ICONOCLASM
From
Fr. Donald Calloway M.I.C., Champions of
the Rosary, Marian Press, Stockbridge, 2016
“Champions of the Rosary is an extremely insightful, pious, and
scholarly work” (Cardinal Schönborn O.P., Vienna)
For anyone who has studied the history of the rosary,
it is very clear that the English Jesuit, Fr. Herbert Thurston (1856-1939) is
responsible for convincing almost the
entire Catholic Church that the pious tradition is a myth.
The pious tradition is the papal belief that the
rosary and its Confraternity were founded by St. Dominic in the 13th
century. This tradition has been
affirmed by dozens of popes in official documents and, in a certain sense, is
not only considered a pious tradition, but also a papal tradition and teaching.
This pseudo-Bollandist, Fr. Thurston, wrote
incessantly on every topic imaginable during his time. His daily routine consisted of researching
and writing articles for publication in journals and periodicals that were read
all over the world. It is estimated that
he wrote more than 800 articles and authored more than a dozen books during his
lifetime. At least 150 of his articles
were written for the first edition of the Catholic
Encyclopaedia, launched in 1907.
When the encyclopaedia was finished in 1914, it was circulated
throughout the entire Catholic world.
Most readers of the articles in the encyclopaedia understood them to
represent the official Catholic position on the topic at hand. Father
Thurston’s most influential article in the Catholic
Encyclopaedia was on the rosary.
This article was read around the globe by laity, priests, and bishops,
and taken to be the official position of the Church on the rosary and its
origins.
In the same year that the Catholic Encyclopaedia was launched (1907), St. Pope Pius X
published his encyclical against Modernism, Pascendi
Dominici Gregis. In this profound
document, the pope railed against those who spread the errors of Modernism,
noting that Modernists were able to influence many because they were believers,
theologians, historians, critics, apologists, reformers, and oftentimes
priests. St. Pius X emphasized that the
greatest danger from the Modernists was their ability to compose both
praiseworthy articles on the faith and writings inimical to the Church and her
traditions. Regarding the latter, Pope
Pius X noted the following:
If
they (Modernists) write history, it is to search out with curiosity and to
publish openly, on the pretext of telling the whole truth and with a species of
ill-concealed satisfaction, everything that looks to them like a stain in the
history of the Church. Under the sway of
certain a priori rules they destroy
as far as they can the pious traditions of the people, and bring ridicule on
certain relics, highly venerable, from antiquity. They are possessed by the empty desire of
being talked about, and they know they would never succeed in this were they to
say only what has been always said. It
may be that they have persuaded themselves that in all this they are really
serving God and the Church – in reality they only offend both, less perhaps by
their works themselves than by the spirit in which they write and by the
encouragement they are giving to the extravagances of the Modernists. (1)
The above statements should be kept in mind as we take
a deeper look at the spirit with which Fr. Thurston – a believer, theologian,
historian, critic, apologist, reformer, and priest – conducted his historical
and theological research on the rosary.
One would have expected Fr. Thurston, a Jesuit priest,
to have been a member of a Marian Sodality, a defender of the pious tradition,
and a champion of the rosary.
Unfortunately, the opposite was the case. Almost all of Fr. Thurston’s articles on
Catholic topics expressed an extreme scepticism toward miracles, especially
miracles associated with the lives of the saints. It was no secret during his lifetime that he
had strong Modernist tendencies and was a controversial and captious historical
critic, often at odds with the traditions and teachings of the Church. Oddly, however, his critique of the pious
tradition was praised by many in the Church and understood to be scientifically
irrefutable. As St. Pope Pius X had
warned in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Modernism
had infiltrated the Church.
What made Fr, Thurston’s presentation of the origins
of the rosary particularly compelling and authoritative was that he was able to
cite a son of St. Dominic, Fr. Esser, who had critiqued the pious tradition and
was now a bishop in Rome. Also, Fr.
Thurston’s zealous use of the very popular historical-critical method almost
made him untouchable, since so many other scholars were using the same method
in their research and theological inquiries.
To question Thurston’s methodology would be to question anyone’s use of
historical criticism. In essence, Fr.
Thurston’s ideas were no different from those that had been previously put
forward by the Bollandists, Fr. Cuypers, and Fr. Esser. In his articles, however, Fr. Thurston did
not present his ideas merely as theories.
Rather, he “dogmatized” his conclusions and presented them as facts. If anyone dared to question his scholarship
or conclusions, Fr. Thurston retaliated by publishing antagonistic and
defamatory articles in defence of his positions.
There were many, however, who were willing to engage
in theological combat with Fr. Thurston over his attempts to change the
Church’s position on the pious tradition.
Fr. Joseph Crehan, SJ, the biographer of Fr. Thurston, made the
following remark in this regard: “His (Fr. Thurston’s) researches (on the
rosary) caused a great stir, and controversy was thrust upon him, for it seemed
to some that his aim was not to promote understanding of the rosary but to
discourage the practice of the devotion”. (2)
Indeed, a battle was raging over the origin of the spiritual sword, and
it wasn’t a battle being fought merely by flesh and blood combatants. It was a battle that involved spirits – some
holy; others, not holy at all.
Quite a few saintly Dominicans came to the defence of
the Dominican rosary tradition and took Fr. Thurston to task over his desire to
rewrite the history of the rosary through his ubiquitous publications. Dominican scholars such as Fr. John Proctor,
Fr. Reginald Walsh, and Fr. Wilfrid Lescher, defended the rosary tradition and
engaged in literary altercations with Fr. Thurston in various widely-read
Catholic publications. One such
altercation occurred between Fr. Thurston and Fr. Andrew Skelly, OP, a priest
of the western province of the Dominicans in the United States, over the Catholic Encyclopaedia rosary
article. The debate lasted from October
of 1912 to February of 1913.
Fr. Thurston lived for the drama of controversy and
loved to engage in debates with Dominicans.
This led to the controversy between Fr. Thurston and Fr. Skelly when the
latter preached a parish mission in Oregon that included statements describing
St. Dominic as the founder of the rosary.
An anonymous writer stated in a local paper that Fr. Skelly’s claim was
contrary to the recent authoritative article by Fr. Thurston on the history of
the rosary that had appeared in the Catholic
Encyclopaedia. When Fr. Skelly
offered a rebuttal to the claims of the article, Fr. Thurston himself submitted
an article to the local paper arguing against Fr. Skelly. In response, Fr. Skelly countered with many
articles proving that St. Dominic was the founder of the rosary. The response from Fr. Thurston to the
scholarly and well-written articles by Fr. Skelly was complete silence. Fr. Thurston had met his match.
Aware that the writings of Fr. Thurston had caused
major confusion, Fr. Skelly wrote more about the issue and organized his
defence of the pious tradition into a pamphlet, St. Dominic and the Rosary or Was He Its Founder?, which made its
appearance in October of 1913. In the
introduction, Fr. Skelly explains why he put the pamphlet together.
As
Father Thurston has not thought good to continue correspondence, and as his ill-formed
and misleading article in the ‘Catholic Encyclopaedia’ is a continual challenge
to the truth of the tradition, and a source of disturbance to the piety of the
faithful in this and other English-speaking countries, I thought it well to
issue the correspondence in pamphlet form. (3)
Fr. Skelly considered Fr. Thurston to be a “notorious
iconoclast” and his rosary article in the Catholic
Encyclopaedia an historical and theological travesty. He knew full well that the article in the Catholic Encyclopaedia would be taken as
the official Church position and deeply regretted that it was allowed to be
printed. He summed up his concern in
these words:
What
does seem to me as unfortunate is that this adverse view (of Fr. Thurston),
rashly put forward, as some think, in opposition to the overwhelming tradition
of the Church to the contrary, should be transferred from the ephemeral pages
of a magazine where it could be met and its worthlessness shown up, to the
columns of a permanent work of reference, such as is the “Catholic
Encyclopaedia.” (4)
Fr. Skelly’s concerns were completely justified;
unfortunately, over time, what he had feared became reality. Fr. Thurston’s article in the Catholic Encyclopaedia was taken to be fact
and understood to represent the official position of the Church on the
issue. Regardless of the fact that his
position contradicted the pious tradition, almost everyone accepted his
conclusions. In this regard Fr.
Thurston’s biographer was correct in noting: “His (Fr. Thurston’s) labour
(against the pious tradition) may be said to have changed the trend of Catholic
teaching on the subject”. (5)
How it came to pass that one man was able to
single-handedly destroy the pious tradition is an enigma. After all, his conclusions were founded on
negative arguments and contradicted the teaching of the popes. His arguments were negative in that they
relied upon a “lack” of documentary evidence on the rosary from the life of St.
Dominic. He was never able to put forth
any positive proof that the rosary had not been founded by St. Dominic. The 180-degree shift in Catholic thought on
this matter is indeed puzzling, especially since only a few years earlier the
great rosary encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII had been published, as well as Louis
de Montfort’s masterpiece The Secret of
the Rosary. The only possible way to
understand how Fr. Thurston was able to accomplish what he did is to look at
the spirit behind his scholarship. The
pen and the one who holds it cannot be separated, and it simply cannot be
denied that when one looks into the life and influences of Fr. Thurston, there
are aspects of his life and intentions that are both devious and disturbing. In particular, there are three areas from his
life that may help explain how one man could have had the power to alter a
Catholic tradition: 1) his lifelong
fascination with the occult and involvement in spiritualism; 2) his Modernist tendencies and association
with the excommunicated Jesuit priest, Fr. George Tyrrell; and 3) his extreme scepticism toward
miracles, especially in the lives of the saints.
From his youth, Herbert Thurston always maintained a
scandalous familiarity with spiritualism and its practices. According to his own written testimony, his association
with spiritualism began when he was eight years old. His father developed a deep friendship with a
man by the name of J.H. Powell, a famous practitioner of spiritualism and the
editor of the spiritualist periodical Spiritual
Times. Throughout Fr. Thurston’s
youth, J.H. Powell was, Fr. Thurston claims, “a constant visitor at our house”.
(6) During these visits, Powell engaged
in the spiritualist practices of mesmerism, mind-control, and hypnotism.
(7) These early experiences left the
young boy with a very sympathetic and favourable attitude toward spiritualism
before becoming an ordained Jesuit priest.
As a Jesuit priest, F. Thurston, in imitation of his father, also formed
a very close friendship with a famous medium, Bertha Hirst. When they got together, it wasn’t to pray the
rosary or ask for the intercession of the saints. (8)
Years before establishing his friendship with Bertha
Hirst, Fr. Thurston’s friend, Fr. George Tyrrell, the infamous excommunicated
Jesuit priest, had encouraged Thurston to become a member of the Society for
Physical Research (SPR). From the
beginning of their friendship, Fr. Tyrrell had encouraged Thurston’s interest
in spiritualism, and desired to see his Jesuit confrere attain the “courage” to
think outside the box of Catholic dogma and papal pronouncements. Thus, encouraged and supported by Fr.
Tyrrell, Fr. Thurston became an official member of the SPR in 1919. He joined the SPR knowing full well that it
was a group devoted to exploring the many practices performed by spiritualists
and that his attendance at such events was obligatory. The SPR was also well known to be inimical to
the beliefs, teachings, and devotions of the Catholic Church. It was not an organization interested in the
saints, mystics, and miracles of Catholicism.
The SPR focused its research on mediums, poltergeists, ghosts, vampires,
and magicians, as well as those who participated in such things as séances,
necromancy, channelling, telepathy, and clairvoyance. The SPR held that a person could only be
considered an “expert in spiritualism” by being present at paranormal events
and attending séances, all dangerous territory, especially for a Catholic
priest. Fr. Thurston never publicly
admitted that he attended séances – he knew this was something absolutely
forbidden by the Catholic Church – yet he also never publicly denied it. His friends in the SPR would, however,
publicly state that he attended séances as part of the organization. (9) His association with the SPR explains why he
adamantly refused to be described as a Catholic teacher or instructor in
spiritual or mystical theology. He
always insisted that he be referred to as an “expert in spiritualism”.
The members of the SPR hardly even considered Fr.
Thurston a Catholic priest since he was so sympathetic toward their views and
practices. In fact, many spiritualists
likened him to one of their own. When
Fr. Thurston died on November 3, 1939, the November 11 edition of the Psychic News praised him as a great
friend of spiritualists and affirmed that he had indeed attended many
séances. This news caused great
confusion among the faithful. Taking
their cue from such a famed Jesuit scholar, many Catholics began to attend
séances as well. To this day, many of
Fr. Thurston’s books are widely read and promoted by members of the New Age
movement and occult practitioners.
The saying is true:
When a man plays with fire, he ends up getting burned. Such a man also leaves the odour of fire upon
everything he touches. This proved
especially true in the writings of Fr. Thurston. The damaging effects of the flames of
spiritualism were manifested in the vast majority of his writings that dealt
with Catholic devotions and practices of piety.
On occasion, his writings intentionally went against Catholic
teaching. For example, in the English
periodical The Month, he presented
necromancy (communicating with the dead) favourably. (10) These articles had to be examined by four
theologians in Rome, due to the ways they conflicted with Church teaching. His Jesuit superiors in England also
conducted their own investigation into Fr. Thurston’s position on
necromancy. In early 1917, after the
investigations were concluded, both the Vatican and his Jesuit superiors
reprimanded him for having promoted teachings contrary to the faith. In April of 1917, in an attempt to correct
the damage Fr. Thurston had done, the Holy Office in Rome issued an official
letter informing Catholics that they were absolutely forbidden to practice
necromancy. (11) Surprisingly, Fr. Thurston’s
unorthodox ideas in other areas continued to appear in his writings and go
unquestioned.
Another problematic area in the life and writings of
Fr. Thurston was his Modernist approach to historical and theological topics. When St. Pope Pius X wrote the encyclical, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, against
Modernism in 1907, one of Fr. Thurston’s best friends immediately responded by
writing articles against it. This priest
was Fr. George Tyrrell. Like Thurston,
he was also a Jesuit, a Modernist, and in opposition to many teachings of the
Church. Eventually Fr. Tyrrell was
suspended from the priesthood, kicked out of the Jesuits, and excommunicated by
St. Pope Pius X. Sadly, Fr. Tyrrell died
in 1909 without reconciling with the Church.
Before Fr. Tyrrell’s death, Fr. Thurston had written a
letter to the Vatican in an attempt to defend the Modernist positions of Fr.
Tyrrell, even audaciously claiming that, because the ecclesial authorities in
Rome did not have a thorough enough grasp of the English language, they were
incapable of understanding or appreciating the genius of Fr. Tyrrell’s
thought. Fr. Thurston even tried to sway
the Vatican into allowing the excommunicated Jesuit to continue to celebrate
Mass, despite Fr. Tyrrell’s lack of belief in the Real Presence of Jesus Christ
in the Eucharist. (12)
Fr. Thurston’s negative impact on the Church didn’t
end with his attack on the rosary or the attempted reversal of Fr. Tyrrell’s
excommunication. His Modernist agenda
continued in his attempts to re-write the history of the Shroud of Turin. He tried to purge from the minds of Catholics
the belief that the Shroud of Turin was the burial cloth of Jesus by writing
lengthy articles against the tradition of the Shroud and dogmatically declaring
it to be a fake. Naturally, the place
where his thought on the matter would have the greatest readership and
influence was the Catholic Encyclopaedia,
and he readily offered his services to compose the official article on the
Shroud. He knew full well that it would
be read around the world, and therefore, whatever he wrote, would have global
influence. Initially, his
“well-researched” article convinced many members of the Church, including
priests and bishops, that the Shroud was a fake. However, due to Fr. Thurston’s faulty
scholarship and a lack of respect for the papal tradition on the matter, the
article was taken out of the second edition of the Catholic Encyclopaedia.
Unfortunately, Fr. Thurston sought to de-mythologize
many such traditions in other “well-researched” articles that were not taken
out of the Catholic Encyclopaedia. For example, in addition to deconstructing
the history of the rosary, he is also responsible for re-defining as myth the
centuries-old tradition that the Holy House of Loreto – the house of Jesus,
Mary, and Joseph in Nazareth – had been mystically transported to Italy by
angels. Thanks to his Modernist
scholarship, this tradition has been downgraded to a myth. Instead of being recognized as a miracle
performed through holy angels, the transportation of the house is now thought
to have a purely human explanation.
Fr. Thurston’s revisionist approach to traditional
accounts of miracles leads us to the third problematic aspect of his thought;
He was an extreme sceptic. In many of
his writings he declared himself to not only be a sceptic, but also a “doubting
Thomas” and “the devil’s advocate”. His
scepticism is easily discerned in what became one of his most infamous
projects. From 1926 to 1938, he took it
upon himself to completely revise the classic 17th century work by
Fr. Alban Butler, known as the Lives of
the Saints. His revision expunged
the vast majority of miracles associated with the saints out of the text. Many who have compared the two versions have
noted that he wielded his pen savagely as if it were an axe. He even ridiculed, mocked, and belittled the
saints themselves, and referred to many of them as hysterics, neurotics, and
masochists. His criticism was so
ruthless that one of his Jesuit confreres made one last request as he lay on
his deathbed. He begged Fr. Thurston to
spare the Blessed Trinity his axe!
Fr. Thurston spared the Trinity, but continued to have
a theological vendetta against saints and miracles. He gave no credence to the belief that Mary
had appeared to St. Dominic and given him the rosary. He also considered Blessed Alan de la Roche a
fanatic who suffered from delusional visions and hallucinations. Catholics aren’t bound to believe in private
revelation, but Fr. Thurston stepped beyond disbelief to write disparagingly
about holy men and women from the past.
And there were many other holy persons that he
criticized and belittled: He wrote
disparagingly about Gemma Galgani (now St. Gemma Galgani), Anne Catherine
Emmerich (now Blessed Anne Catherine Emmerich), and maintained that the
stigmata of Padre Pio (now St. Pio of Pietrelcina) were fake. According to Fr. Thurston’s writings, there
have been no authentic instances of the stigmata since the time of St. Francis
of Assisi. (13) He labelled Venerable
Mary of Agreda an hysteric and claimed her bilocations were more accurately
described as a “clairvoyant ability”. He
also ridiculed the visions of St. Simon Stock regarding the origins of the
Brown Scapular, and wrote that the Sabbatine privilege associated with the
scapular tradition was a fraudulent fairytale.
Fr. Thurston’s scepticism and criticism is almost
without limit. He believed that the
incorrupt bodies of saints could all be explained by natural causes. He was very critical and demeaning toward the
relics of saints and offered cold sneers toward the annual miracle associated
with the blood of St. Januarius. He
believed any person – including canonized saints – who claimed to have lived
solely on the Eucharist for long periods of time to be liars and frauds. He rejected any notion that an image, statue,
or crucifix could bleed or exude oil. He
also held a particular disdain for Marian apparitions, referring to them as
various forms of hypnosis or instances of natural telepathy and psychical
phenomena. He wrote that the Marian
apparitions of La Salette and Beauraing were to be understood as more
psychological in nature than spiritual. (14)
All of the things detailed above serve to reveal the
many disturbing aspects of the life and thought of the man who intentionally
sought to change the accepted history of the rosary. He is the one responsible for teaching the
world that the rosary is not of divine origin, but simply a human
invention. Yet, three years before Fr.
Thurston died, Pope Pius XI made the following statement in his 1936 rosary
encyclical Ingravescentibus Malis:
If men in our century, with its
derisive pride, refuse the holy rosary, there is an innumerable multitude of
holy men of every age and every condition who have always held it dear. They have recited it with great devotion, and
in every moment they have used it as a powerful weapon to put the demons to
flight, to preserve the integrity of life, to acquire virtue more easily, and
in a word to attain real peace among men. (15)
Heaven, too, had something to say regarding the
criticism of the rosary tradition.
Around this time, the Divine Craftsman brought about an unprecedented
number of rosary-themed apparitions.
MIRACLES
AND VICTORIES
Most of the famous miracles and victories associated
with the rosary during the 20th century occurred during times of war
or oppressive governmental regimes. When
the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki, both bombing sites experienced miracles associated with the
rosary. When Hiroshima was bombed on
August 6, 1945, an entire house of Jesuits survived, completely unaffected by
the bomb. The Jesuit house was located
only eight blocks from where the atomic bomb went off and should have been
completely annihilated. A church
attached to the Jesuit house and everything else around it for miles was
obliterated, but the house with the
Jesuits in it survived largely intact.
Furthermore, none of the Jesuits suffered any ill effects from radiation
or loss of hearing whatsoever. In fact,
all eight Jesuits lived healthy lives for years after the event. One of the survivors, Fr. Hubert Schiffer,
SJ, gave public testimony more than 200 times about what had miraculously
happened to him and his confreres. He
testified that he firmly believed that they were spared because they prayed the
rosary every day in that house in response to the request of Our Lady of
Fatima.
Similarly, when the atomic bomb was dropped on
Nagasake on August 9, 1945, it exploded in the Urakami district of the city. That district had been the heart and soul of
Catholicism in Japan since the 16th century. It was i this area that St. Maximillian Kolbe
founded a Conventional Franciscan mission in the 1930s, calling it the “Garden
of the Immaculate”. When St. Maximillian
settled on that particular property, he was informed that he had made a poor
decision. It was in a horrible location,
he was told, since the property was facing away from the city, behind a hill,
and situated in an area that nobody desired to visit. The saint was unmoved, however, and the house
was built on that property.
Miraculously, when the atomic bomb was dropped, the Franciscans’ house
was left standing and all the friars inside were unharmed. Just as the Jesuits had done at their house
in Hiroshima, the Franciscans prayed the rosary every day in their house. Our Lady had guided St. Maximillian to obtain
a piece of property that would be protected from the bomb blast.
REFERENCES:
1. St.
Pope Pius X, Pascendi Dominici Gregis, Encyclical
(September 8, 1907), 43. It is highly
recommended that the reader obtain a copy of this encyclical in order to better
understand the intracacies of Modernism.
2. Fr.
Joseph Crehan, SJ, Father Thurston : A
Memoir with a Bibliography of his Writings (London: Sheed & Ward,
1952), 104.
3. Andrew
Skelly, OP. “St. Dominic and the Rosary
or Was He Its Founder?” (Providence, RI : Providence College Digital
Commons), Historical Catholic and
Dominican Documents, Book 1 (1915), p.7.
4. Ibid.,
14.
5. Fr.
Joseph Crehan, SJ, Father Thurston : A
Memoir with a Bibliography of his Writings, 105.
6. Fr.
Herbert Thurston, SJ, as quoted in Joseph Crehan, SJ, Father Thurston : A Memoir with a Bibliography of his Writings, 135.
7. See Joseph Crehan, SJ, Father Thurston : A Memoir with a
Bibliography of his Writings, 135.
8. See
Paul J. Gaunt, “A Surprising Jesuit”, in PsyPioneer,
vol. 2, no. 9 (September, 2006), 188-191.
9. Ibid.,
188.
10. See
Joseph Crehan, SJ, Father Thurston : A
Memoir with a Bibliography of his Writings, 141.
11. Ibid.,
142.
12. Ibid.,
66.
13. For
examples of Fr. Thurston’s ridicule of saints and holy mystics, see the
following works: Herbert Thurston, “The
Phenomena of Stigmatization”, in Proceedings
of the Society for Physical Research, vol. 32 (1922), 179-208; The
Physical Phenomena of Mysticism (London : Barnes & Oates, 1952); Surprising
Mystics (Barnes & Oates, 1955).
14. See
Fr. Herbert Thurston, Beauraing and Other
Apparitions : An Account of Some Borderland Cases in the Psychology of
Mysticism (London : Oates & Washbourne, 1934).
15. Pope
Pius XI, Ingravescentibus Malis, Encyclical
(September 29, 1937), 14.
