The Catholic revival revisited

...Of the two the Catholic Revival had the more decisive influence...

...Both had been around for more than a decade but penetrated the schools very slowly...

...Little by little, I am rereading all those books which I read so eagerly long ago and cherished, trying to understand what it was that persuaded me of their truth and what, if anything, can be salvaged...

...Raissa Maritain's We Have Been Friends Together was a sublime love story...

...To live the faith, I discovered, meant ccntering each day in the teachings of the church, in the sacrifice of the Mass, in prayer and worship, and in participating in the church's mission of salvation to the world...

...L OOKING BACK upon those days, thirty years Or more ago, what were the overriding ideas, which were so compelling it would take me years to free myself from their tenacious hold on me...

...What mattered, however, was not so much what one did, as what one was...

...With each one of us assigned a part, we read T.S...

...As we generally understood the term (which gave way in the fifties to the "lay apostolate") Catholic Action was a call to the laity to organize and become actively involved in the work of the church...

...Shining brightly among them were the great figures from the Christian past, the Fathers of the Church, St...

...Our headquarters, a former Chinese laundry, was in St...

...This was a very large order, but to a young and fervent Catholic it was seen as a "call" and not impossible with God's grace...

...FROM LOCAL GOVERNMENT TO NATIONAL PARTNERSHIP Bostonians & Kennedys: romance, roots, & leadership I I I DENNIS HALE I I I T HE PAST few months have been busy and difficult times in Boston...

...Last month Frank confessed that he, and Commonweal: 716...

...We did not lack role models...

...The church/world polarity became untenable as I found myself seeking "an original relation with the universe," not a mediated one...

...Watkin, Jacques Maritain, Nicholas Berdyaev, Ronaid Knox, Etienne Gilson, Martin d'Arcy, Paul, Claudel, Lton Bloy, to mention only a few of the luminaries who come readily to mind...

...I was then in my early twenties, very close in age to the Maritains when they embraced Catholicism...

...This may be a good moment to reflect on what has happened to the city, and to speculate on its future...

...In the summer following Freshman year I met with a small group every week at Carol Jackson's small flat in Manhattan to discuss one of the Catholic Masterpiece Series then being published by Sheed and Ward and sold at a dollar a copy...

...Augustine, St...

...The writers of the Revival presented us wi~ a church which alone could offer us wholeness, sanity as well as sanctity, an integrating principle in an otherwise disintegrating society...

...French thinkers and activists, such as,Abb~ Godin, Abb6 Michonneau, Henri Penin, Jacques Loew, Yves de Montcheuil, Jean Danitlou, Yves Congar, Henri deLubac, and Cardinal Suhard, had a profound influence on me...

...I am aware that I was very young, an adolescent, when exposed to tile ideas of the Revival and had lived all my life in a totally Catholic environment, a product of the Catholic ghetto...

...Th~rdse of Lisieux was rescued from the sickening bourgeois piety she seemed to exemplify...

...At the end of the summer Carol joined with Ed Commonweal: 714Willock to found Integrity and I joined a Catholic Action group...

...A new hagiography flourished, breaking the plaster mold in which all the saints seemed to have been cast...

...Now the mayoral campaign is over, the Kennedy campaign is i DENNIS HAlE is a member of the political science department at Boston College...

...Catholicism, in all its splendor, had been there all along, but the Catholic Revival made us see it with new and startled eyes...

...Personal sanctity Was the secret of the apostolate, the power which would convert the world...

...We reminded ourselves of this when we sat bored through dull sermons and took comfort in it when disappointed at the narrowmindedness of church policies and the failure of the church to practice what she preached...

...Although I was oblivious to the implications then (consciousness-raising was still well in the future) it is striking how often the Revival writers chose as instruments of redemption, the young woman, a suffering and sacrificial victim...

...How I reverberated to her eventual union with Jacques Maritain, their search together for Absolute Truth and their desperate decision to die should they not find it...

...I could understand the young Raissa's "sadness and weariness with life," the "feeling of emptiness as one waited for some great event, some perfect fulfillment...

...More mysterious and splendid still was the vision of the church as Christ, incarnated...

...Every human institution, be it philosophy, poetry, or politics, the arts or sciences, education or entertainment, family or society, fulfilled its true purpose only insofar as it was compatible with and guided by Catholic teaching...

...The Maritains dramatized with their lives the fact that Catholicism could not only satisfy the rigorous demands of the intellect but the deepest longings of the soul...

...Their brand of Catholicism was considered to be too pessimistic, too morbid, to be healthy...

...What we need, Lord, what we finally need is a woman who would also be a s a i n t . . , and who would succeed...

...Ironically, what made a commitment to the church so necessary then eventually became a reason to distance myself from the church...

...A warning to the reader, however...

...Hopkins became something of a cult figure during that time, especially among young priests...

...Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, The Cocktail Party,and Claudel's The Tidings Brought to Mary and The Satin Slipper...

...The course was limited to the English Revival and we read fragments of Newman, Francis Thompson, Alice Meynell, Coventry Patmore and of course, Chesterton and Belloc...

...The church, as Guardini had observed, "was becoming a living reality, and we understand that she truly is the One and the All...

...We were those "who with utmost daring discovered what had been discovered before...

...My real exposure to the Revival came outside the classroom as a spiritual adventure which was both intensely personal and communal...

...Thomas Aquinas...

...The Revival was also known, not DOLORES ELISE BRIENJor sixteen years associated with the Grail, is currently on sabbatical from Bryn Mawr doing a study on the Catholic Revival and the lay apostolate in the United States...

...The anguished cry of P~gny's Jeanne d'Arc had particular meaning for those of us in the Grail...

...Last spring, Rep...

...That was, of course, to be a saint...

...The Catholic Revival, however, was a resurgence of Catholic thought and belief brought about by a brilliant crowd of novelists, poets, dramatists, historians, philosophers, biographers and theologians, the like of which we will not see soon again...

...Without the intellectual and spiritual motivation it supplied, Catholic Action would have lost its urgency and appeal...

...Catholicism was a total way of life, embracing every aspect of human experience or endeavor...

...Catherine of Siena, Cardinal Newman...

...In the ascendancy were the twin evils~ materialism and secularism, which were antihuman as well as anti-Christ, and embodied in their most threatening form in Communism...

...But through God's grace they abandoned their selfish ways and gave themselves to God in perfect love...

...No other book conveyed so vividly the kind of spiritual unrest which many people, like myself, were going through at that time...

...We read the Desert Fathers, Newman's Callista, and Belloc's Survivals and New Arrivals, but it was St...

...There is nothing very hopeful to be said here...

...My involvement with Catholic Action and my immersion in the writing of the Revival during college had left me with a deep malaise...

...Today, some thirty or more years later, my feeling toward that period is ambivalent...

...And finally, I realized that it was no longer possible to deny the self for the sake of sainthood...

...Thomas Aquinas, St...

...To turn things around again, if it were not too late, required a radical renewal of Catholic life and the acceptance of Catholicism as the only true system of belief which could save the world...

...officially underway, and the race war has once again settled into a state of siege...

...Without the stimulus of the Revival there would also have been no liturgical and scriptural renewal, little if any change in the thinking and lifestyle of Catholics, lay or religious, and probably, therefore, no Vatican II...

...The real church was invisible, the real church was the Mystical Body of Christ,the Communion of Saints, the Bride of Christ...

...In a philosophy course I struggled through Pegis's The Basic Writings of St...

...Everything else took meaning from that perception...

...I wanted to know the world for and of itself...

...The Catholicism which opened up to us was one of beauty, drama, sacrifice...

...I would leave the meetings in a state of acute excitement and anxiety, dimly aware that there was much more to Catholicism than I had suspected...

...Eveh St...

...Certainly nothing was as important or as powerful as the vision of the church transcendent, the church which was more than a human institution...

...The church was not the pope, the bishops, or the clergy...

...In the Catholic women's college I attended I took a course called "The Catholic Literary Renaissance," taught by a young priest who read poignantly from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins...

...I even tried, and failed, to orchestrate for choral speaking passages from Peguy's Basic Verities...

...A SECOND LOOK AT A SPIRITUAL ADVENTURE ~ The Catholic Revival revisited II DOLORES ELISE BRIEN N I EARLY FIFTY years have passed since the Catholic Revival was welcomed in this country as the beginning, we hoped, of a vigorous Catholic intellectual and cultural life...

...The greatest minds of the period, Maritain, Berdyaev, Watkins, Dawson,and Guardini, dramatized the decline of western civilization once it had abandoned, beginning with the Renaissance and then with the Reformation, its centuries-old link with the church...

...Thomas Merton's The Seven Storey Mountain, published that year, 1948, became a much-read, treasured possession...

...The more one learned about the church, the more one had to love her and give oneself to her...

...I was put in touch with the theologians, liturgists, and spiritual writers of the Revival, with Cardinal Newman (not exactly an optimist), Dom Columba Marmion, Edward Leen, Gerald Vann, Romano Guardinl, L6once de Grandmaison, Dietrich yon Hildebrand, among others...

...Francis of Assisi remained the most popular saint, but lesser known saints began to be celebrated especially as the Daily Missal, with its saint for each day ,became more widely used...

...On my own I read randomly and avidly in fiction, history and the lives of the saints, not always fully understanding but absorbing enough to feed my youthful idealism...

...inappropriately, as the Catholic Renaissance, suggesting the scope and vitality of the period as well as its collective endeavor to create a new synthesis of Christian faith and life, a Christian humanism, rooted in and continuous with the tradition of the church, but responsive to the modern world...

...Those of us who came under its spell were not unlike Chesterton's English yachtsman who discovered England believing it to be an exotic South Sea island...

...We organized many "apostolic" activities but perhaps none as formative as the weekly "literary" meeting attended by a few college students, working men and women, and a number of priests...

...The fictional treatment of this theme was Supported by much of the spiritual writing of the time, notably by Gertrude von leFort's books, especially her Eternal Woman and Caryll Houselander'sThe Reed of God...

...Thomas and Scholasticism I acquired through reading on my own...

...Think of Bloy's Clothilde who dies "happy" and in utter destitution, Claudel's Violaine who becomes a leper, is abanI donedand murdered, Bemanos's Chantal who is also brutally murdered, Eliot's Celia Coplestone, who is martyred on some remote island, P~guy's Jeanne d'Arc who declares she will cast herself into hell if that is necessary to save souls...

...We were given, instead, holy men and women who had started out in life not much different from the rest of us, sometimes even wicked, or worse, mediocre...

...I was very critical of the world-out-there 21 December 1979:715and did not see how I could fit into it...

...Maisie Ward, perhaps more than anyone, brought to our attention the htroic efforts of the French clergy and laity to revitalize the faith in that country...

...Chesterton, Hilaire Belloc, E.I...

...The distinction of having brought the Revival to this country belongs to Maisie Ward and Frank Sheed when, in 1933, they opened up a branch of their publishing house in New York...

...Augustine's Confessions which made the deepest impression...

...The city is now in a relative state of calm--but it has been calm before, encouraging rash predictions and false hopes...

...It was enormously appealing, especially to women, reinforcing in them what they had been told was "natural" to them anyway, to give themselves totally in love and surrender...

...The miracle would happen if only we were holy enough...

...After college I went to Grailville to be trained for the lay apostolate and put aside the likes of Bloy, Mauriae and Bernanos...

...To see the church in this way made the church/world polarity inevitable...

...The only alternative was to turn from the mainstream, to devote myself completely to the church...

...There is only one unhappiness, not to be one of the saints," we were fond of quoting from L~on Bloy's The Woman Who Was Poor...

...We read aloud from Charles Ptguy, I.~on Bioy, Graham Greetle, Gertrude yon LeFort, Gerard Manley Hopkins...

...Grilled rather than taught by three priests, the course was, at best, an arduous mental exercise...

...These gatherings were pervaded by a shared sense of excitement as our perception of Catholicism deepened...

...Growing up as a Catholic and clued into the Revival, then in its heyday, was an exhilarating if often disquieting experience which, for some of us, had profound, personal consequences...

...That the church transcendent proved to be all too human one could certainly live with...

...To understand Catholicism in this way, as a complete system of life and thought, was reassuring, particularly at a time when western civilization seemed doomed...

...But the church's claim to be "the One and the All" I found myself increasingly questioning...

...We always knew there was a Catholic answer to everything, but there was much more to it than that...

...The most widely discussed novels and plays had sanctity for their theme, Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Georges Bernanos'sD/ary of a Country Priest, Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral...

...The rhetoric of city elections, the romance of the once and future Kennedys, and the bitter invective of race war have combined to produce a curious and heady brew...

...I wonder, but will never know, what the outcome would have been had I been an adult at the time, with an adult role and responsibilities in society...

...Temperamentally I was drawn to the French writers, to Mauriac, Bernanos, and especially to Ptguy...

...What I learned about St...

...They were lay people, husband and wife, but they desired to live perfectly in this world...

...I do know that the Catholic Revival which was so remarkably rich, so provocative, and so effective an agent for change, merits a revival of its own...

...Barney Frank, a liberal Democrat who represents the Back Bay in the state legislature, told an audience at Boston College that the "politics of race" was done for in the city...

...Growing up in the forties I discovered Catholic Action in high school and the Catholic Revival in college...

...Over the next years they published most of the haajor as well as the lesser writers of the Revival, among them, G.K...

...Augustine's parish in Brooklyn, and since this was a woman's group, the name Monica House seemed inspired...

...There was nothing on earth or in heaven with which it was not concerned...

...This "spirituality" called for a surrender of the self to God to be used by Him as He wishes...

...That peculiar 61an of the French, their emotional intensity, their seriousness, appealed to my religious sensibility in a way the English, with all their charm, wit, common sense and insight, could not...