Resisting modernist “demolition troops”: Ida Friederieke Görres, w/ Jennifer Bryson

By Thomas V. Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Jan 15, 2026 | In The Catholic Culture Podcast

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Ida Friederieke Görres is little-known to English-speaking Catholics (except perhaps for her biography of St. Therese of Lisieux), but she was a major voice of the orthodox Catholic laity in mid-20th-century Germany, with Joseph Ratzinger giving her eulogy.

Jennifer Bryson has translated Görres’s 1970 essay collection, Bread Grows in Winter, which is a response to the crisis in the Church immediately following Vatican II. Görres’s beautiful and profound writing gives a sense of what it was like to live in those troubling times, and how we (perhaps especially the laity) should respond to the troubles of our own times.

Links

“Trusting the Church” on Catholic Culture Audiobooks https://www.catholicculture.org/commentary/ida-friederike-grres-trusting-church/

Ida Friederieke Görres, Bread Grows in Winter, trans. Jennifer S. Bryson https://ignatius.com/bread-grows-in-winter-bgwp/

Görres, The Hidden Face: A Study of St. Therese of Lisieux https://ignatius.com/the-hidden-face-hfsstp/

Theme music: “Franciscan Eyes”, written and performed by Thomas Mirus. Download the Catholic Culture Podcast soundtrack.