Well, one of countless reasons..I am so terribly distractable. (I started working on this post on 5/21, btw.) Because being distracted is just so interesting. It first hit me when I was working on my MA thesis at Vanderbilt – an examination of how 19th and early 20th century American Protestants arguing for a greater role for women in their churches used Scripture, in case you’re interested – and I would settle down for some rare, but desperately needed library time. The stacks were like crack cocaine. One set of dusty volumes of some old Episcopal publications would lead me to some old dusty Catholic volumes, and it just went on and on until I reached a point at which I knew some more about a lot of little things but not, er, about my thesis topic. Library rats everywhere can identify, by the way.

(By the way, Fr. Mitch Pacwa, S.J. was getting his Ph.D in Old Testament at Vanderbilt at the same time I was there. I met him a couple of times back then.  He was good friends with a friend of mine – a Southern Baptist Church History guy who taught me all about Lottie Moon. Women in 19th century missions were his interest, obviously. I remember him (my friend, not Fr. Mitch)  telling me once about the most shocking thing he had ever seen in an SBC church  –  a stained glass window depicting Lottie Moon. Speaking of Communion of Saints!)

So Saturday morning as I was sitting here with some rare, but desperately needed book-writing time, I decided (of course) to go to the library and find a couple of books I’d been wanting to read, neither of which have anything to do with what I’m writing. I was successful, and returned home and essentially spent all day reading (you can sit on your back porch and read while watching two little boys tear around the back yard and still feel like a semi-decent mother.)

The book for that day, then, was Roman Spring Memoir by "Mrs. Winthrop Chanler", aka Margaret Terry Chanler, published in 1934. Chanler was born and grew up in Rome, the daughter of Americans – an father who was an artist and a mother who had been previously married to another artist (Thomas Crawford, who made the statue that stands atop the US capitol, among other things.). I’d read good things about this book on various Italy discussion boards, so I decided to give it a shot, and yes, I read it in one day.

Much of it was what I expected – delightful reminscicnes of a girlhood in Rome during the mid- and late 19th century, some bits of which I will share in a moment, but it was also something I didn’t expect – for the author, in her late teens, converted from her parents’  Episcopal faith to Catholicism, and there’s actually quite a bit about that in the memoir.

It was certainly a privileged existence, supported in small part by her father’s commissions but in large part by her mother’s family money, living, before said money ran low, in apartments in the Palazzo Odescalchi. The larger context of her life involved a dizzying array of 19th and early 20th century notables – I suppose all you need to know is that her mother was a Howe (Julia Ward Howe being her sister), her future husband was related to the Astors, Edith Wharton was a close friend throughout her adult life, and later, she and her husband were good friends with Teddy Roosevelt. There. That just about covers it.

Just a few highlights:

On rainy days we were sent to St. Peter’s for our walk; St. Peter’s with its golden temperature seems warm in winter, cool in summer…we loved the immense Basilica, the colossal putti (cherubs) holidng up the holy-water basins; the great monuments that lined its walls were full of interest: the lion, on one, whose mouth was open enough to put our hand in, always with some trepidation; the terrifying skeleton holding up the heavy marble draperies over the entrance of the tomb of a Pope…

Pio Nono reigned over the Papal States. We used to see him driving about in his great glass coach with outriders and caparisoned horses. We all knelt on the sidewalk to receive his blessing as he went by. He often came to the Pincio, the public garden where our mornings and most of our afternoons were spent. He would get out and take a little walk attended by a group of ecclesiastics, chamberlains, and Guardie Nobili;  and there was a flutter of excitement in the shady avenues which were our playgrounds when His Holiness’s coach drew up on the piazzale and the kindly white figure alighted. We left our play and ran to surround him and receive his blessing. He would give us his ring to kiss; speak this or that one. One day my brother and I were the favored ones; he took Arthur up in his ams and asked the nurses who we were. When told regretfully that we were Americans and Protestants, he patted our heads and promised to pray for us. This made a a great impression on me.

Pio Nono was much beloved. He had a ready wit and a lovable personality. He was also supposed to have the evil eye; but this was his misfortune, not his fault, and it did not interfere with the affectionate veneration in which he was held. (21-22)

On a trip to Venice, more specifically the island of San Giorgio – although I think it was actually San Lazzaro, because that is where the Armenian monastery is located:

We made the long gondola expeditions to the Lido, to San Giorgio, where we visited the Armenian monastery, and found a young monk happily ensconced in a corner of the garden, reading a forbidden book. We knew it was forbidden, because he hastily hid it under his seat and turned very red and fled away. One of our party had the curiosity to examine the volume, which was no other than I Promessi Sposi, Manzoni’s classic novel.

On Americans visiting Rome:

Often they baffled me by a certain mistrust they showed toward one another, a mistrust derived from a sense of social sets and hierarchies in Boston, Philadelphia, or New York.

On a visit to Paestum:

The shrines had been deserted since the days of Caesar; there was no sign of human habitation in the land. Since then archaeologists have started excavations; they have put a fense about the ruins and established a service of guards and an office for the sale of entrance tickets and postcards. The modern traveler can see the beauty of the temples, but he misses the spell that twenty centuries of silence and solitude had case about them at the time of my first visit. They were a revelation of Greek beauty, purae and more austere than that of Italy; I went a little mad over their perfection and in my rapture poured wine from our picnic bsaket on the altar of the forgotten gods.

There’s much more, including an account of an extended stay in California, encounters with figures from Liszt (during a master class in his studio near the Trevi Fountain) to Eleanora Duse. My interest flagged a bit in the last quarter as she recounts her adult life, mostly in the United States, but that had some points of interest as well.

Now for the religion. She was taken to the Anglican church as a child, and never liked it, preferring the visual and ritual richness of the Catholicism around her. (It is interesting to contrast her perceptions with Dickens in Pictures from Italy, which I’ve been reading over the past couple of days. Dickens being not quite so entranced.)

In her late teens/early twenties, while on the summer sojourn away from the city, the cook fell ill, and  two nursing sisters were brought in from Rome to help (she eventually died), and one of the sisters noted Margaret’s spiritual searching, and took her under her wing, talking to her, escorting her to Benediction, and so on:

The round, spotless wafer, whose circumference has neither beginning nor end, surrounded by the converging rays of the golden monstrance, is in itself an ancient and deeply significant symbol. The One whom we can neither describe nor define, in whom all qualities merge to a white radiance, surrounded by unlimited direction of Power — the rays are infinite, their lines, continued into space, would reach every furthest star. It is meet and right to kneel and b ow our heads before this myster, to send up our prayers with the incense, to feel our hearts burning with the tapers, our spirits rapt in the Cloud of Unknowing.

Her half-brother Marion Crawford had become Catholic two years before (while he was living in India.) Chanler reprints the letter she wrote him telling her of her decision, explaining how she cannot see the Anglican "third way" has having any essential truth to it, and she asks him for advice for whom to talk to in Rome about this. She also reprints his response, which is quite lengthy, taking each of the points she had offered, and then this, which I thought was interesting. He describes the Church as being "modern, formal, and personal."

1. Modern. She does not fall into the English error of denying the possibility of direct inspiration or of direct intervention in human affairs. Nevertheless she is very cautious about declaring miracles…Modern does not mean experimental, it means rather accepting the whole body of demonstrated scientific knowledge. The position of modern Catholics towards modern scientiests is far more liberal than that assumed by scientific freethinkers toward the Catholic Church.

(skipping about to 3)

3. Personal. This point, I understand from your letter, is the one of most importance to you. I call the Church personal, because she proposes to follow the course of every individual from his birth to his death; not leavin ghim to think for himself, to live for himself, to save his soul for himself, but thinking for him in such matters as he is not able to master alone, teaching and exhorting him to live for others, and endeavoring to make him sure of the future.

There is much more of interest. As for her question…he has various bits of advice as to a confessor/advisor, but observes re/the Jesuits:

In all this I do not mean to say that if you are disposed toward the Jesuits you should avoid them. If you like the idea of a party, vigrous and active, but always a party, go to them. You will have no difficulty in finding a confessor of the most modern views…

…You can be an intellectual, progressive, inquiring, and yet a most sincere Catholic, and I know you will be….I would advise you to be admitted to the Church privately, or at least without any great publicity. It will be more satisfactory to yourself.

So. Where does the distraction come in? In the following chain of curiosity:

Hmm..who’s this Marion Crawford? Let’s see. Wow. turns out he was a very, very popular writer. And look here, Ralph McInerny even wrote an appreciation of him.

Oh. And he lived most of his life and died in Sant Agnello in Sorrento where there is a road named after him and his home, Villa Crawford, still exists, but as a "religious institution" where his daughter, a nun, lived. What’s the religious institution? Spend 10 minutes looking. No luck.

But, in process come across this fascinating site, which sucked me in like quicksand – from the Notre Dame archives, summaries, it seems of correspondence from said archives, organized by year. The Crawford connection:

1909 Jul. 10
Crawford, Elizabeth Marion: (Sorrento, Italy)
to Father (Daniel E. Hudson, C.S.C.): (Notre Dame, Indiana)

Crawford is grateful to Hudson for having written a defense of her husband. What the papers said about (Francis) Marion (Crawford)’s last days was utterly untrue. She will send by a friend in a few weeks an old crucifix which belonged to her husband. She believes it must have been given to him when he became a Catholic in India many years ago. Their oldest daughter brought it to Jerusalem to touch Christ’s tomb with it.

But really, that’s nothing compared to this, found in some random wanderings:

1909 July 25
Seton, Archbishop Robert: Vannes, (France) (St. Elizabeth Ann Seton’s grandson)
to (James F.) Edwards: (Notre Dame, Indiana)

He read in a French newspaper a report sent from Rome about the forced resignation of Bishop (John Lancaster) Spalding, saying that it was a mistake to believe that the Bishop had voluntarily resigned for reasons of health and age but was obliged to resign as a Modernist and a Feminist encouraging woman suffrage. Seton thinks it leaked out in Rome probably through the Caldwells that his resignation was demanded. He noticed the absolute insolent disregard of Public Opinion manifested by Spalding; it has brought him grief. He is not a retailer of scandal; he is not writing for publication. He has never noticed anything so scandalous in Bishop Spalding as he has seen and heard of Bishop (John S.) Foley of Detroit. He then tells of his own movements and travels since he left Rome in June, giving details. The pectoral cross he uses on his travels has a relic of St. Fr(ancis) X(avier), the patron of travellers. He is well. The program of the Jubilee of the American College in Rome was too diffuse, not concise enough. Many were disappointed that he was not called on to respond to a toast at the banquet. (Note: Enclosure found pinned to the letter follows:)

1910 Feb. 14
Cavanaugh, C.S.C., Father John (S.): Notre Dame, (Indiana)

He wishes to say before this letter is laid away and to aid future readers in understanding the reference to Bishop Spalding that the letter was written by an old gossip and is an credible as the confidences that pass between old maids.

How can you not love history? Just thank goodness some of us have the discipline to actually get something done. Not me, of course. I just keep wandering…