The Exorcist, Horror, and Faith

The Secret Message of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist

October 2011 marked the 40th anniversary of the publication of the supernatural thriller The Exorcist. The 1973 film version of the novel, starring Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller, and Linda Blair, became one of the highest-grossing movies of all time and inspired not only a series of less interesting sequels but dozens of other horror movies in the 1970’s and 1980’s. For many filmgoers and readers, The Exorcist set the bar for horror and, decades later, still sparks the occasional sleepless night.

“A Novel of Faith”

Yet the novel’s author, William Peter Blatty (who also penned the Academy Award-winning screenplay for the film), marked the 40th anniversary of the novel’s appearance by writing a column for FoxNews.com, in which he reveals that “I haven’t the faintest recollection of any intention to frighten the reader, which many will take, I suppose, as an admission of failure on an almost stupefying scale.” Rather, Blatty, the son of devout Lebanese Catholic immigrants, reveals “‘The Exorcist’s Secret Message”: It is “a novel of faith in the popular dress of a thrilling and suspenseful detective story—in other words, a sermon that no one could possibly sleep through.”

Principalities and Powers

That is not, of course, the way that the novel and the subsequent film have been portrayed by either their fans or their detractors. Indeed, many Christians have accused Blatty of opening up readers and filmgoers to demonic influences—missing not only the point of the novel but misunderstanding Christ’s own teaching regarding the principalities and powers of this world. Demons hold no sway over those who are firm in their faith; but they do, in the words of Pope Leo XIII’s Prayer to Saint Michael the Archangel, “prowl about the world, seeking the ruin of souls.” By denying their existence, and treating the world of spiritual warfare as a parlor game, we open ourselves to their influence and even, in extreme cases, to possession.

That is why I find the most chilling scene in the film version of The Exorcist to be one of the briefest. It does not involve vomit or demonic voices or Regan spider-walking, but a simple Ouija board that Regan finds in the basement. While many viewers might well think that the scene would have been better left on the cutting-room floor, it is clearly the pivotal point of the movie, in which the demon finds his entrance. The spiritual horror of the moment is made all the greater by the fact that the scene is so understated, short, and lightly played.

“Not About Shivers But Rather About Souls”

In his column, Blatty does not directly address those who have, over the years, missed the point of his novel, but he does make a connection that I have made in reminding Catholics of the Catholic origins of Halloween (and the anti-Catholic attack on Halloween):

[E]very year on [Halloween] I put out the pumpkin with the cutout eyes and nose and face and the basket full of Snickers and Mars Bars beside it; but I do keep wishing—oh, ever so wistfully and—let’s face it, hopelessly—that “The Exorcist” be remembered at this time of the year for being not about shivers but rather about souls, for then it would indeed be in the real and true spirit of Halloween, which is short for the eve of All Hallows or All Saints Day.

“If There Were Demons . . . Why Not God?”

And in addressing the persistent rumor that he had based The Exorcist on a 1949 case of possession that occurred near Georgetown University while he was a junior there, Blatty makes much better a point that I tried to express in “Halloween: A Catholic View”:

I remember thinking, “Someday, somebody’s got to write about this, because if an investigation were to prove that possession is real, what a help it would be to the struggling faith of possibly millions, for if there were demons, I reasoned, then why not angels? Why not God?”

Blatty “in fact did not base my novel on the 1949 case,” but the case led him to investigate the history of demonic possession and to the conclusion

that in every period of recorded history, and in every culture and part of the world, there have been consistent accounts of possession and its symptoms going all the way back to ancient Egyptian chronicles, and where there is that much smoke, my reason told me, there is probably fire—and a lot of it, if you get my meaning. Do you? My faith is strong.

“My Faith Is Strong”

“My faith is strong.” In the end, that is the secret message of The Exorcist: The presence of evil in the world points also to the presence of good and indeed of God. The prospect of Hell spurs us on to seek Heaven.

As Christians, we reject Satan and all of his works, and all of his empty promises, but rejecting Satan is something very different from denying his existence. Reducing evil merely to the sins of man—or, worse yet, a sociological phenomenon—does not make us safer. Like Regan’s Ouija board, it opens us up to the horrifying reality of evil from which only faith can save us.

First published on About Catholicism in October 2011.

Halloween, Jack Chick, and Anti-Catholicism

Anti-Catholic Myths

What would you think if I told you that the Catholic Church invented Islam, communism, and freemasonry, in order to undermine the faith of true Christians? That the holocaust was a Vatican plot, and Hitler merely the pawn of Pope Pius XII? That Catholics do not worship Christ and venerate the Blessed Virgin Mary, but instead worship the reincarnated Nimrod, founder of Babylon, and his wife (and mother!) Semiramis? That, as early as 1980, the Vatican had a supercomputer containing the names of every Protestant Christian in the world, designed to make it easier to round them all up in a future persecution carried out by the Catholic Church, headed up by the Antichrist, otherwise known as the Pope?

In all likelihood, you would (at best) laugh at these ridiculous ideas, and probably dismiss me as a raving anti-Catholic. Certainly, you wouldn’t accept my claims as the gospel truth.

What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?

But what if I told you that every year, dozens of children are kidnapped and murdered by Satanists on Halloween?

That scores more are injured or killed when they eat candy laced with poison or shards of glass? That every year on October 31, modern-day witches follow in the footsteps of ancient Druids by celebrating demonic rituals, including human sacrifice?

Some of you are now likely nodding your head in agreement. After all, you’ve heard these claims for years, and where there’s smoke, there must be hellfire, right?

Jack Chick Thinks He Knows

But what if I told you that, over the past 30-plus years, one man has worked tirelessly to advance both sets of claims, and that his attacks on Halloween have as much truth to them as his attacks on the Catholic Church? And that, indeed, his attacks on Halloween are not separate from, but very much a part of, his anti-Catholicism?

That man’s name is Jack T. Chick, the owner of Chick Publications, the world’s largest publisher of fundamentalist tracts—three quarters of a billion since 1960. Since 1980, he has made it his life’s mission to subvert and undermine the Catholic Church. And in 1986, he opened a new front in that battle by focusing his attacks on the vigil of All Saints Day, better known as Halloween.

Life Was So Much Easier 40 Years Ago

In the 1970’s, in the small Midwestern village where I grew up, Halloween was eagerly anticipated by children of all ages and every Christian denomination (with the exception, of course, of the very small population of Jehovah’s Witnesses). In those days before the end of Daylight Savings Time was moved to the first Sunday in November, Halloween always took place after we had set our clocks back, which meant that it was good and dark by the time trick or treating began. Jack-o’-lanterns decorated every stoop, and every porch was an oasis of warm light in the chill night air. The sounds of laughter and cries of “Trick or Treat!” filled that air, as little ghosts and goblins ran from house to house, their empty pillowcases slowly filling with candy bars and popcorn balls and fruit.

No one thought that Halloween was the “Devil’s Night”; in fact, in the Michigan of my youth, Devil’s Night had a very specific meaning: It referred to the mayhem that took place in the inner city of Detroit every October 30, culminating, in the mid-1980’s, in hundreds of acts of arson every year. But in the overwhelmingly Christian West Michigan of my youth, a few smashed pumpkins, a handful of tossed eggs, a couple of soaped windows, and some rolls of toilet paper draped over trees were the most devilish activities that occurred on Halloween.

And the very next evening, November 1, the 20-odd Catholic children on my block would all be found in Saint Mary’s Church, celebrating the Holy Day of Obligation known as All Saints Day, from which Halloween (“All Hallows Eve”) derived its very existence and its name.

All of that began to change around 1980.

Enter Jack Chick

I was in junior high school the year that I returned from home from trick-or-treating to find, hidden among the Butterfingers (my favorite) and Skittles (a candy I could do without), a little comic book that patiently explained why Catholics were not Christians. It was my first Jack Chick tract, but it would be far from my last.

Jack Chick is a fundamentalist Christian who first began publishing his little tracts in comic-book form in 1960. (For an exhaustive examination of Chick’s background and his influence, see “The Nightmare World of Jack T. Chick,” published by Catholic Answers.) Each tract tells a little story of a soul gone bad, often without even knowing that he has; he discovers his error over the course of the story, and on the final page, the reader is given the opportunity to “invite Jesus into your life to become your personal Saviour.” He is then admonished to read the King James Bible every day, pray, be baptized and to worship with fellow Christians, and to “Tell others about Jesus Christ.” One of the best ways to do that, of course, is to purchase more Jack Chick tracts like the one that has brought the gift of faith to the unbeliever, and to hand them out at every possible opportunity—including in lieu of candy on Halloween.

By 1980, Chick had published 45 tracts, and was fairly well known in fundamentalist circles, but not so much outside of them. That changed when he added a new topic into the mix: anti-Catholicism. His first anti-Catholic tract, My Name? . . . In the Vatican? (1980), made the absurd claim that the Catholic Church has a supercomputer that holds the names of all members of every Protestant church in the world, in order to make it easier to track them down and round them up in a future persecution of true Christians by the Catholic Church, which is headed up by the Antichrist, in the form of the pope. (Not all of the tracts that Chick has published remain in print, but Chick’s website, www.chick.com, claims that any out-of-print title can be reprinted by special order. My Name? . . . In the Vatican?, however, is no longer offered even in the out-of-print titles.)

In the first half of the 1980’s, Chick stepped up his attacks on Catholicism in such tracts as Are Roman Catholics Christians? (1981), Kiss the Protestants Good-bye (1981), Macho (1982), Is There Another Christ? (1983), The Poor Pope? (1983), Holocaust (1984), The Only Hope (1985), The Story Teller (1985), and The Attack (1985). Among other things, these tracts claim that the Catholic Church has tried to convince Protestants that Catholics are Christians, in order to Catholicize the Protestant churches; that communism, Masonry, and Islam were all created by the Catholic Church to attack and undermine true Christianity; and that Hitler was a good Catholic, who carried out the holocaust against the Jews on orders from the Vatican.

Only Nimrods Celebrate Halloween

Mixed in with all of this is an unhealthy dose of ideas drawn from a pamphlet published in 1853 (and later expanded to book length) by the Rev. Alexander Hislop, a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. The Two Babylons: Or The Papal Worship Proved to be the Worship of Nimrod and His Wife argues that Roman Catholicism is actually a form of paganism—specifically, a Babylonian mystery cult. According to Hislop, the Christ that Catholics worship is not the same as the Christ other Christians worship, but the reincarnated Nimrod, founder of Babylon, and the Virgin Mary whom Catholic venerate is really the Babylonian deity Semiramis, worshiped in Egypt as Isis, in Greece as Athena, and in Rome as Venus and Diana. True Christianity, according to Hislop, was subverted by pagan worship during the reign of Constantine the Great, and did not reemerge again until the late Middle Ages, and was not fully restored until the Protestant Reformation.

In a similar vein, Hislop argued that the Catholic veneration of the saints, particularly on All Saints Day, and the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory (emphasized strongly in the month of November, beginning on November 2, All Souls Day), is a modified form of Babylonian worship of the dead.

Given Chick’s reliance on The Two Babylons, it should have come as no surprise when, in 1986, his series of anti-Catholic tracts culminated in his first attack on Halloween, in his 1986 tract The Trick.

Witchcraft, Human Sacrifice, Poisoned Candy, and Spells

By the mid-1980’s, many parents had become concerned for the safety of their children on Halloween. The rise of the subgenre of horror movies known as “slasher films,” such as the Halloween and Friday the 13th franchises, combined with stories of serial killers such as Chicago’s “Killer Clown,” John Wayne Gacy, in the popular imagination. Scattered reports of candy laced with drugs or poison, and caramel apples embedded with shards of glass, never very widespread and entirely debunked by 2002 (see Is Halloween Candy Tampering a Myth?), led parents to inspect the goodies that the neighbors they saw every day had given to their children on Halloween night.

The Trick capitalized on this unease to advance Chick’s attack on Halloween. A coven of witches is shown tampering with Halloween candy and performing incantations over it, leading, on Halloween, to the death of children and frightening changes in the behavior of others. Even though the children have been warned by their parents only to visit the houses of people they know, one of those kindly neighbors turns out to be a witch, proving that there is no way to ensure the physical and spiritual safety of any child who celebrates Halloween. Only when an ex-witch exposes Halloween as a “holy day” created by Satan to allow a worldwide conspiracy of witches to “provide additional sacrifices to him” is the kindly but evil neighbor’s plot foiled, as the parents of the affected children accept Jesus as their personal Lord and Savior and then convince their children to do so also.

The Druids Are Coming!

The worldwide conspiracy, however, is nothing new; according to Chick, who, in The Trick, cites Hislop’s Two Babylonsas his source, Halloween was first celebrated by the Druids, who offered children as human sacrifices on Halloween night:

When [a Druid] went to a home and demanded a child or virgin for sacrifice, the victim was the Druid’s treat. In exchange, they would leave a jack-o-lantern with a lighted candle made of human fat to prevent those inside from being killed by demons that night. When some unfortunate couldn’t meet the demands of the Druids, then it was time for the trick. A symbolic hex was drawn on the front door. That night Satan or his demons would kill someone in that home.

In other Chick tracts, similar accounts of Druidic celebration of Halloween are offered, and the jack-o’-lantern is specifically identified as a carved pumpkin.

Of course, as I’ve shown in Should Catholics Celebrate Halloween?, Halloween—that is, the vigil or eve of All Hallows or All Saints Day, was first celebrated in the eighth century A.D., approximately 400 years after the Celts had abandoned druidism for Christianity. And the pumpkin, which is native to North American, was not imported to the British Isles until over a millennium after the conversion of the Celts to Christianity. Indeed, as David Emery, the Expert at About Urban Legends points out in Why Do We Carve Pumpkins on Halloween?, both the name and the custom of the jack-o’-lantern date from the 17th century, and it was commonly associated with Catholic beliefs and practices:

For Catholic children it was customary to carry jack-o’-lanterns door-to-door to represent the souls of the dead while begging for soul cakes on Hallowmas (All Saints Day, Nov. 1) and All Souls Day (Nov. 2).

Irish Catholic immigrants to North America celebrated Halloween by carving pumpkins and trick-or-treating, and, just as their Puritan ancestors had in England, Protestants of English descent in the American Northeast banned the celebration of Halloween (and of Christmas) not out of concerns over witchcraft and the “Devil’s Night,” but explicitly in opposition to Catholic practice. By the late 19th century, those bans had been dropped, and both Halloween and Christmas had been adopted by Protestant Christians of all stripes in the United States, but by the late 1980’s Jack Chick had succeeded in reviving the earlier anti-Catholic attack on Halloween.

Happy Birthday, Satan

Chick’s anti-Halloween tracts helped spread another idea that is ridiculous on its face: that Halloween is Satan’s birthday. Satan, of course, is Lucifer, the leader of the angels who rebelled against God and was cast out of Heaven by Saint Michael the Archangel and the other angels who remained loyal to their Creator (Revelation 12:7-10). As such, he has no “birthday”—a fact that Chick actually admits in one of his tracts, though he attributes the casting of Lucifer and his demons out of Heaven to Jesus Christ, not Saint Michael, as the account in Revelation does. Yet that same tract, Boo! (1991), while getting the story at least partially right, shows Satan, wearing a jack-o’-lantern as a head, rejoicing that a bunch of high-school students are “coming to celebrate my birthday,” before he mows 19 of them down with a chainsaw. The sheriff who is unable to stop Satan’s bloody rampage finally gives up, praying, “May the saints preserve ‘em”—a subtle yet potent anti-Catholic reference.

The Triumph of Chick’s Anti-Catholic War on Halloween

By the turn of the millennium, Jack Chick had made great strides in his attack on Halloween, and not just among his fellow fundamentalist Christians. Many mainstream Christians, including a sizable number of Catholics who had themselves happily and innocently celebrated Halloween when they were young, decided not to let their children take part in trick-or-treating and other Halloween festivities. The common reasons given came straight out of the Jack Chick tracts that many of them had received in their own youth: the supposed Celtic and Babylonian pagan roots of Halloween; the ridiculous claim that Halloween is Satan’s birthday; the possible dangers to the physical and spiritual health of their children, if they are allowed to accept candy from the neighbors that they see everyday. (These have been supplemented in recent years by the claim that Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI warned Catholics against celebrating Halloween—an urban legend that I’ve debunked in Did Pope Benedict XVI Condemn Halloween?)

Various Christian churches came up with “alternatives” to Halloween, such as harvest parties (which, as I’ve discussed in Should Catholics Celebrate Halloween?, actually have more in common with Celtic pagan practices than Halloween ever did) and All Saints Day parties. But underlying all of these is the big lie that Jack Chick has successfully propagated: that there’s something wrong or anti-Christian about Halloween, and therefore an alternative is needed.

By 2001, Chick himself had become something of a victim to his success. Halloween had been a very good time of year for Chick Publications, as fundamentalists purchased Chick tracts to distribute to unsuspecting children. But as Chick managed to convince more and more Christians that Halloween was evil, those who used to pass out Chick tracts quit doing so, and simply kept their porch lights dark on the “Devil’s Night.”

So, in recent years, Chick has changed tactics, announcing in a Halloween Letter on his website that Christians should not shun Halloween, but “Turn Halloween into a night of evangelism,” as it was back in the early 80’s, when I received my first Chick tract on Halloween night. More recent Halloween tracts from Chick Publications, such as The Little Ghost (2001) and First Bite (2008) have dropped scare tactics in favor of humorous stories.

Is Halloween Evil? Consider the Source of the Claim

Yet the damage has been done, and a whole new generation of Christians, including many Catholics, have been indoctrinated in lies about Halloween spread by a man who believes that Catholics aren’t Christians; that Catholics worship Babylonian deities, and not Jesus Christ; and that the Catholic Church created Islam, communism, and Masonry to subvert true Christianity, and raised up Hitler to commit genocide against the Jews.

Catholic children do not need to celebrate Halloween to be good Catholics, though they should understand the true origins of Halloween as the vigil of All Saints Day. But if you’re contemplating keeping your children at home on Halloween while others are enjoying a night of innocent fun because you’ve been told that Halloween is the “Devil’s Night,” I can offer only this advice: Consider the source.

First published on About Catholicism in October 2012.

Did Pope Benedict XVI Condemn Halloween?

An Instructive Example of How Myths Get Started

Whenever I discuss the Catholic roots of Halloween and explain how an odd coalition of anti-Catholic fundamentalists and modern-day “pagans,” “Wiccans,” and self-proclaimed “satanists” have convinced some Catholics that Halloween is anti-Christian, I know what to expect: Someone will send me an email declaring that no less an authority than Pope Benedict XVI himself has condemned Halloween as “dangerous” and “anti-Christian.” In light of the Pope Emeritus’s clear opposition to the holiday, my correspondents ask, how can I possibly make the claim that Halloween is nothing more than the vigil of All Saints Day, much less tell Catholic parents that it is OK to let their children dress up in scary costumes and go out trick-or-treating?

If what my many correspondents over the years have said were true, it would not change the fact that Halloween does not descend from dark druidic customs but from practices developed by Catholic Irish peasants centuries after Celtic paganism had become nothing more than a bad memory.

But it might give Catholic parents a legitimate reason to rethink letting their children celebrate Halloween.

But the truth is that Pope Benedict never declared Halloween “dangerous” or “anti-Christian.”

The Origins of a Myth

So why do so many Catholics think that Pope Benedict condemned Halloween? The answer can be found in a combination of tabloid journalism, the power of the internet, and the tyranny of first impressions.

On October 30, 2009, the Daily Mail, a popular tabloid newspaper out of the United Kingdom, ran an article with the provocative headline “Halloween is ‘dangerous’ says the Pope as he slams ‘anti-Christian’ festival.” The online version of the article features a prominent picture of Benedict, papers in hand, over the caption “Pope Benedict XVI, pictured in the Vatican, has slammed Halloween as ‘dangerous.’“

The impression that one gets upon first viewing the article is that Pope Benedict held a press conference at the Vatican to declare, once and for all, that Catholics should renounce Halloween. Unfortunately, many who load up the webpage never get past that first impression, because they never actually read the text of the article.

So What Did Pope Benedict Actually Say About Halloween?

In a word, nothing. As the text of the Daily Mail article makes clear, the U.K. paper was engaging in one of the sordid traditions of British tabloid journalism: the bait-and-switch. The Daily Mail quotes from an article published on October 29, 2009, in L’Osservatore Romano, the official newspaper of Vatican City—though not, as the Daily Mail and so many others often claim, “the Vatican’s official newspaper,” in the sense of being an authoritative source of Church teaching. In that article, “The Dangerous Messages of Halloween,” “liturgical expert Joan Maria Canals” declares, “Halloween has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”

So there you have the two words, “dangerous” and “anti-Christian.” One comes from the headline of the L’Osservatore Romano article; the other comes from a “liturgical expert.” Neither comes from Pope Benedict.

Both the L’Osservatore Romano article and the Daily Mail bait-and-switch piece do note the rise of opposition in recent years among some Catholics in Europe, especially in Italy and Spain, to Halloween. But outside of the Daily Mail’s completely false headline, neither newspaper claims that Pope Benedict said anything about Halloween, much less condemned it. And I can find no record anywhere else that the Pope Emeritus ever publicly addressed this holiday.

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

That’s not surprising, because Pope Benedict likely never celebrated Halloween or is even all that familiar with it, since the Irish Catholic peasant celebration never really took hold among Germans, except among those who immigrated to the United States.

It is instructive to note, however, that the Pope Emeritus is quite familiar with the Krampus, the demonic figure attached to Saint Nicholas in the folklore of Bavarians and Austrians, who makes the vampires, werewolves, witches, and ghouls of Halloween look positively tame in comparison. And rather than condemn the Germanic tradition of Krampusnacht (December 6), when both Saint Nicholas and the Krampus go house to house to reward the children who have been good and to terrorize those who have been naughty, Pope Benedict has spoken fondly of his memories of Krampusnacht from his childhood days.

Rather than being damaged by his fear of this immense furry demon with red eyes and huge claws, Pope Benedict called the fear of the Krampus “the strongest motivation” for his five-year-old self to be better in the coming year.

What, then, would the Pope Emeritus really think of Halloween? I don’t know. But neither does anyone else—especially if all they have read is a bait-and-switch headline designed to sell copies of a tabloid newspaper.

First published on About Catholicism in October 2013.

Aaron D. Wolf, R.I.P.

This is the text of the eulogy for Aaron D. Wolf, my longtime colleague at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture and my best friend, that I delivered at his funeral on April 29, 2019, at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Rockford, Illinois. Aaron passed into eternal life on Easter Sunday 2019, a day that he had told his family earlier was the happiest day of his life.

Lorrie, Gus, Kati, Carl, Nora, Josie, and Peter; Don and Carol—as we come together in this Easter season to celebrate Aaron’s life and his faith in our Risen Lord, we thank you for sharing your husband, your father, your son with us.

And share him you did, not just in the sense that we all knew him and benefited from his wisdom and work, but in the reality that much of the time that he spent building up the best magazine in the United States was time taken away from you.

I say “much of the time,” because some of it will return to you in the weeks and months and years ahead. Every word Aaron wrote captured not only his insights but his voice, his humor, his faith, and his love for his fellow man. He wrote for all of us, but as we discussed often, everything either of us wrote was written with our families in mind. Those words are a part of his bequest to you. Treasure them, return to them often, and feel his presence with us still.

Editing Chronicles was always rewarding, sometimes enjoyable, but rarely easy. I reacted too often to our daily trials with frustration and anger; Aaron almost always reacted with humor. His wit kept both of us sane through many dark times. The humorous exchanges we inserted in each manuscript as we edited the text electronically formed a running commentary on our life together at Chronicles. A future historian—or better yet, a novelist with an appreciation for the absurd—may someday mine those notes to great effect.

But that’s a story for another day. Today, I want to share two brief anecdotes that illustrate not only how much Chronicles meant to Aaron but how much Aaron meant to Chronicles.

In late 2006 or early 2007, Aaron received a submission—a “Letter From Texas”—from Egon Tausch, a lawyer and longtime Chronicles reader and contributor who passed away last year. Entitled “Gott mit uns” (“God be with us”), it was an amateur historian’s account of the history and culture of the Texas Germans. Aaron immediately recognized it as a quintessential Chronicles article, a story of local culture that illustrated universal truths, and he fought doggedly for it, until Tom Fleming finally relented and agreed to publish it.

Shortly after that article appeared in the August 2007 issue, Chronicles received a donation from a woman named Hannelore Schwindt, a native German who had married a Texas German and moved to Texas. That was the only donation we ever received from her—the only one, that is, until her death a year and a half later, when she bequeathed a quarter of her nearly $30 million estate to the magazine.

That bequest became the endowment that kept Chronicles alive during the early years of this decade, a period when donations to nonprofits—The Rockford Institute included—were declining dramatically.

An investment banker who brought in an account worth seven times’ the firm’s annual budget would have received a promotion and a healthy bonus, but even though the article that Aaron had fought for had resulted in this bequest, he never asked for a raise. As far as I know, he never even told this story to the members of the board of directors who will, in the coming days, consider how to do justice to Lorrie and their children. He was simply happy to have published a great article; everything that flowed from it was, for him, an added grace.

Then there was the night of February 1, 2011. As Aaron described it in introducing my Ides of March Lecture in 2017, that was the night “we slept together”—though, he hastened to add, just “for warmth.”

The March issue was scheduled to go to press on Groundhog Day, but over the night of January 31, a storm had been brewing. When we arrived at the office on the morning of the first, we weighed our options. With projections of up to two feet of snow, we knew that we might not be able to make it back into the office the next day. We could work from home, but we had no guarantee that either of us would have power or internet access.

That, Aaron said, left us with only one option: “We’re going to stay here until this issue is finished.”

By noon, we’d sent the support staff home, and by 5 P.M. the snow was coming down at close to two inches per hour. By 9 P.M., with the end of our efforts in sight, we thought it was odd that we hadn’t seen a snowplow on North Main for a couple of hours. At 10:50, we uploaded the final PDFs to our printer in Midland, Michigan; and we approved the proofs of the entire issue by 11 o’clock.

And then we tried to leave.

Now Aaron, as you know, was a big man, and I’m not so small myself, but even with our combined bulk, we couldn’t force the door of the Institute open by more than a couple of inches, and neither of us was going to be able to squeeze through that opening. So we went back up to the second floor, out the door onto the deck, and cautiously made our way down the icy, snow-covered steps, which looked like the sledding hill at Aldeen Park. I had walked to work; Aaron’s car was buried in snow halfway up the doors. As he shoveled it out, I headed down the drive between The Rockford Institute and the Howard Center to scope out the situation. Before I got to the front of the two buildings, the snowdrifts were up to my waist.

Defeated, we headed back up to Aaron’s office, where we texted Amy and Lorrie to let them know we were OK but we weren’t coming home. Neither of us had eaten since breakfast, so we took stock of our supplies: Aaron found a couple of ancient pieces of venison jerky in his tobacco drawer; I dug up an old protein bar; and we stole a half-empty can of mixed nuts from Cindy Link’s desk.

To wash our great feast down, we cracked open a bottle of my homemade cherry liqueur. As I poured us each a glass, we realized that, in our aborted attempt to return home to our families, we had forgotten to toast the successful completion of another issue.

Every month, that toast consisted of the same five words—words a colleague had uttered with a resigned sigh one month as he pulled the latest issue of Chronicles from his mailbox. We raised our glasses high and said in unison: “It just keeps coming out.”

And then we poured another glass, and another, and yet another, until sleep took us.

When I woke up in Aaron’s office the next morning, the sky was completely blue, and the sun was glaring down on an arctic landscape. Aaron was already awake. “Good news!” he cried. “Punxsutawney Phil says it’s going to be an early spring!”

No offense to our former colleague, but Chronicles didn’t just keep coming out. For all of us who dedicated our lives to it, Chronicles was a labor of love. Between April 5, 2017, when Aaron and I toasted the successful completion of my final issue of Chronicles, and June 11 of that year, when I departed Rockford for our new home in Huntington, Indiana, I often passed by 928 North Main and saw the light in Aaron’s second-floor office shining like a beacon in the night.

That light has been extinguished, but Aaron’s light still shines. It shines in every word he wrote, every speech he gave, every one of the 220 or so issues of Chronicles that he shepherded to conclusion. His light shines in Lorrie and Gus and Kati and Carl and Nora and Josie and Peter. It shines in every one of us gathered here whose own faith was strengthened as we watched the faith that Don and Carol had passed on to Aaron grow ever deeper as he suffered trials, trials worthy of Job. As Aaron would be the first to point out, that light is nothing less than the reflected glory of the Risen Christ, Who died for Aaron’s sins, and for the sins of us all.

May the God Who makes all things new in Christ grant Aaron D. Wolf blessed repose and eternal memory.

‘Lead, Kindly Light’ →

John Henry Cardinal Newman is a saint for our time, when the world seems to have abandoned the Way, lost sight of the Truth, and rejected the Life offered through Christ’s death on the cross.