Liberal Catholicism Research Articles

Charles Owen O’Conor, The O’Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, by Aidan Enright

Charles Owen O’Conor, The O’Conor Don: Landlordism, Liberal Catholicism and Unionism in Nineteenth-Century Ireland, by Aidan Enright

Upper West Side Catholics, Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese by Thomas J. Shelley (review)

Upper West Side Catholics, Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese by Thomas J. Shelley (review)

Catholic Liberalism and the Liberal Tradition

Catholic Liberalism and the Liberal Tradition

Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: landlordism, liberal Catholicism and unionism in nineteenth-century Ireland. By Aidan Enright. Pp 244. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2022. €50 hardback.

Charles Owen O'Conor, the O'Conor Don: landlordism, liberal Catholicism and unionism in nineteenth-century Ireland. By Aidan Enright. Pp 244. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2022. €50 hardback.

Divided Devotion: A Historical Exploration of Bismarck's Kulturkampf and its Impact on German Society

This study examines the Kulturkampf, a major 19th-century German event in which Otto von Bismarck fought to limit Catholic influence in politics. Catholicism remained a powerful influence in German society despite Bismarck's efforts, posing a difficult challenge to the mid-1800s political scene. Start with the Kulturkampf, the Catholic Church's fight to adapt to liberal ideals, democracy, nationalism, socialism, and the industrial revolution. Liberal Catholicism's answer to modernity is analyzed, focusing on Ignaz von Dollinger, who strove to reconcile faith with intellectual currents. The paper discusses the First Vatican Council in 1870, which introduced papal infallibility, and liberal Catholicism's downfall. Germany is highlighted because Catholicism suffered ideological struggles and gained academic support as a secular, Protestant-influenced religion. Bismarck's Catholicism onslaught from 1853-54 to the Kulturkampf of the 1870s is examined. Bismarck's fears of Catholic violence and a Catholic plot are examined in the study. The issue deepened in 1873 when the May Laws sought state control over the Catholic Church. The Prussian bishops' resistance to the May Laws led to incarceration, penalties, and institution closures. Bismarck's authoritarianism failed to suppress Catholicism despite overwhelming opposition. Conclusions highlight the Kulturkampf legislation' impact on church-state relations and the reduction of anti-Catholic measures. This paper analyzes historical events to reveal Bismarck's political maneuvers, the Catholic Church's struggles, and the Kulturkampf's lasting effects on 19th-century Germany's religious and political landscape.

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

A Companion to the Hussites

A Companion to the Hussites

Liberal Catholicism in the Church of England

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the genesis of liberal Catholicism in England from 1822 to roughly 1848, with particular reference to Cardinal Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864). Newman’s reflections reveal a side of liberalism hitherto given little consideration. As a Catholic priest, he endured, albeit disapprovingly, a sort of theological liberalism which sought to reform the Church of England. The discussion of his recollections unravels the ethical and political disposition of early liberals, which in some respects resembles later iterations of liberalism in politics. As a movement, liberal Catholicism did not retain authoritative primacy for very long in England or in any other of the European nations, though the effect of disorientation that it had on the Christian Church was considerable. A careful analysis of this brief chapter of liberalism is perhaps relevant to the study of its political orientation as a whole.

Sexuality and Gender Diversity in the Liberal Catholic Discourse in Poland in the Pastoral Perspective

Abstract One of the most important questions in the Roman Catholic Church is the question of sexual and gender diversity. Therefore, the article presents the results of qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the Catholic sociocultural periodical Więź (Bond) from 2007 to 2020, which is the leading forum for liberal Catholic debates in Poland. The goal was to analyze the period’s narration toward current Church’s instructions on sexuality and gender diversity. Five dominant postulates were identified in Więź: (1) a discussion about people with the need to revise their or the Church’s narration on and experience of sex and gender; (2) a reevaluation of the significance and consequence of sexual revolution in Poland; (3) an organization of the understanding of body, sex, sexuality, and gender; (4) a promotion of the idea of encounter; and (5) a settlement of cases of sexual abuse in the Church. The article concludes that the presence of social dialogue on sexuality and gender diversity in the current pastoral approach of the Church in Poland requires a suspension of moral judgment and an openness from Church with a strong traditional, and rigid viewpoint to better understand the difficult spiritual and social situation of people who live contrary to the moral teachings of the Church or whose views go against these teachings.

Human rationality in Vito Mancuso’s liberal Catholic theology augmenting the notions of Van Huyssteen’s ‘postfoundational transversality’ and McGrath’s ‘rational consilience’

The cue for this article is human rationality being the cornerstone in Wentzel van Huyssteen’s thinking, and Alister McGrath’s scepsis about the feasibility of a postfoundational transversality in particular. This article does not intend to juxtapose Van Huyssteen’s postfoundational rationality to McGrath’s enterprise of a ‘rational consilience’ but contends that a transversal approach to rationality engages social ramifications as well. Subsequently, a liberal Catholic theologian’s take on rationality is presented here as such an offering from the social sciences contributes to a bricolage of unintegrated pieces of knowledge and discernments emerging from various disciplinary or social viewpoints on reality. Vito Mancuso continues to focus on human rationality which, in his view, provides humanity with the hope of eternal life or life from the perspective of eternity. Such a conviction is in line with his horizontal understanding of human rationality, in addition to the human being’s first challenge to understanding reality.Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The reason d’être of this article is to call for a discussion partner to the notion of human rationality from the social sciences (indicated as one of the neglected fields in the theology and science discourse). Vito Mancuso, for one, brings the pragmatic and transformative (even revolutionary) dimension to the table. A transversal approach to rationality must integrate such social practices as well.

¿Un historiador progresista? La evolución del liberalismo católico de Antonio Ferrer del Río

El escritor Antonio Ferrer del Río (1814-1872) ha sido considerado tradicionalmente como un exponente paradigmático de la historiografía progresista por sus obras dedicadas a las Comunidades de Castilla y al reinado de Carlos III. Sin embargo, en el marco de las recientes aportaciones sobre culturas políticas liberales y las relaciones entre nacionalismo y religión en España, se hace necesario revisar esta adscripción ideológica. Un análisis que vaya más allá de las etiquetas simplificadoras revela, en cambio, la complejidad de la aportación de este historiador. Para ello, se ha recurrido a la correspondencia que mantuvo con los archiveros Manuel y Pròsper de Bofarull y a otras producciones menos conocidas, además de sus publicaciones en prensa. Así pues, a través de la contextualización de este material se revela un liberalismo cambiante, que a principios del régimen isabelino se situaba cercano al moderantismo, para luego evolucionar hacia posturas abiertamente progresistas. La rehabilitación historiográfica que este autor emprendió del reformismo dieciochesco ofrece una oportunidad para ahondar en las contradicciones y límites del liberalismo católico hispánico.

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. x + 150 pp. $29.95 hardcover – Erratum

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. x + 150 pp. $29.95 hardcover – Erratum

Right-Wing Anarchism: A Philosophical Left-Wing Concept

The article discusses the issue whether anarchism should be considered a right-wing ideology. Anarchism as an ideology, formulated in the works of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon of the 1830s-1840s, was originally in the leftwing political spectrum. The anarchist Joseph Dejacque, who advocates equality of rights for men and women and does not agree with Proudhon on this issue, called himself a libertaire . The French word libertaire has been translated into English as “libertarian.” Due to the fact that in the 20 th century, economic theories justifying state intervention in the economy became widespread among those who called themselves liberals, the word “liberal” came to mean “socialist.” American liberals (in the original sense of the word) adopted anarcho-communist Dejacque’s neologism “libertarian.” The author shows that, according to the social doctrine of the Catholic Church, unlimited liberalism and socialism have common origins, since these two ideologies proceed from the fact that human freedom is innate, which means that traditional values should not restrict human behavior. Thus, the ideological roots of anarcho-capitalism and libertarianism are to be found in the corpus of doctrines of the French left wing. In the 1970s, the French economist Henri Lepage translated the English word “libertarian” into the French, coining new world libertarien and not using the word libertaire, which is due to the fact that libertarianism began to be perceived as a right-wing ideology, and therefore it was necessary to distinguish it from its roots – libertarisme, which was considered a leftist movement. The author refutes the idea, which became widespread in the 20 th century, that, due to the emergence of the Libertarian party and anarcho-capitalism, a part of the anarchist movement joined the right wing.

Hyacinthe Loyson. Itinéraire vers une inévitable « chute » (1863-1869)

Hyacinthe Loyson: The Story of an Inevitable Fall (1863-1869) Hyacinthe Loyson (1827-1912), who joined the Carmelite Order in 1859, after a time with the Priests of Saint-Sulpice and the Dominicans, is an essential figure of liberal Catholicism of the 19th century, contemporary to the end of Pius IX’s (1846-1878) pontificate. Preacher at Notre-Dame de Paris and in other prestigious chairs in France, Loyson decided to leave the Order, and then finally also the Church on the eve of Vatican Council I and the acceptance of the theses of Quanta cura (December 8, 1864) and the Syllabus. Through a careful study of the three letters addressed to Father Dominique de Saint-Joseph (Arbizu y Munárriz), between July and September 1869, this article traces Loyson’s itinerary and the reasons for his departure. Recourse to Loyson’s unpublished Journal and to little-known sources allows us to understand the journey of a man wounded, like many of his liberal contemporaries, by the slow evolution of the Church amidst a world in upheaval.

Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 by Art Martínez de Vara

Reviewed by: Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840 by Art Martínez de Vara Gerald Poyo Tejano Patriot: The Revolutionary Life of José Francisco Ruiz, 1783–1840. By Art Martínez de Vara. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 2020. Pp. 269. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) Art Martínez de Vara's biography of José Francisco Ruiz is another in a growing list of biographies of Tejano leaders of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Well-written and readable, the book skillfully weaves and contextualizes Ruiz's life into a broader historical story, providing more than the title's promise. Martínez de Vara's fourteen chapters include excellent coverage of the late Spanish period, the Mexican independence era, the Mexican period, Native American affairs, relations with the United States, and Texas independence and politics through 1840. As with other books on Tejano political figures of this era, this text explores Ruiz as what historian Raúl Ramos has called a cultural broker among Mexicans, Anglos Americans, and Native Americans. Also, in keeping with prevailing historiography, the study adheres to the now familiar interpretation of Béxar's Tejano elites as mostly provincially minded and pragmatic historical actors primarily interested in defending their town and region from centralized power in Mexico City while pursuing economic interests with those coming from the east. Martínez de Vara tells us that Ruiz prioritized his economic interests, protected local prerogatives, and threw his lot in with Anglo Americans and Texas independence. Besides exploring these themes, Martínez de Vara explores, albeit briefly, a mostly unexplored aspect of Tejano intellectual history. He draws on Raúl Coronado's award-winning book A World Not to Come: A History of Latino Writing and Print Culture (Harvard University Press, 2013), which [End Page 482] treats religious and philosophical currents in northeastern New Spain in the late eighteenth century. Martínez de Vara embraces Coronado's argument that the region's elites shared a worldview framed by Spanish Catholic liberalism and scholasticism. Coronado traced this through the writings of Bernardo Gutiérrez de Lara, an ardent supporter of insurgent leader Miguel de Hidalgo, who invaded Béxar from Louisiana in 1813 and declared Texas an independent Mexican state. Martínez de Vara confidently argues that Gutiérrez de Lara's ideas also influenced Ruíz and his fellow elite Bexareños as they made revolutionary decisions during the Hidalgo era and later. While Martínez de Vara's view that Ruiz and others in this frontier town shared Bernardo de Lara's revolutionary commitment to liberal Catholic principles in 1813, he does not explicitly explore the theme through the rest of the book. Instead he describes Ruiz as a man with a pragmatic understanding that his economic interests and future lay to the east among Anglo-American Protestant immigrants. The need to pursue pragmatic actions driven by circumstance certainly competed with his Catholic values, but how did his thinking evolve over time? Given the thorough research reflected in this book, apparently Ruiz did not leave much testimony on the subject; Martínez de Vara does not return to the question along the way except to reiterate the point in the conclusion. The extent to which Catholicism and scholasticism influenced the political worldview of Ruiz and other Béxar elites remains an open question, but Martínez de Vara did a favor in raising the issue and alerting Tejano biographers to explore the intellectual history of these important figures. In the process, historians may even explore the extent to which Tejano liberals may have shared similar views with fellow travelers in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico during this period and later who also pragmatically looked to the United States as a model for their own societies even to the point of outright annexation. Gerald Poyo St. Mary's University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. x + 150 pp. $29.95 hardcover.

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. x + 150 pp. $29.95 hardcover.

John Rawlinson and Anglican Liberal Catholicism in the Early Twentieth Century

AbstractThe article examines some key writings in the works of Bishop John Rawlinson with relation to the development of Anglican Liberal Catholicism in the early twentieth century. The article aims to show how he contributed to the development of Anglican Liberal Catholic thought and practice in the period, especially with regard to views on authority and ecumenical relations.

Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese by Thomas J. Shelley

Reviewed by: Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese by Thomas J. Shelley Stephen M. Koeth CSC Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese. By Thomas J. Shelley. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. 144 pp. $29.95. Monsignor Thomas J. Shelley, Professor Emeritus of Church History at Fordham University, has written Upper West Side Catholics: Liberal Catholicism in a Conservative Archdiocese in honor of the 125th anniversary of the Church of the Ascension in New York City. In addition to editing The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History, Shelley has previously written institutional histories of the Archdiocese of New York, Fordham University, and the parishes of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village and Most Holy Trinity in Yonkers. Here, Shelley weaves together the history of Ascension parish, the story of the Upper West Side, and as indicated by the book’s subtitle, an encomium to the liberalism that he says makes both the neighborhood and its Catholic residents unique. The most conventional aspect of this slim volume is its history of Ascension parish, which is said to be a “microcosm of the history of the archdiocese” because it is principally shaped by immigration and neighborhood change (112). Shelley traces the broad outline of the parish’s evolution beginning with its foundation in 1895 to serve the Upper West Side’s German Catholics. Financial and sacramental records indicate that by 1904, Ascension was a typical ethnic parish boasting 5,200 parishioners and 530 school students, who participated enthusiastically in a panoply of lay associations, liturgies, and public devotions. By its heyday in 1932, Ascension’s 9,668 parishioners were predominantly Irish and Shelley describes the lengthy pastorate of [End Page 105] Bishop Joseph P. Donahue, from 1924–1959, as “the confident years” (37). But the status quo of the 1940s and 1950s gave way to “Armageddon” in the 1960s (46). Religious reform and exploding crime rates drove the Irish from the parish and neighborhood, and although Puerto Rican immigrants replaced them, Ascension’s parish rolls plummeted from 7,500 in 1960 to 2,400 in 1971, and then to 1,439 by 1982. Parish enrollment has remained steady since, but from the late 1980s Dominican immigrants replaced Puerto Ricans and, since the 1990s, the Upper West Side’s remarkable reduction in crime has led to gentrification. Unfortunately, Shelley provides few details about how these waves of Ascension parishioners were able to flee the Upper West Side and where they resettled. The book rises above the typical celebratory parish history by contextualizing Ascension’s foundation, growth, travails, and rejuvenation within a sprawling history of its neighborhood. In what are some of the book’s best sections, Shelley relies on Joseph Lyford, Father Henry J. Browne, Alfred Kazin, John Podhoretz, and Theodore White’s writings on the Upper West Side, painting it as “a very different world from a typical American Catholic working-class neighborhood” (27). Shelley asserts that the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan mix of ethnicities, religions, and classes, and its progressive political leanings, helped create a “quintessential Upper West Side liberal Catholic identity” (113). To establish the liberal bonafides of Upper West Side Catholics, Shelley moves beyond the bounds of Ascension, to tell the story of Father George Barry Ford, who led liturgical and educational reform at Corpus Christi parish, and Father Henry J. Browne who supported low income housing projects, sheltered Philip Berrigan from the FBI, and welcomed pro-Castro and LGBT groups at St. Gregory’s parish. But in tracing these priests’ liberal clerical lineage through maverick diocesan priests including Thomas Farrell, Edward McGlynn, and Francis P. Duffy, Shelley moves well beyond the bounds of the Upper West Side, undermining the claim that the neighborhood was unique in its liberal Catholicism. Indeed, a great deal of Ascension parish’s purported liberalism rides on the thirty-one parishioners who wrote Archbishop Terrence Cooke in July 1967 touting their parish’s diversity and proposing Father Henry J. Browne as their new pastor. Although Shelley pitches the entire project as a celebration of liberal Catholicism—quoting Lacordiare’s famous epitaph: “I hope to die a penitent religious and an unrepentant liberal”—this is the weakest aspect of the...

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction

“Love Applied To Suffering”: Nuns in Contemporary Irish American Fiction Sinéad Moynihan (bio) In a New Yorker article anticipating the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland in August 2018, James Carroll reflected on the recent report produced by a Pennsylvania Grand Jury that identified one thousand children (and speculated that there were thousands more) who were abused by three hundred priests over a seventy-year period across six dioceses. Comparing the United States with Ireland, he claimed that “the Irish wound is deeper still.” Citing the revelation that nearly eight hundred infants had died at and had been secretly buried in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, Carroll concludes: “there had been monsters not only among the priests but among the sisters” (emphasis added).1 Carroll inadvertently identifies, here, one of the most significant differences in Irish compared with US (particularly, but not exclusively, Irish [End Page 185] American) cultural depictions of the clergy in relation to the abuse scandals that have been revealed over the past twenty years. US literature and culture has dramatized many predatory priests—several of them with Irish names— in narratives that deal predominantly (Spotlight [dir. Tom McCarthy, 2015]) or only tangentially (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri [dir. Martin Mc-Donagh, 2017]) with clerical abuse.2 However, nuns are largely represented not just as innocent of the crimes perpetrated by their male counterparts in the clergy but as themselves beleaguered targets of the Catholic Church’s heavy-handed authoritarianism and/or as heroic defenders of the victims of sexual abuse. In John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, A Parable (2004), set in 1964, a righteous school principal, Sister Aloysius Beauvier, succeeds in having a priest she believes to be a child molester moved to another parish. While the play ends with Sister Aloysius expressing serious “doubts” over her own actions, her concern for the welfare of the child, Donald Muller, is never in question.3 Moreover, the play is dedicated to “the many orders of Catholic nuns who have devoted their lives to serving others in hospitals, schools and retirement homes.”4 Meanwhile, in the much-discussed Netflix documentary series The Keepers (dir. Ryan White, 2017), former students of the Baltimore teacher, Sister Catherine Cesnik, speculate that the nun was murdered in 1969 because she had evidence that a fellow teacher at Archbishop Keough high school, Father Joseph Maskell, had been abusing teenage girls. These examples exist in stark contrast to representations of nuns in Irish culture, in which the “evil” or “sadistic” nun was immortalized at least as far back as 1992 when Patricia Burke Brogan’s play Eclipsed débuted at the Punchbag Theatre in Galway. In February 1996, RTÉ screened the (now infamous) Dear Daughter documentary (dir. Louis Lentin) built upon testimony from Christine Buckley and other victims of abuse at the Goldenbridge Industrial School in Dublin. Since then, we have seen cinematic and literary representations such as The Magdalene Sisters (dir. Peter Mullan, 2002)5, Sinners (dir. Aisling Walsh, 2002), Benjamin Black’s (John Banville’s) Christine Falls (2006), Martin Sixsmith’s The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (2009), adapted as Philomena (dir. Stephen Frears, 2013), all of which portray Irish nuns as complicit—and sometimes active participants—in the physical, sexual, and psychological abuse of women and children. This contribution to the forum will consider two recent novels by Irish American women writers, Alice McDermott’s The Ninth Hour (2017) and Courtney Sullivan’s Saints for All Occasions (2017), which present their readers with nuns who take liberal, if not radical, views on a range of Catholic doctrinal issues such as suicide, contraception, marital infidelity, and homosexuality. While they engage, to an extent, with clerical abuse (and [End Page 186] Sullivan does this more directly than McDermott), both novels ultimately uphold Mary Gordon’s claim that “[a]t least since the priesthood was first shaken by the sexual-abuse scandal two decades ago…America’s nuns have been the de facto leaders of the country’s liberal Catholics, especially those more interested in social justice than in holding the Vatican’s line on sexual politics.”6 The question I want to consider...

Eulogy for Ida Friederike Görres

Eulogy for Ida Friederike Görres Fr. Joseph Ratzinger Eulogy at the passing of Ida Friederike Görres, delivered by Professor Doctor Joseph Ratzinger at the Requiem Mass in the Cathedral of Freiburg, Germany on May 19, 1971.27 The Church engages in worship by commemorating the death of her Lord. She does this gratefully because she knows that this death has given life to suffering. With such knowledge, the Church dares to give thanks at the graves of her dead. She can do this because she believes that the death of those who believe in Jesus Christ is held in His death and thus in His resurrection. It is overcome in advance. It is not destruction but merely transition into a new and final way of being with God and with all who belong to the Lord. Nevertheless, humanly speaking, this is something shocking, and sometimes we feel this outrageousness, such as when the words from the Song of Zechariah, which had been a song at the birth of a long-awaited child, are used at the open grave: "Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for he has visited and brought redemption to his people."28 In the face of tears and pain, in the face of all the hardship and abandonment that a person's departure can mean, the Church [End Page 148] praises God and sees in this fate of death His visitation, His closeness that gives salvation. And even before that, in the center of the liturgy, the words ring out: It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks—even at this hour. Even at this hour: can we give thanks? Can we give thanks at the death of Ida Friederike Görres, with which a voice has been taken away from us, a voice which seems irreplaceable to the Church in this situation, when we are in a desert of conformism or embarrassed silence? She spoke with an insightful certainty and a fearlessness about the pressing questions and tasks of the Church today, something which is given only to the one who truly believes. And where else are there such voices? This wasn't all easy for her. She had grown up in the liberal Catholicism of the waning Habsburg monarchy. Her education at a convent provided access to faith, rooted her in it, but everything remained strangely stale, inanimate, dry. Encountering the [Catholic] Youth Movement was what brought the great turning point, which determined her entire further path until the end. She realized what from then on remained the center of her thought and work: the living Church. She realized that the Church is not just an organization, a hierarchy, an administrative office, but an organism that grows and lives through the centuries. She realized that the Church is not just the small spatial and temporal segment to which we belong, but that the whole community of believers throughout all time and all places belongs to the Church. In her own words: the Church is "not a system, an idea, an ideology, a structure, a society, but the tremendous living establishment, which has existed since the apostles until today, fulfilling her history from century to century, growing, unfolding, struggling, ailing, recovering, living out her destiny and maturing toward the return of the Lord."29 This very community throughout the eras, the whole that lives from the Lord—this is the Church in which the Lord Himself continues to walk through time and to draw her to Himself. From this point of view, a decisive insight had become a self-evident [End Page 149] matter for her, which at the same time made it possible for her to survive the darkening of the past few years and to maintain independence and serenity in them: a church built in this way must be the Church of sinners. In her last letter to me, she supported this idea passionately: A church of the elites—what would that be? No, it is precisely this that belongs to the Church: that she reaches down to the lowest misery of man, is disfigured by it, wounded, often...