The Feminine Genius and Catholic History
Sixty years ago, Pope Paul VI declared that the Catholic Church is “proud to have glorified and liberated woman, and in the course of centuries, in diversity of characters, to have brought into relief her . . . equality with man.” Almost forty years ago, Pope John Paul II declared that “the Church gives thanks for all the manifestations of the feminine ‘genius’ which have appeared in . . . history” and “all the charisms which the Holy Spirit distributes to women in the history of the People of God.” Yet today, in 2025, I am encountering Catholics of all ages, states of life, and levels of formation and education by Catholic institutions who are shocked to learn that Catholic women have any significant history to speak of, apart from isolated examples such as the sudden, flash-fire bursts in and out again from history’s pages of our most famous female mystics.
Since I was a girl, I have heard numerous, general messages from Catholic leaders about “the feminine genius” and “the dignity of woman.” I have at times received from them, too, pious portraits of a small group of Biblical women and widely venerated female saints, such as Thérèse of Lisieux. But where it comes to what I know, write, and teach others today about the great variety of compelling women in Catholic history, I have had to learn most of it outside the pale of institutionalized Catholicism.
I suspect there are many readers of this journal who, too, have heard a lot about femininity in the abstract from influential Catholic voices but have learned comparatively little about our actual foremothers in the faith. For this reason, I wish to present here a range of remarkable but too-little-known women I have come to know who helped to shape the Church’s rich and complex history. I will then conclude with some general thoughts of my own on the feminine genius.
In keeping with an ancient tradition of Christian history telling, I will begin with a martyr, Saint Blandina. Her story was preserved by the first major Church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea, (whose Ecclesiastical History, as it happens, was first translated into English by a woman: Mary Basset, Saint Thomas More’s granddaughter). Blandina is not included in the Canon of the Roman Mass with Saints Felicity, Perpetua, and several other women, so most Catholics have never heard of her, let alone that she was one of numerous people killed in the Roman persecutions of the followers of Jesus prior to when the Roman emperors embraced Christianity in the fourth century.
Blandina was a slave imprisoned for her faith at fifteen in 177 A.D. Her persecutor was a commander in the Roman province of Gaul. According to Eusebius, she faced torture and interrogation by Roman officials with fortitude. She also encouraged other Christians imprisoned with her to insist on their innocence when falsely accused of cannibalism and incest. Although a simple gesture of acknowledging the Roman gods at some point would have saved her life, Blandina refused to give one. She was stabbed to death after being scourged, burned on a grate, and attacked by a steer.
I would like to jump forward to the early modern period, when more women gave their lives in fidelity to Christ, but in contexts where Protestant authorities attempted to coerce them into accepting their ideas and ways. While many Catholics today know of the courage with which the aforementioned Thomas More faced his trial and execution at the hands of King Henry VIII’s regime, fewer know that some of the bravest Catholics of the same era were Englishwomen condemned by Henry’s daughter, Queen Elizabeth I.
Three were canonized fifty-five years ago. First, Saint Margaret Clitherow was a young wife and mother of three, as well as a Protestant convert to Catholicism (while her husband remained Protestant) when she was arrested several times in her home city of York. She was targeted for not attending Protestant services and for hiding Catholic priests who offered the true Mass inside her home. Upon her final arrest, Clitherow refused to plead innocent or guilty, rejecting the legitimacy of the arrest. She was then crushed to death, on Good Friday of 1586, while pregnant with her fourth child.
Second, Saint Margaret Ward of Cheshire was an unmarried woman in her thirties when she was arrested, tortured, and hanged at Tyburn in 1588 after helping a priest escape from prison. She refused to disclose his whereabouts during rounds of severe torture. She also refused to attend a Protestant service when this would have saved her life.
Third, Saint Anne Line, after converting to Catholicism with her husband, harbored priests to ensure that the true Mass was available to Catholics in Essex. Line was eventually arrested and hanged in 1601 at thirty-seven. But before she was killed, she reportedly said to the crowd around her scaffold, “I am sentenced to die for harboring a Catholic priest; and so far I am from repenting for having so done, that I wish, with all my soul, that where I have entertained one, I could have entertained a thousand.”
I would like now to discuss brave women from the past that we Catholics tend to hear even less about—ones quite willing to suffer martyrdom but who survived to serve the Church in other ways. We encounter some in Carrie F. Klaus’s critical edition for Chicago University Press of the Poor Clare nun Jeanne de Jussie’s Short Chronicle, a first-hand account of the violent Swiss Protestant takeover of Geneva. This resource illustrates how, thanks in part to their cloister walls and armed priests who assisted them, the Poor Clares of Geneva were, by 1530, at the center of the Catholic resistance in Geneva after the city’s bishop had fled to safety. As various churches and monastic buildings shut down after mobs attacked their sacred images, sacred vessels, and reserved Eucharistic hosts, the Poor Clares’ church became the only place where Catholics remaining in Geneva could attend Mass. For this, the nuns for nuns suffered abuse by men who tried to get them to convert or leave, sometimes harassing them with both Bible verses and vulgar songs.
The Poor Clares of Geneva were led in this period by an elderly abbess named Louise Rambo (yes, Mother Rambo). From Jussie’s Short Chronicle, we learn that not only Rambo and the other nuns but also many ordinary Catholic laywomen were among the city’s bravest people. Some were beaten by their newly Protestant husbands for remaining Catholic. One Genevan girl was banished from her home by her father, and forced to become a servant elsewhere when she would not abandon the traditional faith. Other women were, during Holy Week in 1535, thrown into a prison by their husbands for the same reason. But they managed to escape and attend Triduum liturgies at the Poor Clare convent.
Sadly, a mob finally broke into the convent and ransacked it in August 1535. The Poor Clares finally had to leave Geneva. Mother Rambo and her twenty-two consoeurs walked twenty-five miles south to Annecy, where they were given a new convent. The community, though, for centuries called themselves the Sisters of Saint Clare of Geneva in Refuge in Annecy, never forgetting Geneva as their true home.
That faithful community was finally suppressed in 1793, by French revolutionary fanatics. In this later context of Church history, more women faced the prospect of martyrdom bravely. This was the case with the sixteen Discalced Carmelites of Compiègne who were guillotined in Paris on July 17, 1794. These women were finally canonized this past December by Pope Francis. Hopefully we will now see more such women canonized, such as the Daughters of Charity of Arras who were guillotined after remaining together to serve the needy while their bishop and other local clergymen fled France.
But many Catholic women willing to face martyrdom in revolutionary France survived to serve the Church in other ways. Numerous ordinary peasants and townswomen protected persecuted priests, even as many of their husbands complied with the new regime’s anti-Catholic policies. And many determined nuns traumatized by the Revolution embraced new trials to help restore some of the great monastic heritage of France. For example, the Discalced Carmelite Camille de Soyécourt, who was imprisoned during the Revolution and lost many loved ones to the guillotine, lived to tangle with no less a man than Napoleon Bonaparte to re-found, against his wishes, the Discalced Carmelites all over France after their revolutionary suppression. Without her efforts, the most famous French Carmelite, Thérèse of Lisieux, might never have had a French Carmelite community to join in the first place.
The Church owes many famous things to women who are largely forgotten today. Among them—jumping back in time again—is the seventh ecumenical council of the Church. Indeed, Irene of Athens, the ruler of the Byzantine Empire in the late eighth century, selected the layman Tarasios to serve as the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople and then convened the Second Council of Nicaea with him, not with the Pope, who sent his blessings. As historian Judith Herrin has detailed in her Princeton book Unrivalled Influence, Irene furthermore presided over the final session in 787 that pronounced for the universal Church on the matter of how images of Christ, his Mother, saints, and angels could be employed in Christian worship, something that had been dividing Christians to the point of violence for decades.
Several centuries later, another Christian empress contributed to the Cluniac Reform, the most famous monastic reform movement in Church history prior to efforts of Saint Teresa of Avila and other Catholic leaders of the Tridentine era. This was Saint Adelaide of Italy, who has been studied by historian Penelope Nash, among others.
Adelaide’s tenth-century life could make for a blockbuster film. She was married off young to a man who became the King of Italy. She then refused, as the mother of a baby girl, the advances of an Italian nobleman more than twice her age who wanted her wealth and her husband’s throne, and who then probably murdered her husband. Imprisoned by this brute for her resistance, she escaped with the help of a swashbuckling priest. And then she quickly married the recently widowed, more charming, King of the Germans—the man eventually remembered as Otto the Great—after she had proposed to him, not vice versa.
She chose wisely. While bringing into the world and raising several more children, Adelaide not only saw Otto come to dominate Italy militarily and be crowned as Holy Roman Emperor by Pope John XII, but she went on to be consecrated by the Pope alongside him, in a new ceremony just for the Holy Roman Empress, as Otto’s co-ruler. She used her powers to found and protect ecclesiastical institutions in a time of chronic warfare, and she helped to reform lax and corrupt monasteries as an indispensable friend of two saintly Benedictine abbots, Majolus and Odilo of Cluny. She continued to favor the Cluniac Reform as Regent and then Empress Dowager during her son Otto II’s reign, and even more so when governing the Holy Roman Empire as Regent for her grandson, Otto III.
The contributions to the Church of numerous other royal women from Adelaide’s time onward could fill volumes. But I want to turn now to a non-royal laywoman of the seventeenth century, and one who is extremely important to me, as she got me into the study of women in Catholic history in the first place—at a time when I was reluctant to get into the field.
I am referring to the subject of my 2023 biography for Pegasus Books, La Duchesse. Marie de Vignerot, the Duchess of Aiguillon, was a French noblewoman who lived from 1604 to 1675, and she was the niece and right hand of King Louis XIII’s First Minister of State, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu flouted convention and made his niece Marie, not her living brother (a disaster of a man) the heiress of one of the largest fortunes in Europe. He gave her, too—not his official successors in high office—possession of his political papers and special access, too, to the vast network of political clients he had built up over the years.
Vignerot was lauded by Pope Alexander VII and other leading churchmen and statesmen in her day as one of the great Catholic leaders of the age. This is because she chose to employ her power and wealth to serve the Church above all, and on a great, international scale. She established throughout France numerous religious communities, male and female, of diverse orders. She also established and helped to sustain schools, missions to the poor, evangelistic missions in North Africa, the Middle East, and Madagascar, and even entire missionary dioceses in Asia and North America. She helped select bishops for the Church in France and missionary lands, and she was regularly consulted by the rulers of France and princes of the Church on a host of matters. At the same time, she was a leader in French political, social, and cultural arenas, including as a major patroness of artists, scholars, and authors of books on subjects such as, coincidentally, the history of women in the Church and the spiritual and moral equality of women and men.
She was mostly forgotten, though, by modern times. Where remembered at all, it has typically been in one of two distorted ways. On the one hand, she has been dismissed as a retiring widow who had been moved, emotionally, by the charisma of priests such as her friend Saint Vincent de Paul to donate to projects characterized as the fruit of only their initiative. On the other hand, thanks partly to the novelist Alexandre Dumas, she has been caricatured as a mantilla-wearing drip in public who fainted at the slightest whiff of immorality but who, behind closed doors, transformed into a minimally-clad, sighing sexpot. Both characterizations are grossly unjust, given the internationally influential Catholic leader that the historical records I studied show she was.
The Duchess of Aiguillon falls into another category of women that I want to highlight: patronesses and foundresses of innovative Catholic organizations and communities. She was a driving force, for example, behind the original Ladies of Charity, one of the most successful, social-charitable, lay-run organizations in the history of the Church. And she established one of the first communities of female missionaries ever sent overseas from Europe, the Augustinian hospital nuns who were active in colonial Québec beginning in 1639.
The Duchess was part of a long and living tradition of female foundresses and supporters of creative, new institutes and communities—a tradition that developed by leaps and bounds from her era onward. I wish to highlight several women in this tradition here.
In 1606, the young Englishwoman Mary Ward left her homeland, as she felt called to a religious vocation but could not pursue one under Protestant rule. Inspired by the Jesuits to pursue a more active ministry than was possible in the orders open to her, she and some companions formed a new congregation in 1609. They focused on the education of girls, at a time when there were few formal schools for girls anywhere. Soon known as the Sisters of Loreto, Ward’s Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary grew quickly and opened schools in the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, Italy, and France.
While enjoying the support of some powerful Catholic rulers and churchmen, the Sisters of Loreto were mocked by others as “galloping girls.” And some Jesuits were concerned that they were trying to become a female branch of the Society of Jesus. In 1631, the Jesuit General secured a temporary suppression of Ward’s order from Pope Urban VIII.
Ironically, though, Ward was able to establish a new community in her Protestant homeland, because the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria was now influencing matters there during the reign of her Anglican husband, Charles I (who would soon lose his kingdom and his head to Puritan fanaticism, in part because he let his Catholic wife have influence). Furthermore, the Sisters of Loreto were approved by a later pope, Benedict XIV. Ward’s order would eventually spread throughout the world, including to India, where the future Saint Teresa of Calcutta was a member for many years.
Two centuries after Ward’s time lived Juliette Colbert Falletti di Barolo. Having survived the French Revolution while losing her aunt and grandmother to the guillotine, she married an Italian nobleman, Carlo Falletti di Barolo, who took her to Turin to his family’s wine-producing estate. Unable to have children, the two devoted themselves to assisting poor children, prisoners, unwed mothers, and victims of child prostitution. Juliette and Carlo indeed opened free schools and houses of refuge. They also founded the Sisters of Saint Anne, a congregation devoted to social ministries, and they assisted victims of cholera when an epidemic swept through their region. Sadly, Carlo died after contracting this disease. After this, the widowed Juliette became a Secular Franciscan and helped found another charitable congregation, the Daughters of Jesus the Good Shepherd.
The nineteenth century was a fertile time for new women’s congregations, including ones dedicated to overseas mission work. One leader of such a congregation is Blessed Anne-Marie Javouhey, who founded the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Cluny in 1807 and traveled to Madagascar in 1817. Javouhey and sisters of her congregation did missionary work, too, in Sénégal, Réunion Island, British Gambia, and Sierra Leone. Javouhey was among the first Catholic leaders to work toward forming an indigenous African clergy. Furthermore, she crossed the Atlantic to Guiana where she and more than thirty sisters founded the Mana settlement in which black people freed from slave ships were assisted in making new, sustainable livelihoods. Her work won her enemies, but some churchmen who worked with her called her the Bartolomé de Las Casas and Francis Xavier of their time. Javouhey was beatified in 1950, although I have never heard her mentioned in any Catholic setting. I came to know her by stumbling across her story in an Oxford University Press book by historian Sarah Curtis.
The last woman I wish to highlight here is the Englishwoman Mary Elizabeth Herbert, who lived from 1822 to 1911. She was the primary patroness of Saint Joseph’s College at Mill Hill outside London, and of its affiliated society of apostolic life and missionary ventures in various countries. She worked closely for years with the Mill Hill missionaries’ founder, Father (and eventually Cardinal) Herbert Vaughan. From 1866 to the early twentieth century, the two spurred on a new era of English Catholic missionary activity throughout the world. Mill Hill priests, brothers, and sisters in time labored among marginalized African Americans in the U.S., war refugees and epidemic victims in South Asia, and many other suffering communities in Africa, Europe, and Oceania.
I stumbled across Lady Herbert’s name by accident one day, and I learned after some digging that she was also the author, editor, and translator of numerous books on a variety of Catholic themes. She was, additionally, a convert from Anglicanism; a good friend of Saint John Henry Newman; a major philanthropist in both her Anglican and Catholic days; the friend of several prime ministers; an avid traveler around the Mediterranean; a baroness with courtly connections; a woman of dynamic personality who was immortalized as characters in several Victorian novels; the wife of Queen Victoria’s War Secretary in the era of the Crimean War; and, amid all of that, the mother of seven children, including a son who became an ambassador to the United States during Teddy Roosevelt’s administration.
Tragically, after Herbert became Catholic in 1866 as a widow, the British government took her children out of her care to prevent them from following suit. Four years later, she also suffered the death at sea of her son William, when he was sixteen and newly serving in the Navy. I was moved once I realized the timing of these tragedies in relation to her most notable accomplishments for the Church. These included doing all she could for the Catholic population in and around Salisbury—her late husband’s home city—such as setting up an Industrial School and boarding school for poor and working-class girls, to help teach them economically valuable skills in a safe, community environment.
There is no book about Lady Herbert yet (I may write one), nor about numerous other historically important Catholic women about whom we have ample paper trails in archives and library collections. Indeed, when I consider all there is to still discover and reconsider about countless remarkable Catholic women in history, I marvel that I was once hesitant to get into this field. I was indeed reluctant, however, partly because, frustratingly, I had been led by some of my Catholic formation to assume there was not much of interest to be discovered or written about in this area. For example, when I first read John Paul II’s 1995 Letter to Women years ago, I took to heart lines such as these: that the “genius of woman” for the most part had developed and contributed to human progress “in an inconspicuous way,” and that “very little of women’s achievements in history can be registered by the science of history.”
Also, in an Angelus reflection from the same period, while John Paul II called for histories that are written “in a less one-sided way”—less focused on men, that is—he insisted, too, that to do this, we need to stop focusing on “extraordinary . . . events” and “achievements” and shift focus to the “frequently silent,” mostly social and cultural contributions of women in the sphere of daily life. The implication is that the history of women of the Church is primarily a consideration of almost a-historical, largely undocumented manifestations of “feminine genius,” while that of men of the Church gets to remain what it always was: the study of documented deeds, words, and legacies of the great and, I would add, of the notably holy, faithful, courageous, and so on—in short, the most traditional subjects of the historical discipline.
As a student drawn to history, I was interested in understanding my Church’s relationship to major past political events and significant cultural and social developments. So, I chose to focus my first major project on a group of people whom both my Catholic teachers such as John Paul II and, ironically, the more radical feminists who taught me at Harvard and Yale, were telling me occupied, mostly alone, center stage in such arenas: that is, men. And the particular men I chose were Jesuit missionaries tied to French colonialism.
The most unexpected thing happened, though, while I was working on my Yale dissertation, which became my first book, Apostles of Empire. The seventeenth-century Jesuits themselves, in their original writings, told me how important many women were to their work in North America. Contrary to what I had been formed, by Catholic and feminist sources alike, to think about their era, especially about clergymen of their time, they spoke of some women as partners and even at times as people they received invaluable protection from—as was the case with the Duchess of Aiguillon. Indeed, it was these Jesuits who introduced her to me.
The sources of Catholic history are full of surprises like this. Chroniclers from every century have been telling us in all sorts of ways about the deeds, words, and legacies of numerous great and holy, courageous, and faithful women who, alongside all the men, can help us better understanding what the Church has been in the past and who she is today. They also, to be sure, often highlight (and exaggerate, at times) feminine virtues they exhibited, in ways anticipating our discourses today about “the feminine genius.” But our premodern and early modern antecedents were also at times quite ready to praise certain Catholic women as “manly” in their courage or for stepping up when the men around them either were failing, out of cowardice or worldliness, or were absent due to war, their youth, sickness, or death. And they left us with mountains of evidence of countless inspiring and diverse ways our foremothers in the faith served God and the Church in every age.
Yet most Catholics today are little exposed to this vast heritage at our fingertips and are confused how to respond when they do catch glimpses of it. This past year, I have been engaging with numerous Catholics about my book Women of the Church, which weaves together the stories of more than 360 different women and groups of women from all centuries of Catholicism’s past. And I keep getting asked different versions of the same questions, along the lines of “Which women that you’ve studied stand out as illustrating ‘the feminine genius?’” and “Which seem to illustrate feminine virtues such as receptivity and sensitivity to the other?” While I appreciate such questions, they also give me pause. It is almost as if we Catholics are intellectually formed today not to want to learn, in a patient and contemplative way, new lessons from our Catholic history, but instead to want to proof-text from it—to take convenient snippets from it, usually out of context, to underline, say, a pre-defined interpretation of a particular papal teaching or phrase or to quickly advance a pre-determined activistic social or evangelistic goal.
So, I have become ambivalent about the oft-repeated phrase “the feminine genius,” as it seems to get in the way of direct, open-ended encounters with real, historical Catholic women who have things to tell us—not simply in their putatively feminine aspects, but more universally as fellow human beings and Christians, and more individually as prospective friends in our own, just-as-unique pilgrimages into Christ’s kingdom.
I am now committed to doing more work on the history of women of the Church—but not because I want to underscore, as if it is both the beginning and end of why they matter, where they may manifest “the feminine genius.” Rather, I feel called to remind my fellow Catholics, not just the wider world, that women have always been at the heart of Catholic history alongside men, and it is in keeping with the cardinal virtue of justice to restore them to chapters of that history where our own Catholic forebears left us all kinds of evidence that they belong in those chapters.
And, it is long past time we Catholics realize that we have a lot more of our own history in general to learn—and to write better, well-researched books about from a confidently Catholic point of view, and to communicate more effectively about to our young and to a world that badly needs the wisdom of Catholic experience together with the other treasures pouring forth from our Church’s heart.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is adapted from a plenary lecture given at the McGrath Institute’s conference, “True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture,” on March 26, 2025.