HvS CONVERSION | Beaumont on American Catholic Converts

John Beaumont's book on Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church has been published. We were contacted by the author a couple of years ago for help with the biography and quotes.

He has assembled a huge collection of information on American converts to Catholicism, more than 1,000 pages long. The full title of the book is The Mississippi Flows Into the Tiber: A Guide to Notable American Converts to the Catholic Church. It is published in South Bend, Indiana - home of Notre Dame University - by Fidelity Press, 2014. It is 1,014 pp., and sells for $69 in hard cover.

A thoughtful and favorable review of the book appears on a website devoted to "Culture Wars". In May, he gave a reading from the book at the NYU Catholic Center.

My narrow interest is in the entry on Hilda van Stockum. Two quotes in the HvS entry have been used by Leo Wong in his post on quotations from Catholic Converts. One is from The Winged Watchman:

In the camps we saw our own people kill each other over a crust of bread. In the old days I used to think that religion did not matter much, that people could be good without it. That was not true in the camps. If you had no hope or faith to keep you human, you sank to the lowest depths. I'll practice my religion more faithfully now. (The Winged Watchman, p. 188, 1995 edition.)

The other is the beginning of HvS's final decision to become a Catholic, after reading Arnold Lunn's Now I See: 

I'm not thinking about being a Catholic, I AM a Catholic! - Hilda van Stockum

Beaumont's book also quotes at length from two articles on the Hilda van Stockum website, one by Randal Marlin (HvS's elder son) and one by Olga Marlin (HvS's eldest daughter); and he cites two  articles by Randal's daughter Christine Schintgen. The three relevant pages from his book are below.