author
Herbert Thurston
1856–1939
A Jesuit priest with a curious mind, he wrote widely on Catholic history, liturgy, and spiritual life, and was also known for investigating claims of spiritualism. His work reached a broad audience through many books and his extensive contributions to the Catholic Encyclopedia.
1 Audiobook
The Stations of the Cross : an account of their history and devotional purpose
by Herbert Thurston
About the author
Born in London in 1856, Herbert Thurston was an English Roman Catholic priest who joined the Jesuit order and became a remarkably prolific writer. Reference works describe him as a scholar of liturgical, historical, literary, and spiritual subjects, with a career that made him well known in Catholic intellectual life.
He is remembered especially for the sheer range of his writing. In addition to books and essays, he contributed extensively to the Catholic Encyclopedia, which helped fix his reputation as a reliable and energetic popular scholar. Several sources also note that, in his own day, he was regarded as an expert on spiritualism and related phenomena.
Thurston died in London in 1939. Today, he stands out as a learned and unusually wide-ranging Jesuit author whose work brought church history, devotion, and disputed supernatural claims to general readers in an accessible way.