Bread Grows in Winter: The brilliant Ida Friederike Görres

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Dec 05, 2025 | In Reviews

The Bohemian Catholic Ida Friederike Görres (1901-1971) was nearing the end of her life in Germany when she responded in 1970 to the doubts and turmoil within the Church in the wake of the Second Vatican Council by publishing Bread Grows in Winter. This book contained six of her most recent essays, and it resonates with me partly because I had just begun, in my first year of college in 1966-67, to notice the same turmoil within the Church, which led to my own very first published essays in 1968. I could have benefited then (and can still benefit now) from Görres’ spiritual maturity, exquisite balance, penetrating insights, and superior prose.

Here was a woman who within a year was to merit a eulogy from Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI). And here was a woman of whom I was not to learn until Ignatius Press published a new edition of Bread Grows in Winter this year, translated into English and enhanced not only by Ratzinger’s eulogy but also by significant introductory material, extensive notes, a register of persons, a bibliography, and helpful indices provided by the translator, Jennifer S. Bryson. The book is introduced by one of the author’s greatest proponents, Bishop Erik Varden, O.C.S.O.

In addition to brilliant essays, Ida Friederike Görres also wrote a number of larger works with the common theme of sanctity, two of which are likewise available in English from Ignatius Press: John Henry Newman: A Life Sacrificed, and her biography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, The Hidden Face.

Catholic Turmoil

Ida (born Elizabeth Friederike, Reichsgräfin von Couldenhove-Kalergi) married Carl-Josef Görres in 1935. They unfortunately were unable to have children, but Carl-Josef’s income was sufficient to make it possible for his wife to write. Ida had been raised Catholic, and she had already undergone a deeper interior conversion as a student in a convent school, from which she had entered the novitiate but then had left and gone on to higher studies between 1925 and 1929. She was active in the German Catholic Youth Movement, within which she guided other young women. It was at that time that she began writing Catholic articles, and worked at the Catholic Educational Institute.

By 1946 she had begun analyzing the problems which afflicted the Church in Germany and, following the Second Vatican Council, she also participated in synodal efforts at renewal. German Catholic history indicates that she was clearly a minority voice and, had her understanding of authentic renewal been better received, she might not have collapsed and died after giving an urgent speech at the Würzburg synod on May 14, 1971.

As any serious European or American Catholic who remembers the last third of the twentieth-century will understand, the impassioned speech which triggered Görres’ death was made during the throes of the heterodox angst which animated so much of the Church in the West following the Second Vatican Council. At this time, the cultural revolution of the 1960s had seduced dominant Catholic voices—especially academic voices—into an overwhelmingly secular worldview which was determined to alter Catholic faith and morals in accordance with the zeitgeist—the spirit of the times. Had Görres been able to survive into her mid-80s until the Synod of Bishops in 1985, she would have witnessed a turning point in recent Church history in the growing success of Pope St. John Paul II’s effort to substitute authentic Catholic renewal for the runaway train of contemporary secularism.

But the situation in 1971 demanded not only impassioned and illuminating speeches but brilliant and illuminating essays, which Ida Görres was willing to deliver until, almost literally, she drew her last breath.

The essays

The titles of the six essays in this book give some idea of the range of Ida Friedericke Görres’ concerns:

1. Our Image of Christ: A Letter
2. Demolition Troops in the Church
3. Faith: Skeleton or Body?
4. The Spirituality of Studying Theology
5. Remarks on Celibacy
6. Trusting the Church [which you can listen to on our Catholic Culture Audiobooks podcast]

In the first essay, she explores a foundational issue in authentic Catholicism: What we really think of Jesus Christ; in the second, obviously, she responds to the wholesale demolition of Catholicism in the years following the Council in which the secularization of the larger world invaded and stripped the Church of so much of her heritage; in the third, she offers a reflection on the fullness of Faith; in the fourth, she identifies the key issue which emerged in theology in the twentieth-century—namely, whether theology was really Faith seeking understanding or speculation divorced from Faith; in the fifth, Görres thoroughly explores the challenge (and widespread dismissal) of priestly celibacy; and in the sixth, she raises the all-important question reflected in the title “trusting the Church”—the negative answer to which has led to widespread abandonment of the Church and to so many splinter groups in the succeeding years. In each case, the author’s depth and perspicuity are genuinely astonishing, and enormously enriching even today, more than a half-century later.

At one point in the essay on theology, Görres cites a passage from C. S. Lewis in his Letters to Malcolm: “The charge to Peter was Feed my sheep; not Try experiments on my rats, or even, Teach my performing dogs new tricks.” But in truth, most of the brilliance in these essays is her own, as when, in the same essay, she writes:

Whom should we trust? A theology that continually explains its own bankruptcy via leading speakers; an interpretation of revelation that turns it into a rather unimportant science, destroying its own foundations, rejects Tradition, dissolves the Bible, denies the highest Magisterium, and, finally, as the capstone of their wisdom, invents absolute blasphemy, unutterable by any Jew, Muslim, or Gentile, which can quote only to report on and say with physical reluctance: “God is dead”?

However, most of her writing is insight, not denunciation, and this insight presents us all with a challenge which Görres poses to herself in the following passage from her final essay on trusting the Church:

I can imagine that the appearance of the Church, deprived of all the beautiful traditions, the liturgical spaces, vestments, vessels, customs, places of pilgrimage, most of the monasteries, and other “magical remains”, will resemble an ugly, hewn willow stump. The City on the Hill will be reduced to the ruins of the city wall….

I also know that in view of these (and other) conditions, some people who are to be taken seriously consider apocalyptic fulfillment to have come, and they prepare for the end of all things, not just of Germany or Europe or the white race. What can I say? I can understand this even if I do not share their opinion. We have long since deserved this. However, Philipp Dessauer used to say, “The last day has many dress rehearsals.” And we have been told that it will surprise us.

As I said: I can imagine the darkest development, and I also expect it.

Yet, I, by no means, believe, first, that it must happen, and second, that it will come to stay.

In recovery now

Indeed, when we think back on the past seventy-five years, are not our own dire predictions of the death of the Church undermined already by many different signs of abundant new growth? Have we not already seen a wide variety of new and authentically Catholic movements become vibrant sources not only of renewed commitment but of increasing conversions? Yet at times even the most faithful have been tempted to pronounce the Church of Christ dead—which is simply to pronounce God dead.

But God’s death and the death of His Church are merely the periodic illusions presented to us in a purely human history, and especially the history of the last hundred years. Ida Friederike Görres herself heard the death of Catholicism proclaimed by the worst of Catholics in the 1960s, and she closely examined the deep concerns raised within the Church at that time—concerns which still lie at the root of our own faltering steps forward. Yet, as she foresaw, despite the Church’s internal struggles, tremendous attrition, and a long period of immense confusion, the Church is both stronger and more missionary now than when Görres wrote at the end of that era of the 1960s—an era which so clearly marked a new end of the Church’s widespread tendency, in her members, to take herself for granted.

Quick to distinguish both fresh insights and the recognition of previous deficiencies from the false teachings and faithless claims that would destroy the Church, Ida Friederike Görres clearly identified the choking weeds which reduced the harvest of the Church in the last century. Her writings were always directed toward helping others to perceive the vast difference between the weeds and the potential harvest to come. A fine writer whose perceptions were keen with genuine insight, she wrote with intelligence, understanding, resilience and a secure hope in the Church as both body and bride of her crucified yet risen Lord.

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Ida Friederike Görres, Bread Grows in Winter. Ignatius Press, 2025. 222pp. Paper $18.95; eBook $12.32.