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Pascendi’s Reception in the United States: The Case of Joseph McSorley William L. Portier Introduction: Two Post-Pascendi Books I n Pascendi’s American aftermath, two books appeared within six months of one another. In November 1909, the Paulists’ Columbus Press published Joseph McSorley’s The Sacrament of Duty. The following May, Open Court Publishing issued William Sullivan’s anonymous Letters to His Holiness Pius X. With the authorial designation “By a Modernist,” Sullivan’s book had clear connections to the modernist crisis. McSorley’s book, by contrast, and in keeping with his intent, has had no apparent association with modernism. It was received in 1909 and thereafter as an ascetical work. Placing these two books alongside one another, one would never guess that, in the time before their publication, the two authors taught and lived side by side for five years. Sullivan (1872-1935) and McSorley (1874-1963) were brother Paulists and faculty colleagues at St. Thomas College, the Paulist house of studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. With McSorley as novice master and Sullivan as his assistant, they also worked closely together in the area of formation. Though he was younger by two years, McSorley always seemed to be arriving ahead of Sullivan. He came to St. Thomas College in 1891 as a seventeen-year-old prodigy from St. John’s College in Brooklyn. Walter Elliott’s Life of Father Hecker had just appeared serially in the Catholic World and was about to be published as a book. During McSorley’s first years of graduate study, pioneer Paulist Augustine Hewit (1820-1897) was teaching at Catholic University and it fell to McSorley to push Hewit’s wheelchair around campus. McSorley was ordained in October 1897 just before his twenty-third birthday and spent the next two years in parish work at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Manhattan. As McSorley left St. Thomas College in 1897, Sullivan arrived from St. John’s Seminary in Brighton, Massachusetts. He was twenty-five. After only two year’s formation as a Paulist, he was ordained in 1899 and sent to the Tennessee missions. While McSorley worked steadily and relentlessly, Sullivan was prone to alternating 13 bouts of activity and collapse. It was after one such collapse that Sullivan came to Washington in 1902 as McSorley’s assistant. McSorley had returned to Washington in 1899, the year of Sullivan’s ordination, to serve as Walter Elliott’s assistant novice master. He succeeded Elliott in 1901. McSorley was intellectually daring but personally cautious. Sullivan preferred honesty to prudence. While Sullivan tended to think disjunctively, McSorley tried to hold it all together. Through McSorley’s Paulist formation, his personal contact with Hewit, and especially with Elliott, the spirit of Hecker had seeped deep into his soul. In spite of his age, the Paulists had good reason to choose McSorley as novice master. Perhaps they hoped that something of McSorley would rub off on Sullivan. Hecker gave McSorley a spiritual anchor and a depth that Sullivan lacked. Sullivan’s hostility to the modern mystics contrasted with McSorley’s devotion to them. While McSorley celebrated the mystics, Sullivan questioned the morality of their acquiescence in the Inquisition. Both spoke religiously of fidelity to conscience and both claimed Christ as the model for their responses to the repression that followed the modernist crisis. But Sullivan resisted in fellowship with the “apostate Christ.” McSorley submitted in fellowship with the crucified. Sullivan’s Letters denounced scholasticism. McSorley proceeded as if scholastic theology didn’t even exist. By 1910 Sullivan had left the Paulists. McSorley remained. We have Sullivan’s estimate of McSorley, but McSorley is silent about Sullivan. Nevertheless, one cannot read McSorley’s book without thinking that he’s responding to Sullivan’s historical difficulties. Space does not permit reading them together, but these two books are best seen as dueling responses to a shared set of circumstances. As Letters piles up one historical scandal upon another, Sullivan seems to rage at McSorley that his pious edifice could not morally withstand their accumulated weight. From McSorley’s undisturbed center, The Sacrament of Duty seemed to reply that, in the last analysis, Sullivan’s difficulties could...

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