The Living of Maisie Ward by Dana Greene (review)

94BOOK REVIEWS These ecclesiasticisti were primarily concerned with the law of the State in regard to the Church, but also with canon law. Buonaiuti displayed a keen interest in the historical aspects of their work, not just in Jemolo's studies, e.g., on Jansenism in Italy. Buonaiuti, of course, published his own interpretation of his vicissitudes in the autobiographical Pellegrino di Roma (1945). Like George Tyrrell (whom he and his editor spell "Tyrrel"), he was firm in his attachment to the Catholic Church and its priesthood, to which he clung. It is evident from these letters that this was no development of his later years; again and again he mentioned his determination to make it manifest by continuing to wear the soutane. Only the threat of Mussolini's police could induce him to appear in a black suit with clergyman's collar. There are any number of other indications here of the halflife in Mussolini's Italy of the modernist and integralist clashes of the pre-WorldWar -I period. Agostino Gemelli, O.F.M., the founder ofthe Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, and Enrico Rosa, SJ., of the Civiltà Cattolica are two of the villains who appear, Gemelli sometimes trying to"help" Buonaiuti and his friend, Jemolo. Cardinal Gasparri absolved Buonaiuti of one early excommunication without obtaining at that time what the Vatican was after, namely, Buonaiuti's complete retirement from the scene. But on all such figures and incidents , other studies (duly noted) would have to be consulted for a balanced view. Paul Misner Marquette University The Living ofMaisie Ward. By Dana Greene. (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. 1997. Pp. xii, 255. $25.00.) Dana Greene's biography, The Living of Maisie Ward, provides us with a highly contextualized, readable account of the evolution of a remarkable woman: street preacher and apologist for the Catholic Church in London's Hyde Park and on Wall Street in NewYork, biographer ofJohn Henry Newman and G. K. Chesterton, historian of the Oxford Movement and its subsequent ramifications within the English Catholic Church, co-founder of Sheed and Ward, the publishing house that made the fruits of the Catholic intellectual revival widely accessible in England and America by the middle of this century, and later in life, global activist for affordable housing (a commitment she considered a direct mandate of the Mystical Body of Christ). Greene's book is more than an overdue biography of a Catholic writer and activist, however. In writing the life of this exceptional woman, who lived from 1889 to 1975, Green reconstructs the several worlds inhabited by her protagonist, worlds which need to be reinstated within the Catholic historical memory. Ward's story has its origins in the insular world of Victorian and Edwardian English upper-class Catholics captured in a different voice in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. It shifted direction in the wake of the Great War when Ward encountered the Catholic Evidence Guild, an expanding microcosm BOOK REVIEWS95 where Ward, a convent-educated gentrywoman, could share a Hyde Park podium with a cockney charwoman, an Australian law student (her future husband , Frank Sheed), and a growing number ofvolunteers from the working and professional classes dedicated to explaining what it meant to be Catholic to anyone who would listen. The Guild, which reached its peak in the 1930's, helped Ward to find her voice and her vocation as a Catholic writer and publisher and led to her marriage and collaboration with Frank Sheed, with whom she founded Sheed and Ward in 1926. Sheed and Ward, both the publishers and the traveling lecturers, provided access to the works of the Catholic intellectual revival underway in Europe, England, and America for a growing readership, and thereby transformed the meaning and experience of theology and spirituality for the generations ofAmerican and English Catholics who came ofage between the late 1920's and the early 1960's, the eve of Vatican Council II. In 1956, when Sheed and Ward were at the peak of their success and Ward was sixty-seven, she established the Catholic Housing Aid Society, which signaled her recognition that the changing world of Catholic literature, theology, and spirituality...