THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 107

SPRING 2021

NO. 2

Saint Bernardino of Siena and Art:
Preaching and Baptism in Tuscany
NIRIT BEN-ARYEH DEBBY*
This paper deals with the views of the Franciscan preacher Saint
Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) on baptism and civic peace and the
associations he created between art and baptism and preaching. The
widespread building and decoration of baptisteries in Italy points to
the civic importance of that ritual in Italian cities. There was a close
connection between baptism and the sense of civitas: the sacrament of
Christian initiation also served to introduce an individual into the
Christian society of the city. Bernardino’s emphasis on the relationship
between baptism and civic peace followed a long-standing tradition in
mendicant preaching. The present study has two major sections: it
introduces Bernardino’s views on the arts and then suggests correlations between his ideas on baptism and the artistic program of the fifteenth-century baptismal font in the Siena baptistery created by
Lorenzo Ghiberti, Jacopo della Quercia, Donatello, and others. The
central issues concern the way Bernardino referred to works of art as a
way of making his sermons more approachable and graphic for his illiterate listeners and how his sermons may have influenced the decorative
program for the baptismal font in the Sienese baptistery.
Key Words: Saint Bernardino of Siena, baptism, fonts, preaching,
sermons

* Professor Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby is the Evelyn Metz Memorial Research Chair in
Art in the Department of the Arts of the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beer-Sheva,
Israel. Her email address is: nbad@bgu.ac.il. This research was supported by the Israeli Science Foundation Grant ISF 2018/630.

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I

n his Sienese sermons, the Franciscan preacher, Saint Bernardino of
Siena (1380–1444), compared administering the sacrament of baptism
with fulfilling the vocation of preaching; and he declared that whereas
every priest could perform a baptism, only the talented could undertake the
calling of preaching. As an example, he talked about St. Paul, who preferred not to baptize believers but to devote his energy to preaching the
Gospels.1 Bernardino’s intriguing comments serve to illuminate his perception of the relationship between preaching and baptism and suggest
that he himself clearly favored sermonizing.
This paper discusses first the way Bernardino used visual imagery to
communicate his political and religious ideals. It then turns to his views on
baptism as related to good citizenship and the suppression of partisanship.
Finally, it looks at the possible links between Bernardino’s views and the
design of the font in Siena’s baptistery.2 The article has two sections: it
introduces Bernardino’s views on the arts and then suggests the correlations between his ideas on baptism and the artistic program of the baptismal font in Siena baptistery created by Lorenzo Ghiberti, Jacopo della
Quercia, Donatello, and others. The central issues concern the way
Bernardino referred to works of art as a way of making his sermons more
approachable and graphic for the illiterate listeners and how his sermons
1. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, ed. Carlo Delcorno (Milan, 1989), II, 805–06: “[Pavolo] disse: non misit me Dominus baptizare, sed evangelizare: El Signore non ha mandato me perché io battezi, ma sì per predicare la sua parola; né
mai voles attendere per essercizio a batteggiare, benché alcuno elli ne batteggiasse. . . . Tu vedi
bene che ogni prite è atto a potere essere e sapere batteggiare, ma non ogni prete è atto a
potere essere a sapere predicare.”
2. On baptismal fonts, see Charles J. Wall, Porches and Fonts (London, 1912);
Edmund Tyrell Green, Baptismal Fonts: Classified and Illustrated (London, 1928); Carol
Cable, Water and Baptismal Fonts through the Ages: A Bibliography of Scholarship Dealing with
Stylistic, Design and Iconographic Aspects (London, 1985); Folke Nordstrom, Medieval Baptismal Fonts: An Iconological Study (Umea, 1984); Harriet M. Sonne De Torrens, “De Fontibus Salvatoris: A Survey of 12th and 13th Century Baptismal Fonts,” in: Objects, Images
and the Word: Art in the Service of the Liturgy, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton, 2003), 105–
37; Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens and Miguel A. Torrens, eds., The Visual Culture of Baptism
in the Middle Ages: Essays on Medieval Fonts, Settings and Beliefs (Farnham, 2013); Annmaria
Ducci and Marco Frati, eds., Monumenta: Rinascere dalle acque: spazie formi del battesimo nella
Toscana medievale (Pisa, 2011); Amy Bloch, “Baptism, Movement, and Imagery at the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence,” in: Meaning in Motion: The Semantics of Movement in
Medieval Art, eds. Nino Zchomelidse and Giovanni Freni (Princeton, 2011), 149–51; Amy
Bloch, “The Two Fonts of the Florence Baptistery and the Evolution of the Baptismal Rite
in Florence,” in: H. and M. Torrens, eds., The Visual Culture of Baptism, 77–104; Nirit BenAryeh Debby, “Nel mio bel San Giovanni, fatti per loco de’ battezzatori: Baptismal Fonts in
Tuscany,” in: Ibid., 11–30.

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may have influenced the decorative scheme for the baptismal font in the
Sienese baptistery.
The ritual purpose of baptismal fonts accounts for their formal appearance—and that should be viewed in regard to the prevailing social, political, and cultural milieu.3 The importance of these structures is apparent
from the splendor evident in many of those that have survived and by the
eminence of the artists commissioned to design them. This article undertakes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of these baptismal fonts by
combining historical analysis, sermon studies, and art history.4 It first
introduces Bernardino’s views on the visual arts and his activities as a
peacemaker and then discusses the parallels between his ideas and the baptismal font in Sienna. It suggests that Bernardino perceived baptism as an
important civic ritual and as a symbol of reconciliation; then, on a more
concrete level, it explores the notion that his theological views reflected
specific parallels with the design of the Sienese baptismal font. That font
was the first constructed in a novel way wherein a tabernacle was added to
the traditional basin, which made a new visual and liturgical statement that
linked the sacraments of the Eucharist and Baptism.
Bernardino began his activity as an itinerant preacher is 1417, but his
most influential cycles in Siena were delivered in 1425 and 1427. The font
was constructed in three stages between 1416 and 1431. The first phase,
from 1416 to 1422, saw the preliminary discussions and plans drawn for
the basic and simple design and the commissioning of the sculptures for
the basin. In the second stage, which lasted from 1423 to 1427, Lorenzo
Ghiberti, Giovanni Turni, and Donatello executed the reliefs. In the third
and most innovative phase, 1427 to 1434, Jacopo della Quercia built the
marble tabernacle and Donatello and Giovanni di Turni added the Virtues
to the basin and the putti to the tabernacle. The latter was hexagonal in
shape and included five reliefs of the prophets, a small bronze door, and six
dancing putti in bronze; the monument itself was crowned with a sculpture
of John the Baptist. The year 1427 saw Bernardino’s most important
3. See Timothy Verdon and John Henderson, ed., Christianity and the Renaissance:
Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento (New York, 1990). This approach is exemplified in the work of Timothy Verdon, considering more closely the relationship between
liturgy and preaching and the decoration of Renaissance churches.
4. See Timothy Verdon, “Parola, acqua, immagine e spazio: il pulpito e il fonte battesimale,” in: Il Duomo come libro aperto, ed. Senio Bruschelli (Siena, 1998), 107–26; Timothy
Verdon, “Pulpiti e fonti battesimali in Toscana,” Ibid., 137–56; Timothy Verdon, “Verbum
caro factum: Teologia, Spiritualità et Iconografia del Pulpito Istoriato,” in: Pulpiti Medievali
Toscani: Storia e Restauri di Micro-Architetture, ed. Daniela Lamberini (Florence, 1999), 17–29.

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FIGURE 1. Sano di Pietro, Sermon of San Bernardino in the Campo, Siena Museo
Capitolare (Photo: Author)

preaching cycle in Siena and was also a crucial time for the design and construction of the baptismal font, as it was then that the five reliefs and the
construction of the tabernacle were completed.
Saint Bernardino of Siena: The Visual Arts and Peacemaking
Saint Bernardino of Siena was an important reformer of the Franciscan Observant Movement and an itinerant preacher, who spent his life
moving around northern, central, and southern Italy.5 Although he was
often opposed, particularly by preachers from rival orders, he was generally
admired and was declared a saint in 1450, only a few years after his death.
As he devoted his life to preaching, Bernardino’s literary legacy comprises
his Latin sermons and Italian and Latin reportationes, most of which are
now available in modern editions. His most famous cycles of sermons are
5. See Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian Communes, 1125–
1325 (Philadelphia, 2005), 5–10, 28–37.

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FIGURE 2. Sano di Piero, Sermon of San Bernardino in the Piazza San Francesco,
Siena Museo Capitolare (Photo: Author)

the quaresimale, a series of sermons for each day of Lent, delivered in Florence in 1424 and 1425 and in Siena in 1425 and 1427 (Figs. 1 and 2).6
Bernardino’s sermons relied on visual imagery to convey his moral and
theological messages.7 For his famous new devotion to the “Holy Name of

6. On Bernardino da Siena’s preaching techniques see Carlo Delcorno, “L’ars praedicandi di Bernardino da Siena,” in: Atti del simposio internazionale Cateriniano-Bernardiniano
(Siena, 1980), 419–49; Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the
Social Underworld of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago, 1999), 21–29.
7. Creighton Gilbert has published an anthology of translated passages that detail religious views of the arts in the Renaissance. See Creighton E. Gilbert, Italian Art, 1400–1500:
Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1980), 145–59. See also the Italian version of
the anthology, Creighton E. Gilbert, L’arte del Quattrocento nelle testimonianze contemporanea
(Florence, 1988). See also Gilbert’s study, “The Archbishop on the Painters of Florence,
1450,” Art Bulletin 41 (1959), 75–87, giving the views of Archbishop Antoninus (1389–1459)
on the arts as they appear in his Summa Theologica. On Antoninus’ perceptions of art, see also
Fredrick Hartt, A History of Italian Renaissance Art (London, 1970, rev. 1980); Peter Howard,

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Jesus” (Il Nome del Gesù), he designed a tablet (a tavoletta) with the letters
IHS surrounded by rays of light against a blue background, which was
based on a symbol that had mystical origins in the thought of earlier Franciscans. The monogram was a useful tool for helping the preacher in his
efforts to achieve civic peace in the Italian city. He exhibited it during his
sermons in the hope that it would lead his audiences to brotherhood.
Bernardino also introduced a devotion centered on this monogram, which
led his opponents to accuse him of heresy. His most prominent critic was
the Augustinian friar Andrea Biglia, who wrote a book about Bernardino
in which he warned against the devotion’s dangers and claimed that
Bernardino advocated ideas associated with magic to enhance his influence
on simple people.8
Bernardino devoted entire sermons to promoting the devotion, and
these were generally followed by an outpouring of people kissing the
monogram, weeping, and hugging one another:
Having said so, Friar Bernardino, ardent in the love of the Holy Spirit and
of Jesus . . . pulled out a tavoletta about the size of an arm, on every side
of which Il Nome del Gesù was figured against a blue background, with the
letters [of the name] inside rays of gold. All the people in the church,
kneeled and uncovered their heads, and cried with the tenderness of
[their] love for Jesus, and with great devotion adored and worshipped it.9

In his sermons, Bernardino justified the creation of the tablet and his
use of visual images to evoke devotion. He explained that there are three
ways of coming to know God: the first is figurale, through the painted
images by which the simple people could believe; the second is letterale,
through books and letters by which the learned might believe; and the
third and highest is the mental recognition achieved through intuition. The
visual image, he said, could convince people to believe; but he warned his
listeners against adoring figures because of their colors and their gold,
rather than for what they signified. Yet art was very useful as the visual
Beyond the Written Word: Preaching and Theology in the Florence of Archbishop Antoninus 1427–
1459 (Florence, 1995), 2–3.
8. On Bernardino’s cult of Il Nome del Gesù, see Daniel Arasse, “Entre dévotion et
hérésie: la tablette de Saint Bernardin ou le secret d’un prédicateur,” Res 28 (1995), 118–39.
9. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—uaresimale Fiorentino del 1424, vol. 2, ed.
Ciro Cannarozzi (Pistoia, 1934), 213–14: “Detto questo frate Bernardino, ardente d’amore di
Spirito Santo e dell’amore di Gesù . . . cavò fuori una tavoletta di circa a uno braccio per ogni
verso e in essa figurato el nome di Gesù nel campo azzurro, con uno razzo d’oro con lettere
intorno. Tutto el popolo, che era piena la chiesa, inginocchione, senza nulla in capo, tutti
piangendo di tenerezza dell’amore di Gesù, e per grande divozione adorandola e reverendolo.”

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image might have well helped viewers remember Mary and the other
saints, all of whom could move them to true love: “He who does not know
how to read well, when he sees a painted figure, recognizes it and reads it
in a manner in which he can read.”10
In this approach, Bernardino reiterated ecclesiastic traditional views
that considered art a useful tool for educating the illiterate. The Church had
an ambiguous attitude toward the fine arts. There was suspicion that the arts
were a form of idolatry, while at the same time, there was recognition of
their merits as a didactic tool to instruct the ignorant. Pope Gregory I (r.
590–604) defended this religious stance.11 In the High Middle Ages, there
was a growing concern that people might direct their prayers to the actual
works of art instead of to the saint or holy figure depicted there. In the view
of Thomas Aquinas (1226–74): “Religion does not offer worship to images
considered as mere things in themselves but as images drawing us to God
incarnate. Motion to an image does not stop there at the image but goes on
to the thing it represents.” Other views appear in the Catholicon of Johannes
Balbus (d.1298), which was popular in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century
Italy. Accordingly, an image had three functions: the first was to instruct the
ignorant and the illiterate, the second was to keep alive the memory of the
mysteries of the faith and the examples of the saints, and the third was to
act as a means of inspiring devotion.12 These traditional opinions heavily
influenced the views of fifteenth-century Italian preachers.
Preachers’ use of the arts was grounded in their perceptions of their
vocation. Preaching is a mode of communication between a charismatic
individual and his audience, a means of delivering a religious message to
them. The preacher’s task is to guide his listeners in religious matters and
in their lives; he wishes to popularize his religious ideals aiming to convince
them to repent.13
10. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—Predicazione del 1425 in Siena, vol. 1, ed.
Ciro Cannarozzi (Florence, 1958): 195: “Figurale si è dipintura; letterale, mentale. La dipintura si è per genti grosse; vuolselo fare riverenza. Uno dubio si muove, se si debbano adorare
le figure, le quali ànno più cose: azzuro, oro e colori. Tu non puoi errare a far lo’ riverenza,
come tu debbi per lo significato che ti rappresenta, però che se è Maria, vedendola, te ne
ricordi; così d’uno altro santo, però che ti fanno muovere al vero amore. . . . Chi non sa leggiare, pure, quando vede dipenta una figura conosce e legge in quello modo che può leggiare.”
11. For a survey of the Church’s traditional perceptions of the fine arts, see Evelyn
Welch, Art and Society in Italy, 1350–1500 (Oxford, 1997), 133–66.
12. Welch, Art and Society, 137–38.
13. The literature on the complex role of preachers and on the nature of medieval sermons is vast. For a useful survey of the relevant studies, see Phyllis Roberts, “Sermon Studies

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The preacher’s use of the arts in his preaching depends on various
moral and pragmatic considerations: whether art is in accordance with theology, whether it is good for the Christian soul, whether from a pragmatic
perspective works of art are useful as didactic instruments and transmit a
religious message in an instructive manner. A preacher might view art negatively, seeing artists as rivals and fearing the dangers in art; or he might be
aware of the surrounding artistry of his preaching location and allude to
works of art in his sermons. Bernardino preached according to the rules of
the sermo modernus, a traditional literary genre with fixed rules and a stylistic heritage. Within this traditional frame, a preacher could integrate references to works of art whose images and stories (exempla) were intended
to arouse delight and interest (dilitatio).14 One should believe in what a
picture represents, he said in another sermon, and its meaning in eternity.15
Bernardino’s sermons should be evaluated in the context of a growing
interest in the interrelationship of art, performance, and preaching.16 An
especially stimulating subfield links preaching with art and verbal and
visual culture, and Rusconi has been exploring the iconography of preachers in Italian art.17 Another approach is to examine a theme that appears in
both sermons and in works of art, as Katherine Jansen does in her book on
the image of Mary Magdalen in the later Middle Ages.18
Scholarship: The Last Thirty-Five Years,” Medieval Sermon Studies 43 (1999), 9–19; Anne T.
Thayer, “Medieval Sermon Studies since the Sermon: A Deepening and Broadening Field,”
Medieval Sermon Studies 58 (2014), 12–29. See also David D’Avray, The Preaching of the
Friars: Sermons Diffused from Paris before 1300 (Oxford, 1985); Carlo Delcorno, La predicazione nell’età communale (Florence, 1974); Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “The Typology of the
Medieval Sermon and Its Development in the Middle Ages,” in: De l’Homélie au sermon: Histoire de la Prédication Médiévale, eds. Jacqueline Hamesse and Xavier Hermand (Louvain-laNeuve, 1993), 83–102; Beverly Mayne Kienzle, “Preaching as a Touchstone of Orthodoxy
and Dissidence in the Middle Ages,” Medieval Sermon Studies 43 (1999), 19–54; Beverly
Mayne Kienzle, ed., The Sermon (Turnhout, 2000); Carolyn Muessig, ed., Medieval Monastic
Preaching (Leiden, Boston, Cologne, 1998); Roberto Rusconi, Predicazione e vita religiosa
nella società italiana da Carlo Magno alla Controriforma (Turin, 1981).
14. On the distinctions among collections of sermons, see Louis Jacques Bataillon,
“Approaches to the Study of Medieval Sermons,” Leeds Studies in English 11 (1980), 19–35.
15. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgariPredicazione del 1425 in Siena, vol. 1, 118:
“E così della figura dipenta, adora quello che ti dimostra e significa, che è in vita eterna.”
16. On preaching and art, see Charles Carman, Leon Battista and Nicholas Cusanus:
Towards an Epistemology of Vision for Italian Renaissance Art and Culture (Farnham, 2014), 83–
111; Patricia Lee Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven,
2007), 183–96.
17. See Roberto Rusconi, Immagini dei predicatori e della predicazione in Italia alla fine
del Medioevo (Spoleto, 2016).
18. See Katherine Ludwig Jansen, The Making of the Magdalen: Preaching and Popular
Devotion in the Late Middle Ages (Princeton, 2000).

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Michael Baxandall highlights the significance of preaching for understanding Italian Renaissance art, contending: “Sermons were a very important part of the painter’s circumstances: preacher and picture were both part
of the apparatus of a church, and each took notice of the other.”19 A challenging task is to address directly the connections between verbal and visual
rhetoric. In The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from Its Origins to St.
Bernardino da Siena, Lina Bolzoni studies the links between the Renaissance
art of memory and the strategies of medieval preaching and explores the relationship between several different works of art and the rhetoric of
preaching.20 Peter Howard relates to the complex interactions between art
and preaching in Renaissance Florence, and Pietro Delcorno writes at length
on performance and preaching in Italy and their relation to visual culture.21
Bernardino’s most original approach to the use of art in preaching was
that he described specific artworks in his sermons. Referencing works of art
was an integral part of his philosophy and practice of preaching. He is
well-known for his innovative and original use of colorful exempla within
the framework of the sermo modernus, which included attractive narratives,
imaginative stories, charming images, and descriptions of works of art. His
philosophy of preaching was that the preacher’s essential aim should be
clarity of speech: “I tell you it is important to say and preach the doctrine
of Christ in a mode that everyone will understand. Our preaching must be
intelligible. Do you know how? To speak clearly, clearly, so whoever listens, will go his way contented and illuminated and not confused.”22 On
19. See Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford,
1988), 48; Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures
(Oxford, 1985); Michael Baxandall, Words for Pictures (New Haven, 2003).
20. See Lina Bolzoni, La rete delle immagini: Predicazione in volgare dalla origini a
Bernardino da Siena (Turin, 2002); Lina Bolzoni, The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from
its Origins to St. Bernardino da Siena, trans. Carole Preston and Lisa Chien (Farnham, 2004).
21. See Peter Howard, “The Aural Space of the Sacred in Renaissance Florence,” in:
Roger J. Crum and John T. Paoletti, eds., Renaissance Florence: A Social History (New York,
2006), 376–93; Peter Howard, “‘The Womb of Memory’: Carmelite Liturgy and the Frescoes
of the Brancacci Chapel,” in: The Brancacci Chapel: Form, Function and Setting, ed. Nicholas
Eckstein (Florence, 2007), 177–206; Peter Howard, “The Language of Dives and Lazarus:
Preaching Generosity and Almsgiving in Renaissance Florence,” I Tatti Studies 23.1 (2020),
33–51; Pietro Delcorno, “‘We Have Been Made for Learning’: The Fifteenth Century Florentine Religious Play Lazero ricco e Lazero povero as a Sermon in the Form of Theatre,” in:
From Words to Deeds: The Effectiveness of Preaching in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli (Turnhout, 2014), 65–98; Pietro Delcorno, In the Mirror of the Prodigal Son:
The Pastoral Uses of a Biblical Narrative (c. 1200–1550) (Leiden, 2016).
22. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 144: “Io dico
che a voi bisogna dire e predicare la dottrina di Cristo per modo che ognuno la intenda . . .

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another occasion, he explained: “The art of speaking is the highest in the
heavens and beyond the stars . . . but it is the language of men, meaning
that speech should be clear, understood by everyone. Therefore those
speakers or preachers should not be condemned who in order to demonstrate lofty ideas to us, do so with unrefined and folksy tales, since this is
the art of speaking clearly.”23 Bernardino’s use of artworks in his sermons
was another rhetorical device to help convey his religious message in a
more efficacious way.
The most common references to works of art appear in the sermons
Bernardino delivered in Siena in 1425 and 1427. For example, he noted
that he had visited the image of the Virgin Mary in the painting of her
Assumption on the Porta Camollia every day, as he could not sleep at night
without seeing her face. Often, he introduced the setting of his preaching
events into his sermons, describing the works of art in the Duomo (Cathedral) or in the Palazzo Pubblico (Communal Palace) in the Piazza del
Campo—the places where he spoke. He gave his listeners tours of the
Palazzo Pubblico; of the Sala dei Nove, the room of the Council of Nine;
and of the Sala del Gran Consiglio (Mappamondo room, the Hall of the
Great Council) and described the paintings of the fourteenth-century
Sienese masters Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini in detail and
with a keen eye.24
Bernardino used art as didactic tool and as a way to interest his audiences and lead them toward devotion. An engaging example is the altarpiece of the Annunciation depicted by Simone Martini, which was originally in the Cathedral. Bernardino referred to this beautiful painting to
encourage young girls to be modest:
You see she [the Virgin] does not gaze at the angel but sits with that
almost frightened pose. She knew well it was an angel, so why should she
be disturbed? What would she have done if it had been a man? Take her

elli bisogna che ‘l nostro dire sia inteso. Sai come? Dirlo chiarozzo chiarozzo, acciò che chi
ode, ne vada contento e illuminato, e none imbarbagliato.”
23. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgariQuaresimale Fiorentino del 1425, vol. 1, ed.
Ciro Cannarozzi (Florence, 1940), 263: “L’arte de’ dicitori si è le cose alte de’ cieli e delle
stelle . . . però dice: con lingua d’uomini, cioè ch’ella sia sì chiara parlatura, ch’ella sia intesa
da tutti gli uomini; e però non sono da biasimare i dicitori e predicatori che, per mostrarti le
cose alte di sopra a noi, il faccino con essempli grossi e palpabili, che quella è l’arte del dire
ben chiaro.”
24. See Enzo Carli, “Luoghi ed opere d’arte senesi nelle prediche di Bernardino del
1427,” in: Bernardino predicatore nella società del suo tempo: Atti del Convegno (Todi, 1976),
155–82.

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as an example, girls, of what you should do. Never talk to a man unless
your father or mother is present.25

Bernardino related to the Virgin as portrayed there as a model of
chastity and modesty, which the girls should imitate. On other occasions,
he elaborated on other works of art located in Siena’s principal churches
and public buildings. He talked about the Lorenzetti’s paintings, now
almost entirely lost, that were hung in the chapter house of the Convento
di Santo Agostino in Siena. He referred to the four winds (venti) shown in
the frescoes, which provided a stylistic device that separated the parts of his
sermon.26 Elsewhere, he discussed the world map, now nearly illegible,
painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the Sala del Mappamondo in the
Palazzo Pubblico and remarked on the greatness of Italy.27
The most common references to visual images in Bernardino’s sermons were his allusions to Lorenzetti’s frescoes in the Sala dei Nove, the
meeting hall of the Council of the Sienese Republic in Siena’s Palazzo
Pubblico, painted in 1338–1340.28 The layout of the Sala dei Nove was as
follows: Turning one’s back to the window, one found on the left the
fresco War/Allegory of Bad Government and Its Effects, which depicts scenes

25. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 870: “Vedi ch’
ella non mira l’Angiolo; anco sta con uno atto quasi pauroso. Ella sapeva bene ch’ elli era
Angiolo: che bisognava ch’ella si turbasse? Che arebbe fatto se fusse stato uno uomo! Pigliane
essemplo, Fanciulla, di quello che tu debbi fare tu. Non parlare mai a uomo, che non vi sia
tuo padre o tua madre presente.” The translation is from Gilbert, Italian Art, 147. The painting of the Annunciation is from 1333; Simone Martini painted the altarpiece of S. Ansano nel
Duomo, which is today in the Uffizi.
26. Bernardino da Siena, Predicazione del 1425, vol. 1, 42–43: “E sai quali sono questi
venti? Io tel vo’ dire, e ricordomi che già li vidi nel Capitolo di Santo Augustino, et è buono
tempo che io li vidi.” See also Bernardino, Prediche 1427, vol. 1, 132: “Sai come è colassù a
Santo Augustino in Capitolo quelle dipenture con quelli quatro venti da quatro parti, e quali
so’ questi quatro venti ch’io ti dico.” One fresco of the Virgin and Child with Saints survives
in the former chapter house, now the Cappella Piccolomini. See also the note provided by
Delcorno (n. 133).
27. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, ed. Delcorno, vol. 2,
1145: “Doh, dimmi: hai tu veduta Italia come ella sta nel Lappamondo? Or ponvi mente: ella
sta proprio come uno ventre.” See also the note 41 provided by Delcorno.
28. On the Lorenzetti frescoes, see Chiara Frugoni, Una lontana città: Sentimenti e
immagini nel Medioevo (Turin, 1983), 136–210; Nicolai Rubinstein, “Political Ideas in
Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo
Pubblico,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1959), 179–207; Randolph
Starn, Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Palazzo Pubblico—Siena (New York, 1994); Nirit Ben-Aryeh
Debby, “War and Peace: The Description of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Frescoes in St.
Bernardino’s Sermons in Siena 1425,” Renaissance Studies, 15. 3 (2001), 272–86.

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FIGURE 3. Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Sala dei Nove (Photo: Author)

of destruction and violence, the reign of fire and death over city and country.29 On the far wall was the Allegory of Good Government, with allegorical
representations of the Virtues. On the wall to the right was Peace or the
Effects of Good Government, showing scenes reflecting calm and prosperity
(Fig. 3).
Bernardino’s references to these works of art were sometimes brief and
vague,30 and his allusions were sometimes very general, for instance: “You
have [seen] here, painted above in your Palazzo, images of peace that are a
delight to observe. And thus too it is a darkness to see war painted on the
other side.”31 But he also alluded to specific figures, such as the portrayal
of Charity in the fresco Peace or of Tyranny in the fresco War, or even
29. The present condition of the fresco War/ Bad Government is particularly poor,
which may explain why this painting has not received more critical attention from modern
scholars.
30. Bernardino’s allusions to these images are discussed by Delcorno in his introduction
to the 1427 edition of Bernardino’s sermons. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul
Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 21–22, and the detailed notes in this critical edition.
31. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 1254, n. 211:
“Doh, voi l’avete dipenta di sopra nel vostro Palazzo, che a vedere la Pace dipenta è una allegreza. E così è una scurità a vedere dipenta la Guerra dall’altro lato.” The translation is from
Gilbert, Italian Art, 147.

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quoted directly from the inscription under Justice that appeared in Peace.32
He spoke about buildings destroyed, vines burned down, and trees on fire,
based on the episodes shown on the fresco War and praised the prosperity
of agriculture and trade as seen in Peace. He used these colorful allusions to
demonstrate the benefits of peace and the evil consequences of war.33
The most comprehensive account of these artworks appears in the
sermon “Concord and Unity That We Must Have Together,” which he
delivered in Siena in 1425 in the context of a peace ceremony, when he
commented on the frescoes hoping to convince his audience to reconcile
and restore civic peace to the city:
Second. The destruction and waste of war. When I was outside of Siena,
and preached about peace and war, I reflected on the beautiful inventiveness of the [frescoes Peace and War] that you painted. When I turn to
peace, I see commercial activity; I see dances, I see houses being repaired;
I see vineyards and fields being cultivated and sown, I see people going
to the baths, on horses, I see girls going to marry, I see flocks of the
sheep, etc. And I see a man being hanged in order to maintain holy justice. And for this [reason] everyone lives in holy peace and concord. On
the other hand, when I turn to the other [fresco], I do not see commerce;
I do not see dances, [I see] killing; no houses are being repaired, [they
are] damaged and burnt; the fields are not being cultivated; the vineyards
are cut down; there is no sowing, the baths are not used nor [are there]
other delights, I do not see anyone going out. Oh women! Oh men! The
man is dead, the woman raped, the herds are prey [to predators]; men
treacherously kill one another; Justice lies on the ground, her scales
32. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 311, n. 76: “In
ogni modo che tu parli, fa’ che sempre tu parli con carità. . . . E come vedi che l’amore si
dipegna tutto focoso perché è caldo. . . .” Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di
Siena 1427, vol. 1, 504, n. 150: “Sai che ci è detto per bocca di Dio di questi diavoli incarnati,
che non vogliono il ben vivere, ma il tirannesco vivare, ognuno a furare e sforzare chi eglino
possono?” Bernardino alluded to the figure of Tyranny that appears in War and Peace. For the
inscription attached to the figure of Justice, see Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul
Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 710, n. 2: “Diligite iustitiam qui iudicatis terram”: “love justice
you who rule the earth,” the thema of the sermon.
33. For scenes from War, see Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena
1427, vol. 1, 670, n. 132: “Io n’ho veduti tanti danni! Arse case, sì nelle città e sì nel contado,
che quasi non è rimasto niuna in luogo etc., e le vigne tagliate, bosci e selve arse, insino alle
chiese; menato via il bestiame, consumate le ricchezze grandissime per lo mantenere le
guerre.” For scenes from Peace, see Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena
1427, vol. 2, 978–79, n. 123: “Solo per la pace che tu hai auta le vigne so’ state lavorate e hai
del vino in abondanzia. Simile, i poderi per lo lavorare t’hanno renduto del grano in abondanza e dell’altra biada. Perché si so’ lavorate? Pure per la pace che voi avete auta. El bestiame
che tu hai tanto multiplicato, che n’è stato cagione? Pure la pace.”

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broken, she is bound, her hands and legs are bound. And everything is
done with fear.34

In this passage, Bernardino focused on the Peace and War frescoes
completely ignoring the third one, the Allegory of Good Government, perhaps because he considered it less relevant to his sermon’s message in
which he was advocating civic peace in the city. He started with a meticulous account of Peace, which shows people engaging in trade, farmers
working in the fields, young people dancing in a circle, and nobles going
to the baths (a fashionable leisure-time activity in that society). His reference to “girls going to marry” fosters the speculation of scholars that a wedding procession was depicted in the lower-left-hand corner of the fresco;
such a portrayal would have been typical of the preacher’s support of marriage and his campaign to encourage domestic life in the Tuscan towns.35
Bernardino then drew his audience’s attention to the small hanged man
attached to the figure of Security depicted above the city, who appeared to
hold the gallows in his hand. His emphasis on the hanged man is in line
with his repeated statements that criminals should be dealt with severely to
keep the peace. This minor figure conveys his message of cruel justice.
Focusing on the opposite wall, Bernardino offered a series of juxtapositions between War and Peace. His repetitions “I do not see” in the quote
above resonate with modern scholars’ stress on the negative correlations
between the two frescoes. His rhetorical call, “Oh women! Oh men!” riv34. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari—Siena 1425, vol. 2, 266–67: “Secondo. Distruzione e consumazione de la guerra. Io ò considerato quando so’ stato fuore di Siena, e ò
predicato de la pace e de la guerra che voi avete dipenta, che per certo fu bellissima inventiva.
Voltandomi a la pace, vego le mercanzie andare atorno; vego balli, vego racconciare le case;
vego lavorare vigne e terre, seminare, andare a’ bagni, a cavallo, vego andare le fanciulle a
marito, vego le grege de le pecore etc. E vego impicato l’uomo per mantenere la santa giustizia. E per queste cose, ognuno sta in santa pace e concordia. Per lo contrario, voltandomi da
l’altra parte, non vego mercanzie; non vego balli, anco vego uccidare altrui; non s’acconciano
case, anco si guastano e ardono; non si lavora terre; le vigne si tagliano, non si semina, non
s’usano a bagni nè altre cose dilettevoli’ non vego se no’ quando si va di fuore. O donne! O
uomini! L’uomo morto, la donna sforzata, non armenti se none in preda; uomini a tradimento
uccidare l’uno l’altro; la giustizia stare in terra, rotte le bilance’ e lei legata, co’ le mani e co’
piedi legati. E ogni cosa che altro fa, fa con paura.” The description appears in Bernardino’s
thirtieth sermon in the 1425 quaresimale. See also Carlo Delcorno, “La città nella predicazione Francescana del Quattrocento,” in: Alle origini dei Monti dei Pietà: i Francescani fra
etica ed economia nella societa del tardo medioevo: studi in occasione delle celebrazioni nel 5. centenario della morte del Beato Michele Carcano (1427–1484) fondatore del Monte di Pieta di Bologna
[Quaderni del Monte, 3] (Bologna, 1984), 33–34.
35. For Bernardino’s campaign to promote marriage and family life, see David Herlihy and
Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families (New Haven, 1985), 228–31, 250–53.

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eted his listeners’ attention and connected them to the figures depicted
there. He then talked about the impact of war as illustrated in the fresco:
the violence of rape, murder, and betrayal. He then pointed to the bound
figure of Justice, her scales broken, which appeared below Tyranny and the
Vices on the right-hand side of the painting. He concluded with the
thought that when Justice becomes powerless, the result is war.36
Bernardino then returned to the Lorenzetti frescoes to show, vividly
and convincingly, the advantages of peace and the dangers of war. This
depiction was a most effective way to point out the great harm inflicted on
the city by the battles between its factions. He was known in his times as
a professional peacemaker, one who continued the mendicant tradition of
promoting civic peace in the Italian cities.37 According to the biographer,
Vespasiano da Bisticci, “[He] made peace where there had been
mortal enmity. He pacified rulers, and cities, and people. He thought of
nothing else than the restoration of good will.’’38
Internal problems and civic turmoil pervaded fifteenth-century life in
Siena and the Sienese municipal authorities asked Bernardino to come to
the city to preach about civic peace and perform reconciliation ceremonies.
He went to Siena in 1425 and 1427 after preaching peace to great crowds
in other central and northern Italian cities starting in 1417.39 Events that
pointed to internal unrest had been occurring in Siena well before
Bernardino’s arrival. By the second half of the fourteenth century, five factions, or monti, had played leading roles in Sienese politics: the Grandi (or
Gentiluomini), the Dodici, the Nove, the Riformatori, and the Popolari.
The Dodicis ruled from 1355 to 1368, after which they remained partners
in the coalition government until 1403. In November 1403, three of
Siena’s five factions started a rebellion against the government that ended
with many exiles and the permanent exclusion of the Dodici from public
36. Bernardino’s emphasis on justice was noted by Delcorno, La Città, 33–34.
37. On Bernardino’s role as a peacemaker, see Katherine Ludwig Jansen, Peace and
Penance in Late Medieval Italy (Princeton, 2018); Cynthia Louise Polecritti, Preaching Peace
in Renaissance Italy: San Bernardino and His Audience (Washington, DC, 2000).
38. Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasiano Memoirs: Lives of Illustrious Men of the Fifteenth Century, tr. William George Waters and Emily Waters (New York, 1963), 165. For
the original Italian, see Vespasiano da Bisticci, “Vita di San Bernardino,” in: Bernardino da
Siena, Operette volgari, ed. Dionisio Pacetti (Florence, 1938).
39. On the Sienese political situation, see William M. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian
Commune: Siena under the Nine. 1287–1355 (Berkeley, 1981); Mario Ascheri, Siena nel
Rinascimento (Siena, 1985); William Caferro, Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena
(Baltimore and London, 1998).

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office. The prelude to Bernardino’s coming to Siena was new unrest and
dissatisfaction with the unfortunate position of the Dodici. On December
26, 1426, a member of the Nove faction was beheaded because he had
dealings with the exiles and was suspected of supporting the return of the
Dodici. The execution caused a great deal of anger and by the time that
Bernardino arrived in Siena in mid-August of the following year, there was
serious unrest in the city. The government passed a resolution to work with
the preacher to restore civic peace and reconciliation among the parties and
to help promote stability and social concord.40
As Bernardino had lived in Siena before joining the Franciscan order,
his involvement in Sienese politics was greater there than in other cities. He
also manifested enormous civic pride, which was evident when he praised
the glory of the frescoes “you have painted,” relating to them as masterpieces
of the city rather than as the creations of particular artists. The sermon entitled “The Concord and Unity That We Must Have Together” was basically
an attempt to bring peace to Siena. It included a description of the peace
ceremony that was to follow the preaching. Bernardino sent his female listeners to be reconciled in the Chiesa di Santo Martino and the men to the
Duomo. The women had to enter the church from one side and exit from
the other as a sign of peace. The description of the frescoes, then, was part
of a sermon designed to achieve unity that culminated in a ritual.41
Saint Bernardino of Siena and Baptism
The magnificent fifteenth-century baptismal font in Siena’s baptistery
evokes the correlation between Bernardino’s religious values and the visual
arts in Siena. Although there are no archival documents attesting to his
direct involvement in the construction of the font, this article suggests that
his activity as a peacemaker was associated with the emphasis on baptism
as a civic ritual that fostered concord and harmony, which turned the baptismal font into an important civic icon. On a more specific level, the idea
40. On the political developments in Siena, see Polecritti, Preaching Peace, 84–125.
41. Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari—Siena 1425, vol. 2, 262–63: “Quando voi vi
partite di qui, io vi prego e vi comando, se io vi posso comandare, che tutti, per l’amore di Dio
e per santa carità, voi perdoniate a tutti e vostri nemici, e che voi vi riconciliate insieme, e non
rimanga nè donna, nè uomo, nè piccolo, nè grande, che non perdoni liberamente, magnanimamente a tutti coloro che t’ànno offeso. E se fusse niuno che non potesse trovare colui col
quale à l’odio, vada in segno di volere perdonare, al Duomo, a l’altare, e poi, quando trovarà
el suo avversario, facci pace co’ lui e perdoni l’uno a l’altro. E a voi, donne, tutte andate costì
a la chiesa di santo Martino, e intrate dall’una parte e uscite da l’altra, in segno che voi perdoniate a ogni persona.”

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of joining the tabernacle and the basin in this monument and thus the
sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist was clearly grounded in
Bernardino’s theological perceptions.
According to Bernardino, it is through baptism that the believer is
freed from original sin and can be saved: baptism is a doorway that leads
to the other sacraments and to paradise.42 Florence’s baptistery epitomizes
the preacher’s perception. Ghiberti’s doors for the east portal were what
Michelangelo called the Gate of Paradise (Porta del Paradiso). The phrase
referred both to the beauty of the doors as well as to the meaning of the
baptistery building itself as the gateway to the next world.43 The sacrament
of baptism was also associated with Bernardino on another level. Immediately after his death, citizens in Siena began naming their sons after him, a
special honor that clearly spoke of the Sienese’ affection for the preacher.
Christiane Klapisch-Zuber explains that the concern for bringing familial
tradition and respect for the saints together clearly influenced the choice of
the name conferred upon the newborn child and reflected the need to
affirm his political and civic identity.44
In a sermon entitled “Against Guelfs and Ghibellines and Other Divisions and Parties,” Bernardino particularly related to the local flavor of the
St. John the Baptist cult in Tuscany. In a humorous vein, he declared: “Here
[in Florence], there are those who say that St. John is a Guelf and those who
claim that he is a Ghibelline.” In this case, Bernardino was alluding to St.
John the Baptist, the patron saint of Florence, as participating in the city’s
political tensions.45 In his sermons, Bernardino declared that St. John the
Baptist held a place of honor next to the Virgin Mary in importance.46 In a
sermon on marriage, “Del Pigliare Moglie e del Pericolo di stare senze,” he
emphasized the mutual love and the bond between St. John and Christ,
42. See Terje Oestigaard, An Archaeology of Hell: Fire, Water and Sin in Christianity
(Lindome, 2003); Lois Jean Drewer, “Fisherman and Fishpond: From the Sea of Sins to the
Living Water,” Art Bulletin, 63:4 (1981), 533–47; Peter Cramer, Baptism and Change in the
Early Middle Ages, c. 200–c. 1150 (Cambridge, 1993); John Fisher, Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West (London, 1965).
43. See Eloise M. Angiola, “‘Gates of Paradise’ and the Florentine Baptistery,” Art Bulletin, 60 (1978), 242–48.
44. Christine Klapisch-Zuber, “Children’s First Names in Italy during the Late Middle
Ages,” The Medieval History Journal, 2:1 (1999), 37–54.
45. See Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari–Quaresimale Fiorentino del 1425, vol.
3, 100: “Chi dice che santo Giovanni è guelfo, e chi dice che è ghibellino. . . .”
46. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—Quaresimale Fiorentino del 1425, vol. 2,
198: “Già saranno stati in cielo, la gloriosa vergine Maria gli sarà dal lato diritto; san Giovanni
Battista e gli apostolic suoi.”

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both of whom were preachers who enjoyed the people’s abiding affection.47
In a sermon on the incarnation of Christ, Bernardino highlighted the relationship between St. Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary and the birth of St.
John the Baptist and lauded St. John for supporting Christ.48
Bernardino devoted an entire sermon to the sacred sacrament of baptism (Del Sagramento del santo battesimo).49 He stressed the significance
of the rite for the salvation of the individual soul and its crucial importance.
He raised several difficulties in connection with baptism such as was the
baptism considered valid if the words of the rite changed and stressed the
importance of using the correct words. He explained that the words and
the pouring of the water had to be enacted at the same time. A further
requirement for a successful baptism was that the priest had to have the
right intention and speak the words with a sincere heart. He noted again
that the priest had to use the exact phrase: “Io ti battezzo” (I baptize you)
as a requirement for a proper baptism. It was forbidden to add the names
of saints to the ritual, as one was required to adhere to the original words.
Bernardino then explained that the baptism of Jews or Saracens who
want to convert in times of need and under special circumstances is allowed,
if performed by a true Christian. At other times, only an ordained priest can
perform the act. Even a sinful priest may do so if he is ordained and has the
authority. Another case is when one wants to baptize one’s child and the
priest asks for money: if the money is for the water it is allowed, yet if it is
for performing the sacrament of baptism it is forbidden. It was not allowed
to sell the act of baptism, only to pay for the water. Bernardino concluded
the sermon stressing the importance of baptism for salvation.50
In his Sienese cycle of Lenten sermons for 1427, Bernardino returned
to the importance of the act of baptism and to the centrality of St. John the
Baptist.51 In one sermon, he indicated that baptized infants are absolved of
47. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—Quaresimale Fiorentino del 1425, vol. 3,
34–35: “Vedi l’assemplo di Cirsto Gesù e di santo Ioanni Battista quanto smisurato amore fra
l’uno e l’altro. Santo Ioanni cominciò prima a predicare che Christo. E santo Ioanni il mostrò
a ditto alle turbe.”
48. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—Quaresimale Fiorentino del 1425, vol. 3,
123–24.
49. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—Quaresimale Fiorentino del 1424, vol. 2,
124–37.
50. Bernardino da Siena, Le prediche volgari—Quaresimale Fiorentino del 1424, vol. 2,
135–37.
51. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 673–75.

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original sin.52 In another, he explained that it is important to perform the
act of baptism in the name of Christ and referred to the criticism that he
was subject to from the opponents of the cult of Il Nome del Gesù. In the
same sermon, he indicated, as he did on numerous other occasions, that
baptizing an infant included renouncing Satan and the temptations of the
flesh.53 In a sermon in which Bernardino paid special attention to St. John
the Baptist, he talked about the people’s clothing and lauded St. John, who
wore a garment of camel’s hair, as opposed to the priests who wore expensive attire.54 In another sermon, he praised St. John for his austerity and
simple life.55 He explained that St. John is called a Guelf saint due to his
association with Florence. Bernardino highlighted the ludicrousness of
those of his listeners who sometimes claimed that St. John was a Ghibelline and sometimes a Guelf, recruiting even the saints in heaven to their
internal rivalries. What an absurdity and madness, he concluded.56
A central issue raised by Bernardino was the relationship between
baptism and citizenship. In a sermon on the divisions in the city, he spoke
of the rite of baptism in connection with the discord between the medieval
parties known as the Guelfs and the Ghibellines. He ruled that partisans
could not take part in baptismal rituals neither as parents nor as godparents
since they were individuals who endangered the peace of the city. In the
later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the ceremony of baptism involved
not only the infant and his parents, but godparents as well. Parents chose
a child’s godparents with great care for it was a way of expanding the family
circle and even acquiring patrons and clients. It also could become a way of
cementing partisan alliances rather than expanding one’s circle, crossing
lines, or loving one’s neighbor. Since a good citizen looks beyond his own
family’s interests, choosing the right godparents might have been an
expression of good citizenship. The number of godparents at that time
could be large, not the usual two that became the custom after the Council

52. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 221–22.
53. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 256–57;
268–69.
54. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 1076: “la
loda di santo Giovanni, quando elli si vestì di pelle. . . . Non era vestito di porpora , no, ma
di camello.”
55. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 1, 347: “Né
san Giovanni Batista, che fu così santo, nol faceva, che mangiava le locuste per penitenzie,
facendosi aspra vita.”
56. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 675: “Chi
dice che santo Giovanni è guelfo, e chi dice che è ghibellino. E così dicono anco delli angioli,
che so’ partigiani. Uuuh! . . . Oh pazzia!”

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of Trent. Bernardino insisted that one should not choose violent and divisive persons as godparents, as they would not be fit role models of Christian life and of good Sienese citizenship. 57
When Bernardino asked a man who he was, if he answered that he
was a Ghibelline or a Guelf, it was taken to mean that he was a partisan
and thus not eligible for participating in the baptismal ritual. According to
Bernardino, an individual who was properly baptized as an infant grew up
to become a devoted citizen and did not belong to any party but kept the
peace. He was neither a Guelf nor a Ghibelline, but a faithful Christian!
There are, he said, two parties in this world: that of God and that of the
devil. In this sermon, Bernardino skillfully dramatized a dialogue between
partisans who claimed to be good Christians, but declared that they were
not worthy of participating in baptism rituals since they were sinners and
partisans and belonged to the devil’s party.58
In an article on the extensive building and decoration of baptisteries in
Italy, Enrico Cattaneo discusses the civic importance of baptism in the Italian city. He points out the close connection between baptism and the sense
of civitas: the sacrament of Christian initiation also served to introduce the
individual into the Christian society of the city. The role of the bishop as the
spiritual leader of both the Church and commune was embodied in his
function as the administrator of baptism; from his hands came the sign that
united the members of the community. Thus, baptism was both a civic
symbol and a religious rite.59 According to Augustine Thompson, “It was
only in central and northern Italy that public life focused on the revival of
the ancient practice of mass Easter baptisms conducted by the bishop” and
that it was in these regions that “medieval cities constructed great new monumental baptisteries for their Easter rites.” Thompson explains the importance of the ritual of baptism in the Italian commune and argues that baptism more than the Mass, the Eucharist, or confession was the central event
in civic life in the Italian cities. He shows that public baptisms were organ57. On the role of godparents in baptism rituals see John Bossy, Christianity and the
West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), 14–19; and on godparents in the Italian commune, see Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Tuscans and Their Families, 232–54.
58. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 673–75:
“Quando io ho parlato a niuno di questi partigiani, e io l’ho domandato: Se’ tu batteggiato?
Si. O di qual parte se’ tu? E egli ha risposto: Io so’ nato Ghibellino—Io ti domando, se tu se’
batteggiato. Io dico di si. E tieni la parte ? Si. sai che è ? Tu se’ figliuolo del diavolo, con tutto
che tu sia batteggiato. . . .”
59. See Enrico Cattaneo, “Il battistero in Italia dopo il Mille,” in: Miscellanea Gilles
Gérard Meersseman, ed. Edvige Adda [Italia sacra, 15] (Padua, 1970), 171–95.

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ized civic events that took place in the cathedral baptistery and the ritual,
which was frequently carried out in an assembly-line fashion, simultaneously served to turn infants into future citizens and created the community
of the Church and the sacred body of the commune.60
The fusion between being baptized into the Church and baptized into
citizenship is reflected in the civic preaching of the late medieval preachers
prior to Bernardino. Archbishop Federigo Visconti (1254–77), preaching in
Pisa in the early thirteenth century, often referred to this connection,
explaining that the ritual of baptism was the entry into the sacred body of the
medieval commune.61 The Dominican preacher Giovanni Dominici (1356–
1419) declared to his Florentine audiences that when one is baptized one
becomes “a man, a Christian, and a Florentine,” giving each the same degree
of significance.62 Bernardino’s emphasis on the importance of baptism and
civic peace continued this long-standing tradition of mendicant preaching.
In Tuscany, baptisteries were widely established in such towns as
Siena, Pistoia, and Volterra during the Late Middle Ages. Although the
mass baptism of adult converts, an important feature in the calendar of the
Early Church, had largely disappeared, the baptism of infants continued to
be an essential liturgical ceremony. The baptismal font held a significant
place in Tuscan churches as a site symbolic of local pride. One of the oldest
of church accoutrements, the baptismal font has had a prominent place in
basilicas, cathedrals, and churches ever since early Christian times. Its
importance in churches and baptisteries grew following the evolution of
ritual and liturgy, and developments in the arts led to a new complexity in
this traditional genre. Some fonts were designed by such renowned artists
as Donatello, Ghiberti, or Jacopo della Quercia, whereas others, for the
most part simpler in appearance, were the work of less-renowned artists.
When located within a cathedral or some other important church in a
city, the baptismal font was usually placed near the entrance, symbolic of its
liturgical function as the means by which one entered into the Christian
community and served to remind believers of their own baptism as they
entered the church. In some cases, the baptismal font was installed in a spe60. See Thompson, Cities of God, 3–5.
61. See Eloise M. Angiola, “Nicola Pisano, Federigo Visconti, and the Classical Style
in Pisa,” Art Bulletin, 59 (1977), 1–27.
62. See Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, “Political Views in Giovanni Dominici’s Preaching in
Renaissance Florence 1400–1406,” Renaissance Quarterly, 55:1 (2002), 19–48; the citation is
from Ricc. 1301, Predica 13, line 165: “Se se’huomo, se se’christiano, se se’ fiorentino”; Nirit
Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni
Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (Turnhout, 2001).

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cial chapel to highlight its significance. One example is the baptismal font in
the Siena Cathedral created by Antonio Federighi in the early fifteenth century. It presents scenes taken from the story of Adam and Eve, among them
the Creation of Eve and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. The
choice of that story reflects the belief that, through baptism, the Christian is
freed from original sin, the inheritance from Adam’s sin and can be saved.
This font is in the chapel known as Cappella di San Giovanni Battista, which
is shaped like a rotunda and has a statue of St. John the Baptist by Donatello
(1457) in a niche with frescoes created by Pinturucchio illustrating the saint’s
life. In general, it was thought that the baptismal images and the various
artistic objects—including fonts and free-standing sculptures of St. John the
Baptist and painted fresco cycles of his life—would together enhance the
baptismal experience, underscoring its importance for the believer.63
The early fifteenth century saw the development of a new type of baptismal font, which became very popular in Italy in the following century
and coexisted with the traditional structures. This so-called Renaissance
font is approached by a flight of stairs, at the top of which is a polygonal,
square, or round basin sitting on a pedestal and covered by a lid; the side
of the basin and lid are usually ornamented. The innovative design of the
baptismal font in the baptistery of Siena was the first example of this structure, combining the basin and the tabernacle.
Built between 1316 and 1325 by Camaino di Crescentino, the new
baptistery in Siena was in the shape of a rectangular hall that was divided
into a nave and two aisles by a pair of columns; it had a hexagonal baptismal
font in bronze, marble, and decorated stones, which was added between
1417 and 1431. Lorenzo Ghiberti, who was commissioned to advise on its
decoration, was assisted by Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and others.
This font was novel in its structure—a lidless basin and a tabernacle—as well
as in its combination of bronze and marble. The decoration of the hexagonal
basin comprised six gilded bronze reliefs depicting the life of St. John the
Baptist separated by six free-standing bronze Virtues set in shallow marble
niches. In 1425 Donatello began the relief depicting Herod’s Banquet for
the baptismal font. Two reliefs for the same cathedral—the baptism of
Christ and the arrest of St. John—had been ordered from Ghiberti as early
as 1417. Between 1427 and 1429, Donatello also executed two small statues, Faith and Hope, for the corner of the font (Fig. 4).
63. On the font in Siena’s cathedral, see Elinor M. Richter, “The Sculpture of Antonio
Federighi,” Ph D Dissertation (Columbia: 1984), 119–36; Barbara Bays, “The Piccolomini
Library in the Cathedral of Siena,” PhD. dissertation (Indiana: 1999), 141–43, 184–86.

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FIGURE 4. Jacopo della Quercia and others, Baptismal Font, Baptistery, Siena,
Italy, 1417fl31 (Photo: Author)

The panels of the baptismal font included: the Annunciation to
Zacharias by Jacopo della Quercia; the Birth of John the Baptist and the
Baptist Preaching by Giovanni di Turino; the Baptism of Christ by Lorenzo
Ghiberti; the Arrest of John the Baptist by Giuliano di Ser Andrea; and
Herod’s Banquet by Donatello. The Virtues figured were: Faith and Hope by
Donatello; Justice, Faith, and Providence by Giovanni di Turino; and Fortitude by Goro di Ser Neroccio. Gold and azure enameled friezes and inscriptions adorned the rim of the basin and the steps. A cluster of columns in the
center supported the hexagonal marble tabernacle, which was fashioned after
Florentine models. Five of the sides featured the figure of an apostle by
Jacopo della Quercia set within a niche; on the sixth side there was a small
door closing on the place where the baptismal ointments were stored. Putti
crowned the corners of the tabernacle, and columns supporting a statue of St.
John the Baptist atop a pedestal rose above them.64
64. The stylistic and artistic features of this important monument are discussed in John
T. Paoletti, The Siena Baptistery Font: A Study of an Early Renaissance Collaborative Program
1416–1434 (New York, 1967). See also Kees van der Ploeg, Art, Architecture and Liturgy:
Siena Cathedral in the Middle Ages (Groningen, 1993); James Beck, Jacopo della Quercia (New

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SAINT BERNARDINO OF SIENA AND ART

As noted above, the creation of the font was carried out in three stages:
the years 1416 to 1422 saw the develoment of the preparatory plans and
the construction of the simple basin; Lorenzo Ghiberti, Giovanni Turni,
and Donatello created the narrative reliefs from 1423 to 1427; and Jacopo
della Quercia constructed the marble tabernacle and Donatello and Giovanni di Turni added the additional sculptures to the tabernacle in 1427 to
1434. Bernardino delivered his most celebrated Sienese preaching cycle in
1427, which was also a crucial year for the construction of the baptismal
font. It was at that time that the design of the font was changed from a
simple basin by the addition of the large hexagonal marble tabernacle in its
center, which featured five reliefs of the prophets, a small bronze door, and
six bronze dancing putti and a sculpture of John the Baptist.
The idea behind the addition of a tabernacle to the baptismal font was
the link between two sacraments—Baptism and the Eucharist. Bernardino
emphasized the tie between them, declaring that the two together served
to spread God’s grace.65 Further, crowning the monument with the sculpture of John the Baptist highlighted his centrality. The basin itself was
designed to be used for baptism by affusion rather than immersion, which
had been the earlier medieval ritual. This change in liturgy led to a shift
from large medieval fonts as those in Ravenna or the baptistery of Pisa,
which were used for the immersion ritual to simple basins of modest size
suitable for baptism by affusion, such as the one in Florence’s baptistery.
Although Siena’s font was a bit larger than other Tuscan fonts, it did feature the typical iconographic program, which featured narrative reliefs of
Saint John the Baptist and baptismal scenes. The major break with tradition was the addition of the tabernacle.
The tabernacle decorations in Siena’s baptismal font included unidentified prophets as well as a depiction of King David playing a lyre, which
was an innovative element in the relevant iconography. Bernardino highlighted King David in his 1427 preaching cycle in a sermon he called “King
David Searching for Peace in the World and Not Finding It.” He began
with a long narrative about how David searched for peace in the world,
York, 1991); Charles Seymour, Jacopo della Quercia, Sculptor (New Haven, 1973). On
Donatello’s contribution, see Francesco Caglioti, “Donatello and the Baptismal Font in
Siena. A Re-Evaluation of the ‘Dancing Spirits’ in the National Museum of Florence,”
Prospettiva, 110–11 (2003), 18–29.
65. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 138–39.
Paoletti, Siena Baptistery Font, 148–79 (description of the tabernacle), 175 (claim that
although the tabernacle was once used to house the Eucharist, it might have been later on
employed to host the oils used in the baptismal rite).

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189

stating that “I believe that King David was one of the most contemplative
men the Church ever had and when I consider that, I am stupefied. . . .”66
He exhorted his Sienese audiences to follow in King David’s footsteps and
seek ever-lasting civic peace and brotherly love. He went on to say that not
finding peace within his soul, David examined the delights and honors of
this world to see if they resembled immortal life, but they proved false so
he searched instead for celestial love and harmony and urged his listeners
to do the same.67 It might well have been that the unusual inclusion of an
image of King David in the tabernacle was a tribute to that sermon, which
was delivered in the same year that this exceptional image was added.68
Elements of the novel Sienese baptismal font soon appeared in new
commissions and tabernacles were added to existing structures. In the
Massa Marittima Cathedral, for example, in 1447 a new tabernacle by
Pagno di Lapo and Giovanni Rossellino was added to the baptismal font,
which had been built in 1267 as a monolithic Romanesque marble basin
decorated with low reliefs depicting scenes from the Old and New Testament by Giroldo da Como. Among the most important fonts featuring a
tabernacle within the basin are the one dated to 1460 in the crypt of Pienza
cathedral, executed by the school of Bernardo Rossellino, and that of the
baptistery of the Volterra cathedral by Andrea Sansovino from 1502
adorned with reliefs of Hope, Faith, Justice, Charity, and the Baptism.
Clearly, the baptismal font in Siena’s baptistery marked an important
innovation in that artistic tradition.
Between 1447 and 1450, Siena’s baptistery was decorated with frescoes by Vecchietta on such themes as the Articles of Faith, Prophets, and
Sibyls. Vecchietta included Bernardino in the fresco decoration of the baptistery twice, both instances at the top of the Sienese pantheon of saints.
These portrayals of the saint must have been done to celebrate Bernardino’s
canonization in 1450. Among the blessed in the last Creed scene, the
patron saints of Siena are shown standing in the foreground, while St.
Bernardino takes pride of place next to the Virgin Mary. Elsewhere in the
fresco cycle, he appears at the apex of the arch gazing out toward the congregation. He is raising his arms over his head and holding his tablet—Il
Nome del Gesù. Bernardino is the only figure on the arch oriented toward
66. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 1231–32:
“Io mi credo che de’ più contemplitivi omini chem ai avesse la Chiesa di Dio, si fusse Davit.
Quando ilconsidaro, io stupisco.”
67. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 1231–70.
68. See Bernardino da Siena, Prediche volgari sul Campo di Siena 1427, vol. 2, 1254.

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FIGURE 5. Vecchietta, Frescoes: Articles of Faith, Baptistery, Siena, Italy, 1450
(Photo: Author)

the viewer—a prominent position that attests to his popularity and his
overall contribution to the legacy of Siena69 (Fig. 5).
More than any other Italian preacher, Saint Bernardino of Siena
understood the power of visual images and utilized them rhetorically in his
preaching. He is noted for his sophisticated use of works of art as sermon
exempla, whether to teach young girls the value of modesty or to enact a
peace ceremony to encourage his listeners to reconcile one with the other.
His approach to the arts was based on pragmatic considerations. As a
preacher, he viewed art as an efficacious tool for educating the simple
people, for creating fine rhetorical effects, and for moving his listeners to
devotion. It is entirely possible that Bernardino’s concepts and convictions
had an impact on the art of his time and that the design of the city’s baptismal font suggests that his doctrine influenced its creation as a civic icon.

69. On an interesting study showing Bernardino’s influence on the creation of Vecchietta frescoes in Siena’s baptistery see Andrea W. Campbell, The Social and Artistic Context
of the Baptistery of Siena, Ph.D. Dissertation (Rutgers: 2000): 129–39.

Galileo Between Jesuits:
The Fault Is in the Stars
CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY*
In the middle of the seventeenth century, André Tacquet, S.J. briefly discussed a scientific argument regarding the structure of a Copernican universe, and commented on Galileo Galilei’s discussion of that same argument—Galileo’s discussion in turn being a commentary on a version of
the argument by Christoph Scheiner, S.J. The argument was based on
observations of the sizes of stars. This exchange involving Galileo and
two Jesuits illustrates how through much of the seventeenth century, science—meaning observations, measurements, and calculations—supported a view of the Copernican universe in which stars were not other
suns, but were dim bodies, far larger than the sun. Johannes Kepler
emphasized this, especially in arguing against Giordano Bruno. Jesuit
astronomers like Tacquet and Scheiner understood this. Those who might
have listened to Jesuit astronomers would likewise have understood
this—Robert Bellarmine, for example, whose role in the debate over
Copernicanism is well known. To many, such a universe was, in the
words of Galileo’s Dialogue character Sagredo, “beyond belief,” and no
modern view of a universe of many distant suns would be scientifically
supportable until after Tacquet’s death in 1660. The Copernican universe of the seventeenth century looked radically different from the universe as modern astronomers understand it, and recognizing this fact
allows for interesting questions to be asked regarding the actions of those,
such as Bellarmine, who were responding to the work of Copernicus.
Key words: Roberto Bellarmine, Nicolas Copernicus, Galileo
Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Christoph Scheiner, science, stars, star
sizes, André Tacquet

W

hat did the Copernican universe look like to Jesuit astronomers in
the seventeenth century? In the middle of that century, André Tacquet of the Society of Jesus produced an unusual and compact version of a
*Prof. Graney is an astronomer and historian of science on the staff of the Specola Vaticana (the Vatican’s astronomical observatory) in Rome and Tucson. His email address is
c.graney@vaticanobservatory.org.

191

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key scientific argument regarding the structure of a Copernican universe.
He also briefly commented on Galileo Galilei’s lengthy discussion of that
same key argument. Galileo’s discussion was itself a commentary on a different, likewise compact version of the argument, produced earlier in the
century by another Jesuit astronomer, Christoph Scheiner. This exchange
between Galileo and two Jesuit astronomers illustrates a thing not widely
understood regarding the Church’s interaction with Copernican ideas:
that, to a Jesuit astronomer—and indeed to any astronomer persuaded by
observations, measurements, and calculations—the Copernican universe
looked radically different from the universe as we understand it today. And
it looked likewise, we may presume, to anyone who might have consulted
Jesuit astronomers for their expertise. Because the ideas of these
astronomers had influence on the broader Church, and because the
Church’s interaction with Copernican ideas is a prominent aspect of its
history, this exchange among Scheiner, Galileo, and Tacquet regarding the
structure of a Copernican universe is discussed here in detail.
The Sizes of Stars
André Tacquet, S.J. lived from 1612 to 1660. References to Tacquet
are not common in recent scholarship. Perhaps this is in part because, as
Geert H. W. Vanpaemel wrote in a piece on “Jesuit Science in the Spanish
Netherlands,” Tacquet’s life “was utterly uneventful; he apparently never
ventured outside the borders of his native province.” It may also be
because, according to Vanpaemel, while Tacquet produced original work,
much of his effort was spent on teaching mathematics, and on producing
work for teaching.1 While Vanpaemel’s assessment of Tacquet may be correct, we shall see that Tacquet became known for an argument he made
against the heliocentric universe of Nicolas Copernicus.
This argument was based on the apparent sizes of the stars, specifically
of the “fixed” stars. Fixed stars are those called stars today, that make up the
constellations. This is as opposed to the “wandering” stars that move through
the constellations over time, otherwise known as “planets” (“planet” meaning
“wanderer”). Astronomers from Ptolemy in ancient times to Tycho Brahe in
the late sixteenth century had attempted to measure the sizes of these stars
as seen from Earth. They determined the “apparent diameters” of the more
prominent or “first magnitude” (i.e. “first rate”) fixed stars to be roughly one
fifteenth the apparent diameter of the moon; fifteen such stars, placed one
1. Geert H. W. Vanpaemel, “Jesuit Science in the Spanish Netherlands,” in: Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 406.

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FIGURE 1. The more distant an observed object is from Earth (E), the greater its
actual physical size must be to retain the same apparent size (indicated by the
shaded region). A and B will each have the same apparent size as seen from E, but
B is over four times more distant from E than is A, so B has over 4 times the actual
diameter of A, and over 64 times (4 cubed) the volume of A.

against another in a straight line, would equal the apparent diameter of the
full moon. The wandering stars had similar apparent diameters.2
In a heliocentric universe, Earth’s position relative to any given fixed star
necessarily changes as Earth moves annually around the sun. As Earth circles
through its orbit, the distance from Earth to that star changes, and the angle
of view toward that star also changes, owing to Earth’s continually changing
location with respect to the star. These changes must produce observable
annual variations in the appearance of the star, variations known as “annual
parallax.” No such variations were observed in any fixed star, in Copernicus’s
time or in Tacquet’s. This meant that Earth’s orbit had to be vanishingly
small compared to the distance of the fixed stars. But for the fixed stars to be
at such large distances, yet still show measurable apparent diameters,
required that their actual diameters be enormous (Figure 1). Every visible
star in a heliocentric universe had to be a body far larger than the sun.
By contrast, in a geocentric universe the Earth was immobile, so there
was no expectation of annual parallax. Stars could therefore be located just
beyond Saturn. Being comparable to Saturn in apparent size, and lying at
a distance comparable to that of Saturn, stars would have actual sizes also
comparable to Saturn. In a geocentric universe, fixed stars were commensurate in size with the other celestial bodies.
Thus the Copernican hypothesis turned the fixed stars into a new class
of giant celestial bodies, far different from the earth, sun, moon, and planets. The question of Copernican star sizes had been raised by Brahe, who
2. Albert Van Helden, Measuring the Universe: Cosmic Dimensions from Aristarchus to
Halley (Chicago, 1985), 27, 30, 32, 50.

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found the idea of enormous stars too improbable, and considered them an
argument against heliocentrism.3 This challenge to Copernicus’s ideas is
not widely understood today, but as Albert Van Helden has written,
“Tycho’s logic was impeccable; his measurements above reproach. A
Copernican simply had to accept the results of this argument” and agree
that the stars were giant.4 Vanpaemel writes that Tacquet elaborated on
this argument:
Tacquet proved that in the Copernican hypothesis the proportion of the
dimensions of the fixed stars to the distance earth-sun, would be equal to
the proportion of the dimensions of the same stars to the radius of the
earth in the geocentric hypothesis. In the Copernican hypothesis therefore, the stars needed to be much larger and heavier than in the traditional view, a conclusion which conflicted with intellectual economy.5

Brahe had proposed his own hypothesis, in which the sun, moon and stars
circled an immobile Earth while the planets circled the sun (Figure 2). This
system was identical to the Copernican system insofar as any Earth-bound
observation of the sun, moon, or planets was concerned; later telescopic
discoveries involving those bodies, such as the phases of Venus that
showed it to orbit the sun, were thus fully compatible with Brahe’s system.
The Disquisitions of Scheiner and Locher
Brahe may have first raised the star-size question against heliocentrism, but the Jesuit astronomer Christopher Scheiner and his student
Johann Georg Locher arguably wrote the most consequential discussion of
it. In their 1614 book Mathematical Disquistions, Scheiner and Locher
spent a few pages outlining the issue by means of calculations.6 Then they
produced this very compact and clear version of Brahe’s idea:
[In a Copernican universe] even the smallest star visible to the eye is
much larger than the whole circle of Earth’s orbit. This is because such a
star has a measurable size, as does the circumference of the sky. The ratio
of the size of the star to the size of the firmament of fixed stars is therefore perceptible. But according to the Copernican opinion, the ratio of
the size of the circle of Earth’s orbit to the size of the firmament is imper-

3. Christopher M. Graney, Setting Aside All Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the
Science Against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo (Notre Dame, IN, 2015), 25–44.
4. Van Helden, Measuring the Universe, 51.
5. Vanpaemel, “Jesuit Science,” 409.
6. Christopher M. Graney, Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet of Theses Immortalized by Galileo (Notre Dame, IN, 2015), 27–31.

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FIGURE 2. Tycho Brahe proposed that the sun, moon, and fixed stars circle the
Earth while the planets circle the sun. Brahe’s system and Copernicus’s system were
identical insofar as any Earth-bound observations of sun, moon, and planets were
concerned. As Johannes Kepler said, “in Brahe the Earth occupies at any time the
same place that Copernicus gives it, if not in the very vast and measureless region
of the fixed stars, at least in the system of the planetary world” (Johannes Kepler,
Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, trans. Charles Glenn
Wallis [Great Minds Series] (Amherst, NY, 1995), 175). Thus Brahe’s system was
fully compatible with telescopic discoveries involving those bodies. This illustration
of Brahe’s system is from the Mathematical Disquisitions of Scheiner and Locher.
Image credit: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.

ceptible. For in the Copernican opinion the size of the Earth’s orbital
circle holds the same proportion to the firmament as the size of Earth
itself holds to the firmament in the common geocentric opinion. Yet
experience shows the Earth to be of imperceptible size compared to the
firmament. Thus in the Copernican opinion it is the circle of Earth’s orbit
that is of imperceptible size compared to the firmament—and therefore
smaller than the smallest perceptible star.7

7. Graney, Disquisitions, 30.

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Scheiner and Locher thus offered a simple scientific (that is, based on
observation, measurement, and calculation) argument that in a Copernican
universe every last visible star must necessarily have an actual physical size
not just exceeding the sun, but exceeding Earth’s orbit around the sun. This
meant every last visible star would dramatically dwarf the sun, and every
other celestial body, more than a beach ball dwarfs a pea. Their logic can
be distilled down to this: if Earth’s orbit is vanishingly small in a Copernican universe, while the fixed stars have small but measurable apparent sizes,
then it follows that every visible star must be larger than Earth’s orbit—
because “small but measurable” is larger than “vanishingly small.”
This brief discussion was consequential because two decades later
Galileo Galilei would devote significant space in his 1632 Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief Worlds Systems—Copernican and Ptolemaic to addressing the contents of Disquisitions, with many pages spent in response to its
discussion of star sizes. Thus, Galileo immortalized Disquisitions within the
Dialogue, one of the most famous books in the history of science and of the
Church.
None of the characters in the Dialogue embraced the idea of enormous
stars, but some Copernicans actually did. Notable among these was
Johannes Kepler. He saw no issues of intellectual economy in these stars.
He agreed that all visible stars were larger than Earth’s orbit. Indeed, he
estimated the most prominent ones to be larger than Saturn’s orbit, and
thus larger than an entire geocentric universe. Kepler also reasoned that the
fixed stars were dim. This was because their combined power to illuminate
the sky was insignificant compared to the sun, while the fraction of the sky
that they together occupied was comparable to that occupied by the sun.
Their distance did not excuse their dimness, Kepler said, because the farther away they were, the larger they would be (as seen in Figure 1 above).
Thus observations, measurements, and calculations proved that the universe consisted of myriad vast, dim distant stars enveloping a single, unique
sun (itself both tiny and brilliant compared to them) and the sun’s still tinier
planets. Kepler attacked Giordano Bruno’s notion that the stars were other
suns, orbited by other Earths; what Bruno said was contrary to what any
astronomer could easily determine for himself.8 Kepler argued in his 1606 De
Stella Nova that the brilliant, tiny sun versus the dim, hulking stars spoke to
God’s ability to create on a vast scale, while still retaining full concern for the
8. Christopher M. Graney, “The Starry Universe of Johannes Kepler,” Journal for the
History of Astronomy, 50 (2019), 162–66.

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197

smallest things.9 Scheiner and Locher, perhaps with Kepler in mind,
remarked in Disquisitions that Copernicus’s “minions” did not deny the enormous stars, and instead “go on about how from this everyone may better perceive the majesty of the Creator,” an idea they judged to be “laughable.”10
Tacquet on Stars and Galileo
Tacquet’s discussion of the star size question includes no such judgements. It is found in his posthumously published Opera Omnia, Book 5
(“Concerning the Fixed Stars”), Chapter 2 (“Concerning the magnitude,
distance, light, number, kinds, and forms of the Fixed Stars”).11 Book 5 is
divided into numbered sections. The first section in Chapter 2 is number
21. Here Tacquet discusses what Earth-bound astronomers can determine
regarding distances to the stars in a geocentric universe. In a geocentric
universe, astronomers are limited to observing celestial bodies from different places on Earth’s surface, one Earth radius (or semidiameter) from the
center of the geocentric universe. By observing a celestial body from those
different places on Earth’s surface (Figure 3), they can measure angles to
that body from those places, and triangulate to determine the distance of
that body. This is using an Earth-surface “parallax” to find distance.
Triangulating from observations of the moon made at different places
on Earth’s surface provided for accurate determination of its distance, for
example. However, the more distant the object, the narrower the key angle
at the celestial object (at ‘D’ or ‘C’ in Figure 3). When the object is too distant, that angle becomes too small to measure; then there can be no surface
parallax detected, and no distance determined.
Tacquet notes that no surface parallax has ever been detected for the
fixed stars. But, he says, that does not mean that we know nothing of their
distance. Rather, we know the lower limit of their distance—they must be
farther away than that minimum distance within which we could just
detect a parallax. He writes,
Therefore a limit of distance is recognized (which itself is indeed an
extraordinary monument to Astronomy); it is certain the Fixeds may not
lie within it. The other limit of distance, beyond which they may not lie,

9. Christopher M. Graney, “As Big as a Universe: Johannes Kepler on the Immensities of Stars and of Divine Power,” Catholic Historical Review, 105 (2019), 75–90.
10. Graney, Disquisitions, 29
11. André Tacquet, Opera Mathematica (Antverpiæ: Apud Iacobum Meursium,
1668), 205.

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FIGURE 3. Diagram in Opera Omnia for Tacquet, Book 5, Chapter 2, Number 21,
showing the use of triangulation from Earth’s surface to determine the distance to
a celestial body (the moon, it would seem). Lines BC and BD show the position,
as seen from B, of the moon when it is high in the sky and low on the horizon,
respectively. Lines AC and AD are its position seen from points on Earth directly
below it, or from the center of the Earth. With angles measured, trigonometry
reveals the distance to the moon. Were the Earth much smaller (or the moon much
more distant) the angles BCA and BDA would be too small to determine. Image
credit: Google Books.
is truly not able to be explored by human ingenuity. It may be the Fixed
Stars are as much distant from Saturn, as Saturn is from us. It is even
credible that some are higher than others; which perhaps is the reason
why they may appear unequal to us.12

This last idea about how, owing to differing distances, stars appear
“unequal”—not all the same in apparent size—had been discussed by St.
Albert the Great:
We ourselves have indeed recognized one star to be more or less distant
than another through the greater or lesser [apparent] diameter of the
stars: but we are not able to distinguish the number of stars. . . .13
12. Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 205: “Notus est igitur (quod ipsum quidem monumentum Astronomiae eximium est) distantiae terminus, infra quem Fixas non deprimi
certum sit. Terminus vero distantiae alter supra quem non ascendant, explorari humano ingenio non potest. Fortassis Stellae Fixae tantum a Saturno distant, quantum ille a nobis. Credibile est etiam alias esse alijs altiores; quae & forsan est causa, cur inaequales nobis appareant.”
13. Albertus Magnus, Commentarii in II Sententiarum, (Lugduni: Prost, 1651). Dist. 2,
Art. 3, “Ad Quaest.”: “nos quidem deprehenderemus unam stellam magis vel minus distare
quam aliam per diametrum stellarum magis vel minus: sed non possumus distinguere
numerum stellarum. . . .”

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In number 22 Tacquet discusses the speeds of the stars as they circle
Earth in a geocentric universe. In number 23 he discusses their apparent
sizes. He reproduces a table, from the 1651 New Almagest of the Italian
Jesuit Giovanni Battista Riccioli, listing the apparent diameters of twentyone stars, measured via telescope.14 In this table mighty Sirius, the “Dog
Star,” the most prominent fixed star in the sky, measures 18 “seconds of
arc.” That is 1/100th the apparent diameter of the moon, which is half of
one degree, or 1800 seconds of arc. In the same table, insignificant Alcor
(a star in the handle of the Big Dipper, known mostly for being close to
the star Mizar that marks the bend of that handle) has an apparent diameter of just over 4 seconds of arc. These sizes are much smaller than what
Ptolemy or Brahe would have recognized. Recall that they had both determined that prominent stars measured about a fifteenth of the moon’s
apparent diameter, roughly 120 seconds of arc. The advent of the telescope
had prompted a reassessment of the apparent diameters of both fixed and
wandering stars.
In number 24 Tacquet uses Riccioli’s table of apparent stellar diameters, and an estimated minimum distance allowable for the stars to show no
Earth-surface parallax, to produce a table of actual sizes for thirteen stars,
again for a geocentric universe. Tacquet’s result is that Sirius is a minimum
of 815 times greater than Earth as measured by volume; Alcor is nine times
greater.15 This would make Sirius a body whose actual diameter was at minimum nine times that of the Earth, and Alcor a body at minimum twice
Earth’s diameter. For comparison, elsewhere Tacquet determines the sun’s
actual diameter to be roughly twelves times that of Earth.16 Thus, Sirius and
Alcor are larger than the Earth, and smaller than the sun.
Number 25 treats the volume of the geocentric universe. This discussion
assumes the stars are all equidistant from Earth, even though number 21 discussed the possibility that they could lie at various distances past Saturn.
At number 26 Tacquet arrives at the Copernican hypothesis. He
points out that the Earth’s orbit in a heliocentric universe holds the same
position as the Earth itself in a geocentric universe:
14. See Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 206, and Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Almagestum
Novum (Bononinae : Ex typographia Haeredis Victorii Benatii, 1651), vol. 1, 716.
15. There are various errors in Tacquet’s calculations, but these do not change the overall picture significantly—see Christopher M. Graney, “Not the Earth, but its Orbit: André
Tacquet and the Question of Star Sizes in a heliocentric universe,” arXiv:1909.12074v1
(Sept. 24, 2019), 1–16, here 10–11.
16. Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 143.

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G ALILEO BETWEEN J ESUITS
In the hypothesis of a Moved Earth, the Great Orb (that is, the sphere whose
semidiameter is the distance from the Sun to our eye or to the center of the
Earth) is, compared to the Firmament [of the Fixed Stars], the equivalent of
a point.
No [Earth-surface] Parallax in the Fixed Stars has ever been detected,
even though such a Parallax ought to arise, owing to the distance of our
eye from the center of the Firmament [being one semidiameter of
Earth]. Therefore it is evident that distance [of one terrestrial semidiameter] is insensible compared to the distance of the Fixeds. Yet in the
hypothesis of the Moved Earth (that is, where the Sun may rest in the
center of the Firmament, with the Earth running through the Ecliptic),
the distance of our eye from the center of the Firmament is the distance
of the eye from the Sun. This is the semidiameter of the Great Orb.
Therefore, in the Hypothesis of the Moved Earth, the semidiameter of
the Great Orb is insensible compared to the distance of the Fixeds, or the
semidiameter of the Firmament. Whereby the proportion of spheres may
be the cube of the proportion of diameters, a fortiori (as the Philosophers
say), the Great Orb itself will be insensible compared to the Firmament.
Corollary: Hence it follows that the Great Orb is to the Copernican Firmament (that required by the Hypothesis of the Moved Earth) as the Earth is to
the common Firmament (that required by the Hypothesis of the Standing
Earth).17

In other words, in a heliocentric universe, as Earth travels around the sun
on its annual orbit, astronomers can observe celestial bodies from different
places along that orbit, one orbital radius (or semidiameter) from the sun,
the center of the heliocentric universe. As no parallax of any sort is seen in
the fixed stars, the semidiameter of Earth’s orbit in a heliocentric universe
is just like the semidiameter of Earth in a geocentric universe—vanishingly
small compared to the distance to the fixed stars.
17. Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 208: “In Hypothesi Terrae Motae, Orbis Magnus, sive
Sphaera cuius semidiameter est distantia oculi nostri vel centri Terrae a Sole, ad Firmamentum
instar puncti est. Cum enim in Stellis Fixis numquam vlla Parallaxis fuerit deprehensa, Parallaxis autem illa siqua esset, oriri deberet ab oculi nostri distantia a centro Firmamenti; perspicuum est distantiam illam ad distantiam Fixarum esse insensibilem. Atqui in Hypothesi
Terrae Motae, (hoc est, si Terra Eclipticam percurrente, Sol in Firmamenti centro quiescat)
distantia oculi nostri a centro Firmamenti, est ipsa distantia oculi a Sole, hoc est Orbis Magni
semidiameter. Ergo in Hypothesi Terrae Motae semidiameter Orbis Magni ad distantiam
Fixarum, siue Firmamenti semidiametrum, insensibilis est. Quare cum sphaerarum proportio
triplicata sit proportionis diametrorum, ipse Orbis Magnus ad Firmamentum a fortiori (vt
loquuntur Philosophi) insensibilis erit. Corollarium: Hinc sequitur Orbem Magnum esse ad Firmamentum Copernicanum, hoc est debitum Hypothesi Terrae Motae; vt Terra est ad Firmamentum
commune; hoc est, debitum Hypothesi Terrae Stantis.”

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After running through a more rigorous geometrical demonstration of
these statements, Tacquet proceeds to number 27—his own version of the
star size argument:
In the Hypothesis of the Moved Earth, the Fixed Stars hold the same proportion to the Great Orb that they hold to the Earth in the Hypothesis of the
Standing Earth.
The Apparent Diameter of any Fixed (that is, the angle under which the
Fixed is seen from Earth), may be found independently from either
Hypothesis of the Earth (Moved or Standing). As is obvious from
number 23, it is clear a Fixed (Spica, for example) to subtend in either
Hypothesis equally many Seconds of its Firmament; obviously just that
many, as are recorded by observation. Therefore, the Copernican Spica is
to the Copernican Firmament, as the common [geocentric] Spica is to
the common [geocentric] Firmament. And yet the Copernican Firmament is to the Great Orb, as the common Firmament is to the Earth.
Thus the Copernican Spica is to the Great Orb, as the common Spica is
to the Earth, by reason of proportion.18

In number 28, Tacquet points out that, since in the geocentric
hypothesis (recall that Brahe’s geocentric hypothesis was compatible with
telescopic discoveries19) Sirius is 815 times and Alcor 9 times greater than
Earth by volume, it follows that in the Copernican hypothesis Sirius and
Alcor will be 815 and 9 times greater by volume than the Great Orb—that
is, than the sphere of Earth’s orbit. Thus, in terms of actual diameter Sirius
and Alcor will be nine times and twice, respectively, Earth’s orbit—at minimum. Tacquet closes number 28 with the following:
Galileo in his System of the World attempts in vain to elude this monstrous magnitude of the Fixeds by a long discourse, from page 350 up to

18. Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 208: “In Hypothesi Terrae Motae, Stellae Fixae eam
habent proportionem ad Orbem Magnum, quam habent in Terrae Stantis Hypothesi ad Terram.
Cum Diameter Apparens cuiusuis Fixae, hoc est angulus sub quo Fixa videtur ex Terra, reperiatur praescindendo ab vtralibet Hypothesi Telluris Motae vel Stantis, vt patet ex nu. 23,
liquet Fixam, ex. gr. Spicam, in vtraque Hypothesi aeque multa sui Firmamenti Minutae subtendere; tot nimirum, quot obseruatio exhibet. Igitur Spica Copernicaea est ad Firmamentum
Copernicaeum, vt Spica communis est ad Firmamentum commune. Atqui Firmamentum
Copernicaeum est ad Orbem Magnum, vt Firmamentum commune ad Terram. Ex aequo
igitur Spica Copernicaea est ad Orbem Magnum, vt Spica communis ad Terram.” Note that
Tacquet’s “Firmamenti Minutae” must be a typographical error that should have read “seconds,” since in Number 23 the apparent stellar diameters are given in seconds, not minutes.
19. See Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 258 for examples of his using Brahe’s hypothesis
with Venus.

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202

383.20 But he weakens nothing of what we have demonstrated through
numbers 26–28.21

This ends Tacquet’s star size discussion. Like Scheiner and Locher, he used
just a few pages.
Stars Unchanged
Often one thinks of heliocentrism in terms of making the starry universe larger—pushing the stars farther away, much like Rheticus accuses
Copernicus of doing in Dava Sobel’s play And the Sun Stood Still: “The stars
get in your way? You just wave them off to some other place.”22 But under
a seventeenth-century understanding of stars, pushing them farther away
enlarges them proportionately, via Figure 1. Their separations relative to
their sizes remain unaltered. This fact can elude us, with the result that we
imagine that pushing the stars out yields a heliocentric universe of stars that
is vaster and emptier than its geocentric counterpart. But on a stellar scale,
the heliocentric universe of stars is no vaster nor emptier than the geocentric
universe; both are identical, under a seventeenth-century understanding.
Tacquet’s unusual discussion invites us to think of heliocentrism not as
making the starry universe larger, but as making the earth, sun, moon, planets, and their orbits within it all smaller, as the heliocentric Earth’s orbit
replaces the geocentric Earth. If Earth is made smaller, then on any Earthbased scale the universe will seem enlarged, but in fact the starry universe
remains unchanged. As Tacquet notes, the stars occupy the same proportion of space within the sky, whether the universe is heliocentric or geocentric. But, in the switch from geocentrism to heliocentrism, the Earth and
sun are dramatically reduced; stars that were smaller than the sun in a geocentric universe dwarf it in a heliocentric one. Thus not only does mighty
Sirius utterly dwarf the heliocentric universe’s sun, but little Alcor does, too.
Like Scheiner and Locher’s summary of the star size issue, Tacquet’s
is compact, clear, and scientific (that is, based on observations, measure20. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and
Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake [Modern Library Science] (New York, 2001), 416–52—
hereafter cited as Dialogue.
21. Tacquet, Opera Mathematica, 209: “Galilaeus in suo Mundi Systemate immanem
istam Fixarum magnitudinem nequidquam conatur eludere a pag. 350 vsque ad 383 discursu
longissimo, sed nihil eorum, quae num. 26, 27, 28, iam demonstrauimus, infirmante.”
22. Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionised the Cosmos
(London, 2011), 128.

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203

ments, and calculations). The specific details of sizes are not important—
what Tacquet says holds so long as no parallax is detected, and stars show
measurable size. Now let us consider the star size discourse that he so
briefly dismissed—the lengthy one found in Galileo’s Dialogue.
Simplicio, Sagredo, Salviati, and Stars
Galileo discusses the star size question on the “Third Day” of his Dialogue. The character Sagredo opens the door for the discussion, saying that
“it is now time for us to hear the other [anti-Copernican] side, from that
booklet of theses or disquisitions which Simplicio has brought back with
him.”23 That booklet is Scheiner and Locher’s Disquisitions. It had already
been invoked by the character Simplicio on the first and second days,24 and
roundly ridiculed by the character Salviati. Here on the third day, Salviati
again ridicules it, even making reference to certain “apish puerilities” contained within.25 Then Simplicio brings the discussion around to what is in
Disquisitions regarding the star size question:
Now here, as you see, he [Scheiner/Locher] deduces . . . that if the orbit
in which Copernicus makes the earth travel around the sun in a year
were scarcely perceptible with respect to the immensity of the stellar
sphere, as Copernicus says must be assumed, then one would have to
declare and maintain that the fixed stars were at an inconceivable distance from us, and that the smallest of them would be much larger than
this whole orbit. . . .26

Salviati replies that this argument is based on the introduction of “false
assumptions,” and states that,
by assuming that a star of the sixth magnitude may be no larger than the
sun, one may deduce by means of correct demonstrations that the distance of the fixed stars from us is sufficiently great to make quite imperceptible in them the annual movement of the earth. . . .27

Salviati then notes that the apparent diameter of the sun measures one half
of one degree—1800 seconds of arc, like the moon. First magnitude fixed
stars have an apparent diameter measuring no more than five seconds of
arc, he says, while fixed stars of the sixth magnitude (those barely visible to
23. Dialogue, 414.
24. Dialogue, 105, 253.
25. Dialogue, 415.
26. Dialogue, 416.
27. Dialogue, 417.

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the eye) measure 5/6 of a second of arc.28 Thus the apparent diameter of
the sun is 1800 ÷ (5/6) = 2160 times greater than that of a sixth magnitude
star. And so, Salviati continues,
if one assumes that a fixed star of the sixth magnitude is really equal to
the sun and not larger, this amounts to saying that if the sun moved away
until its diameter looked to be 1/2160th of what it now appears to be, its
distance would have to be 2160 times what it is now.29

So, were a star of the sixth magnitude equal in size to the sun, it would lie
at a distance of 2160 solar distances, and the effect of earth’s orbit “would
be little more noticeable than that which is observed in the sun due to the
radius of the earth.”30
Salviati goes on at some length about erroneous assumptions regarding the apparent diameters of stars—the false assumptions he mentioned
above. Earlier astronomers who determined that a prominent star appears
to have an apparent diameter about one fifteenth that of the moon (120
seconds of arc) cannot be excused, he says, for their erroneous measurements of the stars (both fixed and wandering). This is because
it was within their power to see the bare stars at their pleasure, for it suffices to look at them when they first appear in the evening, or just before
they vanish at dawn. And Venus, if nothing else, should have warned
them of their mistake, being frequently seen in daytime so small that it
takes sharp eyesight to see it, though in the following night it appears like
a great torch.31

Salviati notes that the telescope, “by showing the disc of the star bare and
very many times enlarged,” renders the process of measuring apparent diameters of fixed and wandering stars much easier (Figure 4).32 However, he
argues that non-telescopic methods can also remove the “adventitious irradiation” from a fixed or wandering star (such as Venus) and reveal its correct
apparent diameter; these methods again show that to be no more than five
seconds in the case of a first magnitude star.33 The five second value is smaller
28. When Galileo first reported in 1610 on the appearance of fixed stars as seen
through a telescope, he described them as not having an obviously round appearance. However, by 1613 he was describing them as clearly round, and did so repeatedly from then
onward, always ascribing to them an apparent diameter of a few seconds of arc. See Graney,
Setting Aside, 46–48.
29. Dialogue, 417.
30. Dialogue, 418.
31. Dialogue, 419.
32. Dialogue, 419.
33. Dialogue, 421.

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205

FIGURE 4. Illustration from John F. W. Herschel’s 1828 Treatises on Physical
Astronomy, Light and Sound Contributed to the Encyclopædia Metropolitana (p. 491
and plate 9) of a star as seen through a telescope of aperture similar to what was
used for stellar observations in the seventeenth century. Seventeenth-century
astronomers thought that a telescope stripped stars of “spurious” or “adventitious”
rays, so that what was seen here was, as Galileo put it, the bare star. In fact, the
“diffraction” of light waves through the telescope’s aperture creates the globe-like
appearance seen here, greatly inflating the star’s apparent size. What is seen here is
in fact spurious, and not the bare body of the star. A full understanding of diffraction, the wave nature of light, and star images seen in telescopes was not developed
until the early nineteenth century. Image credit: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und
Seltene Drucke.

than the apparent diameter Riccioli would later determine for Sirius,
although it overlaps with Riccioli’s measurement for stars like Alcor. Salviatti
goes on to spend several pages discussing the non-telescopic methods.
However, 2160 solar distances is 216 times the distance of Saturn.
Brahe, having searched for parallax but not detected it, stated that fixed
stars would have to be at least 700 times more distant than Saturn.34 Thus
34. Ann Blair, “Tycho Brahe’s Critique of Copernicus and the Copernican System,”
Journal for the History of Ideas, 51 (1990), 355–77, here 364; Kristian Peder Moesgaard,
“Copernican Influence on Tycho Brahe,” in: The Reception of Copernicus’ Heliocentric Theory,
ed. Jerzy Dobrzyck (Dordrecht, 1972), 30–55, here 51.

GALILEO BETWEEN JESUITS

206

Simplicio comes back to the failure to detect annual parallax; 2160 solar
distances is not far enough to explain its absence:
when one assumes the star of the sixth magnitude to be as large as the
sun . . . it still remains true that the earth’s orbit would necessarily cause
changes and variations in the stellar sphere similar to the observable
changes produced by the earth’s radius in regard to the sun. No such
changes, or even smaller ones, being observed among the fixed stars, it
appears to me that by this fact the annual movement of the earth is rendered untenable and is overthrown.35

Salviati responds that “nothing prevents our supposing that the distance of
the fixed stars is still much greater than has been assumed.” He argues that
the periods of celestial bodies suggest that the stars could be much more distant still. He notes how, in the Copernican system, the periods of time
required for celestial bodies to complete their cycles increase with distance
from the sun: Saturn is farther from the sun than Jupiter and takes longer
than Jupiter to circle the sun; likewise for Jupiter versus Mars. Salviati points
out that, according to Ptolemy, the period for the precession of the fixed stars
is over a thousand times longer than Saturn’s period. By comparing the
period of the fixed stars to those of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars, Salviati supposes that stellar distances could be five, seven, or twelve times larger, respectively, than the 2160 solar distance value he previously calculated.36
But to suppose the stars are five, seven, or twelve times more distant
than previously calculated is to suppose (via Figure 1) that the stars are five,
seven, or twelve times greater in actual diameter than previously calculated—namely, that sixth-magnitude stars are five, seven, or twelve times
greater in actual diameter than the sun (and thus 125, 343, or 1728 times
greater in volume). The more prominent stars, such as first-magnitude
stars, are larger still; Salviati had said these measure six times the apparent
diameter of the sixth-magnitude stars. If first- and sixth-magnitude stars
are assumed to be similarly distant, then the first-magnitude stars must be
six times the actual diameter of the sixth-magnitude stars. First- and sixthmagnitude stars cannot all be assumed to be of the same size, for that
would require the first-magnitude ones to be six times closer, and thus subject to greater parallax.
Salviati and Sagredo at this point launch into a discussion regarding
Divine Providence, what sizes are comprehensible, whether some size is
35. Dialogue, 423.
36. Dialogue, 424.

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207

greater than God can accomplish, and whether certain amounts of space
are purposeless. They discuss the relative sizes of elephants and ants, whales
and gudgeons, the universe and the moon. Sagredo declares that “a great
ineptitude exists on the part of those who would have it that God made the
universe more in proportion to the small capacity of their reason than to
His immense, His infinite, power.”37 However, Simplicio, citing Disquisitions again, pulls the discourse back to the star size question. Salviati has
implicitly granted that little sixth-magnitude stars, barely visible to the eye,
are at least five times the sun’s actual diameter and 125 times the sun’s
volume, with prominent stars being thirty times the sun’s actual diameter,
and 27,000 times its volume. The question of the “other side” remains
unanswered then. Notes Simplicio:
All this that you are saying is good, but what the other side objects to is
having to grant that a fixed star must be not only equal to, but much
greater than, the sun; for both are still individual bodies located within
the stellar orb [i.e. within the universe].38

Here Simplicio is pointing out that in a geocentric universe individual fixed
stars are commensurate in size to the other individual bodies found within
the universe, while in a heliocentric universe they are not. Even under
Salviati’s own numbers, the Copernican system still requires the stars to
become a new class of giant celestial bodies—an “ad hoc” creation to
answer the scientific problem of parallax. In 1633 Galileo stated, in depositions to the Inquisition, that he did not intend for the Dialogue to promote the Copernican system:
I did not do so [write the Dialogue] because I held Copernicus’s opinion
to be true. Instead, deeming only to be doing a beneficial service, I
explained the physical and astronomical reasons that can be advanced for
one side and for the other; I tried to show that none of these, neither
those in favor of this opinion or that, had the strength of a conclusive
proof. . . .39

He stated that he did not hold the Copernican opinion at that time, did
not hold it when he wrote the Dialogue, and that he simply over-wrote the
pro-Copernican side of the book (to an extent he had not realized until he
had recently reread the book) merely out of a desire to appear clever.40

37. Dialogue, 429.
38. Dialogue, 430.
39. Maurice Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley, 1989), 287.
40. Finocchiaro, Galileo Affair, 278, 287.

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Simplicio’s incisive “individual bodies” comment regarding the star size
question might have been something in the Dialogue to which Galileo
could have referred in support of these statements to the Inquisition, had
he wished to do so.
Within the Dialogue, however, Simplicio’s comment is allowed to
pass. The conversation quickly reverts to discussions of “purpose.” Then
Salviati declares that he has “already demonstrated two things.” One of
these is the distance to the fixed stars needed to solve the parallax problem
(he ignores that Simplicio has said that he has not). The other is that a visible “fixed star” need not be assumed to be larger than the sun (he here
omits reference to just “sixth-magnitude” fixed stars). He then proceeds to
question whether anyone has actually “tried to investigate in any way
whether any phenomena is perceived in the stellar sphere by which one
might boldly affirm or deny the annual motion of the earth.”41 Sagredo
answers “no,” that they would have no need, since Copernicus already says
no parallax can be detected. Sagredo continues:
Then on this assumption they show the improbability which follows from
it; namely, it would be required to make the [stellar] sphere so immense
that in order for a fixed star to look as large as it does, it would actually
have to be so immense in bulk as to exceed the earth’s orbit—a thing
which is, as they say, entirely unbelievable.42

Here Sagredo agrees with Brahe that enormous fixed stars are in fact entirely
unbelievable. Salviati may speak of elephants and ants, whales and gudgeons, but Sagredo apparently considers having the sun be the sole ant in
a universe of elephants, the sole gudgeon in a universe of whales, to be
beyond belief. Despite his earlier statement about seeing a great ineptitude
in those who put limits on the power of God, Sagredo seems to think intellectual economy does imply some constraints. Kepler, of course, would
have disagreed.
Salviati passes over Sagredo’s “entirely unbelievable” remark, focusing
instead on Sagredo’s answer of “no.” Salviati says that arguments based on
Copernicus’s own statements “may suffice to refute the man, but certainly
not to clear up the fact.”43 He now turns to methods by which annual parallax might be detected and Earth’s orbital motion revealed, engaging in a
lengthy discussion with Sagredo regarding how fixed stars in different
41. Dialogue, 431–32.
42. Dialogue, 432.
43. Dialogue, 432.

CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY

209

regions of the sky will show this or that specific effect or variation owing
to that motion.
During this discussion, Simplicio reminds the others that, regardless
of the details, he feels repugnance at being asked to grant that stellar distances are so great that all the variations discussed will be “entirely imperceptible.” He notes that “if the variation is null, then the annual motion
attributed to the Earth in its orbit is null.” He grants that, were those variations detectable, he would have to concede the point to Salviati.44
Salviati, meanwhile, suggests two methods for detecting the variations
in the stars caused by Earth’s annual motion. He believes these methods have
not been tried before and would be more sensitive than those that have been
tried. They would be more sensitive even than what Tycho Brahe could
achieve with his instruments—and Salviati grants that Brahe’s vaunted
instruments were expensive and his skill at observations remarkable.
Salviati’s first suggestion is to use the fixed stars by themselves to
reveal Earth’s motion. He states,
it is not entirely impossible for something some time to become observable among the fixed stars by which it might be discovered what the
annual motion does reside in. Then they, too . . . would appear in court
to give witness to such motion in favor of the earth. For I do not believe
that the stars are spread over a spherical surface at equal distances from
one center; I suppose their distances from us vary so much that some are
two or three times as remote as others. Thus if some tiny star were found
by the telescope quite close to some of the larger ones, and if that one
were therefore very very remote, it might happen that some sensible
alterations would take place among them [that reflect Earth’s annual
motion].45

Salviati is suggesting that, if stars lie at differing distances (as we saw St.
Albert the Great describe earlier) and not all on a sphere, then one star
could be used as a reference point against another. Were two stars arranged
as Salviati states—a smaller-looking star next to a larger-looking one, the
smaller-looking star being farther away than the other—it would follow
that, were Earth orbiting the sun, the alignment of these two stars would
change over the course of a year. The stars would exhibit a “differential parallax” (Figure 5).

44. Dialogue, 448, 438, 449.
45. Dialogue, 444.

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FIGURE 5. Earth orbits the sun (s), as shown at top left, moving clockwise from A
to B. Stars q and p are both similar in size to the sun, located at differing distances
from Earth. When the Earth is at A, the line of sight from Earth to q and p causes
the two stars to appear very close together (below left). When Earth is at B, the two
stars appear more separated (below right). When Earth returns to A, the two stars
will again appear very close together. This is “differential parallax.”

However, when Salviati remarks on what might occur “if some tiny
star were found by the telescope” near a larger star, he does not mention
that Galileo had found examples of such “double stars,” and observed them
with the telescope, a decade and a half prior to the Dialogue’s publication.
Galileo and his friend Benedetto Castelli made the first known observation
of a double star in 1617. The star was Mizar, the star at the bend of the
handle of the Big Dipper. Seen with the naked eye, it appears to be a single
star, but a telescope reveals it to be double.
Castelli observed Mizar first, then informed Galileo about it.46 Galileo
observed it and measured it with precision, recording both the separation
of its two components and the apparent diameters of those components.
Based on this record, we can reconstruct what he saw through his telescope, as seen in Figure 6. Galileo also calculated the distance to the
46. Leos Ondra, “A New View of Mizar,” Sky & Telescope 108 (2004), 72–75. Prior to
Ondra’s work, the first observation of a double star had been attributed to Riccioli. Ondra
made his discovery by going through Galileo’s observing notes. An extended version of the
Sky & Telescope article is available on Ondra’s web page: http://www.leosondra.cz/en/mizar/.

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FIGURE 6. Left is the appearance of Mizar through Galileo’s telescope, according
to Galileo’s measurements. The illustration at right perhaps gives a better idea of
the view through Galileo’s telescope.

brighter of the two Mizar component stars, which astronomers now call
Mizar A. As in Salviati’s Dialogue discussion of sixth-magnitude stars,
Galileo assumed Mizar A to be the same actual size as the sun, and then
calculated that, since he measured the apparent diameter of Mizar A as
being 1/300th that of the sun, its distance was 300 solar distances.47
Thus while Salviati states that, “if some tiny star were found by the telescope” near a larger one, then the stars would “appear in court to give witness” to Earth’s motion, in fact such a star had been found in Mizar in
1617. Galileo is known to have observed other double or multiple star systems, including the Trapezium system in Orion, which he sketched with
great accuracy, all more than a decade prior to publication of the Dialogue.48 Mizar shows no differential parallax, even though the differential
parallax for a double star at 300 solar distances would be dramatic, and
47. All this is found in Galileo’s notes, in Antonio Favaro, ed., Le Opere di Galileo
Galilei: Edizione Nazionale sotto gli Auspicii di Sua Maesta` il Re d’Italia (Firenze, 1890–1909),
vol. 3, pt. 2, 877. Galileo recorded the apparent diameters as being 6 seconds and 4 seconds—
somewhat larger than the apparent diameters he gave for fixed stars in the Dialogue discussion
covered in this paper. He recorded their separation as being 15 arc seconds, in complete
agreement with modern measurements. Galileo’s telescopic observations were remarkably
accurate—see Christopher M. Graney, “On the accuracy of Galileo’s observations,” Baltic
Astronomy, 15 (2007), 443–49.
48. Harald Seibert, “The Early Search for Stellar Parallax: Galileo, Castelli, and Ramponi,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 36 (2005), 251–71.

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would reveal Earth’s motion in a very short period of time. Nor does the
Trapezium show any differential parallax, nor do the other close star
groupings that Galileo observed. In fact, no double star that an astronomer
of that time might have observed shows differential parallax. The witness
had not been given. The absence of differential parallax requires the stars
to be far more distant than the values Salviati promotes, even far more distant than the twelve-times-2160-solar-distances value that he suggested
based on the period of Mars. Thus, the stars must also be far larger than he
says, if the universe is heliocentric.49 The star size question remains.
Salviati’s second suggestion for a method to detect Earth’s motion
involves the fixed stars together with a pole or wooden beam, a telescope,
and a lot of distance. Imagine, he says, an open plain. On the north side
of the plain is a mountain, atop which is a chapel, with a horizontal beam
of wood or some other material mounted above its roof. Then, he says,
I shall seek in the plain that place from which one of the stars of the Big
Dipper is hidden by this beam . . . just when the star crosses the meridian.
Or else, if the beam is not large enough to hide the star, I shall find the
place from which the disc of the star is seen to be cut in half by the beam—
an effect which can be discerned perfectly by means of a fine telescope.50

Thus as Earth moves, the star will (when observed under the same conditions at different dates) peek out on one side or the other of the obstructing
beam—that is, exhibit a parallax—owing to the change of Earth’s position
relative to the star. Here Salviati is invoking the ability of the telescope to
show the disk of a star “bare and very many times enlarged” that he mentioned earlier in the discussion. Figure 7 shows a representation of the
appearance of a star as seen through a very small telescope such as
Galileo’s, with simulations of the beam cutting the star in half and revealing Earth’s motion in the manner Salviati envisions.
There is something fundamentally problematic in what Salviati says
here. As we shall see shortly, the disk-like appearance of stars in a small
telescope, seen in Figure 4, was a false product of the telescope,
formed entirely within the telescope. It did not exist outside the telescope.
And since it did not exist outside the telescope, it could not be cut in half
by anything outside the telescope. Any astronomer who tried in any way to
49. Christopher M. Graney and Henry Sipes, “Regarding the Potential Impact of
Double Star Observations on Conceptions of the Universe of Stars in the Early 17th Century,” Baltic Astronomy, 18 (2009), 93–108.
50. Dialogue, 451.

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FIGURE 7. Left—a star seen through a telescope of very small aperture, from Figure
4. Center—simulated view of the star supposedly “cut in half” by Salviati’s distant
wooden beam. Right—simulated view showing how, after a period of time, the
Earth’s motion relative to the star might cause the position of the beam against the
star to change, proving that Earth indeed moves. If, after one year, the star is once
again divided in half by the beam, then Earth’s motion around the sun (in which it
returns annually to the same place) will be clearly demonstrated. As seen in Figure
4, the appearance of a star in a small telescope is entirely spurious. Thus this disk
of the star, being but an artefact of light formed within the telescope, in fact cannot
be cut by an external object in this manner.

cut the disk of a star by means of an external obstructing object would
quickly realize that Salviati was talking nonsense about this supposedly
perfectly discernable effect.
Salviatti’s “obstructing beam” discourse is roughly the end of the Dialogue’s star size discussion. He declares that the detection of parallax in a star
would be a great achievement in astronomy, “for by this means, besides
ascertaining the annual motion, we shall be able to gain a knowledge of the
size and distance of that same star.” Salviati and Sagredo exchange a few
words about whether anyone has ever tried the obstructing beam procedure,
with Salviati stating that he thinks not, “for it is improbable that if anyone
had tried this he would not have mentioned the result, whichever opinion
it turned out to favor.”51 Sagredo states his complete satisfaction, and moves
to change the topic to details about Earth’s motion. This ends Salviati’s
response to the star size argument from Scheiner and Locher’s Disquisitions.
Questions Raised by a False Universe
Tacquet’s assessment that the Dialogue’s long discourse on the star
size question failed to elude or even weaken the heliocentric star size
51. Dialogue, 451.

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problem seems robust. Salviati’s own numbers for stellar distances and
apparent sizes point to even the smallest visible stars being at least five
times the sun’s actual diameter. His proposed methods for eventually
detecting Earth’s motion are problematic and undermine even those numbers. He cannot refute the compact argument Simplicio presents from
Scheiner’s Disquisitions. Remember, of course, that Kepler would not have
thought Salviati should refute it; Kepler embraced a heliocentric universe
of giant stars and a single unique sun (Figure 8). But Salviati tried to promote a heliocentric universe of sun-like stars, like the universe of Bruno
that Kepler opposed. In this Salviati failed. To a knowledgeable and experienced astronomer, Salviati must have appeared to be the simpleton on
this subject.
Tacquet offers no specific criticism of the Dialogue; was he sufficiently
knowledgeable and experienced to recognize fully the depth of Salviati’s
problems? After all, Vanpaemel notes that Tacquet either made no telescopic observations himself or, if he did, no record of them survives.52
However, Tacquet cites Riccioli. Riccioli certainly possessed that knowledge and experience. In his New Almagest, Riccioli writes of Mizar as being
a double star, treats the subject of telescopically measured apparent stellar
diameters at length, and calculates the actual sizes of stars required under
a heliocentric universe given specific parallax limits (finding that even little
Alcor must rival Earth’s orbit in size)—and these things take up but a fraction of that book’s 1400 pages of dense text and diagrams. And Disquisitions and the New Almagest were not the only works by Jesuit astronomers.
Whether Tacquet himself had the knowledge and experience to recognize
fully the shortcomings of Salviati’s discourse, that knowledge and experience was available among Jesuit astronomers.
The Scheiner-Galileo-Tacquet exchange illustrates that the heliocentric universe that Jesuit astronomers saw was Kepler’s heliocentric universe,
with its tiny, brilliant, unique sun orbited by a retinue of tinier planets and
surrounded by a universe of distant, enormous, dim, and not-very-sun-like
stars. Works by Jesuit astronomers undoubtedly informed others in the
Church, including those involved in the actions taken against heliocentrism in the first half of the seventeenth century.
A thorough investigation of the extent to which Kepler’s universe and
the star size question informed those actions remains to be undertaken.
Certainly not all opinions regarding heliocentrism were informed by the
52. Vanpaemel, “Jesuit Science,” 407.

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FIGURE 8. Diagram from Kepler’s 1618 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy (p. 36),
showing the sun as a small dot (just visible at the center), surrounded by larger stars.
Image credit: ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke.

implications of carefully measured apparent star sizes and the failure to
detect parallax. Not everyone who favored the Copernican hypothesis considered the stars to be giant. Not everyone who opposed that hypothesis
did so because of the star size question and concerns about God and intellectual economy. Bruno, of course, is an example of the former. Niccolò
Lorini, who in 1615 filed a complaint about Galileo with the Inquisition
in Rome, would seem to be an example of the latter, as his complaint mentions not heliocentrism and star sizes but rather conflicts between heliocentrism and a plain reading of scripture.53
However, some persons in the Church who were involved in the
actions taken against heliocentrism certainly were informed about the star
size question. Msgr. Francesco Ingoli, who Galileo believed to have been
influential in the rejection of heliocentrism by the Congregation of the
Index in 1616, cited the star size argument against Copernicus in his writings.54 Fr. Melchior Inchofer, S.J. who was selected for a three-person
53. Finocchiaro, Galileo Affair, 28, 134–35.
54. Ingoli in a 1616 essay to Galileo referenced Brahe and noted that the Copernican
system requires “the fixed stars to be of such size, as they may surpass or equal the size of the
orbit circle of the Earth itself”—see Graney, Setting Aside, 70–72, 167–68; this book includes
a full translation of Ingoli’s essay.

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Special Commission formed by Pope Urban VIII to investigate the publication of the Dialogue, likewise noted the star size question.55
Suppose that familiarity with the star size question, illustrated in the
Scheiner-Galileo-Tacquet exchange, went beyond Ingoli and Inchofer.
Might one then look differently at a more prominent figure like Robert
Cardinal Bellarmine and his interactions with heliocentrism and Galileo?
Bellarmine famously demanded that hard evidence in favor of heliocentrism be produced prior to any re-interpretation of the Bible’s references to
Earth’s immobility or the sun’s motion as referring to only appearances
rather than to actualities. Writing in April 1615, he said,
I say that if there were a true demonstration . . . that the sun does not
circle the earth but the earth circles the sun, then one would have to proceed with great care in explaining the Scriptures that appear contrary,
and say rather that we do not understand them than that what is demonstrated is false. But I will not believe that there is such a demonstration,
until it is shown me. Nor is it the same to demonstrate that by supposing
the sun to be at the center and the earth in heaven one can save the
appearances, and to demonstrate that in truth the sun is at the center
and the earth in heaven; for I believe the first demonstration may be
available, but I have very great doubts about the second, and in the case
of doubt one must not abandon the Holy Scripture as interpreted by the
Holy Fathers.56

Some have argued that Bellarmine was not truly interested in such evidence and would not have been persuaded by it. Consider, for example, the
modern Jesuit astronomer George Coyne, Director of the Specola Vaticana, the Vatican’s astronomical observatory at Castel Gandolfo in Italy
and Mt. Graham in Arizona, from 1978 to 2006, and a member of the
1980s Galileo Commission appointed by Pope St. John Paul II. Citing
Bellarmine’s statement that “I will not believe that there is such a demonstration until it is shown me,” Coyne wrote:
it is clear that Bellarmine was convinced that there was no such demonstration to be shown. A further indication of this conviction of Bellarmine is had in the fact that he supported the decree of the Congrega-

55. Inchofer in his 1633 Tractatus Syllepticus noted that “the defenders of the Copernican system imagine that, since the stars are seen at an almost infinite distance, they have a size
which is explicable by hardly any proportion”—see Richard J. Blackwell, Behind the Scenes at
Galileo’s Trial: Including the First English Translation of Melchior Inchofer’s Tractatus Syllepticus
(Notre Dame, IN, 2006), 182.
56. Finocchiaro, Galileo Affair, 68.

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217

tion of the Index in 1616 [declaring heliocentrism both “false” and “contrary to the Holy Scripture”57] which was aimed at excluding any reconciliation of Copernicanism with Scripture. If Bellarmine truly believed
that there might be a demonstration of Copernicanism, why did he not
recommend waiting and not taking a stand? . . . And why did he accept
to deliver an admonition to Galileo in 1616? This admonition prohibited
Galileo from pursuing his research as regards Copernicanism. Galileo
was forbidden to seek precisely those scientific demonstrations which,
according to Bellarmine, would have driven theologians back to reinterpret Scripture. . . . Bellarmine was convinced that there would never be a
demonstration of Copernicanism and that the Scriptures taught an
Earth-centered universe.58

Consider also Harvard astronomer and historian of science Owen Gingerich, who has suggested that Bellarmine might not have accepted as a
true demonstration of Earth’s motion even the discovery of annual parallax, or of the Foucault Pendulum often displayed in science museums today
as a demonstration of Earth’s rotation.59
Other authors assess Bellarmine differently, of course. Historian
David Wootton, for example, has written that Bellarmine was not advocating a ban on the discussion of heliocentrism and was prepared to accept
that it could be demonstrated to be true.60 And Bellarmine himself had
stated that evidence could indeed supersede Scripture in astronomical matters. Decades before he became involved with the debate over heliocentrism, he had argued in his Louvain lectures that Scripture suggested that
celestial bodies were not carried by any celestial machinery, but rather
moved autonomously, “like the birds of the air or the fish of the water.”
This was contrary to then-standard astronomy; Christopher Clavius, S.J.,
in his widely used astronomy text, specifically said that celestial bodies do
not move like birds or fish. However, Bellarmine granted that, while Scripture seemed to support autonomous motion,
If then one ascertained with evidence that the motions of the heavenly
bodies are not autonomous . . . one would have to consider a way of interpreting the Scriptures which would put them in agreement with the

57. Finocchiaro, Galileo Affair, 149.
58. George V. Coyne, “Galileo and Bellarmine,” in: The Inspiration of Astronomical Phenomena VI: ASP Conference Series, Vol. 441, ed. Enrico Maria Corsini (San Francisco, 2011),
7-8.
59. Owen Gingerich, God’s Universe (Cambridge, 2006), 91–94.
60. David Wootton, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies (New Haven, 2013), 144–45.

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ascertained truth: for it is certain that the true meaning of Scripture
cannot be in contrast with any other truth.61

Nevertheless, let us imagine the Bellarmine of 1615 as Coyne did—
adamant that no evidence could demonstrate the veracity of heliocentrism.
The heliocentric universe that Coyne’s Bellarmine probably had in mind
when he expressed skepticism toward heliocentrism in 1615, and eventually stood against it in 1616, would have been Kepler’s giant stars universe.
After all, that is what Bellarmine would have gathered from Jesuit
astronomers like Scheiner. And if Salviati could not effectively argue
against Scheiner in 1632, Galileo certainly could not have done so in 1615.
Do we then look differently at even Coyne’s Bellarmine? As he stood convinced that no demonstration of heliocentrism was possible, the heliocentrism he would surely have had in mind was a heliocentrism that even
Sagredo would call “entirely unbelievable”—all the while Brahe’s geocentric universe (with its stars located just beyond Saturn and commensurate
in size with the other celestial bodies) was a scientifically viable option,
supported by Jesuit astronomers.
While the extent to which these sorts of astronomical considerations
informed Bellarmine’s view on heliocentrism awaits investigation, examples can be found of such considerations being thought capable of swaying
the interpretation of Scripture. Bellarmine’s Louvain lectures are one
example. Another is an assessment in 1661 from the French Jesuit Honoré
Fabri regarding heliocentrism specifically—that the Church does not operate against evidence, and so if some demonstration of the validity of the
Copernican hypothesis were found, the Church would not scruple to
declare that those passages of Scripture that speak of an immobile Earth or
a moving sun are to be understood in a figurative sense.62 A third is the
Inquisition consultant and Jesuit Pietro Lazzari, who urged in 1757 that
the general prohibition against “all books teaching the earth’s motion and
the sun’s immobility” be removed from the Index. Lazzari said that the evidence was indeed against Copernicus in 1616 when the Congregation of
the Index had declared heliocentrism “false” and contrary to Scripture:
Thus, one can say that at that time there were good reasons or motives
for [the Copernican system] being prudently prescribed. I consider three
of these reasons for prescribing it. Firstly, this opinion of the earth’s

61. Roberto Bellarmino, The Louvain lectures (Lectiones Lovanienses) of Bellarmine and
the Autograph copy of his 1616 declaration to Galileo, eds. Ugo Baldini and George V. Coyne
(Città del Vaticano, 1984), 19–20, 38 n. 88.
62. Maurice Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 1633-1992 (Berkeley, 2005), 93–94.

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motion was new and was rejected and branded with serious objections by
most excellent astronomers and physicists. Secondly, it was deemed to be
contrary to Scripture when taken in the proper and literal sense; and this
was conceded even by the defenders of that opinion. Thirdly, no strong
reason or demonstration was advanced to oblige or counsel us to so disregard Scripture and support this opinion.63

Lazzari goes on to note all the strong evidence that had since accumulated
for heliocentrism, specifically since the advent of Newtonian physics at the
end of the seventeenth century, that now obliged and counseled support for
the heliocentric opinion.64 Lazzari prevailed. The general prohibition
against heliocentrism was lifted.
Beyond any specific figure such as Bellarmine, does the star size question illustrated in the Scheiner-Galileo-Tacquet exchange prompt us to
look differently even at institutional actions like the prohibition against
heliocentrism? Does it matter what sort of heliocentric universe the Congregation of the Index had in mind when it labelled heliocentrism “false”?
What does it mean if the heliocentric universe they had in mind was
Kepler’s—the heliocentric universe that observations, measurements, and
calculations required? After all, that universe was indeed “false,” insofar as
today astronomers know that the sun is not the unique central body of all
the universe, and the stars are not all far larger than the sun. Modern
astronomers see great diversity in the stars: a very small portion of the stars
are indeed far larger than the sun; many more are comparable to the sun;
the vast majority are small “red dwarf” stars far outclassed by the sun.
This paper suggests no answers to the questions proposed here. That is
not its purpose. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how, to Jesuit
astronomers in the seventeenth century—and indeed to any astronomers of
that time who were persuaded by observations, measurements, and calculations, and to anyone who might have consulted such astronomers for
their expertise—the Copernican universe looked radically different from
the universe as modern astronomers understand it. But understanding this
allows these sorts of interesting questions to be asked. Thus the details of
the Scheiner-Galileo-Tacquet exchange are worth the time of the general
reader of The Catholic Historical Review.

63. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 139 (italics added).
64. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo, 137–48.

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False Stars
No other Jesuit could follow Tacquet in effectively wielding the star
size argument against heliocentrism, however. In 1674, Robert Hooke published his An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth. In it, he cites Tacquet
as being a leading anti-Copernican who wielded the star size argument
forcefully. But Hooke also mentions an observation that would in time nullify the star size argument. This was not the supposed observation of annual
parallax that was the central feature of the book. No, Hooke reported that
he had been able to observe through his telescope during the daylight a fixed
star at the zenith; he noted how that star appeared to be very, very small;
and he noted that this observation answered Tacquet (and Riccioli):
[B]y this Observation of the Star in the day time when the Sun shined,
with my 36 foot Glass I found the body of the Star so very small, that it
was but some few thirds [i.e. sixtieths of an arc second] in Diameter, all
the spurious rayes that do beard it in the night being cleerly shaved away,
and the naked body thereof left a very small white point.
The smalness of this body thus discovered does very fully answer a grand
objection alledged by divers of the great Anti-copernicans with great vehemency and insulting; amonst which we may reckon Ricciolus and Tacquet,
who would fain make the apparent Diameters of the Stars so big, as that
the body of the Star should contain the great Orb [Earth’s orbit] many
times, which would indeed swell the Stars to a magnitude vastly bigger
then the Sun, thereby hoping to make it seem so improbable, as to be
rejected by all parties. But they that shall by this means examine the
Diameter of the fixt Stars, will find them so very small that according to
these distances and Parallax they will not much differ in magnitude from
the body of the Sun. . . .65

In fact, even Hooke’s method did not reveal the naked body of a star—that
remains beyond most telescopes even today—but his observation gave evidence that previous telescopic measurements of star sizes were in error.
Nor was Hooke the first to obtain such evidence.
In fact, the problem of measuring the apparent diameter of a “star,”
be it a fixed star or a wandering “star”—that is, a planet—was most difficult. For example, consider the case of the wandering star Venus. A keen
eye saw Venus as a bright dot with an apparent diameter approximately
one tenth that of the moon (as Ptolemy and Brahe said). But through the
65. Robert Hooke, An Attempt to Prove the Motion of the Earth from Observations
(London: Printed by T.R. for John Martyn, 1674), 26.

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FIGURE 9. The moon and Venus, seen from the Kamchatka peninsula in November
of 2021, as simulated via the Stellarium planetarium app. Left is the view with the
eye; right is the view with the telescope. Note that the size of Venus relative to the
moon is much smaller in the right-hand image, and that Venus shows a phase like
the moon.

telescope, Venus’s disk appeared much smaller relative to the moon’s
disk—the telescope seemingly enlarged the moon more than it enlarged
Venus (Figure 9). Moreover, seen through the telescope, the disk of
Venus varied in apparent diameter over time, and showed the phases
Galileo had discovered, ranging from nearly a full disk to a slim crescent
(Figure 10). The explanation for all this was that the telescope stripped
away the glare or “spurious rays” or “adventitious irradiation” from Venus,
revealing the bare body of the wandering star, and thus its true form and
its correct apparent size.
The telescope was thought to do also the same thing for fixed stars.
The telescopes of the seventeenth century indeed revealed fixed stars to be
distinct disks. Refer again to Figure 4, and consider the following observation recorded by John Flamsteed, the first English Astronomer Royal:
1672, October 22. When Mercury was about 10 deg. high, I observed
him in the garden with my longer tube (of 14 foot); but could not with
it see the fixa [fixed star] (near him), the daylight being too strong; only
I noted his diameter 45 parts = 16 [seconds of arc], or a little less; for,
turning the tube to Sirius, I found his diameter 42 parts = 15, which I

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FIGURE 10. Galileo’s illustration of the changing phases and apparent diameter of
Venus, from his 1623 Il Saggiatore (p. 217). Image credit: History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries.

judged equal to Mercury’s. The aperture on the object-glass was ¾ of an
inch: so that Sirius was well deprived of spurious rays, and shined not turbulently, but as sedate as Mercury; the limbs of both well defined, but
Sirius best.66

Note Flamsteed’s indication that the disk of Sirius was more clearly
defined than that of the planet Mercury. Note also that the apparent diameter of 15 seconds that Flamsteed gives for Sirius is not much different
from Riccioli and Tacquet’s value of 18 seconds. The telescope also
improved sensitivity to parallax, forcing the stars to be more distant. Riccioli’s calculation of star sizes that showed that even little Alcor must rival
Earth’s orbit in size was based on this improved sensitivity.67
Neither Flamsteed nor Riccioli nor any other astronomer of the time
understood that, in the case of a fixed star, the disk revealed by the telescope was false and formed within the telescope itself, a product of “diffraction”—the interaction of light waves with the small aperture of the telescope. On the other hand, in the case of Venus, the disk (and its phases)
revealed by the telescope was true. This was a most difficult issue, not to be
fully worked out until a satisfactory wave theory of light was developed in
66. Graney, Setting Aside, 152.
67. Graney, Setting Aside, 135.

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223

the early nineteenth century.68 At any rate, as Flamsteed’s 1672 observation record shows, during much of the seventeenth century, the telescopically observed and measured disks of stars were thought to be the actual
bodies of those stars.
Hooke obtained evidence that they were not, but he was not the first
to do so. Shortly before Tacquet’s death in 1660, Christiaan Huygens had
published observations similar to Hooke’s, although Flamsteed rejected
them (indeed, Flamsteed’s observations of Sirius and Mercury quoted
above were part of a discussion rejecting Huygens). Shortly thereafter,
however, Johannes Hevelius published observations by Jeremiah Horrocks
to the effect that the disks of stars could not be cut by an obstructing body
(the moon, specifically), which suggested they were spurious. Riccioli himself may have lost faith in the star size argument by the mid-1660s.69
Hooke’s work simply dealt another blow to the argument. The spurious
nature of any telescopic measurement of apparent stellar diameters was
becoming manifest. The idea that Salviati promoted, that stars were sunlike bodies at distances so vast that Earth’s orbit was nothing by comparison, was becoming something that observations and measurements could
actually support—that is, that science could actually support. But science
did not progress steadily in this case. In 1717 Jacques Cassini, a wellrespected French astronomer, published a paper supporting the idea that
68. Christopher M. Graney and Timothy P. Grayson, “On the telescopic disks of
stars—a review and analysis of stellar observations from the early 17th through the middle
19th centuries,” Annals of Science 68 (2011), 351–73.
69. Graney, Setting Aside, 148–157. There is also an intriguing discussion in Kepler’s
1618 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy. Earlier in Epitome Kepler puts forward the same ideas
as discussed here: stars being large (Figure 8); the idea that the farther away a star is supposed
to be, the larger its true physical size must be; the use of star sizes against Bruno. But several
hundred pages later, Kepler contradicts his earlier discussion by stating that stars are incredibly small—just a tiny fraction of the diameter of the sun. This stems from an argument about
the nature of the universe that is based not on observations but on assumptions Kepler makes
regarding matter and the densities of different regions of the universe. Kepler justifies these
tiny stars by means of a general statement that the fixed stars, when observed by a skilled
astronomer using a telescope, appear as mere points of light. This raises the possibility that
Kepler had learned of observations suggesting the false nature of telescopically measured star
sizes well before Horrocks and Huygens. Likewise, Ingoli makes an intriguing comment
about stars not “operating” like other bodies. However, one telescopic astronomer after
another in the first two thirds of the seventeenth century referred to stars seen through telescopes as being finite, measurable disks, and not as being immeasurable points. Thus, absent
a description such as that provided by Horrocks or Huygens that explains how a skilled
astronomer would see stars as mere points, or how stars would operate differently, Kepler’s
“points” comment and Ingoli’s “operating” comment should perhaps be considered to be
anomalous. See Graney, “Starry Universe,” 162–66.

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telescopic measurement of apparent stellar diameters were indeed valid. He
republished this idea in a book of 1740.70 When Lazzari was arguing for
the Copernican system in 1757, one could find a recently-published
astronomy text that, citing Cassini, reported how a telescope could reliably
reveal the apparent diameter of bright fixed stars to be about five seconds
of arc, just as Salviati claimed more than a century earlier.71 Firm scientific
support for the stars being sun-like bodies did not come easily.
Conclusion: Science, Stars and Universes
Modern astronomers indeed see great diversity in the stars, but in a
broad sense modern astronomers do understand stars to be sun-like bodies
at vast distances. Thus it might seem to follow that those voices from four
centuries ago that promoted the idea that stars were distant suns—whether
they were the voices of real persons like Bruno, or of fictional characters
like Salviati—were “voices of science” in some sense. Correspondingly, it
might seem that opposing voices from that time were in some sense in
opposition to science, disinterested in scientific evidence.72
But through much of the seventeenth century, science—observations,
measurements, and calculations—did not support that modern view of what
stars are. The views science supported were Kepler’s heliocentric view of stars
being distant, dim bodies that utterly dwarf the sun and the other celestial
bodies, and Brahe’s geocentric view of stars being just beyond Saturn and
70. Jacques Cassini, “De le Grandeur des Etoiles Fixes, et de Leur Distance a la Terre,”
13 Nov. 1717, in: Histoire de l’Académie Royale des Sciences, Avec les Mémoires de Mathématique
et de Physique Annee MDCCXVII (Paris, 1741). Cassini describes measuring the apparent
diameter of Sirius by observing both it and Jupiter with a long telescope of reduced aperture,
and comparing the two bodies to find that Sirius measures 1/10th Jupiter’s diameter, or about
five seconds: “Le diametre apparent de Jupiter étoit alors de 50 secondes, d’où il resulte que
celui de Sirius étoit d’environ 5 secondes [pp. 258–59].” The same can be found in found in
Cassini’s book Elements d’Astronomie (Paris, 1740), 50.
71. John Hill, Urania, or a Compleat View of the Heavens, etc. in the form of a Dictionary,
Vol. I (London, 1754): In the entry for “STARS, fixed” (no page numbers) is “The observation of Sirius’s diameter being five seconds, had, for its author, one of the most accurate, and
most judicious astronomers the world has ever known, Cassini, and, whenever it is repeated
with the same apparatus, it succeeds in the same manner, and verified very punctually [italics
added].” The author also discusses the alternate view that stars do not have truly measurable
apparent diameters, stating “it may be well to advise repeated experiments and observations
farther to determine which is right.” The entry for “DISTANCE of the fixed Stars” describes
Cassini’s method of measuring stellar apparent diameters, and it also gives five seconds as the
diameter of Sirius, and states that those who grant the most prominent fixed stars no apparent
diameters seem to be “carrying it too far.”
72. See Mario Livio, Galileo and the Science Deniers (New York, 2020).

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commensurate in size with the other celestial bodies. Jesuit astronomers like
Christoph Scheiner, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, and André Tacquet understood this. Others who might have listened to Jesuit astronomers, including
those involved in actions by Church authorities against Galileo and the
heliocentric system, would have understood this, too.
To many, Kepler’s starry universe was what Galileo’s character
Sagredo said—“beyond belief,” a violation of intellectual economy, or even
perhaps, “foolish and absurd in philosophy.” Brahe’s geocentric universe
was the remaining choice. Tacquet says that Galileo tried in vain to elude,
in essence, the choice of either Kepler or Brahe. Tacquet sees that while he
himself and other anti-Copernicans could offer science against a heliocentric universe of sun-like stars, Galileo’s character Salviati could offer only
intuition in favor of such a universe.
That intuition turned out, of course, to be correct. But at the time that
intuition could not survive even the comments of Galileo’s character Simplicio, much less Jesuit astronomers like Scheiner and Tacquet wielding
observations and calculations against it. Thus the back-and-forth from
Scheiner to Galileo to Tacquet shows that the heliocentric universe that
observations and measurements required, that astronomers discussed, and
that church authorities condemned—and that Simplicio rejected, that
Sagredo said was beyond belief, and that Salviati sought in vain to elude—
was Kepler’s universe of monstrous stars enveloping one single, unique
solar system and its tiny, brilliant sun. This universe looked radically different from the universe as we understand it today. No modern view of a universe of many distant suns would be scientifically supportable until after
Tacquet’s death in 1660.

Anticommunism and Détente:
Cardinal Mindszenty in the USA, 1 9 7 3 /7 4
ARPAD VON KLIMO*
When Cardinal József Mindszenty, since 1945 head of the Catholic
Church of Hungary, returned for a visit to the United States in 1973,
the world had changed dramatically since his first visit in 1947. After
his arrest and show trial in Stalinist Hungary, he had become a symbol
of heroic anti-Communist resistance during the Cold War. Through
negotiations with the U.S. administration and the Vatican in the
wider context of Détente and “Vatican Ostpolitik,” the negative image
of Communist Hungary had changed while Cardinal Mindszenty
now seemed to have become a person of the past. These changes had a
major impact on how the US government, the Vatican, and AmericanHungarians interpreted Mindszenty’s visits in 1973 and 1974.
Key words: U.S. Catholic Church, Hungarian Americans, anticommunism, anti-liberalism, détente
Cardinal Mindszenty, Communist Hungary, and the West, 1 9 7 1 – 7 5

A

fter his death in 1975 and during the 1980s when the communist
regimes in Central and Eastern Europe collapsed, many remembered
Cardinal József Mindszenty as an international symbol of anticommunist
resistance. Today, however, he is largely forgotten in the United States and
most parts of the world outside of Hungary. Even his canonization process
has not sparked more interest.1

This was different when Cardinal Mindszenty visited the USA in 1947
and in the mid-1970s. In 1947, Cardinal Francis Spellman invited him to
celebrate Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.2 Soon after,
*Dr. Von Klimo is Ordinary Professor in the History Department of the Catholic University of America. His email address is: Klimo@cua.edu.
1. On February 12, 2019, Pope Francis advanced Mindszenty’s canonization cause. He
is now a “venerable” of the Catholic Church because he “lived the Christian virtues in a heroic
way.” However, his sainthood case is still in an initial stage. https://www.ncronline.org/
news/people/sainthood-causes-blessed-newman-cardinal-mindszenty-advance
2. “Foreign prelates at St Patrick mass,” New York Times, July 7, 1947.

226

ARPAD VON KLIMO

227

the Hungarian would become a worldwide symbol for the Christian resistance against Communism in Eastern Europe because of his arrest on
Christmas 1948 and after his show trial and incarceration in 1949. This
brought tens of thousands of people to protest against the Hungarian
regime and communism in general all over the Western world, from West
Germany to Australia.3 Even in Protestant countries like Sweden, Mindszenty was celebrated as a “hero of religious freedom.”4 The U.S. weekly
Time magazine put Mindszenty on its cover on February 14, 1949, representing him as a modern-day Christian martyr.5
His fame in the West resurfaced in 1956, after Mindszenty was liberated by Hungarian troops sympathizing with the anti-Stalinist revolution in late October of that year. However, he could only spend a few
days in freedom, giving interviews and a speech on the radio before the
arrival of Soviet troops made him seek refuge in the United States Legation (later: Embassy) in Budapest. He would remain there for the next
fifteen years, which turned him into a major problem in the relations
between the United States, the Vatican, and the Hungarian Communist
government. When he finally left the US Embassy in 1971, many Americans, not only Catholics or American-Hungarians but also anticommunist activists and politicians, extended invitations to the Cardinal to visit
the United States. The “Hungarian National Committee” (Magyar
Nemzeti Bizottság) even wanted to ask the Cardinal to stay permanently
in the United States.6 Numerous local Hungarian diaspora communities
in the USA wanted to host Mindszenty during his trip. The question of
who invited the Cardinal and whose invitation was accepted by him was
politically relevant, as shall be seen.

3. Cf. Patricia K. Tillman, Cardinal Mindszenty, Anticommunism, and American
Catholicism from the Early Cold War to the Reagan Era. PhD Dissertation, Catholic University
of America, Washington, DC, 2018. Many Americans thought that Communism was some
kind of religion that needed to be defeated by religious means. Cf. Jonathan P. Herzog, The
Spiritual-Industrial Complex: America’s Religious Battle against Communism in the Early Cold
War (Oxford, 2011).
4. A 1948 Swedish postcard called Mindszenty a “hero of religious freedom” (“religionsfrihetens hjälte”). Possession of the author.
5. An illustration on the title page depicted him with prison bars in the background.
Time magazine, February 14, 1949. Two rather hagiographical biographies were published in
the same year in New York: Béla Fábián’s Cardinal Mindszenty: The Story of a Modern Martyr
and Stephen K. Swift’s The Cardinal’s Story: The Life and Work of Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty.
6. Report to State Security Agency, Information from Vienna, October 1971. Archives
of the Hungarian State Security Agency (Állambiztonsági Szolgalati Történeti Levéltára,
hereafter cited as: ÁBTL), 3.2.9. R–8–009/ II “Vecchio,” 163.

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ANTICOMMUNISM AND DÉTENTE

However, because the nature of the Cold War had changed tremendously during the quarter-century since 1947, the visits of the Cardinal in the
early 1970s were accompanied by controversies about his personality and his
ideas. These conflicts revealed a changed attitude towards communism in
general and a changing view of the Hungarian Communist regime under
János Kádár (1912–89) in particular. The Hungarian regime had been a diplomatic outcast since 1945, but even more so since the brutal crushing of the
1956 revolution and the retaliation of the regime against its leaders and
activists. This negative image began to change slowly since the early 1960s.
Causes for the improvements of Communist Hungary’s image were the
amnesty of political prisoners in 1963, a step the United States had requested
in exchange for the dropping of the embarrassing debates on the 1956 repression from the agenda of the United Nations in New York.7 Hungary also
opened her borders that made it possible for Hungarians to travel to the
West, almost at the same time that East Germany walled its citizens in.
Tourism, although controlled by the regime, also contributed to a better
understanding and introduced some normality in the relations between Hungary and the West.8 The more open the country became the more difficult it
was to portray it in the colors of the black-and-white Cold War propaganda
associated with Stalinism, labor camps, torture, and “brain-washing.”9 The
dictatorship of the party now used a reduced amount of repression and a new
“culture of prevention” against any opposition.10 Many exiled Hungarians visited the country or received visitors from behind “the Iron Curtain” which
made it more difficult to distinguish between friend and foe. A new, friendlylooking propaganda, cultural diplomacy including musical and dance ensembles, modern art exhibitions, and avantgarde movies from communist Hungary added to the changing image.11 In 1964, the Kádár regime could
7. This was thoroughly studied by Georg Kastner, Ungarn 1956 vor der UNO. (Innsbruck et. al. 2010).
8. Tibor Dessewffy, “Speculators and Travelers: The Political Construction of the
Tourist in the Kadar Regime,” Cultural Studies, 16.1 (2002), 44–62. For a more general view,
see: Sune Pedersen, Sune Bechmann, and Christian Noack, Tourism and Travel during the
Cold War: Negotiating Tourist Experiences across the Iron Curtain (London, 2019).
9. On the role the Mindszenty case played in Western debates on “brain washing,”
see: Paul Betts. “Religion, Science and Cold War Anti-Communism: The 1949 Cardinal
Mindszenty Show Trial,” Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe, eds. Paul
Betts and Stephen A. Smit (London, 2016), 275–307.
10. This “culture of prevention” introduced from the Soviet Union is described with regard
to the suppression of the Catholic Church in Nicolas Bauquet, Pouvoir, Eglise et société en Hongrie
communiste, 1944–1964. PhD Thesis, Sciences Po—Institut d’études politiques de Paris, 2013.
11. On Hungarian cultural diplomacy of the time, see Anikó Macher, “Hungarian Cultural Diplomacy,” in: Searching for a Cultural Diplomacy, eds. Jessica Gienow-Hecht et al.
[Explorations in culture and international history series, 6] (New York, 2010), 75–108.

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celebrate another diplomatic success after the signing of a partial agreement
with the Vatican that resulted in a series of further negotiations in relation to
the fate of Cardinal Mindszenty, ending in his departure from Hungary in
1971. The improved U.S.-Hungarian relations led to the raising of the status
of the US legation in Budapest to embassy, in 1966.
Between 1972 and his death in 1975, the Cardinal visited a number of
countries in the Western World. His trips brought him from Vienna,
where he resided, to Western Europe (West Germany, Belgium), including Portugal, where he visited Fatima, the graves of Admiral Horthy, and
the tomb of the last Hungarian King (and Austrian Emperor) Charles in
Madeira.12 A year later, Mindszenty visited South Africa, where the
apartheid regime justified itself by the threat of communism and financed
the colonial wars of Portugal until the authoritarian regime there collapsed
in 1975.13 Other destinations were Canada, Venezuela, and New Zealand,
among other places. Other countries did not welcome Mindszenty. In
France, the question of his visit created a long debate.14 Everywhere,
expectations and interpretations of his visits were different and changed
according to the local and national circumstances.
It is important to emphasize the different motivations of those who
admired and supported Cardinal Mindszenty during this time. For many
Catholics, the Hungarian primate was a martyr whose body was marked by
long years of suffering and the final triumph over his enemies. However,
this did not necessarily mean that they shared his political and social opin12. On the early context of Fatima, see António Teixeira Fernandes, Igreja e sociedade
na monarquia constitucional e na primeira república (Porto, 2007); Duncan Simpson, “The
Catholic Church and the Portuguese Dictatorial Regime: The Case of Paul VI’s Visit to
Fátima,” Lusitania Sacra (2008), 329–78; William Christian Jr, “Religious Apparitions and
the Cold War in Southern Europe,” in: Religion, Power and Protest in Local Communities: The
Northern Shore of the Mediterranean, ed. Eric A. Wolf (Berlin, Boston, 2015), 239–66; and
João Miguel Almeida. “Progressive Catholicism in Portugal: Considerations on Political
Activism (1958–1974),” Histoire@ Politique 3 (2016), 60–74. On the early Cold War and
Fatima, see Monique Scheer, “Catholic Piety in the Early Cold War Years,” in: Cold War
Cultures: Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies, eds. Thomas Lindenberger and
Annette Vowinckel (New York, 2012), 129–51.
13. Filipe Ribeiro De Meneses and Robert McNamara. “The last throw of the dice:
Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa, 1970–74,” Portuguese Studies, 28.2 (2012), 201–15;
Paulo Correia and Grietjie Verhoef, “Portugal and South Africa: Close Allies or Unwilling
Partners in Southern Africa during the Cold War?” Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of
Military Studies, 37.1 (2009), 50–72.
14. ÁBTL—3. 2. 3. Mt-1109 / 2 /1 „Blanc“. The invitation finally came in April 1975,
but too late.

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ions that began to clash with the policies of the Vatican or the U.S. administration. For some, his traditionalist idea of an authoritarian, pre-Second
Vatican Council church was still valuable, while others found it outdated.15
For many, his story and his words expressed emotions they shared, like fear
of communism, hope in a restored national community, and traditional
values of family and gender. He was someone who withstood the tides of
radical political, economic, and cultural change that characterized the
period since the 1960s. For them, détente and dialogue, the new phase in
the Cold War, were only symptoms of the much more comprehensive
political, social, and cultural decline of Western societies. But public opinion tended slowly towards a different trend that saw the new, more conciliatory diplomacy of détente and Ostpolitik positively. For this camp,
Mindszenty was an obstacle to peaceful co-existence. Public appearances of
Cardinal Mindszenty in this new phase of the Cold War brought underlying controversies about détente, but also about feminism and the changing
values of Western societies to the surface.
On the same Pentecost Sunday, when Cardinal Mindszenty celebrated a Mass in West Germany (May 22, 1972), U.S. President Richard
Nixon arrived in Moscow for an historical summit with the Soviet leader
Leon Brezhnev, ending his visit a couple of days later with the signing of
a number of agreements that eased the tensions between the superpowers.
On the same weekend, Pope Paul VI welcomed a large group of bishops,
priests, and lay people from Communist Hungary in Rome. These meetings were results of the politics of détente and dialogue or, as they were
called in relation to the Vatican and West Germany, of the new “Ostpolitik,” which remained hotly contested.16
15. A few examples, Hansjakob Stehle, the journalist and historian who coined the
term “Vatican Ostpolitik” (similar to West Germany’s diplomatic initiatives towards Communist Eastern Europe which came, however, later), called Mindszenty the “last crusader” of
the Cold War. See Hansjakob Stehle, “Der letzte Kreuzfahrer,” Die Zeit, 40, Oct 1, 1971.
The progressive Catholic journalist James Munro Cameron wrote after the publication of
Mindszenty’s Memoirs in 1975 that “his conception of his role [as a priest] belongs to a world
now dead.” New York Review of Books, 1975, Sept. 18. An example for the more conservative
Catholics was Phyllis Schlafly, the founder of the “Mindszenty Foundation” who would support Mindszenty and his positions regularly in her periodical Mindszenty Report.
16. In West Germany, the erection of the Wall by the GDR contributed to a changed
attitude that made Ostpolitik more popular: Arne Hofmann, The Emergence of Détente in
Europe: Brandt, Kennedy and the Formation of Ostpolitik (London, 2007), 40; Wilfried Loth
and George Soutou, eds. The Making of Détente: Eastern Europe and Western Europe in the Cold
War, 1965–75 (London, 2010); Carole Fink, “Ostpolitik, 1969–1974: The European and
Global Response,” Ohio State University, Mershon Center for International Security Studies
(conference summary, 2006); Poul Villaume and Odd Arne Westad, eds. Perforating the Iron

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Research Perspectives
Analyzing the media coverage of Mindszenty’s visits and studying his
supporters, their networks and what political, social, and cultural interpretations of the time they developed in various local and national settings will provide new insights on “anticommunism.”17 “Anticommunism” is a very blurry
term that can mean many different ways to express antagonism to Communist ideas and movements. It is a set of ideas that can mix with democratic,
liberal, but also with conservative and even extreme right-wing ideas.18 Many
anticommunists did not only reject Communism as an ideology or a political
and social system, but combined this with a broader rejection of modern ideas
and developments, including the opening of the Catholic Church in the
Second Vatican Council, feminism in all its forms, and, even broader, new
phenomena such as the new pop culture of the 1960s.19
By studying groups of anticommunists who referred to and supported
Cardinal Mindszenty, one will also gain new insights into the growing ideological gap within the West that widened in the early 1970s. Already
shortly after his death in 1975, Mindszenty became a hero of neo-conservatism when Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and St John Paul II commemorated him as an example of anti-totalitarian resistance. Much later,
the new constitution of Hungary, introduced in 2010, included a historical
preamble that resembles Cardinal Mindszenty’s “Christian-national” ide-

Curtain: European Détente, Transatlantic Relations, and the Cold War, 1965–1985 (Copenhagen, 2010).
17. “Anticommunism” is spelled without the hyphen in order to emphasize the fact that
this ideology was not necessarily related to real communism but often a rather diffuse conglomerate of, mostly, modern ideas.
18. Studies on anticommunism are numerous but the small group who supported
Mindszenty have not been studied yet. Cf. Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York, 1995). The field of transnational anticommunism
is still small: Transnational Anticommunism and the Cold War. Agents, Activities, and Networks,
eds. Luc van Dongen, Marla Stone, and Giuliana Chamedes, “Naming the Enemy: Anticommunism in Transnational Perspective,” Journal of Contemporary History 53.1 (2018), 4–11. A
related study is New Perspectives on the Transnational Right, eds. Martin Durham and Margaret Power (New York, 2016). For the connection between anticommunism and antisemitism, see: Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolsheavism
(Cambridge, MA, 2018).
19. On the gender aspects: Denise Lynn, “Gendered Narratives in Anti-Stalinism and
Anticommunism during the Cold War: The Case of Juliet Poyntz,” Journal of Cold War Studies, 18.1 (Winter, 2016), 31–59. On establishing of pop culture between the mid-1950s and
the mid-1960, see: Bodo Mrozek, Jugend–Pop–Kultur: Eine transnationale Geschichte (Frankfurt/M., 2019).

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ology.20 Mindszenty and his followers thus conserved older ideas that were
revived a generation later.21
Finally, there is also the aspect of politics of memory related to the
debate on anticommunism. During the 1960s and 1970s, liberals and leftists, mostly in West Germany, Italy, or France, but not only there began
to understand anticommunism as an ideology that had helped right-wing
extremists, Fascists, and Nazi war criminals to find a place within the democratic societies of the West.22 In the USA, anticommunism was also often
seen as a tool to suppress and silence critique of racism or social injustice
by branding it “communist.”23 Already in the 1920s, feminists were discredited as “un-American” “communists.”24 Since the 1970s, the growing
differences on how to understand anticommunism and the growing critique of the Vietnam War as another “genocide” developed into major conflicts on memory politics focusing on the Holocaust.25 Mindszenty’s visits
to the United States in 1973 and 1974 reveal the complexity of this phase
of the Cold War and of the political, social, and cultural changes that had
begun to reshape societies in the United States and in Hungary. The various actors involved in the debates around Mindszenty during this time
were driven by different agendas and represented different positions and
attitudes towards the contemporary world.

20. Árpád von Klimó, Hungary since 1945 (London 2017), 204–05.
21. This refers to newer studies of right-wing movements in the West today, interpreting them as broad coalitions of anti-globalization and anti-liberal groups. Cf. Mikko Salmela
and Christian von Scheve, “Emotional roots of right-wing political populism,” Social Science
Information, 56.4 (2017): 567–95. For a more comprehensive analysis of emotions within the
political, social, and economic context, see Cornelia Koppetsch, Die Gesellschaft des Zorns:
Rechtspopulismus im globalen Zeitalter (Bielefeld, 2019).
22. One of the earliest studies of these networks did not by chance come out in West
Germany in 1971! Heinz Höhne and Hermann Zolling, Network. The Truth about General
Gehlen and His Spy Ring, trans. Richard Barry, introd. by Hugh R. Trevor-Roper (London,
1972). For a more recent perspective: Andrew Beattie, “Cold War Culture in Reunified Germany,” in: Cold War Cultures, 299–329. On the U.S., see Richard Breitman, Hitler’s Shadow:
Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War (U.S. National Archives and Records
Administration, 2010).
23. James Zeigler, Red Scare Racism and Cold War Black Radicalism (Jackson, MS,
2015); Jeff R. Woods, Black Struggle, Red Scare: Segregation and Anticommunism in the South,
1948–1968 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003).
24. Kim E. Nielsen, Un-American Womanhood: Antiradicalism, Antifeminism, and the
First Red Scare (Columbus, OH, 2001).
25. Berthold. Molden, “Vietnam, the New Left and the Holocaust: How the Cold War
Changed Discourse on Genocide,” in: Memory in a Global Age: Discourses, Practices and Trajectories, eds. Aleida Assmann and Conrad, Sebastian (New York, 2010), 79–96.

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Mindszenty’s Return to the United States, 1 9 7 3 – 7 4 ,
and the Crisis of Anticommunism
Nowhere else were there as many organizations and people who wanted
to invite Mindszenty as in the United States. His close relations with the
superpower had already begun after the end of World War II, when he, as
archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary, received large amounts of
financial and food aid from the United States to distribute in war-torn
Budapest. Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York (1889–1967) called
Mindszenty a friend.26 Shortly after his first visit to the United States, Spellman, like Pope Pius XII, and many other church leaders raised their voices
against the arrest and incarceration of the Hungarian Cardinal.27
When Mindszenty left the U.S. Embassy in Budapest a quarter-century later, hundreds of Hungarian priests (about 400 in the USA) and religious who had escaped to the West from the Communist regime’s oppressive policies against the church and religious orders during the Stalinist
years (1949–56) were now hoping to meet with the head of their church.28
Another group that identified with Mindszenty as “victims of communism” were Hungarian lay refugees who had arrived in the USA after
World War II, and particularly after 1956, when more than forty-thousand
Hungarians had found their home in the USA.29 Although many of them,
26. Cf. Tillman, Cardinal Mindszenty. 91. For the broader background, see also
Richard Gid Powers, “American Catholics and Catholic Americans: The Rise and Fall of
Catholic Anticommunism,” U.S. Catholic Historian, 22.4 (2004), 17–35. According to
Powers, one of the turning points that led to the decline of Catholic anticommunism was the
elections of Kennedy and Pope St John XXIII, here 29–30. In 1968, the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference criticized the war in Vietnam. Lay Catholics were even more critical. In January 1971, 80% of Catholics in a poll were in favor of U.S. retreat from Vietnam (here, 32).
27. Tillman, Cardinal Mindszenty, 86–88. The news of his arrest arrived on December
28, 1948 in the form of an AP news report that was published by the New York Times under
the title “Cardinal Mindszenty Seized by the Red Regime.” Pope Pius XII was “shocked” and
“grieved,” according to the NYT of the same day. Three days later, President Truman publicly
protested against the arrest. Public protests in most Western countries, from West Germany
to Australia, followed.
28. The number of 400 Hungarian priests in the USA is taken from a statement by the
president of the Hungarian Priests Association, Fr. Julian Fuzer (Füzér). Cf. The Holy Crown
of St. Stephen and United States-Hungarian Relations: Hearing by the United States Congress,
House Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East
(Washington, DC, 1977), 48.
29. Balázs Balogh, “The Social Integration of Refugees from the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in the United States (Experiences of Ethnographic Field Research),” in: Departure
and Arrival: Migratory Processes and Local Responses from Ethnographic and Anthropological Perspective (Budapest, Cluj-Napoca, 2019), 33–50. On the role of Catholic relief organizations,

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mostly middle-aged men, called themselves “freedom fighters,” only a
small minority of them had actually been involved in fighting with Soviet
troops during the Revolution of 1956. They were not only a small minority
within the American-Hungarian community, but they were even divided
into a number of splinter groups engaged in constant bickering about who
of them was the “true” representative of the 1956 heroes. Many hoped that
Mindszenty could somehow unify them. Also, for U.S. Catholics in general, Mindszenty had been, during the 1950s, a central point of reference,
because of the nature of U.S. Catholicism as an immigrant religion.
Making Mindszenty their symbol, U.S. Catholics could, on the one hand,
demonstrate that they were among the most zealous Americans fighting
communism while it allowed them, on the other hand, to keep their exceptional ties to the culture of “Old Europe” that Mindszenty represented.30
One of the most ardent followers of Mindszenty in the United States was
the conservative activist and self-declared anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly
(1924–2016) who created the “Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation” (CMF)
in St. Louis in 1958 as an organization dedicated to “educate Catholics
about the dangers of communism.”31 CMF “opposed summit meetings [of
the superpowers] and limits on nuclear testing and favored a constitutional
amendment to prevent the president from negotiating international
treaties.”32 In late November 1971, Phyllis Schlafly travelled to Vienna to
meet Mindszenty in person.33 For Schlafly, who had been a supporter of
Barry Goldwater, and was struggling with moderate Republicans during
the 1960s and 1970s, “communism” meant much more than party dictatorships in Eastern Europe, but also Western “decadence” as represented
by feminism as well as cultural and social protest in general. She organized
a broad coalition against the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by Congress almost unanimously in 1970, and succeeded in “killing” it in the late
1970s by convincing a few states not to ratify it.34 However, among U.S.
Catholics, Schlafly had found herself more and more isolated, especially
since the late 1950s. When Catholics moved out of the urban “ghetto
see James P. Niessen, “God Brought the Hungarians: Emigration and Refugee Relief in the
Light of Cold War Religion,” Hungarian Historical Review, 6.3 (2017), 566–96.
30. Tillman, Cardinal Mindszenty, 12-13. The number for the late 1960s is from
Stephen B. Várdy, Hungarian Americans, 239.
31. Tom. Lacy, “Little Religious Orgs: The Schlaflys and The Cardinal Mindszenty
Foundation,” U.S. Intellectual History Blog, 8 September 2016. https://s-usih.org/2016/09/
little-religious-orgs-the-schlaflys-and-the-cardinal-mindszenty-foundation/.
32. Lacy, “Little Religious Orgs.”
33. CMF Meets Cardinal Mindszenty,” The Mindszenty Report, January 1972, 2.
34. David Farber, The Rise and Fall of Modern American Conservatism (Princeton, NJ,
2010), 142–49.

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Catholicism” and into more prosperous suburban areas, they blended in
with the majority of the American middle-class. This gave them a stronger
self-consciousness as U.S. citizens.35 The hysterical anticommunism of
Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908–57) now seemed to be outdated, if not in
substance, then at least in style. Phyllis Schlafly’s Cardinal Mindszenty
Foundation, was increasingly criticized for being “reckless” by representatives of the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference.36
Not so according to Mindszenty. In an interview on January 21, 1972,
the Cardinal was asked why he supported the right-wing group. He
responded that he was “not even aware of the existence of the Cardinal
Mindszenty Foundation . . . until a few weeks ago when ‘some American
ladies came to see me to tell me about it and request that I lend my name
to it, as a prominent victim of communism.’ He did not consider it a
rightwing organization, explaining that his own anti-fascist past was well
enough known ‘to guarantee that I [Mindszenty] would not lend my name
to anything right-wing.’”37
Obviously, the Catholic reporter and the Cardinal had different ideas of
what “right-wing” meant. Mindszenty tried to appear more conciliatory in
this interview, which was the first he gave since he had settled in Vienna. He
even said that “he realizes that ‘the time for diplomacy has arrived to avoid
any danger of war’ between the communist and noncommunist spheres. At
the same time, he sees ‘no noticeable improvements within the communist
regimes’ in the seven years since the Vatican made its first attempts to come
to some sort of workable church-state arrangement with them.”38
However, the interview with the female journalist did not end well.
When Andrea Karman asked him whether he planned to ever return to
Hungary, Mindszenty became very angry and accused the press of “treating
him like a fool or a film star” and of “exploiting him for ‘cheap sensations.’”39 The Cardinal was obviously frustrated and felt misunderstood,
especially by “laymen” who would not “understand the complexity of
church life” and should therefore not write about it. Mindszenty’s frustration might have been caused by the feeling of losing more and more touch,
35. Tillman, Cardinal Mindszenty, 262.
36. Herzog cites Rev. John Cronin, see Herzog, Spiritual-industrial Complex, 204.
37. Andrea Karman, “Mindszenty: Resist Reds,” National Catholic Reporter, 8.12 (January 21, 1972), https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=ncr19720121-01.2.7&srpos=
45&e=———-en-20—41—txt-txIN-Mindszenty
38. Karman, “Mindszenty: Resist Reds.”
39. Karman, “Mindszenty: Resist Reds.”

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not only with the Catholic world, but also with a changing Hungarian
diaspora.
Anticommunism had been a trademark of the most active Hungarian
organizations, such as the Hungarian National Council/Committee, since
it was founded by exiled Hungarian politicians in 1947.40 However, shortly
before Mindszenty left the U.S. Embassy in Budapest, it came out that the
CIA had financed some of the émigré organizations. Now, the U.S. Congress prohibited further financing. As a result, the Hungarian National
Council dissolved in 1971.41 The withdrawal of financial support by the
U.S. government discouraged the work of anticommunist groups among
the Hungarian diaspora in the early 1970s. At the same time, the Americanization of Hungarian Americans who had seen two decades of material
success and integration into U.S. society accelerated.42 The negative effect
of this had been, especially among the second generation, a slow waning of
language skills and enthusiasm for Hungarian national culture, and a
dwindling of the membership in Hungarian cultural and social organizations. Therefore, Mindszenty asked Hungarians in the United States and
elsewhere to hold on to their traditions, their language, and culture and to
pass them on to their children. Some Hungarian diaspora activists were
hoping that Mindszenty’s visits would revive their communities and give
their organizations a boost. For them, the Cardinal was the only legitimate
representative of the Hungarian nation opposing the Communist government they considered illegal.
When he visited West Germany in May 1972, Mindszenty himself
implied that the Hungarian Communist government was not legitimate
because it had brought the country to its “lowest point in history” and its
policies supported abortions and showed “the hand of the devil.”43 In an
interview, he even said that there was “no Hungarian government” and “no
40. For a comprehensive study of the HNC, see: Katalin Kádár-Lynn, “The Hungarian
National Council/Hungarian National Committee—Magyar Nemzeti Bizottmány/
Bizottság,” in: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare. Cold War Organizations sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe/Free Europe Committee, ed. Katalin KádárLynn (St. Helena, CA, 2013), 237–322.
41. Kádár-Lynn, “Hungarian National Council,” 295.
42. Cf. Balázs Balogh, “Social integration.” See also: Nándor Dreisziger, “Hungarians
in North America,” Special issue, Hungarian Studies Review, 40.1 (2013) http://hungarian
studies.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/HSR2013.pdf
43. Quoted in the Fürther Nachrichten, May 23, 1972, title page. The newspaper even
used this quotation as the headline: “Der Teufel regiert” [“the devil rules”], subtitle: “Harsh
critique of the Communist leadership.”

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constitution.”44 Also, since the country had been occupied by foreign
troops since March 1944—first by the Germans then by the Soviets—, it
had lost its sovereignty.45 Because of this, Mindszenty and some of his
most ardent followers assumed that he, as the Primate of the Catholic
Church of Hungary, was the only true representative of the Hungarian
nation. This idea was related to the “invisible constitution” of the “Holy
Crown” founded by King St. Stephen in the eleventh century.46 The “Holy
Crown” had been taken away from Budapest by the last Nazi allies, the
Arrow-Cross government, and later found in Austria by a special U.S.
Army unit for looted art, which transported it to the USA.47 In 1971, after
Nixon had improved his relations with Communist Hungary, many anticommunists were afraid that the U.S. government could hand over the
crown.48 For many, it was the symbol of Hungarian statehood. In the
hands of the Hungarian Communist government, they feared, it would
legitimize an illegal regime and dash all hopes for regime change.49 As long
as the crown was stored in Fort Knox, it could be used, one day, as a
symbol for a legitimate Hungarian government that would replace the
Communist regime. In February, the U.S. government announced that
there were no plans of any such move, and Nixon also wrote a letter to
Mindszenty, containing the same message.50 The Hungarian government,
on the other side, observed closely the Hungarian émigré press that hotly
44. “Exclusive National Catholic Interview. Cardinal Mindszenty discusses Memoirs,
St Stephen’s Crown, Imprisonment,” Catholic News Service—Newsfeeds, October 1, 1973.
45. This is a theory that is also supported by today’s Hungarian constitution of 2011.
46. The priest, Msg. Gábor Vargha, who still used the title “vitéz” referring to the
Horthy regime, addressed Mindszenty in a letter as “Cardinal Mindszenty Prince Primate,
First Standard Bearer.“ Cf. Letter by Mons. Vitéz Vargha Gábor to Mindszenty, February 5,
1972. Archives of the Mindszenty Foundation, Budapest (Mindszenty Alapítvány Levéltára,
i. f. MAL), Bambergi út. For the historical context, see: Martin Mevius, “A Crown for
Rákosi: The Vogeler Case, the Holy Crown of St. Stephen, and the (Inter)national Legitimacy of the Hungarian Communist Regime, 1945–1978,” Slavonic & East European
Review, 89.1 (2011), 76–107.
47. Máté Gergely Balogh, “Killing the Canard: Saint Stephen’s Crown, Nixon,
Budapest, and the Hungarian Lobby,” in: HJEAS: Hungarian Journal of English and American
Studies, 24.1 (2018), 165–266.
48. The USA and Hungary had only limited diplomatic relations during the 1950s,
after the Communist government had nationalized Standard Electric Company in Hungary
and arrested two American managers as “spies.” Cf. Stephen B. Várdy and Agnes Huszár
Várdy, Hungarian Americans in the Current of History (New York, 2010), 269.
49. The Phyllis Schlafly Report. Vol. 6, No. 6, January 1972.
50. New York Times, February 9, 1972. Joseph (József) Vecsey, his secretary, claimed
that it was due to Mindszenty having written to Nixon that the President did not return the
Crown in 1971. Cf. Mindszenty the man, by József Vecsey as told to Phyllis Schlafly, Cardinal
Mindszenty Foundation (St Louis, 1972), 204.

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discussed the question of the crown in relation to Mindszenty’s activities
in the West.51
Mindszenty and the Rise of Feminism in the West
Related to his anticommunism was also his anti-feminism. In New
Brunswick, NJ, Mindszenty, according to a reporter, “in a strong, clear
voice (. . .) urged the Hungarian-American community to resist ‘the moral
decay of the Western world.’ ‘We might be victims of that, too,’ he said.”
Further, the Cardinal said, “that behind the Iron Curtain governments had
started efforts to make birth control devices available to everyone, but they
later reversed their policies because of the deterioration it was causing to
society. What the Iron Curtain countries had tried to do by force, he said,
is being done ‘by free choice in the western world.’ The choice, he said, is
“between the dignity of motherhood or being a street girl.”52 However,
Mindszenty “admitted there were differences from country to country. “In
Rumania [sic!],” he said, “the government there follows policies different
from other Communist regimes, especially in a ‘moral and patriotic sense.’
The Cardinal observed that the government forbids prostitution and abortion, and he predicted because of its population growth Rumania will
emerge the strongest of Eastern European countries.” 53
Praising the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu publicly because of
his nationalism and his pro-natalist policies, Mindszenty contrasted these
to the “moral decay of the West.” Here, Mindszenty’s “anticommunism”
almost seemed to be secondary in comparison to his anti-feminism.54
During a press conference in Cleveland, the Cardinal would come back to
his critique of abortion and the suppression of religion in Hungary which
he called “nemzetgyilkolás” (“murder of the nation”).55
Those, who did not share Mindszenty’s views, tried to put his ideas in
a historical context, subtly distancing him from current U.S. society and
51. Cf. Report of the Office of Church Affairs on the emigré press. Hungarian
National Archives (Magyar Országos Levéltára, i. f. MOL) Állami Egyházügyi Hivatal,
“Magyar Világszövetsége. ”Mindszenty József távozása hatása, visszhangja, az emigrácios
magyar sajtó tükrében.” 1972. Aug. 7, 20–22.
52. Catholic News Service—Newsfeeds, October 2, 1973.
53. Catholic Transcript, Volume LXVI, Number 24, October 5, 1973.
54. For a recent account of Ceausescu’s policies and their long-term impact, see: Jill
Massino, Ambiguous Transitions: Gender, the State, and Everyday Life in Socialist and Postsocialist Romania. (New York, 2019).
55. Mindszenty József Biboros Érsek-Primás Úr Látogatása 1974 Tavaszán Cleveland
Egyházmegyében, (Cleveland, 1975), 9.

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politics and its current liberal tendencies. Vance Hartke (1919–2003), the
Democratic US Senator from Indiana (1959–77), a supporter of Lyndon
B. Johnson’s “Great Society” and a prominent opponent of the Vietnam
War, praised Mindszenty in the Senate in early May 1974 as a “man of
peace.” In his honorary speech welcoming the Cardinal, Hartke called him
“a prince of the church and patriot of the Hungarian Nation.” Describing
briefly Mindszenty’s life, the Democratic senator emphasized the difference between the earlier Cold War and the current period of détente:
He is making quiet pastoral visits with Hungarian Catholics here in the
United States and is expected to tour 25 to 30 cities before returning to his
home in Vienna at the end of June. He is 82 now and as he goes quietly
about his duties, it is very hard for us to remember that 25 years ago this
peaceful priest was at the center of a storm that threatened to engulf all of
Europe. Almost alone he stood up to Stalin, the Red army, and the ruthless
Communist apparatus that held all Eastern Europe in its grip immediately
after World War II. (. . .) The cardinal stood for Hungarian independence,
for a person’s right to disagree with the actions of an arbitrary government.
To Americans, these rights seem as natural as breathing and eating.

Then, the Senator highlighted how “the world had changed” since 1956:
“Stalin was long dead and the community of Communist nations was
breaking into fragments. The East and the West were negotiating. Even
the Vatican was anxious to reach some sort of understanding with the
Communist government of his native country. To some people, the cardinal was symbolic of an age long past, of nuclear threats, brinksmanship,
and the cold war. But such an assessment smacks too much of guilt by
association. Cardinal Mindszenty had nothing to do with violence. He
was—and is—a man of peace.”
Hartke “doubted” that Mindszenty wanted “to become enmeshed in
any political issues,” but he would probably “ask us to remember the plight
of those millions of people who still do not enjoy the freedoms to which all
human beings are entitled.” The USA and the communist countries were
“on the road to peace” and Mindszenty “helped put us there. Because he
“suffered for his beliefs, and his sacrifice has helped make it a better world
for all of us.”56
The State Department had also tried to give Mindszenty’s visit an
“unpolitical” character in order not to risk any negative impact on the rela56. Congressional Record—the Senate, May 1, 2, 1974. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GPO-CRECB-1974-pt12/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1974-pt12-2-2.pdf

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tions with Communist Hungary. As during his first visit to the USA, in
September 1973, President Nixon sent a “warm welcome” telegram while
the State Department and the U.S. Ambassador in Budapest insisted that
Mindszenty was “not officially” invited and Nixon would not meet the
Cardinal during his visit in Washington, DC.57 A confidential CIA report
stated that Hungarian Foreign Minister Nagy “professed the ‘hope’ to
[U.S.] Ambassador Pedersen that Cardinal Mindszenty’s forthcoming visit
to the U.S.—which includes a one-day stop in Washington—would not
cause problems for ‘improving U.S.-Hungarian relations.’”58 According the
CIA, “Nagy seemed unconcerned at the prospect of some anti-regime
statements by Mindszenty, and was concerned only about the type of official contacts Mindszenty would have in Washington. It is the Embassy’s
impression that the Washington visit will be a private affair.”59 Shortly
after this, also the State Department expressed “anxiety” to the White
House about a meeting between President Nixon and Mindszenty.60 The
Hungarian side then confirmed that the visit would not harm the relations
between the two countries.
Neither did the Vatican approve of the Cardinal’s visit. Vatican diplomacy was anxious not to provoke the Hungarian government, fearing
Kádár would increase the suppression of the Catholic Church in Hungary
by arresting priests or imposing other limits to the freedom of the church.
The Pope, however, did nothing to stop Mindszenty, for example, by
taking away his Vatican passport, as the Hungarian regime had asked. Still,
since the summer of 1973, the relationship between Mindszenty and Pope
Paul VI had deteriorated.61 Mindszenty did not want to delay the publication of his Memoirs, which the Kádár regime wanted to prevent. One Vatican official wrote Mindszenty’s secretary in January 1974, that “Rome
cannot allow an archbishop or primate in office to make such a serious
indictment against a current regime, no matter how wicked it may be,
when it itself [Rome] has recognized it [the regime].”62
57. ÁBTL 3.2.9. R–8–009/ II “Vecchio”, 193. See also: Nixon Presidential Library,
National Security Council (NSC) Files, Name Files, Box 19. RM3-1 Catholic 1/1/73–[6/74]
I. Letter of Tom C. Korologos, Deputy Assistant to the President, to Senator Hugh Scott,
May 4, 1973.
58. CIA, confidential report, CIA-RDP79B00864A001400010083-6, April 4, 1974.
59. CIA, confidential report, CIA-RDP79B00864A001400010083-6, 4 April 1974.
60. State Department to Major Gen Scowcroft, The White House, May 2, 1974.
Nixon Library\NSC Files Name Files Box 828 Mindszenty.
61. Cf. Margit Balogh, Mindszenty.József (1892–1975). (Budapest, 2015), 1340–1342.
62. Tibor Mészáros, A száműzött bíboros szolgálatában, Mindszenty titkárának napi
jegyzetei 1972–75. (Abaliget, 2000), 166. Record for January 10, 1974.

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Pope Paul VI was also pressured by the Hungarian bishops who
claimed that Mindszenty’s behavior could have a negative effect on the
church in their country and that they needed a new primate who could fulfill his tasks. So, the Pope asked Mindszenty to step down voluntarily from
his post as archbishop of Esztergom and primate of Hungary. Mindszenty
refused, stating that he did not trust the Communists and had the responsibility to uphold the “unwritten,” 1000 year old constitution of Hungary.63
Paul VI therefore deposed him which led to an international outcry among
many Catholics, and not only conservatives, all over the world.
This had a major influence on Mindszenty’s second, and longest visit,
to the United States between May and June, 1974. Many Hungarian
speakers demonstratively ignored the Pope’s decision, and addressed
Mindszenty still as “our primate.”64 A few conservative politicians used
the retirement of Mindszenty in order to present themselves in public as
those who defended the “truth” against the “error” of détente. These were
mostly Catholic republicans, like the Schlaflys. One of them was William
J. Scherle of Iowa, an “honorary freedom fighter,” who read a letter by the
Hungarian Freedom Fighters to the House of Representatives, that called
the Pope’s decision “a capitulation by the Vatican to communist
encroachment.”65 Another congressman, Philip M. Crane, a Methodist,
who had supported Goldwater and would continue his career under
Reagan, called Mindszenty a “victim of Vatican détente,” saying: “Now in
an era of ‘good feeling’ with the communists he is an anachronism and the
Church is visibly uncomfortable with him. Saints, it seems, are unpopular
in every era.”66 Senator James L. Buckley, brother of William F. Buckley
Jr, disagreed with those “who say that the kind of anticommunism represented by Cardinal Mindszenty is no longer fashionable, that it is a ‘relic’
63. Tibor Mészáros, another of Mindszenty’s secretaries, was born in Hungary, but
studied Theology in Innsbruck and Sitten/Sion (Switzerland) where he was ordained in 1943.
In the summer of 1944, Mészáros rescued 10 Jews with false baptism papers from the Brick
factory in Budakalász. In September 1944, he was arrested by the Arrow Cross for protesting
Mindszenty’s arrest. In 1948, the Red Army deported him to do forced labor in the Soviet
Union, where he stayed until 1955. In 1956, he toiled as a farm worker under police surveillance until he could escape and return to Switzerland. From 1972–75, he was Mindszenty’s
secretary. Biogr.: http://lexikon.katolikus.hu/M/Mészáros.html
64. Balogh, Mindszenty, 1346.
65. Especially in Cleveland. Cf. Mindszenty József Biboros.
66. “Congressman calls Mindszenty removal ‘outrageous.’” Catholic News Service—
Newsfeeds, February 12, 1974, p. 6. William J. Scherle (1923–2003), a Republican representative of Iowa (1967–75), http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=S000121,
was a Catholic and an “Honorary Freedom Fighter.” See: Official Congressional Directory,
92nd Congress, Second Session, 1972, US GPO, 62.

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of the cold war.” Buckley, however, refrained from criticizing the Vatican’s decision.67
Similar to the U.S. government, U.S. bishops, who in contrast to
West German bishops did not publicly oppose the Pope’s decision, also did
not extend an invitation to the Cardinal in relation to his visits in spring
and late summer of 1974. Bishops whose dioceses Mindszenty visited,
would briefly meet with him or celebrate a Mass during his stay, but they
mostly stayed in the background, leaving the stage to local politicians and
representatives of American Hungarian organizations. Who, then, did
officially invite the Cardinal?
On November 5, 1972, the Youngstown paper Katolikus Magyarok
Vasárnapja (Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday) published a letter in which
Mindszenty accepted the official invitation by János Szabó, priest and president of the Hungarian Catholic League, to visit the United States. Szabó
(mostly spelled “Sabo”), was priest at Our Lady of Hungary in South Bend,
Indiana. However, according to a report sent to the Hungarian State Security Agency, Mindszenty had first asked another priest, the Franciscan friar
Kelemen Király (König until 1945), to organize his USA-trip. But Király
(1893–1978) was not uncontroversial because he had been the pastor of the
Hungarian Embassy in Berlin under Hitler (1934–44) and had not been
known for resisting the Nazis.68 Some priests, according to this report, characterized Király as “violent and fanatic” and who had a “bad influence” on
Mindszenty’s secretaries who were responsible for the mistake of asking
Király to be the official organizer of the U.S. trip.69 They also claimed that
67. “Congressman calls Mindszenty Victim of Détente,” Catholic News Service—
Newsfeeds, March 19, 1974, p. 26. Philipp M. Crane (1930–2014), a Republican representative of Illinois, http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C000873
68. “Buckley Regrets ‘End of Era’ in Mindszenty Dismissal,” Catholic News Service—
Newsfeeds, February 21, 1974, p. 22. James Lane Buckley (born March 9, 1923), a jurist,
politician, civil servant, businessman, and author was elected to the U.S. Senate (1971–77) in
1970, as a nominee of the Conservative Party of New York. He was Undersecretary of State
for International Security Affairs under the first Reagan administration. From 1982 to 1985,
he was president of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. Cf. https://fedsoc.org/contributors/
james-buckley.
69. According to the Katolikus Lexikon, Kelemen Király, OFM, (1893–1978), was since
1908 a member of the St. John Capistrano ministry (related to military chaplains) within the
Franciscan Order. Király was ordained in 1916. From 1934 to 1944, he was the Pastor of the
Hungarian Embassy in Berlin, before he returned to Hungary towards the end of the war. In
1947 he was sent to the USA where he became pastor in DeWitt, Michigan. In 1950, he built
a missionary house in Flint, Michigan. From 1954 he worked for the Katolikus Magyarok
Vasárnapja. In 1946, he published the book Hitlerizmus és kerség. A németországi evángelikus

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Sabo was very “offended” when he heard about this. Sabo, who was born in
the United States, had sent over the years thousands of dollars to Mindszenty.70 This conflict, which remained secret at the time, shows how important it was for the Cardinal not to be associated with persons who could be
easily attacked by the liberal press or further divide the Hungarian diaspora.
The official committee that organized the six-week visit in 1974 consisted of priests and lay men who were active and respectable community
organizers. It also confirmed the very important role the Catholic Church
played for Hungarian diaspora communities.71 In Cleveland, the secondlargest Hungarian town at the time (second only to Budapest), the main
organizer was Dr. Gabor Papp (1915–2011), who had founded a Hungarian school in 1958 and later helped to create a Hungarian Museum.72 Two
Catholic priests were also part of the preparatory committee for Mindszenty’s visit, both were Franciscans: Father Julián Füzér (1915–2005) of
St. Ladislaus Church in New Brunswick, NJ, and Father Miklos Dengl
(1916–98) from Youngstown, OH. Füzér (also spelled Fuzer) had also
been active in the Hungarian Catholic League since his arrival in the
United States in 1946.73 Dengl, a priest since 1939, had studied in Rome
and was first serving as pastor in Milan, Italy, where he was involved in
relief work for Hungarian immigrants.74 In 1948, he emigrated to the
United States, where he became one of the editors of the Katolikus Maghitvalló egyház. harca a nemzetiszocializmussal. He was also later engaged in ecumenism.
http://lexikon.katolikus.hu/K/Kir%C3%A1ly.html
70. ÁBTL 3.2.9. R–8–009/ II “Vecchio,” 203–204.
71. ÁBTL 3.2.9. R–8–009/ II “Vecchio,” 203–204. In 1990, Msgr. John Sabo celebrated his sixtieth anniversary of ordination. Cf. St Joseph’s College (Rensselaer, IN). Contact Magazine. https://archive.org/stream/Contact-1990-Fall/Contact-1990-Fall_djvu.txt
72. Niessen, “God Brought the Hungarians.”
73. Papp had been in contact with Mindszenty through a friend, the priest Ferenc
Harangozó (1908–91), the former manager of the Hungarian High School (gimnazium) in
Burg Kastl, West Germany (founded in 1957). In 1973, Harangozó had become one of the secretaries of Mindszenty. Harangozó had served almost a decade in various Soviet labor camps
between 1948 and 1956, before he fled to Austria. From 1960 to 1973, he taught at Burg Kastl,
until he became one of Mindszenty’s secretaries which also shows the close relationship between
the school and Mindszenty’s Austrian home, the Pazmaneum in Vienna. Ferenc Harangozó,
Magyar Katolikus Lexikon .http://lexikon.katolikus.hu/H/Harangoz% C3%B3.html. In 1968,
the school received half a million Deutsche Mark from the West German Ministry for
Expellees. ABTL, 2. 2. 4. 0-8-822 / 3 „Németországi Magyar emigráns szervezetek,“ 33.
74. Füzér returned to Hungary in 1990. He was active in the campaign for the canonization of Mindszenty. He edited: Szentnek kiáltjuk. Mindszenty antol. Szerk (Youngstown,
1987). Füzer wrote also Mindszenty bíboros, a szent., 1989. http://lexikon.katolikus.hu/F/F%
C3%BCz%C3%A9r.html About Papp, see: https://clevelandhungarianmuseum.org/aboutus/chronology/

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yarok Vasárnapja. Mindszenty’s two trips to California, (June and late
December 1974), were organized by the priest Benedek Horváth (1915–
98), a Premonstratensian canon and teacher, who had left Hungary in
1950.75 Horváth was in close contact with Tibor Mészáros (1919–2003),
Mindszenty’s second secretary, who spoke English well and who accompanied the Cardinal during his U.S. visits.76
Next to the Franciscan priests, representatives of the “freedom fighters” served in the committee. One of them was Béla H. Bácskai, a former
political prisoner who had escaped from Hungary in 1956 and lived in
Phoenixville, PA. Bácskai was active in the Hungarian-American boy
scout movement and also as a (rather sporadic) correspondent of the
weekly journal Guardian of Liberty, the moderate English-language edition
of the Nemzetőr, a Hungarian right-wing paper published since 1958 in
Munich, West Germany.77 The 1956 “freedom fighters” were a small, but
very active group that represented the more right-wing orientations among
the Hungarian diaspora. Some of them had political influence on Congress. The most important figure in this milieu was András Pogány
(Andrew H. Pogany) (1919–95), one of the leaders of the POFOSz (Politikai folgyok Szövetsége—Federation of Political Prisoners) and President
of the “World Federation of Hungarian Freedom Fighters.” Since 1972, he
was also advisor to the National Republican Committee.78
75. http://epa.oszk.hu/01300/01397/00024/pdf/EPA01397_magyar_sion_2018_2_
167-188.pdf
76. Benedek Árpád Horváth (1915–98) studied in Budapest and was ordained in 1940.
Between 1940 and 1950, he taught at various high schools of the Premonstratensians until
these were closed by the Communist government. In 1950, he escaped and spend some time
in Rome. Between 1951 and 1953, he was military chaplain of Hungarian foreign legionaries
in Rabat, Marocco. In 1953, he moved to the USA, first to New York, then to Pittsburgh,
where he earned a M. A. in Politics at Duquesen University. Since 1957, he taught at a
middle school in Santa Ana, California. In 1967, he became the priest of St. István Church
in Los Angeles and teacher at the Academica Catholica Hungarica and was active in the Boy
Scout movement. Horváth published numerous articles in Katolikus Szemle, Délamerikai
Magyar Hírlap, Katolikus Magyarok Vasárnapja, Californiai Magyarság, but also for the
Bajtársi Levél (Hungarian gendarmes), mostly under the pseudonym “Horvay Bánk.”
Benedek Horváth, Megállító percek. Karcolatok, emlékek. (Köln, Detroit, Bécs. 1965). Biogr.
http://193.225.122.118/eletrajzilexikon/?dir=H#HORVÀTHBENEDEKÁRPÁD
77. Béla H. Bácskai, “Cserkészek Valley Forgeban,” Nemzetőr II/14 (1957. augusztus),
8. In 1963 he wrote about a gathering of Hungarians in Cleveland, OH. Cf. Library of Congress, Microf. No. 05668, The Guardian of Liberty (Nemzetőr) 1969–1976.
78. In 1966, he had published his memoirs of 1956, The City in Darkness. Könyv,
Könytár, Könyvtáros. 20 (2011). http://epa.oszk.hu/01300/01367/00243/pdf/EPA01367_
3K_2011_05_48-53.pdf In 1975, Pogány wrote the obituary of Mindszenty for the Nemzetör.
András Pogány, „A ravatal Bécsben,“ Nemzetör, XX/303 (June 1975), 2.

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It is very important to emphasize that other representatives of the Hungarian-American diaspora, such as the American Hungarian Foundation
(AHF-Amerikai Magyar Szövetsége) established already in 1906, were not
involved in the organization of Mindszenty’s visits. Although the AHF was
rather to the right of the political spectrum, expressing anticommunist and
nationalist ideas, the federation also included members who were critical of
the Cardinal.79 The President of the AHF at the time (1965–74) was the
reformed (Calvinist) bishop Zoltán Béky (1903–78).80 Mindszenty, who had
been extremely anti-Protestant in his youth, had become more conciliatory
during his later years, including Protestants in his vision of a Hungarian
nation.81 While the Cardinal visited Washington, DC, and Congress, he
also met Béky, who called him “the greatest living Christian martyr.”82
Mindszenty was thus officially invited by representatives of the most important Hungarian parishes and by one of the right-wing “Freedom Fighter”
organizations, not by the more moderate American Hungarian Foundation.
Emotional Encounters: Mindszenty in New Brunswick, NJ,
and Cleveland, OH
Mindszenty’s two visits to the United States were big successes, but
they also revealed the decline of American-Hungarian communities and
the waning support from Rome. His first visits happened before the Pope
deposed him as head of the Catholic Church of Hungary. On September
28, 1973, Father Füzér welcomed Mindszenty at Kennedy Airport when
the Cardinal arrived from his tour through Canada on September 28,
1973. The Archbishop of New York and Cardinal Spellman’s successor,
Cardinal Terence Cooke (1921–83), was also present. But in contrast to
Spellman, Cooke only met briefly with Mindszenty, and then rushed off to
a football game. Cooke was not deeply interested in the fate of AmericanHungarian parishes. Like the Vatican, which was also not in favor of separate ethnic churches in the United States, he did not support Mindszenty’s idea of an American-Hungarian bishop who would be head of all
Hungarian parishes in the country.83
79. Várdy, Hungarian-Americans, 129–30.
80. Béky had studied in Sárospatak and left Hungary already after his graduation in
1927. https://www.arcanum.hu/hu/online-kiadvanyok/Lexikonok-magyar-eletrajzi-lexikon7428D/b-74700/beky-zoltan-74A7B/
81. Cf. also Balogh, Mindszenty, 1365.
82. Quoted in Balog, Mindszenty, 1367.
83. Cf. Balogh, Mindszenty, 1318. Cooke has been, like Mindszenty, considered for
beatification.

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ANTICOMMUNISM AND DÉTENTE

FIGURE 1. József Cardinal Mindszenty in 1973 dedicating newly rebuilt St.
Ladislaus Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey. American Hungarian
Foundation (New Brunswick, NJ) Collection. https://rucore.libraries.rutgers.edu/
rutgers-lib/21745/

On the next day, Mindszenty visited Catholic parishes and Hungarian
communities in New Jersey, including Hungarian protestant pastors. A
few days later, a crowd of 5,000 celebrated the Cardinal’s blessing of St.
Ladislaus Church in New Brunswick.84
There, in a working-class neighborhood called “Little Hungary,” with
its Hungarian bookstore and restaurant, three dozen policemen and an
honorary formation of the Knights of Columbus with swords and featherdecorated hats, protected the Cardinal from the enthusiastic crowd.
A large number of Boy and Girl Scouts also gathered on the occasion.
Many Hungarians, who attended the events, cried and were overwhelmed
by their emotions. For them, meeting or even just being near Mindszenty
seemed to have brought back memories of earlier moments in their lives.
84. Catholic News Service—Newsfeeds, October 2, 1973.

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247

After this short visit, Mindszenty returned to Vienna where he worked
on his Memoirs which were published later in 1974, deepening his rift with
Pope Paul VI. The New York Times reported on February 14, 1974, that
Mindszenty planned “a tour of the United States soon, to explain to Hungarian American communities and other groups why he refused to resign from
his post in the Roman Catholic Church despite personal pleas from Pope
Paul VI.”85 This time, the Cardinal came for six weeks in May and June.
His first stop was Washington, DC. Although Mindszenty was not
invited by the Nixon administration, his visit to the U.S. capital included a
number of official meetings with members of the political elite.86 Among
other places, he visited the Kossuth House on Dupont Circle that was, at
the time, owned by the Hungarian Reformed (Calvinist) Federation of
America. Next was a reception in Congress, where Mindszenty expressed
his gratitude that the U.S. Senate had never signed the Trianon Treaty of
1920 that had led to the dismantlement of the former Hungarian Kingdom.
A Mass in the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the national
church of U.S. Catholics, followed. Here, about 2,500 people gathered,
among them many Hungarians in folk costumes, but also a delegation of
Cuban exiles, who shared the anticommunist attitudes of the Cardinal.
Mindszenty then continued his triumphal tour through the United
States, visiting mostly cities and towns with larger Hungarian communities,
including New York City, Buffalo, NY, Detroit, and, most of all, Cleveland.
His visits were broadcasted by local TV and radio stations, and covered by
the U.S. press, but most of all, by the Hungarian émigré papers. However,
the more “progressive” Canadian Új Szó and the Amerikai Magyar Szó only
briefly commented on the events, while the right-wing papers celebrated
Mindszenty as “the spritiual head of all Hungarians.”87 In New York, in late
May 1974, Mindszenty met András Pogány at Fordham University, where
he was introduced by the philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand as an “inflexible fighter against communism, the relentless enemy of the Catholic
faith.”88 Pogány gave a talk about the “Plight of the Catholic Church in
Hungary” that was later cited in the U.S. House of Representatives.89
85. “Mindszenty Plans to Tour U.S. to Explain His Refusal to Resign,” New York
Times, February 14, 1974.
86. The following according to Balogh, Mindszenty.
87. Quoted in: ÁBTL 3.2.9. R–8–009/ II “Vecchio,” 209.
88. The Ram, June 1, 1974, 3. The Ram is a paper published by Fordham University.
89. Government Publishing Office, Honorable Edward J. Derwisnki of Illinois, Extention of Remarks, September 23, 1974, 32270-32272. https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/
GPO-CRECB-1974-pt24/pdf/GPO-CRECB-1974-pt24-3-3.pdf

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ANTICOMMUNISM AND DÉTENTE

FIGURE 2. Mindszenty portrait (1974), Library of Congress Photographic
Collection. Photographer: Bernard Godfryd (1924–2016).

Outside of New York City and Washington, DC, Mindszenty’s visits
often drew much attention because of the larger Hungarian communities.
In Cleveland, Mayor Ralph J. Perk (1914–99), a Republican, emphasized
the importance of the Hungarian ethnic population.90 Perk, a Catholic,
was also head of the American Nationalities Movement. Perk called the
Cardinal “a living saint” and “the symbol of freedom all around the
world.”91 Again, the visit was accompanied by parades, honor guards by the
Knights of Columbus in full gala uniform, delegations of boy and girl
scouts, and many other Hungarian, Croatian, and other nationality associations. Mindszenty spoke to hundreds of people, while large crowds
attended the events with him. For the Hungarian community in Cleveland, this was probably the most important celebration of their national
identity in the twentieth century.92 While there were still about 113,000
people of Hungarian descent in Greater Cleveland in the 1980s, although
by now mostly in the suburbs, the number had dropped a decade later
90. Perk was mayor from 1972–77 https://case.edu/ech/articles/p/perk-ralph-j
91. Mindszenty József Biboros Érsek-Primás, 15.
92. Endre Szentkirályi, Hungarians in Cleveland, 1951–2011. Then and Now. PhDiss.,
U Debrechen 2013.

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249

FIGURE 3. Mindszenty Plaza in Cleveland. Photographer Daniel Hanson. With
permission of photographer.

almost by half to less than 62,000.93 In 1977, a Mindszenty bronze statue
was dedicated on Mindszenty Plaza in downtown Cleveland.94
A month later, Mindszenty was in Pittsburgh, where the mayor,
Peter F. Flaherty (1924–2005), a Catholic Democrat, even proclaimed a
“Joseph Cardinal Mindszenty Day” on June 26, 1974.95 While many of
the Hungarian Americans were moved to tears when they went to see
Mindszenty, others were concerned about possible negative consequences
of his visits. Almost a year before Mindszenty came to the United States,
a Hungarian priest living in the United States, Elek Horváth, wrote to a
Hungarian priest who worked in the Vatican. In the letter, Horváth
expressed his concern that a visit of the Cardinal could run into difficulties
if it was not of a “private nature.” He further wrote: “Aside from the
93. Numbers from: https://case.edu/ech/articles/h/hungarians.
94. https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WM8W39_Joseph_Mindszenty_1892_
1975_Cleveland_Ohio.
95. MMAL 086. d. Amerikai út, 1974. 3. dosszié, Pittsburgh. Press cuttings from
Magyarság, editions of June 14 and June 21, 1974. On Flaherty: http://old.postgazette.com/pg/05109/490421.stm

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ANTICOMMUNISM AND DÉTENTE

Catholics, for the representatives of the American intellectual circles, the
politicians, the press, radio and television, which are dominated not by
Catholics but by really aggressive liberals and leftists, the Primate is a
‘reactionary’ political personality, and they rather look at him with dislike
than with sympathy.”96
On June 9, 1973, the newspaper Kanadai Magyarság reported about a
letter by a “Committee of Concerned Catholic American Hungarians” that
opposed Mindszenty’s visit.97 The “Committee” wrote an open letter,
urging the U.S. government not to allow the visit or at least postpone it,
adding: “We were born in Hungary but we don’t want Mindszenty to criticize the government.”98 As mentioned above, neither the US government
nor the US bishops extended an official invitation. Others disapproved. On
October 5, 1973, an article in the Catholic Transcript, the newspaper of the
Archdiocese of Hartford, Connecticut, was asking: “Is Cardinal Mindszenty an embarrassment to us in 1973? An embarrassment, that is, to the
so-called free world and to the Church?”99 The article concluded that
Mindszenty’s visit was very timely to remind Americans of the “reality of
communism” which was still “totalitarian.”
When the Vatican announced Mindszenty’s “retirement” in February
1974, many Catholics and American-Hungarians protested. However,
according to the Catholic News Service, the Catholic press was mostly
“favorable,” stating “that the time had been somewhat overdue” and “that the
best interests of the church in Hungary had to be uppermost in the Pope’s
intentions.”100 In this context, Edward Magri, a New York Post correspondent to the Vatican, also wrote that the Pope gained “general approval” for
his “policy of reconciliation with the Soviet Bloc” although when he dismissed Mindszenty, “it led to some protests by conservatives.”101
During his visits, Mindszenty got involved in political controversies.
In June 1974, during his tour through California, the Cardinal declined an
96. Zágon-leveleskönyv. Iratgyűjtemény-töredék Mindszenty József bíboros ról 1967–
1975, ed. Németh László Imre (Budapest: Szent István Társulat, 2011). Letter 28-1, December 31, 1972, Kensington (USA), Dr. Elek Horváth to József Zágon, Rome, pp. 67–70.
97. ÁBTL 3.2.9. R–8–009/ III “Vecchio,” 223.
98. ÁBTL 3.2.9. R–8–009/ III “Vecchio,” 223.
99. “Is he an embarrassment?” Catholic Transcript, Volume LXVI, Number 24, October 5, 1973, p. 4.
100. “Catholic Editors comment on Mindszenty Retirement,” Catholic News Service—
Newsfeeds, February 20, 1974.
101. The New York Post, March 5, 1974.

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251

honorary degree offered by the Jesuit University of Santa Clara. The university president, Father Thomas D. Terry, SJ, said that “the university had
hoped to honor him for his courage and his heroic perseverance in the
cause of justice and freedom.”102 However, the university had come under
fire from “pro-life” organizations when it had named as a member of the
Board of Trustees Congressman Don Edwards, who had been accused for
supporting “pro-choice” positions. Members of the Cardinal Mindszenty
Foundation had sent letters to Mindszenty, urging him not to accept the
honorary degree.
Conclusions
During the early 1970s, Mindszenty was still a symbol for anticommunist activists in the United States. But for many, this also included antifeminist, and, more generally, anti-liberal ideas and a rejection of “Western
decadence.” Thus, he had become entangled in the American Culture Wars.
Many American Hungarians were emotionally moved when Mindszenty visited their communities. However, this did not exclude that they
also respected representatives of the church in Communist Hungary. On
August 17, 1975, 600 believers of Holy Cross (Szent Kereszt) Church in
Detroit, Michigan, commemorated the death of Cardinal József Mindszenty, who had passed away in May of that year.103 Mindszenty had visited the parish in 1974 and had sent a letter to the Franciscan Father
Domonkos Csorba, only days before his death. However, only one year
later, Dr. László Lékai, the new primate of the Catholic Church in Communist Hungary, visited the church and celebrated Saint Stephen’s Day
with the parish community. This was obviously not seen as a contradiction.
On the highest level, President Nixon, Pope Paul VI, and János Kádár
were more or less bound by their diplomatic initiatives in which the Cardinal was seen as an obstacle. Since the weight of American Hungarians
who supported Mindszenty seemed not to count much on the national
level of the United States, it was mostly a few senators, congressmen, or
political activists like Phyllis Schlafly who used the opportunity offered
them by Mindszenty’s international reputation to propagate their conservative agendas that seemed to be, like the Cardinal, out of date at that
time. However, Mindszenty and many of his ideas and some of his political
102. The Catholic Transcript, Vol. LXVII, No. 7, June 7, 1974.
103. István Török, Katolikus Magyarok Észak-Amerikában, A Katolikus Magyarok Vasárnapja (Youngstown, OH, 1978), 143–44.

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supporters would see a revival under Reagan, Pope St John Paul II, and,
later on, in the Era of Viktor Orbán.
For the Catholic Church it was more difficult. Since the late 1950s,
the popes had begun to rethink their policy towards the Soviet Bloc when
Pope St John XXIII initiated a somewhat more conciliatory tone, although
the difference with Pius XII should not be exaggerated.104 The questions
was now: How could a nuclear catastrophe be prevented? And how could
a (further) nationalization of the Catholic Church in countries like
Czechoslovakia or Hungary under strict control by the Communist Party
be avoided or at least slowed down? These were the main questions. One
generation after the early Cold War, communism did not seem to be a
temporary phenomenon any longer. The West, especially the United
States, had, in the meantime, lost much credibility in the world because of
the Vietnam War. Finally, the Catholic Church had to listen to the new
nations of the Southern hemisphere that had come out of colonial rule and
that also regarded the West more critically.
For Mindszenty, all this did not count, he only focused on “his” Hungarian nation that he claimed to represent according to a “thousand year”
old unwritten constitution. He saw negotiations simply as “betrayal” of the
victims of communism. Many, but surely not all, Hungarians, both
Catholics as well as the more nationalist Calvinists, who lived in the
United States, followed him in this. But the emotional encounters of the
Hungarian diaspora with the octogenarian cardinal in places like Cleveland, Detroit, New Brunswick and elsewhere should not be misunderstood
as being in unspoken political agreement. For most, Mindszenty embodied
a time when they had, in one way or another, suffered as victims of communism or simply as refugees in a huge country they did not know. The
Cardinal brought back memories, sometimes probably also traumas. And
he brought American Hungarians together and gave them, for the last time
in the twentieth century, media attention they had not enjoyed since 1956.
For others, Mindszenty was just a famous, fascinating personality, someone whose stubbornness even drew him admiration from people with contrary or at least different political views.

104. Gerald Fogarty, SJ, “Vatican II and the Cold War,” Vatican II Behind the Iron Curtain, ed. Piotr Kosicki (Washington, DC, 2016), 27–48.

Mobility and Identity:
Christianity and the Making of Local Society
in Northeast China, 1840–1945
JI LI*
Unlike other parts of China, most Catholic villages in Manchuria or
northeast China developed out of domestic immigrant settlements from
Shandong and Hebei provinces. This article studies identity formation
of these communities during the century between the establishment of
the Catholic Manchuria Mission in 1840 and the extension of the state
into rural society until the end of the Japanese rule in 1945. In examining the dual processes of integrating Catholic immigrants into a
global Catholic Church and state structure in modern times, it argues
that these communities established a strong Catholic identity within a
short period because they were homogeneous and developed strong
group cohesion during the transformation of Manchurian local society.
Thus, they survived many political storms even to the present day.
Keywords: Catholic community, local society, migration, mobility,
Manchuria

O

n March 5, 1901, in a small village of northeast China, Alfred Marie
Caubrière, a twenty-five-year-old French Catholic missionary from
the Missions Entrangères de Paris (MEP) sat down in front of his desk
and began a letter to his parents. “This might shock you but I admit that
this news brought me great happiness. Later, perhaps, the overwhelming
feeling of new responsibility would have prevailed, and I would have
received it only with fear. But for now, maybe it is bad but, I simply thank

* Ji Li is Assistant Professor of History at The University of Hong Kong. The author
would like to thank the four anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and insightful
suggestions for revision. Earlier drafts of the article have been presented in the annual meeting
of Social Science History Association (SSHA) and the 11th International Convention of Asia
Scholars (ICAS 11) in 2019, and the AAS-in-Asia in 2017. I thank all participants and discussants for their comments. Research for this article is benefited from the support of the Hang
Seng Golden Jubilee Education Fund for Research, Hong Kong Research Grants Council’s
General Research Fund (Project no. HKU17602120), and Collective Research Fund (Project
no. C7052-18G, “Infrastructures of Faith: Religious Mobilities on the Belt and Road”).

253

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MOBILITY AND IDENTITY

FIGURE 1. The Portrait of Alfred Marie Caubrière (1876–1948), from “Massacre
du R. P. Alfred Caubrière (June 18, 1948),” Missionnaires d’Asie: revue bimestrielle;
organe des Missions-Etrangères de Paris et de l’Oeuvre des Partants, (Paris, 1949), 27.

God for having made a little clearer my situation regarding the Christians.
I am now, officially, their priest.”1 Caubrière was then in Santaizi, a
Catholic village in today’s Liaoning province of northeast China. When
Caubrière’s official appointment as the vicar of Santaizi arrived, he had
been in this village less than a year. He first came to Santaizi as a trainee
and assistant to Jean Corbel. A new priest usually has to work for a considerable period of time in a community to be appointed to take charge of
it. But Caubrière made his name in the fatal battles against the Boxers’
siege of the Santaizi church in the previous year. The MEP recognized his
valor and the urgency of appointing a full-time priest-in-residence in the
community. When the official appointment letter arrived, Caubrière was
indeed joyful. “This is a change that I have already told you could happen”
(Figure1).
1. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, March 5, 1901. The collection of Caubrière’s
family letters, including altogether 794 unpublished letters written between 1893 and 1940,
in which 610 were from Manchuria, including 233 from the Catholic village of Santaizi, is
now preserved in the Archives des Missions Etrangères de Paris (AMEP).

JI LI

255

However, soon after the initial joy, Caubrière realized that he was not
quite sure of the precise area that fell under his supervision. “I think it
extends in the north to the Leao River; in the south, it goes as far as a river
that is not far from Chaling, but whose name I do not yet know. If you are
curious about the corner that I have to cultivate, look on your map: Santaizi, K’a lima, Ta niou p’outse, Tseou kia ouo p’eng; these are the principal
chrétientés of this district. I will update you gradually, as I learn more
myself.”2 It is not surprising that Caubrière did not know exactly the
administrative territory for which he was responsible, as the local society
was still loosely formed around scattered immigrant settlements. Before
the state intensified its local administration and established Liaozhong
County in 1906, Santaizi remained marginal to all county seats in this area.
Located in the middle of nowhere, its territory, without any clear demarcation, was loosley associated with neighboring counties of Xinmin,
Liaoyang, Chengde, Zhen’an, and Haicheng—back and forth during different periods.
The situation of Santaizi was not unique in northeast China. Many
chrétientés or Catholic communities like Santaizi did not have clear geographic boundaries and were an outgrowth of immigrant settlements that
were usually located on the border of several county-level administrative
units. Growing in a shadow beyond the effective reach of the state and its
local administration, many Catholic communities in the region hosted resident French missionaries for decades, especially after the Roman Catholic
Manchuria Mission was founded in 1840.3 They developed a strong
Catholic identity in the following decades and survived many political
storms such as the Boxer Uprising, the Russo-Japanese war, the Japanese
occupation, and constant wars and social chaos in the first half of the twentieth century. The resilience of these communities is remarkable, as almost
all of these nineteenth-century Catholic communities survived and remain
Catholic today.
This article examines how these Catholic villages in northeast China
had developed such a strong Catholic identity during this chaotic period by
examining the dual processes of the extension of the global Church into
the lives of indigenous Catholics and the expansion of the state into rural
2. Ibid. This study preserves the original spelling of names and places in Caubrière’s
letters.
3. The Roman Catholic Manchuria Mission was initially a part of the ManchuriaMongolia Mission established in 1838 by Pope Gregory XVI. Two years later in 1840, the
mission was separated into two independent missions of Mongolia and Manchuria.

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society from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. Both processes
have caught scholarly attention in recent years. In his study of the origins
of the Boxer Uprising, Joseph Esherick argues that Catholic communal
identity in Shandong was built in opposition to its neighbors, accumulating mutual hostility that eventually erupted into violence.4 Challenging the
interpretation of acculturation, Henrietta Harrison argues that the indigenous Catholic identity in Shanxi developed from rejecting foreign priests
and foreign imposition, while at the same time local Catholics have been
seeking the authentic membership of a global Catholic Church.5 Focusing
on northeast China, Thomas DuBois discusses how state structures of religion engaged with local society in the Manchukuo period from a conceptual perspective of social engineering.6 This article builds upon these studies on Catholic community in north China and further explores the
formation of Catholic identity in the unique situation of Manchuria that
encountered the reorganization of local society starting from the late Qing
reforms. Against the general background of “two broad historical
processes” in this period summarized by Prasenjit Duara—the economic
changes stemming from the impact of the West and the extension of the
state into rural society—this article provides an empirical study on identity
formation in an immigrant society during the state-building process.7
The analytical unit in this article are the scattered Catholic settlements. They were different from villages in traditional Chinese rural society that were bounded by kinship, lineage, or William Skinner’s marketing
system model.8 Most of these settlements uprooted themselves from
4. Joseph Esherick, The Origin of the Boxer Uprising (California, 1987).
5. Henrietta Harrison. The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic
Village (California, 2013). The scholarship on acculturation and Christianity as an indigenous
and resilient Chinese religion includes Nicole Constable, Christian souls and Chinese spirits: A
Hakka community in Hong Kong (California, 1994); Richard Madsen, China’s Catholics:
Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society (California, 1998) and “Beyond Orthodox:
Catholicism as Chinese Folk Religion,” in: Chinese and Christianity: Burden Past, Hopeful
Future, Stephen Uhally Jr. and Xiaoxin Wu, eds. (Sharpe, 2001), 233–49; Eugenio Menegon,
Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Harvard,
2009); Nicolas Standaert, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange
between China and Europe (Washington, 2008); and Lars Peter Laamann, Christian Heretics
in Late Imperial China (Routledge, 2013).
6. Thomas David DuBois, Empire and the Meaning of Religion in Northeast Asia:
Manchuria 1900–1945 (Cambridge, 2016).
7. Prasenjit Duara, Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford, 1991), 1.
8. William Skinner’s marketing system model is elaborated in “Marketing and Social
Structure in Rural China,” Journal of Asian Studies, 24 (1964–65), 3–43, 195–228.

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257

provinces like Hebei and Shandong and began new Catholic communities
de novo. Many early Catholic immigrant families settled in northeast
China before the arrival of missionaries. In the process that integrated
them into a global Church, these Catholic settlements responded to what
Duara calls the “cultural nexus of power” in rural society.9 Duara adds a
cultural dimension to Philip Huang’s exploration of economic and social
dynamics of rural north China, and points out that Catholic villages were
both grounded in the local society and linked to sources of power beyond
the local cultural nexus itself.10 As Duara did not study Catholic villages
per se, this article examines how the global Church system in immigrant
settlements created a distinctive network beyond the local administration
in the nineteenth century, and how local religious power extended in juxtaposition with the extension of the state in the early twentieth century.
Different from many scholars who study rural society of north China
by using investigative materials produced by the Japanese South
Manchurian Railway Company from 1940–1942, research for this article
relies on missionary writings and systematic church records, as well as Chinese materials of government documents and local gazetteers. These materials provide crucial contemporary perspectives that allow one to explore
how these Catholic communities encountered and experienced the growth
of both the global Church and the state in a transformative period. The first
part of the article discusses local Catholic settlements during the mass
migration. Different types of migration since the Qing dynasty included
the voluntary immigrants of commoners and the government-organized
immigrants of bannermen—those who belong to the Qing military organization of the Eight Banners. This resulted in different relationships among
people, land, and the state. While immigrants’ designated identity defined
their relationship to the land rather than the reverse, religion provided a
crucial alternative for community formation and identity construction. The
second part of this study examines the extension of the global Church into
the Catholic settlements and how this process helped to consolidate the
community identity. The third part argues that the extension of the state
into Manchurian rural society strengthened—rather than weakened as
many may have assumed—the communal Catholic identity during chaotic
years of the state-making in the first half of the twentieth century.

9. Duara, Culture, Power, and the State, 130.
10. See Philip Huang for his examination of the characteristics of north China villages
in The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford, 1985).

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Mass Migration and Catholic Settlements
The growth of Catholic communities in northeast China was historically constituted in the very fabric of Manchurian society, that is, the
unique relationship among people, land, and state that was deeply rooted
in the social structure inherited from the Qing period, especially its immigration policies. After the initial promotion of immigration to Manchuria
for the sake of more extensive land cultivation, for most of the Qing period
there was an official ban on the immigration of Han Chinese to
Manchuria, the homeland of the Qing Manchu rulers.11 In the early nineteenth century, due to financial imperative, the Qing government began to
relocate the capital’s elite banner population to its homeland.12 Such statesponsored migration required a large amount of labor to work on the vast
farmlands of Manchuria, and the immigration ban was lifted in 1860 and
ended altogether in 1897. Consequently, the late nineteenth century began
to witness growing waves of immigration to Manchuria from northern
China. As a result, the population of Manchuria grew from three million
in 1840 to eighteen million in 1910. Between 1889 and 1911, over a mere
thirteen years, the population increased by nine and a half million.13 By
1949, the region’s population was close to forty-nine million.14
Immigrants to Manchuria included primarily two categories: the statesponsored bannermen and the voluntary commoners. The former was
organized under the Eight Banner system and its status in Manchuria created a distinct social structure in the region: the demarcation of qiren (bannermen) and minren (civilians or non-bannermen). According to designated
identities, the Qing government created a delicate system to distribute and
manage Manchurian lands. The land owned by the bannermen were qidi
(banner land) and those by non-bannermen were mindi (civilian land). The
consequence of this banner-civilian land system resulted in the so-called
“state-sponsored inequality.”15 In such a social structure imposed by the
11. In the first two decades of the Qing reign, between 1644 and 1667, the Qing court
issued a series of edicts, including the well-known “The Regulations on Recruiting Civilian
Commoners to Cultivate Land in Liaodong (1653)” to encourage immigration to Manchuria
for land cultivation.
12. Shuang Chen, State-Sponsored Inequality: The Banner System and Social Stratification
in Northeast China (Stanford, 2017).
13. Ping’an Ma, Jindai dongbei yimin yanjiu [Studies on migration to Dongbei in
modern China] (Jinan, 2009), 40.
14. Shanyu Zhang, Zhongguo renkou dili [Demography and geography of China] (Beijing, 2007).
15. Chen, State-Sponsored Inequality.

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state, the correlation between people’s identity and land corresponded to
different types of governance: the military government for bannermen and
banner lands, and the civilian government for non-bannermen and nonbanner lands. This dichotomy is called qimin fenzhi or “separate governance
on bannermen and non-bannermen.”16 But in reality, an ambiguous area
existed in the seemingly strict system and the boundary between the
enforced banner-civilian classification was not rigid.17 Since the late nineteenth century, the military government was unable to manage with the
dramatically increased number of Han Chinese farmers and the civilian
government gradually became dominant during the late Qing reforms in
which Manchuria became Three Northeastern Provinces in 1907. Before
this transition, in the long nineteenth century, the local administration
beyond the military government was very loose and slack.
Different from those state-sponsored immigrants who were all designated local elites, the large number of voluntary immigrants from north
China were lower class farmers. In rural China, people’s identity was largely
defined by land, kinship, and lineage. In an immigrant society like
Manchuria, their identities were dominantly defined by their relationships to
different types of land. Some of these emigrant farmers were yimin
(migrants), legal and entitled to land; some were liumin (vagrants) or youmin
(wandering people), who had no established residence or visible means of
support; and some were fei (bandits) or professional bandit militias who
looted for a living. Yimin usually farmed on the registered land, and liumin,
even if they farmed on land they could not register as farmers.18 Once their
affiliations to land changed, their identities would change accordingly.
On top of these designated and land-affiliated identities, religious
identity—Catholics in this particular study—emerged with migration to
Manchuria. Among the immigrants to Manchuria, Catholic immigrants
were seldom recognized, even though they shaped the religious demography of northeast China with enduring effects. Unlike Chinese Protestants,
whose numbers experienced exponential growth in the post-Mao era,
Chinese Catholics remain a relatively stable population whose growth
depends largely on the continuity of the multigenerational families and the
16. Shuren Diao, Dongbei qidi yanjiu [Research on banner land in Northeast China]
(Jilin wenshi, 1993).
17. Yuanyuan Qiu, “Strategies of Living in the Context of Separate Governance of
Eight Banners People in the Qing Dynasty,” in: Lishi yanjiu [Historical Research], 388
(2020), 68–93.
18. Diao, Dongbei qidi yanjiu.

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MOBILITY AND IDENTITY

community.19 A distinctive feature of Catholicism in northeast China is
that most of the region’s Catholics are descendants of Catholic immigrants
whose ancestors converted to Christianity in their hometowns and brought
Christianity to the locality in which they settled. Many of them arrived in
Manchuria earlier than European missionaries did, and these early
Catholic immigrant clusters gave the church a good foundation on which
to grow.
The majority of the voluntary immigrants were from Hebei and
Shandong provinces in north China; both were well known for having
hosted Catholic missions.20 In Hebei, Catholicism can be traced back to as
early as the fourteenth century. Before 1949, there were 800,000 Catholics
according to official Chinese statistics.21 Similarly, Catholic missionaries
have long worked in Shandong, including a renowned Jesuit missionary,
Niccolo Longobardi (1559–1654), who left abundant letters and reports
describing Catholic missions in the province.22 The Franciscans arrived in
1650, and by 1723 there were “Catholic communities all over the
province.”23
There is no demographic record of Catholic population having immigrated from Hebei and Shandong to northeast China, as China did not
implement systematic registration of Christians or any religious population
in its history. But official court documents and local gazetteers include
many accounts about scattered Catholic communities in northeast China.
In the eleventh year of Emperor Qianlong’s reign (1746), the emperor
issued his first decree to ban Catholicism nationwide. Consequently, the
government of Fengtian Prefecture (roughly equivalent to today’s Liaoning
19. Yonghui Qiu, ed., Zhongguo zongjiao baogao (2017–18) [Annual Report on
Religions in China (2017–18)] (Zhongguo shehui kexue wenxian, 2020).
20. During the mass migration to Manchuria, in nearly all years more than 95% of the
migrants came from Hebei and Shandong provinces. See Thomas R. Gottschang, “Economic
Change, Disasters, and Migration: The Historical Case of Manchuria,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 35.3 (1987), 461–90.
21. Hebeisheng zhi (zongjiaozhi) [Local Gazetteer of Heibei Province (Religion)], vol.
68, p. 208.
22. Ronnie Hsia, “Tianzhujiao yu mingmo shehui: Chongzhenchao Long Huaming
shandong chuanjiao de jige wenti,” [Catholicism and the Chinese society in the late Ming
dynasty: several questions regarding the missionary work of Niccolo Longobardi in Shandong
under the Emperor Chongzhen’s reign], Lishi yanjiu [Historical Research] (2009.2), 51–67.
23. Feiya Tao and Tianlu Liu, Jidu jiaohui yu jindai Shandong shehui [Christian Church
and early modern society of Shandong] (Jinan, 1995), 10. See also Rolf G. Tiedemann,
“Christianity and Chinese ‘Heterodox Sects’: Mass Conversion and Syncretism in Shandong
Province in the Early Eighteenth Century,” Monumenta Serica, 44.1 (1996), 339–82.

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Province) submitted a memorial to the emperor, reporting that the authorities had discovered Catholic communities in seven counties.24 This is the
first official Chinese record of Catholic communities in Manchuria. The
memorial concluded that there were approximately a hundred Chinese
Catholics in the prefecture and no Western missionaries.
From Emperor Qianlong’s reign until the early nineteenth century,
Catholicism experienced very limited growth in Manchuria because of the
official prohibition of Christianity and immigration. Nonetheless, with an
increasing number of Catholics immigrated to Manchuria, immigrant
Catholic families began to spread throughout the vast region. Local
gazetteers, though randomly, mention many prominent Catholic families
in different parts of Manchuria, which include the Du family of Santaizi
and the Su family of Biguanbao in Liaoning, and the families of Li, Ding,
and Xiao of Xiaoheishan in Jilin. In 1818, eight families, including five
Catholic, established a settlement in today’s Nong’an County in Jilin
province. Xiaobajiazi, or literally “small eight families,” soon developed
into a prominent Catholic community.25 In 1840, Emmanuel Verrolles,
the first apostolic vicar of the Catholic Manchuria Mission from the
French MEP, discovered Xiaobajiazi and purchased land to build the first
village church. In 1844, another MEP missionary, Charles Joseph Venault,
was assigned to Xiaobajiazi and became the first priest-in-residence in a
local Catholic community in the Manchuria Mission.
Santaizi in southern Manchuria was another significant Catholic
immigrant settlement. It was originally called Dujiazhuang, or “the village
of the Du family.”26 According to the county gazetteer, the Dus were
Catholic immigrants from the village of Xidu in what used to be Laizhou
Prefecture in Shandong province. The patriarch who spearheaded the
family’s move to Manchuria was Du Shoushan, who settled in Liaoyang in
24. They are Kaiyuan, Chengde, Haicheng, Gaiping, Ningyuan, Yongji, and Yizhou.
See “Qianlong shiyinian Fengtianfu jinjiaoan chahuo jiaomin fenbutu” [The map of distribution of Catholic cases in Fengtian Prefecture in the eleventh year of the Qianlong emperor],
in: Yan Rui, “Qianlong shiyinian Fengtianfu jinjiaoan tanwei” [A study on the cases of prohibition of Catholicism in Fengtian Prefecture in the eleventh year of the Qianlong
Emperor], in: Wenben, diyu yu jieshi de xinshijiao: Zhongguo dongbei diqu de jiduzongjiao yu
zhongxi wenhua jiaoliu [Manuscripts, memories, localization, and explanations: New perspectives on Christianity in northeast China and Sino-Western cultural exchange], ed. Yifeng
Zhao (Shanghai, 2013), 37.
25. Nong’an xianzhi [Local gazetteer of Nong’an County] (Jilin, 1993), 640–41.
26. As recorded in Minjian ziliao ben, a folklore survey conducted by the Liaozhong
County government in the 1980s. Minjian ziliao ben (internal distribution, 1987), 37.

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eastern Manchuria.27 His two sons, Du Hai and Du Ping, later moved
Santaizi and Shaling respectively and introduced Christianity to the two
places. Over the ensuing decades, the two settlements developed into two
significant Catholic communities.28 The earliest missionary who visited
Santaizi was Verrolles; when he first visited the village in 1841, he reported
there were 170 Catholics.29 Two decades later, in 1865, there were already
two missionary schools for girls.30 In 1864, Joseph Boyer purchased three
humble rooms near the southern entrance to the village and established a
catechism school there.31 Boyer called Santaizi a “good village” in his
parish report of 1865.32 A few years later, in his parish report, Philibert
Simon praised Santaizi as a “true Christian parish, like a delicious oasis in
the desert of paganism.”33 In 1875, Isidore Métayer led the construction of
the first village church and was appointed the first priest of Santaizi. By the
time Caubrière arrived in Santaizi in 1900, the village had 600 Catholics,
“which made Santaitzi one of the largest Christian communities in southern Manchuria.”34 Caubrière lived in Santaizi for nearly three decades from
1899 to 1927 and witnessed the most significant growth of the community.
In 1935, the MEP registered over 2,600 Catholics in Santaizi. The
renewed Santaizi Church could accommodate 1,500 people.35 It became
one of the largest among 242 Catholic churches established by the MEP
in the Manchuria Mission in terms of its capacity and grandeur (Figure 2).
Santaizi is one of the many Catholic settlements that experienced the
steady growth until the mid-twentieth century, despite the constant wars
and regime changes. The growth was largely due to the extension of the
27. The exact timing of the family’s relocation to Manchuria remains unknown.
According to the author’s fieldwork and archival research, as well as to the newly compiled
genealogy of the Du family, most probably the first Dus moved to Santaizi between the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
28. Santaizi is one of the five largest Catholic villages in northeast China. The other
four are Haibei in Heilongjiang, Xiaobajiazi and Sujiawopeng in Juin, and Songshuzuizi in
Liaoning. Peijun Wu, “20 shiji shangbanye dongbei tianzhujiao shi de kaocha [Investigation
of the history of Catholicism in northeast China in the first half of the twentieth century],”
Waiguo wenti yanjiu [Journal of Foreign Studies], 3 (2010), 33–36.
29. AMEP 225, p. 153.
30. AMEP 0563, p. 2094.
31. Liaozhong Xianzhi (1993) [Local Gazetteer of Liaozhong County], 770.
32. AMEP 0563, p. 2096.
33. Emile Briand, Philibert Simon, missionnaire en Mandchourie: Sa vie, sa correspondance, ses œuvres [Philibert Simon, Missionary of Manchuria: His Life, His Correspondence,
His Works] (Paris, 1878), 208.
34. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, August 19, 1900.
35. “The Construction of Santaizi Church,”Manzhou gongjiao yuekan [Manchuria
Catholic Monthly], 1 (1935), 14–15.

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FIGURE 2. The Church of Santaizi, 1934, from “The Construction of Santaizi
Church,” in: Manzhou gongjiao yuekan [Manchuria Catholic Monthly], 1 (1935), 14.

global church into local society, which established a distinctive network on
top of the local administration. It also nurtured a strong communal identity, because these Catholic immigrant settlements began de novo as nearly
entirely Catholic communities. The immigrants’ request for stability and
security coincided with the church’s growth, which regulated the local religious practice and consolidated the shared communal identity.
Integrating Catholic Settlements into the Global Church
Before the late Qing reforms that established new counties and reorganized local administrative functions at the turn of the century, many
Catholic communities did not have clear geographic boundaries like those
Caubrière described in his letter. Most Catholic communities were an outgrowth of immigrant settlements located on the borderland of several
counties and far away from county seats. During the Boxers’ attack on the
Santaizi church, Caubrière used to write to the magistrate of the neighboring Liaoyang County asking for help, but his request was ignored. Most
local magistrates paid little attention to such religious communities unless
they were forced to get involved to deal with conflicts and quell unrests.
The slack local administration provided an opportunity for the growth
of Catholic Church on the one hand. On the other hand, it was due to the

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imperial expansion and systematic church effort.36 The Roman Catholic
Manchuria Mission was founded in 1840 and entrusted to the French
MEP. In 1840s, the establishment of the Manchuria Mission and other
four missions on China’s borderlands accompanied the expansion of
French control over the Catholic faith in China.37 The so-called French
Religious Protectorate refers to a system of foreign privilege that was institutionalized through a series of treaties signed between the Qing court and
the French government between 1844 and 1865.38 Under the treaties,
sixty-seven missionaries had joined the Manchuria Mission by the end of
the nineteenth century. They had ordained nineteen indigenous priests,
trained approximately two hundred catechists, and overseen the establishment of Catholic schools in virtually every major Christian community.39
These communities encompassed hundreds of faithful indigenous lay
Christians who participated actively in baptism, proselytism, and church
education40 (Figure 3).
Church records also demonstrate the rapid and steady increase of religious institutions: parishes grew from eleven in 1873 to forty-five in 1919;
churches multiplied fivefold from fifty-three in 1901 to 253 in 1919; chrétientés shot up from 160 in 1896 to 400 in 1919 (Figure 4). As key religious
and institutional signifiers, the hierarchical network of parishes, churches,
and chrétientés played a critical role in organizing local society. A village
church was often shared by several neighboring chrétientés for the
administration of the sacraments, so it gradually became a center to organize localities regardless of its position in local government. Caubrière
recorded that during the Boxers Uprising, a great number of Catholics
from neighboring villages took refuge in the Santaizi church and they
organized into a defensive force against the Boxers’ attack.41 In 1909, Chi36. For the complicated relationship between Christianity and imperialism in China,
see Ryan Dunch, “Beyond cultural imperialism: cultural theory, Christian missions, and
global modernity,” History and Theory, 4.1, no. 3 (2002), 301–25.
37. Within a decade from 1840–48, the MEP had established five new missions or
apostolic vicariates in China’s borderlands: Manchuria (1840), Tibet (1846), and Guangdong,
Guangxi, and Hainan (all in 1848).
38. These treaties include the Treaty of Whampoa (1844), the Treaty of Tianjin (1858),
the Convention of Peking (1860), and the Berthemy Convention (1865). Ernest P. Young,
Ecclesiastical Colony: China’s Catholic Church and the French Religious Protectorate (Oxford,
2013).
39. For the list of the MEP missionaries and indigenous priests in the Manchuria Mission from 1840–98, see Ji Li, God’s Little Daughters: Catholic Women in Nineteenth-Century
Manchuria, (Washington, 2015), 145–51.
40. Ibid., 103–14.
41. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, August 19, 1901.

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FIGURE 3. Map of the Manchuria Mission (1889), from: Adrien Launay, “Mission
de Mandchourie (1889), Carte dressée d’après les travaux des missionnaires de
Mandchourie” (Paris, 1891).

nese Catholics from all the neighboring villages came to Santaizi to celebrate the tenth anniversary of Caubrière’s arrival in the village church. On
that day, Caubrière had in the catechumenate 250 people from different
villages preparing for Baptism.42 Hierarchal institutions and informal relations became fundamental for exercising power through networks. The
local churches created a distinctive network on top of the official administration, and the missionaries in charge became local authorities whose
power extended to cover an area defined by the local church system rather
than the government.
42. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, December 22, 1909.

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FIGURE 4. Churches, Parishes and Chrétientés in the Manchuria Mission, 1873–1919,
from: Parish reports in AMEP 0562, 0563, 0564, 0565, 0566, 0567, and 0567A.

Extension of the global Church into Catholic settlements is shown by
the statistics and it relied on the church reporting system. To fulfill the
requirements in the annual report, missionaries did assiduous work to
supervise and guide local practices. Their daily mission work was transliterated into two forms in the annual report: tableaux d’administration and
comptes-rendus. The former contained quantitative statistics that meticulously documented the frequency of the community’s reception of the
sacraments to demonstrate the consolidation of communal identity. The
latter were mostly qualitative and verbal evaluations that measured local
conversion and religiosity. The reports in Santaizi, for example, recorded
the annual frequency of baptism, confession, confirmation and communion
for about a century. As the frequency increased steadily and ritual practices
became routinized, the communal identity was reported to be confirmed.43
Through the observance of the rituals, the missionary annual reports created a coherent narrative for incorporating the Catholic settlements into
the global Church.
But what Catholic identity meant for the community went beyond the
statistics and graphic representations of parishes, churches, and sacraments. Examining local materials of the nineteenth century, Catholic
43. Ji Li, “Measuring Catholic Faith in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century
China,” in: Owen White and James Patrick Daughton, eds., In God’s Empire: French Missionaries and the Modern World (Oxford, 2012), 173–94.

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identity demonstrated in Manchuria was not as strong as in other parts of
China, where mutual hostility accumulated in villagers’ daily life became
the main reason leading to violent conflicts or jiao’an based on religious
differences between Catholics and non-believers.44 Indeed, Christian communities in Manchuria were attacked significantly during the Boxer Uprising, but an examination of jiao’an recorded in major archival collections
shows that the quantity of anti-Christian jiao’an in northeast China was
notably low.45 For instance, in the first two decades after the first Opium
War from 1842 to 1860, there were 62 jiao’an reported in China, but none
in the northeast.46 The first jiao’an in Manchuria, the Niuzhuang Case, was
reported in 1861. It was twenty years later than the first one reported in
Beijing. From 1861 to 1910, there were altogether 105 jiao’an recorded in
all three northeastern provinces, compared to 333 in a single province of
Shandong during the same period.47 The majority of the 105 jiao’an concerns economic disputes on church land and property rather than violent
conflicts. And 66 of the 105 cases happened between 1894 to 1902, a
decade marked by mass migration, local reforms, wars, and uprisings.
Looking into the daily life of Catholic settlements, missionary personal accounts also demonstrate a relatively peaceful contact between
Catholics and non-believers. For Catholics, threats and hostilities were
mostly from bandits and soldiers rather than from non-Christian villagers.
In Caubrière’s over two-hundred family letters written in Santaizi village
during his three decades of residence there, one finds numerous mentions
of “pagans.” But besides the Boxers’ attack in the summer of 1900, he did
not mention any violent conflicts between pagans and Catholics. In contrast, he talked about how pagan villagers came to remind him of the
advent of bandits and how they helped each other during the Russo-Japan44. See, for example, Alan Sweeten, Christianity in Rural China: Conflict and Accommodation in Jiangxi Province 1860–1900 (Michigan, 2001) and Esherick, The Origins of the Boxer
Uprising.
45. The major published archival collections of Jiao’an include Jiaowu jiao’an dang
[Archives concerning incidents involving foreign missionaries], series 1–7, (Zhongyang yanjiuyuan jindaishi yanjiusuo, 1974–81); Qingmo Jian’an [Religious court cases at the end of
Qing]. Vols. 1–5, (Zhonghua shuju, 1996–2000); and Zhu Shijia, ed., Shijiu shiji meiguo
qinhua dang’an shiliao xuanji [Selected historical archives of the American invasion of China
in the nineteenth century] (Zhonghua shuju, 1959).
46. Zhao Shuhao, “Lun jindai zhongguo zaoqi jiao’an de qiyin he tedian [On the
Causes and Characteristics of Early Religious Cases in Modern China],” Shixue yuekan [Journal of Historical Science], 2 (1998), 15.
47. Tian Chao, “Shilun wanqing dongbei jiao’an de tedian [On the Characteristics of
Religious Cases in Northeast China],” Liaocheng daxue xuebao [Journal of Liaocheng University], 2 (2008), 317.

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ese War: the pagans living in the north of the Santaizi Catholic community
borrowed a small cannon from the church to fight against harassing bandits.48 In the aftermath of the Boxer’s attack on the village church,
Caubrière even wrote that, “They killed a lot of Christians, it is true; but
since the persecution, the pagans have suffered more from the war and the
brigands than the Christians had suffered from the Boxers.”49
So, the origins of jiao’an or anti-Christian sentiments in northeast
China, though they shared many similarities with the anti-foreign sentiments, are not exactly the same as those in inner China. The relatively mild
situation in Manchuria before the Boxer Uprising was largely due to the
unique condition of the region—its vast territory, scattered population,
loose social bonds within immigrant settlements, slack local administration,
as well as the nature of these Catholic settlements which began de novo. The
Boxer Uprising was a turning point and accelerator for the growth of communal identity for these Catholic settlements. During the Boxer Uprising
in 1900, many village churches were attacked by Boxers and government
soldiers, including over a thousand who attacked the Santaizi church and
besieged it for twenty-one days. With tireless resistance, the Santaizi church
survived the Boxer assault, but revenge took place soon after. Two months
after the Boxer Protocol was signed in November 1901, Santaizi Catholics,
led by Du Yintang, a member of the prominent Du family, kidnapped a
provincial inspector named Shan Ying who was passing through the area on
a business trip. Chinese documents explain the kidnapping was due to Shan
Ying who “led a team of soldiers to attack Santaizi church during the Boxer
Rebellion last year.”50 Similar collective retaliation also happened in other
counties like Xinmin and Kaiyuan in southern Manchuria.51 Prominent
families had established a reputation during the resistance against Boxers’
attack. In the case of Santaizi, Du Yintang was able to assemble more than
two-hundred villagers for kidnapping a provincial official. By contrast, the
state appeared weak and incompetent. In the memorial submitted by Zeng
Qi, the General of Shengjing, reporting this incident, Du Yintang and his
two hundred fellow villagers were grouped together and called “Santaizi
48. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, July 20, 1904.
49. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, May 6, 1902.
50. “No. 72, A diplomatic note submitted by Zeng Qi to a Russian military commissioner regarding the kidnapping of Shan Ying by Santaizi Catholic villagers, in: Dongbei
yihetuan shiliao [Archival Documents concerning the Boxer Uprising in Northeast China]
(Liaoning renmin chubanshe, 1981), 184.
51. “No. 71, an advisory note submitted by Zeng Qi to Minister Wang dispatched from
Beijing regarding the revenge and harassment of Catholic villagers of Xinmin and Kaiyuan,”
ibid., 183–84.

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tianzhu jiao’min” or Santaizi Catholic villagers. This was the first official
recognition of Santaizi’s group identity in Chinese government documents,
even though Santaizi as a prominent community was recognized by the
Catholic Church six decades ago. The cohesiveness of the village community was critical for the consolidation and collective identity formation. The
post-Boxer retaliation demonstrated the strong communal identity that
came into being in these Catholic settlements and further facilitated the
growth of the church within the community.
These Catholic communities emerged in an immigrant society, in
which immigrants’ political and social resources were scarce. Their shared
religious identity became a potent force that sought to defend the sense of
security. In the social interstice of the privileged Manchuria society of
banner-civilian system, the global Church created an alternative system
beyond the local administrative structure, that brought significant transformation during the late Qing new policies and subsequent reforms by different regimes. Until the end of the Japanese rule in 1945, the state had no
means to integrate the church system into its state making project. In fact,
the extension of the state into the Manchurian local society virtually facilitated the growth of religious governance in these Catholic communities.
Extension of the State into Catholic Communities
Reorganization of local society in northeast China started during the
late Qing reforms at the turn of the twentieth century. It was launched in
response to the aftermaths of the Boxer Uprising and the heavy burdens of
its indemnity. As part of a broader boosting of the Qing’s local administration of immigrant settlements and borderlands, it also initiated the
state-making process to strengthen the management of local society.52 The
late Qing reforms, in particular the establishment of new administrative
units, intended to set up a new organizational context in which local power
can be wielded. For the Catholic communities, the extension of the global
Church in the nineteenth century already established a network that structured distinctive accesses to power and resources in local society. The
extension of the state into rural society in the early twentieth century did
not challenge the religious governance within these communities. On the
contrary, the constant changes of local administration in different regimes
strengthened the relatively stable religious communities in the first half of
the twentieth century.
52. Ren Yuxue, Studies on the Local Administration System in Qing Northeast China.
Ph.D. dissertation, Fudan University, 2008.

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Santaizi, for example, had received little attention from neighboring
county seats in the long nineteenth century and the Catholic community
had been administered by the church and missionaries, who had effectively
mobilized Catholic villagers in defense of the village church during the
Boxes’ attack. After the attack, the communal identity was consolidated and
became more distinctive as a magnificent church was built with the Boxer
indemnity. But the community, same as other villages, became increasingly
vulnerable to natural disasters and social chaos, especially the “bandits who
are devastating the land and are completely out of control.”53 In 1906, Zhao
Erxun, the General of Shengjing, submitted an edict to the Qing court
regarding the loose hold that the central government had over the Santaizi
area and requested that stronger administration be established through a
new county. Another record reports that Du Lisan, a well-known bandit,
had secured a foothold along the Liao River and was taxing local residents
heavily. He also extracted taxes from the shuttle boats that crossed the Liao
River. In effect, he had become a de facto local administrator, directly challenging the administration of late Qing provincial government. Under the
pressure, on September 15, 1906, a new county named Liaozhong was
established. Liaozhong means “in the middle of the Liao,” as the new
county had the Liao River to its east and the ancient Liaodong Prefecture
to its west.54 Liang Shouxiang was appointed the county’s first local governor.55 Establishing new counties to strengthen local administration had
become an important strategy in the late Qing reforms.
The newly established Liaozhong County imposed an administrative
system and a political hierarchy on the scattered Catholic communities,
ignoring the existing system of religious governance centered on the local
church. Catholic communities were incorporated into an administrative
scheme of five lu [road] and twenty-eight qu [district], covering about
300,000 people and 2,600 square meters reallocated from three neighboring counties.56 Below the level of the qu, there were towns and villages,
many of which grew out of immigrant settlements. A prominent Catholic
community of Xinmin, for example, became a new town. The community
developed out of three families of Shi, Lu and Wu. They were all Catholic

53. Liaozhong xianzhi (1934) [Local gazetteer of Liaozhong County], 33.
54. Liaozhong xianzhi, 34.
55. Liang En’hui, “Liaozhong wangshi: Liao Tai liangxian fenjiang huajie zhi dianmo”
[History of the establishment of Liaozhong and Tai’an Counties], Liaozhong wenshi ziliao, 3,
pp. 91–98.
56. Guangxu Liaozhong xiangtu zhi (1908) [Local history of Liaozhong during the
Emperor Guangxu’s reign], 35.

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from Shandong and regarded as minren, that is, non-bannermen. Their
settlement was named Xinmin, literally “new people.” Many other villages
in Liaozhong were also named after their earliest immigrant families, such
as Zhujiafang, named after the Zhu family; Shijia wopeng, named after the
Shi family; Zhaojia cun, named after the Zhao family; and Liu Erpu,
meaning “two Pus,” named after an immigrant named Liu Pu who had two
sons.57 Such structure of Liaozhong villages provided an opportunity for
the local church to grow, as the conversion to Catholicism was usually
based on families rather than individuals.
In 1906, the new Liaozhong County fell under the jurisdiction of the
late Qing prefecture of Fengtian. All administrative and judicial power in
the county belonged to the zhixian, the local magistrate. Caubrière also
noticed this administrative transformation and mentioned it in a letter to
his parents: “Did I tell you that since the last few months, one of the villages
of the district has been established as a sub-prefecture? It is the village of
Ache Niou, an old nest of brigands, on the road between Santaitzi and
Kalima. I went to visit the new sub-prefect with great fanfare, and I was
very well received. Pray, so that these good relations will be durable; for they
may be of great consequence for the conversion of pagans of the district.”58
As a survivor of the Boxer Uprising of 1900, Caubrière was rightly cautious of the new administration. Even though Catholic communities did not
catch the immediate attention of the new County head, the painful experience of the Boxers’ attack on Santaizi church and the subsequent difficult
negotiations with previous local magistrates forced Caubrière to realize the
local administration was critical for the survival of Catholic community.
In the first two decades after the Liaozhong County was established,
the local administration was instable and precarious. It became a conglomeration of the traditional community-based system and new structures promoted by the late Qing reforms and later warlord government. The
banner-civilian dual government was first abolished and a number of civilian positions were initiated. In 1909, baofang or the community-based
system of law enforcement and civil control was implemented in all villages. Catholic households, same as their neighbors, were organized indiscriminatingly into the system. When the late Qing government initiated
local autonomy in 1910, it set up a Liaozhong County Autonomy Committee that divided the county into five administrative levels encompassing
57. Liaozhong xianzhi (1993), 56–63.
58. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, January 31, 1907.

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one cheng (the county seat), five zhen, two xiang, and altogether 968 towns
and villages. The village of Santaizi belonged to Ciyutuo, one of the five
zhens until the Communist Party took over the region in 1948. The late
Qing reform had little real effect on local governance, including local
Catholic communities.
In 1912, with the overthrow of the Qing dynasty the Republic of
China was founded and the Fengtian warlord replaced the late Qing governor. The political chaos, however, provided an opportunity for the
Church, and missionaries on the ground were generally quite optimistic
about their prospects under the new regime. Caubrière wrote to his parents
about the new Republic on the eve of the 1911 revolution: “Imperialists
and revolutionaries do not want to harm either Christians or foreigners.”59
His colleague Eugène Chometon in northern Manchuria shared the same
optimistic expectation that the Republic would hold “less antipathy
towards that which is foreign, and by consequence, to the Christian religion. Christians will be able to hold literary ranks, to assume official burdens, to have some social influence.”60
But in Liaozhong County, the governance remained too weak and
chaotic to promote any substantial reforms. The local administration and
judiciary were in constant conflict; local administration underwent constant change; and the local governor implemented heavy taxes. The inflation rate skyrocketed. After the founding of Manchukuo in 1932, the
Japanese launched reforms of local administration, including three major
ones in 1934, 1937, and 1940, to consolidate its governance and economic
dominance of the local society. The 1934 reform re-implemented the traditional baojia system. After the total war with China was launched in
1937, in its “Outline of the Reform Proposal for the Local Administrative
Organization of Manchuria,” the Japanese implemented jie-cun or streetvillage system, a new scheme to organize local communities based on
streets, villages, and households. The jie-cun system divided the whole
Liaozhong County into fifty-seven jie-cun and 522 tun or village. According to the pro-Japanese census of 1940, there were 52,413 households and
333,944 people in Liaozhong County.61 In 1940, Manchukuo issued a
series of policies to organize the local administration, including “The Outline of Administrative Reforms” and “The Establishment of the National
59. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, November 21, 1911.
60. Rapport Annuel des Evêques, Southern Manchuria, 1912, in: DuBois, Empire and the
Meaning of Religion in Northeast Asia, 49.
61. Liaozhong xianzhi (1993), 16–17.

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Neighborhood Protection Organization.” These policies intended to
organize and mobilize effectively the grassroots society into the war, but
with only limited effects.
As these polices reorganized local society according to different
administrative units, especially streets and villages, they largely left out the
local religious network that was built on top of them. But the Japanese
government did show an interest to investigate and regulate religious practice on the ground. From 1933 on, the Ministry of Culture and Education
ordered an investigation into local beliefs. In 1934, a census listed all religious professionals, including Buddhist monks, Daoist priests, lamas,
Christian priests, and others. One survey report also identified more than
fifty Catholic communities with “highly autonomous status” or Autonomous Catholic Villages, including Xiaobajiazi, Haibei, Songshuzuizi, Sujiawopeng, Dayingzi, and Santaizi.62 The Japanese government also showed
particular concerns in regulating religious property and personnel, especially in the grassroots Catholic communities and their missionaries, most
of whom were citizens of foreign countries. In 1939, the “Temporary Regulations for Temples and Missionaries” required missionaries to apply to
the Ministry of Civil Affairs for certification. But these regulations did not
challenge the local church authority and were seen as the rule by law in a
time of establishing legitimacy. Manchukuo law set the boundaries of religion as an institution that aimed at its social engineering of the regime.63
Under the negotiated relationship with the Japanese government, the
Catholic Church de facto maintained a steadily growth under Japanese rule.
The Manchuria Catholic Church Monthly was founded in June 1935. It was a
Chinese periodical published by the MEP. From 1935 to 1941, it published
seven volumes and 77 issues, with a total of more than 3,000 pages. The
main content of the periodical was about Catholic doctrine and the
Catholic situation in Manchuria. With approval of the Manchukuo government, the survival of the periodical during the regime suggested a tacit
acquiescence between the Japanese and the Catholic Church. For Catholic
missionaries on the ground, Japanese Manchukuo promised peace and “religious freedom.” Caubrière admitted as such in his family letters written
during the Manchukuo state: “The Japanese do not want to have communists in northern China, since they could contaminate Manchuria and
62. Shibata Kenzō, Religions in Manchuria (Mukden, 1940); Xiaofeng Wang, Weiman
shiqi riben dui dongbei de zongjiao qinlue yanjiu [Research on the Japanese invasion of northeast
China during the Manchukuo period] (Beijing, 2015), 92.
63. See DuBois, Empire and the Meaning of Religion, 108–29.

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Korea . . . and I think they are absolutely right. Call me ‘pro-Japanese’ for
this; I will not defend myself, and will not worry too much about it.”64
Regardless of regime changes, the implementation of varying systems
of local administration by the early Republican government, by warlords,
and by the Japanese Manchukuo did not change the Catholic landscape,
which remained remarkably constant. From 1900 to 1945, the Catholic
Church in Manchuria continued its steady management of forty-five
parishes. Many Catholic communities experienced their most significant
development during this period despite the political disorder. Haibei, for
example, was founded in the early twentieth century by missionary Andrè
Roubin, who purchased from the local government 2,400 xiang of farmland with 5,000 liang of silver, built a small church, and called for Catholic
immigrants. In 1920s, Roubin became the de facto governor of Haibei, or
the Town of St. Joseph as he called it.65 When the state administrative
measures reached into the village level, they did not challenge the Catholic
missions that had already taken deep root in the communities for more
than half a century. In some periods such as the Manchukuo, the government had to negotiate with the Church to reinforce the legitimacy of the
regime. Although the incessant political chaos did constrain the flourishing of the Catholic community to some degree, the expansion of the state
in Manchuria did not transform and delegitimize the established order of
religious authorities. This consistency guaranteed the growth of Catholic
identity in these communities.
Conclusion
A salient feature of Catholic communities in northeast China is that
they were founded by domestic Catholic immigrants, and the development
of the communities were structured in the dual processes of the extension
the global Church into the lives of indigenous Catholics and the extension
of the state into rural society. The two historical trajectories, however, did
not conflict with each other during a long period until the mid-twentieth
century. This was largely due to the region’s unique nature of mobility and
social structure inherited from the Qing dynasty. Due to the state-sponsored migration, the state classified immigrants into distinct categories,
each associated with differentiated entitlements to land and corresponding
social status. Such state-sponsored structure was aimed at the creation of a
64. Letter by Alfred Marie Caubrière, July 25, 1937.
65. For the missionary governance in Haibei, see Ji Li, “Catholic Communities and
Local Governance in Northeast China,” China Review 18.4 (2018), 107–30.

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275

stable society, in which people were mobile, lands were entitled, and
people’s identities were largely designed by the state and affiliated to land.
But voluntary mass migration to Manchuria since the late nineteenth century posed a severe challenge to the state’s efforts to organize and control
society. The unstable immigrant population challenged the political and
social boundaries set in the local society and made local communities fluid
and flexible. This provided an opportunity for the Church to take roots in
the immigrant settlements, as the Church challenged the system of identity
entitlement defined by the state, and in the interstices between military
and civilian government, faith and identity grew.
The church system, led by the Catholic Manchuria Mission, was built
on top of the loose local administration. Especially in the nineteenth century, the Church enjoyed significant authority and legitimacy in Catholic
settlements. Missionaries and prominent indigenous Catholic families saw
their numbers and influence expand greatly. The external threat and social
chaos at the turn of the century such as the Boxer Uprising further confirmed the communal identity. In the first half of the twentieth century,
despite the political chaos, Catholic settlements kept a steady growth. The
Church never challenged the reorganization of local society throughout
different regimes. Similarly, the state’s intrusion into rural society did not
consider indigenous Catholic communities as distinctive political forces, as
all Catholic communities were an integral part of the local society. They
were grounded in local networks of taxation and administration, even
though through the Church they had a distinctive approach to power
beyond indigenous resources.
The local church network and foreign missionaries played vital roles in
the creation of a resilient Catholic identity that persisted under a succession of different political regimes. When missionaries came and erected
churches in Manchuria, they established routines to regulate local religious
practice and foster a Christian identity. This identity, created and expressed
through ritual performance, relied on the local Church that emphasized
the strict observance of Catholic rituals and sought to imprint the global
church system onto local society. This historical process of religion-making
happened in tandem with the formation of local society: immigrants settled in a locality, developed a sense of belonging, and gradually compromised with the state’s evolving system of local administration. Unlike other
immigrant groups, the Catholic community developed a form of religious
governance buttressed by the global church system before the intensive
waves of state-building in the twentieth century. This religious governance
did not undermine the state’s reorganization of local society in different

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regimes. On the contrary, it facilitated the growth of Catholic identity
during the chaotic years.
The development of Catholic communities in northeast China amid
the intense political transformation demonstrates a significant yet neglected story about religion and local society. Catholic immigrants occupied
multiple structures. European missionaries, local priests, and common
believers formed a clear and effective hierarchy beyond the state’s loosely
bounded administration, which had little impact in these villages before
the twentieth century. However, it is important to note that although religion played a critical role in forming and organizing communities that lay
outside the state’s reach in the nineteenth century, in the subsequent years
of intensive state-building the Catholic communities responded to the
strictures of official administration much like other immigrant communities did. Many Catholic communities became integral parts of newly established counties and districts. The transformation of Catholic immigrant
communities did not happen until after 1945 when the communist party
was winning the civil war and finally took over the region to launch the
land reform. It was followed by the campaign to expel missionaries in 1952
and thoroughly reorganize the Chinese church in the following years. The
formation of local society in northeast China and the survival of Catholics
communities in this region, as examined in this article, provide significant
insights on the origins of church-state relations in contemporary China.

Review Essay
American Catholics: A History. By Leslie Woodcock Tentler. (New Haven:
Yale University Press. 2020. Pp. xiv, 402. $30.00. ISBN 978-030021964-7.)

INTRODUCTION
Kathleen Holscher (University of New Mexico)
For decades the field of American Catholic history— its scope and arc,
its protagonists and problems—has been defined by a handful of sweeping
studies of Catholic church and life across the span of U.S. history. With
American Catholics: A History, Leslie Woodcock Tenter contributes to this
genre. Tentler is, notably, the first female historian to publish a survey of
this sort, and American Catholics joins and advances works by male counterparts, including Jay Dolan, Patrick Carey, James Fisher, and James
O’Toole. Drawing upon her pathbreaking academic career in U.S.
Catholic history (Tentler is Professor Emerita in the Department of History at Catholic University of America), and her expertise in urban
Catholicism and Catholic family life, Tentler offers readers a well-organized account of U.S. Catholicism over four centuries, built from selective
original research paired with synthesis of existing scholarship.
American Catholics proceeds in fourteen chapters divided among five
sections. Tentler opens each section with a profile of a Catholic figure
whose life, and sometimes saintly afterlife, manifests themes of the section.
Tentler’s choice of profiles across the book—Eusebio Kino, Samuel Mazzuchelli, Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, John C. Cort, and Patricia Caron
Crowley—demonstrates her commitment to building an account of American Catholicism in which ordained and lay actors, men and women, cradle
Catholics and converts, all make defining contributions.
In Part One, “On the Fringes of Empire,” Tentler departs from histories that locate the origins of American Catholicism in the Protestant
British colonies. Instead, Tentler begins her story with the imperial projects of Spain and France. She introduces the Catholic Reformation in
Europe as context for the work of Franciscans and Jesuits who sought to
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transform the earthly lives and eternal souls of Native peoples in territory
claimed by Spain, stretching from “La Florida” to California, and in
Wendat and Iroquois territory claimed by France. Tentler considers how
Natives responded to missions, and she highlights the role of Catholic sisters in New France from the mid-seventeenth century. In centering
women religious early on, she establishes an important theme for her book.
“Adaptable and surprisingly independent,” Tentler writes, “women religious in New France created a template of sorts for the nascent church in
the United States” (42).
After this foundational treatment of European imperial Catholicism,
the remaining four sections of American Catholics proceed chronologically.
Parts Two (“Growing with the Nation, 1815–1870”) and Three (“A Turbulent Passage, 1871–1919”) treat the long nineteenth century. Episodes
that anchor Tentler’s narrative here—including the development of
Catholic urban strongholds amid European immigration, the expanding
presence of priests and women religious in and beyond ethnic Catholic
communities, and resulting American concerns about Catholic influences
in politics and education—will be familiar to scholars who regularly teach
“Immigrant Church” oriented courses on U.S. Catholic history. Here too,
though, Tentler finds opportunity for fresh historical consideration,
notably through in-depth discussion of rural or “frontier” Catholicism as it
expanded with the formation of dioceses across what is now the Midwest.
“The frontier experience,” writes Tentler, left “in its wake a Catholicism
open to the nation’s democratic culture and even its pluralism” (83).
Tentler’s chapter on “Slavery and the Civil War,” in which she treats
Catholic leaders’ critiques of the Emancipation Proclamation alongside
evidence of anti-Black racism that characteried Irish Catholic regiments
fighting for the Union cause, is also noteworthy (125).
Parts Four and Five of American Catholics, entitled “Exuberant Maturity, 1920-1962” and “A World Unbound, 1963–2015,” span the last century of U.S. Catholic history. Here Tentler follows a U.S. Catholic Church
as it develops via engagement with American social movements, and in
response to its increasingly affluent, educated, and suburban white laity,
even as it is rocked, midway through the period, by Second Vatican Council reforms. While Tentler’s concern with how clerical activity relates to
“ordinary” Catholic life is evident across her book, these final sections offer
readers the clearest sense of a Church moving in dynamic relation to patterns of hardship and gain that mark the lives of lay Catholics. This is clear
in attention that Tentler gives Catholic responses to poverty and labor
organizing, U.S. trends in higher education, birth control, and later declin-

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ing church attendance. The book’s fifth and final section concludes with
subsections treating the clerical sex-abuse crisis and Pope Francis’s 2015
visit to the United States. Side by side, these discussions close American
Catholics on a purposefully ambivalent note. In her last paragraph, however, Tentler opts to end on hope. Recalling a Spanish language Mass she
attended in Los Angeles, she looks “to the Catholic future with joyful
expectation” (353).

REVIEWS
Philip Gleason (University of Notre Dame, emeritus)
Professor Holscher has given us a fine overall assessment of Leslie
Tentler’s American Catholics, the publication of which constitutes a significant landmark in the historiography of our field. In what follows, I will
take note of some points that came to mind in reading Professor Holscher’s
summary and the book itself.
First, it is not as much a novelty as Professor Holscher suggests that
the book begins with chapters on the Spanish and French missions.
Tentler may give more space to these topics than earlier writers did, but
surveys of American Catholic history going back to books published by
James Hennesey in 1981 and Jay Dolan in 1985 begin with Spanish and
French missions.
What is more unusual is that the chapter on “Catholics in the British
Colonies” covers everything from the early days of Catholic settlement in
Maryland in the 1630s up to John Carroll’s death in 1815. If taken literally,
this would mean that American Catholics dwelt in some sort of colonial
status for thirty years after the nation gained its independence from Great
Britain. Moreover, the need to cover so much historical ground in an
eighteen-page chapter threatens to overwhelm the reader with information, all of which seems to occupy the same level of importance. The clarity
of Tentler’s exposition largely mitigates that problem, and her discussion—
always conscientiously documented—benefits from the availability of
much new research. That factor (which for me means work published since
2000) is also reflected in the endnotes to Tentler’s chapter on slavery and
the Civil War, while her notes to the chapters on the frontier church and
ante-bellum immigration suggest that less work has been done in those
areas in recent years. Her own treatment of post-Vatican II developments
is especially valuable in view of the relative paucity of historical work on
that era.

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Tentler’s coverage of the priesthood, from the dire shortage of clergymen in the colonial and frontier eras, to the more recent crises relating to
priestly identity, resignations from the priesthood, and clerical sex-abuse,
is particularly rich, generating more than one hundred index citations. Her
treatment of women religious is almost equally detailed, requiring some
eighty citations. Shifts in lay devotional life are also recorded, including the
practical disappearance of confession over the past half-century.
Herself a convert, Tentler calls frequent attention to the role converts
have played in American Catholic history, beginning with Mother Seton,
foundress of the American Sisters of Charity. As to the most prominent of
ante-bellum converts—Orestes A. Brownson and Isaac T. Hecker—Tentler
finds the latter a much more sympathetic figure than the former. But while
it is not altogether implausible that Brownson called women’s suffrage “the
most dangerous reform initiative ever undertaken in the United States”
(117), the authority cited by Tentler does not validate that assertion.
Tentler’s having viewed American Catholicism from the outside
during her childhood and as a young adult perhaps left her with a special
sensitivity to Catholic “otherness.” Indeed, she speaks in one place (181) of
“the aura of otherness that surrounded anything Catholic in Protestant
America.” That might suggest that otherness was forced upon Catholics by
external pressure, but many other passages in book testify to Catholics’
enthusiastic embrace of a “rhetoric of Catholic difference” (146)—a theme
that runs through the book and is dialectically related to the threat to
Catholic identity posed by socio-cultural assimilation.
It is, no doubt, ungenerous to list things left out of a broad survey that
covers so many topics so well. Yet it is surprising that Bishop John England
is not mentioned at all; that the same is true of Archbishop Bedini’s illstarred visit to the United States in 1853; and that no note is taken of the
role played by the theology of the Mystical Body of Christ in American
Catholic thought in the 1930s and after. What must be a printing error on
page 229 garbles the title of the liturgical journal Orate Fratres. Less easy
to account for is the mis-identification of Erie Pennsylvania’s second
bishop—Josue Young—as Josue White (120). But details like these fade in
significance in the light of Leslie Tentler’s splendid new synthesis of the
American Catholic story.
Robert Trisco (The Catholic University of America, emeritus)
Leslie Woodcock Tentler, professor emerita of history in the Catholic
University of America, has written a social rather than institutional history

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of American Catholicism. Her “first priority” was “to emphasize lay religion in all its variety” (xii). This approach to the field has enabled her to
avoid cluttering her text with many ecclesiastical names and titles, though
she does devote space to clerical ministry. It has also caused her to omit
mention of many important persons and institutions.
The book contains fifteen black-and-white illustrations, which are
not listed in the table of contents. There are no footnotes; the notes are
inconveniently lumped together on the last twenty-nine pages. There is no
bibliography.
The author has divided her text chronologically into five “parts,” each
of which is prefaced by a brief “profile” of a representative person of that
period. The criterion for choosing these five persons is not explained; most
of them are hardly well known, especially Eusebio Kino, S.J., Samuel Mazzuchelli, O.P., John Cort, and Patricia Caron Crowley. Four pages are
devoted to the Jesuit missionary, but only two to St. Junipero Serra without
any reference to his two-volume biography by Maynard Geiger, O.F.M.,
or his writings edited in four volumes by Antonine Tibesar, O.F.M. Such
ignoring of the older pertinent literature is notable in regard to other
prominent historical figures such as the biographies of John Carroll by
Peter Guilday (two volumes) and Annabelle M. Melville. John England,
bishop of Charleston (embracing three southern states) from 1820 to 1842,
the most prominent Catholic prelate of his era and the subject of a heavily
documented two-volume biography by Peter Guilday, is never mentioned.
Several other omissions are surprising. The religious orders of men and
women founded in the United States receive scant attention. The Maryknoll Society is mentioned, but the names of its co-founders are not given.
The production of liturgical music could have been mentioned. Diplomatic
relations between the American government and the Papal States in the
nineteenth century and the Holy See in the twentieth are not included
although all the American ambassadors since 1984 have been Catholic lay
people. Comparisons of American Catholics with American Protestants is
almost completely lacking, nor is the extensive ecumenical activity on the
national and diocesan levels acknowledged. In the chapter on Catholic
“education and intellectual life,” the reader might have expected some
recognition of Catholic learned societies and journals beyond the National
Catholic Educational Association. The prominence that many Catholic
universities and colleges achieved through the success of their athletic
teams would seem to deserve some acknowledgment. Other organizations
that have played important roles but are not included in this history are the

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Catholic Church Extension Society founded by Bishop Francis Clement
Kelley and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference under the
dynamic leadership of Monsignor Luigi Ligutti.
The author’s special interests have determined the choice of topics that
she treats. She has devoted long sections to immigrants, especially Polish
and Italian. Three pages are taken up with the letters of an otherwise
unknown member of the Irish Brigade during the Civil war. Reflecting her
own geographical origins, she relies heavily on sources related to Detroit in
the last chapters. She has described the pastoral work of priests in the later
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries at length. Although many generalizations lack supporting evidence, they merit consideration. The last
chapter, which is a sociological overview of contemporary religious practices, will be useful to future historians of the American Catholic Church.
Joseph M. White (Independent Scholar)
Reading Professor Tentler’s volume brought a flood of memories. In
the early 1980s as a faculty fellow at the Cushwa Center for the Study of
American Catholicism at Notre Dame, I commented on draft chapters of
Director Jay P. Dolan’s American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (1985). By then Christopher J. Kauffman recruited
me for a three-decade stint until 2014 to evaluate, comment on, and fact
check about 600 articles published in his U.S. Catholic Historian during
that period. His motto for historical understanding was: “Context is everything!” As an advisory editor of this Review, I heed Editor Minnich’s command for evaluating submissions: “Look at the notes first!” to determine
what sources are included or excluded.
The dust jacket describes the work as a “comprehensive survey.” To
produce such the author states: “What to include and what to ignore? My
first priority, despite the paucity of relevant sources, has been to emphasize
lay religion in all its variety. What did it mean to be a ‘good Catholic’ at
particular times and in particular places.”
Like previous survey histories, Spanish, French, and British colonial
experiences begin the volume. Therein the pattern emerges and continues
throughout of relying on books as sources. Yet those of major historians are
overlooked. Of perhaps several thousand journal articles in the field especially those addressing the social history of groups and lay activism, the
author cites about twenty-nine and neglects significant unpublished dissertations. Hence, too many sources from the sheer abundance are overlooked
especially those published since Dolan’s 1985 volume.

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What the author presents, nonetheless, is interesting and makes a
striking impression. Across the narrative, five historic figures (Eusebio
Kino, Samuel Mazzuchelli, Frances Xavier Cabrini, John C. Cort, and
Patricia Crowley) are profiled in detail. Throughout the volume the author
introduces the views and activities of interesting lay, clerical, and vowed
religious figures to represent current trends and movements.
In a striking omission of figures related to the lay religion theme, the
author ignores a major founding father. Never mentioned is Bishop John
England of Charleston (1820-41) who provided his famous diocesan constitution with elected parish vestries and annual diocesan conventions of
laity and clergy. His vision for Catholic laity in the United States made
him an iconic figure for lay activism resounding for generations.
Having reflected on the author’s work since first reading it a year ago,
I conclude how impossible it is to do justice to the range of relevant topics
in a volume limited to xiii plus 402 pages. Furthermore, addressing contexts—theological, canonical, or historical—needed for introducing and
providing reasons for what actually happened is either limited or neglected.
In dealing with the range of Catholic peoples, James Joyce’s famous remark
about Catholics “here comes everybody” has gained currency. Instead, presuming a paucity of sources, the author leaves out too many groups and
describes too little about the ones included. For instance, the Irish and
Germans’ mass immigration settling from the 1830s onward provided two
differing ways of being Catholic. The Irish accepted priest-run parishes and
institutions. The author dismisses Germans with a remark that some were
interested in a “vibrant liturgical life.” Ignored is their insistence on selfgoverning parishes and institutions aiming to preserve language, perpetuate traditional religious culture, and above all keep Irish ethnic ways and
bishops away. Their tense relations with bishops exploding in controversies
in the 1880s and 1890s needed explanation.
Despite abundant sources, the author ignores the Second Plenary
Council of Baltimore (1866), its plan for evangelizing African Americans,
and the limited results. In fact, African American Catholic history and
racism as overlooked scholars describe is neglected throughout the volume.
Post- Civil War evangelization of Native Americans especially in the West
and their communities’ religious life is not adequately addressed.
In the “new” immigration of the late nineteenth century, Poles and
Italians are given separate segments unlike Germans. Ultra-Catholic Poles
built strong parishes and institutions to perpetuate their national culture.

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By contrast, the anti-clericalism of Italians who mostly came from southern Italy needs explanation. Arriving in the same era, other Eastern European groups and French Canadians are not mentioned. These groups’ distinctive practices in parish communities and institutions deserve inclusion.
Arrival of what were then called Greek Catholics—members of Eastern Churches (formerly called “rites”)—are predictably ignored as in other
general histories. Because married clergy ministered in their homelands,
the easily frightened American bishops persuaded the Holy See to prohibit
married Eastern Catholic priests to minister in the U.S. This and other
aspects of Eastern Catholics’ mistreatment deserve a mention not given.
When will Eastern Catholics be included in the U.S. Catholic historical
narrative?
Addressing what is expected of a “good Catholic” for various groups
and times needed some elucidation not given. To begin, the author needed
to discuss what bishops and priests obsessively taught: Catholics were
absolutely forbidden to worship with non-Catholics and to join so-called
oath-bound secret societies, e.g., freemasons and specific fraternal orders.
Good Catholics thereby self-isolated from the life of local communities
and increased non-Catholics’ suspicions. But Catholic lay organizations
were enabled to flourish. Not mentioned: Catholic societies offered attractive mutual benefits or insurance for members. The Knights of Columbus
are mentioned in passing, but other lay groups are not. The founding, aims,
and routine activities of lay organizations are not described, and their relations and tensions with Church officials not addressed. After the U.S.
bishops formed their National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) in
1919, its Department of Lay Organizations started the twin groups, the
National Council of Catholic Men/ Women, to organize lay activities at
parish, diocesan, and national levels. Though mentioned in passing, their
founding, aims, and uneven successes are not addressed. The NCWC’s
National Rural Life Conference aiming to nurture the faith life of millions
of rural Catholics is ignored.
Worship, sacramental practice, and lay spirituality are addressed here
and there, but too often theological content, catechetical teaching about,
and spiritual benefits of are not described. The difference between liturgical
and non-liturgical devotions and their relationship to each other are not
made clear to readers.
In conclusion, the volume is under-researched and omits too many
aspects of lay religion and racial/ethnic groups. Likewise explanations of
why often do not appear. It seems unfair that the scholarship of too many

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important authors is ignored. Major works on Catholic women and Latinos are overlooked. But to end on a positive note, the volume well represents the ascendant Lived Religion approach that highlights the historian’s
subjective understanding of topics that evoke personal interest.
Paula M. Kane (University of Pittsburgh)
The volume makes excellent use of the well-timed anecdote and of
many secondary sources on American Catholicism, briskly summarizing
four centuries of history. Readers are handily led to understand how American Catholics became heirs both to European cultural traditions and to
the Enlightenment. Yet ultimately, as the volume shows, Americans built
a different kind of Catholicism, based upon a unique understanding of
church forged by their struggles as disparate immigrant populations striving to succeed in a Protestant-dominated society while embracing democracy and religious pluralism. Through the decades Catholic underdogs even
became arrogant about their otherness. I laughed at Mary McGill’s comment on the overweening confidence of Catholics in 1927: “I think I would
hate people who are so certain and set apart” (204). The strategy of separatism developed by Catholics had its roots in oppression and nativism,
served a useful purpose for a time, and proved to be less necessary by the
1960s. Where is American Catholicism now? With the laity’s accommodation to neoliberalism? With the sharp divide between conservative and
progressive segments of the church as manifested in national, state, and
local politics? With the decline in church membership, Mass attendance
and tithing heralded by the rise of the “nones,” many of whom are former
Catholics?
In this brief comment let me mention three issues that the volume
raises: representation of lay religion; omitted groups; the survey text genre.
Every narrative with a long historical sweep has to make choices, and in
Catholic history it is always hard to strike a balance between the institutional presence and lived experience. In her preface Tentler states her
intention to pay more attention to laypersons than to the clergy, and “to
emphasize lay religion in all its variety” (xii). It is never clear, however, how
she understands these concepts. For many readers lay experience likely
encompasses familiar elements of American social history: assimilation of
immigrants, demographic change, education, labor issues, political
involvement, social mobility and so on. But the phrase “lay religion” needs
some sorting out. Is it extra-liturgical, such as the many activities of ethnics
rendered in studies of vernacular religion? (And even many of those activities remained closely tied to the church due to promised spiritual rewards

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of indulgences.) Or does “lay religion” consist merely of responses to papal
and episcopal statements, which basically subsumes lay “activity” into the
institutional Church? How much of the lay experience is active, and how
much reactive?
Does Tentler hold to her promise to put the laity first? Sort of. For
starters, the visual impact of the book contradicts a focus on lay Catholics
by its puzzling choice of photographs: Elizabeth Seton, a Sisters of Charity
group portrait, Cardinal Gibbons, a clerical Bible scholar, priests at a 1964
civil rights demonstration; both Roosevelt presidents, and Pope John Paul
II. The only images of lay Catholics are of nursing school graduates in
1897, girls at a first communion breakfast, 1940, and black boys boxing at
a Catholic Worker house in the 1940s. Why not also show lay people at a
Grail or Christian Family Movement gathering; a Marian procession or a
shrine pilgrimage; a parish council or Cursillo meeting; Maryknoll lay missioners; the Call to Action conference; a women’s ordination demonstration; Voice of the Faithful and Catholic LGBTQ activists?
If laity are the centerpiece, incidents discussing lay persons or actions
are nevertheless often followed by subsequent profiles of priests and bishops which are lengthier than the lay segments. Even a section on the education of women religious (250–53) is half the length of the treatment of
male seminary training (253–58). At present, the clergy and hierarchy are
in disrepute, given what we know about their callous sexual abuse of children and adolescents throughout the last century, and the deliberate concealment of their criminal predations by higher-ups. While priests are necessary to supply the sacraments to the faithful, it is amazing that any lay
Americans suffering this breach of trust still struggle to be thoughtful,
intellectually curious Catholics. They continue to respect the authority of
papal and episcopal statements, but also have learned to resist ideas that
overlook lay experience on behalf of defending moral abstractions.
(Attempts since 2004 to exclude Catholic pro-choice politicians from the
Eucharist is one recent example of episcopal overreach.)
So how are varied lay experiences captured in these pages? As Tentler
duly notes, chronicling the laity remains hard due to source limitations.
Some chapters, such as “The Frontier Church,” can only foreground
priests, since Catholic settlers left few records. In later chapters, however,
I appreciated the deft treatment of contemporary issues particularly affecting the laity: marriage annulments, birth control, parish closings and clergy
sexual abuse of minors. Still, I missed citations to more recent journal articles and dissertations that could add new details about lay movements and

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opinion in the recent past, and incorporate revisionist views of topics like
anti-Semitism, slavery, the Civil War, the Cold War, and human rights.
Tentler’s use of “public Catholicism” (Chapter 12) as emergent in the
1920s differs from José Casanova’s view of it as a distinct stage following
“social Catholicism,” namely the era defined by papal encyclicals from
Rerum Novarum forward that produced a robust industrial unionism and
reflected a Catholic version of the Social Gospel. Public Catholicism, in
Casanova’s view, arrived only in the 1980s, marking the shift from ethnic
Catholicism to a national sensibility, leading progressive bishops to take
positions against nuclear war and weapons, and for economic justice, complicating a singular focus upon antiabortion. Tracing “public Catholicism”
as a recent formulation would be helpful to highlight how bishops worked
with and against the concerns of the laity and how the laity responded in
parish life, especially using examples from less familiar dioceses.
My second concern is about omissions: why is there no section on
African American Catholics, native Americans, and Eastern Catholics, to
parallel the coverage of European immigrants? Also surprisingly, many lay
organizations, such as the National Council of Catholic Women and the
National Council of Catholic Men, receive only brief mentions and little
discussion about what they did and how they represented a segment of lay
opinion. Since we do not have an abundance of diaries or memoirs by
laypersons, conference proceedings and organizational publications give
some contours to lay history, but there is little use of them here. The influence of Catholic leaders upon American popular culture, especially television and film censorship, comprises less than one page. (272–3) Surely this
topic is an ideal place to explore the impact of lay Catholics on mass media.
A section on Catholic intellectual life and literature was better developed,
but didn’t follow the 1950s surge of fiction authors to the present moment
when Catholics remain lively contributors to literature and theater. One
could trace the creative arts through time as evidence of lay reflection on
the question: “What is a Catholic artist/author/poet/playwright?”
A final question concerns the genre of the narrative survey. Is it
needed in 2021, given the fact that American Catholicism is well-served by
at least ten existing works, from Dolan (1985) to O’Toole (2015)? While
I am glad to praise this impressive contribution by a female colleague, I
wonder about its utility. Who assigns the survey text now and for what
audiences? Are such volumes the mainstay of courses only at Catholic colleges and universities? We badly need data from faculty about current
Catholic textbook usage and curricula, while another agenda item

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prompted by American Catholics is to make an all-out effort to locate primary sources documenting modern lay Catholics and secure them a place
in the archives.

RESPONSE
Leslie Woodcock Tentler (The Catholic University of America, emerita)
My thanks to Kathleen Holscher for her elegantly concise synopsis of
American Catholics, and also to the other contributors for their generally
thoughtful criticisms. Let me note at the outset that this was a book written under what were, at least for me, unaccustomed circumstances. I was
writing for the very first time to the particulars of a publisher’s contract:
Yale imposed a strict page limit and insisted on what was euphemistically
called “light” footnoting. (My initial contact at the press was frank about
his personal preference for no footnotes at all.) Of course I found these
restrictions frustrating. How does one cover some 500 years of “all things
Catholic” in roughly 150,000 words or justify footnotes that academic
reviewers will likely regard as anemic? But I think that Yale was probably
right: very long books are costly and tend to discourage potential readers,
few of whom have much interest in footnoted erudition. Examining the
footnotes first, as Joseph White counsels, makes excellent sense when it
comes to a scholarly monograph. It’s a less revelatory strategy with a book
like American Catholics.
The criticisms offered by the various contributors dwell more than
anything else on what I chose to omit from my narrative. Everyone understood, I think, that omissions—even significant omissions—were necessary. But how could I possibly have neglected to mention Charlestown’s
estimable bishop John England, probably the most interesting of the
nation’s antebellum prelates, not least because of his efforts to promote a
limited degree of lay participation in the governance of his then-remote
diocese? I remember making that choice, albeit a bit nervously. I wanted to
emphasize the extent to which American circumstances—geographic,
demographic, and, if to a typically lesser extent, ideological—promoted lay
participation in parish government in a variety of antebellum locales. I cast
my lot with the grass roots, in other words, rather than honoring a worthy
episcopal vision, and did so, I honestly believe, less for ideological reasons
than a concern for narrative coherence. Still, this omission is one I regret
and would remedy if given the chance.
Other omissions rest more lightly on my conscience. I do not regret
failing to list the numerous Catholic professional societies that came into

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being after the turn of the twentieth century, given the constraints under
which I was operating. Better, I thought, to explain the rise of an institutionally-separate Catholic intellectual world and illustrate the point with a
few examples. Too much information can easily get in the way of meaning.
(This is perhaps as good a place as any to dispute Joseph White’s singular
contention that I fail to explain the causes of the various trends and developments I discuss. He may not agree with my explanations, but they are
indisputably there.) I early on made my peace with a similar strategy when
it came to Catholic social and devotional organizations: given their numbers
and variety, how could I possibly do justice to their various founders and
purposes? But I did discuss the changing scope and nature of Catholic organizational life, employing a limited number of examples as illustration. Certainly my choices in this regard reflect my assumptions about what mattered
most when it came to the larger course of Catholic development. Thus the
sodality movement gets more attention than the Knights of Columbus,
given the impact on the former on the Catholic politics of gender.
There is not much point in a further belaboring of what I chose to
omit. More important by far is the question of what I chose to include.
Robert Trisco, in particular, seems troubled by at least some of these
choices, among which I suspect are my emphasis on birth control and the
space I devote to the labor movement, while Paula Kane queries my inclusion of chapter sections on the clergy. Why would I make such a choice,
she asks, in a book ostensibly centered on lay experience? It does seem
obvious to me that priests have an impact, often quite a powerful one, on
the laity they serve. Priests embody the values of Catholic culture—the
“official” values, if you will—in a particularly evocative way, and until very
recently could enforce those values via the sacrament of penance. Even
lukewarm Catholics, after all, nearly always confessed at least annually, and
although that encounter was typically brief it could also be emotionally
charged. The clergy do not, of course, define the whole of the Catholic
world. The laity has its say, as do the legions of women religious. The larger
society plays a role, as well, making demands and offering alternative
modes of thinking and being. Thus the Catholic world that evolved over
time was characterized at every stage of its development by complexity and
contradiction. Often enough, it appears to have been governed by assumptions and rules not readily apparent to outsiders—including those, like us,
who are outsiders due to temporal distance.
Let me offer an archival example of what I mean. Many years ago,
working in the archives of the Immaculate Heart of Mary sisters in
Monroe, Michigan, I came upon a remarkable entry in the 1938 convent

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chronicle from Holy Rosary church in Detroit, where the IHM sisters
taught in the parish high school. Although central or diocesan high schools
at the time were invariably single-sex institutions, parish high schools like
Rosary’s were often coeducational, largely because of their relatively small
size. The situation seems to have troubled the pastor, given the many
Roman screeds against coeducation in adolescence, and in 1938 he ordered
the boys in his parish high school to leave forthwith and enroll—assuming
that they could afford it—in a same-sex Catholic institution. Many apparently did so. But “about sixty courageous souls walked back to us as if nothing had been said,” according to the sisters’ chronicle, “and tried to hide
behind their more fortunate feminine companions.”1 The gamble succeeded: the brave boys were permitted to remain and they were eventually
joined by others. Boys outnumbered girls in the tenth grade at Holy Rosary
by the fall of 1943.
I learned from archival moments like this the value of sources close to
the ground. Certainly it matters that Rome inveighed against coeducation.
It matters too that Rosary’s pastor was prompted to enforce—or to try to
enforce—such an awkward Roman stricture in his own back yard, although
coeducational Catholic high schools were still quite numerous in Detroit.
(Existing documents, alas, do not indicate his motives.) But the story is not
complete without the sisters’ chronicle, which in this particular instance gives
us the whole of a quirkily complicated story. One only wishes that documents existed to shed light on the thinking of the boys. Authority is being
negotiated here, but more or less wordlessly. We know from experience that
this happens regularly in today’s church. It also happened in the past.
Archival moments like this one do much to explain my choices in
American Catholics. Wherever possible, I gave pride of place to the voices
of ordinary Catholics as they came to terms, aided by a Catholic cultural
tool box, with the sometimes bewildering world into which they had been
born. Thus the obscure Peter Welsh, who joined the Union Army in 1862
and wrestled in his letters with the meaning of a war that ultimately
claimed his life, merits discussion on portions of three pages. I did not
argue for Welsh’s typicality, which I could not possibly have defended. But
as a morally serious Catholic trying to work out his salvation at a fraught
moment in our nation’s past, he does in fact tell us something important
about American Catholic history. So do the many Catholics who joined

1. IHM Mission Chronicles, Holy Rosary, Detroit, entry for 1938. Archives, Sisters,
Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, MI, chronicles, IHM missions.

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the industrial union movement that was born in the 1930s, despite that
movement’s undoubted secularity. They learned to define their Catholic
selves in less exclusively tribal terms, even as clerical support for that movement helped secure the loyalty of working-class men to the church. And
who can doubt that private anguishing over contraception, especially after
1945, led ultimately to a sea change in Catholic assumptions about authority? It is quite true, as Robert Trisco notes, that these particular topics have
long been of interest to me. But American Catholics also deals with any
number of subjects that never previously engaged my attention, ranging
from Catholic education to the evolution of administrative capacities at the
diocesan level. I was actually rather pleased, in the end, at how many
aspects of the Catholic past I managed to include in the book.
None of this really matters, if—as Paula Kane suggests—survey histories are no longer of interest to teachers or students or educated readers
generally. I do know that the death of the book was predicted even before
I published my first one back in 1979, and that books are still with us. Perhaps survey histories are an especially vulnerable genre, although why this
should be so is not entirely clear to me. I would expect a general history to
have broader appeal than a highly specialized monograph. I recall with
gratitude a survey history of Africa that was part of my pandemic reading.
The author’s point of view was vigorously distinctive and he doubtless
omitted many things. But his book opened a world to me. I can only hope
that American Catholics will do the same for whatever readership it manages
to attract.

Book Reviews
MEDIEVAL
Biographical Register of Carmelites in England and Wales, 1240–1540. By
Richard Copsey, O. Carm. (Faversham, Kent, England: Saint Albert’s
Press. 2020. Pp. xxxiv, 548. £ 49.95 plus postage and packing. ISBN
978-0-904849-52-3; ePub ISBN 978-0-904849-0.53-0.)
If Richard Copsey, O. Carm., published only this Biographical
Register, the Carmelite Order and medieval historians would be greatly
indebted to him for what is a major contribution to medieval studies. Over
the years Copsey has authored many publications concerning medieval
Carmelites. Almost singlehandedly he has made it possible to think that
now is the time for a full-length history of the medieval English Carmelites.
Father Copsey, before retirement, did not have the luxury of devoting
himself full-time to historical research. Throughout his life Copsey has been
busy about many things. He is the past prior provincial of the Carmelites in
Britain, former editor of the polyglot journal Carmelus (Rome), member of
the Institutum Carmelitanum (Rome), and founding board member of the
Carmelite Institute of Britain and Ireland. Copsey, a Carmelite friar, priest,
and scholar has wasted few moments in his adult life.
This register was inspired by A. B. Emden’s biographical registers of
the medieval universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Copsey’s entries about
individual friars are exhaustive when data is available. Note the size of the
following entries: John Bale, former Carmelite at the time of the
Reformation, pages 93–108, John Baconthorpe, pages 85–93, Thomas
Netter pages 414–425 and Saint Simon Stock, about whom so little has
been known, pages 369–374. This register includes all known Carmelites
who were members of the English province as well as significant members
of the order who visited this province. The Muslim takeover of the Latin
Kingdom of Jerusalem forced the Carmelite hermits to migrate to Europe,
where they eventually became friars. Geoffrey Chaucer’s “ordres foure”
included Dominicans, Franciscans, Austin Friars, and Carmelites. Copsey
notes interactions between the Carmelites and the other mendicant orders.
It is now clear that medieval mendicant orders need to be studied, not in
isolation, but as a movement with many interactions.
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Copsey’s register has nearly 5,000 entries with 4,480 who were
members of the English province. Copsey has scoured untold record
depositories; in fact, over the years he has amassed countless items of
information not previously noticed by historians. One gains some idea of
the breadth of Copsey’s far-reaching search of published and manuscript
sources with his twelve pages of abbreviations. After the publication of this
volume, Copsey issued two sets of corrections and additions. He welcomes
new information and corrections which will appear on the website of the
British Carmelites at http//:www.carmelite.org/copseyregister.
The Introduction contains a brief overview of the medieval Carmelite
province, an account of the education of medieval Carmelites along with
comments on the characteristics of the register and other information that
facilitates consultation of the register. Copsey has provided readers with
useful Appendices: 1) Carmelite Houses in the Medieval English
Province, 2) Distinctions in the English Province plus Houses with date of
their foundation), 3) Provincials in the English Province, 4) Notable
Carmelites who Visited England, 5) English and Welsh Carmelite
Bishops, 6) Priors General 1240–1540. There is also an alphabetical Index
of Surnames. Scholars and dissertation writers will appreciate that Copsey
has listed publications about friars sometimes amounting to an extensive
bibliography. The binding of the register is sturdy and will hold up well on
the reference shelves. Illustrations in black and white with some in color
are an attractive feature of this register.
Saint Mary’s College and the University of Notre Dame

KEITH J. EGAN

AMERICAN
Telling Stories that Matter: Memoirs and Essays. By Marvin R. O’Connell.
Edited by William Schmitt. (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press.
2020. Pp. xx, 250. $35.00. ISBN 978-1-58731-865-8.)
Many readers of the Catholic Historical Review are no doubt familiar
with the scholarship of Father Marvin O’Connell (1930–2016), who
received the ACHA’s John Gilmary Shea award for his book on Modernism in 1995 and its Lifetime Achievement Award in 2013. Having
completed acclaimed studies on subjects ranging from the Reformation to
the Oxford Movement to Americanism, Father O’Connell finally set to
work telling his own story during his retirement years. While O’Connell’s
health failed before he was able to complete it, three of his friends, Father
Wilson Miscamble, C.S.C., and David Solomon from the University of

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Notre Dame and William Schmitt from Holy Cross College, decided to
publish what he completed of his memoir along with a sampling of his articles and reviews.1
Father O’Connell began studying for the priesthood when he was just
fourteen. He enrolled at Nazareth Hall preparatory seminary in St. Paul
and spent six years there before moving on to the major seminary. A gifted
student, O’Connell hoped that he would be one of the seminarians chosen
to go to Louvain for graduate study but was passed over. Instead, he was
offered something even better: a fellowship to study at the University of
Notre Dame under the direction of Father Philip Hughes, the renowned
English-born church historian. O’Connell declares it “the greatest good
fortune that ever befell me” (p. 14).
Shortly after his ordination in 1956, O’Connell headed down to Notre
Dame to begin his doctoral studies. There he met Father Eugene Clark
from the Archdiocese of New York, who was Hughes’ other student. He
also became a friend of Philip Gleason, who was then a graduate student,
and renewed his friendship with Ralph McInerny, a new philosophy
instructor who had been in the seminary with him in St. Paul.
In his memoir, Father O’Connell makes clear that he treasured his
time studying under Philip Hughes, whom he depicts as genial and brilliant and a bit quirky. Each week O’Connell would go to Hughes’ little
house in South Bend for a tutorial. An authority on the English Reformation, Hughes urged O’Connell to study “one of our fellows” (p. 61).
O’Connell took his advice and completed his dissertation on Thomas Stapleton, a learned English Catholic theologian who spent most of his life in
exile. Hughes also stirred in O’Connell an interest in John Henry Newman
and the Oxford Movement.
Completing his course work in 1958, O’Connell returned to St. Paul
and was assigned by the archbishop to teach at the College of St. Thomas.
He taught four courses per semester and notes that some of his classes were
held on Saturdays. He also lived in a dormitory where he was expected to
keep watch over ninety freshmen. In addition, he served as a weekend
assistant in various St. Paul parishes and as a confessor to two communities
of sisters. Somehow, Father O’Connell found the time and energy to press
on with his research and writing. In 1964 Yale University Press published
1. Father Miscamble also wrote an obituary for Father O’Connell which appeared in
the Catholic Historical Review, 102 (Autumn, 2016), 879–882.

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his Stapleton dissertation, and five years later Macmillan published his
book on the Oxford Movement.
O’Connell’s years at St. Thomas were challenging for him in other
respects as well. As dramatic change swept America and the Catholic
Church in the 1960s, O’Connell found that he did not like much of it.
While he had been a “Commonweal Catholic” in the 1950s, he turned in a
more traditional direction in the following decade. He was disheartened to
see some of his married friends divorcing and several of his clerical classmates leaving the priesthood. Politically, too, he turned in a more conservative direction, becoming friendly with William F. Buckley, Jr., and supportive of the National Review. In 1966, O’Connell agreed to give voice to
his conservative views on a weekly basis for the archdiocesan newspaper.
The column, “Tracts for the Times,” was syndicated in thirty papers and
ran for seven years.
Unfortunately, Father O’Connell’s narrative stops in 1972, when he was
about to leave St. Thomas and return to Notre Dame to succeed Hughes,
who had died a couple of years earlier. However, the essays and reviews
selected by the editors help to give readers some insights into Father O’Connell’s thinking during his years on the Notre Dame faculty (1972−1995). The
editors included two of his eloquent reflections on Newman and several of
the Oxford Movement leaders who remained Anglicans. They also included
O’Connell’s appreciative review of the writings of J.F. Powers, who often
focused his short stories on Minnesota priests.
At the same time, the editors acknowledged that Father O’Connell
had a stern side and could be a fierce critic of work that he considered
subpar. He always strived for objectivity as a historian and had no patience
for writers who were careless with their sources or were interested in promoting political agendas. O’Connell thought that Father Richard
McBrien, who held a chair in Theology at Notre Dame, was guilty on both
counts. The editors chose to put in two of O’Connell’s reviews of
McBrien’s books. With each, O’Connell offered withering criticism of
what he considered to be McBrien’s sloppy and highly partisan work.
The editors are to be commended for publishing the final work of this
eminent historian. It is a thoroughly engaging read from start to finish.
Salve Regina University

JOHN F. QUINN

Notes and Comments
ASSOCIATION NEWS
Davis Prize: In September 2020, the Cushwa Center in partnership with
the American Catholic Historical Association (ACHA) launched the Davis
Prize to recognize outstanding works in progress on the Black Catholic
experience. The prize honors Father Cyprian Davis, O.S.B. (1930–2015), a
Benedictine monk and beloved scholar whose ground-breaking book The
History of Black Catholics in the United States (1990) won the ACHA’s John
Gilmary Shea Prize. The Davis Prize is awarded annually and includes a cash
award of $1,000. Recipients will be honored each January at the ACHA’s
annual meeting. The next application deadline is December 31, 2021.
The University of Notre Dame’s Cushwa Center for the Study of
American Catholicism is pleased to announce that Leah Mickens has been
named the inaugural recipient of the Cyprian Davis, O.S.B., Prize for her
book project, “In the Shadow of Ebenezer: A Black Catholic Parish in the
Age of Civil Rights and Vatican II.”
Mickens recently earned her doctorate from Boston University’s
Graduate Program in Religion. Her project takes as its focus Our Lady of
Lourdes Catholic Church in Atlanta, the city’s oldest historically Black
parish, located one block from Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Martin
Luther King, Jr., served as co-pastor. Mickens examines how Black
Catholics at Our Lady of Lourdes influenced and were influenced by the
religious and social change ushered in by the Second Vatican Council and
the civil rights movement. Among other things, the study considers the
liturgical inculturation and ecumenical exchange whereby the parish
affirmed and reinterpreted its Black Catholic identity in a postconciliar,
Southern, and Protestant-majority urban context.
The selection committee was gratified to receive so many stellar
applications reflecting the variety of research advancing Black Catholic
studies right now,” said Kathleen Sprows Cummings, director of the
Cushwa Center and the John A. O’Brien Professor of American Studies
and History at Notre Dame. “Among the group, Dr. Mickens’ work in
particular stood out. It sets a very high standard for the future of our newest
funding program, and we’re excited to see it progress toward publication.”
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“Dr. Mickens’ work brings together how both the Second Vatican
Council and the civil rights movement engaged the minds, spirits, and
activism of Black Catholics,” said Cecilia Moore of the University of
Dayton, who served as a member of the prize’s review committee. “This is
a study that I will love to see published and to teach as well. It also
promises to open the way for more studies like it.”
Cushwa Center, University of Notre Dame

SHANE ULBRICH

FELLOWSHIPS
The Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz awards
various fellowships.
It awards eight to ten fellowships for international doctoral students in
European history, the history of religion, historical theology, or other
historical disciplines beginning in September, 2021, or later. It funds PhD
projects on European history from the early modern period until 1989/90.
It is particularly interested in projects with a comparative or cross-border
approach on European history in its relation to the wider world, or on
topics of intellectual and religious history.
The IEG Fellowships provide a unique opportunity to pursue one’s
individual PhD project while living and working for six to twelve months
at the Institute in Mainz. The monthly stipend is €1,350. Additionally, one
can apply for family or child allowance.
Requirements: During the fellowship one is required to reside at the
Institute in Mainz and participate actively in the IEG’s research
community, the weekly colloquia, and scholarly activities. Fellows are
expected to present their work at least once during their fellowship. The
IEG preferably supports the writing up of dissertations; it will not provide
funding for preliminary research, language courses, or the revision of book
manuscripts. PhD theses continue to be supervised under the auspices of
the fellows’ home universities. Fellows are expected to have proficiency in
English and a sufficient command of German to participate in discussions
at the Institute. The IEG encourages applications from women.
Application: All application materials except for the application form
are to be combined into a single PDF and sent with their application form
to: application@ieg-mainz.de
Letters of recommendation should be submitted directly by the referees.
They may write in either English or German and should use the language in

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which they are more proficient. The application form can be downloaded
under the following: https://bit.ly/formIEG. The next deadline for these
doctoral students is August 15, 2021. Questions concerning the IEG
Fellowship Programme should be directed to Barbara Müller:
fellowship@ieg-mainz.de. Her postal address is: Leibniz Institute of
European History (IEG); Head of Research Fellowship Programme;
Barbara Müller, M.A.; Alte Universitätsstrasse 19; 55116 Mainz; Germany.
The URL website is: https://www.ieg-mainz.de/en/fellowships
The Leibnitz Institute also offers one fellowship for a period of six to
eight months for international doctoral students (m/f/div.) in the field of
Digital Humanities. The fellowship supports international doctoral
students who wish to carry out their own research project using Digital
Humanities methods. The focus should be on a leading question that
contributes to the institute’s research programme, preferably on the current
topic of “Negotiating differences in Europe.” As a member of the
institute’s Digital Historical Research Unit, the fellow will collaborate
closely with researchers of our DH Lab. This can help one develop
additional perspectives for one’s research project. Scholars from the
humanities with a historical focus who use digital methods for their
projects are also invited to apply for the fellowship.
The monthly stipend is €1,350. Additionally, one can apply for family
or child allowance. As an actively involved member of the IEG’s research
community, one will be able to discuss and complete one’s project in the
inspiring working environment of the IEG. As a Fellowship holder one is
required to reside in Mainz and participate actively in the IEG’s research
community and the weekly colloquia, where one is expected to present
one’s work at least once during one’s fellowship. Fellows must submit a
final report of their project at the end of the funding period. Proficiency
in English and German is required in order to participate in discussions
at the Institute.
Application: Questions regarding the fellowship’s content should be
sent to Thorsten Wübbena. Applications contain the following documents:
1. Letter of motivation (PDF); 2. curriculum vitae; a list of publications, if
available (PDF); 3. a brief description of the proposed research project (5
pages) (PDF); 4. copies of university certificates and proof of language
competence (PDF); 5. Academic letter of reference. The academic advisor
should send an up-to-date reference directly to the IEG by the application
deadline. The deadline for 2021 fellowships has already passed. For
questions regarding subsequent years, please contact Barbara Müller at
fellowship@ieg-mainz.de.

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299

SEMINARS/WORKSHOPS
From June 7 to 8, 2021, the Fondazione per le scienze religiose in
Bologna will sponsor a seminar on the theme “Stigma, Discrimination,
Birth, ‘Racism,’ and Their Dis/Connection with the Christian
Experience.” Among the papers to be presented are: “’For it is not Right to
Take the Children’s Bread and Throw it to the Dogs’ (Mark 7:27b): Ethnic
Tensions in the New Testament” by Gabriella Gelardini; “From Augustine
to Gregory the Great: The Baptism of Conversion of the ‘Rustici’” by Rita
Lizzi Testa; “Slaves, Conversion, and Skin Colour in Rome, 18th and 19th
Centuries” by Giulia Bonazza; “Matrimoni misti, corpo e contagio in età
moderna” by Cecilia Cristellon; “Confessing Slaves in the 18th Century
French Caribbean” by Miriam Franchina; “The Problem of Exclusion of
non-White People from the Priesthood and Religious Orders in the Early
Modern Catholicism(s)” by Massimo Carlo Giannini; “The Race of Slaves.
Sacramental Practices for Slaves in the 18th and 19th Centuries” by Maria
Teresa Fattori; “Anti-Black Racism, Prayer and Sainthood (19th–20th
Centuries)” by Matteo Caponi; and “Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Theological
Assessment of ‘Race’” by Christophe Chalamet. Presentation and
discussion will be in English, French, German, and Italian. The Seminar
will be held in remote mode; online registration is required. Please register
per email writing to segreteria@fscire.it by June 6, 2021 (13.00 CET). The
link to remote participation will be sent to registered participants in the
morning of June 7, 2021
From June 9 to 10, 2021, Atria Larson (St. Louis University) will lead
a seminar on “Medieval Penitentials and the Law, Theology, and Practice
of Penance” sponsored by the Fondazione per le scienze religiose in
Bologna. The seminar will introduce participants to the rich and varied
source material in the medieval period related to penance. An overview of
substantial changes in the historiography of the history of late antique and
medieval penance over the past several decades will be combined with
investigation of original source material extant in manuscripts and in
printed editions. The seminar will emphasize the importance of an
interdisciplinary approach to the history of penance that includes
considerations of literary genre, theology, law, historical change, and ritual
practice. For more information, contact info@fscire.it.
The Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, the Monumenta
Germaniae Historica, and the Deutsche Historische Institut Paris (DHIP)
are sponsoring an autumn course of five days (September 27 to October 1,
2021) devoted to the diplomatics of medieval papal charters open to those

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with doctorates, or working on one. The couse will be held at the DHIP
and Archives nationales. If the Covid crisis does not permit in-person
instruction, the course will be held online. The deadline for applying is
June 15, 2021. For more information, see: DHIP; Zur Ausschreibung;
Zum Kursprogramm; and Zum Anmeldeformular .

CONFERENCES
From August 30 to September 2, 2021, the European Academy of
Religion will hold its annual conference at the Westfälische WilhelmsUniversität Münster in Germany, with both on-site and online
participation possibilities. As in previous years, the scientific program will
be composed of working sessions (panels and book presentations) and
keynote lectures that will focus on the overarching topic “Religion and
Change.” Among the issues to be addressed are:
1. Change and Transformation of Religion (in the history of
religion). Has there been a development of religion within history? Do
religions stand for a solid and substantial metaphysical order of natural and
moral reality amidst a world which is permanently changing, or are
religions themselves in a process of inner (essential) change, reform, and
transformation? How do religions integrate the concepts of change,
reform, and transformation in their own doctrines? How is religion related
to history and change? How does the differentiation of religious symbol
systems proceed?
2. Evolution and Religion. In what sense do we have to understand
religion as being part of the evolution of humankind (of evolutionary
history)? What follows from such an analysis of the origin of religion?
What kind of critique of religion emerges from this understanding (for
example, a genetic critique of religion)? What is the significance of such a
critique for a contemporary concept of religion?
3. Hermeneutics and Religious Traditions, Texts and Practices. Is
Interpretation the key to understand the relation between religion and
change? Is there a specific hermeneutics in respect to the holy texts and
practices of religions? What models of relating the holy texts and practices
of a religious tradition to the present day and its challenges in diverse
contexts are available and used in the religions?
4. Dynamics of Change. How can religions contribute to transformations, development, and progress in societies? Does religion restrain

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301

or promote transformation, development, and progress in societies? Can
and do religions include a dynamic of their own transformation and
development?
For more information, please contact Hans Peter Grosshans,
President of the European Academy of Religion, at tel. 49 251 83-22575
or email: grosshans@uni-muenster.de.
From September 15 to 17, 2021, the Reformation Researh
Consortium in cooperation with the Fondazione per le scienze religiose
(Bologna) will hold a conference on the theme “Righteousness in Early
Modern Christianity: Voices, Fruits, and Failures.” Among the topics to
be treated are: Voices (and their theological or philosophical backgrounds):
Crying out for righteousness: voices of the oppressed; The concept of
‘righteousness’ in Early Modern Law; 14th and 15th century debates on
righteousness; Christian and Non-Christian views of social righteousness;
Cultural voices: art, literature and music. Successes (and their secrets):
Political and ecclesiastical initiatives for a righteous society; Examples from
law and politics; Individual and popular initiatives; Effects on art and
architecture. Failures (and their lessons): Examples of failed projects;
Examples of missed chances; Internal and external causes of failures;
Responses to failures. The conference will be held at the Fondazione per le
scienze religiose Giovanni XXIII, Via San Vitale 114, I-40125 Bologna.
For more information, please conact segretaria@fscire.it.

PUBLICATIONS
Annales Historiae Conciliorum—Journal for the History of Councils (formerly Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum) in the first issue for 2020 (Vol. 50)
contains the third part of the “Beitrãge der Internationalen Tagung zur
Konziliengeschichte “Konzil und Minderheit—I Concili e le Minoranze,”
which was held in Rome on October 10–14, 2018: Johannes Grohe and
Thomas Prügl, “Zur Einführung” (pp. 5–10); Luca Demontis, “La minoranza assente. I vescovi lombardi al concilio provinciale di Aquileia del
1282” (pp. 11–26); Christina Traxler, “The Bohemian Delegation at the
Council of Constance (1414–1418) and its Struggle for Truth and Recognition” (pp. 27–48); Thomas Woelki, “’Papst plus eins’. Eine kanonistische
Lehre zur Verteitigung der pro-pãpstlichen Minderheit auf dem Basler
Konzil” (pp. 49–68); Nelson H. Minnich, “Minorities at Lateran V (1512–
17): Their Need of Papal Support” (pp. 69–82); Matteo Al Kalak, “Minoranze variabili. Tecniche di governo e meccanismi di voto al concilio di
Trento” (pp. 83–100); Klaus Schatz, “’Non placet’ oder ‘Placet iuxta

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modum’? Hintergründe, Intention und Folgen der Abstimmung der
Minorität am 13. Juli 1870” (pp. 101–12); Agostino Marchetto, “La minoranza nel Vaticano II dal ‘Diario’ di Pericle Felici, suo Segretario Generale”
(pp. 113–28); Claudio Anselmo, “Il comunismo al Vaticano II: una
battaglia della minoranza conciliare” (pp. 129–46); and Gabriel Adriányi,
“Die letzten Diözesansynoden Ungarns 1993–99 und die Seelsore für die
grösste Minderheir, die Roma” (pp. 147–54).
The theme of the articles in the issue of Revista de Historia Jerónimo
Zurita for autumn, 2020, Vol. 97, is “Obispos y aristocracias laicas en la
España medieval: entre la colaboración y el conflicto”: Susanna Guijarro
González, “Obispos y laicos durante el período de génesis y afirmación de
la diócesis de Burgos (siglos XI–XII)” (pp. 15–43); Carla Cimino, “Los
obispos y la aristocracia local: las posibilidades del patronazgo eclesiástico
en la Extremadura leonesa del siglo XII” (pp. 45–66); Eduard Juncosa
Bonet,”Ací no hic ha rey ne reyató, car l’archabisbe és rey e senyor. El poder
spiritual y temporal de los arzobispos de Tarragona en la Baja Edad Media”
(pp. 67–95); Juan A. Prieto Sayagués, “Prelados, nobleza y oligarquías
urbanas. Una relación a través de los monasterios en la Castilla bajomedieval” (pp. 97–115); and Jordi Morelló i Bagueat, “Los obispos de la
Corona de Aragón a mediados del siglo XV: panorama socioeconómico de
una élite de poder” (pp. 117–45).
An “Article Forum on Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly’s ‘Singing
Box 331: Re-sounding Eighteenth-Century Mohican Hymns from the
Moravian Archives’” fills the entire issue for July, 2020 (3d ser., Vol. 77) of
the William and Mary Quarterly: Jean M. O’Brien, “Animating Box 331”
(pp. 366–71); Cameron Blevins, “Sound and Community: ‘Singing Box
331’ as Digital History” (pp. 372–79); Glenda Goodman, “Conditioned
Ears: How to Listen to Mohican-Moravian Hymnody” (pp. 380–86);
Patrick M. Erben, “Releasing the Energy of Eighteenth-Century Indigenous Hymnody” (pp. 387–92); and Rachel Wheeler and Sarah Eyerly,
“The Singing Box” (pp. 393–404).
Four articles on Canadian Catholic history are presented in Volume
86 (2020) of Historical Studies: Luca Codignola, “The Church Triumphant:
Roberto Perin’s View from Rome” (pp. 7–24); Patricia E. Roy, “’Something new in Canada’: The Coming of Catholics to the University of
British Columbia” (pp. 25–50); Katelyn Arac, “From Hagiography to Historiography: Reclaiming Kateri Tekakwitha” (pp. 51–70); and Henry
Wostenberg, “The Tinchebray Fathers’ Evolving Relationships with their
Alberta Hierarchy, 1904–1924” (pp. 71–104). The second half of the fas-

NOTES AND COMMENTS

303

cicle contains Volume 86 (1–2, 2020) of Études d’histoire religieuse: JeanPhilippe Warren, “Lutter pour l’Église et la patrie tout en se récréant. Le
cercle Langevin de l’ACJC, 1910–1920” (pp. 5–20); Pierre Hurtubise, “Les
établissements d’enseignement supérieur catholiques au Canada: d’hier à
aujourd’hui” (pp. 21–36); Sébastien Lecompte-Ducharme,”Les élites et la
religion populaire. L’éducation catholique au secondaire Québécois, 1870–
1920” (pp. 37–56); and Dominique Laperle, “La prédication du dominicain Benoît Lacroix auprês des Sœurs des Saints Noms de Jésus et de
Marie” (pp. 57–74). Peter Ludlow will replace Edward MacDonald as
editor, and Colin Barr will be the new associate editor of Historical Studies.

OBITUARY

G il e s C o n s t a b l e
(1 9 2 9 -2 0 2 1 )
In keeping with his desire not to have the traditional obituary, the
journal announces that the noted scholar of medieval Christianity has died.
Born in London on June 1, 1929, he was educated at Harvard (A.B. 1950;
Ph.D. 1957) and at Cambridge (1952–53). He taught at the University of
Iowa (1955–58) and at Harvard University (1958–1984) where he was the
Henry Charles Lea-Professor of Medieval History from 1966 to 1977 and
served as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library from 1977 to
1984. In 1985 he joined the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study as
a Medieval History Professor in the School of Historical Studies, retiring
from that position in 2003 as Professor Emeritus. He received a
Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities in 1967 and was a member of
many international learned societies. He published numerous books and

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articles on medieval religion. Among these are: Monastic Tithes (1964), The
Letters of Peter the Venerable (1967), Consuetudines Benedictinae variae
(1975), Cluniac Studies (1980), The Reformation of the Twelfth Century
(1996), Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (2008), The Abbey of
Cluny (2010), and Medieval Monasticism (2019). He was a truly kind and
supportive teacher, colleague, and friend.
The Catholic University of America

NELSON H. MINNICH

Periodical Literature
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
A centenary of ecclesiological itinerary at the Pontifical Gregorian
University (Part 1). From the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ
to the Post-conciliar Church: a view by Sebastian Tromp and Angel
Anton. Gabriel Mmassi, S.I. Gregorianum, 101 (4, 2020), 813–32.
L’ouverture des Archives du Saint-Siège pour le pontificat de Pie XII
(1939–1958). Dries Vanysacker. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115
(July–Dec., 2020), 729–35.
Un Consultore del Sant’Uffizio al concilio: P. Ermenegildo Lio tra morale
“nuova” e “perenne.” Alessandro Di Marco. A nnales Historiae
Conciliorum, 50 (1, 2020), 175–202.
Discerning Sports as a Sign of the Times: The Vatican II Fathers’
Changing Mentality on Leisure Activities (1959–1965). Dries
Bosschaert. Cristianesimo nella storia, 40 (3, 2020), 629–52.
The Ruptures of History as Challenge to Ecumenism. Giuseppe Ruggieri.
Cristianesimo nella storia, 40 (3, 2020), 653–74.
Caterina da Siena dottore della Chiesa 50 anni dopo. Maria Grazia
Bianco. Istituto Paolo VI, notiziario n. 80 (2020), 37–55.
Des femmes docteures de l’Eglise? Une question inédite dans l’Eglise du
XXe siècle. Clarisse Tesson. Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 106
(July–Dec., 2020), 261–81.
Le “crépuscule” du catholicisme tridentin? Réflexions sur la “fin d’un
monde.” Bruno Dumons. Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (3, 2020), 859–
75.
Storiografia, impegno civile, ispirazione religiosa. Gli studi su Ettore
Passerin d’Entrèves a trent’anni dalla scomparsa. Giuseppe Battelli.
Cristianesimo nella storia, 40 (3, 2020), 675–709.
Catalogues de manuscrits latins. Inventaire hagiographique (trente–
septième série). François Dolbeau. Analecta Bollandiana, 138 (June,
2020), 151–89.
305

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From Paper to Screen. The Digital Indipetae Database, a New Resource
for Jesuit Studies. Emanuele Colombo. Archivum Historicum Societatis
Iesu, LXXXIX (1, 2020), 213–30.
I Francescani a Nazaret: 1620–1954. Narcyz Klimas. Collectanea
Franciscana, 90 (3–4, 2020), 497–525.
Le Scuole della Custodia di Terra Santa dal Seicento al XX secolo nei
documenti della Santa Sede e dell’Ordine dei Frati Minori. Narcyz
Klimas. Collectanea Franciscana, 89 (3–4, 2019), 521–58.
Il restauro della tavola medievale del Museo Francescano di Roma: San
Francesco d’Assisi con la Regola. Barbara Gallas & Yohannes
Teklemariam Bache. Collectanea Franciscana, 89 (3–4, 2019), 721–36.
Relazione tecnica dell’intervento conservativo eseguito sul volume “Magni
S. Francisci Vita Distincta Miraculis Descripta Simulacris,” presso il
Museo Francescano di Roma. Lavina Brugiotti. Collectanea
Franciscana, 89 (3–4, 2019), 737–62.
Ruler Martyrs at the base of Ethiopian crosses. On the design at the base
of the vertical beam of Ethiopian processional crosses and its
comparison to Armenian Khatchk’ars. Dorothea McEwan. Orientalia
Christiana Periodica, 85 (2, 2019), 427–52.
Why Denominations Can Climb Hills: RLDS Conversions in Highland
Tribal India and Midwestern America, 1964–2000. David J. Howlett.
Church History, 89 (Sept., 2020), 633–58.

ANCIENT
La recension longue de l’Index apostolorum discipulorumque Domini du
pseudo-Dorothée: contenu—datation—postérité. Xavier Lequeux.
Analecta Bollandiana, 137 (Dec., 2019), 241–59.
Suicide by Gladiator? The Acts of Perpetua and Felicitas in Its North African
Context. L. Stephanie Cobb. Church History, 88 (Sept., 2019), 597–628.
La Passio di Felice, Ireneo e Mustiola: con edizione critica delle versioni
BHL 4455–4456c. Pierluigi Licciardello. Analecta Bollandiana, 138
(June, 2020), 5–85.
Liturgia stazionale, spazio e inculturazione. La cristianizzazione di Roma
tra il IV secolo e l’età di Gregorio Magno. Massimiliano Proietti.
Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (3, 2020), 663–96.
“Since Those Days All Things Have Progressed for the Better”: Tradition,
Progress, and Creation in Ambrose of Milan. Alex Fogleman.
Harvard Theological Review, 113 (Oct., 2020), 440–59.

P ERIODICAL L ITERATURE

307

John Chrysostom and the Rebirth of Antiochene Mission in Late
Antiquity. Jonathan P. Stanfill. Church History, 88 (Dec., 2019), 899–
924.
A Unique Specimen of Mid-Byzantine Lydian Hagiography: The Life of
Onesimus the Wonder-Worker (BHG 2324).Sergey A. Ivanov.
Analecta Bollandiana, 137 (Dec., 2019), 277–97.
L’évangélisation et la christianisation de Huy. Retour sur la chronologie
problématique d’un vicus du Nord de la Gaule (v–x siècles). Guillaume
Wymmersch. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–Dec., 2020),
457–524.
Literalität und literarische Kultur um suebischen Galizien des 6.
Jahrhunderts: Martin von Braga. Markus Mülke. Cristianesimo nella
storia, 41 (3, 2020), 697–722.
“De noviter venientibus ad conversationem”: l’ammissione in monastero
fra ritualità, tradizione a diritto, alla luce della “Regula sancti
Benedicti.” Fabio Cunismano. Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (3, 2020),
723–65.

MEDIEVAL
St Edith of Polesworth and her Cult. Nigel Tringham. Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Jan., 2020), 1–19.
St Eadburh of Lyminge and Her Hagiographer. Rosalind Love. Analecta
Bollandiana, 137 (Dec., 2019), 313–408.
From Acolyte to Sahābī? Christian Monks as Symbols of Early Confessional Fluidity in the Conversion Story of Salmān al-Fārisī. Bradley
Bowman. Harvard Theological Review, 112 (Jan., 2019), 55–75.
The Merovingian Kingdoms and the Monothelete Controversy. Sihong
Lin. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Apr., 2020), 235–52.
Satan, his fellow demons, and their victims. An anthology of images in the
Byzantine world taken mostly from early illuminations. Massimo
Bernabò. Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 85 (2, 2019), 259–84.
Further considerations on Gemiler Adasi: Urbanization, Procession, and
Amenities in a Provincial Byzantine City. Orientalia Christiana
Periodica, 85 (2, 2019), 285–338.
Relics vs. Paintings of the Three Holy Children: Coptic Responses to
Chalcedonian Claims in Alexandria. Mary K. Farag. Analecta
Bollandiana, 137 (Dec., 2019), 261–76.

308

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Herberto de Claraval, Herberto de Sobrado y el milagro de Moreruela
(Miraculum de novitio hispaniense, BHL 1231a). José María Anguita
Jaén. Analecta Bollandiana, 138 (June, 2020), 100–23.
Una precoce officina grafica femminile? Il caso del monastero benedettino
di Pontetetto di Lucca. Donatella Frioli. Mélanges de l’École française
de Rome, Moyen Âge, 131 (1, 2019), 265–83.
Friend or Foe? The Bishops of Metz in Monastic Historical Narrative, c.
1000–c. 1200. Samantha Kahn Herrick. Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 71 (Apr., 2020), 253–69.
Détruire un autel: Amat d’Oloron, Bérenger de Tours, l’abbaye de
Montierneuf, et les débuts de la réforme grégorienne au concile de
Poitiers en 1075. Peter Scott Brown. Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale,
63 (Oct.–Dec., 2020), 211–32.
La crédulité, le doute et la pratique artistique au XIIe siècle. Robert A.
Maxwell. Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévale, 63 (Oct.–Dec., 2020),
233–66.
Laughing with Sacred Things, ca. 1100–1350: A History in Four Objects.
Peter J. A. Jones. Church History, 89 (Dec., 2020), 759–78.
L’ontologie statutaire de la pneumatologie scolastique (1160–1300). Alexis
Fontbonne. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–Dec., 2020), 526–
50.
Reading the Historia Scholastica at the Close of the Twelfth Century:
Nigel of Canterbury and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS B.15.5.
Irene O’Daly. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Apr., 2020), 270–92.
Medieval Saints and Their Miraculous Songs: Ritual Singing, Funerary
Piety, and the Construction of Female Sanctity in Thirteenth-Century
Liège. Luo Wang. Church History, 89 (Sept., 2020), 509–30.
Expanding the Narrative: The Reception of Ignatius of Antioch in Britain,
ca. 1200–1700. Jonathon Lookadoo. Church History, 89 (Mar., 2020),
1–23.
L’invention de Léocade : reliques et figures d’auteur dans les Miracles de
Nostre Dame de Gautier de Coinci. Brigitte Roux & Marion Uhlig.
Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 63 (Jan.–Mar., 2020), 19–40.
“Ordo Sancti Damiani” e “Ordo Sanctae Clarae” in Veneto e FriuliVenezia Giulia del XIII secolo. Alexa Bianchini. Collectanea
Franciscana, 90 (3–4, 2020), 349–417.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

309

The Rus Archbishop Peter at the First Council of Lyon. Alexander V.
Maiorov. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Jan., 2020), 20–39.
Per una prosopografia episcopale nel Mezzogiorno angioino. I risultati di
Puglia, Molise e Basilicata (1266–1310). Antonio Antonetti. Mélanges
de l’École française de Rome, Moyen Âge, 131 (2, 2019), 207–28.
Thomas Wolf c. Richard de Abingdon,1293–1295: A Case Study of Legal
Argument. Sarah B. White. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Jan.,
2020), 40–58.
“Assumam te, Zorobabel, serve meus”: san Francesco d’Assisi come
rinnovatore della Chiesa nei sermoni di san Bonaventura e di altri
predicatori medievali. Aleksander Horowski. Collectanea Franciscana,
89 (3–4, 2019), 421–520.
Sleeping in Church: Preaching, Boredom, and the Struggle for Attention
in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. David Jütte. American
Historical Review, 125 (Oct., 2020), 1146–74.
Due antichi inventari delle suppellettili, dei paramenti e dei manoscritti
esistenti nelle sacrestie della cattedrale di Asti (fine XIV–inizio XV
secolo). Gian Giacomo Fissore. Bollettino Storico-Bibliografico
Subalpino, CXVIII (1, 2020), 149–95.
Il dibattito sul primato di Pietro in Armenia fra XIV e XV secolo: la
testimonianza del «Girkՙ Ułłapՙ aṙacՙ» di Mxitՙaričՙ Aparanecՙi.
Frederico Alpi. Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (1, 2020), 43–137.
St. Peter, Paul und Hippolyt in Öhningen. Eine kulturgeschichtliche
Studie zum Patrozinium und zur Gründungsgeschichte des
ehemaligen Augustiner-Chorherrenstifts. Fredy Meyer. Freiburger
Diözesan-Archiv, 139 (2019), 7–66.
Otto III. von Hachberg (1410–1434). Ein Konstanzer Bischof in Neuem
Licht. Thomas Martin Buck. Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 139 (2019),
67–86.
Circolazione di scritti edificanti nei monasteri e nei circoli devoti femminili
in Toscana nel Basso Medioevo. Isabella Gagliardi. Mélanges de l’École
française de Rome, Moyen Âge, 131 (1, 2019), 311–23.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Lord or Patron? The Cardinal Protector of the Order of the Hospital of
Saint John of Jerusalem from the Sixteenth to the Early Eighteenth
Century. Francesco Russo. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–
Dec., 2020), 553–80.

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L’ “economia” della misericordia. La “In psalmum XCIII interpretatio” di
Jacopo Sadoleto e l’uso teologico-politico del tema erasmiano del
beneficio di Cristo. Ludovico Battista. Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (3,
2020), 767–816.
Durham Cathedral and Cuthbert Tunstall: a Cathedral and its Bishop
during the Reformation, 1530–1559. Elizabeth Biggs. Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Jan., 2020), 59–76.
Geneva’s Use of Lies, Deceit, and Simulation in Their E
France, 1536–1563. Jon Balserak. Harvard Theological Review, 112
(Jan., 2019), 76–100.
Thomas Becket, William Warham and the Crisis of the Early Tudor
Church. Peter Marshall. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Apr.,
2020), 293–315.
The Antwerpian Printer Jacob van Liesvelt, his Widow, and their Bibles:
Myths and Facts from a Confessional Era. Wim François. Church
History, 89 (Dec., 2020), 779–800.
Intra–Confessional Polemics in the Reformation. Ralph Keen. Church
History, 88 (Sept., 2019), 629–44.
La presenza dei Gesuiti a Tivoli (XVI–XVIII secolo): strategie
imprenditoriali al servizio della Missione. Carla Benocci. Archivum
Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (1, 2020), 117–83.
I bibliotecari del Collegio Romano (1551–1873): un contributo per la
storia delle biblioteche della Compagnia di Gesù. Lorenzo Mancini.
Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (1, 2020), 45–115.
Peter Canisius SJ to Cardinal Giovanni Morone: Two Fabricated Letters
Dated in the Mid–Sixteenth Century. Paul Begheyn SJ and Vincent
Hunink. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (2, 2020), 419–
36.
La alimentación en el Colegio jesuita de Montesión de Palma de Mallorca:
cultura, productos y prácticas (1561–1715). Miguel Gabriel Garí
Pallicer. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (1, 2020), 5–43.
Council of Trent: Spanish Reform, Tametsi, and Marriage. Joseph
Goldsmith. Annales Historiae Conciliorum, 50 (1, 2020), 155–74.
Del «gran escenario de la palabra» al «gran escenario de la imagen»: la
evolución del programa iconográfico de la casa profesa–colegio de San
Ignacio de Valladolid. Eneko Ortega Mentxaka. Archivum Historicum
Societatis Iesu, LXXXVIII (2, 2019), 343–87.

PERIODICAL L ITERATURE

311

Antijudaism and European nationalism—The case of the Society of Jesus
under Acquaviva. Marc Rastoin, S.I. Gregorianum, 101 (4, 2020),
871–82.
Il viaggio degli ambasciatori giapponesi tra Venezia a Mantova (1585)
nelle epistole del codice Ital. 159 dell’Archivum Romanum Societatis
Iesu. Carlo Pelliccia. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (2,
2020), 437–66.
Hagiography as a Platform for Internal Catholic Debate in Early Modern
Europe: Francisco de Ribera’s La Vida de la Madre Teresa de Iesus
(1590) and the Defense of a Contemplative Way Inside the Jesuit
Order. Facundo Sebastián Macías. Church History, 89 (June, 2020),
288–306.
Catholicism Decentralized: Local Religion in the Early Modern
Periphery. Beat Kümin & Felicita Tramontana. Church History, 89
(June, 2020), 268–87.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
(EASTERN HEMISPHERE)
Historical Authenticity and the Expanding Horizons of the Seventeenth–
Century Catholic Church. Stefania Tutino. Journal of Modern History,
92 (Mar., 2020), 1–39.
Gli studi superiori nel collegio di Santa Croce a Cagliari (1606–1773).
Guglielmo Pireddu, S.J. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX
(2, 2020), 337–78.
Georg Garnefelt et les Fasti Sanctorum d’Héribert Rosweyde. Bernard
Joassart. Analecta Bollandiana, 137 (Dec., 2019), 409–27.
The King James Bible: Crown, Church and People. Kenneth Fincham.
Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Jan., 2020), 77–97.
Mysticism and Identity among the English Poor Clares. Liam Peter
Temple. Church History, 88 (Sept., 2019), 645–71.
Suor Annalena Odaldi (1572–1638), camerlenga e commediografa del
monastero di Santa Chiara a Pistoia. Elissa Weaver. Mélanges de
l’École française de Rome, Moyen Âge, 131 (1, 2019), 325–35.
La primera imagen del examen di conciencia en la espiritualidad ignaciana:
orar con el Via vitae Aeternae (1620) de Antonius Sucquet SJ. Bert
Daelemans, S.J. Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (2,
2020), 313–35.

312

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Elders and Deacons in Kampen and Wemeldinge: Dutch Reformed
Approaches to Consistory Elections. Kyle J. Dieleman. Church
History, 89 (Mar., 2020), 24–42.
La prima biografia del beato Marco d’Aviano, scritta da Cosmo da
Castelfranco, e gli interventi del Santo Officio. Vincenzo Criscuolo.
Collectanea Franciscana, 90 (3–4, 2020), 465–95.
Le «notizie storiche» del P. Giancarlo Caputi di S. Barbara. Giancarlo
Caputi. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, 88 (2020), 3–96.
Le “Notizie Historiche” del P. Giancarlo Caputi di S. Barbara. Giancarlo
Caputi. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, 89 (2021), 3–58.
Lost in Translation? Constructing Ancient Roman Martyrs in Baroque
Bavaria. Noria Litaker. Church History, 89 (Dec., 2020), 801–28.
Defining Man as Animal Religiosum in English Religious Writing ca.
1650–ca. 1700. R. J. W. Mills. Church History, 88 (Dec., 2019), 925–
52.
“Inexpressible horror”: The Devil and Baptist Life Writing in Cromwellian
Ireland. Crawford Gribben. Church History, 89 (Sept., 2020), 531–48.
Toward a typology of the 17th–century Slavonic Notated Hirmologion.
Aleksandr Andreev. Orientalia Christiana Periodica, 85 (2, 2019), 481–
503.
Could Chinese Vegetarians be Baptized? Part 2: The Canton Conference
and Prospero Intorcetta SJ’s Report of 1668. Thierry Meynard, S.J.
Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXVIII (2, 2019), 285–341.
Comment spolier l’Eglise de France? par Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Stéphane
Guerre. Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 106 (July–Dec., 2020),
229–39.
Il monastero delle cappuccine di Santa Fiora (secoli XVII–XIX): un
importante insediamento sul Monte Amiata ispirato ai valori
benedettini e cappuccini. Carla Benocci. Collectanea Franciscana, 90
(3–4, 2020), 527–78.
“To Carry the Sins of the World.” The Angelic Brethren and the Strange
Case of Mystical Intercession in Radical Protestantism c. 1700.
Timothy Wright. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–Dec., 2020),
581–622.
A “Syncretism of Piety”: Imagining Global Protestantism in Early
Eighteenth-Century Boston, Tranquebar, and Halle. Jan Stievermann. Church History, 89 (Dec., 2020), 829–56.

PERIODICAL L ITERATURE

313

“For the love of God, he does not want us to languish in this misery”: The
Capuchins’ pastoral role towards christian slaves in Ottoman Istanbul.
Vanessa R. de Obaldía. Collectanea Franciscana, 89 (3–4, 2019), 593–
610.
S. Francesco Antonio Fasani scrittore francescano. Francesco Costa,
OFMConv. Miscellanea Francescana, 119 (3–4, 2019), 488–97.
Members of the Clergy before the Maltese Diocesan Court, 1750–1798.
Frans Ciappara. Church History, 89 (Sept., 2020), 549–66.

NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
(EASTERN HEMISPHERE)
The Fight for Inheritances in the Papal States during the Restoration,
1814–1830. Christopher Korten. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71
(Jan., 2020), 98–115.
Une croisade de charité. L’opinion catholique française et la Terre sainte
(1815–1853). Jean-François Figeac. Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de
France, 106 (July–Dec., 2020), 241–59.
Les catholiques anglais et le don d’indulgence. Controverse avec les
protestants et usages missionnaires entre 1825 et 1965. Olivier Rota.
Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–Dec., 2020), 625–48.
Conversion in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Alphonse Ratisbonne
in Rome and Paris. Carol E. Harrison. Journal of Modern History, 92
(Mar., 2020), 116–44.
L’idea primigenia dell’Apostolato della preghiera nei documenti
dell’Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu. Dario Di Maso. Archivum
Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (1, 2020), 185–212.
Freedom in the Congregation? Culture Wars, Individual Rights, and
National Churches in Switzerland (1848–1907). Sarah Scholl. Church
History, 89 (June, 2020), 333–49.
‘True and Pious Men’: Anglican Ministry to Chinese Settlers in Southern
Queensland, 1850–1914. Howard Le Couteur. Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 71 (Apr., 2020), 337–61.
“A True and Patriotic Band!”: Welsh Anglican Resistance to a Colonial
Victorian Church. Matthew C. Jones. Church History, 88 (Dec.,
2019), 953–77.
Instructing the Heavenly King: Joseph Edkins’s Mission to Correct the
Theology of Hong Xiuquan. Carl S. Kilcourse. Journal of Ecclesiastical
History, 71 (Jan., 2020), 116–34.

314

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

The Troubled Knot: Tying Church Discipline to ‘Christian Marriage’ in
African Contexts. Jennifer C. Snow. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71
(Jan., 2020), 135–53.
Honor, Excrement, Ethnography: Colonial Knowledge between
Missionary and Militaire in French Algeria. Joseph W. Peterson.
Journal of Modern History, 93 (1, 2021), 34–67.
La casa de Cracovia, que casi perdimos y ahora, renovada, brilla en todo su
esplendor. José P. Burgués. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, 88 (2020),
125–224.
Inquisire Porta Pia: i protestanti a Roma e il S. Ufficio all’indomani
dell’Unità. Simone Maghenzani. Cristianesimo nella storia, 40 (3,
2020), 565–91.
Ascesa e declino della dogmatica neoscolastica. Il caso dell’Academia
Theodoriana di Paderborn. Benjamin Dahlke. Cristianesimo nella
storia, 41 (1, 2020), 139–70.
From Failure to Success: The Jesuit Mission in Zambia and the Sources for
its History in the Jesuit Roman Archives. Robert Danieluk, S.J.
Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, LXXXVIII (2, 2019), 419–38.
P. Alfonso Maria Mistrangelo 31° Prepósito General de las Escuelas Pías
(1900–1904). José P. Burgués. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, XLV (n.
89, 2021), 59–187.
A Brief History of Australian Catholic Youth Ministry—Part I.
Christopher Ryan. Australasian Catholic Record, 96 (Oct., 2019), 431–
44.
A Brief History of Australian Catholic Youth Ministry—Part II.
Christopher Ryan. Australasian Catholic Record, 97 (Jan., 2020), 30–
44.
Female Monasticism in Revolutionary Times: The Nizhnii Novgorod
Convent of the Exaltation of the Cross, 1917–1935. William G.
Wagner. Church History, 89 (June, 2020), 350–89.
National and Rational Dress: Catholics Debate Female Fashion in
Lithuania, 1920s–1930s. Indre Cuplinskas. Church History, 88 (Sept.,
2019), 696–719.
Teofil Josip Harapin (1883–1944), uno dei primi professori della Pontificia
Università Antonianum e Cofondatore della rivista Antonianum.
Daniel Patafta. Antonianum, XCV (Oct.–Dec., 2020), 781–834.

P ERIODICAL L ITERATURE

315

El debate teológico-político sobre el Reino en la Europa de entreguerras.
Josep M. Margenat Peralta, SJ. Estudios Eclesiásticos, 96 (Jan.–Mar.,
2021), 39–86.
Fascism, Race, and Religion in Interwar Transylvania: The Case of Father
Liviu Stan (1910–1973). Ionut Biliută. Church History, 89 (Mar.,
2020), 101–24.
“Bendita sea la Falange.” Religión católica y religión política en Falange
Española de las JONS (1933–1936). Jaime de Las Obras-Loscertales
Sampériz. Revista de historia Jerónimo Zurita, 95 (Autumn, 2019),
177–94.
Catholics, Protestants, and the Violent Birth of European Religious
Pluralism. Udi Greenberg. American Historical Review, 124 (Apr.,
2019), 511–38.
Lettere postulatorie per la concessione a san Lorenzo da Brindisi del titolo
di dottore della Chiesa. Vincenzo Criscuolo. Collectanea Franciscana,
89 (3–4, 2019), 611–719.
“Maior internationalitas.” L’internazionalizzazione del Collegio cardinalizio
durante il pontificato di papa Pio XII (1939–1958). Francesco Maria
Corvo. Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (3, 2020), 817–55.
Un curé dans la France de Vichy. Les “Impressions de guerre” de l’abbé
Joseph Brugerette (1939–1943). Louis-Pierre Sardella. Revue d’histoire
de l’Eglise de France, 106 (July–Dec., 2020), 309–39.
Ein Priester ohne Geschichte? In memoriam Erwin Hogg. Karl Volk.
Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 139 (2019), 153–74.
Die “Kriegsberichte” aus den Pfarreien des Erzbistums Freiburg. Zustände
und Entwicklungen am Kriegsende und in der ersten Nachkriegszeit.
Jürgen Brüstle, Annemarie Ohler, Norbert Ohler, and Christoph
Schmider. Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 139 (2019), 175–504.
Le cardinal Joseph-Marie Martin, archevêque de Rouen engagé dans
l’unité des chrétiens (années 1950–1960), d’après les archives
diocésaines. Jean-Baptiste Sèbe and Charles-Édouard Harang. Revue
d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, 106 (July–Dec., 2020), 341–58.
The YCW in Durban and Surrounds: 1952 to 1970. Stuart C. Bate. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–Dec., 2020), 650–80.
Church and Compressed Modernization: South Korea and Japan
Compared. Denis Kim, S.I. Gregorianum, 101 (3, 2020), 573–92.
Une intramondanisation des formes de l’ascèse. Albert-Marie Besnard,
témoin engagé de la spiritualité des jeunes catholiques durant les

316

PERIODICAL L ITERATURE
années 1960. Yann Raison du Cleuziou. Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de
France, 106 (July–Dec., 2020), 283–308.

El pensamiento eclesial de la revista “Vida Nueva” en el posconcilio. Jesús
Sánchez Camacho. Estudios Eclesiásticos, 95 (nr. 374, 2020), 631–70.
Undoing GDR Iconoclasm: The Return and Interpretation of a Spiritual
and Academic Heritage through the Building of the Paulinum in
Leipzig. Kim Groop. Church History, 88 (Dec., 2019), 1013–38.
Historical Research in the Czech Republic between 1979 and 2019 on the
Pre-Suppression Society of Jesus. Jakub Zouhar. Archivum Historicum
Societatis Iesu, LXXXIX (2, 2020), 467–96.
Una chiesa per la nazione. Movimento nazionale e risveglio religioso in
Ucraina tra “perestrojka” e indipendenza (1987–1995). Simona Merlo.
Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (1, 2020), 225–79.
Todo es gracia: Vida y pensamiento de Bernardino de Armellada,
OFMCap. (1930–2018). Jaime Rey Escapa. Collectanea Franciscana,
90 (3–4, 2020), 615–56.

AMERICAN
The Long Road to Sainthood: Indian Christians, the Doctrine of
Preparation, and the Halfway Covenant of 1662. Gregory Michna.
Church History, 89 (Mar., 2020), 43–73.
Transatlantic Discontinuity? The Clapham Sect’s Influence in the United
States. Ryan J. Butler. Church History, 88 (Sept., 2019), 672–95.
Denmark Vesey’s Church. Michael P. Johnson. Journal of Southern History,
LXXVI (4, 2020), 805–48.
History of the German Evangelical Lutheran St. Paul Congregation of
Fort Wayne, Indiana, from 1837 to 1887. H. G. Sauer. Lauren
Marinko, Translator. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 93
(Spring, 2020), 9–38.
A Nineteenth-Century New England Exegete Abroad: Adoniram Judson
and the Burmese Bible. John de Jong. Harvard Theological Review, 112
(July, 2019), 319–39.
Seventeen Centuries of Sin: The Christian Past in Antebellum Slavery
Debates. Paul Gutacker. Church History, 89 (June, 2020), 307–32.
Violence and Atheism in the Age of Abolition. Matthew Bowman. Church
History, 89 (Dec., 2020), 857–74.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

317

Remembering and Rejoicing: Reflections on the 150th Anniversary of
Concordia Publishing House: An Address at the Concordia Historical
Institute Annual Awards Banquet. Paul T. McCain. Concordia
Historical Institute Quarterly, 92 (Winter, 2019), 9–16.
A House with One Heart for the Triune God, Christ’s Church on Earth,
and the People of All Nations. Jack D. Ferguson. Concordia Historical
Institute Quarterly, 92 (Winter, 2019), 17–47.
Early History of the Concordia Publishing House Music Department.
Constance R. Seddon. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 92
(Winter, 2019), 49–71.
Renamed: The Living, the Dead, and the Global in Nineteenth-Century
U.S. Christianity. Hillary Kaell. American Historical Review, 125
(June, 2020), 815-39.
C. F. W. Walther Publishes an Impassioned Plea: “Compare the Word of
Christ with the Decrees of the Pope!” Missouri Synod’s 1878 Saint
Louis Edition of Martin Luther’s Passional Christi und Antichristi.
Daniel N. Harmelink. Concordia Historical Institute Quarterly, 93
(Summer, 2020), 9–39.
C. F. W. Walther’s Real Response to a Real Church: A Nuanced
Response to the Infallibility of the Pope and the First Vatican
Council. Benjamin J. Nickodemus. Concordia Historical Institute
Quarterly, 93 (Summer, 2020), 41–55.
Manhood and Mary Baker Eddy: Muscular Christianity and Christian
Science. Jonathon Eder. Church History, 89 (Dec., 2020), 875–96.
The Doubts of Their Fathers: The God Debate and the Conflict between
African American Churches and Civil Rights Organizations between
the World Wars. Stephen Tuck. Journal of Southern History, LXXVI
(Aug., 2020), 625–78.
Residential School Saint: The Life, Death, and Turbulent Afterlife of Rose
Prince of the Carrier Nation. Emma Anderson. Church History, 89
(Sept., 2020), 592–632.
“Thou Shalt Meet Thy Sexual Needs in Marriage”: Southern Baptists and
Marital Sex in the Postwar Era. Sarah Potter. Church History, 89
(Mar., 2020), 125–47.
The Chrysanthemum and the “Saint”: Kagawa’s Statue in the Washington
National Cathedral. Bo Tao. Church History, 89 (Sept., 2020), 567–
91.

318

PERIODICAL L ITERATURE

Catholic Reform and Local Racism: Vatican II and the Struggle for Civil
Rights in Cincinnati. Michael A. Skaggs. American Catholic Studies,
130 (Winter, 2019), 1–30.
Beyond Unity and Diversity: Race, Culture, and Communion Ecclesiology
in U.S. Catholicism. Susan Bigelow Reynolds. American Catholic
Studies, 130 (4, 2019), 31–58.
A Different Christian Witness to Society: Christian Support for Gay
Rights and Liberation in Minnesota, 1977–1993. Joshua I. Wenzel.
Church History, 88 (Sept., 2019), 720–50.

LATIN AMERICAN
The Creation of a Latin American Catholic Church: Vatican Authority
and Political Imagination, 1854–1899. Francisco Javier Ramón
Solans. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 71 (Apr., 2020), 316–36.
Redeeming Santo Domingo: North Atlantic Missionaries and the Racial
Conversion of a Nation. Christina Cecelia Davidson. Church History,
89 (Mar., 2020), 74–100.
Misiones escolapias en México (1921–1922 y 1922–1923). Enrique
Centelles. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, XLV (n. 89, 2021), 199–214.
Cambios en la conciencia eclesial en América Latina, previo a la
conferencia de Medellín (1968), Estudio a partir de la literatura
clasificada en la base de datos “Seladoc.” Rodrigo Polanco.
Cristianesimo nella storia, 41 (1, 2020), 171–224.
Os bispos e a Igreja do Brasil em Puebla. Memória de algumas
contribuições para a III Conferência Geral do Episcopado LatinoAmericano vistos há 40 anos de distância. Reuberson Ferreira & Ney
de Souza. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 79 (Dec., 2019), 713–37.
“Desde Fuera.” Il diario della Terza Conferenza generale dell’episcopato
latinoamericano del padre Cecilio de Lora SM. Silvia Scatena. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 115 (July–Dec., 2020), 681–713.
Cruzada pela família: os métodos de penetração no espaço público de um
movimento católico (2008–2017). Rodrigo Coppe Caldeira & Víctor
Gama. Revista Eclesiástica Brasileira, 79 (Dec., 2019), 571–90.

Other Books Received
Barth, Karl. The Epistle to the Ephesians. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic.
2017. Pp. 192. $30.00).
Carter, Jason A., and Andrew F. Walls. Inside the Whirlwind: The Book of
Job Through African Eyes. (Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications.
2017. Pp. 324. $38.00 paperback).
Cau, Maurizio, and Christoph Cornelissen (Eds.). I media nei processi
elettorali: modelli ed esperienze tra età moderna e contemporanea.
(Bologna: Il Mulino. 2020. Pp. 432. € 34,00 paperback).
Cavadini, Nancy, and Cecilia Davis Cunningham. Stories in Light. A Guide
to the Stained Glass of the Basilica at the University of Notre Dame.
(Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. Pp. xi, 232.
$24.00 paperback).
Christensen, Mark Z. The Teabo Manuscript: Maya Christian Copybooks,
Chilam Balams, and Native Text Production in Yucatán. (Austin: University of Texas Press. 2016. Pp. 321. $55.00).
Edwards, Dennis R., Tremper Longman, and Scot McKnight. 1 Peter.
[The Story of God Bible Commentary.] (Grand Rapids: Zondervan.
2017. Pp. 304. $29.99).
Champion, Justin, John Coffey, Tim Harris, and John Marshall (Eds).
Politics, Religion and Ideas in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century
Britain: Essays in Honour of Mark Goldie. [Studies in Early Modern
Cultural, Political and Social History] (Rochester, NY: The Boydell
Press. 2019. Pp. 363. $115.00). Contents: 1. Tim Harris,
“Constitutional Royalism Reconsidered: Myth or Reality” (Pp. 19–
37); 2. Dmitri Levitin, “Teaching Political Thought in the Restoration
Divinity Faculty: Avant-Garde Episcopacy, the Two Kingdoms and
Christian Liberty” (Pp. 39–57); 3. Justin Champion, “Violence,
Protest and Resistance: Marvell and the Experience of Dissent after
1670” (Pp. 59–80); 4. Jacqueline Rose, “Bulstrode Whitelocke and the
Limits of Puritan Politics in Restoration England” (Pp. 81–99); 6.
John Coffey, “The Assassination of Archbishop Sharp: Religious
Violence and Martyrdom in Restoration Scotland” (Pp. 101–19); 7.
S.-J. Savonius-Wroth, “Corruption and Regeneration in the Political
Imagination of John Locke” (Pp. 141–59); 8. Geoff Kemp, “Locke the
319

320

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED
Censor, Locke the Anti-Censor” (Pp. 161–80); 9. John Marshall,
“London, Locke and 1690s Provisions for the Poor in Context:
Beggars, Spinners and Slaves” (Pp. 181–201); 10. Delphine Soulard,
“The Reception of Locke’s Politics: Locke in the République des
Lettres” (Pp. 201–217); 11. Hannah Smith, “Court Culture and Godly
Monarchy: Henry Purcell and Sir Charles Sedley’s 1692 Birthday Ode
for Mary II” (Pp. 219–237); 12. Warren Johnston, “Thanksgivings
and the Signs of the Times: The Apocalypse in the Long Eighteenth
Century” (Pp. 239–256); 13. Gabriel Glickman, “The ‘Secret
Reformation’ and the Origins of the Scottish Catholic
Enlightenment” (Pp. 257–275); 14. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, “The
Surprising Lineage of Useful Knowledge” (Pp. 277–291); 15. Conal
Condren, “The Vicissitudes of Innovation: Confessional Politics, the
State and Philosophy in Early Modern England” (Pp. 293–310).

González, Justo L. Brief History of Sunday—from the New Testament to the
New Creation. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing. 2017. Pp. 176.
$ 16.00).
Graham, Barry F. H. Bohemian and Moravian Graduals: 1420–1620.
(Turnhout: Brepols. 2006. Pp. 641. € 150,00).
Greenstein, Edward L. Job: A New Translation. (New Haven: Yale
University Press. 2020. Pp. xxxvi, 248. $26.00).
Johnson, Andy. 1 and 2 Thessalonians. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans
Publishing. 2016. Pp. 367. $26.00 paperback).
Kulikowski, Michael. The Tragedy of Empire: From Constantine to the
Destruction of Roman Italy. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press. 2019. Pp. xxx, 381. $35.00).
Mathewson, David. Revelation: A Handbook on the Greek Text. (Waco:
Baylor University Press. 2016. Pp. 367. $34.99).
McCranor, Timothy, and Steven Michels (Eds). Science Fiction and
Political Philosophy. From Bacon to Black Mirror. [Politics, Literature,
and Film] (Lanham, Boulder, New York: Lexington Books. 2020. Pp.
viii, 241. $95.00).
Oropeza, B.J., and Steve Moyise (Eds.). Exploring Intertextuality: Diverse
Strategies for the New Testament Use of Texts. (Eugene: Cascade Books.
2016. Pp. xix, 325. $40.00 paperback).
Pollmann, Judith. Memory in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800. (Oxford:
Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. 231. $45.95).

OTHER BOOKS RECEIVED

321

Roberts, Mark D., Tremper Longman, and Scot McKnight (Eds.).
Ephesians. [The Story of God Bible Commentary.] (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan. 2016. Pp. 304. $20.99).
Taranto, Stacie. Kitchen Table Politics: Conservative Women and Family
Values in New York. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
2017. Pp. ix, 286. $55.00).
Totah, Mary David. The Joy of God: Collected Writings. (London and New
York: Bloomsbury Continuum. 2019. Pp. xvi, 188. $16.20,
paperback).
Wallace, Carey; illustrated by Nick Thornborrow. Stories of the Saints: Bold
and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage. (New York:
Workman Publishing. 2020. Pp. ix, 221. $24.95, paperback).