(Above) Ida Görres
Broken Lights: Diaries and Letters 1951-1959
by Ida Friederike Görres
Translated by Barbara Waldstein-Wartenberg (The Newman Press, Westminster 1964) (German edition: 1960)
“Wirklich die neue Phönixgestalt?” Über Kirche und Konzil: Unbekannte Briefe 1962-1971 an Paulus Gordan
by Ida Friederike Görres
Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (Editor) (Be & Be Verlag, Heiligenkreuz, 2015)
You may wonder why I speak of the “collapse” of the German Church. Hasn’t the German Catholic Church – their theologians, their charitable organizations and above all their government money – acquired unprecedented influence over the entire Catholic Church under Pope Bergoglio? I am referring, however, to a transformation that took place between 1945 and 1971, in which the Church in Germany acquired an entirely different substance while retaining the hallmarks of the past: institutions, folklore, pretty churches and orchestral masses. A “sea-change” which would – except for certain pockets of resistance – eventually almost extinguish the practice of Catholicism in that country.
Ida Görres is an important witness to this transformation – initially, as a committed supporter of change, then, as an aghast observer of calamity. Her background may be surprising: born in 1901 into Austrian nobility (her brother was the one-Europe, one-world agitator Richard van Condenhove-Kalergi; her mother was Japanese). She had married Carl-Josef Görres; I have found no reference indicating he is a relation of the great 19th century Catholic journalist and thinker Joseph von Görres. A committed Catholic writer, Ida Görres was best known for her hagiographical works of the 1930’s and 40’s – for example, on Mary Ward and Theresa of Lisieux.
From 1950, she was compelled to live as an invalid – so most of the first book we are considering, Broken Lights, takes the form of reflections on her reading. In her diary and letters Görres rambles over all kinds of topics, but returns again and again to her own vocation of hagiography. She discusses many saints and holy people, major and minor. And even the living: for example, there is a reference to Mother Theresa some 15 years or more before she became generally known in the English-speaking world (p. 196). I certainly would like to know more about some of these figures!
The general tenor of Ida Görres’s remarks is one of unease and dissatisfaction with the Church. She seems on the quest of a new “core” underneath the inadequate exterior of contemporary Catholicism, a pearl under the ugly shell of the oyster:
Nothing saddens me more at the moment than the pitiable mediocrity and flatness of Catholic Christendom – I can hardly find one redeeming feature anymore. (p. 51)
And, of course, there are references to the Catholic “ghetto.”
Perhaps as a result, Ida Görres ranged widely afield in her reading: Jewish texts, gnostic writings, mystical and spiritual literature of all kinds, novels – but also Newman and C.S. Lewis. I cannot say that everything she says on this mass of reading is insightful – she excoriates Simone Weil but has some semi-positive words for The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale!
Even in her chosen field of hagiography, the strongly Catholic figures that that once fascinated her are now found to be inadequate or at least in need a radical reinterpretation:
In one way Mary Ward has grown rather strange to me, remote. For her external story represents a model belonging to the very earliest phases of my spiritual life, a model now outdated; the typical zealous figure – almost zealot – of the Counter Reformation.
I have been ruminating on Mother Francis Xavier Cabrini, surely a classical example of that special, perfectly genuine and lawful brand of Christian piety which can be completely unintelligent… In 67 years of holiness truly lived… there is no record of a single “unforgettable sentence”… Completely devoid of self-reflection. One feels almost inclined to say: if animals could be holy, they would be holy this way. (p. 364)
For me, the attitudes, as revealed in his book, of our author and, even more so, of some of her dialogue partners reflect negative characteristics of German Catholicism that have remained until the present day: the striving to appear smarter, not to be holier, than others; the constant assertion of an allegedly enlightened present over previous years of ignorance and conformity; the resulting compulsion to jump on the band wagon of current secular trends; and, finally, resentments against the concrete manifestations and heritage of a (at that time, still extant) Catholic culture.
Now it would be unfair to regard Ida Görres as a mere scribe for the platitudes prevailing in 1950’s Catholic intellectual circles. Here and there she exhibits flashes of brilliance, makes pointed observations, dissents from the intellectual mainstream. Such as in her extensive reflections on marriage – both mystical and concrete, e.g.: If marriages are going to remain deliberately sterile, then there is no longer any logical, conclusive argument against homosexuality (p.112). Or her decidedly un-Maritainian view of the United States: For me America is a symbol: symbol of the sort of ”modernism” I cannot endorse or acknowledge and can only accept with inner protest…. (p. 321). Or her repeated expressions of her joy in the (old) liturgy: I just revelled in that High Mass at Beuron Abbey on All Saints’ day. Once again “the liturgy as drama”, nothing purposeful about it, praise and thanks giving to God as art pour l’art, as natural as the liturgy of the angels before the heavenly throne, devoid of all pastoral instructional “consideration” for the congregation which, for that very reason, was carried away by it all, borne on its wings. (p. 329) This, in the face of one of her acquaintances denouncing this very celebration as mere “spectacle,” “play acting with the congregation just spectators.”
And, finally, what of this weirdly prophetic passage, resonating so clearly at this very moment:
(Referring to actions supported by the Rockefeller Institute in the Philippines) Most extraordinary how nowadays the craze for health can authorize super democratic – professionally democratic – people to resort to the kind of cold-blooded sanitary terror enforced in… areas stricken by epidemics and pestilence. These shock-troops coolly did things which, done in a political cause, would be branded as the most flagrant infringement of human rights of every kind. Here they are apparently taken for granted, indeed even regarded as humane and commendable: houses broken into by force, families torn apart, removal of the sick, destruction of property, houses and furniture etc. … the author’s casual comment: “our educational campaign against these deep-seated prejudices was like a conversion to a new religion” is much more telling than he knew: a new cult and a new scale of values was indeed introduced here. (pp. 259-260 )
Towards the end of the book Ida Görres does sense that she had fallen behind the current tide:
I know you (and lots of other people) think I’m too “Right-wing”, “Papist” , conformist, old-fashioned, too submissive to the clergy. (p. 313)
Yet she nevertheless reaffirms her faith in the “Church to come” and views herself as a transitional figure:
The Church of Today, which is as much my concern as the Church of Tomorrow is that of the reformers. In me the present Church in changing if only in one tiny fragment, into the Church to come – that is the nucleus and meaning of my destiny (p. 315).
This book witnesses that the German Catholic Church of 1959 was in a “pre-revolutionary” situation (much like that of France in 1789). And just as in 1789, the Vatican and the bishops didn’t seem to comprehend what was going on. The “good old days” of Pius XII really didn’t exist. The old landmarks had become obscured – the new had not yet come into view. Therefore, the title of Görres’s book in the original German is well chosen: Between the Ages (or Times).
A word needs to be said about the 1964 English-language edition. By that year, the Catholic Church in England was itself being rocked by first wave of the Vatican II changes. Four years after its initial publication, Ida Görres‘s book was furnished with a new title emphasizing not just transition, but the collapse of the old order: Broken Lights. And some not very accurate comments provided on the dust jacket simplified and radicalized the message of the book:
Her particular interests center on the discrepancies between the beliefs and practices of Catholics, between the conventional, false images of God and His true Revelation and upon the many manifestations of the ultra, ultra Catholic conservatives with tight, closed, prim, authoritarian and infallible views.
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