The Catholic Classics, by Dinesh D'Souza
Scully, Michael A.
Books in Review - "The Catholic Classics, by Dinesh D'Souza" In his book The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), R. W. Southern quotes the account of an eleventhcentury French abbot concerning Scots come to France to assemble for the first Crusade. Not...
...After this the boy, nervous and afraid, blurted out, "Sir, there is still a sentence which is not written down...
...Thus it follows that one mark of a robust religious tradition is that it produces writings that inspire and explain, and preferably both...
...Most surveys lose one or the other audience through pedantry on the one hand, or oversimplification on the other...
...Dinesh D'Souza's offering does not say this, but it is about, and in the tradition of, writers who understood it...
...The reader of such magnificent passages will be hard pressed to remember that there are more illiterates in heaven than literates—even proportionately more...
...A half century later, hardly any books, even by the most prominent authors, are in print in popularly priced editions: a few of Chesterton's, besides his Father Brown stories, and somewhat over a dozen among all the works of Cardinal Newman, Hilaire Belloc, Christopher Dawson, Ronald Knox, and Jacques Maritain...
...From Augustine's Confessions to Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain, each of D'Souza's studies attends as muph to the writer and his search for faith, or the sufferings demanded of him because of his faith, as to the particular work discussed...
...But there was no need for fear...
...they are enhanced by a fine eye for detail...
...Perhaps, therefore, they grasp more intensely than many of us the centrality of the symbol of salvation, fashioned after an instrument of death...
...Theodoric, obsessed with fears that he might be deposed and killed (as he had deposed and killed his predecessor), spurned Boethius, who was shortly convicted of treason and sentenced to death...
...rhe Catholic Classics comprises ten essays, each concerned with a great writer and his most famous work...
...In other chapters D'Souza discusses Bede {Ecclesiastical History), Aquinas (Summa Theologica), Pascal {Pensees), Thomas a Kempis (Imitation of Christ), Newman {Apologia Pro Vita Sua), and Chesterton {Orthodoxy...
...Typical of its current doldrums, America's Roman Catholic Church not only seems to be having a hard time offering more than a few weekly syndicated hours of anemic programming, but the one person, a spunky Alabama nun, who has successfully entered the field of religious broadcasting had to overcome considerable resistance from members of the hierarchy...
...I do not know whether Evelyn Waugh was familiar with this incident, but when I reread Southern's description recently, I could not help thinking of the closing passages of Brideshead Revisited...
...At the end of the last chapter, Waugh describes Lord Marchmain's deathbed repentance, which Charles Ryder narrated this way: I suddenly felt the longing for a sign, if only for courtesy, if only for the sake of the woman I loved, who knelt in front of me, praying, I knew, for a sign...
...I n his book The Making of the Middle Ages (1953), R. W. Southern quotes the account of an eleventhcentury French abbot concerning Scots come to France to assemble for the first Crusade...
...The abbot described the strangers: Drawn from their native swamps, with their bare legs, rough cloaks, purses hanging from their shoulders, hung about in arms, ridiculous enough in our eyes but offering the aid of their faith and devotion to our cause...
...In his preface to Dinesh D'Souza's new book...
...I have before me a reprint of a 1935 book, by a Jesuit priest, called The Catholic Literary Revival (Calvert Alexander, S. J., Kennikat Press, 1968...
...His biographical sketches are terse and sensitive...
...When ecclesiastical historians survey the twentieth century, they will note a great irony: an unprecedented expansion of Christianity, and especially Catholicism, has taken place in the less developed world, while simultaneously the "old world" of Christianity— including, most disappointingly, the United States—has been wallowing in confusion and, sometimes, bad faith...
...As such, it provides proof to the repented Charles Ryders of the world that the small red flame, which the old knights saw, burns ever and anew...
...Boethius's energetic defense of a consul accused of treason provided Boethius's enemies with the opportunity they desired to implicate him in the plot...
...As it is with television evangelism (a field pioneered, let it be remembered, by Catholic clerics such as Bishop Fulton Sheen), so has Catholic pubHshing decUned relative to its own past and the publishing efforts of other religious groups...
...Instead, while awaiting death, Boethius wrote Consolation of Philosophy, which became perhaps the most popular Christian work of the Middle Ages...
...I t comes as no surprise, for example, that the dynamism of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestantism in our day should exhibit itself in book writing and publishing, as in so many other ways...
...More and more, the Church finds itself being governed—and inspired—by modern equivalents of rough, barelegged Scots...
...Both a knowledge of what has been, and thus might be again, and an awareness of the current condition of American Roman Catholicism make D'Souza's book very welcome indeed...
...Here is an echo from that vibrant earlier time: a writer of impressive gifts, illuminating ten great books of Christianity, so that we might understand and appreciate the books and their authors' quests for faith or sanctity...
...One mark of D'Souza's success is that The Catholic Classics can be read with profit by precocious high school sophomores and adult readers alike...
...Then I knew that the sign I had asked for was not a little thing, not a passing nod of recognition, and a phrase came back to me from my childhood of the veil of the temple being rent from top to bottom...
...For a couple of decades now, there have been more Catholics in the southern hemisphere than in the northern...
...Not only had the French never seen such men (it is thought that this is the earliest description of Scottish dress), the Scots and their more refined allies spoke not a word of each other's tongues...
...Then, as Ryder describes, the priest anointed the head of the dying Lord Marchmain, whose hand began to move, perhaps, Ryder feared, to wipe away the oil...
...We know this because, among other things, the tradition tells us as much...
...O God," I prayed, "don't let him do that...
...Yet because we humans are as we are, most of us seek not only to believe, but also to understand...
...If Boethius had been a more clever political operator, he would have passed into obscurity fourteen hundred years ago...
...Of course, at great expense of money and effort, evangelical preachers offer scores of hours of weekly nationwide television programming, which in some cases includes telephone "hotlines" for counseling (anti-suicide, pregnancy, family disputes, and the like) and some remedial social services...
...Hilaire Belloc, Paul Claudel, Francois Mauriac, Leon Bloy, Georges Bernanos, Evelyn Waugh, Eric Gill and even, for the more mystically oriented, Gerard Manley Hopkins—all became known, all evoked to a greater or lesser degree some sense of what Frank O'Malley called "the integrating power of a real faith and truth...
...476, his education, and his eventual entry into the government of the barbarian ruler of Rome, Theodoric, to whom he became chief minister at about the age of forty...
...D'Souza avoids both failings with a performance intelligently planned and executed virtually without flaw...
...When the boy said, "It is finished," Bede sat back...
...The book is a survey of the most prominent writers on Catholic subjects from 1845 to 1935, and its acknowledgments require over a page of tiny print to thank 16 publishers of 37 books by 22 authors for permission to quote copyrighted material...
...The Catholic Classics, New York's Cardinal John J. O'Connor recalls wistfully the high point of CathoHc publishing, the 1930s and 1940s, its vibrancy, and the hopes for a spiritual renascence it inspired: New editions of G. K. Chesterton began to proliferate at the time, side by side with portable Cardinal Newmans...
...The Best of THIS WORLD, containing twenty-seven essays from the journal's first five years, was published in October by University Press of America...
...William F. Buckley, in a moving introduction, notes D'Souza's portrait of the serene death of the historian Bede after months of illness: The day after the feast of the Ascension he was alone with one of his pupils, who was taking down notes he dictated...
...It was hard for Bede to go on, but despite the student's protestations, he insisted that the boy keep writing...
...moved slowly down his breast, then to his shoulder, and Lord Marchmain made the sign of the cross...
...It seemed so small a thing that was asked, the bare acknowledgment of a present, a nod in the crowd...
...It is finished...
...In this endeavor books, though not absolutely necessary, are of immense value...
...D'Souza's summaries of texts and explanations of philosophical and theological arguments are never less than sure-handed...
...the hand Michael A. Scully is editor of This World...
...You have said the truth," he said...
...His anthology...
...In their parts of the globe, not yet overrun wilh social policy conferences, it is easier to remember that the most Christian act is to wash the pus from one dying person's festering sore...
...Lacking, as it were, sophistication, they maintain a hold on common life, including its suffering and its miraculousness...
...Bede replied, "Well, then go ahead and write it...
...the shift to the south continues apace...
...The Word that was in the Beginning was willed, not written, and certainly not read...
...There are over 7,000 evangeUcal bookstores in the United States...
...For example, D'Souza begins his chapter on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy with a brief discussion of its interest as a book of philosophy, but shortly begins to tell us about Boethius himself, his birth to a prominent Roman family four years after the Fall of Rome in A.D...
...He sang the Gloria Patri and died...
...This is, I think, one of history's moving scenes: the rough Scots, in their primitive dress, marching up some French hillside to a monastery, unable to communicate with their hosts, except to announce their intention by crossing their fingers to make the sign of the cross...
...No one walking into a Catholic bookstore today, not to mention the typical commercial bookstore, would think that within living memory there existed a notable Catholic literary tradition...
...Publishers Frank and Maisie Ward were becoming household names...
...As his energy began to leave his body, Bede summoned the priests, who said Mass for him and gave him the last sacraments...
Vol. 19 • December 1986 • No. 12
