Category: History

When an order of nuns could no longer maintain the graves of two of the deceased in their care, they decided to rebury them elsewhere. But the decision wasn’t solely based on the bottom line of economics, but on the bottom line of love. They decided to bring the relatives home to the family plot.

"[Nathaniel] Hawthorne, author of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, died in New Hampshire in 1864. His wife, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, moved to England with their three children and died there six years later. She and their daughter Una were buried at Kensal Green cemetery in London.

[…]

"But when cemetery officials told the nuns that the grave site needed costly repairs, the order arranged to have remains reburied in Concord instead.

"On Monday, one modern casket containing the remains of mother and daughter was put on a horse-drawn 1860 wooden hearse and carried from a local funeral home through the town center to a church for the memorial service. About 40 family members and a group of nuns from the order followed the hearse in a procession."

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Why were the nuns so concerned about the disposition of the Hawthorne family remains? They are the Hawthorne Dominicans, and their foundress was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s daughter, Catholic convert and saint-in-the-making Rose Hawthorne Lathrop.

FIND OUT MORE.

AND MORE.

Some might think Rose Hawthorne Lathrop’s conversion to Catholicism surprising, but I doubt her father, the great American literary artist, would have thought so.

Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers. –Nathaniel Hawthorne

Yesterday was the day that G. K. Chesterton turned 132 year old!

(Not counting the time he was alive in the uterus.)

(And not counting the fact that he happens to be dead at the moment–which I’m sure he would say is immaterial [PUN!].)

Fortunately, his birthday has not gone unnoticed, and some folks in the blogosphere are having a multi-day celebration of it.

GET THE STORY.

A large sun temple of the Egyptian pharaohs has been dug up under an outdoor market in Cairo:

"The partially uncovered site is the largest sun temple ever found in the capital’s Aim Shams and Matariya districts, where the ancient city of Heliopolis — the center of pharaonic sun worship — was located, Zahi Hawass told The Associated Press.

"Among the artifacts was a pink granite statue weighing 4 to 5 tons whose features ‘resemble those of Ramses II,’ said Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities."

GET THE STORY.

<tongue in cheek>

Don’t these archaeologists remember what is commonly believed to have happened to the raiders of King Tut’s tomb?  Not to mention to the Raiders of the Lost Ark.

</tongue in cheek>

JIMMY ADDS: It’s always nice to hear from our old friend Zahi Hawass. Nice to know he’s keeping busy.

It took many, many years — some 145 of them — but the Pony Express has finally seen sweet justice served to the technology that rang its death knell. As of January 27, 2006, Western Union ended its telegram services.

"On the company’s web site, if you click on ‘Telegrams’ in the left-side navigation bar [sic; it’s on the right side], you’re taken to a page that ends a technological era with about as little fanfare as possible:

"’Effective January 27, 2006, Western Union will discontinue all Telegram and Commercial Messaging services. We regret any inconvenience this may cause you, and we thank you for your loyal patronage. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact a customer service representative.’

"The decline of telegram use goes back at least to the 1980s, when long-distance telephone service became cheap enough to offer a viable alternative in many if not most cases. Faxes didn’t help. Email could be counted as the final nail in the coffin."

GET THE STORY.

Somehow I don’t think that the telegram will inspire as much fond sentiment in the centuries to come as did the Pony Express, which continues to fascinate students of the Old West to this day.

Adolf Hitler, who according to popular myth had Pope Pius XII on his payroll, [heavy sarcasm]loved the Catholic Church and "his pope" so much[/heavy sarcasm] that he wanted to build a new St. Peter’s Basilica in Berlin and had chief architect Albert Speer working up plans for the project:

"Speer built a scale model of how he planned to recreate the columns of St Peter’s Square, which encircle the piazza in front of the Basilica.

"The Moscow museum’s director, David Sarkisian, told the Sunday Telegraph: ‘The plan was for the new Berlin to be ready in 1950 after Nazi Germany had defeated the Allies.

"’Hitler would declare Germany the ruler of a world empire and at the centre of its capital Berlin was to be a recreation of St Peter’s Square in the Vatican.

"’Speer’s plans included the columns from the square and at the centre instead of a fountain as in Rome there would be a huge statue of Benito Mussolini.

"’Hitler considered the Eternal City [Rome] to be the only city in the world to rival Berlin so he wanted to better it in every way possible.’ Speer’s documents show that Hitler took a great interest in the plans and was delighted with the architect’s model."

GET THE STORY.

As a side note, for those interested in a thorough refutation of the Catholic urban legend that Pius XII was "Hitler’s Pope," I highly recommend Rabbi David G. Dalin’s The Myth of Hitler’s Pope.

GET THE BOOK.

Ireland has its very own Adam, an Irish warlord named Niall of the Nine Hostages — wonder how he got that name! — who is estimated to have more than three million male descendants. (Because of the manner in which the study was conducted, female descendants were not counted.)

"The scientists, from Trinity College Dublin, have discovered that as many as one in twelve Irish men could be descended from Niall of the Nine Hostages, a 5th-century warlord who was head of the most powerful dynasty in ancient Ireland.

"His genetic legacy is almost as impressive as Genghis Khan, the Mongol emperor who conquered most of Asia in the 13th century and has nearly 16 million descendants, said Dan Bradley, who supervised the research.

"’It’s another link between profligacy and power,’ Bradley told Reuters. ‘We’re the first generation on the planet where if you’re successful you don’t (always) have more children.’"

GET THE STORY.

"We’re the first generation on the planet where if you’re successful you don’t (always) have more children."

Right. That’s because modern man has convinced himself that children stand in the way of success. As ancient man well knew but modern man has forgotten, children contribute to a person’s success, they don’t inhibit it.

Catholicism is probably the only religion that so perfectly fits human nature. You might say that if God hadn’t given it to us, we might have had to invent it. I say this because so much of Catholic sensibilities and customs are mirrored in secular life, often by those who would be horrified to be considered crypto-Catholics.

For example, there are rumors that relic-hunting scientists in Austria have found the skull of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and will reveal the results of DNA testing in an Austrian television documentary commemorating Mozart’s 250th birthday:

"In a documentary entitled Mozart: The Search for Evidence, researchers will reveal the conclusions of tests carried out on the skull at the Institute for Forensic Medicine in Innsbruck last year. DNA from shavings from the skull was compared with genetic material from the thigh bones of Mozart’s maternal grandmother and niece.

"Until now, tests on the skull, which belongs to the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg, have proved inconclusive, but today Dr. Walther Parson, the forensic pathologist who led the analysis said his team had ‘succeeded in getting a clear result.’

"Dr. Parson said the result had been ‘100 percent verified’ by a US Army laboratory but declined to elaborate."

GET THE STORY.

By the way, anyone planning a birthday party for Mozart should consider sending an invitation to Pope Benedict, who is known to be a great admirer of the composer and once said of Mozart’s music, "His music is by no means just entertainment; it contains the whole tragedy of human existence."

A reader writes:

On Thursday there will be a Diane Sawyer special about the evidence for a female Pope Joan.  Are there any holes in the historical record that could account for this or is it a completely rediculous claim?  Where could I find some information on this?

I normally recommend J. N. D. Kelly’s book The Oxford Dictionary of Popes, because Kelly is a Protestant historian and he has an appendix in this book that totally slams the Pope Joan myth.

Unfortunately, most couldn’t consult this book before the broadcast, so I suggest these sources:

WIKIPEDIA ON POPE JOAN.

THE CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA ON POPE JOAN.

The fact that ABC is dumping this story on Thursday in the week between Christmas and New Years (a LOW viewership time) suggests that they don’t have confidence in it, which only increases their culpability in broadcasting it.

OUTRAGE MAY BE EXPRESSED HERE.

Incidentally, a number of years ago I was at my desk at Catholic Answers when I was routed a call from a major Hollywood producer (who shall remain nameless, but who was quite famous and had a lot of credits to his name) who wanted to ask me about sources for Pope Joan to help his upcoming TV/movie project on her.

He was quite alarmed when I told him that Pope Joan was a myth, and he indicated that he was going to go back to the people who had pitched the idea to press them about this fact.

The project never got made.

I wish all producers had as much integrity as this guy did!

Unfortunately, they don’t, and there is a Pope Joan movie coming out of Germany next year.

"Who wrote Shakespeare’s plays?" has a much more controversial answer than "Who is buried in Grant’s tomb?"

In fact, numerous facts about the Bard continue to be hotly disputed, almost three hundred years after his death.

One of the controversies is whether Shakespeare himself may have been a Catholic.

In his day English Protestants were putting tremendous pressure on Catholics to accept the newly imposed faith, and laws were passed against those who would refuse to attend Protestant services (known as "recusants").

The result was that many people hid their Catholicism but continued to consider themselves Catholic and, when possible, to practice Catholicism in secret (e.g., by aiding and hiding priests who would covertly say Mass and hear confessions).

Others were more bold and openly declared their Catholicism.

Among those were Shakespeare’s father and his daughter, both of whom recused themselves from Protestant services.

In fact, Shakespeare was in the middle of a hotbed of secret and not-so-secret Catholics.

HERE’S AN INTERESTING INTERVIEW BY AN AUTHOR ARGUING THAT SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS CONTAIN COVERT CATHOLIC MESSAGES.

HERE’S WHERE YOU CAN BUY HER BOOK.

HERE’S SOME ADDITIONAL PERSPECTIVE ON THE QUESTION FROM WIKIPEDIA.

What a great history of Thanksgiving food the NYT has today!

EXCERPTS:

The native American food that the Pilgrims supposedly enjoyed would
have offended the palate of any self-respecting English colonist – the
colonial minister Charles Woodmason called it "exceedingly filthy and
most execrable." Our comfort food, in short, was the bane of the
settlers’ culinary existence.

The reason is fairly simple. Hale and her fellow writers seem to
have forgotten that their Puritan forebears migrated to New England
with strict notions about food production and preparation. Proper
notions of English husbandry generally demanded that flesh be
domesticated, grain neatly planted and fruit and vegetables cultivated
in gardens and orchards.

Given these expectations, English migrants recoiled upon discovering
that the native inhabitants hunted their game, grew their grain
haphazardly and foraged for fruit and vegetables. Squash, corn, turkey
and ripe cranberries might have tasted perfectly fine to the English
settlers. But that was beside the point. What really mattered was that
the English deemed the native manner of acquiring these goods nothing
short of barbaric. Indeed, the colonists saw it as the essence of
savagery.

No matter how hard [the colonists] tried, no matter how carefully they tended
their crops and repaired their fences and fattened their cattle and
furrowed their fields, colonial Americans failed to replicate European
husbandry practices. Geography alone wouldn’t allow it.

The adaptation of Indian agricultural techniques not only sent
colonists deep into the woods galloping after game and grubbing corn
from unbound, ashen fields, it also provoked severe cultural
insecurity. This insecurity turned to conspicuous dread when the
colonists were mocked by their metropolitan cousins as living, in the
words of one haughty Englishman, "in a state of ignorance and
barbarism, not much superior to those of the native Indians."

This hurt. And under the circumstances no status-minded English
colonist would have possibly highlighted his adherence to native
American victuals – even if the early Thanksgiving holiday had been a
genuine culinary event. Indeed, it wasn’t until after the Revolution,
when the new nation was seeking ways to differentiate itself from the
Old World, that these foods became celebrated as a reflection of
emerging ideals like simplicity, manifest destiny and rugged
individualism.

GET THE (DELICIOUS) STORY!