CHURCH'S GIFT TO 21st CENTURY

 Our last writer for the month was an influential Catholic writer and thinker known for her penetrating studies on sanctity, the Church, and the spiritual life. Though widely read in the mid‑20th century, she is less known today—despite praise from major figures like Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), who called her “a brave and insightful voice given to the Church Today".  She has been almost entirely forgotten in German-speaking Europe but is more well known in the USA.  Bishop Erik Varden  (Trappist monk who has served as Bishop of Trondheim, Norway since 2020) described her as "one of the seminal Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century".

IDA FRIEDERIKE GORRES was born in 1901 in western Bohemia. She was the daughter, one of the seven children, of Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Japanese wife, Mitsuko Aoyama.  Her father was a diplomat for the Habsburg empire in Japan in the late 1800s. There, he met her mother, the daughter of a Japanese antiques dealer. Her father died when Ida was young. Her mother was cold toward her and her two sisters, even telling them they were “ugly” because of their mixed Asian-European features, while the mother embraced her four sons. 

Ida attended Austrian convent schools, first at the College of the Sacred Heart in Pressbaum near Vienna and then with the Mary Ward Sisters in St. Pölten. In 1923, she entered a novitiate at the Mary Ward Institute but left the convent in 1925. After that, she studied political science in Vienna from 1925 to 1927, and then other topics such as the social sciences, history, church history, theology and philosophy from 1927 to 1929 in Freiburg.

She became involved in the German Catholic Youth Movement around 1925, acting as the federal leader of the girls and writing articles for the magazine Die Schildgenossen. Then in 1931, she went to Dresden as a youth secretary for girls' pastoral care working there at the Catholic Educational Institute. In the spring of 1934 she became diocesan secretary at the ordinariate of the Diocese of Meissen. The Catholic Youth Movement during this period saw a tremendous Catholic revival. She was particularly active in the German branch of it known as Quickborn, led by Father Romano Guardini  (great theologan and writer everyone of my generation read in theology class, especially his book The Lord.  See BLOGS 10/24/2017 & 8/2/2016).

Around this time, Ida met engineer Carl-Josef Görres (1903-1973), who was the older brother of Catholic psychologist Albert Görres and his wife, Silvia Görres (née Volkart) a noted. psychotherapist and author. On Easter day (21 April) 1935, Ida and Carl-Josef married at the Oratory in Leipzig. Some time after the ceremony, the couple moved to Stuttgart-Degerloch. Through his work as an engineer and business consultant, Carl-Josef Görres made it possible for Ida to have the opportunity to work as a writer and theologian. Sadly, the couple were never able to have children.

Ida wrote on various topics on hagiography, stressing the importance of the "humanness of saints." During the last three or four years of World War II, her books were not allowed to be sold in Germany.  After the war was over, she continued to write, travel, and lecture, until in 1950 a breakdown in health drove her into seclusion. Her frank 1946 "Letter on the Church" unleashed significant controversy, though it is now viewed in hindsight as prescient.

She was loyal to the tradition of Catholic Church: "I have known no other father but these fathers, the priests of the Church, no brothers but my own dear brothers, the theology students," she said. "No mother but the Church...I loved them all and clung to them, not only as a daughter and sister, but as a Japanese daughter and sister, in the intensity of unconditional submission which belongs to Japanese filial piety." 

On February 21, 1969, the Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper wrote to  Hans Urs von Balthasar, a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered one of the most important Catholic theologians of the 20th century. With Joseph Ratzinger and Henri de Lubac (a French Jesuit priest and cardinal also considered one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century and whose writings and doctrinal research played a key role in shaping the Second Vatican Council), he founded the theological journal Communio, “Do you know the heartfelt essay by Ida Fr. Görres on The Spirituality of Studying Theology [...; I wish it were in the hands of every student of theology, especially ‘lay’ theologians.”

 Ida Görres participated in the Würzburg synod and died a day after (May 16,1971) collapsing following an impassioned speech at  the synod meeting in Frankfurt. At the Requiem held in Freiburg Cathedral, the eulogy was delivered by Father Joseph Ratzinger, who later became Pope Benedict XVI.

"Even at this hour: can we give thanks? Can we give thanks at the death of Ida Friederike Görres, with which a voice has been taken away from us, a voice which seems irreplaceable to the Church in this situation, when we are in a desert of conformism or embarrassed silence? She spoke with an insightful certainty and a fearlessness about the pressing questions and tasks of the Church today, something which is given only to the one who truly believes. And where else are there such voices?" (Homily of Father Joseph Ratziner at Ida Gorres' funeral Mass.

Ida is best known in the English speaking world for her 1944 study of Thérèse of Lisieux, Das Verborgene Antlitz - translated as The Hidden Face.

Since 2020, there has been renewed interest among English-speaking Catholics her work. There have been new translations of her works into English by Jennifer S. Bryson. Magnificat Magazine often uses passages from her writing as meditations