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...
In this novel, set in October, 1958, the pope lies dying in Rome as, thousands of miles away, life carries on in St. Monica’s Girls’ School. The students are living in the adolescent space between childhood and adulthood and are testing their limits. Meanwhile, their...
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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Alfred Delp was taken to the execution chamber of Plotzensee Prison and hanged about 3 o-clock in the afternoon of February 2, 1945. Hitler had ordered that the ashes of those executed for resistance be scattered over sewage. This is probably what happened to Delp's...