Lectio Divinia: All the Same McInerny

There’s an American Catholic philosopher teaching at Notre Dame who writes things like this: “Maritain’s teaching on the relation between philosophy of nature and experimental science, surely one of the most carefully worked out of the Thomist solutions, was not thought adequate by Charles DeKoninck of Laval or by the River Forest Dominicans.”

There’s a midwestern Catholic novelist in the diocese of Fort Elbow who writes things like this: “It took nearly a quarter of an hour, and the towel was no good at all. Finally, he used his bare hands, pressing his thumbs relentlessly down as she kicked and squirmed and did not easily let go her grip on life

There’s an American Catholic commentator, turning his eagle eye on current events from his eyrie in South Bend, Indiana, who writes things like this: “To advise Catholics to ignore clear magisterial teachings is to advise them to reject the clear teaching of Vatican II. How ironic that the council should be invoked as warrant for dissenting from the Magisterium when it is precisely the council that rules this out.”

And the three of them—the philosopher, novelist, and commentator—are all the same person: Ralph Mclnerny, the author of over 50 novels, the composer of over 20 scholarly tomes, the creator of such magazines as Catholic Dossier (to say nothing of his co-founding Crisis is in 1982 with Michael Novak), the head of the Maritain Center at Notre Dame, the giver of innumerable lectures, the teacher of innumerable classes, the receiver of innumerable awards, and a genuine American institution—or, at least, as much an institution as a conservative Catholic philosopher from Minnesota, with a specialty in the Thomistic doctrine of analogy, can ever become.

Indeed, the real question is why he’s not more celebrated, why the pages of America’s mainstream journals are not filled with paeans as his 71st birthday approaches. This is an author, after all, whose book, The Priest, was a bestseller in 1973 and whose lighter mystery fiction was turned into the popular Father Dowling television series. In 1975, he wrote The Gate of Heaven, a tale of aging priests watching in confusion the turn of the American Church after Vatican II. And it is this novel— probably his best—that leaves McInerny, after the death of Walker Percy in 1990 and J.F. Powers in 1999, one of our last connections to the high point of American Catholic fiction.

Part of the answer is his conservatism. If Mclnerny were Andrew Greeley (a curious thought), he would be widely lauded for using his novels to explain to a popular audience the failings of the Church. And if Mclnerny were Mary Gordon (an even curiouser thought), he would be widely canonized for assaulting, through the delicate techniques of fiction, the oppressive world of Catholicism.

Mclnerny is not always above taking a swipe at the hierarchy. “Despite what the Holy Father has written,” he declared last year in the Wall Street Journal, “it remains Catholic doctrine that capital punishment can be a just penalty.” But mostly what his fiction—like his philosophical scholarship and public commentary—concerns is the effort to discover the underlying unities and disunities among the Catholic philosophical and artistic traditions, the post-conciliar Church, and contemporary American life.

He can prove quite sour about the possibility of modern Catholic existence, as he showed in 1998 with The Red Hat. And he can prove surprisingly hopeful, as he showed the year before with the eccentric Notre Dame characters in On This Rockne, the first entry in his latest mystery series. Nearly every mystery published these days has a bad pun for a title, and that sort of encouragement is the last thing an incorrigible like Mclnerny needs. This is a man, after all, capable not only of giving his mysteries such titles as And Then There Were Nun and Abracadaver but even of giving a popular exposition of St. Thomas Aquinas the subtitle A Handbook for Peeping Thomists.

Beyond his conservatism, however, there’s another reason that Mclnerny has yet to receive the highest level of mainstream recognition he deserves, and it may not be entirely unrelated to the topic he took up in 1961 in his very first book, The Logic of Analogy. There must be an interior relation, an analogy, by which he unites his talents as a philosopher, novelist, and commentator. To those of us who aren’t Ralph Mclnerny, however, it looks not like analogy but equivocation. A pros hen equivocation, perhaps, as the philosophers would say—a disparate set of things all given the name “Mclnerny” because they have some univocal feature in common but are still essentially divided and impossible to draw together.

One can spot little unities. There are certain references that bob up throughout his work: to golf, to the midwestern plains, to a vanished world of pre-Vatican II Catholicism. And there’s a certain prose, a kind of writing so clear that it can actually prove deceptive about the complex thought it’s expressing: “Bonnie clearly wanted to make what she had done the object of prolonged discussion so that she could savor the danger of acting contrary to the presumed wishes of Jack Parry,” he tosses off in the 1994 Mom and Dead. There’s even a certain vision of divided human motivation that appears again and again: women who plot marriage with a good provider, only to succumb to a passing seducer; men who plan careful careers, only to wreck them in sudden fits. The only undivided characters in Mclnerny’s mysteries are the murderers, and it’s worth noting how rarely these stories contain any sympathetic figures.

But the weightiest unity we can discern among the various McInernys may be that revealed in his lightest novels. The recent mysteries betray from time to time the speed with which they’re written: In the Andrew Broom series, for instance, Broom’s lifelong enemy, Frank McGough, starts out as a banker in the early books and mysteriously turns into a lawyer in the later, But the speed with which McInerny produces these tales is exactly what makes them so important, for his real view of the world—his deepest philosophy—is what shines through. It is a world of considerable violence and sorrow, peopled by human creatures deeply rent with interior confusion. But for all that, it is clearly a world of creatures. It always gives off little signs of its createdness, and that makes it also a world of considerable joy—for Ralph Mclnerny, who gets to watch human life go by in all its eccentricity and disarray, and for us, his readers, who get to see him do it.

Author

  • J. Bottum

    At the time this article was published, J. Bottum was books and arts editor of The Weekly Standard and a Crisis contributing editor.

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