First Things praises the new book I edited by Francis Canavan SJ

I introduce Fun Is Not Enough at the Human Life Foundation's Great Defender of Life gala, October 26, 2017.
I am gratified to report that the new book I edited by Francis Canavan SJ, Fun Is Not Enough, has received a rave review in First Things. William Doino Jr. writes:

An authority on Edmund Burke and a professor of political science at Fordham for over twenty years, Canavan appealed to academics and laymen alike. Nowhere did he synthesize his talents better than in his many contributions to the Catholic Eye, which published his social and political commentaries for over twenty-five years. These writings have now been collected in Fun is Not Enough, and they are as lively and powerful now as when they first appeared. American Catholics who are confused and distressed by the ongoing tumult in Church and state will be invigorated by them.

Read the entire review. Fun Is Not Enough is available in print and Kindle from En Route Books and Media.

I like to be in America!

The online home of America magazine today features "How God Heals Sexual Abuse: An Interview with Author Dawn Eden." An excerpt:

What do you want readers to take away from your writings?

I want people to know that Jesus, in winning the victory over sin, has won the victory over all the sins committed by us and against us. This is true for each one of us. The good news is that the evil we’ve suffered or that we’ve done in the past no longer needs to define us. We are defined by our union with Jesus in his passion, death and resurrection. The victory of Jesus on the cross frees us from all of the wrong or self-hating ideas we may have acquired from our abuse or from our mistreatment of ourselves.

The interview also includes my thoughts on Pope Francis's meeting with abuse victims, news of the upcoming Thrill of the Chaste: Catholic Edition, and more, so do read the whole thing.

I am deeply grateful to Sean Salai, S.J., a summer editorial intern at America, for enabling me to share the message of My Peace I Give You with the publication's audience, and to David Paternostro, S.J., for recommending me to him.

And speaking of great Jesuits, if you are in the Washington, D.C., area on July 31, the feast of St. Ignatius Loyola, come to the Catholic Information Center as I speak on "Healing the Memory: What St. Ignatius Loyola and Pope Francis Can Teach Us."

Quote of the day

Father Canavan makes me laugh at the Human Life Foundation Dinner, October 2006

"[Coming] to believe is a process that goes on all our lives and is never completely finished. No matter how deeply we believe, we can always believe more deeply, and God will lead us to a steadily more profound faith through the experiences of our lives, if we will let Him. But what is of immediate interest to us here is the coming to believe of the person who has little or no faith in God. "Acting as if” is the way in which he begins the process of coming to believe. ...

"We go through our entire lives "acting as if." No one would ever marry, or have children, or choose a career, or sign a contract if he insisted on certainty in advance. "Marry in haste and repent at leisure" is a salutary warning, but it does not mean putting off marriage until we are absolutely certain that we are marrying the right person. That kind of certainty is not to be had in this world, and insisting on having it means choosing to remain single.

"The same is true of our approach to God. We cannot begin if we insist on beginning with certainty. "Blessed are those who have not seen and have yet believed," said our Lord to doubting Thomas (John 20:29). Instead of waiting until all questions are answered and all doubts removed before we begin our quest for God, the better course is to do something—say a prayer, for instance."

— Francis Canavan S.J. (1917-2009), "Acting as If," from The Light of Faith, available from the Calix Society

My teaching moment

Meeting Father Canavan for the first time at the Human Life Foundation's October 2006 award dinner. Top, Canavan makes me (center) and Lynette Burrows laugh. Next I try to conceal my displeasure as a priest I do not recognize interrupts my conversation with Canavan. (It is Father Richard John Neuhaus.)

Father Ed Dowling S.J., speaking of what happens when the faithful get rusty, quoted a priest friend of his who said that when we get to heaven, the first thing we shall say is, “My God, it’s all true.”

I catch myself feeling a similar shade of functional agnosticism during the times when I miss loved ones who have passed on. It happened the week before last, when I gave three talks over three days at the Pontifical College Josephinum. I wished very badly that Father Francis Canavan S.J., the great Fordham University professor emeritus of political science who died in February 2009 could see me as I gave my first-ever academic-level lectures. Then I had to remind myself that if (as I believed) he was in heaven, Father Canavan could indeed see me. More than that, he could see me as God sees me, with clearer and deeper vision than he ever had during his earthly life.

One of my last memories of Father Canavan is of straining to hear his faint voice over my cell phone while standing in the foyer of Pat Troy’s Irish pub in Alexandria during a Theology on Tap event on a cold night in January 2009. I was worried about the 91-year-old priest because he had left me a shaky-sounding voice mail that seemed urgent. When I reached him, it turned out that his concern was over my having told him, in our last conversation, that I did not think myself capable of teaching, let alone becoming a college professor.

A few weeks earlier, I had sent him a paper I wrote for my Theological Virtues class on the meaning of St. Ignatius Loyola’s Suscipe prayer. It was the first paper I wrote after entering the M.A. program in theology at Dominican House of Studies. My vocational plan, as I had told Father Canavan, was to stop at the master’s degree and then work in campus ministry. It seemed like the most natural thing to do, since the success of my book The Thrill of the Chaste had led to my speaking on chastity at college campuses. What was more, having recently survived thyroid cancer, it seemed most wise to get a degree that would lead as quickly as possible to a full-time job (as opposed to my freelance writing and speaking), so that I would not have to worry about being without health insurance.

All those goals of mine Father Canavan had supported until he read my Suscipe paper. Somehow, reading my account of how praying St. Ignatius’s words facilitates the return of love to God, he got the idea that I was called to be a professor at a Catholic college. He pointed out to me that there were a number of small colleges, such as Magdalen, Thomas Aquinas, and Christendom, that were trying to embody a strong Catholic identity. “Faithful Catholic colleges need faithful Catholic professors,” he said—and they wouldn’t have them unless people of my talents got the education necessary to teach. Therefore, I had to continue towards a doctorate—and he would do everything he could to gently but firmly encourage me in that direction.

So his seemingly urgent voicemail message on that winter’s night turned out to be merely part of his ongoing lobbying campaign. As I stood in the foyer of Pat Troy’s, trying to stay as far as possible from the noise from the packed bar while staying warm inside the front doors, I tried to explain to him over the long-distance connection that the idea of teaching was too scary. To me, it like being a parent except that one had thirty children and no spouse. It seemed a tremendous responsibility. Although nearly single member of my family had the gift to fulfill it, I believed the "teaching gene" had passed me by.

Father Canavan granted that teaching was scary. He proceeded to tell me how daunted he was when he was thrust into the task as a scholastic (that is, a Jesuit seminarian). After the first class he taught, to a group of boys (either to high-schoolers or young collegiates, I can’t recall), one of his students, who had been unruly, told him frankly that he was a terrible instructor. Canavan’s response was to ask the student what he was doing wrong. The student was only too happy to inform him, and he took the criticism to heart. From then on, the student was well behaved.

I was touched beyond words to hear Father Canavan's recollection of the humility he had as a scholastic, and to realize that he had kept that same saintly humility throughout his life.
So I told Father Canavan that I would continue studying towards a doctorate, and find out if I had a vocation to teach. Although I have been blessed to receive the prayers and support of many friends and family, it is fundamentally because of his faith in me that on January 12 of this year, three years to the day after that phone conversation with him, I had the confidence to give the first of my talks at the Josephinum.

The newness of my experience at the Josephinum was not that I was speaking—I have given about 120 talks on chastity and conversion—but that my teaching was not my own. This time, I was asked to speak on John Paul II’s teachings on celibacy. So my talk on January 12 was a two-hour lecture to the seminary’s theologate (those completing their theological and pastoral studies), was on “Celibacy and Communion in John Paul II’s Catechesis on Human Love.” Two days later, I gave a one-hour version of the same talk to the collegiates (men discerning the priesthood while pursuing an undergraduate degree) and pre-theology seminarians. In between, on January 13, I gave an additional two-hour talk to the theologians, on “Pastoral Care for Those Seeking to Overcome Habits of Sexual Sin and for Those Seeking Healing from Childhood Sexual Abuse.” That talk included the reading of a chapter of my upcoming book My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints.

I don't know where to begin describing what it meant for me to give those talks and witness the response, because the entire experience was filled with signal graces. There was the applause, which was wonderful—both my second and third talks received standing ovations. There was also the gratitude that the seminarians expressed personally. For example, after every one of my talks, a different seminarian thanked me for discussing “sacramental theology.” To me, having been immersed in a Thomistic study environment for the past three and a half years, it’s all simply “theology,” minus the qualifiers. It was a joy to discover that, just by passing on what I had been taking in at school, I could help seminarians gain insight into the meaning of the sacraments they would soon be celebrating.

It was even a joy when, during the break in the middle of my second talk, a seminarian suggested to me, rightly, that one of my points could have been put more finely. I’m usually very sensitive to correction, even when it is minor, so it was strange to find myself reacting so happily. All I could think about was how wonderful it was for God to be calling men to the priesthood who have such a hunger for the truth.

But the most amazing gift was something that I had never before experienced in my years as a speaker. Every time I give a talk, I pray beforehand that I may be given the grace to love my audience. Likewise, every time in the past, when I went before an audience, it was with the will to love them. But even though God accepts our will to love others, and can bring grace from it, it is not the same as actually loving them.

What I felt in every talk I gave to the Josephinum seminarians was that I really loved them. It was a completely new feeling, and was, more than anything, what made the experience there vocational. That was what I wanted to tell Father Canavan about. I am beginning to know something of the love he felt, the love he shared with me and all he mentored. And I want to keep passing it on. Suscipe, Domine.


Please pray for me as I continue my studies at the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception towards the degrees I need (STB and STL) in order to pursue a pontifically licensed doctorate. Please also pray specifically for my vocation. Thank you and God bless you.

A Jesuit for lifeFuneral homily for Francis Canavan S.J.By PATRICK J. RYAN S.J.

Francis Canavan S.J.
1917-2009

Patrick J. Ryan S.J. has graciously granted permission to publish the homily he delivered at the funeral of Father Francis Canavan S.J., who passed away February 26 at the age of 91:

March 2, 2009

Fordham University Church

Readings: Job 19: 1, 23-27; Resp.: Psalm 23; Philippians 3:20-21; Luke 12:35-40

Father Frank Canavan, S.J., Professor Emeritus of Political Science here at Fordham University and a long-time member of the Fordham Jesuit community, a Jesuit for seventy years and a priest for 59, has completed his course on earth. There are so many things that could be said about Frank, and especially by those who have known him longer than I, who have only known him for a bit more than 25 years. I am grateful to several of his Jesuit contemporaries who have helped me to fill in my picture of Frank, and especially Fathers John Donohue and Joseph Dolan. In the second reading, an excerpt from Paul’s epistle to the fledgling Christian community at Philippi, Paul strikes a chord on which I would like to play a few variations: “We have our citizenship in heaven; it is from there that we eagerly await the coming of our savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Frank was a citizen of many realms in this sublunary universe: the United States, of course, concretized at first in Queens and Nassau, where Frank grew up. He attended Jamaica Model School in Queens, many years after another famous Jesuit and citizen of Queens, John Courtney Murray. In 1935, Frank at the age of 18 came from Lawrence High School in Cedarhurst in Nassau to the beautiful Bronx where he became a citizen of Rose Hill as a freshman in Fordham College. It was at Fordham in those years that Frank began to think philosophically, since the undergraduate curriculum in those years was largely shaped by philosophical and theological curricular exigencies. Among Frank’s exact undergraduate contemporaries at Fordham College at that time are the aforementioned Fathers John Donohue and Joseph Dolan, as well as the late Fathers William Hogan, Robert Sealey and Robert Gleason. Near contemporaries at Fordham were Fathers Joseph McKenna, James Finlay and Gerald McCool. Each of those former Fordham undergraduates who became Jesuits afterwards would make signal contributions to the life of Fordham and to the intellectual life of their times.

Four years after his enrollment at Fordham, just as he was finishing his undergraduate years, Frank heard the call of Christ the King and became a citizen of Hyde Park in the Hudson Valley in September 1939. The Jesuit novitiate at the time was located (very ironically in view of Frank’s later political leanings) next door to the family home of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. After his two years of novitiate Frank became a citizen of St. Louis, Missouri, for three years, where he imbibed neo-Thomism under the tutelage of Saint Louis University’s distinguished philosophical faculty. After two years of teaching at Regis High School in Manhattan and Canisius College in Buffalo (two more citizenships gained!), Frank completed a Master’s degree at Fordham before beginning his theological studies at Woodstock College in Maryland, thereby becoming a citizen of what Baltimore cabbies call “the land of pleasant living.”

After Frank’s ordination to the priesthood in 1950 and the completion of his licentiate in theology in 1951, he spent much of one year racking up another citizenship at Auriesville, New York, in the valley of the Mohawk. There he underwent the final stage of Jesuit religious formation on the grounds of the Shrine of the North American Martyrs.

Eventually Frank went to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, where he studied under the direction of John Hamilton Hallowell, a political philosopher and Episcopalian who worked on political theory from a pronounced Christian perspective. Frank’s dissertation on Edmund Burke, the 18th-century Anglo-Irish political philosopher, started him on a career-long interest in Burke’s thought and its relevance to contemporary politics. His years in Durham made him not only a citizen of North Carolina but also one of the early Fordham Jesuits whose doctoral training took place in prominent non-Catholic universities.

His first assignment, after Duke, and, I believe, before Duke as well, was to the faculty of Saint Peter’s College in Jersey City. Jersey City, proof positive for the resurrection of the dead every election day, taught Frank a few things about political realities that Edmund Burke had never considered. Those years in Jersey City prepared Frank for a stint as an associate editor of the Jesuit weekly journal of opinion, America. During that period Frank was present in Rome for several sessions of the Second Vatican Council and followed with interest the work of his mentor at Woodstock, John Courtney Murray, on religious freedom and the separation of Church and State

Frank came back to his alma mater, Fordham, to teach in the Department of Political Science in 1966 and became emeritus from that Department in 1988. His political apprenticeship in Jersey City proved valuable in the yeoman service he eventually rendered to the Faculty Senate and the University at large, a task to which he brought the energy of a ward heeler. Always conservative, in the intellectual tradition of Burke, Frank could agree with his intellectual hero that one should—and I quote—“Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair.” Although Burke never apparently said them, Frank would also have agreed with the words often attributed to Burke: “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” Frank was always a good man, and he always did something. His teaching and writing on constitutional law and the scope of personal liberty made a mark in the study of political philosophy in American academe.

A few notes on Frank as a friend: if Frank was conservative politically and intellectually, there was one area in which he was rather radical, his Irish Republicanism. This was an orientation I shared with him and I sometimes engaged him in conversation about developments in County Tyrone, whence his grandparents came, and the rest of the two-thirds of Ulster still under British rule. On American politics, whenever I would meet him at our local polling place, I was fairly sure that he and I were cancelling each other’s vote out. But Frank had a sense of humor about his own conservatism. I met Frank on the Fordham Metro North platform one warm late afternoon in September 1998 when we both were headed to the 80th birthday party in Manhattan of then Father Avery Dulles. In view of the heat, I asked him why he was wearing a black fedora. “I thought,” he replied, “one stopped wearing a straw hat after Labor Day.”

As a member of the Jesuit community Frank could be constructively ironic, as when he once remarked of a an abandoned plate and cup left on a table in the Jesuit community coffee room on the ground level in Faber Hall that it was evidently a sign of the recent departure of “one of Ours of noble birth.” When the community was told by an anxious Rector that the telephone bills were too high, Frank echoed a slogan of AT&T at the time: “Too many of our men reached out and touched somebody.”

Many here this evening will remember that Frank loved the theater; he frequented performances at the Roundabout Theater with several of his Jesuit and lay colleagues. Fewer will remember that he was surprisingly devoted to ballet and admired extravagantly the dancer Suzanne Farrell. Frank was a man of many parts, not easily pigeon-holed; he was what Robert Whittington said in 1520 about Thomas More, “a man for all seasons.”

Frank’s many citizenships here on earth have come to a peaceful conclusion. Even if, like Dean Swift, saeva indignatio sometimes afflicted Frank when he considered the disregard in much of the United States for human life in all its stages from conception to natural death and the general neglect of the principles of natural law, he remained to his last days a basically peaceful and happy man. He deeply appreciated the care he received from the staff in the last years of his life at the Province infirmary in Murray-Weigel Hall. Frank, always an active man heretofore, found himself surprised and pleased with his life in that community of prayer and witness. On behalf of all of us I wish to extend my thanks to Father Marzolf and to Father Scanlon for all that they and their staff did for Frank and continue to do for all our men there.

What Frank wanted for all his seventy years as a Jesuit, for his ninety-one years and more as a man and a Christian, he has now attained. His Vindicator stands forth upon the earth; the Son of Man has come at last and girded on his apron to serve his faithful servants at table. He has seated Frank with the Canavans and the Jesuits and all his other families. Let the heavenly banquet begin.

May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed through the mercy of God rest in peace. Amen.

Patrick J. Ryan, S.J.

Vice President for University Mission and Ministry

Fordham University

FURTHER READING: The 1991 book Pins in the Liberal Balloon* is an excellent collection of Father Canavan's essays for Catholic Eye, which won the praise of Father Richard John Neuhaus .

*All commissions on Amazon purchases made through this blog go toward helping pregnant women who suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum. For details, click here.

Pictured: Father Canavan at the 2005 Human Life Foundation dinner.

Remembering Father Canavan—Part 3

Late last year, having entered the M.A. program at Dominican House of Studies, I mailed Father Francis Canavan S.J. a copy of my first moral-theology paper, which I thought would interest him as it centered upon St. Ignatius of Loyola's Suscipe prayer.

He did like it, so much so that he urged me to consider teaching at a Catholic college once I got out of school, particularly one of the newer, smaller colleges that are strong on both academics and orthodoxy.

Up until that time, I had fantasized about becoming a professor, but was reluctant to set my sights so high. Everyone else in my family is some kind of teacher, and I had never thought of myself as having that gift. Being airdropped into a campus, giving a talk on chastity, and jetting off to the next college—that I could do. But facing the same group of students three times a week with a different lecture each time? That just seemed scary.

Well, it was scary for a beginner, Father Canavan allowed, speaking from personal experience—but he believed I was up for the task, and he wanted me to teach because Catholic colleges sorely needed good, faithful professors. He launched a mini-campaign to encourage me in that direction, starting by mailing me a newsletter for tiny but well-rated Magdalen College in New Hampshire (which had recently honored him), as an example of a good Catholic institution in a beautiful place that could use my talents. Shortly thereafter, in mid-January, he phoned a former student of his who was a department chair at a larger Catholic college, recommending me as someone who would one day make a good professor.

It was the sort of pitch that my father might make for me, and I was deeply touched. If I become a professor—and that has become my hope, despite fears of not being up to the task—it will be thanks to the inspiration that Father Canavan gave by showing such faith in me.

* * *
Of the many stories Father Canavan told me, two remain in my memory pretty much verbatim. I shared one of them last week; here is the other, which sticks with me because it captures both his wit and his humility. It takes place in the mid-1950s, a few years after Father Canavan was ordained to the priesthood. Father Canavan is in his 30s, a recent graduate of Woodstock College, where he received his sacred-theology licentiate. As the curtain rises, it is his first day of class at Duke University, where the order has sent him for doctoral studies. Here's how he told it:

"The young lady who was seated next to me informed me that her daddy was a vice president at General Motors.

"I tried to think of an appropriate response. So I told her that I had just graduated from a school where all the courses were taught in Latin, and all the exams were given in Latin.

"And she said to me, 'That is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard.'"

Remembering Father Canavan—Part 2

A Jesuit who wore clerics:
Father Canavan at the 2005 Human Life Foundation dinner

When I first met Father Francis Canavan S.J. at the Human Life Foundation's annual award dinner in October 2006, it was as a fan. I told him how much I appreciated his writing and asked me to tell me about his life. He obliged the request with great generosity, even though extended conversation in a noisy hall must have been hard for him, given his physical fragility and impaired hearing.

Our friendship really began a couple of months later, after I sent him a copy of my newly published book The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. As an author, you learn there are two kinds of people in this world: people who read the copy of your book that you send them, and people who don't. Father Canavan responded to my gift with a beautiful typed letter that showed he had not only read the book, but really understood it (and you know how writers long to be understood). Best of all, he liked it—enough so, in fact, that he included his phone number in the letter and asked me to call.

Looking back, I realize that was when he began mentoring me, although it was so natural that I didn't think of it as mentoring at the time. He truly had the gift of encouragement, coupled with another gift so precious in intellectual giants: humility. Such genuine interest did he take in my achievements, showing such respect for my abilities, that only in retrospect do I realize I was being guided.

I now see that, throughout our friendship, he was trying to direct me towards continuing and intensifying my efforts to counter the lies of the sexual revolution. His vision of the culture of life was broad and deep, and he saw my efforts to promote chastity the way I did—not as a mere means to preventing abortions and sexually transmitted disease, but rather as an end, bringing with it a restoration of respect for the dignity of every human person.

In addition, I believe there is also another reason why Father Canavan responded to my book. He told me that, for a time, he had suffered from alcoholism and, with it, if I recall correctly, depression. I think he recognized that The Thrill of the Chaste was a recovery memoir, and so appreciated its emphasis on God's healing grace. During the 1980s, he had given inspirational talks to members of a Catholic support organization for recovering alcoholics, the Calix Society, which were compiled into a pair of books, The Light of Faith and By the Grace of God. I have not yet read them, but they are both available via the Calix Web site.

* * *
National Review books editor Mike Potemra says that when he used to converse with Father Canavan during the priest's periodic lunches with the Human Life Review staff, he felt "an unmistakable sense of the numinous from him."

"It was uncanny," Potemra writes, "it was a moment of stopped time, of a deep unity, of 'these things shall pass away but God's words will not pass away.'"

I had the same feeling, especially when visiting Father Canavan at the Murray-Weigel infirmary at Fordham University in the Bronx, where he spent his final years after retiring from his Fordham professorship.

The first time I saw him there was last spring, when I was visiting Fordham to witness a Jesuit friend's ordination to the priesthood. Despite being happy for my friend, I was going through a terribly anxious time. Two weeks earlier, I had been in the hospital for thyroid-cancer surgery which, though successful, had taken a toll on me emotionally and made the other stresses of my life appear more threatening.

All my worries lost their overarching importance when, with a scarf around my neck to protect my surgical scar from the bright June sun, I met Father Canavan on a park bench outside Murray-Weigel. It felt like slipping into untimed time—the kind of sharing of light and just being present for each other that I imagine the saints in heaven enjoy.

* * *
How Father Canavan imagined heaven may be seen in his commentary in the August 2008 issue of Catholic Eye,** which I have been granted permission to excerpt here:

If there is no God who created and rules the world, two consequences follow. One is that there will be no divine judgment on how we have lived our lives. And, anyhow, after death we shall not exist to be judged. The end of life in this world is an absolute end. The other consequence is that, whatever we hope to get from our lives, we have to get it here, because there will be no hereafter in which to get it. ...

In the post-Christian world, many simply accept that as all there is, yet my atheist acquaintances live decent lives with some regard for other people. Many seem to accept "live and let live" as the norm of a good life, and I respect that. But is that really all there is? Or do they avoid thinking about it?

I once was asked to officiate at the marriage of a friend's daughter. Before the marriage took place, I told the young couple that they had a choice between "until death do us part" and "I will love you and honor you all the days of my life." The young man seemed to be uneasy about "until death do us part," so I asked him what upset him. He replied that it "speaks of death."

That may be the explanation of the rejection of the idea of eternal life. People may regard no life but this one as the only one worth living. And, while we all know that we have to die, it is better in this worldview not to think about it.

That is understandable in a young child. A two-year-old's world consists of Mommy and Daddy who love you and care for you, and of visits by uncles and aunts who make a fuss over you. At age 2, you do not think of any life more than that. But, alas, we all grow up.

In my way of looking at this matter, going to see God, as the gospels promise us, can be symbolized in this present life by being taken by a friend to see a view from a mountain. You go up high and around a bend in the road, and before you lies a view of startling beauty, so beautiful that you could stand there forever just looking at it.

God is infinitely more enchanting than that, for He is absolute Being, absolute Good, and absolute Beauty.

In one of his letters, St. Paul describes the pagans of his time as being "without faith, without hope, without God in this world." I would not bother arguing with today's pagans if they demand scientific proof of Him. But if the choice is between eternal life with God and eternal nothingness, I choose God, for nothing else gives life a lasting purpose and a meaning.

More recollections tomorrow.
_____________________________
*All commissions on Amazon purchases made through this blog go toward helping pregnant women who suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum. For details, click here

**Catholic Eye is an excellent monthly newsletter that does not have a Web site. It is published by the National Committee of Catholic Laymen, Inc., which shares its headquarters with Human Life Review: 353 Lexington Ave., Suite 802, New York, NY 10016. Subscriptions are $34.95 per year prepaid, first-class postage included.

Canavan the prophet

If you would like to get an idea of how insightful and far-thinking Father Francis Canavan S.J. was, as well as how he exemplified the Ignatian principle of thinking with the Church, see his 1991 First Things article "The Popes and the Economy":

The liberal mind, atomistic and mechanistic as it is, constantly detaches means from ends and turns them into ends in themselves. In our doctrine of freedom of speech, for example, “expression” becomes its own end, to be pursued and protected without regard to the ends for which a rational and free people might have intended to guarantee it constitutional protection. Similarly, economic productivity and efficiency become ends in themselves, to be pursued without limit. It is against this that the Church protests. ...

Catholic individualism differs from liberal individualism precisely in that it looks to our common human nature as created by God for the obligatory norms of human action. Therefore, as Paul VI also said, faced with a rapidly developing world, we must ask what the goals of development are, and we must look for the answer in a new, complete, and transcendent humanism that aims at “the fully-rounded development of the whole man and of all men” and “is open to the Absolute and is conscious of a vocation which gives human life its true meaning” (PP, 16, 20, 42). Since this is the language of theology, it may seem remote from the practical concerns of economics, but it offers an answer to a question that economics on its own cannot answer: What is economic development for?

See the First Things Web site for more writings by or about Father Canavan from that magazine.

Please pray for the repose of Father Canavan's soul. Details of his wake and memorial services are on the Fordham Web site. Click the "Father Canavan" tag below or scroll down for more posts about him.

Neuhaus on Canavan

Father Richard John Neuhaus included a delightful encapsulation of an article by Father Francis Canavan S.J. in the June/July 1991 First Things:

Father Francis Canavan observes, "Water naturally runs downhill. So do our human passions." He was provoked to think about this when watching a program in which a fellow declared that Christian opposition to the current sexual revolution resulted in the Church "losing its credibility." "If he had said," writes Canavan, "that the Church was losing popularity, I would have understood him, because chastity has never been popular. But why did he say that the Church was losing credibility, i.e., the ability to be believed?" What is being demanded of Christians, he writes, is that they go with the flow of human passions. "It is a morality that has flowed, like water, downhill to its lowest level. In the nineteenth century, even that great exponent of liberal freedom, John Stuart Mill, could still declare: 'It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.' Today the satisfied pig declares Socrates to be lacking in credibility."

Scroll down or click the "Father Canavan" tag below for more on the great Jesuit writer and scholar, including details on his wake and memorial services.

Canavan on liberalism

I will post some more recollections of Father Francis Canavan S.J. later today. In the meantime, his friend and (if I'm not mistaken) former student Dr. Kenneth Grasso posts a bio of him from an encyclopedia. It includes the vintage photo at left and this fine observation about his writings on Catholicism, American culture, and contemporary America’s search for a public philosophy:

"At the heart of [Canavan's] writings is a far-ranging critique of the liberal individualist intellectual tradition. Understanding liberal political theory to be shaped in important ways by the liberal tradition’s philosophical commitments (in particular, by its embrace of a nominalist metaphysics), Canavan argued that the liberal model of man and society is flawed because it is incompatible with the Christian understanding of the nature and destiny of the human person and corrosive of the matrix of institutions, convictions, and virtues on which a democratic society depends for its vitality and ultimately its very viability. He further argued that the claim of liberalism to be 'neutral' on the whole question of the human good is specious and turns politics into 'a shell game' in which, in the name of neutrality, social life is reorganized in accordance with liberalism’s distinctive and highly controversial vision of the human good."

UPDATED WITH MEMORIAL DETAILS:Remembering Francis Canavan S.J.—Part 1

Yesterday, I linked to outside articles by or about Father Canavan. Today, some personal remembrances:

I first heard of Francis Canavan S.J. in April 2006, at a monthly gathering of writers in Manhattan, when one of the fellow regulars, Dimitri Cavalli, handed me an unexpected gift in honor of my entrance into the Catholic Church that Easter vigil.

It was a copy of Pins in the Liberal Balloon,* the 1990 book of columns written for Catholic Eye** by Father Canavan. Dimitri had known the Jesuit priest while studying at Fordham, where Canavan was a professor of political science for many years.

The book stayed on my shelf for a while, as I had lots of reading to do as a new Catholic, being particularly interested in the writings of saints, and wasn't too eager to peruse a work by a modern-day author I had never heard of. Finally, one day that summer, I started taking it with me on my daily commute to work as an associate news editor at the Daily News, and was quickly hooked.

I had only recently been able to wean myself off the expensive habit of purchasing volumes of Ignatius Press's anthologies of G.K. Chesterton's Illustrated London News columns. Now, here was a writer of my own time, composing "quick hit" columns on culture-war topics, and, like Chesterton, doing so with depth, clarity, and wit.

I had thought the days were gone when writers like Chesterton or his idol Samuel Johnson could write newspaper stories about current events that were worth reading years later. The idea that someone could do so in the digital age, when so little of what seems like an interesting read today is worth digesting next week, let alone next year, was terrifically inspiring.

Wanting to meet the author, I contacted Dimitri, who, if I recall, said that Father Canavan was still alive but that he had not seen him for some time. Soon after, a chance remark to my friend Michael Potemra, the books editor of National Review led to the exciting news that Father Canavan regularly lunched with the staff of the Human Life Foundation (publisher of  Human Life Review), which shared its offices with National Review at the time. Michael told Faith McFadden of Human Life Review about my desire to meet him. Delighted that Father Canavan had won a new fan, she generously arranged for me to sit at his table at the foundation's awards dinner that October—coincidentally on his 89th birthday.

Father Canavan was born October 27, 1917. To give you an idea how long ago that was, it was fourteen days after the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima and eleven days after St. Maximilian Kolbe founded the Militia Immaculata. I think of his entering the world as a sort of lagniappe of that outpouring of grace.

Meeting him at the dinner was a joy. I asked him about his life and the stories came pouring out.

From then on, until I last spoke with him thirteen days ago, there were many more stories.

As can happen with age (and sometimes, I find, at my age), he would often retell the same stories. There was one he told so often —in nearly every conversation we had—that I came to see it as his Ur-story, encapsulating the message of his life and work. It would come to mind whenever we were discussing the changes in American culture since the 1960s—which was often, since we shared an interest in the wounds caused by the sexual revolution and how to heal them.

Father Canavan was the humblest man one could hope to meet. Although he was a brilliant cultural observer, he rarely if ever took credit for his observations. Instead, he would mention a comment someone else had made, adding his own perspective. His Ur-story usually began with his noting that, as a writer in Commentary had observed, the Sixties were really about a rebellion against authority. Then the narrative would begin:

"Now, back in the Sixties, I was an associate editor for America magazine, and I used to envy the international correspondent. He would get to travel to places like El Salvador. I traveled to Washington."

There in the capital city, Father Canavan would visit his friend Father Brian McGrath S.J., who was the administrative vice president of Georgetown University at a time when the hallowed school was becoming a hotbed of radicalism. On one occasion, during a time when he was himself seeing the effects of radicalism firsthand as dissent overtook America, he shared with McGrath his concerns about the direction things were going.

He told the Ur-story with slight additions and emendations each time, but the punch line was always the same: "Father McGrath told me that a professor said to him, 'What are you worried about, Father? You guys can't lose."

The message, he explained, was that even a Georgetown professor could see that the secular culture had nothing to offer in comparison to the Church. The liberalism that fueled the decline of morality had no real substance. The longings of hearts could find their fulfillment only in what the Church had to offer—only in Christ.

To understand what that story meant to Father Canavan, and why he felt compelled to share it, is to understand the joy that was essential to his makeup, as well as his deep desire to inspire others to keep fighting the good fight.

During the time we were friends—two years and change—hearing him tell and retell the Ur-story, it seemed to me that he was becoming as a finely polished stone. The intervals between the retelling of it became shorter and shorter. It was as though he were becoming more and more pure, the traces of disillusionment and anxiety being purged, so that all that would remain of his spirit would be a song of praise—ad majorem Dei gloriam.

I had an image that when the priest, who was physically more fragile by the day, got to the pearly gates, the only luggage he would take with him would be his Ur-story. He would tell it to St. Peter, and by the time he got to, "You guys can't lose," that would be it; "OK, you're in."

To put it a different way, as another Jesuit friend, Father Sean Raftis, says, for some holy people as they age, the veil between heaven and earth becomes very thin. It did seem that way with Father Canavan.

To be continued tomorrow. Please pray for the repose of Father Canavan's soul.
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*All commissions on Amazon purchases made through this blog go toward helping pregnant women who suffer from hyperemesis gravidarum. For details, click here

**Catholic Eye is an excellent monthly newsletter that does not have a Web site. It is published by the National Committee of Catholic Laymen, Inc., which shares its headquarters with Human Life Review: 353 Lexington Ave., Suite 802, New York, NY 10016. Subscriptions are $34.95 per year prepaid, first-class postage included.

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UPDATE: Fordham has published a brief obituary of Father Canavan with details of his wake and funeral. The first of the two Masses is at the home for aged Jesuits where he lived.

R.I.P. Francis Canavan S.J.

[UPDATE, 2/27: Since writing the post below, I have posted a personal recollection of Father Canavan.]

Please pray for the repose of the soul of Father Francis Canavan S.J., who died this morning at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx at the age of 91. He was admitted there on Saturday with a broken hip.

I loved Father Canavan very much and will have more to say about him in the coming days.

Father James V. Schall S.J. wrote a lovely tribute to Father Canavan a few years ago. Also online is Dr. Kenneth Grasso's introduction to the Society of Catholic Social Scientists' 1997 symposium on Father Canavan's work.

UPDATE: Yuval Levin remembers Father Canavan on National Review Online.

I'll post some of my own memories of Father Canavan tomorrow. In the meantime, for a look at his prophetic understanding of how cultural relativism would play itself out in 21st-century American life, see his 2000 Human Life Review essay "The Dying of the Mind."