Called To Be Saints: John Hugo, the Catholic Worker, and a Theology of Radical Christianity by Benjamin T. Peters (review)

Few would recognize Pittsburgh diocesan priest, John J. Hugo, as a major figure in the history of Catholicism in the United States; however, Benjamin T. Peters identifies Father Hugo's spiritual direction as crucial to what Dorothy Day described as her "second conversion." Peters reads Day's spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness, as a Hugo-inspired narrative of giving up "the good" in order to choose "the better" (45). Peters further notes that mid-century Catholics who cultivated a skepticism for American politics and culture, including the Catholic writer J. F. Powers who risked imprisonment rather than support World War II, were spurred on by Hugo's commitments to what will later be called "a universal call to holiness." The witness of Day and Powers are an indication for Peters that Hugo was (and remains) relevant (12).

Peters presents his book's three main arguments in the Introduction. Whereas detractors argued that Hugo was a "rigorist," and even a Jansenist, Peters suggests that the theology of Hugo's critics, "rooted in the neo-Thomism of the first half of the twentieth century," led them to caricature Hugo. Peters continues that Hugo's theology of nature and grace was not inspired by Jansenism but was rooted in Ignatian sources from the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556) to French Canadian Jesuit, Onésime Lacouture, (1881–1951), from whom Hugo learned "the retreat" in 1938. Hugo's theology, according to Peters, should be set in the context of the ressourcement movement that propelled Catholic thinking beyond neo-Thomism and may again be useful as a "corrective" to "public theology" or the "dominant perspective" on "Catholic engagement with America society and culture today," which Peters reads as "not so different" from the "neo-Thomist stance" of the early twentieth century (13). Readers need not accept this third argument entirely to appreciate the ways in which Peters mines Hugo's writings to offer a fresh examination of a heady time for Catholicism.

Chapter I offers background on Hugo's Pittsburgh education, ordination in 1936, and priestly ministry. By 1940, Hugo and a priest friend were leading their own Lacouture-inspired retreats. Day attended her first Hugo retreat in 1941; she invited Hugo to contribute to the Catholic Worker and offer her community retreats. In 1942 the bishop of Pittsburgh responded to concerns by priests that Hugo's retreat was "rigorist" by transferring Hugo to a rural parish. Hugo published the theology behind the retreat in a book entitled, Applied Christianity (1942), which received critical reviews from leading American Catholic theologians.

Chapter II examines each of the twenty-six sessions of Hugo's retreat. Sources include Day's unpublished retreat notes, which Peters includes in an Appendix. Nearly sixty percent of the 586 pages in Peters's book are reproductions of Day's handwritten retreat notes and transcriptions by the author's mother. According to Peters's analysis, Hugo offered a way for "ordinary Christians" who embraced the retreat to "live a holy life" in mid-twentieth century America (91).

Chapter III employs The Spiritual Exercises from the sixteenth century and Jesuit writings on Ignatian mysticism from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to locate the sources for Hugo's retreat within Jesuit history. This move allows the reader to understand Hugo's theology, with its emphasis on grace accessed through quiet contemplation and "pruning" of worldly attachments, as a critique of neo-Thomism, with its emphasis on the natural order. In Chapter IV Peters introduces additional "kindred spirits," including Henri de Lubac, SJ (1896–1991) and French lay Catholic philosopher, Maurice Blondel (1861–1949). Peters concedes that Hugo was "less theologically sophisticated" than European thinkers associated with ressourcement but that Hugo "tapped into the same theological currents" (144).

Chapter V begins with an exchange between Hugo and Father Paul Hanly Furfey over "Realist v. Romantic...