Catholic Continental Ambitions

This book is on my wish list. Stefan McDaniel reviews it for First Things (access may be limited, unless you are a subscriber):

In his final book, Continental Ambitions: Roman Catholics in North America; The Colonial Experience, the late Kevin Starr set out to dispel this perception. Continental Ambitions tells the story of Catholic conquest, exploration, and settlement in North America (involving Norse, Spanish, French, and British Catholics), emphasizing the relevance of this story to understanding the present-day continental United States. “The history of Catholicism in America,” says Starr in his preface, “is not simply Catholic history. It is American history . . . part of the warp and woof, the very fabric and meaning, of American life.” . . .

Starr also brings out general issues in Catholic history, providing much matter for meditation. He is keenly aware, for instance, that as the Church works the hard clay of cultural, political, and economic reality, the resistance always generates contradictions and anomalies. How are Spanish Franciscans in the Southwest to create their Indian-Catholic utopia without the protection of the very Spanish soldiers whose criminality alienates and scandalizes the Indians? How to sustain the apostolate of Ville-Marie, meant to make the Indians sons of God, without selling them the guns and brandy that enthrall them to the devil? How can there be any Catholic freedom in Maryland without wealth from black slavery?

One general moral to be drawn from the history Starr relates is that intellectual clarity and practical competence are much more valuable in creating an authentic Christian society than is the mystical exuberance that is currently in fashion. This becomes clear when one compares the North American record of the Franciscans on one hand with that of the Jesuits and Dominicans on the other. Franciscans indulged extravagant theologies of Indians as the new chosen people, but it took cold Dominican pedantry to define and guard the Indians’ most basic rights as human persons. Franciscans let fly thunderous condemnations of the soldiers who abused their Indian charges, but it was the Jesuits, with their traditional insistence on (as Starr says) “polity, power, results,” who got Spanish soldiers on their payroll—that is, on a leash.

While praising many aspects of Starr's book, McDaniel also recommends another to fill some gaps he finds in Continental Ambitions--Our Land and Our Lady by Daniel Sargent:

. . . Our Land and Our Lady is an irenic and refreshing book. It reminds us that America, like many of its current residents, may have been raised Protestant, but it was baptized Catholic. Almost every region was first discovered, explored, and charted by ultra-Catholic Spaniards and Frenchmen. From the Bay of the Mother of God (the Chesapeake) to the River of the Immaculate Conception (the Mississippi) to the Bay of San Francisco, these Catholics christened the land with Catholic names. Far too often, these Catholics (especially the Spanish) went on to promptly profane the land with slaughter and slavery. But they also consecrated it with the blood of martyrdom—profusely in the Southwest, but also in Auriesville, New York, and by the Rappahannock, near Bull Run. Even British Catholics managed to play their part, discreetly devoting a Chesapeake colony to Mary, and there instituting a regime of tolerance based on Catholic humanism and prudence, not on the axioms of Locke. Even in the era of the Anglo-Protestant republic, the Church blessed our country with a true Enlightenment: heroic Catholic evangelization, such as Pierre-Jean De Smet’s work with the Indians of the Northwest, and the accessible Catholic education provided by vast armies of nuns. Finally, Catholics like the fathers of Maryknoll brought America to a sort of Catholic maturity when they harnessed its legendary wealth, energy, and goodwill for foreign missions, making it a spiritual center from which the Gospel is proclaimed to the ends of the earth.

"A distinct, Catholic approach to history"

Kevin Jones of the Catholic News Agency interviewed the authors of a new book about writing narrative history from a Catholic perspective:

Front Royal, Va., Oct 17, 2014 / 03:41 pm (CNA).- The study of history is an opportunity to unite faith and reason and to recover a distinctly Catholic perspective that sees God acting in the past, present and future, the authors of a new book say.

“From its earliest centuries, the Church understood itself as possessing not simply a faith with a history, but a historical faith,” Christendom College history professor Christopher Shannon told CNA Oct. 13.

“That is, Church Fathers such as Eusebius and Augustine understood God as speaking to his people through history, and not simply Church history proper. The rise and fall of nations were to be understood in terms of God calling his people to himself.”

Shannon is the co-author of “The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition, and the Renewal of Catholic History,” from Christendom Press. Through the book, he and Christopher Blum – a history and philosophy professor at the Augustine Institute in Denver – aim to cultivate the awareness of “a distinct, Catholic approach to history” among both professional historians and the general reading public.

“Catholic historians, like non-Catholic historians, use reason to discern facts and establish relations of causality in history, but they also draw on their faith to discern the meaning and significance of events,” Shannon said.

Blum explained that “The Past as Pilgrimage” aims to aid “the recovery of Christian memory” that Pope Benedict XVI and Pope Francis have called for.

The scholar said that Catholic approaches tend to avoid a “critical” history that debunks ideas or a “scientific” history that aims to be “encyclopedic or technical.”

Rather, Catholic forms of history should be “reverent” and seek to be “challenging and meditative.” Blum said the exemplars of this approach to history include Sts. Athanasius, Augustine and Gregory the Great, as well as Blessed John Henry Newman.

Read the rest of the interview there. About the book, from Christendom Press (AmP Publishers Group):

In The Past as Pilgrimage: Narrative, Tradition, and the Renewal of Catholic History, Catholic historians Shannon and Blum challenge the secular bias currently prevalent among professional historians, and argue for the compatibility of faith and reason in the study of the past. Inspired by the understanding of tradition developed in the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the authors first critically examine both the internal contradictions and the enduring faith commitments of secular objectivity, then proceed to explore various traditions of Catholic historical thinking capable of synthesizing the technical advances of modern history with distinctly Catholic historical narratives. Their argument seeks to foster a conversation about the ways in which Catholic historians can integrate their faith traditions into their professional work while still remaining open to and engaged with the best of contemporary, non-Catholic thinking and writing about history.

The BBC Exposes the Myth of the Spanish Inquisition

Last year in Homiletic & Pastoral Review, I wrote about the Spanish Inquisition:

The Monty Python cohort may have said, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” but Catholics can expect it to be brought up regularly. This exaggerated version emphasizes all the depths of the Black Legend of Spain: the tyranny of the popes and the Catholic Church, torture, and the multitude of victims writhing in agony, burned alive during the auto-da-fe. The quick facts to present in response to an attack on the Church concerning the Spanish Inquisition are these:

• The government wanted the Spanish Inquisition, not the Church; the State was in charge.
• Successive popes, like Pope Sixtus IV and Innocent VIII complained to Spain about the conduct of the Inquisition.
• The Church never tortured anyone—Spanish officials may have, but no Inquisitorial friar or monk ever tortured someone accused of heresy.
• The Church did not burn anyone to death; in fact, of the approximately 2,000 condemned to death by the State, very few were actually executed—they were usually burned in effigy, having fled the country.
•  Those condemned were not burned alive at the stake during the auto-da-fe.

Those are the facts to present, but the deeper issue is that in medieval and early modern (Renaissance and Reformation) eras in Europe, heresy was a serious matter for the State. Queen Elizabeth I in England wanted all her subjects to be members of the Church of England, and King Philip II of Spain wanted all his subjects to be Catholics. To them, it was a measure of unity and loyalty in their realms. We look back and think, how could the government be so concerned about what doctrine their subjects believed, what religion they practiced? Governments today around the world are just as concerned about the religious practice of their citizens. Even the United States, which has enshrined religious liberty in our Bill of Rights, is facing a crisis of religious freedom and the rights of conscience.

After watching the 1994 episode from the BBC's Timewatch series linked above, I realized I told only part of the story, because I was defending the Church from attack, not the Spanish Inquisition itself. The BBC's examination of the myth of the Spanish Inquisition is balanced and exact in citing the facts about the history of that effort to suppress heresy, using for what at that time was new information gained from the opening of the archives of the office of the Inquisition. There is discussion of the propaganda of the Black Legend from print media to fiction to even opera (Verdi's Don Carlo). The most disturbing aspect of this propaganda, which did come from enemies of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Empire--many of whom were Protestant, we must admit--is how it contrasts with the horrible record of witch burning in Europe, mostly in Protestant countries. The BBC notes that around 3,000 were sentenced to death during the Spanish Inquisition, but that 150,000 were burned alive as witches--while the Spanish Inquisition rejected the so-called "evidence" of a woman being a witch. Yet even our era accepts the imagery of Spanish cruelty while ignoring northern European horrors. 

The documentary points out that the Spanish Inquisition courts were so well known for their relative fairness that prisoners accused in other civil courts would pretend to be heretics just to switch. The Inquisition courts did allow for proving the negative--that the accused was not a heretic--while other civil courts in that era supposed the guilt of the accused just because he had been accused. Think of the 17th century victims of the false Popish Plot in England. Their efforts to prove themselves not guilty were frustrated by the assumption by the court that they were guilty of conspiracy and treason because they were Catholics. Whatever evidence they offered to prove for example that they could not have been where Titus Oates said they were because they had witnesses who could testify they were somewhere else--it would be rejected because the witnesses were Catholic and thus part of the conspiracy.

It's a long video (about 45 minutes) but well worth watching. Oh, and just like I did above, the program starts with Monty Python, torturing a woman on the comfy chair and poking her with pillows! The end is charming too as a happy chorus proclaims English superiority to all other peoples and nations!

Historical Apologetics @ Homiletic & Pastoral Review

Homiletic & Pastoral Review, which recently went to a web-only format, published an article I submitted on "Knowing Enough History to Defend It: Catholic History and Apologetics":

While many seem to disregard the study of history as a wasteful pastime, events in Catholic Church history are often used to attack us. Based on ignorance, prejudice, or confusion, people know, or think they know, something about our Church’s past that is scandalous, cruel, or just bad. They use this misinformation or some distorted view of an event to attack the Church’s credibility on current moral issues, as if to say an institution that can perpetrate such misdeeds in the past can’t tell me what to do with my body (artificial birth control, abortion, fornication, etc.); it can’t tell me what’s right and what’s wrong.

Catholics should be prepared with at least a brief reply to commonly cited events and issues in the Church’s two millennia past. In the words of Blessed John Henry Newman, we need to be Catholics “who know so much of history that (we) can defend it.” We might not be able to change someone’s mind when she asks us about why the Church was so mean to Galileo, but at least we can demonstrate that we know our history. If she’s not willing to listen to a dissertation-length explanation, a few points might help her understand better. The fact that we know may impress her, open the door to more friendly conversation, and grant an opportunity to witness the reason for our joy in being Catholic. This article offers some guidelines and hints for answering these historical questions.

Please read the rest there. I meant for it to be a survey of helpful hints on answering common questions about Church History, inspired by Blessed John Henry Newman. If you want to read the original--that is, Blessed John Henry Newman--on Church History, you should peruse the five letters he wrote to John Rickards Mozley, his nephew. When Newman speaks about the "light" side of the Catholic Church, he is much more eloquent than I am:

But leaving the highest and truest outcome of the Catholic Church and descending to history, certainly I would maintain firmly, with most writers on the Evidences, that, as the Church has a dark side, so (as you do not seem to admit) it has a light side also, and that its good has been more potent and permanent and evidently intrinsic to it than its evil. Here, of course, we have to rely on the narrative of historians, if we have not made a study of original documents ourselves. It would be a long business (assuming their correctness), but an easy business too, to show how Christianity has raised the moral standard, tone, and customs of human society; and it must be recollected that for 1500 years Christianity and the Catholic Church are in history identical. The care and elevation of the lower classes, the championship of the weak against the powerful, the abolition of slavery, hospitals, the redemption of captives, education of children, agriculture, literature, the cultivation of the virtues of piety, devotion, justice, charity, chastity, family affection, are all historical monuments of the influence and teaching of the Church. Turn to the non-Catholic historians, to Gibbon, Voigt, Hurter, Guizot, Ranke, Waddington, Bowden, Milman, and you will find that they agree in their praises, as well as in their accusations, of the Catholic Church. Guizot says that Christianity would not have weathered the barbarism of the Middle Age but for the Church. Milman says almost or altogether the same. Neander sings the praises of the monks. Hurter was converted by his historical researches. Ranke shows how the Popes fought against the savageness of the Spanish Inquisition. Bowden brings out visibly how the cause of Hildebrand was the cause of religion and morals. If in the long line there be bad as well as good Popes, do not forget that long succession, continuous and thick, of holy and heroic men, all subjects of the Popes, and most of them his direct instruments in the most noble and serviceable and most various works, and some of them Popes themselves, such as Patrick, Leo, Gregory, Augustine, Boniface, Columban, Alfred, Wulstan, Queen Margaret of Scotland, Louis IX., Vincent Ferrer, Las Casas, Turibius, Xavier, Vincent of Paul—all of whom, as multitudes besides, in their day were the life of religion.

And when he answers his nephew's questions about the St. Bartholomew Day's Massacre and the "bad" popes, Newman is direct and "unapologetic" with his apologetics:

I think such insane acts as St. Bartholomew's Massacre were prompted by mortal fear. The French Court considered (rightly or wrongly) that if they did not murder the Huguenots, the Huguenots would murder them. Thus I explain Pope Gregory's hasty approbation of so great a crime, without waiting to hear both sides. After a period of luxury and sloth, the sudden outburst of the Reformation frightened the Court of Rome out of its wits, and there were those who thought the one thing needful was to put it down anyhow, as the destruction, at least eventually, of all religion, morality, and society. Perhaps they were right in this fear; and thus they got mixed up with mere politicians, unscrupulous men, and became in the eyes of posterity answerable for deeds which were not properly theirs. I was reading the other day a defence of Pius V. against Lord Acton, the point of which was that in no sense was it the Pope who sanctioned the plot for assassinating Elizabeth, but, the Duke of Alva. Yet who can deny, true as this may be, still that to readers of history the Pope and the Duke are in one boat? Then, again, their agents, or the sovereigns who sought their sanction for certain courses or measures, went far beyond the intention of the Popes, who nevertheless, from their political entanglements, could not resume the powers that they had once given over to them. A large society, such as the Church, is necessarily a political power, and to touch politics is to touch pitch. A private Catholic is not answerable for the Pope's political errors, any more than the shareholder in a railway in 1875 is answerable for the railway's accidents in 1860, nay, or in 1875.

You say that at least the Popes ought publicly to confess, when it is proved they have gone wrong. Does Queen Victoria confess the sins of George IV.? Do principals feel it generous to abandon their subordinates, or loyal children acquiesce in attacks on their parents? As to controversialists, they are pleaders at a bar, and are afraid to make admissions lest these should be turned against them. To speak out is in the long run the wisest, the most expedient, the most noble policy; seldom the possible, or the natural. Why are private memoirs kept back from publication for thirty or sixty years? No party can be kept together if there is no reticence. But in fact, except among controversialists, there is no want of candour and frankness among us; witness the fact that Protestant attacks on us generally are drawn from the admissions of Catholics. Baronius, writing under the Pope's eye, speaks in the strongest terms of the evil state of the Popedom in the dark age; Rinaldus, his continuator, speaks against Alexander VI.; St. Bernard, St. Thomas, and many others speak against the conduct of the Roman See in their own times. So do Pope Adrian VI., Paul IV., &c. So do holy women in their writings, such as St. Bridget.

The Carmelites in Britain Before and After the English Reformation

On this feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, it's only appropriate for me to highlight the presence and absence and restoration of the Carmelite order in England. According to the website of the British Province of Carmelite Friars:

The hermit brothers from Mount Carmel were first brought to Britain in 1242 by returning crusaders; arriving first at Hulne near Alnwick in the north east of England, and then later in the same year at Aylesford in the southern county of Kent.

At that time we were still a group of hermits but, following a historic General Chapter (meeting of the Order) held at Aylesford in 1247, we became part of the newly formed movement of mendicant friars (begging brothers). Because of our white cloaks, we became known as the Whitefriars. . . .

At its height there were more than 1,000 friars in the English Province in some 40 communities (known as priories, friaries or convents), divided into four 'distinctions' with regional headquarters at London, Oxford, Norwich and York. . . .

Carmelite friars were pastors and theologians, confessors to kings and servants of the poor. To read an article about Carmelite spirituality in the fourteenth century, please click here.

Although there was no 'Third Order' of Lay Carmelites and no Carmelite nuns in Britain before the Reformation, we do know of many lay people - including women - who had varying degrees of affiliation to the Order.

The Carmelite presence disappeared from Britain in 1538 with the Dissolution of the Monasteries under King Henry VIII. At the Reformation the friars were dispersed and the houses were either desecrated and destroyed or handed out to private individuals as rewards by the Crown.

The last active friar we know of, George Rayner, died for the Faith in chains (in odium fidei) in York prison during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

The site also has information about the restoration of the Carmelite order and the interim when English Carmelites lived in exile on the Continent here. There are even more great resources on the order between the dissolution and the restoration linked here.

St. Simon Stock of England is one of the better known of the Carmelite saints, who received the Brown Scapular in a vision of Our Lady and wrote this prayer:

Flower of Carmel, tall vine, blossom-laden;
splendour of heaven, child-bearing, yet maiden;
none equals thee.

Mother so tender, whom no man didst know,
on Carmel's children thy favours bestow;
Star of the Sea!

Strong stem of Jesse, who bore one bright flower,
be ever near us, and guard us each hour,
who serve thee here.

Purest of lilies, that flowers among thorns,
bring help to true hearts that in weakness turn
and trust in thee.

Strongest of armour, we trust in thy might,
under thy mantle, hard pressed in the fight,
we call to thee.

Our way, uncertain, surrounded by foes,
unfailing counsel you offer to those
who turn to thee.

O gentle Mother, who in Carmel reigns,
share with your servants that gladness you gained,
and now enjoy.

Hail, gate of heaven, with glory now crowned,
bring us to safety, where thy Son is found,
true joy to see. Amen.

Hilaire Belloc, RIP

When Belloc ran for Parliament in 1906, his campaign manager begged him not to mention his Catholicism--so Belloc proclaimed during one of his speeches (when heckled for being a "Papist"): "Gentlemen, I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This (taking a rosary out of his pocket) is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that he has spared me the indignity of being your representative." Of course, he was elected.

What a lion of the Faith! Hilaire Belloc died on July 16, 1953, eleven days shy of his 83rd birthday.

As Frederick Wilhelmson said of Belloc:

Born and baptized in the Church, a Catholic from childhood, his love and appreciation of the Faith came to him when young, but it came somewhat slowly. Of his inner life he tells us very little. French on his fathers side, Belloc it must be remembered did his military service in the French artillery, thus delaying his entrance into Oxford when he finally made up his mind to remain an Englishman. His spoken French remained that of a rough cannoneer. Latin European culture was the air he breathed in his youth and to which he returned whenever he could, even sailing across the channel to replenish his reserves of wine.

Were I to seek one scriptural passage which sums up Bellocs vision of the Faith, it would be: By their fruits ye shall know them (Mt 6:30). Aided here by a powerful visual imagination which was brought to bear in his many military histories, Belloc could see the Church at work down the ages and he adored what he saw. The Church made Europe and in so doing quickened the old Roman Order, in disrepair but by no means destroyed by the Germanic tribes from the north. All our typical Western institutions were either created by Catholic men from out of nothing or were inherited from our pagan forefathers and then quickened from within by the yeast of Christianity. Although the terms incarnational and eschatological were not current in Belloc's lifetime, he is a prime instance of a man with an incarnational understanding of religious truth. Belloc looked for blessings everywhere, and the whole of Christendom was for him an immense network of actual graces.

In addition to the book pictured above, TAN Books/St. Benedict's Press publishes several of his 153 or so books. A Path to Rome, The Servile State, and Characters of the Reformation are among my favorite works by Belloc! May he rest in peace. He is buried at Our Lady of Consolation Church in West Grinstead, Sussex.

Christopher Dawson, RIP

The great historian Christopher Dawson died on this day in 1970. According to this site:

A gifted, eloquent and prolific writer, Dawson wrote more than twenty books and numerous articles on the nature of Christian culture. This topic concerned him so deeply that he considered it his vocation to explore the cultural role of religion, the relationship between Christianity and world cultures, and the specific history and institutions of the Christian religion. As a result of this vast research, he emphasized the need to recover the spiritual tradition at the root of the Western European history.

A life dedicated to the study of world cultures led him to claim that: "It is the religious impulse which supplies the cohesive force which unifies a society and a culture... A society which has lost its religion becomes sooner or later a society which has lost its culture." Writing against the positivistic and nihilistic attitude of his age, Dawson challenges commonly held assumptions about culture and history, and unmasks Western religion of progress. His contentions have as much relevance today as they had when he wrote them.

Dawson brilliantly applies Christian principles to the world of historic events, and sees the inner world of spiritual change "as the dynamic element in history and as a real world-transforming power." It is his vast erudition, coupled with his singular vision and talent to present a coherent and global vision of the different aspects that dominate the changing course of history, that have led some to consider him one of the greatest historians of our age, "more realist and convincing than Spengler or Toynbee."
I have benefitted greatly from Christopher Dawson's books and have read several of them, including The Formation of Christendom, The Dividing of Christendom, Religions and the Rise of Western Culture, and The Historic Reality of Christian Culture. Remarkably, Dawson anticipated much of the late twentieth/early twenty-first revisionist historiography of the English Reformation in The Dividing of Christendom. I also really enjoyed this study of life and works: Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson by Bradley Birzer. More here.

Book Review: History In His Hands

Subtitle: A Christian Narrative of the West

By Brennan Pursell, author of The Spanish Match, Benedict of Bavaria, and The Winter King.

From the publisher:

Most professional historians write history as though God either does not exist or doesn’t matter. History in His Hands offers a radically different approach. Brennan Pursell, Harvard-trained historian and author of Benedict of Bavaria, shows how God’s directing hand ensures that history—and each person in history—has significance. We can discover the difference that God’s presence makes in several key issues in human history: time, space, war and peace, wealth and poverty, and human love and hatred.

As we discover that all of us share an identity as God’s creation, Dr. Pursell also challenges us to cease thinking in terms of radically distinct historical periods, whether ancient, medieval, or modern, and recognize how all people who have ever lived are part of the same story.

Finally, Dr. Pursell invites us to recognize how, for all the achievements of our own day, we remain as flawed as ever, and in need of recognizing God as the source of our existence and the shaper of our destinies.

I think an informed reader will get the most out of this book--one who already knows the outlines of the history of Western Civilization, even if it is based upon college-level textbooks that may take an anti-religious or a-religious view of history. A well-read and well-informed reader who has studied that history with a Christian worldview will also benefit greatly from reading this book and one who has studied Christopher Dawson will be almost completely satisfied with Pursell's work in this book. It is not a traditional history text--no footnotes, no index, no apparatus like maps and tables, and the table of contents doesn't even include page numbers (!), just an excellent select bibliography and a very clear teaching voice. This is a book to be read aloud. The style is so lucid and the narrative so direct. (Now how many history books do you ever say that of!)

I have a few minor arguments with Professor Pursell's interpretations (for example: the second son theory of the Crusades has been debunked, I thought {see page 125}). His chapter on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and Napoleon is excellent; he correctly traces the secularization of Western Culture to those historical landmarks. On the other hand, he barely mentions the American Revolution and the founding of the United States--the US just pops up fully formed like a mythical goddess during the section on the "Struggle for Freedom" in Chapter 9. In the last chapter, Pursell takes a prophetic stance, rationally analyzing the post-modern, post-human zeitgeist of the cultural elite.

Overall, Pursell completely debunks the Whig, progressive, "we're so much more advanced now" view of history while also introducing an element of mystery: why do some things happen? what is God's purpose in certain events of history? Since history IS in God's Hands, Pursell opens up this survey of western civ history to meditation and wonder. Highly recommended.

Contents:

Introduction: God Matters (The Secular Narrative+Augustine and the Christian Narrative+Finding Truth in History)

1. God and Man (God, the Alpha, Love, and Reason + Cosmos and Earth + Adam and Eve + Suffering and Death + The Omega + Human "Prehistory" + Paleo- to Neolithic)

2. The Gift of Civilization (Babel + The "First" Civilizations + Mesopotamian Diversity + Unity in the Nile Valley + Around the World + Israel)

3. The Greeks Thought of Everything (In and Out of Ignorance + Archaic and Classical Poleis + The Birth of Western Philosophy + Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle + The Greek Legacy + The Hellenistic World)

4. The Romans Did Everything (Splendor and Squalor + From Republic to Principate + Western Convergence + Jesus of Nazareth + The Resurrection and the Church)

5. The West Diversifies (The Roman Imperial Temptation + the Growth of Christianity + Loving God as One + Rome's Miracle + The Empire Shatters + The Germanic Age in the West, 500-900 + Islam: Another Separation? + The Franks and the Lure of Empire + A New Era Comes)

6. Christendom Consolidates (The Feudal Age + For Better and for Worse: Church, State, and Warfare + The Crux of Centralization + The Papal Monarchy and the Church + A Christian Culture + Feudal Heights + Life Lived in Common + The Burden of Living)

7. A Tear in the Heart (Humanism and the Italian Renaissance + The Old Word and the New + Luther's Reformation + More Protestantisms + The Catholic "Counter-Reformation"? + Wars of Religion?)

8. Christendom Repudicated (New Worlds on Earth and Heaven? + The Scientific Revolution + The Eighteenth-Century Enlightenment -- Writers, Wits, and Renegades + The Coming of the French Revolution + Napoleon, The Revolution in Person)

9. The Perils of Wealth (A Century of Progress? + Still the Christian West + The Struggle for Freedom)

10. Slaughter and Surfeit (A Century of War: World War I and its Offspring + Number Two, and Then Some + Twentieth-Century Surfeit + Twenty-First Century Civilization Barbarism)

11. The Third Millennium A.D. (Post Modernity + The West in the Third Millennium A.D.)

Afterword

Select Bibliography

What are You Working on this Weekend?

I have two projects to work on this weekend, in addition to yard work, housework, shopping, and walking two demanding terriers! I'm working on a more expanded article on Blessed John Henry Newman and Conscience's rights and responsibilities, and an article to provide context for the two historical movies out now: one on the persecution of Catholics in 20th century Mexico and the other on the genocide of the Vendee during the French Revolution.

I'll let you know when they appear in print or on-line. Also, I hope you have a subscription to OSV's The Catholic Answer Magazine, because I am going to have an article in the next issue (May/June) on the two types of saints in the Catholic Church--Martyrs and Confessors!

I am also thinking of joining this project in April, promoted by the Catholic Writers Guild, 30K for Christ, to write 30,000 words in April!

So what are you working on this weekend?

Newman Center Presentation Next Week

The St. Paul Parish/Newman Center at Wichita State University is very dear to me, as I've noted before. It was there that I made an adult commitment to practicing my Catholic faith as fully and truly as God's grace and my cooperation makes possible--where I met my husband Mark--where I discovered Blessed John Henry Newman--where I made some great friends--where I learned to love beauty, history, literature, the good, the true and the beautiful. All in a Catholic student center! (And we had dances, too!)

I'll be going back there next week (Wednesday, October 12) to make a presentation on "Church History and Apologetics", giving the students--WSU/the Newman Center has welcomed a big freshman class from the local Catholic high schools this year--some tools for understanding Church History and answering common objections. My presentation is part of a series on "Catholicism for College Students". I'm sure the Newman Center would welcome any "student" who wants to learn more about the Catholic Church!

Also, please pray to Blessed John Henry Newman that I present the Truth about the Catholic Church with charity and clarity. Thank you!