A Review by Peter Eaton

According to the tradition, in 1061 the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared three times to the noblewoman Richeldis, instructing her to build an exact replica of her house in Nazareth in which she had received the news from the archangel Gabriel that she was to be the Mother of God. The tradition further tells us that the Holy House, as it came to be known, was constructed in a single night while Richeldis kept a vigil of prayer. So the first miracle of Walsingham was revealed.

While it is likely that the traditional date is a little too early to be accurate, there is no dispute about the importance that the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham came to have by the 15th century, when it attracted pilgrims from across Europe. The priory that Richeldis’s son, Geoffrey, founded grew into one of the wealthiest monastic houses in Britain, and was plundered for its riches and dissolved by Henry VIII and his dreadfully destructive administrative machine in 1538. The land of the priory and the shrine were delivered into secular hands, and the site fell into ruin. And so it would remain for almost four centuries.

Nothing comes from nowhere, and the re-founding of the shrine at Walsingham and Alfred Hope Patten’s single-minded determination must be seen in the context of that larger Catholic movement in the Church of England that had begun with John Keble’s Assize Sermon a century earlier in 1833, and which continued until the liturgical reform of the second half of the 20th century. During this time the essentially Catholic nature of the Church and sacramental system was re-established in Anglican theology and practice.

In 1896 a Roman Catholic laywoman, Charlotte Boyd, was able to acquire the small 14th-century church that we now know as the Slipper Chapel, which has become the center of the restored Roman Catholic shrine. Roman Catholic pilgrimages began a year later, but Boyd’s endeavors were not without challenges from the Roman Catholic leadership of the day.

Hope Patten’s two predecessors as vicars of Walsingham were convinced Anglo-Catholics, and so some ground had been tilled. When Fr. Edgar Lee Reeves, who had been Vicar of Walsingham from 1904, and who had set up a modest statue of Our Lady and a small shrine in the parish church, decided to retire in 1921, there was some trouble in finding a successor who would be sympathetic. The vicar of one of London’s Catholic shrine churches, Holy Cross, St. Pancras, had the answer, and recommended his former curate.

Hope Patten would stay at Walsingham for almost 40 years until his enviable death after officiating at Solemn Evensong and Benediction in the shrine church. And a second miracle, no less wondrous than the one by which the original shrine was founded, began to unfold.

No more unlikely a character to re-establish one of Europe’s greatest holy places could there have been than Alfred Hope Patten. Barely conventionally educated, whom the prospect of examinations could put to bed with a nervous condition for weeks, shy and awkward, complicated and difficult, autocratic and rigid, naïve and tireless, the epitome of one who could be both as cunning as a serpent and as innocent as a dove, Hope Patten was often so ill and unable to function as an adult that he had to repair to the continent for months at a time, not infrequently imperiling the work in which he and others were so faithfully engaged.

Yet Hope Patton could be immensely kind and generous, and he had a profound effect on so many during his long life. Though highly disciplined in celebrating the Mass, saying the Daily Office, and leading the devotions that he developed at the shrine, oddly Hope Patten had no obvious interior life. He was never seen to spend time in private prayer in church. Both his extraordinary genius and his crippling shortcomings were evident for all to see almost every day. He was the sort of priest, described by a former Archbishop of Canterbury as sui generis, and once so common in our Anglican tradition, who could never be ordained today.

Michael Yelton, to whom we are indebted for several invaluable volumes of the history and personalities of the Catholic movement in Anglicanism, now gives us in this revised and greatly expanded version of his earlier study of Hope Patten, an important insight into this remarkable man who left not only Walsingham, but also Anglicanism, changed. While Yelton is characteristically modest, especially in reference to Fr. Colin Stephenson’s study of Hope Patten, Walsingham Way, he has given us a fine book, based on documents not available to Stephenson. He helps us see the whole picture of the development of the shrine and its ministry, which went well beyond simply building a replica of the medieval Holy House and setting up the iconic image of Our Lady of Walsingham. While those who are interested in knowing more about Walsingham will want to read Stephenson’s books, they will need to read Yelton’s.

It is hard now, almost three generations after the triumph of the Catholic tradition in Anglicanism that is represented, most obviously for Episcopalians, in the Book of Common Prayer (1979), to understand the effect of Hope Patten and the shrine in their day.   So much that was once strange, exotic, and frightening to so many Anglicans is now so ordinary as to be unremarkable, like candles on altars, surplices on choristers, and chasubles on priests.

And even if the occasional Protestant protestor still shows up at the national pilgrimage, the shrine at Walsingham is no longer regarded as an exotic manifestation of an aberrant expression of Anglicanism or creeping popery. Every Archbishop of Canterbury preaches there at least once during his primacy, and the Bishop of Norwich, who is the local ordinary, is now always present. Walsingham achieved the height of establishment recognition in 2019 when Westminster Abbey hosted a festival of the shrine, and, in an irony not lost on many, the statue of Our Lady of Walsingham was processed into the same church where the king who had destroyed her shrine had been crowned.

The stories about Walsingham and those involved in the mission of the shrine down the decades are legion. One of my favorites concerns Fr. Colin Stephenson, who was Hope Patten’s immediate and greatest successor, and was told to me by the late Canon Michael McLean, who was, at the time of the incident, Stephenson’s assistant administrator and an eyewitness. Those were the heady days when the liturgical practice at Walsingham set the standard for the more advanced Anglo-papalist congregations of the Church of England, especially those in Brighton, a great center of the Anglo-Catholic revival.

Now Fr. Stephenson had lost a leg in the Second World War, and for the rest of his life managed with a cumbersome wooden prosthesis, which was attached to his body with a complicated web of leather straps and buckles. Such devices required the kind of attention that Stephenson was disinclined to give. One Sunday, Fr. Stephenson was celebrating High Mass in the shrine church, with Fr. McLean as his deacon, kneeling behind him to lift his chasuble at the elevations during the Eucharistic Prayer. The leather straps, worn out by years of use and neglect, snapped, and, right after he replaced the chalice on the altar after elevating it for the devotion of the faithful, Fr. Stephenson crumpled to the floor in a pile of lace and brocade, disconcerting his deacon no end.

But Stephenson, not to be undone on his part by the undoing of his wooden leg, with characteristic aplomb and presence of mind, whispered to his deacon, “Don’t worry, dear. They will be doing this all up and down the south coast by next Sunday!”

While it is true, as Yelton reminds us, that Walsingham has been a critical factor in making normal the place of the Mother of God in mainstream Anglicanism, and even among some Protestants (the best book on the rosary remains one written by a British Methodist), in one important sense Hope Patten’s dream remains unfulfilled. He wanted Walsingham to be the center of Marian devotion and pilgrimage for the Church of England and the Anglican world, and this vision is yet to be realized. The second half of the twentieth century saw developments that have been the cause of a number of unhappy divisions, some of which stand in an uneasy tension with the gains that places like Walsingham have wrought for Anglicanism. The Shrine is clear that only male priests ordained by male bishops may be associates, which means that only some Anglicans are able to participate fully in the Society of Our Lady of Walsingham or in the sacramental life of the shrine.

There is no doubt that Hope Patten himself would not have approved of some of the developments in Anglicanism that he did not live to see; but it remains that Walsingham has yet to live into its true vocation to be a place where all Anglicans may come and share equally in the celebration of the Mother of God and her central place in the history of salvation.

When Bishop Philip North preached at the Walsingham festival at Westminster Abbey in 2019, he declared that Mary had been placed that day once again at the nation’s heart. It was indeed an extraordinary moment of which Hope Patten could not have dreamt. Now the Mother of God waits once more, for the time when she may be placed again at the heart of the whole Church, when Walsingham may be opened to all.

On that day Walsingham will see its third great miracle. Jesu mercy, Mary pray.

When His Majesty King Charles III and Her Majesty Queen Camilla are crowned on May 6, it will be the first coronation in 70 years. The last such lengthy interval was between the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1838 and her son King Edward VII in 1902. Today, as in 1902, there are few people alive who have participated in a coronation. King Charles is one of those few, and he was ushered in only for the crowning, spending the rest of the morning with the other royal children playing games in Buckingham Palace while their parents were in church. There is a famous photo of him looking bored as he stood next to his grandmother. According to one witness, he asked questions of her rather loudly while he was there.

The service is more aptly called “the consecration of the sovereign,” or, in more archaic language, “the sacring” of the sovereign, and this is an important clue to the meaning of the rite. The crowning may be the most dramatic moment in the service, but is not its most significant action. The heart of the rite is the anointing of the king and the queen, and it is this act that is the sacramental sign of the grace that the service bestows on them for the life and work to which they have been called.

Every coronation has been different, sometimes significantly, sometimes only in some details. This coronation is quite distinct from its predecessors, and in many respects happily so, and represents a significant development of the coronation liturgy. The rite is no longer a liturgy of the nobility and the aristocracy alone (as in the past), but now includes a range of involvement of others from across British and Commonwealth society. The focus is quite clearly on service, and this is evident at every turn.

Like all great actions of the Church, the coronation properly takes place in the context of the Eucharist. In earlier times, the coronation rite preceded the coronation Mass. But it was part of the genius of the Anglican revision that the anointing and crowning should be placed between the reading of the Gospel and the Offertory, in the same place where other sacramental rites occur. So we see the basic Eucharistic shape of the rite at this coronation, even if there will be much other ceremonial besides — as there is now, for example, at the consecration of a bishop.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is responsible for the liturgy, in consultation with the sovereign and the Dean of Westminster. The Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk, is responsible for the arrangements for the day, even to the extent that he is given full control of the Abbey in preparation for the coronation.

Another layer of important meaning in this version is the participation of a significant group of leaders of other churches and faiths. This reflects not only the king’s appreciation of the multifaith society that Britain has become since 1953; it is an appropriate development of a rite that has always been subject to the realities of the age in which it is celebrated. In 1953, the Moderator of the Church of Scotland presented the Bible to the queen, the first time that a non-Anglican church leader had participated in a coronation in such a way. It is right that such participation should be much wider today. And it has been made public that the canopy over the queen will be held not by nobility, but by members of her family — another innovation that seeks to make the rite more accessible.

Perhaps the most important question is this: What does the coronation rite accomplish? What are we doing when we consecrate a sovereign? The coronation does not make the king in the way that an ordination makes a deacon, priest, or bishop. In a hereditary monarchy such as Britain’s, the sovereign succeeds immediately on the death of the predecessor. The queen is dead. Long live the king. While individual sovereigns die, sovereignty does not. So how are we to understand the sacramental significance of a coronation?

While the rite bears some superficial resemblance to the ordination of a bishop, we are not creating a kind of semi-sacerdotal person, a layperson who has been given some aspect of quasi-priestly identity. There used to be this kind of interpretation, but the coronation and the sovereign have long since ceased to be understood in this way. There have been exaggerated opinions about this resemblance of the rites of the consecration of a bishop and the consecration of a sovereign, and so consequent confusion. The consecration of a bishop and the consecration of a sovereign are two very different actions.

Rather than the analogy of ordination, the analogy of marriage is better. The Church says that a civil marriage is a true marriage, and must be treated and respected as such. But the Church also proclaims that, for a couple to live the vocation of marriage in its deepest possible reality, the sacramental reality of marriage, and the grace that is poured out on the couple in the rite, is necessary.

The same can be said of the accession and coronation of the sovereign. The accession of the sovereign is both a moment and a process. The king became fully the sovereign according to law upon the death of his mother, and the Accession Council and Proclamations in the days immediately following the death of the late queen were the legal recognition of this reality. But the Christian tradition has always said that any Christian to whom the responsibilities of leadership have been entrusted needs the grace of God for the true fulfilment of any vocation. The Christian king has been among those for whom such a sensibility has long been particularly important.

And so to church the sovereign properly goes, as soon as it may be convenient, to receive the Church’s blessing and, by the acts of anointing and receiving Holy Communion, to be united to Christ in the ministry of the servant king. And while this was once a universal practice among the kingdoms of Europe, only the British sovereign now has a coronation. Other European sovereigns have parliamentary ceremonies at which they take the oaths of their office, and while there may still be a religious service associated with an accession in some cases, it is not a coronation.

So the coronation liturgy of the British sovereign is best understood as bestowing upon the sovereign the Church’s blessing and the gift of God’s grace for the life and work of sacrificial service. Queen Elizabeth II once remarked that the coronation is “the beginning of one’s life as a sovereign,” and there was a time, when the coronation followed more closely in time to the accession, when reigns were dated from the coronation for precisely this reason. This makes emotional as well as liturgical sense: the accession is shrouded in grief at the death of the previous sovereign, whereas the coronation is a more joyful celebration.

There is a further important meaning in this rite, which is also present in various ways in other rites of the church. The coronation rite is a reminder that, in the understanding of the Church, all true and authentic authority comes from God, just as all true and authentic love comes from God. The exercise of power, whether by a benevolent authority or a dictator, is a human venture, and often a human failure. But it is authority, authentic and grounded, that lies at the heart of all true leadership, even for a constitutional monarch.

In the ordination rites, ordinands are reminded that their authority is grounded in the one who came not to be served, but to serve. In the marriage rite, spouses are reminded that the love they share flows from the very heart of God. And in the coronation rite, the sovereign, the elected leadership, and the nation are reminded that there is more to reigning and governing and being governed than the exercise of power. Indeed in this rite, at the beginning, the king recalls that he follows the one who came not to be served, but to serve.

Throughout the coronation rite we reaffirm that all true authority for leadership is of divine origin and requires divine sustenance for its proper exercise. The coronation rite, like the ordination rite and the marriage rite, seeks to remind and strengthen both the individual and the community in this understanding of the right relationship of God with the human community and the manner in which we seek to construct our common life.

The coronation rite is not just a service for the new sovereign’s British subjects; it is an Anglican liturgy that is the possession of all Anglicans, and it is full of meaning and symbolism that can enrich everyone’s spiritual life. It is a liturgy of commitment to Christian service, and as we see the king and queen anointed and receiving Holy Communion, we may recall our own baptismal anointing and the life of service to which that dedicated each one of us.

We need not feel self-conscious about a distinctively Anglican rite in a multicultural, multifaith environment. Queen Elizabeth II once said that the role of the Church of England as the established church was “not to defend Anglicanism to the exclusion of other religions. Instead, the church has a duty to protect the free practice of all faiths in this country.” By celebrating an Anglican rite in all its fulness, the church embodies this vocation. And faithful leaders and members of other churches and faiths understand the integrity of this action.

The coronation rite is a rich liturgy full of meaning that extends beyond the sovereign and even beyond Great Britain. There will be an attempt to send various messages of inclusion and embrace on this occasion, and to make the liturgy as much about the wider community as it is about the king and the queen. In all that happens, let us not forget that we shall be watching two individuals giving themselves to a life of service that is impossible without God’s grace and blessing.

When Cosmo Gordon Lang, then Archbishop of York, was looking at his official portrait by Sir William Orpen to be hung in Bishopthorpe, he remarked dolefully that it made him look proud, pompous, and prelatical. The Bishop of Durham, Hensley Henson, himself no shrinking violet, who was standing nearby, asked him, “To which of those adjectives does Your Grace take exception?” Henson, who was himself as sui generis a personality as Lang, once said of him that he was “a man of second-class intellect but of first-class gifts.”

There is no doubt that Lang has struggled, both during his life and after his death, to find his rightful place in the even-handed judgment of others, and we owe Robert Beaken a huge debt for his efforts in balancing that judgment. In 2012 Beaken gave us his ground-breaking study, Cosmo Lang: Archbishop in War and Crisis, and now he has edited one of the more important primary documents for an understanding of Lang and his era in this publication of large extracts from the diaries of the man who was his chaplain, and perhaps his closest confidant, Alan Don, who, after he left Lang’s service in 1941, went on to Westminster Abbey, first as a canon and the rector of Saint Margaret’s, Westminster, and then subsequently and quite unexpectedly (for he was bound for a canonry at Canterbury at the time) dean of Westminster. The diaries here reproduced cover the period from Don’s appointment as chaplain to the archbishop in 1931 to his appointment as dean in 1946.

Diaries and collections of letters are always among the most important witnesses to history, and I devour them like other people do detective novels. So when this volume came with a thump through the letterbox, I took the first exit off the highway of life that I could and locked myself away with it, for it is un-put-downable. Here the life of Lambeth Palace, the Abbey, the Houses of Parliament, Canterbury, and all the busy-ness of church and state that were encompassed by those few blocks on either side of the Thames between Lambeth Palace and Buckingham Palace, and that were Don’s world for all these years during such a tumultuous era, come vividly to the mind’s eye. The gradual passing of diary-keeping and letter-writing from our human experience over the last couple of generations will mean a terrible loss of witness to everyday life for those who come after us and want to understand what it was like to live in this age, and this is a serious matter. This volume is an eloquent reminder of how important such documents are.

There is so much that is striking about all that we learn in these diaries that it is impossible even to remark on a small part of it. But what is particularly illuminating is the progression of understanding of contemporary events and people that unfolds in these pages. This is most notable with respect to the run-up to and the conduct of the Second World War. We are inclined to look back on this time with the harsh assessment that hindsight provides, and we forget that there was a huge aversion to another war after the horrors of World War I (which had ended only 20 years before), and no one wanted to rush into another conflict. There was also the question of whether Britain could have entered the war any earlier than it did from the point of view of its own preparedness. In these pages we see the unfolding realization over time of the inevitability of conflict, and we learn once again that the tipping points of history are not always of our choosing, or even of our engineering.

We see other “development,” too. Don’s reflections on William Temple, who succeeded Lang at York in 1929 after Lang’s translation to Canterbury in the previous year (and of course again when Lang retired from Canterbury in 1941), grow in appreciation, from an early entry for December 11, 1931, when Temple bungles an episcopal ordination, to an entry on January 15, 1933, when Don remarks about one of Temple’s sermons that “he is a marvel in the orderliness of his mind and in his capacity for producing what he wants out of the right pigeonhole and clothing it in clear and incisive language.” But in the same entry about another lecture: “[Temple] was too philosophical and not simple enough — the average listener would not carry much away.” Don refers in an entry on December 22, 1936 to a piece by Temple in the papers during the abdication crisis that he assesses as “maddening” and that “will merely serve to infuriate people.”

Three years later, in an entry for February 26, Don says that he read Temple’s new Readings in Saint John’s Gospel, remarking that “it is noticeable how staunchly conservative he has become in his theology,” and this from one who was himself no radical, but who was what used to be called a “Prayer Book Catholic,” for whom the “Catholic Creeds stand — Sacramentalism stands — the Christian way of life stands — nothing else makes any sense at all.” After Temple’s translation to Canterbury, in an entry for December 2, 1942 we read what became a common criticism: “There are those who think that [Temple] speaks too much — there are those who do not like what he says on the social implications of Christianity — but he is at least making people sit up and take notice — and that, I think, is his object.” The next year, in an entry for February 19, 1943, Don remarks that “[Temple] will not be so cautious as his two Scottish predecessors. He will be more ready to try experiments and to take risks,” and this might mean “stormy days ahead.” We learn also, in an entry for December 16, 1931, that Temple remarked that he had found Gandhi “the most definitely ‘repellant’ individual he had ever met” — an assessment for which this may be the first attestation, as Gandhi does not even appear in the index to Iremonger’s biography of Temple.

And yet in Don’s entry for October 26, 1944, the day Temple died so suddenly and tragically at the age of 63 after a primacy of a period measurable in months, there is this entry, which deserves to be quoted at length:

William Temple has died — this shattering news leaves one speechless and dumbfounded. By all human reckoning he and the Prime Minister [Churchill] are the two men that the country needs most at the present time. Even the Prime Minister could be better spared, for in a sense his work is done — he has brought us in sight of military victory — but William Temple’s work has just begun and many were looking to him more than to any other one man for leadership in these coming years when a spiritual victory is the one hope of better things.

Surely the ways of Providence are past finding out. During his short archiepiscopate William Temple has sown seeds which will yet bear fruit — he has made many people think — he has shaken the self complacency of men in many walks of life by insisting on the implications of Christianity in spheres too often regarded as purely secular and therefore beyond the range of the Church’s influence and concern…

There is nobody who can fill his place. Who is to succeed him at Canterbury?… William Temple was in a catalogue by himself and his loss is a staggering blow to the Church of England in this particular moment in her history.

We get in these pages the picture of a thoughtful, able, committed, faithful, wise, loyal priest who moved easily and with quiet confidence among all those to whom he was called to minister, from monarchs to workmen. The picture that Don paints of life in the center of war-time London is vivid and heart-breaking, and though quite self-contained, his words are no less moving for that. Here is part of his entry for March 8, 1944:

Heard last night that my Godson, Anthony Lyttleton, had been killed in Italy. Poor Sibell [Anthony’s mother] — she has now been twice widowed, has lost her Anthony, while her other boy, Tom Shuttleworth, returned from North Africa hopelessly crippled by the loss of a leg. Such is war!

We get wonderful glimpses of church life in the period, too, especially at a time when a deeper catholic faith and practice were becoming acceptable and more the norm in establishment circles: bishops were now commonly decked out in copes and mitres (Lang was the first Archbishop of Canterbury to wear a mitre, and Temple the first to be enthroned wearing one), and it was the occasion, extraordinary even by today’s standards, of the Orthodox baptism of the son of the King of Yugoslavia in Westminster Abbey with both vested Anglican and Orthodox clergy arrayed, that incense was used in the Abbey for the first time since the Reformation — and in the presence of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, no less. Indeed the then Princess Elizabeth, now Queen Elizabeth II, was there as well, holding the newly baptized baby.

There is a marvelous entry for November 18, 1938 about liturgical revision and its difficulties:

William Ebor: [Temple] who was presiding murmured at the close, ‘Thank heavens, I am not a Protestant!’ — his brother of Canterbury [Lang] had said yesterday, after enduring Crabtree’s long speech in the Church Assembly, ‘The one form of religion which I could never conceivably embrace is Protestantism.’ A few days earlier, the Bishop of Gloucester had been bleating about the obstinate complacency of the same section and their inability to believe anybody to be right but themselves — they are likewise the cause of infinite trouble in South Africa, in Sydney and elsewhere — one recognises in them the successors of men like Prynne and other fanatics of bygone days, from whose predominance the Church of England is slowly recovering.

Here we have, clearly stated, the understanding that Anglicanism is not properly categorized as a “Protestant” church, but represents its own unique identity among the family of churches, an understanding shared by other churches, it has to be said, that was the fruit of the early ecumenical movement. It was common in ecumenical circles until recently to refer to “Roman Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans, and Protestants,” making the distinction clear. But even in such an arena where a deeper sensitivity might be expected, the proper distinctions are beginning to be blurred.

We learn a great deal about Don in these pages, but of course we learn even more about Lang, and this book goes a long way to filling out what has been, until Beaken’s research, an imperfect picture. Even the most recent portrayal of Lang, by Derek Jacobi in the film, The King’s Speech, plays into the old stereotype. And while it does so for obvious dramatic effect, Lang, as complex a person as he was, was far from the ridiculous old codger we saw in the film. The picture that we get of Lang in Don’s diaries is so much more compelling than the caricature. Lang was a consummate courtier of the old school — the last of the courtier archbishops — and had good and close relationships with the Monarchy (with the exception of King Edward VIII, with whom so many had a difficult time), from Queen Victoria to King George VI. Such was Lang’s loyalty that, according to Don’s diaries, he never spoke to anyone of his private conversations with any of the monarchs or consorts whom he served, not even to his most intimate counsellors, and it was King George VI, out of affection and gratitude, who provided to Lang the lifetime use of one of his properties where Lang could live in retirement. No subsequent archbishop has enjoyed such ease with the Monarchy.

Lang was a workhorse who could speak effectively and well even at short notice, who was respected by the Establishment and loved by those who worked and cared for him throughout his long life, and who was sustained by a firm, if reserved, catholic Christian faith and practice. Lang was an attentive diocesan bishop in Canterbury, visiting all his parishes — not a common practice in his day, and a cause of concern to his chaplains for the strain it put on his health. Lang came under the early influence of the saintly bishop Edward King as he was preparing for ordination, and before he became a bishop he was a faithful parish priest who lived a starkly simple private life. This never changed: he wore the same patched and stained purple cassock for his entire episcopate, and his private rooms in Lambeth Palace were spare. If Lang was rather ambitious as a younger man (it is said that he used to practice signing his name “Cosmo Cantuar” when he was still a priest), he had reason to be, and it was on account of both his considerable achievements and his promise that he was catapulted from being the suffragan bishop of Stepney to be Archbishop of York at the age of 44.

One comes away from these diaries appreciating Don and sharing in his admiration and affection for the one he calls “C.C.” (for Cosmo Cantuar) in his diary entries. “Dear old Cosmo is gone,” Don writes in his entry for December 5, 1945, “I loved him and shall miss him dreadfully.” And this reader found that, as I came to the close of this fascinating book, I would miss the old man, too, and his faithful chronicler.

Beaken gives a helpful introduction, and provides notes, bibliographies, a “select biographical index,” as well as a proper index for the entire volume. While I appreciate Beaken’s reluctance not to overload the page with footnotes, and while the notes that he does supply are quite useful, there are many people not identified in the footnotes or in the biographical index, and there are entries that could have used some explanation. For example, there are two references to Nobody’s Friends, including the trial by fire of having to “justify” oneself for membership, but this is not explained, and it would have made for an entertaining and illuminating footnote.

But these minor criticisms must not detract from a significant achievement in making this primary document available to us. As far as I could tell, the only person mentioned in the diaries still alive is the present Queen, and that itself is remarkable. For she is a living witness to so much that is told in these pages. Beaken tells us that there is a further collection of diaries from Don’s time as dean of Westminster for the years 1947 to 1953 that are likely to be as enlightening and compelling as these, but the librarian at the Abbey has refused access to them as they contain references to persons still living. What a tease. I for one hope that Dr. Beaken and I outlive all these folks about whom the librarian is so concerned, as I am already impatient for Alan Don’s diaries from his Westminster years, and Beaken will be just the right person to bring them to us.

These books are complementary. McGuckin’s Encyclopedia follows the usual format for such reference books, with entries and brief bibliographies for well more than 300 subjects, arranged alphabetically and with useful cross references, a complete list of entries, and an index. All this makes for easy use. To add to the Encyclopedia’s general utility, McGuckin includes “Foundational Documents of Orthodox Theology” and nine texts from the Creed of Nicea (325) to portions of St. John of Damascus’s “Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” preceded by a short but insightful introductory essay.

Casiday’s volume, on the other hand, is a collection of 53 essays, divided into three sections: “Orthodox Christianity around the World,” “Important Figures in Orthodox Christianity,” and “Major Themes in Orthodox Christianity.” In this last section one finds the usual subjects, like hagiography, the Philokalia, and music, but there are also some interesting and fresh subject areas, like the relationship of Jewish apocalypticism and Orthodox mysticism, mental health, and the relationship of Orthodoxy to world religions. These essays are substantial, usually with notes and fairly extensive bibliographies, and there is an index.

Both McGuckin and Casiday cast Orthodoxy in its broadest term to include non-Chalcedonian traditions. This is helpful, especially as there remains little in English on these churches for the non-specialist. With world attention focused on the region, it is helpful to have articles on Syrians, Assyrians, Copts, and Ethiopians. As these communities face continued pressure in their mother countries, their communities in the United States continue to grow, and these books will help local clergy and congregations to be good neighbors and informed friends.

Most clergy will not be able to afford either of these reference tools, but they are just right for parish libraries, and those who have access to library copies can count on their reliability.

Along with Saint Nicholas, Francis of Assisi is the best-known of all saints in the Western Church. And yet, for all his popularity both among faithful Christians as well as those who do not describe themselves as religious but who see him as a symbol of environmental stewardship, the Francis of history bears little resemblance to the Francis of later myth and spirituality. These two books help us enormously in gaining a clearer picture of this elusive yet compelling figure.

Francis was a difficult, complex person — a particular and unique spiritual personality, alien to so many sensibilities, both among his contemporaries and in every subsequent generation. He was a trying patient when sick, and deeply ambivalent about his authority and his place in the community he had founded.

There is no uninterpreted Francis, and the task of the historian is to examine very carefully the abundance of evidence that survives. It is a much more difficult task than it may seem, for even the earlier date of some documents does not guarantee their reliability. All those who have written about Francis have had an agenda, including his first biographer. And much that has been written about Francis, or with Francis as a major theme, is of questionable usefulness if what one is interested in is a true portrait of the saint in all his fullness.

Augustine Thompson’s new biography is a model of all that is best in a work of this kind. It is compellingly and lucidly written, accessible both to the interested layperson as well as the scholar. This is the first critical biography of Francis by an English-speaking scholar; the other two biographies that can be described as critical are by an Italian and Frenchman. The book is divided into two parts: the biography and an examination of the sources. In a biography of this intricacy, this is the best way of organizing the work.

Thompson’s biography is now the place to begin for anyone who wants to understand Francis, his life, and the subsequent development of devotion to him, and it is not soon to be bettered.

Michael Robson has given us a helpful collection of essays, divided into two sections. The first section concerns Francis, his writings, his relationship to Clare, and the emergence of the movement. There is even a chapter on “Francis and creation,” which traces Franciscan reflection on the subject as far as Angela of Foligno. The second section collects essays that range through many aspects of the Franciscan heritage in the Church. Anglicans will welcome especially “The ecumenical appeal of Francis” by Petà Dunstan, a leading scholar of Anglican religious life.

As always, truth is much more interesting than fiction, even “holy fiction.” Thompson and Robson have provided us with the sort of attention to Francis that is likelier both to illumine this remarkable historical figure and to enable us to live into a more genuine Franciscan spirituality.

Francis cared about the Eucharist, the Daily Office, and poverty much more than he had anything to do with animals or nature. Francis was, contrary to the popular picture of him, a very ecclesial person in both his commitments and in his preoccupations. What might a clearer picture of Francis give us? We can at last, thanks to these books, ask the question with some confidence that we may find some reliable answers.

The Very Rev. Peter Eaton is dean of St. John’s Cathedral, Denver, and a member of the Episcopal Church’s Standing Commission on Ecumenical and Interreligious Relations.