I think the attempt to reconstruct the intellectual life of American
Catholics around the time of Percy's conversion is a truly compelling
topic. Being 66 and inclined to tell stories, let me tell you about
the very first Presidential election in which I was old enough to vote.
The occasion was remarkable because my two towering mentors at the
University of Notre Dame in 1952, Rev. Louis Putz, C.S.C., and English
Prof Frank O'Malley finally agreed on something! Believe it or not, they
agreed from the very start that Adlai Stevenson should be the next
President of the U.S! The Chicago media at that time did nothing but
trumpet the glories of Senators Joseph McCarthy (Wisc) and Everett Dirksen
(Il). It seemed apostolic, even to a raw undergraduate, to oppose those
vendors of hate and suspicion.
Putz, a founding ancestor of the Catholic Family Movement and Young
Christian Students, advocated door to door canvassing for Stevenson as a
form of Catholic Action (Putz had the mentality and the spirituality of a
worker-priest).
O'Malley lead a band of Notre Dame Faculty who signed and paid for an ad
in the New York Times urging their fellow Catholics to vote for Stevenson,
in spite of his divorce, because his platform was in closer conformity to
Catholic social teaching. The then newly minted President of Notre Dame,
Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., attempted to censure O'Malley and his cohort for
inappropriate use of the name of the University, but they faced him down.
Believe it or not!
Re "the revival of Thomism and natural law philosophy" combining a
"buoyant confidence in human reason with an equally assertive conviction
that modern secular thought, unguided by church teaching, had got things
wrong".
Not quite. My graduate professors in philosophy at St. Louis University
included Leonard Eslick, equally devoted to Plato and A. N. Whitehead, and
James Collins, well known for his books on existentialism and -- among his
graduate students -- for courses on the history of American philosophy,
particularly C. S. Peirce.
All of this was in full flower circa 1955. Although the spirit of the
"modern schoolman" and the "new scholasticism" flourished as well, deep
divisions were developing between those who would use Thomism as an
ideological battering ram and a litmus test of orthodoxy and those
Gilsonians interested first and foremost in authentic scholarship in the
history of medieval philosophy.
Such journals as Cross Currents and Commonweal (and, for all I know,
America) added to a rather lush, but hardly triumphalist or sectarian,
academic environment in Catholic departments of philosophy which might
well have made it seem natural to combine interests in medieval thought,
existentialism and C. S. Peirce. The spirit, I suggest, was
proto-ecumenical.
Such combinations flourished in the department at St. Louis University, in
the 1950's, we thought, the best Catholic Philosophy department in the
country
But I find the archival material painful. Nothing of use for a
philosopher of biology and neuroscience. Perhaps I should have worked
with Collins on Peirce, but I don't think Peirce was interested in
understanding Darwin. That, I suppose, is one of the places and one of
the ways in which Walker Percy and I just disagree.
My remarks are only raw material for an oral history of the period.
This was a time when I never wandered far from the drainage basin of the
Mississippi River and my sense of life on the two coasts, and even in the
Milwaukee Province, was quite dim.
Ed Manier