Brenna Moore
2022 ACHA President

THE CATHOLIC
HISTORICAL REVIEW
VOL. 109

SPRING 2023

NO. 2

Presidential Address to the
American Catholic Historical Association
2023
Rethinking Catholic Intellectual History
BRENNA MOORE*
This paper argues for a revitalization of Catholic intellectual history,
in particular the modern history of Catholic thought. The author
weaves her own personal narrative as a scholar of Catholic ideas with
suggestions for renewed commitment to the discipline of intellectual
history in relation to the themes of embodiment, attention/contemplation, outsiders, and humor.
Key words: Jewish intellectual history, John Tracy Ellis, Catholic
sensibilites and outsiders, attention and contemplation, humor

H

ow might we revitalize what can feel a bit like a curmudgeonly old
subfield, intellectual history, especially when it’s connected to something even more curmudgeonly and old, the Catholic Church? To answer
this question, I’d like to begin with a narrative of my own journey into this
field.
I consider myself fortunate to have come into the academic study of
Catholicism actually by way of Jews and Judaism. I went to a big state
school in Colorado, and a Jewish professor with a gray ponytail named Ira
Chernus introduced me to the study of religion. He taught a course I loved

* Brenna Moore is professor in the Department of Theology of Fordham University. She
would like to thank John Seitz for the generous help and feedback on this essay. Her email
address is: brmoore@fordham.edu.

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on Modern Jewish Thought. My first year in college I was blown away by
Ira’s lectures on Martin Buber, especially Buber’s answers to questions
about how we find our way to God now that religious belief has become so
challenging for modern people. His 1923 book, I and Thou, proposed a theology of relationality, the idea that God’s being is manifest in the interpersonal dynamics of authentic relations.
Growing up in small-town Michigan, of course I had never in my life
heard anything even remotely like that before, and loved it. I went to college
seeking a portal to another world, a way to imagine possibilities for thinking
and living, of which until then I had only hunched in high school through
my music and my subscription to Sassy magazine. Reading these ideas from
Jewish intellectuals made me feel aspirational and grown-up. Today, I still
feel a little pang of embarrassment remembering that, at the time, the only
way I could think to show Ira my enthusiasm for Buber was to print my
entire midterm paper on fancy stationery, embossed with tiny flecks of dried
flowers, like little rose petals, and dried hay. How that didn’t jam the dorm
printer I’ll never know. No idea how he could even read it. I just wanted to
show my professor that I was all-in. Eventually, I learned to simmer down.
With Ira, we learned about Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Elie
Weisel, and others in a field I now recognize as Jewish intellectual history
or modern Jewish thought. But these thinkers were not exactly taught to
me in terms of the dynamics of “them” (the Jewish teacher and authors)
welcoming “us” (outsiders like me) into their world in an atmosphere of
host and guest, like “interfaith dialogue.” No, Ira, along with the authors
we read, seemed to treat me as just an engaged interlocutor interested in
resources for thinking from anywhere, including Judaism, that were as
open to critique and admiration from anyone. There was something indelibly Jewish about these thinkers, to be sure. They were marked by Judaism,
especially the long Jewish tradition on thinking, debating, and writing as
almost sacred activities. But their visions had sights on a wider field of
humanity. I was invited to learn about them, but from them, too—about
our shared would, even about myself.
This all took place in a small undergraduate department of religious
studies in a big football and party school. With not many serious students,
the professors gave us majors who were interested, including John Seitz, my
husband, now a scholar of American religion, so much attention and care.
They were just looking for baseline, sober students. At one point in my
undergraduate program, Ira asked me what my own religious background
was. I said I was Irish Catholic. But I was very quick to assure him that

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there was nothing interesting there. From what I could tell, it seemed to
mostly mean boiled cabbage, silence, and alcoholism. I shook my head, as
in no, please don’t ask me to dig into this, it’s so boring! But Ira pressed, said I
might be surprised. In a course on nonviolence, he showed me things like
the Catholic peacemaking traditions of the twentieth century.1 When I told
him I had to do a research paper for my Spanish minor, he said of course I
must dig into the Spanish mystics. Hmmm. Maybe. I warmed to it a little.
When I decided to go to Boston for graduate school, it was Ira who
said that this would be the best city in the country to really finally dig into
the riches of Catholicism. He convinced me. I was not exactly sure what I
was doing in graduate school and I certainly would not have had any kind
of ability to talk about my preferred historical methods. I now see I was
looking for a kind of Catholic version of what Ira had shown with Judaism,
a kind of history of Catholic thought, combining biography, careful readings of the compelling ideas that came from specific religious and political
contexts, but which were broad and humanistic. Systematic theology,
where I was originally slotted as a graduate student, seemed not empirical
enough, not enough life and people and particularity. So I found my way to
the history of Christianity courses.
But at the time, in the early 2000s, the study of Catholicism was
totally energized in different directions. It was not so much the history of
thought but of practice, not ideas but sensory experience and embodiment,
not the theses of elite writers but religion as it was lived among the marginal and dispossessed, not just white writers from Europe and the US but
people all over the world, at pilgrimage sites, cemeteries, and the bedsides
of the sick and dying.2 Not religion at its most inspiring but in its most violent too, and strange. As you can probably tell from this litany, Robert Orsi
had arrived at Harvard when I began my doctoral program.3 Just as my
study of writers like Buber and Arendt pointed me to the most morally
1. This course became the basis of his book, Ira Chernus, American Nonviolence: The
History of an Idea (Ossining, 2004).
2. For an excellent overview of this turn in the history of religion, see Constance M.
Furey, “Body, Society, and Subjectivity in Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy
of Religion, 80, no. 1 (2012), 7–33.
3. It was Robert Orsi’s teaching that was most influential at the time, but also these
works in particular made an impact: Robert A. Orsi, “Is the Study of Lived Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live in? Special Presidential Plenary Address, Society for the Scientific
Study of Religion, Salt Lake City, November 2, 2002,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 42, no. 2 (2003), 169–74; Robert A. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious
Worlds People Make and the Scholars who Study Them? (Princeton, 2005).

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urgent, serious questions I had ever, ever considered asking—about things
like evil and God—this new way of thinking about religion felt just as
moral, just as urgent. It was much more than a “method” for studying
Catholic history, but was an insight into reality, a new answer to the question of where you look to learn what is real and true, a moral imperative to
expand the list of those we consider worthy of our attention and curiosity
and care. I can only say now that, even though I had my sights elsewhere,
I knew this attention to embodiment, this approach to lived religion, the
move away from elite writers was and is necessary, crucial.
It wasn’t just the field of Catholic history, of course, but I sensed that
the kind of scholarship I was interested in pursuing was not really where the
excitement was in the humanities. Studies about broad humanistic ideas
were handled with a certain kind of nervousness or skepticism. Topics like
the self, freedom, responsibility, love were seen as having an unspoken, tacit
reference to a dominant (usually male, white, Eurocentric) culture. Christian
thinkers and especially the ideas of theologians whose insights purported to
be universal, were seen as holdovers from an earlier history of religion that
had not yet shed its own narrow, ethnocentric perspective, masked as
“humanism.”4 The suspicion of big ideas meant that there was a turn to narrower and narrower frames of reference. It was a warning to be very suspicious of claims that ideas reached beyond their original context.5 At the same
time, there were theories and theorists taught and used in graduate school,
tools that historians of religion used to help interpret the data they studied.
But these theorists, at the time, were largely deconstructive, attuned to
unmasking the dynamics of power, a tool that could be used in any context.
I should add here that I wasn’t nostalgic for the old days because I
found these critiques, and explosions, of the canon to be totally convincing.
I still do. At the same time, I still felt strongly that the study of religious
ideas mattered, and not just the ideas about critique. I knew that ideas
always mattered to the people whose lives I read about, and I knew person4. Much has been written on this topic, but one short essay I found helpful is Michael
Puett, “In Praise of Play,” in: Why We Play: An Anthropological Study, ed. Roberte Hamayon
(Chicago, 2016), xv–xix.
5. See here Amy Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, the Divine in Religious Historiography,” in: Acute Melancholia: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion (New York, 2016).
Tyler Roberts, “Between the Lines: Exceeding Historicism in the Study of Religion,” Journal
of the American Academy of Religion, 74, no. 3 (2006), 697–719; Tyler Roberts, Encountering
Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism (New York, NY, 2013; online
ed., Columbia Scholarship Online, 2015), Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge,
MA, 2016).

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ally that to live with purpose, or to make a difference, ideas mattered a
great deal. But I also could see that when ideas were merely presented as
lifeless theories that floated around in the ether, or were imagined as
abstractions that could be “applied” to life, whatever that means, that was
totally inadequate. I knew even as a budding historian that was not how the
world worked. There were tensions to figure out.
It was a stroke of luck that my first TA job was for the fabulous scholar
of Jewish thought, Jay Harris. It returned me to my undergraduate roots.
In his Modernity and Judaism course, Jay Harris brought to life incredible
new thinkers, people like Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem, and Franz
Rosenzweig. I was completely back in the world of big, humanistic ideas
from the history of religion. We were reading, after all, some of the best
intellectuals of the twentieth century and asking what claim that their ideas
still had on us. But here is the key difference: the ideas were highly dependent on the particularities of modern Judaism; their thinking wasn’t dependent
upon a hidden secret Eurocentrism masked as universalism. Not at all.
These Jewish scholars had fled persecution in Europe. Their lives were lived
amid threat, violence, faint hope. This texture, this contextual particularity,
could not be overlooked. Modern Jewish thought cannot be thought outside of history and of lives; they flee, they hide, they blend in, they create
secret networks as the condition and fabric of their thought. So the ideas
were specifically Jewish with specific histories. But they weren’t thereby niche:
still it was expected that we responded to these authors as interlocutors,
they made claims upon us today about things like memory and the nature
evil, of responsibility, redemption.
Also, these thinkers were immersed in the religious stuff of their
Judaism and in the European intellectual traditions in which they were
trained. But all this was different, less triumphal and less presumptive
because it was combined with a cutting, visceral recognition of the
real dangers of Western thought. They were especially consumed, of
course, with the question of what elements of European thought were
most responsible for the rise of National Socialism. Taking notes as the
TA that semester, it struck me: this way of combining life and ideas, politics, biography, and thought—this was wonderful. And to study writers
who combined religious commitment with realism and critical consciousness—that’s what I wanted to do with Catholicism. But how?
Where were the Catholics like that? Who were the Catholic Bubers,
Arendts, Rosenweigs? It was so much tricker because the Catholic Church,
unlike Judaism, is so much more deeply entangled with Western power

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and doesn’t have this long, visible tradition of outsiderhood that marks so
much of the intellectual creativity of minority communities. And Catholicism doesn’t have the cultural commitment to critical thinking the way
Judaism does. (To put it mildly!). There was more too. Recently, my colleague Michael Pasquier reminded me of the classic 1955 essay by Monseigneur John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life.”6
Some readers may remember this piece: a devastating critique of the mediocrity of American Catholic intellectual culture. Msgr. Ellis claimed that
the weakest aspect of the Church lay in its failure to produce leaders in
intellectual circles. Catholics thinkers instead were life-long defenders of a
fortress, doing apologetics instead of substantive thought.
Although I was in graduate school about fifty years after Msgr. Ellis’s
scathing and actually kind of brilliant article, maybe his insight had something to do with why I ended up studying the Catholics who were most
connected to the European Jewish thinkers I admired so much. With the
help of generous people like the late great scholar for whom we grieve,
John W. Malley, my mentor, Amy Hollywood, and Stephen Schloesser, I
wrote my dissertation on Raïssa Maritain. She was a Jewish-born poet who
had assimilated into French secular laïcité in the late nineteenth century,
but was drawn eventually to Catholic mysticism and converted in 1905.7
But she considered herself a Jewish-Catholic, a designation she reclaimed
after she had to flee Europe in 1939 for North American: though a converted Catholic, still a Jew under Nazi law.
Yet things have changed so much in the field of Catholic history since
Msgr. Ellis published his essay. Now, I think, we are at a moment when
the study of Catholic thought and intellectual history could really be revitalized in wonderful ways. My sense now is that we can even more fully
integrate the insights from fields like Jewish studies and other subfields
whose center of gravity is the history of outsiderhood—African American
studies, postcolonial studies, women’s studies.
The trick is to have this outsider capacity for critique merging, as it
does in Raïssa Maritain, in Arendt, or in Baldwin, for example—to have
that merging with a willingness to think broadly, to think humanistically.
Ideas, and here I mean the relatively refined contributions of intellectuals
6. John Tracy Ellis, “American Catholics and the Intellectual Life,” Thought, 30 (1955)
351–88.
7. Sacred Dread: Raïssa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering, and the French Catholic Revival,
1905–1944 (Notre Dame, IN, 2013).

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and artists to big humanistic questions, are sometimes, but not always, a
mask for power. I believe we are at a moment in the humanities that is
weary of endless suspicions.8 We are also weary of secular modernity’s
promises, and eager for big, bold alternatives to the corrupt, bankrupt religious worldviews circulating in the domains of power. We are open to considering that the religious ideas of the past have something other than false
consciousness, imperialism, or illusion, and that instead, are one possible
historical resource to consider as we could move towards new ways of being
in the world. The buried ideas, we all know in the field of Catholic history,
are often found in archives, glimpsed in old correspondences, homilies,
out-of-print journals and dusty collections of poems. They require careful,
historical work, learning new languages, the standard tools of our craft.
What sorts of Catholic ideas might we excavate from the past? How can
they speak to us now, humanistically? Here are four sites of excitement as
I see it for a renewed Catholic intellectual history.
First, when you’re looking for creative, interesting sites of intellectual
history in Catholicism, one place is to the exiles, the insider-outsiders, the
pariahs. This means we have to expand who counts as Catholic. To be sure,
at its most basic, Catholic intellectual history would have to include the full
panorama of Catholic sensibilities: brilliant, empathetic, misogynistic,
abusive, criminal, pillaging, plundering, insecure, joyful, racist, achingly
dull, creative, disgusting, inspiring, in excess of both compassion and disdain. Catholic “thought” of course happens in all of these spaces. But I am
interested in ideas that might be life-giving. Without losing sight of the
dangers, I want to consider buried Catholic ideas that open up new frames
of reference, ideas that might point another way through some of our tired
conversations, toward unexpected ways of being in the world.
Catholic intellectual history can no longer be limited to who John
Tracy Ellis was looking for: just the white clergy and professional male
Catholics working solely within one national and cultural border, or even
solely within one confessional border. We need a more capacious understanding of who counts as a “Catholic thinker.”9 Again, I think we learn
8. My thinking here is indebted to Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, 2015),
and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC, 2003), 123–51.
9. James Heft, The Future of Catholic Higher Education (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2021) 130–132.; Brian Conniff, “John Tracy Ellis and the Figure of the Catholic Intellectual,” Catholic Education: A Journal of Inquiry and Practice, 10, no. 1 (2006), 76–88.

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from Judaism here. Consider Hannah Arendt’s powerfully vivid essay, “We
Refugees,” that came out in January 1943, before the worst horrors
inflicted upon the Jews were fully revealed.10 In this essay, Arendt breaks
down the tragic optimism of Jews who were trying to assimilate and forget
their past, what she called the parvenu or the upstarts. Arendt instead made
a case for the pariah (the outsider). She celebrates the refugees who refused
to bury their memories in the rush to assimilate. They never wanted to
become upstarts or up-and-comers, they preferred the status of conscious
pariah. For her it was the modern Jew’s salvation to accept that status as
outsider proudly while fighting for a more humane world, always with the
ones who are excluded, just as they were.
Among these Jewish thinkers in the pariah traditions Arendt listed
Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Rahel Varnhagen: not just the philosophers
or theologians, but a female writer in a man’s world, a short-story author
of the fantastical, a comedian. She had in mind wide-ranging intellectuals
who were committed to outsiders wherever they were. Arendt insists that
creativity happens from these perspectives of the wanderers who did not
just leave, but who were expelled outside the borders, whose thought, art,
writing and ideas proceeded to explode tired categories.
So who are Catholicism’s conscious pariahs? This kind of move might
turn historians’ attention to people like the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral,
who was born in 1893 and to this day remains known as the “spiritual queen
of Latin America.”11 Mistral was a Catholic, a lay woman and a Franciscan
oblate. Mistral lived through devastating crises of global magnitude: the rise
of xenophobia and dictatorships, genocide, world war, mass exiles around the
world.12 A wanderer who lived in Chile, Paris, Brazil, and New York, Mis10. Hannah Arendt, “We Refugees,” Menorah Journal, 31, no. 1 (1943), 69–77.
11. Hjalmar Gullberg, “Award ceremony speech,” (speech, Stockholm, Sweden,
December 10, 1945), available on Nobel Media AB 2019, accessed April 18, 2023,
http://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1945/ceremony-speech.
12. There are several excellent biographies of Gabriela Mistral: Licia Fiol-Matta, A
Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral (Minneapolis, 2002); Marjorie
Agosn, A Gabriela Mistral Reader (Fredonia, NY, 1993); Karen Patricia Peña, Poetry and the
Realm of the Public Intellectual: The Alternative Destinies of Gabriela Mistral, Cecília Meireles,
and Rosario Castellanos (Leeds, 2007). The work of Elizabeth Horan is unparalleled: Elizabeth
Horan, Gabriela Mistral: An Artist and Her People (Washington, DC, 1994). The University
of Chile maintains an extraordinary Spanish-language website with up-to-date secondary literature on Mistral, a detailed biography, and photos, at “Gabriela Mistral,” Gabriela Mistral,
Universidad de Chile and the Ministerio de Educación, 2003, accessed April 20, 2023,
http://www.gabrielamistral.uchile.cl. Finally, see Martin C. Taylor, Gabriela Mistral’s Struggle
with God and Man: A Biographical and Critical Study of the Chilean Poet (Jefferson, NC, 2012).

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tral was also a trailblazer in the transatlantic exchange of ideas. Immersed in
international networks of art and thought, her writing drew from indigenous
storytelling from Chile and Mexico, along with Tolstoy, and Chekov, and
Mexican religious figures, like Sor Juana de la Cruz. While Europe offered
her a clear chance to escape her origins, to join the elite intellectual circuit
and not look back, she refused. She never lost sight of the reality of the
people who have little control over their lives. Her psychological involvement
with the class from which she came ran deep. It is this kind of positionality
that enabled Mistral to imagine herself as a defender of Europe’s many midcentury refugees. She imagined herself as someone who would, as one of her
mystical, surreal poems narrates, “lick up” refugee footprints in order to hide
their tracks from their pursuers.13 (To me that’s very Franciscan of her, licking up something gross to make a point about love!) Mistral’s form of wild,
mystical insider-outsider hood is a brilliant beacon, undoing presumptions
about Latin America, about women, about indigeneity, about Catholicism,
and about European modernism itself.
Our openness to pariahs needs to include those who have wandered in
and outside of the Church too. One of my favorite historians, the late
Jesuit Michel de Certeau, offers a brilliant model of this kind of curiosity
in a chapter of The Mystic Fable called “Labadie the Nomad,” focused on
Jean de Labadie, a seventeenth-century French Pietist. Originally a Jesuit
priest, he became a member of the Reformed Church, before founding the
community which became known as the Labadists in 1669. De Certeau
described Labadie as “a man whose wanderings continue to elude the
learned, who only see him cross the narrow field of their competency, and
who leaves us nothing but his sandals.”14 Labadie wandered relentlessly,
and instead of abandoning the journey, de Certeau holds on, seeking to
understand what he called “migrations through the institutions of meaning.” 15 De Certeau stays with him, follows him as he crosses the field outside of Catholicism, like so many borderland seekers of the sacred de
Certeau loved: all “sorts of wanderers, like those Jesuits who become
Protestants, or the other way around.”16 I am interested in joining de
Certeau in the conviction that there is much intellectual vitality and creativity to be found in those who undertake these voyages in and out of the
13. Gabriela Mistral, “Footprint,” in: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, ed. and trans.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Albuquerque, 2003).
14. Michael de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, trans. Michael Smith, 2 vols. (Chicago,
1996-2015, here 1996), Volume 1: the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 293
15. Michael de Certeau. The Mystic Fable, 292.
16. Ibid.

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traditions, whose allegiances are fluid, and yet are shaped, indelibly, by
something called Catholicism.
Imani Perry, the scholar of African American history, provides a more
contemporary example. Perry grew up amid religious multitudes—her
mother and grandmother are Catholics from the south, her great-grandmother was Baptist, and the father she grew up with was Jewish. She
describes herself as “a child of the fragments of Christianity.” “I think of
myself as a seeker,” she explained in an interview, “and I respond to that
which resonates within, so my spiritual life is as promiscuous as my intellectual interests.”17 In her memoir Breathe, Perry writes to her sons, young Black
men in the United States: “In the Catholic tradition, there is a form of
grace—the sanctifying one—that is the stuff of your soul. It is not defined by
moments of mercy or opportunity. It is not good things happening to you.
Rather it is the good thing that is in you, regardless of what happens to you.”18
I found myself drawn to her reflections on grace because openness about her
fluid allegiances. We aren’t looking for Catholic heroes, but for stories that
illuminate the embodied complexity of Catholic ideas in the real world.
The embodied complexity of Catholic ideas in the real world. That brings
me to my second point: The issue of embodiment in Catholic history, and
its relation to thought. Catholic thought has always to be rendered with
sensuality on the page. Scholars of Catholic religiosity have been the leaders in the humanities with attention to the role of embodiment and sensory
experience in history. It was a special joy to participate in bestowing the
2022 Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Catholic Historical
Association to Caroline Walker Bynum. I remember so clearly learning
from her work that it wasn’t mind or body, ideas or senses, but the whole
world of medieval religion, which in her hands simply exploded the longheld notions of duality and mind and body.19 Indeed, it is the texture of a
life that is most often missing from accounts of Catholic ideas and writers.
17. “More Beautiful,” Imani Perry interview with Krista Tippet, On Being podcast,
September 26, 2019, accessed April 10, 2023, https://onbeing.org/programs/imani-perrymore-beautiful/.
18. Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Boston, 2019), 29.
19. Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the.
Human Body in Medieval Religion (NY: Zone Books, 1992); Robert Orsi, “Doing Religion
with Your Whole Body,” Practical Matters, 6, no. 2 (2013), 1–6. Orsi’s work has also been
explicit that it is never mind or body, but ideas are felt, experienced, transformed in embodied
relational worlds. See for example, Robert Orsi, “The problem of the holy,” in: The Cambridge
Companion to Religious Studies, ed. Robert Orsi, [Cambridge Companions to Religion]
(Cambridge, UK, 2012), 84–106.

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As Robert Orsi has written, “other people’s lives are always there, in
one way or another. This is true even when the matters we are thinking
about are huge and abstract, when we ask questions about religion and the
state, for instance, or religion and violence. There are always lives within our
ideas.”20 To draw people in, the more concrete, the better: to what degree
can we evoke the sound of a page turning, the light on the bookshelf, the
feel of holy water on the forehead, the nervousness to share a first poem?
In my own work I show how we cannot understand, for example, how
Jacques Maritain’s ideas made such an impact in places like the U.S., Chile,
and Uruguay without pausing on the materiality that sustained the circulation of his ideas. People who were working on Maritain’s texts were not content with words. They gathered up photos of Jacques—just like the relics that
the most ardent of the faithful Christian disciples have always gathered: bits
of holy cloth, tooth, and bone—and redistributed them among themselves as
relics. He signed letters with kisses and scribbled memories entangled with
visions of God and photos.21 The energy circulating between desire, materiality, and holiness is central to the movement of Catholic ideas. Historians
of Catholicism are, perhaps, trained to see this better than anyone.
In addition to embodiment and pariahs, I offer a third key catalyst for
a better Catholic intellectual history: attention and contemplation. Readers
know how much historical work demands long, sustained efforts at focused
attention, an ability to delve into the strange specificity of the luminous
worlds we study. It requires languages, careful analysis of detailed evidence,
focused attention, and then we have to step back and see how they fit into
larger patterns, for intellectual historians, larger patterns of thought, the big
humanistic ideas. Yet we live in a world of soundbites and clickbait, pop up
ads and interruptions that shatter deep thoughts and undercuts focus.22 The
diminishment and dispersal of our attention I think is a huge deal we have
20. Robert Orsi, “Theorizing Closer to Home,” HDS Bulletin, 38 (Winter/Spring,
2010), 29.
21. I elaborate on this in Brenna Moore, Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Resistance at the
Edges of Modern Catholicism (Chicago, 2021).
22. Sherry Turkle, The Empathy Diaries (New York, NY, 2021); Peter Suciu, “Americans Spent On Average More Than 1,300 Hours On Social Media Last Year,” Forbes, June
24, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/petersuciu/2021/06/24/americans-spent-more-than1300-hours-on-social-media/?sh=51dab12d2547; Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror: Reflections on
Self-Delusion (New York, NY, 2019), 178–79; Jia Tolentino, “What it Takes to Put Your
Phone Away,” New Yorker, April 4, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/
29/what-it-takes-to-put-your-phone-away; Erin Woo, “Teenage Girls Say Instagram’s
Mental Health Impacts are No Surprise,” New York Times, October 5, 2021.

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yet to really reckon with.23 But the Catholic intellectual tradition has rich
resources for reflection on attention, focus, indeed contemplation that is
required for deep attention to the other.24 These ideas are worthy I think of
retrieval given the assaults on our attention we are all experiencing and their
importance for historical work of any sort. The best artists and writers tell
us too that silence—rather than the noise of the crowd, whether Twitter or
friends and parents—is the soil of great creativity. “The impulse to create
begins—often terribly and fearfully—in a tunnel of silence,” Adrianne Rich
wrote in her wonderful lecture “Arts of the Possible.”25 Or as Susan Sontag
put it, “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.”26 Catholic
intellectual traditions have much to offer here.
But that’s just one example of the kind of very Catholic ideas worth historically retrieving today. In that old 1955 essay of Msgr. Ellis, he quotes the
then-president of the University of Chicago, Robert M Hutchens.
Catholics, Hutchens said, have “the longest intellectual tradition of any institution in the contemporary world,” yet the Church has ignored most of the
best ideas. Admittedly, that was eighty-five years ago. But it’s true; historians
of Catholicism are all working in a really long, old tradition. That means we
work with ideas that pre-date so many of the things that seem natural and
intractable in our own time—not only the attention economy, but also the
carbon economy, neoliberalism, and the widespread veneration of merit in
our unequal society. We can rummage around the past, looking for thinkers
in Buenos Aires and Jerusalem, Uruguay and Cairo, and explore ideas that
can point to other ways of thinking, feeling, and relating to one another that
23. Jenny Odell, How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (Brooklyn, 2019).
24. Just a few of the resources I have found helpful on this topic include Adolfo
Nicolás, S.J., “Depth, Universality, and Learned Ministry: Challenges to Jesuit Higher Education,” (lecture, given at conference on Jesuit Higher Education: Shaping the Future for a
Humane, Just, and Sustainable Globe, Mexico City, April 23, 2010), http://www.sjweb.
info/documents/ansj/100423_Mexico%20City_Higher%20Education%20Today_ENG.pdf.
Jose Ignacio Tellechea Idigoras, Ignatius of Loyola: The Pilgrim Saint, trans. Corneluis
Buckley S.J. (Chicago, 1994). José Carlos Coupeau, S.J., “Five personae of Ignatius of Loyola,”
in: The Cambridge Companion to the Jesuits, ed. Thomas Worcester, S.J. (Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 32–51. For an excellent collection of Ignatius’s own writing, see Joseph Munitiz,
S.J., and Philip Endean, S.J., eds., Saint Ignatius of Loyola: Personal Writings, (London, 1997).
Terence O’Reilly, The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Contexts, Sources, Reception,
[Jesuit Studies series] (Netherlands, 2020); Pico Iyer, “A Chapel is Where You Can Hear
Something Beating Below Your Heart,” in: A Sense of Wonder: The World’s Best Writers on the
Sacred, the Profane, and the Ordinary, eds. Brian Doyle (Ossening: Orbis, 2016), 167.
25. Adrianne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York, NY,
2002), 150.
26. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY, 2004), 118.

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267

remind us of the oddness of our own ways. We don’t have to start from
scratch. Catholic tradition is so huge, full of crooks and bozos, but there is
also a long chain of interesting thinkers and artists who I consider our intellectuals, who might be found among the Catholic pariahs, the exiles, who
must be studied in relation to embodiment, who will have things to teach us.
My final and fourth point I would make about revitalizing Catholic
intellectual history takes us to the theme of humor, and to my final story.
A few weeks ago my ten-year-old son Jonah asked me a question. “Mom,
what do you do when your students are so rowdy, when they’re talking
when you’re talking, laughing, making jokes, fooling around? How do you
get them to calm down?” That’s his experience in a classroom. Clap, clap
clap. I laughed and said I wish my problem was too much laughter, too
much joyful talking in class. That sounds kind of glorious! When I walk
into the classroom, I often feel like I’m pulled into a kind of undertow of
the students, so often so quiet, so sullen, hiding behind screens. I know it’s
common to blame students. But I think they are afraid to get to know me,
afraid for me to really know them, afraid to look like anything other than
aloof, afraid of this thing I teach called Catholicism. This fear is contagious, and sometimes even I start to feel it. I sense myself hiding, feeling
nervous and a little afraid, and then annoyed at them. In a classroom,
where we show what intellectual life looks like, I hate to admit it, sometimes there is a vicious cycle of contagious fear and intimidation.27
One of my favorite Jewish writers, Amos Oz, says you cannot laugh
and be afraid at the same time.28 And there is, just like in Judaism, a tradition of Catholic humor. There is so much absurdity in Catholicism that
our best writers, our best thinkers are funny. If intellectual history is to be
revitalized, we have to attend to its humor, lift that up as a precious heartbeat of Catholic thought. For instance, the brilliant Irish novelist Colm
Tóibín in a recent interview was asked about the cultural silence around
sexuality, and if he had come out as gay to his Irish Catholic parents?
“Have I come out to my parents as homosexual? My brothers and sisters
haven’t even come out as heterosexual!”29 Or I think of John O’Malley’s
lectures that were so funny and warm, in contrast to the somber topics like
Church Councils, when he used to make us laugh in class about how bru27. Parker Palmer, “The Culture of Fear: Education and the Disconnected Life,” in: The
Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (San Francisco, CA, 1998).
28. Amos Oz and Fania Oz Salzberger, Jews and Words (New Haven, CT, 2012).
29. Colm Tóibín, “How Colm Tóibín Burrowed Inside Thomas Mann’s Head,” New
Yorker, September 12, 2021.

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RETHINKING CATHOLIC INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

tally dull it must have been at Trent, a meeting that went on for eighteen
years.30 Or my mentor Amy Hollywood (herself not a Catholic but shaped
by the tradition in many ways) giving a brilliant lecture on Meister Eckhart
at Harvard, and stopped midway and asked a packed auditorium, “Is it
weird that I’m wearing jeans?” There is for sure a tradition of Catholic
humor that comes from facing total absurdity.
All of this is to say, intellectual life is compelling, not because it is elite
or obscure, but it always takes place within life; as Adrianne Rich said, poetry
happens alongside “blood and bread.”31 To me that points, too, to one of the
great ideas of Catholicism: something beautiful, holy, and true is not out
there, inaccessible on high, but dwelling in here, among us, in life. As I
worked on this talk, I realized a better title would be “Reviving Catholic
Intellectual History”; reviving is more what I have in mind, with the etymology of the word vivire, to live again, and its connection with life, vitality,
consciousness. It is to pick up again the wonderful conversation historian
James T. Fischer began in his 1995 essay, “Alternative Sources of Catholic
Intellectual Vitality.”32 We have to push against pressures that make the
study of ideas feel unconnected to life, make intellectuals feel inept and powerless, within a system that depends on the alienation of humanistic thinkers.
We will always need many methods for understanding the past: cultural history, institutional history, micro histories: they are all critical. I
have been trying to point to a revived intellectual history to give a boost to
just one subfield that can feel out of step with our own times. We can be
guided by what goes on in Jewish thought. In Catholicism, humanistic
questions can come alive for us through the presence of thinkers and artists
who consciously align themselves with outsiderhood, or by virtue of their
social status end up there. We can think with their embodied experience,
humor, creativity, and ideas. We might have a new generation of young
students eager for wisdom from anywhere, like I felt enthralled by Jewish
thought—randomly! as an absolute clueless outsider a long time ago. It
pulled me out of my own world before I could return to it much later. You
just never know what happens when old ideas and people are dusted off
and put into the world. You just never know.
30. Brenna Moore, “A Tribute to John W. O’Malley, S.J.,” Jesuit Higher Education: A
Journal, 11, no. 2 (2022), 8–10.
31. Adrianne Rich, Arts of the Possible: Essays and Conversations (New York, NY,
2002), 150.
32. James T. Fisher, “Alternative Sources of Catholic Intellectual Vitality,” U.S.
Catholic Historian, 13, no. 1 (1995), 81–94.

Real Presence and Mere Painting on the
Counter-Reformation Altar
IAN VERSTEGEN*
This article proposes a new paradigm for coordinating altarpiece
painting and Eucharistic devotion after Trent. By both accepting the
demotion of painting’s holy efficacy and the establishment of the
Eucharist as the most important sacrament, a new order of priorities
on the high altar began to develop. Painting in this era could no
longer provide an authoritative source of divine matter, and its relational function was increasingly reinforced. However, there was a
complex phenomenological and theological accommodation of the
divinity and relationality as painting (on the side altars, that is,
because the high altar was increasingly reserved for the Host) sought
to regain or substitute the presence that came to be associated with the
space above the altar. By examining a series of paintings—featuring
reproduced sculptures, miraculous images, and visions—one is able to
fully appreciate how painting either told stories to arouse devotion or,
in order to compete with the Host, to charge the central part of the
altarpiece with a holy substitute.
Keywords: iconoclasm, altarpieces, tabernacles, efficacy
Introduction
It is well known that in the sixteenth century there was both a removal
of altarpieces from high altars throughout Italy, and the—sometimes coordinated—placement of sacramental tabernacles on those same altars.
While some altarpieces were sought by emboldened collectors, and the
sacrament was placed on the altar in response to the calls of bishops and

* Ian Verstegen is Associate Director of Visual Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a PhD student of Marcia Hall, and wrote his dissertation on Federico Barocci.
He has written two books on Federico Barocci and edited a volume on the Della Rovere
family, and his current work deals with Urbino military architects and engineers and military
diplomacy. His email is verstege@sas.upenn.edu. He would like to extended his thanks to
Marcia Hall, with whose encouragement these ideas were first developed long ago, as well as
Andrew Casper, who also read an early version and improved it, and deserves his thanks.

269

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING

FIGURE 1. Raphael, Madonna of Foligno, 1511–1512, tempera, canvas and panel,
10.1 × 77.9 (308 × 198 cm), stored in the Vatican Museum. Painting is in the
public domain.

the faithful, the replacement of a modern pictorial work of art with an
three-dimensional tabernacle, housing Christ’s miraculous flesh, is a more
significant phenomenon with deeper meaning for the status of images in
the Catholic Reformation.
As scholars of early modern Italian imagery have become comfortable
with a pan-European “reform,” including a Catholic variant, it is clear that
forms of iconoclasm—the diminishing of the status of images and their
scope—also occurred in Catholic lands. This self-censure helps to explain
the coordinated demotion of pictures and the elevation of the Eucharist.
When seen together, one can observe a dynamic struggle taking place on
the church altar, wherein priests and prelates sought to reclaim efficacy—
the ability to obtain salvation—in light of the doctrines promoted by the
Council of Trent.
A good example of this transition can be seen in the erection of a
sacramental tabernacle on the high altar of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in
Rome and the eventual removal of Raphael’s altarpiece, the Madonna of

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271

FIGURE 2. Girolamo da Carpi, Sacramental Tabernacle, 1553, formerly of Santa
Maria in Aracoeli; taken Alberto Serafini, Girolamo da Carpi: pittore e architetto
ferrarese (1501–1556) (Rome, 1915), fig. 176, p. 353.

Foligno.1 Following the gift of a tabernacle, designed by Girolamo da
Carpi in 1552, from Pope Julius III to the Franciscan church in 1553, the
friars began reserving the host on the high altar. By that date, Raphael’s
altarpiece had been on the high altar for some time. When the altar was
definitively redesigned around 1565, the altarpiece was removed and sent
to Foligno, while the icon of Mary was placed on the altar instead (in what
exact configuration it is not known). What does this say about the coexistence of the tabernacle and famous altarpiece on the same altar? Did an
unhappiness with its relationship with the tabernacle—perhaps it blocked
the putto on the bottom—lead to the search for its replacement?
It has to this point not been emphasized enough how popular narratives of Counter-Reformation art are in harmony with this movement.

1. Carlo Pietrangeli, “Il tabernacolo cinquecentesco dell’Aracoeli al Museo di Roma,”
Bolletino dei Musei Comunali di Roma, 8 (1961), 26–33; Sylvia Ferino Pagden, “From Cult
Images to the Cult of Images: the case of Raphael’s altarpieces,” in: Peter Humfrey and
Martin Kemp, eds., The Altarpiece in the Renaissance (New York, 1990); Kirstin Noreen, “The
High Altar of Santa Maria in Aracoeli: Recontextualizing a Medieval Icon,” Memoirs of the
American Academy in Rome, 53 (2008), 99–128.

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING

Hans Belting saw the extinguishing of the “image” and the rise of “art”;
Victor Stoichita instead stressed how meta-pictorial devices marked the
artistic image.2 Later writings sought to reduce the apparent teleology of
such systems: Klaus Krüger noted how religious altarpieces lost the quality
of being a “thing” in favour of an “illusion,” but could still signal cultic
interests with the metaphor of incarnation, while Alexander Nagel and
Christopher Wood have noted the dialectic of the “substitutional” image
with one that is “performative.”3 In larger art historical debates, such polarities have taken on new importance as irreconcilable regimes of belief surrounding images and their proper study.4 Put simply, art and cult continued, and the tabernacle on the high altar helped decide their relative place.
This paper seeks a resolution of the paradoxical situation in which
scholarship finds itself, by joining discussion of painting with architectural
debates on the proper display of the Eucharist. The Eucharist, supremely
elevated in Catholic doctrine, became the element that arbitrated issues of
the economy of saintliness and artistry in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. The Catholic solution decided at Trent culminated in a new
role for Catholic imagery that paved the way for the metapictorial precisely
because such imagery was clarified as not efficacious. One could argue that
image cults continued unabated.5 Such an approach has the advantage of
fuzzying the borders between apparently separate domains of art and cult.
However, modern artists could no longer be counted on to produce miraculous images and Christopher Nygren writes that “Titian is the only artist
of Vasari’s terza maniera to have been credited by his contemporaries with
2. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art
(Chicago, 1994); Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into Early Modern MetaPainting (Cambridge, 1997).
3. Klaus Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren: Ästhetische Illusion in der Kunst der
frühen Neuzeit in Italien (Munich, 2001); Alexander Nagel and Christopher Wood,
Anachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010); c.f. Christopher Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction:
Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008).
4. William John Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of
Images (Chicago, 2005); Marie-Jose Mondzain, “Can Images Kill?” Critical Inquiry, 36, no. 1
(2009), 20–51.
5. For studies of miraculous images, see Erik Thunø and Gerhard Wolf, eds., The
Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance (Rome, 2004); Fredrika Jacobs,
“Rethinking the Divide: Cult Images and the Cult of Images,” in: James Elkins and Robert
Williams, eds., Renaissance Theory (New York, 2008), 95–114; Megan Holmes, “Miraculous
Images in Renaissance Florence,” Art History, 34 (2011), 432–65; Sheila Barker, “Miraculous Images and the Plagues of Italy, c. 590–1656,” in: Sandra Cardarelli, ed., Saints, Miracles and the Image: Healing Saints and Miraculous Images in the Renaissance (Turnhout, 2017),
29–52.

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having painted a miraculously efficacious image.”6 Relics and reliquary
images, just like the myriad saints that the Catholics chose to limit to the
canonical, were authorized only after laborious processi.7 That which was
saintly and could serve as an efficacious intermediary to Christ was limited,
and art was left in many respects with free reign for new possibilities.
The consecrated host became the main focus of life and liturgy in the
late medieval period.8 The cult of saints diminished, and that of Christ and
the canonical saints grew, as piety became more affective.9 In 1215, the
Lateran Council made mandatory the elevation of the host at Mass, and in
1264 Pope Urban IV established the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament
(Corpus Christi), giving rise to numerous confraternities and scuole.10
During this time, the high altar was hidden behind a monumental rood
screen, enhancing desire to view the real flesh of Christ.11 The evolving
altarpiece form—not necessary for the liturgy but aiding it—came to be
implicated in the elevation of the host at the altarpiece. Patricia Rubin sur6. Christopher Nygren, “Titian’s Miracles: Artistry and Efficacy Between the San
Rocco Christ and the Accademia Pietà,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 57, no. 3 (2015), 320–49.
7. On the general theme of control in the Counter-Reformation period, see Anne
Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain
(Minneapolis, 1992); Wietse de Boer, “Social Discipline in Italy: Peregrinations of a Historical Discipline,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 94 (2003), 294–307; Ute Lotz-Heumann,
Institutions, Instruments and Agents of Social Control and Discipline in Early Modern Europe
(Frankfurt, 1999); Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg, eds., Social Control in
Europe, 2 vols. (Columbus, 2004), Volume I: 1500–1800.
8. Nathan Mitchell, Cult and Controversy: The Worship of the Eucharist outside Mass
(New York, 1982); Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991); Matteo Al Kalak, Mangiare Dio:una storia dell’eucaristia (Turin, 2021).
9. For the shift from relics to the Eucharist, see Patrick Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of
Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton, 1978), 28; Godefridus J. C. Snoek, Medieval Piety
from Relics to the Eucharist: A Process of Mutual Interaction (Leiden, 1995). For the rise of affective piety, see John Hirsh, “The Origin of Affective Devotion,” in: The Boundaries of Faith: The
Development and Transmission of Medieval Spirituality (Leiden, 1996), 11–30; and Rachel
Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary (New York, 2002).
10. Mitchell, Cult and Controversy; Rubin, Corpus Christi.
11. For the relations of visibility, exposure and concealment of the medieval host, see
Jacqueline Jung, “Beyond the Barrier: The Unifying Role of the Choir Screen in Gothic
Churches,” Art Bulletin, 82, no. 4 (2000), 622–57; Anna Moraht-Fromm, ed., Kunst und
Liturgie: Choranlagen des Spätmittelalters: Ihre Architektur, Ausstattung und Nutzung (Stuttgart,
2003); Donal Cooper, “Projecting Presence: The Monumental Cross in the Italian Church
Interior,” in: Robert Maniura and Rupert Shepherd, eds., Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and other Objects (Aldershot, 2006), 47–62; and Søren Kaspersen and Erik
Thunø, eds., Decorating the Lord’s table; on the Dynamics between Image and Altar in the Middle
Ages (Copenhagen, 2006).

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mises that works like Perugino’s Resurrection for San Francesco al Prato,
Perugia, leaves a blank space at the bottom just for this accommodation.12
Although Trent reiterated the relative priority of the Eucharist, it was
merely the clarification and culmination of longstanding practices. Miri
Rubin notes that already in the late medieval period, “the Eucharist was
[becoming] a special type of sacrament, an arch-sacrament;” one which was
increasingly isolated as “the eucharist was being removed from other practices with which it had traditionally been assimilated.”13 Trent served to
codify a new reality and clarify, once and for all, the relative importance of
the Sacraments and the predominance of the Eucharist.
Just as the host was always a virtual presence in Renaissance art, and
the host-like quality of the altarpiece and viewer formed a dyad, its role
was accordingly enhanced after the close of the Council of Trent. So
greatly was the host enhanced, it came to be housed in large altar-tabernacles that literally replaced altarpieces on the altar (see Figure 3).14 The
situation is fascinatingly shown in Counter-Reformation paintings where
altars, in the style of before and after the Council of Trent, or miraculous
subjects, are shown.15 Where one is shown, the other is not: where altars
are depicted, the full power of the Eucharist must be represented in the
altar-tabernacle position, or a combination of relics, objects or miraculous
visions. This amounts to a reformulation of the meaning of the visionary
12. Patricia Rubin, “Commission and Design in Central Italian Altarpieces c. 1450–
1550,” in: Eve Borsook and Fiorella Gioffredi, eds., Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550: Function
and Design (Oxford, 1994), plate 122. For the relation between the elevated host and the
altarpiece, see Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces, 1215–1460: Form, Content, Function, 2 vols.
(Groningen, 1984–1990, here 1984), 12–17; Roger Crum, “Facing the Closed Doors to
Reception? Speculations on Foreign Exchange, Liturgical Diversity, and the ‘Failure’ of the
Portinari Altarpiece,” Art Journal, 57 (1998), 5–13; and Beth Williamson, “Altarpieces,
Liturgy, and Devotion,” Speculum, 79, no. 2 (April 2004), 341–406. For a skeptical reaction
to such interpretations, see Charles Hope, “Altarpieces and the Requirements of Patrons,” in:
Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, eds.
Timothy Verdon and J. Henderson (Syracuse, 1990), 535–71.
13. Rubin, Corpus Christi, 36, 35.
14. In the following, the word tabernacle shall be used to indicate sacramental receptacles that are a part of the high altar or altar of a sacramental chapel and not the chapel frames
themselves, as is sometimes done. Although ciborio is a term frequently encountered to
describe this very element, to be consistent this paper will reserve ciborium for canopied structures built in imitation of antique practices.
15. Counter-Reformation is used as a chronological term, without all the baggage
assumed by early twentieth-century usages of it relating to a universal, centralized reaction
against Protestantism. Although Catholic reform could have been used, the author also does
not agree with that term’s generality, so Counter-Reformation remains indispensable.

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FIGURE 3. Giovanni Pezzini, Interior of Sta Croce, Florence (detail), 1861–1862,
canvas and oil paint, stored in Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Florence. Image stored in
the Uffizi Galleries, Gallery of modern art; image is state property, available under
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

altarpiece.16 In Perugino’s time, the painting accommodates the host and
what takes place in the painting itself is not visionary. Later, coinciding
with the widespread usage of massive altar-tabernacles, qualitatively different entities appear in paintings, visions “of divinity soliciting the worshipper to enter and participate in that vision.”17
It is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate how a type of altarpiece
that shows altars bears out the new importance of the Eucharist. These
16. For the visionary altarpiece, see Victor Stoichita, Visionary Experiences in the Golden
Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995); Krüger, Das Bild als Schleier des Unsichtbaren; Krüger,
“Authenticity and Fiction: On the Pictorial Construction of Inner Presence in Early Modern
Italy,” in: Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern
Europe, eds. Reindert L. Falkenburg, Walter S. Melion, and Todd M. Richardson (Turnhout, 2007). On the prehistory of the Baroque visionary altarpiece, see John Shearman, Only
Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1992), esp. 102–06.
17. Marcia Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco,
Caravaggio (New Haven, 2011), 74.

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observations help stake out the space between art and the sacred, and clarify the spaces that were allowed for artists to display artistry and where they
dared not go for lack of any salvific religious efficacy. This paper shows,
then, how a contradiction between artistry and piety, a contradiction
shown most clearly in the response to the Last Judgment by Michelangelo,
began to be resolved in a way that those at the time could not foresee would
lead to the secularization of art taken for granted today. This story is familiar for the Protestant North, but these comments indicate how a kind of
Catholic Reformation and a Catholic self-censuring “soft” iconoclasm produced similar results.18
After discussing the rules for the display of the Eucharist in the postTridentine church, this paper outlines a variety of Catholic iconoclasm in
changing doctrines that demote the image in connection to the efficacious
Eucharist. It then goes on to show paintings from the Catholic tradition of
Italy, Spain and the Spanish Netherlands that indicate how the Eucharist
overpowers all art on the altar. Finally, turning away from relations enacted
within paintings, it will reconsider once again paintings themselves, and
their viewers and the consequences of the preceding observations for the
new Eucharistic role given to the altarpiece in terms of devotion.
The Eucharist and the New Ordination of the Altar
The cult of images was affirmed in the post-Tridentine period, but certain concessions were made to the Protestants that changed the role of
images, and, therefore, altarpieces in the liturgy of the Catholic Mass.19
These subtle changes created a crisis in the viability of the mere image in
opposition to the substantial and miraculous host. The result is that the relationship between the Host and the individual taking communion gained priority above all other sacramental relationships and was the standard of communing with God. The Eucharist therefore was ever-present in dealings with
images and subtly informed the internal formal organization of such images.
Faced with pressures from Protestants, who questioned the transubstantiation of the host in the Mass and the role of Mary and the saints, the
Catholic Church responded by emphatically asserting the miraculous tran18. See Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Religious Art (Chicago, 2011).
19. For an overview, see Giuseppe Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images from Calvin to
Baronius (New York, 1992); Christian Hecht, Katholische Bildertheologie im Zeitalter von
Gegenreformation und Barock: Studien zu Traktaten von Johannes Molanus, Gabriele Paleotti und
anderen Autoren (Berlin, 1997).

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substantiation of the host into the flesh of Christ.20 However, the Church
acceded points about Mary, the saints, relics and pictorial art in the liturgy.
The result was quite tangible, as clerics were instructed to bring the host
into veneration on the high altar—in the process displacing art from this
focal point. As Alexander Nagel has noted, this amounts to a form of
Catholic iconoclasm, with all the anxieties it normally serves to impute in
the Protestant case.21
The Council of Trent not only upheld the miracle of the Eucharist
(denied by Calvin, and qualified by Luther) but it also asserted that of all
the sacraments, the Eucharist was the most important: “there is found in the
Eucharist this excellent and peculiar thing, that the other sacraments have
then first the power of sanctifying when one uses them, whereas in the
Eucharist, before being used, there is the Author Himself of sanctity.”22
Almost in consequence, the cults of the saints and of works of art were
reduced.23 In the twenty-second session (September 17, 1562) it was conceded that:
although the Church has been accustomed at times to celebrate certain
masses in honor and memory of the saints; not therefore, however, doth

20. Zwingli and Calvin denied the transubstantiation, while Luther argued for consubstantiation, or, as recently argued by Thomas Osborne (“Faith, Philosophy, and the Nominalist Background to Luther’s Defense of the Real Presence,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 63
[2002], 63–82), Luther did not offer a theological position at all, but rather argued on faith.
For Luther on transubstantiation, see Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church
(1520), trans. Albert T. W. Steinhäuser, Frederock C. Ahrens, and Abdel Ross Wenz, in:
Luther’s Works, 55 vols. (Philadelphia, 1900–1986, here 1959), XXXVI, 28–35; Confession
Concerning Christ’s Supper (1528), trans. Robert H. Fischer, in: Luther’s Works, ed. Robert H.
Fischer (Philadelphia, 1961), XXXVII, 317; The Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ—
Against the Fanatics, trans. Frederick C. Ahrens, in: Luther’s Works, ed. Abdel Ross Wentz
(Philadelphia, 1959), XXXVI, 335–61. On Luther, see Herman Sasse, This Is My Body:
Luther’s Contention for the Real Presence in the Sacrament of the Altar (Minneapolis, 1959). For
Calvin, see Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1559), Book IV, xvii, 1: “First, the
signs are bread and wine, which represent for us the invisible food that we receive from the
flesh and blood of Christ.”
21. Nagel, The Controversy of Religious Art, especially on Giberti, 239–54.
22. Thirteenth Session, “On the excellency of the most holy Eucharist over the rest of
the Sacraments,” The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and
trans. J. Waterworth (London, 1848), Chapter III, 77; c.f., John F. McHugh, “The Sacrifice
of the Mass at the Council of Trent,” in: Sacrifice and Redemption: Durham Essays in Theology,
ed. Stephen W. Sykes (Cambridge, 1991).
23. Hubert Jedin, “Entstehung und Tragweite des Trienter Dekrets über die
Bilderverehrung,” Theologische Quartalschrift, 116 (1935), 143–88, 404–29; Ernest Graf,
trans., A History of the Council of Trent, 2 vols. (London and New York, 1957–1961); Scavizzi,
Controversy on Images, 75–78.

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING
she teach that sacrifice is offered unto them, but unto God alone, who
crowned them; whence neither is the priest wont to say, “I offer sacrifice
to thee, Peter, or Paul”; but, giving thanks to God for their victories, he
implores their patronage, that they may vouchsafe to intercede for us in
heaven, whose memory we celebrate upon earth.24

Already in the thirteenth session (October 11, 1551) on “Concerning the
Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist,” Chapter V, “On the cult and veneration to be shown to this most holy Sacrament,” had determined that,
“Wherefore, there is no room left for doubt, that all the faithful of Christ
may, according to the custom ever received in the Catholic Church, render
in veneration the worship of latria, which is due to the true God, to this most
holy sacrament.”25 Later, in the twenty-fifth session (December 3–4, 1563),
where images and relics are discussed together, in conformity with the
Council of Nicaea, honour is referred instead to the original and not the
image. In other words, latria is denied to images. It is stated again that while:
images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints,
are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honour
and veneration are to be given them: not that any divinity, or virtue, is
believed to be in them, on account of which they are to be worshipped;
or that anything is to be asked of them; or, that trust is to be reposed in
images, as was of old done by the Gentiles who placed their hope in idols;
but because the honour which is shown them is referred to the prototypes
which those images represent; in such wise that by the images which we
kiss, and before which we uncover the head, and prostrate ourselves, we
adore Christ; and we venerate the Saints, whose similitude they bear: as,
by the decrees of Councils, and especially of the second Synod of Nicaea,
has been defined against the opponents of images.26

This is a reversal of the scholastic deference to images, which seems to have
begun with worship of the crucifix.27 Both Aquinas and Bonaventure had
apologized for images.28 In other words, contrary to an iconophilic image
theology and popular visual piety of the late medieval period, Trent denied
that divine power resided in images.
24. Canons and Decrees, 155.
25. Canons and Decrees, 79.
26. Canons and Decrees, 234.
27. William Wood Seymour, The Cross in Tradition, History and Art (New York, 1898),
398–401. Seymour is equivocally stating “The Council of Trent declined to give a clear decision in this matter, only desiring that due worship should be given to images, but did not
define what ‘due worship’ was” (400).
28. For a review, see Cooper, “Projecting Presence,” 49–50. As an anonymous reviewer
pointed out, Thomas’ position on images was never criticized after Trent.

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The issue was decided based on the signifying relation and whether it
was real or not. Calvin specifically wrote that the relation of the host to the
body of Christ was metaphoric, merely a referring sign, and the Catholics
refuted him by affirming the referential connection.29 But once Christ’s
connection to the host was emphatically affirmed, this left the indexing
power of Mary, the saints and images of them at the level of mere signification. This view is contrary to the standard narrative according to which
the cult of saints not only continued unabated but even accelerated, as did
the use of images. They did, but a subtle shift had occurred where the literality of the saint-image-Eucharist connection was shaken.
The result was that in the post-Tridentine universe, the Eucharist bore
almost all divine assistance that was formerly distributed among images
and relics (or rather, images and relics were efficacious only insofar as they
made reference to the Eucharist, i.e., Christ).30 Furthermore, frequent
(non-ocular) communion was promoted, divorced from the confines of the
Mass and literally ever-present.31 The focalization of interest on the altar
toward the miraculous stuff of the Host, and away from works of art (especially painting), must have subtly altered the phenomenology of the church
space in the mind of contemporary beholders, where the power of the Host
in its tabernacle upon the altar overtook other symbols in importance.
Pictures retained importance as instructional tools, although they too
took on more and more of a Christological focus.32 They more or less carried
on a standard function in the aisle chapels, especially when joined into a
linked program, but the high altar was increasingly given over to an altartabernacle rather than a painting.33 Especially in the context of extended
exposition of the host, as in the Forty Hours (Quarant’ Ore) Devotion associated with Saints Filippo Neri and Carlo Borromeo, there is no question
29. Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image, 93–94.
30. On Renaissance “magic” in its manifestation in regard to images, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989), Chapter 11. On distributed “personhood” as an explanation of animism, see Alfred Gell, Art and
Agency: An Anthropological Theory (New York, 1998). In this paper, the author is arguing that
this distribution historically came to encompass fewer agents, i.e., the miraculous host.
31. John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” Past and Present, 100
(1983), 29–61.
32. Peter Humfrey, “Altarpieces and Altar Decorations in Counter-Reformation
Venice and the Veneto,” Renaissance Studies, 10, no. 3 (1996), 371–87.
33. In the event that an altarpiece was chosen, especially in a provincial center, the subject matter referred more and more to the Eucharist. As Humfrey writes, there was a “huge
expansion in the number of high altarpieces with Christological subjects”; Humfrey, “Altarpieces and altar dedications,” 376.

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING

that mere art had no place.34 As this paper ultimately will show, this
changed the function of Counter-Reformation painting, which had to earn
its keep in a new way under the pressure of competition from the high altar.
First, the due veneration of the host immediately suggested architectural changes to complement and display it. Early Renaissance church
architecture was simple and unified, and often didn’t leave a place for an
altarpiece.35 However, in this period there was already devotion to the
Eucharist. Already in the fifteenth century, wall tabernacles became popular, creating a permanent locus for display of the Eucharist outside of the
liturgy.36 Even before the close of the Council of Trent this movement was
afoot—in Florence, where Savonarola set up a wooden tabernacle on the
high altar of the duomo, and in Siena, where Vecchietta’s tabernacle from
the Ospedale was mounted on the high altar of the duomo. Such initiatives
to move the Eucharist culminated in the efforts of the Bishop of Verona,
Matteo Giberti (reigned 1524–1543).37 San Carlo Borromeo, in the chapter on the “Tabernacle of the Most Holy Sacrament” in his Instructiones
fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae, ordered that the tabernacle be located on
the high altar and adorned in a fit manner; his instructions passed into the
Roman Missal and Ceremonial of the Bishop, becoming ecclesiastical law in
1614 in the Rituale Romanum.38 Placement on the high altar was intended
34. See Mark S. Weil, “The Devotion of the Forty Hours and Roman Baroque Illusion,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 37 (1974), 218–48, esp. 220–35;
Mitchell, Cult and Controversy. On Neri and the display of the host, see Pietro Giacomo
Bacci, Vita di San Filippo Neri, (1636); Frederick Ignatius Antrobus, ed., The Life of St. Philip
Neri, 2 vols. (London, 1902–03), I, 154.
35. See the useful discussion in Henk van Os, “Painting in a House of Glass: The
Altarpieces of Pienza,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 17, no. 1 (1987),
23–38.
36. For Florence, see Eve Borsook, “Cults and Imagery at Sant’ Ambrogio in Florence,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Instituts in Florenz, 25, no. 2 (1981), 147–202; for
Siena, see van Os, “Painting in a House of Glass”; for Rome, see Thomas Pöpper, “‘. . . una
certa opera di marmoro che vulgare se chiama tabernaculo’: Zu zwei identifizierten römischen
Sakramentstabernakeln: nebst einem Exkurs zu Andrea Bregno, Giovanni de Larigo und den
Fenster-Aedikulen des Palazzo Raffaele Riario (La Cancelleria) in Rom,” Jahrbuch der
Berliner Museen, 45 (2003), 39–63.
37. Archdale A. King, Eucharistic Reservation in the Western Church (New York, 1965),
179, 201; c.f., Otto Nussbaum, Die Aufbewahrung der Eucharistie (Bonn, 1979). A brief review
of these developments is given in Alexander Nagel, The Controversy of Renaissance Art.
38. Carlo Borromeo, Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae (1577), Eng. trans.
Evelyn Carole Voelker, Charles Borromeo’s ‘Instructiones fabricae et supellectilis ecclesiasticae,’
1577. A Translation with Commentary and Analysis (Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University,
1977), chapter XIII, “The Tabernacle and the Most Holy Eucharist”; Rituale Romanum
Paule V. Pontificis Maximi iussu editum (Rome, 1615); c.f., Milton Lewine, The Roman

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281

for perpetual adoration, not just during the elevatio; thus rood screens had
to be taken down, not only to open the visibility of the host, but also to aid
the lay people in communion.39 Almost all major churches after Trent
received altar-tabernacles on the high altar.40
For famous churches that had such sacramental tabernacles, one may
think of Santa Croce in Florence (see Figure 3), the Orvieto Duomo, the
Gesù and the Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, and the Milan Duomo.41
These altar-tabernacles—and similar structures like canopied ciboria all’an-

Church Interior, 1527–80 (Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1960), 82–3; Dalma
Frascarelli, “Arte e Controriforma: l’altare maggiore nelle Instructiones fabricae et suppellectilis di Carlo Borromeo,” in: I cardinali di Santa romana chiesa, collezionisti e mecenati, 6
vols., ed. Marco Gallo (Rome, 2001–2003, here 2001), I: Quasi oculi et aures ac nobilissimae
sacri capitis partes, 24-37.
39. For the removal of the rood screens in the two mendicant churches of Florence, see
Marcia Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation. Vasari and Duke Cosimo in Sta. Maria
Novella and Sta. Croce 1565–1557 (Oxford, 1979).
40. On the Christian altar, see Josef Braun, Der christliche Altar in seiner geschichtlichen
Entwicklung, 2 vols. (Munich, 1924), II, 623–48. For pre-Tridentine altars, see Hans Caspary, Das Sakramentstabernakel in Italien bis zum Konzil von Trent, Gestalt, Ikonographie und
Symbolik, Kultische Funktion (Munich, 1965); and Maurice Cope, The Venetian Chapel of the
Sacrament in the 16th Century (New York, 1979); and for Counter-Reformation altars, see
Anna Forlani Tempesti, ed., Altari e immagini nello spazio ecclesiale: Progetti e realizzazioni fra
Firenze e Bologna nell’età della Controriforma (Florence, 1996); Cristina De Benedictis, ed.,
Altari e Committenza: Episodi a Firenze nell’età della Controriforma (Florence, 1996); Carlo
Cresti, “Altari fiorentini controriformati: lineamenti di fortuna e sfortuna critica,” in: Altari
controriformati in Toscana: architettura e arredi, ed. Carlo Cresti (Florence, 1999), 9–73. Of
course, many high altar complexes, including tabernacles, were torn down in the nineteenth
century as part of the neo-Gothic revival. Cathedrals and the major Roman basilicas did not
have an altar-tabernacle because altars at which the bishop or pope might officiate were not
allowed to have them; it is also possible that Marian churches resisted sacramental tabernacles
on their high altars (for example, the Chiesa Nuova). On the Roman basilicas, see Steven
Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in
S. Maria Maggiore (New York, 1996); on Marian churches, see Giles Knox, “The Unified
Church Interior in Baroque Italy: S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo,” Art Bulletin, 82, no. 4
(2000), 679–701, esp. 689.
41. For Orvieto Cathedral’s sacramental tabernacle (commissioned in 1554 and in place
by 1564), see Marietta Cambareri, “A Study in the 16th Century Renovation of Orvieto
Cathedral: The Sacramental Tabernacle for the High Altar,” in: Saggi in Onore di Renato
Bonelli, ed. Corrado Bozzoni et al., 2 vols. (Rome, 1992), II, 617–22; for the Gesù, see Joseph
D. C. Masheck, “The Original High Altar Tabernacle of the Gesù Rediscovered,” Burlington
Magazine, 112, no. 803 (1970), 110–13; for the Aracoeli’s tabernacle (now in the Museo di
Roma) begun in 1552, see Carlo Pietrangeli, “Il tabernacolo cinquecentesco dell’Aracoeli al
Museo di Roma,” Bolletino dei Musei Comunali di Roma, 8 (1961), 26–33; for the Milan
Duomo, see S. Benedetti, “Un’aggiunta a Pirro Ligorio: Il tabernacolo di Pio IV nel Duomo
di Milano,” Palladio, 25 (1978), 45–64.

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING

FIGURE 4. Drawing of Host-Communee metaphor within a painting and new
Host-Communee relationship with painting. Ian Verstegen, Drawing of HostCommunee metaphor, 2023, drawing.

tica—are monstrous affairs, insurmountable screens to the choir with side
doors for entry. They are almost as substantial as the rood screens that they
universally replaced, effectively pushing back a much more modest choir
space (retrochoir) reserved for the clergy and leaving the laity with access
to the high altar. All over Italy, altarpieces—even venerable images—were
taken down. Either there was no room for painting (except for small
sportelli on the tabernacle) or paintings were cast off to the side of the
choir.42 In a sense this maintained them in the altar area, but it destroyed
the proximity that allows a communee-host metaphor to arise between
believer and altarpiece (see Figure 4).43
This can be illustrated in Rubens’s altarpiece for the Chiesa Nuova (see
Figure 5).44 As a pictorial frame that incorporates another revered image, it
is a picture tabernacle (Bildtabernakel).45 In such pictures no altar is present.
Most often the historic image floats in the picture space and is adored, more
42. In some cases, there were gains for painting, as for instance in the case investigated
by Paul Hills, in which lateral paintings were devised to surround the tabernacle. These
remained, however, a different kind of painting, like an altarpiece but more like a mural; Paull
Hill, “Piety and Patronage in Cinquecento Venice: Tintoretto and the Scuole del Sacramento,” Art History, 6, no. 1 (1983), 30–43.
43. In other words, the transitive dimension investigated by John Shearman (Only Connect), in which the viewer completes the picture as a participant in its composition, is destroyed.
44. For discussions of this much-investigated painting, see, in addition to Belting and
Stoichita, Michael Jaffe, Rubens and Italy (Oxford, 1977).
45. Martin Warnke, “Italienische Bildtabernakel bis zum Frühbarock,” Münchner
Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 19 (1968), 61–102; Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image; Iris Krick,

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283

FIGURE 5. Peter Paul Rubens, The Adoration of the Madonna Vallicelliana, 1608,
Rome, Chiesa Nuova, oil on canvas and slate, 13.9 × 98.4 (425 × 250 cm), stored
in Chiesa di Santa Maria in Vallicella, Rome, Italy. Photograph courtesy of Mattis
by Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license, cropped,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rome,_Chiesa_di_Santa_Maria_in_Va
llicella_005_-_Main_altar.JPG.

or less naturalistically, by surrounding figures. Nevertheless, images like the
Madonna del Soccorso (Gregorian Chapel, St. Peter’s), the Madonna della
Clemenza (Cappella Altemps, Santa Maria in Trastevere), and the Salus
Populi Romani (Cappella Paolina, Santa Maria Maggiore) are nominal relics
(Lucan Madonnas, miraculous images) and share in the distributed sacramentality (host, relic, image) that had been lost with the Edicts of the
Council of Trent. Each of these images was sanctioned as miraculous and
therefore suitable for the object of cult worship; they were proven to be efficacious conduits to the one godhead of Christ.46
Römische Altarbild malerei zwischen 1563 und 1605: ikonographische Analyse anhand ausgewählter Beispiele (Taunusstein, 2002).
46. For these Roman icons, see Pietro Amato, De vera effiegie Mariae: antiche icone
romane (Rome, 1988); Gerhard Wolf, Salus Populi Romani: Die Geschichte römischer Kultbilder
im Mittelalter (Weinheim, 1990).

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING

Rubens’s earlier, rejected version had life-sized figures adoring a
painted version of the Madonna Vallicelliana above, with which a viewer
could relate as in traditional altarpieces. But these were cast off into the laterals in the final version. What remains are attendant angel figures that are
surrogates for us, the viewers, who behold the Madonna Vallicelliana above.
Because this is a Marian church, no monumental tabernacle is present
(Cirro Ferri’s tabernacle that can be seen in the photograph was added
later).47 The Marian relic is like the relic of Christ’s body, for which the
painting becomes a Bildtabernakel, a pictorial tabernacle, for the miraculous image. The term has become familiar to us today as an index of
metapictoriality, but the fact that Rubens’s altarpiece type is inspired, as
pointed out by Steven Ostrow, by a sculpted tabernacle suggests how this
painted tabernacle is other than a traditional altarpiece.48 Functionally,
Rubens’s painting is only that in medium; it really is a receptacle for the
miraculous image.
Almost diagrammatic of the new sacramental role of altar painting is the
frequent appearance of the Eucharist as the subject of an altarpiece (Adoration, Disputation, etc.) as a self-sufficient subject.49 A prominent example is
Rubens’s Real Presence in the Holy Sacrament in the Sint Pauluskerk,
Antwerp.50 Various church fathers discuss and consult texts to fathom the
47. This can be seen in Andrea Sacchi’s record of the solemnities for the canonization
of Filippo Neri (1622, Vatican Pinacoteca), reproduced in La Regola e la Fama, 322, where
no tabernacle is present. A remarkable Marian counterpart to the altarpiece coupled with
tabernacle is the Marian painting above a Marian reliquary, as for example is seen at the pilgrimage church of Scherpenheuvel, where the miraculous silver reliquary housing an image is
below a painting by Theodor van Loo.
48. Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome, 174–80; Warnke, “Italienische Bildtabernakel bis zum Frühbarock.”
49. This is in addition to tapestries and wall frescoes celebrating the Eucharist, such as
Agostino Ciampelli’s fresco of the Adoration of the Sacrament (1601–3) from the sacristy ceiling of the church of the Gesù in Rome; Howard Hibbard, “Ut picturae sermones: The First
Painted Decorations of the Gesu,” in: Baroque Art: The Jesuit Contribution, eds. Rudolf Wittkower and Irma B. Jaffe (New York, 1972), 36, 42–3; Gauvin Bailey, Between Renaissance
and Baroque: Jesuit Art in Rome, 1565–1610 (Toronto, 2009).
50. Reproduced in Cynthia Lawrence, “Confronting heresy in post-Tridentine
Antwerp,” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 55 (2004), 86–115, fig. 1, p. 88. For similar
paintings, see also Ventura Salimbeni, Glorification of the Eucharist, 1600, church of San
Pietro, Montalcino; Francesco Vanni, Disputation of the Eucharist, 1606, Duomo, Pisa. Naturally, there were plenty of examples of Adoration of the Eucharist before Trent; one example
is Sassetta’s Arte della Lana Altarpiece, now destroyed; c.f., Machtelt Israëls, “Sassetta’s Arte
della Lana Altar-Piece and the Cult of Corpus Domini in Siena,” Burlington Magazine, 143
(2001), 532–43. Two other examples are given in Craig Harbison, “Religious Imagination
and Art-Historical Method: A Reply to Barbara Lane’s ‘Sacred versus Profane,” Simiolus, 19,

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285

FIGURE 6. Federico Zuccaro, The Most Holy Trinity Venerated by the Seven
Archangels, c. 1600, Rome, Gesù.

mystery of the holy host, centrally placed in a monstrance. The Eucharist
now shows quite clearly the activated power at the altarpiece’s center that
would beg to be occupied by other suitably potent subjects. Related examples
are the number of paintings of adoring angels that look up to a flash of light
bearing the symbol of the Trinity or, in a Franciscan or Jesuit context, the
trigram (“IHS”), such as Federico Zuccaro’s altarpiece of The Most Holy
Trinity Venerated by the Seven Archangels in the Gesù (see Figure 6).51
no. 31 (1989), 198–205. However, these examples, as the Sassetta altarpiece shows, were
often for Congregations of Corpus Domini rather than for parish churches. Closely related
are examples of the Last Supper marking the Institution of the Eucharist: Federico Barocci,
Chapel of the Sacrament, Duomo, Urbino; Andrea Emiliani, Federico Barocci: 1535–1612
(Bologna, 1985), II, 330–41.
51. Bonita Cleri, ed., Federico Zuccari: le idee, gli scritti: atti del Convegno di Sant’Angelo
in Vado (Milan, 1997), 227, fig. 6. See also (in De Benedictis, Altari e Committenza, 9–10)
Jacopo da Empoli’s Exaltation of the Name of Maria, 1592, San Remigio, Florence; and El
Greco’s Adoration of the Name of Jesus, late 1570s, National Gallery, London (see Gabriele
Finaldi, The Image of Christ [New Haven, 2000], 122). In the sense that the burst of light is
cloudlike, Hubert Damisch sees it as using the same denotation system of the divine; A Theory
of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd (Stanford, 2002), 51.

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The altarpiece versus the altar-tabernacle was often an either-or
proposition, as already suggested by the Siena duomo, where the move of
Vecchietta’s tabernacle coincided with the removal of Duccio’s Maestà
from the high altar. An interesting example is provided by Urbino’s cathedral, which still has a Chapel of the SS. Sacrament to the left of the altar.
The Archbishop of Ravenna, with pastoral authority over Urbino, urged
the Urbinates to relocate the host on the high altar, but lack of money to
commission a proper tabernacle caused them to stall.52 When Federico
Zuccaro later offered a free altarpiece for the Chapel of the Sacrament,
they finally considered moving the altar-tabernacle.53 This uncoupling of
image and tabernacle is no doubt due to the fact that especially in churches
with retrochoirs, it was desirable to move the altarpiece to allow adoration
of the Host from behind the altar.54
Further evidence suggests that altarpieces were not preferred where
monumental tabernacles resided was already provided, such as in the
aforestated example of Santa Maria in Aracoeli in Rome, which received
Girolamo da Carpi’s new-style tabernacle in 1553, and Raphael’s Madonna
di Foligno (Vatican, Pinacoteca), which was eventually moved and replaced
with the icon of the Madonna Advocata.55 An example of concerted renovations to the high altar that can still be seen today is the high altar of the
Augustinian church of Sant’Agostino in Rome, which possesses both a
monumental tabernacle and a reliquary icon (Figure 7).56 In these cases, an
52. Cardinal Giulio Feltrio della Rovere, Archbishop of Ravenna, to the Communal
Council, 10 January 1565, stored in Biblioteca Universitaria, Urbino, Consigli dei Quaranta,
vol. II, 1557–1572, f. 118; Franco Negroni, Il Duomo di Urbino (Urbino, 1993), 80. Della
Rovere’s urgings came, obviously, before the stipulation relating to cathedrals had been
decided.
53. Federico Zuccaro, Letter from Zuccaro to the Canons of the Cathedral, September
1589, Urbino, Archivio della Cappella del SS. Sacramento, Risoluzioni Consigliari, 1581–
1589, 107; Negroni, Il Duomo di Urbino, 98.
54. This was expressly stated in regard to Santa Croce, Florence, when the friars
explained to Duke Cosimo de’ Medici that the removal of the altarpiece on the high altar
would permit seeing “the elevation of the host, and on the altar once could place a ciborium
or crucifix, as in S. Spirito, the Annunziata and S. Piero Maggiore.” See the letter of July 21,
1566, in: Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 18.
55. An analogous case happened earlier when the high altar was renovated at SS.
Annunziata in Florence, and Perugino’s Assumption of the Virgin altarpiece was removed; c.f.
Jonathan Nelson, “The high altar-piece of the SS. Annunziata in Florence: history, form, and
function,” Burlington Magazine, 134, no. 1127 (1997), 84–94. The Annunziata’s tabernacle is
mentioned in passing below.
56. For the high altar, decorated in the 1620s, see Anna Maria Pedrocchi, “Giovan
Lorenzo Bernini e Santi Ghetti: l’altare maggiore in Sant’Agostino a Roma, nuovi documenti
e precisazioni,” Bolletino d’Arte, 90, no. 133–134 (2005), 115–26.

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FIGURE 7. High altar of Sant’Agostino, Rome. Livioandronico2013, Sant’Agostino
(Rome)—Interior HDR, July 26, 2015, photograph, https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Sant%27Agostino_(Rome)_-_Interior_HDR.jpg. Cropped, available
under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

efficacious pre-Reformation cult-image replaced a traditional altarpiece,
confirming that the altar in general became the site of relics. The consequences are clear for artists, since they cannot manufacture such a relic.
They are relegated to painting or, especially, sculpting its tabernacle
(including the tabernacle itself, reliefs and surmounting crucifix).57
It is worth dwelling on the lack of efficacy of religious art here. Patricia
Rubin has noted how what was earlier a Kultbild—a cult picture serving
the liturgy—was translated in the sixteenth century into a Bildkult, a cult
celebrating the genius of the artist.58 More technically, Alexander Nagel
has noted how under the rapid change of artistic style, older works were
less often substituted and increasingly treated in their unique and unsub57. For a useful list of small crucifixes atop post-Tridentine tabernacles, see John Paoletti, “Wooden Sculpture in Italy as Sacral Presence,” Artibus et historiae, 13, no. 26 (1992),
85–100, here 98n18.
58. Rubin, “Commission and Design in Central Italian Altarpieces c. 1450–1550.”

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stitutable “performative” historicity, which is close to the definition of a
relic.59 It was precisely Raphael’s modernity that discounted him for religious efficacy. Ironically, his death thirty years before the publication of
Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite now nominated him for a new kind of reliquary
quality: his works now could not be substituted.
Renaissance subjects take on Eucharistic meaning when their position
relative to Christ’s body in the painting duplicates that of the act of taking
communion (Mary as altar) or protecting Him (Mary as tabernacle).60 This
paper is adding the further claim that once the divinity of an intercessory
universe was limited by the Tridentine church, figure-altar relations within
a painting become literally Eucharistic as well; no longer metaphors, they
are indexes of the act of communion. Thus, even a painting depicting a
miracle, like Francisco Ribalta’s Christ Embracing Saint Bernard (1620–25)
in the Prado, Madrid, is literal.61 In the image, St. Bernard is in a trancelike state as Christ appears to him. It might seem to be the reward of great
piety, and that Christ appears from above because Bernard was meditating
piously on the crucifixion. There is a long history of imaginative devotion
in which devotees are asked to imagine helping Christ down from the
cross. However, the Eucharistic meaning becomes central, where Christ is
host-like on the altar table and has been miraculously transubstantiated
from mere wafer into living being.62
In the case of the Ribalta altarpiece it is nonsense to say that Christ is
Eucharistic. The true source of the Eucharist is not also a symbol of itself.
59. Alexander Nagel, “Fashion and the Now-Time of Renaissance Art,” Res: Journal of
Aesthetics and Anthropology, 46 (2004), 33–52.
60. Examples are the numerous depictions of kneeling subjects (the Kings in the
Epiphany, etc.) before the Christ child, who is seated upon a cloth of honor; c.f., Maurice
Vloberg, L’Eucharistie dans l’art (Paris and Grenoble, 1946); Barbara Lane, Altar and the
Altarpiece: Sacramental Themes in Early Netherlandish Painting (New York, 1984); Maurice B.
McNamee, Vested Angels: Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Paintings (Leuven,
1998); Heike Schlie, Bilder des Corpus Christi: Sakramentaler Realismus von Jan van Eyck bis
Hieronymus Bosch (Berlin, 2002).
61. Reproduced in Freedberg, Power of Images, 288. See further by Ribalta, St. Francis
Embraces the Crucified Christ. 1620, Valencia, Museo de Bellas Artes; reproduced in Finaldi,
The Image of Christ, 122.
62. This example was discussed by Freedberg (The Power of Images, 287–88), who
stressed the real-life dramas that implicated these objects and provided the background
knowledge for those looking at such an image. The author appreciates the implication of practices in his account, is making the complementary argument that comportment at the altar
was another source of background knowledge. These two approaches are not exclusive;
Corpus Christi dramas would certainly enhance the mystery of the Eucharist on the altar, see
Rubin, Corpus Christi, 271–87.

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This is the substance of Craig Harbison’s critique of Barbara Lane’s theory
of sacramental allusion in Netherlandish art; the new realism did provide
the viewer real presence.63 But if this was true for Jan van Eyck and his
contemporaries, it is much less clear after Trent. An image became merely
an image and could not provide presence like it once could. Now the image
of Christ was in some sense Eucharistic because it is in close proximity to
the Eucharist. Thus, one has to nuance his understanding of these images
as the miracle of Christ coming to life to a saint-before-an-altar-at-whichthe-miraculous-host-comes-alive. This puts the situation in more reasonable terms, for while the believer is convinced that Christ certainly
appeared before Bernard, there is an aetiology to the situation that explains
the context. This becomes clear in numerous examples.
In the post-reformation period, quite in general images are supplemented
with real presence: by the figure of Christ, obviously the most potent, the
Virgin Mary and other saints (perhaps invoked by relics at the altar), and
finally miraculous images, whose heavy panel construction becomes a surrogate for the figural presence of the depicted figures of Christ and the saints
and becomes a suitable locus of power for the viewer. Formally, the construction of the new kind of altarpiece is literally a question of poles of Eucharistic
power and three-dimensional personages (or at least substantial sculptures or
heavy icon-relics take this place). Images of miraculous statues-come-to-life
are also sacrament made flesh, stand-ins for the absent host.
Trent, it will be recalled, denied authority to images. In its place, it
ordered that “the bishops shall carefully teach this, that, by means of the
histories of the mysteries of our Redemption, portrayed by paintings or
other representations, the people be instructed, and confirmed in (the habit
of) remembering, and continually revolving in mind the articles of faith.”64
Following closely on Trent, Gabriele Paleotti argued that the believer must
avoid idolatry and remember that one was looking on the divinity itself and
not the image: “we are adoring Christ, the Virgin, and the saints represented in the images; and when we kneel in before their images, it amounts
to kneeling before themselves.”65 This might lead to a clever observation
63. Harbison, “Religious Imagination and Art-Historical Method.”
64. Canons and Decrees, 235.
65. Bishop Gabriele Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, ed. Paolo Prodi
(Los Angeles, 2012), 138; Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane (1582), in: Paola Barocchi (ed.), Trattati d’arte del cinquecento fra manierismo e controriforma (Bari, 1961), II, 117–509,
here 257: “Nello adorare dunque le sacre imagini di Cristo, della Vergine e de’ santi, adoriamo
Cristo, la Vergine et i santi rappresentati nelle imagini; e quando ci inginocchiamo davanti le loro
imagini, e’ quanto ci inginocchiassimo davanti essi…”

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that explains away these visions as the real saint, hence avoiding idolatry.
However, this is a theological point. Paleotti, on good theological grounds,
asserted that praying to an image was like praying to the saint. However,
for an artist, this is another matter. Here the problem is one of matching
the power of the miraculous host that had been elevated beyond its prior
position. The question then is phenomenological, of the way of imparting
a formal presence to a painting in the nave, away from the High Altar, to
compensate for what one would habitually expect to see there—i.e., the
presence of the Host.
Catholic Iconoclasm
As noted, the changes here documented regarding the Eucharist and
the altar are part of what may be called a large-scale process of Catholic
Reformation and Catholic iconoclasm. Indeed, the Catholics were not
completely dismissive of Protestant challenges. All aspects of sacred
potency were rethought by Catholic theologians, and a vast reduction of
efficacious avenues was the result. Loomis noted that “the Medieval church
was a magical place.”66 In the Counter-Reformation period, this was much
less the case.
Although the Catholic reform is most often portrayed as a triumphant
continuation of the Church’s prior themes and priorities, the concessions
listed above emphasize the Catholic attempt to reform aspects of their doctrine. It did become harder to become a saint, as lengthy processi prove.
Relics were only invoked if they were honoured by ratification or tradition.
The sacraments were clarified so that the Eucharist was easily the most
important. While Catholics were accused of idolatry, they demoted images
and granted the Protestant charge that images merely referred to their prototypes. They were to be merely crutches for devotion and exemplars of
good actions.
But an even bigger change had been made; vision itself had been
demoted. At the same time that Eucharistic adoration was increasing, the

C.f., Scavizzi, Controversy on Images, 131–40; Pamela Jones, “Art Theory as Ideology:
Gabriele Paleotti’s Hierarchical Notion of Painting’s Universality and Reception,” in:
Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire
Farago, (New Haven, 1995). See further Cesare Baronio on the worship of images in his
Annales ecclesiastici, discussed in Romeo de Maio et al. (eds.), Baronio e l’Arte (Sora, 1985).
66. Charles G. Loomis, White Magic: An Introduction to the Folklore of Christian Legend,
(Cambridge, 1948).

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new perspectival account of vision was growing in importance as well. This
account was tailor-made for an imagery of presence because it was founded
on the idea that the properties of bodies—even Christ’s—were the formal
cause (in Aristotle’s sense) of one’s perception of that cause. In avoiding a
mechanistic account of perception, the visible species became in the eye a
sensible species and finally an intelligible species. The form was maintained
all along. As explained by A. Mark Smith, “What guarantees this congruence [between one’s mental picture of objective reality and the objective
reality it pictures] is the congruence of formal cause and effect at every
stage in the visual process as it unfolds from light- and colour-radiation,
through seeing and perceiving, to apperception.”67
According to such a neo-Aristotelian philosophy, accidents inhering
in substances were communicated precisely through picture-like species,
sent through the air. Thus, “ocular” communion could suffice for the
believer.68 It is not hard to see how an image of Christ, like the face of
Veronica, could seem to be Christ himself. The linking of a believer’s emotions to those of Christ’s Passion led, of course, to the Passion becoming a
popular subject in religious iconography.69 However, once emphasis was
placed on the sole act of communion and incorporating the true substance
of Christ’s body rather than the accident, it is easy to see why vision came
to possess less efficacy.70
67. A. Mark Smith, “Descartes’s Theory of Light and Refraction,” Transactions of the
American Philosophical Society, 77, no. 3 (1987), 78. In a related vein, Richard Trexler noted,
“The cult of the body of Christ validated one of the strongest religious tendencies: to give
form to power on the principle that power was imputable to objects. If in so improbable a
place as bread, how much more plausible in an effigy” (Richrad Trexler, “Florentine Religious
Experience: The Sacred Image,” Studies in the Renaissance, 18 [1972], 7–41). For a discussion
of how the ontology of the work of art changed, and the early Renaissance understanding of
it, see Jack M. Greenstein, “On Alberti’s ‘Sign’: Vision and Composition in Quattrocento
Painting,” Art Bulletin, 79, no. 4 (1997), 669–98.
68. On ocular communion, see Mitchell, Cult and Controversy, passim; Charles
Caspers, “The Western Church During the Late Middle Ages: Augenkommunion or Popular
Mysticism?” in: Bread of Heaven, eds. Charles Caspers, Gerard Lukken, and Gerard
Rouwhorst (Kampen, 1995), 83–98; Suzannah Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment in the Middle
Ages (Basingstoke, 2002), 140–46.
69. For the rise of devotion to the passion and ‘affective’ spirituality, see Fulton, From
Judgment to Passion. On passion iconography, see James Marrow, Passion Iconography in
Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, 1979); and
Peter Parshall, “The Art of Memory and the Passion,” Art Bulletin, 81 (1999), 456–72.
70. The Dominicans, perennial conservatives in theology, had already challenged the
efficacy of ocular communion on similar grounds: see Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the
later Middle Ages.” Of course, this placed Catholicism behind the latest developments in
physics, which posited atoms instead. Thus the implications of Descartes’s views on the

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Before, in representations of the Miraculous Mass of St. Gregory, for
example, the Eucharistic miracle was usually interpreted as the Eucharist
transformed into a miniature three-dimensional Christ, come to life, but
the Tridentine Mass emphatically changed the referent from image to relic
itself. It is extremely telling that when Andrea Sacchi was assigned a subject for an altarpiece in New St. Peter’s, it was not Gregory’s miraculous
mass which was selected, but instead a miracle of the corporal, according
to which a cloth that had held a relic bled when pierced.71 The former subject begged for pictorialization that was now inappropriate, while the latter
maintained a properly indexical relationship.72 Indeed, although there are
dozens of images from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of saints
having visions inspired by images—and even though believers were still
encouraged to engage in imaginative devotion and meditate on holy mysteries as if they were present to the mind—such images are rare in the
Counter-Reformation period.73
The late medieval period saw a tight coupling between imaginative
devotion and salvation through indulgence images. It is no accident that
the Miraculous Mass of St. Gregory was precisely one of the most popular
of these. The profligacy of images come to life in Gregory’s miracle, and
the believer’s private devotional practice was linked to the doctrine of PurEucharist were unacceptable for banishing the Aristotelian vocabulary of substance and accident; Tad Schmaltz, “What has Cartesianism to do with Jansenism?” Journal of the History of
Ideas, 60 (1999), 48.
71. The story derives from the Golden Legend: see Ann Sutherland Harris, Andrea
Sacchi, (Princeton, 1977), 52.
72. On the iconography of the Miracle of St. Gregory, see Uwe Westfehling, Die Messe
Gregors des Grossen. Vision, Kunst, Realität, exh. cat. Schnütgen-Museum (Cologne, 1982);
Carolyn Walker Bynum, “The Blood of Christ in the later Middle Ages,” Church History, 71
(2002), 685–714, esp. 708–13. On the idolatrous nature of the Miracle of St. Gregory, see
Christine Göttler, “Is Seeing Believing? The Use of Evidence in Representations of the
Miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory,” The Germanic Review, 76 (2001), 120–42. For a semiotic
discussion of the significance of the index with a stain, such as that on the Shroud of Turin,
see Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain),”
trans. Thomas Repensek, October, 29 (Summer 1984), 63–81.
73. One example of such an image is Cesare Aretusi and Gabriele Fiorini, The Miraculous Mass of Saint Gregory, 1580, Bologna, Santa Maria dei Servi; reproduced in Mistero e
immagine: L’Eucarestia nell’arte dal XVI al XVIII secolo, exh. cat., Milan, 1997. For late
medieval iconography of praying before an image, see Cooper, “Projecting Presence”; Scavizzi, Controversy on Images; and Krüger “Authenticity and Fiction.” One rare Counter-Reformation example of an image inspiring a miracle is Rutilio Manetti, Stigmatization of St. Francis, private collection; reproduced in Finaldi, The Image of Christ, 124. Characteristically, the
small crucifix is shown in archaeological detail and becomes a historical prop rather than conflated hybrid of image and Christ.

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gatory. Of course, indulgences were one of Luther’s largest grievances.
When reforming popes like Pius V restricted the use of indulgence
images, emphasis was placed instead on the true efficacy of Christ’s
flesh.74 The result was a compelling reprioritization of efficacy in the
Catholic Church. The Eucharist and its surrogates, i.e., approved relics,
took over the role of efficacious material, while painting and sculpture
could now be “art.”
Here one can return to Belting’s and Stoichita’s discussion of the
Bildtabernakel. Belting, one must recall, notes how the enframement
enhanced the aura of the reliquary image, while Stoichita emphasizes its
metapictorial element. Both can be reconciled by seeing that the aura of
the reliquary image allowed for metapictorial play outside of it or in relation to it. The two impulses—one religious and one self-consciously artistic, representing the spirit of the Council of Trent on one hand and the
creation of an academy of artists on the other—were both permitted,
according to the theology of the time. Just as painters had won the intellectual argument over the paragone—the superiority of painting or sculpture—according to its gentlemanly distance from physical labour, they had
to yield the high altar to the sculptors, who thereby gained prominence,
but only in the yeoman’s task of altar adornment.75
The Overpowering Altar-Tabernacle
In Counter-Reformation churches, the altar-tabernacle overpowers
the choir, or, in the case of churches outfitted with Counter-Reformation
retrochoirs, creates it. Similarly, in pictures with fully developed altartabernacles, the altar-tabernacles overpower other pictorial content, so that
little else may be depicted. The subjects of high altarpieces are often coordinated so that they tend to be Christological with Eucharistic connota74. On Pius V’s restriction of indulgences, see Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1896), III, 424.
75. Stoichita (Visionary Experiences, 70–72) agrees: “in ecclesiastical circles sculpture
was held in higher regard than painting and that in any comparison of the two, elements were
taken from early paragone . . . and combined with criteria of a doctrinal nature.” There is an
interesting record of the contemporary painter’s dilemma in Armenini, who recommends
that, “sensible painters learn all about the forms of the tabernacles and their positions and
sizes in order to make them with proportionate and appropriate measures. Not only are
painters expected to have a knowledge of good architecture, but they must also be able to
make drawings, models, and the actual tabernacles in stucco in new and extraordinary ways”:
Giovanni Battista Armenini, On the True Percepts of Paintings, trans. Edward Olszeski (New
York, 1977), 230.

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FIGURE 8. Andrea Sacchi, Gesu, 1639, Museo di Roma, Rome, with Girolamo
Muziano’s Circumcision of Christ and altar tabernacle on the high altar; taken from
Gauvin Bailey, Between renaissance and Baroque, plate 114.

tions.76 In such high-altarpiece-and-tabernacle combinations, a space is
often reserved for the vertical tabernacle that juts upward into the pictorial
space, creating an opportunity for complex referential meanings. But one
can see that this disruption, once again, belies the sacramental priorities
here, as the inner pictorial content tries to negotiate an interesting response
in spite of the tabernacle.77
There are other paintings that simply acknowledge the tabernacle or
echo it in some way. Girolamo Muziano’s important Circumcision of Christ,
formerly of the high altar of the Gesù in Rome but now relegated to the
sacristy, left an empty space to accommodate the tabernacle. Muziano
76. Humfrey, “Altarpieces and altar dedications.”
77. In a rare acknowledgement of this dilemma, Armenini (231) writes that, “[the
paintings that will adorn it] must be appropriate to that Most Holy Mystery, both in the front
as well as on the sides; one must avoid chimeras and fanciful scenes which often are used in
similar places by fools who do not realize their mistake.”

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soberly shows the moment when Christ received his name, which was of
course also sacred to the Society of Jesus. The emptiness at the bottom
centre of the composition accommodates the sacramental tabernacle that
would have ‘completed’ the painting, but that was long ago dismantled.
The spatial effect of the painting-tabernacle combination is clearly
shown in Andrea Sacchi’s painting of the interior of the Gesù (Figure 8;
1641, Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna).78 There it is clear that
the central action of Christ’s circumcision exists as a sort of duplication of
the tabernacle below. There is a thematic echo, Christ in the tabernacle and
the Christ child. But the merely represented Christ child now draws his
power from his proximity to the true flesh of Christ below. The tension of
focus almost puts the painting in the role of Bildtabernakel, as simple embellishment next to the divine Eucharist. The altar diagrams the priorities of
the Counter-Reformation; images are images and the Eucharist is Christ.
Other examples can be added.79 In general, these altarpieces contain a
sacramental subject (Last Supper, Communion) placed behind the tabernacle. Centrally placed is the communion wafer, being proffered by Christ,
just above the actual tabernacle holding the real Eucharist. This example
goes well beyond metaphor to being extremely literal. The Muziano and
other examples are from high altars or altars of the sacrament, and it is
interesting to see next how the memory of the altar-tabernacle affects the
construction of altarpieces away from the high altar. During the CounterReformation frequent communion was encouraged, so more masses at
more altars in more chapels required artists to take the host into consideration, as when Vasari corresponded with Vincenzo Borghini about his Resurrection altarpiece for the Pasquali chapel in Sta Maria Novella, whose
78. Harris, Andrea Sacchi.
79. See, for example, Felice Pellegrini’s Last Supper (1600) in the Chiesa Collegiata di
Santo Stefano, Castelfidardo (near Ancona); Andrea Camassei, St. John Giving Communion
to the Virgin, 1630s, S. Lucia in Selci, Rome (Marilyn Dunn, “Piety and Agency: Patronage
at the Convent of S. Lucia in Selci,” Aurora: The Journal of the History of Art, 1 [2000], 29–59,
fig. 6). Of course, the iconography of communion was very popular; see Paris Nogari, Communion of St. Lucy, 1580s, Chapel of St. Lucy, Santa Maria Maggiore; Veronese, The Last
Communion of St. Lucy (1582, stored in Washington, National Gallery of Art); Federico
Barocci, Communion of the Apostles, 1608, Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome; Domenichino,
St. Jerome Receiving Communion, San Girolamo della Carita’, Rome; Baccio Ciarpi, Communion of St. Lucy, 1615, S. Lucia in Selci, Rome, Rome: Dunn, “Piety and Agency,” fig. 2.
Stranger are cases where a tabernacle is depicted on an altarpiece for a high altar, as in Nicolò
di Simon Pietro’s The Virgin and Child with Saints Joseph and Nicholas of Bari, in the Church
of the Madre di Dio e San Nicola, Lecce; Michele Paone, Chiese di Lecce (Galatina, here
1979), II, 142–44, fig. 225; Cresti, “Altari fiorentini controriformati,” 47.

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preparatory drawing did not sufficiently anticipate the priest’s elevation of
the host into the space of the picture.80
What is of interest here, however, is how something new occurred—the
concession to the massive altar-tabernacle on the high altar affected the altarpiece itself. There are direct ways that this was registered, as when the very
architecture of the high altar informed the design of an altarpiece on another
altar elsewhere in the nave and brought with it Eucharistic symbolism, as in
Vasari’s Incredulity of St. Thomas (1569) in Santa Croce, which shows a triumphal arch reminiscent of that over the church’s own high altar.81 Yet more
importantly for the present discussion, altarpieces also abstractly registered
this recognition of the theological and formal power of the Eucharist.
These examples show that the Counter-Reformation altar-tabernacle,
especially as it became the partial subject of a genre of painting, was perceived as literally larger than life. In the same sense that the host intercedes
for all relics, saints, and even other sacraments, the altar does a similar job
within the altarpiece proper. To introduce the altar-tabernacle as subject is
to limit the composition ab initio, or else to anchor the scene so much in
the present that it begins to appear as mere reportage.
The Consequences for Counter-Reformation Painting
There is much more that can be said about the altar-tabernacle. There is
for instance a large presence of post-Tridentine pictures that contain sculptures, visions and painted icons. These forms phenomenologically seem to
match the presence of the tabernacle, both visually and in the economy of
holiness, supplementing for the Host in its absence. To give a brief example
of each, one could mention: Cerano’s The Madonna dei Miracoli of Santa
Maria presso San Celso venerated by St. Francis and Beato Borromeo (1610,
Turini, Galleria Sabauda),82 featuring a prominent statue dominating the
80. Hall, Renovation and Counter-Reformation, 111.
81. Cresti, “Altari fiorentini controriformati,” 16; Hall, Renovation and CounterReformation, 111.
82. Marco Rosci, Il Cerano (Milan, 2000), 150-51; c.f. Krüger “Authenticity and Fiction,” 53–59. The original context for the work is untraced; it was already in the Sabauda collections by 1635. Represented also are the Madonna of Loreto (Guercino, Sts. Francis and
Bernardino in Prayer before the Madonna of Loreto [1618, Cento, Pinacoteca Civica], referenced in Denis Mahon, ed., Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, il Guercino: 1591–1666 [Bologna,
1991], 88–90), Kiev Mary Statue (Francesco Vanni, St. Hyacinth Rescuing the Host and a Mary
Statue from Burning Kiev [1600, Siena, San Domenico], referenced in Peter Anselm Riedl
and Max Seidel, Die Kirchen von Siena, 3 vols., [Munich, 1985–2006], Oratorio della CaritaS. Domenico, II, no. 128; 664–66.)

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center of the painting; Palma Giovane’s The Vision of St. Thomas Aquinas for
San Domenico (c. 1590, Pinacoteca San Domenico, Fano), with the crucifix
coming alive;83 or Francesco Vanni’s Madonna Vallicelliana Adored by SS.
Francis and Restituta (1602, Sora, Santa Maria degli Angeli), with a painted
version of the Oratorian icon.84 In each case, one sees some substantial subject occurring precisely where the Host would be housed in a tabernacle.
The tabernacle on the altar was a virtual presence in the minds of late
sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century artists and their publics whenever
approaching an altar. The charge of the relationship between host and
taker of communion was very strong, and informed depictions of altars (or
suggested altars) in altarpieces. What, then, are the consequences for other
works of art? Most importantly, what happens when the viewer does not
witness a host-communee relationship within a painting, but rather enters
into a Eucharistic relationship with the painting itself? As hinted earlier,
side altars became the domain of the painter, where smaller altars (with no
permanent, or at least not such a dominant, apparatus for preserving the
Host) let the painter engage in his traditional function of expressing the
sacramental nature of the represented personages.
No doubt images were important to the post-Tridentine Church.
Qualitatively speaking, there was little change before and after Trent, as
churches and ecclesiastical buildings continued to be decorated. No doubt
the Church’s call to move viewers also promoted a mistaking of sign and
the signified—depicted saint and real saint—that served an important part
of popular devotion and therefore was quite purposeful, even though theologically it was denied. Less sceptically, one could say that the recognition
of saints, miracles and visions now had a rigorous apparatus for recognizing
sanctity, as the legalistic processi well attest.

83. On the Palma painting, see S. Tomani Amiani, Guida Storica Artistica di Fano
(Pesaro, 1981), 92–97; and Franco Battistelli, “Precisazioni sulla datazione del ‘S. Tommaso
d’Aquino’ di Palma il Giovane e sul suo committente,” in: Studi per Pietro Zampetti, ed.
Ranieri Varese (Ancona, 1993), 350–52. See further Santi di Tito’s The Vision of St. Thomas
Aquinas for San Marco, Florence (1593), referenced in Jack Spalding, Santi di Tito (Ann
Arbor, 1976), 299–304, 423–26. See also Santi’s painting of the same subject for the Oratorio
of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Florence (1569) and Francesco Vanni, The Crucified Christ speaking
to Thomas Aquinas, 1602, church of San Romano, Lucca; see Belli Barsali I., Lucca: Guida alla
città (Lucca, 1988).
84. La Regola e la Fama, 505–06. Other icons repainted are the Volto Santo of Lucca,
the Madonna of Constantinople (Ascensidonio Spacca), and others. This is not to mention the
actual reproduction of icons, like the Madonna of Santissima Annunziata, Florence (see versions made by the artists Alessandro Allori, Cosimo Daddi, Ottavio Vannini).

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Nevertheless, the goal to move viewers, as effective as it could be for
personal discipline and conduct, was not intercessory in the least. Trent
taught that art instructed and confirmed the memory of believers so that
they “may order their own lives and manners in imitation of the saints; and
may be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety.”85 Cardinal
Paleotti wrote of paintings that: “Their principle end is to persuade persons
to piety and order them toward God. . . . The purpose of these images will
be to move individuals to the obedience and subjection they owe to God.”86
The sine qua non of such painting would be the various martyr scenes that
were so popular in broadsheets, and the frescoes, for example, of the various Jesuit national colleges in Rome.87
But in the position over an altar, without any of the didactic import relating to the host-communee relationship, one can begin to see why artists in
treating their subjects in a post-Tridentine milieu had only two directions
available to them: toward imitation of the historicized, reliquary image or
sculpture, i.e., archaism; or toward a metaphoric indexing of the fleshy host,
i.e., the “Baroque.”88 After Federico Zeri’s pioneering analysis of late sixteenth-century painting, archaism has only recently been taken up again as a
serious topic.89 Many of the works of Girolamo Muziano, Scipione Pulzone
and Federico Zuccaro fall into this category. As in the paintings of Vanni that
recall the absent Madonna Vallicelliana, archaizing works gain their power by
employing the stylistic choices of a more pious age. But as the foregoing discussion makes clear, it is not simply to partake of a more devout style

85. Canons and Decrees, 235.
86. Paleotti, Discourse on Sacred and Profane Images, 111; Discorso, 214–15: “il fine di esse
prencipale sarà di persuadere le persone alla pietà et ordinarle a Dio . . . lo scopo di queste imagini
sarà di movere gli uomini alla debita obedienza a soggezzione a Dio”; c.f., Stoichita, Visionary
Experience.
87. Thomas Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome,” The Art Bulletin, 58,
no. 3 (1976), 425–33; Leslie Korrick, “On the Meaning of Style: Nicolò Circignani in PostTridentine Rome,” Word & Image, 15, no. 2 (1999), 170–89; Bailey, Between Renaissance and
Baroque, Chapters 2 and 4.
88. The preceding context qualifies this freighted term. It is simply intended to mean a
visual technology that blends disegno and colorito, chiaroscuro and color, for maximally convincing illusion: Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of the Baroque Style, 2nd
ed. (Fiesole, 2000).
89. Federico Zeri, Pittura e controriforma: l’arte senza tempo di Scipione da Gaeta (Turin,
1957). The most important recent discussions are Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in
Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York, 1999); Nagel, Michelangelo and the Reform
of Art, 1–22; Lingo, Federico Barocci. Allure and Devotion, 14–31; Livia Stoenescu, “Ancient
Prototypes Reinstantiated: Zuccari’s Encounter of Christ and Veronica of 1594,” Art Bulletin,
93, no. 4 (2011), 423–48; and Seaman, The Religious Paintings of Hendrick ter Brugghen.

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FIGURE 9. Federico Barocci, Immaculate Conception, 1577, San Francesco, Urbino,
now stored in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino.

(although this is important) but also to enjoy the authority of pre-Reformation objects that shared in the distributed sacramentality of the Host.
More interesting are the works regarded as proto-Baroque, works by
Barocci, Vanni, Cigoli, and the Carracci. Each possesses a style that works
through empathic identification. The carnoso and pastoso flesh of the Carracci, commented upon by Malvasia, is often opposed to the hard, cold
flesh of Mannerist works. There is a sense that the Carracci’s figures are
living, but this can now be seen to be more than a mere rhetorical trope.
The figures have to appear alive to the receptive viewer, not just as exemplars worthy of inciting pious devotion, but also as quasi-present stand-ins
for sacramental life.90
90. In Northern Europe, Karel van Mander’s discussion of the “glow,” a treatment of
flesh that pulsates with life, became another touchstone for a reforming style; Paul Taylor,
“The Glow in late Sixteenth and Seventeenth Dutch Painting,” in: Looking Through Paintings:
The Study of Painting Techniques and Materials in Support of Art Historical Research, ed. Erma
Hermens (Leids, 1998).

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REAL PRESENCE AND MERE PAINTING

FIGURE 10. Federico Zuccaro, Immaculate Conception, 1592, San Francesco, Pesaro.

The choice between the two paths in Counter-Reformation art is dramatically shown in a juxtaposition of two paintings, by two men who knew
each other, of the same subject in Franciscan churches in neighbouring
towns: Federico Barocci’s Immaculate Conception of c. 1577 (San
Francesco, Urbino, now Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino; Figure
9) and Federico Zuccaro’s Immaculate Conception of 1592 (San Francesco,
Pesaro; Figure 10). Barocci’s graceful Madonna looks forward to the
Baroque type of Immocalata while Zuccaro’s might be mistaken for a poor
provincial work, yet both were valued in their time. However, after about
1600 interest waned in the archaic style in favor of the “Baroque.”91
As recent research by Stuart Lingo shows, in spite of the optical sensuousness of Barocci’s works, the artist was still intensely interested in
making his paintings iconic and directly accessible to viewers.92 Thus
91. An interesting Spanish analogy might be the works of El Greco, so different from
those of Pulzone, but in another sense sharing a figured quality of outline that invites intellectual reflection on the part of the viewer. There were no heirs to El Greco’s style after his
death in 1614.

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Barocci’s Perdono, an optically complex work, is notable for the arrested
narrative action of the story—relating to the indulgence granted to Francis—so that Francis’s body is presented to the viewer for worship in a centralized, satisfying way (see Figures 9, 10). Thus, one sees an interesting
combination of iconic display with rich optical surfaces.
It is true that seventeenth-century artists rediscovered Correggio, with
all his intimacy, sfumato and expression, and showed the reforming generation how to form the pieces of “Baroque” art. At the same time, however,
he also showed them how to make a statement full of soft pathos that would
be reserved for Christ’s sacrificed flesh, and apply it to any subject suitable
for an altar at which Mass was said and at which divine transubstantiation
took place. This is the deeper lesson for the rise of what is called Baroque
painting. It is variously (and contradictorily) described as emotional, theatrical, and energetic, but what it may be most of all is empathic, and a
direct appeal for the sensuous identification of Christ’s (and his interceding
saints’) flesh. Even when Counter-Reformation viewers reflected intellectually on his sacrifice and its enormity, the first, immediate identification with
the real Christ is what was most important. And this real Christ was always
already present on the altar in the sacramental tabernacle.

92. Lingo, Federico Barocci.

Spin off: The Surprising History of the Coriolis
Effect and the Jesuits Who Investigated It
CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY AND GUY CONSOLMAGNO, S.J.*
This paper discusses six astronomers of the Society of Jesus who investigated the Coriolis Effect: the deflection of objects moving at Earth’s
surface that is caused by Earth’s rotation. The paper includes introductory material on what the Coriolis Effect is and how it works, especially as regards the atmosphere of Earth and other planets. Four of the
six Jesuits—Christoph Scheiner, Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Francesco
Maria Grimaldi, and Claude François Milliet Dechales—worked in
the seventeenth century. They envisioned the effect occurring if Earth
rotated; they believed that no such effect actually occurred; and thus
they investigated the effect as an argument against Earth’s motion. The
fifth, Angelo Secchi, experimented with the Foucault pendulum, the
first clear demonstration of this effect. The sixth, Johann Georg Hagen,
the first Jesuit Director of the Vatican Observatory, worked in the early
twentieth century. He developed experimental tests for the effect. This
paper provides a synopsis of information that recently has been published in books and journals related to physics and the history of astronomy regarding Jesuits and the Coriolis Effect.
Keywords: Coriolis Effect; the motion of the Earth; Jesuit
astronomers; Christoph Scheiner; Giovanni Battista Riccioli;
Francesco Maria Grimaldi; Claude François Milliet Dechales;
Angelo Secchi; Johann Georg Hagen
Introduction
The hurricanes that spin into North America every summer and fall
are dramatic, often catastrophic, manifestations of the Coriolis Effect that
comes from Earth spinning on its axis, so important in weather patterns.
However, this effect also played a surprising role in the seventeenth* Professor Christopher Graney (c.graney@vaticanobservatory.org) is an astronomer
and historian of science with the Specola Vaticana (the Vatican’s astronomical observatory).
Br. Guy Consolmagno (g.consolmagno@vaticanobservatory.org) is Director of the Specola
Vaticana.

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CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY AND GUY CONSOLMAGNO, S.J.

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century debates over the Copernican theory and whether or not the Earth
actually spins. The surprise is that the astronomers who best understood
the Coriolis Effect were those who in fact argued against the Earth’s spin.
The Coriolis Effect bears the name of Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis
(1792–1843), as he worked out the detailed mathematics of the effect in
the early nineteenth century. Coriolis’s name became commonly associated
with the effect only in the early twentieth century;1 George Hadley, who
considered the effect of the spinning Earth on winds in a paper of 1735, is
often supposed the first to conceive of the Effect—his paper being “cited
in every meteorological treatise dealing with atmospheric circulation since
the beginning of the 19th century.”2 However, the idea behind the Coriolis
Effect was developed well prior to Hadley, largely by members of the Society of Jesus who did not believe that it existed (at least, not on the surface
of the Earth).
Spin Cycle
The Coriolis Effect arises because Earth’s spin causes its surface to
move at different speeds at different latitudes. Earth’s circumference is
about 25,000 miles, and it spins once every twenty-four hours; therefore, at
the equator its surface (and the atmosphere above that surface) moves eastward at a speed of just over a thousand miles per hour. At the poles, however, the surface doesn’t move at all; it merely turns around once per day.
Thus, with the increase in latitude as one moves from the equator to the
poles, the speed of the surface drops from a thousand miles an hour to zero.
If one were to launch an object from the equator toward a pole, conservation of momentum says that the object will continue to move eastward
at a thousand miles an hour. As it leaves the equator, however, it eventually
passes over ground whose eastward motion is significantly less than its
own. Thus the object, outrunning the ground toward the east, will appear
to the launcher’s perspective to be deflected toward the east. Conversely, if

1. Charles L. Jordan, “On Coriolis and the Deflective Force,” Bulletin of the American
Meteorological Society, 47, no. 5 (1966), 401–03; Helmut E. Landsberg and William Ferrel, “Why
indeed Coriolis?” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 47, no. 11 (1966), 887–89.
2. Landsberg and Ferrel, “Why indeed Coriolis?” 887; Anders O. Persson, “Hadley’s
Principle: Understanding and Misunderstanding the Trade Winds,” History of Meteorology, 3
(2006), 17–42, here 17–20; Anders O. Persson, “The Coriolis Effect: Four centuries of conflict between common sense and mathematics, Part I: A history to 1885,” History of Meteorology, 2 (2005), 1–24, on 6–8.

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one were to launch the object from the pole toward the equator, the object
will be outrun by the ground it passes over, and appear to be deflected to
the west. Likewise in the atmosphere, air drawn toward a low-pressure
zone deflects east if it approaches the zone from the equator, west if from
the pole. This sets up a circulation around the “low,” i.e. counter-clockwise
in the northern hemisphere and clockwise in the southern—in other
words, a hurricane’s rotation.3
But Does the Earth Spin?
The idea that Earth’s rotation must produce an apparent deflection of
objects traveling across its surface figured in the seventeenth century debate
over whether Earth does, in fact, rotate. The Danish astronomer Tycho
Brahe lived from 1546 to 1601, just between when Nicolaus Copernicus
published his theory that Earth orbits the sun, in 1543, and when Galileo
started his telescopic observations, in 1609.4 Brahe admired many aspects
of Copernicus’s ideas, but he did not accept them for a number of reasons.
One of these was that Copernicus required a daily or diurnal rotation of the
Earth about its own axis, in order to explain the diurnal rising and setting
of the sun, moon, and stars.
The traditional astronomy and cosmology of Aristotle and Ptolemy
said that this diurnal motion of celestial bodies belonged to them by their
nature. The Earth, by contrast, was naturally at rest. This view also
agreed with the various biblical passages that described the Earth as
being at rest and the sun as moving, such as Ecclesiastes 1:5 (“The sun
riseth, and goeth down, and returneth to his place: and there rising
again”5). While “common sense” might suggest that the traditional view
must be correct since surely any motion of Earth’s surface (at speeds of
hundreds of miles per hour) would be noticeable, the counter-argument
was that if everything moved together in a uniform fashion then that
motion could not be detected.

3. A complete treatment of the Coriolis Effect involves vectors and calculus and can be
found in textbooks, such as Herbert Goldstein, Charles Poole, and John Safko, Classical
Mechanics, 3rd. ed. (San Francisco, 2001), 174–83, with an outline of the effect in the atmosphere on 177–78; also Jerry B. Marion, Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, 2nd ed.
(Orlando, 1970), 343–356.
4. This discussion of Tycho Brahe draws from Christopher M. Graney, Setting Aside all
Authority: Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science against Copernicus in the Age of Galileo
(Notre Dame, IN, 2015), 37–44, as are the English translations of Brahe’s writings.
5. Douay-Rheims translation, which seems appropriate for Brahe’s time.

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305

Brahe recognized that a rotating Earth implied a difference in motion
between the poles and the equator; everything was not moving uniformly
together. He felt that this difference should produce observable effects. In
his 1601 book Astronomical Letters he wrote that “near the poles of the
Earth, where the diurnal motion (if such might exist) comes to rest” a ball
fired from a cannon should be expected to travel in the same manner
regardless of which way the cannon is aimed. On the other hand, “in the
middle between each pole at the Equator, where the motion of the circumference of the Earth ought to be fastest,” the situation should be different.6
Brahe did not discuss what exactly he expected to be different between
poles and equator. He merely said that, “since these [cannon shots] may
come about uniformly everywhere, indeed it is necessary that Earth rest
uniformly everywhere.”7 After all, if Earth is immobile, then every place on
its surface is equally immobile.
Brahe developed his own ideas about the working of the universe. He
supposed the Earth to be indeed immobile, and circled by the sun, moon,
and stars. The planets, however, circled the sun (Figure 1). So far as the
apparent motions of anything in the solar system are concerned, this
arrangement is identical to that of Copernicus; nothing you could see in a
telescope like Galileo’s of the sun, moon, and planets could tell the two
arrangements apart. 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.”8
Brahe’s system offered the advantages of the Copernican system, and
got around certain disadvantages. There was no need to explain those
cannon ball trajectories discussed above. There was also no need to explain
how the “hulking, lazy Earth,” as Brahe put it, could be made to move
(Newtonian physics was far in the future, and one must recall that the
physics of the time assumed celestial bodies like the sun moved naturally).
Furthermore, there was no need to explain biblical passages like Ecclesiastes 1:5. This was an issue in the sixteenth century, as the Protestant
reformers had complained that the unreformed Church was too lax in how
it interpreted the words of the Bible. Thus Brahe described his system as
one that “offended neither the principles of physics nor Holy Scripture.”
6. Tycho Brahe, Epistolarum Astronomicarum Libri (Nuremberg, 1601), 189–90.
7. Brahe, Epistolarum, 189–90.
8. Johannes Kepler, Epitome of Copernican Astronomy and Harmonies of the World, trans.
Charles Glenn Wallis [Great Minds Series] (Amherst, NY, 1995), 175.

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FIGURE 1. Tycho Brahe’s system in which the Earth is at rest (and thus having no
motion that might affect the flight of projectiles like cannon balls), circled by the
sun, moon, and stars, with the planets circling the sun. Illustration, print, Scheiner
and Locher’s Disquisitions, 52, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke,
[old and rare prints], https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/zoom/359318.

Four Jesuits Add Their Spin
A decade after Brahe, another astronomer, Christoph Scheiner
(1573–1650) of the Society of Jesus, endorsed Brahe’s system as the most
elegant and most consistent with observations. (In doing so, however, he
said Brahe had appropriated it from the ancient African writer Martianus
Capella;9 the fact that Brahe was a Protestant while Scheiner was a
Catholic may have led him to temper his praise.) In a 1614 book entitled
Mathematical Disquisitions, Scheiner and his student, Johann Georg
Locher, also noted the issues that a rotating Earth raised regarding objects
moving above its surface at differing latitudes.10
However, they focused on objects rising and falling, rather than on
projectiles like cannon balls. Starting with the premise that “everyone, even
9. Christoph Scheiner and Johann Georg Locher, Disquisitiones Mathematicae, de
Controversiis et Novitatibus Astronomicis (Ingolstadt, 1614), 51–53. Also see Scheiner and
Locher, Mathematical Disquisitions, Concerning Astronomical Controversies and Novelties, English translation, available in Christopher M. Graney, Mathematical Disquisitions: The Booklet
of Theses Immortalized by Galileo (Notre Dame, IN, 2017), 59–60.
10. Scheiner and Locher, “Disquisition XIV,” in: Disquisitiones Mathematicae, 28–35.

CHRISTOPHER M. GRANEY AND GUY CONSOLMAGNO, S.J.

307

FIGURE 2. Illustration by Scheiner and Locher of the paths of falling bodies on a
rotating Earth. The Earth’s axis is horizontal, along the line ν-λ. The balls falling
from above the equator, above a point at mid-latitudes, and above a pole are objects
Α (top), ϒ (upper right), and ν (far left). Ball A approaches Earth while it moves
with Earth’s rotation (perpendicularly to the page), thus describing a spiral on a
plane perpendicular to the page. Ball ν moves toward Earth, rotating with Earth on
its own axis; thus it describes a line rightward. Ball ϒ approaches Earth while
moving perpendicularly to the page, thus describing a spiral on a cone whose vertex
lies at Earth’s center and whose base faces toward λ, as illustrated by ϒ-Ƶ-α-β-γ-...c. Illustration, print, in Scheiner and Locher’s Disquisitions, 30, ETH-Bibliothek
Zürich, Alte und Seltene Drucke [old and rare prints], https://www.e-rara.ch/
zut/content/zoom/359296.

Copernicans, acknowledges heavy bodies to be pulled down toward the
center of the Earth along a vertical line,”11 Locher and Scheiner asked their
readers to consider three identical balls carried around with the rotating
Earth, high above its surface: one above the equator, another above a midlatitude point, and a third above a pole (Figure 2). When these balls are let
fall, they ask, how is it that they each will follow such different paths in
order to track that vertical line downward? A vertical line on the equator
of a rotating Earth sweeps out a plane as the globe turns; the ball falling at
the equator, descending along that vertical line, would therefore follow a
11. “Disquisition XIV,” in: Disquisitiones, 29: “[. . .] omnes, etiam Copernicos grauia
deorsum rapi secundum lineam verticalem ad centrum terrae.” English from Mathematical
Disquisitions, 31.

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path that is a flat spiral. A vertical line at the pole of a rotating Earth does
not move; the ball falling there simply descends. A vertical line at mid-latitudes sweeps out a cone; the ball falling there describes a conical downward spiral. And at differing heights above the surface any ball not over the
pole would have to have differing speeds to maintain the vertical line.12
Unlike Brahe, Scheiner and Locher were not concerned about how the
“hulking” Earth could move. They had developed an explanation for
Earth’s orbit, saying that it might be like the fall of an iron ball attached to
a bent pole stuck in the ground. When the pole topples over, the ball
moves in a circular path.13 They were not so concerned about scripture,
either. They granted that words about the “rising and setting” of the sun
might actually describe the horizon “setting and rising” (convoluted as that
may seem, they said).14
Still, they concluded that the questions they raised argued against any
motion of the Earth. “Innumerable absurdities arise” because of that
motion in regard to “all things moving up or down,” they said, and so
“therefore the motion of Earth need not be granted.”15 Brahe, Locher, and
Scheiner could see no observable effect of the Earth’s spin on either projectiles or falling bodies at different latitudes. To them, this lack of evidence served as an argument for Earth’s immobility.
Mathematical Disquisitions made a big impression on Galileo Galilei
(1564–1642), and not in a positive sense. He devoted many pages of his
1632 Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican to casting Disquisitions in a negative light. He made jokes in the Dialogue about the figure reproduced here as Figure 2. And then he contested
Scheiner and Locher’s statement that everyone agrees that heavy bodies fall
12. “Disquisition XIV,” in: Disquisitiones, 30–32.
13. Scheiner and Locher, “Disquisition XV (Consectaria 4),” of Disquisitiones, 36-38;
for further discussion of Scheiner and Locher’s orbit explanation, see Christopher M. Graney,
“How to Make the Earth Orbit the Sun in 1614,” Journal for the History of Astronomy, 50, no.
1 (2019).
14. Scheiner and Locher, “Disquisition XIII,” of Disquisitiones, 25: “sidera non terrae,
sed terra sideribus oritur occiditque,” an idea that must be granted as satisfactory but convoluted (“licet torte satis”).
15. Scheiner and Locher, “Disquisition XIV,” of Disquisitiones, 35; “Motus terrae
Copernicanus inducit necessario rebus omnibus tam a centro quam ad centrum latis, motum
aliquem circularem, cuius tamen principium . . . assignari absque innumeris absurdis non
potest: motus igitur terrae non est admittendus.” English from Mathematical Disquisitions, 39.
Despite the “innumeris,” this Disquisition treats a mere twenty specific problems (roughly),
or “questions” that arise.

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309

straight down to Earth; he wrote that if Earth rotates then a ball held in a
high place would be carried around by Earth’s rotation in a larger circle
than, and therefore move faster than, the ground to which it falls. So when
the ball is let fall, it should “run ahead” of the ground, and be deflected
eastward.16
Elsewhere Galileo argued for another effect caused by Earth’s rotation: a cannonball launched toward a target located due east of the cannon
should strike above its intended mark, he said, because the rotation of
Earth carries the target downward while the ball is in flight (as the “horizon sets”); conversely, a ball launched west should strike below its mark.
Galileo even worked out the magnitude of this effect: one inch of deflection for a ball that takes one second to travel from cannon to target. Since
in fact such shots are typically off from their target by up to a yard, he said,
this effect is completely unobservable.17 Both the easterly deflection of
falling balls and the vertical deflection of projectiles that Galileo describes
do in fact occur (the vertical deflection is now known as the Eötvös Effect)
but they had not been detected at the time.
In 1651 Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671), also of the Society of
Jesus, took the deflection idea further in his book New Almagest. Like
Galileo, he argued that on a rotating Earth objects will not fall straight to
the ground, but will instead be deflected to the east. Then he discussed projectiles. This discussion shows some in-depth physical thinking (which he
attributes to his assistant, Francesco Maria Grimaldi, yet another Jesuit,
who would go on to discover the phenomenon of the diffraction of light).
Riccioli noted Brahe’s argument about Earth’s rotation and cannon balls
flying at the poles and at the equator. He noted how the speed of the
Earth’s surface is greater toward the equator and less toward the poles. And
then he provided an illustration (Figure 3) of a north-fired cannon ball
veering slightly eastward because of changing ground speed. This is, of
course, the Coriolis Effect. Riccioli considered the absence of any such
observable effect to be a key argument in favor of Earth’s immobility—a
very useful argument, given that, in the time since Scheiner and Locher’s
Disquisitions had been published, Copernicus’s 1543 On the Revolutions
had been placed on the Index of Prohibited books “until corrected” (until
16. Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and
Copernican, trans. Stillman Drake [Modern Library Sciences] (New York, 2001). Discussion
of the Figure 2 diagram begins on 269, with the specific discussion of the ball running ahead
of the Earth on 271.
17. Dialogue, 206–12.

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FIGURES 3a AND 3b. Riccioli’s cannon diagram. 3a (left): Riccioli writes that if the
cannon is fired eastward at a target at B in the Figure, then as the ball is in flight,
the Earth’s (supposed) diurnal rotation carries the mouth of the cannon from A to
C, and carries the target from B to D, so the ball travels from A to I, where it hits
the target. If the cannon is aimed northward and fired at a target at E, then as the
ball is in flight, the target moves from E to N. However, Riccioli says, the ball
travels along the curve AKF, not the straight line AHF, because the diurnal motion
is faster at the beginning of the ball’s flight. The ball does not strike the target at N
squarely, but grazes it or misses it, striking to the right, at G. This analysis is
sophisticated enough that the shape of the curve AKF follows modern calculations.
3b (right): The cannon travels with the ground and the target, so as seen from the
cannon, the ball, expected to travel in a straight line from the mouth of the cannon
at C to the end of its travel at F, is in fact seen to veer slightly right, into G. See
Riccioli, illustration, print, New Almagest, II, 426, stored in the library in the
Vatican Observatory; electronic version available at ETH-Bibliothek Zürich,
https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/titleinfo/140180.

passages speaking of the Copernican system as being more than a hypothesis had been edited) and Galileo had been tried over his Dialogue.18 Riccioli agreed with Brahe’s idea that the sun circled the immobile Earth,
while planets circled the sun.19
18. Maurice A. Finocchiaro, The Galileo Affair: A Documentary History (Berkeley, CA,
1989), 28–31, 34–39, 148–49, 200–02, 287–91; Maurice A. Finocchiaro, Retrying Galileo,
1633–1992 (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 26–42.
19. Regarding this paragraph, see Graney, Setting Aside, 116–20. The matter of Riccioli
and the Coriolis Effect touches on a broader question, because various writers over time have

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311

Riccioli worked out much of what we now call the Coriolis Effect, but
Claude François Milliet Dechales (1621–78), in his book Mathematical
World (published in 1674 and again in 1690), wrote an illustrated discus-

asserted that Riccioli did not accept the concept of inertia. Alexandre Koyré stated that “Riccioli, in physics, is rather behind the times and . . . is a partisan of the semi-Aristotelian conception of motion as change produced by an external or internal cause, and . . . understands
neither the principle of inertia nor that of the relativity of motion”—see Koyré, “A Documentary History of the Problem of Fall from Kepler to Newton: De Motu Gravium Naturaliter
Cadentium in Hypothesi Terrae Motae,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 45,
no. 4 (1955), 329–95, on 349. Alfredo Dinis described Riccioli as “unable to accept the principle of inertia”—see Dinis, “Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the Science of His Time,” in: Jesuit
Science and the Republic of Letters, ed. M. Feingold (Cambridge, MA, 2003), 195–224, on 220
(although Dinis also has argued against a view of Jesuits that “does not do justice to the complexity of their intellectual and scientific activity in general, and ignores the originality of many
Jesuits, Riccioli among them,” and has pointed out Riccioli’s “quest for truth” and use of
research “to provide the objective foundations” for his views and willingness to be flexible
regarding Aristotelian opinions. See Dinis, A Jesuit Against Galileo? The Strange Case of Giovanni Battista Riccioli Cosmology [Braga, 2017], 11, 18–19). Ivana Gambaro wrote that Riccioli
“could not accept Galileo’s proto-concept of inertia, so he could not imagine, for a falling body,
a rotational motion, in common with the Earth, composed with the centripetal and rectilinear
motion.” See Gambaro, “Geo-heliocentric models and the Society of Jesus: from Clavius’s
resistance to Dechales’s Mathesis Regia,” Annals of Science, 78, no. 3 (2021), 265–94, on 276. It
is true that the New Almagest contains many ideas that differ from modern physical concepts—
it sees objects that rise upward as doing so because they have a positive “levity” driving them
(as opposed to the “gravity” of heavy objects that drives them downward); it makes a variety of
statements regarding “impetus” of moving bodies, and the force of impact of projectiles, perhaps reflecting the differing views of Riccioli vs. Grimaldi. Nevertheless, the New Almagest discussion of the deflection of a falling body and of a northward-traveling cannon ball (and even
of rising bodies, see Graney, Setting Aside, 249) clearly involves an implicit assumption of the
existence of what we today would call inertia. Riccioli’s words about AKF and the deflection
of a north-moving cannonball that are paraphrased in the caption for Figure 3 read, “At quia
et tellus et globus transferri ponuntur Orientem versus, et dum globus nititur versus E praevalente diurno motu deviat ac detorquetur a recta AE, trahiturque per curuam AKF, versus F,
(quia in principio motus hic velocior est, et globus fertur ultra rectam AHF, quam describeret
si motus esse uniformis). . . . Hinc fieret, vt globus non impingeret in scopum . . . recta in F,
sed veluti fugaci ac valde obliquo contactu, qui mereretur potius nomen attritionis aut confrictionis, quam ictus et vulneris, vix feriret scopum N; et si ad latus ipsius N, esset scopus alter in
G, dextrorsum versus ventum Graecum collocatum, etiam si in illum non esset directa Bombarda et globus; illum tamen multo maiori impetus feriret globus. . . .” Riccioli, Almagestum
Novum, 2 vols. (Bologna, 1651), II, 427, col. 1. On the curve AKF in Figure 3 that Riccioli
and Grimaldi drew for the trajectory of the cannon ball as seen from the fixed stars matching
the results of calculations using modern concepts of inertia and the Coriolis Effect, see Graney,
“Contra Galileo: Riccioli’s ‘Coriolis-Force’ Argument on the Earth’s Diurnal Rotation,”
Physics in Perspective, 13 (2011), 387–400; also Graney, “The Coriolis Effect Apparently
Described in Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s Arguments Against the Motion of the Earth: An
English Rendition of Almagestum Novum Part II, Book 9, Section 4, Chapter 21, Pages 425,
426-7,” arXiv (2010), https://arxiv.org/abs/ 1012.3642.

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FIGURE 4a (left). Dechales’s tower diagram. Note curves indicating greater and
lesser distances traveled by the top and bottom of the tower. Dechales wrote: “A
ball F, hanging from the top of a tower directly above point G, is dropped. While
the ball descends, point G is carried [by Earth’s rotation] into I. I propose the ball
F will be unable to arrive at point G (now at I). This is because the ball when
positioned at F has an impetus requisite for passing through arc FH (through
which the tower top moves while the ball descends) which is greater than that
requisite for arc GI. Therefore, if the ball is dropped, it will not arrive at point I,
but will advance forward farther [to L].” Dechales, Mathematical World, 4 vols.
(1690), IV, 328, stored in the library in the Vatican Observatory; electronic version
available at ETH-Bibliothek Zürich, https://www.e-rara.ch/zut/content/
titleinfo/2518348.
FIGURE 4b (right). Dechales’s cannon diagram. Note curves indicating greater and
lesser distances traveled by the cannon and the target. Dechales wrote: “Consider a
cannon discharged in the direction of one of the poles [of the Earth]. During the
time in which the ball would traverse the distance MO, the cannon [originally at
M] would be carried to N, while the target [originally at O] would be carried to P.
While the ball was at M, it had from the rotation of the Earth impetus able to carry
it through arc MN (which is greater than arc OP) during the time required to travel
from M to O. But the ball, separated from the cannon, conserves this impetus
whole. Therefore, it should run through a distance greater than OP and
consequently not hit the target.” Ibid.

sion of it that could have come from a textbook of today. In a section entitled “Objections against Copernicus,” Dechales (the fourth astronomer
from the Society of Jesus in this story!) included an illustration (Figure 4a)
of a tower carried by a rotating Earth, and argued that a ball dropped from
its top would not fall straight down, but would travel farther toward the

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313

east, because of the greater speed of the top of the tower vs. the ground.20
He also included an illustration (4b) of a cannon aimed at a target to the
north. The diagram shows the cannon and the target both carried to the
east by Earth’s rotation, but with the cannon carried farther east, and the
ball that it fires at the target carried farther east as well, so that it misses
the target to the right.21
Dechales cites Riccioli in his book. However, his qualitative treatment
of these effects is more straightforward than Riccioli’s, and his diagrams
are clearer. His discussion differs little from modern qualitative discussions
of the Coriolis Effect, like the one at the start of this article.22 In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, these effects that Dechales treated in
a discussion of objections against the Copernican rotation of the Earth
would finally be observed directly, in pendulums and in the atmosphere,
and become confirmations of that rotation.

20. The deflection of a falling body is sometimes considered a version of the Coriolis
Effect. See Goldstein, Poole, Safko, Classical Mechanics, 178–79; Marion, Classical Dynamics,
348–53.
21. Claude François Milliet Dechales, “Astronomia Liber Primus: Propositio XVII,”
in: Cursus Seu Mundus Mathematicus, Tomus Quartus (Lugduni, 1690), 328. In the 1674 version this is “Astronomia Liber Primus: Propositio IX” (located in the third volume), where it
has the same diagrams, and the language is similar but not identical. Translations in the captions for DeChales’ diagrams are from Christopher M. Graney, “Early descriptions of Coriolis effect,” Physics Today, 70, no. 7 (2017), 12–13.
22. Compare Dechales’s discussion of the north-launched cannonball in the caption of
Figure 4 to this modern discussion, from Lee M. Grenci, Jon M. Nese, A World of Weather:
Fundamentals of Meteorology (Dubuque, IA, 2001), in a section labelled “Coriolis Force: As
the World Turns” (p. 101): “As you might guess, if points on different latitude circles move
at different speeds, something peculiar should result. Suppose a projectile is launched northward from the equator. At the instant before launch, the projectile is moving eastward at 1668
km/hr, courtesy of the rotating earth. Once airborne, the projectile retains its original endowment of eastward momentum. The projectile is like a train robber jumping off a speeding
locomotive in an old Western movie. While in the air, the bandit is still moving at a forward
speed equal to the train’s. Thus, his landing will be rough . . . he will slide and roll and tumble.
. . . Think of the projectile’s northward flight as a long leap off a train that is travelling east
on the equator at 1668 km/hr. Until it hits the ground, the projectile will continue to move
east with the approximate speed of the ‘train’ (the equator). But the projectile is also moving
northward. With each passing moment, it moves over ground that has an eastward speed less
than its own. In essence, the projectile surges into the lead in this eastward race with the
slower-moving ground below. To someone watching from the launching pad, the projectile
appears to gradually swerve to the right.” Similar discussions are found in many text or reference books—see, for example, James Shipman, Jerry D. Wilson, Charles A. Higgins, and Bo
Lou, An Introduction to Physical Science, 15th edition (Boston, 2020), 579; Bradley W. Carroll
and Dale A. Ostlie, An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics (Cambridge, UK, 2017), 731; Erik
Gregersen, ed., The Britannica Guide to Heat, Force, and Motion (New York, 2011), 121.

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A Different Spin: Pendulums and the Precision of Gunnery
The importance of the Coriolis Effect depends on two factors—how
fast the object is moving, and how far it moves. Thus it is not surprising
that flying cannon balls were often used as examples of such motion, especially in the earliest descriptions of the effect. But astronomers like Riccioli overlooked something that Galileo did not: many other things can
deflect the motion of a cannonball and thus overwhelm the Coriolis
Effect.23
Riccioli believed that the gunners of his time were so skilled that they
could place a shot precisely into the mouth of an enemy’s cannon. Any difference in the trajectories of cannonballs fired in different directions would
certainly have been noticed, therefore. The fact that they had not, indicated
to him that Earth was immobile.24
Riccioli was not alone in his ideas. John Flamsteed, England’s first
Astronomer Royal, once described gunners as knowing how to fire a
cannon upward so as to make the ball drop right back into the mouth of
their own cannon. Italian experimenters in the seventeenth century also

23. Dechales did not overlook this. Regarding the deflection of a projectile or a falling
ball being an objection against Copernicus, he writes in Cursus (1674 version, vol. 3, 298) that
this is “of no importance, and imperceptible, because if it [the deflection] might happen in
the manner which the objection contends, nothing need be concluded against Copernicus,
and Copernicus remains uncompelled to admit it [rem nullius esse momenti, et imperceptibilem, vnde si accideret eo modo, quo contendit obiectio, nihil concluderetur contra Copernicum, neque tamen cogitur Copernicus id admittere].” He goes on to say that “indeed he
[Copernicus] might concede that the objection would have strength if the motion might take
place in a vacuum [concederet enim obiectionem valituram si motus fieret in vacuo]” where
the air would not influence the trajectory of the ball. Moreover, “if any difference [of deflection] might exist, in such small distances it will not be of any importance [si quae intercedat
differentia, in tam paruis distantiis, non erit alicuius momenti]”. This discussion comprises a
single, 105-word sentence, punctuated only by commas. It is significantly edited in the
posthumous 1690 version of Cursus, where it is shortened and divided into three sentences,
themselves parsed by semicolons (vol. 4, 329). Still, the point remains: “even if the thing
might take place in the manner which the objection contends, the thing might be of no
importance, and might be imperceptible. And Copernicus remains uncompelled to admit it;
indeed he might concede that the objection would have strength, if the motion itself might
be accomplished in a vacuum. . . . [I]f there might be any difference, in such small distances
it will not be perceptible to sense. [etiamsi res se haberet eo modo quo contendit objectio, res
nullius esset momenti, et imperceptibilis foret. Neque tamen id cogitur admittere Copernicus;
concederet enim objectionem valituram, si isti motus in vacua perficerentur. . . . [S]i quae sit
differentia, nullo sensu, in tam parvis distantiis sit perceptibilis.]”
24. Graney, Setting Aside, 118.

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315

claimed to have been able to fire a cannon vertically and have the ball fall
right back to the cannon’s mouth.25
Even today the precision of gunnery can be overstated. An oftenrepeated story claims that, during the naval Battle of the Falkland Islands
in December 1914, the British initially missed their German opponents by
over one hundred yards, because they did not account for the Coriolis
Effect operating in the opposite direction south of the equator. But the
British and Germans had fought other actions, off Brazil and Chile, earlier
in the year, so the story that the British were surprised by something peculiar to the southern hemisphere does not ring true. Moreover, the effect of
the Earth’s rotation was minor compared to the difficulty of shooting at
distant, moving targets from a rocking, moving platform at sea. Reports
from the time, such as a book on the battle written during the war by
Commander H. Spencer-Cooper with input from those who fought it, do
not mention the Coriolis Effect, but do mention a variability of two hundred yards in a single volley of shots as being evidence of good gunnery!26
Interestingly, even had gunners been as accurate as Riccioli imagined,
they would have noticed no difference between shots sent toward the north
or south vs. those sent east or west. A full mathematical analysis of the
Coriolis Effect reveals that, at a given latitude, the effect is independent of
direction. This is not intuitive; discussions of the effect usually treat only
the intuitive examples of objects moving north or south.
The Coriolis Effect can indeed be detected in projectiles; long-distance target shooters have put some interesting Coriolis Effect videos on
the web. But the first easily visible demonstration of the Coriolis Effect
involved not projectiles or falling bodies, but pendulums.
Remember that in the northern hemisphere a north-moving object
deflects east—to the right—while a south-moving one deflects west—also
25. On Flamsteed, at a 4 December 1679 meeting of the Royal Society, see Thomas
Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge, etc., 4 vols.
(London, 1756–1757, here 1757), III, 513. On the Italian experiments, see William Edgar
Knowles Middleton, The Experimenters: A Study of the Accademia Del Cimento (Baltimore,
MD, 1971), 242. Also see, for example, the correspondence of Descartes, on the failures of
such experiments, where the ball might be launched upward and perhaps never be found at
all; see René Descartes and Anthony Kenny, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, 3 vols.
(Cambridge, 1984–1991, here 1991), III, Volume 3, The Correspondence, 43, 113.
26. Christopher M. Graney, “Wide of the mark by 100 yards: Textbooks and the Falklands Coriolis myth,” Physics Today Online, 2 February 2022, retrieved 25 January 2023,
https://physicstoday.scitation.org/do/10.1063/PT.6.3.20220202b/full/.

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right. Now, imagine this occurring, not in a single large movement to the
north or south, but in many small repeated movements to the north and
south, such as would occur in the case of a pendulum swinging in a northsouth plane. Every northward swing yields a tiny rightward deflection.
Every southward swing yields another tiny deflection, again rightward.
Each individual deflection is almost negligible. But as the pendulum
swings back and forth over the course of a day, these negligible deflections
add up, and the plane of the pendulum’s swing is altered. Because the
Coriolis Effect is independent of direction, the plane continually rotates.27
This was first demonstrated by Léon Foucault in Paris in early 1851, two
centuries after Riccioli’s New Almagest first described the effect behind it.
Foucault Pendulums are commonly featured in science museums today
as a demonstration of Earth’s rotation. An early public demonstration of the
Foucault pendulum was carried out in May of 1851 by another Jesuit, Fr.
Angelo Secchi (1818–78). From the ceiling of St. Ignatius Church in
Rome, Secchi suspended a lead ball on an iron wire, repeating Foucault’s
experiment before “the most distinguished professors of the city,” studying
the pendulum’s motion in great detail and publishing his results.28
Final Spin, in the Vatican
It fell to one final Jesuit in the early twentieth century to demonstrate
the Coriolis Effect with a slightly different approach—at the Vatican
itself.29 Johann Georg Hagen was born in Austria in 1847. After being
ordained a priest in 1878, he was sent to the United States, where he
became an American citizen. He taught mathematics at Sacred Heart College at Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, where he built a small observatory and
began to study variable stars. Then in 1888 he was appointed director of the
Jesuits’ Georgetown College Observatory in Washington, D.C., where he
published the first three volumes of his monumental atlas of variable stars,
the Atlas Stellarum Variabilium. Finally, in 1906 Hagen was called back to
27. For a full mathematical treatment of the Foucault pendulum and the Coriolis
Effect, see Marion, Classical Dynamics, 353–56.
28. Ileana Chinnici, Decoding the Stars: A Biography of Angelo Secchi, Jesuit and Scientist
(Leiden, 2019), 72–75.
29. This discussion of Joseph Hagan draws from Sabino Maffeo S.J., “Stars in our History: A History of the Vatican Observatory (The Rotation of the Earth),” in: The Heavens Proclaim; Astronomy and the Vatican, ed. Guy Consolmagno, S.J. (Vatican City, 2009), 63–64;
and from Sabino Maffeo S.J., The Vatican Observatory: In the Service of Nine Popes (Vatican
City and Notre Dame, IN), 75–6, 91, 102–3, plate 33.

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317

FIGURE 5. The Isotomeografo of Fr. Hagen. Weights driven along the beam
experience a Coriolis effect, causing the beam to be deflected. Image credit:
Isotomeografo, anon., likely prior to 1911, stored in the Vatican Observatory. (The
photographer and precise date are unknown, but the authors suspect the photo was
likely taken by Hagen prior to 1911, as the image is similar to one of the plates in
La Rotation de la Terre.)

Europe to become the first Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, then
located on the walls surrounding St. Peter’s in Rome.
Hagen was fascinated with finding proofs from mechanics for the
Earth’s rotation. He gathered together and examined all of the attempts
made up until that time to measure the Earth’s rotation. He took notice of
Secchi’s experiments with pendulums, and some work by Riccioli (but not
the discussions mentioned here), but he did not mention Scheiner or
Dechales. Then he invented two experiments of his own.30
The first was his “Isotomeografo” which he installed on the basement
floor of one of the Observatory’s telescope domes. An 8.5 meter horizontal
beam was hung by a two-strand steel cord about 7 meters long. Two small
lead carriages weighing 90 kilograms (about 200 pounds) each were driven
along the beam on symmetrical tracks, from the middle towards the ends
30. J. G. Hagen, S.J., La Rotation de la Terre ses Preuves Mécaniques Anciennes et Nouvelles (Roma, 1911), 7, 46, 113–120.

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FIGURE 6. This telescope, made by Carpentier of Paris, was installed above an
Atwood machine in a tall stairwell at the Vatican Museum to follow the deflection
of a falling object due to the Coriolis Effect. Image credit: Guy Consolmagno, S.J.,
Telescope, 2002, Vatican Observatory.

and back (Figure 5).31 As the carriages moved, the Coriolis Effect would
cause the beam to undergo a small but measurable rotation in the horizontal plane. This was only the second experiment to demonstrate that the
Earth was spinning, after Foucault’s famous pendulum.
The second invention involved setting up a large Atwood machine in
a 75-foot high stairwell at the Vatican Museum. (An Atwood machine
slows down a falling object by connecting it over a pulley to a counterweight; it allows for a careful study of the falling object’s motion.) By using
a clever downwards-looking telescope (Figure 6), Hagen was able to follow
the path of a falling object as the Earth spun underneath it and measure
the spin of the Earth, to better than one percent accuracy.
Hagen published his work in a book printed by the Vatican in 1911.32
He reported his results at the Fifth International Congress of Mathematicians, held in Cambridge in 1912, where he received an enthusiastic ova31. Also see Hagen, La Rotation, Plates II–VI.
32. Hagen, La Rotation.

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319

tion.33 The intuition of Scheiner, Riccioli, Grimaldi and Dechales was confirmed—and their conclusions about the spin of the Earth, refuted (not
that Hagen, or anyone else, remembered their work34).
Spinning Worlds: the Coriolis Effect and Planetary Atmospheres
The motions of high and low pressure systems, especially in hurricanes, are the most dramatic examples of the Coriolis Effect visible on
Earth. Alas for the debaters of Galileo’s time, the knowledge of such
weather patterns was only discovered in the mid-nineteenth century. At
that time, naval officers (notably Matthew Fontaine Maury of the US
Navy) collected the extensive records of weather patterns from navy vessels
traversing the globe to correlate data about winds and currents. Meanwhile, the invention of the telegraph allowed meteorological offices in
Europe to collect and correlate weather data at the same time on a continental scale, thus making these cyclonic patterns evident.
Other planets also demonstrated the Coriolis Effect, or its absence.
Venus spins so slowly that there is essentially no Coriolis Effect there, and
thus no cyclonic systems in its atmosphere (Figure 7). However, thanks to
intense solar heating, its atmosphere does feature large convection currents,
called “Hadley Cells,” that develop to move hot air from the equator to the
cooler zones near the poles or the nighttime side. The result of this efficient
transport of heat is that the atmosphere of Venus is essentially the same temperature everywhere. By contrast, the spin rate of Jupiter is so fast and its
radius so large that its atmosphere is being carried around at a rate that is not
only rapid, but rapidly changing with latitude. This brings about the complex
patterns of storms and clouds, from the Great Red Spot to smaller cyclonic
features, which the recent Juno mission has illustrated so well (Figure 8).
Conclusion
The idea for the Coriolis Effect caused by a spinning Earth (or other
planet) had been worked out long before Gaspard-Gustave de Coriolis had
33. Letter from Hagen to Cardinal Pietro Maffi, 2 September 1912, in Maffeo, The
Vatican Observatory, 102.
34. As noted, Hagen mentions only Riccioli and Grimaldi, but not regarding the material discussed here (La Rotation, 7). No mention of Scheiner, Riccioli, Grimaldi and Dechales
is found in any secondary source the authors can find, including Jordan, “On Coriolis”;
Landsberg and Ferrel, “Why indeed Coriolis?”; Persson, “The Coriolis Effect”; and also
Agustín Udías, “Jesuits’ Contribution to Meteorology,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological
Society, 77, no. 10 (1996), 2307–15 (Udías has written extensively on Jesuits and science).

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FIGURE 7 (left). A newly processed, contrast-enhanced version of an image of
Venus taken by Mariner 10 in February 1974. NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory—
California Institute of Technology and processed by engineer Kevin M. Gill,
PIA23791: Venus from Mariner 10, taken February 7, 1974, published June 8, 2020,
2245 pixels × 1096 pixels, Photojournal, https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/
PIA23791. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
FIGURE 8 (right). Jupiter’s northern hemisphere as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.
Kevin M. Gill, Tumultuous Clouds of Jupiter, image created using data from the Juno
spacecraft’s JunoCam imager, original four images taken May 29, 2019, available at
Yvette Smith, “Tumultuous Clouds of Jupiter,” NASA, June 27, 2019, https://
www.nasa.gov/image-feature/tumultuous-clouds-of-jupiter. Image credit: NASA/
JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Kevin M. Gill.

even been born, largely by Jesuit astronomers building on the ideas of
Tycho Brahe. Methods for detecting the effect were then investigated by
other Jesuit astronomers. There is a certain irony in the effect having been
described in large part by astronomers who did not think that it existed;
they took its apparent absence as evidence that Earth does not spin, so that
the theory of Copernicus fell to that of Brahe. But there is additional irony
in that the Vatican, which had become infamous for opposing Earth’s
motion, became the site of two delicate experiments demonstrating that
motion.35 Then there is a final irony that the Coriolis Effect, originally
envisioned as something that would not exist anywhere, and thus by its
absence would be scientific evidence defending the immobility of Earth
and Aristotle’s physics of difference between the Earth and celestial bodies,
is now seen to exist even on other planets, thus being scientific evidence for
how the same physics applies both on Earth and on celestial bodies.
35. Hagen commented on this irony as regards to his experiments in his letter to Cardinal Maffi; Maffeo, The Vatican Observatory, 102.

A Servant of Two Masters:
Bishop Aloisius Muench and the Debate over
Catholic Schools in Postwar Bavaria
NICHOLAS MISUKANIS*
In 1946, President Harry Truman sought to reform the German education system and appointed Bishop Aloisius Muench as the Catholic
Liaison to assist the U.S. occupational forces. Simultaneously, Muench
was appointed as the Vatican’s official visitor to Germany. Using these
roles, Muench influenced denazification and educational policies in
Bavaria. Drawing on unused primary sources from Muench’s personal
correspondence, OMGUS files, the papers of Lucius Clay, the Christian
Social Union Archives, the personal papers of Cardinal Michael von
Faulhaber, and the files from the archives of the archdiocese of Munich
and Freising, this article concludes that Muench played a key role in
preserving Catholic schools in Bavaria. Muench’s case proves that
denazification policies were contested and formed by a coalition of secular and religious individuals.
Keywords: Denazification, Aloisius Muench, OMGUS, religious
education
Introduction
In 1946, the United States stood victorious from the Second World
War but faced the challenges of occupying and rebuilding a defeated and
divided Germany. U.S. forces occupied Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg,
Greater Hesse, and a section of Berlin, and debated about how to begin the
process of denazification.1 To do so, U.S. officials sought to reform the
education systems in these areas, and eventually decided to establish one
* Nicholas Misukanis is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Maryland–College Park.
The author is grateful to the reviewers of the Catholic Historical Review for their suggestions,
the archivists at the Hanns Seidel Stiftung, the Archiv und Bibliothek des Erzbistums
München und Freising, and to Colleen Curran for her unwavering support and to whom the
article is dedicated. The author’s email address is Misukani@umd.edu.
1. James Tent, Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany (Chicago, 1982), 48.

321

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

based on the American public school system: public elementary schools
feeding into secondary schools. But the U.S. faced significant resistance to
its efforts, specifically in predominantly Catholic Bavaria where the Office
of the United States Military Government (OMGUS) planned to close all
confessional schools and funnel students into one public education system.
In contrast to the United States, confessional schools in Bavaria, which
also included Protestant schools, were part of the public education system,
which meant they were mainly financed by taxpayers rather than religious
institutions. Catholic schools in Bavaria had a long-standing history of
teaching with a religious focus in mind, and they now risked losing this
independence, considering this U.S.-controlled educational policy.
At the heart of the education debate lay a difference of opinion on how
to denazify the education system in Bavaria, where Catholic institutions’ relationship with primary schools dated back to the eighteenth century.2
OMGUS, Catholic Bavarians, and Vatican officials agreed on the importance
of denazification, but the U.S. government and the Catholic Bavarian officials
had different visions for achieving this. For Americans in the OMGUS, the
goal was to encourage democratic ideals and toleration of differences between
individuals in hopes of denazification through public education. The American proposal for Bavarian school reform aimed to establish a liberal democratic ideology taught in schools. In contrast, Bavarian Catholics and the Vatican argued that Catholic education focused on the development of one’s
religious growth while blending this with Bavarian customs, and they argued
that their religious education was consistent with the aims of denazification
but that Catholic traditions needed to be prioritized.
To drum up support for education reform and assist OMGUS with
occupational duties, President Harry Truman appointed Bishop Aloisius
Muench to a unique role as the American liaison between OMGUS and
German Catholic Churches. Truman selected Muench because of his popularity among Germans and clergymen and for his connections with
German Catholics, which Truman thought could be useful in rebuilding
postwar Germany.3 Muench was also selected as the Vatican’s Apostolic
Visitor to Germany by Pope Pius XII. Using both positions, Muench
played a crucial role in the heated debate from 1946–1949 between Bavarian Catholics, American bureaucrats, and Vatican officials over what role
Catholic schools should play in the effort towards denazification and in the
2. Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New
York, 2007), 148.
3. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 30.

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323

FIGURE 1. Apostolic Nuncio Bishop Aloysius Muench departing for Rome from
the Bonn train station. To his immediate left is Hans Josef Maria Globke who was
a State Secretary in the Chancellor’s office; to his right Heinrich von Brentano di
Tremezzo, the West German foreign minister. Rolf Unterberg, Bahnhof Bonn,
Verabschiedung Apostolischer Nuntius, December 8, 1959, photograph, Bundesarchiv
B 145 Bild-F007416-0008, also https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Bundesarchiv_B_145_Bild-F007416-0008,_Bahnhof_Bonn,_Verabschiedung_
Apostolischer_Nuntius.jpg. “This image was provided to Wikimedia Commons by
the German Federal Archive (Deutsches Bundesarchiv) as part of a cooperation
project. The German Federal Archive guarantees an authentic representation only
using the originals (negative and/or positive), resp. the digitalization of the originals
as provided by the Digital Image Archive.” Available by CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

discussion over whether Bavarian Catholic schools should continue to
exist. Muench utilized his positions and connections to gain information
and influence internal conversations within the U.S. Military Government
to delay the U.S. officials from implementing an Americanized school
system in Bavaria. His position in this debate reveals a complex intersection of foreign and domestic policies in determining what postwar Bavarian education would look like.
This article will demonstrate that by occupying seemingly contradictory
roles with the Vatican and OMGUS, Muench utilized his positions and was
instrumental in the preservation of the Bavarian Catholic school system.

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

From 1946 to 1948, OMGUS sought to reform the Bavarian educational
system into a more secular and streamlined system reflecting the American
public school system. This plan was staunchly and successfully resisted by
both Vatican officials, such as Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber and the
Bavarian Christian Social Union (CSU), and politicians, such as Alois
Hundhammer and Hans Ehard. Cardinal von Faulhaber and other Vatican
officials saw an opportunity in the postwar period to reinstate the Catholic
Church’s authority over educational affairs and made common cause with
CSU politicians who campaigned on the importance of preserving confessional schools as being integral to Bavarian identity and “parental rights.”
The anti-pedagogical reformist alliance’s successful effort to resist OMGUS’s
educational initiative heavily benefitted from Bishop Muench’s consistent
provision of information on internal OMGUS conversations, letters to
Catholic organizations in the United States to apply pressure on OMGUS,
translations of Bavarian articles and protests, and by also internally influencing OMGUS conversations towards eventually resisting larger school
reforms. Overall, this article contends that Archbishop Muench was a key
member of the anti-school reformists in Bavaria, alongside Cardinal von
Faulhaber, Dr. Alois Hundhammer, and Hans Ehard, and his consistent
information and efforts within OMGUS proved crucial in the anti-school
reformist’s ability to quickly respond and mobilize dissent to OMGUS
efforts and eventually resist an American inspired pedagogical overhaul.
Historiography
Historiographically, Muench’s case brings together many of the previous studies to show that local religious institutions and officials played key
roles in the decisions that shaped denazification in postwar Germany.
There currently exists a small historiographical field surrounding Cardinal
Aloisius Muench and his writings on the idea of collective guilt and the
Holocaust. Previously, historians such as Suzanne Brown-Fleming and
Michael Phayer had analyzed Muench’s intellectual efforts to cover Vatican anti-Semitism but neither had analyzed Muench’s efforts in steering
the Bavarian confessional school debate. Another relevant historiographic
field that Muench’s story highlights is the Vatican’s efforts to shape denazification and rebuilding policies in Catholic parts of Europe after the
Second World War.4 James Tent, Carolyn Eisenberg, and Mark Ruff have
4. See Michael Phayer’s The Catholic Church and the Holocaust, 1930–1965 (Bloomington, 2000), which discusses Muench and his dual-appointment and consistent effort to serve
Vatican interests in postwar Germany. Phayer does not go into too much detail on what
actions Muench actually took to aid the Vatican’s efforts when it came to the Bavarian school

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325

analyzed how American educational and denazification policy developed in
different regions, but none have looked at the importance of Catholic clergymen and Bavarian politicians in the efforts to preserve Bavarian confessional schools. There is also an extensive historiography about Bavarian
education and the role of the Catholic Church in Bavarian educational
policy.5 Oliver Braun and Winfried Müller have looked at the history of
key Bavarian actors or ministries and the efforts to rebuild the Bavarian
educational system after the war, but neither addressed the role Muench
played with other key officials.6 The last historiographical field this article
will engage with is that dedicated to American occupational policy, educational debates and their relationship to denazification efforts.7
While some historians have analyzed the life of Aloisius Muench,
Muench’s direct role as a source of information to Bavarian and Catholic
officials in the postwar educational debate has often been overlooked. This
author’s historiographical interjection is that all of these previous studies
provide a lens into the educational debates and other key figures, but none
have analyzed the key role that Aloisius Muench played in the Bavarian
debate. See Mark Edward Ruff’s The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany 1945–1980 (Cambridge, 2017) for a discussion on how Pope Pius XII and other Vatican officials worked in the
educational debate in postwar Germany.
5. See See Stefan Samerski Deutschland und der Heilige Stuhl: Diplomatische Beziehungen
1920–1945 (Munich, 2019); and Stefan Samerski, Schuld und Sühne? Bischof Carl Maria Splett
in Krieg und Gefangenschaft (Bonn, 2000). Samerski’s analysis looks at the continuity of the
Vatican’s influence on German educational policy, among other elements in society, throughout the twentieth century. Winfried Mueller‘s Schulpolitik in Bayern im Spannunsfeld von Kultusbuerokratie und Besatzungsmacht, 1945–1949 (Munich, 1995), looks extensively at efforts to
rebuild the Bavarian school system from the CSU perspective. Lastly, Oliver Braun’s Alois
Hundhammer: Konservative Existenz in der Moderne: Das politische Weltbild Alois Hundhammers (1900–1974) (Munich, 2006), focuses on Alois Hundhammer and his efforts to defend
the Bavarian school system from OMGUS, but does little to mention Muench and the role
he played in providing information of OMGUS’ intentions.
6. See Suzanne Brown-Fleming’s The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience: Cardinal Aloisius Muench and the Guilt Question in Germany (Notre Dame, IN, 2006), for her analysis on
Muench and his stances on the question of collective guilt for German citizens after the
Holocaust and Second World War. See Barry Coleman’s American Nuncio: Cardinal Aloisius
Muench (Collegeville, 1969), for a commissioned biography by Muench. While these works
have analyzed Muench’s role in the larger debates in the postwar period, neither of them focus
in particular on how he sought to influence educational policies in postwar Germany.
7. See James F. Tent’s Mission on the Rhine: Reeducation and Denazification in American-Occupied Germany. Tent’s analysis looked at the debates within the American occupational authorities’ offices. Brian Puaca’s monograph Learning Democracy: Education Reform in
West Germany, 1945–1965 (New York, 2009) analyzes how many regional educational systems remained similar to their prewar conditions despite the goals that Western Allied officials had for denazification.

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

education debate of providing information to other actors such as Cardinal
von Faulhaber and Alois Hundhammer and his perspective blending all of
these fields.8 This paper’s argument is rooted in the analysis of letters from
Muench and other officials that were not used by these historians and were
discovered by searching through Muench’s personal papers and records
located at the Catholic University of America archives. In addition to
Muench’s personal files, this article utilizes OMGUS records, the personal
papers of General Lucius Clay, the head of OMGUS during this educational debate, letters from Catholic Clergymen and American Catholic
officials, and minutes from meetings that Muench was a part of. The
author has also analyzed the personal papers and diaries of Cardinal
Michael von Faulhaber in the Archiv und Bibliothek des Erzbistums
München und Freising, and the papers and memos of Alois Hundhammer
and the Christian Social Union in the Hanns Seidel Stiftung. By using
these previously unused records, this article sheds light on how the formation of Bavarian education progressed in the post-World War II period
and Muench’s key role.
Historiographically, this study also contributes to the understanding
of the denazification process by demonstrating that, in many cases,
OMGUS sought not only to teach democratic principles to Germans but
also directly make decisions in the efforts towards uprooting the traditions
of National Socialism. In this case in Bavaria, grassroots democratic
efforts and Bavarians voting to keep the existing Catholic educational
structures directly clashed with OMGUS’ vision for a pivotal element of
denazification in Bavaria: secular liberal public schools. State-building in
this instance was not a clean-cut process and often local politicians and
religious officials clashed with OMGUS authorities. Muench recognized
the cultural and religious tensions at play in this debate and continually
manipulated conversations, leaked information, and became a confessional pleader to favor the survival of Catholic schools in Bavaria. This
case also reveals the multifaceted relationship between nation-building in
occupied Germany and religion in the German state of Bavaria, and
demonstrates that religious institutions played a significant role in education development in Bavaria after the Second World War and resisted
OMGUS’ efforts.
8. Other works that were relevant to the background historiographical conversation
were: Marc Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Basingstoke,
Hampshire, 2007); Kevin Spicer, Resisting the Third Reich: The Catholic Clergy in Hitler’s Berlin
(DeKalb, Ill., 2004); and Frederic Spotts, The Churches and Politics in Germany (Middletown,
CT, 1973).

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327

It is also essential to note that Bavaria was a special case because of its
long relationship between Catholic institutions and primary schools.
Bavaria as a kingdom had signed Concordats with the Vatican prior to
being absorbed into the German Empire. After the First World War,
another Concordat was signed between the state of Bavaria and the Vatican that was led by Eugenio Pacelli, the future Pope Pius XII. This Concordat discussed the Church’s authority on issues of education and contributed to the belief that pedagogical matters fell into the local diocese’s
jurisdiction. Other regions of Germany that were occupied by the U.S. did
not experience as much pushback and adopted similar models to American
public schooling. One last note worth pointing out is the important difference between Vatican interests and local Bavarian Catholics’ interests. The
Vatican and its official diplomatic office were relatively silent about this
issue, but Vatican officials in Bavaria, like Muench, and Bavarian Catholics
were vocal about educational reform. Consequently, the system that
Muench and other anti-reformists sought to uphold was a system that
operated independently from the state government in how it evaluated its
teachers and formed its curriculum, but still received funding from the
state.9 The instructors tended to either be priests or those with close ties to
the Catholic Church, but the Bavarian system offered a unique component
because its curriculum stressed the importance of Bavarian cultural and
Catholic identity being linked together. This cultural and religious synchronization was different from how other Catholic confessional schools in
Germany operated because this educational system was so much more
widespread in Bavaria; furthermore, Vatican officials were quite protective
of this system, as it had developed over hundreds of years. This system
came under attack during the Nazi Gleichschaltung, and Catholic and
Vatican officials actively resisted the Nazi efforts to remove Catholic
schools.10 The fight over confessional school independence also represented
an effort to resist authoritarianism for some Catholics in Bavaria. With the
defeat of the Third Reich, and OMGUS’ uncertainty regarding educational
policy, Vatican and Bavarian Catholics recognized an opportunity to capitalize on OMGUS’ lack of preparedness and strengthen their confessional
educational system.11 Consequently, Muench found his position at the
nexus of the Vatican, OMGUS, and Bavarian efforts and utilized the series
9. Oliver Braun, “Alois Hundhammer,” in: Christliche Demokraten gegen Hitler: Aus
Verfolgung und Widerstand zur Union, eds. Günter Buchstab and Brigitte Kleinmann,
(Freiburg im Breisgau, 2004), 304–12, here 308.
10. Ibid., 309.
11. Walter Hudson, U.S. Military Government and Democratic Reform and Denazification in Bavaria, 1945–1947 (New York, 2001), 113.

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

of events in the Bavarian school debate from 1946–1949 in favor of local
Catholic and Vatican interests.
Aloisius Muench
Aloisius Muench was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1889 to
German immigrants.12 Muench’s parents came from the devoutly Catholic
region of Bavaria in Germany, and this influenced his upbringing.13
Muench gained international recognition in the U.S. and in Germany
when he published his work One World in Charity in 1946.14 In this Lenten
Pastoral, Muench advocated for the importance of reconciliation and
mercy towards the defeated German people. Muench was careful with his
words not to openly condemn the position of the Allied governments
towards the defeated Germans, but he used the language of the gospels to
emphasize that the Germans were the enemy worthy of love.15
Muench wrote One World in Charity by synthesizing his Lenten sermons, and his pamphlet made him quite popular within the Catholic
clergy and with German Catholics.16 Muench also gained supporters in the
upper echelons of the Vatican in the form of Archbishop Samuel Stritch,
who communicated the importance of Muench’s message to Pope Pius
XII. Stritch was the archbishop of Milwaukee in the 1930’s and eventually
became the archbishop of Chicago before being elevated to Cardinal.17 He
personally knew Pius XII, as they had studied together in Rome, and had
worked closely with Muench as a fellow Bishop in the American Midwest.
Stritch invited Muench to travel with him to the Vatican for Stritch’s
installation as a cardinal.18 During this trip, the newly appointed Cardinal
Stritch met with Pius XII and recommended that he appoint Muench to

12. Barry, American Nuncio, 314.
13. Ibid., 220.
14. Muench, Aloisius, “One World in Charity,” appendix to: The Holocaust and Catholic
Conscience, ed. Brown-Flemming, 139–57.
15. Throughout his letters, Muench emphasized that it was pointless to try and isolate
these atrocities based on what the killers’ aims were. Muench was also critical of the Nuremberg Trials and felt that the Allied powers were defining too many people as war criminals.
Muench wrote in his diary that while he agreed that war criminals were the persons committing medical experiments and brutal acts, killings under orders were different and circumstances in the war were difficult. For Muench, criminalizing too many people would make it
difficult for a smooth transition in postwar Germany.
16. Ibid.
17. Barry, American Nuncio, 111.
18. Brown-Fleming, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience, 116.

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329

the position of Apostolic Visitor19 to Germany for his compassion and
popularity among German Catholics.20 This position would require
Muench to report on the status of Catholic Institutions in Germany to the
Vatican. Pius XII met with Muench on February 23, 1946, and formally
confirmed Muench for the position on March 3.21
While Muench was in Rome, officials in the U.S. sought to address
the question of what an education curriculum should look like in Germany. Due to the focus on winning the war, the question of education
and occupation had not received much attention until 1943.22 President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had agreed that designing an education curriculum was important, but he assigned two departments to address this
issue: the Department of State and the War Department.23 In 1945, both
departments proposed differing positions and different plans for what the
aims of an education curriculum should be and who should carry it out.24
As Truman was being sworn into the Presidency in 1945, shifting political appointments meant that the U.S. approached the occupation without a cohesive plan in place to address the question of an education curriculum in Germany. Upon hearing of the division between the
Department of War and the State Department’s education plans,
Truman expressed the importance of the two branches working
together.25 Overall, this meant that there was no central authority in the
U.S.’s occupational organization and no cohesive plan to address the education question as it shifted to occupation.
Considering Truman’s decision for cooperation, the Secretary of War,
Robert Patterson, wrote to the general secretary of the National Catholic
19. Normally the position of Apostolic Nuncio is given for this role, but because Germany was no longer recognized as a country, the position was changed to Apostolic Visitor.
20. Barry, American Nuncio, 118.
21. Ibid., 124.
22. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 14.
23. Carolyn Eisenberg, Drawing the Line: The American Decision to Divide Germany,
1944–1949 (Cambridge, UK, 1996), 22.
24. The Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued that the Department of War’s plan
should be imposed by the Military Government that would eventually occupy German territory. The War Department’s plan envisioned American military officials involved in German
universities and schools to observe and report on the curriculum. In contrast, the plan put forward by Archibald MacLeish, the Assistant Secretary of State, sought to establish a curriculum dedicated to denazification, but one that worked in conjunction with local elements to
adapt the curriculum to local customs. For more on the interdepartmental rivalry, see Tent,
Mission on the Rhine, 15.
25. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 17.

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Welfare Conference (NCWC) in March of 1946.26 The NCWC was
important because it was one of the largest Catholic organizations in the
U.S. that members of the Catholic Clergy would use to meet and issue
Catholic stances on American policies. Patterson requested that the
NCWC’s general secretary recommend Catholic officials who would be
willing to go to the U.S. occupation zones and assist the occupational government in Germany in gauging public sentiment. Truman agreed to
appoint a Catholic Liaison and the liaison was selected when the newly
appointed Cardinal Stritch, the chairman of the board of NCWC and the
same man who advocated for Muench’s Papal appointment, recommended
Muench.27 Stritch viewed Muench as a protégé and as a result, Muench
received both this Catholic Liaison on behalf of the U.S. government and
his appointment as Apostolic Visitor for the Vatican due to Stritch’s direct
involvement.28 On May 22, the Secretary of War approved Muench for the
government liaison position. Muench found himself serving both the Vatican and the U.S. government simultaneously.
Due to the concern regarding Muench’s dual roles in Germany, his
instructions from the OMGUS reflected strict responsibilities and duties.
OMGUS had a clear idea for what it envisioned for representatives. They
were to:
Provide information to the Military Government as to developments in
the area of spiritual life and reconstruction of German churches; and . . .
[assist] in making available to the German churches whatever information or service pertaining to clerical functions of the churches which [the]
Military Government might possess; confer with German church leaders
relative to problems relating to the field of clerical functions of the
German churches.29

Therefore, U.S. officials viewed these liaisons as tools to inform OMGUS
of the status of affairs for religious officials in Europe, and to also help
them in the transition towards a democratic society and potentially use
religion as a basis for denazification.
In addition to his duties and responsibilities, Muench’s instructions
also outlined what he was not to do. OMGUS officials were aware of
Muench’s dual appointment and explicitly stated “The liaison representa26. Brown-Fleming, The Holocaust and Catholic Conscience, 37.
27. Ibid., 38.
28. Barry, American Nuncio: Cardinal Aloisius Muench, 22.
29. Ibid., 137.

NICHOLAS MISUKANIS

331

tive shall not: become spiritual pleaders to the Military Government for
the churches of Germany; assume responsibilities in the functional fields of
operation now directed and supervised by Religious Affairs officers of the
Military Government.”30 Under these instructions, Muench was not supposed to become a spiritual pleader on behalf of the Catholic Church to
the Military Government. By 1946, Aloisius Muench found himself serving in the American occupation zone in Germany as both the OMGUS’
Catholic Liaison and as the Vatican’s Apostolic Visitor to Germany.31
Muench and Catholic Education
Muench arrived in Germany and immediately began to network with
the prominent German clergy members. Muench met with Cardinal
Michael von Faulhaber in July 1946, and von Faulhaber recorded in his
diary that they quickly agreed on the potential for Muench’s role in Germany. Von Faulhaber encouraged Muench to also be a last-minute
attendee at the annual Bishops conference the following month and share
his role with the other bishops.32 Muench spoke at the annual Catholic
Bishops Conference in the German town of Fulda in August 1946 and
stated, “I have come to Germany as apostolic visitor. . . . It will always be
my earnest and firm endeavor to safeguard and protect the interests of the
Catholic Church in collaboration with you, most esteemed brethren.”33
30. Ibid., 138.
31. While OMGUS officials were suspicious of Muench serving in seemingly contradictory roles and provided instructions against it, there was also a strong belief that utilizing
Christianity as the basis of denazification policy could be effective in Bavaria. Many priests
and Vatican officials already had a deep theological foundation for rejecting National Socialist
ideology in favor of Catholic theology based on human dignity. Lucius D. Clay was among
those OMGUS officials who were suspicious of Muench’s true loyalties but the focus in 1946
was to get policies in place and Muench’s appointment was not challenged. For more on
OMGUS denazification policy and Catholicism, see Brian Puaca: Learning Democracy: Education Reform in West Germany.
32. Aloisius Muench, “Gesprächsprotokoll, 24.–27. Juli 1946,” [Conversation Log, 24–
27 July 1946], in: Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber,
Kritische Online-Edition der Tagebücher Michael Kardinal von Faulhabers (1911–1952)
[Critical online edition of the diaries [of] Michael Kardinal von Faulhabers (1911–1952)],
Archiv und Bibliothek des Erzbistums München und Freising (Hereafter referred to as
EAM), der Nachlass Faulhaber (hereafter referred to as NL Faulhaber) 09265, Fol. 373,
available under: https://faulhaber-edition.de/BB_09265_0373r.
33. Aloisius Muench, “Address to the German Bishop’s Conference, Fulda, 20–22
August 1946” (Fulda, August 1946), stored in Washington, D.C., Special Collections of the
University Libraries at The Catholic University of America (hereafter referred to as ACUA),
The Cardinal Aloisius Muench Papers (hereafter referred to as CAMP), Box 57, Folder Citation: 185/5.

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Muench intended to use his positions to benefit the Catholic Church’s
interests and continued on how he intended to use the networks as a liaison
for this task. Muench exclaimed:
The providence of God has ordained that I was requested by President
Truman . . . to accept the position of a liaison consultant for religious
matters in order to render possible a better contact between the German
hierarchy and the military government. The position provides for access to
higher officers. Thus it was possible for me in Berlin to discuss various important matters with General Clay and his political adviser, Ambassador
Murphy. [emphasis added]

Muench revealed that with this role, he had direct access to important officials within the OMGUS chain of command. Muench’s statement implied
that he was the contact person for Catholics if they had concerns, and that
he would plead with higher ups on their behalf, a direct violation of his
OMGUS orders. Muench’s statement reflects his diplomatic and networking abilities, but also reveals that Vatican and Catholic concerns took priority over his liaison role on behalf of OMGUS. Furthermore, just one
month after the conference, Cardinal von Faulhaber wrote to the Bavarian
Episcopacy and notified the other clergymen that “I assume that the Most
Reverend Bishops have also received or will receive the questionnaire from
Apostolic Visitator Muench. Concerning point four ‘school and education’
I would like to take over the work from the Most Reverend Sirs.”34 Consequently, Muench and von Faulhaber would begin corresponding and
meeting regularly on the question of school and education.
By December 1946, OMGUS was still drafting a coherent plan for an
education curriculum, and Muench sought to capitalize on the absence of a
policy by advocating for maintaining autonomous Catholic schools and
teachings. He revealed his background and intentions for the coming year
in a meeting with Cardinal von Faulhaber on December 3, 1946. Von Faulhaber wrote in his diary that Muench “speaks perfect German and his
grandparents had emigrated from the Upper Palatinate, now he has to stand
up for relatives who are being harassed. . .” and that Muench’s actions and
writings in the emerging education discussion reflected a genuine drive to
maintain Catholic autonomy in Bavarian schools.35 By December 1946,
34. Michael von Faulhaber, “Faulhaber an den bayerischen Episkopat—111” in: Akten
Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers, ed. Heinz Hürten, 3 vols. (Paderborn, 2000-02, here 2002),
III, 211, stored in the Archiv und Bibliothek des Erzbistums München und Freising.
35. Alois Muench and Ivo Zeiger “Gesprächsprotokoll, 03.12.1946/28.04.1947”
[“Minutes of conversation, December 3, 1946/April 28, 1947”], in: Cardinal Michael von

NICHOLAS MISUKANIS

333

FIGURE 2. Photograph of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber (center of the photo)
and Bishop Aloysius Muench (right of von Faulhaber), entitled: Michael Faulhaber
with Aloysius Muench leaving a church in a crowd with flags, c.1948–1952,
photographer unknown. Preserved in the Archiv und Bibliothek des Erzbistums
München und Freising which grants permission for its reproduction.

Muench had revealed his intentions to Cardinal von Faulhaber and the two
would begin working closely to preserve Catholic interests in Bavaria.
The Education Debate Emerges
In December 1946, after a series of tense debates about Bavarian state
authority with OMGUS that resulted in vetoing a series of articles, a Bavarian state constitution was ratified.36 Bavarians received the right to vote and
organize political parties to create a state government. OMGUS officials
felt that it could achieve major strides towards denazification if it could
work with a legitimate democratically elected body of Bavarian officials.
Lucius D. Clay, the U.S. Military Commander of German Occupied territory, was optimistic that despite a tense series of negotiations about the
Faulhaber, Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber, Kritische Online-Edition der Tagebücher Michael Kardinal von Faulhabers (1911–1952), EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 09265, pp.
371–72, available under: https://faulhaber-edition.de/BB_09265_0371r.
36. Robert Neumann. “New Constitution in Germany,” The American Political Science
Review, 42, no. 3 (1948), 448–68, here 454.

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

Bavarian Constitution, building a stable and democratically elected Bavarian government would be a smooth process. Clay worked with the State
Department and the War Department to organize a comprehensive education curriculum plan. Clay wanted to work with Bavarians to see it implemented rather than enforce it and asked the Bavarian State Government to
organize a ministerial position dedicated to Culture and Education. The
party that won the majority was the Christian Social Union and they immediately established ministerial positions, but tensions quickly emerged. The
CSU appointed Dr. Alois Hundhammer to the position of Minister for
Culture and Education. Hundhammer was known for protesting the Nazi
party, spending time in a concentration camp, and was an ardent Catholic.37
Clay was optimistic that his office could work with Hundhammer to establish a reformed education system and curriculum, but this optimism quickly
faded when the education debate became one of many flashpoints between
OMGUS and Bavarian officials in the following months.
In January 1947, Clay and OMGUS made their first official proposal
for school reform in Bavaria. At the time, there were multiple options for
education in Bavaria. One could go to Katholische Schule (Catholic School),
Grundschule (General School), or the humanistisches Gymnasium (Humanistic Secondary School). At the Katholische Schule, one would be educated
with a theological focus. These schools had operated independently for
hundreds of years and had designed their own curriculums.38 Grundschule
operated as schools for most students who did not intend to become priests
or intellectuals and focused on basic education, vocational training and a
Catholic education. Lastly, the humanistisches Gymnasium served as the
intellectually rigorous schools and trained future intellectuals for German
universities.39 To complicate matters, the German Länder school system
also included provisions where confessional schools were covered by public
taxes. Each school had their own freedom to design their curriculums and
this system had been affirmed in Bavaria in article 23 of the 1933 Reichskonkordat, which the Vatican argued was still in effect.40
Clay and his office disliked the complexity of this system and argued
that a common experience for the students was essential to instilling dem37. Oliver Braun, Alois Hundhammer: Konservative Existenz in der Moderne, 351.
38. See Bernd Zymek, “Schulen, Hochschulen, Lehrer,” in: Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, eds. Dieter Langewische and Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, 6 vols. (Munich, 1996–
98, here 1998), V, 155–208.
39. Ibid.
40. Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 54.

NICHOLAS MISUKANIS

335

FIGURE 3. Dr. Alois Hundhammer, photograph, taken at the Christian Social Union
party conference on October 16–17, 1970 in the exhibition park Theresienhöhe in
Munich. Photographer unknown. Preserved in the Archive for the Christian Social
Union of the Hans Seidel Stiftung which grants permission for its reproduction.
HSS-ACSP/Photo Josef A. Slominski.

ocratic values. Clay and OMGUS officials based their proposal on a report
from a committee of ten U.S. educational experts.41 This Educational Mission outlined their suggestions and argued that if denazification were to be
successful, a radical curriculum and personnel reform was necessary.42
First, the complex Bavarian system would need to do away with so many
41. The Committee was chaired by Dr. George Zook and included Bess Goodykoontz,
the United States Office of Education; Henry Hill, George Peabody College for teachers;
Paul Lambert, YMCA College; Earl McGrath, Dean of the University of Iowa; Reinhold
Niebuhr, Professor at the Union Theological Seminary; Reverend Felix Newton Pitt, Secretary of the Catholic School Board in Louisville Kentucky; Lawrence Rogin, Director of Education at the Textile Workers’ Union; T.V. Smith, Professor at the University of Chicago;
and Helen White, Professor at the University of Wisconsin.
42. The members of the Committee arrived in the American occupational zone in
August 1946 and traveled to Greater Hesse, Baden-Württemberg, and Bavaria. There they
spoke with instructors, American officials, and parents before preparing their report for Lucius
Clay in September 1946. There does not seem to be any record of the Committee meeting with
Muench or any of the prominent Vatican officials who would go on to protest Clay’s plan.

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

schooling options. Instead, the students should be funneled into a primary
and secondary school system that would expose them to students of all
intellectual capabilities and backgrounds.43 Second, OMGUS officials proposed that any teachers that were part of the Nazi Party were to be dismissed. Those who were not National Socialists but taught during the
Third Reich’s existence were to take a survey that would gauge their loyalty
to the previous administration and their devotion to democratic ideals.44
The Educational Committee proposed that new lessons prioritizing democratic ideas and attacking concepts such as the Führerprinzip ideas were
essential as well as new textbooks.45 Lastly, the report took a hard stance
regarding religious education and argued that the religious divisions in
Germany risked undermining the goal of a democratic and denazified education curriculum. The report stated that “toleration must be guaranteed
not only for believers but for disbelievers as well. . .” and criticized the
prevalence of confessional schools.46 Consequently, the report made major
recommendations to Clay and OMGUS regarding the school system and
its role in denazification in the American zone.
Taking the recommendations from the report, Clay and his team
sought to create a system where students would funnel from public elementary schools into public secondary schools. OMGUS officials believed
this system taught what they called “democratic toleration,” which was a
major goal of denazification. At public schools, children would interact
with students from different backgrounds and learn to be tolerant and
accepting of different religious, socio-economic, and racial backgrounds.47
Consequently, this meant that Catholic Schools would either need to convert to public schools or close. Clay and OMGUS envisioned that a
timetable could be established, but that their intent was to begin removing

43. United States, Education Mission to Germany, and George Frederick Zook, Report
of the United States Education Mission to Germany, [United States Department of State Publication 2664, European Series 16] (Washington, 1946), 6.
44. Ibid., 18. The Committee did recommend that due to the shortage of teachers in
the American occupation zone, there should be a probationary committee created to offer
teachers an opportunity to appeal their termination and show that they no longer believed in
the Nazi ideology. The Committee encouraged a parole option and leniency when it came to
evaluating teachers and either reinstating them without parole or giving them a year to reorganize their political beliefs and curriculum. Lastly, the Committee felt that while private
schools should be offered and protected, they recommended a firm and solid public educational system to address denazification.
45. Ibid., 20.
46. Ibid., 13.
47. Puaca, Learning Democracy, 39.

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337

FIGURE 4. U.S. Army, General Lucius D. Clay, retiring U.S. Military Governor of
Germany, visits the Pentagon, Washington, D. C., following his return from Germany,
May 17, 1949, photograph, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GEN_
Lucius_D._Clay_portrait_(cropped).jpg. This image has been made public domain
in the United States by the U.S. federal government.

confessional schools so that all students would eventually enter this Americanized system. For the time being, however, Clay and his team argued
that all teacher’s backgrounds needed to be evaluated and began dismissing
teachers based on their survey results or political background. The pupilto-teacher ratio grew exponentially to 79:1 by the beginning of 1947.48
Upon seeing OMGUS’ plan, Hundhammer was incensed by the idea of
what he called “Americanizing” the Bavarian school system and felt that the
Americans were simply imposing their vision and acting as conquerors.
Hundhammer stated, “Our Bavarian system of education was entirely contrary to American educational personnel who entertained more liberal views.
We Catholics presuppose this attitude toward religion in our brothers in the
faith. . . . Parents decide what type of school the child will attend. . . .”49 Furthermore, Hundhammer and other Bavarians pointed to the disastrous
48. Ibid., 34.
49. Alois Hundhammer, “Letter to Murray Van Wagoner,” appendix to: American
Nuncio: Cardinal Aloisius Muench, 337.

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denazification protocols in Hesse which resulted in nearly 65% of Hessian
teachers being dismissed due to their party affiliation or their results on the
OMGUS survey.50 In addition to these remarks, Hundhammer claimed the
American efforts were a renewed Kulturkampf and urged Bavarian newspapers to express their support for Catholic schools.51 In March 1947, Hundhammer wrote in his school reform plan that “the highest educational goals
are the fear of God, respect for religious conviction and the dignity of man,
self-control, a sense of responsibility and willingness to take responsibility”
and that under the CSU plan “the pupils are to be educated in the spirit of
democracy in love for the Bavarian homeland and the German people and in
the spirit of reconciliation among nations.”52 If OMGUS’s plan was implemented, he argued, it would remove the crucial religious and cultural elements that were unique to Bavaria and so for this reason, “the Bavarian educational administration must fail to implement the OMGUS plan of the
differentiated unified school in general.”53 Hundhammer’s counter-proposal
left most of the complex tiered school system intact and emphasized the continued existence of Confessional Schools. OMGUS rejected this plan and
sought to find ways to negotiate with the Bavarian government.
On July 25, 1947, Hundhammer raised the issue of the American
plan for education reform with Cardinal von Faulhaber and requested
assistance. Von Faulhaber’s diary reveals that Hundhammer sought to
raise the alarm and discussed the situation of catholic schooling and
what was at risk with the American plan.54 Vatican officials and Catholic
clergymen began mobilizing against the effort to close confessional
schools. In October 1947, a meeting of Bishops was called in Frankfurt
to discuss the growing concern surrounding the American reform plan
efforts. Muench did not attend; however, the protocol notes state that
Father Ivo Zeiger was sent to the meeting explicitly on Muench’s behalf.
In the meeting, Father Zeiger expressed “the opinion of the Apostolic
Delegate [Muench] [is] that the Germans sometimes lack activity and
that in their all too submissive attitude toward the government they

50. Puaca, Learning Democracy, 34.
51. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 129.
52. Alois Hundhammer, “Erziehungsplan auf Weite Sicht,” stored in Munich, the
Hanns Seidel Stiftung Archiv für Christlich-Soziale Politik (hereafter referred to as ACSP),
Josef Müller Folder 16, p. 1.
53. Ibid., 6.
54. Michael von Faulhaber, “Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber” 25, July 1947,
EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 10026, pp. 79. https://faulhaber-edition.de/10026_1947-0725_T01

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often put up with things which, from the Catholic conscience, deserve
condemnation.”55 Muench was clearly calling for the clergymen to resist
these curriculum changes.
In December 1947, the anti-reformists continued to coordinate their
efforts for the following year and how to effectively resist OMGUS’ educational plans. First, Von Faulhaber wrote to Pius XII to inform him of the
situation regarding the education debate. He praised Muench and wrote
that “Excellency Alois Muench, who will come here again the day after
tomorrow, has earned the sympathy of the German bishops by his amazing
speed of work, by his canonistic rectitude, and by his vigor in the matter.”56
After meeting with Muench, Von Faulhaber’s diaries reveal that on
December 14, Prof. Stanley Bertke, Muench’s personal assistant, von Faulhaber, and Hundhammer met for two hours “because of [the] school question.”57 The team ultimately discussed whether Muench should make a
plea directly to General Clay or if more letters from Bishops and politicians
would showcase the support of their efforts against OMGUS. They
decided that they would pursue both courses of action in January and send
drafts to one another.
Muench also began informing Catholics in the US about the prospect
of closing down Bavarian Catholic schools. In a letter dated December 23,
1947, Muench wrote to his colleague Archbishop John McNicholas of
Cincinnati, about his concerns with the OMGUS education reform plan.
Muench acknowledged the need for a new education system, but his contention lay with the secular emphasis that the American forces wanted and
their desire to close Catholic schools. Muench wrote that the development
of democracy in Bavaria would depend upon “the awakening and realization of the concepts of human dignity and right [rather] than upon structural reorganization of the German school system. In other words, they
consider their school system a part of Bavaria’s culture, and think they have

55. Generalvikar Kastell, “Protokoll des Frankfurter Treffens von Vertreten der Bistuemer Fulda, Mainz, und Limburg,” [“Minutes of the Frankfurt meeting of representatives of
the Bishops of Fulda, Mainz, and Limburg,”] in: Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945. Westliche
Besatzungszonen 1945–1947, [Files of German bishops since 1945. Western zones of occupation 1945–1947,] ed. Ulrich Helbach, 2 vols., [Veröffentlichungen der Kommission für Zeitgeschichte, Series A: Quellen, 54] (Paderborn, 2012), pp. 1338–1339.
56. Michael von Faulhaber, “Faulhaber an Pius XII—131” in: Akten Kardinal Michael
von Faulhabers, III, 242–43.
57. Michael von Faulhaber, “Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber,” December 14,
1947, EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 10026, pp. 150. https://faulhaber-edition.de/10026_194712-14_T01.

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a perfect right to retain that culture”58 Muench argued that the key to
denazification lay in teaching people about human dignity in the view of
Catholic doctrine and this concept was best taught in schools that operated
under Catholic officials.
Early January 1948 saw the anti-reformists continue their campaign to
secure Catholic schooling rights and Muench and Von Faulhaber began
communicating more with politicians like Hans Ehard, the head of the
CSU. Muench first corresponded with Cardinal Faulhaber and began
relaying the Cardinal’s concerns directly to OMGUS officials. On January
7, 1948, Muench and Hundhammer received a letter from von Faulhaber
which stated,
The Bishops therefore ask that the Am. Milt. Gvt. recognize that matters
pertaining to the education and school questions in Bavaria are the
responsibility of the Bavarian gov. They insist it would be contrary to natural law if Am. Mil. Gvt. would enforce a certain school system in a
besieged country. This would contradict true democracy and certainly
weaken the people’s faith and believe [sic] in democracy.59

Muench forwarded these issues and offered his own opinion in a letter
dated January 17 to OMGUS leadership. Muench wrote,
In his administration, General Clay has manifested a spirit of fairness
toward the German people that has evoked much favorable comment
among the people with whom I have come into contact. . . . In view of
this policy I trust that it will be possible to grant all interested parties a
thorough airing of a subject that affect very seriously the rising generation
of youth in Bavaria.60

Muench was projecting himself as a middle man while really relaying carefully coordinated messages from the Vatican and Bavarian Catholics
directly to American decision makers.
On January 8, 1948, just one day after Muench had received Cardinal
Faulhaber’s letter, Muench began actively undermining OMGUS efforts
in Bavaria. Muench wrote to Howard J. Carrol, the General Secretary of
58. Aloisius Muench, “Letter to Archbishop McNicholas,” December 23, 1947, stored
in Washington, D.C. ACUA, CAMP, Box 57, Folder Citation: 185/7.
59. Michael von Faulhaber, “Letter to Aloisius Muench,” January 7, 1948, stored in
Washington, D.C., ACUA, CAMP, Box 38, Folder Citation: 124/6.
60. Aloisius Muench, “Letter to Murray Van Wagoner,” January 17, 1948, stored in
Washington, D.C., ACUA, CAMP, Box 38, Folder citation: 124/3.

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341

the NCWC, to express his frustration with the American school plan and
to undermine the image of OMGUS’ competence back in the United
States. The NCWC had a large network system among American
Catholics. Muench was aware of this when he wrote
A serious conflict threatens in Bavaria and in order to prevent it, if possible, I thought the enclosed news release might put the brakes on the
MG [Military Government]—Bavaria by War and State. . . . Under no
circumstances must my name be connected with the release. The date line
should be Munich Jan, 7, 1948.61 [Emphasis original]

Muench himself underlined the statements and location in this letter. He
enclosed articles from local German newspapers as well as translations of
Alois Hundhammer’s speeches in which he critiqued the American occupiers as a “new dictatorship” with their efforts to enforce an education curriculum and the increasing concerns of so many teachers being dismissed.
Muench continued in the letter,
The suggestion might be made to War and State that a Special Commission be set up for further study of the problem and for working out a plan
of reform that will do justice to all parties concerned. Americans and
Germans who know the history, traditions, and problems of education in
Bavaria should be represented on a commission. . . . I am sending a copy
of this letter to Archbishop McNicholas. You will want to confer with
him before going into action.62

Muench was now actively undermining OMGUS by asking for his name
to not be attached to press leaks that disparaged the American efforts in
Bavaria. Furthermore, Muench was requesting Catholics in the U.S. to
petition the government to get others with a similar aim of protecting
Catholic schooling appointed to positions that could help the Catholic
Bavarians’ efforts.
The anti-reformists continued to utilize the opening months of 1948
to showcase their unity and increase pressure on OMGUS. On January 12,
1948, Cardinal von Faulhaber recorded a meeting with Alois Hundhammer in his diary in which they agreed to continue mounting pressure on
OMGUS’ efforts. Von Faulhaber noted that they discussed “the school
reform, the American dictatorship letter, my letter to Muench. . .” and that
61. Aloisius Muench, “Letter to Monsignor Carrol,” January, 8 1948, stored in Washington, D.C., ACUA, CAMP, Box 38, Folder citation: 124/3.
62. Ibid.

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von Faulhaber would inquire about more information about OMGUS
with Muench.63 Von Faulhaber followed up with Muench on January 22
in which he recorded that they discussed “the height of the struggle for
school reform. What I wrote to Bishop Muench on behalf of the Bavarian
bishops is publicly mentioned on the radio and in Minister Hundhammer’s
radio speech.”64 Furthermore, von Faulhaber praised Muench for his assistance and noted that Muench’s efforts in translating their petitions into
English for American audiences and German for German audiences was
yielding results, as Hundhammer continued to receive more and more letters of support. The two met once again on February 2 and were joined by
Father Zinkl, Auxiliary Bishop Neuhäusler, and Father Zeiger, in a daylong meeting regarding “questions of school reform.”65 Cardinal von Faulhaber also requested Muench’s presence at an upcoming Conference of
Bavarian Episcopacy in March to lay out the situation directly to other
priests to which Muench attended.66 Von Faulhaber and Muench agreed
upon the importance of a unified approach between Vatican officials and
Bavarian Catholic politicians, and they were not alone in this regard. The
CSU was also reflecting this theme in internal conversations that were
shared with OMGUS. In a memo dated February 11, 1948, directly from
Hans Ehard, the Prime Minister of Bavaria called for unity in the CSU
regarding the school reform plan and emphasized that the party was not
alone in its position. Ehard wrote “As you know, Eminence the Cardinal
Archbishop of Munich as well as the Bavarian Catholic Bishops and the
Papal Delegate Excellency Bishop Muench as well as the Bishop of the
Evangelical Church in Bavaria have pointed out the serious objections they
have to the planned school reform.”67 Therefore, by the spring of 1948,
OMGUS was now facing a coordinated front of Vatican officials, Bavarian
politicians, and an increasingly upset populace, and Muench had been a
key factor in these developments.

63. Michael von Faulhaber, “Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber,” December 12,
1948, EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 10027, pp. 13. https://faulhaber-edition.de/10027_194801-12_T01.
64. Michael von Faulhaber, “Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber,” January 22,
1948, EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 10027, pp. 19. https://faulhaber-edition.de/10027_194801-22_T01.
65. Michael von Faulhaber, “Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber” February 2,
1948, EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 10027, pp. 25. https://faulhaber-edition.de/10027_194802-02_T01
66. Michael von Faulhaber, “Protokoll der Konferenz des bayerischen Episkopates –
201,” March 17, 1948, in: Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers, III, 361–65, here 361.
67. Hans Ehard, “Schulereform,” February, 10, 1948, stored in Munich, ACSP, Josef
Müller Folder 16, pp. 16.

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343

Muench’s Loyalty is Challenged
OMGUS leadership was hopeful that 1948 would bring success in the
school curriculum negotiations if they changed their approach. Consequently, General Clay decided to rotate some of his staff in hopes that they
could achieve better results with Hundhammer and the CSU. Clay turned
to the former Governor of Michigan, Murray D. Van Wagoner, in hopes
that his political experience would aid in finding a compromise about the
education debate. Van Wagoner arrived and immediately expressed his
concerns about the work and loyalty of Archbishop Muench. On May 22,
1948, Van Wagoner wrote a detailed letter to General Clay, explaining his
frustrations with Muench. Van Wagoner stated:
I am taking this means of inviting your attention to the activities of
Bishop Muench. . . . His representations here and his dealings with certain Bavarian ministers, Catholic bishops and Cardinal Faulhaber have
not been any help to the Military Government. On the contrary, he has
obstructively interfered with the very delicate negotiations we have been
conducting for the attainment of school reform.68

Van Wagoner argued that Muench had a consistent pattern of leaking his
conversations with military officials to the German press or his Catholic
colleagues.69 In addition to these accusations, Van Wagoner accused
Muench of supporting Hundhammer, which represented a direct violation
to his duties as a liaison for OMGUS. His most reproaching remarks
stated:
The fact that Dr. Hundhammer continually raises religious issues in connection with the school reform plan and the fact that points raised by him
parallel comments and observations of Bishop Muench lead us to believe
that he aids and abets Dr. Hundhammer, instigates fears, and endeavors
to create difficulties for Military Government in connection with school
reform. . . . I am convinced, however, that Bishop Muench is in active opposition to our plan [emphasis added].70

Van Wagoner’s suspicions turned out to be correct as Muench’s diary also
reflected that he had multiple breakfast appointments with Dr. Hundhammer. In one meeting on July 17, 1948, in his notes, Muench stated that the
meeting’s goal was to “bring in fundamental principles over the Education
68. Murray D. Van Wagoner, “Letter to General Lucius D. Clay,” May 22, 1948,
stored in Washington, D.C., ACUA, CAMP, Box 57, Folder citation: 185/6.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.

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debate—Safeguard rights of Church education—religion.”71 Muench’s
meetings with both Hundhammer and von Faulhaber confirm that Van
Wagoner’s suspicions were correct.
Muench’s actions in the Bavarian Catholic school debate were escalating tensions in OMGUS circles. General Lucius Clay responded to Van
Wagoner later in the summer, but with the Soviet Union’s decision to cut
off supplies to Berlin and the beginning of the Berlin Airlift in June 1948,
OMGUS’s focus quickly shifted to this crisis, and all Clay could hope to
do was calm internal tensions. Clay responded to Van Wagoner regarding
Muench and stated, “I have had a long talk with Bishop Muench. . . . He
thinks that Military Government has misjudged him because he has
expressed to us views other than those we sponsor. . . . I trust that we will
find sufficient progress soon so that this problem no longer continues to be
our number one irritation.”72 General Clay also indicated that while he recognized the conflict of interest in Muench’s positions, there was no way to
find a replacement if they hoped to resolve the curriculum debate by the
end of the year. General Clay’s response revealed that while he continued
to trust in Muench, it was not blind trust, and that given their situation,
OMGUS would need to continue using the information that Muench
relayed in finding a compromise on the ideas of a school reform.
Despite Van Wagoner’s formal complaint, Muench continued to advocate for the importance of Catholic Schools and their continued existence
despite OMGUS’s plan. Following along with the plan discussed in
December between the anti-reformists, Muench wrote a long and detailed
letter to General Lucius Clay on June 21, 1948, just three days before the
beginning of the Berlin Airlift. In this letter, Muench tried to convey the
negative consequences of a fully secular school system in Bavaria, and that
many other Catholics were concerned with the U.S.’s policy. Furthermore,
the CSU was the majority party in parliament, and OMGUS imposing its
will on Bavaria would undermine support for democracy. Muench conveyed
that Cardinal Faulhaber was becoming a leading advocate about the concept
that education should be decided by parents, not imposed by an occupying
army. Muench wrote, “I urged that serious consideration be given to the
Cardinal’s contention that the people, through their constitutionally elected
representatives, should assume the responsibility for achieving school
71. Aloisius Muench, “Muench Diary—Entry 17 July 1948,” stored in Washington,
D.C., ACUA, CAMP, Box 1, Folder 8, pp. 49.
72. Clay, “Letter to Murray D. Van Wagoner,” appendix to American Nuncio: Cardinal
Aloisius Muench, ed. Colman, 298–99, here 299.

NICHOLAS MISUKANIS

345

reform. Education, he [Cardinal von Faulhaber] maintained, is an internal
cultural matter which lies beyond the competence of occupying powers.”73
Muench’s remark here suggests that if OMGUS were to force its American
system of schooling onto Bavaria, many would have seen this as anti-democratic and another forced mandate on the local education system.
The Educational Debate Reaches a Climax
In July 1948, as tensions continued to escalate, it was becoming
increasingly clear that a West German state and constitution would be
established, and so the anti-education-reformists recognized that if they
could delay a reform until the end of the year, it would be left for discussion
in the West German constitution. Muench relayed this suggestion to
Hundhammer and requested he discuss it more with Cardinal von Faulhaber. On July 19, von Faulhaber recorded a meeting in his diary with
Hundhammer and wrote that Hundhammer reported that “Bishop
Muench wants a preliminary discussion for the constitution of the West
German state.”74 Furthermore, the anti-reformists recognized that there
was now a target date in sight and that if they could maintain pressure on
OMGUS until West German constitutional talks had been held, they had
a chance of retaining Catholic confessional schools. On the very same day
as his recorded meeting with Hundhammer, Cardinal Faulhaber wrote a
letter to Murray D. Van Wagoner75 and expressed his concerns about the
education debate. Faulhaber emphasized the irony of a democracy imposing its will on a defeated people. He argued that:
It would be against the natural right and outside the legitimate claims of
an occupation government if they were to force a school-system on a vanquished people and a vanquished country. Such an interference, though
explained with the intention of democratizing the educational system,
would entirely contradict the spirit of true democracy and annihilate the
belief in democracy. . . .76

Von Faulhaber sent a copy of this letter to Muench, but he also included a
copy in a letter to Robert Leiber, a close advisor to Pope Pius XII, and stated
73. Ibid.
74. Michael von Faulhaber, “Diary of Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber,” July 19, 1948,
EAM, NL Faulhaber, File 10027, pp. 87–88. https://faulhaber-edition.de/10027_1948-0719_T01.
75. Faulhaber, Michael, Letter to Murray D. Van Wagoner, 19 July 1948, stored in
Washington, D.C., ACUA, CAMP Box 57, Folder Citation: 186/1.
76. Ibid.

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that while he did not ask the Pope to intervene on the matter yet, he would
keep him informed.77 Muench, Von Faulhaber, and their allies felt that victory was within their grasp, but prepared to call on the Papacy if necessary.
Nevertheless, von Faulhaber wrote again to Van Wagoner on August 11 and
emphasized that if OMGUS officials continued to insist on their plan, “I see
the hour coming when the Bavarian bishops will have to publicly defend the
Bavarian people’s own right and the tradition of the Bavarian school system
in addition to other differences in the school reform.”78
In August 1948, the issue surrounding education reform reached its
decisive moment. After meeting with Muench for multiple breakfast
appointments, Hundhammer agreed to stand his ground and dismissed all
of OMGUS’ suggestions in his newest proposal. His educational plan
retained Catholic confessional schools and Bavaria’s complex system.
Hundhammer recognized that the CSU’s majority in parliament allowed it
to rule without a coalition and that if OMGUS officials fired him or
imposed their own plan, this would spark major outrage and undermine
Bavarians’ support for democratic principles.79 General Clay recognized
the potential for a public relations disaster and weighed whether to directly
dismiss Hundhammer and enforce the American school system, or try and
find a compromise. Muench wrote a letter dated August 28, 1948 to his
friend Archbishop McNicholas and stated
Excitement is running high. Comments such as “democracy through
dictatorship” are heard on all sides. Sentiment in favor of democracy has
not been at so low an ebb as now. . . . The bishops are aroused over the
whole affair. They fear for their private schools. . . . They talk of “deliberate persecution.”80

For Muench it appeared as though the campaign for Catholic schools had
support from Vatican officials, himself, and Bavarian politicians, and had
forced OMGUS into a no-win scenario.
In late August, General Lucius D. Clay personally acted.81 Clay
expressed his concerns that firing Hundhammer would sour relations
77. Michael von Faulhaber, “Faulhaber an Leiber—210,” 24 July 1948, in Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers , III, pp. 38.
78. Michael von Faulhaber, “Faulhaber an Van Wagoner—214,” August 24, 1948, in:
Akten Kardinal Michael von Faulhabers, III, 388–89, here 388.
79. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 156.
80. Aloisius Muench, “Letter to Archbishop McNicholas,” August 28, 1948, stored in
Washington, D.C., ACUA, CAMP, Box 57, Folder citation: 186/5.
81. Tent, Mission on the Rhine, 156.

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347

between OMGUS and Bavarians and proposed a compromise. Clay wrote
to Hans Ehard, the Minister-President of the Bavarian Landtag in which
he also offered to negotiate financial terms in which OMGUS funds could
be allocated to cover Bavarian school tuition and new textbooks for two
years if Ehard would agree to meet with Clay and negotiate rather than
force the issue into the public with “action of the Landtag.”82 Furthermore,
Clay had been outmaneuvered and would not impose an education system
and allow the question to be decided by both German and American officials in a conference for the fall of 1948.83 Ehard, recognizing the importance of good relations with OMGUS officials, agreed to not pass any proposals in the Bavarian Landtag and Hundhammer remained in his position
as Minister.
In October 1948, American, Bavarian, French, and British officials
met in Berchtesgaden, Bavaria, to discuss education guidelines and the
progress that had been made. The agreement from this conference was that
imposing an education system would seem like a conqueror imposing their
will on a conquered people. General Clay stated, “There always is a temptation to use arbitrary powers . . . when we are struggling for what we consider a vital educational reform, there is a temptation to regret that we did
not order it, although I think most of us know here that if we had ordered
it, we would not have laid a sound foundation for an enduring structure.”84
The resulting decision was one that maintained the traditional Bavarian
systems, and Catholic schools remained intact. The efforts by Muench had
been key to eventually outmaneuvering OMGUS alongside the efforts of
Cardinal von Faulhaber, Alois Hundhammer, and Hans Ehard. In the
end, OMGUS made the decision to not implement an American based
school system in Bavaria, and a large degree of autonomy in educational
freedom was recognized in Article 7 of the West German constitution.
Conclusion
Muench’s efforts alongside von Faulhaber, Hundhammer, and Ehard
made him a celebrity among Vatican officials and German Catholics. In

82. Lucius Clay. “Educational Reform in Bavaria: CC5763,” in: The Papers of General
Lucius D. Clay, ed. Jean Edwards Smith (Bloomington, IN, 1974), 797.
83. Ibid., 158.
84. Office of the Military Government of the United States: Educational and Cultural
and Relations Div., “Education Reconstruction in Germany: Berchtesgaden Conference, 712 October 1948,” stored in Muncie, IN, Ball State University, University Libraries. Archives
and Special Collections, Robert R. LaFollette Papers, RG.04.01.05, Box 4, Folder 0, p. 32.

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November 1948, Father Otto Lüfolding wrote a letter to another archbishop, commenting that the Munich “team” of “CSU, Prime Minister
Ehard, Minister Hundhammer, Cardinal von Faulhaber, and Bishop
Muench” had been instrumental in getting the best possible solution for
Catholic schools.85 Muench eventually went on to become the official
diplomat to Germany for the Vatican in 1949. He continued to reflect the
position that a local government should be allowed to decide educational
matters, but would soon find himself arguing from the opposite perspective. In 1953, the Lower Saxon Landtag passed an anti-Confessional
school law and Muench petitioned for Adenauer to directly intervene to
protect Christian educational principles.86 Clearly, his arguments were
flexible if the interests of the Vatican were served. OMGUS’s decision to
not do away with confessional schools was also significant as it allowed the
Catholic confessional school system to remain intact and effective until a
major series of school reforms were introduced across Bavaria in the 1960s.
Muench’s role as both the U.S. Liaison for Catholics and the Apostolic Visitor to Germany during the U.S. occupation of Bavaria allowed
him to play a significant part in the debate surrounding Bavarian education. By occupying these roles, Muench utilized his positions and connections to gain information, communicate Catholic positions, influence
internal conversations within OMGUS, and delay the U.S. officials from
implementing a similar American school system in Bavaria. Perhaps the
most blatant example of Muench’s undermining of American efforts can be
seen in his letter to Howard J. Carrol on January 8, in which he supplied
newspaper articles that were intended to embarrass OMGUS officials and
showcase their inability to provide an education system in Bavaria. Furthermore, Muench was in constant contact with Cardinal Michael Faulhaber and Alois Hundhammer and coordinated efforts to take advantage
of the fine line between relaying Catholic sentiment and becoming a spiritual pleader. Therefore, from Muench’s and Von Faulhaber’s personal
writings and the memos, diary entries, and other correspondence from
those around them, it can be concluded that Muench was a loyal servant to
the Vatican above all, as well as a Bavarian patriot, as he indicated to Cardinal Faulhaber in there meeting in December 1946. The work of Suzanne
Brown-Fleming demonstrates that Muench was actively prioritizing Vatican interests, and this article has built on her fine work and demonstrated
85. Otto Lüfolding, “Lüfolding an Berning—122,” in: Akten deutscher Bischöfe seit 1945:
Westliche Besatzungszonen und Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1948/1949, ed.
Annette Mertens, 60 vols. (Paderborn, 1974–2022, here 2010), LV, 364.
86. Ruff, The Battle for the Catholic Past in Germany, 70.

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349

that the case of the Bavarian education debate offered Muench a way to
serve both Vatican and Bavarian interests. This episode also reveals that
Muench seemed to care little about the United States’ aims and vision.
Muench’s position also reveals a complex intersection of foreign and
domestic policies in occupied Germany in determining what postwar Germany would look like. Muench’s efforts brought him into conflict with
officials such as Murray Van Wagoner, reflecting his priorities in this
debate. The U.S. military officials constantly debated about whether to
enforce this plan or allow it to receive democratic support, and Muench
played a key role in organizing support to delay OMGUS officials until the
question would be decided by the formation of the Federal Republic of
Germany. From these actions, we can conclude that Muench, while an
official for both the U.S. and the Vatican, constantly worked against
OMGUS efforts in the postwar Bavarian school debate.
By looking at OMGUS files, Muench’s personal papers from the
Catholic University of America, the personal papers of General Lucius
Clay, the private diaries and papers of Cardinal von Faulhaber, and the
archives of Christian Social Union, however, we learn that Muench was a
key player because of the roles he occupied as he sought to keep Catholic
teachers and clergy members influential in Bavarian communities by
retaining the traditional Catholic schooling system. Other historians had
looked at Muench and his role in amnesty trials and his role in perpetuating Catholic anti-Semitism, but his role as an informant to Vatican and
CSU officials had yet to be discussed in-depth. At the core of this debate
was the relationship between denazification and education and what
system offered the best opportunity for this process. OMGUS officials
believed that a system like the United States’ public school system that prioritized secular liberal principles would lead to a stronger democratic identity for future Bavarians. Vatican and Bavarian officials believed that the
key to denazification lay in the Catholic teachings regarding individual
dignity, and that the United States imposing its will against the Bavarian
consensus was all too like the Third Reich’s efforts to co-opt the educational curriculum for political needs. Furthermore, Muench’s perspective
also reveals how open for debate the term “denazification” was in postwar
Bavaria. While Americans thought it meant a completely overhauled educational policy, Bavarian Catholics and Vatican officials sought to implement a vision of denazification where Catholic education returned to the
parameters laid out in the 1933 Reichskonkordat. Muench saw firsthand
how these cultural and religious tensions were playing out and used his
position within OMGUS and as Vatican official to aid Bavarian Catholics.

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A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS

A broader contribution that this article also suggests is that religion and
politics were quite influential in postwar Bavaria and brought OMGUS
and Bavarian officials to the brink during the occupational state building
crisis. As U.S. government liaison and Apostolic Visitor, Muench was
located at the intersection of foreign relations, local politics, and the divide
between religious and secular policy in occupied Germany. His position
within the education debate between 1946 and 1949 helps explain the
complexities involved in the rebuilding of a divided Germany in the postwar period and the importance of local cultural and religious traditions in
the establishment of postwar institutions.

Bracero-Priests: The Vatican’s Response to
Mexican Migration, 1942–1964
MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON *
This article examines Operation Migratory Labor (O.M.L.), a crossborder collaboration between the Mexican and United States Catholic
hierarchies, guided by Vatican authorities, from 1953–1964, which
brought Mexican priests into the United States to tend to Bracero
migrants and to protect them from Protestant missionization.
Employing Vatican sources in tandem with Mexican documentation,
this article demonstrates the geopolitical ramifications of this surge of
migration in distinctively religious terms. O.M.L. heralded a new era
of transnational migratory pastoral care and revealed how intertwined the institutional and pastoral concerns of the Mexican Catholic
Hierarchy were during the 1940s and 1950s.
Keywords: Braceros Program [Mexican Farm Labor Program],
Operation Migratory Labor, Mexican priests, Pius XII’s Exsul
Familia Nazarethana, Jose Garibi y Rivera, Robert E. Lucey
Introduction
Wiry and thin-faced, Pastor Augustín Álvarez had a working day that
began at sundown and sometimes lasted until 2:00 a.m. Born in Volcanes,
Jalisco, Álvararez entered the seminary in Baja California, but then moved
to the United States after being ordained a priest.1 A member of a young
Mexican congregation, the Missionaries of the Holy Spirit, Álvarez was
invited by the Archbishop of Los Angeles to undertake a mobile apostolate.
Chaplain to four thousand Mexican guest workers, dubbed Braceros,
between 1956 and 1959, Álvarez traveled between twenty-four labor camps
within Ventura County, an agricultural hub that rimmed the sea between
* Madeleine Claire Olson is a predoctoral fellow at the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies
at the University of California San Diego and a Ph.D. Candidate in History at the University
of Texas at Austin. She would like to thank the Center for U.S. Mexican Studies and the
Council for American Oversees Research Center for supporting this research. She is grateful
to Matthew Butler, Steve Andes, and Julia Young for early feedback on this manuscript, as
well as to the anonymous reviewers of this article for their thoughtful and constructive comments. Her email address is: molson@utexas.edu.
1. Augustin Alvarez, “Alien laborer’s identification card (back),” stored in the Bracero
History Archive, online archive, Item #1028, http://Braceroarchive.org/items/show/1028,
accessed September 7, 2021.

351

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THE VATICAN’S RESPONSE TO MEXICAN MIGRATION

fashionable Malibu and Santa Barbara.2 The archdiocese provided him with
a car and living quarters at St. John’s Major Seminary, located in Ventura.
And so, at sundown, Pastor Álvarez followed El Camino Real toward
camps like Buena Vista, which housed one thousand workers. His arrival at
camp lured the Braceros back to the hall, where a statue of the Virgin of
Guadalupe greeted the workers, fresh flowers adorning the beloved icon.
Still in their work clothes, they filled the benches of the hall and recited the
Rosary with Father Álvarez. He preached a short sermon, which provided
catechetical instruction. A multitude of confessions followed, the men confiding in Álvarez all their sins and miseries until well after midnight.
Álvarez’s ministry to the Braceros came about from a conjuncture of
state policies, migration patterns, and ecclesiastical initiatives. Seasonal
migrations of Mexicans to the United States were nothing new, but they
accelerated during the Bracero program from 1942–1964. Officially called
the Mexican Farm Labor Program, the Bracero Program was a bilateral
agreement between the United States and Mexico that allowed American
growers to contract Mexican citizens for seasonal work on farms and
ranches. In response, during the summer of 1953, members of the Mexican
Catholic hierarchy, in collaboration with the United States’ Bishops’ Committee for the Spanish Speaking (B.C.S.S.), launched “Operation Migratory Labor” (O.M.L.). O.M.L. was a cross-border missionary program
that brought priests from Mexico to provide Spanish-speaking ministry in
the United States to Mexican agricultural laborers.3 It was a partnership
2. Al Antczak, “His Rectory An Auto, Parish a Country, As Priest Cares for Migrant
Workers from Mexico,” October 1, 1956, 4–5, stored by the Catholic Research Resource
Alliance, online archive, https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=cns19561001-01.1.68&
srpos=6&e=———-en-20—1-byDA-txt-txIN-Bracero———-, accessed September 13, 2021.
3. For the Bracero Program, see Alberto García Maldonado, “Regulating Bracero
Migration: How National, Regional, and Local Political Considerations Shaped the Bracero
Program,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 101 no. 3 (2021), 433–60; Deborah E.
Kanter, “Mexican Priests and Migrant Ministry in the Midwest, 1953–1961,” U.S. Catholic
historian 39, no. 1 (2021), 93–112. Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Berkeley, CA, 2011). Gledhill’s primary focus is the ejido created from the expropriated hacienda of Guaracha, Michoacán, but
he does note that many ejidatarios sought to migrate after the early failures of the collective
ejido. John Gledhill, Casi Nada: A Study of Agrarian Reform in the Homeland of Cardenismo
(Albany, N.Y., 1991); Michael Snodgrass, “The Bracero Program, 1942–1964,” in: Beyond La
Frontera: The History of Mexico-U.S. Migration (New York, NY, 2011), 79–102. For the
OML, including Stephen A. Privett, S.J., The U.S. Catholic Church and its Hispanic Members:
The Pastoral Vision of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey (San Antonio, TX, 1988), 102–10; Gina
Marie Petti, “‘A Ghastly International Racket’: The Catholic Church and the Bracero Program in California, 1942–1964,” [Working Paper Series 33, no. 2] (working paper, Cushwa
Center for the Study of American Catholicism, University of Notre Dame, Fall 2001).

MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON

353

FIGURE 1. Los Angeles Times, Mexican workers await legal employment in the
United States, Mexicali, Mexico, February 8, 1954. Photographer unknown.
Photograph is in the public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
MexicaliBraceros,1954.jpg

between the Mexican and U.S. hierarchies to station Mexican missionary
priests among Braceros—and other Mexican seasonal migrant farmworkers—in the United States.
For its part, the Mexican Catholic Church was especially worried about
Protestant proselytizing, as well as the threat of moral decay among Mexican citizens while they labored abroad.4 To counter these threats, new
4. In the eyes of the Catholic Church, the argument of “moral decay” linked long-standing fears that secularism was undermining traditional sources of moral authority. For instance,
many Catholic organizations worked to perfect the religious and moral work of the nation,
principally in public and home life. The Church’s aim was to attack philosophical bases of the
spiritual corruption and immoral attitudes of the people. Historians such as Ana Elizabeth
Rosas and Deborah Cohen have recently explored how the migration of unaccompanied men
to the U.S engendered economic, social, and emotional turmoil in the hometowns and families
they left behind. Ana Elizabeth Rosas, Abrazando el Espíritu, Bracero Families Confront the
US-Mexico Border (Berkeley, CA, 2014). Deborah Cohen, Braceros: Migrant Citizens and
Transnational Subjects in the Postwar United States and Mexico (Chapel Hill, NC, 2011).

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THE VATICAN’S RESPONSE TO MEXICAN MIGRATION

teams of Mexican priests came to the U.S. through O.M.L. every summer
beginning in 1953. In any one year, the total number of priests rarely
exceeded twenty-five, peaking at thirty priests in 1958 for 400,000 Braceros
dispersed across the United States. By 1961, the regional office’s annual
reports to the hierarchy ceased making any reference to O.M.L., suggesting
that the once-celebrated program had been allowed to fade away quietly.
Despite O.M.L.’s limited effectiveness in either stemming the tide of
Protestantism or in moralizing Braceros, the program holds a crucial historical importance. O.M.L. was the first binational Catholic program between
Mexico and the United States that aimed at ministering to Mexican and
Mexican American seasonal migrants in the twentieth century.
Human mobility represented a particular concern for the hierarchical
organization of the Catholic Church during the early twentieth century.
Arriving ethnic minorities needed a specific type of pastoral accompaniment according to their language, culture, and community expressions of
faith, which included rites, hymns, processions, and sacraments.5 Working
from the position that every Catholic has a home parish that is responsible
for their religious journey, the Church established certain policies regarding what happens when congregants migrate.6 However, questions
remained. Who was responsible for these congregants when they were
north of the border? Was it the U.S. hierarchy, or did the Mexican hierarchy still bear responsibility, as the migrants planned to return? The peculiar
border-crossing existence of Braceros challenged the existing ecclesiastical
magisterium toward this form of migration. It also laid bare to what extent
the Catholic Church existed as both a nation-bound institution and a universal religious authority.
An examination of the history of this cross-border missionary program
also helps to illuminate some essential features of the Mexican Church’s
changing apostolate to its members, both citizens and emigrants, in the
middle decades of the twentieth century. Both the Mexican hierarchy and
the Vatican paid a zealous interest in the spiritual welfare of displaced per5. Jorge E Castillo Guerra, “Contributions to the Social Teaching of the Roman
Catholic Church on Migration,” Exchange, 44, no. 4 (2015), 122.
6. By the Church, the author is referring here to the institutional Catholic Church
acknowledged by canonical law, including the Vatican, state hierarchies including the Mexican and United States hierarchies, and bishops as well as parish priests. The analysis here
regarding the motivations of the bishops with respect to their work with migrants is based
primarily on internal memoranda, public statements, reports, and other documentation that
originated at the Vatican Archives. Bishops are not monolithic in their thinking, however and
are often guided by more regional concerns.

MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON

355

sons, mainly because the “foreign Protestant infiltration” was a threat to
migrants’ spiritual sovereignty. Vatican documents are replete with
detailed instructions about how to negotiate these different ways of organizing the Church’s ministry toward migrants.7 Via an analysis of the policy
and policy changes toward the Braceros, this article traces the continuities
and changes in the interplay between three branches of the Church—the
Vatican, the Mexican Hierarchy, and the U.S. Hierarchy. As the Bracero
Program progressed, the Mexican Hierarchy, in collaboration with Vatican
officials and the United States and Canadian Hierarchies, shifted its pastoral emphasis from discouraging migration to ministering to migrants and
actively developing policy to support moving persons. Operation Migratory Labor (O.M.L.) was the Mexican Hierarchy’s response to the
demands and concerns emanating from the Vatican, from state and municipal governments, from the Braceros themselves, and from the North
American Hierarchy.
The Catholic Church’s unique capacity to attend to international
migrants who cross nation-state boundaries draws attention to its transnational qualities. However, taking the Catholic Church at face value as a
universal institution that transcends national divisions obscures how
transnationalism is paradoxically often nationalistic. While O.M.L. heralded a new era of transnational Catholic pastoral care, it also laid bare the
nation-centered orientations within both the U.S. and Mexican Catholic
hierarchies. Given these demands, the Mexican and United States episcopates were not able to achieve a cross-border collaboration to respond to
migration due to these internal disagreements between leaders in the
Church and national divisions between hierarchies. Thus, the failures of
O.M.L. demonstrated the geopolitical ramifications of this surge of migration, particularly in terms of challenging existing ecclesial formulations to
go beyond a nation-centered pastoral model.
This article begins with a brief examination of the Catholic Church’s
migration policy before the Bracero Program to explain the role of the Vatican in creating transnational collaboration at the episcopal level. The question of migration, particularly the conservation of souls outside the home
nation, had long generated debate in the Church, but the official policy had
7. Examples include major papal Encyclicals such as Exsul Familia Nazarethana as well
as personal correspondences. In 1952, Pope Pius XII founded the Superior Council for Emigrants, a special division with the Vatican responsible for populations subject to relocation.
David Fitzgerald, A Nation of Emigrants: How Mexico Manages its Migration (Berkeley, CA,
2009), 24.

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never extended much beyond discouraging prospective migrants from traveling. The discussion then shifts focus to Catholic responses to the Bracero
Program during several distinct periods: the program’s first years when the
Mexican hierarchy first started to craft policy toward it, dubbed the
“Bracero Priest Campaign” (1942–1946); the period in which the Bracero
Program extended past its initial purpose after World War II, when ecclesiastical authorities, faced with a lack of priests, were fully tasked with
recruiting Bracero priests (1946–1953); the promulgation of Pius XII’s
Exsul familia (1953) which shifted both the Mexican and U.S. Hierarchies’
goals and methods; and, finally, the program’s concluding ten years, 1954 to
1964, when the emphasis focused on how to protect Mexican Braceros from
converting to Protestantism. By foregrounding the transnational aspects of
Catholicism and its structural similarities between a nation-state and a
national branch of the universal Church, this analysis explores how Mexican
Church policy has influenced the shape of Mexico-U.S. migration.
Catholic Social Teaching and Migration
The Church tradition of defining human rights as “expressions of
human unity and dignity that flow from being created in the likeness of
God” had existed since the early sixteenth century. Catholic thinking on
human rights began to converge with secular political models of rights
during the papacy of Leo XII (1878–1903).8 Thus, in terms of the Catholic
Church’s policy toward migration, the accepted starting point is Pope Leo
XIII’s encyclical entitled Rerum novarum (“Of New Things”). Published on
May 15 of 1891, the encyclical responded to the anticlericalism of the
French revolution, the social effects of the industrial revolution, capitalist
individualism, Italian emigration, and the growth of Communism.9 In it,
Pope Leo declared that migrants were not to be seen merely as “inanimate
cogs greasing the wheels of capitalist supply and demand. They [were]
human beings, made in the image of God, needing spiritual succor.” 10 Thus,
the Church needed to care for Catholic persons migrating to foreign
nations, often taking great care to preserve Catholic migrants when they
8. Paolo G. Carozza and Daniel Philpott, “The Catholic Church, Human Rights, and
Democracy: Convergence and Conflict with the Modern State,” Logos: A Journal of Catholic
Thought and Culture, 15, no. 3 (2012), 15–43, here 18.
9. Muehlebach, The Catholicization of Neoliberalism: On Love and Welfare in Lombardy,
Italy, 2013.
10. Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum: Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIII on the Condition of
Labor (Vatican City, May 15, 1891); Manuel Ceballos Ramírez, “Rerum novarum en México:
cuarenta años entre la conciliación y la intransigencia (1891–1931),” Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 49, no. 3 (1987), 170.

MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON

357

found themselves in the context of a Protestant majority. These ministries
worked for the pastoral well-being of migrants, as well as to improve the
livelihood of immigrants while they sojourned in a foreign land. Special care
was likewise established in migrants’ home nations. Church authorities
assigned ecclesiastical structures—parishes and dioceses—in both sending
and receiving areas to offer guidance regarding the problematic situations
that migrants would encounter when traveling abroad.11 In the years after
Rerum Novarum, other initiatives emerged to increase the ecclesial response
to the challenges of emigration. For example, in 1914, Pope Pius X (1903–
1914) proposed the foundation of a specialized seminary to form priests to
be assigned to Italian migrants. The Sacred Consistorial Congregation published a decree in 1914 stating that missionaries for migrants had to complete studies in ethnography to prepare for the ad quam (receiving) Church
that tended to these persons in their destination country.12
As early as March 1937, the Holy See recognized the importance of
protecting those who emigrated specifically from Mexico, either temporarily or permanently. In the papal encyclical Firmissiman Constantiam (On the
Religious Situation in Mexico), Pius XI (1922–1939) directly commented
on the Mexican case, ordering Mexican and American bishops to work
together to minister to Mexican migrants.13 He clearly emphasized the
threat of conversion to Protestantism, noting the necessity of “the assistance
for Mexicans who have emigrated to other countries, who, torn away from
their country and their traditions, more easily become prey to the insidious
propaganda of the emissaries seeking to induce them to apostatize from
their faith.”14 Thus, so that Mexicans who migrated to foreign countries
might not become “the prey of the enemies of Christ,” nor lose the Christian ways of their fathers, Pius XI urged the Mexican Bishops to confer with
their brother bishops in the United States and appealed for the cooperation
of Catholic Action groups. Using more conciliatory language than the usual
condemnations of migrants, the letter claimed they “have had to estrange
11. Leo XIII, Encyclical Quam Aerumnosa: On Italian Immigrants (Vatican, December
10, 1888); Angelo Negrini and all “La Santa Sede y el fenómeno de la movilidad humana,”
People on the Move, 88–89 (2002), 1–14, here 4.
12. Eduardo Barua, “Movimientos migratorios y derechos de los fieles en la Iglesia,” Ius
Canonicum, 43, no. 85 (2003), 51–86.
13. Pius XI, Firmissiman Constantiam: On the Religious Situation in Mexico: To the Venerable Brethren the Archbishops, Bishops, and Other Ordinaries of Mexico: In Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See (Rome, March 28, 1937), accessed September 11, 2021, https://www.
vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370328_firmissimamconstantiam.html.
14. Firmissiman Constantiam, §18.

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THE V ATICAN’S RESPONSE TO MEXICAN MIGRATION

themselves from the motherland,” implying that migrants were forced into
leaving by circumstances at home, rather than because they were dupes or
adventurers.15 Thus, in the process of creating a migration theology, the
Vatican began to chart roads of collaborations for the Mexican and U.S.
hierarchies to develop active responses toward the movement of people.16 In
1939, Mexican and U.S. church authorities agreed to ensure that Mexican,
or at least Spanish-speaking, priests could minister to Mexicans in the
United States.17 Parishes in sending areas of Mexico were urged to form
committees to help repatriates find work. The same year, the Mexican episcopate urged parish priests to develop registries of emigrants in the United
States that could be used to send them invitations to the patron saint fiestas
and exhortations to keep their religious obligations.
Firmissiman Constantiam, in fact, was but one articulation of the deep
concerns brewing in the Vatican regarding Mexican Catholic vulnerability
to Protestant evangelization. Eugenio Pacelli, Vatican Secretary of State
under Pius XI (later Pope Pius XII, 1939–1958), constantly spoke about
the issue in his expositions to the Congregation for Extraordinary Ecclesiastical Affairs (the papal commission that deals with relationships with
civil states).18 From the early 1930s, Pacelli argued that Protestant agents
were plotting a revolution in Mexico. New reports reached the Secretary
of State corroborating this view, affirming that “authentic Evangelicals”
were taking over Mexican government offices and the “ultimate aim of the
Mexican government is to create a new non-Catholic generation,” by
migrants returning as Protestant converts and missionaries. 19 Rather than
adopting a wait-and-see approach, the Vatican Secretary of State along
with the Secretariat on Atheism participated in a project it termed
“enlightening public opinion on the danger of Protestant penetration in
15. Ibid.
16. This paper uses the terms “papacy,” “Holy See,” and “Vatican” interchangeably, following Vaillancourt’s argument that “in practice the distinction has little value for the
researcher, since it is used mostly by Church officials to cover the political nature of many of
the papacy’s activities.”
17. David Fitzgerald, “Uncovering the Emigration Policies of the Catholic Church in
Mexico,” Migration Policy Institute, May 21, 2009, accessed February 20, 2023, https://
www.migrationpolicy.org/article/uncovering-emigration-policies-catholic-church-mexico.
18. The Secretary of State is responsible for all the political and diplomatic functions of
the Holy See and Vatican City. The Cardinal Secretary is appointed by the Pope and serves
as one of the principal advisors to the papacy.
19. Informe from Enrique de Jesús Ochua to Leopoldo Ruíz, September 30, 1939,
stored in Vatican City, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano (hereafter A.A.V.), busta 119, fasc. 545;
Todd Hartch, Missionaries of the State: The Summer Institute of Linguistics, State Formation, and
Indigenous Mexico, 1935–1985 (2006).

MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON

359

FIGURE 2. Michael Pitcairn, Pius XII with tabard, 1951, photograph (retouched).
Photograph is in the public domain. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:
Pius_XII_with_tabard,_by_Michael_Pitcairn,_1951.png

Mexico.”20 Drawing on questionable information culled from local
sources, Pacelli argued that Soviet agents were actively spreading “communistic and protestant propaganda” through the Mexican school system
and among Mexico’s lower classes—ignoring the fact that Mexico had
broken off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union in 1930.21 Archives
suggest that many of Pacelli’s interlocutors in these critical reports were
Jesuits, whose letters were forwarded to the Vatican Secretary of State via
Wlodzimierz Ledôchowksi, the Jesuits’ Superior-General with whom
Pacelli had a long-standing personal relationship.22 Ledôchowksi and his
backers within the Jesuits were also convinced that a wave of Protestant,
Communist, and anti-Catholic revolution was spreading from the Soviet
Union to Spain and the United States and, from there, to Mexico.
Migrants, therefore, became more important in the eyes of Rome. As
20. The Secretariat on Atheism was the Papal office established to be the center of
counter-Propaganda against atheism and other non-Catholic ideologies. Letter from Enrique
de Jesús Ochua to Leopoldo Ruiz, September 27, 1937, A.A.V., busta 119, fasc. 545.
21. Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931–1939 (Princeton, NJ
1965).
22. A.A.V., Affari Ecclesiastici Straordinari, (henceforth A.E.S.) quarto periodo, pos.
474 P.O., fasc. 482.

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THE VATICAN’S RESPONSE TO MEXICAN MIGRATION

potential carriers of Communist propaganda and Protestant doctrine,
according to Pacelli and Ledôchowksi, there was a growing urgency to
create policies toward border-crossing peoples.
Notwithstanding Pacelli’s alarm, time and the vicissitudes of world
war conspired to soften Pacelli’s stance on migrants. In a radio broadcast
on the feast of Pentecost, June 1, 1941, the newly-appointed Pius XII gave
a much more extensive articulation of a Catholic migration theology,
which insisted upon the right to migrate, acquire a living wage, and preserve the unity of one’s family.23 Referring to Rerum Novarum, Pius XII
emphasized that allowing the migration of families in this way meant that
emigration “attains its natural scope,” or, as the Pope clarified: “We mean
the more favorable distribution of men on the earth’s surface suitable to
colonies of agricultural workers; that surface which God created and prepared for the use of all.”24 He emphasized that a positive and open attitude
to such migration would benefit all individual families, the societies into
which they moved, and the prosperity and stability of humankind.25 He
paid particular attention to Catholic social doctrine’s insistence upon the
family as the core unit of human society.26 The Pope insisted, in short, that
migration provided a route to stability and property security for those families who could not obtain it in their home areas.
At the end of the Second World War, Pius XII showed his immediate
concern for the plight of refugees and asylum seekers. In 1944 he established the Pontifical Commission for the Assistance of Refugees under the
direction of Msgr. Ferdinando Baldelli, and in 1946, Pius XII launched the
Office for Migrations inside the Secretariat of State, which divided its
focus between “voluntary migration” and “forced migration.”27 Other
national initiatives immediately followed the example. Between 1947 and
1948, the Bishops Resettlement Council in the United States, the Catholic
Committee for Relief Abroad in the United Kingdom, the Catholic ComOn American fears of “Mexican Bolshevism,” see Goodall, Loyalty and Liberty, Chapter
5; and Matthew A. Redinger, American Catholics and the Mexican Revolution, 1924–1936
(Notre Dame, IN, 2005).
23. Catholic Association for International Peace, compilers, Pius XII and Peace 1939–
1943: Excerpts From Selected Messages (Washington, DC, 1943), 22, 35, 52.
24. Pius XII, La Solennità: Radiomensaje de su Santidad Pío XII en el 50 Aniversario de la
Rerum Novarum (Vatican City, June 1, 1941).
25. Ibid.
26. C.A.I.P., Pius XII and Peace, 1939–1943, 31.
27. Montini to Luis María Martinez, July 16, 1947, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V.,
busta 81, fasc. 424.

MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON

361

mittee for Aid to Immigrant Canada, and the Missio Vaticana in Germany
were all established. As the Church developed institutionalized ministries
for migrants, it also developed a documentary heritage. On August 1,
1952, Pius XII published the Apostolic Constitution, Exsul Familia
Nazarethana. The document can be considered the Magna Carta of the
pastoral care of migrants, a compendium of historical information, doctrinal principles, and pastoral indications.
Although the Church understood itself as addressing the needs of
Catholic migrants throughout history, Exsul Familia served as the first
extensive Papal document dealing exclusively with migration issues. In
contrast to previous popes, Pius XII did not write a social encyclical, which
meant that Exsul Familia has been excluded from most sources detailing
the development of the Church’s social teaching. However, it does reveal
his interest in the social questions of his time and his application and
development of social teaching.28 Exsul Familia came four years after the
promulgation in 1948 of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights, which specified in Articles 13 and 14 the right to circulate
freely and the right to asylum as universal rights. In addition to advocating
for these articles, the Pope also urged implementing a border policy based
on the common good and natural rights. Pope Pius XII declared that natural law and devotion to humanity required international migration to be
opened to people forced from their countries by revolutions, unemployment, or hunger. The Vatican’s principles helped establish universal regulations for the Catholic Church, especially in providing “ethnic” ministry
to immigrants and their children.29 Exsul Familia “identified emigration,
immigration and family reunification as basic human rights.”30
Pope Pius XII explicitly stated that migration was a human right and
directly addressed the migration between Mexico and the United States by
citing with approval the actions of American bishops who responded to
Pope Benedict XV’s (1914–1922) plea that those fleeing religious persecution in Mexico find refuge in the American Church. Exsul Familia repre28. John P. Langan, “The Christmas Messages of Pius XII (1939–1945),” in: Modern
Catholic Social Teaching: Commentaries & Interpretations, ed. Kenneth R. Himes (Washington, D.C., 2005), 175–91.
29. Card. Stephen Fumio Hamao, “Address to the Holy Father,” (Pontifical Council
for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant People, December 2004), accessed February
20, 2023, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/migrants/pom2004_96/
rc_pc_migrants_pom96_om-hamao.html.
30. Pius XII, Exsul Familia Nazarethana (apostolic constitution, given at Castel Gandolfo, August 1, 1952).

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THE VATICAN’S RESPONSE TO MEXICAN MIGRATION

sented a significant advance in the social teaching of the Catholic Church
because it regarded emigration as a natural right, a right depicted clearly in
Chapter 2 of Matthew’s gospel narration of the exile of the Sacred
Family.31 These core aspects of ecclesial concern for border policies shaped
a common thread in the Vatican authorities’ concern for the topic of frontiers, as well as how the social teaching of the Catholic Church pertains to
migration. Thus, in terms of doctrinal support for clergy involvement in
labor and migration issues, clergy closest to Mexican and Mexican-American farmworkers were quite prepared to draw upon these encyclicals to
both guide and defend their activities.
“Muchos Problemas Religiosos”: The Episcopate’s First Response
Following the repatriation of an estimated 400,000 Mexicans in the
1930s, the 1942–1964 Bracero guest worker era renewed the challenge of
emigration for the Church. The onset of the Bracero era intensified the rate
and pattern of Evangelical Protestant growth in both countries. As the
migratory stream shifted northward again, Mexican Catholics joined their
countrymen, searching for better economic opportunities. While living on
the border, these Catholics often had repeated contact with Evangelical
preachers who offered social services as well as classes on reading and writing, Christian doctrine, and even courses in violin and music theory.32 This
became an attraction for those who could not read or write and brought
many Braceros under the fold of Evangelical Protestantism. As newly-converted Braceros returned home from their stints in the United States, they
invigorated or established congregations in Mexico, often bringing their
entire families into the new faith.
For several years, Catholic leaders on both sides of the border focused
the bulk of their efforts on providing the sacraments and sufficient pastoral
care to the Braceros. The vision and mission of two Catholics Archbishops,
Luis María Martínez and Robert E. Lucey, shaped the Church’s early
response to the Bracero Program.33 The main threat was not the inhumane
31. Pius XII, Exsul Familia Nazarethana, para. 100.
32. Ibid., 141.
33. For a detailed survey of Archbishop Lucey’s work with the B.C.S.S., see Stephen
A. Privett, S.J., The U.S. Catholic Church and its Hispanic Members: The Pastoral Vision of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey (San Antonio, TX, 1988). Saul E. Bronder, Social Justice, and Church
Authority: The Public Life of Archbishop Robert E. Lucey (Philadelphia, PA, 1982), 25–30, 74.
For more on the Catholic Church’s apostolate of assimilation to the Hispanic Church in the
mid-twentieth century, see Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto Miguel Hinojosa, Mexican Americans
and the Catholic Church, 1900–1965 (South Bend, IN, 1994).

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living and working conditions, however, but instead conversion to Protestantism. In correspondences between Luis María Martínez and the U.S.
Apostolic Delegate Amleto G. Cicognani in Washington, D. C. in 1944,
Martinez lamented about Protestants in the United States, stating that missionaries met workers on the border, offering them goods and services to
gain favor with them as they began the process of conversion. Ignorant and
poor migrant workers could fall victim to Protestant “perversion,” Martínez
informed Cicognani, because large Protestant denominations funded these
missionaries. Reiterating the Mexican hierarchy’s earlier anxieties, Martinez
also explained that because of their exposure to “Protestant propaganda,”
returned migrants, or “northerners,” had become a severe problem in Mexican cities and towns where, he claimed, they taught “Protestantism or
hatred of religion or indifferentism.”34 Martínez proposed a remedy: Mexican bishops could dispatch priests from their dioceses to accompany their
migratory compatriots to and throughout the U.S., providing them with the
sacraments in their native tongue, thereby protecting their faith until they
returned home.35 However, first, they would need to obtain the consent of
the government and bishops of various dioceses as they recognized that
there would be jurisdictional disputes between parish priests in the United
States and visiting priests from Mexico.36
Other Mexican Catholic leaders were anxious to protect the souls of
the faithful at home, as well as those in the U.S, but their only strategy
often seemed to be simply to dissuade Mexicans from making the journey
north. For instance, Archbishop of Guadalajara José Garibi y Rivera told
priests in Jalisco to warn prospective migrants of the spiritual and material
dangers facing them in the United States “so they will not abandon their
homes, families, work, and motherland for this adventure. The public
should be warned that illegal immigrants went hungry waiting for false
promises of contracts.”37 Even the legally contracted migrants, Garibi y
34. Rivera, Minutes of November 12, 1952, Minutes of the Annual Meetings of the
Bishops of the United States, 1947–1954, stored in Washington DC, Archive Catholic University of America (ACUA), National Catholic Welfare Conference’s Social Action Department (S.A.D.), box 90A, folder 18.
35. Monsignor Michael J. Ready to Samuel Cardinal Stritch, November 18, 1944,
S.A.D., stored in Washington, D.C., A.C.U.A., box 90A, folder 17; Apostolic Delegate
Amleto Cicognani to Archbishop Edward Mooney, October 27, 1944, S.A.D., stored in
Washington, D.C., A.C.U.A., box 90A, folder 18.
36. Luis María Martínez to Amleto G. Cicognani, June 19, 1944, stored in Vatican
City, A.A.V., busta 79, fasc. 409.
37. José Garibi y Rivera to Robert R. Lucey, December 4, 1952, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 119, fasc. 543.

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THE VATICAN’S RESPONSE TO MEXICAN MIGRATION

FIGURE 3. Archbishop Robert E. Lucey, n.d., photograph. Photographer unknown.
Archdiocese of San Antonio, “Remembering Archbishop Robert E. Lucey,”
Today’s Catholic, January 29, 2019, https://satodayscatholic.org/rememberingarchbishop-robert-e-lucey/. Image is property of, and used with the permission of,
the Archdiocese of San Antonio and Today’s Catholic.

Rivera emphasized, “live in miserable pigsties, face high costs, are taken
out by brute force to work on rainy days, and are given opportunities to
spend what they earn on vices.”38
Archbishop Martínez was more astute. His simultaneous appeal to
both Apostolic Delegates—in Mexico and the U.S.—reflected his concern
that his American brethren might not receive his suggestion with the
appropriate enthusiasm. When members of the American hierarchy considered Martínez’s proposal in early 1945, their response was not overly
optimistic or energetic, owing perhaps to the nascent condition of the
American Bishops’ national infrastructure for ministering to Hispanic
Catholics. Martínez’s suggestion arrived as the U.S. hierarchy was beginning to respond constructively to the nation’s growing number of Mexican
38. The parish priest of Arandas took the initiative to reprint a thousand copies of the
Archbishop’s warning (published May 10, 1951, stored in Guadalajara, Archivo Histórico de
la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara [hereafter A.A.G.], Gobierno: Parroquia-Arandas). Paul
Taylor documented that some twelve hundred Arandenses emigrated to the United States in
the years between 1926 and 1929, arguing that the Cristero wars accelerated emigration in
places where it had already existed.

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365

immigrants, but these efforts were still in their infancy.39 Furthermore, the
U.S. hierarchy in the late 1930s was determined to prioritize the numerous
Catholics of Mexican heritage in the U.S. rather than new arrivals.
Martínez wrote that the circumstances of migratory labor meant that Mexican workers neglected their religious duties through a combination of
their carelessness, their geographical remoteness from centers of population, and their lack of access to Spanish-speaking priests.40
To remedy this, Luis María Martinez instructed parish priests to form
a Pro-Emigrant Section of the Acción Católica Mexicana (A.C.M.). Section members were asked to work through their friends and family to find
addresses of those living in the United States or other parts of Mexico.
Secretaries scoured notary records looking for migrants who had asked for
copies of their church records. Once a directory had been compiled, the
parish sent migrants local news, invitations to join pious associations, and
town images to revive their memories.41 In Jalisco, the section sent patron
saint fiesta programs to more than 300 families in 1942, 700 in 1943, and
1160 in 1944. Migrants living in the United States, Mexico City, Guadalajara, and León were asked to establish a mutual aid fund and form religious
study groups. Pro-Emigrant Sections throughout Mexico were active
through the 1950s, sending migrants letters calling on them to unite with
them “not as foreigners or strangers . . . but rather forming with us one
town, a single flock, a single-family,” albeit a transnational one.42 With
improved communication between migrants and the local clergy, absentees
shared intimate details of their lives that facilitated clerical intervention.
Priests reunited several marriages, separated couples living in free union,
and even “pulled three of ours out of the bosom of Protestantism who had
affiliated with that sect, one of whom was already a pastor.”43 All involved
in the program agreed that thanks to the Pro-Emigrant Section’s reawakening of hometown sentiments, “repatriates and absentees make the needs
of the parish—its enterprises and projects—their own, showing themselves
39. Minutes of the Annual Meetings of the Bishops of the United States, 1919–1935,
September 24, 1924, stored in Washington DC, Archive Catholic University of America
(ACUA), National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC), p. 8.
40. Luis María Martínez, Correspondence with the Apostolic Delegation in the United
States, 1943, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 78, fasc. 408.
41. Luis María Martínez to C.E.M., March 2, 1953, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V.,
busta 160, fasc. 825.
42. Sacra Congregatio Concilii (S.C.C.) to Guillermo Piani, June 27, 1953, stored in
Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 825.
43. Boletin Ecclesiastico, July 22, 1944, Mexico City, Archivo Histórico de la
Arquidiócesis de México (hereafter AHAM), caja 0018, exp. 42.

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to be extremely generous in the donations they voluntarily offer for diverse
purposes.”44 As time progressed, contributions from those living outside of
their home parish became another source of parish economic revitalization.
Thanks to the efforts of Archbishop Martínez and the Pro-Emigrant
Sections of A.C.M., the Church’s policy shifted from simple dissuasion to
a campaign that prepared Braceros heading north for the dangers—moral
and spiritual, according to Mexican Church leaders—they would face.
Thus, in 1945, the Conferencia del Episcopado Mexicano (C.E.M., the body
that coordinates the Mexican Church’s social and pastoral policy) published
a pastoral letter, calling on the civil authorities and all social classes to
develop a solution. The C.E.M.’s joint pastoral letter alluded to a changing
strategy in dealing with migration.45 By developing a standardized policy for
diocesan migrant programs and the exchange of priests, the C.E.M. determined which bishops were authorized to send and receive Bracero-priests.
The bishops recognized that simply telling workers not to leave was an ineffective policy, but that it was also the responsibility of parish priests to tend
to Braceros and those who returned to Mexico.46 The new campaign
included a “Manual for Braceros,” special masses and charity in Mexican
contracting centers, and a “Bracero Hour” radio broadcast about conditions
in the United States. The trend continued toward a greater emphasis on
managing migration’s effects rather than hindering departure.
As the Archbishop of Guadalajara, Garibi y Rivera, served as head of
the C.E.M.’s Committee on Migration, recruitment was concentrated in
Guadalajara.47 Throughout the 1940s, Garibi y Rivera recruited around six
priests per year to serve in the United States from six to twelve weeks in
the summer.48 Priests came from Acatic, Arandas, Cocula, Jalostotitlán,
and Tamazula, where colonial-era churches loomed over their Mexican
44. Boletin Ecclesiastico, July 22, 1944, stored in Mexico City, A.H.A.M., caja 0018,
exp. 42.
45. Letter from Pedro Velazquez to Piani, September 19, 1954, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 825; Dictamen from Archbishop of Durango, March 2, 1944, stored
in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 103, fasc. 466.
46. Based on interviews in Los Altos, Espinosa suggests that some priests even encouraged poor men to participate in the Bracero program so they could help finance Church projects. See Víctor M. Espinosa, “El día del emigrante y el retorno del purgatorio: iglesia,
migración a los Estados Unidos y cambio sociocultural en un pueblo de Los Altos de Jalisco,”
Estudios Sociológicos, 17, no. 50 (1999), 375–418.
47. Jay P. Dolan and Gilberto Hinojosa, eds., Mexican Americans and the Catholic
Church, 1900–1965 (Notre Dame, IN, 1994), 30.
48. Boletin Ecclesiastico, 1953, 1955, 1959, stored in Mexico City, A.H.A.M., caja
0277, exp. 34.

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FIGURE 4. Jack de Nijs for Anefo, Cardinal Jose Garibi y Rivera, June 30, 1961,
photograph. Image from the Nationaal Archief, the Dutch National Archives,
donated in the context of a partnership program. This file is made available under
the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jose_Garibi_y_Rivera_(1961).jpg

towns. In rural areas especially, these priests could significantly influence
the local Bracero applicants (aspirantes) sent to the Mexican government.
The young Bracero-priests formed a unique cohort. Many were born in the
1920s, at the height of the Mexican government’s Church repression; they
were likely baptized in secret. Memories of priests martyred in the Cristero
Rebellion (La Cristiada) remained fresh. The Bracero-misioneros, like much
of Mexico’s hierarchy, worried about the endless waves of male parishioners heading north. The Mexican priests wanted the adventurers to
return to their families, their parish, and their nation to avoid, in the words
of one priest, “muchos problemas religiosos.”49
“Pan y Catecismo”: Vatican Redirection
When it became clear, after the conclusion of World War II, that
Mexico and the United States would renew the Bracero program, the
49. J. Francisco Muñoz, letter to Archbishop José Garibi Rivera, Newaygo, Michigan,
August 5, 1955, stored in the Archivo de la Arquidiócesis de Guadalajara (A.A.G.)., section
“Migrantes,” subsection 1940–2001, p. 1.

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migrant committee of the C.E.M. met to plan the Church’s response. The
volume and characteristics of the post-war Bracero program exacerbated
every problem highlighted by the Catholic social critique of the importation of Mexican migrant workers. Church leadership understood that
migration patterns were already beginning to change from circular migration—movement back and forth across the border—toward permanent
settlement in the United States.50 As early as 1951, the C.E.M. renewed
meetings about the spiritual care of the Braceros. One of the main challenges arose regarding priests leaving their dioceses to tend to the Braceros,
as there were not enough priests to tend to Mexican Catholics at home and
on the border. In a letter to the C.E.M., the Archbishop of Guadalajara
noted the need for far more priests than the Archdiocese of Guadalajara
could provide. He asked not to bear the burden alone, but that the invitation to supply priests for the Braceros be extended to all other dioceses and
the regular clergy.51
In January of 1952, the C.E.M. began an official study of the conditions of Braceros. The study concluded that overarching issues of lack of
organization and preparation, combined with a lack of knowledge of the
English language, left many open to exploitation. One submitted report
described the conditions in vivid detail: laborers were told if they wanted to
eat, they must work first, and were paid minimal wages while the price of
goods in camps were overpriced, even as they worked under the blazing sun
without breaks.52 Some of the main causes noted by the C.E.M. included
misery, insecurity, and caciquismo, and they recommended that campesino
organizations help. While stopping short of calling for an end to the importation of labor entirely, U.S. Catholic lay critics insisted that it was in the
national interest for the federal government to manage this movement
across its borders by controlling legal migration and curtailing the use of
illegal laborers. This justification for control of the nation’s borders in the
interests of domestic workers echoed arguments made by the public on both
sides of the border. Increasingly, it was becoming clear that there needed to
be better guidance on navigating the contours of migration.
As the 1950s unfolded, Catholic advocacy towards Braceros matured.
In response to the results of the study, on February 2, 1952, the Bishop50. David FitzGerald, A Nation of Immigrants, 85.
51. Garibi Rivera to C.E.M., December 4, 1952, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta
119, fasc. 543.
52. Piani to C.E.M., March 17, 1953, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 160,
fasc. 825.

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President of the C.E.M. called upon U.S. clergy to request that eighteen
missionaries be sent from Michigan for the spiritual care of the Braceros
between June 1 and October 1 of that same year.53 Cardinal Secretary
Domenico Tardini offered practical solutions on how to move forward—
including delegating bishops to make the assignment of priests to this
position. He also recommended that the C.E.M. create a special committee dedicated to the care of the Braceros. While Garibi y Rivera and Robert
Lucey were in constant contact, particularly regarding the recruitment of
Mexican priests to send to the border, on April 9, 1952, the C.E.M. voted
to appoint Pedro Velázquez Hernández, the director of the Secretariado
Social Mexicano (S.S.M.), as lead representative and coordinator between
Mexican and United States Episcopates.54 Tardini spoke very highly of
working with Robert E. Lucey as they were old friends—Lucey had studied under him at the Propaganda Fide, and they presented at conferences
together in Rome in 1949.55 In a 1952 review of the previous year, the
C.E.M. expressed their satisfaction with the work carried out during the
year, particularly in protecting Mexican emigrants from the dangers of
Protestant missionaries, and called on Robert E. Lucey, Bishop of San
Antonio, Texas, and Matthew Kelly, Executive Secretary, to renew the
contracts of Mexican priests. Specifically, the congregation asked to send
twenty priests during the summer months of June to September for the following year, 1953.56 Additionally, the C.E.M. decided to cancel the
Catholic Radio Hour, instead opting for each bishop to supply ten dollars
to fund Catholic propaganda to send to the Braceros.57
By June and July of 1952, a Catholic Rural Life delegation led by
Father Joseph B. Gremillion visited Mexico City to develop further social
action collaboration with their across-the-border counterparts, including
the development of the Pan American Congress on rural life problems.
During this visit, the group met with Archbishop José Garibi y Rivera of
Guadalajara and aired their concerns about the spiritual wellbeing of Mexican immigrant laborers in America’s fields. Gremillion asked whether
laymen belonging to Catholic Action in Mexico could travel to the U.S.
53. D. Luis Stepinac Minutes from C.E.M., February 2, 1952, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 533.
54. D. Luis Stepinac, Minutes from C.E.M., April 9, 1952, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 533; the executive secretary was Matthew Kelly.
55. Tardini to Piani, March 2, 1953, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 825.
56. Minutes from C.E.M., December 29, 1952, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta
118, fasc. 533.
57. Minutes from C.E.M., April 9, 1952, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 118,
fasc. 533.

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and act as intermediaries who would “draw the workers closer to the Spanish-speaking priests and thus see to it that they do not neglect their religious duties.”58
Archbishop of San Antonio, Robert E. Lucey, on behalf of the U.S.
hierarchy, wrote to Jose Garibi y Rivera asking if he could send priests to
the U.S. to assist Lucey’s ministry to Spanish speaking Catholics. Specifically, he asked about the number of priests in the Comunidad de Los
Misioneros del Espiritu Santo, a new congregation in Mexico, that he hoped
would come to the U.S. that same year. Jose Garibi y Rivera informed
Piani of the initial results of the “draft,” saying that the maximum amount,
twenty-four more priests, could be sent to tend to Mexican migrants on the
border. For those priests that did not leave their dioceses, ecclesiastical
authorities recommended that they keep in contact with those who had left
their diocese to work on the border via letter and telegram. The C.E.M.
provided these priests with various leaflets and other Catholic propaganda
to send in these communications. Considering these issues, in a meeting
on October 9 and 10, 1952, the council concluded that Archbishop Martinez needed to write to Piani about moving forward.59
In the early 1950s, Pius XII’s Exsul Familia continued to influence
Catholic thinking on migration. Matthew Kelly, secretary of the Bishop’s
Office for the Spanish-Speaking, published a manual for U.S. clergymen
tending to the Braceros, called “Priestly Care for Mexican Nationals”
(1952). The manual took seriously Pius XII’s call for pastoral care of
migrants in both their home country and the land to which they emigrated.
Kelly’s “Priestly Care for Mexican Nationals” was one of the first examples
of the U.S. Catholic Church’s expanded advocacy, although modest in
scope, of immigrant rights. Kelly’s pamphlet urged the clergy to take a zealous interest in the spiritual welfare of displaced people in the document’s
opening sections. Then, he moved on to the perceived Protestant threat,
noting that some Mexicans converted to Protestantism, saying, “Let us not
deceive ourselves. Mexicans do become Protestants—sometimes very active
Protestant church workers. Let us not be complacent and say that they will
call the priest when death approaches.”60 Despite Protestants spending mil58. Tardini to Piani, March 2, 1953, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 825.
59. Minutes from C.E.M., October 9–10, 1951, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta
118 fasc. 534 .Letter from Garibi Rivera to Piani, March 18, 1952, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V. busta 119, fasc. 543
60. S.C.C. to C.E.M., March 25, 1954, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 118,
fasc. 536.

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lions for missionary work, Kelly argued in his manual, their main asset was
kindness and free social services—including health clinics, medical aid, and
nurseries for young children. Yet Kelly held out hope that Mexican religious
traditions would have a lasting influence, as he argued that Mexican
national customs were all dearly loved.61 The solution to the Protestant
attraction, Kelly argued, was “pan y catecismo” (“bread and catechism”).
Drawing upon an earlier suggestion from Piani, Kelly asked Mexican ecclesiastical authorities to produce more propaganda which would inform Mexican citizens of the dangers of Protestantism, as well as make sure to extend
catechism centers from the cities, where the majority resided, into the countryside. Taking a cue from Protestant missionaries, Kelly contended that by
offering hungry migrants portions of bread and secure shelter they would be
more willing to come into these Catholic centers.62
A consensus was growing. Exsul Familia provided theological grounding, and Vatican backing, for migrant pastoral care. Matthew Kelly’s publication of “Priestly Care for Mexican Nationals” laid out practical strategies for beating Protestants at their own game. Then, Pedro Velázquez,
director of the S.S.M., endeavored to bring the threads of theology and
practical ministry together. In front of the C.E.M., Velázquez proposed a
plan, dubbed Operation Migratory Labor (O.M.L.) by reiterating the Vatican’s calls for U.S. and Mexican hierarchies to create a centralized organization to tackle “the Bracero Problem.” One of the major issues,
Velázquez knew, was that priests needed the correct documentation to
obtain visas to work in the United States.63 And, he noted, that many
priests struggled to balance the social and spiritual needs of migrants. A
report from ecclesiastical officials in Michigan in 1953, reported by
Velázquez to C.E.M., showed that while Mexican priests were instructed
to “work directly for souls,” they were becoming “entangled” with farmers
and companies over the migrant workers’ social condition, an aspect of the
problem that had been assigned to U.S. priests only. Father Velázquez
closed his speech by nominating himself to lead a commission to study and
solve the matter to the best of his ability.64 Pedro Velázquez’s project
aimed to adjust the activities of the Mexican priests who, at the request of
61. Matthew Kelly, “Priestly Care for Mexican Nationals,” 1953, stored in Vatican
City, A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 536.
62. Circular from C.E.M. #15 (1951–53) July 31, 1953, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V.
busta 120, fasc. 547.
63. “Project to Solve the Bracero Problem,” January 23, 1952, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 825.
64. Minutes from C.E.M., July 28, 1954, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 118,
fasc. 533.

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the North American hierarchy, would attend to the Braceros. Velázquez
drew connections between Exsul Familia and Pope Pius XI’s 1936 proclamation, Firmissiman Consantiam, stating that the Pope had begun to point
out the problem as early as 1936 and that Pius had nominated Miguel
Darío Miranda as coordinator. Velázquez concluded by asking Archbishop
Miranda—who was then Bishop of Tulancingo and a member of
C.E.M.—and the rest of the committee to review the project and request
guidance from the Sacra Concilia Constantiam (S.C.C.).65
When Operation Migratory Labor was launched in the early summer
of 1953, it brought twenty-four priests to minister to Mexican migrants.66
During meetings with Archbishop Octaviano Márquez of Puebla, Father
Velázquez, and others, the C.E.M. agreed to a series of changes in the
manner of selecting, preparing, and conveying Mexican priests to the U.S.
This involved permitting the missionaries to stay in the U.S. for a full three
to four months, ensuring that they learned “a modicum of English,” and
that they would be provided with a series of “classes . . . so as to prepare
them for effective work and help them avoid the pitfalls.”67 They attempted
to funnel all O.M.L. priests from Mexico through San Antonio before
assignment to host dioceses, but the priests’ staggered arrivals stymied the
plan. While some priests arrived several weeks early and some several weeks
late, others failed to make it to San Antonio. To make matters worse, the
regional office’s point person in Mexico City, Father Pedro Velázquez, “disappeared . . . and could not be located for two weeks.”68 Reports also
appeared revealing that Lucey and the regional office found priests from
religious orders challenging to direct, mainly because of the conflicting
direction of Velázquez. Informing the C.E.M., Kelly noted that even when
Velázquez was in contact, by letter, telegram, or phone, it was bristling with
difficulties and his own personal views that did not reflect the perspective of
the Catholic hierarchy. There were bureaucratic complaints, which included
the inability of Velázquez to follow the numbers and names of missionaries
sent, creating unnecessary delays with the U.S. embassy in Mexico City.69
Therefore, the C.E.M. asked Velázquez to step down, naming Miguel
65. (Italian: Sacra Congregazione Concistoriale). Minutes from C.E.M., October 9–10,
1954, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 533b.
66. Robert E. Lucey, “Migratory Workers,” The Commonweal, January 15, 1954, 372.
67. Matthew Kelly, Memorandum on “Mission to Mexico,” January 11, 1954, stored in
University of Notre Dame (U.N.D.A.), Robert E Lucey Papers (C.L.U.C.), box 19, folder 2.
68. Letter from Robert E. Lucey to Márquez, December 9, 1953, A.A.V., busta 160,
fasc. 825. Father Matthew Kelly, Memorandum on “Mission to Mexico,” January 11, 1954,
stored in U.N.D.A., C.L.U.C., box 19, folder 2.
69. Ultimas Noticias, May 4, 1953, stored in Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 825.

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Darío Miranda as interim coordinator. There was little reference to these
logistical issues in later annual reports, indicating perhaps that the difficulties were remedied or became less critical to O.M.L.’s perceived success.
In 1957, only twenty to thirty U.S.-based priests were assigned to care
for Braceros in about three thousand labor camps in California. Alarmed
by the shortfall and the bureaucratic issues, Lucey resorted to the same
tactic used by Archbishop Martínez in the 1940s and appealed to the Holy
See and to Apostolic Delegate Cicognani to exert pressure on the Mexican
hierarchy to encourage their continued support for O.M.L. In December
1954, Lucey wrote to Márquez, bringing his attention to communication
between Cicognani and Cardinal Adeodato Piazza of the Vatican’s Sacred
Consistorial Congregation “relative to the difficulties which we have been
encountering in obtaining the services of Mexican missionary priests for
Spanish-speaking workers in American agriculture.” Lucey noted that “his
Eminence expressed confidence that these difficulties would be overcome”
and proposed meeting Márquez in Mexico City to discuss the difficulties.
Diplomatically, Lucey praised the “excellent” work of the Mexican missionary priests, which was “greatly appreciated by the American Bishops.”
“We hope,” he urged, “that far from permitting it to grow less, we may by
prayer and diligent action cause this work to grow and increase for the salvation of souls.”70 Lucey’s efforts seemed to have borne fruit, as the intake
of around twenty-five priests per year for O.M.L. was steady for the
remainder of the 1950s, but by this time, even his desire to expand the program appears to have waned. However, by the late 1950s, it was evident
that Lucey’s guidance of the committee had led them toward consistent
and robust expressions of concern for the worker that went far beyond fears
of Protestant proselytism.
Miguel Dario Miranda, who led the C.E.M. committee tasked to study
the Bracero problem, presented his findings and suggestions in front of the
C.E.M. in October of 1955. Five resolutions came from this. First, the Episcopal Committee needed to present the problem to the S.C.C. as soon as
possible to receive instructions on how best to move forward. If the S.C.C.
did not respond, following instructions from the Apostolic Delegate, Mexican priests would continue to provide religious assistance for the Braceros.
Next, the C.E.M. needed to appoint two representatives from the Mexican
70. See, “A Preliminary Report on the Work of Mexican ‘Chaplains’ for Migrants in
the Michigan Area,” 1953, stored in U.N.D.A. box 19, folder 6. Report to the American
Hierarchy on the work of the Regional Office of the B.C.S.S., November 17, 1954, stored in
U.N.D.A.; C.L.U.C., box 13, folder 8.

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hierarchy to hold conversations with representatives from the U.S. hierarchy,
furthering the Mexican-U.S. collaboration. In response to Exsul Familia,
Miranda highlighted the need to appoint a national delegate of missionary
priests. The C.E.M. nominated and approved Javier Hernández (bishop of
Chilapa) to carry this out. Finally, considering previous experiences, and to
be as productive as possible, the C.E.M. resolved to create a spiritual preparation guide to the next cohort of priests attending the Braceros.71
In 1955, the Seventh Regional Congress between the U.S. and the
Mexican Hierarchy commenced, centering around their plan for Braceros.
Several conclusions emerged, which were then sent to Cardinal Secretary
Domenico Tardini.72 First, the agreement between North American and
Mexican governments would be extended for another season. At the same
time, a committee of United States senators and deputies would study the
problem of all work in the fields, trying to find a permanent policy for field
workers, who were primarily disorganized and who had very little de facto
protection from existing legislation. Since many farmworkers provided
their services on ranches that were, in fact, factories, they argued that farmworkers should have the same protection as other factory workers in terms
of wage hours, social security, and the right to organize. In addition, the
Bishop’s Council for the Spanish Speaking urged its members in the
Southwest to actively support legislation and organization in favor of the
Spanish-speaking peasant workers.73 Since migrant farmworkers frequently did not vote, were disorganized, and were poorly protected by law,
the B.C.S.S. recommended its members to form local committees of citizens to represent the interests of those same citizens. Even if foreign labor
was necessary for the U.S. economy during World War II, it was a mistake
to make this temporary solution a permanent problem, according to the
Seventh Regional Congress. In addition, the U.S. and Mexican Bishops
agreed that a newsletter be distributed to its members to report on the
progress of O.M.L. In this context, despite the protracted struggle to
launch and sustain the cross-border Mexican apostolate, the program
became increasingly irrelevant and obsolete, and needed to be reformed to
match the changing conditions of laborers on the border.
For moral, social, and philosophical reasons, it appears O.M.L. was no
longer appropriate for the Mexican Church’s apostolate. Apostolic Dele71. Minutes from C.E.M., October 13–15. 1955, stored in A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 535.
72. Minutes from C.E.M., October 13–15. 1955, stored in A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 535.
73. Letter from Angel Gonzalez to the C.E.M., August 10, 1955, stored in Vatican
City, A.A.V., busta 160, fasc. 824.

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gate Piani reiterated this feeling, writing to the C.E.M. on October 13,
1955, to create a permanent organization tasked with following Mexican
Catholics living abroad.74 This organization would represent Mexican
Catholics on an international stage and coordinate with the Mexican hierarchy. He discussed the problems of the modern world that were “contaminating” Catholics, including Protestant heresy and other spiritual ills,
calling upon priests to be the first line of defense against its spread in the
communities. Just as Pope Pius XII called for reform of consciousnesses,
he [Piani] called for an intense campaign for the sanctification of the
clergy, beginning with the revision of the spiritual ministry to the Braceros
to be more effective.75 Writing on behalf of the S.C.C., Piazza responded
to the C.E.M. in early 1956, asking for an effort to increase influence, not
on the lower migrant classes but the intellectual class, saying, “These people
are more pliable to the whims of the hierarchy and can exert a considerable
amount of influence on society and civil wellbeing.”76 In addition to setting
up social centers to apply Catholic social doctrine, this meeting developed
a manual for missionary priests that departed to tend to these people.77
At a national level, by 1960, sixteen Mexican priests attended to the
Braceros for twelve-to-sixteen week stretches, hardly adequate for a
Bracero population that year of more than 315,000, not to mention a probably higher number of unauthorized workers.78 Articles posted in newspapers in Mexico and around the American Southwest highlighted the sheer
dearth of priests tending to the Braceros. One priest working out of California estimated that less than five percent of Mexican nationals had a
chance to attend Catholic Mass. Priests moved from grower to grower,
region to region, crop to crop, and stayed in the State as short a time as
forty-five days or for as long as eight months, the length of the entire crop

74. Letter from Piani to the C.E.M., October 13, 1955, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 535.
75. Letter from Piani to the C.E.M., October 13, 1955, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 535.
76. Letter from the S.C.C. to the C.E.M., February 16, 1956, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 118, fasc. 535.
77. Letter from the S.S.M. to Cardinal Adeolato Piazza, December 4, 1956, stored in
Vatican City, A.A.V., busta 119, fasc. 543.
78. Manuel Garcia y Griego, “The Importation of Mexican Contract Laborers to the
United States, 1942–1964,” in: David G. Gutiérez, Between Two Worlds: Mexican Immigrants
in the United States (Wilmington, DE, 1996), 45–85. Joyce Vialet, “Temporary worker programs, background and issues: a report, Congressional Research Service, prepared for the
Senate Committee on the Judiciary” (1980), accessed March 3, 2023, https://babel.
hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951d00817043c&view=1up&seq=1.

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cycle.79 Those who did attend to these labor camps often led mission
churches—equipped with trailer chapels. Most, however, only carried a
mass kit with them, offering Mass as early as 3:30 AM and as late as 8:00
PM. Relying on local parishioners for transportation, priests moved from
camp to camp, holding Mass or evening services for whomever would
attend. With as few as twenty to thirty U.S. priests per several thousand
Braceros, priests spread their efforts so thin that migrants remarked that
they were “here today, gone tomorrow.”80 In a 1960 meeting between the
episcopate’s migrant affairs committee and U.S. Catholic leaders, participants agreed that American priests would come to Mexico to learn Spanish
and the “mentality of the Mexican people.” The C.E.M. developed a standardized policy for the exchange of priests, in which bishops in both sending and receiving areas were required to give their authorization.
The slow bureaucratic process was resisted by parish priests, seeking the
right to make brief visits North without authorization by the hierarchy. For
instance, Vatican officials made it clear that without prior authorization, no
national or international charitable organization was allowed to collect
money or aid outside of their country, limiting priests to only collect money
in Mexico.81 The hierarchy drew further regulations for long-term exchanges
of priests between the United States and Mexico in 1969, 1985, and 1991.82
In the minds of Mexican Catholic leaders, the Mexican hierarchy’s efforts
weren’t sufficient at ameliorating the profound problems of the Bracero Program. The Mexican Church hierarchy claimed that between 1942–1957, the
Bracero Program caused the dissolution of one million Mexican families.
And the Braceros were only part of the migration of Mexican workers to the
United States. For example, there were only 4.6 million Bracero contracts,
but 5 million apprehensions by the U.S. Border Patrol from 1942–1964.
Conclusion
Father Álvarez was not only a chaplain in Ventura County, California
during the latter half of the Bracero Program. In addition to preaching for
79. Ted Le Berthon, “The Church and the Bracero,” The Catholic Worker, 24, no. 2,
(September 1, 1957), 6–8.
80. Ted Le Berthon, “The Church and the Bracero,” The Catholic Worker, 24, no. 2
(September 1, 1957), 6–8.
81. Letter from Montini to Luis María Martínez, July 16, 1947, stored in Vatican City,
A.A.V., busta 81, fasc. 424.
82. For post-Bracero Program migration, see Jesus Arroyo Alejandre de León Arias,
Migración rural hacia Estados Unidos: Un estudio rural de Jalisco (Mexico City, 1991); Cámara
and Van Kemper, ed., Migration Across Frontiers (New York, 1979).

MADELEINE CLAIRE OLSON

377

his mobile apostolate, he created two radio programs: one called “La Voz
Guadalupana” that was broadcasted over two local stations, as well as a daily
talk radio program in nearby Santa Paula, California. The programs, predominantly funded through donations by the Braceros themselves, offered
spiritual guidance, sermons, as well as Catholic-centered news updates. In
an interview about these new programs, Álvarez expressed that the greatest
value of his work overall was “the testimony it gives men that the Church
has their welfare at heart, even when they are in a strange land.”83
Father Álvarez’s story exemplifies the two major priorities that guided
Mexican Catholic policy during the Bracero Program: providing pastoral
and material needs as well as advocating for fellow Catholics. At the behest
of the Mexican Hierarchy and through sustained efforts by Archbishop
Lucey, the Mexican Church experimented with a cross-border apostolate
of Mexican “Bracero priests” designed to provide spiritual and material
support to migrating laborers with access to the sacraments, mass, and
spiritual guidance. Despite the stated goals of transnational cooperation
between Episcopates, in practice, both the U.S. and Mexican episcopates
struggled to share responsibility for Bracero spiritual accompaniment due
to its inability to go beyond a nation-centered pastoral model. Ultimately,
national politics both within the Church and the Mexican and U.S. governments, as well as efforts to ensure the stability of the Mexican Catholic
Church as an institution, constrained both episcopates from fully achieving
their goals to tackle this migratory stream. By examining Operation
Migratory Labor (O.M.L.), this article shows how intertwined the institutional and pastoral concerns of the Mexican Catholic Hierarchy were
during the 1940s and 1950s.
Given that bishops are not monolithic in their thinking and hold differing priorities and opinions, additional research could examine the motivations of individual bishops in their responses towards migration. Likewise, the lived experiences of these Bracero-Priests has only begun to be
resurrected from the historical narrative. For instance, the Bracero History
Archive has compiled oral histories from those who lived and worked
during the Bracero Era and has only begun to be mined. These appear to
be good potential avenues for further research on this matter.

83. Al Antczak, “His Rectory An Auto, Parish a Country, As Priest Cares for Migrant
Workers from Mexico,” October 1, 1956, 4–5, stored by the Catholic Research Resource
Alliance, online archive, https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=cns19561001-01.1.68&
srpos=6&e=———-en-20—1-byDA-txt-txIN-Bracero———-, accessed September 13, 2021.

Review Essay
Guillaume Cuchet on Catholicism in France:
Sentiment, Eclecticism, Collapse, and Future
STEPHEN SCHLOESSER, S.J.*
Le Catholicisme a-t-il encore de l’avenir en France? By Guillaume Cuchet.
(Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2021. Pp. 256. 21,00 €. ISBN
9782021472745.)
Une histoire du sentiment religieux au XIXe siècle. By Guillaume Cuchet.
(Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 2020. Pp. 424. 24,00 €. ISBN
9782204135023.)
Comment notre monde a cessé d’être chrétien. Anatomie d’un effondrement. By
Guillaume Cuchet. (Paris: Points, 2020 [Éditions du Seuil, 2018]. Pp.
288. 8,80 €. ISBN 9782757877623.)
Le Crépuscule du purgatoire. Le souci du salut dans les mentalités catholiques
(XIXe–XXe siècles). By Guillaume Cuchet. (Paris: Points, 2020
[Armand Colin, 2005]. Pp. 448. 11,00 €. ISBN 978-2757881118.)

G

uillaume Cuchet is a professor of contemporary history at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne specializing in the history of
religions. Although Cuchet has been a prolific scholar over the past twenty
years, his visibility has grown exponentially following his 2018 book
provocatively titled How Our World Ceased Being Christian: Anatomy of a
Collapse. (His pinpointing 1965 as the decisive turning moment—the year
of Vatican II’s closure—has been enthusiastically embraced by the Council’s critics.) In 2020, along with a new pocket edition of that work, two
other books were republished: a pocket edition of his first monograph surveying The Twilight of Purgatory (2005); and a revised enlarged edition of
Faire de l’histoire religieuse dans une société sortie de la religion (Doing Religious History in a Society Exiting from Religion, 2013), the title playing on
Marcel Gauchet’s thesis of Western Christianity as representing a “religion
of exit [or departure] from religion” (la religion de la sortie de la religion). In
*Stephen Schloesser, S.J. is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago. His email
address is: sschloesser@luc.edu

378

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2021, Cuchet published a collection of essays (serving as a sequel to the
2018 blockbuster) posing the anxious question: Does Catholicism Still Have
a Future in France? As Cuchet (b. 1973) arrives this year at his half-century
mark, he is widely associated with contemporary anxieties about Catholicism’s future fate, both within and beyond France.
Although Cuchet’s unusually broad range of interests resists synthesis,
a useful entry point is the prism of cultural attitudes toward death.
Cuchet’s historical method is indebted to Philippe Ariès (1914–84), a towering postwar medievalist who applied the Annales school’s “histoire des
mentalités” (lit. “history of attitudes”) to the history of private life. In a
recent interview, Cuchet invoked Ariès’s work, most notably The Hour of
Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death over the
Last One Thousand Years (1977; tr. 1980). “Religious history,” remarked
Cuchet, “is, from one perspective, a derivative of the history of attitudes
toward death, and hence also towards life.” (“I came to history by way of
Philippe Ariès,” he quipped, “and I have kept the birthmarks!”) This entry
point helps synthesize Cuchet’s varied interests—from his 2002 doctoral
dissertation on attitudes toward the doctrine of purgatory from 1850–1935
to his study a decade later of nineteenth-century spiritualism, seances, and
the use of table-turning to access spirits of the deceased. (See Cuchet, Les
Voix d’outre-tombe: Tables tournantes, spiritisme et société au XIXe siècle
[Voices from Beyond the Grave: Turning-Tables, Spiritualism, and Society in
the 19th Century], 2012.)
Cuchet’s most recent monograph surveys A History of Religious Sentiment in the Nineteenth Century: Religion, Culture and Society in France,
1830–1880. While the title calls to mind Henri Bremond’s monumental
twelve-volume A Literary History of Religious Sentiment in France from the
End of the Wars of Religion Up To the Present (1916–1936), it also evokes
one of the most influential novels of the nineteenth century, Gustave
Flaubert’s Sentimental Education (1869). Beginning already with the lateeighteenth-century reaction against Enlightenment rationalism (and
industrial revolution), Romanticism exalted sentiment, feeling, and emotion. (Flaubert famously noted in 1864: “I want to write the moral history
[l’histoire morale] of the men of my generation—‘sentimental’ [« sentimentale »] would be more accurate.”) Arguing against common conceptions of
the nineteenth century as an era of religious decline (or even disappearance) in the face of rationalism and scientific positivism, Cuchet instead
surveys a fifty-year period (1830–80) of creative religious ferment that
waxed and waned, ebbed and flowed in tandem with turning points of
political fortunes.

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Up until the July Revolution of 1830, “Catholicism still lived largely
on its heritage from the Ancien Régime.” Even as it was re-founded after
the Revolution by those formed in the eighteenth century, Catholicism still
imagined “a time when it could be restored to its previous state” (pp. 21–
22). Around 1880, at the opposite end of Cuchet’s timeline, theology
underwent a neo-scholastic “re-professionalization” following the First
Vatican Council (1869–70), the beginning of Leo XIII’s papacy (1878),
and most acutely the encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). Even as theology
became more technical and scholarly, it also became “more disconnected
and less in contact with its time” (p. 22).
Between these two endpoints, Cuchet also notes that the years 185070 (beginning with the 1850 Falloux Law) were dominated by recurring
clashes between “liberals” and “intransigents.” He colorfully observes that
this undeniable ideological division has “somewhat hypnotized historiography,” and encourages focusing attention instead on the less predetermined and predictable “diversity of constitutive areas of Catholicism, the
conditions of transaction with the modern world, their social interests,
dominant ideas, its emotions (affectivité), its pedagogies, its fashions” (p.
22). Viewed from this standpoint, it often turns out that the “moderns”
were not those we might reflexively assume.
Cuchet divides his study into three parts: “Portraits” (pp. 25–181),
“Debates” (pp. 183–291), and “Tendencies” (pp. 293–393). “Portraits” features four persons with eclectic makeups now largely forgotten to time. In
Chapter 1, Jean Reynaud (1806–63) represents the “democratic theologian
and laicist saint.” A French mining engineer, Saint-Simonian socialist
philosopher, and co-founder of the Encyclopédie nouvelle, Reynaud shared
his contemporaries’ critical views of the doctrine of hell as “barbaric” and
“medieval.” By contrast, the doctrine of purgatory—which made a great
comeback in 1855–60 (the early Second Empire)—responded (in Reynaud’s words) “to the most generous and elevated aspirations of human
thought” (p. 41). Reynaud also shared his epoch’s fascination with reincarnation and interstellar metempsychosis, a vogue spurred by discoveries of
Brahmanism and Buddhism earlier in the century (pp. 55–60).
In Chapter 2, “mystical eclecticism” is represented by Alphonse
Gratry (1805–72), Catholic priest, Sorbonne theology professor, and
member of the Académie Française (occupying Voltaire’s one-time seat).
(Compare Penser le christianisme au XIXe siècle [Thinking About Christianity
in the Nineteenth Century, 2017], Cuchet’s edited collection of Gratry’s
“Journal of My Life” and other texts). In sharp contrast to co-religionists

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who belittled the value of speculative reason, Gratry instead feared skepticism in philosophy: “The world lacks reason more than religion” (p. 76).
Gratry defended a paradoxical conception of mystical reason, a “force that
seeks faith” grounded in the “intimate feeling” (sens intime) the mind has
of God and its final destination (pp. 78, 79). His blockbuster On the
Knowledge of God (1855) was an extended argument against scientific positivism (cf. Auguste Comte’s Course in Positive Philosophy [1830–42] and
General View of Positivism [1848]). Surviving sales figures show that,
between 1853 and 1857—i.e., during the years of bitter ideological opposition between “liberals” and “intransigents”—the eclectic Gratry was one
of the best-selling religious authors (p. 87). Perhaps not surprisingly, a
quarter-century prior to Aeterni Patris, Gratry was one of the first voices
insisting on the necessity of retrieving Thomas Aquinas—Aquinas who
was “unknown to us, because he is too large” (p. 85).
In Chapter 3, Henri Perreyve (1831–65) represents the “liberal theologian” with friends like Henri Lacordaire (1802–61), Frédéric Ozanam
(1813–53), and Charles de Montalembert (1815–70). An Oratorian priest
and Sorbonne church history professor, Perreyve admired fellow Oratorian
John Henry Newman whose approach to doctrinal “development” had
shown that “Catholicism was capable of evolving and adapting to new
times” (p. 122). Perreyve’s premature death at age thirty-four, just six
months after Pius IX’s publication of the Syllabus of Errors (December
1864), strikes Cuchet as a symbol of the “failure” or at least the “extremely
embryonic character” of French liberal theology in the mid-nineteenth
century (p. 135).
Chapter 4 investigates the phenomenal popular reception of On Life
and Christian Virtues Considered in the Religious State (1874) by Charles
Gay (1815–92), regarded by contemporaries as an archetypally modern
“mystic of the nineteenth century,” ascetical theologian, and eventually
bishop who attended Vatican Council I. Cuchet highlights Gay’s sympathetic readings of François Fénelon (1651–1715), the archbishop associated with seventeenth-century quietism. At the same time, Gay—yet
another promoter of purgatory—was thoroughly rooted in the culture of
his own century. Describing Gay’s literary style marked by “a certain
Romantic pathos, restrained yet sensitive at times to the ‘anguish’ and
despair’ of the contemporary soul with almost Kierkegaardian accents” (p.
157), Cuchet draws a counterintuitive conclusion. In matters of spirituality, sometimes the most daring of anti-modernists—either because of their
anti-Jansenism (i.e., promoting sentiment and emotions) or for pastoral
reasons—unexpectedly ended up sharing the most in common with the

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affectivity that marks modernity (l’affectivité moderne) (pp. 159, 160). The
“Portraits” section concludes with Chapter 5, a departure from the previous
four largely unremembered figures. It recounts the celebrated Victor Hugo
(1802–85), here in a lesser-known role as spiritualist and necromant, motivated by profound grief over the tragic death of his daughter Léopoldine,
drowned at age nineteen in the Seine River.
“Debates,” the book’s second part, has three chapters with themes
more self-evident than “Portraits.” Chapter 6, “A Forgotten Theological
Revolution,” recalls the significant shift in 1850s Catholic discourse about
the number of “elect” [élus] chosen for salvation—a shift from few to many.
Chapter 7 treats the controversy over “historical naturalism” between the
years 1856 and 1860. Chapter 8 asks whether there was “A First Wave of
Neo-Buddhism in the Middle of the Nineteenth Century?”
“Tendencies,” the book’s third part, has four chapters, again with more
self-evident themes. Chapter 9 surveys the “Saint Sulpician” turn in the
1850s in both publications of pietistic literature and the outpouring of particular devotions and mass-produced devotional objects. Dismissed by religious elites as sentimental kitsch, Cuchet asks instead whether religion’s
entry into this “first age of mass culture” should be interpreted as reflecting
a “spiritual revolution.” Chapter 10 investigates “The Religion of Mourning and Communication with the Beyond.” Topics include the shift in
terms from the timeworn “heaven” (ciel) to the more evocative “beyond”
(l’au-delà), the cult of the dead, heightened devotion toward purgatory, and
the birth of spiritualism. In Chapter 11, Cuchet considers Blessed Frédéric
Ozanam’s (dates above) approach to religion, sickness, and death as a “witness to the history of attitudes toward death” (note here citations of Ariès,
pp. 342–43, 356, 357–58). Like Perreyve, Ozanam died prematurely, and
the reader of Ozanam’s correspondence “cannot help but be struck, at first
sight, by the omnipresence of mentions of death” (p. 344). For Cuchet,
Ozanam’s brief life in the century’s first half represents a transitional spiritual figure, “traditional enough” in his theology but “already modern in his
affectivity” (déjà moderne par son affectivité) (p. 362). Chapter 12 concludes
the book with “Esotericism and Revolutions. Insurgents and Initiates in
1848.” The mid-century resurgence of the esoteric, located within the
larger context of 1848’s social revolutions, suggests a surprising link
between the “double interest” of religion and politics.
What connections might be drawn between Cuchet’s nineteenth and
twentieth centuries? An important bridge may be found in Cuchet’s The
Twilight of Purgatory. Anxiety of Salvation in Catholic Mentalities

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383

(Nineeenth-Twentieth Centuries), reprinted in 2020 in a pocket edition. The
title consciously echoes The Birth of Purgatory (1981; tr. 1986), the seminal
work by Jacques Le Goff (1924–2014), a towering figure (like Ariès) of the
French Annales school. Le Goff argued that the “birth” of purgatory, catalyzed by incipient capitalism’s first stirring, offered a sort of safety valve
for Christian usurers. At the other end of purgatory’s long career, Cuchet
argues that its twilight (le crépuscule) began following the catastrophe of the
Great War (1914–18). In light of the massacre of millions of youth in
indescribable misery—a veritable hell on earth—it became difficult to
believe in yet more purgative suffering after death, especially for the war’s
venerated sacrificed generation.
This massive shift in attitudes toward death prefigures a more overarching one Cuchet identifies at the conclusion of How the World Ceased to
be Christian. There he underscores a “crisis of preaching” about the traditional “four last things” (fins dernières)—Death, Judgment, Heaven, and
Hell. This crisis placed in question “The End of Salvation?” (“La fin du
salut?”) itself—playing on the meanings of fin (“end”) as both conclusion
(end of the line) and teleological aim (end-in-view). Although Cuchet
traces the trajectory of this “crisis of preaching” back to the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, he sees its twentieth-century form as having been
latent since at least 1939–45—yet another experience of hell on earth. It
then shot up to the surface in the 1960s following the Algerian War
(1954–62), France’s traumatic analogue to the USA’s Vietnam and the
USSR’s Afghanistan. While Cuchet’s specification of the year 1965 as the
definitive turning point in French Catholicism’s “collapse” relies on multiple evidentiary sources, his fundamental mentalités method maintains
this linkage: the study of religious history as derivative from the history of
attitudes toward death. Hence, the deeply destabilizing effects of the end
of preaching about the four final things implicitly deriving from “The End
of Salvation?”
Finally, these same tropes recur in Cuchet’s anxious interrogation
published during Covid: Does Catholicism Still Have a Future in France?
(2021). This collection of essays (including some previously published)
opens with one about the “baby boomer” generation. Their disappearance
announces the question: “How to Die Without Believing?” This essay is
immediately followed by “The Ideal of a Light Death”—légère meaning
“light” in the sense of lightened, simplified, less weighted or freighted—a
look at “transformations of the contemporary funerary scene.” Today’s
scene mirrors the eclectic juxta-positions Cuchet finds in the nineteenth
century: seeming contradictions that nevertheless coexist with relative ease

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REVIEW ESSAY

and lack of self-conscious reflection or anxiety. The nineteenth-century
Buddhism vogue makes a twentieth-century return in “The Buddha is
More Popular than Jesus,” an essay investigating the “new Western quietism.” In yet another essay, in spite of Vatican II’s “de-diabolization,” the
devil’s retreat from the popular imagination has been slow and delayed.
(Compare today’s contemporary vampire craze.)
Does Catholicism have a future in France and beyond? Cuchet’s strict
attention to chronology, periodization, and non-linear development keeps
the door ajar. Just as ninetenth-century religiosity’s eclecticism defied
determinism and predictability, so too does the globalized postmodern
hybridity. Cuchet concludes his essay “Spiritual but not Religious?” with a
subtle nod recalling the quietism of both the nineteenth-century Gay and
the seventeenth-century Fénelon. Although no one can predict with certainty the future of the twenty-first century’s new quietism, “one thing is
sure: our religious history is not finished” (p. 96).

Book Reviews
GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS
The “Sense of the Faith” in History: Its Sources, Reception, and Theology. By John J.
Burkhard, OFM Conv. (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press Academic. 2022.
Pp. xiv, 442. $59.95. ISBN: 9780814666890).
John Burkhard taught ecclesiology at the Washington Theological Union
from the 1990s until the Union’s closure in 2015, with service as its President in
2006 and 2008–09. Theologians will know Burkhard’s ample bibliographies of
post-Vatican Council II studies of the sensus fidei published in Heythrop Journal in
1993, 2005, and 2006. The volume reviewed here is also extensive bibliographically,
offering a chronological list of nearly 400 studies of the sensus from 1940 to 2000.
The importance of Burkhard’s work rests on the centrality of the sensus fidei in
Vatican II’s teaching, as brought out recently in several passages of Ormond Rush’s
theological summa of the Council, The Vision of Vatican II (Liturgical Press, 2019).
For the sensus fidei is a key dimension of a basic theological principle of the Council,
namely, faith’s graced adherence to God’s saving revelation. The sensus is the capacity, sometimes called an “instinct,” given by the Holy Spirit’s “anointing” (1 John
2: 20.27), to enable the believer and the believing community to lay hold of God’s
word in its true meaning while dismissing inauthentic versions. It is at the heart of
living faith in personal adherence, penetration of revealed meaning, and the application of God’s word to life in the Lord (so, Lumen gentium 12, also 35, with Dei
verbum 8, and Gaudium et spes 44 and 62).
In ten substantial chapters, Burkhard presents the history of treatments of the
sensus fidei in Catholic teaching, both by theologians and the magisterium, beginning
with scattered references to doctrines held by an unexplained “sense of the church”
both before Trent and in that council’s decrees. Learned accounts treated the sensus
in nineteenth-century works by Johann Adam Möhler, Giovanni Perrone, and John
Henry Newman, with its importance being sealed by Pope Pius IX’s consultation of
the Catholic people’s consensus in adhering in faith to Mary’s Immaculate Conception, as a step to the dogmatic definition of 1854. In the twentieth century, two
Dominicans treated the sensus, first as a major factor in doctrinal development (Francisco Marin-Sola) and then as the instinctive wisdom of the believer’s graced sensibility (Mannes D. Koster). After the dogmatic definition of Mary’s Assumption in
1950, the Alsatian Redemptorist Clément Dillenschneider promoted attention to the
sensus fidei while relating it to the Church’s lex orandi, while Yves Congar’s Lay People
in the Church (originally 1953) situated the sensus in God’s spiritual endowment of the
whole Church to enable it to carry out its share in Christ’s prophetic office.
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Burkhard relates the iter of the sensus fidei through the labors of Vatican Council II, beginning textually with a later chapter of the 1962 schema De ecclesia, which
contrasted public opinion in the Church with the grace-effect that enables the
believing people to respond obediently to proposed teaching and understand its
meaning. In early 1963 a transformed ecclesiology schema located the sensus in a
new second chapter on the whole people of God, who are indefectible in believing,
taught and anointed as they are by God (Jn. 6:45; 1 Jn. 2:20.27), for carrying out in
the world Christ’s offices of priest, prophet, and royal servant. The aula discussion
of 1963 led to several refinements now in Lumen gentium 12, which distinguishes
sharply the one sensus of all believers from the great variety of charisms for special
callings, with the former leading believers to adhere to what is truly the word of God
(1 Thes. 2:13), both grasping its depths and applying it more completely in life.
Burkhard treats the reception of Vatican II’s doctrine of the sensus fidei in several venues, as in ecumenical dialogue documents, in the new codes of Catholic
canon law, in papal teaching, especially by John Paul II and Francis, and in the
admonitory Donum veritatis of 1990 issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine
of the Faith. Something of a climax comes with the International Theological
Commission’s comprehensive study-document of 2014, “Sensus Fidei in the Life of
the Church.” In a final more reflective chapter, Burkhard assembles “components
of a possible synthesis,” while leaving the work itself of synthesis to those who are
well prepared by following the grand narrative of his work.
A reviewer has to express gratitude to Father Burkhard for his sustained work
across the ample field of this problematic. Theological students, teachers, and educated lay readers will gain much by study of what he offers. Some sections are a
bonus, in excurses from the main narrative, for example, by moving from the
Marian dogma of 1854 into reporting recently developed accounts of the fall and
original sin, or similarly, from treating Mary’s bodily Assumption into surveying
new views of the passage into God that is human death.
Along the way, however, the present reviewer experienced some desires not
fulfilled by the narrative, which in many places is really describing a great ressourcement process concerning God’s grace given the believer and the church. But works
of biblical theology, say, of the Johannine “anointing which teaches” (1 Jn.
2:20.27), do not appear in the book. From the First Vatican Council, one misses
even a brief treatment of the Constitution Dei Filius, with its several brief references to the grace-dimension of divine revelation’s coming to be personally possessed by faith’s assent. Typically, when Burkhard treats Vatican II’s 1963 revised
De ecclesia, in par. 24 on the sensus, he gives no account of the dense set of biblical
and patristic references, given in the schema’s backnotes to illustrate and ground
the new text which gained the hearty approval of the Council Fathers (see Vatican
II’s Acta Synodalia, vol. II/1, pp. 259 and 265–66). These issues point to a work of
further penetration of the sensus fidei, for which this book prepares its readers well.
Colombiere Center, Clarkston, Michigan

JARED WICKS, S.J.

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The History of Galilee, 1538–1949: Mysticism, Modernization, and War. By Matthew
M. Silver. (Lanham: Lexington Books. 2022 Pp. ix, 391. $125.00. ISBN 9781-7936-4942-3.)
The two-volume History of Galilee begins with the period 47 BC to 1260 AD:
From Josephus and Jesus to the Crusades (Lexington Books, 2021) and the volume
under review. The author, a professor of Jewish history and world history at the
Max Stern Yezreel Valley College and the University of Haifa, presents this work
“based on principles of liberal humanism and inter-faith dialogue” (p. 5). This
volume moves from sixteenth-century Kabbalistic mysticism in Safed to “the 1948
events known as Israel’s War of Independence or the Palestinian Nakba” (p. 1).
Silver notes “. . . Galilee’s history attains singular import in world history as the
place where monotheism multiplied” (p. 1).
The prominence of Galilee in Jewish thought relates to the centers of study
developed after the disastrous result of two revolts against the Romans. Unable to
return to Jerusalem, Jewish scholars founded academies in Galilee. In medieval
Spain the life of Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai (Rashbi), a hero of the second revolt
(132–135 AD), was idealized. Scholars in the mystical traditions of Judaism looked
to Rashbi as their hero. As healer and martyr he was portrayed in ways that seem
to provide an equivalent to Jesus of Nazareth. Tracing Jewish mystical teachings to
this period, the Zohar (Book of Splendor) was attributed to him. With their imagined background of Galilee, Spanish Jewish mystics prepared for Jews exiled from
Spain to return to the area where Rashbi was buried. In the Sixteenth century the
mystical traditions developed by Isaac Luria, linked with Joseph Karo’s Set Table of
Jewish Law, exercised enormous influence on Jews of Europe.
The chapter “Ottoman Galilee” begins with the rule of a Druze prince Emir
Fakhr al-Din about 1622. He paid tribute to the Ottoman empire but, facing its
army and navy, he fled to Florence under Medici auspices. He dreamed of leading
a crusade to recover his dominance in Palestine. The Franciscans are mentioned in
this context, for the only time in this book. Captured by the Ottomans, Fakhr alDin was executed in 1635.
Orthodox Jews from eastern Europe and from within the Ottoman Empire
became immigrants to Safed and Tiberias. They included members of Hasidic
communities, followers of the Baal Shem Tov.
Chapter 3, “The Quest for Historical Galilee,” portrays the increasingly secular images of Jesus in his home region. Silver reviews the works of David F. Strauss,
Ernest Renan, and Albert Schweitzer’s evaluation of this quest. Silver includes
Abraham Geiger, founder of Reform Judaism, and Heinrich Graetz, for whom
Jesus was a country yokel pitted against the sophisticated teachers in Jerusalem. The
review of the last century moves from Joseph Klausner’s 1922 “biography” of Jesus
to Richard Horsley and John Hanson’s Bandits, Prophets and Messiahs (1985) and
Reza Aslan’s Zealot (2013). Silver follows Horsley to question “[t]he pertinence of

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Zealotry to the specific period of Jesus’s life in Galilee, its impetus, and its scope”
(p. 201). In contrast to European gentiles, “Americans have had a manifest tendency to see the Holy Land, its past and ongoing development, through their own
American frames” (p. 202). Silver reviews the Protestant “lives of Jesus” in the nineteenth century and then looks at “the American pilgrimage scene in Israel today”
(p. 204). Protestants are not impressed with the traditional shrines (in the hands of
Orthodox and Catholic clergy) but seek “the fifth Gospel in Galilee” (p. 210),
where these pilgrims feel most at home (p. 228).
Chapter 4, “Zionist Pioneering Galilee,” describes the migration of Jews,
especially from Eastern Europe, with return to the land to develop its agricultural
potential, with less emphasis on piety than earlier immigrants had.
Chapter 5, “The Fight for Galilee, 1948,” begins with mini-biographies of a
prominent Arab fighter, Fawzi al-Qawuqii, a native of Tripoli and leader of the
Arab Liberation Army, and a Jewish native of Galilee, Yigal Allon, leader of
Palmah, a unit of the Israeli army that showed an independent streak. This
approach offers a personal dimension to the War of Independence, known from the
other side as the Nakha (catastrophe).
Silver hopes that the tragedies of the past will not prevail over choices that
“the better, shared side of their heritages will inspire them to make” (p. 351). The
book has a helpful glossary, a bibliography, and an index.
Seton Hall University

LAWRENCE FRIZZELL

The Divine Plan: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Dramatic End of the Cold War.
By Paul Kengor and Robert Orlando. (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books. 2019.
Pp. 221. $19.21. ISBN: 9781610171540.)
When John Paul II was elected to the papacy in 1978, no one quite knew what
to expect. This Polish Pope, the “man from a far country,” as he called himself, was not
well known outside the Catholic Church. The media were initially fascinated with him
but only because he was a non-Italian pope. Some pundits predicted the beginning of
liberal reforms in the Church, but they were obviously unfamiliar with John Paul II’s
writings or his reputation for theological orthodoxy. Cardinal Karol Wojtyła, an ethics
professor at the Catholic University of Lublin, was a resolute defender of Humanae
Vitae along with the traditional principles of Catholic morality.
No one, however, would have predicted that this philosopher-pope would be
instrumental in ending the protracted cold war and dissolving the Soviet Union.
The Divine Plan explores the consequential alliance between Pope John Paul II and
Ronald Reagan who joined forces in this noble effort. The book is based on a documentary of the same name, and is structured as a play in five acts with these two
major actors. The book’s basic premise is that Divine Providence brought these two
leaders together on the world stage so that they could rescue the world from com-

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munism. Secular historians will not find this argument persuasive, but it will surely
resonate with Catholic historians. What might be surprising for the latter group is
that Ronald Regan saw himself as a “tool of God” for this memorable undertaking.
The Divine Plan devotes several instructive chapters to reviewing the symmetries between the lives of these two men. Both survived an assassination attempt
within two months of each other. And both believed that they were spared by
Divine Providence for a transcendent purpose. John Paul II was convinced that
Our Lady of Fatima intervened to save his life. As he confided in an interview
shortly before his death: this professional assassin certainly shot to kill, “yet it was
as if someone was guiding and deflecting that bullet.” There are other interesting
parallels as well. Both men were actors—Reagan, of course, was a professional actor
before he entered politics, and Wojtyla loved the stage as a young student. They
shared similar political philosophies, with strong convictions about the “ideologies
of evil,” including communism. And these “kindred spirits” were known for their
constructive optimism despite the traumas and challenges they encountered on
their road to the world stage.
But how precisely did President Regan and John Paul II cooperate with each
other in this common purpose? Reagan vigorously supported Poland’s Solidarity
Movement, calling for an end to the marital law that had been imposed on this
“martyred nation” in the early 1980’s. The partnership between President Reagan
and John Paul II also included the exchange of classified intelligence. When
Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power with promises of glasnost and perestroika, John
Paul II and President Reagan seized the opportunity to convince him to unravel the
oppressive Soviet system.
The Divine Plan is a gripping historical account of these events, even though
we all know how the story will end. The book’s provocative thesis about the role of
divine providence in the flow of historical events is well worth pondering. As John
Paul II often said, “In the designs of Providence there are no mere coincidences.”
In Hegel’s Vernunft in Geschichte, where history is defined as the manifestation of
the Absolute Spirit, the author refers to the “cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft).
While history is not determined in any direction, it is possible to speak about the
cunning of providence that coalesces with the free will of heroic men like John Paul
II and Ronald Reagan.
RICHARD A. SPINELLO

Boston College

ANCIENT
The Donatist Controversy, Volume I. Translated by Maureen Tilley and Boniface
Ramsey, edited by Boniface Ramsey and David G. Hunter. (Hyde Park, NY:
New City Press. 2019. Pp. 689. $89.00. ISBN: 9781565484047.)
The publication, in 2019, of the first volume of the Anti-Donatist works of
Augustine was a significant, albeit late, step forward in the progress of The Works of

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St. Augustine: A translation for the 21st Century. The volume was delayed by the illness of its translator, Maureen Tilley, and the completion of her unfinished work
by Boniface Ramsey after her death. Three of the five texts presented appear in
English for the first time; the other two were available only in the Nicene and PostNicene printing of the nineteenth century translation of J. R. King.
The translations are clear and, with a very few exceptions, accurate in conveying the meaning of Augustine and of the opponents he occasionally quoted. The
notes are spare but helpful in guiding the reader through Augustine’s allusions and
contrasts of opposing positions. The scriptural references—especially for the
Psalms—have been updated into modern usage, but their translation has respected
the Latin versions used by the ancient authors (on which their arguments often
depended). For the most part, the translation follows the most recent critical edition by Michael Petschenig, in CSEL 51–53, published in 1908–10. The manuscript tradition of de baptismo omits the texts of four of eighty-seven episcopal sententiae from the acta of the Council of Carthage in 256, upon which Augustine was
commenting. Petschenig noted that Erasmus had supplied these four from the surviving text of acta of the council; he omitted them from his text of On Baptism
because they were not included in its surviving manuscripts (CSEL 51:308, 309,
312). The editors of the French and Italian translations placed Erasmus’s supplements in a note to their translation of On Baptism. Tilley inserted them into her
text, with appropriate notation, in order to clarify Augustine’s responses.
Infelicities in translation are infrequent and minor, usually resulting from the
compact syntax and complex sentences of Augustine’s Latin. However, the rendering of a paragraph of Answer to the Letter of Parmenian 1.4.9 (pp. 279–80) fails to
communicate its counter-factual nature. The English translation does not use the
subjunctive verb forms necessary to express what Augustine suggests would have
been Parmenian’s disapproval of the actions of his episcopal successor, had Parmenian still been alive (and, therefore, not yet had that successor). The translation
of a sequence of interrogations that bridges pages 331–32 might have been made
more successful by rearranging its parts to specify who is (supposed) to be speaking
in each. Similarly, the Latin of the sentence bridging pages 520–21 seems to have
resisted the—clearly evident—efforts of the translator. At the end of that paragraph, finally, an ambiguous ablative absolute construction may have been misconstrued. Augustine did not affirm that God gives the Holy Spirit by a murderous
baptizer but rather when a murderer baptizes (p. 520). This distinction is important
because of the role Augustine assigned to the unity of the holy Christians within
the assembly in conveying the Holy Spirit to those being joined to their unity. Such
lapses in the process of translation, no matter how carefully performed and repeatedly reviewed, are recognized generally as inevitable—not unlike Augustine’s estimation of the sins of daily living.
The chronology adopted by Professor Tilley for some of these anti-Donatists
writings has been challenged by scholars exploring the implications of Augustine’s
sermons recently discovered by François Dolbeau and by the results of analysis of

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his Tractates on the Gospel of John initiated by Anne Marie LaBonnardière. As a
result, Augustine’s response to Parmenian’s letter is now assigned to the winter of
403–404, followed immediately by the treatise On Baptism and the Letter to
Catholics. The arguments for these decisions are detailed in Pierre-Marie Hombert,
Nouvelles recherches de chronologie augustinienne (Paris, 2000), pp. 89–94, 189–93.
A series of interpretations of the Donatist controversy that Professor Tilley
advanced in her scholarly work, and that were disputed by her colleagues, have been
used in the notes to her introductions and translations. Three in particular might be
signaled so that readers recognize that they are not generally accepted as accurate.
First, the Donatist claim that Caecilian’s ordination as the bishop of Carthage
was irregular because he should have been installed by another primate and, in particular, that of Numidia, (p. 35 n. 10) was rejected as unsupported by any documentary evidence, in Augustine’s Summary of the Meeting with the Donatists
(3.16.29). The necessary evidence remains undiscovered. For a fuller explanation,
see Christianity in Roman Africa (Grand Rapids, 2014), pp. 47–48 n. 61, a study to
which Professor Tilley collaborated extensively.
Second, the charge that Caecilian had abused Christian confessors during the
Decian persecution (pp. 35 n. 11, 82 n. 15, 323 n. 82) is based on an account of the
prosecution in Carthage of Christians from Abitina, whose translation is published
in Professor Tilley’s Donatist Martyr Stories (Liverpool, 1996). The historical
implausibility of elements of that narrative has led many scholars to interpret it as
a propaganda piece produced during the early fifth-century conflicts between Caecilianists and Donatists rather than as an historical report of events in the early
fourth-century during the persecution of Christians under Diocletian. For a fuller
explanation, see Christianity in Roman Africa, p. 101 n. 60.
Third, the explanation that Donatist clergy being received into service in the
Caecilianist communion were subjected to penance in private rather than before
the community in order to avoid the appearance of a repetition or replacement of
an invalid ordination in the Donatist communion (p. 324, n. 83 and p. 393 n. 4) is
speculative. It ignores the available evidence that the penitential ritual was avoided
lest it injure the sacrament of orders already received by these Donatists and recognized as valid by the Caecilianists. The Caecilianist proposal for their purification
of clergy from the prior sin of schism was focused on the efficacy of the intercessory
prayer of the newly united congregations they would serve. The plan was introduced in a council in 393 and confirmed four years later in the Brevarium Hipponensis 37 (CCSL 149:42–43); it was repeated as an explanation of practice in
Augustine’s later Contra Cresconium 2.16.19 and late Letter 185.10.45. A private
penitential ritual was initiated in this period but was offered only to protect penitents from admitting before a congregation a crime for which they could be prosecuted in imperial courts. When the sin was already widely known, such a private
ritual of confession would not have been allowed. To foster the great good of the
Church’s unity, the converting bishops were accepted without a formal confession
of their prior, public sin. The African bishops were guided in these decisions by the

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canons of the Council of Nicaea, which may also be the source to which Augustine
referred in support of the practice of accepting Donatist baptisms (in addition to
that of Arles [314] which the Donatists disputed). For a fuller treatment of both
issues, please see Christianity in Roman Africa, pp. 339–345, 390–91.
To fault the translator(s) and editors for these infrequent lapses in precision
and prudence would involve gross ingratitude for a work that required and demonstrates such wide erudition and sustained labor. The Works of St. Augustine for the
21st Century was established by the extensive contributions of Maria Boulding,
Edmund Hill, and Roland Teske; it has been carried forward by William Babcock,
Joseph Lienhard, among many others. This volume—and the promise of its successor, whose completion was prevented by her death—place Maureen Tilley among
these luminaries of scholarship and of service to a widely shared mission of understanding and interpretating the past for the sake of the present.
University of Notre Dame

J. PATOUT BURNS, JR.

La saluberrima auctoritas del sinodo: il tracciato della sinodalitá al tempo di Agostino
d’Ippona. By Giuseppe Di Corrado. (Trapani, Italy: Il Pozzo di Giacobbe.
2022. Pp. 165. €20,00. ISBN 978-88-6124-997-4).
The title of his book in English would be: The Healthy Authority of the Synod:
the Pathways of Synodality at the Time of Augustine of Hippo. As noted by Cardinal
Mario Grech, in the introduction to this book, this is an important work that will
help the Roman Catholic Church find its path along the tortuous road of the third
millennium. Grech is absolutely right.
As observed by the author, Giuseppe Di Corrado, reconstructing the history
of the origins of synodality within the Church is not easy, as the early fathers did
not keep records or have fixed rules and regulations about how these synods were
to be convened and held. Therefore, even the percursus of constructing such a history represents a mammoth task. However, the end result is more than rewarding,
for it can help today’s Church establish the correct way of holding synods and what
these synods should represent to the faithful of God.
Di Corrado has built his narrative step by step from snippets, and detailed references, to the administrative procedures from works of St. Augustine and other
early fathers of the Church. No source has been ignored, including those considered controversial such as the works and letters of Pelagius. Even disputed theological treaties can furnish invaluable historical information. Nothing in history can or
should ever be discarded.
What is of great interest here, and this is not only for those who study early
church history but also for those interested in the development of democracy in
Europe, is that this process of synodality began in North Africa. It was the work of
the bishops in North Africa, starting with Augustine of Hippo—but not only Augustine—who established the Roman authority of the pope on the principle of collegiality.

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Thanks to this process, Rome had left it in the hands of local bishops to regulate issues of discipline within their own dioceses. On their part, the bishops did
not take matters into their hands but sought to regulate their actions through the
governing body of the synod. The way these synods met was not much different
from the way parliaments or Estates-General worked in Europe during Early
Modern Times. What made these synods unique, and I would add precursors of
modern parliaments, was the fact that the laymen had a right to attend and even to
set and influence the synods’ agenda. As happens in parliaments today, they were
not allowed to sit with the elected who, in the case of the synods, were the priests
and presbyterians; the rest stayed outside the presbytery.
At the same time, Di Corrado warns the reader that the synods should not be
considered—as rightly stated by Pope Francis—to be a sort of church parliament.
Synods were not held to confront theologians nor to set up policies but to bring
reconciliation within the Church’s fractured communities. This was to materialize
through auctoritas or authority. This explains why authority is described as salubrious in this book. Therefore, auctoritas goes beyond the Foucauldian interpretation
of power. The power of the Church, Di Corrado reminds us, should be employed
differently from the power or auctoritas of the state. The power of the Church
should be led by the Holy Spirit and the love toward one’s neighbor.
Di Corrado’s work reveals another interesting aspect that deserves attention.
In this period of early Christianity, there was no concept of separation of powers.
This is what the author of this book means when he states that the Church of
Africa, in particular St. Augustine, upheld the principle that the ultimate power lay
with the pope in Rome. In other words, in the Early Church, there were different
concepts of power or auctoritas and the auctoritas of the pope in Rome was understood differently from the auctoritas of the synods. Therefore, those within the
church, the author notes, who are seeing the synods as a tool of separation of
authorities within the Church are making the wrong reading of history. This idea
of no separation allowed the pope to interfere in all matters and aspects of religion.
But what is interesting here is that it was not the popes who sought to interfere in
local matters; indeed it was the bishops, through the synodal processes, who sought
the direct intervention and guidance of the supreme pontiff.
What comes out strongly from this narrative is that the synods, and even
church councils, were held primarily and exclusively to affirm unity within the
Church. Secondly, there was no great difference in the manner early councils and
synods were held. Synods were used to discipline priests and even bishops who
were in error. Councils acted as a supreme authority over the pope and were
employed to correct erring popes and, in the process, reinforced the figure of the
pope not just as primus inter pares among bishops but as the overall authority within
the Church.
In Augustine’s views, the reference to music in the prodigal son’s parable
(Luke 15:26) expresses the way collegiality and synodality should work. Augustine

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explains that synodality stands for the ability of those participating to listen to each
other. As in a choir, a community needs to be in unison. It was this one voice that
according to St Augustine gave the pope auctoritas. When a choir is not in unison,
St. Augustine explains, there is cacophony.
Di Corrado arrived at these conclusions by analyzing the Latin texts and providing his own interpretations that sometimes differ from those already established
on this subject of auctoritas, synods, and church councils. His interpretations are
well grounded within the events that he recounts in this book, and therefore, his
text is an indispensable tool for both the historians and the theologians who want
to understand better the origins and function of the church synods. As rightly
stated by Cardinal Grech, this historical analysis is worthy to be taken into account
in the formation of the plan of action for the Church of today.
University of Malta

SIMON MERCIECA

Penser la tolérance durant l’Antiquité tardive. By Peter Van Nuffelen. [Les conférences de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, 10.] (Paris: Éditions du Cerf.
2018. Pp. 181. €16,00. ISBN: 9782204126489.)
The most important point of the many important points in Peter Van Nuffelen’s study of toleration in Late Antiquity is that scholars (including, alas, the
author of this review) err when we carelessly transfer modern concepts onto ancient
texts, especially those that use the same words (such as “religious liberty”) to mean
very different things. We usually remember that there was no separation of Church
and State in antiquity, but too often we forget that the ancient state could never be
a neutral party in the same way that modern states can, because its purpose (at least
theoretically) was to create virtuous citizens. Also unlike the modern state, the
ancient one did not lay claim to a monopoly on the legitimate use of coercive force.
Accordingly, the modern binary of toleration/repression does not accurately reflect
ancient conditions.
Each of the four ensuing chapters enlarges on these introductory observations.
Chapter One expands on the difference between ancient and modern ideas of toleration. Looking at texts from Tertullian in the second century to Themistius in the
fourth, Van Nuffelen argues that orators put forth toleration not as a principle but
as a rhetorical strategy built on long-standing views of the role of the state and the
importance of divine support that both Christians and pagans shared. Especially
because of the latter, emperors could not stand by when divinity (Christian or
pagan) did not receive its due. Chapter Two takes on the assertion that Christianity
stifled debate in Late Antiquity. To the contrary, a variety of texts from the second
to the eighth century show the importance not only of debate but of the premium
placed on providing rational argument. Christians like John Chrysostom even
argued that authority without reason was not sufficient to justify faith (p. 82).
A key question is the subject of Chapter Three. If rational argument was the
sine qua non, why did authorities turn to coercion when argument did not work?

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For an answer, Van Nuffelen distinguishes between two groups. Philosophers and
their followers had already made pursuit of virtue their highest goal, and therefore
did not need further incentive. But the same was not the case for ordinary citizens.
For them, the state was obligated to intervene, if only to remove obstacles to a more
virtuous life. Failure to distinguish between these two groups leads to a false equivalence when comparing Christian and pagan ideas about coercion. Christian treatment of the laity may seem intolerant when compared with philosophers and other
elites, but they are completely normal when compared with the state’s obligation to
remove obstacles to the moral improvement of ordinary citizens (in an epilogue,
Van Nuffelen cites modern “sin taxes” on tobacco and alcohol as an example).
With the air cleared, Chapter Four turns specifically to the topic of religious
violence. Here, Van Nuffelen takes on the argument that Christianizing the empire
was fundamentally a violent process—an argument supported by focus on spectacular events like the murder of the philosopher Hypatia in 415, the closing of Plato’s
Academy in 529, and the destruction of pagan temples. Arguing that using the
term “violence” for all such actions effectively homogenizes their causes, Van
Nuffelen chooses to focus on two incidents as case studies: the destruction of the
Serapeum in Alexandria in 391 and the conversion of the Jews on Minorca in 418.
The destruction of the great temple quickly became a symbol of triumphant Christianity, but as Van Nuffelen points out the story told by Rufinus on which all other
accounts rely, is contradictory and vague, and seems to have been written to reassure his readers that God would not abandon them in times of distress. His account
cannot be accepted uncritically. As for Minorca, Van Nuffelen suggests that the
letter written by Bishop Severus a year after the event, read carefully, does not celebrate the violent events, which included burning their synagogue to the ground,
as the cause of the mass conversion of the island’s Jews. To the contrary, it seems
that he wrote defensively to head off a legal and moral backlash, and went to great
lengths to characterize the conversions as the result of persuasion and miracles.
Van Nuffelen’s knowledge is encyclopedic, and he musters his arguments
carefully and persuasively. But, as the case of the Minorcans should indicate, his
emphasis on the rhetorical context of violence can stretch the bounds of credulity.
One wonders how a different pair of examples—say Ambrose of Milan’s hectoring
of Theodosius (also over the destruction of a synagogue) and Augustine’s baleful reinterpretation of the meaning of “compel them to come in” (Luke 14, cf. Matt. 5)
might have produced a different result. It is also reasonable to ask if the difference
between ancient and modern understandings of toleration means comparison with
the proper disclaimers is completely misleading. Documents can have significant
impact beyond their original circumstances. A case in point is the “Edict of Milan,”
which Van Nuffelen argues (p. 51) is only significant for its clauses that restore
property seized from Christians during the late persecution, despite other clauses
that guarantee freedom of religion to all Romans and express a refreshing uncertainty about “whatever divinity there is in the seat of heaven”—a bit like saying
Magna Carta was nothing more than a property dispute between King John and a
handful of disgruntled barons.

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But these are the types of questions that can be dealt with by rational argument, of the sort Van Nuffelen here celebrates. They pale in comparison to his
major achievement, which is to lay bare the intellectual and cultural roots that
shaped the thinking of both pagans and Christians in the ancient world.
University of California, Santa Barbara

HAROLD A. DRAKE

MEDIEVAL
Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire: Paschasius Radbertus’ Funeral Oration
for Wala of Corbie. Translated and annotated by Mayke de Jong and Justin
Lake. (Manchester: Manchester University Press. 2020. Pp. xx, 264. £19.99.
ISBN: 9781526134844.)
Confronting Crisis in the Carolingian Empire presents a welcome new translation of one of the ninth century’s more enigmatic literary texts, the “Funeral Oration for Wala” (Epitaphium Arsenii) by Paschasius Radbertus. Until now, Anglophone Carolingianists have appreciatively consulted the venerable, if sometimes
eccentric, translation by Allen Cabaniss, Charlemagne’s Cousins (Syracuse, 1967).
Mayke de Jong and Justin Lake offer scholars a new alternative to Cabaniss that
manages to be at the same time more consistently legible and more stylistically representative of Paschasius’s original Latinity.
Abbot Wala of Corbie (d. 836) was a cousin and close confidant of Charlemagne, who served that emperor and his imperial successor, Louis the Pious, in
sundry roles before being implicated in the two rebellions against Louis that took
place in 830 and 833. The Epitaphium represents Paschasius’s attempt to rehabilitate his former abbot’s reputation. De Jong and Lake argue that Paschasius wrote
the Epitaphium in two parts at two distinct political moments. The first part, written during the 830s soon after the rebellions, makes a case for Wala’s exemplary life
and virtues as a servant of God and empire. The second part, very different from
the first, comprises a fiery retrospective of Wala’s final years that Paschasius wrote
during the 850s, when he felt freer to speak openly and to pillory Wala’s former
detractors and enemies. The full text of the Epitaphium provides, therefore, a
unique witness to the troubles of this period, reflecting both the chaos of Louis’s
final decade and the sorrowful modes by which Carolingian society later made
sense of it.
After a useful biographical index of the Epitaphium’s dramatis personae, a
scholarly introduction offers a summary of the text’s narrative, a history of its central figures and events, and a brief overview of relevant research to date. Sections
ably analyze the text’s distinctive composition, style, and language within the
broader context of the early Carolingian literary corpus—Paschasius chose to write
his account as a prose dialogue, and his characters often borrow wholesale from the
language of ancient Roman theater. Specialist readers will wish to read the introduction alongside De Jong’s most recent monograph, Epitaph for an Era (Cam-

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bridge, 2019), in which she presents her extended research on the text and the historical moment to which it speaks. Of particular interest to Latinists, furthermore,
will be De Jong and Lake’s discussion of the Epitaphium’s parallels with Ambrose
of Milan’s De excessu fratris sui Satyri, a funeral oration that Ambrose composed in
the year 378 on the occasion of his own brother’s death. Connections to this earlier
text have gone virtually unnoticed by previous editors and translators of the Epitaphium. Yet Paschasius’s extensive intertextual borrowing (made patent in extensive notes to the body of the translation) proves crucial to De Jong and Lake’s arguments for Paschasius’s planned composition of the two books.
In sum, De Jong and Lake have provided a readable and erudite update and
companion to Cabaniss’s earlier work. Carolingian scholars will welcome with open
arms both the new translation and the fresh scholarship that it will no doubt facilitate and inspire. Paschasius Radbertus’s literary art is certainly rich enough to sustain further scholarly attention.
New York University

ANDREW ROMIG

Le “catharisme” en questions. Edited by Jean-Louis Biget, Sylvie Caucanas, Michelle
Fournié, and Daniel le Blévec. (Fanjeaux: Centre d’études historiques de Fanjeaux, 2020. €30,00. ISBN: 97829568972.)
Since the publication of the first Cahier de Fanjeaux back in 1966, this series, a
treasure trove for scholars of medieval culture and religion, has devoted four volumes—namely CF3 (1968), CF14 (1979), CF20 (1985), and CF55 (2020)—to what
has come to be known as the “Cathar debate.” Significantly enough, the only title
where we can find the term “catharisme” surrounded with scare quotes is that of the
most recent installment, as if, in keeping up with our times, the volume tried to distance itself from an uncomfortable concept. One must appreciate the refreshing
candor of such an open display of skepticism, especially in a research area that has
turned into something of a scholarly minefield to be navigated with the utmost care.
This skeptical perspective gains momentum in the preface to the volume, where
Michelle Fournié and Daniel le Blévec present Le “catharisme” en questions as a
Festschrift to honor the work of Jean-Louis Biget, a French scholar widely renowned
for his holistic approach to the study of heresy, as well as for pioneering the questioning of the ‘Cathar paradigm.’ In the Introduction (pp. 13–34), Biget himself
criticizes what he considers to be the shortsightedness of historians who resist the
revision of traditional views. He follows this up with a barrage of seemingly open
questions whose rather rhetorical nature leaves no doubt as to his position in the
debate. Arguing that the Albigensian Crusade marked a turning point for the perception of the religious groups known in French as the bons hommes and bones dames,
Biget underscores how polemicists and clerics alike could only understand their religious expressions by shaping them to conform to the model of an alternative
Church. His praise of the colloquia of Fanjeaux, the academic events that produce
the Cahiers, is far from formulaic, and instead compares them favorably to previous

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gatherings; more specifically, the 2013 conference that resulted in Cathars in Question,1 a volume that casts its long shadow over the one discussed here.
Le “catharisme” en questions is made of four sections that present the Albigensian Crusade as a watershed moment. The first one, looking into the twelfth-century origins of this religious movement, gathers five chapters that run the gamut
from outright rejection to willing embrace of long-standing views on the spread,
hierarchical structure and, in sum, the existence of Catharism. Thus, Alessia Trivellone (pp. 37–63) argues that conclusions about Italian Cathars have been drawn
from theoretical treatises with little or inconsistent use of factual data and calls for
a deeper philological study of these; Edina Bozoky (pp. 65–80) does not question
the sources of Italian treatises but takes these at face value. The reader almost
wishes these two chapters were arranged in reverse order, as Bozoky, in her discussion of the circulation of the well-known Interrogatio Iohannis, makes the more traditional argument that Trivellone’s piece questions. In keeping with the latter,
Jean-Louis Biget, in his second contribution to the volume (pp. 81–110), torpedoes
the cornerstone of pan-Catharism, that is, the infamous document known as the
Charter of Niquinta, a 1167 record of a council that allegedly brought together the
whole leadership of the alternative Cathar Church, including a Cathar pope and
bishops, for the official establishment of Cathar dioceses. While few scholars still
defend its authenticity, many argue for it being a thirteenth-century forgery. In
contrast, Biget vindicates the erudition of Pierre de Caseneuve and Guillaume
Besse, the seventeenth-century French scholars who respectively discovered and
edited the documents, and their intellectual milieu, arguing that they produced the
successful forgery themselves and rooting their motivations in their own political
context and personal aspirations. In a more ecclesiological vein, Dominique IognaPrat (pp. 111–25) reflects on the “othering” of heresy as a means by which the
Church, within the context of the Gregorian reforms, emphasized its unity in contrast to the disordered diversity of those who were excluded from it. Likewise, Uwe
Brunn (pp. 127–53) provides an overview of the development of the twin themes
of the filii Dei/filii diaboli, retracing how these expressions went from moral categories that singled out sinners to political categories that separated those who supported the unity of the Church from those who defied it. Brunn goes on to show
how these concepts were ultimately subverted and repurposed by heretics.
Picking up the thread of the weaponization of heresy already suggested in the
Introduction, the second section of the volume discusses the formation of the
image of a heretical Occitania. Robert I. Moore (pp. 157–72) puts forward the
Gregorian reforms as triggering factor for the appearance of dissidence. Unauthorized itinerant preachers went too far and suffered from it in the climate of reconciliation between the papacy and the emperor that led to the Concordat of Worms.
Accusations of heresy were wielded to bring down political opponents, particularly

1. Antonio Sennis, ed., Cathars in Question (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer–York
Medieval Press, 2016).

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by Plantagênet propaganda against the Counts of Toulouse, which presented Occitania as a hotbed of heresy. Emmanuel Bain (pp. 173–95) situates the theologian
Alain de Lille within this context, presenting his sojourn in Montpellier, under the
aegis of the Guilhems, lords of the city, as a major influence on his De fide catholica,
widely known as Contra haereticos, which served the political interests of both Guilhem VIII and the papacy by painting the region under the rule of Toulouse as overrun by heretics. Moreover, Bain argues that this treatise was meant to be a compendium on heresy rather than a reflection of local realities. Allegiance to the lords
of Montpellier and bitter enmity to the Counts of Toulouse are also brought up in
Helène Débax’s chapter (pp. 197–223), which focuses on the personal background
of the papal legates Peire de Castelnau, Master Raoul, and Arnau Amalric to
explain the role they played in the run-up to the Albigensian Crusade. Débax presents the appointment of legates as an experiment in papal encroachment on episcopal authority and secular jurisdictions; an experiment that would later be resumed
with the appointment of inquisitors. Her contribution to the trajectory of Amalric
is especially noteworthy, as Débax argues for Castilian origins that would connect
him at the same time to a powerful Castilian lineage and to the dukes of Narbonne,
further justifying his actions as part of the anti-Toulousan party.
The third section of the book turns to the religious scene in Occitania before
the start of the Albigensian Crusade. Guy Lobrichon (pp. 227–44) explores evangelical movements in the twelfth century, showcasing the plurality of such expressions that started to crystallize towards the end of the period, with ecclesiastical
authorities playing no small part in that process. In his final contribution to the
volume (pp. 245–84), Jean-Louis Biget explores the groups of bons hommes and
bones dames before the Crusade and presents them as communities with local roots,
faithful to traditional religious and social mores, who rejected the novelties of a
post-Gregorian Church in search of unity and uniformity. Biget concludes that it
was not their religious way of life that was imported from outside the region, but
rather their stigmatization as heretics. In the chapter closing this section, Bernard
Hodel (pp. 285–97) insists on the need to revise the established chronology for the
trajectory of Dominic of Caleruega, Dominic of Guzmán, and his mentor Diego
de Osma in the Midi, blindly accepted as a “vulgate” version of the life of the
founder of the Order of Preachers but full of inaccuracies.
The final section of the volume is devoted to the aftermath of the Albigensian
Crusade. Jacques Paul (pp. 301–29) uses the case brought against a man called Peire
Garsias in 1247 to gauge the understanding of Cathar doctrine among what he calls
“simple believers.” Paul argues that such depth of knowledge, coming from a presumably illiterate man who did not belong to the elite of the movement, implies the
pre-existence of a tradition. He claims that ignorance was not the rule for Cathar
believers and goes on to establish a connection between theoretical works such as
Alain de Lille’s and more widespread beliefs in the mid-thirteenth century, in clear
opposition to Trivellone’s and Bain’s arguments. If this whole volume can be seen
as a response to Cathars in Question (2016), no chapter makes it clearer than Mark
Gregory Pegg’s piece, which contends that ad hominem attacks against him and

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Moore have turned historians themselves into the subject of the “Cathar debate.”
Defining heresy in terms of self-awareness, Pegg does not reject the existence of
groups of good men and good women, nor the polemicists’ perceptions of the heretical threat, but rather the representativeness of the Cathar paradigm, whose nineteenth-century construction he surveys. The true innovation in this chapter, however, is Pegg’s suggestion that, when the long-prevailing paradigm of Catharism is
shown to be false, Cathars turn into Karl Popper’s black swans, providing the falsifiability that turns history into a science. Finally, Jean-Paul Rehr states the need for
a critical edition of the famous MS 609 of the Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse,
which he is currently producing. He argues that in contrast to the claims of traditional scholarship about the manuscript, the Great Inquisition of 1245–46 was not
an enquiry into the religious landscape of the region, but rather a targeted inquest
into a specific social group, that of village consuls or probi homines; he proves this
through an ingenious use of social network analysis.
In his conclusions to the volume, André Vauchez does not dispute the presence of organized unsanctioned religious groups in Occitania in the second half of
the twelfth century, but refuses to explicitly call them Cathars, or to associate them
with all that this term has come to signify. His words round off the main common
thread of the volume, that is, the fact that new expressions of evangelical revival
were weaponized into heresy mainly due to political motivations, which prompted
a change in narratives that was then projected backwards in time after the Albigensian Crusade. The volume succeeds in calling for a bottom-up approach to the
sources that does not rely on existing theoretical frameworks. Yet, one wishes that
some of the chapters confronted their stance on the existence of dualism more
explicitly, as therein lies the rub. Compelling as some of these arguments are, they
only stand if dualism is removed from the conversation.
At the end of the day, the question that remains open is a counterfactual one.
Without the nineteenth-century paradigm in place and only the bare sources as evidence, would present-day historians still produce the same picture of twelfth- and
thirteenth-century Occitania? This is a question that any scholar working in this
particular field must ask and answer carefully; a question that is most certainly not
rhetorical.
Queen Mary University of London

DELFI I. NIETO-ISABEL

Remembering the Crusades and Crusading. Edited by Megan Cassidy-Welch. (New
York: Routledge. 2017. Pp. 266. $56.95. ISBN: 9781138811157.)
Megan Cassidy-Welch has assembled an excellent and exceedingly helpful set
of contributions on the ways in which the meaning of crusading was constructed
and reconstructed through historical memory. That the crusades informed the creation of family and, ultimately, national histories, has been central to crusades studies for two decades now, and several contributors to this volume have been instrumental in bringing this insight into the scholarly mainstream. Remembrance, as

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these scholars have recently shown, was as essential as ecclesiastical prescription in
helping to define the crusades for contemporary Christians.
Following upon Cassidy-Welch’s introduction, six chapters on “Sources of
Memory” (Part II of the volume) survey the vehicles through which Christians
encountered crusading memory. According to M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, when the
liturgy celebrated the 1099 conquest of Jerusalem with invocation of the Psalms and
Isaiah, the city’s capture “was in a sense taken out of time and submerged through
Prophecy into Eschatology” (p. 42). A similar sensibility informed the composition
of the crusade sermons that provide the subject of Jessalynn Bird’s essay. An event
in historical time, when liturgically remembered, partakes of eternity. The next two
chapters in Part II similarly provide a bridge from the ideological and military
aspects of crusading to the quotidian experience of Latin Christians. Elizabeth
Lapina’s amply illustrated contribution on visual culture shows how crusading
informed the artistic representation of saintly intervention (again relating the crusades to a larger divine plan), while Anne Lester demonstrates that Christians recreated the sacral importance of crusading through the preservation of material
objects. Part II concludes with thoughtful studies of historiography and romance as
genres that both conveyed and re-negotiated the memory of the crusades.
Part III includes five essays on “Communities of Memory,” which for the purposes of this volume include monasteries, royal dynasties, various examples from
the Jewish diaspora, and families with cross-generational commitments to crusading. Katherine Allen Smith demonstrates that the monastic memory of the crusades, like everything else monastic, was a communal endeavor, constructed
through memories of returned crusaders, but always mediated by the exegesis of
exemplary wars in scripture. The medieval and modern memory of medieval kings,
and indeed the very notion of Capetian sacred kingship, also built on crusading
exploits, as discussed in a useful summary by James Naus and Vincent Ryan. For
Jewish communities, on the other hand, invoking the memory of crusader violence,
and papal protection from it, was a matter of collective safety. Rebecca Rist reads
two Hebrew texts—the Terrible Event of 1 0 0 7 , and Shelomo bar Shimshon’s
chronicle of the First Crusade—as part of a continuing negotiation over the pope’s
role in safeguarding the Jews of Latin Christendom. In the final essay in this part
of the book, Nicholas L. Paul and Jochen G. Schenk revisit some of Paul’s earlier
ideas about the role of crusading in creating family memories, using an impressive
theoretical framework to explore kinship relations within crusading families.
Family memories inspired and even obliged further participation in the movement.
Part IV includes four excellent contributions to the burgeoning literature on
the enduring cultural resonance of the crusades in both medieval and modern contexts. Late medieval Byzantine chroniclers, despite the availability of early sources
like Anna Comnena’s Alexiad, reckoned primarily with the sack of Constantinople
in 1204—a reckoning that continues to influence modern accounts of the relations
between eastern and western Christians (as neatly outlined Jonathan Harris’s contribution). Ana Rodríguez turns her attention to Iberia where, as scholars have long

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argued, the memory of the crusades cannot be separated from the experience of the
so-called “Re-conquest.”
The final two essays of the volume directly confront the weaponization of crusading memory in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Alex Mallett traces the
evolution of Muslim views of crusading from the twelfth century through the age
of European imperialism and beyond, offering a useful corrective to recent claims
that the rhetoric of crusading in the modern Islamic world was largely a recent
invention. The final essay, by C. S. Jensen, offers a refreshingly original discussion
of how the experience of the “northern crusades” informed Baltic liberation movements of the nineteenth century, as well as those that arose in the aftermath of
World War II and of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
The essays are well suited to a scholarly audience looking for succinct summaries of each contribution’s general topic, and the essays in Part II are especially
helpful in summarizing some of the most important developments in recent crusading scholarship. In addition, the wonderfully detailed bibliographies will provide an ideal starting point for additional work on crusading memory.
JOHN COTTS

Whitman College

EARLY MODERN
The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio between Renaissance and Catholic
Reform. By Stefan Bauer. [Oxford-Warburg Studies]. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. ix, 288. $110.00. ISBN: 9780198807001.)
Onofrio Panvinio was a great scholar in a century of great scholars. His expert
studies of antiquity, resulting from an extraordinary care for chronology, won
nearly universal acknowledgment. Joseph Justus Scaliger even called him the
“father of all history.” Panvinio had a remarkable mastery of non-narrative sources
(monuments, inscriptions, coins) that enabled him to supply background and to
correct the narratives of Roman history both of the ancients and of his more recent
predecessors. The chronological lists and tables in his books became helpful tools
of reference precisely in the decades when antiquarianism was becoming a serious
enterprise in Europe. Already by his early death in 1568, at the age of 38, this
Augustinian hermit had published ten books under his own name, plus an edition
and continuation of Platina’s Lives of the Popes. Panvinio’s work on Roman history
was treated as “safe” in an age of religious controversy, and it served as the foundation of his later reputation. But a great deal of his writing in ecclesiastical history
remained in manuscript, including a number of important books that were completed or nearly so. Unfortunately, after Panvinio’s death, although his remarkably
detailed work was advanced by supporters, official authorization of selected works
was slow in coming and then only for texts that were censored. The records of the
Congregation of the Index, established in 1571, now make it possible to examine
the procedures by which these manuscripts were reviewed and censored.

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Stefan Bauer’s splendid new book comprises four rich chapters: the first two
are biographical; the third explores Panvinio’s history of papal elections; and the
fourth looks carefully at the procedures and goals of Church censorship as revealed
by the not especially welcoming reception of Panvinio’s writings by the Congregation of the Index. A biography of Panvinio has been very much needed, as the only
prior attempt was Davide Aurelio Perini’s book of 1899. In my own copy of this
volume, one that formerly belonged to the Collegium Leoninum in Bonn (now a
hotel), an unknown German scholar once littered the margins to a shocking degree
with penciled corrections of Perini’s transcriptions of documents. In more recent
years, the Augustinian Karl A. Gersbach has published numerous well-documented articles on Panvinio that do much to expand our knowledge and to set the
record straight. Bauer, for his part, adds much that he himself has found, while
offering needed general considerations of Panvinio’s aims and, most usefully, of the
extent to which Panvinio, in his early conclusions concerning the medieval Church,
anticipated modern historical research.
Bauer makes a compelling case for Panvinio’s role as the most important
writer of Catholic history between Platina (d. 1481) and Baronio, the first volume
of whose Annales was published in 1588. Most importantly, Panvinio abandoned
the humanist mode of historical writing, which, in imitation of the ancients,
resulted in finely structured narratives, and instead privileged evidence over narrative, discussing and quoting documents in his text in the fashion of the first Church
historian, Eusebius. Thus Panvinio, who edited Platina’s humanistic Lives of the
Popes—its censorship was studied in a previous book by Bauer—pointed the way to
the methodical source criticism adopted by Baronio. Yet Baronio would represent
something different: “a confessionalized view of history . . . in which theological
and historical truth could not diverge” (pp. 13–14). As Bauer emphasizes, when
Panvinio was writing in the 1550s and ‘60s, he was able to bracket theological concerns in order to pursue the traces left by the past wherever they might lead.
Panvinio’s talent was recognized early on by Girolamo Seripando, the prior
general of the Augustinians, who commissioned his first major work (at the age of
19), a history of the Augustinian Order that was printed in 1550. He soon entered
the well-established circle of Roman scholars under the patronage of Cardinal
Marcello Cervini, to whom he dedicated his important work, De primatu Petri
(1553), which would only be published posthumously in 1589. After Cervini’s election as Marcello II, followed by his sudden death, Panvinio was able to secure the
patronage of Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, to whom he dedicated a chronological
study of popes and cardinals published in 1557. Under Paul IV, Panvinio followed
his patron, Farnese, into exile, making a subsequent journey to Germany in search
of documents and Fugger patronage, but with the election of Pius IV he was able
to remain in Rome. Pius appointed him to the historical commission charged with
responding to the Magdeburg Centuries, and 1565 he made Panvinio corrector and
revisor of the manuscripts in the Vatican Library. But Panvinio died unexpectedly
during a trip to Sicily with Cardinal Farnese. Pius V at first instructed Cardinal
Guglielmo Sirleto to study Panvinio’s manuscripts and to publish “for the common

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benefit” those that were “worthy of being approved” (p. 83). But Pius, who was
famous for changing his mind, reneged in this case as well, and in 1569, via his
nephew, Cardinal Michele Bonelli, he forbade the publication of all Panvinio’s
manuscripts as well as the reprinting of any of his previously published books. Only
after the establishment of the Congregation of the Index in 1571, which had the
authority to purge works for approved publication, did a trickle of Panvinio’s work
find its way to press. Bauer’s study of the censors’ notes shows that their chief concern was to eliminate passages that might offer historical grounds for challenges to
the most expansive views of papal authority.
With this study of the writings in ecclesiastical history of one of the sixteenth
century’s best historical minds, Bauer illuminates the striking contrast between one
man’s new approach to history and the successive generation’s determination to
view the past quite differently.
Seton Hall University

WILLIAM J. CONNELL

Eloquent Images. Evangelisation, Conversion and Propaganda in the Global World of
the Early Modern Period. Edited by Giuseppe Capriotti, Pierre-Antoine Fabre,
and Sabina Pavone. (Leuven: Leuven University Press. 2022. Pp. 345. Plates,
27 color and 73 b/w. €69,50. ISBN: 9789462703278.)
A collaboration between cultural historians and historians of art, this volume
collects seventeen essays of which twelve were written by art historians. All except
one chapter is devoted to art in the Catholic world during the centuries of Catholic
renewal and Counter-Reformation; and there is a fine balance between essays
devoted to Europe and others concerned with the non-European world (largely
about China and the Iberian global empires). In methodology, the collection
reflects a diversity of approaches, ranging from traditional iconography to theories
of cultural practices. Nevertheless, many essays cite the crucial Tridentine texts
regarding sacred images (that representations should not be confused with idolatry), which provided the launching ground for theoretical excursions. A strength in
this collection is the synergy between articles: Fabre’s essay on Jerónimo Nadal’s
Evangelicae Historiae Imagines and Ariana Magnani’s study of its diffusion by the
Jesuit Giulio Aleni in seventeenth-century China; the studies by Federico Palomo,
Michela Catto, Maria Vittoria Spissu, Valentina Borniotto, Francesco Sorce, and
Roberto Ricci on the use of images in global evangelization; detailed interpretations of European Catholic art by Mauro Salis, Clara Lieutaghi, Silvia Mostaccio,
Maria Coutinho, Paulo Pinto, Silvia Ferrira, Lorenzo Ratto, Gwladys Le Cuff,
Silvia Notarfonso, and Stehanie Porras. While it is beyond the scope of a short
review to evaluate every contribution, special mention should be made of the following: Magnani’s study, which provides the best analysis of the handful of articles
that exist on Aleni’s cultural adaptation of Nadal; the attention to the image and
metaphor of a nautical Ecclesia in the Iberian global empire in the article of Spissu;
the intricate analysis of the interplay between image and word by Lieutaghi; the
original insights into angelology by Le Cuff and Porras; and Palomo’s research into

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the visual images of the martyrs of Japan. Somewhat out-of-sync are the essays by
Fabre, Mauricio Salazar, and Catto. The theoretical ambition of the first remains
unachieved in an opaque essay, which is not helped by a shaky English translation.
The second fails to develop the common cultural space between the Calvinist Jan
Luyken’s emblem of the heart as the organ for divine experience and the Jesuit
authors of emblem books active in the southern Netherlands. This seems like one
example of cross-cultural practices in an otherwise sharply demarcated confessional
landscape in early modern Europe. Lastly, while interesting, Catto’s study of Jesuit
reports of supernatural phenomena in seventeenth-century China comes neither
with illustrations nor with a strong thematic connection to the collection. These
minor flaws notwithstanding, this is a beautifully produced book with twenty-even
colored and seventy-three black-and-white images that reflect the fruitful collaboration between disciplines.
Penn State University

RONNIE PO-CHIA HSIA

Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700: Suppression, Migration, and Reintegration. By Bronagh Ann McShane. (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2022. Pp. xv,
324. $115.00. ISBN: 9781783277308.)
Long considered nearly impossible due to the disparate nature of the sources,
Bronagh Ann McShane has produced the first overarching study of Irish women
associated with religious orders in the early modern period. Gathering evidence
from mentions scattered throughout a range of materials, McShane successfully
traces various forms of Irish female religious commitment from the dissolution of
religious houses in the 1530s and 1540s to the end of the seventeenth century,
including both those at home and in mainland Europe.
Her opening two chapters consider the suppression and survival of female
religious life during the Henrician dissolution of the monasteries. McShane judges
the reformation in Ireland to have been far less systematic than that in England,
though, unlike their male equivalents, it did manage to crush institutional
expressions of female religious life. Having to rely on some conjecture to draw
conclusions about what happened to the women after their convents were
dissolved, McShane uncovers evidence of different types of religious life being
adopted, including as tertiaries affiliated to male mendicant orders, and the shortlived but pioneering Catholic Reformation experiment that was the Mná Bochta
(Poor Women), who worked alongside the small Jesuit mission in an active
apostolate.
Fairly heavy on detailed financial records and Irish family history, these two
chapters are followed by a shift in focus to look at migration, and those women who
went abroad to pursue their vocations. Really hitting her stride, McShane tracks
several Irish women who made the journey to mainland Europe. Some entered
local convents, though a number headed to English houses established in exile,
especially the Poor Clares at Gravelines. Nevertheless, a Dominican convent was

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founded for the Irish nation at Lisbon. Intriguingly, it seems to have been markedly
different from the exile English convents; both enjoyed local support, though the
Irish Dominican convent appears to have been wealthier than the majority of
English ones, and was a popular destination for Portuguese nun recruits as much
as it was for Irish women.
The final section examines the return of professed female religious life to
Ireland. The slightly more tolerant 1630s witnessed a cautious return, which
flourished under the Catholic confederacy of the 1640s before being crushed during
the Cromwellian wars. Following the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II
in 1660, McShane outlines attempts at again fostering female religious life in the
country that reached greater heights under the Catholic toleration that followed the
accession of James II. However, the Glorious Revolution and the Williamite wars
halted official advancement, McShane judging, though, that it was nowhere near
as traumatic as the Cromwellian period, and female religious life continued in
Ireland into the eighteenth century.
Tracing down these stories across a variety of sources is an impressive
achievement that should not be underestimated. At times, the book’s shifting focus
affects its wider definitive positioning, whether to go all out for Irish national
history, the history of the Catholic Reformation, or gender history. There is also a
question at the book’s heart: as McShane acknowledges, the formation of Irish
women religious in exile English convents was “pivotal” (p. 249); yet the question
of why there was not an equivalent exile movement for Irish women religious is not
answered. With far greater numbers of Catholic women in Ireland, why was it that
the English conventual movement was so much bigger?
That this book raises such a question is testament to McShane’s convincing
achievement. Irish Women in Religious Orders, 1530–1700, fills an obvious gap in
the scholarship and, proving that it can be done, should encourage others to work
on early modern Irish women religious.
Durham University

JAMES E. KELLY

Vittoria Colonna: Poetry, Religion, Art, Impact. Edited by Virginia Cox and Shannon
McHugh. (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2022. Pp. 406.
€115,00. ISBN: 9789463723947.)
Virginia Cox and Shannon McHugh appropriately dedicated this beautifully
illustrated volume to Giovanna Rabitti, the late editor and translator of works by
Chiara Matraini (1515–1604), an author of both spiritual texts and Petrarchanstyle love poetry, just like Vittoria Colonna. They have presented fifteen different
contributions grouped into six parts, adding a masterful introduction by Cox.
The argument of Cox, and the thesis of the book overall, is straightforward.
The negative image of Colonna—like that of her counterparts Marguerite de

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Navarre and Veronica Gambara—nursed over most of the twentieth century must
be rejected. Critics honing in on the apparent participation of these women in a
patriarchal literary culture they chose not to threaten, according to Cox, McHugh,
and their collaborators, missed an important part of the story. Colonna, they persuasively demonstrate, was a prototype and inspiration for Italian women who
wrote from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.
Much is revealed in the demonstration. In part 1 on social relationships in
the literary circles Colonna frequented, there’s no prosopography, but contributors
identified links between the Neapolitan Accademia Pontaniana and the circle that
Colonna gathered on the island of Ischia, and analyzed the attachment of Colonna
to Reginald Pole through their correspondence between 1541 and 1545. Part 2
turns on role models from Colonna’s widowhood, and the way she became a
model for others. Colonna emulated not just conventional models like the Virgin
Mary, but also Birgitta of Sweden, a reform-minded aristocratic widow in fourteenth-century Rome. Colonna in turn became a model author for female poets in
the second half of the sixteenth century, like Laura Battiferri, Matraini, and
Francesca Turina, who used her reputation to legitimate their own voices. The
editors organized part 3 around Colonna’s poetry, especially where she expressed
religious desire, but also included a contribution making claims about Colonna’s
network of epistolary relationships that seems out of place. Part 4, on the other
hand, is wholly focused on art, including Colonna’s relationship with Michelangelo, and her use of art to promote devotion. One essay considers possible
Colonna patronage of Titian for a Mary Magdalene painting that suggested presentation of female nudity was not always seen as deleterious to devotion in this
era. Another explained that Colonna was the original recipient of Pontormo’s Noli
me tangere (1531), and discussed the implications of the unorthodox depiction of
Jesus and Mary Magdalene it contains. Parts 5 and 6 include essays on the readership of Colonna’s works and the long-term impact of that literature. Her poetry,
these scholars assert, not only became a dominant tradition in the late Renaissance, but also quickly established Colonna as an author who surpassed the
accomplishments of Virgil, Dante, and Petrarcha.
These findings, and the overall argument, are surely consistent with the results
of my investigations into the literary production of Camilla Battista da Varano
(1458–1524). The deeper implication of it all, as Cox rightly indicated in the introduction, is to further delineate the limits of any pernicious literary effects wreaked
by the Counter-Reformation. Benedetto Croce, who—with Francesco de Sanctis—helped enshrine the polemical view of those effects, gets some critical attention
here. But among Anglo-American scholars, Eric Cochrane began questioning such
oversimplifications fully fifty years ago, in works now far-too-infrequently cited,
such as Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973), Historians and Historiography in
the Italian Renaissance (1981), and Italy 1530–1630 (1988). He was right. And he
would have loved this book.
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

WILLIAM V. HUDON

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Giulia Gonzaga: A Gentlewoman in the Italian Reformation. By Susanna Peyronel
Rambaldi. Translated by Richard Bates. [Viella History, Arts and Humanities
Collection, 11. Società di Studi Valdesi—English Series] (Rome: Viella. 2021.
Pp. 248. € 49,00. ISBN: 978-88-3313-763-6.)
Specialists in early modern Italian history know this first volume in the new
Viella series, translating a work originally published in 2012. Susanna Peyronel
Rambaldi, lauded for her studies of reform in Italy, particularly in Modena, here
provided reconsideration of a central figure in that history, Giulia Gonzaga (1513–
1566). Rambaldi plays off an early, defective, and mannered initial biography of
Gonzaga by Giuseppe Betussi (c.1512–c.1573). Gonzaga was significant not just
for the dynastic and political life Betussi traced, Rambaldi maintains, but also
because of her hazardous spiritual interests and contacts with heterodox individuals, features that Betussi omitted. Rambaldi argues that Gonzaga was affected by
the social tension generated by growing Spanish imperial power and by Italian
ruling factions allying with it, but never abandoned the largely clandestine,
Nicodemitic culture she found appealing, not even when living in a Neapolitan
convent. Instead, Rambaldi maintains, she and other women of the time exhibited
a cultural and spiritual restlessness, plus a commitment to religious renewal they
thought could be achieved within protective familial and political loyalties that ultimately proved not-so-protective.
After this prefatory thesis statement, Rambaldi delivered a focused, five-chapter biography, one that revolves around the action of women from aristocratic families in the Gonzaga orbit. She highlights Giulia’s agency throughout. Gonzaga, as
a widow at the age of twenty-two, could have been considered socially and politically weak, but she proved overwise. She was, as Rambaldi said, “beautiful and difficult, . . . strong, proud . . . [and] sometimes vindictive” (p. 137). She was a protagonist, not a bystander, actively advising political leaders such as her cousin Ferrante
(1544–1586), governor of Milan; Cardinal Ercole Gonzaga (1505–1563), the governor of Mantua; and a beloved nephew, Vespasiano (1531–1591), founder and
duke of Sabbioneta. She represented the family before Charles V on his tour in
Naples, served as an unofficial marriage broker guiding her extended family on
prospective alliances, and, as the close friend of Pietro Carnesecchi (1508–1567),
narrowly escaped an inquisitorial trial—and likely execution—of her own. Rambaldi traced Gonzaga’s movement around courtly circles, including her “ruling from
the convent,” the subject of a meaty chapter (pp. 137–96). All this seemed, for
Rambaldi, to illustrate the inadequacy of standard images that circulate about early
modern widows and nuns. I couldn’t agree more, as my examination of the life and
writings of Camilla Battista da Varano (1458–1524) confirms the point. Individuals like Gonzaga and Varano show how widely varied contemporary female experience of convent life really was.
Rambaldi’s findings are based on prodigious research. At the center lies her
analysis of Gonzaga’s vernacular correspondence scattered across numerous
archives in north-central Italy. Imbedded in the notes are hints toward projects for

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still more historical investigation, among the numerous individuals with whom
Gonzaga corresponded. She was not alone in the activities that Rambaldi found so
fascinating, including in her relationships with religious dissenters. And while the
study highlights inquisitorial action under popes Paul IV (1555–1559) and Pius V
(1566-1572), Rambaldi’s analysis shows—like so many studies of local behavior—
that institutional intent under those popes to restrict the spread of dissenting, heterodox ideas was firm, but their ability to shut it down, even among women like
Gonzaga, was limited.
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania

WILLIAM V. HUDON

Egidio Foscarari—Giovanni Morone: Carteggio durante l’ultima fase del Concilio di
Trento (1561–1563). Edited by Matteo Al Kalak. (Münster: Aschendorff
Verlag, 2018. Pp. 267. €64,00. ISBN: 9783402105276).
For more than a century, historians of the Council of Trent have sought to
overcome stark and often cliched judgements on the council born in a more sectarian era through examination of the substantial documentation left behind by participants in the form of letters and diaries. This has allowed for greater nuance in
judgements on the Council of Trent. Matteo Al Kalak has made a significant contribution to this work. His recent biography of Bishop Egidio Foscarari, Il riformatore dimenticato: Egidio Foscarari tra Inquisizione, concilio, e governo pastorale (1512–
1564) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2016) shed light on the life and career of this
Dominican bishop who succeeded Cardinal Giovanni Morone as bishop of
Modena where he took a conciliatory position towards Modenese Protestants and
was subsequently imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo by Pope Paul IV. At the
council, Foscarari continued to seek reconciliation where possible not only between
the emperor and the pope but between Protestants and the Catholic Church. Al
Kalak has since edited and published Egidio Foscarari—Giovanni Morone: Carteggio
durante l’ultima fase del Concilio di Trento (1561–1563), a valuable collection of the
correspondence between Foscarari and his patron Morone during the final phase of
the Council. These 133 letters, all but three of them from Foscarari, show the
efforts made by the two to find practical means to obtain agreement not only
between the often polarized Catholic factions at the Council but even in the hope
of bringing some Protestants on board.
Foscarari’s efforts at conciliation are seen on three principal issues. One concerned whether the renewed meetings of the council in 1561 should be considered
a continuation of the previous sessions and therefore prohibited review of previously decided issues. The Bull of convocation makes it clear that the pope considered it a continuation of the earlier sessions. Nevertheless, Foscarari sought middle
ground by suggesting that flexibility as to the interpretation of the previously
agreed upon decrees would allow for the possible reconciliation of at least some
Protestants. Foscarari wanted similar room for maneuver regarding the Index of
Prohibited Books of Pope Paul IV. If a complete retraction of it were not possible,
in Al-Kalak’s terms, they should propose “corrective measures that worked either

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by moderating excessively severe prohibitions or by interpreting existing provisions
in an accommodating key with respect to the requests of the Protestant reformers.”
(p. 11) Foscarari took a similarly flexible position on emending the text of the Bible
for publication. If Foscarari and Morone found common ground on many issues,
they came to strong disagreement on the issue that nearly wrecked the council, the
residence of bishops, and whether that obligation was understood as according to
jus divinum and therefore not open to exemptions. Foscarari strongly supported the
jus divinum interpretation as necessary for a real reform of the clergy, a position
rejected by Morone.
is correspondence not only sheds light on the debates at the final sessions of
the Council of Trent but also brings new issues into focus regarding these two wellknown figures. e letters reveal Foscarari to have remained largely faithful to the
path of reform he had followed from the time he became bishop of Modena, thus
illustrating a great deal of continuity with an earlier generation of Italian reform. e
letters raise questions about Morone, in contrast, as one who in the end opted for
positions, on the residence of bishops in particular, that stood in contrast with those
of Foscarari and a number of his earlier defenders. Al Kalak suggests that as one who
had only recently been rehabilitated by Pope Pius IV after his imprisonment at the
hands of Paul IV, Morone not only wanted to see the council come to a successful
conclusion but also may have continued to feel vulnerable to the suspicions of some
in the Roman Curia. Matteo Al Kalak enriches our understanding of the final sessions of the Council of Trent and provides useful material to any who are interested
in the long drama of reform in Early Modern Catholicism.

John Carroll University

PAUL V. MURPHY

Berruyer’s Bible: Public Opinion and the Politics of Enlightenment Catholicism in
France. By Daniel J. Watkins. (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
2021. Pp. xviii, 325. $130.00 CAD. ISBN 9780228006305.)
 
 
   
 

 


  


  ized around the history and reception of a single book, the French Jesuit IsaacJoseph Berruyer’s Histoire du peuple de Dieu. Published successively in three parts in
1728, 1753, and 1757, the work was a rare, if tremendously popular, French example of what the historian Jonathan Sheehan has described, with reference to the
more prevalent varieties in England and Germany, as an “Enlightenment Bible,” an
attempt to apply Enlightenment scholarly practices, attitudes, and opinions to the
hermeneutical investigation and translation of Scripture. In Berruyer’s case, the
work reflected, as well, the broader Jesuit effort to accommodate time and place in
its teaching of the Christian word. Whereas Matteo Ricci and his brethren had
famously donned the vocabulary and dress of China in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in order to proselytize more effectively there, Berruyer made a similar calculation about eighteenth-century France. “To combat the unbelievers of our
day,” he insisted, the Church needed “new weapons.” Drawing freely on the
Enlightenment’s own arsenal, Berruyer produced a Bible that aimed to appeal to an

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enlightened eighteenth-century public. Employing novelistic conventions (and in a
revised edition the illustrations of the great rococo painter François Boucher), the
booked aimed to appeal to the sentiments, recounting the Biblical narrative
through characters and stories in paraphrase that relegated the actual words of the
Vulgate to glosses in the margin. It also stressed that the Bible’s chief aim was that
great eighteenth-century concern—earthly happiness—and it used sensationalist
epistemology, accounts of natural religion, and doctrines of human progress to
show Christianity’s evolution and consonance with reason.
If in this way, as Watkins observes in a nice line, “The Enlightenment became
yet another mission field” for Jesuit proselytism, the impact of Berruyer’s Bible was
decidedly mixed (p. 28). Enlightenment authors like Voltaire predictably mocked
it as a “salon novel,” while others, like the radical abbé Morellet, hailed its innovative Christology. Yet despite evidence of the work’s genuine popularity among the
laity (precise publication figures, unfortunately, seem to be lacking), the work irked
the Jesuits’ Jansenist critics, who drew attention to theological concerns and decried
the book’s allegedly lax morality and its presumption in substituting the word of
man for the word of God. For their part, more traditionally minded figures within
the Jesuit order itself worried out loud about dangerous “innovation,” and their
complaints soon caught the ear of Gallican authorities in the French hierarchy,
who detected their own dubious departures from tradition and orthodoxy, as well
as hints of ultra-Montanism.
Watkins spends the bulk of the book showing how these disputes metastasized into a full-blown affaire, which not only divided Jansenists from Jesuits, and
Gallicans from Ultramontanes, contributing ultimately to the expulsion of the
order and various official condemnations of Berruyer’s book, but drove a further
wedge between those ready to accommodate aspects of Enlightenment thought to
Catholic teaching and those who saw any such flirtation with Catholic Enlightenment as traffic with the enemy. The upshot of his analysis, Watkins argues, “flips
the traditional narrative of the Enlightenment . . . on its head, by suggesting that
the damage that the Enlightenment did to the church had as much to do with
internal efforts of Catholic theologians to appropriate it as it do with external
assaults by radical, anti-clerical philosophes” (p. 5).
Tracing that same tension into the nineteenth century, when various French
Catholics attempted to revive Berruyer’s book in the effort to better reach the laity,
Watkins writes with an admirably limpid style and is well-versed in the relevant
scholarship. The consequence is a book about a book, which is also a great deal
more. Scholars of Catholicism, the Enlightenment, and the interaction of the two
over the course of the long eighteenth-century will want to take note.
Dartmouth College

DARRIN M. MCMAHON

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Herrnhut: The Formation of a Moravian Community, 1722–1732. By Paul Peucker.
[Pietist, Moravian and Anabaptist Studies.] (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press. 2022. Pp. xvii, 320. $54.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-09239-3.)
The premise of this book is that in order to understand the eighteenth-century
Moravian movement scholars need to understand the formative years, from 1722
to 1732. Yet scholarship on Herrnhut’s early years is “not as exhaustive as one
might expect,” notes Peucker. “No monographs on the origins of Herrnhut have
been published during the last five decades” (p. 17). Peucker’s study is based on an
abundance of archival records from Herrnhut’s early years, and on recent scholarship in fields “relevant for the understanding of early Herrnhut”: radical Pietism,
the history of upper Lusatia, and the history of crypto-Protestantism in the Habsburg Empire. He orients his study to the broader field of radical German Pietism
and the contributions of the late Hans Schneider. This marks a significant re-orientation for Moravian historiography, which has often existed in isolation from the
broader field of Pietism scholarship.
There are two main genres of archival records: the congregational diary, beginning in April, 1727, that recounted special divine action with many miracle stories;
and memoirs (Lebensläufe) of individual members (p. 19). Peucker, director and
archivist at the Moravian Archives in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, makes impressive
use of these sources, especially writings by Christian David, Martin Dober, David
Nitschmann, David Schneider, Friedrich von Watteville, Melchior Scheffer, and
Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf.
Peucker’s book offers some insightful and provocative arguments. Foremost is
his conviction that Herrnhut is rightly characterized as a radical Pietist, separatist
movement informed by the Philadelphian thought of Jane Leade and by Gottfried
Arnold’s writings on the early church, especially die Erste Liebe. Philadelphians promoted impartial, brotherly love and opposed denominational divisions. Peucker
joins Hans Schneider in finding “Philadelphian principles at play in the Moravian
church of the eighteenth century” (p. 17). The ecclesiology of Zinzendorf represents a radical departure from the ecclesiola in ecclesia of Philipp Jakob Spener and
from Martin Luther’s clerical church marked by sacraments and preaching. Peucker
rejects the view found in later histories of the Moravian Church, such as Spangenberg’s biography of Zinzendorf, that Zinzendorf was a Lutheran who wanted to
keep Herrnhut within the Lutheran Church. Herrnhut was not a community
within the Lutheran church, but one outside the church (p. 198).
A second conclusion is that Zinzendorf was not only a brilliant organizer and
leader; he was also an astute and deceitful manipulator in achieving his ends. A key
question for this early period is how the new religious community in Herrnhut was
able to survive at a time when religious and secular authorities did not permit religious activity outside the recognized churches. The answer is that Zinzendorf
misled the royal commission when they investigated the community in January,
1732. Herrnhut survived as long as it did because it developed a narrative that

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masked its true identity in order to make it more acceptable to the authorities.
“Herrnhut masked its separatism behind a pretense of affiliation with the Lutheran
Church and behind a chosen historical identity, that of the renewed Unity of
Brethren” (p. 3). Moravians claimed to be a distinct church dating back to the fifteenth century and one ostensibly adhering to the Augsburg Confession; in reality
they were radical Pietists living by Philadelphian ideals (p. 210).
Zinzendorf also misled his own community. He incorporated Comenius’s
1702 Latin Brevis Historiola of the Unitas Fratrum into his own “The Newest History of Herrnhut,” adapting Comenius to align with the theology and practice in
Herrnhut. He made Comenius’s summary of the teachings of Jan Hus into a summary of Philadelphian teachings, making Hus into a Philadelphian. Peucker follows the unpublished manuscript of Joseph Theodor Müller (1937), who showed
that Zinzendorf “deliberately misconstrued the regulations of the ancient
[Bohemian] Brethren to match the Herrnhut statutes” (p. 127). Zinzendorf
“forged” the statutes of the early Brethren, something scholars previously have not
noticed. He includes references to the Love Feast, which was practiced by the
Herrnhuters but unknown to the Bohemian Brethren (pp. 126–29). The idea that
Herrnhut represented a renewal of the ancient Unity of Brethren was a useful
model that Zinzendorf invented and presented to Moravian settlers in summer
1727 (p. 5).
Peucker builds his case with analysis of beginnings in Berthelsdorf and the
plan formulated by the Brotherhood of Four (Vierbrüderbund): Zinzendorf, pastors
Johann Andreas Rothe and Scheffer, and von Watteville (p. 54). He considers the
three migrations of the Moravians, causes of dissent among the settlers, their
beliefs and ideals, liturgical life including song services (Singstunden), and creation
of “the Herrnhut model” to mask their true identity. A recurring theme is Zinzendorf’s gradual assumption of absolute authority in the community and side-lining
of Rothe and Scheffer. Peucker highlights the “passivity trope” in Zinzendorf:
throughout his career he pretended ignorance about situations he was well aware of
(p. 51). He did this to avoid responsibility when things went badly.
One can only marvel at Peucker’s achievement in Herrnhut. Grounded in a
mass of archival and printed sources, the author wears his scholarship lightly and
has produced a readable and interesting narrative. At the same time, he has revised
the scholarship around the Moravian movement and its founder. He has firmly
placed the Moravian story within the larger orbit of radical German Pietism and
put to rest the claim of affiliation with the Lutheran Church. The book is enhanced
by numerous images, three maps, tables listing offices in Herrnhut in 1725 and
population numbers, and an index.
University of Calgary

DOUGLAS H. SHANTZ

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MODERN EUROPEAN
The Persistence of the Sacred: German Catholic Pilgrimage, 1832–1937. By Skye
Doney. [German and European Studies.] (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press. 2022. Pp. xxii, 345. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-4875-4310-5.)
Skye Doney’s book is a study of two major pilgrimages in western Germany
during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the septennial pilgrimage to
the relics of the Aachen Cathedral and, especially, the pilgrimages to the Holy
Coat of Trier, occurring at irregular intervals. Based on extensive unpublished
material in ecclesiastical archives, the contemporary periodical press, the many
pamphlets, fliers, memorial images, medallions, and other ephemeral forms of
commemoration, and a thorough evaluation of the anthropological and historical
literature on popular religious practice, the book contrasts official and expressly
stated opinions of the church hierarchy and more bourgeois and educated Catholics
on the one hand, and the not explicitly articulated aspirations of the hundreds of
thousands or even millions of less educated and lower-middle or lower-class pilgrims on the other. The upshot is an eminently readable and very fruitful study,
whose main premises might require some additional consideration.
Doney outlines the development of a more bureaucratic organization of the
pilgrimages—complete with pre-registration, entry tickets, assigned viewing times,
and even medical questionnaires to fill out, in order to evaluate claims of miraculous
healing. Proposals for pilgrimage songs or for memorial images and medallions
required approval of the cathedral chapter, whose canons applied strict aesthetic
criteria. Coterminous with this organizational process was the growth of a more
empirical attitude toward the sacred. Positivist historical investigation would
demonstrate the authenticity of the relics; pilgrims’ claims of being cured of disease
would no longer be accepted at face value but would require medical confirmation.
The author is critical of this whole line of intellectual development, seeing it as a
concession to Protestant and rationalist critics of Catholic piety and the sexist
imposition of the evaluation of male clergy and physicians on the claims of miraculous healing by female pilgrims—although he does show that there was a male
minority of claimants to the miraculous as well.
Doney contrasts these changing opinions with the attitudes of the pilgrims,
who yearned for the physical presence of the sacred in their lives. They aspired to
touch the relics, to touch objects which had touched the relics, or, at the very least
to take home a picture or medallion with an image of a relic. He argues that these
attitudes persisted, largely unchanging, spontaneously expressed, and unprepared,
over the entire period his book covers.
This idea of a naïve, spontaneous, and unchanging popular piety is the weakest
point of the book, largely because the author does not investigate any potential influences on it. He has nothing to say about the impact of ecclesiastically sponsored
devotions—the two great nineteenth-century ones, to the Virgin and to the Sacred

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Heart, and the early twentieth-century Christ the King devotions. (One of the officially disapproved proposals for a pilgrimage song does seem to work from Christ
the King devotions.) Widely publicized experiences of other pilgrimage sites, especially Lourdes, are missing from his argument, although his study of potential pilgrims’ correspondence with the pilgrimage organizers contains many mentions of
Lourdes. Changes in the prevalence of disease, attitudes toward illness, or in the
practice of medicine, as well as the increasing familiarity of Germans with medical
treatment and the medical profession, as a result of the growth of the social insurance system, do not enter his discussions of claims to miraculous healing. Without
any consideration of these developments, the assertion of an autonomous, persisting
popular piety, in contrast to a changing clerically sponsored one, remains unproven.
University of Missouri

JONATHAN SPERBER

Sacred Sounds, Secular Spaces: Transforming Catholicism Through the Music of Third
Republic Paris. By Jennifer Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press.
2021. Pp. x, 355. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-19-757805-6.)
Paris was the setting for compositions and performances of religious (and here
read Catholic) music in secular venues. Jennifer Walker offers as her first example
a performance of the mystery play Sainte-Genviève de Paris in the Montmartre
cabaret Le Chat Noir on January 6, 1893. For Walker, the history of such performances is, in effect, a history of Church-State interchange, yea even reconciliation.
She narrates the rich and varied musical history of a secularized Catholicism, which
presumably gives the lie to the old standard notion of “two Frances”—a Church
and State in mutual opposition.
Musical notation is integral to the analysis of religious music throughout the
book, which is a volume in a remarkable series of studies labelled “AMS Studies in
Music,” a joint effort of the American Musicological Society and the Oxford University Press. Footnotes include a wide and detailed range of references, with the
French texts translated by the author expanded to include preceding and following
sentences. Too extensive to be read in full—they almost created an overweight
metanarrative—these notes can serve for subsequent use by researchers.
In “e Catholic Church in Republican Musical Aesthetics,” Walker introduces both the Catholic in-house churchmen and musicologists who tried to define
“sacred” music and the secular critics who, surprisingly, even more severely limited
the texts, melodies, and harmonies that deserved the label of “sacred music.” At the
center of such discussions figured the works of Dubois, Fauré, Massenet, SaintSaëns, and Widor. The centerpiece of the next chapter, “Pious Puppets and the
Limits of Symbolism,” is the puppetry of the Petit-Théâtre de la Marionnette,
wherein the musical narratives were almost exclusively Catholic, to wit, Tobie
(Tobias) and Noël, ou le Mystère de la nativité. Reporters and critics provided detailed
presentations of story and musical line. In “Sincerity and the Limits of Symbolism,”
the author juxtaposes the Petit-Théâtre’s offering of La Légende de Sainte-Cécile to

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the Théâtre de Vaudeville’s Les Drames sacrés to show again how critics, believers,
and non-believers alike demanded text fidelity and musical seriousness.
In chapters four and five, Walker trains a much more wide-angle lens on the
series of concerts at the Church of Sainte-Eustache, “The Republic’s Sacred Cathedral,” and at the Trocadéro, “The Republic’s Secular Cathedral.”
The Sainte-Eustache oratorio performances were religious in musical content
but were problematically tied to the government’s control of the 1900 Exposition
Universelle. Handel’s Messiah, Berlioz’s Requiem, Gounod’s Mors et Vita, Wagner’s
La Cène des Apôtres, Massenet`s La Terre promise, and Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion constituted the series, the use of Sainte-Eustache as a “theater” disturbing
Cardinal François Richard and pleasing secular critics. Walker calls the ensemble a
“Repertoire for the Republic.” She details here the subtleties of the story lines, the
mechanics of the musical lines, their place within each composer’s total oeuvre, and
the usually favorable critical response, concluding, “Much to the Church’s chagrin,
the church of Saint-Eustache thus became a key site in dismantling the polarizing
dichotomy between Church and State” (p. 191).
At the Trocadéro and the Champ de Mars, the 1900 Exposition Universelle
featured displays of Catholic art, literature, and music. Cardinal Richard was absent
from the opening liturgical celebration, but in his place Father Stéphen Coubé
preached reconciliation with the Republic, pointing out that work, science, and art
could be sanctified and given moral force by the Church. For all this to take place in
1900, ideologies had shifted in the preceding ten years, according to Walker,
although, in fact, featured composers and works in 1889 (the Fair commemorating
the 1789 Revolution) and 1900 overlapped considerably in their story, musical lines,
and critics’ responses. Brand new was Dubois’s Le Baptême de Clovis, which had premiered the preceding year in Reims cathedral, and so inspired critics to favorably
compare the results: one in a sacred setting and the other in a secular setting. At the
same time Gabriel Pierné’s L’An mil at the Théâtre du Châtelet seemed to accomplish for the Middle Ages what the Clovis drama accomplished for an earlier era.
The final chapter, “The Republic’s Righteous Empire at the Opéra-Comique”
is an exploration of the feminine ideal embodied in an updated version of Boccaccio’s Griselda, who was chaste and devout, faithful to her husband, and dedicated
to her son. This was Massenet’s Grisélidis, another appropriation of the religious
Middle Ages minutely analyzed by the author.
The conclusion reviews the book chapters in relation to the wider historical literature on Church and State, and here we can see clearly Walker’s contribution to
that literature: her thesis and its problems. She has clearly shown how Catholic and
anti-Catholic artists and intellectuals valued the beauty of religious musical works.
But this makes musical life a middle ground aesthetically and socially, not a religious or political middle ground. Mutual acceptance, a détente of sorts, meant
more of an agreement to disagree on the part of conciliatory individuals on both

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sides, not the creation of a middle ground. Resentment over the legislative manigances to push through the law expelling unauthorized religious congregations
(1880) and the Separation of Church and State law (1905) had almost disappeared,
but as Jean-Jacques Becker, doyen of World War I historians, says, ”If the French
were in agreement in facing what they considered to be aggression, if they agreed
to limit the violence of their former antagonisms, no one . . . had the intention of
abandoning his deep convictions for the sake of those others.” (See his “Union
sacrée et idéologies bourgoises,” Revue Historique, 264 [1980], 65–66.)
Catholic religious culture was certainly—Walker is right—a “Lieu de
Mémoire” as presented several times by Pierre Nora in his Lieux de Mémoire, the
volumes variously entitled La République, La Nation, and Les France (Paris: Gallimard, 1982–92) , but it was lived and interpreted in very different ways by the “two
Frances,” believers and unbelievers divorced as before but after World War I getting along amiably.
Oklahoma State University

JOSEPH F. BYRNES

Religious Vitality in Victorian London. By William M. Jacob. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2021. Pp. viii, 348. £75,00. ISBN 978-0-19-289740-4.)
Victorian London, like other great cities, has often been presented as a place
where religion went to die. Contemporary sermons, pastoral letters, reports, newspaper articles and novels portrayed the capital sensationally, as a sink of immorality,
heathenism, infidelity, religious indifference, the modern Babylon. Secularization
and urbanization, popular theories of the 1960s which only began to be challenged
by scholars in the 1980s, still exercise considerable hold over the popular imagination. In this densely packed survey of religious life in Victorian London, W. M.
Jacob argues for the pervasiveness of religiosity—a term which goes well beyond
formal church affiliation or attendance—at every level of society.
Religious Vitality in Victorian London offers a useful service in bringing
together two generations of scholarship on how the Church of England, together
with a variety of Nonconformist and Dissenting traditions, fared in the Victorian
religious marketplace. Like them, Jacob frames much of the discussion through the
prism of social class and gender; the focus on London enables the study meaningfully to incorporate Judaism and Roman Catholicism into his analysis. Jacob’s definition of “religion” follows trends in post-1990s scholarship in including nominal,
tacit, or implicit faith. The monograph further builds on the work of others in
bringing into “religiosity” what Jacob terms “quasi-religious” movements (including
even ethical and humanist movements), and “parareligions” (including phrenologists, spiritualists, theosophists, and occultists). By bringing both supernaturalist
and secularist organizations under the blanket term “religion,” it could be argued
that Religious Vitality in Victorian London expands the term “religion” so far as to
invalidate comparisons with earlier works about the decline of religion, thereby
weakening its revisionist claims.

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Religious Vitality in Victorian London concludes that “in the context of the massive social disturbance of migration, urbanization and industrialization religion continued to be a vital core ingredient framing the nature of this great modern metropolis” (p. 308). While this statement might not come as news to specialists in Victorian
religion, the message still needs to be heard by non-specialists and students, for
whom W. M. Jacob offers a careful, detailed compendium and discussion of religious
activity of all sorts which took place in London during the reign of Victoria.
Cardi

MARY HEIMANN

A Heart Lost in Wonder: The Life and Faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins. By Catharine
Randall. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company. 2020. Pp. 195. $22.95 paperback. ISBN: 978-0-8028-7770-3.)
Professor Randall offers readers a refreshing and succinct reflection upon the
life, writings, and faith of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Her book is scholarly in its
roots yet purposefully accessible to a wide audience as an introduction to the
person, art, and religious experience of Hopkins. Randall’s presentation of Hopkins
contains no hint of hagiography. The Hopkins portrayed is fully human—brilliant,
loved, not always understood, steel-willed at times, physically fragile, and substantially plagued with neuroses and depression. Her realistic portrayal of Hopkins
makes his incarnation-amplifying faith and chiming poetic creativity all the more
shining and striking. A reader new to Hopkins, however, may underappreciate the
degree to which the joyful and playful seasoned much of his life.
Professor Randall describes her method in this biography as holistic. This
means that the chronologies of Hopkins’ life and writings do not always correspond,
particularly in the first chapters of her book. She purposefully follows this method
to heighten a “you are there” feeling and face-to-face encounter with Hopkins (p.
xiv). More importantly, she hopes that this interpretive biography will assist readers
in seeing Hopkins’ life through the prism of his theology. I think her method will
help a new Hopkins reader move to the heart of the matter with alacrity. A reader
familiar with Hopkins, however, may experience some disorientation.
Professor Randall quickly moves the reader into the mainstream of Hopkins’
faith and art—the world of the senses is the high road to the world of the spirit.
Woven through by this contextual theme, her summative recounting of Hopkins’
childhood, education, conversion to Roman Catholicism, and formation and life as
a Jesuit priest is substantive and, at times, innovative. For example, while discussing
how Hopkins experienced nature, Randall offers the possibility of some neurological idiosyncrasy as the cause. While I do not think that Hopkins was in some
altered state in his perception and experience of beauty in nature, I appreciate the
thought-provoking discussion. In any case, Professor Randall here introduces a
hermeneutic lens through which she views Hopkins—he is an “ecstatic,” “one who
entered into and took on the life around him in an imagined, artistic creation of a
new form of participation in essence” (p. 59).

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While focusing upon Hopkins’ Jesuit formation and training, Professor Randall justifiably discusses at length the probable influence of Duns Scotus. In this
context, she suggests and supports the possibility of influence by the Cappadocian
fathers.
and currently prevalent theme of the Cosmic Christ into the discussion of Hopkins’
theological thought and its expression in prose and poetry. Her following analyses
of Hopkins’ “
bring this Scotian influence and theological theme to life.
Professor Randall’s last chapter, “Desolation,” portrays the final years of Hopkins’ life in Dublin as a time of internal disintegration and physical collapse. She
weaves Hopkins’ own words and the reflections of others to show how near he was
to madness and even temptation to suicide. It is a dark, distressing portrayal rooted
in primary sources and well conveyed by the author.
book, Randall wonderfully describes Hopkins’ sudden break into light as best
expressed in his poem “
Resurrection.” She suggests this re-enlightenment is a return to or remembering of
an earlier shining faith in and perception of the Cosmic Christ in creation.
time and last flash of creativity in Hopkins’ life seems not so much a resolving
denouement as a kind of resurrection from darkness and internal death. I wonder
if Hopkins’ experience of abandonment by God was so discontiguous from the end
of his life and his final words—“I am so happy.”
Professor Randall has created for new Hopkins readers an academically substantial yet accessible introduction to a great English poet and even theologian. For
seasoned Hopkins readers, she offers not only a synthesis of recent scholarship, but
also a deeply thoughtful, innovative reflection on the life, mind, and faith of this
deeply loved poet and priest.
University of Washington, Seattle

PHILIP BALLINGER

Carteggio Scalabrini e Zaboglio (1886–1904). Edited by Veronica De Santis and
Giovanni Terragni. (Rome: Istituto Storico Scalabriniano. 2021. Pp. 416.
ISBN: 9788885438279.)
  Veronica De Santis and Giovanni Terragni’s edition of the correspondence exchanged between the Scalabrinian missionary Francesco Zaboglio
(1852–1911) and Monsignor Giovanni Battista Scalabrini (1839–1905) represents
a welcome and useful research tool for understanding one of the most dramatic
phases of Italian emigration to North America.
spanning the years from 1886 to 1904, to which it is added an appendix of articles
written by Zaboglio, upon Scalabrini’s solicitation, on the Italian emigrants in
America. The last part of the book provides a very detailed list of the missions managed by Italian Catholic missionaries in the United States in 1899. The book has
many merits. First, it sheds light on a period of crucial changes for Italian emigration to North America, also showing how the Catholic Church responded to it.

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Secondly, it offers a first-hand account of the difficulties and perils faced by the
Italian missionaries vis-à-vis their fellow countrymen and the other migrant communities as well as the American authorities.
The importance of the correspondence between Zaboglio and Scalabrini
becomes more and more evident as one goes through the letters. Indeed, from
the beginning, Zaboglio offers a vivid portrait of the Italian emigration and its
consequences both on the Italian society and on the American society.
Zaboglio’s gloomy but detailed descriptions funnelled a flow of constant information to Scalabrini, and more broadly to the Holy See, which was used to
develop a missionary strategy. Clearly, Zaboglio was not a mere observer. He
put forward concrete missionary plans, such as—to name the most relevant
one—the project to establish an institute for the training of the priests who were
to operate among the Italian emigrants. A further crucial aspect, which comes
out from Zaboglio’s letters, is his “transnational” outlook. Very soon he realized
that the development of any missionary plans could not be limited to the Italian
community but had to encompass all migrants. From the very first letter to last
one, the correspondence between Zaboglio and Scalabrini demonstrates the
harsh aspects of the Italian emigration and the persistent difficulty to elaborate
and implement effective plans geared toward the complex economic and social
situation in the Americas.
This edited collection is enriched by a very well written introduction authored
by Matteo Sanfilippo and Giovanni Terragni, two leading experts on the history of
migrations and of the Scalabrinians. They effectively reconstruct the multifaceted
world of Scalabrini and Zaboglio and their web of institutional and private networks in the Americas and Italy. The fact that the book can be downloaded for free
as a PDF file from the website of the Centro Studi Emigrazione di Roma is a further merit to be ascribed to the editors, who deserve to be praised for their scholarship which so much improves our knowledge of the Scalabrinian order and more
broadly of the Italian emigration to the Americas.
Universitá degli Stranieri di Siena

MATEO BINASCO

Jesuit Kaddish: Jesuits, Jews, and Holocaust Remembrance. By James Bernauer, S.J.
(Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 2020. Pp. xxx, 220.
$55.00. ISBN: 9780268107017).
In James Bernauer’s work, readers are drawn into the distinctive elements of
Jesuit spirituality: the examination of conscience and the discernment of spirits in
order to address and more fully understand the Holocaust and members of the
Society of Jesus’s attitudes toward Jews. His work challenges the reader to think
about how Jesuits thought about the Jews. How did Jesuits perpetrate evil against
the Jews, but also how did actions of Jesuits bring about good for Jews as well? By
scrutinizing the conduct of Jesuits, the hope is to gain not only a greater understanding of the events of the Holocaust, but also to achieve a type of reconciliation

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with the Jewish community. The Kaddish is recited as a prayer of mourning that
praises God and the gift of life.
From the opening chapter the reader is invited to accompany Bernauer on a
pilgrimage. He begins with the work of Pope Saint John Paul II in seeking forgiveness for past sins against the Jews. In calling for genuine brotherhood with the
Jews, the Pope made confessions of guilt for Catholics who participated in crimes
against Jews, from his visit to Auschwitz in 1979, through his visit in 2000 to Yad
Vashem in Israel. In all of these travels, the Pope instructed Catholics that honestly
addressing the errors of the past would be a step toward atonement and forgiveness.
What the Pope had done was earth-shattering in importance. The Pope had recognized that in order for a true reconciliation with Jews to happen, Catholics would
first have to remember what had actually occurred.
Readers continue their pilgrimage in Chapters Two and Three, learning about
the concept of “asemitism” which was often practiced within the Society of Jesus.
Asemitism meant strict separation between Jews and Catholics, accompanied by an
indifference to what was happening to Jews in society. This attitude of indifference
also did not argue against other forms of antisemitism that were running rampant
in European society. It essentially rendered Jews and their problems invisible to
Catholics. Despite the separation that “asemites” might have wished for, there were
tracts published intimating that Jesuits and Jews shared similar characteristics, e.g.,
a desire for world domination, wealth, etc. By Chapter Three, one encounters the
subtler forms of Jesuit hostility toward Jews, particularly in the realm of fears over
the sexualization of culture which were then linked to a supposed Jewish materialist, carnal way of living. The Jesuits were calling for chastity and obedience. The
Church, along with the Nazi state, were out to cleanse the German people from
the sensual and erotic elements of Weimar Germany. That frequently meant that
“Jewish influence” had to be eradicated.
The final portion of the pilgrimage brings readers out of the darkness of the
previous chapters. Here we encounter French and German Jesuits who realized that
they were part of a larger, wider community: the community of the human race.
They recognized that one could not remain indifferent. These individuals aligned
themselves with persecuted Jews, at times sacrificing their lives in order to save the
persecuted. The work then takes us back to the central image of the pilgrimage,
where the image of Jesus as a Jew becomes central to our understanding of Catholicism and concludes with the author’s proposed statement of Jesuit repentance.
The Society of Jesus has come a long way from its early history of banning men
of Jewish origin as members to embracing true community with Jews. A 1995
Jesuits’ General Congregation recognized the need for special dialogue with Jews,
“The first covenant which is theirs and which Jesus the Messiah came to fulfill, has
never been revoked. A shared history both unites us and divides us from our elder
brothers and sisters, the Jewish people, in whom and through whom God continues
to act for the salvation of the world” (p. 118). Bernauer’s work on the evolution of

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Jesuit approaches to the Jewish community offers a refreshing way to think about
penitence, atonement, forgiveness, and ultimately, signals the promise of a new
relationship between Jews and Catholics.
Pacific Lutheran University

BETH A. GRIECH-POLELLE

The Pope in Poland: The Pilgrimages of John Paul II, 1979–1991. By James Ramon
Felak. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. 2020. Pp. 344. $30.00.
ISBN: 9780822945987.)
John Paul II’s first Polish pilgrimage, in June, 1979, ignited a revolution of
conscience throughout east-central Europe that would give the Revolution of 1989,
and the subsequent collapse of European communism, their distinctive moral and
political texture. The Polish pope’s second pilgrimage to his homeland, in June,
1983, restored hope among a people who had briefly tasted a measure of freedom
in the first year of the Solidarity movement, but who had then been demoralized
by the Polish communist regime’s imposition of martial law on December 12–23,
1981. John Paul’s third Polish pilgrimage, in June, 1987, presciently assumed the
communist crack-up that would come two years later, and sought to put before his
countrymen the moral and cultural requisites for living freedom nobly and well—
themes on which the pope would expand during his first pilgrimage to a post-communist Poland, in June, 1991.
James Ramon Felak’s explication of these four epic moments in modern
Catholic and Polish history draws on a wealth of primary source materials to offer
readers a sturdy, if somewhat dry, account of what transpired when religious
themes, brilliantly preached and taught, shaped events with world-historical consequences. Those looking for a day-by-day chronology of the papal pilgrimages will
be grateful for Professor Felak’s industriousness in mining his sources, especially
the records of the Polish communist regime and its mouthpieces in 1979, 1983,
and 1987. Those records demonstrate, yet again, the self-delusory character of communist functionaries, either too besotted by ideology or too stupid to recognize
what was unfolding in front of them: a process of social renewal, spiritual as well as
political in character, over which they had no control, and to which they had no
answer insofar as maintaining their own position was concerned.
Felak’s use of his sources is not, however, as judicious—or as wide-ranging—
as it might have been. The credibility the professor extends to the veteran communist apparatchik Mieczysław F. Rakowski, an especially slippery character even by
Leninist standards, seems quite misplaced; Rakowski was just as likely to lie to his
diary as he was to the public. The author of martial law, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, is also treated more gingerly than my own studies suggest is appropriate. There
is no mention, for example, of the fists-pounding-on-tables aspect of John Paul II’s
first meeting with the Polish leader in 1983; nor does the author record the pope
telling Jaruzelski at the beginning of that meeting that Poland was “one great concentration camp” under martial law.

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Felak’s account of the 1983 visit also goes out of its way to downplay the
pope’s insistence on meeting Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa, to the point of John
Paul threatening to return to Rome if the regime blocked such an encounter. In
dealing with that subject, and indeed with the negotiations preceding the 1983 pilgrimage, the author also overplays the role of various Vatican diplomats to whom
John Paul always listened politely, but whose strategic or tactical advice he rarely
followed. Moreover, Felak wholly ignores the ways in which East Bloc secret intelligence services tried to undercut the 1983 pilgrimage to the point of clumsily
attempting to blackmail John Paul II—matters discussed in detail in the second
volume of my John Paul II biography, The End and the Beginning, which is not referenced in the book’s Selected Bibliography.
In sum, then, The Pope in Poland is a useful reference source, but less helpful
as analysis.
Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, D.C.

GEORGE WEIGEL

AMERICAN
America’s Jesuit Colleges and Universities: A History. By Michael T. Rizzi. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press. 2022. Pp. xvi, 512.
$34.95. ISBN: 9780813236162.)
Michael Rizzi provides a comprehensive history of the formation and development of Jesuit universities in the United States. However, Rizzi has done more
than that. He provides an overview of the Society of Jesus, its spirituality, its
approach to education, its experience in colonial Maryland, including its participation in the plantation economy entwined with slavery, the suppression of the order
in 1773, and its rebirth in the United States in 1804 as a component of the Russian
province of the Society, which had avoided suppression. By that time the former
Jesuits of Maryland had maintained their corporate identity and their considerable
land holdings as the Select Body of Clergy. In 1789, they founded their first American college, Georgetown under the leadership of the ex-Jesuit John Carroll before
his consecration as the first bishop of Baltimore.
Beginning with the foundation at Georgetown, Rizzi traces the development
step by step, and sometimes with missteps, of the educational enterprise undertaken by the Jesuits, following the order’s universal reconstitution by Pius VII in
1814. Of their fifty-four colleges and universities founded in twenty-five states and
the District of Columbia, twenty-seven Jesuit colleges and universities exist today.
These institutions have played an outsize role in American Catholicism. They constitute one out of six Catholic colleges in the United States and educate nearly a
quarter million students, twenty percent of students in American Catholic higher
education. This a book that should be of interest to anyone interested in Jesuit
higher education or the Catholic Church in the United States.

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Rizzi describes how the Jesuits eventually adapted to the educational needs of
an immigrant Catholic community in a predominantly Protestant country, and to
the developing system of American higher education. Rizzi’s work is very much an
institutional history, almost exclusively concentrating on the leaders of the institutions. He seldom provides much biography of individual Jesuits, which might provide some insight into their persons, their leadership, and their objectives. This is
unfortunate but perhaps in line with the Jesuit ethos. Presidents of Jesuit universities were until late in the nineteenth century also the religious superior of the university’s Jesuit community. The Society treated these leaders as largely interchangeable. Presidencies were generally limited to three years. However, capable
presidents were moved to other institutions and often served at a single institution
for several discontinuous terms. Rizzi indicates that this had the advantage of
giving multiple institutions the benefit of effective leadership, but it had the disadvantage of not allowing creative individuals to leave their stamp on a particular
institution. The situation changed in the twentieth century. Effective Presidents
were left in place much longer and were enabled to imprint their stamp upon the
institution. Nevertheless, readers will probably wish that Rizzi would have devoted
more time to individual administrators and professors rather than discussing topics
such as school colors, mascots, and athletic programs.
In telling this broad ranging story, Rizzi does not omit what he calls “the
darkest year in the History of the American Jesuits,” the sale by the Jesuits of over
270 slaves on their Maryland plantations. The Jesuits long excluded African Americans from their universities. Though a number of Jesuit universities admitted Black
students during the 1920s and 1930s, the real breakthrough did not come until
after World War II. Rizzi’s treatment of the heroic challenge against segregation
by Claude Heithouse, S.J., at Saint Louis in 1944, is a welcome highlighting of an
exceptional individual.
Blacks were not the sole victims of prejudice. The Jesuits at Gonzaga accepted
a large donation with the stipulation that Native Americans were to be excluded
from the college. However, Jesuits were more open-minded toward Jewish and
Protestant students and eventually women. Nursing programs allowed women to
enroll in Jesuit universities in a technical sense. Education programs led to coeducation by first allowing women into evening and weekend courses. Despite opposition from Jesuit leadership in Rome against women enrolling in liberal arts programs, women as part of their professional programs began attending liberal arts
courses with males. Marquette claims the honor of introducing coeducation in
1909. Today women are an essential part of Jesuit higher education, forming a substantial portion of faculty, department chairs, and deans. Since 1990, women,
beginning with Sister Maureen Fay, O.P., at the University of Detroit Mercy, have
become presidents at a number of Jesuit universities.
Rizzi concludes with the transforming aggiornamento which occurred among
the Jesuits and their universities following Vatican Council II. As many Jesuits left
the priesthood, others, led by Pedro Aruppe, the Jesuit Superior General, envi-

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sioned their ministry in new and visionary fashions. Groundbreaking conferences
re-envisioned Jesuit higher education. Jesuit colleges and universities were transformed. Lay professors became predominant. Universities separated themselves
from direct ecclesiastical management. Boards became predominantly lay. Loyola
Marymount appointed a non-Catholic president in 2010. By 2022, a majority of
Jesuit universities had lay presidents, female as well as male. These changes were
accompanied by on-going efforts of discernment about the role of Jesuits within
what were traditionally their universities and, indeed, the nature and character of
universities in the Jesuit Catholic tradition.
Rizzi does not deal adequately with the Jesuits’ loss of control of their universities. As the Jesuits relinquished control of universities, their institutions have been
challenged to maintain their Jesuit Catholic identity and to fulfill their Christian
educational mission: to train young people, who are not only intellectually prepared, but who are also aware of their social and moral obligations. The decline of,
sometimes absence of, Catholic theology in the universities’ common or required
curriculum speaks to an identity and value issue. Rizzi does not address this.
Rizzi is overly optimistic that boards of directors, no longer composed of a
majority of Jesuits, will in the long run preserve a commitment to Jesuit Catholic
values, including a commitment to social justice. One might ask if business schools
at Jesuit universities value and promote social justice issues with the same enthusiasm as they promote profitability. Rizzi also ignores the tendency for departments
in interviewing and hiring new faculty to de-emphasize commitment to the Jesuit
Catholic mission. What these universities become in the future is an open question.
Despite the optimism of Rizzi, it remains to be seen if these schools remain in any
meaningful sense Jesuit and Catholic.
Nevertheless, this is a book that should be of interest to anyone seeking to
understand the evolution of Jesuit higher education in the United States and its role
in transforming the Catholic community while itself attempting to adapt to changing religious and social environments.
Loyola University New Orleans

BERNARD A. COOK

American Crusade: Christianity, Warfare, and National Identity, 1860–1920. By Benjamin J. Wetzel. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2022. Pp. x, 228. $47.95.
ISBN: 9781501763946).
Benjamin Wetzel has taken up a civic mission in his new book. He seeks to
alert readers to the deeply problematic tradition of religion—especially Protestant
churches—underwriting the patriotic ideology present in American wars. This problem has a long history, of course, dating back to the earliest European settlement
and extending to our present day. At its core, Wetzel finds Protestant elites conflating “Christianity with nationalism, associating America’s enemies with the devil,
and equating dead soldiers with religious martyrs” (p. 2). While this intellectual

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ground has been covered before by scholars such as Jill Lepore and Amanda Porterfield, Harry Stout, Jonathan Ebel, and Stanley Hauerwas, Wetzel contends that
most studies have missed the relationship between “confident white Protestants . . .
[and] counterpoint groups [who] regarded racism, imperialism, and an unholy civil
religion as sins in ways that the mainline establishment never could” (p. 3). To make
his argument, Wetzel does not attempt a grand sweep of American history, but
rather chooses to focus on three wars from 1860 to1920; and he emphasizes what he
calls the “social location” of those who both dissented from and defended the dominant narrative of American religious nationalism in a time of war. In the end,
Wetzel hopes to help readers better understand America by confronting “the ways
religion and war have reinforced and challenged each other” (p. 9).
Wetzel is a fine and careful historian, letting his subjects speak for themselves
and tracking, as best he can, the significance of counterpoint groups. By following
this tack, though, Wetzel has also demonstrated something he might not have fully
intended—that different faiths, classes, and races largely agreed about the sanctity
of war, especially after the fighting, killing, and dying had begun.
Despite a cast of characters who opposed confident White Protestants,
Wetzel’s evidence clearly illustrates how patriotic influence overwhelms dissent and
independent thought in a time of war. For example, in the Spanish-American War,
Wetzel writes extensively about Catholic ambivalence and outright opposition to
America’s war against Spain in Cuba and especially the Philippines. But he also
makes clear, writing about the Catholic population in late nineteenth- century
America is a tricky enterprise—were these American Catholics or Catholics in
America, or hyphenated Americans who were also Catholic? The tangle of class,
ethnicity, and social locations of Catholics made it impossible to speak about a
“Catholic position” or even to delineate opposition to the war from a profound
unease with American providentialism. Wetzel’s conclusion about Catholics
echoed similar insights about the African Methodist Church in the Civil War and
the Missouri Synod Lutherans in the First World War: “Ultimately, the debate in
the American Catholic Church was only partly about the war itself. . . . Instead,
American armed conflict provided the impetus for a larger discussion of the
church’s relationship to the American nation-state as a whole” (p. 95). In a sense,
the counterpoint positions Wetzel highlights in his book remind his readers that in
a time of war, we rarely debate the valor of those who fight and die, but should consider the integrity of those who order them to do so.
Throughout my reading of this book, I couldn’t help but consider how
Wetzel’s argument related to the one made by Andrew Preston in his history of
American religions in war and diplomacy, Sword of Spirit, Shield of Faith. Like
Wetzel, Preston wrote extensively about those who questioned and even
opposed aspects of the Spanish-American War and concluded (not unlike
Wetzel): “Some Christian leaders may have opposed the war, but most did not”
(p. 224). The inability of Americans to sustain opposition to war, imperialism,
Christian nationalism, and providentialism, is a remarkable lesson to take from

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Wetzel’s book. Even Mark Twain felt the pressure; he declined to publish his
essay “The War Prayer,” written in 1905, out of fear that his scathing indictment of religious endorsement of the Spanish-American War would prove too
sacrilegious even for him.
Indiana University IUPUI

RAYMOND HABERSKI, JR.

Ingrained Habits: Growing Up Catholic in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. By
Mary Ellen O’Donnell. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2018. Pp. xviii, 164. $75.00. ISBN 9780813230375).
As Mary Ellen O’Donnell explains in the preface, this book began at a memorial Mass for her mother. In the kneeling figures of her mother’s generation,
O’Donnell caught a glimpse of the passing world in which she learned to be a
Catholic. Her three-year-old daughter might grow up to be a Catholic, but she
would never know that world. Her daughter’s Catholicism would not be embedded
in a culture. O’Donnell sensed an emerging “chasm,” based on fundamental generational differences “in the way Catholicism has been lived, shared, and internalized”
(p. xiv). This book explores the “cultural Catholicism” (not a pejorative term for the
author) of northeastern and midwestern descendants of European Catholic immigrants, mostly Irish and Italian, born between 1940 and 1965. Since O’Donnell is
part of the cohort she is writing about and often finds her own experience mirrored
in the narratives on which she draws, Ingrained Habits sometimes reads as a
memoir. Rather than an intrusion, however, this autobiographical dimension adds
to the book’s overall impact.
Ingrained Habits is a work of cultural studies, a literary ethnography—a salvage
ethnography perhaps—that draws upon almost fifty authors, e.g., Mary McCarthy,
Garry Wills, Alice McDermott, Robert Orsi, Claudia DeMonte, Donna Brazile,
Anne Rice, Thomas Ferraro, and Anna Quindlen. Their literary productions, some
fictional, some explicitly autobiographical, depict their Catholic culture as an “all
encompassing, world determining experience” to which there appears to be no
alternative (p. xviii). The author locates this work in a thick social network that
includes parish and school, home, and neighborhood and community. After an
opening chapter that introduces them historically and sociologically, these three
sites structure the book’s remaining three chapters. This world’s tension arises from
its rarely seamless blending of “celebration and community” with “rules and
enforcement” (p. 5).
O’Donnell’s carefully circumscribed study of the “bridge generation” to which
she and I belong, by definition, leaves out many voices. The divide this generation
crossed, however, led not only from one experience of Catholicism to another, but
also from ethnic enclaves to what sociologists of this generation might have called
the dominant culture. Here there are alternatives, choices to make, and inevitable
ambivalence. I would like to have heard more of the author’s reflection on this
ambivalence.

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Nevertheless, O’Donnell’s insightful, elegantly written account of a particular
“cultural Catholicism” makes a valuable contribution, capturing the “feel” of European American Catholicism in this period. One of this book’s main audiences
would be cultural studies scholars in the field of Catholic Studies. A strong secondary audience would be educated Catholics who are members of the generational
cohort the author is writing about. Ingrained Habits would also work in undergraduate courses on U.S. Catholicism, Catholic Studies, or American religion, giving a
real-life, narrative feel to the kinds of formal sociological and historical works the
author cites in Chapter 1. It is especially effective in opening a window on women’s
experience of what O’Donnell calls “Catholic culture.” It is highly recommended.
University of Dayton
Mount St. Mary’s University, Emmitsburg, Maryland

WILLIAM L. PORTIER

Seeing Jesus in the Eyes of the Oppressed: A History of Franciscans Working for Peace and
Justice. By Paul T. Murray. [United States Franciscan History Project.]
(Oceanside, CA: The Academy of American Franciscan History, 2021. Pp.
vii, 283. $20.00. ISBN 978-0-8838-2274-6.
Seeing Jesus in the Eyes of the Oppressed focuses on the activism of eight Franciscans: four priests, three sisters, and one brother, who addressed social issues in
the era since 1945. They drew inspiration from core Franciscan charisms, such as
the respect for the dignity of the poor and marginalized, official Catholic social
teaching, and ecumenical and global sources. In these profiles, Franciscan activists
have supplemented charity with creative justice initiatives as a path to address the
root causes of social and economic ills.
The author of this engaging volume, Paul T. Murray, came to this project with
a deep connection to Franciscans as teachers and colleagues and to the struggle for
Black civil rights. Half of this volume features racial justice activists. The story of
Father Nathaniel Machesky details his path toward outright confrontation with
white supremacy. Participation in the Selma campaign for voting rights launched
Sister Antona Ebo into leadership roles. The first Black Capuchin, Brother Booker
Ashe, promoted interracial awareness and Black pride through a variety of programs in Milwaukee, including establishment of the House of Peace and a summer
enrichment and recreation program for children. The chapter on Sister Thea
Bowman unfortunately relegates her to a secondary position by highlighting the
works of the Holy Child Jesus Mission, where she was educated and baptized into
the Catholic church.
Profiles of Father Alan McCoy and Sister Patricia Drydyk focus on support
for the farm workers’ movement. Influenced by Cesar Chavez, McCoy prioritized
tackling inadequate wages to supplement providing relief. Additionally, he
addressed such international concerns as the war in Vietnam. An inspiring and
energetic picketer, organizer, and publicist, Drydyk dedicated herself to the farm
workers’ cause. Father Joseph Nangle’s profile considers how his experiences as a

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missionary in Latin America and familiarity with liberation theology shaped his
prophetic role upon his recall to the United States. Involved in protesting overseas
sales of infant formula and arms, and supporting the Sanctuary Movement, he
helped create an intentional community dedicated to simple living and acts of social
justice. Before joining the Franciscans, Father Louie Vítale, an Air Force intercept
officer, nearly shot down a U.S. passenger plane that was mistaken for a Soviet
bomber. Shaken by the experience, Vitale pledged himself to protesting militarism
and war, which resulted in his hundreds of arrests.
As Murray makes clear, these prophetic activists lived in Franciscan communities that represented a range of opinion on how sisters and friars could best effect
social change—or if they should even try. They would enlarge Catholic teaching
and practice as they confronted the moral challenges of the outside world. Yet like
the larger American Catholic community, Franciscan houses struggled with the
activism of vowed members and racism, an indication of the limits of “made in the
image and likeness of God” belief.
This book is an exciting example of the possibilities of researching the histories
of religious orders. Each portrait contains a wealth of details on the interplay
between Franciscans and social and economic realities. Oral interviews add insight
and broaden historical context. Surprisingly, despite the growth of lay associate
groups in the post-Vatican Council II era, this volume does not include an indepth profile of a lay Franciscan activist. Overall, readers can expect an absorbing
and well researched visit into living Franciscan values nearly nine centuries after
Francis of Assisi.
ANNE KLEJMENT

University of St. Thomas

LATIN AMERICAN
The Religion of Life: Eugenics, Race, and Catholicism in Chile. By Sarah Walsh. [Pitt
Latin American Series.] (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.
2021. Pp, x, 223. $50.00. ISBN: 9780822946649.)
The author argues that the “raza Chilena” (the Chilean race) was construed
as an enduring national myth and does so by explaining how Chileans incorporated eugenic discourse into a myth that characterized their national racial identity as homogeneous, and therefore unique. Walsh’s starting point is the work of
Nicolás Palacios, Raza Chilena: Libro escrito por un chileno para los chilenos (The
Chilean Race: Book Written by a Chilean for the Chileans), published anonymously
in 1904, a book not analyzed in English literature. This Chilean exceptionality
was construed based on the encounter “between a superior Indigenous group,”
mainly the “Araucarian” (Mapuche people), and “hardy Europeans,” and Walsh
asserts that “packaged in this way, being Chilean meant being effectively White
and therefore racially superior in comparison to other Latin Americans” (p. 149).
This, she argues, would lead to the erasure of minorities from the Chilean social

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imaginary. Central contextual components were the patriarchal structure of society and the convergence of Catholic and secular ideas on eugenics theories, sustained by ideas of gender difference. In an original way, Walsh examines social
constructions from the perspective of science, medicine, and religion; in fact, as
she asserts, the dominant Catholic Church did not oppose science. An interesting dimension of Walsh’s research is her discussion of the translation of North
Atlantic eugenics to the Chilean context, taking the form, as in other Latin
American countries, of a “synthesis of neo-Lamarkism and Darwinism” (p. 7),
with strong traces of Lamarkism.
The book is grounded in primary sources and has an extensive bibliography. It
contains six chapters, and although it covers from the end of the nineteenth century
in Chile to c.1952, the approach is thematic. The first three chapters deal with
Catholicism and gender, the harmonizing of science and Catholicism, and eugenics
in Chile. The last three chapters focus more on the literature on eugenics in Chile
while discussing the construction of the “Chilean race” in a transnational framework, the modernization of patriarchy, and finally the visual imagery in relation to
the creation of a racial type.
The approach is original, and it is engaging, albeit a bit repetitive. However,
as a Latin American reader familiar with Chile, I miss a richer historical contextualization. This was a time of intense political developments, in which Emilio
Recabarren founded the Partido Obrero Socialista in 1912 (becoming in 1922 the
Partido Comunista de Chile), and the new Socialist Party was founded in 1933.
The left and the right were clearly defined. The left had developed a discourse centered in internationalism, class struggle, exploitation, class awareness, and political
consciousness with Latin American tones. There were nationalist populist discourses as well. Patriarchy was quite intact, although there was an incipient feminist movement in Latin America. Of course, the place of the state in the solution
of social issues, including healthcare, was central. These discourses would intersect
with dominant eugenic notions and provide particular political tones. The Chilean
Catholic Church would develop strands that advocated for a re-configuration of the
Christian social order, in which charity appears to be related to social justice. These
are some of the contextual elements missing for me as a reader and scholar.
As a reader, I sensed, on occasion, the use of forced inferences and the pursuit
of a linear interpretation leading to causality—even if I take into account that Walsh
wants to move beyond ideological and socio-political explanations. An example of
this is found in the conclusion where the author builds a connection between President Salvador Allende and General Augusto Pinochet. This connection is grounded
in the sharing of a supposedly common privileged background and an environment
of dominant ideas, a shared culture. The basis of the comparison is arguable and even
erroneous in terms of the personal history of each one. Although Salvador Allende,
a mason and co-founder of the Socialist Party, had a highly regarded and progressive
background, Pinochet did not belong to an intellectual elite, held a lower rank, and
climbed socially by virtue of his marriage to Lucía Hiriart.

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431

Beyond the above observations, the book offers an interesting and well-examined history of eugenics and Catholicism framed in a local and global context. The
book does not neglect how eugenics sustained a hierarchical, classist society, and it
makes a substantial contribution to historiography on eugenics.
ROSA BRUNO-JOFRÉ

Queen’s University, Canada

ASIAN-PACIFIC
This Suffering Is My Joy: The Underground Church in Eighteenth-Century China. By
David E. Mungello. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. Pp. 174.
$100.00 hardcover ISBN: 978-1-53815-029-0.)
This new monograph on the emergence of China’s “underground” Catholic
community is a welcome addition to the extensive scholarly oeuvre of David E.
Mungello, whose early works include such important studies as Leibniz and Confucianism: The Search for Accord (1977), Curious Land: Jesuit Accommodation and the
Origins of Sinology (1985), and The Forgotten Christians of Hangzhou (1994). In this
study, Mungello effectively reasons against the usual assumption that the underground Catholic community first emerged during the 1950s, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Instead, he asserts that “the longer
view of history shows that the underground church dates from the eighteenth century” (p. 7). Rather than locate the first movement underground during the Maoist
era (1949–1977), Mungello suggests that China’s Catholics were forced to conceal
themselves after the Yongzheng (r. 1722–1735) emperor banned the propagation
of Christianity in his 1724 edict after the Vatican’s refusal to align with the Jesuit
position regarding China’s Confucian and ancestral rites. Responding to previous
books that consider China’s underground Christians, such as Ian Johnson’s The
Souls of China: The Return of Religion after Mao (2017) and Paul Mariani’s Church
Militant: Bishop Kung and Catholic Resistance in Communist Shanghai (2011), Mungello has provided a timely study that views the “underground” movement as part
of a more protracted chronological landscape, one that analyzes the longue durée of
underground Catholics that connects long-embedded religious strategies of survival from the imperial to modern eras.
Chapter one describes the various responses of three Qing (1644–1911)
emperors to the vicissitudes of Catholic missionaries and faithful within the
empire: Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng, and Qianlong (r. 1735–1796). Mungello notes that the “auspicious beginning of Catholicism in China” that began
during the end of Matteo Ricci’s (1552–1610) life in China’s capital city and
reached a peak of tolerance during the reign of Kangxi, ended in 1724 when
Yongzheng publicized his view that Christianity was an unorthodox (yiduan 異端)
teaching that transformed Chinese into disloyal citizens (pp. 10–12). Rejecting the
narrative that Yongzheng’s prohibition was merely “xenophobic” and “anti-foreign,” Mungello aptly demonstrates that coterminous with the 1773 suppression of
the Society of Jesus was a Vatican culture which “demanded that the European

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missionaries of the eighteenth century become less accommodating” to Chinese
mores, a rigidity that “eventually forced the Church to go underground” (p. 14).
Chapter two examines the efforts of Matteo Ripa (1682-1746) to establish a
college in Naples for Chinese seminarians, and it does not overlook several of the
significant historical details that influenced Ripa’s life such as his sexuality and his
distinctly eighteenth-century spirituality. A member of the anti-Jesuit Propaganda
Fide, Ripa was granted access to the imperial court in Beijing in a characteristically
Jesuit fashion, as an artist. After his appointment as an engraver at Chengde
(Jehol), where he produced several engravings of local scenes for the Kangxi
emperor’s sixtieth birthday, Ripa formed an interest to “develop a native priesthood” in 1714, and he began to train Chinese boys at a makeshift seminary at his
own residence (p. 32). Here, Mungello outlines accusations against Ripa for having
“abused” his pupils, underscoring well some of the controversies that surrounded
Ripa in both China and in Europe. Given the complaints against his school, Ripa
decided to return to his native Italy in 1723 and reestablish his school in Naples.
Chapters three and four are of particular importance because they examine the
complications engendered from displacing young Chinese boys from their native
China into the entirely different culture of eighteenth-century Europe. Mungello
inverses what the predominance of previous Western scholars have done; instead of
describing how Western missionaries struggled to acclimate to China, he recounts
how Chinese struggled to acclimate to Europe. Following Eugenio Menegon’s
2010 article that also discusses Chinese students at Ripa’s Collegio de’ Cinesi, especially the escapades of Cai Ruoxiang (1739–1806), Mungello expands our understanding of the trials of Chinese attempting to either adjust to the West or hasten
their return to China (Eugenio Menegon, “Wanted: An Eighteenth-Century Chinese Catholic Priest in China, Italy, India, and Southeast Asia,” 2010). Four Chinese students were trained at the Naples seminary in hopes that they would be able
to clandestinely replace the Europeans who had been expelled after the 1724 prohibition against Christianity. Mungello underlines several examples of how Ripa’s
“tyrannical” treatment of the Chinese seminarians resulted in acute “cultural dislocation and homesickness” (pp. 64-65). Chapters four and five consider tensions
between Chinese and European clergy and the materialization of China’s underground Catholic community during the eighteenth century. Quoting one Chinese
priest, Huang Batong, European priests “are eternally hostile to the Chinese
priests,” so hostile in fact that Huang and other Chinese clergy alleged that “they
do not want Chinese priests” at all (p. 93).
Despite these tensions, Chinese clergy continued their pastoral work in
underground networks unique to China. Mungello compares China’s underground Catholic perseverance to the hidden Christians (kakure kirishitan) of
Japan. Unlike Japan’s hidden Christians, China’s underground “was never completely cut off from Rome,” and thus China’s Catholics remained aligned with the
orthodoxy and orthopraxy of Rome (p. 110). One important point that Mungello
makes is that during the eighteenth century the number of Chinese clergy out-

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numbered European priests, a reality that served to more effectively indigenize
Chinese Catholicism. This study also includes an important description of how
Catholic “virgins” contributed to the growth and formation of the underground
Church as “baptizers” and “catechists,” a community of women who provided a
cultural blending of “Christian theology with the Confucian idea of a ‘chaste
woman’ (zhennu)” (pp. 120–21).
Chapter six and the conclusion trace China’s history of indigenization through
periods of martyrdom, though Mungello frames this history within a context that
is more Chinese than Western. This is a welcome approach. Scholars have mainly
focused on the death or apostasy view of martyrdom common of Tridentine
Catholicism, whereas Mungello argues that “the more pervasive model of Chinese
martyrdom involved extended suffering that expressed itself in long-term commitment rather than death” (p. 135). China’s underground Catholic community,
Mungello suggests, survived and persisted precisely because its own cultural views
were more easily applied to its Christian practice when China was largely untethered from European missionary oversight. Mungello draws expansively from
archival sources in several languages to provide his thorough analysis of the circumstances and historical emergence of China’s Catholic underground community.
This Suffering Is My Joy represents a noteworthy contribution to the field of SinoWestern and China Christianity studies, and we can hope that other researchers
continue to uncover new sources and scrutinize them with the same deftness that
Mungello has demonstrated in this important new work.
Whitworth University, Spokane

ANTHONY E. CLARK

Titus Coan: “Apostle to the Sandwich Islands.” By Phil Corr. (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf
& Stock. 2021. Pp. 513. $60.00. ISBN: 978-1-6667-1393-0).
In the annals of missionary history, few places were evangelized as thoroughly
as Hawaii (the Sandwich Islands), where missionaries from the American Board of
Commissioners for Foreign Missions (Congregational/Presbyterian) converted the
bulk of the populace to Christianity in the 1800s. Generally intolerant of native
Hawaiian customs and beliefs, ABCFM missionaries on the islands were definitely
not broad-minded by the standards of today. They were at the forefront of progressive nineteenth-century movements such as abolitionism, however, and they were
exceptionally well educated for their day (the women as well as the men). They also
included intellectually curious individuals such as the Reverend Titus Coan (1801–
1882), whom Phil Corr writes about in his absorbing new biography, Titus Coan:
“Apostle to the Sandwich Islands.”
That Coan is the worthy subject of a biography cannot be denied. A Presbyterian missionary in Hilo on Hawaii (the big island) for forty-eight years (1835–
1882), he was a powerful preacher, and he was a prolific writer, with a gift for
describing people and places. He was also an ardent revivalist, and he did more
than anyone else to instigate the Great Awakening in Hawaii (1836–1840), a

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period during which tens of thousands of Hawaiians converted to Christianity. On
a Sunday in 1838, at the height of the Awakening, Coan used a bucket and paintbrush to baptize 1,705 adults, whom he subsequently made members of his church
in Hilo. The church had over 7,000 members in 1841, and Coan could boast of it
being the largest church in the world at that time.
In addition to being a successful evangelist, Coan was a skillful (albeit amateur) scientist, and he made important discoveries in the field of vulcanology. As a
resident of Hawaii (one of the most geologically active islands in the world), Coan
experienced earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions, and he provided
detailed descriptions of them for missionary publications and leading scientific
journals. He also made innumerable trips to Mauna Loa and Kilauea (the island’s
two active volcanos), and he risked death on many of those trips. Most people avoid
erupting volcanoes, but Coan (who possessed a strong physique and a fearless
nature) liked to climb them, even when plumes of red-hot lava were splashing
down around him.
For his biography of Coan, Phil Corr spent years doing research, relying on
published works (especially Coan’s autobiography) and unpublished materials, such
as letters. From these materials, Corr provides readers with a richly comprehensive
portrait of Coan (“the bishop of Kilauea”), encompassing the missionary’s childhood on a farm in Connecticut, his conversion during America’s Second Great
Awakening, his acquaintance with the famous revivalist Charles Finney, his experimental mission in the wilds of Patagonia (1833–1834), his clashes with conservative members of the ABCFM (who opposed Coan’s style of revivalism), his two
marriages (the latter to a woman thirty-three years his junior), his successful outreach to white sailors, his participation in the American peace movement, his twoyear (1870–1871) tour of America (where he was greeted by crowds that sometimes
numbered in the thousands), and his long presidency (1863–1882) of the Hawaiian
Evangelical Association, the successor body to the ABCFM in Hawaii.
Throughout his biography of Coan, Corr expresses admiration for the man
and his work. Corr is an evangelical pastor (just as Coan was), and he rarely provides secular explanations for religious phenomena, preferring instead to take the
religious phenomena at face value. Doubtlessly this will frustrate secular readers of
his book, but even they might well come away from the volume with a liking for
Coan, who was not a toxic missionary of the sort found in novels such as The Poisonwood Bible. Rather than being harshly judgmental and arrogant, Coan was a
deeply caring individual, and he won the enduring love of people around him.
Bentley University

CLIFFORD PUTNEY

Notes and Comments
CAUSES OF SAINTS
On March 23, 2023, Pope Francis declared six persons as venerable servants
of God due to their heroic virtue:
— Father Carlo Crespi Croci (1891–1982), a priest of the the Salesian Society
of St. John Bosco, was an Italian botanist and archaeologist, who worked in
Ecuador in a ministry to the young and in hearing confessions.
— Mother Maria Caterina Flanagan (1892–1942) of the Order of the Most
Holy Saviour (known as Bridgetines) was born in London but worked in Stockholm in dialogue with Lutherans.
— Sister Leonilde of San Giovanni Battista (1890–1945) of the Congregation
of the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary worked in Italy,
teaching and helping the poor.
— Sister María do Monte Pereira (1897–1963) of the Congregation of the
Hospitaller Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus worked on the Madeira archipelago, caring for the sick.
— Maria Domenica Lazzeri (1815–1848) was an Italian lay woman who suffered from anorexia, bore stigmatic wounds, and was nourished only by the
Eucharist.
— Teresa Enríquez de Alvarado (1456–1529), a noble lady, attendant to
Queen Isabella of Castile, and mother, she spent her time and wealth caring for the
sick and poor and promoting devotion to the Eucharist.

FELLOWSHIPS
The Center for Research on Global Catholicism at Saint Louis University is
pleased to announce the launch of its inaugural Seminar Fellowship Program for
2024–2025 on the theme of “New Directions in Research on Global Catholicism:
Mobilities, Migrations, Circulations.”
The program will bring together eight scholars from different professional
ranks, disciplinary perspectives, and personal backgrounds to share and advance
their current lines of research within the framework of global Catholicism.
Successful applicants will be engaged in research projects related to Catholicism on the move—that is, the mobilities, migrations, and circulations of Catholi435

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cism in all of its manifestations across chronologies and geographies. The CRGC
invites applicants at any academic rank, including ABDs, from any humanities or
social science discipline to apply.
The Seminar will consist of eight fellows: four from academic departments at
Saint Louis University; four scholars from other universities or academic institutions
(research library, museum, archives, etc.) in the United States or around the world.
Six of the eight fellowships are reserved for scholars holding a PhD with active
research and publishing agendas. The two remaining fellowships are reserved for
advanced PhD students. The CRGC will provide additional resources for seminar
meetings, such as guest speakers, respondents, and moderators, to enrich the intellectual experience for participants. Scholars selected to participate in the Seminar Fellowship Program will receive a $4000 stipend. The CRGC will subsidize all costs for
transportation, meals, and accommodations for the on-campus seminar meetings.
Fellows will meet four times between January 2024 and April 2025 to share
work in progress: January 26, 2024 (full day) on campus at SLU; April 12, 2024
(half day) by Zoom; October 23, 2024 (half day) by Zoom; and April 11, 2025 (full
day) on campus at SLU. Fellows are responsible, in consultation with the CRGC,
for organizing a book symposium featuring an author-led discussion of a recent
publication related to the seminar themes of global Catholicism, mobilities, migrations, and circulations. The book symposium will be the capstone event of the final
meeting on April 11, 2025.
Interested applicants should submit a C.V., contact information for two references, and a one-page letter of interest describing their research project in light
of the Fellowship program themes by June 15, 2023 to crgc@slu.edu.

CONFERENCES
On May 5, 2023, the Newberry Library Center for Renaissance Studies in
Chicago sponsored a European Art Seminar on the theme “When the Replica
Becomes the Model” that was led by Erin Griffin. It dealt with how the Santa Casa
di Loreto, or Holy House of the Virgin Mary, was recreated extensively throughout
the early modern Catholic world, due to its perception as the site of the Annunciation, Jesus’ childhood home, and the purported first church of the faith consecrated by the apostles following Christ’s ascension. Rather than cultivate a single
site of pilgrimage worship, the cult at Loreto flourished through its replicas, though
these recreations introduced subtly competing iconographic narratives that disseminated distinct iterations of the Santa Casa throughout the Catholic world. Taking
its departure from a manuscript reproduction of the Santa Casa in the Newberry
Collection, this presentation maps the Loretan cult’s malleable messaging and the
effect of replicas upon the original.
On June 1–2, 2023, the Canadian Cathoic Historical Association will hold it
annual meeting in Toronto, Ontario. Among the featured presentations will be: “A

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437

Double-Edged Sword: Excommunication and its Unanticipated Effects in Nineteenth-Century Canada” by Emma Anderson; a panel on Jesuits and Global
Catholicism will include “Neo-Confucian Debates in 18th-century Korea” by Jooyoung Hong, and two other papers by Mairi Cowan and Fannie Dionne; and a panel
on Catholic Archives will include presentations by Linda Wicks and Deb Majer.
In a book launch session, Peter Ludlow’s Disciples of Antigonish: Catholics in Nova
Scotia, 1880–1960 will be discussed by Edward MacDonald. He will later present
a paper on “Catholic Clio: The Writing of Catholic History on Prince Edward
Island, 1885–1922,” and Ross Hebb will also treat Catholicism in Atlantic Canada
in his paper. Finally, Mark G. McGowan will speak on “‘Much remains to be
learned’: Ninety Years of the CCHA, 1933–2023.”

PUBLICATIONS
The history of the Council of Nicaea is studied in eight articles published in
Volume 32 (2023) of the Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia. Following a “presentación” by Manuel Mira Iborra (pp. 15–18) are: Almudena Alba López, “Histoiografía sobre el Concilio de Nicea: el Concilio de Nicea a la luz de sus historiadores” (pp. 19–48); Ramón Teja and Silvia Acerbi, “El Concilio de Nicea y los
inicios de una nueva relación entre el poder imperial y la jerarquía eclesiástica” (pp.
49–68); Giulio Maspero, “Nicea como crisis filosófica de la telogía: La transferencia
de la fe bíblica de la Iglesia al mundo filosófico helenístico” (pp. 69–96); Samuel
Fernández, “Eusebio de Cesarea y desarrollo del sínodo de Nicea” (pp. 97–122);
Angelo Segneri, “Atanasio e Melezio: tentative e fallimenti alla ricerca della comunione ecclesiale” (pp. 123–58); Xavier Morales, “What did Constantine learn in
325? Constantine’s theological declarations before, at and after Nicaea” (pp. 159–
87); Josep Vilella Massana, “De Córdoba a Nicea: Osio en la política eclesiástica
constantiniana” (pp. 189–214); Angelo Di Berardino, “Concilio di Nicea: la fine
della controversia sulla data della Pasqua?” (pp. 215–46).
One of the observances of the eighth centenary of the founding of the Order
of Preachers was a conference held in Vienna on October 27–29, 2016, on the
theme “Bibelstudium und Predigt im Dominikanerorden: Geschichte, Ideal,
Praxis.” The papers presented on those days have been published in Volume
XXXVI (2019) of Dissertationes Historicae. The first of the fifteen articles is “From
the University to the Order: Study of the Bible and Preaching against Heresy in the
First Generation of Dominicans at Bologna,” by Riccardo Parmeggiani (pp. 21–
38); the last is “The Spiritual Conferences in the Church of Saint Carolus Borromeus in Antwerp (1927–1940): An Example of Dominican Preaching Apostolate in Turbulent Times,” by Anton Milh, O.P. (pp. 343–68). The other thirteen
articles are in German.
The “Historia fratrum laicorum in Ordine Minorum” is the subject of both
fascicles (1–2 and 3–4) for 2019 (Volume 112 of the Archivum Franciscanum Historicum). There are twelve articles in Italian, English, Spanish, and German, including in the issue for January–June,“The Minorite Vocation of the fratres laici in the

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Franciscan Order (13th–Early 14th Centuries),” by Michael F. Cusato, O.F.M.
(pp. 21–124); “Franciscan Servants, Tertiaries and Lay Brothers in NineteenthCentury Ireland,” by Stephen O’Kane, O.F.M. (pp. 235–314); and “Spiritual Exercises as a Means of Disciplining Lay Brothers? A Bavarian Case of 1722,” by
Benedikt Mertens, O.F.M. (pp. 505–34), and in the issue for July–December, “Los
hermanos laicos en las provincias de México, siglos XVI y XVII. Dos temas por
estudiar; evangelización y sociedad,” by Francisco Morales, O.F.M. (pp. 433–68).
The entire volume (115) for 2022 of the Archivum Franciscanum Historicum
contains seventeen articles in various languages in 531 pages on the theme “Franciscans and Nature.” Among them are “Franciscan Missionaries as Witnesses of
Nature in Colonial Mexico,” by Asunción Lavrin (pp. 237–85); “The Great Comet
of 1680. Amandus Hermann between Theory and Experience,” by Martin Elbel
(pp. 409–36); and “A Recollect among the Dakota Sioux: Louis Hennepin and the
Plains Bison,” by Jordan Kellman (pp. 437–54).
The sesquicentennial of the founding of the Evangelical Lutheran Synodical
Conference is commemorated in the issue of the Concordia Historical Institute
Quarterly for spring, 2023 (Volume 96, Number 1).
The second number for 2022 (Volume 48) of the Annali dell’Istituto storico
italo-germanico in Trento—Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in
Trient is devoted to the theme “Motherhood Denied, Motherhood Rejected:
Abortion in the 20th–21st Centuries.” Edited by Marina Garbellotti and Cecilia
Nubol, there are eight articles in Italian, German, and English.

Obituary

D ale K. V a n Kle y
(J uly 3 1 , 1 9 4 1 – M a r c h 1 4 , 2 0 2 3 )
A self-professed “Protestant historian of the Catholic Jansenist controversy,”
Dale K. Van Kley was a pioneer in the field of eighteenth-century European history. Van Kley studied at Calvin College before pursuing a Ph.D. in History at Yale
University. After a brief time as a professor at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst, he returned to Calvin where he taught for twenty-eight years. He spent
another fourteen years at The Ohio State University, training and mentoring both
undergraduate and graduate students.
Van Kley dedicated much of his career to studying the impact of the Jansenist
movement on the politics, society, and intellectual culture of Old Regime and revolutionary Europe. His first book, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from
France, uncovered the role that Jansenist barristers and their allies played in the
downfall of the Society of Jesus in France. Through meticulous archival research,
Van Kley singlehandedly dismantled the narrative, propagated most famously by
Jean le Rond d’Alembert himself, that the philosophes were the sole figures responsible for the Jesuits’ demise. In the 1980s, Van Kley turned his eyes toward the French
Revolution. His first step was to explore, in his words, “the relevance of the Jansenist
controversy to the ‘social’” by way of a book on the Robert-François Damiens, a
domestic servant who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV in 1757. The Damiens
Affair and the Unraveling of the Ancien Régime showed that the Jansenist controversy
permeated the popular elements of French society and, in so doing, contributed to
439

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OBITUARY

the “de-sacralization” of the monarchy and the collapse of the Old Regime. Van
Kley’s study of the French Revolution reached new heights at the end of the decade
when he—along with many of the most notable scholars of the revolution in the
United States, England, and France—participated in a series of conferences on “The
French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture.” The conferences
commemorated the bicentennial of the event and ushered in a rethinking of the
French Revolution and its impact on the modern world. Van Kley’s own work on
the revolution continued into the 1990s with numerous articles and essays in The
Journal of Modern History, French Historical Studies, and other outlets. In 1996, he
published his intellectual tour de force, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution.
The Religious Origins masterfully traced the role that religious disputes played in
shaping constitutional and “patriotic” discourses from the sixteenth-century Reformation through the initial years of the revolution. It remains required reading for all
those studying the intellectual culture of revolution in the early modern period.
By the opening of the new millennium, Van Kley’s interests turned to lands
beyond France. In an edited volume and a number of essays and articles—including
“Catholic Conciliar Reform in an Age of Anti-Catholic Revolution” and “Religion
and the Age of ‘Patriot’ Reform”—Van Kley investigated the ways that the Jansenist
controversy and other neo-Augustinian reform movements took hold in Catholic
Europe. His final monograph, Reform Catholicism and the International Suppression
of the Jesuits in Enlightenment Europe, completed his transnational and comparative
historical work and brought his career full circle by returning him to his initial
research interest in the Jansenists’ role in the suppression of the Society of Jesus.
As much as Van Kley’s work broke new ground, his career is best understood
in continuity with his ideological predecessors, Robert Palmer and Carl Becker.
Palmer, Van Kley’s doctoral advisor at Yale, and Becker, Palmer’s advisor, stand as
paragons not only of American historians of France but also of historians who
valued the role that religion played in the lives of eighteenth-century Europeans.
Van Kley remained committed throughout his career to understanding what he
called “the fundamentally religious character of human nature.” Perhaps no work
exemplifies this better than the thoughtful article that he co-wrote with Susan Rosa
and published in French Historical Studies in 1998. Together, Rosa and Van Kley
made a powerful plea for historians to understand religion “in religious terms . . .
as a response to the transcendent that may in turn motivate people to take actions
that have the potential to transform the world.” As simple as this idea was, it
nonetheless ran counter to much of the Marxist historiography that dominated the
study of early modern Europe in the 1960s and the decades that followed. An
acknowledgement of religious ideas as powerful forces of change stood at the center
of Van Kley’s methodological framework, and his research continues to impact the
study of early modern history and religion today. Dale will be missed by all those
whose careers he shaped and whose lives he improved through his kindness, generosity, and grace.
B aylor University

DANIEL J. W ATKINS

Periodical Literature

GENERAL
Collective memory and sanctity: the case of equivalent canonization. Marco
Papasidero and Gabriele Vissio. Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa, 58 (1,
2022), 119–38.
Vatican II: Bibliographical Survey 2019–2022. Massimo Fagioli. Cristianesimo
nella storia, 43 (3, 2022), 875–904.

ANCIENT
La datation du “Contre Celse” et du “Commentaire sur Matthieu” d’Origène.” À
propos de quelques hypothèses récentes. Gianluca Piscini. Cristianesimo nella
storia, 43 (3, 2022), 713–30.
La Praxis de stratelatis (BHG 1349z). Da libello di filosofia politica a legenda
agiografica. Cioffari Gerardo. Analecta Bollandiana, 140 (2, 2022), 241–70.
The Martyrdom of Dorotheos of Alexandria under Valens in Nikephoros,
Chronographia Brevis 97.5–9. Juan Signes Codoñer. Analecta Bollandiana, 140
(2, 2022), 271–80.
Forme di bullismo in ambiente monastico del IV secolo secondo l’Historia Lausiaca
di Palladio. Antonino Isola. Augustinianum, 62 (Dec., 2022), 423–33.
L’antiracisme de saint Augustin. Jean-Marie Salamito. Cristianesimo nella storia, 43
(3, 2022), 731–47.
“When God sees us in the circuses”: Salvian of Marseille’s De gubernatione Dei and
the critique of Roman society. Jonathan Stutz. Early Medieval Europe, 31
(Feb., 2023), 3–22.
Ut nullus ad Romanam Ecclesiam audeat appellare. La réaction canonique de l’Église
africaine aux affirmations de la primauté judiciaire romaine pendant les 5e et
6e siècles. Dominic Moreau. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (July, 2022),
493–527.
An Armenian Life of Jacbo Serugh. Introduction, Edition, and English
Translation. Andy Hilkens. Analecta Bollandiana, 140 (Dec., 2022), 320–39.
La carità del papa. Gregorio Magno tra storia e agiografia. Carlo dell’Osso.
Augustinianum, 62 (Dec., 2022), 463–75.
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MEDIEVAL
Bede, Bishops and Bisi of East Anglia: Questions of Chronology and Episcopal
Consecration in the Historia Ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum. Column Platts.
Anglo-Saxon England, 49 (Dec., 2020), 7–41.
Be wifmannes beweddunge. Betrothals and Weddings in Anglo-Saxon England.
Samuel Cardwell. Anglo-Saxon England, 49 (Dec., 2020), 81–106.
Before the canon houses. A reform at the domus episcopi of Lucca in the Lombard
period. Marco Stoffella. Early Medieval Europe, 31 (Feb., 2023), 51–68.
“The Whole Congregation of St. Mary.” The Prosopography of the Freising
Cathedral Clergy and the Carolingian Reforms. Carl I. Hammer. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (July, 2022), 528–60.
Re-examining Hrabanus Maurus’ letter on incest and magic. Matthew B. Edholm.
Early Medieval Europe, 31 (Feb., 2023), 252–73.
The Abridged life of Constantine the Former Jew (BHG 370b): Editio Princeps and
Translation. Niels De Ridder. Analecta Bollandiana, 140 (2, 2022), 305–19.
Sacred Shivering. Ravinder S. Benning. Speculum, 98 (Apr., 2023), 496–535.
Notger de Liège (972-1008): instrumentalisation épiscopale et appropriation du
territoire principautaire par le culte des saints. Philippe George. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (July, 2022), 563–82.
Pope Leo IX and the (Quasi-)Canonization of St. Deodatus (1049). Hagiography,
Papal Politics, and Local Competition at the Collegiate Chapter of Saint-Dié.
Steven Vanderputten. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (July, 2022), 584–618.
Las procesiones y su canto en la liturgia hispánica. David Andrés Fernández,
Carmen Julia Gutiérrez, Emma Hornby, and Raquel Rojo Carrillo. Anuario
de Historia de la Iglesia, 32 (2023), 249–308.
Der Chormantel aus St. Blasien und das Märtyrerfenster des Freiburger Münsters—
ein Vergleich. Valerie Möhle. Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 141 (2021), 11–54.
Honorius Augustodunensis, Joachim of Fiore, and the Liturgical Concordance of
History. Brett Edward Whalen. Recherches de Théologie et Philosophie
médiévales, 89 (2, 2022), 279–304.
Inter-faith relations and their spatial representation in the Late Medieval Aegean:
the double-apsed churches of Kythnos in the Western Cyclades. Christianna
Veloudaki. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 47 (Apr., 2023), 37–53.
Sulla chartula di frate Francesco. Felice Accrocca. Archivum Franciscanum
Historicum, 113 ????
The Historical Setting of Clare’s So-called Hunger Strike (LegCl 24). Gerard
Pieter Freeman. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (Jan., 2020), 3–54.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

443

“Optans fore socius glorie victorum”. La vocazione martiriale di sant’Antonio di
Padova nei sermoni medievali. Eleonora Lombardo. Cristianesimo nella storia,
43 (3, 2022), 749–81.
Litteras domini Alexandri pape quarti integras […] perspeximus. Die durch
Bischof Eberhard II. von Konstanz beglaubigten Litterae zur Kanonisation
Klaras. Florian Mair, OFM. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 112 (July,
2019), 619–65.
Zwischen hochadeliger Gründung und Ordensinkorporation. Die Anfänge des
Klarissenklosters Seußlitz (1273). Jörg Voigt. Archivum Franciscanum
Historicum, 114 (Jan., 2021), 47–79.
La textualidad de la representación política: el ejemplo de los franciscanos en los
dominios catalano-aragoneses (siglos XIII-XIV). Rogerio R. Tostes.
Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 114 (Jan., 2021), 81–126.
“Iidem Episcopus et Ecclesia, quos speciali affectione prosequimur”. Pope John XXII and
Iohannes Grothonis, bishop of Cracow (1326–1347). Dorota Żywczak. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (July, 2022), 620–38.
La evolución de los vínculos entre los poderes laicos y las órdenes religiosas en la
Castilla bajomedieval. Juan A. Prieto Sayagués. Anuario de Historia de la
Iglesia, 32 (2023), 309–44.
La reforma de la mirada en la Castilla observante del siglo xv: arte, curiositas y
contemplación. Diana Lucía Gómez-Chancón. Anuario de Historia de la
Iglesia, 32 (2023), 345–74.
Rime volgari in onore di Caterina Vigri (1413–1463). Dal chiostro alla città. Juri
Leoni, OFM. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (July, 2020), 253–322.
A monte del Quadragesimale di Cherubino da Spoleto. Il Sermo de innominabili
vicio sodomie (studio e edizione). Giorgio Proietti. Archivum Franciscanum
Historicum, 113 (Jan., 2020), 81–117.
Per la biografia di Paola “da Montaldo” (1443–1514). GIuseppe Gardoni.
Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (Jan., 2020), 149–68.

SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Vademecum delle fonti scritte nell’ambito dell’Ufficio delle cerimonie pontificie a
cavallo tra il XV e il XVI sec. Łukasz Żak. Anuario de Historia de la Iglesia, 32
(2023), 375–98.
Il confessore del principe. Frate Antonio della Croce e Francesco II Gonzaga.
Giuseppe Gardoni. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (July, 2020), 323–90.
L’Oratio funebris atque consolatoria per Antonio Cardona. Un’opera sconosciuta di
Pietro Galatino. Florian Mair, OFM. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113
(July, 2020), 391-425.

444

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

La Librorum vetitorum brevis enumeratio de 1546. Un abrégé du premier index de
livres interdits aux Pays-Bas. Hervé Baudry. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117
(July, 2022), 639–88.
Jean Molanus (1533-1585) et le martyrologe perdu de l’abbaye de Saint-Pierre-auMont-Blandin. Contribution à l’étude des martyrologes imprimés du XVIe
siècle. Georges Declercq. Analecta Bollandiana, 140 (Dec., 2022), 373–403
Un inquisitore nella Toscana medicea, padre Dionigi Sanmattei OFMConv.
(†1603). Herman Schwedt. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 114 (Jan.,
2021), 233–58.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
(EASTERN HEMISPHERE)
Hasta los confines de Japón: un manuscrito inédito sobre el viaje de Jerónimo de
Angelis a la isla de Hokkaidô (1618). Jaime González-Bolado. Anuario de
Historia de la Iglesia, 32 (2023), 399–421.
“Un’opera che sarà una perpetua memoria”: una fonte sull’origine e progresso del
monastero delle Cappuccine di Città di Castello. Mauro Papalini. Archivum
Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (July, 2020), 427–64.
Notizie Historiche (continuazione). Giancarlo Caputi. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, 47 (1, 2023), 31–60.
La diócesis de Nueva Cáceres (Filipinas) en 1655 según un informe de su obispo
electo fray Antonio de San Gregorio, OFM. Cayetano Sánches Fuertes,
OFM. Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 112 (Jan., 2019), 347–70.
The Popish Plot: A Case Study in the Political History of Fear. Jeffrey Collins.
Journal of Modern History, 95 (Mar., 2023), 1–37.
Mosén Jaume Boixó, fundador de la Escuela Pia de Moià. Archivum Scholarum
Piarum, 47 (1, 2023), 199–240.
Die Bearbeitung von Augustin von Alvedelts Erklärung der Klarissen-Regel (1535)
durch Theoderich Dinger (Eger, 1704). Johannes K. Schlageter, OFM.
Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (July, 2020), 543–68.
Autour de Pierre de Quesneville. Les commissaires généraux de la Terre sainte en
France (XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles). Pierre Moracchini. Archivum Franciscanum
Historicum, 114 (Jan., 2021), 259–80.
El monasterio de Santa Clara de Manila durante la ocupación de la ciudad por los
ingleses (1762–1764). Cayetano Sánchez Fuertes, OFM. Archivum
Franciscanum Historicum, 114 (Jan., 2021), 127–98.
Fray Antonio José de Luna Ramos obispo de Nueva Cáceres (1768–1773) y el
despotismo ilustrado en Filipinas. Cayetano Sánchez Fuertes, OFM.
Archivum Franciscanum Historicum, 113 (July, 2020), 465–542.

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

445

NINETEENTH AND TWENTIETH CENTURIES
(EASTERN HEMISPHERE)
Joseph de Maistre: A Molinist Responds to the French Revolution. Nathaniel
Sanders. Gregorianum, 103 (4, 2022), 781–804.
Making sense of an execution: Patriarch Gregory V between the Sublime Porte and
the Patriarchate. Yusuf Ziya Karabıçak. Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies,
47 (Apr., 2023), 85–102.
Martin Lutero e il vero Antichristo moderno : profezie antiluterane nelle opere di
Anton Francesco Doni. Luca Pastori. Rivista di Storia e Letteratura Religiosa,
58 (1, 2022), 51–76.
Il cardinale Pietro Gasparri all’Istituto Cattolico di Parigi. Stefano Orazi. Revue
d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (Jul., 2022), 681–709.
P. Tomás Viñas Sala de S. Luis, 34° Prepósito General de la Orden de las Escuelas
Pías (1912–1923). György Sántha. Archivum Scholarum Piarum, 47 (1, 2023),
61–190.
Schwierige Rückkehr in die Freiheit: Die ehemaligen “KZ-Priester” des
Erzbistums Freiburg nach Kriegsende. Johannes Kuber. Freiburger DiözesanArchiv, 141 (2021), 55–116.
Die “Kriegsberichte” aus den Pfarreien des Erzbistums Freiburg. Zustände und
Entwicklungen am Kriegsende und in der ersten Nachkriegszeit. Jürgen
Brüstle, Annemarie Ohler, Norbert Ohler und Christoph Schmider.
Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv, 141 (2021), 117–513.
Modus vivendi with Moscow? The 1945 Flynn Mission and the Eastern Policy of
Pius XII. András Fejérdy. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (Jul., 2022), 711–
33.
Pontifical Diplomacy in the East Asian Region: A Pre-Pope Francis Era (1964–
2013). Angeli Francis S. Rivera. Philippiniana Sacra, 57 (Sept.-Dec., 2022),
463–89.
Johannes Paul II. und der slowakische Katholizismus auf dem Weg zur politischen
Wende 1989. Emìlia Hrabovec. Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 117 (Jul., 2022),
735–72.

AMERICAN
“Sacred Legalities”: The Indelible and Interconnected Relationship Between
Baptism and Race in Spanish New Orleans. Benjamin Groth. Louisiana
History, 64 (Winter, 2023), 45–82.

446

PERIODICAL LITERATURE

LATIN AMERICAN
La “recognitio” de la Sagrada Congregación del Concilio a los concilios
provinciales americanos (siglos XVI). Luis Martínez Ferrer. Cristianesimo
nella storia, 43 (3, 2022), 783–817.
“In the Name of the (God) Father”: Baptismal Naming in Early Colonial
Guatemala. Mallory E. Matsumoto. The Americas, 80 (Apr., 2023), 183–219.
Papeles Seductivos: Friars, Intermediaries, and Organizers in the Huánuco
Rebellion of 1812. Taylor Cozzens. The Americas, 80 (Apr., 2023), 261–89.
Why Rara Burns Judas During Lent: Rethinking the Origins of Catholic Elements
in Haitian Culture from an Afro-iberian Perspective. Jeroen Dewulf. The
Americas, 80 (Jan., 2023), 33–68.