The Jesuit Relations (1610–1791)

The yearly reports of Jesuit missionaries in New France: one of the richest records of early contact between Europeans and Native peoples.

For nearly two centuries, French Jesuit missionaries in what is now Canada and the northern United States sent detailed reports home to Paris. Edited by Reuben Gold Thwaites into 73 volumes, they describe missions among the Wendat (Huron), Innu and Haudenosaunee peoples, the martyrdom of missionaries, and the devastating epidemics that followed European arrival.

They are read today as a record of faith and courage and also of the cultural upheaval that colonization brought.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Bartolomé de las Casas — A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies (1552)

A Spanish priest’s eyewitness protest against the cruelty of the conquest of the Americas.

Bartolomé de las Casas came to the Caribbean as a colonist and slaveholder. After seeing the violence inflicted on Indigenous people, he gave up his estates, became a Dominican friar, and spent the rest of his life campaigning against their enslavement and murder.

His Brief Account, written for the future King Philip II of Spain, is a searing indictment of colonization carried out in the name of Christianity, written by a Christian who believed it betrayed the faith.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Heinrich Graetz — History of the Jews (1891–1898)

The landmark six-volume history of the Jewish people, from ancient times to the nineteenth century.

Heinrich Graetz was the first historian to write a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from a Jewish perspective. The English edition, published by the Jewish Publication Society of America, traces centuries of Jewish life, learning and survival, including expulsions, massacres and forced conversions across Europe and the Middle East.

Graetz wrote before the twentieth century, so his history ends long before the Holocaust. It remains essential for understanding the long history of persecution that came before it.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Josephus — The Wars of the Jews (c. 75)

An eyewitness history of the Jewish revolt against Rome and the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in the year 70.

Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest and commander who fought against Rome, was captured, and then witnessed the siege of Jerusalem from the Roman side. His account of the fall of the city and the burning of the Second Temple is among the most important histories of the ancient world.

The destruction he describes, remembered every year on the fast of Tisha B’Av, began nearly two thousand years of Jewish exile.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah (1998)

The Vatican’s reflection on the Holocaust and on the Church’s duty of memory and repentance.

Published by the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews in March 1998, this document calls the Shoah an unspeakable tragedy and asks Catholics to remember it, to repent of the failures of Christians, and to work so that it can never happen again.

Jewish organizations welcomed it while also raising critical questions, and the debate it opened is part of its importance.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Nostra Aetate (1965)

The Second Vatican Council’s declaration that transformed the Catholic Church’s relationship with the Jewish people.

Promulgated on October 28, 1965, Nostra Aetate (“In Our Time”) is one of the shortest documents of the Second Vatican Council, and one of the most important. It rejected the charge that the Jewish people as a whole were responsible for the death of Jesus, and it declared that the Church “decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone.”

It opened a new era of dialogue between Catholics and Jews that continues today.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Pope Pius XI — Mit brennender Sorge (1937)

“With Burning Concern”: the encyclical smuggled into Nazi Germany and read from Catholic pulpits on Palm Sunday, 1937.

Pope Pius XI wrote this encyclical in German, not Latin, so it could be read directly to German Catholics. It condemned the Nazi regime’s violations of its agreement with the Church and rejected the idolatry of race and state.

Copies were secretly printed and distributed, then read aloud in churches across Germany on March 21, 1937. The regime responded with arrests and the seizure of printing presses.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Foxe’s Book of Martyrs (1563)

One of the most widely read books in the English-speaking world for three centuries.

John Foxe’s book tells the stories of Christian martyrs from the early Church through the Reformation. The Project Gutenberg edition is an abridged version of the classic.

Readers should know that Foxe wrote as a committed Protestant during the religious wars of the sixteenth century, and his account of Catholics is strongly partisan. It is valuable both for the stories it preserves and as a window into how bitterly Christians of that era persecuted one another.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Lactantius — Of the Manner in Which the Persecutors Died (c. 315)

A tutor at the imperial court tells the story of the emperors who persecuted the Church, and how their reigns ended.

Lactantius taught rhetoric in the eastern capital of Nicomedia when the Great Persecution began there in 303. His short, vivid book is one of the key sources for the period, including the Edict of Milan (313) that granted Christians freedom of worship.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.

Eusebius — Church History, Book VIII (c. 325)

An eyewitness account of the Great Persecution under the Emperor Diocletian, the harshest the early Church ever faced.

Eusebius of Caesarea is called the father of church history. In Book VIII he describes the persecution that began in 303: churches destroyed, Scriptures burned, and believers imprisoned, tortured and killed across the empire.

Eusebius lived through it himself. A decade later, under Constantine, Christianity became legal, and his history records both the suffering and the survival.

Part of the Boston Made Reader’s special collection Courage, Conscience & Service. Every book and document here is free to read.