Preview: Why St. John Henry Newman Should be on the USA's Liturgical Calendar

We're going to interrupt our series on the Mementoes of the English Martyrs and Confessors on the Son Rise Morning Show on Monday, October 9 to discuss the feast of Saint John Henry Newman. I'll be on the show at my usual time, around 6:50 a.m. Central/7:50 a.m. Eastern, to talk with Anna Mitchell or Matt Swaim.

Please listen live here or listen to the podcast at your convenience here.

Saint John Henry Newman died on August 11, 1890 and usually his feast would be celebrated on the date of his death, but it was already the feast of Saint Clare of Assisi. So the anniversary of his joining the Catholic Church on October 9 in 1845 was chosen instead when his beatification was announced.

In England and Wales October 9 is celebrated as a Feast now (with the Gloria recited or sung at Mass). There were already three optional memorials on October 9 (St. Denis and Companions, St. John Leonardi, and St. Paulinus of York, an English saint) before his canonization in 2019, meaning that either the Weekday or Ordinary Time, or the memorial of one of those three saints, could be celebrated. The English Bishops moved those three optional memorials to October 10 to make room for Newman's Feast on October 9. (The Anglican Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter in the United States also celebrates this Feast day.)

I propose that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops do something similar to make room for Newman on our Liturgical Calendar and offer three reasons, in ascending order of importance. 

At this time, his feast is not on the Liturgical Calendar at all, not even as an optional memorial.

I'm not going to be greedy enough to propose his feast as a Feast in the USA, but as the Memorial, thus the only feast to be celebrated on October 9--and that St. Denis and St. John Leonardi be moved as optional memorials on October 10.

My three reasons: First:

Newman and the New Evangelization: After teaching a graduate class on Newman and the New Evangelization for our local Newman University the past two summers, I'm convinced that he is an excellent patron saint for this project, which includes the Eucharistic Revival, to renew the faith of Catholics, particularly the laity. 

Newman offers many insights into how to revive and re-enforce Catholics' belief in what they believe and what the Church teaches, and to integrate it more firmly in their lives. He encouraged both growth of knowledge of the truths of the Catholic Faith and the actions that demonstrated that knowledge and belief. As he told the Little Brothers of the Oratory in Birmingham:

I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious, but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it. I want an intelligent, well-instructed laity. I wish you to enlarge your knowledge, to cultivate your reason, to get an insight into the relation of truth to truth, to learn to view things as they are, to understand how faith and reason stand to each other, what are the bases and principles of Catholicism and where lies the main inconsistencies and absurdities of the Protestant theory. I have no apprehension you will be the worse Catholics for familiarity with these subjects, provided you cherish a vivid sense of God above and keep in mind that you have souls to be judged and saved. In all times the laity have been the measure of the Catholic spirit; they saved the Irish Church three centuries ago and they betrayed the Church in England. You ought to be able to bring out what you feel and what you mean, as well as to feel and mean it; to expose to the comprehension of others the fictions and fallacies of your opponents; to explain the charges brought against the Church, to the satisfaction, not, indeed, of bigots, but of men of sense, of whatever cast of opinion.

By preparing those Little Brothers of the Oratory with vibrant knowledge and conviction of the Faith, Newman wanted them to use their personal influence to help others gain that assurance. Quoting an earlier work from his Anglican days (The Tamworth Reading Room letters of 1841) in the Grammar of Assent (1870), he proposed:

The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion.

He dedicated an entire sermon to this theme, "Personal Influence, the Means of Propagating the Truth" as an Anglican, so it was a constant in his life that he wanted to prepare Christians to share their Faith effectively through formal education, sermons, literature, friendships, and arguments and apologetics--in that order. Thus they would be able to move others to embrace the Truth.

I'm not alone in this belief about Newman and the New Evangelization: Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop James Conley, the late Father Ian Ker, and many others have observed this.

My Second Reason: 

The Newman Centers at secular universities in the USA: Since the first Newman Club was founded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1893--just three years after his death!--Newman Centers at secular universities have provided students with Holy Mass and the other Sacraments, continuing religious education, social activities, a place a study, etc. The National Catholic Register just published an article about them last month.

As the Newman Ministry website notes:

Over 80% of students stop practicing the faith in college—that’s most of the campus! The problem is, many students struggle to find great friends that share their faith.

It can be overwhelming to walk onto a new campus with no friends. There’s so many opportunities and decisions to make. Faith usually isn’t at the top of the list.

That’s where we come in. Newman Ministry connects students with a Catholic community on campus, so their faith thrives in college and beyond.

So Saint John Henry Newman has had an influence in the USA since the late 19th century through these campus centers for Catholics, even though not all of them still use his name. I attended the Newman Center at Wichita State University and learned about Saint John Henry Newman there (it now does not use his name, but that's still the way I think of it!).

My Third Reason: 

Newman's Miracles

Both the miracle accepted for his Beatification in 2010, and the miracle accepted for his Canonization in 2019 occurred in the United States of America, and both of them through the influence of EWTN!

Deacon Jack Sullivan had watched a program on then-Venerable John Henry Newman on EWTN and decided to ask Newman's intercession for his back problems:

“They were discussing not only Newman’s teachings, but the process of beatification,” Sullivan explained to EWTN. “At the end of the program, they had on screen an address of the Oratory in Birmingham [England] and they said, ‘if you receive any Divine favors, please contact that Oratory.’

“I happened to have a piece of paper and a pen on the table in front of me and I wrote it down. Then, I thought, ‘If I wrote it down, I might as well pray to Newman.”

“I prayed, ‘Please Cardinal Newman, help me with God so that I might walk and go back to classes and be ordained.’”

After a later surgery that found greater damage to his spine than thought:

On August 15, 2001, four days after his surgery, Sullivan again prayed to Cardinal Newman.

“I felt tremendous heat and a tingling feeling all over that lasted for five or 10 minutes,” Sullivan said. “After I experienced this, I immediately stood up straight. I was able to walk, not with a walker or cane, but on my own, without any difficulty or pain. I walked all over the hospital, just joyful. I never needed any pain medication after that.”

Melissa Villalobos was inspired by the same program to ask Newman's intercession in the second miracle:

Melissa Villalobos lives near Chicago. As a college student at Washington University in St Louis she met her husband-to-be David Villalobos, and it was there that she also first came across the Newman Center, which she had assumed was named after a rich benefactor.

Soon after graduating in 2000, she watched a TV show on EWTN called ‘Newman At 2000’. In 2010 she watched the Beatification of Cardinal Newman on EWTN, and remembers being very moved. She was given a prayer card with the face of Newman, and she began to read his works on the Internet and her devotion to him grew, so that she would turn in prayer often to ask him for favours and inspiration. . . 

When she was pregnant with her fifth child, Gemma, Villalobos began to experience bleeding from uterus. During a particularly dangerous hemorrhage, she prayed:

"Please Cardinal Newman make the bleeding stop!” As soon as she had finished her sentence the bleeding stopped. She immediately thanked Cardinal Newman, convinced that she had been healed by his intercession. She was then able to hurry downstairs and check on her children with no further bleeding.

On a visit to the doctor later that very same day, 15 May, he confirmed with an ultrasound that Melissa had been cured of her condition, and her placenta was no longer torn. The bleeding never returned. . . .

These two miracles are further evidence of devotion to Newman in the United States.

There's at least one more reason I've thought of: the many American converts, especially from the Episcopalian church, who have been influenced by Saint John Henry Newman. Like the late Thomas Howard, Holly Ordway, Father Dwight Longenecker, Deacon Scott Carson, Monsignor Jeffrey Stinson, etc., etc., many have attested to Newman's influence on them. Just peruse the stories collected on the Coming Home Network website and you'll see what he has meant to converts in the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States.

Finally, I do have a very personal reason for this proposal: after studying the works of Saint John Henry Newman since I first learned about him as a college sophomore, writing about him, teaching about him, and praying for his intercession, I'd like to attend a daily Mass on his feast day on October 9 in the next year or so.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us!

St. Augustine of Canterbury and Ecumenical Gifts

St. Augustine of Canterbury's Grave in the 

Ruins of the Abbey Church of his Monastery

Image Credit

Since today is the feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury, it seems appropriate to post some comments on the gifts given to the Anglican Archbishops of Canterbury by Pope Paul VI and Pope Francis, noted in this article in The Catholic Herald. When Michael Ramsey visited Pope Paul VI at the Vatican in 1966, Pope Paul gave him a gift of a ring from his own finger:

Many Anglo-Catholics inferred that the ring was the Pope’s way of tacitly repudiating Pope Leo XIII’s papal bull Apostolicae Curae, which declared Anglican orders “absolutely null and utterly void”. Whatever Paul VI meant by it, it was a dramatic gesture of the kind of recognition of Christian brotherhood that was described by Vatican II’s Decree on Ecumenism, Unitatis Redintegratio, from 1964. The two men issued a common declaration, and an official Anglican-Catholic dialogue was born. At a celebration in Rome in 2016 to mark the 50th anniversary of the event, Pope Francis gave Archbishop Justin Welby a replica of the crozier of St Gregory the Great, who commissioned Augustine, later the first Archbishop of Canterbury, to re-Christianise Britain in 595.

Gift-giving has become expected. But ecumenism between Catholics and Anglicans has not succeeded in the way Ramsey and his generation originally imagined.

According to this article, Ramsey was quite moved by the gesture and wore the ring for the rest of his life. Subsequent Archbishops of Canterbury have worn the ring when meeting with the Pope. The article includes a picture of the ring.

The author of The Catholic Herald article is a former Episcopalian priest, Andrew Petiprin. He cites a comment that Ramsey made about Newman that surprised me:

For those still committed to the success of dialogue in bringing about corporate reconciliation, however, individual defections from the Anglican Communion to the Catholic Church are deemed unfortunate. By the end of his life, Ramsey went so far as to tell American seminarians about the “final tragedy” of John Henry Newman’s conversion in 1845. He regarded Newman as having made a selfish, pre-ecumenical mistake in leaving behind the English Church of his baptism and ordination. Strangely, Ramsey imagined the way for Newman to solve the dilemma of not feeling Catholic enough was to double down on being more Anglican. “He had not quite got historic Anglicanism into his bones,” he said, “and he came to it rather as one who is fulfilling deep personal needs of his own.”

As I've been preparing for my Newman presentation at the Eighth Day Institute's Florovsky-Newman week the first week of June, I'd reread Henry Cardinal Manning's opinion of Newman, which flatly contradicts Ramsey:

"I see much danger of an English Catholicism of which Newman is the highest type. It is the old Anglican, patristic, literary, Oxford tone transplanted into the Church." (Ian Ker, John Henry Newman: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 609).

Newman became a Catholic, not for some selfish reason, but because he believed the Catholic Church was the one, true fold of Christ, the Church Jesus had established. Like St. Augustine of Canterbury, he was a Catholic because, as Andrew Petiprin's book title says, Truth Matters.

St. Augustine of Canterbury, pray for us!

Newman and Converts and the Church

Matt Swaim--who also works for the Coming Home Network--and I will talk about Blessed John Henry Newman and conversion on the Son Rise Morning Show at about 7:50 a.m. Eastern DST/6:50 a.m. Central DST. All last week we prayed at the daily Masses of the Octave of Easter for those who joined the Church at the Easter Vigil, particularly through Baptism. According to CRUX, publishing a story by the Catholic News Service:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Tens of thousands of new Catholics are expected to join the Catholic Church at Easter Vigil liturgies in parishes throughout the United States the night of April 20.

While a precise number was not available, reports from 89 U.S. Latin-rite dioceses, roughly half the total number, indicate that their dioceses alone will account for about 37,000 Catholics joining the Church.

As the article states, many of those who became Catholic on Saturday, April 20, came through a parish Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. They were prepared for the Rites of Initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion, through study, prayer, reflection, questions and answers, practices and rehearsals, and the final decision to join the Catholic Church, either leaving another faith community or coming to the Sacraments for the first time.

But how has the Church or the individual parish been prepared to receive them? Welcome them beyond a "recruiting" process, and help them become part of the parish? The process of initiation can't end at the Easter Vigil.

That was a concern Newman certainly had about the individuals and groups of Anglican converts coming to the Catholic Church in the 1840's and later. The converts had to be prepared for the Church, but he also thought the Church needed to be prepared for them: how to welcome them; how to integrate them; how to make use of their education and abilities. As he commented:  “There are those who only wish to convert, and then leave the poor converts to shift for themselves, as far as knowledge of their religion goes. The other end which is so important, is what I call levelling up." He did not want failed conversions: “I am afraid to make hasty converts of educated men lest they should not have counted the cost & should have difficulties after they have entered the Church . . . . ” 

It is true that Newman thought the Catholic Church in England needed to focus on making sure the Catholics she had were well formed and educated, but he also worked with hundreds of prospective converts, helping them prepare for life in the Catholic Church, to understand what they faced with their families and friends, etc. But when he knew that they believed that the Catholic Church was the one, true Church that Jesus had founded, he insisted that they should become Catholics as soon as possible and he pointed to the example of himself and others who may suffered loss and trouble in temporal matters, but had received great spiritual consolation and comfort in knowing they were in the "one fold of Christ." 

Father Stanley Jaki and Peter Wilcox have written about the letters Newman sent to prospective converts and those who had joined the Church, advising them, consoling them, urging them to be patient, forbearing, and brave.

The Anglican Ordinariate, which will celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of Anglicanorum Coetibus this November 4th, provides a structure for groups of Anglicans coming into the Catholic Church. The Pastoral Provision which Pope John Paul II arranged in 1980 still assists individual Anglicans and Episcopalians. The Coming Home Network--perhaps I should interview Matt!--reaches out to all Protestant pastors and their families to help them in their journeys to the Catholic Church. For most of the men, women and children who became Catholic at the Easter Vigil on April 20, however, it will be up to the parishes they joined to help them progress in their love of Jesus and His Church.

Coming Home Network Newsletter

What a thrill to open my monthly copy of The Coming Home Network Newsletter and see that Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation is offered as a premium for a donation. I presume The Coming Home Network (CHN) chose my book because the featured convert makes some Catholic connections when exploring his family history in England and then reads more about Catholicism in England:

When I was well on the way to being received into the Church, an unexpected form of historical encouragement appeared. Somehow I became aware of Eamon Duffy’s book, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. (Note: This book can be purchased through the CHNetwork by calling 740-450-1175 or online at www.chresources.com. Only a limited quantity is available.) Duffy’s thesis, backed by considerable historical evidence, was that

[L]ate medieval Catholicism [in England] exerted an enormously strong, diverse, and vigorous hold over the imagination and the loyalty of the people up to the very moment of Reformation. Traditional religion had about it no particular marks of exhaustion or decay, and indeed in a whole host of ways, from the multiplication of vernacular religious books to adaptations within the national and regional cult of the saints, was showing itself well able to meet needs and new conditions. (p. 4)

This came as quite a surprise, because over time I had acquired just the opposite impression: that the English people by the time of the Protestant Reformation were clamoring to be rid of Catholicism. Now, for the first time, it occurred to me that many, if not most, of my English ancestors of the early Reformation period may not have been “intentional Protestants,” that is, people who affirmatively split from existing versions of Christianity. Instead, they were more likely to have had Protestantism forced on them from the top down. Catholicism in England was destroyed, not abandoned.

Supremacy and Survival is more accessible and more available for a premium, I suppose, than The Stripping of the Altars. When Matt Swaim of The Son Rise Morning Show appeared on The Journey Home, the CHN interview program on EWTN, he said I'd be perfect for the show--except that I'm neither a convert nor a revert. Marcus Grodi usually interviews one or the other; Matt suggested I could lapse ever so briefly to qualify, but that's not happening.

The Lady of the Lamp Dies

Florence Nightingale, the famed Lady of the Lamp, was born on May 12, 1820 and died on August 13, 1910. The Guardian wrote of her death in 1910:

We greatly regret to announce that Miss Florence Nightingale, memorable for her work as organiser and inspirer of the Crimean War nursing service, died at her home in London somewhat unexpectedly on Saturday afternoon.

The cause of death was heart failure. Two members of her family were present when Miss Nightingale passed away. The funeral will take place in the course of the next few days, and will be of the quietest possible character, in accordance with Miss Nightingale's expressed wish.

Baptized in the Church of England, she was raised a Unitarian Universalist and yet at one time investigated the possiblity of joining a Catholic religious order. Nightingale, according to biographer Gillian Gill, saw that as a means to the end of becoming a professional nurse. Father Henry Manning, who had left the Oxford Movement and the Church of England to become a Catholic priest (and who would become the second Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster) corresponded with her.

Her Unitarian beliefs however prevented any serious consideration of conversion. When she went to the Crimea to assist the British military she did take Catholic sisters with her as nurses. There was some fear that the sisters would try to convert good Protestant men, weakened by their wounds and illness--so the Catholic sisters took care of the Irish Catholic soldiers.

As I recount in the second revised printing of Supremacy and Survival: How Catholics Endured the English Reformation, however, one of the English lay nurses who accompanied Nightingale, Frances Taylor, did become a Catholic after working with the Catholic sisters and Irish soldiers in Scutari. After returning to England she founded the Poor Servants of the Mother of God and Frances Taylor became Mother Mary Magdalene of the Sacred Heart. She wrote Tyborne: and the Gem of Christendom, one of the first Catholic historical novels about the English Reformation.

Florence Nightingale is honored by the Church of England on August 12 as a social activist, even though she was not even a Christian. As a Unitarian, she did not believe in the Holy Trinity, in the Divinity of Jesus Christ and in many other crucial Christian teachings. But she is an English heroine, so they honor her. More about her religion and spirituality here.

Three Martyrs at Tyburn: April 20, 1602

Thomas Tichborne (born at Hartley, Hampshire, 1567; executed at Tyburn, London, 20 April 1602) was an English Roman Catholic priest. He is a Catholic martyr, beatified in 1987.

He was educated at Reims (1584–87) and Rome, where he was ordained on Ascension Day, 17 May 1592. Returning to England on 10 March 1594, he worked in Hampshire. There he escaped apprehension by the authorities until the early part of 1597.

He was sent a prisoner to the Gatehouse in London, but in the autumn of 1598 was helped to escape by his brother, Nicholas Tichborne, and Thomas Hackshot, who were both executed shortly afterwards. Betrayed by Atkinson, an apostate priest, he was re-arrested and on 17 April 1602, was brought to trial with Robert Watkinson (a young Yorkshire man who had been educated at Rome and ordained priest at Douai a month before) and James Duckett, a London bookseller (see yesterday's post). On 20 April he was executed with Watkinson and Francis Page, S.J. Tichborne was in the last stages of consumption when he was executed. Whether he was related to Chidiock Tichborne, one of the Babington Plot conspirators, I cannot tell.

Blessed Robert Watkinson was born in 1579 at Hemingborough, Yorkshire; he left England and studied at Douai, France, and then Rome in preparation for his ordination in 1602 in Arras, France. Sent home to work for the reconversion of England, he was arrested almost immediately and executed at Tyburn. Robert was hanged, drawn, and quartered on April 20, with Blessed Francis Page and Blessed Thomas Tichborne. He was beatified in 1929.

And here is the account of Blessed Francis Page's life and death--please note that he was the priest St. Anne Line was arrested for aiding:

Francis Page (portrait above) was born in Antwerp of well-to-do English Protestant parents. As a young man he embarked on a lawyer’s career and went to London to study law. He fell in love with the daughter of the Catholic lawyer for whom he served as a clerk, but she refused to marry him until he became a Catholic. His Catholic roommate had, as his confessor, Fr John Gerald, a Jesuit priest. So it was to Fr Gerald that Francis went for instruction. The more he studied religion, the more he felt drawn to the priesthood. Much to his fiancee’s sorrow, Francis called off the marriage as he began to think of the priesthood. When Fr Gerald was arrested and transferred to the Tower of London, Francis would stand outside the prison everyday just to get a glimpse of the priest and for his blessing. His suspicious actions led to a brief arrest and after his release, Francis decided to follow the call and joined the English College in Rheims, France. He was ordained in 1600.

Fr Page returned to London and was active in his priestly ministry for a year. He narrowly escaped arrest on one occasion just as he was about to celebrate Mass. He barely had time to remove his vestments, hid them, took a seat among the people who had come for Mass, when the priest hunters rushed in. The owner of the house who was hosting the mass helped him escape but she herself was arrested and later executed for harbouring a priest.

Richard Crashaw, Baroque Metaphysical Poet

Richard Crashaw, born around 1613 in London, joined the Catholic Church in France while in exile from the Civil War in England. His father is commonly called a "strongly anti-Catholic" Anglican divine who yet had an interest in Jesuit Latin hymns.

Crashaw studied at Cambridge and took his BA at Pembroke in 1634 and his MA at Peterhouse in 1638, becoming the vicar at the Church of St. Mary the Less. He was influenced by George Herbert's poetry, friends with Abraham Cowley and even visited Nicholas Farrar at Little Gidding--securely in the Anglican High Church community. The Church of St. Mary the Less, called so to distinguish it from the University Church of St. Mary the Great, still calls itself an Anglo-Catholic church today.

He was forced from his Fellowship at Peterhouse in 1644 and fled the country. In Paris he became destitute; Abraham Cowley brought him to the attention of the exiled Queen Henrietta Maria who gained him some patronage from a Roman Cardinal. He lived for a time at the Venerable English College in Rome. Crashaw became upset with the licentious behavior of some of the Cardinal's retinue however and was moved to Loreto for safety, as a Canon of the Holy House. Soon after his arrival there he died, on August 25, 1649. There is a rumor of poisoning by that faction of the Cardinal's retinue.

Richard Crashaw is one of the Metaphysical Poets, remarkable for the brilliance and extravagance of his language and imagery. Here is an example of his simpler style of verse:

Two went up to the Temple to Pray

Two went to pray? Or rather say
One went to brag, th'other to pray

One stands up close and treads on high,
Where th'other dates not lend his eye.

One nearer to God's altar trod;
The other to the altar's God.

Crashaw was also influenced by the mysticism of St. Teresa of Avila and composed three poems in her honor, the most famous being "The Flaming Heart."

Abraham Cowley wrote an elegy to his friend, praising him as "poet and saint" and proclaiming that he, Abraham, "a Catholic will be/So far at least, Great Saint, to pray to thee" while defending Crashaw's leaving the Church of England for "Error"!

Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland

Thanks to Peter Freeman, I'll put this in the file labelled "You Learn Something New Everyday"! From the new on-line crisismagazine, the story of Lady Elizabeth Falkland, playwright and Catholic convert. She was born in 1585, married Henry Cary, 1st Viscount Falkland in 1600 and died in 1639. According to the article, Lady Falkland is

the first known woman to publish an original play in English with the Tragedy of Miriam the Fair Queen of Jewry in 1613. Raised a Protestant, she was something of a celebrity convert in her day.

Despite the intervening four hundred years of history, aspects of Cary’s life after her conversion will seem familiar to modern Catholics. Reportedly, she gave up sugar for Lent; her Protestant husband had to remind her not to eat fish on Fridays, and she was perpetually worried about her children’s faith while raising them in a country that was openly hostile to her religious beliefs.

Yet much of her life also seems quite alien. Perhaps a few of us have been estranged from our families on account of our faith; fewer have kidnapped our own children to prevent them from falling under the influence of Protestant wards. Fewer still have had the king of England place them under house arrest for converting to papism.

That we can say so much about her personal life gives Cary a distinct advantage over Shakespeare in these religious debates. Whereas Shakespeare’s biography is largely lost to time and confined to a few legal documents, Cary’s biography has been preserved for us in a manuscript — The Lady Falkland: Her Life — purportedly composed by her own daughter, another Catholic convert and a Benedictine nun.

The manuscript not only recounts Cary’s conversion to Catholicism, it also offers a kind of how-to guide for inspiring faith in a new generation of Catholics through “indirect evangelization.”

Her method of evangelization, with the aim of bringing her children to the Catholic faith, was to invite both Protestant and Catholic guests to dinner whose conversation would naturally turn to religion and whose conversation stayed measured, rational, and fair. She believed that hearing both sides, her children would choose the right church! Four of her daughters became Benedictine nuns (one wrote her biography) and one of her sons became a Catholic priest, so it worked.

Her husband was honored by both James I and Charles I with important offices--including Lord Deputy of Ireland--but according to the wikipedia article, it does not seem he was a very effective adminstrator at all.