When the English writer and artist Caryll Houselander was thirteen years of age, she had an experience that brought her face to face with the suffering of the world. The year was late 1914 or early 1915, and Caryll was a boarder at a convent school on the outskirts of Birmingham. Britain had declared war against Germany only a few months earlier, and anti-German fever ran high. Among the nuns at...
During the summer of 1940, the writer and visual artist Caryll Houselander was going on thirty-nine. Her writing and drawings appeared anonymously in three periodicals: the Jesuit-run Messenger of the Sacred Heart, The Children’s Messenger, and The Grail Magazine. She lived in a house on Milborne Grove with her friend, Iris Wyndham, and Iris’s eighteen-year-old daughter, Joan, who was taking art classes and falling in love with one man after another. Over the anxious weeks...
Alfred Delp in Berlin’s “People’s Court”, January 8-9, 1945 One day in mid-January, 1945, the Jesuit Alfred Delp wrote to his secretary from his cell in Berlin’s Tegel Prison: “I’ve begun writing a few thoughts on the Pentecost prayer for you.” The letter was later dated “after 11 January”. That date, the 11th of January, was significant: a demarcation line. On that afternoon, after his two-day trial for high treason, Delp had stood...
Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1879 In December 1918, a ninety-seven-year-old widow by the name of Catherine Hopkins, received a modest volume of poetry with a simple blue cover. The title was Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. The book, prepared and edited by England’s Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges, was dedicated to her. The dedication, written in Latin, indicated in part that the book was “a memorial, though late, of her beloved son,...
In the story “The Enduring Chill” by the fiction writer of the American South, Flannery O’Connor, an atheistic character by the name of Asbury is visited by a Jesuit priest. Asbury, who fancies himself literary and intellectual, comes home to die and is met by his mother, a plainspoken woman whom he considers foolish. The priest who visits him is half-blind and half-deaf. In their exchange, he tells Asbury to...
In 1946, two years before Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain brought Trappist monasteries into popular focus, a twenty-one-year-old man set out on a ship from France to try his vocation in one of them. His destination was the Abbey of Notre-Dame du Lac in Oka, Quebec. His name was Georges Vanier, named after his father, who was the Canadian ambassador to France. Georges Vanier Sr. had been named to...
At the beginning of his autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton introduces himself thus: “On the last day of January 1915, under the sign of the Water Bearer, in a year of a great war, and down in the shadow of some French mountains on the border of Spain, I came into the world.” This book made him famous: a paradox for someone whose professed desire was to become...
At six o’clock on a summer morning, the only sound outside the Trappist Abbaye Val Notre Dame is the croaking of two bull frogs in the nearby pond. The abbey, located deep inside the foothills of the Laurentian Mountains in southern Quebec, is so remote that when the monks began building, they had to forge a road to link it with the outside world. They moved there in 2009, relocating130...
When the English novelist Evelyn Waugh visited the United States in the late 1940s, a young journalist asked him what impressed him most in America. His answer: the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Finding that his interviewer, whom he identified only as “the wretched girl”, knew nothing about the Trappists and little about anything else in Christianity, the famous convert seized the opportunity. “My apostolic zeal was roused, and,...
In late October, 1866, a young student and poet named Gerard Manley Hopkins boarded a train in Oxford and took the 60-mile journey north to the industrial city of Birmingham. There, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church by John Henry Newman. By that time, Newman had a saintly reputation. Once a renowned Anglican preacher and don at Oxford, he had gone on to become a Catholic priest and later...