Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays

By Marvin R. O'Connell, Wilson D. Miscamble and David Solomon

The late historian Marvin O’Connell left a legacy of brilliant prose and pictures of the past, and in this book the reader at long last has access to O’Connell’s own story. Fr. Bill Miscamble, a noted historian and scholar in his own right, attributes to O’Connell the title ‘Master’ above all on account of his ability to know what matters and then write about it “in the way that all great stories are told.” In addition to his status as histor (giver of history), O’Connell was a long-time professor and chair of the history department at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of the masterwork, Sorin, which presents the riveting and dynamic narrative of the founding of Notre Dame on the inspired ambition of Edward Sorin, C.S.C. O’Connell was not a man who “genuflected in hagiography.” Rather, in the manner he lived faithfully yet soberly under the shining shadow of the Golden Dome, O’Connell told stories in the manner they were lived and with all the accompanying faults and triumphs. 

In Miscamble’s thorough introduction of O’Connell, he writes that the latter “utilized his striking talents as a historian as an integral part of his fundamental vocation as a priest. [O’Connell] once described the historian as a veritable ‘midwife to our faith,’ who must capture, as best as evidence will allow, the truth of the past.” This position lends itself to the structure of this work. The first part is the sadly incomplete memoirs of Fr. O’Connell, wherein the reader meets the historian and moves with eagerness and confidence into the essays that follow. Highlights of these collected essays include thoughts on Cardinal Newman, Belloc, the Spanish Inquisition, and the historical perspective of evangelization in the United States and modernism at large. What one reads are stories that might have been lost but are here preserved in what can with all moral certainty be called truthfulness. As his friend Ralph McInerny once qualified him, O’Connell combined compassion and judgment such that his histories were always indeed primarily stories and, as the reader well knows, stories have layers and threads and are not told simply for their conclusions. 

O’Connell succeeds in showing one how human history is written. Above all, he reveals that history is made by humans, but must also be remembered and deciphered by humans who cannot forego leaving their own marks and prints on everything they encounter (in memory or otherwise). The objectivity we seek can be found in one historical account alone, asserts the priest-storyteller, yet a sharp eye to the past is always consonant with a compassionate desire to understand. Bill Schmitt, Fr. Bill Miscamble and David Solomon do posterity a service by giving us this man and his masterful engagement of history. These friends of O’Connell deem the historian’s passion for truth-in-context to be foundational for shaping stories that matter, including his own. 

 "This artful combination of memoir and selected essays reawakens our memory of Father O'Connell in all his immense personal charm, intellectual energy, rich erudition, keen wit, and steadfast dedication to his interlocking callings as priest and historian." —J. Philip Gleason, Emeritus Professor, History Department, University of Notre Dame

"The work of a master historian, these memoirs and essays are reliable in recounting what happened, insightful in judging how and why, and eloquent in presenting it all with a flair and wit rarely equaled in historical writing. Moreover, they come forth from a Catholic faith so deep and secure that it need not be imposed on the reader. Rather, they do what good historical writing does, placing the reader into a past that can be seen and felt, recognized and understood. Whether it be his colorful accounts of the tumultuous life and times of Thomas More, or the valiant struggles of Newman and the Oxford Movement, or his own seminary training and teaching in St. Paul, or hi

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781587318665

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C.S.C.

Preface

The structure and contents of this book have been guided by several basic principles depicted by the words on its cover: Telling Stories That Matter: Memoirs and Essays, by Marvin R. O’Connell.

Most importantly, this is a book by and about Marvin R. O’Connell, a premier Catholic historian whose life as a priest, scholar, author, and teacher made him a formidable force in the lives of countless truth-seekers. The story of his life of 86 years deserves to be told in his own words, from his own perspective, because seeing the sweep of Church history he studied so masterfully, through a unique lens, offers an abundance of insights that should not be missed.

Therefore, readers will find here O’Connell’s voice, enhanced only by supplemental commentary from friends and touched only by occasional editing for readability, clarity in references, and format continuity, lest the insights lose any of their power to reflect the author and instruct the audience. Ralph McInerny, a friend since boyhood who joined O’Connell among the important figures in the history of the University of Notre Dame, describes the value of this historian’s words: Few writers have the ability to locate the reader more surely in place and time, to give a sense of the human beings whose deeds and antics are the stuff of history. The historian dotes on the particular; the great historian makes it shine with a more than particular import.

McInerny, in his appreciation of O’Connell, included here as an addendum, also offers what might be called a word to the wise for those who would impose substantial editing upon the expression of the historian’s rigorous, comprehensive research. "An editor at Notre Dame Magazine presumed to cut a commissioned article in half, McInerny recalled in his 1998 essay. O’Connell determined he would never again appear in those benighted pages. He is, in a word, Irish." There is no desire in these pages to provoke that insistent professional ire again, this time from beyond the grave.

The second guiding principle for this book is found in the title’s reference to telling stories. O’Connell was a master story-teller whose passion for compelling content and context about people and circumstances was sparked in his youth while enjoying the genre of historical fiction. Again, McInerny’s reflections from 1998 are relevant: "An historian like O’Connell becomes perforce a bit of a biographer, and there is always a soupçon of the novelist in his style now."

This project is grounded in the fact that, in the last years of his life, O’Connell took up the project of telling his own story. The memoirs he began writing constitute Part One — the impetus, validation, and anchor of this book. Although he died before he could advance his biography beyond a glimpse of the 1970s, he suggests in the first chapter the delightful complexity of the task he is undertaking. He refers to a book from his childhood, George Washington’s World — this time, a work of non-fiction. But it is a feast of language and imagery suitable for a clever youngster, with notable events and personages that flourished outside the United States, opening up a wonderful new insight into the human story. He observes, It is well if the schoolboy recognizes that the world is a vast place and that the human family includes a dizzying number of components. History therefore brings forward a myriad of stories and stories within stories, and parallels, and distinctions, all of which must be taken into account if one is to grasp something of the past. An integral, multi-faceted history is the only satisfying variety.

The title of this book spotlights stories that matter, pointing out its third guiding principle. In his story-telling, O’Connell sought out not only the multi-faceted but the deeply meaningful. This priest-scholar is not patient with wasting his or others’ time. Indeed, in Chapter 12 of his memoirs, he looks back over a lifetime of scholarship and recalls the statement of Pilate from the Scriptural account of Christ’s passion. Referring to the words placed on the cross of Jesus which declare him to be the King of the Jews, Pilate says, What I have written, I have written. O’Connell launches from that statement of bold resignation to a reflection applying a touch of wit and humility to the sheer bulk of what I have written over a long career. I’m startled when I contemplate what I’ve asked readers to accept from me: books (some very long), articles (some serious, some trivial), columns, reviews, sermons . . . and now even memoirs. He asks for forbearance from the audiences who have consumed all that text, concluding: Yet I must say that, like Pilate, I’m pretty satisfied with what I have written.

One must conclude he believes in the meaningfulness of the immense body of his work assessing people and developments that shaped the Catholic Church, society, and people’s lives, past, present, and future. His stories matter because people matter — an appreciation aligned with his dual vocation as priest and historian. The Church and the pursuit of truth matter. If the central question is whether the Christian religion is true, O’Connell says the question is essentially an historical one. Pondering this in a funeral homily whose text is included here, he notes that God chose to reveal himself as an historical person at a particular time and in a particular place. The Christian religion is first a subject for the mind to comprehend before it can engage the emotions, he says. History may have its humdrum aspects, but it has a special role in the life of the Christian people, and so does the historian. He describes the historian as a midwife because our faith is stillborn without the facts which relentlessly emerge from history. An historian’s obsession with objective facts saves humankind from a subjective religion of self-consciousness and sentimentality.

This means O’Connell took the discipline of history, with all its protocols and canons, seriously. He respected the past — every story within a story and every point in the timeline — as a subject revealing its own gift package of distinctive and integral qualities. The past, with all its fascinating and multi-dimensional stories, seemed so worthy of attention that he also appreciated other ways to spread its lessons, such as novels and plays, although he insisted upon properly practiced historical research as an independent guarantee of solid interpretation.

In a critique of Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for All Seasons, he demurs with a reminder that Saint Thomas More’s one season is all gone now. That fact does not take away from the brilliance of the drama or the holiness of the martyr. But O’Connell cautions against imposing generalized, present-day interpretations that may diminish the past. The embrace of a particular season, exactly as it was, enlightens an audience; they learn how the context of circumstances and viewpoints made More so special for his time and place.

Such applications of O’Connell’s passion for the big picture, plus his insistence on precise focal points when making judgments about everything, from plays to presentism to the role of an historian, point to one final guiding principle of this book. As captured in its title, the phrase Memoirs and Essays identifies the special endeavor here to bestow upon O’Connell’s story the same kind of comprehensive, broad yet deep, treatment he gave to others’ stories throughout his career. His memoirs cease at the point where he accepts a journalistic position he was to hold until 1973, when he was on the threshold of a capstone career at the University of Notre Dame. But the team that assembled this book saw in his additional decades of writing in magazines and journals a way to expand his biography, extend his voice into specific timeframes and circumstances, and examine his diverse analyses as a consistent model. He still speaks to his readers today through essays he wrote while pursuing the work of teaching and authoring acclaimed books.

Thus, Part Two comprises essays of various sorts O’Connell wrote between 1978 and 2001. The selections presented here are only a sampling of subjects he explored, commentaries he published, and contributions he made to Church history. But they do allow the reader to get to know this remarkable historian better in light of the principles discussed above and the narrative arc begun in Part One. Each essay was selected because, in some way, it elucidates how his talents and traits are applicable to a particular topic and how his viewpoints can inform new generations teaching and learning history. Each essay is presented with its own brief introduction, but the following roadmap will connect certain themes of the reader’s encounter with O’Connell.

Two essays regarding Cardinal John Henry Newman, an Anglican convert to Catholicism and perhaps the dominant force in the religious history of nineteenth-century England, constitute a natural follow-up to the memoirs. They include a discussion of O’Connell’s stance as an academic at the intersection of faith and historicity, as well as his launch into writing newspaper columns between 1966 and 1973. O’Connell’s columns, reflecting a more conservative mind frame transformed from his earlier inclinations toward the views of a more liberal Catholic journal Commonweal (making him a Commonweal Catholic), were titled Tracts for the Times. That phrase memorialized the name of the series of essays co-edited by Newman at the helm of the Oxford Movement. O’Connell sympathized with the effort to establish the small-c catholicism of the Anglican Church and keep faith-informed values alive in public conversation at Oxford University and elsewhere. The essay, Newman and the Ideal of a University, describes O’Connell’s experience at the University of Notre Dame in terms of challenges to the vibrant dialogue integrating faith and reason for which Newman had fought.

Defenders of the Faith goes deeper into O’Connell’s argument that history and Christian religion are inseparable. He uses examples from the Doctors of the Church in positing the need for historical insights in order to cultivate a mature faith. A disregard for history leads to a privatization of faith that does not enable sound judgments, he warns.

The value he placed on the role of history helped O’Connell to appreciate authors who could communicate essential messages of faith alive in the public sphere over time — even authors who could not technically be called historians. One such contributor, spotlighted in the next essay on the uses of history, was Hilaire Belloc, the outstanding English polemicist whose passion and Catholic imagination O’Connell found exhilarating.

Nevertheless, concerns could arise from a slippery slope between the rigorous canons of historiography and lesser forms of story-telling. O’Connell saw the danger from what today’s audience might call disinformation rise to distressing levels in defamatory, hyperbolic legends about the Spanish Inquisition. In an essay reflecting the breadth and depth of his knowledge — embracing theology and culture along with history — O’Connell quashes notions of the Inquisition as a weapon of mass murder wielded by the Church.

The next two essays transport the reader to another front, along which O’Connell battles the slippery slope he sees in the historical scholarship of controversial Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien. O’Connell sharply derides what he sees as injections of opinion and selective use of sources, as well as carelessness in research and writing, in two McBrien books — one on the history of the papacy and one called Caesar’s Coin: Religion and Politics.

But O’Connell consistently exhibited a balance between staunch advocacy of responsible Church history and an interdisciplinary openness to descriptions of the life of faith served up in different genres. Not surprisingly for a man who had a fondness for historical fiction and variety in explorations of religion, his next two essays — on the historian and literature — discuss the ability to humanize religion evinced in the novels of J. F. Powers and in the famous play about Saint Thomas More written by Robert Bolt. The everyday insights into the lives of priests in the Midwest offered by Powers resonate with O’Connell and draw only restrained critiques. However, as discussed above, the assessment of More as a model of the faithful conscience transcending all seasons receives a mixed review. O’Connell acknowledges the play’s the thing that can laudably reach new audiences with worthy displays of religious zeal, but he wants to shed more light on the story. He defines the understanding of conscience dominant during More’s unique season of challenge and boldness. An unwavering skepticism toward the use of history to make generalizations or predictions prompts O’Connell to push back against the claim of timelessness in Bolt’s title.

His next essay, An Historical Perspective on Evangelization in the United States, takes readers on a tour through a timeline of religious history close to home. Assessed through O’Connell’s panoramic but precise observations, each period in the American Catholic immigrant experience, from the survival phase of early arrivals to the assimilation phase of later generations to the new challenges driven by secular culture, yields its own lessons. He concludes with a bold suggestion that Catholics return to a ghetto of sorts. This is not a presentism that imagines repeating the past, but a call for Catholics to return to their own identity, to recapture a sense of ourselves as separate from the consumerist society: We need to find again the spirit of community and fellowship we have lost.

Just as a review of the past in the Historical Perspectives essay of 1991 spawns a fresh idea presaging twenty-first-century proposals for a Benedict Option, the next essay presented here traces different steps in the development of modernism and extracts fundamental principles. These prompt O’Connell to issue another clarion call to the Church. This time, he prescribes what might be called a preferential option for reality. Seeing the seeds of relativism planted, he says current cultural tendencies among many people to create customized realities and abstract notions of progress must be resisted. The strategy he recommends is taken from the historian’s playbook — judging the tenor of the times objectively and standing by the evidence found in faith and reason, not drifting with tides of personal taste or popular opinion. His strategy gains credence from the fact that in 1994 he wrote a history of modernism titled Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis.

The last two essays found in Part Two are reminders that O’Connell’s perspectives and prescriptions are rooted not in coldly analytical research, but in the exhilaration of real-life relationships. In a lecture to the American Catholic Historical Association, he is the consummate educator whose credibility is that of a witness sharing personal experiences. He recalls developing his passion for history through the power of teachers and authors who captured the complex stories of people and places, sparking a sense of wonder. In a homily he delivered at a funeral, he is the consummate priest, appreciating the gifts of an incarnational God whose revelation emerges not in mere sentiments, but in our human relationships and communities over time — essentially in one’s enduring connection to the historical figure of Jesus Christ: The practice of exploring our past, present, and future, when conducted with sensitivity, is at once human and divine.

This is a good point at which to refer one last time to the appreciation written by Ralph McInerny. Perhaps O’Connell’s own sensitivity as an educator and priest, in creative tension with the Irish irascibility cited earlier, helped shape his friend’s observations, including a recommendation of Critics on Trial. McInerny says this: Rare is the writer who can combine compassion for his subjects and judgment on what they did and said. There will never be a better book on the modernist crisis.

O’Connell’s lifelong respect for the impact of relationships in real time has informed the approach taken in these pages. The Memoirs and Essays of Part One and Part Two are bracketed by recollections from three of his closest friends. The Foreword by Rev. Wilson D. Miscamble, C.S.C., and the Afterword by David Solomon, along with McInerny’s Addendum, provide the reader with valuable extensions of Marvin O’Connell’s voice. These scholars saw him persevere to draw conclusions that served the truth in the context of community as well as personal integrity. They testify that he can enlighten audiences today — about the two vocations that jointly shaped him; about the way he championed the art and craft of Church history as a gift to others; about his own experiences amid the complexities of collegiality and accountability; and about challenging trends now manifest in the Church and society. These friends of O’Connell deem the historian’s passion for truth-in-context to be foundational for shaping stories that matter, including his own