First Things RSS Feed - Bronwen McShea

The Remarkable Legacies of Ordinary Catholic Women

Mon, 01 Apr 2024 06:00:00 -0400

The following is excerpted and adapted from Bronwen McShea’s new book, Women of the Church: What Every Catholic Should Know , out today from Ignatius Press and the Augustine Institute.

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The Duchess Who Shaped the Fate of France

Tue, 07 Mar 2023 06:00:00 -0500

The following is excerpted from Bronwen McShea ’s new historical biography, La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France , out today from Pegasus Books.

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The Old Evangelization

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 00:00:00 -0400

Truth in Many Tongues:
Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empire
by daniel i. wasserman-soler
penn state university, 240 pages, $33

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When Rome Policed Art

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:00 -0400

A century ago, a little-known Belgian artist named Albert Servaes became famous when cardinals at the Holy Office in Rome censured him for depicting Jesus Christ in a way they considered unsuitable for Catholics. The story made the front page of American Art News in New York. In this “curious case,” a reporter explained, Church authorities had judged a series of Servaes’s charcoal drawings of the Passion to be “impregnated with a bold realism which render[ed] his representations of Christ as undignified and improper.”

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Seventy-Five Years Ago in Silesia

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 06:00:00 -0500

In 2012, while visiting the German city of Trier, I stumbled upon the birthplace of Karl Marx. This Baroque townhouse at Brückenstrasse 10 is now a museum, a kind of shrine to its most famous former resident. Not many steps away is the beautiful old seminary church for the Diocese of Trier. As I walked by the seminary gate, I noticed seven small brass plaques among the cobblestones on the sidewalk. One of them read: Johannes Schulz, date of death August 19, 1942 . Place of death? Dachau .

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Bishops Unbound

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0500

In Before Church and State , Andrew Willard Jones describes a time when Christendom’s lay rulers were leaders in building the City of God. They “wielded the secular, temporal sword . . . bestowed on the Christian people by Christ himself.” In the medieval era, before sharp categorical distinctions had been drawn among “church,” “state,” and “secular society,” Christians understood their world as “sacramental,” with “the material and the spiritual . . . always present together.” As the clergy dispensed graces “that sustained . . . society in charity,” wielding “the spiritual sword of excommunication,” laymen wielded “temporal power”—to defend the Church’s body “against the violent” and to “organize the world of things and events,” so that their fellow Christians could enjoy earthly blessings while sojourning toward heaven.

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Pope Francis as Historian

Thu, 23 Mar 2017 06:00:00 -0400

During a friendly meeting on January 19 with an ecumenical delegation from Finland, Pope Francis affirmed his commitment to reunion with Lutheran Christians by offering an historical claim about the great German reformer: “The intention of Martin Luther five hundred years ago was to renew the Church, not divide her.” A day or so before, news had begun circulating that Vatican City would honor the five hundredth anniversary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses with a special postage stamp. And earlier this fall, the pope praised Luther for having re-focused the Church’s attentions on the centrality of Scripture, blaming subsequent divisions between Catholics and Lutherans not on anything the reformer himself had done, but on those of us who “closed in on ourselves out of fear or bias with regard to the faith which others profess with a different accent and language.”

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Harvard Springtime

Fri, 01 Aug 2003 00:00:00 -0400

On Sunday, April 27, one of the large lecture halls at Harvard Divinity School was two-thirds filled primarily with graying, upper-middle-class liberal women of the baby-boom generation who had come to hear and applaud Dr. Ida Raming’s “courageous” story of resisting the all-male hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. Raming, you may recall, is one of seven women, mostly German and Austrian, who were excommunicated in summer 2002 for participating in an illicit ordination ceremony. She celebrated a liturgy at Harvard, kindling the activist fires in her supportive listeners, who are working to “liberate” women from the Roman “structures of power” that have discriminated against them these long twenty centuries.

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