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U p F r o n t
By Karl Keating
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IN this issue we print the concluding part of Fr. Herbert Thurston's devastating debunking of the scholarship of H. C. Lea. Perhaps you have wondered why we have given space to something so closely focused. The reasons are several:
1. I like Thurston. (That's reason enough, I say.) He was a fine example of the best Jesuit scholarship: precise, indefatigable, telling. He is remembered for his essays and books about spiritualism, but his writings covered many fields, including history and theology. It's good to be reminded of the intellectual strengths of the Catholic side-they were formidable sixty years ago, and they're not at all absent today.
2. I don't like G. G. Coulton because he disliked and wrote against my Church. (More fine reasoning on my part, I think.) Coulton challenged Thurston to find what the Jesuit said he could find: one blunder per page in any ten pages of the works of the Cambridge professor's American protégé, Lea, who was best known for his (slanted) history of the Inquisition. Coulton magnanimously threw in two extra pages and asked Thurston to come up with ten blunders. The priest found fifteen. Touché!
Coulton was a fine example of the highly educated anti-Catholic. He had run-ins with Hilaire Belloc, Arnold Lunn, and any prominent Catholic who would give him the time of day. He was more a Modernist than a conservative Protestant, and he was living proof that Modernists can be infected with a persistent anti-Catholic bug. In his old age, having tired the magazines to which he sent an unending stream of letters to the editor, Coulton was reduced to self-publishing his essays.
3. Thurston's piece deserves republication because in itself it has value: It debunks positions that still are brought up against the Catholic faith. Lea's writings, in many ways strong (as I mentioned in Catholicism and Fundamentalism), were laced with errors concerning the history of the Church. Ditto for Coulton's writings. Neither man could be called unbiased. They worked on the presumption that the Catholic Church was theologically and socially retrograde, and they seem to have been tempted to accept all too easily anything that seemed to speak to the Church's disfavor.
Their kind is still with us, but in a cruder form. I'm not thinking here of anti-Catholic Fundamentalists, but of anti-Catholic Catholics and secularists (a partial redundancy).
Once you start to examine the more sophisticated arguments against the Church, you come to realize that today's highbrows aren't much better than yesterday's middlebrows. (The lowbrows haven't changed much.) A lifetime ago anti-Catholic scholarship was better scholarship-still wrong, but not as glaringly wrong. People not otherwise friendly to the Church were embarrassed by it. Not enough people seem embarrassed today.
I just returned from a dual-purpose trip to Steubenville. One reason for going was to drop off my son, Justin, at one of the high school conferences held each summer at Franciscan University. The other was to interview three prominent Catholics for This Rock.
I'm still not altogether sure what Justin's reaction was to the weekend event, but I know that neither he nor any of the other 1,200 boys got much sleep-they were assigned the fieldhouse. (The girls got the dormitories.) Perhaps the problem was having so many teenage boys in one room. Perhaps it was the "light wars" they held using secreted flashlights and laser-beam pointers. Or perhaps it was the food fights. ("Heads up! Sliced pears at twelve o'clock!")
Tired or not, these young people were pioneers, in a way. When you and I were young, there wasn't anything like these conferences. At least I never heard of them. There never was a chance to be in the midst of a crowd of kids all of whom were Catholic. There never was a chance to be surrounded by two or three thousand young people who looked funny if they weren't fingering rosary beads.
As I said, I'm not sure what Justin got out of the weekend-the evidence will unfold slowly, as is usually the case with teenagers-but I sense that from such events the Church will reap many vibrant young members. They won't be as hesitant as some of us were in expressing and standing up for the faith.
Ah, yes. I mentioned two reasons that brought me to Steubenville. The trip wasn't all play and no work, you know. I interviewed three cutting-edge Catholics: Scott Hahn, Marcus Grodi, and Mike Aquilina.
Hahn is well known as a convert from Presbyterianism; he now teaches at Franciscan University. Grodi, also a convert and, like Hahn, a former minister, heads the Coming Home Network, an organization designed to ease the way into the Church not just for Protestant ministers, but for all who are drawn to Rome. Aquilina edits one of the best diocesan newspapers in the country, the Pittsburgh Catholic. The interviews will appear beginning with the September issue.
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