To mark our anniversary, we have invited 50 Catholics to choose a person from the past 175 years whose life has been a personal inspiration to them and an example of their faith at its best “Baloney!” This was the first “inspiring word” young Tom Merton heard from the deep Russian voice of Baroness Catherine de Hueck as he wandered into her public lecture at St Bonaventure University, New York, in 1941. At that time she was living in Harlem, one of the first white people to be involved in racial justice in the United States. Merton was just one of many people who would have their lives significantly changed by Catherine. Born in Russia in 1896, raised in both Orthodoxy and Catholicism, experiencing the First World War and the Russian Revolution, enduring the pligh