Fine Catholic writing: A delightful collection in our library

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Apr 10, 2026

A little over a year ago (February 3, 2025), I began adding to our library the collection of Catholic essays published in 1946 by Books for Libraries Press, which was edited with biographical notes by Fr. Raphael H. Gross, C.PP.S. This was one volume in the “Essay Index Reprint Series”, the remaining volumes of which, if they ever materialized, never entered my collection of books.

If I recall correctly, I picked this Catholic collection for a song at a Princeton University library sale of unneeded books when I was in graduate school in the early 1970s. It wasn’t being shed from the library because printed volumes were no longer needed (as has been the case with many old reference works since digitization). But a collection of Catholic essays might well have been pretty low on the University’s wish list.

The volume was entitled A Century of the Catholic Essay, and it included 45 essays by 39 different writers, many of whom, like the controversialist G. K. Chesterton, the novelist Robert Hugh Benson, the poet Francis Thompson, and the scholar St. John Henry Newman are still well-known today. One of the latest writers included in the collection was Fulton Sheen, whose cause for canonization is currently active.

The two oldest writers in the collection were the Englishman John Henry Newman (born in 1801 and now canonized) and the American Orestes Brownson (born in 1803). The writer who died most recently was the Irish Séan O’Faoláin (1991), but all the essays first appeared, as the book’s title suggests, within the hundred years preceding the collection’s 1946 publication date. The length of these essays is generally short, ranging from 3 to 17 pages. In alphabetical order by last name, the authors included are:

• Maurice Baring
• Hilaire Belloc
• Robert Hugh Benson
• Orestes Brownson
• G. K. Chesterton
• Padraic Colum
• Joseph Conrad
• James J. Daly
• Christopher Dawson
• Aubrey De Vere
• Finley Peter Dunne
• Helen Parry Eden
• Charles Bullard Fairbanks
• Leonard Feeney
• Eric Gill
• James M. Gillis
• Louise Imogen Guiney
• Joel Chandler Harris
• Lionel Johnson
• Joyce Kilmer
• Ronald Knox
• Dominic Bevan Wyndham Lewis
• Seumas MacManus
• Sister Mary Madeleva
• Cyril C. Martindale
• Alice Meynell
• John Henry Cardinal Newman (St.)
• Alfred Noyes
• Séan O’Faoláin
• Coventry Patmore
• Agnes Repplier
• Francis J. Sheed
• Parick A. Sheehan
• Fulton J. Sheen
• John Lancaster Spalding
• Charles Warren Stoddard
• Francis X. Talbot
• Francis Thompson
• Sir Bertram Windle

These essays were written by Catholics but are not necessarily devoted to Catholic topics, as all of reality, in both its more serious and more humorous aspects, falls within the purview of a well-balanced soul. The collection is divided into eight sub-sections: The Texture of Life, Fellow-Travelers, Length and Breadth, Amenities, Culture and Education, Literature and Art, Biography and Criticism, and The Church and the Modern World.

I had been announcing the addition of these essays to our library in my Insights messages as they were added, but I neglected to announce the five I posted last month, and I finished up the remaining ten all at once yesterday. So at this point, it is best simply to refer to the table of contents document in our library which lists and links to all of the individual essays: A Century of the Catholic Essay: Contents & Links.

I have read through this collection several times since I acquired it, and have most enjoyed different selections on each reading. I think it is safe to say that there is something for everyone, from the lightest and most humorous treatment of life’s small pleasures to the serious concerns of the Church.

For example, Sheen wrote about “The Conspiracy against Life” while Chesterton wrote “On Lying in Bed”, which he very much enjoyed. For sheer lunacy you might read Finley Peter Dunne’s spoof concerning “Mr. Dooley on the Education of the Young”, which could lead you to a more serious exploration of “Imagination” with the help of Coventry Patmore. But for a refresher on how the Church seems always to renew herself as soon as the world pronounces her dead, as if she possesses a supernatural energy, consider the final essay in the collection by Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson: “Catholicism and the Future”.