Divided Friends

14. Finding a Place to Stand

14 FINDING A PLACE TO STAND Tumultuous times bring massive and unexpected ground shifts. We find ourselves with no place to stand. The modernist crisis was such a time. The four subjects of the intertwined biographical portraits in this book are tragic figures whose lives embody the American reverberations of this crisis. Slattery and O’Connell, McSorley and Sullivan—each began with high-minded and even heroic ideals . All were inspired to some degree, McSorley the most, O’Connell the least, by one of America’s truly home-grown religious geniuses, whose name turned up at the center of the Americanist controversy in France—Paulist founder Isaac Hecker. Their dreams of reconciling church and age carried each along the liberal-to-modernist trajectory plotted by Scott Appleby in 1992. Each was caught up in a collective effervescence anticipating “a new type of Catholicism” being born of the present age. As American members of a transnational church, each had trans-Atlantic connections. All four participated in what has come to be known as the modernist crisis in their church. It tested these companions sorely and divided them one from the other. It drove Slattery and Sullivan out of the church that they once loved and ended their dreams of reconciling it with the age. Slattery and Sullivan would accuse O’Connell and McSorley of bad faith because of their conduct during the modernist crisis. Slattery and Sullivan thought that O’Connell and McSorley should, if they were honest, have followed them out of the church. It is hard not to ask if they were right. Slattery and Sullivan want us to ask that, of course. The same inclinations that made them positivists in history also inclined them to think that the answer would be much simpler than, in fact, it is. But what Nicholas Lash has styled the “John Wayne’s Arizona view of the modernist crisis,” with its sepa362 A Place to Stand  363 ration of the good guys from the bad guys, simply cannot work.1 The stories of these four figures show the moral and religious complexities involved in pioneer attempts to deal with the subjective conditions of religious meaning and truth in an ecclesial world normed by one-sided theological objectivity and conceptualism. However, in spite of the complexities and ambiguities of history and devotion, I have written about these four men because I have hoped that it would be salutary to talk about them. Forces perdues were Loisy’s last words on Slattery. He pronounced Slattery a theologian who had discovered the emptiness of theology and exaggerated the loss, and concluded that he was a rich American who had wasted his life.2 If Loisy’s judgment is too harsh, Slattery’s own estimate of his fate at the end of his autobiography is not much gentler. He had studied Newman mightily during his difficult years of 1901–1902, especially the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine. By 1912 all he could take from Newman was the description of apostate priests as “weeds from the Pope’s garden.” Though he had made light of his former priesthood in talking to O’Connell in San Francisco, Slattery concluded his autobiography on a more pensive note. He talked of the solitariness of his life, the soul as “at best a lonely thing.” This he found especially true of the “priestly soul who has studied himself adrift” and needs to start afresh in the garden of life.3 Intellectually, he ended his autobiography as a materialist discussing ether with William Hayes Ward. He had told Houtin that he could not believe in free will. He would remain the self-styled “traveller.”4 Even as he made his last appeal to the Victorian ideal of honest manhood, Slattery seemed to know that it was a poor match for the forces ranged against a solitary soul. Like Slattery, Sullivan too felt impersonal lines of force threatening his conscientious individuality. He appealed to “personality” instead of honest manhood. Who could argue with his resistance to “degradation”? Sullivan’s question about the heart of the inquisitor is as profound as his approach to it is disappointing. He was indeed a moralist. Like Slattery, he rejected the self-sacrificial ideal that would have kept him in the church. As a Unitarian 1. Nicholas Lash, “Modernism, Aggiornamento and the Night Battle,” in Bishops and Writers: Aspects of the Evolution of Modern English Catholicism, ed. Adrian Hastings (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire: Anthony Clarke, 1977), 53. 2. Loisy...