On September 18, 1951, the final day of a three-day event celebrating the dedication of the Holy Cross Memorial Seminary in La Crosse, WI, the great Catholic apologist Bishop Fulton J. Sheen stood at an outdoor podium before a crowd of 12,000 faithful in the shadow of the newly erected school for future priests. He delivered that day a presentation on the importance of the priesthood, but one which had an unexpected focus: women. Bishop Sheen reminded his audience that women in the gospels had an impeccable record in their service to Christ, and compared favorably to men in the gospel, including Christ’s own Apostles. He noted that “three [Apostles] slept in the garden” and “one of the chosen ones blistered the lips of the Lord with a kiss.” On the other hand, “there is a not a single instance of a woman failing Him.” Bishop Sheen continued by listing positive examples of women who came to Christ’s aid during his greatest trial. “Only one voice was raised in His defense—the voice of a woman; women solaced Him on the way to Calvary and when He came to the great denouement, on the Cross, looking down, he saw three women, Mary of Cleophas, Mary of Magdala, and Mary of Nazareth.” Bishop Sheen further focused his address, speaking to the wives and mothers who were to give their sons to Holy Cross Seminary now and in the future, asking them to see their sons as a gift to Christ and his Church. “Your children are from God but are not for you. God is the target. Blessed are you women who will have as a target of this seminary Christ the King and will give your sons back to God as priests.”
Like the three women beneath the cross and other heroines of sacred scripture (not to mention the female saints and doctors of the Church), Helen Hull Hitchcock had dedicated much of her life to Christ and to being a fearless “voice…raised in His defense”—and that of his Church. Hitchcock is best known to Adoremus readers as one of the co-founders of Adoremus—Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy and one of Adoremus Bulletin’s first editors. Ten years have passed since this powerhouse of words and wisdom passed from this life into eternity. After a brief illness, Hitchcock died on October 20, 2014, leaving behind her husband, Catholic historian James Hitchcock, and her four children, Alexandra Kassing, Consuelo Hitchcock, Hilary Hitchcock, and Louisa Spampinato. As a fitting way to mark the 30th anniversary of the journal Helen Hull Hitchcock had been so instrumental in establishing, Adoremus looks back at her life as a champion of the Catholic faith and an advocate for authentic expression of the liturgy as envisioned by the Church. Hitchcock was not born Catholic, but a liturgical sensibility had run like a thread throughout her entire life. It helped define her understanding of the Christian faith in general but also drew her ever closer to Christ through the one true Church he established here on earth, the same Church that she would dedicate her lifetime to defending in words and deeds.
Hitchcock was not born Catholic, but a liturgical sensibility had run like a thread throughout her entire life.
Early Life
Even in her formative years, growing up in a Methodist household, Hitchcock found the symbolism of liturgical actions a matter of fascination and meditation. Hitchcock was born in Phillipsburg, KS, in 1939, the daughter of Downer Hull, a local school superintendent, and Thelma Hull, a homemaker. Hitchcock and her two siblings, Thomas and Connie, were raised working a farm and attending Methodist services on Sundays. In a 2006 interview on EWTN, Hitchcock recalled how even in her youth she recognized the importance of symbols in worship. “I remember as a child—and little children were allowed to go to communion in the churches I belonged to…I had that experience of receiving and the minister would say as you’re kneeling at the altar rail receiving communion…, ‘This is the body of Christ which has been given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ That’s not something you take lightly, even if somehow, it’s thought to be [only] symbolic.”
Later in life, after graduating college and taking up work as an insurance underwriter in New York City, as Hitchcock began to mature in her appreciation of sacramental liturgy, she began to drift toward Anglicanism, drawn to it, she said, by the beauty and prominence of its sacramental system. Around the same time that she had entered the Anglican communion, Helen Hull had met James Hitchcock, a history professor working at a local university—and a Catholic. In the 2006 interview, Hitchcock recalled that she and her future husband—they were married in 1967—“had very interesting discussions because his particular field of interest was the English Reformation, and the reactions to the suppression of the Catholic faith there…. He knew more about my own church’s background than I knew myself, which was fascinating. So, we had a lot in common, we shared almost everything in the Christian faith: appreciation for the sacraments, most of the doctrine.” In a 2016 interview with this writer, Dr. Hitchcock acknowledged that there was a great sense of cooperation in their marriage, noting that his work had “an enormous influence from my wife.”
“We provided each other moral support and we had profound sympathy with one another; we were on the same track and understood things in the same way,” James Hitchcock noted. “We had the same beliefs and core values. Since my wife had been raised a Protestant, I learned a great deal about her actual Protestantism, instead of a textbook account of Protestantism…. We each had our specialties, too. She didn’t know a whole lot about history, and I didn’t know that much about the details of liturgy. She came to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the Catholic liturgy, and even though we both followed the contemporary Church in our own disciplines, she followed it in more detail than I did. She went to bishops’ meetings, conferences in Rome, and she was in correspondence with a lot of different people in the Church.”
Home At Last
The Hitchcocks represented a truly profound marriage of minds which eventually became a marriage of faith as Helen took the next and final step in her spiritual journey by entering the Catholic Church in 1984. It was, she acknowledged, a “negative nudge” which brought her to the steps of the Catholic Church, but one that was both heartbreaking and eye-opening. At the 1976 General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the United States of America, held in Minneapolis, MN, the Episcopalian Church voted to admit women into the priesthood. This dismantling of the Anglican sacramental system became a leading cause for Hitchcock becoming Catholic. “The Episcopal Church…by the vote of the general convention [of 1976] eliminated the 450-year-old prayer book, the classic language of The Book of Common Prayer,” she explained in her 2006 interview. It was, she added, “the same convention that accepted the ordination of women—and one of the women they accepted for ordination was a lesbian. At the same convention they accepted abortion.” Traditional means of worship, the exclusive male priesthood, and longstanding moral teachings were all rejected in an instant. Hitchcock’s enthusiasm for the Anglican way did not survive the scandal. “It was all over,” she realized. “If that can happen, then there is no magisterial truth in the Anglican Church.” Hitchcock may have considered the Catholic Church as an alternative, but her first impressions of the Catholic liturgy caused her to hesitate: what she knew of the Catholic liturgy was only what she witnessed at her husband’s parish in the early days of their marriage—“the terrible liturgies that were singing goofy songs and drumrolls and ‘nutso’ stuff going on in Catholic liturgies,” she said in the 2006 interview.
This dismantling of the Anglican sacramental system became a leading cause for Hitchcock becoming Catholic.
Three years after the integrity of the Episcopal Church collapsed, however, as Hitchcock tended to her spiritual wounds, the Church had elected a new pope. The news was full of the new pope, a Polish cardinal, Karol Wojtyla, who had taken the name of John Paul II. Hitchcock noted in the 2006 interview that “they elected this incredible scholar whose field precisely put his finger on the most sensitive point in our entire culture…the relationship of human beings with one another and with God, and I thought, that is amazing. It is amazing—an amazing sign that the Holy Spirit really is with the Catholic Church.” Suddenly, it became clear to Hitchcock where the truth could be found. In 1984, she had entered the Catholic Church and found herself home at last.
The year 1984 proved to be Hitchcock’s annus mirabilis—a year remarkable not only for seeing her enter the Catholic Church but also for beginning her work as an activist for that same Church. She and a group of like-minded Catholic women gathered at the Hitchcock’s residence in St. Louis (James Hitchcock was teaching at St. Louis University by this time) to formulate a plan. They had all become concerned about reports that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (known at the time as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops (NCCB)) was contemplating a pastoral letter addressing “women’s concerns.” These same reports were indicating that the bishops advocating for the letter were immersed in feminist ideology. From that meeting at the Hitchcock’s residence, Women for Faith and Family (WFF) was born. What began with a mimeographed newsletter and a letter-writing campaign, asking Catholic women around the country to sign the WFF’s Affirmation for Catholic Women, a document which declared fidelity to Church teaching, eventually became a nationwide organization, hosting annual conferences and transforming the organization’s newsletter into Voices, a respectable and respected journal of Catholic thought. Thanks in large part to WFF’s efforts, and Hitchcock’s leadership in the organization, the fourth and final draft of the disastrous pastoral letter was voted down by the U.S. Bishops in 1992.
Liturgical Battleground
Voices covered a broad range of topics, always with the focus on how it could best serve the Church, and especially Catholic women. Most, if not all, the writers published in Voices defended Church teaching against feminism within the Church, especially in its attempts to render as normative Catholic teaching the acceptance of abortion, contraception, and female ordinations to the priesthood. But one topic which early on drew Hitchcock and her fellow “WFFers” (as they affectionally referred to themselves) to the battle line was the sacred liturgy.
Hitchcock’s early interest in writing about the Catholic liturgy in Voices eventually led to her helping found Adoremus Bulletin. According to Susan Benofy, a contributor and former research editor for Adoremus, and a founding member of WFF, Hitchcock was already “very aware of the dangers of the feminist influence on the Church and concerned with the intrusion of this ideology into liturgy and Scripture through so-called ‘inclusive’ language. So WFF was already covering developments in liturgy in its publication, Voices, which Helen edited.”
One topic which early on drew Hitchcock and her fellow “WFFers” (as they affectionally referred to themselves) to the battle line was the sacred liturgy.
Hitchcock co-founded Adoremus in 1995 with Father Jerry Pokorsky, a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, VA, and founder of Credo, an organization dedicated to ensuring accurate English translations of liturgical texts, and Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, founder of Ignatius Press. All three individuals were already concerned with what would become a founding principle of Adoremus: “to rediscover and restore the beauty, the holiness, and the power of the Church’s rich liturgical tradition while remaining faithful to an organic, living process of renewal.” For Hitchcock, the desire for an authentic expression of the liturgy led her to attend NCCB meetings, tape-recorder in hand. “Helen had attended meetings of the NCCB for a few years, and some important liturgy discussions were taped, and transcriptions published in Voices,” Benofy told Adoremus. Any attempt to achieve authenticity in the liturgy, for Hitchcock, was decidedly not a matter to leave to identity politics, Father Pokorksy told Adoremus. “Helen was a fierce opponent of feminism,” he said, “and saw the ideological threat posed by so-called ‘inclusive language.’ Incidentally, Helen always insisted on ‘so-called’ and placing ‘inclusive language’ in quotes.”
Father Pokorsky and Father Fessio knew Hitchcock well before they formed Adoremus. As Benofy notes, their relationship was only “formalized in the founding of Adoremus.” Father Fessio and Hitchcock had already collaborated in an important endeavor three years before Adoremus came into existence. In 1992, Hitchcock had edited for Ignatius Press a book on the liturgy, The Politics of Prayer: Feminist Language in the Worship of God. “The Church is in danger of being seduced by ideological dialectic of feminism based on power,” she writes in the introduction to The Politics of Prayer. “In the matter of liturgical language, it is of central importance to feminists that they control every utterance in the Church. In the Catholic Church, this can be accomplished only with the collaboration of the hierarchy, who alone can mandate liturgical language.” According to Father Pokorsky, this compendium of essays (penned by Catholic and non-Catholic scholars alike) “remains an essential historical record of the terms of the debate” regarding liturgical translations.
Turn of Tide
If anything characterized Helen Hull Hitchcock’s 20-year tenure as Adoremus’s editor, it was her ability to get information out—not only to her readers but also to the Vatican. Recalling how and why Hitchcock first became invited to serve as Adoremus’s editor, Father Fessio said that he and Father Pokorsky immediately recognized her genius. “She was a woman who could get things done, and worked tirelessly and very efficiently,” he told Adoremus. “She had tremendous intelligence and ability to write. It wasn’t like we had a search committee to find an editor for Adoremus, but the three of us were very interested in the liturgy. When Helen got excited, she did things, and when I get excited, I delegate.”
Adoremus was born in the early days of the Internet, Father Pokorsky said, but even at that time, Hitchcock had the insight to use the information superhighway to the Church’s advantage. “Behind the scenes, Helen and others of our group kept the Vatican informed,” Father Pokorsky said. “With the Internet in its infancy, the fax machine was the most dependable method to send information to Vatican dicasteries. CompuServe was among the first reliable commercial email services. Vatican officials were usually starved for accurate and timely information from the United States. So, Helen arranged to install a CompuServe email service for an assistant to Cardinal Ratzinger.”
In serving the Church, Hitchcock was always gracious to American bishops, both those that she saw as allies and those who were hostile or indifferent to Adoremus’s efforts to foster love and understanding for the liturgy. Sherry Tyree, one of the founding members of WFF and its vice president, regularly attended U.S. bishops’ meetings with Hitchcock. She told this writer that as the outlook on the liturgy improved, so did the bishops’ appreciation of Hitchcock’s work. “When I started going with Helen at the very beginning to the bishops’ meetings,” Tyree said, “it was very different from the end. We were personae non gratae, at the beginning, but by the end of it, there were lines of bishops waiting to talk to Helen.”
Father Pokorsky recalls an incident only a few years after Adoremus began publishing which showed that the U.S. bishops were beginning to acknowledge the value of Hitchcock’s work. “Over the years, Adoremus introduced into the mainstream of the hierarchy a significant point of view” regarding the liturgy, Father Pokorsky told Adoremus. “We promoted accurate translations free from ideological bias. In the late 1990s, even a member of the U.S. bishop’s liturgy committee met with us. But the meetings were in secret, like Nicodemus.”
“During a meeting of the bishops in Portland,” he continued, “this USCCB official met with Helen at a restaurant some distance from the meeting so that he would not be seen. Helen, as usual, wasn’t the least bit humiliated. She laughed at the insult.”
Art for God’s Sake
Hitchcock devoted herself to the work given to her as both one of WFF’s leaders and as editor of Adoremus. Yet, as those who knew her best attest, her decision to take on the work of liturgical activist came at a personal price. Hitchcock’s parents, Downer and Thelma Hull, taught their children a love for art. Hitchcock’s mother was a locally renowned painter and her father had regularly exhibited his photographs in local galleries. Her parents’ love for art was likely one of the reasons Hitchcock graduated from the University of Kansas in Lawrence, KS, with an art degree. In the 30th-anniversary issue of Voices, which Hitchcock would not live to see published, her daughter Hilary Hitchcock remembered her mother’s artistic side. “She was tremendously creative and multitalented,” Hitchcock’s daughter writes. “She could paint and sculpt and draw (a family friend recently told us he still has a little sketch she made of him, using a burnt matchstick on a napkin…). She could sing and make jewelry and play just about any musical instrument she got her hands on (when we were little kids, she would sometimes play her mountain dulcimer for events at 19th-century museum houses).”
When Christ returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, the Church, in some recognizable shape or form that is both Catholic and Apostolic, will be there to meet him. –Francis Cardinal George
According to Father Pokorsky, Hitchcock’s dedication to advancing the cause for liturgical renewal took precedent over even her love for art. “Helen was so dedicated to liturgical renewal that she often worked well into the evening, sometimes past midnight,” he said. “She occasionally suffered from severe eye strain, making her work all the more difficult. But perhaps her greatest sacrifice came with her trading off one of the loves of her life…. Helen was an artist, literally, and like her mother, probably had the gifts to become widely acclaimed for her artwork.”
“But her skill was largely neglected in favor of her work for the Church,” Father Pokorsky added. “In a happier time, Helen’s artistic gifts could have been devoted to beautifying liturgical worship.”
Dedicated Warrior
For 20 years, Helen Hull Hitchcock, scourge of wayward liturgists and headache to not a few bishops in her time, served first as a faithful woman of the Church, dedicated to the mission she embraced from the moment she entered the Church. As Hilary Hitchcock notes in her 2015 remembrance of her mother in Voices, this dedication carried through to the very end. “When an ordinary issue of Voices would go out, she would work on her column last, to give context to all of the articles appearing in that edition,” Hilary Hitchcock writes. “She had not yet written her column for this issue when she became ill. She asked me to bring her computer to the hospital, but I told her that her only job was to rest; the column could wait.” She would not have the opportunity to write her final editorial for Voices, but she did write a final editorial for Adoremus, in September 2014. Her own words in the editorial ended with a pair of questions: “How will the Church navigate the intense political and cultural challenges to the Catholic faith and religious freedom, both at home and abroad? How can she overcome the enormity of the persecution of Christians in today’s world?” Perhaps fittingly, by way of answer, she allowed a bishop—renowned for his own work in advancing liturgical renewal—to have the final word: Cardinal Francis George, who among his other contributions to improving the celebration of the liturgy in the US, founded in 2000 the Liturgical Institute at the University of St. Mary of the Lake (many of whose alums are current staff and authors for the Adoremus Bulletin today).
“How does the tale end?” Hitchcock quotes Cardinal George from one of his own final columns as Archbishop of Chicago. “We don’t know…. But Catholics do know, with the certainty of faith, that, when Christ returns in glory to judge the living and the dead, the Church, in some recognizable shape or form that is both Catholic and Apostolic, will be there to meet him. There is no such divine guarantee for any country, culture or society of this or any age.” For Helen Hull Hitchcock, this “divine guarantee” served as the foundation for all she did as a wife, mother, artist, writer, and thinker. Father Fessio, in his 2015 remembrance of Hitchcock for Adoremus points to Helen Hull Hitchcock’s greatest achievements as a matter between herself and her maker. “Only God,” Father Fessio writes, “will be able to give the final accounting of how many priests were helped by Helen’s work to celebrate Mass more reverently and faithfully; how many bishops were affected by what she wrote and passed that on to their seminary rectors and seminarians; how many seminarians were helped in their liturgical and spiritual formation; how many lay faithful had their questions answered, their problems solved, their spirits uplifted.”
“Without Helen, nothing would have happened,” Father Fessio continues, adding with tongue in cheek, “Arch-clericalists like Father Pokorsky and myself expect the laity to do all the work. Thank God that the generous and talented Helen Hull Hitchcock was also humble enough to take on the task.”
