Originally published on National Catholic Register, on July 25, 2025
The noted historian and longtime college professor is being remembered as a man of prophetic insight who defended Church teaching and helped to make the Catholic intellectual tradition accessible for his students and readers.
James Hitchcock — a noted historian of the Catholic Church, popular author and longtime college professor — is being remembered by friends and colleagues as a man of prophetic insight who defended Church teaching and helped to make the Catholic intellectual tradition accessible for his students and readers. Hitchcock died on July 14 at age 87.
Hitchcock taught history at Saint Louis University (SLU), a Jesuit institution, from the late 1960s until 2013. Some of the most popular of the dozen books he wrote include his one-volume History of the Catholic Church: From the Apostolic Age to the Third Millennium, published in 2012 by Ignatius Press, as well as Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation? and Recovery of the Sacred.
He served as a commentator for EWTN’s television coverage of the papal conclave in 2013 that elected Pope Francis, appeared as a guest on EWTN Bookmark, and many of his articles are available at the EWTN website. In addition, Hitchcock was an occasional contributor to the Register over the years, writing columns on various topics such as the life of St. John XXIII upon the occasion of the pope’s canonization, as well as a critique of the removal of a statue of Jesuit missionaries from SLU’s campus in 2015.
Defender of Doctrine
Coming of age as a teacher and an academic in the years immediately following the Second Vatican Council, Hitchcock was known for his defense of Catholic doctrine and of reverent liturgical practice, amid the widespread dissent and liturgical experimentation that emerged in the Church in the years following Vatican II. Through his writings and insights, such as his books Recovery of the Sacred and The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, he provided stability and clarity to many Catholics feeling disoriented in the decades after the Second Vatican Council.
Speaking with Catholic News Agency, the Register’s sister news agency, in 2013, Hitchcock spoke about the importance of learning the history of Christianity as a means of deepening one’s faith in the Church.
“In order to understand what the Catholic Church is and what it means to be a Catholic, one has to understand the evolution and development of dogma, the various kinds of spirituality, the relationship between the Church and cultures, and religious art and music,” Hitchcock said at the time.
“[History is] moving toward something, and we’re called upon to bring about the presence of Christ in the world. It’s directly related to evangelization and moving toward the eventual fulfillment of history.”
Hitchcock’s late wife, Helen Hull Hitchcock, was also a prominent Catholic author and speaker and served for more than a decade as a board member for EWTN (which owns the Register). She was the co-founder of Adoremus, a respected society that promotes faithful celebration of the Catholic liturgy, and founding director of Women for Faith and Family, an organization that provides support for Catholic women and encourages fidelity to the Church. Helen, a convert from Episcopalianism, died in 2014.
Born on Feb. 13, 1938, James Francis Hitchcock grew up in St. Louis and attended both St. Louis University High School and Saint Louis University. He later earned master’s and doctoral degrees in history from Princeton University, teaching for a time at St. John’s University in New York, according to his obituary.
James met Helen in New York, and the two were married in 1966 in St. Louis; they went on to have four daughters. That same year, Hitchcock began his teaching tenure at his alma mater — SLU — a post he retained for nearly five decades.
Suffering from Parkinson’s disease in his later years, Hitchcock died July 14 after receiving last rites. He was laid to rest July 22 after a funeral at his home parish, St. Roch, in St. Louis.
Colleagues, Readers and Friends Remember Hitchcock
Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, the founder of Ignatius Press, called Hitchcock’s death “the end of a dynasty.” He spoke fondly of visiting his friends the Hitchcocks in their St. Louis home, which was filled with books as well as an extensive personal archive of documents, periodicals, correspondence with bishops and letters from concerned Catholics.
“He and his wife Helen were without doubt among the ‘pillars of the Church’ in the late 20th and early 21st century. I was blessed to have known them both well,” Father Fessio told the Register.
Father Fessio noted that Hitchcock played a major role in founding the U.S. edition of the theological journal Communio, which was started by Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri de Lubac and the future Pope Benedict XVI. He also was a founding member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars.
As an author, “He was always easy to work with, prompt and professional. If we had an author-appreciation medal, he’d have earned one,” Father Fessio added.
Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius Press, told the Register that Hitchcock’s 2012 History of the Catholic Church has been “far and away his best-selling title” with Ignatius, posting strong numbers upon its release and still to this day. He described Hitchcock as “a national figure in Catholicism” in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, noting that he frequently spoke to evangelical Christian as well as Catholic audiences.
Brumley, a convert to Catholicism, was edified in the 1980s by Hitchcock’s book Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation? Brumley said the book helped him in his conversion journey to becoming Catholic “by making sense out of the Church.” Brumley said he believes Hitchcock helped many other young people navigate the turbulent post-conciliar period.
One of those young seekers was Sam Fentress, a St. Louis-based photographer who, as a 25-year-old and not yet a Catholic, knocked on Hitchcock’s office door at SLU, interested in talking to Hitchcock about Catholicism. Fentress said Hitchcock was very welcoming and they had a long and fruitful conversation, and later Hitchcock invited Fentress to ecumenical Christian meetings at his home, where he got to know Helen as well.
Fentress told the Register that he had been interested in Catholicism for a while — he had been a fan of then-Pope John Paul II and had been reading a lot of Catholic theology and the Bible — but didn’t know any Catholics until he got to know “Jim.” His friendship with the Hitchcocks blossomed into the couple agreeing to be his godparents, and he was baptized into the Church in 1982.
“He was a great example for me, and a good friend, and my life would not be the same without him. He was also the first practicing Catholic I ever met,” Fentress recalled.
For his part, Brumley got to know Hitchcock in the 1980s through some mutual friends. Though Hitchcock was a “typical Catholic professor” in his manner, Brumley said James and Helen went out of their way to make themselves accessible to young people, warmly opening their home to students and others who were interested in learning about Catholicism.
“Hitchcock was a key figure in American Catholicism following Vatican II,” Brumley told the Register in a follow-up email.
“For many Catholics, his ‘traditional Catholicism’ (to be distinguished from today’s ‘Traditionalist Catholicism’) charted the sane, balanced Catholic course between reactionary rejection of the Second Vatican Council on the one hand and hyper-progressive, dissenting revision of it to serve a largely non-Catholic, world-driven agenda on the other.”
Father Gerald Murray, a canon lawyer and frequent EWTN contributor, cited Hitchcock’s aforementioned works The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism and Catholicism and Modernity: Confrontation or Capitulation? as important contributions to the defense of Catholic doctrine in response to “the wave of dissent that rolled over the Church in the years following the Second Vatican Council,” saying the latter “provided much needed encouragement for those who felt overwhelmed by the chaotic situation of rampant doctrinal heterodoxy.”
Father Murray told the Register: “He was courageous in the defense of orthodox Catholicism then and remained so for his entire life. May he rest in God’s peace.”
Jonah McKeown is a Register staff writer. He previously was a staff writer and podcast producer for Catholic News Agency. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and has worked as a writer, as a producer for public radio, and as a videographer. He is based in St. Louis.