The Drama of Catholicism: Church History as Tragicomedy

Death by burning, beheading, drowning, rack, and rope. Adultery, treachery, warfare, temptation, persecution. These and many more evils besides characterize the history of Christ’s Church on earth, especially as told by great dramatists and poets over the centuries. For these great playwrights, the blood of the martyrs was the ink of their plays. And yet, just as Christ’s Passion ends not on the Cross but with the Resurrection, death never gets the final word in a Catholic play. 

Join us for the Collegium Institute Young Catholic Leaders Initiative’s daylong Spring workshop The Drama of Catholicism: Church History as Tragicomedy at the University of Pennsylvania Newman Center from 9am to 3pm on Saturday, March 21st. Through lectures, small group discussions, music, dramatic readings, and a staged play, this workshop invites high school students and teachers to see all of Church history as a tragicomedy, a tragic thing of blood and tears resolving into a divine comedy of smiles and laughter. 

From the famous medieval English mystery plays that Shakespeare saw in his youth retelling the Bible from Creation to Doomsday to St. John Henry Newman’s dramatization of the Patristic period, from the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket as told by T.S. Eliot to the martyrdom of St. Thomas More as told by Shakespeare and Robert Bolt, from the drowning Jesuit of Paul Claudel to the enigmatic Jeweler of Karol Wojtyla, witness every period of Church history on the page and the stage. Do you feel like your life is a tragedy? Come to this workshop and learn to turn your tragedies into comedies, your struggles with sin into a stage fit for sanctity. 

The workshop is free of charge and includes free breakfast and lunch.

Registration: