Dr.

Maike Hickson

7 November 2014
St. Willibrord (d. 739), Missionary
St. Carina and Companions (d. 360), Martyrs

The Saint as a Counterrevolutionary:

Some Depictions in the Historical Novel Stephana Schwertner
by Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti
--Epigraphs-He whom the devil insults is beloved of God. (Stephana Schwertner to her fretful
mother)
***
Yes, Steyr is heretical, unfortunately. But when no good Christians want to live
among the heretics and the heathens here, how, then, can the word of Our Lord about
the good leaven be fulfilled; if you, maiden, find it hard to live in Steyr, think also of
how Corozaim and Bethsaida were not so sweet for Our Lord either; but through a
good example you can work much good here. (Father Albert Grnwald to Stephana
Schwertner)
***
Goodness does not consist in tolerating error, and to be silent toward sin is the
greatest vice of the pulpit. (Abbot Wilhelm Heller to the lax Prior Karl)
***
Preserve your devout Catholic courage, which is not a sinful form of pride [i.e.,
Hochmut]. I will pray for that [courage]. (Father Albert Grnwald to Stephana
Schwertner)
***
If Steyr is evil, God helps us still so that we remain nevertheless good and faithful!
(Stephana Schwertner to her mother.)
***
He is the greatest heretic in Steyr and the fiercest enemy of Our Holy Church.
Whoever wants to honor him, may well do so, but I shall not. (Father Albert
Grnwald about Mayor Joachim Hndel)
***
'The most beautiful thing on this sinful earth is the Faith,' said the priest with a deep
voice. 'Let us pray for such a Faith which even conquers God's omnipotence.'
(Father Albert Grnwald to Stephana Schwertner)
***
1

In the last few weeks, the Catholic Church has been faced with some grave assaults on the moral
teaching of the Her Incarnate Divine Founder, Jesus Christ, as was in part disclosed in the public
documents of the Synod of Bishops in Rome (5-19 October 2014). Each Catholic is now confronted
with the question of how he should more deeply contribute to the defense of the truth, even if it
requests to speak up, in justice, against the very hierarchy of the Church which was originally put in
place for the defense of the Faith whole and entire. It is almost an unprecedented situation, in
contradistinction to most of the Church's adventurous and ever-challenging history. Facing the
implicitly revolutionary dismissal of Christ's irreformable teaching on sacramental marriage and the
family, we ask ourselves how we, even in our smallness, can be (and may be) a witness to Christ's
truth. If properly done, we will thereby become even refreshing counterrevolutionaries.
A book that was published a little over a hundred years ago and unfortunately it is available
only in German can help us in our historical situation and inspire us in discerning our proper
response. The three-volume lengthy book is called Stephana Schwertner1 and is set in the Austrian
town of Steyr to the northeast of Salzburg in Upper Austria on the Enns River not far from the Danube
at Linz; and it takes place in the beginning part of the 17th century, the time of the CounterReformation after the Protestant Reformation and just before the outbreak of the gravely destructive
Thirty-Years' War (1618-1648).2 This historical novel was published within a similar historical context,
that is, just before the outbreak of the First World War, itself the beginning of another Thirty Years' War
(1914-1945). The Catholic Austrian author, Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, sets the scene of the story in
such a way that the Catholics of the time are generally shown to be a weak and spiritually listless and
also materially impoverished group of people who are losing ground and authority day by day.
In the following, I shall point out some of the crucial and representative parts of this lengthy
historical novel and thereby to highlight some aspects that can be very useful for us in our own current
situation.
In the year 1613, most of the local clerics, and also the nearby monastery, sought a faint-hearted
accommodation with the growing Protestant power in the town. They send a sign of peace to the newly
elected Protestant mayor, Joachim Hndel, who draws his own wealth from his prosperous steel-andarmaments industry and whose hatred of the Catholic Church is only further fed and fostered by Her
1 Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti, Stephana Schwertner (Ksel Verlag: Kempten and Mnchen, 1912-1914).
2 We might remember that Alessandro Manzoni's own classic 19 th -century historical novel I Promessi Sposi The
Betrothed takes place in northern Italy during the middle part of the Thirty-Years' War, just before and during the time
of the terrible 1630 Plague in Milan, which was so consequential and so vividly depicted in Manzoni's enduring work.

provocative weakness and seeming softness and decadence.

To make things worse, Hndel even gains the sympathy of the Austrian Emperor Matthias, a
Catholic, who is grateful for Mayor Hndel's donations of armaments, the military weapons which the
Emperor so direly needs to be able to defend Austria against the attacking Turks. Hndel successfully
requests from the weak and beset Emperor that the Protestants be granted more privileges in Steyr if
they come to form the numerical majority in that town within three years. In the time after the imperial
promise is given, Hndel resolutely sets his main work to be the destroying of the Catholic Faith in his
town. The sudden appearance of the pestilence in a nearby region gives him a good pretext to start
repressing the Catholics. For supposed health reasons, he unjustly closes the Catholic churches and
forbids any kind of public religious devotion such as a procession, much less a procession with the
Blessed Sacrament. The waves of evil seemed to be flowing down upon the Catholics in Steyr.
It would take a saint or two to change this seemingly hopeless situation.
That inchoate and maturing saint is Stephana Schwertner, along with the indispensable and
providential help of Father Albert Grnwald, her monastic confessor, who is also himself a germinating
saint. The two of them together present a formidable (and inspiring) combination.
Stephana, when we first meet her, is an eighteen-year-old girl who is just moving to Steyr from
the mountains of Admont with her widowed mother and her three younger brothers and sisters and
soon after her beloved father had suddenly died in order to open a restaurant at the outskirts of the
town. At the age of thirteen, on the very day of her First Holy Communion, Stephana whose name is
a female variant of the name of the first martyr, Saint Stephen had vowed to give herself completely
to Our Lord; and thus she is already generously filled with a deep love for Our Savior. Any form of
sanctity must start here, under Grace (sub Gratia). Any attempt in fighting for the Church without a
deeply rooted, gracious love for Jesus Christ (and His Blessed Mother) will fail. For, we would likely
lack the sufficient (and efficient) supernatural virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity as well as the acts
that derive from those infused virtues within the Supernatural Order of Grace.
In Stephana's case, she had them all. Her ardent love for God leads her to have and to retain firm
principles, and to act upon them, and thereby to be a wonderful channel of grace to her neighbors and
visiting guests. To give an example. On a Friday, a guest in the restaurant complains that he cannot
order a meal with meat and thus makes fun of the Catholic priests and of their odd rules. As it turns out
he is a fallen-away Catholic. Stephana responds swiftly, quite curtly, and briefly: It is easy to
3

complain, but it is harder, yet much more rewarding, to practice the Catholic Faith. She said it, turned
around, and left. That man, moved by her example, was soon to be seen in church again.
This little story shows us so much about Stephana. Being so deeply steeped in the love of God,
she has no debilitating or compromising inclination to mere human respect. She would rather defend
God and His Church, even if she thereby loses the respect and the praise of others, or even if her
witness damages the commercial business of the family restaurant and, as we shall see, even if it
puts her own life at risk.
Her strong faith makes her promptly do the right thing at the right moment and for the right
reasons.
Father Albert himself a missionary priest who was specifically called to Steyr by the dying
Abbot Wilhelm Heller of the Benedictine Monastery of Garsten to help him fight against the growing
power and insinuating influence of the Protestants, to preach against Mayor Hndel, and thereby to
reawaken the slothful and intimidated Catholics soon tests the sincerity and character of Stephana
when she penitentially comes to his confessional for the first time. By means of this priestly test, Father
Albert can thereby witness her principled spontaneous clarity of thought and deed.
Father Albert, a thirty-year-old, stern and energetic man, asks Stephana, after her sacramental
confession and absolution, whether her family still has holy images displayed in their restaurant, in
spite of the order of the unjust mayor to remove all holy images from public houses and places. When
Stephana responds with a Yes, Father Albert urges her to remove them all, so as not to get into
trouble with the civil authorities of the town. She answers him with astonishment for she had heard
Father Albert's strong homilies and had therefore felt drawn to have him as her confessor and
promptly says that she has to obey God more than man and that the holy pictures will stay where they
are. Although Father Albert threatens her then and says that she should henceforth not come to him to
confession, Stephana stays strong and is even about to leave the confessional when the priest joyfully
calls her back and reveals to her that he only wanted to test her faith. His heart is leaping, because in
her he finds the first Catholic in town with still a pure heart and a strong faith! All morning long, he had
had to listen to half-hearted confessions of the crudest sins, and suddenly young Stephana comes to
him, who sincerely then confesses only the sins of a child, as he puts it. He nearly hears the wings of
an angel behind Stephana when she tells him that she is not afraid of working in the restaurant with
some of the rude guests because she has given herself completely to Jesus and she knows that her
4

guardian angel protects her! At the end of this first confession which took place significantly on the
Feast of the Protomartyr St. Stephen, on 26 December Father Albert leaves Stephana with the clear
instruction to keep the holy images where they are and, additionally, to light a candle in the restaurant
in front of the image of the Blessed Mother on Saturdays, so that even passengers could see it from the
outside!
In Father Albert, Stephana finds her guide and sanctifier. He himself is ascetical, strict, and filled
with Holy Love and Holy Anger. He himself will thus soon also come to the test when his very lax
Prior Karl who took over the government of the monastery because the strong and holy Abbot
Heller was gravely ill and will soon die gives him instructions to stop preaching so strongly against
Hndel. Father Albert reflects upon this order in his little cell. Just when he himself has a moment of
weakness, the local chronicler, a layman, comes into the room to tell him about the wondrous work of
Stephana in her village and how people, through her example of purity and firmness, turn back to the
Faith. Encouraged himself by her witness, Father Albert recovers his deeper fidelity and concludes: I
would rather be disobedient than a Judas! With this renewed grace-filled fire in his heart, he preaches
on the following Sunday an even stronger and holier sermon than before (while tactically leaving out
the personal name of Hndel), with the result that the faithful are moved to tears.
These two inchoate and growing saints will save Steyr from heresy and apostasy. Father Albert
and Stephana, each in his (her) own way of self-sacrifice, both in their deep love for Christ and His
Church and thereby for each individual soul in responding to the abundant graces God is shown
to send them, will now form the larger corporate resistance against Hndel and his evil pretenses to
suffocate every single practice and devotion of the Catholic Faith in Steyr.
Shortly before the last Mass is elegiacally offered prior to the closing of the Church for an
uncertain period of time in obedience to Hndel's pestilence laws for the protection of public health
Stephana approaches Father Albert and proposes to organize a sacrificial pilgrimage to a famous
pestilence-chapel (Pestkapelle) in Weng 120 kilometers (75 miles) away from Steyr which was known
to be the place of efficacious prayers in times of the plague. Father Albert responds with all his might
and calls everybody to join that pilgrimage. The faint-hearted receive encouragement by the calm
witness of Stephana, who is the first to step up and to proclaim that she will go. Many women and men
follow her example, and finally more than hundred of the faithful promise to come to the start of the
pilgrimage on the very next day, knowing well that this act of seeming defiance might call down upon
5

them the wrath and punishment of Hndel. And indeed, Mayor Hndel hears of the plan right away
from an apostate Catholic priest and monk, Romulus Kern, who was in the Church in disguise and had
listened to the plans.
Kern had previously already once been the cause of a deep conflict between his former Abbot
Heller and Hndel, because the mayor had, under the pretext of a false mercy toward an outcast, invited
Kern and his mistress, a former prostitute, to stay in Steyr and even to work as a Protestant teacher, and
with an honorific position. Originally, Kern had left the monastery and his town wandering from town
to town. Only after the election of Mayor Hndel did he dare to come back again to his hometown,
together with his mistress, and had now asked for asylum as well as for the right to marry his mistress
in the Protestant rite. This all was granted to him by Hndel.
That particular conflict came to its climax when the old Abbot, from whose monastery Kern had
fled, asked Hndel to come to his deathbed. Abbot Heller tells Hndel not to marry Kern to his mistress
because Kern had previously given his soul to God in a solemn vow in his sacramental ordination as a
priest. In his last moments of his life, the Abbot thus fights for one of the souls entrusted to him by
God. Abbot Heller himself had been the last bastion of the Faith before Stephana came, and he was also
the one who had called upon Father Albert to come into town to help him. Abbot Heller fights like a
lion. He roars and wrestles with Hndel, reminding him of the social effect of his licentious welcome of
a public sinner and of someone who had broken his vows before God and men by leaving the
priesthood and by then illicitly cohabiting with a woman. (We might want to remember that at this time
in the early 17th century, a vow was regarded to be so holy and so important, also, for the thriving of
society, that a man who broke his vows was condignly sent out of town.) The Abbot rightly pointed out
the moral consequences for the young in town of such leniency toward Kern.
Father Abbot, in his spiritual and moral concern for his former monk, had said privately to Father
Albert, that only if Kern stays in his condition of misery, poverty and social isolation, might he soon
repent for his sins and find his way back to God. (The Abbot also still remembered vividly what a
fervent and deeply pious monk Kern once had been.) That is to say, only if he feels the pain and the
further consequences of his deed might he be able to repent. A man in sin should not feel a consolation.
That would only keep him listlessly in his sin. (We also are mindful here of the teaching of St. Ignatius
of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises.)
It is worth considering Abbot Heller's reflection in a deeper way, because it also has a reference to
6

our situation today. This scene radiates the Catholicity that permeates the whole novel. We are
reminded of the supernatural Catholic way of thinking and acting, as distinct from the way of the
world. Applied to today, it would mean that the Church should not make the sinners feel comfortable in
their sin by prematurely welcoming them and by telling them that they still have good in their evil
deeds. (This would apply, for example, both to active homosexuals, as well as to Catholics who are
cohabiting or who remarry civilly outside the Church.) The Church has to tell the sinner to repent
sincerely and to make a convincing and abiding reparation so that he may save his soul after being
restored to the state of sanctifying grace.
To return to the Abbot. This old, deeply zealous, dying Abbot is filled with love for the apostate
monk. He sacrifices and gives up his life for him. When Hndel stays hard and unchanged, Abbot
Heller, breathing his last breath, with blood flowing out of his mouth, predicts that Hndel will destroy
the Catholic Faith within that very year, and he then dies with the word sanctam on his lips. Father
Albert, having been present there at that moment and having prayed out loud the Credo for his superior,
will later remember this word and then realize that, with the Abbot's prophetic word, God Himself had
hinted at the important role Stephana herself would play in rescuing the town from apostasy.
After this preparatory digression and depiction of the dramatic and prophetic deathbed scene with
Abbot Heller, let me return to the now inchoate pilgrimage on the way to the pestilence-chapel in
Weng. Kern the apostate, once again, had told the mayor about the planned pilgrimage, which Hndel
plans now to halt by surprise. He sends to the meeting place his own young son, Heinrich Hndel, a
very handsome, fiery, and dedicated twenty one-year-old man, but filled with an uninformed disgust for
the Catholic Church and Her devotions and practices. (He himself had also witnessed the death of
Abbot Heller and was astonished to see him die under such poor conditions, after all the detrimental
stories he had heard about the luxurious ways of Catholic clerics.)
The next day, surprised by the young Hndel and his men for, he is the valorous commander of
the local militia Father Albert and Stephana (who are at the head of the procession) refuse to give up
their pilgrimage. Stephana, who holds one of the banners of the procession, is even able to swing it
against the sword which the angry and prideful young Hndel was trying to use so as to hit Father
Albert on the head. Heinrichs sword thus splits in two indeed an embarrassing moment for a soldier
to have been disarmed by a woman and the life of the priest is saved. A valorous woman, indeed,
this Stephana Schwertner. (Schwertner in German contains the word sword, Schwert.) Stephana
7

and Father Albert are then arrested, and, while Father Albert as a priest is soon released and handed
over to Catholic ecclesiastical authorities for his trial, then, in accord with the laws of the time,
Stephana herself (as a laywoman) also has to pay the price for her disobedience against the pestilence
regulations of the town. Her attempt to solve the problem of the plague with supernatural means is now
being thwarted by the laws of a man who would (and does) rather trust in his own power and in the
merely natural means of illness-prevention.
The mayor, Joachim Hndel, thus sentences Stephana to two hours of punitive exposure, while
being chained in iron chains and kept standing at a pillar in the public place of penance. Masses of
people crowd about her in her hour of suffering, and they insult her and demean her in the most
unspeakable ways, just as the crowds did with Our Lord, just as crowds are still able to do such
merciless things when they incite each other further and further into irrationality and cruelty. The iron
of the chains cuts into Stephana's flesh, and she soon nearly faints and rather hangs at the pillar, instead
of standing erectly. The young Heinrich Hndel, whose duty it is to execute his father's specific
sentence, grows by the minute in pity for this beautiful young and innocent girl with golden hair whose
only fault it was to turn to God for help. (While standing at the pillar, she prays the Rosary out loud,
until someone rips it out of her hands.)
When, on top of it all, the crowds start accusing Stephana of having had a child out of wedlock
they claim that her youngest brother is really her own son the young Hndel goes into action and
frees Stephana from her humiliating and disgraceful penance, in spite of the fact that he will have to
give an account and suffer grave punishment from his father for his disobedience toward his ruling by
having shortened Stephana's humiliating public penance. (We might want to remember that, unlike
today, accusing a woman of violating her virginity was at the time a grave charge and shame for her.)
Later, Stephana confesses to Father Albert that at the pillar she heard things that she had never heard
before. She felt that her soul was even soiled thereby. That shows how deep her purity was. Yet, In the
fire of suffering, her heroism matured, as our author Handel-Mazzetti puts it beautifully.
In the wake of this incident, Stephana and her family have much to suffer. Their restaurant is less
frequented, and they fall into poverty. While Stephana has to carry the burden of having proximately
caused this fate for her family, she does not shift or waver one inch concerning what she had done. She
has no regrets, even though her mother, who is too concerned with earthly matters, reminds her daily of
how she had brought so much suffering into the family. Stephana does not regret her acts because she
8

knows that they were acts of love for her One True Spouse to Whom she had given herself so
completely at her First Holy Communion five years ago. And her acts were also acts of love for the
town of Steyr and its people, trying to prevent the pestilence from entering the city. She believed that
only by turning to God in a penitential and reparatory pilgrimage could the pestilence be halted.
Soon, Stephana will turn this same ardent love again into action.
When four Catholic men of Steyr are condemned to death at the gibbet because they dared to
oppose the mayor and his injustices, also toward Stephana, it is she who from within the crowd starts
saying aloud prayers of repentance and of mercy, so that the condemned men standing on the public
place of execution, and soon to be hanged, might still turn their own hearts to God and away from any
vengeful hard anger and hatred of their Protestant enemy. At the moment when one of the men wants to
cry out loud a curse against Hndel, Stephana's beautiful angelic voice is heard, calling upon the name
of Jesus.3 The four men, shaken by her prayers, fall on their knees and prepare their hearts for their
moment of death. This is one of the most beautiful scenes of the novel. (We will notice that there was
no priest then present for fear of the mayor, who explicitly denied the visit of a priest.) As soon as
the four men are hanged, and Stephana sees that she can do no more, she quietly slips out into a dark
street and goes home. She speaks calmly and plainly with her two little siblings at her hand, telling
them how good it was that they were able to do some good for the four slain men, especially the one
who left his wife and little child behind.
What is so striking in Stephana is that a disturbed and desolating conscience does not greatly
trouble or paralyze her with temptations. Satan has no access to the interior of her pure soul, though
deviously perhaps trying to grip it and torture it with remorse and self-doubts as to whether she should
not have done what she did. She did not foresee nor wish the death of the four men, but indirectly she
might have caused it. After all, these men had tried to defend her innocence. Yet, she walks the way
God draws for her, not looking right or left. When any bad thought comes into her heart, she picks up a
piece of unfinished work and goes about her dutiful chores. There is no time to squander. Stephana
prays all fifteen decades of the Rosary every day while she does her needlework and other handwork.
She is both a Martha and a Mary in the same time, as the author Handel-Mazzetti puts it.
Stephana's love does not stop at this one good deed of helping the four condemned men. Soon
God calls her for more. She assists Father Albert, who is still imprisoned in a tower of his monastery
3 Stephana's voice was so angelic, because her Baptismal Grace had never been tainted, as Handel-Mazzetti puts it so
beautifully.

outside of the city walls and who is thus able to detect from his tower the first wandering traveler
infected with the dreaded pestilence. After Father Albert's having convinced his confessor, Father
Ertelius, to let him secretly invite the man into his cell so that he can either cure or bury him, Stephana
then provides food and medicine for her beloved saintly confessor and spiritual director, who has put
his own life at great risk for the greater common good of Steyr by taking care of the sick and infectious
man. Stephana and Father Albert now work together, in order to protect the weak and faint-hearted
town that has shown much cruelty and injustice towards them.
But Father Albert and Stephana do even more. The saintly priest is able to reach the heart of the
dying military mercenary who had spent most of his own life amidst moral sewage. (At the beginning,
that man had come into the cell of the monk to only look whether he could steal money or food!) After
a good confession, however, the sinner yearns to receive Holy Communion, and since Father Ertelius
himself is too afraid to do it, it is Stephana who will carry Our Lord to him. She, too, puts her life at
risk to save the town and bring consolation to a dying and highly infectious man. She will remember it
as the most beautiful moment of her earthly life when she was given the privilege to carry Jesus on her
heart, in a pix on a chain hanging around her neck. Her love for God is so intense that she felt that
honor and that grace most intimately. Glowing with that gift of divine love in the Blessed Sacrament,
she enters the room of the dying man who, at her sight, calls out the name Maria!
Stephana performs all these heroic acts of virtue with a calmness and with a natural selfforgetfulness that can only be explained by her growing holiness, thus with her more perfect and
constant cooperation with the Holy Will of God. She thereby becomes an effective channel of grace to
many others and is the mediating instrument of God's own merciful love (and, thus, is God's Agent,
i.e., showing Providential use of an intermediary Second Cause, in the recent profound words of
Monsignor Ignacio Barreiro). She is a saint who becomes a counterrevolutionary, at the moment when
a paganized Christian Mayor Joachim Hndel who is more interested in material wealth and
power than in the meeker and weaker aspects, much less the suffering side, of Christianity confronts
the Catholics of Steyr with the demand that they completely apostatize from the Catholic Faith.
Stephana steps out when God calls her.
She helps convert souls one by one and soon her little village outside of town is a stronghold of
the Faith. And she speaks up when necessary. For example, her family was the only family who did not
light candles in the windows when Hndel was elected as mayor at the beginning of the novel. The
10

Schwertners had just moved into the house that day. When the meandering cheering crowds saw the
missing candles and banged against the door and windows and called upon them, Stephana simply
opened the window in the second floor and declared: We do not light candles for your uncatholic
mayor, because we are Catholic Christians! And she closed the window. A little Saint Joan of Arc.
Stephana's Catholic witness had darkly inflamed the elder Hndel with such a hatred that he even
uses the suspicious fact that she once was seen at night climbing into the tower of Father Albert in a
disguise as a pretext in order to demand that she and her family move at once completely out of town.
While still hesitating to act in such a harsh manner, the Mayor now realizes that his own son, Heinrich,
has fallen in love with Stephana, and in a very fervent manner.
Both Hndels, father and son, had been at an audience with Emperor Matthias, and it happened
that Heinrich declared to the Emperor his intention to marry Stephana, whereupon the Emperor
promises him to be the godfather of Heinrich's first born son. (Little did Heinrich then know about
Stephana's secret promises to God.) Thus Joachim Hndel is surprised and informed by his son's openhearted disclosure of his love in front of the Emperor. As soon as his son left town to ride back to his
love, the father writes up the order to expel the Schwertner family from Steyr, secretly hoping to be
able to thereby win back his son's heart. Hndel sends a messenger with the decree to Steyr.
The son, Heinrich, having arrived in Steyr before the arrival of the terrible decree, visits Stephana
and asks her for her hand, but she declines and remains distanced from him. Leaving her home with a
broken heart, Heinrich meets the messenger and hears of the grave charges against Stephana. He is now
inflamed with jealousy toward the suspect Father Albert. Heinrich earlier himself had been wondering
with a heavy heart why Stephana herself had never responded to his sincere attempts to approach her
kindly and affectionately (even in helping her to recover her Rosary, a precious gift from her own
father that she had lost during her humiliating public penance at the pillar) and he now thought that he
had found the true and heart-breaking reason for her conduct.
Heinrich Hndel rides in haste back to Stephana's house, still secretly hoping to be able to
disprove the evil claims alleged against her, about her secret love affair and nocturnal liaison with a
priest, Father Albert himself. Heinrich encounters Stephana alone in the restaurant, just as she is
lighting an oil lamp in honor of Saint Joseph. When challenged about her purportedly impure affair, she
refuses to render any explanation because she had promised Father Albert never to reveal to anyone
what they had done together, out of fear that the dead man's grave would then be dug up and that with it
11

the pestilence would come to the town. Loyal to her promise, Stephana remains silent. Heinrich
Hndel, who regards her behavior as a confirmation of her guilt, but who, in his fiery love, still does
not want to expose her to another public scene of shame and disgrace, then has a dark and sudden fit of
jealous passion, and he stabs Stephana with his own knife and kills her instantly.
Stephana Schwertner is dead.
Stephana indirectly becomes a martyr in the face of the hatred that the Protestant Mayor Joachim
Hndel has for the Catholic Faith. Tragically, this mayor comes to use his own son as the executor
the instrument of his own arguably demonic hate. But, as is so often the case in the history of the
world and as it was at the moment when Jesus Christ Himself had died at the Cross just when the
evil powers believe to have achieved their goal and thought to have conquered the Faith, they lose. (In
the same manner today, just when Satan believes that he will have conquered the Church, She will
spring up again, and the Blessed Mother will even firmly and finally tread upon him!) The death of
Stephana likewise calls down so many graces from heaven upon Steyr, and inspires and enkindles so
many people, that the majority of the town is very convincingly shown to have returned sincerely to
their Catholic Faith, and this within hours of her martyrdom. Steyr is Catholic again. Hndel the mayor
has lost his battle. Moreover, he in his juridical function as the mayor must now even condemn his own
son to death according to his own laws and he has to admit that Stephana, after all, has won, and
with her the Catholic Church. Not even two years after his election as mayor, the ugly face of his
tyranny has shown itself fully and it had thoroughly, as well, disgraced him.
When Heinrich Hndel is later being led out of the courtroom into the yard to be executed in
public, his own most loyal soldiers suddenly shoot him so as to spare him a shameful death in front of
the retributive as well as sorrowing and justly indignant citizenry. While Heinrich then lies dying, he
unexpectedly calls for a priest. Filled with sorrow and true contrition for, in the courtroom, Father
Albert had finally related the whole truth about Stephana's visit to him by night in his tower
Heinrich now yearns to become a Catholic like Stephana. Father Albert who had rushed to him, firmly
demands from him a renunciation of Satan and of his Protestant beliefs; then removes from him the ban
of Excommunication; and, before giving the dying man the Viaticum, hears his confession. Questioned
by Father Albert about his own personal carnal sins, Heinrich admits that it was Stephana's purity
which had kept him from falling into any kind of such sin. Stephana's purity had kept him pure. Father
Albert, moved by this open-hearted statement, realizes that God had even made use of the earthly love
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of this young man for a beautiful young virgin, in order to prepare his own heart for heaven.
Heinrich's father, the tyrant of Steyr, who had rushed into the room where his dying son was
lying, now witnesses his son's conversion. His last hatred against the Church dies away when he
realizes that She in Her love for the sinner reaches out to a young man who is despised by all mankind.
The supernatural Charity of the Church shines brightly in the room. Joachim Hndel thus witnesses the
peace that enters his son's soul after having received the sacraments of the Church and after having
heard, as well, the touching counsel of Father Albert himself that he, Heinrich, might also soon see
Stephana again, but now as brother and sister in Christ, and in heaven. Heinrich then prays: Saint
Stephana, Bride of Christ, pray for me, a sinner!
Thus Heinrich Hndel dies with Stephana's name upon his lips while her body is being carried
through town and then exposed for veneration in a coffin placed in front of one of the churches whose
keys Mayor Hndel was just about to give back to Father Albert for its renewed liturgical use by the
Catholics. Heinrich Hndel himself was to be buried in the same Church where, at the beginning of the
tragedy, the plan had been made by Father Albert and Stephana to make a pilgrimage to Weng, in order
to save the town of Steyr from the pestilence. As it turned out, God's plans went even further and did
not only save the town from the pestilence, but also from the danger of apostasy, and from many other
lesser forms of infidelity and sin. On the last pages of this novel, Father Albert is shown to give a
blessing to the people of Steyr with the Blessed Sacrament which he thereafter returns to the church.
This selective summary of our chosen and deeply cherished 1500-page book might give a helpful
glimpse of its moral beauty and intensity, and, most of all, of its Catholicity. 4 I gratefully acknowledge
that I have never read a more beautiful or a more Catholic historical novel than this not even
Manzoni's The Betrothed in spite of the many very beautiful Catholic books which my husband has
so generously introduced me to over the years. (In a follow-up article, I could, perhaps, even present
some further-fortifying selections from this three-volume Austrian novel.) There are so many passages
that even constitute, as it were, a vivid and intimate set of sacramentals, and they thus gradually seep
in and deeply touch the soul, because, while reading them, one's own Catholic Faith is lifted and
purified, and one even palpably feels the graces of love and insight flowing in. 5 This book by Handel4 Stephana Schwertner was the book that brought about a reconciliation with some of the Integrists of the time who had
earlier opposed Enrica von Handel-Mazzetti for her seeming Liberalism and even for her quasi-Modernist tendencies in
her first novelsto include even some parts of Jesse und Maria. When confronted with this rebuke, she publicly
declared, in 1910, her faithful submission to the authority and guidance of Pope Saint Pius X, and thereafter she acted
upon it. Stephana Schwertner is one fruit of her deepened understanding of the Catholic Faith.
5 I would here like to refer to a very important 1982 article written by my husband, where he describes in detail his own

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Mazzetti gives us an example, indeed, of how we are all called to become saints and, thereby, also to
become heroic, but humble, counterrevolutionaries.
Additionally, this Trilogy suggests so many parallels or analogies to our own time: the loss of
Faith and the loss of intellectual and moral strength among clergymen and laymen alike; the increase of
power by the open and covert enemies of the Faith; the use of pretenses and ruses to limit and restrict
the traditional practices and devotions of Catholics in society and in the Church; and, most of all, the
few glowing examples of a courageous and persevering witness to the Catholic Faith in its fullness.
May this book be translated soon into English and may it inspire many other readers unto personal
sanctity and unto counterrevolutionary action and, if it be God's will, even unto blood martyrdom.

--Postscript-Does he think that, because of my mother, I shall be silent? Truth it has to be, Truth
is Truth! (Stephana Schwertner's reflection about a comment by Father Albert)
***
Where the distress is the greatest, the closest one to us is God. (Stephana
Schwertner)
***
Blessed be those who believe and do not fear death. (Stephana Schwertner)
***
I have loved Stephana...who was so pure....like your Blessed Mother.... Would I
have been allowed...to love her....as a bad man? (Heinrich Hndel in his confession
to Father Albert)
***
What is mother and father in comparison with God and His Will and His Kingdom?
If God has been merciful with your mother, you will find her again in heaven, to
which only the Catholic path leads, but if not, then you shan't wish to be re-united
with her. (Father Albert to Heinrich Hndel who was hesitating to reject the faith of
his beloved deceased Protestant mother)
***
Or was it the case also with the Church as it was with Stephana herself, whom
research and thesis about the sacramentality of good Catholic literature. See Robert Hickson, Restoring a Catholic
Memory, http://catholicism.org/restoring-a-catholic-memory.html.

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[Joachim] Hndel had once called a harlot, and who was actually a Saint? (The
interior thoughts of Joachim Hndel himself, as presented by the novel's narrator)
***
And [Joachim] Hndel still closed off his hard and frozen heart against the Divine
Grace, and yet he saw growing in himself the insight that the Church which he had so
much persecuted was, indeed, much more than a human being. (Enrica von HandelMazzetti)

FINIS
This article is dedicated to my little family: to my husband Robert Hickson, and to our children
Isabella and Robby. All three of them have supported me with their vivid and inquiring encouragements
(Mama, what did you read now about Stephana?); and they have allowed me to have so many serene
hours last summer to be sitting in a rocking chair and reading, with attentive absorption, this eloquent
and deeply stirring Catholic book. (Why don't you sit down and read a little more Stephana, Mama?)

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