Religion booknotes Books on John LaFarge, Ita Ford, Jacques Galliot, Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Cranmer
Cunningham, Lawrence S
RELIGION BOOKNOTES Lawrence S. Cunningham Biographical / autobiographical writing is a favorite of mine. A few of the works under review here can be read in a single sitting, but others demand...
...in which even the face of God is eternally invisible...
...There is a story-perhaps apocryphal- that when the pope remarked on Gail-lot's skill at getting press attention, Gaillot replied humbly that he took the pope himself as his model...
...He was further implicated in the continuing marital travails of Henry...
...Zagano gives us a simple and straightforward account of Ford's early education and upbringing, her entrance into the Maryknoll community and life as a missionary, first in Chile and then in El Salvador...
...Passing observations like that, in the midst of a bracing good narrative of a full and successful career, make a worthy testimony to the life of an eighty-year-old writer who now stands looking at his past and our future "from the ridge...
...We have a picture of Bernard as a saintly mystic who has been the object of cult in the Catholic church for centuries as well as the wellspring for much mystical nourishment...
...Yet we still need an authoritative biography of the saint, who, in the words of the late Etienne Gilson, gave up everything for God except the art of writing well...
...When we talk of martyrs we also need to talk about contemporary American women buried in shallow, peasant-dug graves who were murdered with military weaponry financed by our government...
...It is distressing, however, that the outrageous price of this book will give pause to interested readers and perhaps even make some libraries think twice before purchasing it...
...Gaillot, a French prelate, was removed, on orders of Pope John Paul II, as bishop of the diocese of Evreux in 1995 because of his alleged lack of orthodoxy and public participation in movements thought inimical to the good of the church (see, Commonweal, October 6, Voices from the Desert by Bishop Jacques Gaillot Crossroad, $15.95,116 pp...
...I also have a pedagogical idea of how to use it...
...When we have finished reading the early documents on Christian martyrs in my freshman seminar, I will circulate this book and others like it...
...he never wavered in his desire for a general council to heal religious rifts), and particularly helpful in tracing the long intellectual evolution of Cranmer's thinking, especially on the Eucharist...
...West is a cradle Catholic with just enough combative feistiness to have also made him a critical one...
...he was married to the daughter of the Lutheran divine, Osiander...
...Evil...is not merely the absence of good...
...He was not only an impressive monastic founder, but his writings had their influence on the high medieval scholastics as well as the major reformers like Luther and Calvin...
...His highly complex career involved, among other things, the production of The Book of Common Prayer as well as his role as the architect of religious change in England...
...My students need not think of martyrs as only facing hostile Roman judges, pleading parents, and lions in the circus as did Perpetua and Felicity in third-century North Africa...
...This is the kind of book to keep at one's desk to read a chapter at a time...
...Most of his writings are now available in good English translations...
...In wonderfully written chapters, West describes his life as a fiction writer and years in the Far East and in Rome as a newspaper columnist...
...His removal caused an uproar in France...
...Gaillot's hope is to continue to preach the liberating news of the gospel while remaining "in communion with the church...
...This biography is a very "good read," although the author seems overly apologetic for the shortcomings of this generous and saintly priest...
...Bredero concludes that any complete biography of the saint will have to take into account Bernard as a monk and as a monastic founder (he is very good on Bernard's incredible gift for founding monasteries) in tandem with Bernard's attempt to "monasticize" the larger culture and, at the same time, to give "this state of life more depth in a mystical sense...
...The author has obviously mastered both the primary sources and the secondary literature...
...novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman, about the first Slavic pope...
...There are also some moving paragraphs about faith and the life of faith...
...Though he is now fully reconciled to the church, Morris's indignation is still palpable-an indignation with which many Catholics will identify...
...A recently retired Dutch scholar, Bredero sets out to account for a problem...
...This is definitely a specialist's book and not a book for the casual reader...
...1995...
...the success of The Devil's Advocate...
...A book (actually, a booklet) like this serves its own purpose...
...Today, he works tirelessly to reach out to the Algerians in France who are the subject of much distrust and hatred as France grapples with vexatious conflicts over immigrants and the fear of the "Islamicization" of France...
...Zagano's brief memoir of her life and death is an act of pietas toward one of the many martyrs in that unhappy country during a very perilous time...
...All but one are easily accessible to the nonexpert...
...by Robert A. Hecht Scarecrow Press, $67.50, 304 pp...
...LaFarge knew the contemporary world but the limitations of his world view are also clear: his defense of Franco was unwavering...
...but when he went to the stake in 1556 (after the execution of the other two Oxford martyrs, Ridley and Latimer) he reaffirmed his faith and repudiated his earlier recantations...
...That is exactly what I did: awarding myself a "good read" after finishing more pedestrian chores...
...Many critics have judged Cranmer harshly for his hypocrisy in persecuting married clergy when he had a "secret" wife himself, for his willingness to send to the stake persons who had views similar to his own, and for his almost pecksniffian subservience to Henry...
...He is quite good at linking his subject to the continental reformers (Cranmer got Bucer to England...
...Ita Ford: Missionary Martyr by Phyllis Zagano Paulist, $5.95, 50 pp...
...His name has resurfaced most recently because of his involvement, during the waning days of Pius XI's papacy, in a never-published encyclical on the topic of racism which he co-wrote with two other Jesuits...
...When Rome refused to annul A View from the Ridge by Morris West Harper San Francisco, $18, 157 pp...
...However, it is provocative and succeeds in contextualizing a figure who has often been called the "Last of the Fathers...
...and the majestic prose of The Book of Common Prayer which, more than anything else, gave a center of unity to the Anglican communion...
...Conference, LaFarge was a long-time editor at America and a contributor to the pages of this journal...
...it is the absence of everything human, the black hole...
...But against that portrait, we have the "historical" Bernard who was engaged in ferocious attacks on the emerging university theology of the day, a relentless hunter of heretics (as Abelard found out to his sorrow), a bitter polemicist, and a preacher of crusades...
...For Catholics of a certain age it is a treat to be reminded of his publications about Don Mario Borelli and the street urchins of Naples...
...and (3) to come to some conclusions about Bernard as an "historiographical problem...
...and his fascination with Giordano Bruno (and the play The Heretic which derived from it...
...Hecht's wide knowledge of the LaFarge family is put to good advantage in telling this story, which ranges from LaFarge's childhood through his education for the priesthood and subsequent entrance into the Jesuits, his long pastoral years with the rural population of Maryland (separate white and black parishes), to his work as a journalist and his wider involvement on the world stage...
...Evil is serene in its enormity...
...Although this is a very long book which has its share of longueurs, it is gracefully written and has its flashes of wit...
...This polite fiction is the church's way of making or keeping bishops (who need an episcopal location) by naming them to a place which is, in the words of the law, in part-ibus infidelium ("in a pagan area...
...a revised marriage rite...
...A pioneer in interracial relations, deeply interested in the liturgical arts (as befitting the son of a well-known artist), active with Luigi Ligutti in the Catholic Rural Life An Unordinary Man: A Life of Father John LaFarge, S.J...
...Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...
...He does not write a straight autobiography but lets us see the progress of his life from his days as an Irish Christian Brother through his military service in the Pacific during World War II to his later eminence as a playwright, novelist, and journalist...
...It would be a fine gift to a person seeking a life of Christian discipleship or an example of how hagiography ought to be written...
...Arrested as a traitor at the time of the Marian restoration (1553), Cranmer first recanted his "Protestant" theological positions, Thomas Cranmer by Diarmuid MacCulloch Yale University Press, $35, 692 pp...
...I mention the spareness of Zagano's narrative not as a criticism...
...At base, in MacCulloch's words, was Cranmer's desire to guide the Church of England "through the thickets of wicked deceit which must be avoided at all costs: on the one hand, papistry...
...As a young man he spent two years in the French military defending French rights in Algeria...
...I also rather enjoyed going to my OED to look up such arcane words as chough, becket, feoffment, eftsoons, ad-vowsons, and mumpsimus...
...Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153) was one of the most influential figures in the medieval church...
...West, the celebrated Australian man of letters, subtitles his work "The Testimony of a Twentieth-Century Christian...
...Anyone who wishes to see starkly the preconciliar church as lived by one of its livelier minds would benefit from this biography...
...His defense of the king led him, in time, to the See of Canterbury and, as a consequence, to center stage in the move of Canterbury away from Rome...
...Ita Ford was one of the four religious women who were raped and murdered by members of the Salvadoran military in 1980...
...Those interested in church history in general and the history of theology and liturgy in particular will learn a good deal from MacCulloch...
...Zagano's succinct and vivid book truly expresses the meaning of martyrdom...
...John LaFarge, who died in 1963, was one of the best known Jesuits of the American preconciliar church...
...There is almost nothing of the editorial nor anything approaching theological reflection in this work...
...This tribute has none of the "thickness" of, say, Jon Sobrino's published reflections on the Jesuit martyrs or his study of Archbishop Romero...
...Nonetheless, Cranmer is best remembered for the liturgical service he provided the Church of England, including the establishment of Morning Prayer and Evensong for clergy and laity...
...Later they were besmirched by our then secretary of state who had the gall to designate the women as "just not nuns...
...We still await an authoritative contemporary biography, though the secondary literature on his writings comes out in a never-ending stream...
...She was only forty when she died...
...Readers will be struck, as I was, at the symmetry in Gaillot's life...
...This book is the "report of a long investigation" which has three prongs: (1) to read closely the first life of Bernard (the Vita Prima) in order to understand its apologetical character (especially the early part, which is the work of William of Saint Thierry...
...2) to follow the history of historical interpretation from the saint's canonization down to the present renaissance of Bernardine scholarship...
...his first marriage (even though his canonical intermediary said that he was a free man as far as the "internal forum" was concerned), West responded by raising his children as Catholics, not taking the sacraments, and waging a public literary war against what he saw as the cumbersome and insensitive procedures of canonical marriage courts...
...When Gaillot lost his diocese he was made bishop of Partenia, an area in Algeria which disappeared as an actual diocese sometime after the Muslim conquest of North Africa...
...This slim volume, written in his modest rooms in Paris, is an extended "pastoral letter" to the flock of the church of Partenia, which is a symbolic population of those who are on the fringes of society and the church...
...his involvement with interracial matters a bit patronizing...
...Bredero's dense and demanding study is not a biography but a prologomenon to one...
...his loathing of birth control patent...
...The bare-bones description of Cranmer's importance provided above does little to indicate the depth of MacCulloch's comprehensive but eminently readable (and prize-winning) biography...
...Hecht came to this biography as a result of his research on LaFarge's nephew, Oliver LaFarge, who was a Pulitzer prize-winning novelist (1929) and keen student of Native Americans...
...As Bredero notes, the tension between the piety of Bernard's writings and the excesses of his public actions is patent...
...After a conversation in Rome with a wealthy Latin American who supported the death squads in his own country as a sheer necessity, West writes: "I learned the hardest lesson of my life...
...Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History by Adriaan H. Bredero Eerdmans, $30,320 pp...
...A few of the works under review here can be read in a single sitting, but others demand time and concentration...
...That latter topic is so important that one might consult David Southern's John LaFarge and the Limits of Catholic Inter-racialism-1911-63 (Louisiana State University Press, 1996) for a more ample discussion than Hecht is able to provide...
...That never-published encyclical shows another facet of the Vatican's attitude toward the Jews on the eve of World War II...
...his (prescient...
...He created his diocese anew in cyberspace with a Partenia website (www.partenia.fr) and carries on his apostolate to the marginalized through the force of his own personality and via his computer...
...Thomas Cranmer (1489-1556) was plucked from the relative obscurity of his academic career at Cambridge in 1529 as part of a team who defended Henry VIII's right to set aside his wife in order to marry Anne Boleyn...
...Rome, unfortunately, did not reckon with the ingenuity of Gaillot...
...and, on the other, Anabaptism...
Vol. 124 • April 1997 • No. 7
