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The Remarkable Legacies of Ordinary Catholic Women

Bronwen Catherine McShea

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

The Duchess Who Shaped the Fate of France

Bronwen Catherine McShea

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

The Old Evangelization

Bronwen Catherine McShea

Truth in Many Tongues: Religious Conversion and the Languages of the Early Spanish Empireby daniel i. wasserman-solerpenn state university, 240 pages, $33 As a historian who studies missionaries, I am...

When Rome Policed Art

Bronwen Catherine McShea

A century ago, a little-known Belgian artist named Albert Servaes became famous when cardinals at the Holy Office in Rome censured him for depicting Jesus Christ in a way...

Seventy-Five Years Ago in Silesia

Bronwen Catherine McShea

In 2012, while visiting the German city of Trier, I stumbled upon the birthplace of Karl Marx. This Baroque townhouse at Brückenstrasse 10 is now a museum, a kind...

Bishops Unbound

Bronwen Catherine McShea

In Before Church and State, Andrew Willard Jones describes a time when Christendom’s lay rulers were leaders in building the City of God. They “wielded the secular, temporal sword...

Harvard Springtime

Bronwen Catherine McShea

On Sunday, April 27, one of the large lecture halls at Harvard Divinity School was two-thirds filled primarily with graying, upper-middle-class liberal women of the baby-boom generation who had...