In his autobiography, Benjamin Franklin recalled that after leaving his apprenticeship at his older brother’s print shop in Boston and moving to Philadelphia, young Franklin wanted to become the best printer in town. To pursue that ambition, in 1725 he sailed from Philadelphia to London to learn from some of the best printers in the business. “I immediately got into work at [Samuel] Palmer’s, then a famous printing house in Bartholomew Close,” Franklin wrote, “and here I continued near a year.” It was a neighborhood in London called Little Britain, not far from Saint Paul’s Cathedral, but anyone going to London to follow in the footsteps of Franklin will find that the street where he lived was obliterated by German bombs during the Second World War.

After nearly a year, Franklin found work at a larger printing house, that of John Watt. It was in a building at Wild Court, near Lincon Inn’s Fields, and Franklin decided that his walk to his new job from his digs near Saint Paul’s was too long. As he put it, “My lodging in Little Britain being too remote, I found another in Duke Street, opposite to the Romish chapel.” This street was on the western side of the formed by the buildings of Lincoln’s Inn Fields.  Until civic improvements made in 1735, the area remained congested, rowdy, and filthy.

The Duke Street where Franklin lived has been renamed Sardinia Street. That change of name acknowledged that in Franklin’s day, the predominant feature on the old Duke Street was the embassy of the Kingdom of Sardinia. It was in this embassy that one would have found what Franklin called “the Romish chapel;” that Roman Catholic chapel is now the Roman Catholic Church of Saints Anselm and Cecilia.

As Franklin thought back on his room in Duke Street, he wrote in his autobiography that it was “two pair of stairs backward, at an Italian warehouse.” His phrasing implies that at the back of the warehouse, two flights of stairs led up to living quarters. He wrote that an elderly “widow lady kept the house; she had a daughter, and a maid servant, and a journeyman who attended the warehouse,” although he lived elsewhere. After inquiring about Franklin’s character, the landlady agreed to rent to him at the same rate as his previous landlord “as she said, from the protection she expected in having a man lodge in the house.”

Her father was a Protestant clergyman, but she married a Roman Catholic and converted to Catholicism. Franklin dined with her every evening, and he visited another lodger in the house. “In a garret of her house,” Franklin wrote, “there lived a maiden lady of seventy, in the most retired manner.” Franklin’s landlady told him that this tenant “was a Roman Catholic, had been sent abroad when young, and lodged in a nunnery with an intent of becoming a nun; but, the country not agreeing with her, she returned to England, where, there being no nunnery, she had vowed to lead the life of a nun, as near as might be done in those circumstances.”

To that end, he recalled, “she had given all her estate to charitable uses, reserving only twelve pounds a year to live on, and out of this sum she still gave a great deal in charity, living herself on water-gruel only, and using no fire but to boil it.” During her many years of living in that attic, she paid no rent, since the current landlady and the previous landlords, also Catholics, “deemed it a blessing to have her there.” Each day, a priest came to hear her confession. Franklin related that his landlady asked this old hermit, “how she, as she lived, could possibly find so much employment for a confessor?”

When Franklin recorded her answer, he retained the lady’s emphasis: “Oh,” said she, “it is impossible to avoid vain thoughts.”

Franklin wrote of his hermit neighbor that he “was permitted once to visit her.” When he visited her, he found that “She was cheerful and polite, and conversed pleasantly.” He looked around and saw that her “room was clean, but had no other furniture than a matrass, a table with a crucifix and book, a stool which she gave me to sit on, and a picture over the chimney of Saint Veronica displaying her handkerchief, with the miraculous figure of Christ’s bleeding face on it, which she explained to me with great seriousness.” Franklin said that “She looked pale, but was never sick; and I give it as another instance on how small an income life and health may be supported.”

Fifty years after living in a slummy part of London, Franklin was Pennsylvania’s elder statesman. “What makes him, after two centuries,” observed Alistair Cooke in his America, “not merely impressive but lovable is his absolute lack of arrogance and the steady goodness of his belief that in helping to create the American Republic he was founding a truer order of society.”  Franklin’s absence of arrogance allowed him to be open to other perspectives, giving them a fair hearing even if he disagreed.

In an era when Protestants and Catholics tended to glare at one another with enmity, convinced each other was the spawn of Satan, Franklin was willing to have dinner every day with a Catholic widow and pay a respectful visit to a Catholic hermit. As Franklin knew from his Authorised or King James Version of the Bible, the Jewish fisherman that Catholics regard as the first Pope told a Roman centurion, “Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons; but in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him” (Acts 10:34-35).

Based on my article in the 2025 issue of Conversatio.