The book was selling at a reduced price by June 1735. Johnson treated his source author, Father Lobo , a sixteenth-century Portuguese missionary, with astonishing freedom, openly signalling his disapproval of the Roman Catholic missionary spirit which Lobo celebrates.

Indeed, Resurgence celebrates the passing of bodily suffering:WHERE are ye, goblins of a while ago?
Ill-health, dull gloom, Grief with its footsteps slow,
Wry-visaged Pain, the bat-winged form of Care;
Insomnia, whose accursed and cruel brood
Fasten their horrid fangs in faithful Sleep,
Burrs of our life, whose hookèd talons creep
Even to the very soul; whose unseen snare
Besets our path, our bed, our toil, our food;
Whose touch is madness, and whose poisoned breath
Is worse than the hard clutch of fatal Death?
Quite a number of the poems in the volume address details of the natural world in Ireland, such as a moth native to the Burren, or a wave, and others evince spiritual reflections that suggest a generalized faith rather than a particular creed. While some pieces (such as a gripping ballad about Catholic recusants and a cluster on eighteenth-century life) treat of painful specifics of Ireland's plight, others are symbolic in their mournful tone. The Emigrants is, in the first instance at least, about ducks departing west.

This novel highlights the psychological and spiritual consequences for women of violent or abusive sexual events, which the novel figures in two generations of women. Maddalena is an aristocratic Italian housewife who is sexually inhibited as a consequence of having witnessed, as a child, her father having sex with a servant. She is also devoutly Catholic and highly conventional. Maddalena disappears mysteriously, though not for the first time, and when four years later she has still not returned, her daughter, Pina Labardi (whose name becomes Angela in the film), goes to Florence to search for her. Pina has only one clue to direct her search: every time her mother vanishes, the sign of the Seven Moons, is all that is left behind.Pina eventually finds this sign carved into the archway over the Trattoria, which is the home base of a gang of thieves run by Nino, whose lover, Rosanna, is one of the most successful thieves. Rosanna is a strong, wilful woman, entirely unhibited, disrespectful of social conventions such as marriage, and defiant towards the Catholic church: she was strong enough to stand by herself, to defy God and the law alike.

One of her main subjects here is William James (recently deceased), whose theory of and experiments in pragmatism—particularly his emphasis on the will to believe—Lee disputes in favour of those explored by Charles Sanders Peirce and Giovanni Vailate . She also engages critically with the work of Henri Bergson , George Tyrell (a leader of Catholic modernism), and anthropologist Ernest Crawley .

This travel book inscribes both an orientalist and exoticised India. It displays the same kind of feminist impulse that is evident in AL 's earlier books—an identification that erases cultural difference. She concerns herself with the position of women, servants, and slaves. She praises British rule in India since the Mutiny of 1857-8, saying it has all but eliminated sutteeism, infanticide, self-immolation to the idols, Thuggism, and slavery. (She voices anti-Catholic sentiments as well as condemnation of these Indian customs.) She observes, however, that she felt that it was a very solemn affair for the Briton to be in India luxuriating on her soil and on her spoils. Early in the book she describes a dinner party where the topic of conversation is British supremacy in India. She recalls that during the meal she was very aware of the Indian servants overhearing the table chat: I did comprehend, and that very painfully, that no one seemed to mind those dark, silent, stationary figures any more than if they had been hewn out of stone.

There follows a series of six stories under the general title A Sketch from the Parlour of my Inn, three of which open with quotations from William Wordsworth . The final story in this group, A Mother's Guilt, is one of the few not to deal with generally masculine topics. Three independent stories complete the collection. Standing centrally in it is not a story but an essay, Serious Reflections on Catholic Emancipation. The essay warns against any relaxation of limitations, arguing that a Roman Catholic cannot be free: his confessor is his master, and that therefore Catholics should be allowed the rights of citizenship—but no more! A note, however, says these reflections are Not Original, but supplied by Everard Allen from the manuscripts of Philip Lumley . Either or both of these people may well be fictional, but the meditative style of Serious Reflections is indeed unlike anything else in EBL 's known writings.

The title of Not All Saints comes from an Irish proverb which is quoted on the title-page. The novel looks at Catholic girls growing up. The orphaned Netta Heath cheerfully faces the necessity of earning her own living because of her late father's gambling habit. A Jesuit priest who knew her mother and converted her father to Catholicism is now her mainstay, but she has a lot to learn. While she is unwilling to accept Ned van Ruten, the man who loves her, the beautiful Charmion Crosby wants nothing but to become a nun. In the end Charmion saves Netta from a murder attempt by interposing her body, and the novel closes with her recuperating before becoming a nun, while Netta, with tearful apology for the terrible mistakes she has made, realises her love for Ned and agrees to marry him.

She expresses here an interest in comparative religion which may distantly herald her eventual conversion. She refers to the battering-ram qualities of Protestantism and the charmed and glorified, the rich and magical atmosphere of Catholic thought.

Its plot employs ghosts and revenants to satirize the bizarre machinations of the Roman Catholic Church in the throes of change. Set in the mythical town of Fetherhoughton in the north of England in the mid 1950s, the story precedes (with hindsight) the changes wrought by Vatican II, or the Second Ecumenical Council. Opened by Pope John XXIII in 1962, the Council within three years made widespread liturgical and ecumenical changes, including introducing the use of vernacular languages in Catholic services and increased social responsibility and accessibility of the Church to modern society. The novel depicts the unmodern, pre-Council Catholic Church in an English village whose people have lives of unimaginable bleakness and whose inherited quarrels have endured for centuries. Its fantastic events involve ghosts, the resurrection of the alchemist Robert Fludd in the form of a curate, and the burial and resurrection of the plaster images of saints from the village church. All this affords Mantel opportunity for savage and funny satire. In alchemy, she points out, everything has a literal and factual description, and in addition a description that is symbolic and fantastical. The protagonist, Father Angwin, an atheist by secret conviction and thus a stickler for the forms of the faith, is charged by the bishop with the removal of the plaster saints in an effort to expunge local and deeply entrenched superstitions.

Constance, Countess Markievicz, published in Dublin a pamphlet on James Connolly 's Policy and Catholic Doctrine.

Her subjects in the first essay are Hannah More (especially her Practical Piety and An Essay on the Character and Practical Writings of Saint Paul) and Anna Letitia Barbauld , whom she regarded as the finest woman poet alive. (The volume indexes her remarks on Barbauld as a eulogy.) She also makes admiring mention of the scholar Elizabeth Smith . The earlier piece opens by remarking that some of the finest and most useful English works on the subject of Practical Divinity are by female authors. I suppose it is owing to the peculiar susceptibility of the female mind, and its consequent warmth of feeling . . . . After this she shifts her attention from gender to national culture. Hannah More, she says, is superior to the qualified morality, the affected feeling, and the long-drawn-out sentiments of Madame de Genlis because of the inferiority of the Roman Catholic religion. In the same way, despite Germaine de Staël 's genius and goodness, she lacks Barbauld's spirit of pure and simple devotion because our countrywoman has been taught to fix her standard higher, and has consequently made the greatest advances. The second essay argues for improved female education (though still restricted: for instance to the living languages as opposed to Latin and Greek) on the grounds that this will better fit women to fulfil their domestic and marital duties. It adopts a masculine voice to maintain that wives should be companions to men, instead of playthings.

In this work MMC elaborates on her childhood experiences: how her mixed heritatge (Jewish as well as Catholic) affected her life and worldview. She also deals with painful topics like the loss of her parents to influenza and her life as an orphan.

The first part of this volume revolves around MMG 's parents, particularly her father, who had recently died. The second part moves from the personal to encompass also the political, and revolves around dialogue: between man and woman, North and South, Catholic and Protestant, Ireland and England.

Something Odd! opens with a prefatory dialogue, The Author and his Pen, which consistently treats the author as male; he is addressed by the pen as master. It satirises both the Roman Catholic and the Anglican churches and presents a sympathetic account of work as a governess.

Through religious allusion and diction, VM addresses the theme of sacred and profane love and explores the ethical dilemmas of a love triangle in a small village.Evan Davidstow, an altruistic lawyer, is caught between his vain and shallow fiancée, Dorcas Lilliot, and the pious and moralJane Haffenden. Jane and Evan are too conscientious to act upon their burgeoning love, but when Dorcas leaves to go travelling with an aunt, they are left to realise their feelings for each other. Jane is presented as being rewarded and purified for obedience to Catholic morality.

Montagu in her travel book shows herself an acute observer of the various Christian European cultures, as well as of Islamic Europe and Turkey, and the classically-haunted Mediterranean. She tends to approve Protestant or republican states, and to disparage anything ancien régime (she admires technological advance, despises gothic architecture, and never tires of poking fun at Catholic reverence for relics), yet she often writes enthusiastically of the charm of individual monarchs. She delights in the fantastic opulence of Turkey (which, she says, suggests that oriental romances are actually realistic) yet describes daily life and manners there in almost sociological style. She evidently excised duplication and personal passages from her actual letters, but retained a general aptness of material to recipient, writing to her sister of clothes and social customs, to the abbé Antonio Conti her Enlightenment cultural and religious analysis, and to Pope of literary matters. She enters with gusto into correcting the errors of previous travellers to Turkey, and delights in taking the part of Islam against Christendom, especially in disputing the generally accepted view that Europe shows its superiority in the status accorded its women. She notes that Turkish married women own property. One of these letters admiringly describes, in careful empirical detail, the eastern medical practice of inoculation against smallpox, and declares her intention of one day introducing it to England. Her openness to other cultures suffered a regrettable lapse in North Africa, where she seemed blind to the humanity of the local people, as she was nowhere else.

SWM also pioneered the sonnet in America and wrote hymns for several different denominations. Her tolerance for different beliefs and movements appears in Reanimation, a Hymn for the Humane Society (an organization dedicated to saving lives), Dedication Hymn. Composed for, and to be Sung at the Opening of the West Boston Meeting House (celebrating Unitarianism ), and Stanzas in Honor of Bishop Cheverus , First Primate of the Roman Catholic Church in New England.

Reviewer Camille-Yvette Welsch read this poem as an allegory of the uneasy bonds joining pagan with Christian, Catholic with Protestant .

In February 1956 FOC began reviewing books for the diocesan paper, yclept the Bulletin. The diocese was the newly-formed Catholic one of Atlanta, whose Bulletin appeared bi-weekly. She found reviewing books for it both a useful discipline (she began it as a mortification for Lent) and a useful source of free books. Her first subject was a volume of Catholic short fiction, but some of the books she reviewed make a pointer to her central concerns. She often reviewed works of theology, including in February 1960The Phenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin , which was recently translated into English. She presented him as a poet and visionary, whom poets would recognise at once though scientists and theologians might take time to digest his thought. He became a yardstick for her, often cited and recommended to friends.

JOF published another historical novel involving developments in Roman Catholic Christianity , entitling it The Judas Cloth.