A Gentle Jesuit: The Life of Philip Caraman, S. J., 1911-1998 (review)

To someone who knows Philip Caraman primarily as the historian who brought to life the exploits of Elizabethan Jesuits, or as the chronicler of the travels and travails of Jesuit missionaries in exotic lands, the supposition that a biography of Caraman himself would provide as compelling a story line might seem far-fetched. But it is nevertheless true, and June Rockett, who is an astute observer of modern ecclesiastical history, has distilled much archival material into a lively account of a man who was at the center of the Catholic literary revival in its later stages and who was a high-profile casualty of the turbulent times that brought that revival to its end.

Caraman was of Catholic Armenian heritage, but impeccably British. Educated at Stonyhurst, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1930 and was eventually chosen to pursue historical studies at Oxford at Campion Hall during the tenure of Martin D'Arcy, who was to become his mentor and friend until D'Arcy's death in 1976. Soon after D'Arcy's elevation to the post of provincial, he appointed the recently ordained Caraman to the editorship of The Month, the prestigious journal that had once been the vehicle for Herbert Thurston, but had lost much of its panache by the 1940s. Caraman enlivened its pages with contributions by Evelyn Waugh,Graham Greene, Robert Speaight, Thomas Merton, and other prominent writers. More than once, articles by Waugh and Greene in particular brought controversy to Caraman's door, but he was earning plaudits for his groundbreaking translations and annotations of the hitherto overlooked memoirs of the Elizabethan Jesuit priests John Gerard (1951) and William Weston (1955). These were followed in 1957 by a biography of another English Jesuit, Henry Morse; a compilation of source materials that appeared in 1960 as The Other Face: Catholic Life Under Elizabeth I; and a biography, commissioned by the Ursulines, of St. Angela Merici in 1963. At the same time he was serving as vice postulator of the cause for the canonization of forty English martyrs, maintaining his editorial duties, editing three volumes of sermons by Ronald Knox, and cultivating high-profile converts such as Dame Edith Sitwell and Alec Guinness, while continuing to socialize with the Waughs and Herberts.

By then, however, the Jesuit administration had changed. The shift in personnel and priorities has already been covered in the excellent 1997 biography of D'Arcy by H. J. A. Sire. Caraman was summarily fired as editor of The Month in 1963 and banished from the Farm Street "writers' house," ostensibly for excessive favoritism shown toward Evelyn Waugh's daughter, Margaret FitzHerbert, a staffer working on the martyrs' cause. (It is interesting to note that Martin Stannard, in his multivolume study of Evelyn Waugh published in the early 1990s, adopted the perspective of Caraman's detractors in this episode without critical examination, to the annoyance of the octogenarian priest who could have offered a different perspective on the jealousies and infighting that permeated the office and the Society at the time.)

The demotion, however, did not prevent Caraman from completing his most lasting contribution to recusant history, his definitive biography Henry Garnet and the Gunpowder Plot, 1551–1606. His friendship with a Norwegian Cistercian, John Willem Gran, led to his move to Norway after Gran was appointed bishop of Oslo in the mid-1960s. Here Caraman finished his relatively short biographical study of C. C. Martindale, the brilliant convert and prolific writer who had died in 1963.

With Norway as his base and freed from the strictures of the Farm Street overseers, Caraman could satisfy his desire to explore the remoter regions of the globe as background for his histories of Jesuit missionaries. He visited Ethiopia in 1967 and the hinterlands of Paraguay in 1971. The latter visit informs his highly successful book The Lost Paradise (1975), and the former contributed...