Divided Friends

13. McSorley’s Ressourcement: Saving the Hecker Tradition

13 McSORLEY’S RESSOURCEMENT Saving the Hecker Tradition DaysofBitterTrial In 1899 the apostolic letter Testem Benevolentiae ended the Americanist controversies in both France and the United States and left progressive American ecclesiastics in a distinctly uncomfortable position. With the possible exceptions of Archbishop John Ireland and Bishop John Keane, no one was more deeply affected by the letter than the Paulists. At least Pope Leo XIII had refrained from mentioning Ireland and Keane by name, but he did mention Isaac Hecker and by implication Walter Elliott. Testem Benevolentiae ’s second paragraph begins with these words addressed to Cardinal James Gibbons as “beloved Son,” a designation Leo used seven times in the letter. You are aware, beloved Son, that the book entitled “The Life of Isaac Thomas Hecker,” chiefly through the action of those who have undertaken to publish and interpret it in a foreign language, has excited no small controversy on account of certain opinions which are introduced on the manner of leading a Christian life.1 If he had been controversial during his lifetime, the Paulist founder was now the possible object of a papal censure. The letter was not clear about this. The legitimacy of Hecker’s teaching “on the manner of leading a Christian life” was in question. Walter Elliott, 347 1. An English text of Testem Benevolentiae is included as a “Related Document” in David O’Brien’s “Americanism” in The Encyclopedia of American Catholic History; see 100. On Americanism, see William L. Portier, “Americanism and Inculturation: 1899–1999,” Communio 27 (Spring 2000): 139–60. 348  McSorley and Sullivan one of Hecker’s spiritual heirs, had written the book singled out for mention by the Pope. Not only were the Paulists devastated, they also feared further Vatican disciplinary measures. Through the modernist crisis and beyond, McSorley carried the memory of this shock. But Americanism was a memory best left in silence, especially after 1907. Both Ireland and Keane died in 1918. Gibbons and Denis O’Connell lived into the 1920s. The Catholic Renaissance took off and few historians mentioned the crisis of 1899. With the end of World War II, all of this changed. McSorley’s treatment of the subject in his Outline History coincides with the beginnings of a renewed interest in Americanism. He cited approvingly Archbishop Patrick Riordan’s declaration that “the heresy known as Americanism existed only ‘in the imagination of three or four Frenchmen.’”2 Already in 1946, McSorley approached Ellis with a request to consider writing on Hecker’s life after 1844, the date of Hecker’s conversion, and the terminus of Paulist Vincent Holden’s 1939 monograph, a Catholic University master’s thesis on Hecker’s early years. By 1946, Ellis reported that he was “deeply immersed in gathering materials for a definitive life of Cardinal Gibbons.” He suggested instead that “some talented young Paulist like Father Holden” be sent to Catholic University for doctoral studies “with a view to having assigned to him as a doctoral dissertation the years of Hecker’s life from 1844 to 1888.”3 The Paulists would eventually take Ellis ’s advice. TheReturnofAmericanism Renewed Catholic interest in Americanism came along with the “American celebration” that followed World War II.4 At stake here was a shift in Catholicism’s relationship to American culture. This new interest in the Americanists signaled an end to the Catholic separatism of the inter-war period . Though Thomas T. McAvoy was a key figure, John Tracy Ellis was at 2. McSorley, Outline History of the Church, 877–78. 3. McSorley to Ellis, New York, July 30, 1946; Ellis to McSorley, July 31, 1946 (carbon); ACUA, Ellis Papers, McSorley—1942–1950. 4. On this “wartime shift of feeling,” see Philip Gleason, Keeping the Faith, 31–32, and at greater length in his “The New Americanism in Catholic Historiography,” U.S. Catholic Historian 11, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 5–7. Saving the Hecker Tradition  349 the center of this shift. During the period between Pascendi and Vatican II, neo-Scholastics such as Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s student Joseph Clifford Fenton tended to dominate theology. Biblical scholars generally waited for the scholarly atmosphere to become more congenial, and occupied themselves with biblical languages and archaeology. In 1943 Pope Pius XII rewarded their patience with his encyclical on biblical studies, Divino Afflante Spiritu. In what might loosely be called “theological disciplines,” church history remained one of the only serious areas open to...