The Poetry of Providence: King David and the Psalms

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Divine Providence in the life and thought of King David as revealed in the Psalms: the

Psalms as the poetry of Providence, in that, throughout the Psalms, God the Logos

interacts with time through the person of King David, to bring about His will; David’s gift is to be able to see this at a time in the first millennium BC when very few people, save the prophets, could. God’s love and will are the same. God loves David, and knows David’s actions and thoughts, and witnesses whether David’s actions and thoughts conform to God’s will, and God blesses accordingly. If God does this for David, he does it for every human. “Thou hast traced my path . . . , and hast foreseen all my ways.”

King David and his story and responses to God as revealed in the Psalms, interspersed throughout Providential History, reveals that sense, so completely shown in Psalm 139, that God knows all, involves Himself in all, lives and things in the cosmos.

According to Psalm 139 of the Old Testament, “O Lord, Thou hast proved me, and known me.” This psalm is a wonderful source of essential knowingness, a source of truthfulness, a source in which a person knows God and knows that God made him/her, makes the individual human self.

Ironically, it was written by King David, a warrior, murderer, adulterer, and conqueror who was also a poet and singer of extraordinary talent and sensitivity. He composed verse and hymns to express piety and love, fear, the search for redemption, the need for deliverance. He knew that God knew. His awareness of God’s awareness is most profoundly stated in this psalm. “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine up-rising: Thou understandest my thoughts from afar.”

God’s love and will are the same. God loves David, and knows David’s actions and thoughts, and witnesses whether David’s actions and thoughts conform to God’s will, and God blesses accordingly. If God does this for David, he does it for every human. “Thou hast traced my path . . . , and hast foreseen all my ways.”

God is with David always–whether awake or asleep, He is part of him, as He is part of all the Creation. David was exceptional only in that he had such a profound awareness of God’s presence in every moment of his life. “O Lord, Thou hast known all things, the last and the first.”

God does not form the word on the tongue, but God nevertheless knows. Such awareness allows David the insight to be able to speak and act in a way that is apt to conform to God’s will. God is present in the past and future, before and after, in the previous step and the forthcoming step. Awareness of this is a sure guide in taking the multifarious steps of life.

“The knowledge of Thee is too wonderful for me; it is very difficult, I cannot attain to it.” The greatest counter to hubris, David knew, was the realization of the supremacy of God’s knowledge and the overwhelming gulf separating David from God. He could not come close to God or His knowledge. Rather, he must wait upon God. “O Whither shall I go from Thy Spirit?” David imagines the ways a being could escape from Being, and it is impossible. One cannot hide from God. If I imagine that I can hide in the dark, the dark is but light to God, who sees all.

“For Thou, O Lord, hast possessed my reins; Thou hast helped me from my mother’s womb.” God has been with David always, even from the womb, and has held onto his path, directed him, as David ran along through life. “Thine eyes saw my unwrought substance, and all men shall be written in Thy book.” God formed the flesh and bones and spirit, brought David out of the depths into the light, and composed the record of his life in the book of life.

“I awake, and am still with Thee.” It is not a dream, this utter connection with the Lord. Though the knowledge of the relationship is intuitive, found deep within the self, in the innermost being, nevertheless daily, upon awakening, Being is among us.

“Prove me, O God, and know my heart; examine me, and know my paths.” David has proven his devotion to God by the point of his sword; the blood dripping from his enemies is his testament to his faith in God. And he asks God, “See if there is any way of iniquity in me, and lead me in an everlasting way.” Bloodshed on behalf of God to David is not iniquity, but such are the king and warrior’s way. As the Hebrews came to know God more fully, and as the descendants of David grew to accept God’s will and ways, to accept defeat as well as victory, no longer was the sword needed. And Jesus counseled His disciples: put away the sword.

God, outside of time, seeing all simultaneously, means that there is an existence that is not of our momentary, exclusive time, but of all times and places. The Logos encompassing timeless God the father and active Holy Spirit is able to see in present tense all that was, is, and will be. Possibly in death we will experience something like this. But God can see the swallows and sparrows in Psalm 82 3000 years ago as well as those birds flying today. He sees them simultaneously. Therefore they exist simultaneously. Death is relevant only to present experience.

“The Psalms purport to be written largely by David, the Hebrew king who lived three thousand years ago. David was warrior, poet, lover, judge, sinner, man of feeling, student of God’s creation. He knew much about himself because of his search to know God. His Psalms are reflective pieces that consider the distance between the Creator and the Creation, between the all-wise and good God and the limited sinful human. God is a shepherd to His people, David wrote, a Father to His children who are repeatedly errant and wayward. These poems are wonderful psychological portraits of the human search for peace and love in a world of conflict and hate.”

“The Psalmist was a historian, recounting God’s plan for Israel, and His providential role in bringing about His ways among the people of Israel. We should all be historians in this regard, seeing God’s providential role in all things, the great and small, in the existence of all things, in our own singular existence as well.”

“Happiness comes from acting according to God’s will. This simple truth is so obvious and necessary, it should so drive all human actions and thoughts, that the alternative should appear nonsensical. And yet the alternative is what drives humans forward in time, confronting the everyday with their own actions, their own will, contrary to God’s will, God’s law.

Other living creatures are not like this. Other creatures live according to God’s will and law. Their choices are restricted to nature’s mandates. They eat, sleep, hunt, live, and die, according to what God has willed. They don’t contrive self-devised opposites, of living in an unnatural way, staving off death as long as possible, eating more than what nature mandates, seeking to break from nature by creating as artificial an existence as possible.

Humans are cursed with the ability to choose. They are cursed with apparent free will. They have convinced themselves that they can order their lives, control their destinies, make choices without (or ignoring the) consequences, tempt fate in so many ways, and live almost as gods. When it all comes crashing down, they are shocked, surprised, horrified, feel ill-used, curse God, fate, or the heavens, all the while taking no responsibility for what they themselves have contrived.

In His law will he meditate day and night . . .

God’s law, God’s word, comes in so many forms, it is impossible, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Romans, to be unaware, or pretend unawareness, of God’s Creation, God’s actions throughout time in human and natural experience. Nature is filled with the writing of God. Human history is a narrative of God’s will. Each life, human as well as others, are contrived by, designed by, God, and it takes very little thought, from humans who are otherwise so reflective and ruminating, to see the hand of God in each day of our existence.

God’s law is natural law, it is the law of the heart and soul, and we scarcely need to be told what is obvious in our deepest intuitions. As Richard Hooker, the Anglican theologian, wrote: “nature teaches men to judge good from evil, as well in laws as in other things” by “the force of their own discretion.” It follows then that “whatsoever we do, if our own secret judgment consent not unto it as fit and good to be done, the doing of it to us is sin, although the thing itself be allowable.”

Hooker said further respecting the laws of God and humans, that God is a law unto Himself, in that He is both the Author of Law and the Doer of Law, both equally in perfection. Human natural and civil laws are learned from nature, learned from God, not original to humans, who perceive disorder and chaos because we are ignorant of God’s true purposes and His eternal laws: all things work according to His will, which is good and perfect.

It follows that all things yearn for what is more perfect, all things therefore yearn for Goodness, and by this yearning, all things are Good. All things therefore yearn for God.

For the Lord knows the way of the righteous; but the way of the ungodly shall perish . . .

As Hooker wrote, “the general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself. For that which all men have at all times learned, Nature herself must needs have taught; and God being the author of Nature, her voice is but his instrument. By her from Him we receive whatsoever in such sort we learn.”

By listening to the voice of reason and the authority of teaching over time we know the Good and are able to withstand the temptations inherent in the passing moments of fads and whims.”

Psalm 9: I will recount all Thy wonderful works . . .

“My deeds are your deeds, just as my being is enwrapped in your Being. The deeds of all humans are expressions of the Deeds of God, for God’s will is supreme; God’s will embraces all human will, all human action. To tell of God’s deeds is to tell the story of human existence. The Greek historia, inquiries into all things, human, natural, and supernatural, is what the human bard, historian, teacher, must tell, by spoken and written words, by thoughts and actions.”

Psalm 18: The Lord will recompense me according to my righteousness, . . . His statutes I did not reject . . .

“Following God’s law, living a life accordingly, in righteousness, is its own reward. Punishment for neglecting God’s will is the consequences of such folly. Impiety never leads to happiness. Contentment does not follow upon sin. Wanton pleasure is its own instantaneous reward; it does not last beyond the moment.”

Psalm 33: The eyes of the Lord are upon those who Fear Him . . .

“To fear God is to trust. To fear God is reliance upon God. To fear God is to love God. To fear God is to accept. No fear is a popular expression among the thoughtless and arrogant, who think they are in control, until they find out they are not. Then fear in the moment comes. Fear in the moment is awareness, it is mindfulness, it is knowing that God’s will is not our wills, that our thoughts are not God’s thoughts. Fear is waiting upon the Lord, patience, silence, peacefulness, watching and waiting upon the Creation.”

Psalm 44: For He it is that knows the secrets of the heart . . .

“God’s will, the Psalmist knows, is active through the heart, the mind and emotions of each person, who knows within, feels within, God’s presence, if not a recognized presence of God, at least a recognized presence of what is true and false, right and wrong, no matter how much a person resists, denies, deceives, sins.”

Psalm 46: Be still, and know that I am God . . .

“Be still in the present, be still in the heart, be still in ambition, be still in wanderlust and restlessness, be still in poverty and humility, be still in sickness and approaching death. Be still, know that God is. God has been, is, will be exalted, above all. Not me, not you. God. Be still, and know that God is your God, God’s will is your’s, God’s being is your being, God alone is sufficient, that you must rely on God, accept God, be still, to cancel the fear. Accept.”

Psalm 47: For God is the king of all the earth . . .

“Nations don’t defend themselves. Nor do humans. I cannot keep away from what is willed for me. If a gun shoots, or a flood floods, or a tornado roars, and I am in the path of bullet, water, or wind, there is little I can do to save myself. I cannot shield myself. I must rely on God, who has all of the shields. God has all of the defenses. Armies and weapons, bombs and jets, guards and armor, are illusory. They cannot hold back the inevitable. They might shield, protect, for a minute. But the inevitable is coming. It cannot be stopped. Death is ever-present. Therefore be still, wait upon the Lord, don’t imagine what cannot be done, don’t engage in fruitless folly, accept God’s will. Accept.”

Psalm 51: Against thee only have I sinned . . .

“Sin is, after all, an act in contrast to the will of God. God’s will is manifest, is thorough and overwhelming; we perceive it, know it in our hearts, and in the choice of the moment, when the weight of fear and flesh drag upon our spirits and our sense of rightness, we sometimes make the false choice, go against God’s will of love and peace, and immediately, even while the sin is taking place, regret it, and feel overwhelming guilt.”

Psalm 67: That men may know Thy way on the earth, Thy salvation among all nations . . .

“The earth’s way is God’s way: nature is a reflection of God’s love. God’s salvation is manifest throughout nature. He saves, that is guides, protects, watches over, loves, all of His creation. All nations, all tribes, not just of humans, but the varied forms of life, are products of God’s Love. Only humans struggle against God’s will. The rest of nature abides by, accepts, God’s will, God’s love and the Creation are wonderfully alive, thriving and bountiful.”

Psalm 94: The Lord is a God of vengeance . . .

“Can this be true? Does the Lord exercise vengeance upon His Creation? What can the Psalmist mean? If by vengeance the Psalmist means that the Lord punishes and condemns His creation, then one wonders what kind of Love this is. Jesus’s Father, as presented in the New Testament, is not the God of vengeance and hatred. The Psalmist reveals in so many of his psalms that he understands God to be Love. Vengeance is therefore a response to those who deny God’s love and deny God’s will and try to circumvent His plan and do what they might for their own ends. They certainly deserve vengeance, that is, punishment. And as Jesus said, they have their reward. They have punished themselves. They have avenged their own wrongs by the folly of their actions and the consequent misery that they bring upon themselves.

The Lord knows the thoughts of men, that they are vain . . .”

Psalm 139

Psalm 142: I cried to the Lord with my voice; with my voice I made supplication to the Lord . . .

“Fleeing Saul, David hid in a cave, waiting. Waiting ostensibly for what Saul would do, David was in truth waiting for what God would do. This psalm is David’s prayer for God’s benevolence.”

Psalm 143:

“The enemy has persecuted my soul; he has brought my life down to the ground; he has made me to dwell in a dark place . . .

Hiding, in pursuit, fearing for his life, are themes of these Psalms, 141, 142, 143, 144. David flees from Saul in his youth, and flees from his son Absalom, who had declared himself king, in his old age. But David did not have to flee from God. Rather, he knew God was there, with him, supporting him, protecting him.

My soul thirst for thee, as a dry land . . .

Even so, knowing the nearness of God, fears of the moment distract even so great a soul as David, so that he is parched, thirsty, waiting for God, wondering where He is. He spends a long night, hoping to “hear Thy mercy in the morning.”

I have fled to Thee for refuge . . .

Here David admits that although he is hiding in a cave, his refuge is not a place, rather God. Only God can save him. Not necessarily from fear, from death. But God can save him so that he acts righteously notwithstanding the many arrows raining down upon him.”

Good ending: Psalm 144: My mercy, and my refuge; my help, and my deliverer; my protector, in whom I have trusted . . .

“A short and complete list of what God is to David, to any person, any creature. God concerns himself with humans, with all of his creation: why?

Lord, what is man, that Thou art made known to him? Or the son of man, that Thou takest account of him? . . .

Humans are temporal creatures, living moment by moment, wrapped up in the concerns of the immediate, the falseness, the vanity, the apparent meaningless, of life.

Man is like to vanity: his days pass as a shadow . . .

The shadow waxes and wanes as the sun crosses the horizon. Daily we see our shadow, then nightly it vanishes. A tale of what humans, all creatures, are like: here today, gone tomorrow. God alone remains, the send the rain, to hide the sun, to crash the bolts of lightning, to bring peace to the storm, to clothe the day with night.

O God, I will sing a new song to Thee . . .

Deliver me from vanity, Lord. Let me sing of You, not me, not others. Let wealth, and appearance, and beauty, and the riches of the land, the fatness of the storehouses, the strength of youth, the bubbles of the moment, not distract me from You.

Blessed is the people whose God is the Lord.”

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Primer on Providence: Augustine’s City of God

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Augustine, a convert to Christianity who had experienced four seconds of providence in 386 AD, who had become Bishop of Hippo in Africa in 397, who had written an account of his life, Confessions, in 392, who heard as all Romans had of the disaster of the Eternal City falling to Alaric the Goth in 410, who watched as Germanic tribes were overrunning the western empire and the Vandals after 409 were sweeping through Spain into North Africa and approaching Augustine’s diocese of Hippo, who grew old and was facing death in the 420s, was at peace. Knowing that the will of God is behind all things brought him peace.

But who has peace today? Our world is in love with disasters. The news, social media, blockbuster movies feed on the fear people have in the twenty-first century that a disaster–an F-5 tornado, category 5 hurricane, tsunami, terrorist attack, random shooting, nuclear war—will lead to destruction, chaos, death. The end of time. Few of us actually experience such disasters. But the people of the Roman Empire during Augustine’s time did. For the Romans, Rome was civilization. What would succeed civilization but barbarism, evil, and death? But why was this happening? Romans asked, why have the gods forsaken us? And some answered: it is the Christians, who have denied Jupiter, Juno, Apollo, and the rest, and focused on only one god. The gods—Neptune, Venus, Athena—are punishing us, and Rome is doomed. Augustine knew differently. “God’s providence constantly uses war to correct and chasten the corrupt morals of mankind,” he wrote in 426 in his masterpiece, The City of God.

God is behind all earthly events. Providence is eternally active in the affairs of humans, animals, the universe, nature, all things. Such is the thesis of The City of God. Rome falls not because of the anger of the gods but because the one true God wills it. Humans die not because of something they have done but because the one true God wills it. All things, all corporeal life, come to an end. The works of humans, notwithstanding the wonders of architecture, the power of modern technology, will be destroyed in time. But we ask, as did the Romans, why? Why must bad things such as suffering and death happen to the good, the innocent?

The City of God is a deep and complex book, but there is a reason why people have for fourteen hundred years, and still do, read it. In its depth is a simple primer of providence. Pope John Paul II during his papacy wrote extensively on suffering and its validity for Christians; in his works he was echoing the theme of The City of God. Augustine wrote succinctly, God “has willed that these temporal goods and temporal evils should befall good and bad alike, so that the good things should not be too eagerly coveted, when it is seen that the wicked also enjoy them, and that the evils should not be discreditably shunned, when it is apparent that the good are often afflicted with them.” Remember, he declared, that humans are conceived in sin; the good and bad are both punished not because they are equal but because both love temporal existence and must be chastened. Who can argue against this when Christ Himself taught the same lessons? Moths might destroy our finest dresses, our designer suits, but they cannot touch our souls. Augustine throughout his book condemns pagans for doing every kind of hedonistic vice there is, and such hedonism is what led to the destruction of Rome.  Hence such hedonism, it is implied, necessitated the coming of Christ the redeemer.

In theory this makes sense, but then we see what the powerful can do, see the privileges of wealth, see the fame that money and power bring, while most of us live our anonymous lives in obscurity. Just think if I was an Instagram influencer or had my own Youtube Channel! Providence is the great equalizer. The great, the rich, the famous, begin to lose hair, develop arthritis in their joints, suffer incontinence and develop cataracts, then the slow painful march towards the end occurs demanding such patience, such faith! God “gives earthly dominion both to good men and to evil . . . in accordance with the order of events in history, an order completely hidden from us, but perfectly known to God himself.” This is why Augustine was at peace. He knew that God was in control, that God is good, that evil is but a departure from ultimate good, thus suffering and death are ultimately, Good.

The skeptic then asks, with good reason: “So are we therefore mere puppets on a string?” Philosophers for millennia have debated the issue of fate and will. One of Augustine’s favorite writers, Cicero, believed that the gods cannot have ultimate control over the future because this would limit free will—and no good Roman would want to admit that he or she was not in charge of their own thoughts and behavior. It is the issue of foreknowledge, which Martin Luther wrote extensively about in the sixteenth century. If God know all things, all events, even those in the future, then by knowing God is willing. No, not right, responded Augustine. God knows “all things before they happen and . . . leaves nothing unordered. From him come all powers, but not all wills.” What does this mean? “We are not afraid that what we do by an act of will may not be a voluntary act, because God, with his infallible prescience, knew that we should do it.”

God does not conform to the either/or: Either God is in control or we are in control. God is in control and we are in control of our own actions–but God knows our actions even before we do them. This was David’s message in Psalm 139. God in His great love will not abandon us to our own ways. Augustine, in the Confessions as well as The City of God, examines the intricacies of Providence per the nature of time. Following St. John, God is the creator of time, and as the creator is not bound by time—He is time. God creates beginning and end simultaneously. God sees past, present, future simultaneously. The son, the Logos, is with God in the beginning, appears in His creation, time, at the Incarnation, leaves His creation, time, at the ascension, and interacts with time as the Holy Spirit until the end. God sees all simultaneously, hence knows all simultaneously. But such is His great love for His creation, His creatures, that He allows them to live in time making their own decisions, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, sometimes living, sometimes dying. But they live and die in the presence of Love, as John so eloquently expressed. God showers Love upon His creatures, and bids them to respond to Him in love. To respond to God in Love is to meet and fulfill what He has providentially determined. To deny God’s love, to distance oneself from God, is to deny His will, His providence, and doom oneself to the consequences of not fulfilling God’s will. God knows the choices we make, has foreseen them, but does not change them, does not pull us back from walking in front of the bus. Rather, walking in front of the bus might be exactly what He wills, in His love, and has foreseen.

But wait! What then is the efficacy of prayer? Augustine wrote: “Prayers are effectual in obtaining all that God foreknew that he would grant in answer to them.” So we are praying for something that God already knows what the conclusion is? “The fact that God foreknew that a man would sin does not make a man sin; on the contrary, it cannot be doubted that it is the man himself who sins just because he whose prescience cannot be mistaken has foreseen that the man himself would sin. A man does not sin unless he wills to sin; and if he had willed not to sin, then God would have foreseen that refusal.”

So yes, humans have free will. Our father knows what we have done, are doing, and will do, and in His Love He has directed us, through His councils, through His scripture, through His church, as to how we should choose to act. If we act according to the ways of God then we are more apt to conform to God’s will, what God wishes us to do through His love. The basic rule, Augustine taught, is simple: Do what Love tells us to do. Do unto others what we would have them do unto us. As Jesus taught, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done”—if we hallow God’s name and act in Love toward God His will will indeed be done.

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Four Seconds of Providence

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Providence, the will and presence of God in each moment, is never felt by some people, is felt in moments of joy or consternation by others, is sensed in the minutiae of nature by some, is a product of intense contemplation, a sudden epiphany, in others, is experienced in a dream by some, is sensed by intuitive awareness by others, is seen by some, and is heard by others. Aurelius Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo, and after death a Saint and a Doctor of the Church, heard the voice of Providence during one intense moment in his life; what he heard during four seconds changed his life.

               Aurelius Augustine (354-430 AD) used the story of life to discover what was universally true. Following upon John the Apostle, Augustine conceived of knowledge as a universal transcendent phenomenon understood at particular times and places by the individual knower. Augustine knew this relationship between himself the knower and Knowledge, God, because of “a voice” “within me” that “cries out” to “truth itself.” This personal, temporal realization of Knowledge is what John meant by the word (Logos). Augustine’s more complete portrait of the individual’s experience of the word, that is, Providence, is his Confessions.

               Augustine was raised in North Africa near Carthage by a pagan father and Christian mother named Monica. Her son was an intelligent, precocious boy, a genius at rhetoric, but a sensualist as well. He often got into trouble growing up, at one point engaging in the wanton theft and destruction of an apple orchard. Monica meant him to be a Christian, but her son was not attracted to the stories of the Bible, which he found boring and ludicrous; instead, the great humanistic works of the Greeks and Romans interested him.

               Augustine lived at a time during which Christianity was a little over three centuries old; it had not been that many years since Christians were mercilessly hunted and tortured by the Emperor Diocletian. Since Constantine’s conversion in 312, the Church had become more secure. Nevertheless paganism, the beliefs in the old Roman and Greeks gods, preoccupied the population more than the new religion, which was however making inroads. Near Eastern religions such as Mithraism and Manicheism were strong competitors with Christianity for the beliefs and loyalties of Romans. Greco-Roman philosophies, too, attracted the attention of the educated, such as the Agnostic Aurelius Augustine.

               Augustine was as he grew up the typical Roman of his time. He was a sensualist, drinking and whoring, at the same time as he read deeply in the works of Latin writers such as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace. Cicero in particular attracted Augustine because of his eloquence, mastery of written and spoken Latin, Stoic philosophy, Republican politics, and sophisticated tastes. The extreme diversity of Roman culture, however, confused Augustine, as it did many others, and he engaged in a search by the time he was beginning to teach rhetoric at age twenty-one—the search to know what is true. There were so many different philosophies, mystery religions, and expressions of Christianity in the far-flung empire that encompassed western and southern Europe, north Africa, and the Near East, that Augustine was not alone in feeling confused, and confusion resulted in anxiety. For example, Augustine over the course of a decade or so studied Stoicism, the philosophy of Cicero and Seneca, Manicheism, an eastern philosophy developed by the mystic Mani, and Neoplatonism, a derivative of Plato’s thought developed by the philosopher Plotinus. Stoicism focused on the path to contentment by thought and controlling emotions; Manicheism focused on the path to spiritual enlightenment by controlling the bodily senses and dietary restrictions; and Neoplatonism focused on the path to uncovering the ultimate reality, the One, by a strict focus on the mind. As Augustine studied and taught rhetoric first in North Africa then in Milan, Italy, as he grew famous as a teacher and wealthy so that he could afford to indulge his senses in a variety of ways, he grew increasingly unhappy—and he did not know why he was so unhappy. Why did not success, fame, wealth, a great mind, a great career, lead to happiness? What was the source of happiness?

               Living in Milan, Augustine’s mother Monica came to join him, as she was concerned about his anxiety and unhappiness, and she knew that the answer was Christianity. She encouraged Augustine to go to the cathedral to listen to the sermons of Bishop Ambrose. In doing so, Augustine developed a new appreciation for the Bible, especially the writings of St. Paul. He found in Paul’s Epistles a mind like his own, searching for truth even while experiencing anxiety and doubt. But Paul found the truth, the discovery of which eluded Augustine. He grew more restive as his unhappiness grew, and his attempts to alleviate it by drink, sex, philosophy, and work, failed. At a point of crisis, visiting a friend, while in the garden of the friend’s house, Augustine suffered a breakdown. He began to cry uncontrollably that he did not know what is the correct path, how to achieve contentment. Then he heard a voice. “Take if and read . . . Take it and read.” He stopped, listening. Were there children nearby? No. Whose voice did he hear? Was it the wind, his imagination, his nerves speaking? No, it was real, it was an auditory event. But who spoke to him? Augustine had been reading Paul’s Epistles, and a copy of the book was nearby. He thought that he was being beckoned to take the book and read from it. He did: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”

               The words were directed toward him and his emotional quandary. He knew. A child’s voice had told him to read the solution that he was searching for so vehemently. Put on the Lord Jesus Christ. Who could have spoken to him but the Lord? It was a child’s voice, yes, a voice of innocence, but a voice of command. Do this, and ye shall be saved, the voice said to him in so many words. In the space of four seconds on a given afternoon in the year 386, God intervened in time to speak His will to Aurelius Augustine. Four seconds of the experience of Providence had saved a disturbed and sorrowful man.

It was a new birth. Shortly thereafter, he was baptized; he joined the Church and put as much energy into his work as he had before in ruminating, doubting, searching, and hungering. He became a priest and then a bishop, all the while thinking of what happened to him, the four seconds that changed him. Knowing the miracle that occurred to an unrepentant sinner, he decided to put into words what had happened to him. The result was The Confessions, completed in 398. What fascinated him the most was how Providence could act in just a moment of time to affect the whole of time. In that four seconds God spoke to his previous thirty-two years of anguish and searching, bringing to an end the moment by moment despair, after which providential moment the future was secured for him. This must be the nature of God, he thought. God is wisdom, intellect, spoken and written truth, creator of all, including time, hence outside of time yet interacting in time. God sees all simultaneously, knows past, present, future, and intervenes at will. He intervened in Augustine’s life at a point when Augustine was ready, when Augustine would hear and respond, realize God’s love and return love to God and His creation.

A life in search of contentment found it. As he wrote in Confessions, “Surely happiness is what everyone wants, so much so that there can be none who do not want it.” Augustine believed that all people know what happiness is because they at one point or another have experienced it. At each moment one yearns for happiness because one has a memory of its experience. What, then, is this experience of happiness? Augustine argued that this experience of God, however fleeting, is the experience of happiness. “True happiness is to rejoice in the truth, for to rejoice in the truth is to rejoice in you, O God.” But how can humans, ignorant because they live in time, know what is timeless, the truth? One’s mind must “be seized and held steady,” Augustine wrote, “for that short moment” so to “glimpse the splendour of eternity which is for ever still.” Time on the other hand “is never still.” God alone is still.

(Quotes from Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Books, 1961) and Wippel and Wolter, Medieval Philosophy (New York: Free Press, 1969).)

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Dorothy Day and The Catholic Worker

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Dorothy Day was a lay missionary. She was not a member of a religious order (although she did become a Benedictine oblate), rather she was a convert to Catholicism who completely embraced the religion to guide her everyday existence according to the Church calendar, liturgy, prayers, and Mass. She believed wholeheartedly in Jesus’ proclamation, according to Luke, that “Blessed are the poor.” She rejected the dominant social/economic philosophies of her time—Socialism, Communism, Capitalism—embracing a philosophy—Personalism—that, she believed, best matched the human with her Maker.

Born to a lower middle-class family in Brooklyn, her father was a journalist who moved his family around as he found different jobs in Oakland and Chicago. Dorothy was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church. As a teenager she read the Bible and developed a firm foundation of religious faith. But when she attended the University of Illinois, she began to question her religious foundation. She gravitated toward the radical political philosophies in America during World War I and became an anti-war activist and quasi-atheist. She identified herself as a Socialist, writing for Socialist periodicals, following in her father’s footsteps as a journalist. Arrested for protesting in Washington, D. C. for women’s suffrage, she spent a short time in Occoquan prison, becoming familiar with the guidance and solace of the Psalms. But ultimately her radical philosophy turned her away from Christianity. But she could not turn away from God’s ultimate plan.

Living in New York she slowly became attracted to the Catholic church. Dorothy had a variety of love affairs and several marriages; she even experienced the tragedy of aborting a child. In the mid-1920s she was in a common law marriage with Forster Batterham when she became pregnant; he did not want the child, but she did, naming her Tamar. Having the baby inspired in Dorothy religious feelings, and she wanted the child baptized in the Catholic Church. Dorothy soon followed. The Catholic Church, she realized, was the church of the poor, which drew her to it. Dorothy began to be inspired by the New Testament, St. Augustine, St. Teresa de Avila, and in time, St. Therese of Lisieux. She recounts her journey toward converting to Catholicism in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness.

Dorothy met Peter Maurin, a lay member of the De La Salle Brothers and a philosopher on behalf of the European peasantry, in New York in 1932 during the height of the Great Depression. They jointly decided to publish a paper. The Catholic Worker. The first issue appeared in May, 1933. Dorothy and Peter also began to sponsor places for the poor to go for food and shelter, Houses of Hospitality, and soon, farming communes.

During the 1930s Catholicism became second nature to her; she experienced the mystical body of Christ, living her faith wholeheartedly, every day, saying the rosary and daily office. She gravitated toward the liturgy and divine office of the Benedictines, embracing Benedictine hospitality. She was also fascinated by the Franciscans, and imitated them in her view of voluntary poverty, pacificism, and mercy toward others. She also studied Ignatius Loyola and his Spiritual Exercises.

Dorothy became highly critical of capitalism and socialism, choosing instead the philosophy of distributism; the broad gap between the rich and poor disturbed her, and she wanted to see more people able to own their own property. She also embraced the philosophy of personalism, defined as, as she wrote in a 1936 issue of the Catholic Worker:

“We are working for the Communitarian revolution to oppose both the rugged individualism of the capitalist era and the collectivism of the Communist revolution. We are working for the Personalist revolution because we believe in the dignity of man, the temple of the Holy Ghost, so beloved by God that He sent His son to take upon Himself our sins and die an ignominious and disgraceful death for us. We are Personalists because we believe that man, a person, a creature of body and soul, is greater than the State, of which as an individual he is a part. We are Personalists because we oppose the vesting of all authority in the hands of the state instead of in the hands of Christ the King. We are Personalists because we believe in free will, and not in the economic determinism of the Communist philosophy.” (“Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” Mark and Louise Zwick, p 22, in Dorothy Day, On Pilgrimage (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdsmans Publishing Company, 1999).)

In short, Dorothy’s personal philosophy, reflected in her abundant writings, involved human dignity, free will, obedience to God, working for God, subjecting oneself to God’s will, availability of property for all, and adequate wages for each individual to live a life in conformity to God’s will.

She spoke out against society’s exploitation of the poor, governments spending money on arms and war, advertising that tries to fool the poor into seeking what they don’t need—the sin of concupiscence—and employers refusing to pay adequate wages to the poor for his/her work. For Dorothy, one should live one’s life according to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount. She also believed in Holy Poverty, giving what one possesses to others, as found in Matthew 25, 31-46: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.”

Dorothy anticipated Vatican II wishing for the liturgy to be brought to the people, to conform to their needs. She rejoiced in the reforms of Vatican II, wanting Mass to be less artificial, more natural, not conforming to the wealthy, rather conforming to the poor.

She supported worker’s causes, strikes, unions like the United Farm Workers, she opposed child labor, she opposed environmental destruction, she was worried that agribusiness would omit the poor farmers and farm workers. In some sense Dorothy opposed the dangers of economic and social modernization.

She was pacifistic even during World War II, which put her on the FBI watch list. She was opposed to the Vietnam War. Many Catholic Workers burned their draft cards. She believed in taking Christ’s words in the Sermon on Mount, to turn the other cheek, literally. War corrupts youth, she believed, as well as soldiers, helping to cause the horrors of the 1960s, such as the sexual revolution and the widespread experimentation with drug use. War and conscription, she argued, exploits the poor.

Dorothy was a prolific writer, penning not only her many articles and opinion pieces in The Catholic Worker, but a variety of books: On Pilgrimage, a journal of the year 1948 living on a farm in West Virginia with her daughter Tamar and her husband David Hennessey; The Long Loneliness, her autobiography (1952); Loaves and Fishes (1963), about the Catholic Workers Movement; Thérèse, a biography of Thérèse of Lisieux (1960); The Eleventh Virgin, fiction from 1924; Little by Little: The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day (1983).

Dorothy identified the woman’s typical daily life with the life of dedication to Jesus, to a life in conformity of living in the shadow of the Cross.

Dorothy is an example of a Catholic lay missionary, a person who dedicates her life to the Great Commission, spreading the word and love of God to others, strangers, sacrificing themselves to ensure that God’s kingdom triumphs over evil, secularism, and disbelief. She was famous, of course, but there have been many others just like her who have spent their lives in relative anonymity working on behalf of Jesus. Their work often goes unobserved—but not completely. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians, 2:13: “For it is God who works in you to will and to act on behalf of His good purpose.”

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Fanny Allen (1784-1819): From Vermont to the Religious Hospitallers of St. Joseph

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Fanny Allen’s commitment to the Great Commission was not flashy, the stuff of grand tales of perseverance, suffering, and martyrdom—more the everyday, the challenges to faith of family and friends, the renewed commitment time and again, the daily putting on of the Cross to go out among the suffering and the sick to heal them, if not physically, then spiritually.

            Fanny Allen, born to revolutionary war hero Ethan Allen and his second wife Francis Montresor Brush Buchanan, was the first native New Englander to become a Roman Catholic nun. She was born and raised in Westminster and Burlington, Vermont; after her father’s death in 1789 she lived with her mother in Westminster before and after her mother’s marriage to Jabez Penniman. Fanny like her father Ethan was uncomfortable with some Protestant doctrines; when she went to Montreal in 1807 to learn French at the Convent School of the Sisters of the Congregation she came under the influence of Catholicism. At the convent she had a conversion experience, as told by her biographer, Bishop Louis De Goësbriand: “On a certain day, one of the Sisters, by a sort of inspiration, asked Fanny Allen to take a vase of flowers which she gave her, and to carry it upon the altar upon which the Holy Sacrament was present, recommending her to adore our Lord Jesus Christ when she would enter the sanctuary. The young lady started smiling, fully intending not to comply with the request; but as she opened the gate of the chancel she felt arrested by an invisible power, and quite unable to move a step. Three times did she endeavor to go up the sanctuary, and three times she failed in her attempt. Surprised and overcome she at last fell on her knees and in the sincerity of her soul adored Jesus Christ, of whose real presence in the Eucharist she then became fully convinced. Immediately after she withdrew to a remote part of the church where she shed abundance of tears and said to herself: ‘After this miraculous occurrence, I must give myself up to my Saviour.’ She, however, did not at once inform her teachers of what had happened, but desired to be instructed, and made up her mind some time after, to go to confession. After she was sufficiently instructed, she made her solemn abjuration [of her previous, Episcopal Church baptism], and was baptized by the parish priest of Montreal, Rev. L. Saulnier. . . . After her baptism she received her first communion, and on this very occasion resolved to embrace the religious life.” (Louis De Goësbriand, Catholic Memoirs of Vermont and New Hampshire (Burlington, VT, 1886, 14.)

            Upon returning to Vermont, her mother, stepfather, and friends were shocked to find her conversion to Catholicism; Vermont was, like all of New England, a place in which Protestants had long looked upon Roman Catholics with hatred. “The grief and indignation of her parents knew no bounds. They looked upon it as a most disgraceful infatuation. Peremptorily imposing silence upon her in relation to the subject, they determined to suppress it, if possible, until every means had been used to divert her mind from the fatal delusion.” (Goësbriand, 15) This reminds us of Jesus’ words, according to Luke, “Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I have come to divide people against each other. From now on families will be split apart, three in favor of me, and two against—or two in favor and three against.” (Luke, 12, 51-52)

            Time passed, during which her mother accepted Fanny’s religious change, and agreed to take her to Montreal where she might find a community of nuns with whom to live. They visited the Church at the Hotel-Dieu of St. Joseph, where Fanny experienced an epiphany: “She hardly cast her eyes upon the painting of the holy family placed behind the great altar and beheld the face of St. Joseph, that she cried out and said to her mother: ‘That is himself. You see, mother, that St. Joseph wishes me to live here, he it was who saved me from the monster. She by these words reminded her mother of an event which had occurred when she was twelve years of age. As she was walking along a river and looking out upon the water which was much agitated, she saw arising out of it an enormous beast of monstrous shape which was coming towards her. In her terror she thought she could not take her eyes from it, nor stir from where she was, when all at once she thought she saw near her a venerable, bald-headed man, wrapped up in a brown cloak, and carrying a stick in his hand, who took hold of her arm, saying : “Little girl, what do you do here? make haste and run away.” At the sound of his voice she recovered her strength and made towards home in a hurry, turning about, however, to see the old man, but he had disappeared. When she reached home, her mother noticing her excited condition and the changed appearance of her features, understood that some extraordinary accident must have happened, and the child told her the best she could and the cause of her terror and the manner of her rescue by the old man.” (Goësbriand, 16.) Fanny immediately resolved to become one of Sisters of St. Joseph of the Hotel Dieu.

            Hotel-Dieu of St. Joseph in Montreal had a long and illustrious career when Fanny devoted her life to God. “In Montreal, the mission of St. Joseph on earth was . . . represented by the founding of the Hotel-Dieu, under the charge of the Sisters of St. Joseph. . . . The Sisters of St. Joseph of the Hotel- Dieu are true to the spirit of their first mother, and in their immense and admirable new hospital at the foot of the mountain in Montreal, they nearly always have some patients of Vermont or other New England States. There many are cured, owing, perhaps, more to the prayers and excellent nursing of the sisters than to the skill of their admirable physicians and surgeons. The Sisters of St. Joseph are a cloistered community. In their works of charity they are not encouraged by the hope of being praised by men. The remembrance of St. Joseph ministering to the Son of God, the honor in the sight of God attached to this office, the hope of the greater reward promised to works of mercy, are the chief incentives to their life of devotion.” (Goësbriand, 8-9) Fanny joined the convent in 1808, and there lived for nine years serving the poor and the sick, bringing to them the message of Christ in accord with the Great Commission.

            Fanny’s life is illustrative of what often happens when a person goes against comfort and expectation to take on a life-changing task. Fanny’s conversion upset the cohesiveness of family based on traditional ways of worship, challenging her mother’s Protestantism and her birth-father Ethan Allen’s Deism. She followed the will of her heavenly father over the remonstrances of her family and friends, but in so doing she taught her mother, stepfather, and friends that love for God required amazing sacrifices. As Louis Goësbriand related: When “Mr. Penniman and his wife came to Montreal to see her; they visited the monastery in all its details, were surprised to see how happy, contented and perfectly united amongst themselves were the Sisters of this community. They had imagined that Catholic Convents were no better than so many prisons, and they were so pleased with what they saw, that they continually spoke of the happiness of those Sisters, and congratulated the young novice on the choice of life she had made. She also felt so pleased to see her parents free from former prejudices against the religious life, that she seemed to grow more fervent in the service of God, and in the discharge of all the duties of her state. When the time of her profession had come (1810) many of her acquaintances of the United States came to witness this solemn action. They filled the whole chancel, and the church itself was quite full. All the Americans could not but wonder at seeing this young lady of Vermont shut herself up in a convent for the rest of her life.” (Goësbriand, 19)  It was truly an eye-opening experience for New Englanders traditionally brought up in an atmosphere of suspicion of Catholicism in general and convents in particular.

            Fanny lived out her life in love for others, both her family and friends as well as the mentally and physically ill at the Hotel-Dieu. Her life echoed what Pope Francis recently encouraged healing nuns to do, “to cultivate their service and love for the sick, always with joy and hope, never losing the joy in their hearts, and loving the most fragile persons.” https://www.vaticannews.va/en/church/news/2024-10/world-day-mental-health-interview-sisters-hospitaller.html

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Ignatius of Loyola, Soldier for Christ

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Ignatius of Loyola was a soldier for Navarre, Spain, who became a soldier for Christ. Recovering from battle wounds at his family’s castle in Loyola in the Basque region of Spain, he experienced conversion in which he renounced his former sinful ways of war, arrogance, and lust and took up the Cross of poverty, humility, and service to the Lord. He quit the military and renounced his former life, gave away all of his possessions, and became a wandering penitent. He journeyed to Rome and to Jerusalem as a pilgrim and formed a society of brethren in 1534 to serve the poor, which eventually became the Jesuit movement in 1540. Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises reveal his faith while the Autobiography reveals his actions taken for Christ.

            Loyola wrote the Spiritual Exercises for his disciples to help each individual to achieve freedom of the soul in discovering and conforming to God’s will. Loyola devised a plan of meditation that covered four weeks, more or less, depending on the energy and success of the disciple. The emphasis is on understanding that the role of humans on earth is to praise God; the rest of Creation assists each individual in this task. The individual charts sin and resolves through prayer to vanquish the enemy. The penitent contemplates Christ and His call to all humans to fight for the glory of God. The individual must make humility a work of art, humbling the self to God, rejecting all desire for earthly things, imitating Christ in poverty and suffering. The disciple learns to choose wisely: if God wills it, you accept it, and do it; to acquire knowledge, as to why the choice must be made; to make the choice, the decision to act, during a moment of tranquility. In making a choice, combine imagery and reason—but ultimately the decision rests on reason.

The Exercises require daily close personal examination to commune with God, recognize sin, and eradicate it. In each exercise, the individual imagines the sinful body, imagines the suffering Christ and identifies with Christ’s passion. Loyola’s technique is an active approach to meditation, wherein one contemplates an image and wills a response, merging reason, will, and empathy. The Exercises are an extended form of penance, self-denial in the extreme according to the imagery of Christ’s suffering.

The theme of Loyola’s life as described in his Autobiography was the fight against Satan for the souls of Christ. When he was enduring the pain of recuperation from his battle wounds, and a broken leg had to be set and reset, he learned to be grateful for the intense pain and resultant deformity, as it allowed him to grow in humility and to be a “martyr to his own pleasure.” After his recovery, and his decision to begin a new life, he was overwhelmed by his past sins, and was constantly caught between happiness and sadness, thoughts of redemption and sin; it was as if angels and demons waged war over him. He became obsessed with trying to meet God’s demands for his soul. In 1523 he journeyed to Jerusalem, guided by his soul, guided by visions, even one of Christ, which gave him certainty that he was on the right path. When he returned to Spain he decided to expand his learning, which would bring further spiritual insights. He studied Thomas Aquinas and Peter Lombard in particular. His teaching of spiritual exercises was brought to the attention of the Inquisition. In 1528 Loyola was at the University of Paris, winning converts because of the Spiritual Exercises. Yet he still felt uncertain and insecure. Once when attending to a plague-stricken person, he touched an infected boil and, terrified of acquiring the sickness but disdainful of his fear, plunged his hand into his mouth. In 1538, in Rome, he completed his Autobiography at the same time that he completed the Spiritual Exercises, his journey of body and soul now complete.

By this time Loyola had attracted many followers whom he called a Company of men devoted to Christ willing to share poverty, humility, and danger for the sake of spreading the Good News. The Society of Jesus was constituted by Pope Paul III in 1540. Loyola pledged loyalty to the Pope, organizing his men as soldiers of God without weapons save those of education, charity, spirituality, obedience, poverty, and humility. Loyola, believing in action for the sake of Christianity, inspired his followers, the Jesuits, to journey to far-away places to help others and spread the word of God. Francis Xavier, a Jesuit priest and friend, went as a missionary to China. Other Jesuits traveled to North, Central, and South America. Throughout their history the fervent dedication of the Jesuits has brought anger, jealousy, and suppression. But would Catholicism have been spread so effectively, its roots planted so deeply, in North America, without the work of the Jesuits?

Sources: The Autobiography of Ignatius Loyola, ed. John C. Olin, New York, Harper and Row, 1974; The Spiritual Exercises, New York: Doubleday & Co., 1964.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814-1888), Missionary Bishop on Horseback

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Visitors to downtown Santa Fe are drawn to two majestic buildings, the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi and the Chapel of the Loretto Sisters. Little would one suspect today that the founder of these two buildings, indeed the father of American Catholicism in the southwestern states of New Mexico and Arizona, was a Frenchman who came to America for the express intent of following the Great Commission, that command by Christ to “Go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation.”

When Jean Baptiste Lamy arrived at Santa Fe in 1851 the city was an old Spanish capitol, founded 242 years before. Only recently at the end of the Mexican War the U.S. had taken control of the region politically and militarily, which necessitated commensurate ecclesiastical changes. The Vatican appointed the thirty-five-year-old Lamy Bishop Apostolic of the Diocese of New Mexico, a vast region of thousands of square miles encompassing the states of New Mexico, Arizona, western Texas, southern parts of Colorado and Nevada—in short, much of the vast borderland between Mexico and the United States. The land was sparsely settled, the farmers and ranchers harassed by aggressive Plains Indian tribes. The appointment was a surprise and an immense challenge for Lamy, who had only recently been a frontier parish priest in northern Kentucky and Ohio. Lamy had been ordained in Mont-Ferrand; recruited by Bishop Jean Purcell of Cincinnati, Lamy arrived in the United States in 1839. Twelve years later he journeyed down the Ohio to the Mississippi River, on to New Orleans, from there to Galveston by steamer followed by another sea journey to Matagorda Bay, then overland to San Antonio, eventually arriving at Santa Fe. He assumed control of a small town of mostly Mexicans served by a few priests who were basically on their own, the Bishop of Durango, Mexico, being fifteen hundred miles away. The sacraments in Lamy’s new diocese were rarely administered and the morals of the priests were not befitting the heritage and magisterium of the Catholic Church.

Lamy discovered that he was to be a missionary bishop on horseback. He took to the road, over and over, sometimes accompanied by soldiers, traders, guides, sometimes alone, in a forbidding country of vast deserts, few settlements, and Indian tribes discontented with the new authority of the United States. One of his first journeys was to take his Vatican credentials and travel to and from Durango over six months and three thousand miles to apprise Bishop José Antonio Laureano de Zubiría y Escalante of the change. In 1852 he journeyed to and from Baltimore to participate in a plenary council; on the return journey he stopped in Kentucky and recruited sisters of the Loretto mission to hazard the journey to New Mexico to establish a convent. Lamy made this harrowing journey numerous times, often in the company of priests and nuns, and frequently experiencing attack by the Apaches and other warlike tribes such as the Pueblo, Comanche, and Navajo. In July, 1867, for example, he escorted priests and sisters to Santa Fe when Plains Indians attacked. After a fierce battle, “Sister Alphonsa Thompson, a native of Kentucky, fell sick. Night settling we camped, and she being very ill received the last Sacraments. The other sisters waited on her all night, and the next day we had to continue our journey. She was put into a wagon with four other sisters, and when we had halted, she died at ten o’clock, July 24, being not quite twenty years old.” (Quoted in M. Lilliana Owens, “Our Lady of Light Academy, Santa Fe,” New Mexico Historical Review 13(1938))

Bishop Lamy realized that to turn around declining morals, which was a consequence of ignorance, schools must be built. The Loretto Sisters helped to fill the gulf, opening a school, Our Lady of Light Academy, in 1853. The challenge of educating the poor and ignorant grew over the years; Lamy’s diocese expanded to include Colorado and the region of the Gadsden Purchase acquired by the United States in 1854. During the Civil War, to find priests to assist in the Arizona Territory, Father Lamy journeyed to California, crossing Death Valley and the Mohave Desert. Along the way he chanced upon a settler who described the bishop as “a frank agreeable fascinating gentleman with the bonhomie of the Frenchman and the earnestness of the typical Christian. . . . A man of works rather than words, whose field of work is an empire, his diocese stretching from Denver to Mexico, from the Rio Grande to the Colorado.” (Quoted in Paul Horgan, Lamy of Santa Fe, 1975.)

Lamy sent his vicar general and close friend Father Joseph Machebeuf to Colorado to organize that part of his quickly growing diocese, centered in Denver. He frequently had occasion to make the journey north into the Rocky Mountains, such as in 1866, when he made the nine-hundred-mile trip, founding churches and confirming neophytes to the Catholic faith. The next year, 1867, he journeyed to Rome to report to Pope Pius IX of the 135,000 Catholics under his charge and the fifty-one priests he directed to serve them. Lamy became Archbishop in 1875 having spent twenty-four years in the desert southwest.

Recently Pope Francis has commemorated American missionaries in Puerto Rico to carry out the Great Commission with love. There is no better example of loving self-sacrifice than Jean-Baptiste Lamy. Willa Cather, in her fictional portrait of Lamy, Death Comes for the Archbishop (New York: Random House, 1990), wrote truly of Lamy and other missionaries in America: “Those early missionaries threw themselves naked upon the hard heart of a country that was calculated to try the endurance of giants. They thirsted in its deserts, starved among its rocks, climbed up and down its terrible canyons on stone-bruised feet, broke long fasts by unclean and repugnant food. Surely these endured Hunger, Thirst, Cold, Nakedness, of a kind beyond any conception St. Paul and his brethren could have had. Whatever the early Christians suffered, it all happened in that safe little Mediterranean world, amid the old manners, the old landmarks. If they endured martyrdom, they died among their brethren, their relics were piously preserved, their names lived in the mouths of holy men. Riding with his Auvergnats to the old missions that had been scenes of martyrdom, the Bishop [Lamy] used to remind them that no man could know what triumphs of faith had happened there, where one white man met torture and death alone among so many infidels, or what visions and revelations God may have granted to soften that brutal end.”

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Juniper Berthiaume (1744-?) French Missionary to the Penobscot Tribe

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Pope Francis said on his Apostolic Journey to Canada in July 2022, “I have been waiting to come here and be with you! Here, from this place associated with painful memories, I would like to begin what I consider a pilgrimage, a penitential pilgrimage. I have come to your native lands to tell you in person of my sorrow, to implore God’s forgiveness, healing and reconciliation, to express my closeness and to pray with you and for you.”

Pope Francis was addressing the years of abuse perpetrated by some Catholics upon the indigenous First Nations of North America. As the Pope said on his visit, “when the European colonists first arrived here, there was a great opportunity to bring about a fruitful encounter between cultures, traditions and forms of spirituality. Yet for the most part that did not happen.”

There is much anger among the First Nations, such that his listeners might not have picked up on another comment he made: “Christian charity was not absent, and there were many outstanding instances of devotion and care for children.”

Indeed, there are thousands of examples of people who came to American to fulfill the Great Commission. These people had love not hate in their heart. Many of these missionaries are well known. Some are just a footnote in history. One of these footnotes is the French Canadian missionary, Franciscan Juniper Berthiaume.

Of the thousands of missionaries who traveled about America from the beginning of the Spanish voyages of discoveries through the centuries to today, many were lay missionaries, not ordained as priests or deacons, but those who committed their lives to God and the Great Commission either by joining religious orders or through the activities of service in their parish, by teaching, and through other volunteer work. One such person was Juniper Berthiaume, whose life is obscured by time and the lack of records, save letters and journals by which his significant work as a missionary to the Penobscot tribe of Maine and the Micmac of eastern Canada in the 1780s can be recreated.

The Penobscot region, like most of the eastern frontier of Maine, was under the influence of New France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, hence had been dominated by Roman Catholic interests as delivered to the native inhabitants, the Abenakis, by Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries. The Penobscot tribe in particular had the presence of French missionary priests among them for generations until the end of the French-Indian War in 1763. Thereupon the English governed the region and had the age-old antipathy toward Papism. In the period after the French-Indian War, the Penobscot and other Abenaki tribes of Maine felt increasingly abandoned. Their new masters the English preferred to send Anglican rather than Catholic missionaries among them. This changed during the war. The Penobscot people, wishing to ally themselves with the Americans, appealed to the government of Massachusetts to assign a Catholic priest to serve their interests. One priest, a chaplain with the French navy, ministered to the Penobscot for about a year. He was soon replaced by another missionary, who stayed much longer with the Penobscot tribe. This was Juniper Berthiaume.

Frère Juniper was a native of Quebec, educated in France and Quebec. Surviving records shed little light on his early years. One anecdote has it that he was frustrated with the Franciscan authorities in Quebec and decided to cross the St. Lawrence to the American camp, where he brought General Washington important correspondence from agents in Quebec. Perhaps. What is certain is that Frère Juniper had joined the Recollect Franciscans in Quebec around 1768; in 1776 he lived at the Franciscan convent in Montreal; in 1778 he was living at St. Peters, Newfoundland; and in 1780 he was in Rhode Island, perhaps because he served as a chaplain in the French fleet, which frequently anchored at Newport. At the same time, Penobscot Indians led by their chief Orono arrived in Rhode Island to appeal for a Catholic priest to minister to them. Their appeal was answered in 1780 by the Massachusetts General Court, which appointed Juniper Berthiaume an “instructor” to the Penobscot tribe. He traveled with the Penobscot to Maine, stopping at Fort Halifax at the confluence of the Kennebec River with the Sebasticook River. Here he stayed, ministering to the Penobscot tribe, and representing their interests before Massachusetts authorities. Neither he nor the Indians received full financial support from the Massachusetts government. He was released, then reinstated, then released, by the government, though he was often unaware of his official status with the Penobscot. What he knew for certain was that they depended on him, and he in turn felt called to minister to them as a missionary.  

Upon the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783, New England Congregational missionaries set their sights on causing religious change among the Maine Indians after several centuries of Roman Catholic missionary influence. A leader in this endeavor was the Rev. Daniel Little (1724-1801), who was pastor of the Second Parish of Wells (Kennebunk) for fifty years. Little made half a dozen journeys before and after the War for Independence along Maine’s eastern shore as far as Penobscot Bay, visiting the scattered settlers of the coast, ascending the Penobscot River to reach out to, make peace with, minister to, and convert to Protestantism, the Penobscot tribe. During his journey in 1786, Little was sanguine that he would accomplish his mission by establishing a school to teach the Indian children English as a pathway to their learning the English Bible and the Congregational Way. What he did not anticipate was the presence among the Penobscot of forty-two-year-old French Franciscan lay Frère Juniper Berthiaume, who by this time had years of experience living with, teaching, and ministering to the Maine Indians. Frère Berthiaume worked against Little’s project to convert the Penobscot tribe, forcing the Congregationalist to retreat from the Penobscot region in frustration.

Frère Juniper was the spiritual leader of the Penobscot people, Rev. Little learned, but he was something of a maverick; neither the Bishop of Quebec nor the Superior of the Missions of the Thirteen United States authorized his work among the Indians. Nevertheless, he performed many of the sacraments the best he could, including communion though he was not able to consecrate the elements, and confession though he could not absolve the penitents of their sins. As a result, the Quebec Vicar General Henri-François Gravé de la Rive encouraged Catholics in Maine to drive the Berthiaume out of Maine; but Frère Juniper stayed. Compared to what the Penobscot people had experienced in recent decades, and the frequent lack of a priest among them, Frère Juniper’s limited role must have been perfectly acceptable to their needs. At some point between 1786 and 1788, Frère Juniper departed Maine for New Brunswick, there to minister to the Micmac tribe. In October 1788, the newly installed Bishop of Quebec, Jean-François Hubert, wrote letters to two Catholic leaders in New Brunswick, requesting that they determine the whereabouts of Juniper Berthiaume, and force him to leave the Micmac tribe alone and depart New Brunswick. At some point Juniper Berthiaume did depart New England and Canada for warmer climes. There exist scattered records from the Diocese of New Orleans, Louisiana, when under Spanish influence in 1796, of reports of a parish priest of New Madrid on the Mississippi River being drunk during the sacrament of Eucharist. The person who reported the priest was a Franciscan assigned to the parish, Frère Juniper Berthiaume!

Frère Juniper was one of those who Pope Francis said had “Christian charity.” Nothing required him to stay, teach, and minister to the Indians of the upper North American coast, against a host of odds, than the pure love of Jesus in his heart.

(For more information on Juniper Berthiaume, see Russell M. Lawson, Apostle of the East: The Life and Journeys of Rev. Daniel Little (Wipf and Stock, 2019))

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Missionary John Thayer

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

John Thayer (1755-1815) was a New England convert, educated at Yale where he was taught that all things Roman Catholic were despicable. Then he went to Europe and underwent a conversion—a most unexpected religious change. He wrote a book about his experience, The Conversion of the Reverend John Thayer, formerly a Protestant Minister of Boston, Written by Himself, which was of interest to New Englanders, then he returned and became a priest, the first New Englander consecrated by John Carroll. He served in Boston (where at the time a priest was really a missionary among the overwhelming majority in opposition), got into some intellectual controversies between Catholics and Protestants, then went out west (the Old Northwest, Ohio River Valley) to be a missionary. Eventually he went to Ireland, where he lived the rest of his life as a village priest.

Thayer’s life is instructive in several ways. He was restless and headstrong, but had to learn to give into Providence, to accept God’s ways. He was controversial and opinionated—as a Catholic living in New England he experienced bias towards his beliefs, but he did not learn the lesson, and turned his bias against slaves in Kentucky. Eventually his legacy would be a symbol of wrongheaded bias that could take a fiery and deadly turn.

Thayer served as a Protestant chaplain during the Revolutionary War, but when the war began to grind to a halt, Thayer, restless, decided to travel to Europe, thinking it would be a novelty to see how Catholics in France and Italy treated a Congregational minister. He was, surprisingly, welcomed by Catholics, and made to feel at home. He learned Italian, and had a lengthy stay in Rome, where, against his previous intentions, he began to fall under the spell of Roman Catholicism: the liturgy, the Saints, the Virgin, the priests: “thanks to that admirable Providence,” he later recalled, “which made all conduce to my good; as the desire of travelling had led me to the centre of light, without my knowledge, so the desire of instructing myself, brought me to the knowledge of the truth without my intention.” Providence had steered him in the opposite way. He attended the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, where he was ordained in 1789, whereupon he returned to Boston.

Boston at the time was a Protestant stronghold of the vestiges of Puritanism with some liberal Protestant beliefs springled in. The number of Catholics in the city was perhaps a hundred or so, and these were mostly French-speaking immigrants and a few Irish immigrants, and neither saw eye to eye. The French were suspicious of a convert American priest, though the Irish were more tolerant of Father Thayer. The first American bishop, John Carroll, gave Father Thayer permission to try to organize a church, and to begin to spread the Good News throughout the New England towns surrounding Boston. There were a few French missionary priests in the neighborhood as well, though they mostly did not get along with Thayer.

Father Thayer, indeed, was a fiery personality, often argumentative, unwilling to ignore an attack on his person or his religion. He often argued with his French counterparts as well as the clergy of Boston. Thayer, for example, engaged in a literary battle with the Protestant clergyman and historian Jeremy Belknap, who had written a history of colonial America in which he described the Wars for Empire between the English and the French, and accused the French of converting the Algonquian tribes of northern New England not only to Catholicism, but to hatred for Protestants as well. Thayer took Belknap to task for not presenting both sides of the story, that Protestants had been just as violent and warlike as their Native American counterparts, and French priests, such as Father Sebastian Rale, the Jesuit missionary to the Norridgewock Indians of Maine, did them a service not only by converting them to the true faith but also by helping them defend their homeland against aggressive Protestant militia forces. Thayer accused Belknap and other New England Protestants of bias and name-calling, taunting Catholics for being superstitious idol-worshippers. Such was the atmosphere of bigotry and oppression in which American Catholics lived at the beginning of the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Bishop Carroll grew impatient with Father Thayer’s combativeness, even if it was for a good cause. When Thayer, who became increasingly frustrated in his attempts to spread the Great Commission in Massachusetts, requested a new assignment as a missionary in the trans-Appalachian West, Carroll agreed. But Thayer’s time working in the vineyard of Kentucky was not fruitful either. When he arrived, he worked with Father Stephen Badin and other priests who at the time relied on slave labor to provide for material wealth to engage in their frontier ministry. Catholics such as Father Badin argued that slaves were children of God deserving baptism and the sacraments, but their inferiority to whites meant that enslavement was what was best for their own needs. The New Englander Thayer was at first outraged. But in time, when he became obsessed with building a new convent, he convinced himself that he could not do it without slaves, so changed his tune, embraced slavery, and even was accused (anecdotally) of whipping recalcitrant slaves. Such erratic behavior could only mean he was dissatisfied. He finally left Kentucky, and America as well, adding to his complete departure from his Protestant heritage by completely departing from his New England ancestry. In 1803 he journeyed to Ireland, settling in Limerick, where he became a parish priest.

But Father Thayer could not escape Providence, could not escape the impact he would have on America. In Ireland he got to know James Ryan, his daughters Margaret, Anne, Mary, and Catherine, and their cousin Catherine O’Connell Molineaux. Thayer, thinking about his homeland and wishing still to make an impact, contemplated helping the young women go to America to join the Ursuline convent in Quebec. He wrote to his friend Father Francis Anthony Matignon to help the Ryans and their cousin. The young women departed Ireland and traveled to America, where Father Matignon welcomed them and helped them to travel to the Ursuline convent at Trois Rivières in Canada, which they entered for their novitiate. Meanwhile Father Thayer became ill and died, leaving behind a legacy of funds that he had requested Father Matignon invest for the purpose of eventually building an Ursuline convent in Boston. Before he died Father Matignon invested the money, which earned interest while the Ryan women became Ursuline nuns intent on going to Boston to serve. The Ryan sisters–Mary Ryan, Sister Joseph, superior; Catherine Molineaux, Sister Mary Angela; Catherine Ryan, Sister Mary Magdalene; Margaret Ryan, Sister Mary Augustine–arrived in Boston in 1820, opened the convent (in nearby Charlestown) under the authority of Bishop Jean-Louis Lefebvre de Cheverus, and began working with the poor. In time, as renewed anti-Catholicism swept New England, the convent in Charlestown was notorious as a place where Ursuline nuns groomed young women for, Protestants believed, diabolical purposes. Intense hatred and bigotry, the kind of sinful feelings Father Thayer had experienced when he first came to Boston, the same hatred he turned upon others, slaves, in Kentucky, came full circle. The Mount St. Benedict Convent was attacked and burned down by an angry mob of Protestants in 1834, becoming a symbol of the destructive hatred that Christians—all humans–fall prey to.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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Junipero Serra: Work and Prayer

Posted on September 11, 2025 by theamericanplutarch

Franciscan Junipero Serra (1713-1784), one of the founders of Catholicism in California, should he miraculously walk the paths of California today (on tired, sore, bare feet, for he believed in the practice of mortification), he would be astonished at the vitriol and condemnations of his efforts at bringing the Great Commission among the native people of California.

In recent years the Left has joined on the bandwagon of hating Franciscan missionaries such as Fray Serra, who has become a symbol of the evils of the Spanish missionary experience in colonial California. Serra has been accused of outrageous actions by the Left in books such as Bad Indians by Deborah Miranda (2013) and in petitions to condemn his memory in such as the following: “Serra is not the historical hero people thought when this landmark statue to him was erected [in Ventura], one of many throughout California, as a historical emblem, he is toxic and should be removed. As a community we cannot and will not support the dehumanization of the Native American community any longer. We are calling for restorative justice and are petitioning for his statue to be removed immediately.” (https://www.change.org/p/ventura-city-council-removal-of-father-serra-statues-name-change-of-schools)

In response, Archbishop of Los Angeles Jose Gomez declared: “The real St. Junipero fought a colonial system where natives were regarded as ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages,’ whose only value was to serve the appetites of the white man. For St. Junipero, this colonial ideology was a blasphemy against the God who has ‘created (all men and women) and redeemed them with the most precious blood of his Son’.” Fray Serra “lived and worked alongside native peoples and spent his whole career defending their humanity and protesting crimes and indignities committed against them.” (https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/45029/st-junipero-serra-protested-colonial-oppression-and-abuses-archbishop-gomez-says)

Yes, Junipero Serra sacrificed his life for others. A native of Majorca, he was an intellectual and expert on the Medieval philosopher John Duns Scotus. A Franciscan devoted to the Great Commission, Fray Serra responded to Jesus’ commandment to leave family and friends and, in 1749, journeyed to America. Upon landing at Veracruz, he traveled to Mexico City by foot in an act of humility and mortification. Arriving, he stopped to pray at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, then joined the faculty of the College of San Fernando, where he often spent years working as a missionary to the people of the Querétaro region northwest of Mexico City. In 1767, Fray Serra was appointed presidente of Franciscan missions in California, to which he journeyed.

Fray Serra traveled to Baja California, where the Spanish had established numerous missions, before turning his attention to the north, Alta California, in 1769. He journeyed overland through Baja California, halting on his journey in April, 1769, between Mission Purisima Concepción and Mission Guadalupe, where he found the local Indian tribe, the Cochimi, suffering from lack of food. “When night came on I tarried on the ground,” he wrote in his diary. “There I talked with some ten families of Indians, and when I asked them for the reason of their being there, they told me with much sorrow that they were of the mission of Guadalupe; and that the Father, for want of provisions, had found himself obliged to send them out to the mountains to seek their food; and that as they were not accustomed to this, their hardship was great, particularly in seeing their babies suffer and hearing them cry. I felt sorry enough, and though it was somewhat unfortunate that the pack-train was behind and could not arrive that night, they were not left without some alleviation; for with a portion of pinole which I carried they made themselves a dish of good atole, which was for the women and children. Afterwards the process was repeated for the men. At this they were consoled, the more so, when I told them that they should go to their mission; that already corn was on the way to the Father by sea from Mulegé by order of the most illustrious inspector. I took my rest, and had them pray together. They concluded by singing a very tender song of the love of God; and as those of that mission have justly the fame of singing with especial sweetness, I had a good deal of consolation in hearing them.” (Quoted in Zephyrin Engelhardt, The Missions and Missionaries of California (San Francisco: James Barry, 1908), 1: 349-50.)

A month later on May 15th, still on the road in northern Baja California, Fray Serra encountered many Indians whom he called “gentiles,” meaning they had not yet heard the Good News. “And I praised God,” Serra wrote, “for allowing me to encounter such humble creatures for whom there appear to be no obstacles that would prevent them from receiving the light of the Holy Gospel.” In June Serra wrote: “The time we have spent with them has been most pleasurable. Their beautiful physique, comportment, friendliness, and happiness have won all our hearts.” June 26, “one of the women wanted me to hold the infant she was nursing. I held him in my arms for a while, so wishing that I could baptize him.” (Quoted in Beebe and Senkewicz, Junipero Serra: California, Indians, and the Transformation of a Missionary (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015,)186, 194, 197.)

On his many journeys, usually on foot, Fray Serra often incurred leg sores that became chronic, so that his friends were worried for his health. He had such sores on his journey through Baja California. Arriving at San Diego in July 1769, Serra’s leg unexpectedly began to heal–and so too did the people under his charge at the new mission he founded, Mission San Diego de Alcalá, where he halted to take time (about nine months) to tend to the many sick. In July, 1770, he moved north, founding Mission San Carlos de Monterey on the Carmel River (renamed Mission San Carlos Borroméo de Carmelo), a place from where Fray Serra would direct his missionary activities in Alta California. He founded Mission San Antonio de Padua, near Monterey in the Santa Lucia Mountains, in July 1771. Two months later Fray Serra founded Mission San Gabriel, named for the archangel. In 1772 he founded Mission San Luis Obispo de Toloso.

In November, 1776, Fray Fermin Francisco de Lasuén founded Mission San Juan Capistrano on the San Juan Creek. A month later, Fray Serra was journeying with Fray Lasuén on the path from Mission San Carlos on the Carmel River to the new Mission San Juan Capistrano. Caught in a terrible rainstorm, the two Franciscans and their military escort were confronted by warriors from the Chumush tribe, who were often aggressive toward the Spanish; indeed, Fray Lasuén the previous year had narrowly escaped death at their hands. But this time, the Chumush came to the aid of the Franciscans, carrying Fray Serra through a difficult, muddy passage. In return Fray Serra stayed with the people, getting to know them, praying and singing with them. “And for me,” he wrote in his diary, “this served to deepen the compassion I have felt for them for quite some time.” (Quoted in Beebe and Senkewicz, Junipero Serra, 19)

At some of the many missions founded by Fray Serra, such as at San Diego, the local Indians, the Kumeyaay, rebelled against the Spanish presence, especially of the soldiers at the local presidio. On several occasions the Indians attacked the mission. The 1773 attack killed the resident Franciscan missionary, Fray Luis Jayme, who ironically had been a champion of Indian rights against the presidio soldiers. Fray Serra made the decision not to avenge his death, rather to capture, briefly imprison, and set free the Kumeyaay warriors, hoping by such generosity to bring them closer to the faith.

Fray Serra followed the dictates of the Franciscans and other missionaries in America, who believed that Christianity and civilization were linked, that converts must be catechized and learn the sign of the cross before baptism, must learn to farm, and must live in missions to be directed by the missionaries, who thought of the Indians as spiritual children, and believed that often the body must be mortified to embrace the spirit; hence corporeal punishment was often necessary, even if self-inflicted. As he wrote in 1778, “I maintain that settlements populated by fine Spanish citizens who are models of good behavior can be established only after the gentiles who are scattered across the territory have become Christians and have been brought together in their respective . . . missions.” (Quoted in Beebe and Senkewicz, Junipero Serra, 357.)

In Fray Serra’s missions, every day the people of the mission came together for morning mass, which involved the homily and hymns of praise to God. “Then they go to breakfast on the mush (atole) which is made for all, and before partaking of it they cross themselves and sing the Bendito [hymn of praise]; then they go to work at whatever can be done, the padres inclining them and applying them to the work by setting an example themselves; at noon they eat their soup (pozole), which is made for all alike (de comunidad); then they work another stint; and at sunset they return to recite doctrine and end by singing the Alabado,” an evening hymn of praise. (Quoted in Elliott Coues, ed. and trans., On the Trail of a Spanish Pioneer: The Diary and itinerary of Francisco Garcés (Missionary Priest) in His Travels through Sonora, Arizona, and California, 1775-1776, vol. 1 (New York: Francis P. Harper, 1900), 262.)

Junipero Serra was a teacher, a man who gave his life to Christ in obedience to the Great Commission. He believed in establishing missions for the Indians to follow the examples of St. Benedict and St. Francis, who, according to Pope Francis, believed in “combining prayer and spiritual reading with manual labor (ora et labora). Seeing manual labour as spiritually meaningful proved revolutionary. Personal growth and sanctification came to be sought in the interplay of recollection and work. This way of experiencing work makes us more protective and respectful of the environment; it imbues our relationship to the world with a healthy sobriety.” (Pope Francis, On the Care for Our Common Home, section 126: https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html)

Work and prayer: Junipero Serra taught others to believe what he believed, that these are the keys to a successful life.

A version of this essay appeared in Catholic Exchange

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