By Robert Royal.
But first a note: One of our contributing writers, Eduardo Echeverria, and two of this site's friends, Ralph Martin and Ed Peters, were abruptly fired from the Sacred Heart Seminary this week by Detroit's new Archbishop Edward Weisenburger. The situation is still developing, so we will be commenting via the Papal Posse in a few days as the situation becomes clearer. In the meantime, today, a very different story from the groves of academe.
Now for today's column...
James Hitchcock, the American Catholic historian, died in his native St. Louis last week. He was an accomplished academic - Princeton PhD - and his History of the Catholic Church will remain a point of reference for years to come. But he was also a man of broad insight and learning, an able tongue, and a ready wit that he applied not only to the past, but to the present. His volumes on public Catholicism, such as Catholicism & Modernity, The Decline and Fall of Radical Catholicism, and The Pope and the Jesuits, were guiding stars for many of us younger readers trying to find our way through the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. But when friends passed along the news of his death, one of his essays came spontaneously to mind: "Postmortem on a Rebirth: The Catholic Intellectual Renaissance."
His main point in that text was to disprove the view that the Catholic Church prior to Vatican II was an intellectual desert:
Conventional wisdom in Catholic intellectual circles of the 1970s holds that the condemnation of modernism [by Pius X in 1907] brought an end to serious Catholic thought for more than fifty years, ushering in a reign of terror which inhibited intellectuals until the benign pontificate of Pope John XXIII (1958-63) and the dramatic changes of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65).
Of course, anyone who knows anything about Catholic culture in the first two-thirds of the twentieth century also knows that, despite some bumps along the road for some specific thinkers, this is not only false, but something close to the opposite of the truth. I've written a bit about this in my book A Deeper Vision, and Jim Hitchcock, in particular, knew quite a lot. His summaries of various thinkers in just a few pages here can only be termed magisterial.
What's true is that, in several nations, Catholic thought had been undergoing what Hitchcock called a "rebirth" ever since Leo XIII's encyclicals Aeterni patris (encouraging renewed study of Aquinas) and Rerum novarum (a Catholic approach to the new social and political conditions in the modern world). Not only did many world-class Catholic thinkers emerge as a result, they were valued both inside the Church and even in secular, sometimes historically anti-Catholic institutions such as Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, the Universities of Virginia, Chicago, Toronto, Oxford, and beyond.
It's enough to mention just a few of the most obvious names to prove his point. Among the orthodox Thomists: the Maritains, Gilson, Simon, Pieper, Gilby, and Fulton Sheen (if you think he was just a glib media figure, take a look at his doctoral dissertation, "The Spirit of Contemporary Philosophy and the Finite God," for which he - the first American to do so - won the Cardinal Mercier Prize for International Philosophy at the then-prestigious Catholic University of Louvain). And less orthodox Thomists - sometimes bordering and more than bordering on heterodoxies - also flourished, figures like Rahner, Lonergan, Maréchal, and many more.
In the same period, though its practitioners sometimes encountered pushback from the more pugnacious neo-Scholastics, were other currents like personalism, existentialism, and la nouvelle théologie: Guardini, Daniélou, de Lubac, Congar, Chenu, Marcel, Dawson, von Hildebrand, Bouyer, von Balthasar - later Ratzinger and Wojtyla.
Pius X may well have aimed at curbing now-obvious heresies. And acolytes of the pope went further than he did himself in sniffing out modernists. But you could hardly claim tha...
