A Bloody Habit: A Novel
By Eleanor Bourg Nicholson. Reviewed by Fr. John Patrick Cush. (skip to review)
Was the Reformation a Mistake?: Why Catholic Doctrine Is Not Unbiblical
By Matthew Levering and Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Reviewed by Dr. Ryan (Bud) Marr. (skip to review)
Merton’s Palace of Nowhere and What I Am Living For: Lessons from the Life and Writings of Thomas Merton
By James Finley, and by Jon M. Sweeney. Reviewed by K.E. Colombini. (skip to review)
Signs: Seven Words of Hope
By Jean Vanier. Reviewed by Randall Woodward. (skip to review)
To Restore All Things in Christ: Memoirs of LaDonna Hermann
By LaDonna Hermann. Reviewed by Fr. Michael Monshau, OP, STL, PhD. (skip to review)
A Bloody Habit – Eleanor Bourg Nicholson
Bourg Nicholson, Eleanor. A Bloody Habit: A Novel. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2018. 440 pages. ISBN 978-1-62164-206-0.
Reviewed by Fr. John Patrick Cush.
Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s novel, A Bloody Habit, is not going to enter the pantheon of great Catholic novels like the works of Bernanos, Waugh, Chesterton, or Greene, and it’s not meant to. It is a fine, mostly fun, novel that can occupy your leisure time, while at the same time — if you allow its overall themes of faith, natural law, grace, and evil to be at the forefront of your reading — it can be a really positive experience.
The reader can tell that Mrs. Bourg Nicholson loves her faith. The reader can discern that the author is immensely fond of the Order of Preachers. The reader can tell that the author is extremely familiar with Bram Stoker’s Dracula and with the very-late Victorian–early Edwardian time period in English literature. Mrs. Bourg Nicholson parallels her tale of John Kemp and his encounters with vampiric presence in 1900-01 England with Stoker’s work, and does a very good job of offering a Catholic version of the familiar vampire trope. In many ways, A Bloody Habit can be seen as an homage to the suspense and horror fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and it is apparent that Mrs. Bourg Nicholson is checking all the appropriate boxes — e.g., lawyer-protagonist, swooning love interest, and, for her Van Helsing character, she has cleverly created the very endearing Dominican friar Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, a doctor of canon law and a vampire slayer. Equal parts Chesterton’s Father Brown combined with Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Father Thomas Edmund is the best part of a novel that can be, at times, a bit labored if one is not really into this genre of fiction.
For me, the highlight of the novel is found on pages 219–24, in which the author explains, in a creative “official Dominican document,” The Catalogue of the Preternatural, the rationale as to how the Order of Friars Preachers began to battle against the vampires. We learn in this clever manner how the Franciscans are commissioned to combat werewolves! One wonders what beasts the Society of Jesus must fight! If for these pages alone, I would buy this book!
Mrs. Bourg Nicholson, in her prose, is able to describe the reality of evil. Page 224 offers the following: “Evil can create nothing for itself; it can only corrupt which is. Thus, we conclude that the undead body, though preserved from corruption by the intervention of the Evil One and his breaking of the natural law, is good. Because of this, treatment of that body must proceed with proper respect.” The author has some wonderful descriptions of the beauty of the religious life, as can be demonstrated on page 245: “When the door opened, and I saw the gentle, smiling face of the lady, attired in white like her priestly counterparts, with a black veil over her head, it was as if I walked into another realm — a spiritual place loftier and yet more mundanely real than the world knew.” She conveys the reality of consecrated life lived well in these brief pages.
The person to whom Mrs. Bourg Nicholson dedicates this novel is the Dominican theologian Father Thomas Joseph White, and, as I have mentioned, it is very clear that a real and properly formed spirituality and theological formation is present in the author’s worldview. That is what makes this novel unique and charming. In his back-cover book endorsement, Father White states that “A Bloody Habit is the first real theological examination of the vampire state and of the classical battle waged by the Dominican Order against the vampire phenomenon.” While certainly this is the case in terms of the Dominicans, this novel is certainly not the first piece of fiction to offer a theological explanation of the roots of vampirism. One needs only to look (if one should want to do so, as it is not a great film!) to the film Dracula 2000, in which Dracula is really Judas Iscariot!
It is the love that the author demonstrates for the Catholic faith and the fine tradition of the Dominicans that this novel should be read. I can only hope that Mrs. Bourg Nicholson will grace us with a sequel with Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy, or even offer her readers an “extended universe” where we might read of the exploits of the Franciscans versus werewolves (or maybe even we poor diocesan priests battling Frankenstein’s monster!).
Rev. John Patrick Cush is a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn. He serves as the academic dean and as a formation advisor at the Pontifical North American College, Vatican City State. Fr. Cush holds a Doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy, where he serves as an adjunct professor of theology and U.S. Catholic church history. He is a massive movie, science fiction, and comic book fan as well!
Was the Reformation a Mistake?
– Matthew Levering and Kevin J. Vanhoozer
Levering, Matthew, and Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Was the Reformation a Mistake?: Why Catholic Doctrine Is Not Unbiblical. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2017. 240 pages.
Reviewed by Dr. Ryan (Bud) Marr.
In the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council the ecumenical movement arguably reached its zenith, as the Catholic Church fully committed itself to the kind of fraternal dialogue that was already taking place among Protestant Christians and some Orthodox communities. This momentum carried forward for the next few decades, such that the period from the mid-1960s until the end of the twentieth century was characterized by great optimism for reunion among the major branches of the Christian movement — magisterial Protestants, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholics. Even as late as 1999, when the Catholic Church’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the Lutheran World Federation released the Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification (JDDJ), it appeared that divided Christian communions were making serious progress towards rapprochement.
In recent years, however, the ecumenical movement seems to have stalled. For starters, documents such as the JDDJ, while signaling congenial relations at the level of institutional leadership, produced very little in the way of concrete steps towards Eucharistic fellowship. Even if formerly disputed theological ideas need no longer be reasons for ecclesial division, it was unclear how the communities involved in ecumenical discussions were to move from acknowledging that point to effective reconciliation. Second, the fruits of bilateral ecumenical dialogue were not received by all. For example, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger — Pope John Paul II’s most trusted adviser — raised several concerns about conclusions drawn in the text of the JDDJ, while on the Lutheran side of things groups such as the Missouri Synod did not follow other Lutherans in accepting the document as an accurate statement of their core theological convictions. Finally, certain developments within some of the mainstream Protestant traditions (e.g., the decision to ordain women and increasing openness to same-sex marriage) effectively broadened the chasm that separates Roman Catholics from their Protestant brothers and sisters at a time when it seemed like real ecumenical progress was possible.
In light of this background, Matthew Levering’s Was the Reformation a Mistake? presents, in my view, a significant ecumenical contribution. One characteristic that makes Levering’s book so effective is that he sets clear parameters for what he intends to accomplish. Each chapter (nine in total) begins by summarizing a specific theological concern raised by Martin Luther at the outset of the Protestant Reformation. These include Scripture, Mary, the Eucharist, the existence of seven Sacraments, monasticism, justification and merit, Purgatory, the saints, and the papacy. In the latter part of each chapter, Levering proceeds to offer a biblical reflection on the topic under consideration, “aimed at conveying some biblical grounds for why Catholics hold the doctrinal positions that we do” (17). Levering makes clear that he is “not trying to prove Catholic doctrine to Protestants” (20), which is an important, but altogether different apologetical task. Rather, his aim is more modest: he is simply intending to “challeng[e] the view that the Catholic positions on the topics treated . . . are ‘unbiblical,’ in the sense of being derived from modes of reasoning not warranted by Scripture and/or being not rooted in Scripture” (ibid.). Given his central goal, Levering views Luther as a promising dialogue partner. Besides forthrightly expressing the disagreements that continue to divide Catholics and Protestants, Luther also established “fidelity to the scriptural Word” as a governing principle for discerning doctrinal orthodoxy — a commitment that Levering, too, is keen to affirm (19).
Since Levering accepts the rules for engagement laid down by Luther, one hopes that Levering’s arguments will be given a charitable read by Protestants who may be predisposed to the idea that Catholic doctrine simply cannot be squared with the biblical witness. For this Catholic, it feels odd even to speak in such terms, but as someone who was raised in an Evangelical context, I know from experience that a considerable number of Protestants still mistakenly assume that the Catholic Church is somehow unconcerned about fidelity to Scripture. In each chapter, Levering carefully and charitably demonstrates how such an assumption is unfounded. While most Protestant readers are likely to shut the book with their theological convictions intact, it’s difficult to see how they could walk away from it still clinging to the idea that Catholic doctrinal commitments are not rooted in Scripture, even though (admittedly) the mode of reasoning used to reach certain theological conclusions differs in form from how the major Protestant traditions generally interpret the biblical text.
The book concludes with “A Mere Protestant Response” by Kevin Vanhoozer, who is research professor of systematic theology at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. Dr. Vanhoozer is a charitable interlocutor — beginning his chapter with an encomium to Levering’s stature as a scholar — yet is simultaneously unsparing in his criticism of what he sees as the shortcomings of the Catholic position. Regarding ecumenical relations, Vanhoozer calls for a “catholic spirit” (a phrase borrowed from John Wesley), which he describes as an “openness to friendship with and learning from Christians in other traditions than [one’s] own . . . without becoming indifferent to the truth” (198, 200). But he is careful to distinguish between this (“small-c”) catholic spirit and being “Catholic” as Roman Catholics understand that term. The latter viewpoint, Vanhoozer charges, mistakenly conflates Roman Catholic tradition with the full breadth of the deposit of faith and, in the process, closes itself off to insights about the Gospel more faithfully expressed in other strands of the Christian movement.
While he takes the time to confront specific exegetical conclusions that Levering has drawn, Vanhoozer’s central point of contention is with Roman Catholic claims regarding the locus of Church authority. In his view, and this is a recurring theme in Protestant polemics, Catholic convictions regarding such matters as apostolic succession and papal infallibility are fundamentally opposed to the notion of sola scriptura — “the principle that Scripture alone is the only infallible authority and proper ground for establishing doctrine” (213). Building on this point, Vanhoozer argues that when Levering uses the term “biblical,” he is using it in a different sense than Protestants do. Sure, Catholic doctrines may not be unbiblical in the sense of “not being directly contrary to Scripture, yet at crucial points” they do appear “suprabiblical, in the sense of supplementing what the Bible directly teaches (or what is directly implied) with ideas derived from somewhere else” (ibid.). But, “for Protestants,” Vanhoozer writes, “the church’s say-so does not make it so” (ibid.). This final point seems to me a caricature of what the Catholic Church actually teaches, but that is where Vanhoozer lands in the case that he develops against Levering and like-minded Catholics: Evangelical Protestants look to the Bible as the ultimate standard for Christian doctrine while Catholics settle for the voluntaristic judgments of a hierarchical — and, in his view, clearly fallible — magisterium.
I personally think Levering gets the better of this exchange, though many Protestant readers will undoubtedly disagree with me. Prescinding from the question of who “won the debate,” from this Catholic’s standpoint, one idea advanced by Vanhoozer jumped out at me — namely, his assertion that even though “sola scriptura means that the Bible alone authorizes doctrine . . . the Bible that authorizes is not alone, for the Spirit who speaks in and through Scripture does not do so independently of the church’s tradition and teaching ministry” (ibid., emphasis mine). The latter clause in that statement sounds surprisingly close, in my view, to what Roman Catholics practically affirm. A book, on its own — i.e., apart from a community of interpreters — cannot exercise authority. That being the case, the question then becomes: Where do we in fact find a trustworthy authority that has faithfully transmitted the deposit of faith from the apostolic era until now — or, to put it another way, where today can we locate the church founded by Jesus Christ, against which the gates of Hell cannot prevail?
Levering’s answer to this question is both clear and concrete. As a safeguard against division, “Jesus provide[d] his messianic people with an apostolic structure (fulfilling that of the twelve tribes) and with one leader among the apostles [Peter] who [was granted] the unique role of steward and shepherd under Jesus” (185). Because the community of believers would need such leadership until the consummation of all things, Jesus intended for this ministry to extend beyond the lifetime of Peter, as it has in fact done through the means of apostolic succession. In contrast to this incarnational ecclesiology, when Vanhoozer turns to questions that pertain to the church, I worry that he settles into false dichotomies. For instance, at one point he rhetorically asks, “What exactly is the good news? That the church makes salvation possible, or that Christ saves?” (218). From a Catholic perspective, of course, the two are not mutually exclusive options: Christ saves through the ministration of the Church that he founded, not beyond or in spite of it. Similarly, the Bible and Sacred Tradition function not in a competitive relationship, but with each informing and expanding upon the other. In sum, Catholicism is the religion of the “both-and,” a characteristic that some confessional Protestants will only ever view as compromise rather than wholeness.
As is clear from Vanhoozer’s response, Levering’s engagement with Luther’s theology is unlikely to resolve the debate around these and other topics any time soon. But it certainly appears like a step in the right direction, if for no other reason than that Levering is able to get an esteemed Protestant scholar like Vanhoozer to admit outright that the faithful handling of Scripture must take place within a tradition of interpretation while being overseen by ministers who have been vested with real teaching authority. In my view, common ground on this key question represents a promising starting point for fruitfully addressing persisting disagreements about specific doctrines. Considering the fact that the ecumenical movement has been stuck in neutral for some time now, it’s encouraging to see books like this one, which foster an irenic ethos while at the same time clearly isolating which theological disputes still need to be hashed out.
Dr. Ryan (Bud) Marr holds his PhD from Saint Louis University and is currently the director of the National Institute for Newman Studies at Duquesne University, as well as Associate Editor of the Newman Studies Journal.
Merton’s Palace of Nowhere – James Finley
What I Am Living For – Jon M. Sweeney
Finley, James. Merton’s Palace of Nowhere. South Bend: Ave Maria Press, (1978) 2018. 128 pages.
Sweeney, Jon M. What I Am Living For: Lessons from the Life and Writings of Thomas Merton. South Bend: Ave Maria Press, 2018. 197 pages.
Reviewed by K.E. Colombini.
Mentioning Thomas Merton can be triggering for some people, because those who know his story often hold contradictory images and opinions of the man and the monk. There is Merton the convert who entered a Trappist monastery at the beginning of the Second World War, and whose best-selling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, drew many others to the cloister at war’s end, and whose subsequent writings offered wholesome spiritual fare. Then, there’s the Merton who battled temptations away from his vocation, who developed a deep interest in Eastern mysticism, and who then died at the age of 53, electrocuted in a freak accident far from his abbey.
These two books from Ave Maria Press help shed light on the mystery of the man. Forty years ago, a decade after Merton’s death, James Finley came out with his book, a reflection on his time under Merton’s tutelage spent at the Abbey of Gethsemani near Louisville and an exposition of Merton’s idea of spirituality and contemplation as a search for the true self over the false self.
Thinking about this subject, one stumbles upon a reference by Fr. James Martin, SJ, in Jon Sweeney’s eclectic collection of essays by others on Merton. In his chapter, the first in the book, Fr. Martin remembers a quote of Merton’s from his 1955 book No Man Is an Island, a passage that “stopped him dead” in his tracks as an aspiring corporate executive and eventually led him to the priesthood. Merton asks us: “Why do we have to spend our lives striving to be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we wanted? Why do we waste our time doing things which, if we only stopped to think about it, are just the opposite of what we were made for?”
Fr. Martin may be more controversial than Merton for some Catholics; however, Sweeney’s book runs the spectrum, as it were, and includes an essay by Los Angeles Auxiliary Bishop Robert Barron that he had written in conjunction with the centenary of Merton’s birth. You can read that essay online here, and it’s clearly a defense of the monk. Those Catholics who today have little use for Merton — often, Catholics of a more traditional or conservative bent — should know that there is much to appreciate in Merton’s work, starting with Seven Storey Mountain, which was highly praised by contemporaries like Bishop Fulton Sheen and the British writer Evelyn Waugh, who visited Merton in Kentucky and edited the book for publication in England, providing a strong foreword.
In Sweeney’s book, a few contributors mention an experience Merton had on a street corner in Louisville in 1958, when he was struck by the spiritual significance of those around him. A plaque marks the spot to this day, and here’s how Merton records it, a decade before his death:
In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. . . . There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Given his early death, Merton’s career as a monk was a quarter century, and as a recognized writer only two decades. This was the mid-point of that time, and if it marked a turning point, so be it. But as Bishop Barron was told on his visit to Gethsemani by one of the monks who knew him best, Merton “died a monk of Gethsemani Abbey and a priest of the Catholic Church.” Was he perfect? No. He struggled as do we all. Early on he struggled with a call to hermitage or to even become a Carthusian — and one was built at the abbey, but he remained a Trappist. He studied the traditions of the East, and found them lacking. He fell in love with a nurse while being treated in a hospital, but nothing appears to have come of it. His calling was intact to the end.
At the same time, he brought many men to the monastic life and provided great hope and peace for those who saw a world bouncing from one war to another. He recognized that war was the effect of sin and true peace was not for this world. And he had grave concerns about Eastern meditation practices that focus on emptying oneself out. “Merton says that one sits in meditation industriously engaged in the act of emptying the mind of all thoughts so as to reach an elusive state of emptiness,” Finley writes, then cites the monk in calling this “narcissism under the guise of ‘emptiness’ and ‘contemplation’.” Meditation and contemplation must focus on God. The prayer aspect, not recognized by the East, must be recalled.
These books help add shape to the mystery of Merton, but still one must tread carefully to avoid error where some thoughts are not expressed clearly. So many volumes have been written about Thomas Merton, a man who still mystifies, enlightens, confounds, and inspires, a half-century after an untimely passing.
Ken Colombini is a Catholic writer in St. Louis, MO. He also has written for First Things and other publications.
Signs – Jean Vanier
Vanier, Jean. Signs: Seven Words of Hope. New York: Paulist Press, 2013. 94 pages.
Reviewed by Randall Woodward.
Readers may be familiar with Vanier’s writing or the organization he founded called L’Arche, a community dedicated to those with disabilities. A Canadian-born philosopher, Vanier has written extensively over the years on human dignity, community, and vulnerability in light of our vocation to serve life. This current work is focused on providing a mirror into which individual readers peer in order to take on a difficult and critical self-examination. Additionally, the author attempts to provide the same for the wider Church community, calling us to an examination of conscience and to repent as an organization for the failures we have made, and continue to make collectively. The book as a whole seeks to read the “signs of the times” using a perspective of human dignity, solidarity, and the option for the poor — key tenets of Catholic Social Teaching and following the example of John Paul II who (on many occasions) asked us all to repent for our individual and collective infidelities to the Gospel (12). Thus, the work functions as an examination of conscience and an invitation for us all to develop our own spirituality through the seven words of hope.
Vanier organizes the book into seven chapters or themes that derive from his vision of where we have collectively missed the mark. These are familiar categories for those acquainted with some of his other books, including Becoming Human. Thus, the self-examination flows from his reflections on humiliation, awakening, encounter, authority, community, vulnerability, and mystery. In each chapter, Vanier explains the concept, ties in scriptural reflections to shed light on the major theme, and then shares positive stories and problematic areas in which humanity (and often times the Church body) has failed to deeply love and serve the dignity of the other. For example, in chapter two — on the idea of awakening — Vanier, paraphrasing Benedict XVI, explains that today the worst things happening to the Church “come not from the outside, but from within, from its own sin” (21). Thus, Vanier sees that movement from our own humiliation to our waking up, to our ability to move into true encounter with God and others, and to share our own vulnerability, build authentic community, serve others in the beautiful and mysterious way in which Jesus served others unto death.
The strength of Vanier’s book is that he writes in a manner that does invite each of us to examine our consciences at an individual level as well as in a more social and ecclesial manner. He communicates clearly with powerful stories and examples, and avoids an overly scholarly tone which could be unappealing to some readers. The value of the book will really depend on the reader’s openness to critique of one’s personal, and our collective ecclesiological, faults. The author approaches our brokenness with sympathy and humility, but his critical examination of our failures and misguided values are direct and pointed (without being disrespectful). If readers are willing to examine many of their assumptions and think critically about a deeper respect for the dignity of life (and in particular for certain marginalized groups), then they will deeply benefit from this book.
Randall Woodard, PhD, is an associate professor and department chairman in the theology department at Saint Leo University in Florida.
To Restore All Things in Christ – LaDonna Hermann
Hermann, LaDonna. To Restore All Things in Christ: Memoirs of LaDonna Hermann. Self-published by the Rural Parish Workers of Christ the King, Cadet (Fertile), Missouri, 2014. 131 pp.
Reviewed by Fr. Michael Monshau, OP, STL, PhD.
A remarkably important historical source, filling a lacuna in the narrative of consecrated life and of the American church, has fallen into place with the publication of To Restore All Things in Christ: Memoirs of LaDonna Hermann. The record of the founding of secular institutes in the middle of the last century has gone largely unreported in historical circles. The memoirs of a co-founder of one such community provide a folksy, first-person account of this phenomenon as it unfolded in one particular secular institute in rural Missouri, just miles away from the city of St. Louis. Written as a personal memoir to document the early days of this secular institute for its members and the wider public, this work answers more to the description of a homespun journal than an academic text, yet it provides the kind of intimate look into one of the Church’s most hidden vocations that any serious historian would prize.
In 1942, five years before Pope Pius XII issued Provida Mater Ecclesia — the apostolic constitution in which he recognized the vocation of the secular institute — two college-educated St. Louis women, Alice Widmer and LaDonna Hermann, were eager to embark upon this emerging Church vocation with the particular goal of serving the rural Church. They found encouragement from several priests of the Archdiocese of St. Louis, notably Msgr. Leo Steck, as well as the trio of Msgr. Joseph Huels, Msgr. James Bresnahan, and Msgr. (later Bishop) Charles Helmsing. The account reports that “these . . . wonderful priest friends assured us that the Lord was leading us to fulfill a real need in the Church — lay people bringing the Gospel to others by living amongst them and sharing in their lives” (15).
Late on Friday evening, June 25, 1942, Msgr. Steck escorted the two founders to the rectory at St. Joseph Parish, Cottleville, Missouri, where the pastor, Fr. Pezold, had agreed to receive them, provide accommodations (initially in his attic, as it turned out), and allow them to begin serving the marginalized in his parish. It turned out that Fr. Pezold was no more informed about the nature of a secular institute than anyone else seemed to be at that time. Within the first weeks after their arrival in his parish, he warned the Parish Workers that it would be better not to inform the parishioners that they were university graduates and certainly not to answer to the title “social workers,” lest they frighten the faithful away. Further, although they could do some home visiting outside of the town, they could not visit any families living within the town since the Children of Mary Sodalists, who were already covering that base, might be offended; nonetheless, they could visit the homes of the rural poor if they wished. And they did. They were also allowed to help the Precious Blood Sisters operate the parish’s vacation Bible school for children.
Not only was Fr. Pezold unclear about their appropriate duties, but he was also confused about how to treat members of a secular institute. He housed them in the attic of his own rectory before installing them in an equally unsuitable dwelling place of their own elsewhere on parish property some weeks later. Instead of creatively trying to imagine how the parish might benefit from the presence of two professional apostles, he recommended that they assist his housekeeper with her duties as they settled in. The housekeeper was so disinclined to be welcoming toward them that, when the women asked her for bath towels to use for the once-a-week Saturday night bath they were permitted in that rectory, the housekeeper suggested that rather than using fresh ones, they should just use the same towel she had used earlier that evening for her own bath! When winter came and they had been installed in their own dwelling place, Fr. Pezold required that they tend to the snow removal surrounding their own small home themselves, despite the fact that they were housed on parish property and the parish janitor saw to the snow removal of the entire parish plant, except for their house. Fr. Pezold admonished them, “You want to be laity. Well, the laity has to become responsible for their own needs” (26).
It wouldn’t do to make it seem as if the Parish Workers were consistently treated badly by their first pastor or by anyone else; the memoirs suggest a magnanimous interpretation of the uncertain responses they received again and again from pastors and people who seemed to understand immediately that the women dressed in secular attire were not nuns, but then, if they weren’t nuns, precisely what were they? Perhaps it is the record of how the activities of the unfolding years provided the answer to that question for the clergy, laity, and, to some extent, even for the Parish Workers themselves that demonstrates the greatest contribution of these memoirs. The fact that the women chose to be identified uniquely by the title “Miss” along with their Christian name, as in “Miss Mary,” reveals that they were themselves conscious of forging a new role in the Church, somewhere between the public identity of a consecrated religious and the anonymity of a lay person.
Early on in their development, they formed friendships with notable Benedictines such as Dom Ermin Vitry, who was then chaplain and liturgy professor at the neighboring motherhouse of the Precious Blood Sisters in O’Fallon, and Frs. Hugh Farrington and Bede Scholz of Conception Abbey. The influences of these important figures of the Liturgical Movement on the Rural Parish Workers have been enduring. The women later formed associations with the monks of Pius X Abbey in Pevely, and, still later, with the monks of the English Congregation at St. Louis Priory in St. Louis. As a result, this secular institute based its constitutions on the Rule of St. Benedict and has regarded itself as a small entity in the worldwide Benedictine family ever since.
This volume of memoirs includes anecdotes about many of the early friends of the community. Even more stories describe souls touched, indeed, often transformed, through parish visiting, children and families counseled and helped, a homeless infant nurtured, sick people being matched with health care services, emergency interventions with individuals in crisis, tutoring provided for children in various compromised situations, the collaborations with other religious communities that enabled the Parish Workers to assist their neighbors in need, vacation Bible schools, and numerous other sponsored programs. Eventually the community relocated to a home of its own, just outside of Fertile, Missouri, from where they have continued their lives of service while also participating vigorously in parish life at St. Joachim’s in Old Mines. Today their compound includes the St. Michael Center, a large multi-purpose facility in which numerous workers’ pastoral programs are conducted.
Explanations about how the ministries of the community developed are intermixed with narratives of how the community developed its own internal structure, its Benedictine spirituality, and its gradual self-understanding of the vocation of the secular institute. At one moment one might be reading about the delight the two founders expressed when an early priest-advisor declared that the use of cosmetics was not incompatible with their vowed status, while several lines later one might read about the newer members who joined the Parish Workers as time progressed, or, then again, an anecdote will be featured detailing the annual retreat program they eventually determined for themselves. At various points, comedic stories about the unreliable service rendered by various pieces of equipment used by the early members (e.g., an ancient automobile they named “Isabelle” or a temperamental refrigerator that only worked following prayerful recourse to St. Rita) also surface. Although some grouping of themes is achieved by chapter titles, the intermixing of topics is a steady feature of the narrative that leaves for highly interesting reading, albeit a more complicated task for the historian trying to research its contents.
On one hand, these memoirs relate the institutional history of the specific American Benedictine secular institute known as the Rural Parish Workers of Christ the King. On the other hand, this record provides one account of the founding of, and the first seventy years of operation of, a representative group within the constellation of secular institutes that began appearing throughout the universal Church from the 1940s onward. It is a particular history, but it also provides insight into the broader history of the phenomenon known as the secular institute.
This publication features a mosaic of primary sources, since basically it consists of selected passages from co-founder Miss LaDonna Hermann’s own memoirs, her own commentary on the events to which the sources refer, and her collection of photographs and primary documents associated with their foundation. Since it is the personal record of a well-educated participant, a reliable and articulate witness of the events is reported, and it is a reliable primary source. Because Miss LaDonna did not have an academic volume of history in mind when she took pen to paper, it might seem inadequate to the formal historian for its lack of organization or academic structure (for example, it features no footnotes, bibliography, or index) but it is not found wanting in its contents. The author’s recollections of their earliest and on-going social contacts, ministries, projects, affiliations, spirituality, and identity as a secular institute — and specifically as the particular secular institute that they are — are casually interwoven in conversational mode rather than being divided into clearly defined sections that would make research easier for the scholar. Yet, these memoirs are a goldmine for the insight the author’s personal account provides into a rather unknown but important piece of the Church’s story. The fact that the community claims a Benedictine patrimony only increases the importance that the story of this small community occupies in Catholic historical literature.
To Restore All Things in Christ: Memoirs of LaDonna Hermann is a self-published work that does not include all the bibliographical information typically found in historical texts, yet this somehow enhances its authenticity, given that it records events that take place in a region where beds are more commonly dressed in home-made quilts than they are in commercially manufactured, store-purchased blankets. It is a valuable volume for any library attempting to house a rounded-out narrative of contemporary ecclesial life.
Dominican Father Michael Monshau, STL, PhD, formerly of the theology department of the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (the “Angelicum”) in Rome, writes from Christ the King Seminary in East Aurora, New York, where he is Professor of Liturgy and Homiletics and Assistant Director of Formation.
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