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Rev. Thomas Timothy McAvoy, C.S.C.
AS A YOUNGSTER IN ST. JOHN'S PAROCHIAL SCHOOL in Tipton, Indiana,
I heard many stories of two noted priests who had been trained
by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Tipton. One was the president
of Notre Dame from 1905 to 1917, Father John William Cavanaugh,
C.S.C.; the other was the poet, Father Charles Leo O'Donnell,
C.S.C., who came from neighboring Kokomo. To Father O'Donnell
at Notre Dame I came on July 5, 1920, with a letter of introduction
from my pastor as a possible member of the Holy Cross community.
Father O'Donnell became the Provincial Superior between the time
I visited Notre Dame and my return as a seminarian the following
September, and he took a special interest in this younger fellow
Hoosier.
The Sisters of St. Joseph, who looked after my early education
when I was not ill (for I spent a great portion of my school
years fighting various diseases and illnesses), insisted on basic
education, especially grammar. Indeed, when at the tender age
of fourteen I became the reporter for the Tipton Times I
could write chiefly because that training in good grammar had
become part of my expression. Because of the war-time manpower
shortage, I wrote most of the local news daily in the eight-page
paper during the summer of 1918. When the regular reporter returned
after the war, I continued to write occasionally for the paper
but returned to St. John's School. My third and final year of
high school was in the Tipton Public School. I began in June
1920, as fulltime combined city editor and reporter, intending
to work for two years to acquire money to attend Notre Dame as
a student of journalism. The Sisters of St. Joseph, who occasionally
visited the Times office, and the pastor, Father Joseph
Bilstein, persisted in the notion that I would some day be a
priest, at first with no thanks from me for the suggestion. But
it was due to a long and inspiring talk by Father Bilstein that
I came to see Father O'Donnell in July of 1920.
I made my novitiate under Father James Wesley Donahue, later
Superior General, a very ascetic man. Of my college career I
remember mostly the training I received from Father Lawrence
Broughal who insisted that besides correctness in grammar, thought
was necessary for good composition. I liked philosophy but tangled
very often with my teacher, Father Charles Miltner; the exchange
with him served to increase my interest in the subject. Two other
important influences at this time were Father Thomas Kearney
who, as my Superior, insisted that I confine my spiritual reading
to twenty minutes a day and spend the rest of my reading time
on the English classics; and Father Thomas Irving, my spiritual
director, who taught confidence and moderation and also insisted
that I acquire the habit of writing something every day. In my
senior year at Notre Dame I won the Dockweiler Medal in Philosophy
and the O'Brien Medal in History, and came in second on the Quan
Medal for the senior with the highest average--after I notified
the Dean that an overlooked lay student had a higher average
than mine.
For theology I attended Holy Cross College at the Catholic
University in Washington and also attended classes at the University
with lectures in history from Dr. Patrick Healey and in Scripture
from Dr. Heinrich Schumacher and Dr. Franz J. Coeln. Because
our class at Holy Cross was the first not permitted to take secular
subjects at the University during our theological course, I became
a borrower at the District Public Library and the Congressional
Library as well as at the University and College Libraries. And
I organized during my second year a seminar among some seminarians
in which we discussed literature, history, and kindred
subjects. My readings were essentially in philosophy. I planned
to make my future basic study in metaphysics with a hobby in
American philosophy. In the meantime I read a balanced diet in
literature (which I discussed with Leo L. Ward), history, and
economics. Besides my reading for classes, I read 119 books during
my first year in Washington.
As house librarian both in Moreau Seminary at Notre Dame and
in Holy Cross College I reorganized both libraries with my own
version of the Dewey Decimal System. Father Burns, the new Provincial
Superior, in looking for an Archivist, learned that I had received
very high marks in history at Notre Dame, and within six months
of my ordination told me I was to be Archivist of the University's
manuscript collection. Never having been in an archives in my
life, I shifted my reading to archival methods and American church
history. Father Burns told me that the valuable assortment of
diocesan archives and personal papers on American Catholic history
gathered by librarian James F. Edwards had been sadly neglected
since his death in 1911. I visited the various Washington archives
and had conferences with John C. Fitzpatrick, acting chief of
the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress, with Professor
Francis Stock of the Catholic University, with Tyler Dennett,
then in charge of the Archives of the State Department, and with
other archives. I also conferred with Monsignor Peter Guilday,
then the dean of historians of American Catholicism.
I was ordained on June 24, 1929, and after a brief vacation,
I returned to find myself, among other assignments, in charge
of the University Archives. I immediately created the title of
Archivist. But for the first two years I wore coveralls and labored
to recreate the original collections which had become confused
in pell mell sorting. Father Charles O'Donnell, then president
of the University, authorized purchase of the necessary equipment
and furnished me with a student secretary. At the end of the
second year I began calendaring the papers, in the way I had
been instructed by Mr. Fitzpatrick. In my spare time, besides
earning a master's degree in history, I taught first year Latin
and some English in the minor seminary for two years. Then I
became rector of a resident hall on the campus of Notre Dame
and began to teach American history. By the end of my third year
at Notre Dame I began to realize that unless I attracted attention
to the Archivist and the Archives I could not hope to get the
necessary aid and equipment to complete my work. So I began to
write for the Indiana Magazine of History and the Records
of the American Historical Society of Philadelphia. But
I felt that I needed further training, and I began to prepare
myself for doctoral studies. On the advice of Father Robert H.
Lord of Boston and my old friend, Professor Stock, I obtained
permission to register at Columbia University in the summer of
1935. There I was welcomed by Professors Carlton J. H. Hayes
and Parker T. Moon, and in particular by Professors John A. Krout
and E. B. Greene. When the time came for choosing a thesis I
wanted to write on Orestes A. Brownson whose papers were in my
collections; but Professor Krout wisely insisted that I work
on something pertaining to my church archives. We settled on
the history of the Church in Indiana during the transition period
between the decline of the French missions and the re-establishment
of the Church under the American hierarchy. The result was The
Catholic Church in Indiana, 1784-1334 (Columbia University
Press, 1940). In the course of preparing for this, I gave a paper,
since published, at the Rural Life Conference on "Agrarianism
in Early Vincennes," and wrote a few articles in the Ave
Maria on historical topics.
When I returned to Notre Dame in '38, Dr. Gurian had arrived
and begun to pontificate over the intellectual life of the Arts
and Letters faculty. The Review of Politics had just finished
its first year when he asked me to contribute book reviews.
Then, without waiting for me to get my degree from Columbia,
Father O'Hara appointed me Head of the Department of History.
During the twenty-one years I held that post, I had the pleasure
of gathering about me a band of hard working and fruitful scholars.
M. A. (Bob) Fitzsimons, whose traditions I had encountered at
Columbia, was already in the Department, as was James Corbett,
a medieval scholar from the Ecole de Chartes of Paris. My first
permanent acquisition was William Shanahan, the apple of Professor
Carlton Hayes' eye, whom I had known at Columbia, World War II
interrupted my plans for offering the doctorate in History, but
resuming thereafter I brought to Notre Dame Aaron I. Abell who
is the chief authority in Catholic social history. Next, at the
suggestion of Samuel Morison of Harvard, I brought one of his
favorite pupils, Marshall Smelser. To these men I owe whatever
reputation the Department has attained in such a short time.
I should add Anton H. Chroust of history and law and Gerhart
Ladner and Marshall Baldwin, medievalists, who did not stay with
us. The younger men of the Department are of the same mold.
But, after all, this masterminding a department (and some
administrators who had no use for history) was just a distraction
from what had been the purpose of my Superiors when they assigned
me to the Archives. I taught an occasional class in American
cultural history; in addition, the class in Historical Methods,
which I taught for twenty years, became very important through
my efforts to change budding philosophers into potential historians.
I used the vacations and periods between semesters for occasional
essays in Ave Maria. I also collaborated in a History
of the United States (Fordham University Press, 1951) for
college students.
In 1942, I became co-managing editor, with Frank O'Malley,
of the Review of Politics, holding the post since except
in 1954 when I was acting editor from the death of Dr. Gurian
until the appointment of M. A. Fitzsimons as editor. With O'Malley
and Fitzsimons I collaborated on The Image of Man (Notre
Dame, 1959), a selection of some of the many important articles
published in the Review during its first twenty years.
There were many things that led to my interest in the history
of the Catholic minority. As a seminarian, when I expected to
make philosophy my field of intense study, I was aware that the
philosophy of Americans was obviously not the syllogisms and
other arguments that I learned in the classrooms. I had read
the two available histories of American philosophy and some of
the writings of Jonathan Edwards, William James, John Dewey,
and of several Neo-Realists, and had talked the matter over with
the late Monsignor Edward Pace. When I began to study American
history the religious and the intellectual history of the country
were my chief interest. Puritan thought became a kind of hobby
and the delineation of American cultural ideals occupied much
of my reading and writing.
As Archivist, my chief assignment remained American Catholic
history. After ordination in 1929, I plunged into the work of
organizing and calendaring the manuscript collections obtained
by Edwards. I found that I had material on nearly every Catholic
movement in the United States between 1800 and 1880. Through
reading the letters of the Bishops I became acquainted not only
with handwriting, but with the minds expressed in it. Early in
my studies I decided that the nucleus of American Catholic cultural
progress lay in the English and AngloAmerican Catholic groups.
I also began to understand the cultural conflicts involved in
the adaptation of foreignborn Catholics to a Protestant English-speaking
United States. I had heard the criticism expressed so often that
the existing studies of Catholicism in the United States were
written in a vacuum and had no real relationship to the rest
of American history. While this criticism was leveled chiefly
at Monsignor Peter Guilday, he was not at fault, as he had explained
in writing to his friends. He had returned from Louvain with
the hope of publishing not biographies but collections of documents
from which future histories of American Catholicism could be
written. He was warned that he could not get support for that
kind of work. On the advice of his friends, he wrote his massive
biographies, which were deliberately filled with his documents
in the hope of achieving his real purpose of making these documents
available to the future historian of the Church in this country.
Unfortunately, some of his students imitated their master without
understanding his purpose and contributed little to the correlation
of secular and Catholic history.
My interest and writing gradually centered on the history
of the relations between the Catholic minority and the dominant
culture of the country. Some have hinted that I use the notion
of a minority too much. It is also true that minorities are usually
political groupings and that political independence has not been
part of the concepts of American Catholics. Nevertheless, Roman
Catholicism claims about one-fifth of the American population
and they insist that they are fully American citizens while maintaining
at the same time distinct religious and cultural positions. I
used to ask my undergraduate classes in history how many of them
had an ancestor in the American Revolution, but they did not
seem to understand the reason for my question. Also, as a rector
and prefect, I used to try to discover how many of the students
I knew had parents who had gone to high school or college, and
how many had parents had not any higher education. I studied
the national origins and cultural inheritances of the bishops
and priests at different periods of American history. I scrutinized
the history of Catholic educational institutions. My Catholic
history became a history of Catholic people, not the traditional
list of clergymen, buildings, and occasional politicians.
At the urging of Dr. Gurian, I prepared an essay for the Notre
Dame centennial issue of the Review of Politics (November
1942) in which I surveyed the activities of the Church in this
country between the world wars; a second essay described Catholic
efforts at the beginning of the war. In 1948, I published what
I regard as the fundamental essay of my interpretation of the
history of the Catholic minority under the title, "The Formation
of the Catholic Minority, 1820-1860." I gave a paper on
the earlier period to the United States Catholic Historical Society
in New York in 1950. Having been invited to give a paper on Bishop
John Lancaster Spalding, a favorite of mine from student days,
I developed the paper into his notions of the Catholic minority.
I also wrote an essay on contemporary American Catholicism in
The Catholic Church in World Affairs (Notre Dame, 1952).
In the course of my studies of the history of the Catholic
minority I found a real stumbling block in the socalled "heresy
of Americanism." I was warned that this was a dangerous
topic and I understood that much of the bitterness centered about
nationalistic prejudices. I tried to ignore these prejudices.
I had begun to divide the factors in the developing of American
culture into two: the frontier, about which I had written in
my Columbia thesis, and the migration from Europe. I changed
the frontier to "frontier conditions" and the migration
to "European cultural inheritance." Applying these
to American Catholicism, I decided that the Americanist controversy
was the cultural conflict between American frontier conditions
and European forms of Catholicism. Later I was to decide that
the European phase of the controversy took place over caricatures
of both of these elements, but I also became aware that the American
phase of the controversy centered on the adaptation of Catholicism
to new world conditions in English-speaking and predominantly
Protestant America. I published my first essay on this subject
in the Review of Politics in 1943. I was asked to discuss the
topic at the Catholic Historical Convention in Chicago in 1944.
The paper was enlarged and published in the Catholic Historical
Review. I continued to search American records and obtained
a grant from the American Philosophical Society to pursue my
investigations in European sources in 1951. After four years
of further exploration of American sources, I began to write
my history of the Americanist controversy. The book surveyed
the period immediately before the controversy, depicted the two
chief opposing groups of the American hierarchy, the American
conflicts, the European counterpart, the final stage of the controversy
after the European translation of the biography of Father Hecker,
and the papal condemnation. My researches had not fundamentally
changed my original contentions, but had brought out many corroborative
details, and had enabled me to explain the enigmatical French
controversy as well as the bitterness which had silenced study
of the controversy for nearly fifty years. Despite the fact that
the Thomas More Book Club adopted the book, The Great Crisis
in American Catholic History, 1895-1900 (Regnery, 1957),
Regnery refused me a royalty on the first 4,000 copies. But it
continues in demand and has not been seriously challenged by
other scholars.
To the twentieth anniversary celebration of the Review
of Politics (January 1959), I contributed an article on
Catholicism from the Americanist controversy to World War I under
the title "American Catholicism after the Americanist controversy,
1899-1917--a Survey." To further the study of the position
of the Catholic minority today, I sponsored two symposia at Notre
Dame under the general title Roman Catholicism and the American
Way of Life (Notre Dame, 1960). In these I invited Protestant
and Jewish scholars as well as Catholic historians and social
scientists to examine the external and cultural relations between
the Catholic minority and the non-Catholic majority culture.
Meanwhile, I have continued my researches into the origins of
the Catholic minority. I have already arrived at some new opinions
about the character and ideals of the English Catholic minority
in Maryland and of the religious traditions of the contemporary
majority culture as well. I have not yet surveyed satisfactorily
the period from 1850 to 1870 and I plan to revise my essays on
other periods. Before long I hope to write at least a full volume
history of the Catholic minority in the United States.
Originally published
in The Book of Catholic Authors, Walter Romig, Sixth Series,
1960.
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