FEATURE image: At the National Shrine of St. Peregrine at Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica on Chicago’s west side is a painting attributed to the late 17th century painter, Gregorio Lazzarini (1665-1740) entitled Jesus the Healer; St. Peregrine, OSM the Helper. December 2013. Author’s photograph. 3.89mb DSC_0218 (1).
St. Peregrine Laziosi’s enduring significance lies in his transformation from a hot-headed opponent of the Church into a holy servant whose own miraculous healing from a cancerous tumor made him a lasting symbol of hope, healing, and intercession for those facing cancer and other life-threatening illnesses. His medieval life story is connected to the continuing ministry of his shrine in Chicago.
Peregrine Laziosi grew up in Forli near Ravenna in Italy. Peregrine came from a very wealthy family who lived in the town in which half the population was for being part of the Papal States and half were against. Peregrine’s family, and thus Peregrine as a young man, was against the pope’s political rule.
Pope Alexander IV (1254-1261), pope at the time of the birth of Saint Peregrine, is depicted in a fresco in San Marco in Milan, Italy. On September 26, 1255, Alexander IV had canonized Saint Clare of Assisi, founder of the second order of Franciscans, known as the Poor Clares. The following month, on October 29, 1255, Alexander IV, in his bull Benigna Operatio, declared that the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi (who was canonized in 1228) was a fact of the pope’s “own knowledge.” Public domain.
Guelphs and Ghibellines.
14th century Illumination on parchment of Pope Martin IV, c. 1335. From the manuscript Vie et miracles de saint Louis. Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Born Simon de Brion (c. 1210 –1285), Martin IV was the last French pope to stay in Rome before the papacy moved to Avignon. He ruled the Papal States from 1281 to 1285. Public Domain.
Filippo Benizzi (1233-1285), fifth general superior of the Servants of Mary (Servite Order), was assigned by Pope Martin IV to go to Forli to try to bring together the two sides. The Servites were a mendicant order that embraced poverty and devoted to preaching and encouraging devotion to the Virgin Mary. General Superior Benizzi was the Order’s chief propagator and organizer. In Forli, the pro-pope group was called Guelphs and pro-Holy Roman Emperor group was called Ghibellines. A political meeting was called where Fr. Benizzi would meet the two sides. Benizzi is also reputed to have healed a leper when in the town by giving him his tunic to wear. The Guelphs represented the interests of wealthy merchants, bankers, and urban elites who viewed the Empire as a threat to their free trade and dominance. This group later split into Black (radical) Guelphs and White (moderate) Guelphs. The Ghibellines represented the landed aristocracy who favored traditional hierarchical structures and sought imperial protection against the expanding papal states that fostered smaller, autonomous communes and free trade practices representing the “new money” merchant class.
Saint Filippo Benizzi, Girolamo Romanino (c,1484-c.1560), c.1524, High Altarpiece, S. Alessandro, Brescia. oil on wood, 74.2 × 64.9 cm, The National Gallery London. Benizzi wears the black scapular, tunic and cowl of his Order. Saint Filippo Benizzi’s body is in the church of the Servants of Mary in Todi, Umbria. He was beatified by Pope Leo X in 1516 and made a saint by Pope Clement X in 1671. see – Girolamo Romanino | Saint Filippo Benizzi | NG297.5 | National Gallery, London – retrieved Jan. 27, 2026.
St. Peregrine born in Forlì, Italy, came from a wealthy family aligned against papal political authority during the bitter Guelph-Ghibelline conflicts. As an 18-year-old, he joined a hostile crowd confronting St. Filippo Benizzi, the Servite leader and papal representative, and even struck him physically. Peregrine repented and moved by Benizzi’s forgiveness and charity, joined the Servite Order, and eventually became a priest.
At the meeting, the crowds that gathered spewed insults at the friar and 18-year-old Peregrine, son of a Ghibelline leader, was among them. They chased the Servite General out of Forli with insults and violence and Peregrine physically struck him. Soon after, Peregrine regretted his violent actions and sought out his victim to apologize. Filippo Benizzi greeted Peregrine with charity which made a lasting impression on the young man. A few years later, Peregrine Laziosi joined the Servites in Siena and became a priest.
Peregrine was sent back to Forli, founded a new Servite house, and became popular for his preaching and well known for charitable work.
Returning to Forlì, Peregrine founded a Servite house and became known for a lifetime of preaching and charitable works.
Miraculous cure.
Saints are often famous for their miracle-working powers. In the case of St Peregrine, he is known for being the recipient of a miracle. At 60 years old, Peregrine found he had a cancerous tumor on his right leg. The doctors had given up hope of a cure and decided to amputate the leg. The night before the operation St. Peregrine had a vision. It is the one depicted in the shrine’s painting: St. Peregrine seeing Jesus descend from the cross to touch and heal his leg.
The artwork depicts the healing miracle of his tumorous leg experienced by St. Peregrine Laziosi.
Detail of painting depicting St. Peregrine’s tumorous leg that was miraculously cured by Jesus Christ in a vision in 1320. Author’s photograph. 5.09mb DSC_0246 (1)
When the doctors arrived the next day to perform the operation, they found that Peregrine had been completely cured, an event unexplained by medical science. The news spread like wildfire through the town. St. Peregrine died of fever 25 years later on May 1, 1345, in his mid 80’s. After his death people who were sick and cured attributed it to St. Peregrine’s miraculous intercession, particularly when it was a life-threatening disease. His saintly cult grew – Peregrine is patron saint of cancer and other life-threatening maladies – and his image often shows him exposing his own tumorous leg that was miraculously cured by Christ.
Around age sixty, Peregrine developed a cancerous tumor in his leg, and doctors planned an amputation. On the eve of the operation, he experienced a vision of Christ descending from the Cross and healing him. The next day, the tumor had disappeared, a cure described as unexplained by medical science.
The shrine through prayer, blessing, pilgrimage, reconciliation and evangelization, accompanies those persons who live with serious illness, traditionally cancer, and their caregivers, as they seek to find healing, support, peace and God in their daily lives. There is also a relic of St. Peregrine Laziosi at the shrine. Author’s photograph. 2.74mbDSC_0260 (1)
After his death in 1345, devotion to St. Peregrine grew as many attributed healings to his intercession were made. He became the patron saint of cancer patients and those suffering from other grave illnesses, often depicted exposing his miraculously healed leg.
Statue of St. Peregrine Laziosi in an outdoor garden near to the Shrine of Christ’s Passion, St. John, Indiana. June 2018. Author’s photograph. 89% 7.93mb DSC_9062
Pope St. John XXIII was far more than the popular “Good Pope John.” Through his humility, warmth, humor, diplomatic skill, commitment to peace, and launching of the Second Vatican Council, he helpedshape the Catholic Church’s relationship with the modern world while leaving a lasting moral vision centered on human dignity, unity, and reconciliation.
“Giovanni, why don’t you sleep? Is it the Pope or the Holy Spirit who governs the church? It’s the Holy Spirit, no? Well, then, go to sleep, Giovanni!” Wit and Wisdom of Good Pope John, collected by Henri Fesquet.
One day John XXIII visited the Hospital of the Holy Spirit in Rome. Deeply stirred by the pope’s visit, the mother superior whose nuns administered the hospital, went up to introduce herself. “Most Holy Father,” she announced, “I am the Superior of the Holy Spirit!” “Well, I must say you’re lucky,” the pope said. “I’m only the Vicar of Jesus Christ!”Wit and Wisdom of Good Pope John, collected by Henri Fesquet.
As Vatican representative in Turkey during World War II, Roncalli participated in humanitarian efforts that helped Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-occupied Europe.
1943 – Istanbul, Raffaele Guariglia (1889-1970), ambassador to Turkey, and Msgr. Angelo Roncalli, apostolic delegate in Istanbul. Msgr. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) stands alongside Italian diplomat Raffaele Guariglia (at right, in sunglasses) and another unnamed official from the Italian Embassy in Turkey with his hands resting behind his back. Appointed by Pope Pius XI Roncalli served as the Catholic Church’s Archbishop and Apostolic Delegate to Turkey and Greece from January 1935 until December 1944. Raffaele Guariglia (1889–1970) was a prominent Italian diplomat who served as the Italian Ambassador to Turkey during World War II. The photograph was taken during an official diplomatic meeting in Istanbul, Turkey, in 1943, Roncalli’s base the entirety of the time. During World War II, Istanbul was a critical nexus of quiet diplomacy and intelligence exchange. While stationed there as the Vatican’s Apostolic Delegate, Msgr. Roncalli worked closely with international ambassadors, including Guariglia, to coordinate extensive humanitarian efforts, transit visas, and rescue operations that ultimately saved thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing occupied Europe. PHOTO:”1943 – Istanbul, Raffaele Guariglia, Ambasciatore in Turchia, e Mons. Angelo Roncalli delegato apostolico ad Istanbul” by realizzato da Stefano Baldi is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Voglio essere buono, ad ogni costo, sempre, con tutti.(“I want to be good, at all costs, always, with everyone.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
In postwar France, he successfully navigated the politically sensitive dispute over bishops associated with the Vichy regime, demonstrating the diplomatic style that later defined his papacy.
1953, Paris, Angelo Roncalli, Apostolic Nuncio in Paris, with some officials of the Embassy. Roberto Gaja (1912-1992), Embassy Counsellor, is the third from the left. Taken in 1953 in Paris, France, Apostolic Nuncio Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) gathered with members of the Italian Embassy staff. Roncalli served as the Holy See’s Apostolic Nuncio to France from late 1944 until early 1953. This photo records one of his final diplomatic engagements in Paris before he was elevated to Cardinal and appointed Patriarch of Venice later that year. Third from the left is Roberto Gaja, who was serving as an Embassy Counselor (Consigliere d’Ambasciata) and eventually became Italy’s Ambassador to the United States. Having successfully spent his tenure navigating intense post-war church-state tensions—including de Gaulle’s provisional government demands to purge Vichy-era bishops—Roncalli had become deeply beloved by the Parisian political and diplomatic corps. The event served as both a diplomatic working meeting and part of a series of farewell courtesies before his departure back to Italy.PHOTO: “1953, Parigi, Angelo Roncalli, Nunzio Apostolico a Parigi, con alcuni funzionari dell’Ambasciata. Roberto Gaja, Consigliere d’Ambasciata, è il terzo da sinistra” by realizzato da Stefano Baldi is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
What was the Vichy Bishops Purge in France at the end of World War II?
The Vichy bishops purge was one of the most consequential church-state confrontations in postwar Europe and the principal reason Monsignor Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was abruptly reassigned from Turkey to France. Following the liberation of France in 1944, General Charles de Gaulle’s provisional government launched the épuration légale (“legal purge”) to remove collaborators from public life. Among the institutions placed under intense scrutiny was the Catholic Church. During the war, most French bishops had supported Marshal Philippe Pétain’s Vichy regime, while some openly encouraged French youth to comply with compulsory labor programs in Germany. The hierarchy’s general silence during the deportation of French Jews further damaged its standing in the eyes of many French citizens.
Supported by prominent Catholic members of the Resistance, who regarded sections of the episcopate as morally compromised, De Gaulle pressed the Vatican to remove approximately thirty to thirty-three bishops accused of collaboration. Rome strongly resisted. Pope Pius XII and senior Vatican officials maintained that the Vichy regime had been the legally constituted government of France and that the bishops had merely dealt with the authorities then in power. From the Vatican’s perspective, De Gaulle’s demands represented an unacceptable intrusion by the state into the internal governance of the Church.
To break the impasse, the Vatican sent Roncalli to Paris in late December 1944, replacing a nuncio whose associations with Vichy had become politically untenable. Arriving on New Year’s Eve, Roncalli approached the crisis not through public confrontation but through patient diplomacy. Unlike some Vatican hardliners who dismissed French grievances, he engaged directly with government officials and accepted that odium plebis (“hatred of the people”) could constitute a legitimate reason for removing a bishop who had lost public confidence and moral authority.
Through a series of discreet negotiations, Roncalli succeeded in dramatically reducing the scope of the proposed purge. De Gaulle’s original list of more than thirty bishops was ultimately narrowed to three diocesan bishops, the Archbishop of Aix-en-Provence, the Bishop of Arras, and the Bishop of Mende, together with several auxiliary bishops and overseas prelates. Their departures were arranged through resignation rather than public dismissal.
By guiding the crisis to a negotiated resolution, Roncalli spared the Vatican a humiliating confrontation while allowing the French government to demonstrate accountability in the aftermath of occupation and collaboration. The episode established his reputation as an exceptionally skilled diplomat and helped lay the foundations for the conciliatory leadership style that would later characterize his pontificate as Pope John XXIII.
John XXIII’s personal spirituality was marked by humility, kindness, simplicity, and optimism, reflected in the collection of quotations featured throughout the article.
Una croce mi ci vuole: Signore Gesù aiutami a portarla umilmente e degnamente(“A cross is needed for me: Lord Jesus, help me to carry it humbly and worthily.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
The President of the Italian Republic, Luigi Einaudi (1874-1961), receives His Eminence Cardinal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Archbishop of Venice.Cardinal Roncalli, the newly appointed Patriarch of Venice meets the President of the Italian Republic, on March 16, 1953. Following his nearly decade-long service as Nuncio to France, Pope Pius XII elevated Roncalli to Cardinal in January 1953. This official photo from the Quirinale Palace Historical Archives captures Roncalli taking his mandatory constitutional oath of allegiance before President Einaudi prior to officially taking control of his new archdiocese in Venice. “Il Presidente della Repubblica Luigi Einaudi riceve Sua Eminenza il Cardinale Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Arcivescovo di Venezia” is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
Giuseppe Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, was made a cardinal by Pope Pius XII on January 12, 1953. Immediately afterward, he was appointed Patriarch of Venice, a post he held until his election as pope in October 1958. Roncalli holds a cappello romano (literally “Roman hat”), also universally known in Catholic clerical circles as a saturno because its wide, circular brim resembles the rings of the planet Saturn. In strict ecclesiastical etiquette, a premium saturno like the one held here by Cardinal Angelo Roncalli (the future Pope John XXIII) is traditionally fashioned from fine brushed beaver fur (beaver pelt). The interior is typically lined with white silk. The saturno evolved into its shape by 1850, moving away from the “tricorne” cocked hats worn by 18th-century European clergy. Unlike ceremonial headwear like the miter or the square biretta, the saturno has no liturgical function though the color and trim of the hat indicated the rank of the wearer. Roncalli is holding a traditional black saturno outfitted with a red and gold braided silk cord and matching tassels indicating his rank as Cardinal. The saturno fell out of widespread, everyday usage following the modernization reforms of the Second Vatican Council in the mid-1960s, turning it into a rare, historic piece of traditional clerical attire.In 1950’s Venice, Cardinal Roncalli’s leadership stood out: prayerful, humble, effective, and unfailingly affable, he immersed himself in the daily life of the archdiocese with a level of personal engagement locals had not experienced in decades. PHOTO: “Kardinaal Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, Bestanddeelnr 909-9364” by Anefo is marked with CC0 1.0.
Non cade lacrima dai nostri occhi e non c’è sospiro del nostro cuore senza una riposta di Dio. (“There is no tear that falls from our eyes and no sigh of our heart without a response from God.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
Mi sento più che mai unito ai tanti e tanti che soffrono negli ospedali e nelle case, o sono angustiati in varie forme. (“I feel more than ever united with the many who suffer in hospitals and homes, or are distressed in various forms.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
Elected pope in 1958 at age 77, he was widely expected to be a transitional figure but instead became one of the most consequential popes of the twentieth century.
Installation of Pope John 23 in 1958.The central loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica overlooking Saint Peter’s Square in Vatican City, Rome, on November 4, 1958 (the Feast of Saint Charles Borromeo). Following a traditional five-hour mass and ceremony inside the basilica, Pope John XXIII (Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli), newly elected as the 261st successor to St. Peter and vested in grand white pontifical vestments, is about to be crowned with the triple-tiered papal tiara (the triregnum) placed on his head by the Senior Cardinal Deacon in full view of the public. This stunning public ritual would turn out to be one of the very last traditional papal coronations in history, as his successor, Pope Paul VI, retired the use of the papal tiara in continuous use for over 1,100 years. PHOTO: “The Coronation of Pope John XXIII (23)” by manhhai is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
In this photograph from November 4, 1958, Pope John XXIII, newly crowned as Supreme Pontiff of the Roman Catholic Church, lifts his hand in blessing before the faithful gathered at the Vatican. The gentle dignity of the moment foreshadows the deep pastoral spirit that would define his pontificate. Decades later, John XXIII would be canonized alongside Pope John Paul II in a solemn Vatican ceremony. (AP Photo) This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published in the United States between 1931 and 1963, and although there may or may not have been a copyright notice, the copyright was not renewed.
Una gran medicina per i nostri mali è la buona coscienza, soprattutto l’abbandano nella Provvidenza di Dio. (“A great medicine for our ills is a good conscience, especially its abandonment to the Providence of God.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
Per la pace in famiglia tutto bisogna sacrificare e tutto conviene prendere dalla buona parte. (“For peace in the family everything must be sacrificed and everything should be taken from its good part.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
Pope John XXIII convened the Second Vatican Council in 1962. The Council’s proceedings were held in four sessions from 1962 to 1965 as it aimed to define the Church for modern times, or aggiornamento. The First Session was opened by Pope John XXIII in October 1962 and closed in December 1962. John XXIII died on June 3, 1963, and his successor Paul VI (Giovanni Montini) was elected on June 21, 1963. The Second Session, opened by Paul VI in September 1963 closed in December 1963. The Third and Fourth Sessions were also held from September to December in 1964 and 1965, respectively. The Council adjourned on December 8, 1965, which is the feast of The Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. PHOTO: “50th Anniversary of Vatican II” by Lawrence OP is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.
Vatican II produced 16 major documents, including Constitutions (4), Decrees (9), and Declarations (3).
Constitutions: Lumen Gentium: (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church) – Defined Church as the People of God and as sacrament. – promulgated November 21, 1964. Dei Verbum: (Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation) – Cited the Bible and Tradition as sources of divine revelation. – November 18, 1965. Sacrosanctum Concilium: (Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy) – Called for liturgical changes including use of local languages. – December 4, 1963. Gaudium et Spes: (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World) – Addressed the Church’s engagement with contemporary human life. – December 7, 1963.
Decrees: Ad Gentes (Mission Activity) – 1965. Apostolicam Actuositatem (Apostolate of the Laity) – November 18, 1965. Christus Dominus (Pastoral Office of Bishops) – October 28, 1965. Inter Mirifica (Media of Social Communications) – December 4, 1963. Orientalium Ecclesiarum (Eastern Catholic Churches) – November 21, 1964. Optatam Totius (Priestly Training) – October 28, 1965. Perfectae Caritatis (Renewal of Religious Life) – October 28, 1965. Presbyterorum Ordinis (Ministry and Life of Priests) – December 7, 1965. Unitatis Redintegratio (Ecumenism) – November 21, 1964.
Declarations: Gravissimum Educationis (On Christian Education) – October 28, 1965. Nostra Aetate (On the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions): A landmark document that opened dialogue and understanding with other faiths, particularly Judaism and Islam, and addressed universal human spiritual heritage. – October 28, 1965. Dignitatis Humanae (On Religious Freedom): Affirmed the human right to religious liberty. – December 7, 1965.
Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani (Holy Office head), Cardinal Francis Spellman of Boston and Enrico Dante (Master of Ceremonies) gather around John XXIII at the opening ceremonies of the Second Vatican Council on October 11, 1962. Off to the left is Aspreno II Colonna, Prince of Paliano, near Rome. Called by John XXIII on January 25, 1959, the Council was held in four fall sessions between 1962 and 1965, continuing under Pope Paul VI after Pope John XXIII’s death in June 1963. PHOTO: Public Domain. The country of origin of this photograph is Italy. It is in the public domain there because its copyright term has expired.
Figlioli, cercate più quello che unisce che ciò che divide… (“Little children, seek more what unites than what divides…”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
Tutti ricordo e per tutti pregherò. (“I remember everyone and I will pray for everyone.”) Casa Natale di Papa Giovanni, Sotto Il Monte Giovanni XXIII (Bergamo).
Published in January 1963, Pope John XXIII was named TIME’s Man of the Year for his decisive global influence, highlighted by his role in convening the Second Vatican Council and his quiet but effective mediation during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Elected in 1958 at age 77 and widely expected to be a short-term “transitional” pope, he surprised the world by reshaping the papacy through openness, pastoral warmth, and a new commitment to ecumenical dialogue. His selection marked the first time a pope received the magazine’s annual distinction, underscoring his impact on both believers and nonbelievers. PHOTO: Time Inc., started renewing the copyrights of Time magazine in 1962 with the 29 January 1934, issue. Therefore, issues that were published before 29 January 1934 are in the public domain. In addition, a few later issues were not renewed. The copyright on this 1963 issue of Time magazine was not renewed, and it is in the public domain.
John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris (April 1963) became one of the most influential Catholic statements on peace, human rights, and international cooperation during the Cold War.
Thus, in this age which boasts of its atomic power, it no longer makes sense to maintain that war is a fit instrument with which to repair the violation of justice…Their object is not aggression, so they say—and there is no reason for disbelieving them—but to deter others from aggression. Nevertheless, We are hopeful that, by establishing contact with one another and by a policy of negotiation, nations will come to a better recognition of the natural ties that bind them together as men. – Pacem in Terris, April 11, 1963.
Issued on April 11, 1963, in the harrowing shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pacem in Terris (“Peace on Earth”) served as a vital moral intervention for a world teetering on the edge of nuclear conflict. In a groundbreaking departure from tradition, Pope St. John XXIII addressed this final encyclical not only to the Catholic faithful but to all “men of good will,” signaling a new era of universal engagement. By urging a retreat from the Cold War arms race, the Pope shifted the foundation of global security from the “balance of terror” to a framework of mutual trust, disarmament, and restraint. Within the Church, the document marked a pivotal evolution, embedding religious freedom and universal human rights into the core of Catholic social teaching and establishing the Church as a credible voice in the modern struggle for international justice. Though Pope John XXIII passed away on June 3, 1963—just 53 days after its publication and less than five years into his papacy—his final work remains a prophetic cornerstone. Today, it continues to provide the moral blueprint for the Church’s response to humanitarian crises and the enduring quest for a peaceful global order.
His most significant initiative was convening the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II), which sought to bring the Church into deeper engagement with the modern world through aggiornamento (“updating”).
Pope John XXIII (1958–1963) issued eight encyclicals during his pontificate, focusing on themes of social justice, peace, unity, and pastoral care.
Here is the list of, with links, his 8 encyclicals (1959-1963):
Ad Petri Cathedram (To the Chair of Peter) – June 29, 1959. Purpose: Promotes truth, unity, and peace under the light of charity. Ad Petri Cathedram (June 29, 1959)
Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia (At the Beginning of Our Priesthood) – August 1, 1959. Purpose: Honors St. John Vianney and urges priests toward spiritual perfection. Sacerdotii Nostri Primordia (August 1, 1959)
Grata Recordatio (With Joyful Recollection) – September 26, 1959. Purpose: Encourages praying the Rosary for the success of the upcoming Council. Grata Recordatio (September 26, 1959)
Princeps Pastorum (The Prince of Shepherds) – November 28, 1959. Purpose: Stresses the need for native clergy and lay leadership in mission territories. Princeps Pastorum (November 28, 1959)
Mater et Magistra (Mother and Teacher) – May 15, 1961. Purpose: Explains the Church’s role in social progress including workers’ rights and global economic justice. Mater et Magistra (May 15, 1961)
John 23’s coat of arms with the motto “Obedience and Peace.” This is the official ecclesiastical coat of arms used by Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli during his tenure as Cardinal Patriarch of Venice (1953–1958), before his election as Pope John XXIII. Created in early 1953, the design follows Church heraldic tradition by combining Roncalli’s family arms with the historic symbols of the Venetian patriarchate.
Dominating the shield is the Lion of St. Mark, the traditional emblem retained by Venetian cardinals. The golden winged lion holds an open book bearing the inscription “Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus” (“Peace be with you, Mark, my evangelist”), the ancient heraldic symbol of the Patriarchate of Venice and its patron saint. Beneath it appear Roncalli’s personal family emblems: a stone tower with an open gate representing Sotto il Monte, the Bergamo village where he was born and raised, flanked by two silver lilies symbolizing purity and devotion to the Virgin Mary.
Surrounding the shield is the red galero, the ceremonial hat reserved for cardinals, with its thirty tassels serving as the strict heraldic indication of cardinalatial rank. Above the shield stands the golden patriarchal cross with its distinctive double crossbars, signifying jurisdiction over an archdiocese and patriarchate rather than a standard bishopric.
At the base appears Roncalli’s lifelong episcopal motto, “Oboedientia et Pax” (“Obedience and Peace”), inspired by the writings of St. Caesar Baronius, the sixteenth-century church historian and Oratorian priest. Roncalli carried this motto with him throughout the remainder of his life, including his historic papacy as Pope John XXIII.
Roncalli’s lifelong habits of diplomacy, humility, and compassion prepared him to become Pope John XXIII, whose leadership transformed the Catholic Church and influenced the wider world.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
N.B. – Vatican City, July 31, 2025 (UPI) — Pope Leo XIV will bestow St. John Henry Newman, the influential 19th-century Anglican convert, with the honor of “Doctor of the Church” [today].” Cardinal Newman was beatified by Pope Benedict XVI in 2010 and canonized by Pope Francis in 2019. With Pope Leo XIV’s action Card. St. Newman is now one of 38 “Doctors of the Church” whose ranks include four women. St. John Henry Newman became the first saint canonized from Britain since 1976.
FEATURE image: Photographic portrait, John Henry Cardinal Newman, 1880.
Canonized in 2019 and later declared a Doctor of the Church, Newman is a thinker whose relevance extends well beyond the 19th century.
John Henry Newman, Oratory of St. Philip Neri, Birmingham, England. London; New York; Bombay; Calcutta: Longmans, Green. Newman’s method of composing a sermon was to do so by heart and then write it down afterwards. English theologian James Mozley (1813-1878) who was active in the Oxford Movement, observed about these sermons: “A sermon of Mr. Newman’s enters into our feelings, ideas, and modes of viewing things. Persons look into Mr. Newman’s sermons and see their own thoughts in them.”
John Henry Newman was one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern era, whose journey from Anglican leader to Catholic cardinal, combined with his profound writings on truth, conscience, faith, reason, and holiness, continues to offer a model for navigating religious, intellectual, and cultural divisions.
Introduction by John P. Walsh
John Henry Newman (1801-1890) was a theologian and poet who was first an Anglican priest and later a Roman Catholic priest and cardinal. In the 1830’s and until his conversion to Catholicism in 1845, Newman was a leading figure in the Oxford Movement. They were a group of Anglicans who looked to create a bridge between the Church of England and the Catholic Church by adopting many Catholic beliefs and liturgical rituals from before the English Reformation. Newman eventually came to believe for himself that these religious efforts proved insufficient and he left the Anglican Communion for the Catholic Church in 1845. Already an articulate and influential religious leader in Britain, Newman’s decision brought with it the burden of having upset his friends as well as being challenged by them and others for his changed religious opinions on polemical grounds. Newman, a longtime writer and speaker, responded after a while with his now-celebrated Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1865–1866), which served as a defense of his religious opinions after he quit his position as Anglican vicar at Oxford. Newman, a 19th-century master of English prose and poetry, had already published The Idea of a University (1852) and went on to publish Grammar of Assent (1870) as well as several poems, some of which were set to music or served as hymns. In 1879, at the age of 78 years old, Pope Leo XIII named Newman a cardinal for his work on behalf of the Catholic Church in England as well as his having co-founded the Catholic University of Ireland in 1854, which today as University College Dublin is Ireland’s largest institution of higher learning. On October 13, 2019, John Henry Newman was canonized a Catholic saint at the Vatican by Pope Francis. St. John Henry Newman became the first saint canonized from Britain since 1976. In remarks by Prince Charles who led the British delegation to the Vatican for Newman’s canonization, the Prince of Wales said: “In the age in which he [Newman] attains sainthood, his example is needed more than ever – for the manner in which, at his best, he could advocate without accusation, could disagree without disrespect and, perhaps most of all, could see differences as places of encounter rather than exclusion.” London-born Cardinal Newman died in England in 1890 at 89 years old. He founded the Oratory at Birmingham in 1848 and through his writings spoke to many about the issues of faith, education, and conscience.
John Henry Newman began as an Anglican priest and leading figure in the Oxford Movement before converting to Catholicism in 1845. Newman became a major Catholic intellectual, publishing influential works on education, belief, doctrine, and the development of Christian thought.
A given opinion, as held by several individuals, even when of the most congenial views, is as distinct as are their faces. Oxford University sermons, 1843.
It is as absurd to argue men, as to torture them, into believing. Oxford University sermon, December 11, 1831.
His conversion cost him friendships and provoked controversy, prompting him to write Apologia Pro Vita Sua, one of the great religious autobiographies and defenses of conscience.
From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know of no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion; religion, as a mere sentiment, is to me a dream and a mockery. Apologia Pro Vita Sua, 1864.
I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true; my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and talismans. I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me, and deceiving me from the semblance of a material world. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Up to 1833).
I was brought up from a child to take great delight in reading the Bible; but I had formed no religious convictions till I was fifteen. Of course I had perfect knowledge of my Catechism. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Up to 1833).
I read Joseph Milner’s Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians.Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Part III).
I read Newton on the Prophecies, and in consequence became most firmly convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul and St. John. My imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine up to the year 1843. Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Part III).
There are virtues indeed, which the world is not fitted to judge about or to uphold, such as faith, hope and charity; but it can judge about Truthfulness; it can judge about the natural virtues, and truthfulness is one of them. Natural virtues may also become supernatural; Truthfulness is such…Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Part II).
Newman sought truth above party loyalty, holiness above comfort, and intellectual honesty above ideological conformity.
Catholics on the other hand shade and soften the awful antagonism between good and evil, which is one of their dogmas, by holding that there are different degrees of justification, that there is a great difference in point of gravity between sin and sin, that there is a possibility and the danger of falling away, and that there is no certain knowledge given to anyone that he is simply in a state of grace, and much less that he is to persevere to the end.Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Part III).
Let us seek the grace of a cheerful heart, an even temper, sweetness, gentleness, and brightness of mind, as well as walking in His light, and by His grace. Let us pray to Him to give us the ever-abundant, ever-springing love, which overpowers and sweeps away the vexations of life by its own richness and strength, and which above all unites us to Him, Who is the fountain and center of all mercy, loving kindness and joy. 17, Religious Joy (Sermon for Christmas Day), 1868.
Ex Umbris et Imaginibus in Veritatem! (From shadows and symbols into the truth!) Epitaph at Edgbaston.
He believed faith and reason worked together and rejected both blind skepticism and rigid rationalism. His writings emphasize the importance of truthfulness, conscience, reverence, humility, and intellectual integrity. His famous hymn Lead, Kindly Light emerged from a difficult period of illness, uncertainty, and spiritual reflection.
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom; Lead thou me on! The night is dark, and I am far from home; Lead thou me on! Keep thou my feet: I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.The Pillar of the Cloud, 1833.
Lead, Kindly Light is a hymn with words written in 1833 by Saint John Henry Newman as a poem titled “The Pillar of the Cloud.” The impetus for the poem was that young Newman, traveling in Italy, became ill and found himself stranded in Palermo, Sicily, without any passage out for almost a month.
To occupy his time, the 32-year-old Newman visited the many churches in Palermo but only when they were dark, abandoned and silent. Newman, then still an Anglican, didn’t attend any services.
Newman finally got a ship to England that sailed direct for Marseilles yet, between Corsica and Sardinia, the ship lay idle for a week from lack of wind. It was just at that point in his far-flung journey that the words, Lead Kindly Light, articulated themselves in Newman’s mind as he ached to go home.
This is what the Church is said to want, not party men, but sensible, temperate, sober, well-judging persons, to guide it through the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and no. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “History of My Religious Opinions from 1839-1841” (1864).
Nature was a parable: Scripture was an allegory: pagan literature, philosophy, and mythology, properly understood, were but a preparation for the Gospel. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “History of My Religious Opinions from 1839-1841” (1864).
The Greek poets and sages were in a certain sense prophets; for “thoughts beyond their thought to those high bards were given.” St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “History of My Religious Opinions from 1839-1841” (1864).
Holy Church in her sacraments and her hierarchical appointments, will remain even to the end of the world. Her mysteries are but expressions in human language of truths to which the human mind is unequal. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Apologia Pro Vita Sua, “History of My Religious Opinions from 1839-1841” (1864).
We may not speak of [Jesus] as we speak of any individual man, acting from and governed by a human intelligence within Him, but He was God, acting not only as God, but now through the flesh also, when He would. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Parochial and Plain Sermons, volume 6.
[Prophetic tradition] permeates the Church like an atmosphere, irregular in shape from its very profusion and exuberance. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Lectures on the Prophetical Office of the Church (1837).
Newman viewed disagreement as an opportunity for encounter rather than exclusion, a theme highlighted by then-Prince Charles at his canonization.
The more claim an idea has to be considered living, the more various will be its aspects; and the more social and political is its nature, the more complicated and subtle will be its issues. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.
And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason – not by rule, but by an inward faculty. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Fifteen Sermons preached before the University of Oxford.
If we insist upon being as sure as is conceivable, in every step of our course, we must be content to creep along the ground, and can never soar. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Fifteen Sermons preached before the University of Oxford.
If we are intended for great ends, we are called to great hazards; and, whereas we are given absolute certainty in nothing, we must in all things choose between doubt and inactivity. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Fifteen Sermons preached before the University of Oxford.
I am what I am, or I am nothing. I cannot think, reflect, or judge about my being, without starting from the very point which I am concluding…I cannot avoid being sufficient for myself, for I cannot make myself anything else, and to change me is to destroy me. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), The Grammar of Assent (1870).
A man who said “I cannot trust a cable, I must have an iron bar,” would, in certain given cases, be irrational and unreasonable: so too is a man who says I must have a rigid demonstration, not moral demonstration, of religious truth. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letters & Diaries, volume 21.
We differ in our sense and use of the word “certain.” I use it of minds, you of propositions. I fully grant the uncertainty of all conclusions in your sense of the word, but I maintain that minds may in my sense be certain of conclusions which are uncertain in yours. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to William Froude, April 29, 1879.
There is a great attempt to bring a new theory of Papal Infallibility, which would make it a mortal sin not to hold the Temporal Power necessary to the papacy. No one answers them and multitudes are being carried away. The pope gives ear to them and the consequence is there is a very extreme prejudice in the highest quarters at Rome against such as me. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to James Hope Scott, April 11, 1867.
Really and truly I am NOT a theologian. A theologian is one who has mastered theology…and a hundred things besides. And this I am not and never shall be. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Maria Giberne, February 10, 1869.
To write theology is like dancing on the tight-rope some hundred feet above ground: it is hard to keep from falling, and the fall is great. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Emily Bowles, April 16, 1866.
Cardinal Henry Edward Manning is not a theologian, the pope is not a theologian, and therefore theology has gone out of fashion. I don’t profess to be a theologian, but at all events I should have been able to show a side of the Catholic religion more theological, more exact, than theirs. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Lord Blatchford, February 5, 1875.
There was true private judgment in the primitive and medieval schools. There are no schools now, no private judgment (in the religious sense of the phrase), no freedom of opinion. That is, no exercise of the intellect. This is a way of things which in God’s own time, will work its own cure of necessity. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Emily Bowles, May 19, 1863.
This age of the Church is peculiar. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Emily Bowles, May 19, 1863.
Everything is good which brings matters to a crisis. It is not the matter of the document, but the animus of its authors, and their mode of doing it, which is so trying. Will not the next century demand Popes who are not Italians? St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to William Monsell, January 12, 1865.
The Fathers made me a Catholic, and I am not going to kick down the ladder by which I ascended into the Church. It is a ladder quite as serviceable for that purpose now, as it was twenty years ago. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Rev. E. B. Pusey, D.D.
He maintained an independent mind, sometimes criticizing excesses and abuses within church governance while remaining deeply loyal to Catholic doctrine.
We have come to a climax of tyranny. It is not good for a Pope to live 20 years. It is an anomaly and bears no good fruit; he becomes a god, has no one to contradict him, does not know facts, and does cruel things without meaning it. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Lady Simeon, November 18, 1870.
There is no evil without its alleviation. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Bishop David Moriarty, November 14, 1866.
To be at once infallible in religion and a despot in temporals is perhaps too great for mortal man. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Letter to Mrs. William Frounde, January 2, 1871.
Truth is the guiding principle of theology and theological inquiries; devotion and edification, of worship; and of government, expedience. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), The Via Media of the Anglican Church Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts written between 1830 and 1841.
The instrument of theology is reasoning; of worship, our emotional nature; of rule, command and coercion. Further, as man is, reasoning tends to rationalism; devotion to superstition and enthusiasm; and power to ambition and tyranny. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), The Via Media of the Anglican Church Illustrated in Lectures, Letters and Tracts written between 1830 and 1841.
Now all of us are sinners, all of us have need to come to God as the Publican did; every one, if he does but search his heart, and watch his conduct, and try to do his duty, will find himself to be full of sins which provoke God’s wrath. I do not mean to say that all men are equally sinners; some are wilful sinners, and of them there is no hope, till they repent; others sin, but they try to avoid sinning, pray to God to make them better, and come to church to be made better; but all men are quite sinners enough to make it their duty to behave as the Publican. Every one ought to come into Church as the Publican did, to say in his heart, “Lord, I am not worthy to enter this sacred place; my only plea for coming is the merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour.” St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Sermon, Reverence in Worship, October 30, 1836 (PPS-8).
To believe and not to revere, to worship familiarly and at one’s ease, is an anomaly and a prodigy unknown even to false religions, to say nothing of the true one…Worship, forms of worship — such as bowing the knee, taking off the shoes, keeping silence, a prescribed dress and the like — are considered as necessary for a due approach to God. Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VIII — “Reverence in Worship,” October 30, 1836.
[Christ] is not past, He is present now. And though He is not seen, He is here. The same God who walked the water, who did miracles, etc., is in the Tabernacle. We come before Him, we speak to Him just as He was spoken to 1800 years ago, etc. This [is] how He counteracts time and the world… It is this that makes devotion in lives. It is the life of our religion. We are brought into the unseen world. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), SN 127: May 25, 1856.
To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world,”—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chapter 5: Position of My Mind Since 1845.
What shall be said to this heart-piercing, reason-bewildering fact? I can only answer, that either there is no Creator, or this living society of men is in a true sense discarded from His presence. Did I see a boy of good make and mind, with the tokens on him of a refined nature, cast upon the world without provision, unable to say whence he came, his birth-place or his family connections, I should conclude that there was some mystery connected with his history, and that he was one, of whom, from one cause or other, his parents were ashamed. Thus only should I be able to account for the contrast between the promise and the condition of his being. And so I argue about the world;—if there be a God, since there is a God, the human race is implicated in some terrible aboriginal calamity. It is out of joint with the purposes of its Creator. This is a fact, a fact as true as the fact of its existence; and thus the doctrine of what is theologicallycalled original sin becomes to me almost as certain as that the world exists, and as the existence of God. St. John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890), Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Chapter 5: Position of My Mind Since 1845.
On October 13, 2019 in Rome then-Prince Charles attended the canonization of St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) by Pope Francis. On July 31, 2025 Cardinal Newman—English Catholic theologian, academic, philosopher, historian, writer, and poet—was declared Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIV. On September 4, 2025, King Charles III became the first British monarch to visit the Oratory of St. Philip Neri in Birmingham which served as headquarters for the 19th century Catholic cardinal’s life and activities. On his visit, Charles III viewed the cardinal’s library as well as his personal items and the room where Newman died which has remained unchanged. John Henry Newman was born in London and grew up in the Church of England. He became an Anglican priest in 1825 and a leader of the Oxford Movement which sought affinities with Roman Catholicism. In 1845, in his mid-40’s, Newman became a Catholic and studied in Rome where he became a Catholic priest. Newman was always a prolific writer of letters, sermons and articles, and this continued throughout his life. The Cardinal often fell between the cracks – Anglicans mistrusting his Catholic “betrayal” and Catholics mistrusting his having been an Anglican. A cloud lifted in 1879 when Newman was named a cardinal of the Roman Church by Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903). After Rome, Newman returned to England in 1847 and founded the first English Oratory in 1848 here in Birmingham. Newman was soon joined by other English converts, including Father Wilfrid Faber (1814-1863) who Newman sent to London to establish its Oratory in 1849. After Newman was made a Cardinal in 1879, he lived at the Birmingham Oratory and died there in 1890. In 2008 Newman’s grave was opened so to move his remains into the Birmingham Oratory. But his wooden coffin was found to have disintegrated and no bones were found.
St. Philip Neri, Birmingham Oratory.
St. Philip Neri (1515-1595) who founded the Oratory in Rome in 1550 came from Florence where his family were Tuscan nobles who practicied the learned professions. Like some saints do, Philip tore up these family pedigrees in preference for the poor and itinerant. Once in Rome Philip never made study his central occupation and was reticent to talk about it, but he surprised professional scholars not only by his natural wit and humor but his learned depth and the clearness of his theological thinking and knowledge.
“Holiness rather than peace.” St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, (1801-1890), Motto which he had taken from his youth.
His lifelong motto was “Holiness rather than peace,” reflecting his belief that truth and sanctity mattered more than comfort or popularity.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
FEATURE image: Titus Brandsma, a Dutch educator, journalist and priest, had been appointed by the Catholic Bishops in Holland as their chief spokesman to defend the freedom of Catholic education and the press. in early 1942, the 60-year-old Carmelite was arrested in Holland by the Nazis and sent to Dachau concentration camp in Germany where, in July 1942, he killed by lethal injection (carbolic acid). This is one of the last photos of Fr. Brandsma prior to his arrest. FOTO GPD/PR. Bob van Huet. Fair Use.
St. Titus Brandsma exemplifies the ultimate synthesis of intellectual freedom, journalistic integrity, and radical Christian charity, serving as a powerful testament to unyielding spiritual resistance against the dehumanizing machinery of Nazi ideology. In the terror of Dachau, Brandsma maintained a transcendent joy and forgiveness, proving that the deepest human freedom is rooted in spiritual devotion.
Special note: When this post was published in August 2019 Titus Brandsma was a declared Blessed of the Catholic Church. On May 15, 2022, in the first canonization ceremony at the Vatican since 2019, Pope Francis declared 10 new saints, including Titus Brandsma, O. Carm., who had been a prisoner of the Nazis and killed by them in Dachau concentration camp in 1942. Father Brandsma was a prolific writer published in scores of publications who publicly opposed Nazi ideology since 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany.
Blessed Titus Brandsma (1881-1942).
By John P. Walsh
August 14 is the Feast of St. Maximilian Kolbe (1894-1941). Fr. Kolbe died in a Nazi concentration camp (Auschwitz) after he traded places with another camp prisoner condemned to die who was a stranger. That camp prisoner, a husband and father, survived the war. He testified to Kolbe’s heroic and charitable action as a martyr during Kolbe’s canonization process in the Roman Catholic Church. Kolbe was pronounced a saint on October 10, 1982 by St. Pope John Paul II (1920-2005).
Another Catholic martyr out of the Nazi camps who is also much worth knowing is Blessed Titus Brandsma (1881-1942). Brandsma died in Dachau concentration camp, the Nazi’s first concentration camp. Opened in 1933 Dachau’s initial purpose was to imprison political opponents of the Third Reich. Kolbe was a Polish Franciscan and Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite. In 1985 Fr. Brandsma was declared a Blessed of the Church by St. Pope John Paul II setting him too on the road to sainthood.
Fr. Brandsma during his beatification process, long after the war was over, also had a person in a Nazi concentration camp (Dachau) that testified for him. It was the camp nurse and SS functionary who had given the priest the lethal injection by order of her SS doctors on July 26, 1942—five weeks after the Carmelite friar arrived into Dachau. Then a lapsed Catholic, the nurse survived the war and, having returned to her faith, testified for Fr. Brandsma on the exact cause of death that she personally knew about.
Blessed Titus Brandsma as a young Carmelite friar. He became an ordained priest.
Parallels with St. Maximilian Kolbe: Both were Catholic friars, passionate journalists, and camp martyrs executed via carbolic acid injections.
St. Maximilian Kolbe.
Franciscan friar Fr. Maximilian Kolbe’s father was an ethnic German and his mother was Polish. A journalist by trade, he had dedicated his work to the Virgin Mary. Arrested in Poland on February 17, 1941, for sheltering Jews and anti-Nazi publishing, Fr. Kolbe was sent to Auschwitz on May 28, 1941. After a prisoner escaped from his block, the Nazi authorities chose ten prisoners to die by starvation in an underground bunker as retribution. When one of the selected men, Franciszek Gajowniczek, began weeping and crying out for his wife and children, Fr. Kolbe calmly stepped forward and offered to take the stranger’s place, stating simply that he was a Catholic priest and had no family. The deputy commandant granted the request, and for the next two weeks the men were starved of food and water, with most perishing within those fourteen days. Fr. Kolbe, who comforted the others and led them in prayer through their death watch, survived along with three others. The Nazis, needing the starvation bunker for other prisoners, terminated their lives with a lethal injection of carbolic acid (phenol), and Fr. Kolbe died on August 14, 1941. In 1982, Kolbe was made a saint by St. Pope John Paul II—his fellow countryman who had witnessed that murderous regime firsthand—with Franciszek Gajowniczek in attendance.
Both Frs. Kolbe and Brandsma were dedicated journalists. Brandsma was a university founder and teacher as well as a modern art advocate. In 1921 he famously defended the artistic freedom of the leading Symbolist and Expressionist painter in Belgium, Albert Servaes (1883-1966). The artist, a committed Catholic, once said “I have had only two masters. The Gospels and nature.” Yet his new artwork for the Stations of the Cross caused an uproar among some Catholics who were offended by the contemporary depictions of Christ’s Passion. Brandsma supported Servaes’ work for the church of the Discalced Carmelites in Luythagen, a suburb of Antwerp (they can be found today in the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Koningshoeven in Tilburg, Netherlands). Brandsma arranged for the new art to be accompanied by Brandsma’s own meditations on them and published together in a newly-founded Catholic cultural review called Opgang, This helped present and clarify the profound religious content of the artwork which worked to inspire the Catholic Flemish people as well as placate irate Carmelite superiors in Rome.
Much has been said and written on Titus Brandsma since his death in 1942 in Dachau concentration camp. One major theme about Brandsma from those who crossed paths with him in his lifetime was that he was a man of positive vitality, charity and cheer.
Brandsma, born in February 1881 in Bolsward in Friesland, came from a religious family of Dutch farmers. Brandsma was educated in college by the Franciscans and, afterwards, in 1898, became a Carmelite novice in Boxmeer, south of Nijmegen near the German border. In 1905 he was ordained a priest and studied in Rome until 1910. When the 30-year-old Carmelite priest returned to Holland, he was made professor of philosophy and Church history in Oss, about halfway between ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Nijmegen. Later Fr. Brandsma served as the professor of philosophy in the newly-established Catholic University at Nijmegen, becoming its Rector Magnificus in 1932.
When the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940, the Catholic bishops named Titus Brandsma as the spokesman for the freedom of Catholic education and the press. Since 1935 he was chaplain to the Union of Catholic Journalists, an episcopal appointment. Brandsma did his jobs seriously and effectively. Father Brandsma, who was a prolific writer published in scores of publications, had vociferously and publicly opposed Nazi ideology since 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany. In July 1941 Brandsma authored a Pastoral Letter on behalf of the bishops that was read in all Catholic parishes. The letter officially condemned the Nazis’s anti-Semitic laws and Dutch Catholics were informed that they would be denied the sacraments if they supported the Nazi party.
Vocal Resistance to Nazism: Fr. Brandsma publicly opposed Adolf Hitler’s regime from its start in 1933.
By speaking out and writing against it many times before the Second World War, Fr. Brandsma was finally arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis in their infamous Dachau concentration camp where he died.
The Nazis hated Brandsma’s vehement and active long opposition to them. They finally arrested him and tried and condemned him as an “enemy of the state” in January 1942. Just seven months later, in July 1942, Titus Brandsma was dead. His death was caused by the terrible sufferings inflicted on him by the Nazis. At the very end, Brandsma, like other prisoners, was used as a guinea pig for Nazi “doctors.” To combat malaria affecting German soldiers, the Nazis experimented on prisoners, in this instance, involuntarily infecting them with malaria and then using exotic and dangerous drugs in an attempt at a cure. At that point in his captivity, Brandsma, already worthless to the Nazis since he couldn’t work—and whose convictions they could not beat or dehumanize out of him — became a dead man walking.
Defending Free Press and Education: Appointed by the Dutch bishops, Fr. Brandsma authored a 1941 pastoral letter fiercely condemning anti-Semitic laws.
There were around 40 million Protestants and 20 million Catholics in Nazi Germany. A vast majority of Germans including Germany’s 20,000 Catholic priests lived under Hitler’s ideology and were not persecuted by the Nazis. The Nazis wanted all culture and thought to bend to their ideology and whoever spoke or acted against that imperative were imprisoned and often murdered. The first clergymen to arrive at Dachau were Polish priests sent there in 1939 for helping the Polish Resistance against the Nazi invasion. Many of these nearly 2,000 Polish priests suffered the same brutal treatment as did Titus Brandsma — a regimen of starvation, beatings, and involuntary medical experimentation. From 1933 to 1945, of the 3,000 clergymen who were inmates at Dachau—whether Catholic, Protestant, Greek Orthodox, or Muslim — about 1,100 perished. Nearly one-third of Dachau’s 200,000 prisoners (or 65,000) were Jews, many of them Germans and Austrians.
Titus Brandsma as a young Carmelite friar.
Titus Brandsma as a 30 year old Dutch Carmelite priest. Brandsma was a teacher, journalist, and modern religious art advocate.
Brandsma as a teacher in 1924.
Bradsma was university rector at Nijmegan in 1934. Hitler had rose to power in neighboring Germany the year before which Brandsma vehemently opposed for the rest of his life.
For weeks since his arrival into Dachau concentration camp just outside cheery Munich, Brandsma had been starved and savagely beaten regularly. His body depleted of strength, Brandsma became infected with camp plague. Refusing to go to the camp hospital called by camp prisoners “a hell within hell,” Brandsma was eventually admitted. Its doctors, having no mission to heal and restore their patients often used them, as they did Brandsma, for cruel medical experimentation. In the end, the camp doctor assigned to Brandsma’s case ordered that his patient, now dying of terminal renal failure, be given a lethal injection administered by a camp nurse. The woman remembered his last moments and that he reached into his tattered pocket to give her his only personal possession. It was a crude rosary made and given to Brandsma by another Dutch prisoner who had been executed.
Titus Brandsma in studeerkamer. ‘den geleerden pater uit Oss’. (FOTO GPD/PR). Bob van Huet.
One of the last photographs of Titus Brandsma before his arrest and condemnation by the Nazis as an “enemy of the state.” Brandsma had been appointed by the Catholic Bishops in Holland as their chief spokesman to defend the freedom of Catholic education and the press. After Brandsma authored a Pastoral Letter on behalf of the bishops that was read in all Catholic parishes in July 1941 that officially condemned the Nazis’s anti-Semitic laws and informed Dutch Catholics that they would be denied the sacraments if they supported the Nazi party, the Nazis arrested the Carmelite friar. Brandsma spent most of the winter and spring of 1942 in Nazi jails in Holland and was taken to Dachau concentration camp on June 19, 1942 where he died on July 26, 1942.
A drawing of Titus Brandsma in Amersfoort prison in Holland in spring 1942. It was drawn by a fellow prisoner who himself was executed by the Nazis on May 6, 1942.
When the Nazis arrested Brandsma in Holland for his exercise of free speech, the journalist-priest marveled at his bad luck: “I’m 60 years old and I’m going to jail.” Confined in assorted jails of worsening condition all that winter and into spring he arrived at Dachau in June 1942. Brandsma worked to keep a positive, indeed charitable, attitude as far as possible within a hideously barbaric situation. When he went so far as to encourage other Catholic camp prisoners to include the Nazi guards in their prayers, the other prisoners violently demurred. Brandsma retorted: “I didn’t say you ought to pray for them all day long!”
Titus Brandsma’s signature with the abbreviation “O.Carm.” after it indicating his being part of the Carmelite Order.
Worn out by the violent maltreatment of the Nazi camp guards, and inhuman camp conditions, Brandsma fell ill and, deemed invaluable for work, became a guinea pig for camp medical experiments conducted by SS doctors. When Brandsma died in Nazi hands on July 26, 1942–a lethal injection of carbolic acid administered by a young Berlin-trained nurse assigned to Dachau under penalty of being shot for insubordination and who, over 40 years later, testified at Brandsma’s beatification process–his remains were taken by camp staff after three days and burned in the camp’s old furnaces.
By 1943 Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) had ordered and installed new and bigger furnaces. They were used around the clock to dispose of prisoner remains until April 29, 1945 when Dachau was liberated by a large force of American soldiers. The Nazis scraped Brandsma’s ashes out of the furnace and disposed of them in the camp’s unmarked pit among thousands of other victims at Dachau. Inside this once-mass killing facility set within a leafy, banal German suburb that gives it its name, it is unknown the precise number of actual prisoner deaths that occurred here between 1933 and 1945, although 32,000 deaths are recorded.
Furnaces in the crematorium at Dachau. More than 31,000 prisoners died in Dachau concentration camp from 1933 to its liberation by American soldiers in 1945. The former concentration camp is situated in the middle of a leafy, banal German suburb of the same name.
When 61-year-old Fr. Brandsma died in Nazi hands on July 26, 1942 from a lethal injection of carbolic acid administered by a young Berlin-trained nurse assigned to Dachau under penalty of being shot for insubordination, his remains were taken by camp staff after three days and burned in the camp’s old furnaces. Over 40 years later, the nurse testified at Fr. Brandsma’s beatification process. Author’s photograph, July 1984.
At the Dachau Memorial Site, a Carmelite convent of contemplative nuns is one of the memorials close by. Built on the site of a gravel pit where prisoners were sent to work when punished for breaking camp rules, the convent’s entrance is through a former Dachau guard tower.
Always the writer, Titus Brandsma kept writing even in prison. These prison writings are a source for amazement and inspiration today. In the depth of his own terrible suffering at the hands of others, Titus Brandsma wrote: “In the depths of our being we come upon the activity of God by which he sustains us and we are led and guided by him. We have to go to its deepest source to rediscover ourselves in God.”
The author at Dachau concentration camp in July 1984. The sculpture memorial to Dachau prisoners from 1933 to 1945 by Yugoslav sculptor Nandor Glid (1924-1997) is just behind me. Glid was a Holocaust survivor who had been a forced laborer and partisan during the war and whose father and most of his family were murdered in Auschwitz.
My photograph of the entrance gate into the camp during a visit in July 1984.
Another of my photographs from Dachau in July 1984 — barbed wire, ditch, and a watch tower. The broad expanse of the prisoner barracks were dismantled leaving only their graveled footprint.
Martyrdom in Dachau: Arrested as an “enemy of the state” in 1942, Fr. Brandsma endured brutal beatings and lethal medical extermination.
Brief newspaper announcement of the death of Blessed Fr. Titus Brandsma, Carmelite Order. Brandsma’s cause for sainthood continues to go forward today.
Oil painting by Steve Trizna of the stages of life of Blessed Fr. Titus Brandsma, O. Carm. Author’s photograph.
Burnished bronze statue of St. Titus Brandsma, O. Carm. by Demetz Studio (Italy), National Shrine and Museum of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Darien, Illinois. July 2021. Author’s photograph.
Radical Forgiveness at Death: He gifted his handmade rosary to the camp nurse who administered his execution; she later returned to her faith and testified for his sainthood.
Alfred Delp, S.J., stands as one of the most compelling Christian witnesses of the Second World War: a Jesuit priest, intellectual, and Nazi resister whose prison meditations transformed personal suffering, political tyranny, and the certainty of death into enduring reflections on faith, freedom, conscience, and hope.
Alfred Delp, S.J. sailing. Fair use.
Arrested by the Gestapo on July 28, 1944—just eight days after the failed July 20 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler—Delp was formally moved to Berlin’s notorious Tegel Prison in August 1944, following initial brutal interrogations and torture at the Gestapo’s Lehrter Straße Cell Prison (known as Moabit). Fr. Delp spent months imprisoned in Tegel, much of the time shackled. During imprisonment he wrote profound Advent and Christmas meditations, which were smuggled out of prison on scraps of paper.
During World War II in Germany, Alfred Delp, S.J. (September 15, 1907 – executed, Berlin, February 2, 1945) was a member of the Kreisauer Kreis (The Kreisau Circle) composed of German men and women from a variety of backgrounds who opposed Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime.
Fr. Delp was arrested by the Nazis in 1944 and, after six months in prison in shackles, the German Catholic priest and Jesuit was sentenced to death for high treason and executed by hanging on Candlemas 1945.
Following the Allied victory in 1945, Fr. Delp’s prison writings were assembled into a posthumous book called Facing Death (German: Im Angesicht des Todes). A highlight of the 37-year-old Delp’s writings are his seasonal sermons and meditations for Advent and Christmas which were written as he languished in a cell “three steps wide” surrounded by Nazi guards.
Fr. Delp’s writings, scrawled on numerous slips of paper and smuggled out before his death, have been compared to Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison also written in Tegel prison in Berlin, Germany, during World War II.
Father Delp was developing his thoughts and writing about the annual Advent drama at least as early as 1933 so his prison writings became a concluding chapter of a lasting adult interest as he faced his death.
Jesuit priest Alfred Delp was a member of the German Nazi Resistance and the Kreisau Circle, a group that opposed Hitler’s regime and envisioned a democratic Germany after the fall of the Third Reich.
German-born Alfred Delp S.J. (September 15, 1907 – Berlin, 2 February 1945).
Fr. Delp wrote his meditations and sermons on Advent and Christmas when he was a political prisoner of the Nazis in Germany in World War II.This photo was taken most likely in 1942 or 1943—prior to his arrest by the Gestapo in July 1944. It captures a rare, candid moment of Delp smiling outdoors, wearing his round wire-rimmed glasses and civilian clothing. At the time, Father Delp was a Nazi resister living a dangerous double life. He was serving as a parish priest at St. Georg’s Church in Munich while secretly utilizing a covert underground network to help Jewish refugees escape Nazi persecution into neutral Switzerland. By 1942, he had joined the Kreisau Circle at the invitation of Count Helmuth von Moltke. This clandestine group of Christian intellectuals, theologians, and socialists met secretly to design a humane, democratic, and Christian-principled social order for Germany to rebuild upon after the inevitable downfall of Adolf Hitler’s regime. Though the Kreisau Circle explicitly favored peaceful planning over violence, the Gestapo rounded up its members following the failed July 20, 1944 bomb plot to assassinate Hitler. Delp was arrested on July 28, 1944, severely tortured, subjected to a mock show trial, and ultimately executed by hanging on February 2, 1945. PHOTO: “Alfred Delp Mannheim” by Graf Foto is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
From Alfred Delp, S.J., “Figures of Advent,” Advent of the Heart, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2006 (adapted):
“I see this year’s Advent (December 1944 in Berlin’s Tegel Prison) with an intensity and discomposure like never before….Along with these thoughts comes the memory of an angel that a good person gave me for Advent in 1942. It held a banner: ‘Rejoice, for the Lord is near.’ A war bomb destroyed the angel as well as that good person although I often sense that she continues to do angel-services for me. It is the knowledge of the quiet angels of annunciation, who speak their message of blessing into the distress of our world situation and scatter their blessing’s seeds which begin to grow in the middle of the night which informs and encourages us of the truth of a situation. These angels of Advent are not loud angels of public jubilation and fulfillment but, silent and unnoticed, they come into private and shabby rooms and appear before our hearts as they did long ago. Silently they bring the questions of God and proclaim to us the miracles of God, with whom nothing is impossible. Advent is a time of refuge because it has received a message – and so to believe in God’s auspicious seeds that the angels offer an open heart are the first things we must do with our lives. The next is to go through the days as announcing messengers ourselves. We wait in faith for the abundance of the coming harvest – not because we trust the earth or the stars or our own good sense and courage – but only because we have perceived God’s messages and know about His herald angels – and even have ourselves encountered one.”
SECOND SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
Standing Nativity Angel holding a lyre. Author’s photograph.
Thomas Merton in his introduction to Alfred Delp’s Prison Writings – a modern compilation of a young German Jesuit’s writings in prison in Berlin before he was executed for high treason as a Nazi resister in World War II – states that Fr. Delp was condemned because he and others “hoped to build a new Germany on Christian principles.” (p. xxv.)
Merton, a mid20th century Trappist monk, priest, and spiritual writer, links Fr. Delp’s political activity in the Kreisau Circle—an underground group of about twenty-five German dissidents of diverse backgrounds opposed to the Nazi regime—to broader Church doctrine and the western tradition of liberalism in evidence since the Ancient Greeks that “always hoped to attain a more equitable world order by peaceful collaboration among nations.” (ibid.)
For Fr. Delp, according to Merton, the stark choice before human beings remained the crucial one of global order or global destruction. Father Delp observed that even religious people in his time had fallen into the militaristic government’s syllogistic trap of “conquest first and a new and better world later.”
Fr. Delp’s concern when making this sort of choice is that “if the person who says it tolerates or helps further conditions which are fatal to mankind…or weakens his or her own spiritual, moral, and religious sense” – then even “the most pious prayer can become a blasphemy.” (ibid.) Fr. Delp proposed that any human indifference to honesty and justice originating in passionate conviction vitiates human nature which is left to then express itself in a vicious circle of fear and arrogance.
From Fr. Delp’s perspective, his active participation in Kreisauer Kreis for which he was executed by the Nazis in February 1945 pointed to the eschatological character of the Advent drama by the young Jesuit priest’s hope in his time for the political and social ruin of Germany which had sunk into bitter darkness and that it would find its way ahead by the light of each person’s burning candle “for honesty and justice.”
Hanging symmetrically from the classical pilasters are lush green pine Advent wreaths accented with vibrant, formal red ribbon bows. Against a peach-toned back wall is a dedicated devotional stand filled with dozens of glowing red glass prayer candles lit by parishioners. Author’s photograph.
Alfred Delp, S.J. Fair use.
From Alfred Delp S.J., Prison Writings, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2004:
“So this Sunday we must again fold our hands and kneel humbly before God in order that his salvation may be active in us and that we may be ready to call upon him and be moved by his presence. The arrogance so typical of modern men and women is deflated here. At the same time, the icy loneliness and helplessness into which we are frozen melts under the divine warmth that fills and blesses us …If we are terrified by a dawning realization of our true condition, that terror is completely calmed by the certain knowledge that God is on the way and actually approaching. Our fate, no matter how much it may be entwined with the inescapable logic of circumstance, is still nothing more than the way to God, the way God has chosen for the ultimate consummation of his purpose, for his permanent ends. Light your candles – such candles as you possess – for they are the appropriate symbol for all that must happen in Advent if we are to live.”
THIRD SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
Part of a grand nativity scene, a young woman, Martha, dressed in traditional rustic garments, holds a woven basket overflowing with apples and pears, while a garland of red berries drapes down her skirt. Author’s photograph.
On Friday, July 28, 1944, two Gestapo men were waiting outside St. George’s church in Munich, a simple Baroque pile in an almost pastoral setting near the Englischer Garten.
Eight days before there had been an assassination attempt on Hitler’s life which failed. For active German dissidents to the Nazi regime in custody or, for the time being, still walking free, things were going to get worse.
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke (1907 – 1945), one of the leaders of the Kreisau Circle, a type of anti-Nazi salon, had been in prison since January 1944. Now, following the failed bombing at the Wolf’s Lair, Peter Yorck von Wartenburg (1904 –1944) who was the other leader of the Kreisau Circle, was immediately arrested and sent to Berlin where he was tried and executed on August 8, 1944.
St. Michael’s Church (Michaelskirche), Munich. July 1984. Author’s photograph.
Beyond its architectural prominence as the largest Renaissance church north of the Alps, St. Michael’s maintains a deeply profound, historic connection to the German anti-Nazi resistance through Father Alfred Delp, S.J. The young Jesuit priest began his formal priestly ministry within these walls when he was ordained on June 24, 1937, by Munich’s celebrated Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber who delivered his famous anti-Nazi Advent sermons in 1933 which largely defined his ongoing critical tone towards the regime. Father Delp frequently ascended the pulpit of St. Michael’s to deliver powerful sermons that, alongside the courageous ministry of his fellow Jesuit Father Rupert Mayer, openly condemned the total incompatibility of National Socialist ideology with Christian values. This vocal opposition eventually led Delp to join the Kreisau Circle, a clandestine network of dissidents drafting plans for a humanitarian, Christian social order to rebuild Germany following the anticipated collapse of the Third Reich. Implicated in the wider resistance movements, Delp was arrested by the Gestapo in July 1944 and subsequently executed by hanging at Berlin-Plötzensee prison on February 2, 1945. In recognition of his enduring martyrdom, the Archdiocese of Munich and Freising has formally initiated the diocesan phase for Father Delp’s beatification process, ensuring that St. Michael’s continues to honor him as one of its most courageous historic voices.
St. Georg München-Bogenhausen, Munich:
St. Georg München-Bogenhausen. The exterior with its historic cemetery of St. Georg Church in Bogenhausen, Munich. A diocesan parish, a church has existed on this site since the Middle Ages. The current building was reconstructed between 1766 and 1768 and designed by Late Baroque architect Johann Michael Fischer, with interior art created by master sculptors Johann Baptist Straub and Ignaz Günther. As St. Georg was a filial church to the larger Heilig Blut (Holy Blood) parish nearby, Father Delp was the church rector—though to the ordinary churchgoers who attended his anti-Nazi sermons every Sunday, he effectively acted as their pastor.
Jesuit Father Delp’s primary assignment in Munich was serving on the editorial staff of the Jesuit journal Stimmen der Zeit (“Voices of the Times”). When the Nazi Gestapo suppressed and seized the journal’s offices in April 1941, Delp was left without a formal station. The local Archdiocese of Munich stepped in and appointed him as the rector/administrator of this small parish to keep him active. While his regional Jesuit Provincial superior (Augustin Rösch) kept close contact with him and introduced him to the anti-Nazi Kreisau Circle, the day-to-day parish staff at St. Georg was otherwise standard diocesan clergy.
The ornate, highly detailed Late Baroque (Rococo) interior of St. Georg Church in Bogenhausen, Munich, Germany. The architecture and abundant decoration emphasize dramatic composition, theatrical lighting effects, and rich faux-marble finishes characteristic of 18th-century Bavarian church design. PHOTO: “St. Georg München-Bogenhausen, Hochaltar” by Rufus46, used under CC BY-SA 3.0 / Cropped from original.
The danger surrounding Father Delp’s ministry was evident in the constant scrutiny of the Gestapo. Rather than denouncing the Nazi regime through direct political attacks, his sermons systematically dismantled its core ideology. From the pulpit, he rejected the State-as-God concept, affirming instead that only God possessed supreme authority. He also spoke forcefully about the intrinsic dignity, spiritual freedom, and equal worth of every human being, principles that stood in absolute opposition to Nazi racial doctrines and persecution.
The Gestapo fully understood what Delp was doing. Undercover agents and informants regularly filled the pews of St. Georg, reporting his sermons back to the authorities. Delp, in turn, knew they were there and occasionally mocked their presence from the pulpit itself. His dynamic and compelling preaching style drew large crowds, making his influence impossible to ignore. Ultimately, it was this fearless refusal to remain silent that kept him under permanent surveillance and led to his eventual arrest by the Gestapo.Portrait of Father Alfred Delp with glasses smiling [Photograph]. (n.d.). Historical Archives of the German Resistance / Public Domain.
One of the two Gestapo men waiting outside St. George’s to arrest Fr. Alfred Delp, S.J. happened to be an old schoolmate of his.
Like other Catholic bishops and priests who were known de facto dissenters working against the Nazi regime, especially its social and racial ideologies and practices, Fr. Delp had long been under close surveillance by the Gestapo.
As a member of the Kreisau Circle – that group of professionals of diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds with one thing in common (being dyed-in-the-wool anti-Nazis), Fr. Delp was their social scientist with a Ph.D. He illumined their minds to cutting-edge labor issues, including what could be the German worker’s role in a post-war liberated Germany.
Helmuth James Graf von Moltke (March 11, 1907 – January 23, 1945).
Count Moltke had close sympathies with the democratic forces of the day and expressed open criticism as he watched the rise of Hitler. In 1933 he refused to accept Nazi appointments. After the outbreak of World War II, as an expert adviser on international law and the laws of war he served as war administration councilor in the Office for Foreign Affairs/Counterintelligence in the Armed Forces High Command in Berlin. He was particularly active in advocating for humane treatment of prisoners of war and observance of international law. In 1940 Moltke with Peter Graf Yorck von Wartenburg became the leading figures in a group that emerged as the Kreisau Circle with its discussions held in Berlin and Kreisau. Moltke, formulating memoranda on the establishment of a new political order in Germany, systematically extended his contacts to Protestant and Catholic church leaders and to leaders of the social democratic political opposition. Moltke was arrested on January 19, 1944 after he had warned members of the Solf Circle that they were under Gestapo surveillance. His involvement in the plans for a coup against Hitler was not exposed until after the failure of the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944. Helmuth James Graf von Moltke was sentenced to death by the People’s Court on January 11, 1945 and executed on January 23, 1945 in Berlin-Plötzensee. http://www.gdw-berlin.de/home/ Fair use.
Under arrest, Fr. Delp disappeared into Nazi prisons in Munich and Berlin for almost three weeks. None of his friends could find him.
At Lehrterstrasse, a Gestapo prison in Berlin that specifically dealt with German resisters, the doctor-priest was regularly beaten. Fr. Delp was charged by the National Socialists with a half dozen crimes—being in Kriesau Circle; holding resistance meetings; knowing von Moltke and other anti-Nazis; knowing Claus von Stauffenberg who placed the bomb on July 20, 1944 to assassinate Hitler; knowing in advance of the assassination plot; and, displaying a general attitude of anti-Nazism.
The charge of knowing about the assassination plot before it happened greatly concerned Fr. Delp. He categorically denied it and, consequently worked vigorously through his lawyer to disprove it.
Having moved to Tegel Prison in Berlin on August 8, 1944, Fr. Delp’s whereabouts were finally discovered on August 15, 1944, by Marianne Hapig (1894-1973), a social worker and indefatigable friend to German resistance.
At Tegel, Fr. Delp found another significant friend—Harald Poelchau (1907-1972) the prison’s Lutheran chaplain since 1933. With the agency of chaplain Poelchau, the Catholic priest, Fr. Delp, had wafers and wine to say Mass. Also, messages could be smuggled in and out by way of the laundry.
It was through such a clandestine route that Fr. Delp made his final vows as a Jesuit on December 8, 1944. In front of a visiting witness, Fr. Delp pronounced the vow formula. Afterwards, he apologized for his emotion as he sank into a prison chair and wept.
Marianne Hapig (March 5, 1894 – March 23, 1973).Marianne Hapig discovered Father Delp’s presence at Tegel prison in Berlin after his disappearance following his arrest in Munich three weeks earlier. A career social worker and anti-Nazi Marianne Hapig and her lifelong jurist friend Marianne Pünder managed to smuggle Alfred Delp’s prison writings out of Tegel prison where soon after the war they were published. Fair use.
Dorothee und Harald Poelchau. Dorothee Poelchau (born Dorothee Ziegele; June 6, 1902 – November 4, 1977) was a German librarian and a prominent anti-Nazi resistance fighter who worked alongside her husband, Harald Poelchau. PHOTO: “Dorothee und Harald Poelchau (cropped)” by OTFW, Berlin is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Harald Poelchau (October 5, 1903 – April 29, 1972). Rev. Poelchau gained his doctorate in 1931 under Paul Tillich, the leading representative of Religious Socialism. At the end of 1932, Poelchau applied for a prison chaplain’s post in Berlin and became the first cleric to be employed by the National Socialist regime in a penal institution. As an official in the Justice Department he rapidly became an important source of support for the victims of National Socialist violence, and gave spiritual comfort to hundreds of people sentenced to death as they faced execution. From 1941 onwards he was a member of the circle around Helmuth James Graf von Moltke and attended the first major Kreisau Conference. After the failed coup attempt of July 20, 1944 Poelchau was able to pass on last messages and farewell letters to the relatives of many of those sentenced to death. Harald Poelchau managed to avoid being investigated by the Gestapo and survived the war. Fair use.
Many of Fr. Delp’s Advent writings come during these months in prison. They were smuggled out by Marianne Hapig and, her lifelong friend, Marianne Pünder. For more than a decade, Fr. Delp had written extensively on the Christian season of expectant waiting for the coming of Christmas.
Die gefesselten Hände (English: “Bound Hands”) by Tilman Riemenschneider (c.1460-1531).
During these months in prison, his hands almost always in chains, Fr. Delp had identified with a specific artwork as he wrote his Advent thoughts onto endless slips of paper. It was a sixteenth century German wood sculpture of St. Sebastian known as Die gefesselten Hände (English:“Bound Hands”) by Tilman Riemenschneider (c.1460-1531).
Alfred Delp, S.J. at his trial. Fair use.
In a moving ceremony while in prison and facing possible execution, Father Delp made his final Jesuit vows. Delp refused Nazi offers that could have secured his freedom if he abandoned his Jesuit vocation.
At his two-day trial in January 1945, rabid Nazi judge Roland Freisler was interested in one charge against Delp: the priest’s association with von Moltke. The leader of Kreisauer Kreis would be soon on death row and executed on January 23, 1945. Since 1942, Friesler’s reign of terror already included 5,000 death sentences as president of the People’s Court. It did not help that Fr. Delp was a Catholic priest and Jesuit.
So with Hitler, Friesler was maniacally anticlerical. Although many Nazis grew up as Catholics, in adulthood such notorious men as Hitler, Josef Goebbels, Martin Bormann, Heinrich Himmler, and others, held Christianity in utter and complete contempt. (Ian Kershaw; Hitler: a Biography; pp. 381–82). Once in power, Hitler believed that Christianity signified “the systematic cultivation of the human failure” and that its religious organization and central beliefs had to be marginalized and eventually purged from a heroic German worldview (Alan Bullock; Hitler: a Study in Tyranny; p. 218).
When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, the Superior-General of the Jesuits was just then a Pole, Wlodimir Ledóchowski, S.J. (1866 –1942). Ledóchowski who was in charge of neutral Vatican Radio made international broadcasts about Nazi wartime atrocities in many languages.
Wlodimir Ledóchowski, S.J. (1866 –1942). Ledóchowski, S.J. (1866 –1942) had been the Polish Superior-General of the Jesuits since 1915 when Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, setting off World War II. A renowned institutional builder, Ledóchowski established several notable institutes and colleges in Rome. In January 1940, Vatican Radio controlled by the Jesuits and with Pope Pius XII’s authorization broadcast the details of the Polish wartime situation. When the German ambassador protested the German language broadcasts, the Pope honored the request. But Vatican Radio broadcasts in other languages of the Poland situation continued and in even more explicit detail. The British press at the time hailed Vatican Radio as “tortured Poland’s powerful advocate.” see – Peter Hebblethwaite; Paul VI The First Modern Pope, Paulist Press, 1993, p. 140.Portrait of Father Wlodimir Ledóchowski, S.J. [Photograph]. (n.d.). Historical Archives of the Society of Jesus / Public Domain.
That Fr. Delp remained a Jesuit—even after he was offered a plea deal by the Nazis to walk free of all charges if he renounced his religious faith—undoubtedly deserved the death penalty in Freisler’s court.
After the death sentence was pronounced on January 11, 1945, the typical procedure of immediate execution was delayed. During this time, the bombing by British and Americans intensified. Fr. Delp desperately hoped that the Allies would arrive in time to set political prisoners, including himself, free. But, finally, on February 2, 1945, at Berlin-Plötzensee Alfred Delp was taken from his holding pen by the Nazi executioner and executed by hanging. The next day, February 3, 1945, Roland Freisler presiding in his People’s Court, was killed by collateral damage in an Allied bombing attack.
Alfred Delp, S.J.
From Alfred Delp, S.J., “Meditation for the Third Sunday of Advent Written in Tegel Prison, Berlin, December 1944” (adapted), Advent of the Heart, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2006:
“Mankind is challenged again to stand and deliver. Only man does not merely exchange one set of chains for another – God’s calls are always creative. They increase the very reality within us that is called upon – precisely because of their realness and authenticity…Freedom is the breath of life. We sit in musty bomb cellars and cramped prisons and groan under the bursting and destructive blows of fate. We should finally stop giving everything a false glamour and unrealistic value and begin to bear it for what it is – unredeemed life. As soon as we do this, the jangling of chains and the trembling of nerves and the faintness of heart transform themselves into a small prayer – “Drop down, dew…” We should much more definitively unite our concrete destiny with those kind of connections and call upon God’s redeeming freedom. Then the narrowness widens, our lungs breathe in fresh air again, and the horizon has promises again. Existence still weeps and mourns, but already a soft, joyous melody of longing and knowledge is ringing through the mourners’ broken voices. With this knowledge and attitude humanity releases itself from the lonely relationship to things and circumstances. A person finds wholesomeness and healing – not the goal-oriented, cool distance of calculation, mechanization, and organization. It is rather that higher level of freedom, the perspective given to someone looking from the heights to what lies below. The voice of such a person is not so quickly silenced!”
“The conditions for true joy have nothing to do with conditions of our exterior life but consist of humanity’s interior frame of mind and competence, which make it possible now and again for the person to sense, even in adverse circumstances, what life is really about…And the first answer is found in the figure of John the Baptist who personifies Advent. Humanity must be brought to an absolute clarity about himself and honestly before himself and others. He must come down from all the pedestals of arrogance onto which he always climbs…From the high-horses of vanity and self-deception that, for a time, let themselves be trotted out so proudly. Those horses though finally throw off their “master” in the wilderness…Two criteria identify whether we are following an authentic impulse or not…Both are found once again in John the Baptist. The first is service – human honesty requires a person to see himself as a servant and perceive his reality as mission and an assignment…The second criterion keeps us on track- annunciation, which calls us to praise of God. An extended personal effort is required to keep giving oneself the impulse to rise above, move away from self. But at the same time this is how a human being attains the necessary openness in which he or she must continue if sincerely wanting to strive toward the great realities God has prepared for him or her.”
FOURTH SUNDAY IN ADVENT.
Advent Nativity awaiting the birth of Jesus. Author’s photograph.
Thomas Merton makes clear about Father Delp that his writings on Advent are usually a simple presentation of the traditional Christian faith with no special originality to his images. (p. xxxv, Prison Writings). It is Fr. Delp’s application of those facts based in his personal experience – as an active dissident and prisoner of a Germany in ruins during World War II – that restores the sometimes hackneyed outcome to Advent to its original hope.
In Fr. Delp’s world, if humanity is fully alert to the desperation and bitterness of the times, Advent’s basic image of God-made-man becomes immensely opportune and favorable for humanity’s future although not holding any foregone conclusions or sudden outcomes.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” Luke 4:18-19.
Thomas Merton views Father Delp’s Advent meditations in Pauline terms, although Fr. Delp found St. Paul sometimes had a ‘tendency to over-emphasize.’ (p. 55, ibid.). Humanity hopes in God’s close alliance so to win back or have restored a future that is not any longer in ruins and in which humanity and even created life itself is absurdly helpless to fix.
His show trial before the notorious Nazi “People’s Court” took place over two days, spanning January 8–9, 1945. He was officially sentenced to death on January 11, 1945, and subsequently executed on February 2, 1945.
Holy Face painted by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois. Author’s photograph.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (French, 1873-1897) traced and painted this image of the Holy Face of Jesus and tacked it to wool for hanging as a gift to her sister Céline who was at home at Les Buissonnets taking care of their widower father who was suffering from illness. The National Shrine of St. Thérèse in Darien, Illinois. It may be expected that a similar sort of facial expression was found on Father Delp. On February 2, 1945 Father Delp was imprisoned, tried and executed by the Nazis for “hop[ing] to build a new Germany on Christian principles.”
Alfred Delp S.J. Fair use.
From Alfred Delp S.J., Prison Writings, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2004:
“God in the Christmas encounter is still the challenging God. The greatest misconceptions all center round the typical Christmas picture of God. Humanity becomes so wrapped up in appearance that the breathtaking reality of the birth of God as a human child scarcely enters our mind and the soul doesn’t grasp its significance….Of course the externals, the sweet sentimental pictures, carols, cribs and so on, are a comfort….but there is a great deal more to the nativity than that. The truth of it is too tremendous to be appreciated unless one concentrates on it fully. Since the birth of God, humanity has been confirmed in the hope that when we turn to God’s throne for favor that God is on our side. This does not mean that God has dethroned Himself any more than it means that human life has become a primrose path in the wake of that stupendous event. We need to look critically at the tendency to sentimentalize the divine attributes by personifying them in an innocent child or over-beautifying the adult Jesus. The glamorizing of the nativity story – the making the whole tone of Christ’s life equal to a Baroque sermon full of ominous warnings and grave moralizing – has contributed quite a lot to the West’s being paralyzed in the face of those conditions that hinder us and keep us trapped. God became man but nevertheless is God, master of all creation. Human beings must approach the God-made-man with reverence and adoration – disenthralling themselves in order to find themselves. It is the only way.”
His prison writings remain among the most powerful spiritual documents produced during the Third Reich, uniting Christian faith, human dignity, and resistance to totalitarianism
Alfred Delp, S.J. fair use.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Bullock, Alan, Hitler: a Study in Tyranny, Completely Revised Edition, Harper & Row, New York, 1964.
Delp, S.J., Alfred, Advent of the Heart, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2006.
Delp, S.J., Alfred, Prison Writings, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2004.
Hebblethwaite, Peter, Paul VI The First Modern Pope, Paulist Press, New York, 1993.
Kershaw, Ian, Hitler: a Biography, W. W. Norton & Company, New York, 2010.
Kidder, Annemarie S., Ultimate Price Testimonies of Christians who Resisted the Third Reich, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, 2012.
Royal, Robert, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century A Comprehensive World History, Crossroad, New York, 2000.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
FEATURE image: Thérèse Martin (St. Thérèse of Lisieux) at 15 years old in a photograph taken in October 1887.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux demonstrated that sanctity is achieved not through dramatic achievements but through humility, trust, suffering accepted with love, and fidelity to ordinary daily life, a spiritual vision that transformed an unknown Carmelite nun into one of the most influential figures in modern Christianity.
Thérèse Martin at 8 years old in 1881.
Thérèse Martin at 8 years old in 1881 with her sister Céline. The Martin family had moved from Alençon to Lisieux to be with the Guerin relatives. Zélie Martin had died four years before.
By John P. Walsh
October 1 is the feast day of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (French, 1873-1897), one of only four women “doctors” in the Roman Catholic Church, and popularly known as The Little Flower of Jesus. Her religious name is Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face and, with St. Francis of Assisi, she is one of today’s most popular saints. For a young Norman woman who died at 24 years old in an obscure convent in northern France that is a surprisingly solid list of titles and accolades.
Yet, when she died on September 30, 1897, the Carmelite nuns in her community at the Carmel in Lisieux didn’t think they had any accomplishments to cite for her obituary. Her sister Céline (1869-1959), a nun in the same convent as Thérèse, observed: “In general, even in the last years, she continued to lead a hidden life, the sublimity of which was known more to God than to the Sisters around her.”1
Born Marie-Françoise-Thérèse Martin in 1873, she was the youngest of five sisters and lively and precocious. She lost her mother Zélie Martin (née Guérin, 1831-1877) to breast cancer as a four-year-old. The next decade – according to Thérèse’s journal (The Story of a Soul, begun in 1895) – was the most “distressing” years of her life.2
Thérèse’s mother was the breadwinner in the Martin house and after she died little Thérèse naturally turned to her father Louis (1823-1894) for nurturing along with her four older sisters — especially the second eldest, Pauline.
For the rest of the 1870s and into the 1880s, Thérèse was the high-spirited baby sister in the family home called Les Buissonnets in the Normandy town of Lisieux.
Les Buissonnets, at 22 Chemin des Buissonnets in Lisieux, Normandy, is the historic brick home where St. Thérèse of Lisieux spent her childhood. The Martin family moved here in November 1877 after the death of her mother, Zélie Martin, in Alençon. Thérèse lived in this house from age four until she left at fifteen to enter the Carmel of Lisieux in 1888, beginning the religious life that would define her legacy.
Thérèse was born in Alençon in 1873 and raised in Lisieux after the death of her mother.
Les Buissonnets, St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s childhood home in Lisieux, France. October 2002. Author’s photograph.
St. Azélie-Marie “Zélie” Martin née Guérin (1831 -1877) and St. Louis Martin (1823 –1894), the mother and father of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The married couple were canonized together in the Catholic Church by Pope Francis on October 18, 2015.
As three of Thérèse’s sisters left the family homestead to enter convents -– two of them to a Carmelite convent (“Carmel”) in Lisieux and another later to a Visitation convent in Caen– the two youngest sisters, Céline and Thérèse, remained at home with their father.
Although Louis adored Thérèse and called her his “little flower,” Thérèse was headstrong and obstinate and she seemed to do chores with the attitude like she was doing the household a big favor. The young child also began to have panic attacks. Though intelligent and educated, at ten years old Thérèse believed she saw a statue of the Blessed Virgin given to her by her mother in her bedroom smile at her. While unusual, from that point forward, the girl’s nerves calmed. These early tantrums left a mark on her reputation. They, along with some of her later writings in journals, letters, and poems, left the future saint prey for others in her lifetime and after her death to be called “immature” and “sentimental,” even “neurotic.”3
Doubtless some of Thérèse’s thoughts sound naïve, though she writes profoundly: “At times when I am reading certain spiritual treatises in which perfection is shown through a thousand obstacles…my poor little mind quickly tires; I close the learned book that is breaking my head and drying up my heart and I take up Holy Scripture. Then all seems luminous to me; a single word uncovers for my soul infinite horizons, perfection seems simple to me, I see it is sufficient to recognize one’s nothingness and to abandon oneself as a child into God’s arms.”4
Marie.
Marie (1860-1940), the eldest Martin sister. After she entered the Carmel in Lisieux, she was called Sister Marie of the Sacred Heart.
Pauline.
Pauline (1861- 1951). Thérèse’s “favorite” sister. When Pauline entered the Carmel in Lisieux her name was Mother Agnes of Jesus.
Léonie.
Léonie (1863-1941). She entered the Visitation Sisters in Caen and took the name Sister Françoise-Thérèse.
Céline.
Céline (1869-1959) was four years older than Thérèse and closest in age. She entered the Carmel in Lisieux after Thérèse and took the name Sister Geneviève of the Holy Face.
On April 9, 1888, a 15-year-old Thérèse entered the Carmel de Lisieux on Rue du Carmel, less than a one-half mile walk from Les Buissonnets. Younger than a typical postulant, exceptions had to be made. She received the habit after some delay mostly because of her father’s declining health in January 1890. Although her profession was also postponed, Thérèse’s spiritual life was deepening through her reading of another Carmelite, St. John of the Cross (1542-1591).
St. Thérèse of Lisieux as a young nun read deeply of Saint John of the Cross who said many beautiful things about having a close relationship with Jesus.
In due time, despite difficulty in prayer and doubts about becoming a nun, Thérèse received the black veil in September 1890. In early 1891 the 18-year-old Thérèse was made sacristan’s aide, a duty she carried into 1892 as her father lay slowly dying. During this time her reading and prayer transitioned to the Gospels and she began to write poems for which she had talent. Founded in 1838 as a “progressive” convent so that by the 1890’s the nuns were allowed to practice photography within its walls, the Carmel was also a working-class foundation comprised of daughters of shop-keepers and craftspeople brought up to expect a day’s work for a day’s wage. Thérèse, like another young French mystic saint, St. Bernadette Soubirous, sought to be useful.
When Thérèse’s favorite sister Pauline was elected prioress in early 1893, Thérèse was appointed novice master (though a novice herself) and embarked on her artistic avocation of picture painting. Scheduled to graduate from the novitiate in September 1893 it was postponed in part due to convent politics. The duty of doorkeeper’s aide was added to Thérèse’s tasks.
In the spring of 1894 Thérèse began to experience chest pains and a hoarse throat that grew worse by that summer. After her father died in July 1894, Céline entered the Carmel six weeks later. It was at that time that Thérèse began to seriously formulate her “little way” of seeking holiness of life based on scripture passages. Before 1894 had ended, her sister Pauline (Mother Agnes Of Jesus) ordered her to begin to record her life story in a journal (The Story of a Soul). The novice composed her journal in segments in her free time over the next two and a half years.
Early in 1895 Thérèse voiced the first prediction of her death as her prayer life was working out an idea for what she would dedicate her life to. It would be a life with God whom she called Merciful Love. On June 9, 1895, the Feast of the Holy Trinity, during Mass, Thérèse decided to offer herself to Merciful Love who is the Lord. Thérèse confided these spiritual developments to Céline so that by summer 1895 Thérèse recommended the same devotion to more nuns in the community.
Sister Geneviève recounted later in her memoirs: “Coming out of Mass, eyes all on fire, breathing holy enthusiasm, Thérèse dragged me without saying a word to follow our Mother who was then Mother Agnes of Jesus. She told him in front of me how she had just offered herself as a Holocaust Victim to Merciful Love, asking her permission to deliver us together. Our Mother, in a great hurry at the moment, allowed everything without really understanding what it was about. Once alone, Thérèse confided in me the grace she had received and began to compose an act of offering.” (”Au sortir de la messe, l’œil tout enflammé, respirant un saint enthousiasme, Thérèse m’entraîna sans mot dire à la suite de notre Mère qui était alors Mère Agnès de Jésus. Elle lui raconta devant moi comment elle venait de s’offrir en Victime d’Holocauste à l’Amour Miséricordieux, lui demandant la permission de nous livrer ensemble. Notre Mère, très pressée en ce moment, permit tout sans trop comprendre de quoi il s’agissait. Une fois seule, Thérèse me confia la grâce qu’elle avait reçue et se mit à composer un acte d’offrande.”)
June 11, 1895.
Céline (Sister Geneviève) and Thérèse, June 11, 1895.
Throughout 1895 Thérèse continued to write–composing poems and giving them as gifts on special occasions, writing plays and painting pictures. Her spirit was characterized by humility.
Thérèse wrote: “How shall she prove her lovesince love is proved by works? Well, the little child will strew flowers, she will perfume the royal throne with their sweet scents, and she will sing in her silvery tones the canticle of Love.”5 (the emphases are Thérèse’s).
July 1876, Thérèse.
Taken in the first part of July 1876, Thérèse is 3 1/2 years old. As a child she was stubborn and headstrong. For this photography sitting, Thérèse was fidgety and ill at ease. Looking as if she might cry, the photographer had to take her photograph several times so to achieve this image of Thérèse with a pouting look. Thérèse’s mother, Zélie Martin, accompanied her youngest child during the photography session and had to reassure her throughout.
February 1886.
Thérèse was 13 years old in this photograph taken in February 1886. Just months later, at Christmas 1886, Thérèse made her first Holy Communion and at once her nervous childhood sensitivity stopped. That December 1886 she wrote about these occurrences, stating: “I felt love enter my soul, and the need to forget myself and please others, and since then I have been happy.”
October 1887.
Pretty and well-dressed Thérèse at 15 years old in a photograph taken in October 1887. At the time this photograph was taken Thérèse was seeking the permission of Bishop at Bayeux, Flavien-Abel-Antoinin Hugonin (1823-1898), to enter the convent of Carmel. She entered on April 9, 1888.
Thérèse 1887.
Thérèse entered the Carmelite convent in Lisieux at age fifteen after obtaining special permission because of her youth.
Above: Recent photograph of the Carmelite convent (Carmel) where Thérèse Martin entered at Lisieux in April 1888 and photograph of Carmel taken in September 1894 by Céline. Thérèse stands on the steps, third from the right.
Bishop Flavien-Abel-Antoine Hugonin (July 3, 1823 – May 2, 1898).
Bishop Hugonin of Bayeux and Lisieux had confirmed Thérèse on June 14, 1884. Nearly four years later, he authorized, with some reluctance on account of her young age, Thérèse’s entrance in Carmel at 15 years old. Soon after, Bishop Hugonin presided over her clothing on January 10, 1889 as he showed continued solicitude for the young Carmelite novice he had specially approved. Less than two months before his own death in May 1898, Bishop Hugonin, on March 7, 1898, gave his verbal imprimatur to Thérèse’s Story of a Soul.
Thérèse January 1889.
Above: Thérèse as a novice in Carmel in January 1889. She was 16 years old and in the convent nine months. The photographs were taken by Fr. Gombault, the bursar of the minor seminary.
Late 1894.
Thérèse (right) was one of five Martin sisters who became religious nuns. The photograph was taken by Céline in late 1894 or early 1895.
Original oil oval portrait painting of Thérèse by Céline based on her photograph of Thérèse around Christmas 1894. Céline later claimed that this image captured the real Thérèse. National Shrine & Museum of St. Thérèse, Darien. Author’s photograph.
Detail of a photograph of Thérèse taken by Céline in late 1894 or early 1895. The photographic image was the basis for an oval portrait painting done by Céline in the same time period.
Thérèse dressed as Joan of Arc in winter 1895.
A series of photographs taken by Céline from January 21 to March 25, 1895, in the convent courtyard. Thérèse is dressed as Joan of Arc. Thérèse played the part of La Pucelle in a play Thérèse had written called Joan of Arc Accomplishing Her Mission.
A longtime revered figure in France, Joan of Arc was not yet a canonized saint in late winter 1895 (Joan became a saint in 1920 and is today patron of France).
In March 1895 Thérèse was 22 years old. In a little over a year Thérèse’s symptoms of tuberculosis indicated a serious turn for the worse in her health. Over the next two years, her health continued to decline so that by summer 1897 Thérèse was on her death bed.
Close up of a photograph taken by Céline of Thérèse dressed as Joan of Arc in 1895.
Thérèse developed her famous spiritual philosophy known as the “Little Way,” rooted in humility, simplicity, and complete trust in God and love of Him.
Thérèse knew her great desire to be a missionary to Vietnam was now impractical. In June 1895 Thérèse decided to have an earthly mission within convent walls of “merciful love” and the “little way.” Like young Joan of Arc, Thérèse’s spiritual mission began on earth and would continue in heaven. So that a little over 6 months before her early death at 24 years old, Thérèse implored the favor by the command of Our Lord and of the Angels of “spending her heaven doing good on earth.”
Community of 22 Carmelite nuns in a photograph taken by Céline on Easter Monday, April 15th, 1895. First row left to right: Geneviève of the Holy Face (Céline). Second row left to right: Mother Agnès of Jesus (Pauline) and Thérèse of the Child Jesus.
Easter Monday, April 15, 1895.
Photograph taken by Céline for the feast of the Good Shepherd, April 27 or 28, 1895. Thérèse is at right between two of her white-veiled novices.
Above photograph (including close-up) was taken by Céline in July 1896. Thérèse had been ill for several months.
After July 3, 1896, photograph taken by Céline.
Thérèse 1896.
Thérèse holds a lily in a photograph taken by Céline in the convent garden in July 1896.
Carmel, July 1896.
Photograph of the community taken by Céline. July 1896.
November 1896.
Photograph taken by Céline in early-mid November 1896 of her sisters and cousin showing the work of the sacristan. Thérèse stands at right. In September 1896 Thérèse wrote a letter to her sister Marie whose text called Manuscript B became part of The Story of a Soul.
Thérèse recorded her spiritual experiences in The Story of a Soul, one of the most influential religious autobiographies of the modern age.
Photocopied pages of Thérèse’s original notebook entries in Thérèse’s own handwriting. National Shrine & Museum of St. Thérèse, Darien. Author’s photograph.
Published transcriptions of The Story of a Soul (“HISTOIRE D’UNE AME”) have varied over the years by way of editorial additions, omissions or consolidations that have taken liberties with Thérèse’s original notebook entries whose form can be like a shower of roses of her memory. One version of the spiritual classic that was updated to 1911 had followed her second exhumation in 1910 in the presence of the bishop of Bayeux which led to the start of her canonization process in 1914 (Thérèse of Lisieux was canonized in Rome on May 17, 1925). The text provides in French the following transcription of these photocopied pages in Thérèse’s own handwriting. They appear in chapter 4 (“CHAPITRE IV”) of the 1911 publication where Thérèse discusses her life in the mid-1880s as a child and teenager which includes her first Communion, Confirmation, and her personal experiences of light and darkness. Thérèse relates her deliverance from her interior pains which left her with an indescribably deep sweet peace that followed her into the convent of Carmel in Lisieux in 1888 and stayed with her in that place amid the greatest trials until her death there in 1897. These pages are part of the display at the National Shrine and Museum of St. Therese in Darien, Illinois.
French:
A cette époque, il m’eût été bien doux de faire oraison; mais Marie, me trouvant assez pieuse, ne me permettait que mes seules prières vocales. Un jour, à l’Abbaye, une de mes maîtresses me demanda quelles étaient mes occupations les jours de congé, quand je restais aux Buissonnets. Je répondis timidement: «Madame, je vais bien souvent me cacher dans un petit espace vide de ma chambre, qu’il m’est facile de fermer avec les rideaux de mon lit, et là, je pense…—Mais à quoi pensez-vous? me dit en riant la bonne religieuse.—Je pense au bon Dieu, à la rapidité de la vie, à l’éternité; enfin, je pense!» Cette réflexion ne fut pas perdue, et plus tard ma maîtresse aimait à me rappeler le temps où je pensais, me demandant si je pensais encore… Je comprends aujourd’hui que je faisais alors une véritable oraison, dans laquelle le divin Maître instruisait doucement mon cœur. Les trois mois de préparation à ma première communion passèrent vite; bientôt je dus entrer en retraite et pendant ce temps devenir grande pensionnaire. Ah! quelle retraite bénie! Je ne crois pas que l’on puisse goûter une semblable joie ailleurs que dans les communautés religieuses: le nombre des enfants étant petit, il est d’autant plus facile de s’occuper de chacune. Oui, je l’écris avec une reconnaissance filiale: nos maîtresses de l’Abbaye nous prodiguaient alors des soins vraiment maternels. Je ne sais pour quel motif, mais je m’apercevais bien qu’elles veillaient plus encore sur moi que sur mes compagnes. Chaque soir, la première maîtresse venait avec sa petite lanterne ouvrir doucement les rideaux de mon lit, et déposait sur mon front un tendre baiser. Elle me témoignait tant d’affection, que, touchée de sa bonté, je lui dis un soir: «O Madame, je vous aime bien, aussi je vais vous confier un grand secret.» Tirant alors mystérieusement le précieux petit livre du Carmel, caché sous mon oreiller, je le lui montrai avec des yeux brillants de joie. Elle l’ouvrit bien délicatement, le feuilleta avec attention et me fit remarquer combien j’étais privilégiée. Plusieurs fois, en effet, pendant ma retraite, je fis l’expérience que bien peu d’enfants, comme moi privées de leur mère, sont aussi choyées que je l’étais à cet âge. J’écoutais avec beaucoup d’attention les instructions données par M. l’abbé Domin, et j’en faisais soigneusement le résumé. Pour mes pensées, je ne voulus en écrire aucune, disant que je me les rappellerais bien; ce qui fut vrai. Avec quel bonheur je me rendais à tous les offices comme les religieuses! Je me faisais remarquer au milieu de mes petites compagnes par un grand crucifix donné par ma chère Léonie; je le passais dans ma ceinture à la façon des missionnaires, et l’on crut que je voulais imiter ainsi ma sœur carmélite. C’était bien vers elle, en effet, que s’envolaient souvent mes pensées et mon cœur! Je la savais en retraite aussi; non pas, il est vrai, pour que Jésus se donnât à elle, mais pour se donner elle-même tout entière à Jésus, et cela le jour même de ma première communion. Cette solitude passée dans l’attente me fut donc doublement chère. Enfin le beau jour entre tous les jours de la vie se leva pour moi! Quels ineffables souvenirs laissèrent dans mon âme les moindres détails de ces heures du ciel! Le joyeux réveil de l’aurore, les baisers respectueux et tendres des maîtresses et des grandes compagnes, la chambre de toilette remplie de flocons neigeux, dont chaque enfant se voyait revêtue à son tour; surtout l’entrée à la chapelle et le chant du cantique matinal: O saint autel qu’environnent les anges!*
At that time, it would have been very sweet for me to make prayers; but Mary, finding me quite pious, allowed me only my vocal prayers. One day, at the Abbey, one of my mistresses asked me what my occupations were on my days off, when I stayed at Les Buissonnets. I replied timidly: “Madam, I often go to hide in a small empty space in my room, which it is easy for me to close with the curtains of my bed, and there, I think…—But what are you thinking? said the good nun, laughing.—I think of God, of the rapidity of life, of eternity; well, I think!” This reflection was not lost, and later my mistress liked to remind me of the time when I thought, asking me if I still thought… I understand today that I was then making a true prayer, in which the divine Master gently instructed my heart. The three months of preparation for my First Communion passed quickly; Soon I had to retire and during this time become a boarder. Ah! What a blessed retreat! I do not believe that one can taste such joy anywhere else than in religious communities: the number of children being small, it is all the easier to take care of each one. Yes, I write it with filial gratitude: our mistresses of the Abbey then provided us with truly maternal care. I do not know for what reason, but I could see that they watched over me even more than my companions. Every evening, the first mistress came with her little lantern gently to open the curtains of my bed, and placed on my forehead a tender kiss. I listened very carefully to the instructions given by Father Domin, and I carefully summarized them. For my thoughts, I would not write any, saying that I would remember them well; which was true. With what happiness I went to all the services like the nuns! I was noticed in the midst of my little companions by a large crucifix given by my dear Léonie; I put it in my belt like missionaries, and it was thought that I wanted to imitate my Carmelite sister in this way. It was to her, indeed, that my thoughts and my heart often flew away! I knew she was retired too; not, it is true, so that Jesus might give himself to her, but to give herself entirely to Jesus, and that on the very day of my First Communion. This solitude spent waiting was therefore doubly dear to me. At last the beautiful day between all the days of life dawned for me! What ineffable memories left in my soul the smallest details of those hours of heaven! The joyful awakening of dawn, the respectful and tender kisses of mistresses and great companions, the washroom filled with snowflakes, with which each child saw himself clothed in turn; especially the entrance to the chapel and the singing of the morning hymn: O holy altar that surrounds the angels!
June 7, 1897.
The second pose of three posed photographs taken by Céline in the sacristy courtyard on June 7th, 1897. It was taken 4 days after Thérèse had been asked to complete the last section of A Story of a Soul. Thérèse, who holds the image of the “Holy Face” of Jesus, was in the midst of her 18-month “dark night” of faith. She knew she would die soon and Céline made these photographs intentionally as a “final remembrance” of her 24-year-old sister. After many months of sickness and suffering, Thérèse died on Thursday, September 30, 1897.
Thérèse desired missionary service and ultimately viewed prayer and sacrifice as her missionary vocation.
Circumstances were growing more difficult for Thérèse in terms of her health and spirituality. In 1896 a new prioress of Carmel confirmed Thérèse’s role in the novitiate where she could continue to teach her “little way” and work in the sacristy and the laundry room. In addition to finding it difficult to pray, in April 1896 she began to spit blood, a sure sign of the seriousness of her illness. These last eighteen months of her life proved a dark period for the normally vivacious five-foot three-inch Norman young woman. Her physical pain was often unrelenting and the dreams she had of becoming a foreign missionary to Vietnam had to be abandoned. Yet, the priest in charge of foreign missions, Father Adolphe Roulland (1870–1934) whom Thérèse had met in July 1896 as he was going to China, asked her to be a “spiritual sister” to the mission priests. This charge meant not only to pray for the priests but in her correspondence with them to “console and warn, encourage and praise, answer questions, offer corroboration, and instruct them in the meaning of her little way.”6
In 1896 Father Adolphe Roulland (1870-1934) of the Society of Foreign Missions asked the Carmel of Lisieux for a “spiritual sister.”
In a letter from Thérèse to Fr. Roulland she wrote: “Reverend Father… I feel very unworthy to be associated in a special way with one of the missionaries of our adorable Jesus, but since obedience entrusts me with this sweet task, I am assured my heavenly Spouse will make up for my feeble merits (upon which I in no way rely), and that He will listen to the desires of my soul by rendering fruitful your apostolate. I shall be truly happy to work with you for the salvation of souls. It is for this purpose I became a Carmelite nun; being unable to be an active missionary, I wanted to be one through love and penance just like Saint Teresa, my seraphic Mother….I beg you, Reverend Father, ask for me from Jesus, on the day He deigns for the first time to descend from heaven at your voice, ask Him to set me on fire with His Love so that I may enkindle it in hearts. For a long time I wanted to know an Apostle who would pronounce my name at the holy altar on the day of his first Mass….I wanted to prepare for him the sacred linens and the white host destined to veil the King of heaven…The God of Goodness has willed to realize my dream and to show me once again how pleased He is to grant the desires of souls who love Him alone.”7
Thérèse endured illness, spiritual darkness, and tuberculosis during her final years while continuing to write, pray, and encourage others.
The year 1897 was defined on the one hand by Thérèse’s physical decline because of tuberculosis and, on the other hand, her personal joy expressed in her conversations and poems. It was on the feast day of St. Joseph, March 19, 1897, during a personal novena to St. Francis Xavier (1506-1552), that Thérèse asked St. Joseph to obtain from God the favor of “spending her heaven doing good on earth.” She asked St. Francis Xavier for the same intercession.8
Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), St. Joseph and the Child Jesus, Glasgow.
By April 1897 Thérèse was gravely ill and in May 1897 was relieved of all work duties and community prayer. Thérèse continued to write in her journal but abadoned it, too weak to write. In August 1897 Thérèse’s suffering was so great she confessed to the temptation of suicide. After August 19, 1897 Thérèse was too physically weak to even ingest the consecrated communion wafer. On September 30, 1897, Thérèse died in the convent infirmary. She was 24 years old.
In her last hours Thérèse said: “Oh! It is pure suffering because there are no consolations. No, not one! O my God…Good Blessed Virgin, come to my aid! My God…have pity on me! I can’t take it anymore! I can’t take it anymore!…I am reduced…No, I would never have believed one could suffer so much…never! never!…I no longer believe in death for me…I believe in suffering…O I love Him. My God I love you…”9 These last words of the dying nun were reported by more than one witness.
At the centenary of her death in 1997, St. Pope John Paul II (1920-2005) made Thérèse a “Doctor of the Church,” one of only thirty-three such credentialed. By elevating Thérèse’s example of simple love, the Polish pope, himself called out from behind an Iron Curtain and lived to see it fall, clarified what may constitute a Church Doctor’s character and purpose.
Thérèse died in 1897 at only twenty-four years old after prolonged suffering.
August 30, 1897.
Sick Thérèse one month before her death, August 30, 1897. she promised, “After my death, I will let fall a shower of roses,” which is a sign of her own crucifixion and martyrdom in union with the crucifixion and resurrection of her mystically beloved Jesus Christ. The rose is an expression of the divine love linked to this faith-filled action of oblation that is shared with others in the Holy Spirit who ask for it.
St. Thérèse of Lisieux was beatified on April 29, 1923 and canonized on May 17, 1925. She is co-patron saint of all church missions with St. Francis Xavier and co-patron saint of France with St. Jeanne d’Arc (1412-1431). Thérèse is patron saint of AIDS sufferers, pilots, florists, bodily ills (particularly tuberculosis), and the loss of parents.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s obituary (above) was written by the nuns of her community and printed in Le Normand. In an English translation it reads:“It is with a spirited feeling of sadness that we learned Thursday evening of the death at the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel of a young person who gave the most beautiful years of youth to a life of prayer and sacrifice. Miss Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin, renounced the world at fifteen years of age and consecrated herself to God as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus. She departed after ten years of angelic life in the shadow of the cloister, and we have sweet confidence that death which put an end to long and cruel sufferings has come to take this youth in her bloom and already placed on her head the immortal crown, the goal of all our earthly aspirations. The funeral will be celebrated Monday morning at 9 o’clock in the Carmel chapel. Le Normand offers to the family of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and to the Prioress and all the Carmelite sisters the tribute of its respectful condolences.”
Thérèse in death, October 1, 1897.
Thérèse died in the evening of September 30, 1897. The next morning, October 1, 1897, before her body left the infirmary where she died, Céline (Sister Geneviève), deeply impressed by Thérèse’s peaceful countenance in death, took one final photograph of her sister.
Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus was buried in the Carmelite section at the municipal cemetery at Lisieux on the morning of October 4, 1897 after a funeral Mass at the Carmel. An obscure figure at the time of her death, the funeral procession which followed her body to the cemetery was small that day. It was to this municipal cemetery grave that pilgrims first came. Miracles began to be reported to have taken place at her tomb through her intercession. One notable miracle was that of Reine Fauquet, a four-year-old girl from Lisieux, who was blind. On May 25, 1908, the child was brought by her mother to the tomb of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus where the child’s sight was suddenly restored. A medical doctor who was not in favor of making Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus a saint, signed the medical documents attesting to the cure.10
Because of these events, a tribunal was convened by the bishop of Bayeux in August 1910 to interview witnesses at Lisieux. To investigate the corporeal remains of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus for its condition, the body was exhumed on September 6, 1910. The exhumation took place in the presence of the bishop of Bayeux, Thomas-Paul-Henri Lemonnier (1853-1927) and scores of others. The doctors who treated Thérèse before her death confirmed that the body decayed in the usual manner, finding only bones and bits of clothes.
The site of Therese’s first grave from 1897 to 1910 continues to be marked by the same cross. The site of her second grave in the same Carmelite section of the municipal cemetery is also marked. The second grave held her bodily remains in a cemented vault from 1910 until 1923. When Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus was declared a “servant of God,” the first step on the road to sainthood, there was a second exhumation. It was to the second grave site that large and growing numbers of pilgrims came to implore the Little Flower’s intercessions. The cross that marked the second grave was completely covered by prayers and tributes to Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus by pilgrims.
Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus rapidly became the focus of international devotion, with reported miracles associated with her intercession.
Second exhumation of Thérèse of the Child Jesus, August 1917.
On the occasion of her beatification, Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus’s remains were transferred for a third time on March 26, 1923 to the Carmelite Chapel at Lisieux. Saint Thérèse was canonized on May 17, 1925 by Pope Pius XI (1922-1939) and declared Doctor of the Church by Pope John Paul II (1978-2005) in 1997. Her feast day is October 1.
Reine Fauquet was 4 years old when she visited Thérèse’s grave in Lisieux and her eyesight was cured.
It is recorded that on May 26, 1908, Reine Fauquet who lived in Lisieux was cured of an eye disease following her visit to Thérèse’s grave in Lisieux. The 4-year-old child explained to her sister that she had an apparition of Thérèse: “I saw little Thérèse, right next to my bed, she took my hand, she laughed at me, she was beautiful, she had a veil, and it was all lit around her head” (“J’ai vu la petite Thérèse, là, tout près de mon lit, elle m’a pris la main, elle me riait, elle était belle, elle avait un voile, et c’était tout allumé autour de sa tête“). When Reine Fauquet met Thérèse’s sisters at the Carmel they asked her how Thérèse had been dressed in the vision. The child replied: “The same as you!′′ (“Pareille à vous!“).
Thérèse hand-made costumes for Christmas crèche. National Shrine & Museum of St. Thérèse, Darien. Spring 2018. Author’s photograph.
Using this light-blue dress with lace trim, on the evening of December 25, 1895, Thérèse created a ceremony for her community of sisters that celebrated the birthday of the Christ Child.
During the celebration each sister selected a folded note from a basket and handed it to an “angel” (one of the other sisters). The “angel” opened the note and sang its prayerful verse.
Each sister was then asked to offer to Jesus her best self in the coming year. Thérèse’s ceremony included a crib and wax figure of the infant Jesus for which Thérèse and her novice designed these hand-made costumes.
Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus was canonized in 1925 and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.
Papal decree, August 14, 1921.
The papal decree of August 14, 1921 declaring Thérèse of the Child Jesus a “Venerable” of the Church. It was promulgated by Benedict XV.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux (1873-1897) was beatified in 1923 and canonized in 1925 by Pope Pius XI (1857-1939). The bishop of Bayeux, Thomas-Paul-Henri Lemonnier (1853-1927) decided to build a large basilica dedicated to her in Lisieux, France. The cornerstone was laid after his death in 1929 by then-bishop of Bayeux-Lisieux, Emmanuel Célestin Suhard (1874-1949), soon to be named cardinal archbishop of Reims, both appointments by Pope Pius XI. The basilica project had the full support of that indomitable Roman pontiff who had placed his pontificate which began in 1922 under the sign of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Funded completely by private donations received worldwide, construction started in 1929 and continued unto its dedication in 1954.https://youtu.be/4uCfaHOy4KE?si=LsFactM78MBy8euY – retrieved January 27, 2026.
Basilica of Sainte-Thérèse in Lisieux, France. October 2002. Author’s photograph.
Architecture and Style
The Basilica of Sainte‑Thérèse in Lisieux is built in a Neo‑Byzantine–Romano style closely inspired by the Sacré‑Cœur in Paris. Its exterior is defined by massive towers, intricate arcade arches, and a monumental central dome that dominates the surrounding hillside.
Pilgrimage Significance
Drawing roughly 2 million visitors and pilgrims each year, it is the second most important pilgrimage destination in France after Lourdes. Though St. Thérèse of Lisieux is not buried here—her primary tomb is at the nearby Carmel of Lisieux where she lived—one of her arm bones, a major relic, is permanently enshrined in a reliquary in the basilica’s south transept.
Family Legacy
The basilica also houses the tombs of Saints Louis and Zélie Martin, Thérèse’s parents, who are buried in the crypt, making the site a central locus of devotion for pilgrims honoring the Martin family.
Completed and released in 2001, Thérèse de Lisieux, une course de géant (translated as “Thérèse of Lisieux, a giant’s race”) is a 35-minute documentary directed by Fabrice Maze and produced by Seven Doc. For decades, this film has served as the official introduction for visitors, screening on a continuous loop in the auditorium at the Centre d’Accueil Pastoral International Saint Jean-Paul II—the international visitor center located directly across from the Basilica. The title is inspired by a phrase describing St. Thérèse’s rapid spiritual journey, and the documentary beautifully traces her childhood, her life inside the Carmel convent, and her vast global legacy. Filmed entirely on-site in Lisieux and inside the Basilica throughout 2001, this video serves as a brief trailer for the feature.
Stained glass.
ENDNOTES:
St. Thérèse of Lisieux: her last conversations, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1977, pp. 18-19. Her complete obituary printed in Le Normand reads: “It is with a spirited feeling of sadness that we learned Thursday evening of the death at the Monastery of Our Lady of Mount Carmel of a young person who gave the most beautiful years of youth to a life of prayer and sacrifice. Miss Marie-Francoise-Thérèse Martin, renounced the world at fifteen years of age and consecrated herself to God as Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus. She departed after ten years of angelic life in the shadow of the cloister, and we have sweet confidence that death which put an end to long and cruel sufferings has come to take this youth in her bloom and already placed on her head the immortal crown, the goal of all our earthly aspirations. The funeral will be celebrated Monday morning at 9 o’clock in the Carmel chapel. Le Normand offers to the family of Sister Thérèse of the Child Jesus and to the Prioress and all the Carmelite sisters the tribute of its respectful condolences.”
see Story of a Soul: the Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1996, pp. 51-67.
The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Ida Friederike Görres, London, 2003, p. 83.
Letter from Thérèse to Father Roulland, LT 226, dated May 9, 1897, Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Volume II, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1974, p. 1094.
Story of a Soul, p. 196. For this paragraph’s chronology see Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Volume II, 1297-1329.
Görres, p.189.
Letter from Thérèse to Father Roulland, LT 189, dated June 23, 1896, Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Volume II, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1974, pp. 956-957.
see footnote 11 in Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Volume II, p. 1074.
Last conversations, pp. 204-205; 230; 243.
Thérèse and Lisieux, Pierre Descouvement and Helmut-Nils Loose, Toronto: Novalis, 1996, p. 316.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Story of a Soul: the Autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1996;
Light of the Night: The Last Eighteen Months in the Life of Thérèse of Lisieux, Jean-François Six, University of Notre Dame Press, South Bend, Indiana, 1996;
St. Thérèse of Lisieux: her last conversations, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1977;
Letters of St. Thérèse of Lisieux,Volumes I and II, translated by John Clarke O.C.D., ICS Publications, Institute of Carmelite Studies, Washington, D.C., 1974;
The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Ida Friederike Görres, London, 2003;
FEATURE image: At the top of the high altar’s retable in St. Michael Church in Chicago’s Old Town is the figure of St. Michael the Archangel, the parish church’s patron. St. Michael is mentioned in several places in both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. The near northside Chicago parish has been administered by the Redemptorist Order since 1860. Author’s photograph.
In October 1871, the Great Chicago Fire reduced the surrounding neighborhood to absolute ash. Yet, the stone walls of St. Michael Church remained standing. Built by German immigrants, this Romanesque landmark stands as a literal monument to Chicago’s resilience. If you look closely at the historic brickwork, you can still trace the legacy of the fire. Inside, the structure holds a massive, hand-carved Bavarian high altar and towering stained-glass windows crafted by the renowned Mayer of Munich studio in Germany.
The great tower of St. Michael Church on the Near North Side of Chicago identifies the Old Town Triangle historic district. St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 8.03mb
By John P. Walsh
The story is told that if you can hear the five 2-to-6-ton bells peel from the 290-feet-tall tower of St. Michael Church you live in Chicago’s Old Town. Yet it depends on which way the wind is blowing.
St. Michael Church is one of Chicago’s oldest parishes and church buildings. It was founded by German Catholics in 1852. From their arrival in the 1830s and 1840s until World War I, German immigrants of all faiths made up Chicago’s most numerous nationality.
The bell tower of St. Michael Church in Chicago’s Old Town at 1633 N. Cleveland Avenue. From 1869 to 1885, this church tower was the tallest building in Chicago. It was surpassed by the old Board of Trade Building.
Saint Michael Old Town Chicago. October 2016. Author’s photograph. 2.31mb DSC_0941 (1)
German immigrants soon migrated out of downtown Chicago and about two miles north to North Avenue. The east-west thoroughfare became known as “German Broadway.”
This European immigrant community expanded to eventually settle a four-mile square area that was called “North Town.” St. Michael Church was situated in the virtual center of North Town on land donated by successful German-born Chicago businessman and brewer Michael Diversey (1810-1869). Diversey had immigrated to the United States in the 1830s from Saarland in western Germany.
Built on land donated by successful German-born brewer, businessman, and Chicago alderman Michael Diversey (1810–1869).
St. Michael Church stands on land donated expressly for the purpose of building it by successful German-American brewer Michael Diversey (1810-1869). Diversey emigrated from Germany in 1830, and by 1844 he was a Chicago alderman. The church is named after the wealthy beer maker’s patron saint, St Michael the Archangel, whose limestone figure stands in the high niche on the façade (see photograph below). Diversey’s so-called Chicago Brewery, first established in Chicago in 1839, grew to become one of the most extensive establishments of its kind in the West.
In 1876, five years after the Great Chicago Fire that ravaged the city, the rebuilt St. Michael Church raised five new bells cast by McShane Company into the tower. The four-sided clock was installed in 1888. Atop the steeple, a twenty-four-foot-tall cross weighs over one ton.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 18.70mb
The church building is built of red brick with limestone trim in the Romanesque style. Construction started in 1866 and was finished three years later. In 1871 the new building was virtually destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire along with its North Town neighborhood. Only the church’s exterior walls remained. Using these existing walls, the fire-gutted St. Michael Church was rebuilt and rededicated in 1873. Ashes from that infamous conflagration can still be seen in the church’s basement.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 11.43 mb
Gabled three-portal main entrance (above) was added to the façade in 1913 by a Chicago architect. The architectural design harkens back to the cathedrals of Europe.
Redecorated for its 1902 Golden Jubilee, the church features extensive European craft, including a 56-foot wood-carved Main Altar by the E. Hackner Company, stained glass by Franz Mayer & Co. of Munich, and a certified 1870 replica of the Mother of Perpetual Help icon that survived the 1871 fire intact.
St. Michael Old Town. Main altar at one end of a 190-foot central nave.June 2022. Author’s photograph. 10.01 mb
The church was gutted by the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, leaving only the exterior red brick walls. It was rapidly rebuilt and rededicated using those same walls in 1873.
St. Michael Church, Chicago. February 2013. Author’s phtograph.
St. Michael Church, Chicago. Main Altar. February 2013. Author’s phtograph.
The Main Altar of the Angels, dating from 1902, is a cacophony of German-style wood carving whose immense weight required the building of its own foundation.
In 1851 when St Michael was founded, Chicago’s total population was around 30,000 making it the twenty-fourth largest city in the United States.
Ten years later, in 1860, right before the outbreak of the American Civil War, Chicago’s population had nearly quadrupled and ranked in the nation’s top ten largest cities.
Chicago’s Catholic Church hierarchy in the middle of the nineteenth century was mostly Irish. These English-speaking bishops relied on religious orders to handle a tidal wave of non-English-speaking immigrants to Chicago, including the Germans.
In 1860, the St. Michael Church parish was entrusted to the Redemptorists, a religious order founded in 1748 in Italy. The Redemptorists with their German congregation built the St. Michael Church in Old Town that stands today. Over 170 years later, the Redemptorist order continues to shepherd the parish.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 14.16 mb
A peaceful, breathtaking sanctuary in the middle of a bustling neighborhood.
June 2022. St. Michael Old Town Chicago 12.62 mb
A mosaic of Saint Michael the Archangel (above) in the floor at the entrance of the church. “Archangel” is a title that signifies he is the leader of all God’s angels.
The mosaic of the patron angel in the floor starts the church’s 190-foot-long nave. It is one of the many religious images—others in stone, wood and paint—that constitutes the interior and exterior decoration of St. Michael Church.
St. Michael the Archangel is mentioned four times in the Bible: twice in the Book of Daniel and in the Epistle of Jude and the Book of Revelation. In the Book of Daniel, St. Michael the archangel helps the prophet Daniel and is linked to the “end times” of the world. In the Epistle of Jude, St. Michael the archangel guards the tombs of Eve and Moses and combats Satan to protect these holy sites.
In the Book of Revelation St. Michael and his angels do battle with the “dragon.” In addition to being charged with expelling Satan from Heaven (as depicted in the retable), St. Michael is charged with the care of all departed souls to introduce them to the holy light. St. Michael the Archangel is the patron saint of soldiers, police, and doctors.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 20%
Detail of the Main Altar retable depicts St. Michael the archangel in the traditional iconography of armor with sword and shield casting Satan out of Heaven by God’s command. St. Michael the Archangel is the patron saint of soldiers, police, and doctors.
The spacious, airy, and dramatic church sanctuary today looks basically as it did by 1902. The motivation for the church’s extensive redecoration in 1902 was its Golden Jubilee as well as one expression of the parishioners’ decided prosperity by the later 1890s.
Created and installed by Mayer & Company of Munich for St. Michael Church’s Golden Jubilee in 1902, the tall and thin stained glass windows —the fourth set of windows to be installed into architect August Walbaum’s original design— depicted Biblical and other scenes. The window’s artistic technique drew upon centuries of European craft and design – and were recently cleaned in 2012.
The stunning stained glass was crafted by the famous Mayer of Munich in Germany.
Annunciation to Mary Window (Luke 1: 26-38. St. Michael Old Town Chicago. Annunciation to Mary Window (Luke 1: 26-38). Mary’s virginal conception of Jesus is stated explicitly in verses 34-35. In Hebrew her name, Miryām, means “exalted one.” June 2022. Author’s photograph. 10.71 mb
In that Jubilee year, the stained glass was installed along with the 56-foot-high carved wood retable of the High (or main) Altar of the Angels. Though there are five altars in St. Michael Church, the main altar is the most spectacular, drawing the eye forward and upward from practically anywhere in the church. Crowning this painted construct—which is so heavy that it required a new local foundation to be dug for it—is the figure of St. Michael the Archangel described in the Book of Revelation. The angel is garbed in his panzer (“armor”) running rebellious angels out of heaven. St. Michael is flanked by the archangels Gabriel and Raphael. Nine choirs of angels and the saints Peter and Paul are also depicted in wood. Smaller human figures depict the four evangelists identified by their Christian symbols—specifically, the Winged Man (Matthew), Winged Lion (Mark), Winged Ox (Luke) and Eagle (John). All five altars were made by E. Hackner Company of La Crosse, Wisconsin, an early twentieth century designer, manufacturer and importer of artistic ecclesiastic furnishings.
St. Michael Church, Chicago.Annunciation Window, detail (above), Franz Mayer & Co. of Munich. The angel Gabriel’s greeting, “Hail, full of grace,” is a greeting that is full of peace, joy and wisdom. Mary is the object of God’s grace and favor and is shown to be chosen for a long time past. The depiction of lilies, whether in the angel’s hand or arranged into a bouquet by Mary’s side, is traditional imagery for purity. February 2013. Author’s photograph.
In 1869 the St. Michael Church building cost over $130,000 to build which is approximately $2.65 million today. After the fire the repairs in 1872 cost an additional $40,000 plus unknown amounts of insurance money–or upwards of $700,000 today. Reconstruction did not include the stained glass windows which were installed in 1902. For a history of the stained glass in St. Michael church go to: https://johnpwalshblog.com/2016/05/10/angels-in-stained-glass-1902-complete-st-michael-church-in-old-town-chicago/.
St. Michael Church, Chicago. Anointing of Jesus by Mary Magdalene at Bethany Window, 1902, Franz Mayer & Co., Munich. This stained-glass window depicts the anointing of Jesus at Bethany by the sinful woman traditionally identified as Mary Magdalene. Although the Gospel accounts differ in certain details, all four describe a meal in a house during which a woman pours costly ointment upon Jesus, prompting objections from some of those present. In Mark’s account (Mark 14:3), the ointment is identified as pure nard, a perfume of extraordinary value estimated at more than a year’s wages (Mark 14:5). Luke’s Gospel recounts a woman known for her sinful life who anoints Jesus’ feet while weeping; her tears fall upon his feet, which she then kisses and wipes with her hair (Luke 7:38). While none of the biblical texts explicitly identify this woman as Mary Magdalene, Christian tradition and artistic iconography have long associated her with the figure portrayed in these Gospel narratives.Spikenard was grown in India, China, and Nepal and known in ancient Rome where it was used as a cooking agent. By the time of Jesus, in the early Roman Empire, spikenard was used primarily in perfume. May 2016.Author’s photograph,
Coat of Arms of Pope Francis (2013-2025). According to the Vatican, the image of the plant to the right of the star on the blue background is spikenard and represents St. Joseph.
St. Michael Church, Chicago. Let the Little Children Come to Me Window. During Jesus’ public ministry, crowds frequently gathered around him, bringing not only themselves but also their children and even their infants to receive his blessing. The disciples attempted to turn them away, but Jesus rebuked them. His well-known words, recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels (Matthew 19:14, Mark 10:14, and Luke 18:16), affirm the special place of children in the Kingdom of God: “Let the little children come to me; do not prevent them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.” He continued, “Amen, I say to you, whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it” (Mark 10:14-15). This stained-glass window commemorates one of the most beloved episodes in the Gospels, emphasizing the humility, trust, and openness that Jesus presented as models of faith. Author’s photograph.
June 2022. St. Michael Old Town Chicago 12.82 mb
St. Michael Church, Chicago.Sacred Heart Window. The first of four great visions in which Jesus Christ revealed his Sacred Heart to French nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) took place on December 27, 1673, in her Visitation convent in Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy France. In each of these visions Christ revealed messages that the young saint was to communicate. The greatest of all the visions took place in 1676. Before the Tabernacle on the altar that exposed the Eucharist, Jesus said: “Behold this Heart which has so loved mankind, that it has spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself in order to demonstrate and prove its love for them.” St. Margaret Mary was ordered by her confessor, St. Claude de la Colombière, a Jesuit priest, to write down all her visions. Afterwards, the saint suffered great persecutions from the Church and others for these visions until she fell ill and died in 1690 at 43 years old. She was beatified in 1864 and canonized in 1920. Author’s photograph.
August 2017. Christmas Window (detail). 76% 7.97 mb DSC_0980 (1)August 2017. Ascension Window (detail). 80% 7.74mb DSC_0985August 2017. Jesus at age 12 in the Temple(detail). 80% 7.74mb DSC_0985
The passage describing Jesus at age twelve in the temple appears in Luke 2:41–52, the one place in the canonical Gospels that steps beyond the infancy stories to show him in early adolescence. It offers a rare look at his formative years and stands as the only sustained biblical account of his childhood.
Ceiling mural.
St. Michael Church, Chicago. Central nave ceiling mural includes symbolic depictions of the four evangelists: the Winged Man (Matthew); Winged Lion (Mark); Winged Ox (Luke); Eagle (John). Its filigree evokes medieval illuminated manuscripts and perhaps is inspired by a scene painted in the 15th century in the dome of The Basilica of St Mark in Venice. February 2013. Author’s photograph.
Original Pulpit.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 15.27 mb
This magnificent, elevated pulpit inside St. Michael Church in Chicago’s Old Town is a masterwork of historic liturgical art. While the church building itself was rebuilt immediately after the Great Chicago Fire in 1873, the highly detailed altars and intricate interior wood carvings are largely attributed to the grand 1902 Golden Jubilee renovation by the E. Hackner Company. The design combines elements of Romanesque Revival and Bavarian Baroque styles, relying on theology built directly into the woodwork.
Deep-Rooted Symbolism
The Scallop Shell Canopy: The massive scallop shell serving as the soundboard (abat-voix) holds a double meaning. In Catholic tradition, the shell is the universal symbol of pilgrimage (specifically the Camino de Santiago) and baptismal rebirth. It reminds the listener that the Word being preached guides the soul’s earthly journey.
The Dove of the Holy Spirit: Tacked at the very top underside of the shell canopy is a carved white dove. It is positioned above the priest’s head, symbolizing that the words spoken from this pulpit should be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit.
The Ten Commandments: Directly below the shell, two overlapping tablets showing Roman numerals I through X represent the law given to Moses, rooting the New Testament preaching firmly in Old Testament foundational law.
The Carved Figures: In addition to the two angels holding up the shell, surrounding the octagonal basket of the pulpit are niche carvings depicting prominent Church figures, popes, or bishops—identifiable by their liturgical mitres and croziers—representing the historic lineage, authority, and continuity of Catholic teaching.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 19.11 mb
As with other American church building adaptations of earlier European architectural styles, the use of Romanesque rounded arches and corbels accentuated the use of Gothic-style glass in Chicago’s Old Town Roman Catholic church.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 20%
Pietà, copy of a 16th-century Swabian-style artwork made around 1913.
June 2022. St. Michael Old Town Chicago 7.8mb 70%.
This devotional and deeply moving Pietà is in the foyer of St. Michael Church. The foyer (narthex) acts as the boundary between the chaotic, bustling streets of Chicago’s Old Town and the sacred interior of the sanctuary. Encountering the raw vulnerability of the Pietà forces an immediate pause, inviting quiet reflection and reverence. By placing a monument of profound maternal grief right at the entrance, the church sends an unspoken message to its community: bring your sorrows inside. It reassures visitors that the church is a sanctuary for those carrying heavy burdens.
Though the heartbreaking image of the Virgin Mary cradling the dead body of Jesus after the Crucifixion emerged from Late Medieval and Renaissance European devotion, German and especially Swabian Pietàs often emphasized intense human suffering, a devotional sensibility sometimes described as dolorism. Swabia, a historic region of southwestern Germany, was renowned during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries for its emotionally charged religious woodcarvings, produced by masters such as Michel Erhart and Jörg Syrlin. Unlike Michelangelo’s serene and idealized marble Pietà in St. Peter’s Basilica, these German works frequently stressed the physical wounds of Christ and the overwhelming grief of his mother, encouraging worshippers to contemplate the realities of sacrifice, death, and redemption through an intensely personal and emotional encounter.
Pieta. St. Michael Church, Chicago. February 2013. Author’s photograph.
Emotional Realism
The Sorrow of Mary: Mary is depicted not as a youthful queen, but as a grieving mother. Her face is heavy with sorrow, her head tilted tenderly over her son, and her heavy drapery realistically bundles around her figure, grounding the scene in heavy, earthbound grief.
The Wounds of Christ: The sculpture vividly details the physical toll of the Passion. The spear wound in Christ’s side (the Holy Wound) is prominently visible and painted with realistic blood droplets, a hallmark of Northern European devotional art designed to evoke deep empathy (compassio) from the viewer.
Sacred Heart side altar.The Sacred Heart side altar (east nave). In addition to the central statue of Christ are those depicting Redemptorist Order founder, St. Alphonsus Liguori (Italian, 1696-1787) and Discalced Carmelite Order founder, St. Teresa of Avila (Spanish, 1515-1582). February 2013. Author’s photograph.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. St. Joseph altar (west nave) with a mural above it of Redemptorists before Christ’s Heavenly throne. In this photograph’s foreground at right is a wood confessional box. Italian-born St. Alphonsus Liguori, founder of the Redemptorists, was highly educated and spent much of his life hearing the confessions of the ordinary peopleas a home missionary in his city of Naples, Italy. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 25%
Side altar honors Mary, Mother of Perpetual Help.
St. Michael Old Town Chicago. The Redemptorists—a Catholic religious order founded in Italy by St. Alphonsus Liguori—became the custodians of this icon long after their founder’s death. On December 11, 1865, Pope Pius IX formally entrusted the original 15th‑century Byzantine icon to the order, handing it to Father Nicholas Mauron, the Redemptorist Superior General in Rome. By April 1866, the original icon was placed on public display at the Church of Saint Alphonsus on Rome’s Esquiline Hill, where it remains permanently enshrined. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 12.53 mb
Following the Pope’s directive to “make her known throughout the world,” the Redemptorists began distributing authorized copies to their missions and parishes. In 1870, one of the first four official copies sent to the United States was dispatched to St. Michael Church in Chicago. Although not placed directly into the pastor’s hands by the Pope, it was a certified first‑generation replica produced under the authority of the 1865 decree.
After the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Chicago icon was recovered intact from the rubble—an event taken as a sign to rebuild the church. It was later installed in the present German Baroque‑style retable.
The icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help is regarded as miraculous because of centuries of reported healings, apparitions, and its own improbable survival. In 1798, French revolutionary forces destroyed San Matteo, the church where it had been housed in Rome. Augustinian monks rescued the icon and hid it; it remained forgotten for decades until the 1860s, when an elderly Augustinian friar and a former altar server—by then a Redemptorist priest—identified it.
When the icon was restored to public veneration on April 26, 1866, a major street procession accompanied its installation at Saint Alphonsus in Rome. Contemporary accounts record several immediate physical cures among the crowd. In the decades that followed, the Redemptorists documented hundreds of unexplained medical healings associated with prayers before the image.
Because of this long record of devotion, survival, and reported grace, the Vatican crowned the icon with gold and precious stones in 1867, a distinction reserved for ancient images linked to extraordinary divine favors. August 2017 Author’s photograph. 78% 7.75mb DSC_0981
The Stations of the Cross at St. Michael Church
Second and Third Stations of the Cross. June 2022. Author’s photograph. 12.60 mb
These magnificent high-relief panels depict the Second and Third Stations of the Cross, Jesus Is Laden with the Cross and Jesus Falls the First Time. Installed during St. Michael Church’s extensive late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century decorative campaigns, they are exceptional examples of European-influenced polychrome plaster relief sculpture. Rich in color, depth, and dramatic expression, the panels were created to draw worshippers into a meditative participation in Christ’s Passion, transforming sacred history into a vivid devotional experience.
St. Alphonsus Liguori and the Modern Stations
The fourteen traditional Stations of the Cross found in churches throughout the world today were codified in 1761 by St. Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787). One of the most accomplished figures of the eighteenth-century Catholic Church, Liguori was a bishop, theologian, philosopher, lawyer, poet, composer, musician, artist, spiritual writer, and founder of a religious order. His reflections on Christ’s Passion became enormously influential because of their ability to move the faithful toward prayer, humility, repentance, and a deeper appreciation of Christ’s sacrifice.
Born in Naples in 1696, Liguori initially pursued a distinguished legal career before discerning a vocation to the priesthood and being ordained in 1726. Though his parents were devout Catholics, they were disappointed by his decision, in part because the clergy of the era often suffered from a reputation for corruption and worldliness. Liguori nevertheless devoted his life to pastoral ministry, becoming especially beloved for his work among ordinary people, spending countless hours hearing confessions and serving as a missionary in and around Naples.
Scholar, Bishop, and Founder
In 1732, Liguori founded the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, better known as the Redemptorists, a religious community dedicated to preaching missions and serving the spiritual needs of ordinary people. His influential work Moral Theology, published in 1748, received papal approbation and helped establish his reputation as one of the Church’s foremost moral theologians. He was appointed a bishop in 1762 and, nearly a century after his death, was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1871, recognizing the enduring value of his theological and spiritual writings.
The Redemptorists and St. Michael Church
The connection between St. Alphonsus and St. Michael Church is more than devotional. In 1860, the parish was entrusted to the Redemptorists, who ministered to Chicago’s growing German Catholic population. Under their leadership, the present church was completed in 1869 in the Old Town neighborhood. Remarkably, it survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 and continues to stand as one of the city’s most important historic churches. More than 165 years after their arrival, the Redemptorists remain entrusted with the spiritual care of the parish.
A Living Tradition of Devotion
The Stations of the Cross at St. Michael are therefore more than decorative works of religious art. They embody a devotional tradition shaped by St. Alphonsus Liguori, preserved by the Redemptorists, and passed down through generations of Chicago Catholics. Through their vivid imagery and emotional power, these sculptures continue to invite worshippers to walk spiritually beside Christ on the road to Calvary, reflecting on suffering, sacrifice, redemption, and hope.
St. Michael Old Town. June 2022 5.83mb DSC_5296 (1)
Conclusion
The Rise of German Chicago
The history of St. Michael Church is inseparable from the rise of Chicago itself. In scarcely half a century, Chicago transformed from a frontier settlement built on low, marshy ground into the second-largest city in the United States. As railroads, industry, and commerce propelled the city onto the national stage, German immigrants emerged as one of its most influential communities, shaping neighborhoods, churches, schools, businesses, associations, and civic life.
The Age of Deutschtum
Between the Great Fire of 1871 and the years following World War I, Chicago’s astonishing growth coincided with the flourishing of Deutschtum, or “Germanness.” German-language newspapers, singing societies, breweries, social clubs, educational institutions, and Roman Catholic parishes formed a vibrant cultural world that touched nearly every aspect of urban life. St. Michael Church stood not only as a place of worship but also as an expression of the confidence, prosperity, and cultural identity of German Chicago during its height.
The End of an Era
Yet the prominence of German Chicago proved less permanent than the architecture its community left behind. The defeat of Imperial Germany in World War I unleashed powerful currents of anti-German sentiment across the United States and accelerated pressures toward assimilation. Institutions that had once proudly proclaimed their German heritage increasingly abandoned the language and public expressions of ethnic identity. By the eve of World War II, much of the cultural hegemony that Germans had exercised in Chicago for generations had largely disappeared.
A Lasting Legacy
Although Deutschtum faded as a public cultural force, its legacy remains embedded in Chicago’s built environment. Churches such as St. Michael preserve the artistic, religious, and historical aspirations of the immigrant community that helped transform Chicago from a frontier town into a world city. Their architecture and stained glass stand today as enduring witnesses to the rise, influence, and eventual assimilation of one of the city’s most important ethnic populations.
Saint Michael Old Town Chicago. October 2016. 4.52mb DSC_0836 (5)
Sources: G. Lane and A. Kezys, Chicago Churches and Synogogues. P. d’A Jones and M.G. Holli, Ethnic Chicago. D.A. Pacyga and E. Skerrett, Chicago, City of Neighborhoods. D. McNamara, Heavenly City. The Saints: A Concise Biographical Dictionary, edited by John Coulson, Guild Press, New York, 1957. The New American Bible, Catholic Book Publishing Corp, New York, 1993. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd Edition, Doubleday, New York, 1997. The Jerome Biblical Commentary, edited by Raymond E. Brown, S.S., Joseph a Fitzmyer, S.J., and Roland E. Murphy, O. Carm., 1982. St. Michael Church website. https://iamjesus.net/traditional-stations-of-the-cross/https://www.emporis.com/buildings/136851/st-michael-church-chicago-il-usa
Photographs taken by author in February 2013; May and October 2016; June 2022.
This explanatory article may be periodically updated.
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