Elizabeth Hayes: Pioneer Franciscan Journalist
Pauline Shaw
In his recent major work, A Secular Age (2007), the distinguished Canadian thinker Charles Taylor speaks of a succession of three key periods in the conception of religious identity in the modern world. In the ancien regime, before the French Revolution, religious identity was a given, together with the institutions of the monarchical state. After the revolution, there emerged what Taylor calls the ‘Age of Mobilization’, an age of intense commitment to mobilizing large faith communities, of developing and retaining their allegiance at a time when that allegiance could no longer be taken for granted, in a social and intellectual climate that was often adversarial but which also offered the means of mobilizing group identity in the form of freedom of speech and of the press. Our own age, since about 1960, Taylor calls the ‘Age of Authenticity’, an age in which the search for authentic self-expression and self-realization has become more influential than the mobilization of community identity.
If we are now in a different age to that ‘Age of Mobilization’ that Taylor has delineated, then it behoves us to study and understand that age, to appreciate the particular features of the age when Catholic identity was formed through intense and sustained efforts to educate and mobilize communities of faith – and to strengthen them against adversaries - in the context of freedom of the press and modern means of mass communication. Dr Pauline Shaw’s Elizabeth Hayes: Pioneer Franciscan Journalist is an excellent study of one important figure of that ‘Age of Mobilization’, of a woman who brought intense religious commitment, a convert’s missionary zeal and a highly developed English literary heritage to the task of developing and strengthening Catholic identity through the vehicle of the periodical press.
Dr Shaw’s study is, in the first place, the story of a person, a unique individual who expressed her love of God and her experience of religious conversion through passionate dedication to a missionary ideal, expressed through the apostolate of the periodical press. At the same time, the study of Elizabeth Hayes in her personal uniqueness also demonstrates how a number of factors came together to make her work and mission a particularly striking example of Taylor’s category of the ‘Age of Mobilization’. Her own religious story includes some of the most well-known figures in English Christianity of the time: her attraction to the Oxford Movement through the influence of the distinguished Edward Pusey, and the role of Henry Manning, himself a convert from Anglicanism and later the second Archbishop of Westminster, in her conversion to Catholicism. Her conversion led her to the Franciscan tradition, and part of her commitment to religious life was a fourth vow to become a missionary. Although her experience as a missionary in Jamaica was disappointing in some respects, her missionary zeal found fitting expression in the founding of a Catholic periodical, the Annals of Our Lady of the Angels, which she began during her subsequent mission in Belle Prairie, Minnesota, in the midst of pioneer America, and sustained during her later years in Rome.
Dr Shaw notes how seriously Elizabeth Hayes took the words of Leo XIII concerning the Catholic press in the late nineteenth century. For Pope Leo, the task of the press was to ‘fight writing with writing’, to make ‘a powerful instrument for salvation’ of the ‘powerful engine for ruin’ that the press could be. The context for this Papal exhortation was of course the highly adversarial intellectual, social and political context of the time, marked in France and Italy by a particular kind of liberalism that gave pride of place to anti-clericalism as well as by the developing influence of atheistic and utopian forms of socialism, Marxism in particular, which Leo was to condemn in Rerum Novarum in 1891. In religious terms, the age was also formed by the severe tensions between Catholic and Protestant – recalling that Elizabeth was a convert from Anglicanism, we can have some sense of the distance between Anglican and Catholic communities, and the gravity of departing one for the other, when we recall Leo XIII’s repudiation of Anglican orders in 1896 as ‘utterly invalid and altogether void’.
Elizabeth Hayes responded to this Papal challenge by developing a periodical that brought to bear her own outstanding literary gifts, the spiritual and devotional heritage of the Franciscan tradition, and the wider Catholic culture of the time. Her literary abilities and affinities had been initially nurtured through her Anglican heritage and were deployed in a remarkable range of correspondence with prominent Catholic ecclesiastics and writers, who were able to contribute to the flourishing of the Annals – including for, example, the priest Frederick Faber, whom we know in particular as the author of the hymn Faith of our Fathers. Dr Shaw informs us that periodicals were read more than books in the nineteenth-century by a factor of ten to one – and the importance of this mode of literary communication was linked to newly developing means of production and distribution in the form of printing technology and the railways. The power of the Annals of Our Lady of the Angels to develop and nurture Catholic identity is evident in the richness and diversity of resources of Catholic faith, devotion and history that it made available to its readers – and the ways in which it invited them not only to be readers, but through their subscription to the journal to share in the Franciscan tradition and to become part of a community of prayer and devotion. Elizabeth Hayes was the foundress of the congregation of the Missionary Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception – her favourite Marian feast – and the apparition of Mary to Bernadette Soubirous and Pius IX’s proclamation of the dogma in 1854 played a prominent role in the Annals.
I would like to congratulate Dr Shaw on this fine study – if I may give just one example of the depth of research that lies behind it, I might note that, in order to study the dissemination of European periodical literature in America at the time of Elizabeth Hayes, Dr Shaw investigated the periodical holdings of libraries in Minnesota to see what periodicals they subscribed to in the nineteenth-century – and there are many other examples that could be mentioned of the wealth of painstaking research that has been invested in this book. This patient scholarship has been formed into a very well-written and well-structured study, a book which, while giving a detailed and well-conceived analysis of contextual factors, is unified by an admiration for its central figure, Elizabeth Hayes, whose passionate commitment to the apostolate of the press, in the midst of so many vicissitudes, is so convincingly and sensitively portrayed.
In giving this book its Australian launch, may I also congratulate Dr Rosa McGinley, Dr Shaw’s doctoral supervisor and Dr Sophie McGrath, Director of the Golding Centre, on this fine work of scholarship that the Golding Centre has helped to nurture.
Professor Robert Gascoigne,
School of Theology, Australian Catholic University
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