John J. Mulloy, 1916-1995
by William Doino, Jr.
As long as people have attacked Catholicism, courageous faithful
have risen to defend it. Ten years ago, I met such a hero: John J.
Mulloy. Today, a few months after his death, I number myself but
one of countless proteges for whom he served as a wise and devoted
mentor. My debt to him is immeasurable; I can only begin to repay
it by telling some part of his remarkable story.
Providence Takes a Hand
John always saw his life as a series of providential acts, and it
is hard to dispute that. Born in Philadelphia in 1916, he was the
first of seven children of an immigrant Irish Catholic family. A
shy, frail and bespectacled youth, John had some difficulty
forging friendships outside his home. In an attempt to gain favor
with his classmates, he took up athletics despite his lack of
aptitude. When he was playing tennis one day, a hard serve bounced
into his face and smashed his spectacles, seriously cutting the
iris of one of his eyes.
Rushed to the hospital, John underwent emergency surgery. The
doctors were able to salvage part of the eye's vision, but the
iris could no longer contract, so that John's injured eye appeared
much darker than the other. "It was a tremendous blow to my ego
and confidence," he told me, especially for a teenager already
sensitive about his appearance. Worse yet, he was forced to wear
an eye patch for a long time. But during his convalescence, one of
John's tutors introduced him to the writings of Newman and
Brownson and Chesterton and Dawson, among others.
John had always been a good Catholic, but had never really been
aware of the complexity and depth of the Faith he so loved. Now a
whole new religious world was opened up to him. "I can remember
the excitement I felt upon reading Chesterton's <Orthodoxy>," he
once told me. "Here was my fellow believer in arms, dueling with
the antiChristian polemicists of his day, effectively dispatching
them one after the next." It was exhilarating, he said, to watch
contemporary Catholic apologists stare down a Nietzsche or a Marx,
and expose their fevered philosophies as hollow and moribund.
"Their faith and courage in the face of enemy fire was a lesson I
never forgot," he remarked.
On his own, John expanded his studies to include Dostoyevsky and
important Protestant writers like Kierkegaard, then began a
serious study of religious poetry. Absorbing everyone from Dante
and Chaucer to modern luminaries like Eliot and Auden, John
embraced the Victorians as his favorites. He memorized the classic
poems of Tennyson and the Brownings, of Hopkins and Christina
Rossetti, then began to recite them aloud. Gifted with a
stentorian voice-the one physical trait he was proud of-John
initially rehearsed alone before the mirror, then, once he had
mastered the sentiments and cadence of each poem, performed for
his family and friends. Doing so brought him out of his
psychological shell, and helped restore his self-confidence.
Indeed, his new devotion to the study of Christian culture proved
a tonic to both his body and his spirit, and gave him a mission in
life which he previously lacked.
By the time he returned to high school, John so impressed his
teachers with his precocious knowledge that they allowed him to
graduate at sixteen. Thus, what he was not able to accomplish on
the ball field he achieved-tenfold-in class.
Brilliant Teacher
John's insatiable appetite for learning continued at St. Joseph's
College, which he attended from 1932 to 1936. There he studied not
only Christianity, but the societies of China, India and Islam as
well. His broad interest in nonWestern cultures allowed him to
compare Christianity with rival systems. By the time he emerged
from college with his bachelor's degree, John had acquired a great
knowledge of religion, history and world civilization. He also had
become immersed in the thought of Christopher Dawson (1889-1970),
the great English Catholic historian.
With the death of Chesterton in 1936, Dawson was the best known
Catholic writer still living. And as the foremost social analyst
of his time, Dawson was, in John's view, the most valuable of
modern Christian apologists, for his broad historical approach-
encompassing religion, economics, politics, education, science and
the arts-gave him a unique cultural perspective which other
apologists lacked.
After graduating from St. Joseph's with honors, John struggled to
find good work-as did many others-since America was still in the
Depression. He could get only odd jobs for meager wages, and for a
time he seemed destined for manual labor. But again Providence
intervened, and John acquired a plum teaching job at
Philadelphia's Central High School- the nation's oldest, and one
of the most respected. There, for the next decade, John taught
history, social studies and a special course in world
civilizations, which allowed him to make use of Dawson's ideas on
the cultural approach to history.
Central High was intensely competitive, with high-I.Q. students
drawn from around the city, giving John the stimulus he needed to
develop his courses effectively. Also, many students and faculty
at Central were Jewish, so John was able to introduce the riches
of Christianity to non-Christians. Indeed, following in the steps
of Dawson, John led an ecumenical discussion group at Central,
conducting lively exchanges between Catholics, Protestants and
Jews.
John saw the Catholic-Jewish dialogue as particularly important.
As a historian steeped in the Old Testament and Hebrew culture,
John had the highest respect for the Jewish religion, recognizing
that it was the foundation on which Christianity stood. But in
Catholic-Jewish relations, he always believed it wrong-indeed, a
betrayal of true ecumenism-for Catholics not to proselytize; for
to do so would suppress the primary mission of the Church, and
deny to Jews the fulfillment of the promises made to Israel.
John's fidelity to the Gospel bore unexpected fruit. For many
times, in some cases years after he had inspired them, former
Jewish students would return, privately, to report the good news:
thanks to him, they had been baptized and received into the Church
of Rome.
The Master Responds
In 1950, John took a sabbatical to pursue post-graduate studies at
the University of Notre Dame. There he became fascinated with
anthropology and sociology, two fields directly related to
religion and culture. Dawson was himself an expert in both
disciplines, and John decided to write him.
He did not expect much of a reply, but Dawson in fact replied at
length, offering profound reflections and supplying a detailed
reading list to his eager correspondent. Stunned and excited, John
immediately answered back. What followed was a scholarly
communication between the two that lasted a decade-"al the
result," John told me later, "of a sheepish letter which I almost
didn't write."
After graduating from Notre Dame in 1952 (with a combined master's
in sociology and anthropology), John returned to Philadelphia. In
addition to his duties at Central, he began locale speaking
engagements on the history of philosophy and cultural
anthropology, describing how each of these disciplines helped
explain God's plan for humanly. These Lectures were so successful
that he immediately began receiving invitations to speak
elsewhere. Soon, John developed a special Christian culture
seminar which he offered at various schools and universities
throughout the United States. California, Indiana, Wisconsin and
Washington were just a few of the states John visited to inspire
young minds.
It was during these travels that John became aware that a need
existed for an education based upon solid religious principles-
and, in particular, for a Dawsonian approach to history.
consequently, he decided to put together a grand synthesis of
Dawson's thought, which could serve as a guide to scholars and
students everywhere. After working out the details, he pitched the
idea to Dawson, asking for his permission and help. Dawson
complied. The result was <The Dynamics of World History> (Sheed
and Ward, 1957), a nearly 500-page collection of Dawson's best
writing, which John edited and to which he contributed an
introduction and postscript. The time frame covered in the book is
vast-everything from primitive society to contemporary England-and
a special focus is Dawson's refutations of anti-Christian
historians (Gibbon, Marx, Wells, Spengler and Toynbee) who have
falsified the past in the service of ideology.
The book garnered sterling reviews even from the journals known
for their hostility toward Christianity-such as the <Times
Literary Supplement>, the <New York Times Book Review>,
<Commentary> and the <London Observer>. John was ecstatic. "In a
sense," he later wrote me, "the success of <The Dynamics> among
the non-Christian community was a wonderful fulfillment of
Dawson's own statement about the Church existing to preach the
Gospel not only to the converted, but especially to the
<unconverted>-the people most desperately in need of it. As he
wrote: 'The Church does not wait until she finds a sound
foundation of natural truth and natural virtue and then proceed to
cultivate supernatural faith and virtue. She sowed her seeds among
publicans and harlots, in the corruption of the great Roman and
Hellenistic cities, in the welter of barbarism and violence of the
Dark Ages, in the slums of Manchester and New York."'
Watersheds
In the latter half of the '50s there occurred two watershed events
in John's life. First, in 1956, at one of his discussion groups,
John met Oda Bartsch, a young immigrant from Germany. The two were
married the same year. They had three sons: Justin, Vincent and
Clement, all gifted with the intellectual passions of their
parents. John once told me that he considered marriage and
children a heavy but welcome responsibility, and was fond of
quoting the French Catholic poet Charles Peguy: "The true heroes
of the future will be the fathers of Christian families."
Then, in 1958, Harvard's Divinity School established its first
Chair of Roman Catholic Studies, offering the post to Christopher
Dawson who, at 69, accepted. John had met Dawson only once before,
on a visit to England. But now, with Dawson in Cambridge, Mass.,
and John in Philadelphia, the two would meet often.
Stimulated by the new atmosphere of America, and ably assisted by
John in preparing his lectures and writings, Dawson's years at
Harvard were among his most productive, despite-his age. Perhaps
his greatest achievements of that period were his three lecture
series on "Catholicism and the Development of Western Culture"-the
climax of his lifetime work on the history of culture. All three
series eventually found their way into book form.
While at Harvard, Dawson also published <The Crisis of Western
Education> (1961), in which he argued that only the study of
Christian culture could safeguard Western culture-first, by
maintaining the tradition of liberal education against the growing
pressure of specialization and vocationalism; second, by
preserving the unity of Western culture against the centrifugal
forces of nationalism, racialism and, above all, relativism. Thus,
long before Alan Bloom exposed the collapse of higher education in
<The Closing of the American Mind> (1987), and long before the
forces of political correctness were poisoning the academic
community, Dawson saw it all coming. <The Crisis of Western
Education> generated considerable controversy, not least because
it contained an appendix by John advocating the abolition of
America's popular secular curricula for a more demanding and
religious-oriented one.
Accepting a challenge
At that point, one of the most momentous in Church history-Vatican
II was about to begin-Dawson's prophetic voice fell silent.
Crippled by a stroke, he never recovered, and was forced to return
to England, where he remained until his death in 1970. Before he
died, however, Dawson was able to communicate one last request to
John: Carry on the work I began. Don't let it die. Pray that God
allows you to succeed, for the coming years may prove exceedingly
difficult for the life of the Church.
Eager to accept his mentor's challenge, John began a second career
as a Catholic commentator. Throughout the '60s and '70s, John
published articles in leading periodicals on every aspect of the
Catholic faith: Church history, theology, ethics and morality,
biblical exegesis, ecumenism, social justice and catechesis, just
to start the list. Many of these articles appeared in <The
Wanderer>, the nation's oldest and most influential orthodox
Catholic weekly, of which John eventually became an editor. His
essays and opinions generated such interest that John decided to
devote full time to writing. He took early retirement from
teaching, moving with his family to Fayetteville, Arkansas, right
next to the state's university-an ideal location to carry out his
new apostolate of research and writing.
A central concern of John Mulloy's commentary during these years
was the great drama known as Vatican II. During his last year at
Harvard, Dawson told John to keep close tabs on the Council, since
he feared the liberal component would hijack its original purpose
and use it as a platform to wage destruction. When Vatican II
finally ended in 1965, Dawson's greatest fears came true.
Controversy immediately broke out over its correct interpretation,
and dissent and rebellion raged everywhere. Bringing his calm
orthodox perspective to bear on the conflict, John defended the
Council against both those who dismissed its legitimate authority
and those who lionized it while ignoring its deficiencies.
Although John found much that was beautiful and orthodox in the
Council's documents, he also found much to be soft and ambiguous.
Two aspects of Vatican II particularly concerned John. The first
was its lack of historical consciousness. "Is it not astonishing
that in the sixteen documents of the Second Vatican Council there
is practically no mention of history?" he once wrote to me. "It is
as though nothing ever happened to the people of God between the
death of the last Apostle, St. John, closing the canon of
Scripture, and the words of Pope John XXIII, opening the first
session of Vatican II. Apparently, the martyrs of the early
Church, the crusaders, the heresies of Luther and Calvin and the
Counter-Reformation combating them, and the glorious trail blazed
by the saints, were of little interest to the fathers of Vatican
II." This conscious rejection of the past, he said, left modern
Catholics "rootless and profoundly alienated," and it should come
as no surprise if many of them "eventually lose their faith, or
wind up embracing Fundamentalism, which has no such doubts about
its traditions."
The second element of Vatican II which disturbed John was <Nostra
Aetate>, its declaration on non-Christian religions. Though
orthodox, <Nostra Aetate> lavished extravagant praise on these
religions while downplaying their essential failing-namely, their
refusal to accept Jesus Christ as Messiah and Lord. This imbalance
was especially reprehensible, thought John, for many Catholics
(e.g., Thomas Merton) were just then experimenting with Eastern
religions. In 1977 this trend became all too apparent when the
American Catholic bishops published their <National Catechetical
Directory>. In a perceptive analysis for <The Wanderer>, John
noted how the bishops went out of their way to stress the
"positive and enriching aspects" of Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and
Buddhism, even going so far as to suggest that their beliefs could
be incorporated into the Church and thus "became part of ecclesial
life." He concluded his essay thus:
In fact, the surest way to see how radically deficient is the
NCD's treatment of the non-Christian religions, is to ask oneself,
just what motivation is left for spreading the Gospel if the ideas
behind this treatment are accepted as valid?
The authors of the Directory have been misled by the desire not to
offend anyone, whether Christian or non-Christian, by proclaiming
that the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of Divine
Revelation. And in taking this attitude, they are in direct
contradiction to the teaching of Vatican Council II-a council
whose teachings they claim as the charter for their enterprise.
John knew that only someone armed with Dawson's insights into the
world's religions could avoid the kind of shallow enthusiasm about
them displayed by the bishops. "Very few scholars have Dawson's
ability to enter into sympathetic understanding of non-Christian
religions, while still seeing their deficiencies," he wrote to me.
"But if it is done properly-that is, from a Christ-centered
perspective-it wil1 help the student see that the great majority
of mankind have always held to a belief in the religious meaning
of life. He will thus understand how limited and time-bound are
the attitudes of atheism and agnosticism and secular humanism
which influence our society so deeply today. It will give the
student a sense of kinship with the innumerable generations of the
past, through his realizing that they also found in a supernatural
order of reality, and in a life after death, the fundamental
meaning of human existence."
Exposing Frauds
Another area that concerned John was biblical scholarship. Since
the end of the Council, an alarming number of exegetes had taken
great liberties with Scripture. The most influential was Fr.
Raymond E. Brown, who denied the scriptural evidence for many
Catholic beliefs but nonetheless demanded to be accepted as a
pious Catholic scholar in good standing-and was so by many,
including bishops. John wrote dozens of articles eviscerating the
methodology and conclusions of Fr. Brown. One of John's most
effective rebuttals, entitled "Schizophrenic Theologyich" laid
waste Brown's contradictory reasoning:
The scholarship of Fr. Brown involves a process which tends to cut
the thinking mind in two. As a Catholic, one may believe in the
Virginity of Mary, the Resurrection of Christ, the Divinity of
Jesus, and the foundation of the Church of Christ; but as a
biblical scholar, one is required to reject all of these teachings
in the name of a higher and more scientific learning. One is then
free to speculate upon whether or not Jesus was conceived as a
result of rape or fornication, rather than through the virginal
conception attested to by the Gospels; one is at liberty to
believe that the body of Jesus may have rotted in the tomb, and
that it was only the subjective conviction of the Apostles that
Jesus had been a great inspiration to them which became the basis
for the teaching of the Resurrection; and one can claim that Jesus
had only the mind and ideas of a Jew of the first third of the
first century, and therefore did not speak as a Divine Person with
infallible authority.
How long is it possible for any person thus to split his mind in
two between the teachings of the Catholic faith, and the alleged
scientific conclusions of biblical scholarship? Is the position of
Fr. Brown that he accepts the Virginity of Mary as a dogma, while
implying that Jesus was in fact conceived as the result of some
illegitimate union, any more than a pose meant to deceive the
unwary? Does anyone-can anyone-really adopt two such contradictory
beliefs and still remain sane? Is not the logical result the
sacrifice of either one's sanity or of one's honesty? (<The
Wanderer>, May 4, 1978) Years later, when the so-called "Jesus
Seminar," a group of dubious biblical scholars, created a
sensation by claiming that eighty percent of Our Lord's sayings
were fabrications, John took to his typewriter again. In an
editorial entitled "The Jesus Seminar and the Jesus of the
Gospels," he chastised the media for their uncritical acceptance
of these radical exegetes, and challenged the seminar's
assumptions and conclusion:
It doesn't really matter whether a biblical critic accepts only
20% or all of 95% of the sayings and actions of Jesus in the
Gospels as authentic, if his premise is that his ideas determine
the content of what the Christian shall believe about Jesus. For
this betrays a scholarly hubris which thinks that it has the
authority to overrule the Word of God by the word of man...Either
God has spoken His Word to man through the words of Jesus in the
Gospels, or He has not. If the critics believe He has not, they
should make that clear from the very beginning.
Of course, there would be one great disadvantage to their doing
so. If they were to make their real beliefs clear, they would no
longer command newspaper headlines. If it were once recognized
that they are not in fact believers in the faith of Christianity,
but the usual agnostic met with so often in the modern world, the
game would be over, and the media would no longer have any
interest in them (<The Wanderer,> April 18, 1991).
Contra Curran
John was equally adept at upbraiding dissenting theologians. In
1987, during the Pope's second visit to America, Fr. Charles
Curran took to the airwaves to assail the Holy Father, and to
advocate a change in Church teachings on sexual morality. Curran
argued that whereas the Church once taught that freedom of
conscience, in the words of Pope Gregory XVI, "is a sewer," but
now regarded it as an inviolable right, the Church would justify
changing its teaching on a host of other issues: contraception,
fornication and homosexuality.
But in a blistering editorial entitled "Fr. Curran and the Pope,"
John immediately replied that the Church has never changed its
essential moral teachings, and that those who claim it has 1)
always use selective quotations; 2) ignore the context in which
the quotations were made, as well as the qualifications
surrounding them; and 3) rely upon the theological and historical
ignorance of their listeners. Answering Curran specifically, he
remarked:
Let us suppose that the claim to freedom of conscience is being
used to justify the vileness of homosexual behavior, on the basis
that this kind of behavior is a contribution to one's better
understanding of the meaning of Christian love. Would not this
kind of "freedom of conscience" most accurately be called an evil-
smelling sewer? Or let us suppose that Christians are appealing to
freedom of conscience in order to justify an alleged right to kill
unborn babies, and that this barbarous and horrible practice has
spread throughout the entire world, killing millions of these
defenseless infants each year. What better description of that
kind of freedom of conscience can be given than that it is indeed
a sewer full of the most loathsome rottenness?
It is a clear indication of the corruption of the moral sense of
our society, and the diminution of our minds by words rather than
realities, that Fr. Curran thought that all he had to do was to
refer to freedom of conscience in order to win his point hands
down.
When a Catholic invokes freedom of conscience to go counter to the
teaching of the Church, he is saying that his own unaided
conscience knows more about the moral law and its obligations than
the teaching of the Son of God transmitted through His Catholic
Church. What more absurd position could be imagined?
.. It is possible that Pope Gregory foresaw the kind of thing
which would result from the assertion of an unlimited freedom of
conscience, with no objective norms of morality to guide it, and
left at the mercy of man's pride and self-will. But if he had
tried to make his point by giving as examples such things as are
now thought normal in the late 20th century, the people of his
time would have thought him mad. It is left to our own time to
make madness a sign of sanity. (<The Wanderer>, October 11, 1987).
Changing Minds
How effective were these brilliant apologetics? While a few men
like Curran remained lost in dissent, others were dearly
influenced by John's criticisms. In the 1970s, for instance, Fr.
Avery Dulles, the prominent Catholic theologian, published a
number of books exploring the history of Catholic doctrine. After
reading them, John thought that Dulles had come dangerously dose
to suggesting that Catholic teaching was historically relative-and
said so, in <The Wanderer>. Dulles wrote a letter of protest to
the paper, professing his complete loyalty to the Magisterium, and
recommended that Mulloy consult Cardinal Newman's famous <Essay on
the Development of Christian Doctrine>, whose methodology Dulles
claimed to follow.
John was only too happy to do so. In a devastating reply, he
outlined the seven criteria Newman had established to recognize
authentic developments of Catholic doctrine (as opposed to
corruptions) and showed how Dulles' writings violated or
disregarded every one. Not surprisingly, Fr. Dulles chose not to
continue the exchange. In the years that followed, John wrote many
more pieces about Dulles, contrasting his increasingly
questionable speculations with his earlier orthodox writings and
reproving Dulles for his sympathetic attitude toward dissenters.
Then, just when it seemed likely that Fr. Dulles would join their
ranks, he began sounding unusually orthodox-publicly defending the
new <Catechism of the Catholic Church>, issuing warnings about
secular humanism, assailing false brands of ecumenism and praising
the new wave of converts to the Church. Fr. Dulles even wrote an
essay lauding St. Robert Bellarmine, the great Catholic reformer
and apologist who was the arch-foe of Luther and the Protestants.
Fully vindicated but never one to gloat, John welcomed Fr. Dulles
back to orthodoxy in the pages of <The Wanderer>, and later wrote
him a personal letter of congratulation, mentioning how the study
of Bellarmine and the Catholic Reformation had been instrumental
in the conversion of Christopher Dawson.
John's most satisfying exchange, however, occurred between him and
Richard John Neuhaus. In 1987 Neuhaus, a leading Lutheran
theologian, wrote <The Catholic Moment>, an acclaimed analysis of
the post-Conciliar Church. John liked the book, but noted one
glaring error. Commenting on the heresy of Modernism and the
Church's reaction to it, Neuhaus had written:
The Modernist movement...was condemned by Pius X in 1907. The
Modernists were a talented and varied lot and their condemnation,
in the form of the decree <Lamentabili> and the encyclical
<Pascendi>, cast a terrible pall over Roman Catholic theology for
over half a century.
This was exactly the type of revisionist Church history that so
aggravated John. Not only had Neuhaus misrepresented the Catholic
past, but-worse yet-he had misrepresented the very period when
Christopher Dawson and other Catholic giants had produced their
best work. In a swift response, entitled, "St. Pius X and the
Catholic Half Century," John retaliated with evidence that surely
must have jolted Pastor Neuhaus. "The actual record shows that
this was one of the most intellectually productive periods in the
history of the Catholic Church," John wrote in <The Wanderer.> In
point of fact, he argued, it was precisely St. Pius X's courageous
condemnation of Modernism which cleared the air and created an
intellectual environment which made possible the Catholic
renaissance of the early twentieth century. Commented John:
However much Modernist sympathizers in the ranks of the clergy may
have felt repressed by being prohibited from using Modernist ideas
to emasculate Church doctrine, their unhappiness did not prevent a
great flowering of Catholic thought and culture. This was to be
seen in theology and philosophy, in history and sociology, in
poetry and the novel. Consider such facts as these:
In French poetry, we have the great achievements of Charles Peguy
and Paul Claudel, with Peguy coming back to the Catholic Church in
1908, the year following the Papal encyclical against Modernism,
and writing his poetic masterpieces between then and his death in
1914. Claudel's <The Satin Slipper> is a drama of epic dimensions
which critics have compared to Dante's <Divine Comedy>.
In the novel we have the impressive achievements of Francois
Mauriac, Bernanos, Waugh, Graham Greene, Gironella (author of <The
Cypresses Believe in God>) and Sigrid Undset, author of <Kristin
Lavransdatter>, possibly the greatest novel of the twentieth
century.
In philosophy, we have three important French figures whose
thought is well known to the English-speaking world: Jacques
Maritain, Etienne Gilson and Gabriel Marcel. Maritain's influence
has been especially strong in America, while Gilson and Marcel
were each invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in
Scotland. In addition, Gilson gave the William James Lectures on
the occasion of the Harvard tercentenary. All of these thinkers
possess a worldview of reputation. Moreover, Pierre Duhem's
pioneering work on the history and philosophy of science was
carried on in this same period.
In France these years were a time of great flourishing of
theology. Danielou, Congar, de Lubac and Bouyer are French
theologians whose work is highly regarded both in their own
country and in England and America. During this half century,
French scholars were producing a massive 20-volume history of the
Catholic Church, while Henri Daniel-Rops was publishing his own
ten-volume Church history. In fact, the work of French scholars
during this period of alleged repression is so rich and impressive
that it is not possible to give even a summary of it all.
In Germany Karl Adam, Romano Guardini, Joseph Pieper and Theodore
Haecker were doing outstanding work in theology and philosophy,
and applying the principles from these disciplines to cultural
issues also. Karl Adam's <The Spirit of Catholicism> had
considerable influence on the teaching of Vatican II concerning
the nature of the Church, as set forth in <Lumen Gentium.>
In England during this period, when the decrees against Modernism
were supposed to have darkened Catholic intellectual life, there
was a steady stream of outstanding converts entering the Church.
Among these we may mention E. J. Watkin in 1912, Christopher
Dawson in 1914, Ronald Knox in 1917, G. K. Chesterton in 1922,
Arnold Lunn in 1932, R. C. Zaehner in 1946 and E. Evans Pritchard,
an outstanding cultural anthropologist, in the same year... In
English poetry, David Jones, a convert to the Catholic Church,
wrote poetic works which are now compared in importance with the
achievement of Eliot and Keats. Nor did the Modernist decrees do
anything to check the widespread influence of the poetry of Gerard
Manley Hopkins, whose work was first published in 1918.... In
England, this was the time when Hillaire Belloc, Phillip Hughes
and Martin D'Arcy were producing some of their finest work.
And in the United States, Fr. John O'Brien was able to fill five
books with autobiographical accounts of how prominent nonCatholics
found their way into the Catholic Church.
In light of these facts, would it not seem advisable for Pastor
Neuhaus to reverse his verdict on the harmful effects of the
measures taken against Modernism? Is it not likely that these
measures made possible, not a Catholic moment, but a great
Catholic half century in the life of Western civilization? (<The
Wanderer,> May 5, 1988)
Reforming Education
John's lively exchanges in the Catholic press earned him a
reputation as a leading Catholic apologist; and this reputation,
in turn, enabled him to raise funds for a project he had long
desired: the creation of a journal devoted to the ideas of
Christopher Dawson. In 1981, with the help of generous Catholic
benefactors, John founded <The Dawson Newsletter,> which he
edited. The purpose of the <Newsletter> was twofold: to persuade
academics of the importance of the study of Christian culture; and
to convince them that Christianity not only had saved Western
civilization, but could revitalize it again.
A persistent theme of <The Dawson Newsletter> was the virtual
collapse of higher education in America. Indeed, not only had
secular colleges and universities been corrupted but-worse yet-
Catholic education had as well. In John's view, the changes in the
Church during the 1960s and 1970s turned in quite a different
direction from that prepared by Dawson. Whereas Dawson had spoken
of the great importance of understanding our Christian historical
roots, Catholic education now turned away from this task. There
emerged an emphasis on the contemporary period-an emphasis that
was encouraged by the misconception that Vatican Council II had
made the achievements of the Catholic past irrelevant.
Even the few orthodox Catholic colleges that tried to rectify this
situation often missed the mark. An example was their adoption of
the "Great Books" reading program established at Columbia
University, then expanded and made famous by the University of
Chicago. Because the program was sponsored by two prestigious
universities and gave attention to a few Catholic authors (e.g.
Augustine and Aquinas), many Catholic colleges rushed to embrace
it. But as <The Dawson Newsletter> made clear, there was a serious
problem with the program: unlike Dawson's approach to education,
the Great Books curriculum had no overarching cultural vision,
much less one that saw the hand of God acting throughout history.
In effect, the Great Books program was a hodgepodge of classic
works which had no unifying theme. This approach left young minds
lost in a jumble of ideas, rather than giving them a coherent
outlook on life.
Another error of the Great Books curriculum was its concentration
on philosophy and literature at the expense of history. Again and
again, John would tell of meeting bright young Catholic
undergraduates who could brilliantly elucidate the abstract
concepts of Aristotle and Aquinas, and speak knowledgeably about
the merits of <Don Quixote> or <Paradise Lost>-but could not for
the life of them describe the history and culture out of which
these achievements arose. They were largely ignorant of ancient
cultures and the factors that led to their decline; they knew
little about the rise and expansion of early Christianity, or the:
reasons for its dramatic success; knowledge about Western Europe
during the Middle Ages was hazy, and they knew even less about the
Byzantine Empire; they could not explain the history of the
Crusades, much less defend them; they did not know the actual
historical record of the Spanish Inquisition; they could not
recount the heroic Christian missions of North and South America
or India, China and Japan; they knew only the barest facts about
the Reformation, Renaissance and Enlightenment, and could not
speak intelligibly about the Romantic Period or the Victorian Age;
their knowledge of the modern anti-Christian ideologies- Marxism,
Darwinism and Freudanism-was shallow and, worse yet, they could
not effectively reply to them.
This lack of historical literacy among young Catholics was in
John's view disastrous, and he set out to reverse it. This he did,
not only through <The Dawson Newsletter> but also with the Society
for Christian Culture, which he established at the same time. The
idea behind the Society was to create a nationwide network of
academics who would enact Christian culture study programs at
their respective colleges and universities. Its success exceeded
John's greatest expectations. Major Christian culture conferences
were held throughout the land, which John usually hosted or at
least directed from afar. As a result, countless teachers
introduced Dawsonian ideas to their curricula. More importantly,
young Catholic students have been introduced to the rich heritage
of Christian history all because of John's tireless efforts from a
tiny office in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
Devoted Mentor
It was during this time-in 1986, to be exact-that I first
discovered John. Because of a serious illness, I was more or less
homebound and devoted many hours to Catholic reading. And of all
the Catholic periodicals I read, none was more lively or
intellectually exciting than <The Wanderer>-largely because of
John Mulloy. Eager to meet the man behind the words, I wrote him a
letter describing how impressed I was with his commentary and
stating that I, too, hoped to write for the Catholic press
someday. John immediately responded, exhorting me to begin writing
at once. He gave me a detailed reading list and even sent me a
complimentary subscription to <The Dawson Newsletter.> Just as
Christopher Dawson had inspired him with an encouraging letter
years earlier, so did John now do the same for me.
What followed over the next decade was an exchange of letters,
phone conversations and personal meetings with John, in which he
gave me an informal education-every bit as demanding as a college
degree-always making certain that my path as a Catholic never
strayed into enemy territory. Thus, early on, when I wrote John a
concerned letter about an attack on the accuracy of the Bible in
<The Columbia History of the World>, he was there to rescue me.
After sending me the names of a dozen illustrious historians and
archeologists who established the veracity of the Old and New
Testaments, he scolded me for my initial reaction:
You must realize that you are not acting in a prudent manner to
accept the unfounded allegations of all of these secular
humanists, while you have next to no knowledge of reputable
authorities on the subject they speak so confidently upon. Who
ever gave <The Columbia History of the World> the right to speak
with such authority on matters that have been subjected to
investigation for many years now?
First of all, then, try to read something from the Christian side
of these subjects before you take on the anti-Christian side. You
remind me of a swimmer who constantly goes beyond his depth,
without any support from others, and who then cries out for help.
Remember that the practice of a certain intelligence in dealing
with these controversial matters is a part of the virtue of
prudence. You over-estimate your own strength and abilities, and
thus are in danger of drowning. Remember that Christianity is a
cooperative enterprise, and that means not trying to do everything
yourself.
When I ignored his advice, and wrote him a second anguished letter
about another attack on the Church I had read, John chastised me
even more severely and told me to consider the source of the
criticism:
Since you know that these are enemies who are anxious to destroy
you and your beliefs, one would assume that you would advance
cautiously upon their position, making sure that you had adequate
support to protect your flanks and to be able to make a good move
against them. But, instead, you rush right out against the enemy
like Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, and then you ask yourself why
you are cut to pieces and your faith comes reeling back in
disorder and near despair. What else can be expected if you act
with the kind of rashness that you make use of?
You would seem to be the only one left who is committed to the
idea that truth will necessarily win out in any contest with
falsehood. If one were speaking of angels or men without Original
Sin, there might be some likelihood of that. But, as it is, it is
not truth which is the object of most of the anti-Catholic and
antiChristian scholars, but the destruction of Christianity. And
you ignore that fact. Most of these writers you are drawn to are
not tolerant and balanced; they have a passionate desire to show
that Christianity and Catholicism are not true. They thus see
things through a glow of hatred and loathing when they approach
Catholicism-and yet you plan to take them as your guides. You seem
to feel that, unless you can refute every argument brought against
Christianity and the Catholic Church by those who hate them, your
faith is not secure. Which means that you will never come to the
end of your doubts and mental anguish, for there will always be
new attacks arising to replace the old.
John urged me to read Cardinal Newman's famous sermon, "Faith and
Doubt," which argues brilliantly that Christian faith is invalid
if it does not have the courage of its convictions; and that no
true Christian could believe that his faith might someday be
undermined by a scientific or scholarly argument- for if he
believed that, his faith was empty to begin with. As Newman
remarked, "Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt."
After I read the sermon, I felt much more secure, though I still
peppered John with questions about my faith. One of the most
valuable lessons I learned from him was the hypocrisy of liberals
who railed against the "absolutism" of the Church. In actual fact,
John taught, such liberals were more intolerant and intransigent
than anyone they condemned. As he wrote to me:
The dearest reply to moral relativism is this: no one really
accepts it when it is his own moral code which is concerned; he
only uses it against someone else's morality. In particular,
secular liberals use it against sexual morality derived from
Christianity. But when it comes to issues which they think
important-racism, slavery, the treatment of women or the
exploitation of workers-these are regarded as sins which cry to
Heaven for vengeance. Liberals do not look back on societies which
have had different views on these subjects and say, "We must not
be judgmental, for the experience of history shows that all
societies are culturally conditioned and that morality is purely
relative." In fact, liberals always assume that their moral
concerns are absolute, while those of Christians are only
relative.
Remember that liberals, although they often speak of the freedom
to read, do not read books which are antagonistic to their own
beliefs-they shut themselves off from such books...But the modern-
day secular intellectual is more attached to sin than he is to
truth, and when he realizes that the ideology of liberalism
provides a convenient excuse for his sins, he naturally declares
himself to be a liberal in due time...
Passing the Torch
Without doubt, the most important gift John gave me was the
ability to write in defense of my faith. Within a year of
contacting him, I was writing for leading conservative journals,
selling reviews to influential magazines and writing full-length
essays for <The Wanderer.> Within two years I began contributing
to <The Dawson Newsletter>, and within three John made me the
associate editor.
It was while working as an assistant to John that I first realized
that my relationship with him was hardly unique. In fact, John
served as a tutor to countless others. Each day, he would spent at
least two hours typing letters to academics and students,
instructing and exhorting them as he had done me. And these
correspondents came not only from America, but from abroad as
well: Canada, England, Italy, Austria, Latin America, Australia
and Africa and elsewhere.
But the highlight of our friendship came when I finally met the
grand old man in 1988. At the time, John had been delivering a
series of lectures along the East Coast, and he had generously
offered to interrupt his travels to stop by my home in Connecticut
and speak to my local parish. Since he was used to addressing
large, prestigious audiences, I was somewhat embarrassed to tell
John that my parish would consist of a much less numerous,
nondescript audience. He was surprised at my remark. God was no
respecter of persons, he told me. And besides, he said, he
<preferred> speaking to small gatherings of lay people, who were
less snobbish than academics.
Although I did not know it, John was suffering from prostate
cancer at the time, and I learned later that he had been working
under considerable pain. Yet he never showed it, and he buoyantly
entertained my family during his visit and promised to return
again-which he did, many times in the early 1990s.
Mulloy vs. the Mob
One thing I was able to share with John was my passion for great
movies. Every other week, I would send him a video of a favorite
film and, after he had seen it, we would debate its merits.
Because of the drastic decline (both moral and artistic) of motion
pictures in Hollywood during the last thirty years, John was
naturally suspicious of any movie made after 1965.
His favorite was the 1962 drama <To Kill a Mockingbird>, starring
Gregory Peck. Based on Harper Lee's famous novel, it is the story
of Atticus Finch, a white defense lawyer who bravely defends an
innocent black man accused of rape against a mob wanting to hang
him, as seen through the eyes of the lawyer's young daughter.
Although on the surface it might appear a politically correct
allegory filled with stereotypes of the South, on its deepest
level it is about the importance of standing up for the truth even
at the cost of one's reputation or one's life. I believe John
enjoyed <To Kill a Mockingbird> so much because he identified with
Atticus Finch. He saw himself as a defender of God's truth against
a lynch mob of anti-Christians in academia, in the media and, all
too often, within the Church. As he subsequently wrote to me in a
revealing letter about dissenting theologians:
Such people are not really scholars, but advocates-I compare them
to unscrupulous lawyers aiming to present only that evidence which
favors their side of the case, and aiming to distort whatever
evidence they cannot easily ignore. For this reason, the only
sensible way to combat dissenters is through an adversary
relationship, as exists in a court of law. That is, the lawyer for
one side is counterbalanced by the arguments of the lawyer for the
other. Unfortunately, the orthodox Catholic side rarely gets
presented nowadays, and thus the laity is left in ignorance that
there is an orthodox side. This is the situation which lies before
us, and one we desperately need to correct.
True to the End
By the beginning of 1995, John's cancer had spread and his body
was often wracked with pain. Yet amazingly he continued to write,
lecture and correspond. In one of his last letters to me, he told
me never to become discouraged about my own chronic illness, "for
the Devil would like nothing better than to vanquish another
Christian soldier."
In words that are no doubt guilty of excessive flattery, John
wrote to me:
You are probably some kind of chosen instrument to do God's work-
which is why you are being pruned as it were. You know that famous
story of St. Teresa of Avila who, when crossing a stream fell from
her donkey and went under. She called out to God for help and came
gasping to the surface, but then she sank again, came up a second
time after asking for help from God, and then sank a third time
before being able to get onto the bank. She reproached Our Lord
for this and asked Him why He had been so slow in coming to her
aid, why He had almost allowed her to drown. He replied to her,
"Teresa, that is the way I treat my friends." She said in
response, "Lord, that is why you have so few of them!"
In his final conversation with me, in the autumn of 1995, John
told me that he had received Last Rites, and noted that he was
just a few days away from the 150th anniversary of John Henry
Newman's reception into the Church. "I hope to make it," he said.
He did- dying on October 10, 1995, one day after the anniversary
of Cardinal Newman's conversion.
There are two images I will always cherish of John Mulloy. The
first: One night during one of John's visits to my home-it must
have been 2:30 in the morning-I came across a shadowy figure on my
living room couch, speaking something barely audibly. As I
approached I realized it was John, reciting the Rosary, as he did
each night (I later learned). For all his intellectual gifts and
erudition, John was first a devout man of prayer, one who
especially loved those devotions hallowed by centuries of use by
humble Catholics everywhere.
The second image is that of the lonely but brave defense lawyer.
Like Atticus Finch, John was a man who stood up for the truth no
matter what anyone thought-including his fellow Catholics. "When
any member of the faithful sees Catholic teaching being eroded or
undermined, it is his right- indeed it is even his duty-to speak
out in protest," he once declared. "It is not the right of wayward
theologians, or of bishops who may acquiesce in their views, to
decide that certain parts of the Gospel and Catholic tradition are
now antiquated and may be dropped-and then to protest against
usurpation of their authority when the faithful demand that they
receive the whole Word of God."
No statement better summarizes the purity of John's faith, or his
commitment to the Church, which he spent his whole life defending.
To the very end, John Mulloy remained faithful to his calling.
The Best of John Mulloy
For those interested in sampling the work of John Mulloy,
Christendom Press has just published a 275-page paperback
collection of John Mulloy's best essays entitled <Christianity and
the Challenge of History> (available for $17.95 postpaid from
Christendom Press, Dept. 395, 134 Christendom Drive, Front Royal'
Virginia 22630).
Many of John's finest lectures are available on affordable audio
and video cassettes from Keep the Faith (P. O. Box 10544,
Fairfield, New Jersey 07004. Phone: (201) 244-1990).
Two works of Christopher Dawson, which John edited and provided
learned introductions and postscripts to, remain in print. These
are the acclaimed <Dynamics of World History> and <Christianity in
East and West>, both available, respectively for $15.95 and $11.95
postpaid, from: Sherwood Sugden, Open Court Company, P. O. Box
599, Peru, Illinois, 61354.
<The Dawson Newsletter> continues under the editorship of
Professor James Gaston, Director of Humanities and Catholic
Culture at the Franciscan University at Steubenville. John
Mulloy's enormous library--consisting of some 5,000 books-will
also be transferred to Steubenville. (For further information
contact: Department of History, University of Steubenville,
Steubenville, Ohio 43952).
This article was taken from the Summer 1996 issue of "Sursum
Corda!" Published quarterly and mailed in December, March, June
and September by the Foundation for Catholic Reform. Send all
subscription requests to "Sursum Corda!", Subscription Dept., 1331
Red Cedar Circle, Ft. Collins, CO 80524. RATES: $26.95 per year.
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