Ida Görres on the Saints and Sanctity, by Dr. Jennifer Bryson

Dr. Jennifer Bryson, Ethics and Public Policy Center Fellow in Catholic Women's Forum presented at the Little Way Café on Thursday April 23, 2026 on the profound insights on the saints and sanctity according to the writings and life of Ida Görres. An adult Catholic convert, she shared her own conversion story on The Journey Home. 

Currently, she is translating the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971) from German to English, and via the Sports Policy Initiative, she researches and advocates for sound sports governance. 

Dr. Bryson has studied and worked in Egypt and Yemen, been an intelligence agent for the Defense Intelligence Agency, including two years as an interrogator at Guantanamo, and worked at several research institutes, including the Witherspoon Institute and Religious Freedom Institute. Her articles are at jenniferbryson.net. 

Dr. Bryson earned her B.A. from Stanford in Political Science, her M.A. in medieval European intellectual History from Yale, and her Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations from Yale, with a focus on Greco-Arabic and Islamic studies. She learned German in high school in Austria and while studying Marxism-Leninism for a year in former East Germany as an undergraduate. Bryson was an Earhart Fellow, a Richard M. Weaver Fellow of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, and a Fulbright Scholar. Her Ph.D. work included the study of translation theory. 

From 2021–2023 she was a Visiting Researcher at the Pope Benedict XVI Philosophical-Theological Institute, known as Hochschule Heiligenkreuz, in Austria, while translating several works by Ida Görres. Her translations include the German government’s report, “Anti-Semitism among Islamists in Germany,” Görres’ 1970 lecture “Trusting the Church,” and Görres’ book The Church in the Flesh (2023), John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed (2024), Bread Grows in Winter (2025) with a foreword by Bishop Varden who recently preached to Pope Leo for his 2026 Lenten retreat, and most recently What Binds Marriage Forever (2026).

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Thank you, and it's a delight to be at your parish. If any of you have difficulty hearing, there are more seats up front, and so don't be shy if you want to move while I am speaking. The saints matter to us today, and here's why. I want to talk to you about three aspects of the saints and the work of Edigurus. The saints themselves. Also, why the saints? Why write about the saints? And then also the question: what is sanctity? The saints were central to the work of Edigurus. She wrote about them across genres. She wrote about the saints in her nonfiction work. She wrote short stories based on lives of the saints. She wrote about them in her poetry. She wrote plays about some of the saints. Among the saints, she wrote about an incomplete list. We have Saint Therese of Lysieux, Saint John Henry Newman, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, Saint Stephen, Saint Radagund, Saint Henry Susso, Saint Alphonsus Liguri, Saint Joseph, Saint Severine, Saint Joan of Arc, Saint Alexius of Rome, Saint Barbara, Saint Stephen, and Venerable Mary Ward. I'd like to share a rather long passage from an autobiographical text by her. And I know that it can be difficult to share a long quotation and a presentation, but I think it's really worth it because this passage reveals why the saints played such a central role in the life of Edigorus. So in this passage, she starts out by saying, quote, God can be found in many ways. One is through the saints. This does not refer to their example, their teachings, or their guidance, but simply to their very existence. For it's one thing to have heard of God and another to become aware of him, or in other words, to experience him. End quote. She then goes on over several pages that I'm going to skip, talking about Graham Greene and his childhood, and how in his autobiographical depiction of his childhood, evil is something that exists, is a very real part of the world. And she contrasts this then with her own childhood and how her life was changed by the saints. For Green, in this darker vision of childhood, quote, goodness wilts into philanthropy kindness. Goodness appears as ineffective goodness that makes its last stand in a condemned world. And Green writes, goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again. But evil can always find a home in the world. End quote. Keep in mind she's born in 1901 in a remote village in the Bohemian forest to a noble family. And after the main part of her childhood in this remote area, she then goes to Catholic boarding schools. She writes, quote, religion, oh, there was plenty of religion in our world. Only God was missing. A textile of life boring without any discernible meaning, yet too insignificant to rebel against. One accepted it like the weather. How early, how thoroughly did one learn simply to switch off and retreat into one's inmost soundproof, impenetrable, protective capsule? One would crouch down and recite ballads to oneself so successfully that after a year of daily devotional services at her boarding school, one could heart honestly claim never to have heard the Tantum Ergo before. And wasn't it just like the weather? Impossible to influence, and despite occasional grumbling, something one never seriously challenged, just as unavoidable as it was indifferent to us, when we crossed the threshold of the boarding school into the holidays, the whole thing lay behind us, indivisible, devoid of meaning. Nah, religion, in its rigid, strictly strict forms, was nothing more than a strand of the world itself. Tidy, unattractive sheath that enclosed not a precious gem, but the secret vulgarity of life, discreetly concealing what's unsavorable, unsavory, unspeakable, unavoidable. In such circumstances as well, a childhood can be lost. One does not need a naval battle to drown. Sometimes a goldfish pond is enough. At the age of 14, I discovered Francis of Assisi. It was probably due to a meticulous biography with its many dates and source citations that I accepted Francis as a real person instead of relegating him like the heroes of other historical narratives to the realm of dream figures on my private planet. No, this was a person like me, not a figure of the imagination. And his life was not really about him. Not and his life was not really about him, but about someone else to whom he was completely and passionately devoted. His life was a conversation of the highest intensity. Like a mountain peak while the sun is still below the horizon, this figure glowed in my twilight world, illuminated by God. God? A vague formula, slipping away from consciousness. Christ? A pious phrase, never doubted as a concept, never experienced. Yet in the face of the saint, Christ was suddenly recognized as the strongest soul reality. No, Graham Greene was wrong. God's physical presence on earth has never ceased. It appears steadily in those who are seized by him. Just as the bristling branches of a weather-beaten pine bent sharply in one direction reveal the force of the wind, so too do the countenance and gestures of one speaking on the telephone manifest the invisible presence of a counterpart. Though fragments of the conversation may elude us. The saints are wholly an indicative sign because they are wholly an imprint, a response. One grasps the resemblance with the unseen counterpart only later. Holiness does not abolish evil, but the cramped, gloomy dome of evil is no longer the world. The wall has been broken through, dazzling and blinding. New stars revolve outside. Their light restores the proper proportion. Without much refutation, evil reveals itself as the intruder, the disruption, the disease, and the distortion. It is no longer the norm or an inevitable artifact of development. Even more importantly, in this new light, veils and layers of paint dissolve from the old environment. Previously unnoticed lines and colors emerge. From the familiar, exasperatingly monotonous pattern, in one form or another, the good that was hidden, overlooked, and not understood emerges as a living surprise. God has long since dwelt among us in the inconspicuousness of his faithful followers, and no one had known it. Now one's gaze began to search for signs of his presence. Of course, the saints judge not only our wickedness, but also our virtues, especially our piety. How can we stand before their standard? Thus, their entry into our lives is not only a source of comfort and reassurance, but also a summons and a jolt. A mixture of glory and misery, the face of Christ shines forth from mirrors in which light glass and a dark amalgam are combined. It is precisely their holiness, not their virtues or achievements, that it's both visible and invisible at the same time, just as the divinity of Jesus was on earth. It can be overlooked, confused, denied, and misinterpreted. The saints are part of God's mystery in the world, which is why the longer you spend with them, the more the light grows, but also the darkness. They are both the answer and silence for us. One never reaches an end point with them. After that point, Edigorus literally gave the rest of her life to the church. And as a Catholic writer, she was most well known for her work on the saints and on the question of what is sanctity. On sanctity, she is very concerned to help us understand not only individual saints, but this question of what is a saint, what are we talking about when we talk about sanctity? She was concerned to dismantle false definitions that would obscure a true encounter with the holiness of the saints. And so in The Church in the Flesh, which she wrote in 1950, it has six letters that are addressed to those who are in the church but are drifting away, away, away, who are really tuned into the spirit of the age, who are starting to say, oh, we don't need that old fuddy-duddy stuff like rosaries and scapulars and statues. Can't we just be spiritual and not religious? Aren't the saints' stories just a bunch of old legends? We're more sophisticated than that. To all of this, she says, oh no, it all matters very much. And chapter six is the last section of this book, and each chapter builds like a crescendo. So by the time you get to chapter six, it's really one of her great accounts of the saints. And in this chapter, she warns against having a false image of a saint. She also warns against having false images of Jesus in the church. All these false images could serve as a barrier to our recognition of them. She differentiates, for example, between, quote, a false saint saint in the sense of a deceiver, in the sense of the deceiver. On the one hand, and what she calls, quote, the erzatz saints, the substitute saints, the mere idea of the saint, the model images which adulterate this idea. And she also warns against the pious who seek to realize such a model simply by copying its behavior without the interior life. She also warns against what she calls the plaster saint, the saint of overly sentimental hagiography, who's flawless, distant, and human. And not because the figure is too exalted, but she argues that such a figure is too small, that this figure reduces the miracle of sanctity to a moral catalog. She also says that equally misleading is a modern notion of a quote, splendid saint, unquote. Somebody who's charismatic, sunny, good-looking, a culturally attractive figure, who seems to conquer by natural charm rather than by grace. And in another work of hers, an important work of hers in 1931 on the nature of sanctity, that the first year it was published in German was picked up right away, published into English and printed by Sheed and Ward, she warns of confusing great men with saints. And by great men, she means those who are impressive just by their human personality, who have a splendid humanity. And she warns that for such figures as the great men, if you look at them closely, Christian piety would actually pose a danger because it would introduce a call to humility or perhaps to poverty. And she says that in her view, the worst of all is the fashionable, quote, holy sinner, unquote, who bears his eradicable faults with resigned melancholy and claims that this living with sin is just simply new humility. Such figures, she argues, deny the real victory of God. But true holiness, she teaches, is not a mere natural perfection, although grace builds on nature. True holiness instead is bestowed and accepted. It's not achieved. She says it appears in the form of a servant, often hidden beneath ordinary or even a repellent human frailty. The saints are not exempt from temptation, weakness, or the scars of former sins. She writes about how they are tempted and sometimes terribly, but they do not make peace with sin. And in the saints, we see God's redeeming power has triumphed. The saints abide in God's love, and therefore they cannot sin in the sense that their will has been freed to choose the good. And that their lives show that grace builds upon nature without destroying it, and that the same raw material, flawed, limited, often unpromising, can be transfigured into a vessel of divine glory. Also, now going back to her 1931 work on the nature of sanctity, there she talks about how the saint is a friend of God, a person of deep humility, and lives a life of, quote, sacrifice, penance, self-denial, poverty, end quote. And yet here she warns that this combination of sacrifice, penance, self-denial, poverty can pose a spiritual danger, oddly enough, for the seeker who again seeks mere imitation of behavior and can be without a healthy interior spiritual life, this type of life could lead somebody into scrupulosity and other problems. And she also talks about a characteristic of the saint, is the person who helps us to glimpse something of the life of Christ. In the church in the flesh, where she's writing to a young woman who says, Come on, come on, you know, Edagorus, you've spent decades of your life writing about the saints. Are you still doing this? Does anybody care about this anymore? I mean, don't you have more worthwhile things to do? Edagorus responds, quote, for me, the saint is the most important person, not only in the church, the saint is the most important person in the world because the saint is the decisive answer to the big riddle. What is a human being? The saint is the terrifying statement. Humans are sanctific, meaning, quote, holy able, holy hyphenable. She makes up a word that doesn't exist in the German here and writes it there, Heiligbar. This word, holyable, having the capacity for holiness, this word she writes does not exist in our language. Why not, actually? But such a thing does exist. Is there a greater, more exciting claim about us as human beings? A claim, if it is true, that concerns us in a more burning manner? End quote. And a few lines later on the same page, she goes deeper into this. She writes, quote, in the saint we see the true measure and the true possibility of man that he is not condemned to remain what he is by nature, but that God can and will make him holy if only he consents. And for her, the saints reveal the church herself as the holy church, even with the flaws and blemishes of the church. As the mother who births and nourishes holiness in her sacraments and in her living tradition. In 1969, in the essay Remarks on Celibacy, that is in Bread Grows in Winter, that's available over there, she writes, quote, the saints who lived in virginity and celibacy show us what this higher fruitfulness looks like in practice. They are proof of what. They prove that holiness is not reserved for the religiously gifted or the naturally talented, but it is offered to ordinary Christians in the ordinary conditions of life. And thus, because the saints exist, we cannot claim that the path is blocked, or that our heritage or circumstances make transformation impossible, or that God's commandments are too heavy. As if to say, quote, if God could do this with them, he can do it with us, end quote. Gurus writes, quote, the saints take every excuse from us. Where should we go to hide from their accusation if we want to escape the call? Those who accept the doctrine of sanctification have cut themselves off from retreat. Thank you. I'm wide open to your questions. And I also have some of her works on the saints here that have been translated to English. Many have not. Her masterpiece is considered to be her work on St. Therese of Lisoux, The Hidden Face, which is quite a deep dive. And her work on St. John Henry Newman that she wrote in the late 1940s but didn't get published. Until the 2000s and is now available in English. And I think St. John Henry Newman may have been her second favorite saint after St. Michael the Archangel, if I had to guess.

SPEAKER_06 22:21

Thank you for being here one California to another. I'm very curious how was Edith exposed and motivated to learn and write about St. Francis of the CC at the age of 14.

SPEAKER_00 22:38

She was definitely a precocious child. She was writing already when she was she was very young. Also, growing up in this remote environment in Bohemia, I've had the fortune of getting to visit the family home. And that is really, it helped me understand that there's really nothing there but the family estate and a few little houses around in the parish in the village. And so her father, who was uh an Austrian intellectual, pardon me, he died when in 1906. So she was born in 1901, very young. And she grew up with his library, and she writes quite a bit about how much of her life she spent in his library. So, in addition, I think she was very intelligent.

unknown 23:30

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 23:31

Um she also is surrounded by learning and books. So she's already curious. Um she only has older brothers. Um she has two older sisters, but her three oldest older brothers are quite a bit older than her. Um and they're very different, very secular, very cynical, which is part of what gives her a very negative impression of religion as a child. Um and I think that she also is very curious about the world because of them. I mean, they're very strong personalities, one of them becomes very famous. Um the first boarding school she goes to, she got kicked out and she laughs about it. Her writing about it was quite funny. She was young, she was 14 when she got kicked out. Um, she hated the school. And then when she she got kicked out, and this is sort of typical of Edagoris, for um writing a satirical poem as a teenager. Um so, but then the next school she went to was run by the Mary Ward Sisters. Um, and we've got Don Butner here who's written about Venerable Mary Ward, um, and who was written about the book that Edagoris wrote about Venerable Mary Ward. So this new school for her was a real blessing that came out of a bad situation. Through the Mary Ward Sisters, she experiences love and light. She loves the new school. And um I would also say, by God's grace, that this encounter she has when she's 14 with this book, as I said, makes her realize this this saint is a real person. This isn't a literary figure. And and literally her whole the trajectory of her life changed after that. And very unusually she became a very religious Catholic and was for the rest of her life, and none of her siblings were. So Jamie, do you want to take QA or do you want me to Okay? No, no, that's okay.

SPEAKER_02 25:46

So I'm curious. She's born into this interracial family, mother Japanese, other society, the prize racial, racial purity. And I'm I'm just curious, does she ever reflect on that world around her? Um I saw one of her books I guess got, you know, wasn't able to be sold during the Nazi occupation, but it's just I'm just curious to like the reality, in addition to kind of her intellectual life, how did that impact her?

SPEAKER_00 26:24

Uh I'm gonna start with the Nazi period because you mentioned that and then go to some other aspects of this. So um, to the extent that anything by her you know wasn't allowed to be sold during that period, it was because she was associated with the Catholic youth movement, this amazing revival in uh German-speaking Europe of the 1920s, early 30s. And the Catholic youth movement then set into leading the intellectual resistance to the Nazis. Um, and so that would have been the problem with her. Whereas being half Japanese, because uh the Germans were allied with Japan, um, I can't remember if it's in Austria or Germany, but that the Japanese ambassador um makes a point of asking that the government, you know, keep lay a hand off of those who are of Japanese heritage in the country. She never writes about this aspect, but this is just sort of the circumstance around. Now, this doesn't help her brother, the the one who becomes famous, Richard von Kudenov-Kalergi. Um, he was very sought after by the Nazis. And in when I was in Austria uh recently in Vienna, uh we parked at um I went to a theology school that was part of a Cistercian monastery, and the Cistercian monastery out in a village has a chapel in downtown Vienna. So we were going to um, I don't know, I think it was a public rosary or or something. And so we were able to use the uh the little bitty parking lot next to the monastery's chapel because there's no parking in Vienna. Um so we were there just for very pragmatic reasons, and all of a sudden I looked up and I realized there's a plaque to her brother on the wall, and that this was where he had fled from when the Nazis um took over Austria. And then I found out from Professor Russell Berman at Stanford, and I appreciated him sharing his research with me, that um her brother was on the top sought-after list of the Nazis because her brother went to England.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

What did your brother do? I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_00 28:32

Her brother uh started the pan-European movement, um, and also her father had written the first book that had uh scholars from what I've read say was the first book ever written against anti-Semitism. Interestingly, he wrote his dissertation on that in the 1800s, and then Richard had translated this into English, republished it. Um so it certainly didn't help her brother, and um, so he was on the list in England that the Nazis had of the people they wanted to find once they took over the country. Uh but the the Japanese part certainly wouldn't have hurt her during the Nazi period. It she doesn't connect significantly with that part of her life. She has an extremely difficult relationship with her mother. I think her mother is a, you know, comes to Bohemia from Japan as a very young woman. Her mother's not from a cosmopolitan upper class family, but from a she's a tradesman's daughter. Um her mother never learns German very well. Um, I also don't know of any, her mother converted to Catholicism to marry the father of Edaguris, but I don't know of indications that her Catholic faith ever played a significant role in her life. I don't know. Um so with the difficulties with her mother, um also that Ida Guris is brought up that her second language is English. She had a nanny from England. Um she also learned French from her nanny growing up. She doesn't learn Japanese growing up. Um so it this doesn't play a very large role in her life. But also with the Catholic youth movement in the 1920s, there's sometimes some people call the Catholic Youth Movement the Catholic hippies. I mean, they're not quite, but if you there's this sense of freedom from restraint. So, for example, at that point in her life, she stops using the Fon in her name because she's from a noble family. Um, Ida Fon Kudenov and starts going by Ida Kudinov. Because in the Catholic youth movement um there was a tremendous sense of Catholic community and Catholics together in the body of Christ, regardless of you know aristocracy or not. Um and so that also I think may have freed her from you know concerns about prejudice looking different from being you know visually you know half Japanese. So but at her, she was buried um in a white kimono, and the great German scholar, Dr. Hannah Barbara Gail Falkowitz, her reading of that is that it was a reconciliation for Edigoris with her mother. Um so that part of her life's complicated.

SPEAKER_07 31:34

Something about the historical context and her focus on sanctity, the reality of sanctity, and all that implies in light of the devastating experience of World War I and World War II. How does that relate to her wanting the truth about sanctity to be known for a restoration of whole? And then secondly, my understanding that historically speaking, the dogma and the assumption in 1950, right, was also something of a response to the discouragement that the world had experienced because of the war. So just thoughts of those didn't.

SPEAKER_00 32:16

Um she's fairly young during World War I, you know, and she's in boarding school in Austria during much of it. Um also when she, so after she finished high school, she entered the novitiate with the Mary Ward sisters in St. Polten for almost two years. And uh she wrote somewhere that she burned her diaries up until that point, which I'm very disappointed by. Um and I think she kind of regretted that later. But also, that means that I don't know of reflections of hers about World War I. Now, for the Catholic youth movement that forms her so intensely, it very much is a response of hope and light out of devastation, um, even though some of its seeds start before the World War I. However, her evangelization and her work on the saints as lights of hope in the face of darkness is much more responding to the worldview darkness that's coming from um secularism and nihilism and feminism. Um she views um that this the saints is reflecting a what as guides for people to reality in a world that's really starting to lose its way. Um and what was the second half of your question?

SPEAKER_07 33:51

Similar to my understanding of how the church discerned the Holy Father. Oh, the assumption.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

Yes. Um I am going to punt on that because I have not read her works on the assumption. Okay. But she loved Mary and in the 1960s, um, one of her concerns, she has an essay on the Marian crisis, um, the loss of Marian spirituality in the 60s is an indication of a deep problem.

SPEAKER_03 34:17

So as mentioned, she grew up and lived in a very dark time when people were disillusioned about religion during World War I and World War II. I'm curious if in her later writings, when she got a chance to kind of digest all that, did she have any uh views or allegiances and philosophy to Edith Stein?

SPEAKER_00 34:41

Ah, um, it's interesting. I think it's the third time this week a question on Edigorus and Edith Stein has come up, and it's a natural question because they're in the same, you know, milieu. However, Edagorus, although she loved philosophy, she loved Thomas Aquinas, um, respects philosophy, she wasn't a philosopher. You know, her great love was really church history, the saints. Also, she read lots of literature. Um, and I so Dr. Gerol Falkowitz is a scholar of Romano Guardini, and also she's one of the uh chief editors of the collected works of Ida Stein. So she in particular, she's mentioned to me she's been looking to see if there ever was an intersection of the two, um, and she hasn't found one yet. Whereas we know, for example, and I learned this from Dr. Gerald Falkowitz, that Ediguris did meet Gertrude von Lefort during her lifetime, the great Catholic novelist who was a convert in the 1920s. Um, but haven't found an intersection yet. Uh so uh but there's much more work to be done. I mean, Edagoris was entirely swept aside and forgotten after her death in 71. She's more well known today in English than in German. Um there's need for very basic archival work to put together a complete bibliography of her work. Um, so there's a lot still to learn.

SPEAKER_02 36:14

Um I haven't not read a book on Saint Patrice of the So what's in the book that you can share in like summary form and then it goes beyond the story of the soul? What do we learn about Saint Teresa from that book?

SPEAKER_00 36:31

So I I think the primary thing to share is already in the title of the book, The Hidden Face. So Edith Gurris saw an undoctored photo of Saint Therese, I think in the early 1930s. And when you know Saint Therese was really a big deal and coming onto the screen, and also when there was there were many um little booklets and many images of Saint Therese that were quite saccharine, sentimental, and this undoctored photo um Edigurus saw this face and wanted to know who who was this woman really, and that's why the book is called The Hidden Face. The face of the person that's hidden behind some of the public portrayals. Um, the hidden face is, I would say, not a place to start with Saint Therese of Lisieux. As much as I want people to counter Gurus, I would recommend starting with other books on Saint Therese, maybe as an on-ram. But for those who are great lovers of Saint Therese and who go deeper and deeper into her work, uh, Father Benedict Grochelle called The Hidden Face. Um he said it was not only the best book about Saint Therese of Lisou, he said it was the best work of hagiography he had ever read. Um and part of Gorissa's approach that's in this, and then also her book on Newman, um, is um she she gets deep into the primary source work and wants to know who is this person really?

SPEAKER_04 38:15

So if I may, um the hidden phase and who is this person really deep down, and um you've mentioned the interior life a few times being important for the saint, uh not just exterior behavior, but who are they deep inside? Speak of habits or practices to foster that. And you mentioned she has a relationship with uh Ramana Bardin and some kind of big names we think of her energy. So are there any basic practices that we could maybe incorporate in our own lives that she would recommend?

SPEAKER_00 38:48

Let me see if I can find the passage that comes to mind. I know it's in chapter four of this. Okay. Nope, chapter four is too long. I'm not gonna be able to find it, but there's a passage in here on conscience, but it's a it's a for me, it's a fabulous summary of the spiritual life. Um so I'd say uh go read her to find out. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 39:26

Okay. Um I want to put you on the spot with two questions. First, what did she have to say in the last part of her life about the great struggle between the West and the communists, particularly with the fact that Germany was literally a fire. And then second of all, what might she say today about today's church and our church today, the scandals that we've had, and the I I did with while you were speaking, a very famous person gave her a eulogy in 1970. Oh, yes. So, so anyway.

SPEAKER_00 40:03

Um she never, she is one of the least political writers I have ever read in my life. She um it's just not her domain. Um, so I don't know of anything she wrote about the division of Germany. However, on the communists, her writings about um, I think it's now Blessed Cardinal Minchetti. Is he blessed? Yes. Um I get chills thinking about her, are gorgeous. And that's in the uh one of the main places in the Church in the Flesh. She has a passage on him. Um and it's it's his, you know, he's a martyr in a sense, and his resistance to uh the Nazis. She did not, or to the communists, she she does not see communism as, oh great, an economic system that just provides everything, no problem. She sees a very, very, very deep spiritual battle. Um but another interesting passage she has about communist Central Europe is during the period of uh quite extensive and often borderless liturgical experimentation in the mid-1960s, she um talks about a passage from um a blue-collar worker comments after going to the Easter Vigil in uh Leipzig, so in what is then communist East Germany, and Edegor talks about how the liturgy there is still just the basic traditional, you know, traditional Latin mass because they don't have all of this experimentation that you've got going on in the West, um, uh, about how this blue-collar worker says, you know, a man's soul can live for a year from the Easter vigil. Um, that over there, where they don't have all this sort of new reform that's supposed to be really great, like in the West, there you've got this spiritual vitality that is shining through in spite of the circumstances. So her comments on communism are always in the context of a spiritual life. And you had another question.

SPEAKER_05 42:29

What might she say about what I meant when I put you on the slide?

SPEAKER_00 42:36

Yes, yes. So I wrote an article with um passages from Ida Goris and uh her friend Um Joseph Ratzinger um about why there the question of um why heretics remain in the church. Because she has a private uh letter that she wrote to a friend of hers who's a priest and Benedictine monk. She wrote to him, he uh the two of them corresponded frequently in the 1960s, and her letters to him have been edited and published in a volume edited by Dr. Gerald Falkowitz in German. And um so she writes to him about this topic, and in her letters, she's sometimes even a little more blunt than you know in public works. And uh she she comments how um, you know, she says, I think we're it's obvious we're already in open schism. I wonder sometimes, you know, why church leadership doesn't just admit that there's actually outright schism going on. And one of her comments is that I think that those you know who are heretics in the church about well, why don't they just leave, it's that they wouldn't um is that they would be ignored if they were outside the church. Whereas inside the church, as rebels, they have constant media attention. So she sees through some of what is going on. She's very concerned about it. And as for what she'd say, I'm gonna say read Bread Goes in Winter, because these are essays and lectures from 1967 to 70. This is also a great on-ramp to Ida Guris if you've never read anything by her. And this is her commentary on a very modern period of turmoil in the church. And every essay in here is so relevant for today, which is the reason I wanted to translate the book.

SPEAKER_01 44:39

Yes, please. I apologize for being late, so I might be asking a question we already dealt with, but you mentioned something about how the saints' relationship with sin. And I didn't quite follow that.

SPEAKER_00 44:56

Okay, I'm gonna look back at my notes. She comments on a uh the saints and sin in a number of different ways. Um is she she rejects the image of what's called the the holy sinner who you know just can't help but keep on sinning. Um she talks about sanctity instead being a person who will give God victory in their life. Um not that the saint never sins, but the saint wants to let God win in their life. Um she also talks about um how the saints um sometimes have scars in their lives from their own former sins, um, and that their holiness doesn't erase those but rather helps them work through those. So those are just two examples.

SPEAKER_02 46:02

Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 46:06

Okay, well, I think Dr. Brunson, you'll be around for a few more minutes so we can potentially ask another question offline, but make sure we give gratitude and thank you so much for speaking.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Thank you.