The Catholic world can thank Jennifer S. Bryson for her labor of love in bringing into English translation a large selection of the works of Ida Friederike Görres (1901-71). A giant of German Catholic writing from the 1930s until her death in 1971, Görres has been largely eclipsed since then. Her reflections on the nature of the Church, vocation, and the way in which Christ shines through his saints are a light from which Catholics in the English-speaking world can find warmth and deeper vision.
The only Görres volume available for many years was The Hidden Face, her brilliant analysis of St. Thérèse. But, in 2023, Bryson published with Cluny a translation of the 1950 work The Church in the Flesh, a volume about the nature of a Church both divine and human (all too human), born of controversy after Görres publicly wrote about the weakness of the German Catholic Church in the late 1940s. (She hadn’t seen anything yet.)
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