Warrior, Daughter, Saint – The Funeral Visit

Shortly after the death of Nora Quinn Larkin, in February 1974, two of her
nine daughters felt bold enough to make long distance calls to Italy. At the
Villa Schifanoia in Florence, a polite young lady answered the phone, and went
to fetch the Dean of Art History. Later, comparing notes, the two daughters
agreed as to how polite the young lady was, how vast the transoceanic silence
seemed when they were put on hold, and how the cost didn’t matter, not at a
time like this. Soon Sister Martin de Porres was making plans to come home
to Dubuque, Iowa, for the first time in forty-two years.

Nora Eunice Gagliano, who had bravely continued working during her grandmother’s
decline, told everyone in the offices of B&B Books not to expect to meet
their bestselling author–the Sinsinawa Dominicans had rigid rules, and Sister
Martin, for all her achievements, had been given permission only to attend
the funeral of her mother. But Father Bresnahan was eager to meet this nun
whose scholarship was rumored to match his own, and whose book had outsold
his last two. He still had connections in Rome, and he made a few phone calls.

At the wake, Sister Martin told her sisters and cousins and nieces that times
were changing, and she had decided to use her birth name: they could now call
her "Sister Eunice Larkin." Nora Eunice Magliano was disappointed
in the change, but everyone else seemed to like it–they all said it was so
much easier to talk to Sister Eunice than to Sister Martin. After the burial,
Sister Eunice returned to the Mother House in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin, a few miles
from Dubuque, across the Mississippi.

That evening, the Mother Superior took Sister Eunice aside–after first calling
her Sister Martin, and then apologizing with a smile that Sister Eunice considered
rather unctuous–and gave her permission to visit her publisher the next day.
Apparently a priest named Father Bresnahan had arranged to send a car in the
morning.

At first, Sister Eunice had no idea what the Mother Superior was talking
about. But the Mother Superior seemed quite certain that she, Sister Eunice,
had some sort of business relationship with "B&B Books" in Dubuque.
Could this be the place where her niece had found a job? Concealing her puzzlement,
Sister Eunice agreed to the arrangements, and asked a few discreet questions
about this priest and his publishing house. The Mother Superior told her all
the details, rattling off sales figures with evident pride.

Sister Eunice listened carefully. This was the first she had heard of Father
Niall Bresnahan, or B&B Books, or Marcellina’s Bookshelf, or a best-seller
called Warrior, Daughter, Saint: the Story of St. Matilda of Canossa,
by Sister Martin de Porres.

The Mother Superior suspected nothing: Sister Eunice gave no hint of her
astonishment or her suspicions. In fact, Sister Eunice seemed most grateful
for the opportunity to make a visit to B&B Books.

Warrior, Daughter, Saint – Marcellina’s Bookshelf

Fr. Niall Bresnahan’s own prolific pen supplied the early catalog of B&B
Books: Learning the Suscipiat: the Struggles of an Irish Altar Boy, Non
Serviam: The Contraceptive Mentality in Modern American Life, and The
Feel-Good Trap: How the Pursuit of Pleasure Leads to Despair all appeared
within three years of that fateful golf outing. In this period, he
also contributed entertaining prefaces (many readers said they were his best
work) for two books co-written by his stockbroker: Faith: Your Greatest
Asset, and The Rosary and Your Portfolio: Marian Investment Strategies.
B&B Books added staff, moved to larger offices, and in 1973 Bresnahan,
perhaps sensing that his own well might soon run dry, made what turned out
to be a very shrewd move: he asked his employees (all of them Catholic women)
what mattered to them, as readers.

Bresnahan knew little of women (aside from sharing his bed in Angola with
his housekeeper, a sin for which the Cardinal Patriarch had granted him a dismissive
absolution), and he was surprised at the enthusiasm of his employees’ response.
Intrigued, Bresnahan began visiting book clubs, holding impromptu focus groups,
and listening to the life stories of devout women told in the form of effusively
annotated reading lists. Bresnahan discerned a pattern–that a woman’s lifetime
love of inspirational reading always began with the passionate literary appetites
of a prepubescent Catholic girl. From that insight, Marcellina’s Bookshelf
was born, taking its name from Bresnahan’s favorite female saint: the consecrated
virgin sister of St. Ambrose.

Needless to say, the female employees of B&B Books embraced this new project.
(Bresnahan, for his part, had learned more about Catholic women than he really
wanted to know, and returned, refreshed, to his polemics and his putter.) Among
the staffers most ardent about Marcellina’s Bookshelf was a overweight typist
in her early thirties named Nora Eunice Magliano. A self-described "ceramist" who
was "lost without her kiln," Magliano had moved to Dubuque only a
few years before, after vaguely described domiciles in Madison, Milwaukee,
Florence, and London, to care for her frail and aged grandmother, also named
Nora. Nora Eunice Magliano referred to tiny grandmother as "big Nora" and
herself as "little Nora," and often spoke to her co-workers of duty,
sacrifice, and the lessons taught to her by her "favorite aunt"–the
distinguished Sister Martin de Porres. A formidable woman indeed, Sister Martin
was dean of art history at the Villa Schifanoia in Florence, an Italian graduate
school "of the fine arts for women," where Nora Eunice Gagliano had
once taught, or studied, or visited, no one was quite sure. It was Nora who
brought the manuscript of Warrior, Daughter, Saint to the B&B offices,
where it instantly impressed everyone who read it, even Fr. Bresnahan, and
it was quickly chosen as the first book to be placed with pride on Marcellina’s
Bookshelf. Throughout the pre-publication process all communication with Sister
Martin was conducted through hand-written letters, which Nora Eunice received
at the home of her grandmother, who was, of course, Sister Martin’s mother.

Then, in 1974, "big Nora" died at the age of 93, her final weight
in pounds matching her age in years.

Warrior, Daughter, Saint – The Publisher

Fr. Niall Bresnahan, the publisher and founder of B&B Books, joked that
until the success of Warrior, Daughter, Saint, he had secretly suspected
himself of running a vanity press. Though repeated often, the joke, delivered
in Fr. Bresnahan’s nasal Cork City brogue, usually got a laugh, and quickly
joined his repertoire of apparently self-deprecating humor. Fr. Bresnahan had
only discovered his skills as a raconteur four years earlier, when he had been
assigned to the Archdiocese of Dubuque–some would say exiled–as Censor Librorum
and assistant Cathedral Chaplain. In Dubuque he took up the game of golf and
learned, to his surprise, that middle Americans found his accent charming.
Prior to his arrival in Iowa, charm had been the least of Niall Bresnahan’s
qualities. A brief outline of his career to that point reveals little time
for conviviality, let alone golf:

1930 Born, Cork City, Ireland

1944-51 St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Baccalaureate in Theology, summa
cum laude

1951-52 Assistant Chaplain, Hospital Nacional de Enfermedades Infeciosas
(Hospital del Rey), Madrid, Spain.

1952 Ordination1

1952-57 Curate, St. Kentigen’s Parish, Manchester, England

1953-56 Oxford University, First class degree, philosophy

1957-60 Institutum Patristicum Augustinianum, Lateran Pontifical
University, Rome, Sacrae Theologiae Doctor, theology and patristic
sciences

1960-63 Missionary in Angola

1963-65 Personal Secretary
to Manuel Gonçalves Cerejeira, Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, at the
Second Vatican Council

1966-70 Assistant Professor, Theology and Philosophy, Catholic University,
Washington D.C.

1969 Receives book contract from the University of Notre Dame Press; one-semester
leave of absence from teaching duties

1970 Publication of Lean and Flashy Songs: The Misuse of Vatican II in
America

In Lean and Flashy Songs, Bresnahan performed a delicate balancing
act–he endorsed, or claimed to endorse, every decree, constitution and declaration
issued by Vatican II (many of which he cited at length, in Latin, with punctilious
accuracy), while at the same time using those very documents to denounce the
implementation of the Council’s work in the United States: Bresnahan declared
that legacy of the Council had been "hijacked by the unholiest of ideas,
the idea of Reform." In a furious final chapter, Bresnahan broadened
his attack to include several other unholy ideas–"the sweaty nightmare
of Progress, the brutal lie of Social Equality, and the scorched
wasteland of Psychology." It was in this final chapter that
he made his most shocking–and yet most subtle–accusation. Bresnahan somehow
managed to proclaim his loyalty, love, and eternal respect for Pope Paul VI,
while simultaneously suggesting that Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the
former Archbishop of Milan, had been a lifelong member of the Italian Communist
Party.

Bresnahan learned quickly that fervid anti-communism played very well on the
golf courses of Dubuque, Iowa. On the fairway, men of substance and achievement
would confide to him their growing estrangement from a Church in which the
celebration of Holy Mass increasingly resembled the meetings of a socialist
cell, or a spaced-out drug party, or both. Bresnahan reminded them of a more
vigorous strain of Catholicism: long hours in the polio ward, strict adherence
to ancient rules, narrow escapes from Communist guerrillas at African mission
schools. The golfers bought his book; they skipped the Latin but read with
guttural assent the incendiary final chapter; soon an offer of financing was
presented to him over drinks at the country club bar. He took the money with
a handshake, bought his friends a round of his favorite apertif, and
the next day established Burke & Benedict Books ("libertas per
opsequium") as a "platform for the neglected voices of conservative
Catholics." If the liberal Catholic bishops of the early 1970s thought
they could silence Fr. Niall Bresnahan by sending him to Dubuque, they were
sorely mistaken.

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1Bresnahan’s
fellow students at St. Patrick’s were puzzled by the odd delay between his
baccalaureate and his ordination–why did the brightest light in their class
spend a seemingly penitential year rotting in Spain? A dozen years later,
in the Roman Curia, that same year would elicit knowing nods.