africa as a means
of resistance. It would only have widened the scope of complicity with
imperial rule and undermined the fight for liberation.
The Ohio State University–Marion

JAMES E. GENOVA

German Catholicism at War, 1939–1945. By Thomas Brodie. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 2018. Pp. xi, 275. $93.00 cloth. ISBN 9780-19-882702-3.)
What roles did Catholicism play in shaping Germans’ experiences and
understandings of World War II? Such is the question that Thomas Brodie
answers in this well-researched and well-written monograph, which
focuses on the Rhineland and Westphalia. These two regions represented
heartlands of German Catholicism and were homes to the archdiocese of

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BOOK REVIEWS

Cologne as well as the dioceses of Aachen and Münster. They were also
part of the Ruhr industrial belt, which was heavily bombed by the western
Allies during the war.
During the 1930s, the Nazi regime pursued increasingly hostile policies towards the Catholic Church. Nevertheless, at the outbreak of the war
in September, 1939, the Catholic hierarchy in western Germany urged the
faithful to fulfill their patriotic duty, though with less rhetorical enthusiasm
and nationalist fervor than their forebears had displayed in August, 1914.
They also expressed their hope for a swift end to the hostilities. While
Catholic bishops and theologians described the war as a divine punishment
for a secular and sinful humanity, Protestants saw the war as an opportunity to redeem the national disgrace of November, 1918, and prove the
nation worthy of divine favor. Between 1939 and 1941, this commitment
to the national war effort on the part of German Catholics expressed itself
in various ways: German bishops did not speak out against the atrocities
perpetrated against Polish co-religionists and the Jews; most Catholics
accepted the regime’s claim that the war was defensive in nature and
rejoiced at the news of the fall of France in June 1940.
As the war on the Eastern front and Allied bombing raids on the
German home front intensified between December, 1941, and June, 1944,
Catholics responded to these developments in complex and diverse ways.
On the one hand, bishops and priests appreciated the slackening of Nazi
anti-clerical policy; on the other, though clerical and lay support for the
war effort remained generally strong throughout 1942, the surrender of the
German Sixth Army at Stalingrad in February 1943 and the subsequent
advance of the Red Army placed real strains on the Catholic community’s
cohesion. Criticism of the Nazi authorities increased, as a result of these
military setbacks, and even Hitler’s own popularity showed signs of erosion. The final collapse of morale—defeatism—among Catholics occurred
only from the summer of 1944 onwards.
From the early stages of the war, the Nazi authorities imposed various
pressures on the Church’s resources, both in terms of personnel (extensively
recruited to the armed forces) and infrastructure (in the wake of Allied
bombing raids) that greatly hindered parish life. More specifically, did the
war years invigorate religious life in German society? Brodie’s answer is that
levels of religious engagement oscillated. Though the Neo-Scholastic language of episcopal pastoral letters did little to inspire the laity to greater
devotional efforts, religion helped sustain Germans’ morale and their perception of the war’s legitimacy, with women and the elderly at the forefront

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151

of Catholic religious practice. In particular, as rituals of individual bereavement and communal solidarity, funerals and memorial services mobilized
religious sentiments in large sections of the population. Brodie’s second thematic chapter (“The Catholic Diaspora—Experiences of Evacuation”) is
arguably his most original. As Allied bombing of the German home front
intensified from 1943 onwards, evacuation measures scattered Catholics
throughout the Reich. Such wide geographic dispersal resulted in the dislocation of parish life and, simultaneously, the emergence of great pastoral
challenges. Indeed, in these new surroundings, the makeshift living conditions experienced by many evacuated people, the widespread tensions with
the local population, the demonstrations of confessional hostility from
Protestants, the cultural divides between rural and urban areas, and the lack
of priests—all had a negative impact on the levels of religious engagement,
to the bitter disappointment of the clergy ministering in the diaspora.
Popular defeatism and alienation from the Nazi regime increased
during the final—and so destructive—stages of the war, with homes and
churches destroyed and traditional parish structures unravelled. Nevertheless, not only had the Catholic Church survived as an institution, it would
become an influential political and cultural force during the immediate
post-war period. Indeed, the Catholic Church benefited greatly from the
American and British occupiers’ assumptions that it had resisted Nazism.
Furthermore—and somewhat paradoxically, given the many fractures that
had existed between bishops, priests, and the laity—the clerical hierarchy
acquired considerable popular support after 1945 by positioning themselves as the defenders of German cultural and material interests, for example by confronting the Allies over accusations of collective German guilt,
the treatment of German prisoners of wars, and the expulsion of ethnic
Germans from the Reich’s former eastern territories. Such clerical influence, in turn, facilitated the emergence of Christian Democracy in postwar West Germany.
German Catholicism at War, 1939–1945, started its life as a Ph. D. dissertation at Oxford University and, unsurprisingly, it bears all the marks of
its birth: a superb grasp of the literature, a very dense narrative and some
unnecessary repetitions, the use of a wide range of source material (sermons, pastoral letters, visitation reports, diaries and letters, clerical discussions of popular opinion, documentation produced by Nazi agencies, and
reports of clergymen employed by the Gestapo), and a well-argued
thesis—that German Catholics’ mentalities as well as religious beliefs and
practices were intimately bound up with notions of patriotic duty and
hopes of German victory. Such dual loyalties accounted for the co-exis-

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BOOK REVIEWS

tence between the Nazi regime and what Brodie calls “a Catholic milieu”
(p. 15) anxious to preserve its place within the Volksgemeinschaft. An
informative and valuable contribution to the vast literature on the relationship between Catholicism and National Socialism and on World War II,
this study—the work of a quite promising young scholar—will appeal to
readers with an interest in the story of Catholicism, the relationship of
Church and State, or that of religion and war.
JEAN-GUY LALANDE

St. Francis Xavier University

ASIAN
Beyond East and West. By John C. H. Wu. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. Pp. xxv, 384. $27.00 paperback.
ISBN 978-0-268-10366-8.)
Over the recent decades, while there has been a growing interest in the
history of Chinese Catholicism, particularly in Late Ming and Early Qing,
not enough scholarly attention in the English-speaking world has been
given to Chinese Catholic elites in the twentieth century. Limited treatments include an edited book by Ruth Hayhoe and Lu Yongling on Ma
Xiangbo (1840–1939), who founded the Jesuit Aurora University in Shanghai in 1903, and Ernest Brandewie contributed to a monograph in 2007 on
Bishop Thomas Tian Gengxi (Tien Keng-hsin), S.V.D. (1890–1967), and
Paul P. Mariani in 2011 on Bishop Ignatius Gong Pinmei (Kung Pinmei)
(1901–2000). Given the scarcity of the academic outputs in the field, Chinese Catholic elites’ autobiographies, such as John C. H. Wu’s (Wu Jingxiong, 1899–1986) Beyond East and West, would be indispensable for us to
hear Chinese Catholics’ authentic voices in a turbulent century.
Originally published by Sheed and Ward—a Catholic publishing
house—back in 1951 and republished by University of Notre Dame Press
in 2018, Beyond East and West may be considered the only one of its kind in
terms of not only the original language—English—this Chinese Catholic
author used for writing but also the multiple identities he owned: Protestant-turned Catholic, professor of law, judge, lawyer, scholar (of jurisprudence, Chinese philosophy, literature, and religious studies), official of the
Nationalist central government in the Republic of China, Minister Plenipotentiary of the Republic of China to the Vatican (1947–49), friend of Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. (Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States),
Oriental philosophical mentor to—and correspondence partner of—
Thomas Merton (one of the most well-known Catholic writers of the twen-

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153

tieth century), and a father of thirteen children. Wu was also known as the
“Chinese [G. K.] Chesterton,” and this spiritual autobiography can be well
named, this reviewer claims, as the Chinese Augustinian Confessions.
While it consists of, as in the original edition, “A Note of Introduction” by the Catholic writer Francis Joseph Sheed (Sheed and Ward was
named after him and his wife Maisie Ward), two main parts with twentyone chapters plus a Prologue and an Epilogue, and Wu’s Explanations and
Acknowledgments, this new edition also includes both a long, helpful
Foreword by John Wu, Jr. (one of Wu’s sons), and an additional chapter,
“European Reminiscences,” that was left out in the original edition for reasons of space.
The book is arranged chronologically. It starts from the stories of Wu’s
birth, childhood, earlier formative education, and marriage in Ningbo city
around the turn of the twentieth century through the early Republican
period (Chapters 1–6), before turning to his conversion to Methodism in
1917 during his studying at the Comparative Law School (at Shanghai) of
the Methodist Soochow University (Chapter 7). As the narrative progresses, the reader will then follow him to the Michigan Law School at
Ann Arbor and later to the University of Paris in the early 1920s (Chapters
8–9). Upon his return to China in the mid-1920s, Wu became a law professor in his Alma Mater, before being appointed a judge in the newly born
“Shanghai Provisional Court” and then becoming a lawyer in the 1930s
(Chapters 10–11). Wu’s almost two decades of drifting away from the
Christian faith since his American period ended up converting to Catholicism in the winter of 1937 immediately following the outbreak of the SinoJapanese War (Chapters 12–15). The rest of the book then recounts his
wartime and postwar experiences, religious and secular, in Hong Kong,
Guilin, Chongqing, Shanghai, the Vatican City, and other more cities
across Europe, up until the year 1949 when the Communist took over
China (Chapters 16–21).
Wu’s life was entangled between the East and the West, Chinese religions and Western Protestantism/Catholicism, the secular and the religious, the material and the spiritual, and the scholarly and the political. In
the end, for Wu, “It is a mistake to regard Christianity as Western.” As he
went on to argue, “The West may be Christian (I wish it were more so),
but Christianity is not Western. It is beyond East and West. . . . It is more
native to me than the Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism in whose
milieu I was born. I am grateful to them, because they have served as pedagogues to lead me to Christ” (p. 12). One key thread that runs through

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the book is what this reviewer terms “theology of preparation.” That is,
Wu’s narrating of his own life was not only historical but also theological:
he interpreted all his Chinese upbringing, religious or secular, in one way
or another, as preparation for him to embrace the global Catholic faith in
his late thirties. To paraphrase what Lu Zhengxiang (also known as Dom
Pierre-Célestin Lou Tseng-Tsiang, O.S.B., 1871–1949) wrote about Wu’s
1949 Chinese translation of the New Testament, his life, just as his Chinese translation of the Bible, was “a living synthesis of the East and the
West” (p. 323). Another key thread is Wu’s search for a mother all his life.
The importance or lack thereof of Mariology may partly explain Wu’s reaffiliation from Protestantism to Catholicism. In Catholicism, Wu not only
found the Blessed Virgin Mary, but also had God and the Catholic
Church, as his mother. As he concludes, “these three Mothers have
merged into one Motherhood, in which I live, move and have my being”
(p. 244).
Overall, Wu’s religious autobiography is a must-have not only for
those in the field of Chinese Catholic history. It will also appeal to scholars
who are interested in interfaith dialogues, Sino-American and Sino-Vatican relations, and the legal, political, religious, intellectual, literary, and
translation history in China. To be sure, as autobiographical writing in
nature, Beyond East and West may not be critical enough in terms of scholarship and did not include the last four decades of Wu’s life. Yet it is indispensable for future research on a complete, analytical biography of Wu. Its
republication hopefully will stimulate such exploration.
College of Liberal Arts, Shantou University

ZHIXI WANG

Editor’s Report for 2020
Volume 106 of the journal consisted of 666 pages of articles,
addresses, essays, book reviews, brief notices, and the quarterly sections
Notes and Comments, Periodical Literature, and Other Books Received,
with an additional eight pages of preliminary material and thirty-seven
pages of the general index. In all volume 106 contained 721 pages. Subsidies from authors and contributions from others made directly to the journal allowed for the addition of pages above those budgeted. Professor Paul
F. Grendler of Chapel Hill, NC (emeritus of the University of Toronto)
has once again made a generous contribution.
Of the nineteen regular articles published, excluding the ACHA Presidental Address and the “Journey in Church History” essay, three treated a
medieval topic, five an early modern European, three a late modern European, four an American, two a Latin American, and one an African theme.
Eleven of their authors came from American institutions, the others from
Argentinian (2), Belgian (2), Chinese, French, Polish, and Tanzanian universities. In addition there was a Miscellany Essay, dealing with the late modern
period, that had contributions by three scholars from Russian institutions.
In 2020 the journal published twenty-one book reviews. The book
reviews can be subdivided into the following categories: general and miscellaneous (2), ancient (3), medieval (3), early modern (5), late modern (4),
American (2), and Latin American (2). Their authors came mostly from
institutions in the United States (15 or 71%), but those in other countries
were also represented (29%): in Germany (2), England (1), Japan (1),
Switzerland (1), and Vatican City (1). Please see Table 1.
TABLE 1. Book Reviews Published in 2020
Area
General
Ancient
Medieval
Early Modern
Late Modern
American
Latin American
TOTAL

Winter
2
3
2
3
2
1
2
15

Spring

Summer

1
1
1

0
155

3

Autumn

1
1
1
3

TOTAL
2
3
3
5
4
2
2
21

EDITOR’S REPORT FOR 2020

156

TABLE 2. Manuscripts Submitted in 2020

Area

Rejected or
Conditionally Withdrawn
Published
Accepted
Accepted
(W)
Pending in 2020 TOTAL

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

3
1
2
3
2
1

1

1

0

12

1
7
3
2
2
2
17

1
1

2

0
3
2
10
8
4
3
2
32

The paucity of book reviews published in 2020 is primarily attributed
to the Covid-19 epidemic. The university that houses the journal closed
down on-campus work activities and sent home students who assist in
positions around the university.
The editors received thirty-two new submissions of articles in 2020.
They came primarily from the United States, but also from Argentina,
Canada, China, France, Germany, Grenada, Ireland, Israel, Italy, and
Poland. Table 2 shows the current disposition of these submissions.
During the year 2020, seventeen articles submitted prior to 2020 were
accepted and published.
During 2020 the journal experienced serious staffing problems due to
safety measures taken as a result of Covid-19 and to other health problems.
We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding during this trying
period.
NELSON H. MINNICH
Editor

OBITUARY
Fra n k Jo h n C o p p a
(1 9 3 7 – 2 0 2 1)

Frank J. Coppa, who taught Italian and Catholic History at St. John’s
University in Queens, New York, passed away on January 13, 2021. Born
in 1937 in New York City, Coppa obtained his BA from Brooklyn College
in 1960 and went on to The Catholic University of America where he
earned the PhD in 1966. His dissertation there, under John K. Zeender
and funded in part with a Fulbright grant, concerned the work of Italy’s
pre-World War One Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti. Titled “Giolitti
and Industrial Italy: An Analysis of the Interrelationship between Giolitti’s
Economic Policy and His Political Program,” the Catholic University of
America Press published it in 1971 as Planning, Protectionism, and Politics
in Liberal Italy: Economics and Politics in the Giolittian Age. It was the first
of his twelve books. Beyond a biography of Count Cavour and a study of
the Italian Wars of Independence, Coppa devoted the balance of his booklength studies to aspects of the papacy, particularly the pontificates of Pius
IX and Pius XII. Much of his later work focused on the Holy See and the

164

NOTES AND COMMENTS

Jews and he became keenly interested in interfaith dialogue. Among those
later studies, his The Papacy, the Jews and the Holocaust: From NineteenthCentury Anti-Semitism to the Third Millennium, which the CUA press
published in 2006, earned him particularly glowing reviews. He also edited
or co-edited fourteen books beginning with the 1969’s (with Benjamin
Bast) From Vienna to Vietnam: War and Peace in the Modern World.
Frank Coppa joined the faculty of St. John’s University in 1965,
reached the full professor rank in 1979, and he remained there until his
retirement in 2010. Known as a charming and collegial figure among his
peers and students, Coppa served as Department Chair. He also
established and directed St. John’s doctoral program in World History.
Professor Coppa was a tireless worker and produced three more books after
his retirement, displaying an energy that St. John’s recognized when it
honored him in 2012 with Emeritus status.
Frank Coppa was also a long-standing and loyal member of the
ACHA, which chose to award him with its first Lifetime Distinguished
Scholarship Award at the 2011 meeting in Boston. Father Steven Avella,
the ACHA president at the time, remarked that the award honored
Coppa’s “contributions, which have fundamentally animated the research
of others, beside being significant in their own right.”
Coppa’s wife, Rosina, who often accompanied him to conferences,
survives him as do their daughters, Francesca and Molina, and two
grandchildren. Professor Dolores Augustine, a colleague and friend at St.
Johns, noted that Frank Coppa was not only “one of the most preeminent
scholars in the field of Catholic history, but, equally important, he . . .
contributed to a general spirit of collegiality in the History Department.”
The University of Scranton

ROY DOMENICO