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...then that she heard of a wealthy lady who had founded a new Catholic order. Katharine Drexel, daughter of a Morgan partner, had been troubled by the squalor of Indian life she had seen on a trip through the West. In Rome later, she begged Pope Leo XIII to do something about it. "Why don't you become a missionary yourself?" the Pope replied. Katharine Drexel did, and gathered together in the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament a group of women who devoted their lives to teaching Indians and Negroes. Among them was Agatha Ryan...
...some Roman Catholic bishops, Washington, D.C. seemed like a hotbed of sin and political skulduggery-no fit place to start a school for priests. But when Pope Leo XIII polled the whole U.S. hierarchy to find out where to build a Catholic University of America, wicked Washington won in a walk...
...Mesnil de la Tour lived in the 17th Century, in a quiet town deep in the Duchy of Lorraine. There he married an heiress, and probably using his family as models, painted his life away. He sold a few canvases to the Dukes of Lorraine. Once, when Louis XIII marched into the Duchy in the midst of a plague, La Tour presented him with his Saint Sebastian in the Night. The king removed all other paintings from his room (perhaps, one historian suggests, because he hoped Saint Sebastian would protect him from the plague...
...Only the gowns are medieval. Wigs first became fashionable in Europe in 1624, when King Louis XIII of France hid his premature baldness under a mop of false hair. For years afterward Britain's professional men continued to wear wigs that marked them as doctor, lawyer, soldier or clergyman. Today, Britain's judges and lawyers, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the clerks of Parliament and the Lord Chancellor all wear wigs on duty...
...great ambitions, not all of them realized. H. G. Wells once called him "the champion international visitor and retriever of foreign orders and degrees" (he was kudosed by 15 countries, 38 universities). On his first trip to Europe, at 22, Butler was armed with letters to Pope Leo XIII, William Gladstone, Otto von Bismarck, John Henry Cardinal Newman. That was only the beginning. "It has been my happy fortune," he wrote later, "to meet, to talk with and often to know in warm friendship almost every man of light and learning during the past half century...