The Burning of Butler's Lives of the Saints
Or, Horrors in Hagiography
The first red flag was the cover—the harsh orange and blue color scheme clashing in a minimalist book design that subliminally reminded me of the cold sterility of a doctor’s office exam room. My inner radical traditionalist immediately jumped to conclusions of modernist errors in aesthetics, the brutalism of the tome a far cry from the baroque beauty one would expect from a Catholic classic.
Remembering not to judge a book by its cover—a secular proverb1 in contrast to our Lord’s injunction to judge a tree by its fruits—I opened the book to read the inside flap of the dust jacket, hoping against hope that there was indeed no accounting for taste.
“Saints belong to the whole history of the Church but are especially visible today.”
True, true, so far so good…
“One of the most visible legacies of the papacy of John Paul II has been the acceleration and multiplication of the processes of beatification and canonization, mainly of figures from the recent past—martyrs under Nazism and Communism, for example.”
No denying that, as it should be…
“They also reflect the new universality of the Church, including more men and—increasingly, with belated justice—”
Uh-oh…
“—women from the New World and the Third World.”
Aaand there it is.2
Turning to the About the Author section in its usual spot at the back of the book, my heart sank as I read the two words that all but confirmed my suspicions: “liberation” and “theology,” benign when separate but combined become the false oath by which every so-called progressive Catholic swears. After double checking the spine to make sure the book wasn’t published by America Magazine or National Catholic Reporter, I did my charitable best to remind myself that there are still some good Jesuits out there before turning to the first of three hundred and sixty-five saints.
Making the Sign of the Cross and knowing I was in for a literary dark night of the soul, I began to read…
***
Even as a cradle Catholic, I don’t have much of a memory of Butler’s Lives of the Saints, the quintessential compendium of canonized confessors of the faith.
Described by the TAN Books abridged edition as ranking “only after the Bible, the Missal, and The Imitation of Christ as the all-time most popular and authoritative Catholic book,” the beloved collection of hagiographies was first compiled in the mid-eighteenth century by English priest Fr. Alban Butler (1711-1773) and has maintained its good reputation ever since for any Catholic who takes their bookshelf seriously.
It wasn’t until my wife was gifted a copy of Lives of the Saints (as a thoughtful RCIA gift to help give her ideas for choosing her confirmation saint) that I delved into the Butlerian lore more deeply and found that, due to the enduring legacy of the work, Butler had in recent years become a brand name synonymous with its product, like Sharpie for permanent markers and Dumpster for waste containers.3
This was confirmed when I read that the surname of the author of the present edition was not, in fact, Butler, but Burns.
Paul Burns4, editor extraordinaire for Catholic publisher Liturgical Press and its various updated editions of Lives, gives us a good glimpse into his priorities (in case the liberation theology shoutout in his bio didn’t tip you off) by way of a block quote found in the foreword to the New Concise Edition (2003):
Traditionally, women saints have been classified as virgins, matrons and widows–that is by status rather than by their own achievements. Yet we do not write of ‘St. Jerome, bachelor,’ or ‘St. Peter, married man,’ and if a male saint became a widower, we assume that the loss was his private affair, not a description of his personality. Women have been treated by ascription, men by achievement; but a holy life is essentially a matter of achievement. Women do not become saints by being somebody’s wife, somebody’s daughter, or somebody’s mother5. They become saints by the way in which they deal with the problems of living.
—Kathleen Jones, Women Saints: Lives of Faith and Courage (1999)
I suppose we should be grateful that Mr. Burns made clear all his gender, economic, and racial grievances up front, as it really sets the tone for the hagiographies (if you can call them that) that follow.
As I couldn’t stomach reading the book cover to cover, I instead worked my way through the book page by page, month by month, stopping only at the saints I felt generally familiar with to better see just how hot Mr. Burns’s takes really are. As such it’s possible I missed some even more egregious examples, but the following entries should give you more than enough incentive to pray that Pope Francis will bring back the Index of Forbidden Books.
Derides St. John Vianney as an “intransigent moralist” [Page 361]
Claims St. Teresa of Ávila fled to a convent in order to avoid “submission to the will of a man and [the] risk of early death from excessive childbearing” [Page 480]
Raises doubts about St. Joan of Arc’s sanctity6 (“there is no real consensus about what makes her holy as opposed to simply heroic”) and the historicity of the saints who inspired her (“Margaret of Antioch and Catherine of Alexandria have been found to have no historical existence.”) [Page 246]
Chides the Church for doing “little to condemn or attempt to change” the “considerable disquiet” felt in “Christian feminist circles” by the “patriarchal” implications of St. Maria Goretti’s canonization [Page 310]
Dabbles in comparative religion à la Frazer by suggesting St. Bartholomew’s martyrdom was “almost certainly copied from the Greek myth7 of the flaying of Marsyas by Apollo.” [Page 395]
Says St. Aloysius Gonzaga represents an “outmoded notion of holiness” and states “his example needs some disentangling from what might seem to encourage self-destructive tendencies.”[Page 283]
Gossips about St. Anselm by stating his “friendship and love for his monks” has “led to questions about his suppressed homosexuality” [Page 180]
Questions the nature of St. Catherine of Siena’s mortifications: “how far she was responsible for her own death and how far she was suffering from what we now know as anorexia nervosa are questions that can be debated for ever [sic].” [Page 191]
Cites “Christian feminist writers” to make a lame point about “patriarchal society” in the entry for the Blessed Virgin Mary [Page 380]
And then there’s the most outrageous claim of all, plopped into parentheticals midway through the entry for St. Martha, Mary, and Lazarus: “Jesus’ (problematical)8 rebuke that ‘you always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.” How one can claim to be Christian and call anything the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the Incarnate Word, the Alpha and the Omega, the Son of Living God, Our Lord Jesus Christ says problematic truly beggars belief. [Page 349]
There you have it: the literary equivalent of liturgical abuse, two thousand years of hagiographical history strained through a hundred years of modernist madness. An entirely different essay (or book, for that matter) would need to be written to dive into the mindset that allows such left-wing lunacy to make it to print9 under the category of Catholic, but I’m not qualified nor inclined.
Seeking a charitable silver lining, not all the entries are entirely awful10, particularly when Mr. Burns sticks to the facts and avoids editorializing, but there’s nonetheless a weirdly skeptical, cynical tone throughout the book, indicative of the (thankfully fading) fad of historical-critical methodology that has haunted so much of 20th century biblical and ecclesiastical scholarship.
Even when Mr. Burns isn’t casting suspicion on the supernatural or throwing passive aggressive shade on saints who don’t live up to his personal social justice standards, there’s never any real sense of religious piety or the raising of the spirit toward the transcendental one would (and should) expect from a book about the saints—it’s just cold facts and color commentary from the same leftwing worldview that has produced so many airport-lobby basilicas since the iconoclastic spirit of the 1960s was unleashed upon the heretofore well-adorned Holy Mother Church.
Having read the knockoff version of Butler’s Lives of the Saints11, I thought it important to grab a copy of the genuine article to compare and contrast. Mercifully, the Liturgical Press version is hard to find from a cursory glance on Amazon, while the unedited TAN Books version has pride of place in the search results. Not ready to shell out hundreds of dollars for the full multi-volume set, I settled instead for a copy of the greatest hits, and the simple but artful cover and 18th century prosody was exactly the pious palate cleanser I expected it to be.
Hagiographies and a-saint-a-day devotionals are a dime a dozen but—over five-hundred years after St. Ignatius of Loyola’s life (and the life of the Church) was changed forever by reading his own (pre-Butlerian) lives of the saints—it is Butler’s that has truly stood the test of time.
Which is not found in the Bible and would be nonsensical to scripture’s papyrus-scroll readership.
Insert obligatory “not that there’s anything wrong that” here—but what progressives who harp on about representation don’t understand is that sanctification isn’t a zero sum game and there’s more than enough grace to go around.
Pardon the trashy comparisons, but you get the point.
Interesting anecdote provided by Mr. Burns in the entry for St. Catherine Labouré: “The present writer—to end on a personal note—was given [the miraculous medal] by an aunt in 1953 and urged to wear it on military service in Korea, where it never actually had to prove its efficacy as I arrived there just after the cease-fire.” [Page 610]
Small consolation that Mr. Burns avoids the usual liberal canard of suggesting Joan was some sort of proto-icon of transgender ideology.
Why not just go full-on Reddit atheist and say Jesus was a copy of an ancient Egyptian deity while you’re at it?
[sic] (and sick)
It almost goes without saying at this point that there’s nary a nihil obstat nor imprimatur to be found in their usual location near the copyright section.
One good entry, ironically enough, is that of The Solemnity of All Saints: “On this day the Church venerates all those, known and unknown, whose virtues and efforts in this life are considered to have earned them an eternal reward with God. In doing so, we, the Church on earth, traditionally give thanks for their lives, consider their example and strive to emulate them, ask for their intercession in the trials of this life, and glorify God through the multitude that have gone before us, remembering that we too are all called to be saints.” [Page 508]
As it turns out, irreverent editing isn’t a new problem for Butler: Donald Attwater and Fr. Herbert Thurston, S.J. (whom Mr. Burns gives shoutouts to in his introduction!) apparently struck a similarly skeptical tone in their 1950s revision.