Fall Book Week: Julie A. Ferraro on Sr. Carmel Posa’s Life of St. Scholastica

The “Lost” Dialogue of Gregory the Great:
The Life of St. Scholastica
By Carmel Posa, SGS
Liturgical Press, 2024
$19.95   132 pp.

Sister Carmel Posa, a Good Samaritan Sister of the Order of St. Benedict, is passionate about the hagiography of the early Christian saints, especially the desert mothers. I know this to be a fact because I took her course on the wisdom of the desert mothers through St. John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, during the 2024 spring semester.

Posa is a lecturer at the Yarra Theological Union, a member college of the University of Divinity in Melbourne, Australia, as well as an editor of a Benedictine journal. During the 2024 fall semester at St. John’s University, she will be teaching a course on the Rule of St. Benedict in person at Collegeville as well.

As Fr. Michael Casey, OCSO, points out in his foreword to Posa’s latest book, The “Lost” Dialogue of Gregory the Great: The Life of St. Scholastica, she uses a “disciplined imagination”—and a style similar to St. Gregory the Great (who originally provided a biography of St. Benedict in his Dialogues)—to present a plausible life of St. Scholastica, about whom little is known beyond her brief inclusion as an example of holiness in Gregory’s work.

In the process of introducing the book, Posa details her fascination with Gregory’s Dialogues, and a certain frustration that the women included there are mostly echoes of the male “heroes” of the text. Her interest led her to begin researching Scholastica and, as she admits, this “lost” dialogue is a fictional attempt to give her subject substance.

Posa draws not only from Gregory the Great, but also Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Aelred of Rievaulx, Athanasius, and John Cassian. She incorporates references to the early religious rules, Terence Kardong, Tim Vivian, and other contemporary authors who have delved into the hagiography of the early saints, as listed in the bibliography.

The book’s 20 chapters, prologue, and postscript are brief, and have the feel of texts written in the early centuries of the Christian era. Gregory “dialogues” with Peter, his disciple, then details the stories about St. Scholastica’s spiritual journey from her birth to her death, and how Benedict instructed she be buried.

Posa’s stated goal is to “insert a story of a beloved saint into the hagiographic record of Christianity that will not only delight and inspire readers, but cause them to ponder more searchingly the sources of wisdom contained in Benedict’s remarkable Rule.” In this, she has succeeded.

Posa also inserts a rather feminist slant on the text, which isn’t a bad thing. As she taught in her class on the desert mothers, many of these early Christian women outshone the men of the time, but their light was forcibly hidden under a bushel basket by those same men, who couldn’t believe a female could be privy to the wisdom of God.

Case in point: in chapter 2, Posa has Peter remarking, “I am astounded at the wisdom and how God saw fit to bestow his gifts upon them.” Gregory replies, “You may wonder at this pursuit of philosophy and the gift of wisdom in a woman.”  Gregory then scolds Peter for his pride in believing that women aren’t worthy of such gifts, reminding him the Holy Spirit “blows where it chooses.”

Some might make excuses for the early hagiographers, who did not have the benefit of modern research to create their portraits of the likes of Mary of Egypt, Macrina the Younger, and many others, as Casey notes in his foreword. Or they might excuse the tendency to “bury” the wisdom of these women, ignore them completely, or diminish their influence, as Gregory the Great did with Scholastica in his Dialogues, making her almost a footnote in the story of her twin brother Benedict. But in reading Posa’s book, we find that the Holy Spirit always has always drawn both men and women to holiness, and will continue to do so. Even if those stories haven’t been written by the “authorities” of a given era, the truth remains. ♦

Julie A. Ferraro has been a journalist for over 30 years, covering diverse beats for secular newspapers as well as writing for many Catholic publications. A mother and grandmother, she currently lives in Idaho. Her column, “God ‘n Life,” appears regularly in Today’s American Catholic.

Image: Detail from Philippe Sauvan, Saint Scholastica, 18th c.