Divided Friends

11. McSorley’s Response to Pascendi

11 McSORLEY’S RESPONSE TO PASCENDI McSorleyandSullivan:TwoPaulists,TwoBooks In 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 such association. It was received in 1909 and thereafter as an ascetical work. Placing these two books side by side, one would never guess that, prior to publication, the two authors taught and lived together for five years. Sullivan and McSorley were brother Paulists and faculty colleagues at St. Thomas College, the Paulist house of studies at Catholic University. 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 in Brooklyn. Walter Elliott’s Life of Father Hecker had just appeared serially in 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 290 McSorley’s Response  291 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 years of 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 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. When Sullivan arrived in 1902, McSorley had already been at Washington for three years. The two Paulists had never lived together for any extended period. As they responded differently to the religious turbulence of the years between 1902 and 1907, increasing conflict and even rivalry between them is not difficult to imagine. 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 early modern mystics contrasted with McSorley’s devotion to them. While McSorley celebrated the mystics, Sullivan questioned the morality of their acquiescence to the Inquisition. Both spoke in religious tones 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” while McSorley submitted in fellowship with the crucified. Sullivan’s Letters denounces Scholasticism. McSorley proceeded as if Scholastic theology did not 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 often thinking that he is attempting to address Sullivan’s historical difficulties. Indeed, one can see their books 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 cannot morally withstand the scandals’ accumulated weight. From McSorley’s undisturbed center, The Sacrament of Duty seems to reply that, in the last analysis, Sullivan’s difficulties cannot be what really matter. In both Letters and in his subsequent novel, The Priest...