Piety and Criticism

In the present time of trial, Catholics need examples of piety and of the critical exercise of reason. These two complementary excellences are on display in the late Fr. Marvin R. O’Connell’s Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays (St. Augustine’s Press, 2020).

O’Connell (1930-2016) is best-known for his narrative histories, among which loom large The Oxford Conspirators (1969), John Ireland and the American Catholic Church (1988), and Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (1994). The reader of these monumental books will find them to be “reconstructions of the past by the mind from sources,” for such was O’Connell’s conception of history. It was a definition he received from his mentor, Msgr. Philip Hughes (1895-1967), author of one of the most compelling historical narratives penned in the last century, The Reformation in England (1951).

Telling Stories that Matter, edited by William G. Schmitt and introduced by O’Connell’s long-time friend and colleague at Notre Dame, Fr. Bill Miscamble, C.S.C., contains a memoir and a selection of book reviews, historical essays, and transcripts of lectures. Each of these documents preserves a precious example of O’Connell’s voice, which was characterized by understated piety, precise observation, and a restrained eloquence that was never exactly romantic but just as surely never prosaic.

O’Connell was an empiricist. His narratives were the result of the careful sifting of circumstance, motive, end, achievement, and failure, all as they could be revealed by the documents, his sources. His memoir bears the imprint of his life-long method. It is certainly about himself; there is no other center to the narrative. Yet he placed himself against the backdrop of his family, his education, and the early years of his priesthood and professorial life in such a way as to produce something quite different from a conventional memoir, something more like a reliving of certain episodes of his life with himself as spectator and, yes, critic.

There is self-criticism, sometimes mild, sometimes not. As a newly-ordained priest, he was smitten with the optimism of the burgeoning post-war American Church. By his own admission, piety and humility were not then his strong suits. He had, apparently, an edge of Irish-American middle class resentment to his character. And he had a certain ambition—a desire to write and to publish—a drive for which O’Connell himself said he could not account. Yet he testified to his deep admiration for his father, who was at least for a time a journalist, and that may suffice to explain it, together with a nod to the extraordinary verbal gifts with which he was endowed.

The memoir was unfinished at the time of Fr. O’Connell’s death. If it has an incipient storyline, then it would seem to be that he presents his own development—from a devoted reader of Commonweal to an even-more devoted reader of National Review—as a path not trodden by the majority of American Catholics. Would the Church in America today be facing our current travails better had more priests followed O’Connell’s trajectory? We are left to supply our own judgment, having been given the evidence to make one in the form of vignettes about ecclesial life in Minnesota, Indiana, New York, and abroad. 

By placing O’Connell’s memoir in conversation with his friend Fr. Miscamble’s biography of Theodore Hesburgh, we can better appreciate the criticism of the post-war American Church that is arguably implicit in his narrative. Miscamble’s book—required reading for anyone who would understand the University of Notre Dame, but also the Church in America—is primarily a story of externals. Fr. Hesburgh’s very public talents and achievements are on display; his inner virtues and suffering are not. There was an interior poverty in Hesburgh—and not of the kind praised in the beatitudes. O’Connell’s tales from the Church of the 1950s point in the same direction. In his memoir, we meet churchmen distracted by the world and lured by the flesh, and thus—unwittingly we hope but nonetheless tragically—ensnared to one degree or another by the devil. 

Yet like any memoir worth reading, O’Connell’s manifests not merely his awareness of his own and others’ folly, but also of their goodness. There is much piety here. It is expressed at some length towards Msgr. Hughes, but also, if briefly, towards O’Connell’s priest-professors in minor seminary and colleagues at the University of St. Thomas, where he taught from 1958 to 1972. And throughout, we see glimpses of his close friends, Eugene Clark and Ralph McInerny. These sketches and remembrances are fitting reminders that the faith has indeed been passed down successfully to our generation by the previous ones, even if much of the legacy of the last century is otherwise of questionable merit.

One of the worst episodes of Twentieth Century Catholic life was the reception of Humanae Vitae. Fr. O’Connell’s discussion of the topic leaves much to be desired. “I had never been comfortable,” he wrote, “with the Catholic Church’s total condemnation of any form of artificial contraception.” He testified to an ambivalence about the encyclical’s teaching: “I do not believe I ever preached on the subject.” And he seems to have persisted in that ambivalence: “Humanae vitae has long proved its value as a beautiful evocation of married love. But I didn’t believe then, and I don’t believe now, that it presents the only possible evocation.” To say the least, these statements are deeply regrettable. Perhaps a partial explanation of them may be found in O’Connell’s admitted lack of interest in the speculative disciplines. He allowed his empiricism freer rein than he should have.

In addition to presenting his memoir, Telling Stories that Matter brings together some of Fr. O’Connell’s more memorable shorter works. If it contained only his twin review of books by Eamon Duffy and Fr. Richard McBrien, it would be well worth its reasonable price. The review’s title says it all: “Not Infallible: Two Histories of the Papacy.” Of special value is the text of the speech O’Connell delivered at the annual meeting of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in 1990. Beneath its plain brown wrapper—“An Historical Perspective on Evangelization in the United States”—the lecture offered a sweeping vision of the Church in America, a vision with a surprising moral: that Catholics should “return to the ghetto.” Thirty years later, O’Connell’s proposal reads like prophecy.

In his sermon “Learning in War-Time” (1939), C. S. Lewis insisted on the value of historical learning in terms that may be most fittingly applied to O’Connell. “The scholar,” Lewis said, “has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.” Over a long and distinguished career, Fr. Marvin O’Connell’s piety and sharp, critical faculties held him in good stead amidst a century rivaled in its nonsense only by our own.