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Bernard McGinn spends most of his time with books. He rises at 7am, “not terribly early,” he says, works through the morning, and ends his scholarly research with a run to the library around 5pm. Before bed, he prefers reading books unrelated to his scholarship on mysticism. He enjoys reading novels or books on history. He has just finished reading a novel by the Irish writer Sebastian Barry and a historical account of railroad construction in the Florida Keys.
As the world’s leading expert on mysticism—and those extraordinary souls on the fringes of society who have shared through their writings what it means to surrender oneself to the Divine—it should come as no surprise that his most cherished possession is his library. He is proud to own 70 antique books published before 1800, all of them related to his scholarship in some way. The oldest book in his collection is the 3rd printing of Peter Lombard’s Sentences in Latin dating from before 1477.
To those students who would wish to emulate his trajectory to scholarly stardom, he offers this advice. “To be an expert at something, you need commitment, hard work, and a bit of luck.” He admits that he was lucky that his interest in mysticism became popular subject matter at the university during the course of his career. There are times when someone could be interested in something but no one else cares about it. Or fifteen years later they care.
“To be an expert at something, you need
commitment, hard work, and a bit of luck.”
But he emphasizes how important it is to work hard. “You have to have a fire in your belly,” he says. “There’s no substitute for hard work no matter how clever or brilliant you are.”
His partner in his scholarly pursuits is his wife of 46 years, Pat.
“Pat and I have tried to learn to live and work as a team,” he says. “Pat has her own career as a Psychotherapist and has also been very active in Counselor Professional organizations, both on the state and the national level. But she also has a background in theology and philosophy and so has a great interest in the things that interest me.”
The McGinns are indeed a power couple. One often sees them walking across campus together, and Pat sits near the front at almost all his lectures and conferences. They relish helping one other achieve intellectual excellence. “For many years, she has edited almost everything I write,” says McGinn. “We even did a book together back in 2003, Early Christian Mystics: The Divine Vision of the Spiritual Masters, and are currently working on another joint volume to be called Mystical Conversations.”
They are as united in their intellectual interests as they are in their faith. They start and end their day with a wonderful ritual—praying the Divine Office together.
McGinn has now been at the University of Chicago for almost fifty years. He is a legend, the kind of person serious students get starry-eyed about. He seems to belong to another era as he came to the U of C just after Vatican II, when the Divinity School was looking to recruit Catholic scholars to its faculty.
For McGinn, these years have been an adventure. He admires the remarkable genius of the faculty members he is surrounded by, and he has loved engaging with each year’s cadre of bright, engaging students.
Of Lumen Christi, McGinn says that Thomas Levergood “blames me for getting it started.” He clarifies by sharing that in the 1990s, when Fr. Willard Jabusch—the Chaplain of the Calvert House Catholic Chaplaincy at the U of C—talked about having a Catholic Studies department on campus, McGinn opposed the idea. “I thought it would be good to have a center that offered lectures and courses and tapped into a whole range of people, not just the faculty at Chicago.”
It was Thomas Levergood and Paul J. Griffiths—now Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke Divinty School—who started the Institute in 1997, and did “all the hard work,” says McGinn.
Today, practically twenty years later, the Institute has achieved what McGinn never thought would be possible. Not only does it offer lectures and events on campus, but it also gives courses at Berkeley, in Boston, and New York City—and now even in Europe. “It is beyond what I envisioned,” he admits.
This spring, McGinn is thrilled to be presenting yet another lecture for Lumen Christi. The topic—“The Soul of Early Irish Monasticism”—is one especially dear to him. After all, he is three-quarters Irish, and one-quarter Scots. He and Pat travel to Ireland as often as they can, and for the lecture, he will be presenting a slide show of 80 photographs which he took himself as he traversed the country and visited its ancient centers of Irish monastic culture.
One way people show what they love is how much time they give to it. If that is true, then McGinn has two loves—his beloved wife Pat and other-worldly mystical types, especially those that hail from where his ancestors did, the Emerald Isle.
“The violence I had seen has left me feeling hollowed out,
unable to guild all the agony with some beautiful meaning.”
– Phil Klay
Across centuries and civilizations, human beings have found themselves struggling to come to terms with the grim and horrific realities of war.
Perhaps nothing is as heartbreaking as holding a dying child in your hands—one that has been ripped apart by shrapnel or one whose final moments are marked by a labored agonizing breathing.
Iraqi War Veteran Phil Klay, who has a young child of his own, confessed that he understands people who are atheists in the foxhole. “Some of them are atheists because of what they experienced in foxholes,” he said at a breakfast event on “Religious Faith and Modern War” (Oct 21) held in downtown Chicago.
A public affairs officer in the Anbar Province of Iraq, Klay didn’t have to kill; he never experienced the trauma of having a human life on his conscience. Nonetheless, what he heard and saw through others—especially the deaths of innocent children—convinced him that “none of us walks away without blood on our hands.”
If the tragedies in the Middle East seem too remote for us, there is a tragedy closer to home that we perhaps overlook. Whether we live in New York or Fallujah, Chicago or Baghdad, “we are regularly failing to protect our most vulnerable, our poor, our desperate,” said Klay.
Klay spoke openly and candidly about his struggles with faith.
Faith in God does not make it any easier to understand suffering, to accept pain as a transformative and transcendent experience.
On the contrary, suffering makes one question God—question what sort of God he must be to allow all the anguish.
Nonetheless he quoted Vietnam War Veteran Karl Marlantes who described the combat experience as inescapably spiritual: “Mystical or religious experiences have four common components: constant awareness of one’s own inevitable death, total focus on the present moment, the valuing of other people’s lives above one’s own, and being part of a larger religious community such as the Sangha, Ummah, or Church. All four of these exist in combat. The big difference is that the mystic sees heaven and the warrior sees hell.”
Indeed, Klay witnessed hell.
“The violence I had seen has left me feeling hollowed out, unable to guild all the agony with some beautiful meaning,” confessed Klay.
Later that afternoon, Klay engaged in an informal conversation with Scott Moringiello, Assistant Professor of Catholic Studies at DePaul University. Before students at the University of Chicago, the two discussed how literature helps us reflect on themes of brutality, faith, fear, and morality .
For Klay, literature has been a vehicle to express what has haunted him. After being discharged, he went to Hunter College and received an MFA. He then went on to write a collection of short stories titled Redeployment for which he was awarded the National Book Award for fiction in 2014. A review in The New York Times described it as “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls.”
The conversation with Moringiello on literature was particularly meaningful given that it took place at the Divinity School where war veteran Joshua Casteel had been a graduate student prior to his diagnosis and eventual death from stage IV lung cancer in 2012.
Casteel, like Klay, was a veteran of the Iraq War. His time as an interrogator at Baghdad’s Abu Ghraib prison led him to seek early discharge as a conscientious objector.
When he returned home, Casteel similarly turned to literature to express the moral quandaries he experienced during war. Having earned an MFA at the University of Iowa, he then started advanced studies at the University of Chicago in theology, philosophy, and religion and literature. Casteel was a graduate associate of the Lumen Christi Institute and was assisting in the process of editing Cardinal George’s final book when he learned of his diagnosis.
The witness of both Klay and Casteel challenges us not to accept religious platitudes when it comes to exploring the darkest corners of the human soul.
“We English majors were fortunate in the timing of our intellectual coming of age as Catholic.” – Kenneth L. Woodward
In his writing—as well as in person—long-time religion writer Kenneth L. Woodward is notable for his irreverence, his gruff boldness, his refusal to be pigeon-holed as one thing or another. “For a long time,” he says, “I wrote conservative op-ed pieces for The New York Times, liberal ones for the Wall Street Journal. But given the poisonous polarization in our politics these days and—lets face it—also in the Catholic Church, it’s very hard now for a writer to work both sides of the ideological street.”
Most readers know Woodward from the more than 1000 articles, essays and reviews he wrote for Newsweek, where he was Religion Editor for 38 years, as well as from pieces he has published in journals as diverse in outlook as Commonweal and First Things, The Nation and The Weekly Standard. His more scholarly essays can be found in reference works like The Encyclopedia of Protestantism and the Encyclopedia of the History of Ideas. His new book, Getting Religion: Faith, Culture and Politics from the Age of Eisenhower to the Era of Obama, joins three previous ones: The Book of Miracles: The Meaning of the Miracle Stories in Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam; Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn’t, and Why, and Grandparents, Grandchildren: The Vital Connection, written with child psychiatrist Arthur Kornhaber.
Woodward is from the “Middle West”—which, as he writes in his new book, “is what movie mythmakers have imagined the entire nation to be like when Americans are on their best behavior.” Before moving to New York he had lived in six of the eleven “heartland” states and studied at universities in three of them. At one point he planned to be an academic, but all he really wanted to do is write.
A 1957 graduate of Notre Dame, Woodward never intended to be a journalist. Like a lot of English majors in the Fifties, he says, “I aspired to be a poet, a novelist, or a critic—in that descending order.” As an undergraduate, he was heavily influenced by Frank O’Malley, a much beloved professor of English, and by a number of poets who brought a practitioner’s keen sensibility to bear on the study of literature. “We English majors were fortunate in the timing of our intellectual coming of age as Catholics,” he realizes now. “The Forties and Fifties witnessed a renaissance in Catholic letters: there were Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh in England, Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos in France, to name a few, and at home the early work of Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, J.F. Powers and others.”
Under the rubric of “Modern Catholic Writers,” O’Malley had his students read a wide range of authors from James Joyce and Franz Kafka to Dostoevsky, Rimbaud and Rilke—all of whom, he argued, were Catholic in the sense that that they addressed the deepest mysteries of human existence in an authentically religious way. This was a richer, more embedded way of coming to understand what Catholicism means than by studying theology, Woodward argues. “In any case, we had no real theology courses at Notre Dame in the Fifties. What passed for theology were basically study of the moral virtues and advanced high school apologetics.” Today, he observes, the situation is the opposite: “students can take sophisticated courses in Scripture and theology at many Catholics universities but few of them offer sustained immersion in the tradition of Catholic art, thought and literature.”
As Woodward tells it, there was in his undergraduate days an identifiable and quite compelling Catholic intellectual tradition that was recognized outside strictly Catholic precincts. “Modern Thomism was a strong and recognized philosophical tradition, thanks in large part to Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson,” he says. “Not only at Notre Dame, but also at the University of Chicago, Yale, and Princeton, you found a reception for Catholic aesthetics.” In 1956, for example, 15,000 students turned out to hear a lecture by Anglo-Catholic poet T.S. Eliot held in the University of Minnesota’s basketball gymnasium. In short, Catholic university students felt they were swimming with, not against, many of the era’s swiftest intellectual currents.
So how exactly did it happen that Woodward became a journalist? Well, right after their wedding, he and his wife did what all aspiring writers do and set sail for Europe. “We spent my wife’s savings bumming around Western Europe,” he says. “We left a twosome and returned a threesome.” Having started a family, Woodward realized he had to make a living. He knew he could write. One of the first pieces he wrote was published in Commonweal. “If you can write for Commonweal, I figured, you could write for anyone.” In 1964 he was hired off a liberal weekly newspaper in Omaha to be Newsweek’s Religion Editor. Oddly enough, the Religion Editor at TIME, his competitor, was also a Notre Dame graduate (five years earlier) who had studied under Frank O’Malley.
Well before he and his wife moved to Chicago in 2012, Woodward had been tipped by former Chicagoans in New York to check out Lumen Christi. He was especially impressed by the fact that it had been created by Catholic faculty at the University of Chicago like David Tracy and Bernard McGinn whose work he knew and long admired.
Woodward thinks it is still possible to have small Catholic colleges imbued with an Incarnational perspective in the liberal arts and sciences—indeed, Notre Dame in his day had only about 5,000 students. But most Catholic universities, he believes, “now are virtually indistinguishable from their secular counterparts. When a Catholic university houses a center or offers a major in Catholic studies, you can conclude that most of the faculty are not Catholic—nor most of the students either—and that the university culture is not particularly interested in the church’s intellectual tradition. “Hence the need and particular salience of places like Lumen Christi,” says Woodward. “May its tribe increase.”
You can hear Kenneth Woodward discuss his new book with Martin Marty on September 27.
Conference Encourages Catholics to Cultivate and Care for the Created World
“Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our relationship with others and with God. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than romantic individualism dressed up in ecological garb.” – Pope Francis, Laudato si’
It may come as a surprise—especially given Pope Francis’ current reputation as a pontiff concerned about the environment—that Pope Benedict XVI was considered in both religious and secular circles to be the original “Green Pope.” In boosting efforts to make Vatican City more environmentally efficient, he even purchased a forest to offset the Vatican’s carbon imprint.
Archbishop Thomas G. Wenski (Archdiocese of Miami) reminded the audience of Benedict in order to put Pope Francis’ contribution in perspective in his keynote address in the symposium, “Caring for our Common Home: Economics, Environment, & Catholic Social Thought” (May 19).
Pope Francis’ concerns belong to a tradition of Catholic Social Thought that reaches back to the dawn of the Industrial Age with Pope Leo XIII’s groundbreaking encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Since then, the Church has repeatedly called for a more just society in which people can strive for holiness in peace and harmony.
In terms of ecology, a concern for the earth and man’s stewardship of it has roots even deeper than modernity. In the Book of Genesis, man was placed in a garden that he was supposed to tend and cultivate. He was “charged with this duty of cultivation for all time,” said Wenski.
How does Pope Francis’ message in his second encyclical Laudato si’ fit into the larger dialogue the Church has on this topic?
The key to understanding Laudato si’ is the term “integral ecology,” explained Wenski. Francis expressed what this means most vividly in the following passage from his encyclical: “If the present ecological crisis is one small sign of the ethical, cultural and spiritual crisis of modernity, we cannot presume to heal our relationship with nature and the environment without healing all fundamental human relationships…Our relationship with the environment can never be isolated from our relationship with others and with God. Otherwise, it would be nothing more than romantic individualism dressed up in ecological garb.”
That, argued Wenski, is where we have to start in our discussions on the environment. In a guest appearance he had on the “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” he told the comedian, “we gotta get our relationship with God right, our relationship with our fellow man right, if we’re gonna hope to get our relationship with Mother Earth right.”
In other words, “our lack of concern about the degradation of the environment is ultimately a symptom of our sickness of soul,” said Wenski. We can’t repair one relationship in isolation. They are all interconnected.
The disharmony in our souls seeps into everything we do and touch. Because we don’t care about God or one another, neither do we care for the world in which we live. The damage resulting from this rupture resounds through nature. Our negligent souls contribute to pollution, toxic waste, and climate change.
Furthermore, Wenski said that Francis brings to our attention a more serious form of pollution. “Our throwaway culture is not just about McDonald’s wrappers along the side of the highway. It is extended to human beings as well. In Laudato si’—as part of this integral ecology—he zeroes in on how we throw away life in the womb, how we neglect the disabled and show little respect for the lives and the contributions of the elderly. This is a moral pollution as bad as the pollution of rivers and lakes.”
Not only do we casually discard human life in its most vulnerable stages, we treat it as a commodity when it is healthy and strong. Describing human trafficking as a “juggernaut of filth and slavery,” Wenski echoed Francis’ claim that it is fueled by a “pollution of the heart.”
Francis also worries that our ecological challenges weigh heavily on those who can least afford it – the poor. But in assisting the poor and coming to their aid, one culture cannot disregard and disrespect the traditions of another. “The disappearance of a culture can be just as serious, or even more serious, than the disappearance of a species of plant or animal,” Wenski said, quoting Francis.
Given all these challenges that ultimately originate from a crisis in relationship, Pope Francis believes the most important place to start is with dialogue. “Pope Francis uses the word dialogue very frequently,” observed Wenski. It is not a trite word. He takes it very seriously. He wants us to engage with one another, “to be led to an encounter at the heart where significant concepts can be discussed and where real change can occur.”
Wenski praised the Institute for its initiative in organizing the conference. “I think [Pope Francis] would be proud of the dialogue we are having today and the spirit the Lumen Christi Institute brings to these forums on Economics and Catholic Social Thought.” He noted that the Institute provides a rare forum for the discussion of ideas that otherwise get hijacked by right or left. “In our highly politicized reality, our space for these conversations is harder to come by.”
One of the many myths surrounding “The Inquisition” is that the Catholic Church was brutally executing scores of innocent people by drowning them or burning them at the stake.
In the symposium titled “The Inquisition: What Really Happened?” (April 20) cosponsored by the Lumen Christi Institute and the Medieval Studies Workshop, scholars Hannah Marcus (Stanford University), Daniele Macuglia (University of Chicago), and Ada Palmer (University of Chicago) sought to clarify the numerous misconceptions surrounding the infamous period.
For one, “the Church itself is never executing,” remarked Palmer, Assistant Professor of History, Associate Faculty of Classics, and Member of the Stevanovich Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. “There is no Inquisitor tying people’s feet and then dropping them in the canal.”
On the contrary, the most common sentences meted out by the Inquisition were that heretics recite Hail Marys or sit through really boring lectures. “There were very few burnings and drownings,” said Palmer. Furthermore, the Church didn’t have the authority to execute anyone. That was the prerogative of the state. They would recommend that a heretic be executed and then local government authorities would carry out the sentence.
Local governments, for their part, were concerned with political dissenters, primarily those who committed treason against the state. The reason that executions were rare is because they were so costly. Unless a heretic was also a political threat, local officials wouldn’t ordinarily get entangled in the Church’s problems.
Nonetheless, even a mild sentence seems outlandish for modern democratic societies accustomed to freedom of thought.
But in Medieval Europe, ideas mattered. One’s eternal soul could be imperiled by adherence to heretical doctrine. It was rare that heretics were executed. For the most part, they were given every chance to renounce their ill-informed or dangerous beliefs, as in the case of a young man who allegedly sold his soul to the devil in order to sleep with his boss’s wife. He was merely chastised and told to recite prayers, which he did with seeming remorse.
What has come to be regarded as the Catholic form of the Inquisition was an ecclesiastical tribunal established in twelfth-century France for the suppression of heresy. The Inquisition therefore dealt with ideas, news, information, and the dissemination of knowledge—striving to defend people from wayward doctrine by ensuring its purity and veracity.
The Church itself is never executing…There is no Inquisitor tying people’s feet and then dropping them in the canal.
To give even greater context to the topic, Marcus, a PhD student in History at Stanford University, drew upon the work of historian Edward Peters who distinguishes between three types of inquisition. There is the “inquisition,” which was a legal practice that originated in Ancient Rome. Then there is the “Inquisition,” which usually comes with a modifier before it. That’s because there were Inquisitions in many parts of the Catholic world, including Spain, Italy, Portugal, France, Mexico, and even in Goa, a state located in western India. Each of these Inquisitions had different concerns. Even Naples had a different inquisition from the one in Rome. Finally, there is “The Inquisition,” a stubborn myth whose origins can be traced to the “Black Legend” and the Protestant polemicists from the Netherlands in the 16th century who spread it. What was their sinister tale? “That Catholic Spain (which controlled the Netherlands at the time) is the worst and destroys everything,” said Marcus, mimicking the legend’s exaggerated tone.
The propaganda started against Spain, but then spread to Italy and other parts of Europe. “It’s an enduring legend,” she added, explaining that it makes historical scholarship difficult.
There are numerous myths to rebuff.
One is that the Church was opposed to science and reason, and that the victims suffering at the hands of bloodthirsty clerics were intellectuals or saintly visionaries like Joan of Arc.
Macuglia, a PhD student at The University of Chicago’s Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, confessed to being surprised that the Church actually helped disseminate new discoveries and ideas. “Some of the major contributions to the spread of Newtonianism came from within the Church,” he said, adding that many mathematicians and natural philosophers were able to advance their scholarship through the Church’s inquisitorial networks.
In fact, quite a few academies and centers of learning were established and funded by the Church—especially in Rome. While they helped promote knowledge, their primary purpose may have been more Machiavellian, i.e., to assist the Inquisition in determining whether the latest scientific theories were true or not.
With the invention of the printing press in 1450, the Church was overwhelmed with the scope of their project. Ideas—both good and bad— could circulate with astonishing speed. For example, news of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was able to reach London within 17 days. If Luther had lived several hundred years earlier, only the inhabitants of Nuremberg would probably have known about his complaints.
“Suddenly and newly in the 1500s, scary ideas – from the perspective of a nervous, conservative, self-identified Orthodox theologian – are jumping all over Europe with incredible speed and multiplying themselves into a hundred or a thousand copies,” said Palmer.
“Heresies were being imagined in the contagion sense,” said Palmer, to give an idea of the Church’s perspective on the threat. Prior to the printing press, a heresy could have been confined to a single area, to one city even. If someone came up with a crazy idea, e.g., projecting your soul out of your body to spy on your enemies, it would stay within a group of interconnected individuals. This was no longer the case.
The Protestant Reformation of 1517 dealt the Church another severe blow in its mission to stop the spread of heresy. “There are suddenly territories where everyone in that territory is officially labeled a heretic,” said Palmer. According to Church law, “you’re supposed to have no contact with them; they’re excommunicated.”
In 1559, the Roman Inquisition under Pope Paul IV issued the first papal index of prohibited books. Catholics were now expressly forbidden from reading Martin Luther or any books written by Protestants. But the Church soon realized that not all Protestant intellectual work is heretical. “Some of the books they wrote are scary theology that you don’t want around,” said Palmer, “but some of the books that they wrote are drawings of rocks.” And these drawings might prove incredibly helpful to a Catholic geologist, only he is unable to use them because they were created by a heretic. “How do you handle that? Is that allowed? Is that not allowed?” asked Palmer, showing how the Church was forced to bend its rules, to make exceptions.
Marcus elaborated on the problem by sharing that the “heretic” countries of Switzerland and Germany were particularly advanced in botany and pharmacology. A Roman physician approached the Inquisition, pleading for permission to read scholarly material published by the sixteenth-century German physician and botanist Leonhart Fuchs. “The physician said he doesn’t know how to save Catholic bodies without the works of a Protestant author.” The Church now has to contend with cases where you need a “heretic” to save a human life.
So when did this painstaking process of sifting through information to determine whether it is heresy or not come to an end?
One thing that probably surprises most people is that the “Inquisition” still is around today. However, just as in the past, it is incredibly rare for cases to go to trial. However, if they do, the body responsible for promulgating and defending Catholic doctrine is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Although it doesn’t have the universal jurisdiction it had in the past, “there still needs to be an authority that regulates what is and isn’t theologically sound within the Catholic Church,” said Marcus.