Enjoying a varied reputation as pioneering parish priest, educational trail-blazer, inspiring mission preacher, formidable religious controversialist, and, oh yes, a ghost that haunts historical buildings on Chicago’s Near West Side, Father Arnold Damen, S.J., is an important figure in American Catholic history. The Society of Jesus, to which the Dutch-born priest belonged, can boast an almost four-hundred-year history on our continent, a history consistent with the Jesuits’ Marine-like reputation as the first ones at the scene of a battle. They were builders, founders, religious frontiersmen – or, if you will, special forces sent in to take out the demonic first line of resistance in enemy territory. Continue reading →

The Edict of Nantes was a pragmatic, political solution to the civil strife that existed in a sixteenth-century France ravaged by wars of religion. Though the edict itself was not trusted, appreciated, or liked by most Frenchmen at the time, its implementation (and enforcement by Henri of Navarre) succeeded in securing a measure of domestic tranquility to this nation seeking to establish itself in modern, international, secular statecraft. Continue reading →

I have finished reading the wonderful volume of Godfrey Kurth, The Church at the Turning Points of History, now happily brought back into print by my friends at IHS Press. This accomplished author is not so well known as he should be. For that reason, I’m posting the biographical information on him furnished in the older (1929) edition of the book I have at hand. (Note to the hurried reader: At the bottom of this piece, I have put hyperlinks to Kurth’s articles in the Catholic Encyclopedia, where “Godefroid” was the form of his first name the editors used.) Continue reading →

The importance of the Council of Trent lies in its being two things at the same time: 1) the heart and soul of the Catholic Reformation (the authentic reform of the Church); and 2) the definitive moment of the Counter Reformation (the reaction against the Protestant Revolt): “By almost universal agreement, the counter-attack of the Church to the movement that is known as the Protestant Reformation begins seriously with the Council of Trent.” Continue reading →