”What about Princess Diana?” was not one of the questions I was prepared for as we began our speaking tour in Chicago this spring, but with Gavin Ashenden in tow – when he was an Anglican he was an Honorary Queen’s Chaplain – we had to factor in an extra half hour for questions about the royal family.
In 2022, Gavin, Mark Lambert and I established Catholic Unscripted: an online apostolate of evangelism and renewal of Catholic faith. Since then, we have developed a special relationship with our American brothers and sisters after discovering that they make up a large part of our online audience. Some of them had invited us to give a series of talks at various locations across the Midwest.
We were connected with a hidden wealth of Catholic orthodoxy in the belly of Cardinal Blase Cupich’s archdiocese, where the traditionalist community at St John Cantius has more vocations than the whole of the rest of the archdiocese of Chicago put together. We began our tour with a visit to the canons there, who are thriving under the inspiring pastoral vision of Fr Joshua Caswell.
The Canadian Fr Caswell is the son of a Pentecostal politician known as “The Saskatchewan Sledgehammer” who, after converting to Catholicism, informed the whole family that if they wanted to stay under her roof, they would too! For one son, Joshua himself, this ultimatum sent him to live out of a camper van in the wild until an unlikely call found him becoming first a Catholic and then a priest.
The parish is known as the place to find the old rite in Chicago, yet when we turned up to pre-dinner Vespers we found the canons chanting in English. When asked how the order is managing under the current arrangements, Fr Caswell, who had recently appeared on the documentary <em>Mass of the Ages</em>, said “never allow yourself to be placed in a box … Surprise them … Scandalise to evangelise!”
When we entered the living quarters of the canons regular, we were shown to our seats at the dining table. As the only woman in the building I found that my behaviour changed; I sat straighter in my seat, I more consciously took time with my food, I listened carefully and responded with care. Somehow I became very aware of my femininity, and the respectful way I was treated drew the very best out of me. I thought about the ways in which some men treat and mistreat women today: a sterile shell to be medicated, penetrated and abandoned in a contraceptive culture of casual sex. In a culture of low expectations, I remembered, God through the Church calls us to a higher standard, to become what we were created to be.
Over homemade limoncello after dinner, a conversation about the particular charism of St John Cantius began when Mark asked how the community’s relic collecting was going. A picture over the high altar depicts John Cantius helping a woman who had dropped and smashed a water jug; when he stopped to pick up the pieces, the jug was miraculously restored and was even better than before. Under his patronage, the canons now work to “restore the sacred”, even resor ting to eBay. “It’s going well,” said Fr David, before Gavin mischievously offered a word of warning about the authenticity of St Fulgentius’s third kneebone.
Large crowds assembled for the talks that we had prepared, which were billed as “Paradigm Lost – a restoration of heart, body and mind”. I spoke about the culture of distorted femininity and Mark explored the great intellectual tradition of our faith; Gavin addressed his conversion to Catholicism, which was a destination arrived at only after some Bible-smuggling in the old Soviet bloc, being arrested by the KGB, teaching at the most radical left-wing university in the UK and joining Elizabeth II’s ecclesiastical household.
To my surprise, after each event a number of women approached me to discuss the impact the modern world has had on their families. “I wish I had heard these things 40 years ago,” said one mother, full of regret about the way she raised her daughters.
From St John Cantius we went to St James’s, Sag Bridge, a historic church founded in 1833 for the Irish labourers digging the nearby canal. When we saw that recent poor weather had caused some damage, Mark and I instinctively reached for the overalls as Gavin leaned back on the deck smoking a pipe. “You’re a Catholic now, mate,” Mark said, handing him a shovel.
Our host was Jim Coughlin, father of Seamus Coughlin of <em>FreedomToons</em> – it calls itself “an animated web series producing satirical and educational content about politics and cur rent events from a conservative perspective”. Jim told us a moving story about trust. After marrying his childhood sweetheart, they spent nine years childless with hope fading and the temptations of technological intervention increasing, but with the help of their wonderful pastor, Fr Tom Koys, they continued to place their trust in God.
Not long after adopting a baby girl, Jim’s wife began to feel unwell. “It’s the flu,” she said before realising that she had fallen pregnant naturally with what would turn out to be the first of three sons. We met “the flu”, now a firefighter in his late 20s, before the evening Mass at St James’s. The next morning, as Fr Ryan Brady gave us a tour of the city, a number of police officers stopped to tip their caps to him as we passed. “The police always do that here,” he said. “It’s very old school. We both know what it’s like to walk around with a bullseye on our backs.” He observed that “the police here have a rosary in one pocket and a gun in the other.”
A visit to some Catholic business leaders and a conversation with Drew Mariani on Relevant Radio brought the Chicago portion of our trip to a close. We then flew to Oklahoma at the invitation of Tammy Peterson (with whom I spoke for a recent podcast) for an evening of wrestling with God with her husband, Jordan.
After Konstantin Kisin introduced him, he came out to whoops, cheers and one very excited “We love your jacket!” from a group of Texan tailors behind us. Peterson did what Peterson does, and did it brilliantly.
Catholic Unscripted continues to cast the net wide; we have already been invited to speak at a Catholic Identity conference in Pittsburgh in the autumn. The aim is simple one: to speak truth in a culture in which truth is too often a dirty word, and to direct viewers to the face of Truth itself: Jesus Christ.
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<strong><strong>This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click</strong> <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">here</mark></a>.</strong>
