NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
One afternoon in the late 1920s, Katherine Burton stood outside a Catholic church, desperate and overwhelmed. Her husband of almost 20 years had recently suffered a nervous breakdown and left.
With three children still at home, Burton -didn’t know how she would make ends meet. She also wanted to help her husband, but he didn’t want her help. Exhausted and unsure of what to do next, the nominal Episcopalian went inside the church and prayed. She later described what happened next:
As I knelt I was suddenly aware of a new sensation. For weeks and weeks, I had had the feeling of falling and falling nowhere. Now of a sudden something seemed to be holding me up. It too came from outside; it was not anything I had conjured up to comfort myself. Somehow I had been caught and lifted high above my own pain and loss. They were still there, heartbreakingly real, but the sense of being alone with them was gone.
For two years, while working as an assistant editor at McCall’s, Burton contemplated conversion. In 1930, she made up her mind and entered the Catholic Church. Burton then spent the next three years working as an editor at Redbook, until she worked up the confidence to venture out on her own.
When she did, Burton became one of the most prolific Catholic writers of the mid-20th century, penning more than 40 books (mostly biographies of prominent Catholics and institutions), as well as writing essays and news stories for Catholic periodicals. Her column, “Woman to Woman,” published in the Passionist Fathers’ magazine The Sign, was the first regular column written by a Catholic woman in America.
Although Burton wrote widely on questions of both Church and culture, much of her work focused on the role of women. Long before Pope John Paul II spoke of “the feminine genius,” Burton helped Catholic women understand and navigate their place at work and home in a changing world. Burton continued writing until her death on September 22, 1969.
