Correspondence

I was recently referred to Sean Pilcher’s excellent article (“Too Much Catholick,” Easter 2025). As the publisher of the King James Bible for Catholics, I am always glad to see honest articles about the Authorized Version.

The King James Bible for Catholics exists because of many requests by members of the Ordinariates for ready availability of a complete edition of the K.J.V. with all eighty books in the 1611 edition. I responded to these requests with the encouragement of Steven Lopes, the bishop of the Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter and the chairman of the U.S.C.C.B.’s Committee on Divine Worship. While his verbal imprimatur (“publish it”) does not have the force of a Council of Bishops as the 1983 Code of Canon Law requires for official approbation, the introduction he commissioned to be published with it, written by David Ousley, makes many of the same fine points as Pilcher does. The introduction has no formal nihil obstat, but it certainly contains nothing objectionable, as many would say is the case with the entire K.J.V.—as long as Catholics read it through a Catholic lens, that is, with a Catholic commentary.

Because of Bishop Lopes’s encouragement, Catholics may now own a K.J.V. Bible with all the books in the accustomed Catholic order. Indeed, the K.J.V. for Catholics includes all of the books that were in both the 1610 Douay–Rheims and the 1611 K.J.V., including the three books in the Sixto-Clementine Vulgate removed from almost all more recent Catholic Bibles due to the formal listing by the Council of Trent of the deuterocanonical books.

Regarding those “extra” books which Trent directed to be included in an Appendix so they would not be lost, Pilcher mentions the Prayer of Manasseh as a “delight,” but there are also I and II Esdras (III and IV Esdras in the Douay). Oddly, in his short list of “delights” Pilcher includes Bel and the Dragon as though it were not canonical, but it is actually in Catholic Bibles as chapter fourteen of the book of Daniel. In the 1611 K.J.V., it was separated from the main canon because—as is the case with the rest of the deuterocanon—the Hebrew Bible omits it along with the Song of the Three Children (a portion of Daniel chapter three) and the History of Susanna (chapter thirteen). In the K.J.V. for Catholics, all three of these deuterocanonical texts in Daniel are restored to their expected order. The excluded books in the Appendix remain an appendix, indicating their non-canonical status.

Pilcher calls the use of “highly favored” for “full of grace” in Luke’s Annunciation narrative “inexcusable.” The K.J.V. for Catholics includes an appropriate footnote about this. The New American Bible Revised Edition (N.A.B.R.E.) uses “favored one” here, not even “highly favored.” Catholics hear “full of grace” when Luke is read at Mass because the N.A.B.R.E. lectionary is not the same as the N.A.B.R.E. Bible!

As I was preparing the K.J.V. for Catholics and seeking information about why some Catholics believe it is full of heresies, I received long lists of objections about the K.J.V., many of them complaining about language in the K.J.V. which those complaining were apparently unaware is identical to language in the Douay, the N.A.B.R.E., or other approved Catholic Bibles. The Walsingham Publishing website presents a compilation of these objections and describes how they were adjudicated in the K.J.V. for Catholics. This was usually accomplished with a footnote, since I chose to be completely faithful to the unaltered original language of the K.J.V. One exception is the non-word “Jehovah,” which in accordance with a decree issued by Pope Benedict is replaced with “the Lord” and a footnote indicating the change in the small number of places it occurs.

While portions of the K.J.V., especially the Last Gospel, have now entered the official public liturgy of the Catholic Church in Divine Worship: The Missal, promulgated for the Ordinariates by Cardinal Sarah and Pope Francis, most access to the K.J.V. by Catholics remains “for private study.” But as with all translations, Catholics have always been advised to read the Bible along with approved Catholic commentaries in order to understand the text as interpreted by Holy Mother Church.

John Covert
Walsingham Publishing

I appreciated Emmett Rensin’s essay “The Ambivalence of the Asylum” (Easter 2025). It gave me a good picture of what it’s like to be taken to one in New York now. I came upon the essay because Rensin mentioned Reluctantly Told by Jane Hillyer, and I must say that, whereas he may be right about the ambivalence in many asylum narratives, his interpretation of the incident in Reluctantly Told is incorrect.

When Jane, not realizing she is locked in, goes downstairs to sit in a lawn chair and finds the place rather pleasant, she is in a private sanitarium, not yet the large public asylum that she will find herself in after six weeks in the sanitarium. Importantly, she doesn’t know where she is. The place does include people who are mentally ill, but she doesn’t know that yet. She thinks it is a sort of rest home.

Later in the book, Jane escapes from the large asylum, and does turn back to it rather than going home. She never expressed an appreciation of any aspect of the asylum, though: Some parts of it were less bad than others, but she always just wanted out. She says she didn’t go home on the day she escaped because she didn’t have a proper hat and gloves, which would have shocked her family members, not because she found any part of being in an asylum pleasant.

I know this because I have written, though not yet published, a book revealing the true identity of “Jane Hillyer,” which is a pseudonym. I knew the real author, who was a family member, and have studied Reluctantly Told carefully as part of my research. The working title of my biography is Out of the Dark Castle, a title based on the second of the two popular images of asylums mentioned by Rensin: the vampire’s castle.

Pam Peirce
San Francisco, California

The author replies:

Autobiography is a tricky genre for many reasons, chief among them that it has never quite been clear to what extent we should regard these texts as literature and to what extent they should be regarded as literal, historical testimony by their author. I don’t mean: Do they contain fiction? (although they often do). I mean: Do they contain subtext? Ambiguity? Lacunae? Do they ever reveal more than what their authors strictly intended?

Pam Peirce is correct that Hillyer never writes, “I felt ambivalent.” She is correct that in the early chapters of Reluctantly Told, she never writes, “I knew I was in a private sanitarium” (although she does know she’s meant to stay put). But Hillyer does know it wasn’t her idea to come there and that there is something wrong with her mind, and I do not believe she is stupid. She tries to leave, and then, at the very moment she escapes, she stops short with the vague idea that it might not be so bad to rest for a while. Then, as soon as she is recaptured, she begins to upbraid herself for failing to escape.

Did Hillyer really want to leave? Did she really want to stay? My argument in the essay is that she, like many others in similar situations, wants neither, and wants both, and that this tension is unbearable and difficult to articulate, and leads—in various ways I describe—to baffling and seemingly self-contradictory thoughts and actions. Hillyer never writes, “I felt ambivalent; I wanted both things.” Neither does Kaysen, nor Kavan—neither, frankly, have I. But I don’t think there’s a better way to read these texts unless one takes their authors to possess total and totally articulated self-awareness: that is, unless one takes autobiography—and human psychology itself—to be a very shallow thing.

Peirce actually provides a clarifying example here, one that I nearly used in my own essay. Hillyer “just wanted out” of another, larger asylum. She wasn’t ambivalent at all. She was so dedicated to getting out that she actually escaped—no small feat in an asylum of the early twentieth century. But then she went back, returning herself to indefinite incarceration in a mental facility, just as she had earlier in the book. Peirce holds that this is because, and only because, “she didn’t have a proper hat and gloves.” That’s what Hillyer tells us too. Maybe we have to take her word for it, but I leave it to the reader to decide whether there might be something else—something more ambivalent—going on here.