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St. Louis Cultural History Project—Fall 2021

What Men Astutely Trained Got Wrong:
Rescuing Daniel Lord, S.J., and Joseph Husslein, S.J.,
from Peter McDonough’s Hatchet Job
by Stephen Werner, Ph.D.

  

A good many non-Catholic writers and some Catholics who prefer their own speculations to the facts of the case have theorized about what makes a Jesuit tick. They miss the point completely if they do not understand the long retreat.1

— Daniel Lord

  

In 1990, I completed my dissertation which was published in 2000 by Marquette University Press as Prophet of the Christian Social Manifesto: Joseph Husslein, S.J., His Life, Work, & Social Thought. Peter McDonough’s book, Men Astutely Trained: A History of the Jesuits in the American Century, was published by The Free Press in 1992. In his book, McDonough talks about Husslein on some two dozen pages.

Men Astutely Trained received numerous reviews, most of which were positive or positive with qualifications.2 One reviewer did note a lack of supporting data for some of McDonough’s statements.3 Only John McIntyre’s review in the Thomist raised serious criticisms and spoke of the flawed methodology.4 However, when I looked at the book I was appalled at the glaring errors and misinterpretations of Husslein. In several cases, McDonough’s descriptions of Husslein are the exact opposite of what evidence shows Husslein to have been. Even worse, McDonough uses these incorrect ideas about Husslein as counterpoints in the book to describe the overall arc of Jesuit history in America.

In 2017, I completed my book: Daniel Lord, S.J., The Restless Flame: Thinking Big in a Parochial World. McDonough mentions Daniel Lord on some thirty pages. Yet most of what McDonough says is factually wrong, misleading, or imaginative fiction. Furthermore, time and time again, McDonough makes assertions and interpretations yet gives no evidence. After many years dedicated to researching and writing on these two amazing men, Joseph Husslein and Daniel Lord, I need to rescue them from Peter McDonough’s hatchet job.

  

  

Part I: Joseph Husslein, S.J.

Joseph Husslein, S.J. (1873-1952), grew up in Milwaukee.5 He attended the combined high school and college of Marquette University. He entered the Jesuits at St. Stanislaus Seminary outside of St. Louis and was ordained in 1905. In 1911 he joined the staff of the Jesuit weekly America and started teaching at Fordham University. He helped Fordham create its School of Philanthropy and Social Science. During these years Husslein wrote hundreds of signed articles for America on the Catholic response to social problems and countless unsigned articles. Many of his articles became books: The Church and Social Problems (1912), A Catholic’s Work in the World (1917), The World Problem: Capital, Labor, and the Church (1917), and Democratic Industry (1919).6 Husslein’s Bible and Labor (1924) was groundbreaking for its attempt to use the Old Testament to develop principles for Catholic social theory.

Husslein wrote at a time when several Catholic thinkers in America, such as John A. Ryan, were trying to apply Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum to real-life economic situations. Husslein, following Catholic teaching, opposed both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. He explored the possibilities of worker-owned cooperatives. When Pius XI released Quadragesimo anno in 1931, Husslein wrote The Christian Social Manifesto (1931). To this day, Husslein’s book, written in clear and straightforward language, remains the best source to understand Quadragesimo anno.

In 1930, Husslein came to Saint Louis University where he founded the School of Social Service (Social Work). Husslein also started A University in Print. His goal was to publish books on a wide range of topics so that someone who could not attend college could cover the same material. The series included books on science, history, and religion. He called his effort the Science and Culture Series. He added to this a Science and Culture Texts and Religion and Culture Series. Husslein published 213 books including two by Hilaire Belloc and two by Fulton Sheen. He also wrote a number of his own devotional works in the series. Husslein played a key role in the Catholic Literary Revival of the 1930s and 1940s.7

Although largely forgotten, Husslein made a significant contribution to the American Catholic Church in this period. Sadly, McDonough’s distorted treatment of what Husslein did and wrote is a grave injustice. Examples of McDonough’s hatchet job follow.

  

Husslein and the Middle Ages

McDonough in Men Astutely Trained repeatedly describes Husslein as a naive romantic wanting to return to the Middle Ages.8 Yet Husslein wanted to recapture only two things from that era: 1) a recognition of the moral authority of the Church, and 2) social principles from the medieval guilds that could be applied to modern situations. Nonetheless, McDonough writes: His fondness for a tapestrylike medievalism caused him to posit the Catholic ghetto as an ideal writ large, with the church monopolizing authority in public and private spheres.9 Curiously, McDonough links medievalism with the Catholic ghetto. In the Middle Ages non-Catholics lived in the ghetto.

Husslein did not envision the Church monopolizing authority in the public and private realm. He only asserted the authority of the Catholic Church as the preeminent teacher of Christian morality. Husslein, following Leo XIII, saw such moral authority as a leaven in society to teach both workers and managers to treat each other according to their God-given dignity.

In Rerum novarum, Leo XIII, in opposing Socialism, defended the right of private property and called for its increase. Husslein, using this emphasis, imagined the creation of worker-owned cooperative businesses which he called Democratic Industry. Husslein saw cooperatives as following the model of medieval guilds. Admittedly, Husslein might have had an uncritical view of the history of the guilds, however in the idea of worker cooperatives he promoted what seemed to him a realistic, concrete, and specific application of Catholic social and ethical principles. Yet McDonough states Husslein's writing exhibited the classic flaw of visionary literature: a lack of follow-up and specificity about the applications of old truths or revolutionary predictions to current conditions.10

Other social reformers of the time also proposed worker cooperatives. Over the decades there have been many attempts at worker cooperatives with varying degrees of success. A number exist today. Perhaps Husslein was too optimistic about the future possibilities of worker cooperatives. However, today a similar over-optimism surrounds the current promotion of entrepreneurship as the future for our economy and for individual careers. This emphasis ignores two realities. First, more and more of the pieces of the economy are controlled by fewer and fewer large corporations. Second, the success rate for entrepreneurship is quite low. To be successful one would have to create a business that created a profit over a number of years and that paid the entrepreneur adequately for his or her time. Perhaps Husslein in his time can be compared to those today promoting entrepreneurship.

  

Husslein’s Writings

McDonough states regarding Husslein: But his own books were decorous and full of strange lore.11 McDonough provides no examples to prove his point. McDonough inaccurately states that few Catholics read Husslein's books and articles.12 Evidence, please? Husslein published 500 signed articles in America, very likely an equal number of unsigned articles, dozens of articles in other Catholic publications, and twenty books.

McDonough states that Husslein's writings were ineffective since his religiously based social views would be ignored by leftists, the secular center, progressives, and influential persons. He [Husslein] packaged conservative proposals in semipopular form on the supposition that his main antagonists were revolutionaries on the left. He did not, nor did the revolutionaries, advance democratic propositions in analytical form for a specialized audience.13 Several points in this statement are inaccurate. First, Husslein's proposal for Democratic Industry, which today might seem benign, was not a conservative proposal to maintain the status quo, but was in many ways quite progressive. Secondly, Democratic Industry was based on worker ownership of businesses. (Husslein was not proposing the socialist vision that workers would own all the means of production. Rather, he proposed that some business would be created by workers or bought by workers.) Husslein gave many specific details on how to form cooperatives. Thirdly, although Husslein saw leftists as antagonists, he considered unjust capitalists to be worse. It was their unjust practices that had spawned radicalism. Fourthly, Husslein wrote to a very specialized audience: Roman Catholics. Husslein attacked the left and right but he knew the battle ground was the Catholic worker. Lastly, over seventy years after Husslein wrote, how can McDonough know whether influential persons did nor did not read his work? We knew Teddy Roosevelt read Husslein.

14

McDonough also states, The problem was aggravated by the inclination of Husslein to let imagery soar past graphic communication and take the place of ideas themselves. His metaphors were the conservative equivalent of revolutionary slogans. They mimicked the paradoxes of Chesterton and the witticisms of Belloc. Thought was truncated for the sake of Ciceronian effect.15 Examples, please? This is not an accurate description of Husslein’s writings. Ironically, this statement seems to describe McDonough’s own writing.

Inaccurately McDonough states, The high-toned homiletic pitch of his writing, appropriate in sermons on personal morals, seemed poetic and therefore impractical when he [Husslein] touched on social and economic matters.16 McDonough does not cite examples of Husslein’s writing to illustrate his claims. Here is a typical Husslein passage attacking capitalist abuses in an article, The Message of Dynamite, on the bombing of the anti-union Times of Los Angeles building in 1910 by radical unionists. Twenty-two people died. Husslein condemned the bombing but then turned on business:

It is important, however, that the crimes of capital be weighed in the same scales with the crimes of labor, and that the same Nemesis overtake them both. It is needless to enumerate the scores of industrial accidents, the poisoning, crippling and premature death brought on by the neglect of capital in providing the proper means of safety and sanitation where the need of them was sufficiently understood. Although such neglect was not always criminal, yet there are instances where the fatal results could have been worked out with almost mathematical certainty. Not infrequently the wasting diseases or sudden deaths due to certain manufacturing processes and conditions of labor could readily have been averted, but the remedy would have diminished to some extent the stream of dividends pouring into the already overflowing reservoirs of wealth. Gold has proved more deadly to the human race than dynamite.17

McDonough fails to see the Old Testament prophet, such as Amos, as the prototype underlying Husslein's writings.

McDonough is wrong on factual details about Husslein’s writings: Beginning in the 1930s he [Husslein] edited a line of texts on social problems directed at students in Catholic colleges; among the best known were two stout volumes on papal social teaching, entitled Social Wellsprings18 Of Husslein’s 213 books in his A University in Print, fewer than 10% were college texts. Most were aimed at non-college readers and only a handful were books about social problems.

McDonough also states that toward the end of Husslein’s life his writings concentrated on matters of pastoral psychology. Husslein wrote devotional books such as The Golden Years: A Story of the Holy Family that were not pastoral psychology.

  

Husslein: the Progressive

Husslein was a progressive. The term ‘liberal’ also applies, if understood correctly. On moral issues, such as sexuality and marriage, he would have held traditional views. Beyond those, his positions on economic issues were progressive or liberal.

What must be clarified is that Rerum novarum rejected liberal capitalism or laisez-faire capitalism which held that businesses should be free of government interference. Today this view is commonly held by conservatives, sometimes called free-market conservatives. Liberals today typically believe that governments have a role in restraining the abuses of capitalism and protecting and aiding the poor and needy. Anyone writing about Catholic social teaching in early 1900s needs to be aware of this shift in language. Husslein’s early social writings come from the period before this transition in terminology had taken place. So in the few places where Husslein condemns liberalism, it is economic liberalism—laisez-faire capitalism—which today is typically the conservative position. Husslein, following Leo XIII, believed that government had a role in restraining the abuses of capitalism and protecting the rights of workers, which today are typical positions of liberals.

However, because of a handful of Husslein’s statements on families, McDonough appears to extrapolate and incorrectly assert that Husslein was a conservative as shown in the following statements. His metaphors were the conservative equivalent of revolutionary slogans.19 (What metaphors does Husslein use?) He [Husslein] packaged conservative proposals in semipopular form . . .20 His was an energetic, not a melancholy, conservatism.21 McDonough states that Husslein did not embrace democratic liberalism.22 Like Husslein, Rawe traced the roots of modern social distress to the rise of liberalism.23 McDonough refers to the condemnation of liberalism and communism that ran through the writings of Joseph Husslein and John Rawe.24 (Jesuit John C. Rawe wrote Rural Roads to Security, America’s Third Struggle for Freedom with Luigi Ligutti which was published in Husslein’s Science and Culture Series in 1940.25)

Husslein was a progressive. In one place McDonough actually admits: the social policies advocated by Husslein were progressive.26

  

A Catholic Social Platform

In 1919, Lord wrote A Catholic Social Platform amidst the recession that followed World War I and the problems facing war veterans. Several dozen other platforms were written at that time, including the most famous by the preeminent Catholic social writer, John A. Ryan, for the American bishops: Plan for Social Reconstruction. Most of Husslein’s sixty proposals in his platform were typical progressive reform ideas. What Husslein added was a Catholic context to the ideas. Here are some sample points. Again, these are typical progressive reform ideas.

21. Adequate government regulation should prevent the accumulation of excessive gains in the hands of a few . . .

27. Until a larger social justice reigns, minimum wage laws must enable every male worker to support a family in Christian decency.

38. . . . social insurance is to be favored to whatever extent may be necessary to safeguard the laborer in sickness, accident, invalidity and old age.

39. An intelligent penal system will make it possible for dependents to live upon the earning of the imprisoned wage-earner.

40. The right to labor organization is no longer in question and never should have been.

42. Exploitation of woman and child labor is to be strictly abolished, as well as every form of sweating.

43. Women in industry should receive a minimum wage sufficient for her own support and should receive an equal wage with man for work equal in quantity and quality . . .

44. Pensions should be paid for widows with children.

46. Every just encouragement is to be given to promote farm labor and the development of a large class of small farm owners.

47-48. Cooperatives and government loans should support farmers.

55. The purity of family life must be restored, and the family, as the unit of society, must bravely assume its duties and responsibilities in a true Christian spirit.

Only principle 55 talks about the family. Yet McDonough says. He saw the preservation of the patriarchal family, rather than the reform of public institutions, as essential to achieving something between the evocation and the restoration of this lost world.27 What lost world had social insurance and minimum wage laws?

What is noteworthy about Husslein’s principles is how far they are from being realized today. The minimum wage in many places is not a living wage. Numerous state governments have passed laws undermining unions and continue to do so. The accumulation of excessive gains in the hands of a few today is on a scale that Husslein could not have imagined. World wide, child labor is still an important social justice issue.

Husslein’s platform contains four principles on farm labor; one of the few places Husslein addressed the topic. However, McDonough refers to the austere, homey ruralism idealized by Husslein and Rawe.28

  

Husslein and the Family

According to McDonough:

If Husslein’s reconstruction of the medieval order is taken literally, the factor of utmost importance in the scale of everyday social stratification—the elemental building block—seems to not have been class, or even the distinction between the temporal and spiritual spheres, but rather gender and the dominance of male over female necessary for right order. The family, stable and hierarchical, was the linchpin of society.29

Evidence, please? Husslein never proposed reconstructing the medieval order instead he stated, It is clear that the guilds cannot be reproduced today precisely as they existed in the Middle Ages.30 Husslein never spoke of the dominance of male over female.

Although Husslein wrote about the family and considered it a critical element in reforming society, McDonough overstates the case that Husslein described the family as the microcosm of the state.31 Husslein never used language such as building block or linchpin for the family. Husslein occasionally discussed the family but did not propose the familial hierarchy was the bulwark of collective order as McDonough describes.32 Husslein saw morality and religion as the true linchpins for recreating society.33

  

Distorting Husslein’s Views on Women

McDonough insults Husslein by portraying him as a male chauvinist calling for patriarchy in the family. He refers to Husslein’s shifting back and forth between prudence and in-house chauvinism, between weaker and stronger readings of the social functions of the family.34 McDonough describes Husslein’s views as family hierarchies and the sexual division of labor,35 patriarchy at home, and a dour morality suffusing public and private spheres alike.36

McDonough states that according to Husslein, The place for women was ‘on their knees at home’ in prayer. He gives the source as Husslein’s 1912 book The Church and Social Problems, pages 176-82. On pages 176-180 Husslein does talk about the importance of a prayer life for women although Husslein would have believed that men should also have a prayer life. However, on pages 181-186 a chapter follows, Social Mission of Catholic Women, in which Husslein describes and compares Socialist efforts to mobilize women with Catholic efforts to mobilize women. Husslein calls for the establishment of a National American League of Catholic Women to promote Catholic social work outside the home.

McDonough states:

Husslein then made a quantum leap in claiming—fuzzily and through images but nonetheless positing as an ideal—that the family was a minimodel of the state. His theory of social change implied not merely stasis but a return to a prelapsarian state of familial simplicity and maternal austerity.37

Evidence, please? What images? Husslein was a progressive pushing for changes such as equal wages for women, safe working conditions, no child labor, social insurance, and widows’ pensions. McDonough does not even use his Bible references correctly. Prelapsarian means before the Fall of Adam and Eve when they ate the fruit. No familial simplicity and maternal austerity existed since Cain and Abel were born after the Fall. The idea that Adam was the master was one of the curses after the Fall. In the prelapsarian part of the story, God had created both man and woman in his image, which implies equality.

In 1919, Husslein called for equal pay for woman for equal work. Husslein only described a few occupations as unfit for women: mines and quarries because they were such dangerous places to work. Husslein also opposed women and girls as messengers because in the all-male environment of offices, girl messengers would be subject to sexual harassment and sexual assault. Those are the only occupations Husslein thought inappropriate for women. Husslein was a leader in developing the field of social work, one of the first fields to treat women as equal professionals. Also, Husslein never wrote against woman’s suffrage. Husslein even gave a positive review of a book in 1914 recognizing women scientists.

What Husslein wanted for many working families was a family wage for the husband so the wife did not have to work and could properly raise the children. Keep in mind that he wrote at a time when there were few kindergartens, no preschools, and few daycare programs for working women. If both husband and wife had to work, who took care of the children? Also, vaccinations did not exist, which meant long periods with sick children at home.

  

The False Charge of Anti-Intellectualism

Husslein labored throughout his life to improve the intellectual standing of Catholics, yet McDonough states, At times Husslein tended toward the rhapsodic, and he lapsed into a florid anti-intellectualism.38 McDonough then quotes Husslein: More can be accomplished by the pure preaching of the Gospel than by all the wisdom of our social experts. . . . A Saint Francis of Assisi is of more avail for the true regeneration of mankind than a host of sociologists, and a Saint Teresa of Carmel than a hundred social institutes. McDonough quotes Husslein out of context, ignoring the rest of the passage where Husslein stated regarding social experts: The Church does not repudiate their labors, she encourages her children to aid in this work to the utmost of their power wherever it is conducted on righteous and charitable principles. Husslein followed the reference to sociologists and social institutions with, it is not to discredit social work, but to motive it aright, that these lines have been written.39 Husslein was aware that his statements could be easily misunderstood.40 Husslein played a significant role in promoting Catholic social work, sociology, and scholarship. He spent his whole career at universities. He helped found two Schools of Social Work at Jesuit universities and served as a dean for many years. With his A University in Print, Husslein played a key role in the Catholic Literary Revival of the 1930s and 1940s.41

  

Patriotism

McDonough states regarding Husslein: he draped his skepticism about democratic government in the effulgent patriotism common to American Catholics at the time, and He was conventionally, even enthusiastically, patriotic.42 Evidence, please? There is little if any patriotism in Husslein's writings. He does use the terms ‘democracy’ and ‘democratic’ in his proposals for Democratic Industry and Christian Democracy. Husslein never expressed skepticism about democratic government; rather, he wanted to extend democratic principles to industry, hence his book Democratic Industry.

He wrote little on either World War. He rarely mentioned specific political figures and usually maintained the perspective of talking about social issues from a moral perspective that transcended national borders. Although Husslein attacked socialism and communism, he did not present the United States of America as the ideal alternative. Husslein vigorously attacked social and economic conditions in the United States, including injustices done by American courts. Thus, describing Husslein as draped . . . in effulgent patriotism is completely inaccurate.

Husslein was skeptical that American government or any other government could resolve social and economic problems. He believed that this was beyond the capability of government. For Husslein, true social reform could only be achieved by moral reform brought about by true religion. Such a moral reform, while including personal morality, emphasized moral economic relationships. However, government did have an important role in providing legislation to protect workers since such moral reform was an ideal not likely to be achieved. Lastly, in claiming a Catholic origin of democracy, Husslein attempted to give democracy an international grounding rather than an American grounding.43

  

The Ultimate Insults

McDonough describes Husslein as being like other more-or-less eccentric advocates of social nostrums.44 In fairness, however, there is a finger-exercise quality to his [Husslein’s] organizational speculations that suggests self-doubt or perhaps lack of genuine interest in the realism of such a scheme.45 Evidence, please? Husslein spun fables of premodern utopia.46 McDonough calls Husslein a dotty curmudgeon. Everyone who reached the age of reason was supposed to know that Husslein was using figures of speech and the literal application of Catholic social thought was to be curbed by prudence, not let to innocence or enthusiasm.47

McDonough calls Husslein’s views a museum piece, a catechetical piety, that managed nonetheless to forestall an engagement with American realities while at the same time discrediting Catholic Social Thought . . .48 Husslein was a key figure in developing Catholic social thought in the face of the economic realities in America.

What did Husslein actually write? He attacked capitalism for the concentration of property in the hands of a few, the domination of capital, and the subordination of all interests to personal gain. He wrote:

The gospel rule of charity, the laws of justice and the sanctions of religion were all obliged to yield to the overmastering considerations of profit, rent and interest; in a word, to the one absorbing idea of personal gain. This became the sole motor power of the entire system as the idea of religion was eliminated from its business transactions. . . . Its law was summed up in the materialistic motto: Business is business, which means that the considerations of humanity and religion may have their proper time and place, but must not be allowed to interfere with the interests of personal gain. A man might grind and crush the poor, pay starvation wages to labor and exact starvation prices for his products, and yet stand justified by the principles of this system. He might even, if he chose, be crowned as a philanthropist and public benefactor, to satisfy his craving for publicity.49

Husslein’s writings are quite relevant today and anything but a museum piece. Sadly, today many Catholics still do not know the basics of Catholic social thought.

  

  

Part II: Daniel Lord

The Life of Daniel Lord

Daniel A. Lord, S.J. (1888-1955), was one of the most influential religious figures in American Catholic history.50 He grew up in Chicago and attended the combined St. Ignatius high school and college. In 1909, he entered the Jesuits at St. Stanislaus Seminary outside of St. Louis and was ordained in 1923.

From 1925 to 1949, Lord ran the Queen’s Work office in St. Louis which coordinated over 13,000 Sodalities across the country. Sodalities were clubs to encourage faith at Catholic high schools, colleges, and parishes. He published The Queen’s Work magazine for Sodality members. This creative magazine ran a wide range of articles on Catholic life. Lord created Student Leadership Conferences and the popular Summer School of Catholic Action, the SSCA, a week-long conference of Sodality members.51

Lord started working with young people and writing for them at a critical time in American history. The growing Catholic population needed more schools. As child labor laws and mandatory education laws became more common many young people were freed from the need to work. A high school education became the norm and young people had more time for other activities. Lord thought that living out their Catholic faith could be one of those activities. Father Lord found in the expanding American Catholic high school system a splendid opportunity for promoting religious life of the students through the sodality.52

In 1926, Lord went to Hollywood to serve as Technical Adviser on the silent film, The King of Kings, directed by Cecil B. DeMille.53 Lord wrote the controversial 1930 Motion Picture Production Code giving guidelines for movie content and the 1936 papal encyclical on movies: Vigilanti cura.54 He was also the key catalyst of the American Catholic Literary Revival of the 1930s and 1940s.55

Catholic historian Jay Dolan summarized the impact of Lord:

In keeping with the 20th-century emphasis on the apostolate of the young, the sodality movement experienced a renaissance in the 1920s and 1930s. The main force behind this was the Jesuit priest Daniel Lord. . . . He promoted the sodality and its appeal and its special brand of devotional Catholicism in a variety of ways: through a magazine, pamphlets, theater, summer schools of Catholic action, and national conventions.56

During his career, Lord wrote forty-eight books and booklets and seventy children’s books. He also wrote some seventy theatrical shows. Some were small plays for grade schools; others were large musical pageants with casts of over a 1,000, leading someone to call Daniel Lord a frocked Cecil B. DeMille. Lord also wrote 228 pamphlets, producing an important body of writings that covered the entire scope of Catholic faith and life: everything from the sacraments, to marriage and divorce, to apologetics and catechetics, to naming a child and child safety. Over 25 million copies of Lord’s pamphlets were sold and countless additional millions were given away.

  

McDonough on Daniel Lord as a Speaker and Writer

In Men Astutely Trained, McDonough states regarding Lord: Yet his habit of pitching what he said in the chipper tone of an enthusiastic high school teacher, as if he were striving to keep the attention of bright-but-distracted adolescents, belied his modernity.57 This statement demeans Daniel Lord the lecturer. Lord was popular and engaging with high schools students, but also college students, lay adults, sisters, brothers, and priests. There was an ironic convergence between Lord’s bubbly manner and the fantasy of a European past whose reality Americans wanted to forget: both were somewhat childlike.58

Lord did not have a fantasy of a European past. He was a Jesuit active in the modern world figuring out how to communicate to American youth. What evidence does McDonough have to assert that Lord had a chipper tone and bubbly manner? Perhaps a hundred records of Lord's radio talks are in the Jesuit Archives in St. Louis, but did McDonough listen to any of them? So how would he know Lord's tone?

However, most of Lord’s pamphlets were written from his talks. The language of his pamphlets is likely close to the language of his talks. McDonough’s imaginary descriptions do not match the language of Lord’s pamphlets. Lord was one of the most popular Catholic speakers and writers in America. It is an insult to Lord’s achievements to describe his work as childlike.

  

The Summer School of Catholic Action

In 1931 Daniel Lord created the Summer School of Catholic Action. SSCA conventions would last until 1868 by which time some 300,000 people had attended the SSCA and other Sodality conventions. Regarding the SSCA, McDonough states These were weeklong sessions, mainly for high school students and women religious, that offered liturgy, religious counseling, and social uplift.59

Actually, high schools students went to the high school Student Leadership Conferences. (There were also college conferences.) The SSCA delegates were adults: college students, sisters, brothers, priests, and Catholic lay adults. In all my research on the SSCA I have never seen a reference to religious counseling and I am unsure what social uplift means. Typical SSCA topics included consumer cooperatives, mental prayer, the mystical body and social relations, Catholic literature, liturgy, teaching catechism in grammar school, college comedy, rural sodalities, Catholic propaganda, plays and drama, programs for democracy, musical games and recreational life, parliamentary law, school and sodality publications, and voting.

McDonough states, The organizational consequences of Lord’s dramatization and exhortations appear to have been sparse. The SSCAs were inspirational, but the actions that participants were supposed to follow up on during the rest of the year were ill defined.60 This is nonsense. The SSCAs were part of the broader Sodality movement with year-round activities. Most of the attendees were Sodality members. One need only look through a year of The Queen’s Work magazine from fall to spring to see how much was happening and how the SSCA was an extension of all that activity.

  

Lord on Catholic Doctrine

McDonough states about Lord: Just as he improvised methods for spreading the magisterium, Lord patched and filled where doctrinal substance needed definition. He worked the purlieus [outskirts] of institutional respectability.61 Evidence, please? Daniel Lord would be taken aback to be accused of patching and filling doctrine. Lord did not think Catholic doctrine needed patching at all. He saw Catholic doctrine as a comprehensive and coherent system of thought and belief that just needed to be explained clearly to show its beauty and reasonableness.

Lord was not on the outskirts of the Catholic institution. His Sodality movement was approved and supported by the Popes. In all his activities Lord was very careful to always get permission from the local bishop, archbishop, or cardinal. He did run afoul of a handful of bishops but that was not due to his disregard of their role as bishops. Most conventions had approval from multiple ordinaries (20+ approvals in one case). For Lord’s big shows, local church officials were treated as VIP guests. Lord even wrote two shows to honor local bishops.

McDonough also states, His gift was for topicality charged with a zeal that conveyed conviction rather than doctrine.62 This is total nonsense.63 In so many of his lectures and writings Lord was teaching Catholic doctrine. One has only to look at his book Armchair Philosophy or Arguments for the Existence of God or dozens of his pamphlets. Lord taught Catholic doctrine in straightforward, clear, and readable language. Also, Daniel Lord did not think you had to push conviction. Rather, he thought that you had to lay out Catholic teaching clearly and its logic would create conviction.

McDonough also states, Self-affirmation mattered more than doctrinal specifics.64 Evidence, please? In his lectures and pamphlets Lord taught the specifics of Catholic doctrine. Lord’s 1933 Religion and Leadership, a popular college text book for freshmen religion into the 1950s, taught Catholic doctrine in detail.

Also, Daniel Lord did not improvise. Everything he did was well thought out, planned, and well-prepared. In his sophomore year in college, Lord won an oratory contest. His mentor Claude Pernin, S.J. thought the speech was terrible: You had nothing to say, but somehow you managed to say it very well. Now if the day comes when you have something to say and you say it as well as you did today or better . . .65 From then on, Lord never spoke in public without thorough preparation to develop a speech or lecture with content.

  

Lord’s Intellectual System

McDonough states, As early as the 1930s Daniel Lord and others had begun to suspect that the intellectual system on which successful popularization depended might be naive.66 Evidence, please? In his 1931 pamphlet, Murder in the Classroom, on the importance of Catholic college education and the Catholic intellectual system, Lord wrote:

We must not forget that Catholicity is not merely an external form; it is a system of life and living. It is a historic tradition 2000 years old. It is faith permeating knowledge and supported by the cold, clear reasonings of philosophy and science. It is art and music and beauty and literature and drama all in one magnificent unity. It is big enough to take in the latest findings of science and yet to remember the undying words of Christ; to be interested in the last discoveries in Egypt without forgetting the God who is ages older than the pyramids; to be ever as modern as the day and as enduringly ancient as the rock of Peter.67

  

Pageants

During his life Daniel Lord wrote some seventy plays, musicals, and pageants, many of which he produced himself. McDonough states that Lord did his pageants to spread the moral and social gospel of Catholicism.68 Aside from Lord’s Social Order Follies of 1936, the other dozen pageants, such as Salute to Canada and Joy for Jamaica, were not about moral and social teaching.

McDonough states about Lord’s pageants: The spectacles—Lord pounding away at the piano, spotlights turning from one end of the proscenium to other, much flapping of drapery and theatrical gowns—were the multimedia events of the era.69 This description demeans Lord’s pageants. Lord did not play the piano for his shows. His music was professionally arranged and performed by professional orchestras. His pageants unfolded on large indoor and outdoor stages, sometimes multiple stages that could hold hundreds of performers. The large casts ranged from 750 to 1250, all in costume in front of elaborate scenery.

McDonough goes on: The pageants were animated images, histrionic extensions of the colorful perorations of Joseph Husslein.70 What does this mean? According to the dictionary a peroration is a concluding speech. If Husslein ever made such a speech no record of one survives—much less the text—and Lord’s pageants had nothing to do with the writings of Husslein. Finally, McDonough gives no indication that he actually read any of Lord’s pageant scripts, although he visited the archives that hold them. Instead McDonough makes statements such as Lord’s brand of outreach through entertainment was an attention getter even if the social message got lost in the spectacle itself,71 and it was the effort at popularization itself, rather than its content or even its impact on the audience, that constituted a breakthrough,72 that are based on imagination and no evidence. How would McDonough know what impact Lord’s plays and pageants had on his audiences?

  

Radio and Movies

McDonough states that Lord shied away from making use of radio and motion pictures . . . 73 Lord made extensive use of radio including countless regular broadcasts with his Ask Father Lord program on WEW, the pioneering radio station at the Jesuit University in St. Louis. Lord wrote 900 fifteen-minute radio transcriptions to be read by others over the air. He wrote several plays for radio, one was broadcast nationally. Lord spoke regularly on the Jesuit Sacred Heart radio program. Lord’s college mentor Claude Pernin, S.J., did a popular weekly radio broadcast in the 1920s on Chicago’s WGNU that was one of the first regular national broadcasts.

Twice Lord went to Hollywood to try to figure out how to make educational religious films although neither effort came to fruition. The famous producer John Considine, who did such films as the 1938 movie Boys Town with Spencer Tracy, bought an option to make a movie of Daniel Lord’s book My Mother (1934) a tribute to Lord’s mother, Iva Jane. Lastly, Lord’s 1952 Detroit pageant, Light Up the Land, was filmed and can be seen online with Lord as the narrator.74

McDonough completes the above sentence: as if threatened by the impersonality of the media and by the lack of control that collaborative production implied.75 As noted before, Lord produced several dozen shows—collaborative productions—with casts and crews ranging from several hundred to over a thousand. The famous movie producer Cecil B. DeMille, with a different assessment of Lord’s abilities, offered Lord $50,000 a year to come to Hollywood and make movies.

  

McDonough on the ISO

In 1943, Daniel Lord became the director of the Institute of Social Order. This was an ambitious project created by the Jesuits to promote Catholic social teaching by educating Jesuits who would then educate the broader Catholic population.

McDonough states, A recurrent problem with this venture was the never-quite-acknowledged sense that it constituted an operation potentially outside the perimeters of the order.76 Evidence, please? When initially started, the ISO was part of Lord’s Queen’s Work operation which was a Jesuit-sanctioned institution run and staffed by Jesuits, and approved and encouraged by several popes. The ISO was approved by the American Jesuit Provincials and ultimately controlled by them.

McDonough also states that the fear was that if ISO were to work, it would have to go off on its own, beyond the realm of Jesuit institutions already in place.77 When Lord was removed as head and Leo Brown, S.J., took over, the ISO continued into the 1970s as a special program at the Jesuit university in St. Louis which had existed since 1818.

  

Daniel Lord’s Pamphlets

Lord wrote 228 pamphlets that educated two generations of Catholics about their faith and how to live out that faith. As noted before, Lord sold over 25 million pamphlets. Countless more were given away and many millions were sold or given away oversees in translation. Yet McDonough dismisses this important body of work as peppy declamatory pamphlets.78 Did McDonough read any of them? Here is a sample of Lord’s writing from the 1940 pamphlet Man Says If I Were God . . . :

I have seen, as I rode along [in a train], green luxuriant hills serving as background for the choking, sulfurous smile of smoke-black mills; I have seen the river turn a poisonous yellow from the dumpings of factories; I have noticed where the earth was gashed in great jagged wounds; and under the shadow of once beautiful shade trees I have observed rows of crazy, unpainted hovels, at the shabby doors of which sat listless children and men black with unprofitable labor. Down that exquisite hillside careless human beings have poured a cataract of tin cans and skeletons of exhausted motorcars. My swift-moving train carries me sick at heart past monuments built to oppressive, soul grinding toil, squalor holding poverty to its heart, wasted beauty destroyed by swift human greed. The background of glorious mountains brood sadly over cabins of inhuman, debasing want.79

  

  

Part III: Summation

More False Assertions

For Husslein the foundation of the church was the family, set inside the Catholic ghetto. For Rawe it was the family set inside the farm. In his efforts to knit together the dispersed communities of American Catholics Daniel Lord also broached the problem.80 This statement is wrong about Husslein, Rawe, and Lord: a trifecta of errors! Lord never talked about uniting Catholic communities. He was simply trying to educate Catholics and get them excited about their faith. According to McDonough, the problem that needed to be broached was how to assemble benign microcosms into a workable whole.81 This was not the agenda for these Jesuits.

McDonough states, In the thirties, the few Jesuits who took the mass media seriously embraced the popularizing manner and not, since the start-up costs were formidable, the machinery itself.82 The Jesuits in St. Louis built the pioneering radio station WEW, one of the first AM radio stations west of the Mississippi. Daniel Lord built Queen’s Work publishing with its own editing staff, print shops, and distribution system. His Queen’s Work office would eventually employ 45 people! There is a lack of good data on this; however, the Queen’s Work probably published over 40 million pamphlets, books, and booklets.

Joseph Husslein would create his A University in Print which would publish 213 books through Bruce Publishing in Milwaukee.

McDonough states regarding Lord: A quasi-charismatic figure, he tried instead to magnify his enthusiasm through constant travel and pamphleteering until these exertions finally proved too much for him.83 Cancer did Lord in, not travel and writing. In his last year, he went full steam despite the cancer, writing three books and ten pamphlets and giving numerous lectures and retreats. He was not worn out at all. He directed his last show, Marian Year Pageant in October 1954, months before he died, from a cot. Furthermore, there was nothing quasi about him: Daniel Lord was charismatic.

  

The Final Fault

In his review of McDonough’s book John McIntyre notes:

The author is never able to relate the works of the Society to the principal texts of the Society. The Spiritual Exercises, for example, does not rate even a mention. The Constitutions merits a fleeting reference on p. 160. St. Ignatius himself does not appear. Divorced as he is from the principal experience of Jesuits, our author cannot provide an adequate understanding for any of their priorities.84

As quoted above, Daniel Lord stated in 1954:

A good many non-Catholic writers and some Catholics who prefer their own speculations to the facts of the case have theorized about what makes a Jesuit tick. They miss the point completely if they do not understand the long retreat.85

  

The Final Analysis

Peter McDonough gets many details wrong on Joseph Husslein and Daniel Lord. Even worse, he uses these inaccuracies of detail to draw sweeping conclusions which amplify these inaccuracies. As one reviewer noted, Once you magnify the American context and minimize the ecclesial, the Jesuits look like silly amateurs indeed.86 Another reviewer stated about the description of American Jesuits in McDonough’s book: They emerge, instead, as men who are long on moral earnestness and dreams, but rather short on coordination, practical ability and follow-through.87

McDonough makes Husslein and Lord look like silly amateurs. If a person actually read the numerous writings of these two authors that person would draw very different conclusions. McDonough’s book Men Astutely Trained is a travesty and a tragedy. He paints these Jesuit pioneers of the 20th century so incorrectly and fails to recognize the ground-breaking work of these two men and their peers. Daniel Lord’s reputation will survive. This book has done great damage to Husslein’s reputation. Husslein played a significant, but now forgotten, role in the rise and development of American Catholic social thought. He has been overshadowed by John A. Ryan, but is equally important. Husslein surpassed Ryan in using theological arguments to support social principles. The charge that Husslein was a male chauvinist is particularly damaging. Husslein tried to give a Catholic model for women in the early part of the 20th century. Husslein wanted to maintain traditional teachings about sexuality and the importance of the family, yet he tried to address the realities of working women and professional women and push for their fair and equal treatment. Husslein was a pioneer, even if today some of views may seem a bit dated.

This article has analyzed Peter McDonough’s statements on Joseph Husslein and Daniel Lord to rescue them. McDonough’s comments on the other Jesuits described in his book also deserve to be thoroughly analyzed for others need to be rescued. A final question remains. Why call the book Men Astutely Trained and then go to such lengths to depict these Jesuits as such bumblers?

  

NOTES

Copyright 2021 Stephen A. Werner