Half a century before today’s battles over marriage and family reached their current intensity, one Catholic writer had already identified the fault lines with remarkable clarity. Earlier than most, Ida Friederike Görres saw that the question of marriage was becoming the decisive cultural battleground of the modern age.
Writing in the final years of her life, the German Catholic intellectual confronted a transformation that had only just begun to gather momentum. The sexual revolution was reshaping western society, and its assumptions were already beginning to filter into theological debates within the Church itself. In What Binds Marriage Forever, published in 1971 shortly before her death, Görres offered a strikingly lucid defence of the indissolubility of marriage – and a diagnosis of the deeper anthropological crisis beneath the cultural upheaval.
Then she disappeared.
Within only a few years of her death, Görres – once a respected Catholic writer and a friend of figures such as Joseph Ratzinger – had largely vanished from the conversation. Her books slipped quietly out of print, and her voice was increasingly sidelined in theological circles shaped by new intellectual and ideological currents. Only a small number of scholars continued to recognise the depth and originality of her work.
Today, however, Görres is being rediscovered. Through a series of new translations, the scholar and translator Jennifer S Bryson has begun to bring this remarkable thinker back into the English-speaking world. What makes the rediscovery so striking is how contemporary Görres now sounds. Her analysis of marriage, love and the cultural forces reshaping both Church and society reads uncannily like a diagnosis of the present moment.
In this conversation with the Catholic Herald, Bryson reflects on how she first encountered Görres, why the author’s work was pushed aside after 1968, and why her defence of the indissolubility of marriage may be more relevant today than ever.
Jan C Bentz: Let us begin with the obvious starting point. How and when did you first discover Ida Friederike Görres?
Jennifer S Bryson: I stumbled upon her in 2019 while working on something almost completely unrelated. At the time, I had started a petition to FIFA asking the organisation to implement its own rules banning political, religious and personal symbols or messages on player uniforms.
I was concerned that allowing such messages undermines the integrity of sport. It places players in a difficult and unfair position of coercion and raises serious questions of conscience.
Because Americans are, to put it mildly, not very interested in soccer, I was looking for European allies. A friend recommended that I contact someone in Austria. When I looked up some background information about her, I discovered that she and her husband had founded a German-language Catholic matchmaking website.
What caught my attention was that they recommended one particular book on marriage. When I saw that the book had been published in 1949, I was immediately intrigued. I had never heard of the author at all, but I thought that perhaps it might be very good precisely because it was written before things went crazy culturally.
On questions concerning marriage and the relationship between men and women, there are some real gems written before the 1960s that are now difficult to find. So I became curious.
The author was Ida Friederike Görres. It was surprisingly difficult to find information about her. Eventually I discovered a lecture about her by the philosopher Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz. After watching it, I became fascinated both by Görres’s life and by the depth of her faith.
I ordered the book on marriage immediately. When it arrived, I was amazed by it. I soon realised that it had never been translated into English.
What began as a small curiosity quickly turned into something much larger. It was like a snowball rolling down a mountain that suddenly becomes an avalanche. Since late 2019 I have been working on this almost full time. By now I have published four translations of Görres’s works and have also been researching her life and the reception of her writings.
JCB: How much did Görres write overall?
JSB: A great deal. Off the top of my head, I could not tell you how many books. She began publishing as early as 1919, though her book publishing really accelerated from 1932 onwards, and she continued for the rest of her life.
Her main genre was the essay. She wrote extensively for Catholic journals, and there are several collections of her essays. One of the major problems is that there is still no complete bibliography of Görres’s work. That, too, is part of what happens when an author is forgotten: no one studies her systematically enough to produce the basic scholarly tools.
There is a dissertation by a priest that established a fairly good bibliography, and that has been very valuable to me. But it is not comprehensive. I have already been finding items that are not listed there.
At the moment there is also a great need to find a proper institutional repository for her papers and her library.
JCB: Your translation makes visible something rather striking. Görres’s book appeared precisely at the moment when the sexual revolution was beginning to reshape western society and – at least to some degree – the Catholic Church as well. Yet Görres herself is not widely known today, even in Germany. She is certainly not a household name among 20th-century Catholic writers. Do you think this disappearance was simply accidental, or do you see deeper reasons behind the fact that Görres was so quickly forgotten after 1968?
JSB: I see two main reasons why she was almost entirely forgotten soon after her death in 1971.
The first and most important reason is that she represented exactly the kind of voice that the new progressive forces rising to power within the Church in Germany did not want to hear.
That is not just speculation. In my research I have found concrete examples. I have been studying the debate over women’s ordination among German-speaking Catholics between 1922 and 1934, and I have a long academic paper on that topic forthcoming. One of the things I examined was what happened to the remarkable women writers who had strongly opposed women’s ordination during that period.
For example, there was a writer named Ottilie Schneider, who is extraordinary and even more forgotten today than Görres. When the question of women’s ordination became a major public issue again in the 1960s, some priests and theologians recommended that contemporary feminists read authors like Görres, Schneider or Gertrud von Le Fort.
The responses to these suggestions were extremely hostile. I have collected written reactions in which feminist writers dismissed these earlier women in very degrading and aggressive terms. They rejected the very idea that one should read voices that did not support a feminist revolution in the Church.
So the marginalisation of Görres was not accidental. Her work was inconvenient for the ideological direction that many wanted to pursue.
The other factor is the content of her final book, What Binds Marriage Forever. It is a strong defence of the indissolubility of marriage. Both the indissolubility of marriage and the understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman function as a kind of emergency brake on the sexual revolution.
Görres was therefore swimming directly against the current of her time.
What made her especially threatening was that she was not merely a reactionary voice. She was deeply rooted in tradition, but she also understood the modern world extremely well. She engaged seriously with those she disagreed with and showed a remarkable sensitivity to modern intellectual developments.
That combination made her far more dangerous to the revolutionaries than the reactionaries were.
A second factor – less decisive but still important – is biographical. After her death there was simply no one within her family to preserve her legacy. Her siblings and their descendants were largely secular, and Görres herself and her husband suffered the sorrow of infertility. They had no children who might have carried forward her work. Her husband died within a year of her own death.
So both ideological and personal factors contributed to her rapid disappearance from public awareness.
JCB: What can readers of What Binds Marriage Forever expect to take away in addition?
JSB: I would emphasise that What Binds Marriage Forever provides both a historical window into how advanced the effort already was, within the Catholic Church in 1971, to push divorce and remarriage with full sacramental access, and at the same time it remains highly relevant today.
There is one more point worth stressing. Although Görres is writing at a high level and engages theology and anthropology very seriously, the book also has what we might call a pastoral dimension. She is deeply aware that marriages can become extremely difficult and painful. She writes specifically about such situations, and she does so with great sensitivity.
So she is never merely abstract. She is not someone writing in lofty categories while remaining unaware of how hard marriage can be in real life. But she is convinced that if one understands what marriage truly is, then within that understanding lies the key to dealing with and helping in difficult situations.
JCB: Wonderful. And what is next in the pipeline? I get the sense that this will not be the last Görres volume you bring out.
JSB: The next one, which is scheduled for the autumn, is a different book on marriage: On Marriage and on Being Single. It consists of letters to young women, and it is very beautiful.
