Divided Friends

12. Holiness and History: From Americanism and Modernism to Vatican II

12 HOLINESS AND HISTORY From Americanism and Modernism to Vatican II BetweenPascendiandVaticanII For historians of the phantom heresy persuasion, the negative effects of the condemnation of Modernism on Catholic intellectual life in the United States can hardly be exaggerated. As 1908 proceeded on its course a gradually developing dread of heresy settled over episcopal residences, chanceries, seminaries, and Catholic institutions of higher learning. Security, safety, conservatism became national imperatives. Free intellectual inquiry in ecclesiastical circles came to a virtual standstill. The nascent intellectual movement went underground or died. Contacts with Protestant and secular thinkers were broken off. It was as though someone had pulled a switch and the lights had failed all across the American Catholic landscape.1 Jay Dolan cites this passage approvingly. Likening Pascendi to a bomb, he goes on to note that answers to later questions about lack of Catholic intellectual achievement “lay scattered among the heap of rubble produced by the fallout of Pascendi Dominici Gregis.”2 Digging down to the “bedrock” of the reasons for Catholic intellectual deficiencies, Gannon finds “the scholasticism of the countermodernism repression.” In contrast to academically respectable forms of Scholasticism, this was “artificial, gerrymandered scholasticism composed of syllogisms piled Ossa on Pelion, frozen into textbook form, and memorized by unnumbered seminarians.”3 325 1. Gannon, “Before and After Modernism: The Intellectual Isolation of the American Priest,” 341. 2. Jay P. Dolan, The American Catholic Experience: A History from Colonial Times to the Present (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1985), 319. 3. Gannon, “Before and After Modernism,” 296. 326  McSorley and Sullivan The “counter-modernism repression” had its most chilling effects in biblical studies and theology. But, even here, the connection with the past was never completely broken. Raymond Brown’s intellectual genealogy, for example, connects him to the Sulpician scripture scholars of McSorley’s generation. In keeping with his concern to promote reforms in seminary education, Gannon focused in 1971 on the general state of clerical intellectual life. Fair enough. But continued historiographical emphasis on the intellectual poverty of the period between Pascendi and Vatican II tends to bury real achievements, of which Catholic thinkers should be proud heirs, and to legitimate the massive European colonization of Catholic theology in the U.S. that followed in the wake of that council. To be Catholic in the United States necessarily involves transatlantic relations, particularly with Rome, but in post-conciliar decades this relationship was so one-sided as to retard the development of homegrown theology. Looking at the centers of Gannon’s brief shining moment of modest but inexplicable intellectual flowering, Dunwoodie was primarily inspired by French learning, while Philadelphia and Rochester looked to Rome. Catholic University was different and the difference shaped its post-Pascendi path. Catholic University’s Americanist impulse toward positive intellectual engagement with American culture, inspired by the generation of Spalding, Keane, and Ireland, survived the modernist crisis chastened but redirected. McSorley belonged to the early history of Catholic University. He came there as a seventeen-year-old graduate student and completed his entire program of study before the condemnations of Americanism and modernism. Lost in the Catholic rush to be free of a pre-conciliar “ghetto,” the history to which McSorley belonged is all but forgotten. Perhaps enough time has passed that we can return to it now with profit and begin to redeem the time between 1907 and 1962. Despite Pascendi’s disastrous impact on Catholic theology and biblical studies, it could not cut off all paths to positive intellectual engagement with modern culture in the United States. If we put aside obvious questions about where exceptions such as John Courtney Murray and Raymond Brown might have come from, three main intellectual paths emerge into view: 1) the National Catholic War Council and the social sciences, 2) the Catholic Renaissance or Catholic medievalism in philosophy, literature, and social thought, and 3) history and church history. These three paths Holiness and History  327 were closely related. To the desire for positive engagement with modern American society inherited from the generations of the Americanist and modernist crises, postwar Catholic intellectuals brought the new emphasis on neo-Scholastic foundations characteristic of the post-Pascendi period. With the caveat that St. Thomas remained for McSorley primarily an inspirational model of Catholic engagement with his time, McSorley’s intellectual life after 1909 is best understood in the context of these three paths with an emphasis on the first and...