A Crusader Goes Home: An Homage to Siobhan Nash-Marshall

A few weeks ago, on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe (December 12), a great crusading spirit passed from this land of exile to her true home. Siobhan Nash-Marshall’s death, following a long and heroic struggle with cancer, marked the end of this indomitable crusader’s tour of active service in the Church Militant. In her relatively short life, she was always on the front line in the culture wars, defiant and indefatigable. She will be missed by those who knew her and those who had the privilege of working with her.

I’m not sure when I first met Siobhan. It might have been in Rome, possibly at a conference held at Santa Croce University. We only met a few times, but we corresponded often. As a Catholic philosopher, she wrote for the St. Austin Review, the cultural journal of which I am the editor, but our closest collaboration was on the publication of Silent Angel by Antonia Arslan, an inspiring novella about the Armenian Genocide. This would have been in around 2019 when I was working as the director of book publishing at the Augustine Institute.

Siobhan had translated the novel from the Italian of the original and asked me if the Augustine Institute might be interested in publishing it. I had read Antonia Arslan’s earlier novel Skylark Farm, also about the Armenian Genocide, which had been a New York Times bestseller. The literary merit of this earlier work, coupled with its unflinchingly realistic depiction of the horrors of the genocide, had impressed me greatly. Excited by the prospect of publishing this new work by such a fine and esteemed novelist, I persuaded my colleagues at the Augustine Institute and my friends at Ignatius Press to co-publish Silent Angel.

Siobhan Nash-Marshall was born in Munich in Germany on July 4, 1965. There was something symbolic about the dates of both her birth and her death. A fiercely independent spirit, she fought for justice and freedom for the downtrodden in both the United States and wherever else in the world such justice and freedom were threatened. And it seems providentially fitting that she should pass from this world on the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, considering that everything she did was inspired by her Catholic faith and her profound sense of charity.

The daughter of diplomats, she grew up among polyglots. She learned languages as a child, she would say, before “it took work”. As an adult, she could speak Greek, Latin, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Armenian. She pursued an academic vocation as a philosopher and her dissertation was published in 2000 as Participation and the Good: A Study in Boethian Metaphysics. Yet the ivory towers of academe could not contain her irrepressible spirit, nor her desire to educate and evangelize. She published a popular book on Joan of Arc in 1999 and four years later entered the political fray with the publication of What it Takes to be Free: Religion and the Roots of Democracy.

Her candour and her willingness to court controversy in defence of authentic Catholic education, and in defiance of those who sought to undermine it, did not make her many friends with those who wielded power at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, at which she taught. She was denied tenure by those who were in the process of overseeing UST’s abandonment of its Catholic mission. David Deavel, her colleague and friend at UST, offered his own view of the reasons for her being refused tenure:

Why was she denied tenure? The only people whom I know to have information refused to say. I suspect it was because of her boldness in promoting a much more sharply delineated version of what a Catholic university was than what the administration wanted to hear. She did this both in committees and in public. Though the demons of wokeness and DEI had not fully colonized America in the 2000s, they were being nourished in the universities already, even ostensibly Catholic and Christian ones.

Dr. Deavel also recalled that, before the tenure decision, some of Siobhan’s views on the nature of Catholic education had been praised to some of the senior administrators at the university by Archbishop Michael Miller, the Secretary of the Congregation for Catholic Education at the Vatican.

“I have long suspected that his approval sealed her fate,” Dr. Deavel wrote. “She was too high a flyer to be saying things that didn’t match with the direction that so-called normal Catholic institutions were taking. While the women’s center on campus liked to talk about how unfairly women were treated, nobody associated with that institution uttered a peep about this decision. As is well known, one’s woman card will not work if the woman in question does not utter the liberal and leftist pieties required. Siobhan never did.”

Rejected by a Catholic university, which was in the process of losing both its faith and its way, Siobhan was appointed as the Mary T. Clark Chair of Christian Philosophy at Manhattanville College in 2007, a position she held until her death.

As a philosopher and a lover of freedom and justice, she was alarmed at the globalist Machiavellian manipulation of the Covid-19 outbreak. She wrote many essays on the tyranny and injustice that prevailed in the wake of the “pandemic”, especially for The Imaginative Conservative, and her final book, George, published in 2022, was inspired by the need to confront such tyranny. An imaginative reflection on the story of St. George and the Dragon, it is, like C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, “a myth retold”.

“Siobhan Nash-Marshall reminds me of C. S. Lewis,” I wrote of George. “Like Lewis, she uses old stories to teach timeless truths in a new way. With the eye of the true philosopher, she shows that the distance between what is and what I want can be wider than the abyss that separates heaven from hell…. This is storytelling at its most depth-delvingly profound.”

Related to the desire for the restoration of rational thinking which had inspired the post-COVID essays and the writing of George was the Marshall Institute for Ethical Thought and Activity, which Siobhan founded in 2020. This was created to encourage students to debate contemporary issues calmly, logically, and coherently by offering workshops in ethics, logic, and writing for high school students. This initiative has proved a great success, with over 250 students from the New York City area gathering annually at Manhattanville College to debate controversial topics calmly and rationally.

Perhaps her most important work, however, and the one which might prove to be her most enduring legacy, is The Sins of the Fathers: Turkish Denialism and the Armenian Genocide, published in 2017. This work is so important and so potent in its damning indictment of the Turkish extermination of the Armenians, that I cannot forebear quoting from Siobhan’s foreword:

The Armenian Genocide that has played out for over a century marks the moment in which the entire world consented (and still consents) to the sacrifice of an entire people and culture to an anti-ideal: to a radical group’s will to power. It marks the moment in which the entire world consented (and still consents) to the sacrifice of a genos to a falsehood. It marks the moment when the world consented (and still consents) to the sacrifice of history itself and the truth. It is not by chance that the Armenian Genocide was so quickly and carefuly reproduced by the Nazis. Hitler bargained that once the world consented to allowing one radical group’s will to power to ravage a people, appropriate its wealth and native lands, dstroy its culture, deny its history, and lie about its own past, it would have to allow a second radical group the same privilege. If the Turks could do it, why not the Germans?

In the same spirit which inspired her to write so strongly about the plight of the Armenians, Siobhan was a key player in the founding of the Christians in Need Foundation (CINF) in 2014 to help the ancient Christian cultures of the world which are imperiled by the threat of genocide or “ethnic cleansing”.

Considering the work she’s done to highlight the historical monstrosity of the Armenian Genocide, it is not surprising that most of the tributes to Siobhan Nash-Marshall in the wake of her untimely death at the age of only fifty-nine, have been from the Armenian community. (Deavel’s moving memoir, published by the Imaginative Conservative, is a noble and notable exception.) I am, therefore, honoured and grateful to be offering these few words in homage to a heroine of Christendom and a crusader for truth.

May she rest in peace and may flights of angels sing her to her rest.