Unsung Heroes Take Center Stage, by Joseph Pearce

By Joseph Pearce, Crisis Magazine, June 20, 2026

Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire). The author of over thirty books, he is editor of the St. Austin Review, series editor of the Ignatius Critical Editions, senior instructor with Homeschool Connections, and senior contributor at the Imaginative Conservative and Crisis Magazine. His personal website is http://www.jpearce.co.

Belloc and Manning deserve to emerge from the shadows of Chesterton and Newman.

Regular readers of this illustrious journal might recall that I recently wrote a multipart series titled “Unsung Heroes of Christendom,” which focused on heroic figures from history who are not as well-known as they should be. This series came to mind as I received three newly published books from Mysterium Press, an intrepid new publisher in England. The three books in question are Charles II and James II, both by Hilaire Belloc, and The Glories of the Sacred Heart by Cardinal Manning. More on these specific books presently, but why the connection with the “Unsung Heroes of Christendom” series?

Quite simply, the two authors, Belloc and Manning, have spent far too long in the shadows of better-known contemporaries with whom they are inextricably associated. …