Restore All Things in Thomas?

One of the signature conceits of Catholics who “came of age” during the 1960s is that the Church first directly confronted modernity at the Second Vatican Council. (“Coming of age,” like “secular city,” was a trendy phrase among Christians, tying Boomers’ new adulthood to the vogue for Dietrich Bonhoeffer.) Until the aggiornomento, so the tale goes, the American Church was shrouded in neo-scholastic darkness, with its finest minds malnourished by an intellectual diet of all Thomas, all the time. And then came the springtime of Catholics, when “the spirit of Vatican II”—another phrase that’s become a hackneyed generational marker—shone through the vaults of this musty medievalism, bathing the sanctuary in the saving light of modern secular culture.

The Church Confronts Modernity: Catholic Intellectuals and the Progressive Era

Thomas E. Woods Jr. (Author)

Columbia University Press

228 pages

$54.98

This mythological account of ’60s Catholicism is remarkably resilient—testimony, like much of the lore of that decade, to the power and self-regard of the Boomer cohort—and it bears so much truth about Catholic insularity that it still deserves attention, regardless of the smugness it can sanction. Still, it withers in the face of a growing trove of scholarship in history and theology. Over the last two decades, a number of historians—many but not all of whom “came of age” after Vatican II—have traced the Catholic encounter with modernity back well into the 19th century. Vatican II increasingly looks more like an ending than a beginning, the culmination of a century-long engagement with classical modernity in which Catholic medievalism doesn’t come out so badly. Indeed, as the theologian Tracey Rowland has argued in Culture and the Thomist Tradition, the Council’s own exemplary documents—especially Gaudium et spes—were all too superficial in their analyses of modern culture.1

Thomas Woods’ new study of American Catholic intellectuals in the Progressive period is a worthy if limited contribution to this revisioning. An assistant professor of history at Suffolk Community College-SUNY, Woods has turned his dissertation into a lucid and accessible book, taming the usual postdoctoral anxiety to mention every Previous Study. In five brief but informative chapters, he examines the responses of Catholic intellectuals to the pragmatism of William James and John Dewey; to the theory and practice of “progressive education”; to the new secular sociology; to the “social question” posed by industrial capitalism and answered—incorrectly, in Woods’ view—by socialists, Progressive reformers, and Protestant social gospellers; and finally to the Progressive attempt to create an American nationalism unanchored in any specific religious identity. On all these fronts, Catholics, Woods writes, fought “a low-intensity civil war” with other American intellectuals.

Woods opens with an account of the Catholic-pragmatist antagonism, a conflict that dovetailed with the bitter “Modernist” controversy. It’s now conventional historical wisdom that pragmatism offered an unambiguously flexible, democratic alternative to more dogmatic, natural-law philosophical traditions such as neo-scholasticism. It’s also standard fare among Catholic historians to see the Vatican’s suppression of Modernism as a cudgel against intellectual freedom. Woods counters that, by making human “experience” the touchstone of metaphysical and moral truth, both pragmatism and Modernism issued in “a narcissistic and self-centered view of the world.” While I think that Woods misses an even better and more ironical criticism—namely, that the affirmation of “experience” ratified an undemocratic reliance on professional expertise—his assertion should resonate among professors (not all of them conservative) who’ve noted the breezy suburban solipsism of contemporary students.

These students have come, not coincidentally, from public and private schools informed by the verities of Progressive Ed. Here, Woods acknowledges that Catholic educational theorists like Thomas Edward Shields and Edward A. Pace shared many Deweyan concerns about liberating children from lifeless pedagogical routine. In fact, he notes, they even believed that Progressive pedagogy had been “employed by Christ himself.” But they also recoiled from Dewey’s emphasis on process and inquiry over content and objective truth—an emphasis which, they suspected, would foster subjectivism and nihilism. They also feared that the “practicality” enjoined by progressive educators would entail the overshadowing of the humanities by science and business instruction. (One wonders what they would think of our mandatory and desperate courses in “business ethics.”) And they realized that progressive pedagogy envisioned a nonsectarian democratic nationalism in which Catholic particularity would be drowned. So when they adopted progressive methods, “it was the letter and not the spirit that they followed” in making the new pedagogy serve the ends of Catholic formation.

The debate over education spilled over into a larger battle, conducted on the new terrain of “social science,” over the nature of human society. Against sociologists like Albion Small and Lester Frank Ward, and against Protestant social gospellers like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, Catholic social scientists like Frs. William Kerby and John Burke insisted on the reality of humanity’s supernatural telos, the anti-utopian implications of original sin, and the philosophical indispensability of Thomist natural law. Now there are serious problems here: Woods obscures the Protestant origins of American sociology, and repeats canards about Social Gospel “optimism” which have long been discredited. But he also realizes that, despite their claims to democratic inclusiveness, Progressive sociologists and social workers were subtly and sometimes overtly technocratic, and that their conceptions of social welfare could undermine individual dignity.2

The chasm separating Catholics from Progressives was also evident in their answers to “the social question.” Where Progressives (and to a lesser extent Protestants) saw economic justice as a matter of humanitarian or socialist expertise, Catholic reformers like John Ryan and Joseph Husslein offered “corporatist” models of class cooperation based on function and religious spirit, and they even attributed the condition of labor to the individualist “social and ideological consequences of the Protestant Reformation.” Conceding the many areas of policy agreement, Woods underlines the differences between Catholics’ natural-law approach and Progressives’ reliance on materialist arguments from utility and efficiency. Taking their cue from Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (1891), but also employing Progressive criteria, Ryan and Husslein argued that natural law mandated living (not minimum) wages, just prices, workers’ right to organize, and a state that intervened (frequently) to regulate industry and ensure social welfare. Readers will especially benefit from Woods’ account of the Catholic idealization of guilds, modern forms of which, they thought, would democratize factories, compose class conflict by structuring caritas into the workplace, and revive artisanal skill against the division of labor.

These confrontations culminated, in Woods’ view, in Catholic resistance to what he calls Progressive “syncretism,” the attempt to create a nonsectarian, humanist ethical creed for a modern national community. Inspired by Eldon Eisenach’s little-known but brilliant study of “the religion of the American way of life,” Woods describes Catholic efforts to defend its dogmatic conceptions of natural law and revelation against liberal Protestantism, Ethical Culture, and other movements which looked toward the blurring and eventual erasure of denominational differences.3 On this score, Woods bucks a still-dominant tendency among Catholic historians to see assimilation into the mainstream in more or less upbeat terms.

It’s unpleasant to mention the shortcomings of so useful a book. Spellbound by the fetish of novelty, scholars looking for some interpretive breakthrough will be disappointed—but then, Woods doesn’t promise one. On the one hand, I admire this modesty: far too many trees are felled these days to record less weighty insights. Yet I also wish that Woods had tried to do more than stress differences which are, in the end, rather obvious. Indeed, because he accentuates the differences between Catholics and Progressives, Woods may end up marginalizing his own work from a mainstream much in need of refreshment.

One way to supply this refreshment—and here I’ll unashamedly draw an argument from my own book—would be to measure the chasm between Catholics and Progressives with a new set of instruments. Were Progressives as “secular” as Woods makes them? Most of them were lapsed Protestants, and their upbringing never left them, reappearing in their notions of the Progressive nation-state as a new “Beloved Community.” If the social thought of the Progressive era were reformulated as, in part, a “religious” imbroglio, then the differences between Catholics and Progressives could be acknowledged in a way that re-envisioned the entire period. As it is, I fear that Woods’ larger and most invaluable point—that Catholic social thought has been most provocative and illuminating when it highlighted its supernatural hopes—will be dismissed as special pleading.

Moreover, it’s not as clear to me as it is to Woods that fidelity to that Thomist framework will both rekindle Catholic faith and reorient Catholic social thought. As Rowland reminds us, the Vatican II documents were written, not by generic “liberals,” but by men trained in a neo-scholastic tradition which, she demonstrates, never developed coherent theologies of modernity or of culture. Preconciliar Catholic intellectuals may well have been “uncompromising,” but they were also more unsure and ambivalent than Woods lets on about the relationship of faith and modern culture. Rowland’s more constructive project—a “radical orthodox” blending of Thomist natural law with Augustinian sensitivity to history—may well prove to be a more durable foundation for Catholic social thought than neo-scholasticism.

It would be a pity if liberal Catholics or others read Woods’ book as little more than a defense of Catholic parochialism. While I strongly suspect that Woods and

I have serious differences over where and how Catholics should go from here, his concluding admonition—the interwar Catholic Revival motto, “restore all things in Christ”—beckons to a recovery of all that was best in neo-scholastic Catholicism. For a new generation “coming of age,” that’s a boldness wiser than any maturity.

Eugene McCarraher teaches humanities at Villanova University. He is the author of Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought (Cornell Univ. Press).

1. Tracey Rowland, Culture and the Thomist Tradition: After Vatican II (Routledge, 2003).

2. I might note that Richard Sennett—no “compassionate conservative”—makes a similar point in Respect in a World of Inequality (Norton, 2003).

3. Eldon J. Eisenach, The Lost Promise of Progressivism (Univ. Press of Kansas, 1994).