Catholicism, Science, and Frankenstein

I talked about the Catholic Church's relationship to science in How Can You Still Be Catholic?, mentioning a number of considerations, including the classic horror novel Frankenstein. Its author, Mary Shelley, wasn't Catholic or even a particularly orthodox Christian. She held quite modern views, and yet she still wrote a novel of science taken too far, science abused, science twisted to ends that caused destruction.

The scientist, in some sense, has taken the place of the magician in some of our modern literature, of the one willing to go too far, to seek out powers forbidden or knowledge that corrupts the ones who possess it. We recognize on some level that there are limits, that though knowledge and its pursuit is a good thing, there are some things human eyes should not see, powers human beings ought not to possess.

On some level, I think people know this, even if subconsciously, even if subrationally. There's a point in a conversation where people begin to get spooked, where perhaps they may get the first hint of corruption, of disease, of madness or perversion, of danger. Something is wrong with that man, we may think; something's not healthy here.

Hence the fascination in pop culture with Sherlock Holmes (particularly as played by Benedict Cumberbatch), with the brilliant but unpredictable, possibly quite dangerous, even if inadvertently dangerous Sherlock. In A Study in Scarlet, he's described thusly:

I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects. To do him justice, I think he would take it himself with the same readiness.

And we all look with fascination at such a character, thinking all the while that we'd never want to be around someone quite so dangerous in real life.

But when are we? Would we know? When do we recognize Frankenstein in our midst?

Not the monster himself; the scientist. (But then again, perhaps the scientist is the monster, and Frankenstein's monster really the man.)

When do we say, "Science is going/has gone too far?"

What are the limits of acceptable scientific manipulation of nature?

Do we today acknowledge any? Is the Church the last bastion of bioethics, shouting into the winds of change an unheeded warning? Or does the culture, the zeitgest, hold certain unchallenged assumptions while bioethicists and healthcare professionals labor quietly behind the scenes for a saner, more stable way of proceeding? Are the myths of obscurantist religion standing against the right and good progress of science only afloat in the popular culture, and laughed out of the room in serious conversations?

Academia is a mixed bag; we are all reaping the whirlwind of the dictatorship of relativism right now, and the hurricane of the myths of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and modernism. Much is obscure that should be clear, "and some things that should not have been forgotten were lost," to borrow a phrase from Galadriel.

So we don't see as clearly as we should. We have to defend certain truths that should not need defending, truths such as the dignity of the human person, the inalienable rights of all mankind, the good stewardship we owe to the created order, and more--creation as a gift, not as something subject to endless manipulation, for one.

Science is a great gift from God, as is the existence of a universe in which technology can be so powerful. Minds that are adequate to understand reality; the capacity to teach and to learn; the use of language and mathematics to convey wonders--all of this is good, given by a wise and loving Creator. Modern medicine is awesome, and growing greater all the time. And yet, though our stories and entertainments ask many of the right questions, do we notice that there are boundaries? Do we listen? Do we recognize the warnings?

Bill Cosby and Abortion

An interesting point. Excerpt:

... Notre Dame is set to award the Laetare Medal to Vice President Joe Biden, a man whose record on abortion could hardly be worse. He is not slightly in favor it; he has often been one of abortion’s strongest supporters in the Senate. When you award a man with this record your highest honor, what do you say about yourself? At least these three things.

First, you show that don’t really take the evil of abortion all that seriously—certainly not as seriously as other forms of sexual assault against women, which is precisely what abortion is, since you would never consider awarding any honor at this point to Bill Cosby. ... 

Religious Freedom, HHS Mandate, and The Future in America

Kathryn Jean Lopez spells it out for you. Excerpts:

...On Wednesday, President Obama said that “maintaining our nation’s commitment to religious freedom is also vital.” He said that: “How religious institutions define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions. Nothing about this decision – which applies only to civil marriages – changes that.” Forgive me for having very little confidence on this front, given this continuing HHS mandate charade. A priest on a secular campus, even if employed by a Catholic diocese, will likely have some legal trouble in his future, the way this is all going. (And we’ve already seen hints of the cultural posture that will lead there. And don’t expect retreat centers to be safe, either.)

The administration’s position in this abortion/contraception/sterilization HHS mandate controversy appears to be, and consistently, since January 2012, and the summer before and in the roots of the regulation in an abortion-industry dream of a panel: Women’s health and freedom absolutely, fundamentally requires ready and covered access to abortion and contraception and sterilization (sorry, guys, you’re not covered). Religious folk with objections are wrong, and we’ll pretend to let them off the hook with a little sliding of the hand, but they’ve got to get their employees to abortion-pill and contraception coverage, because that’s good and their teachings aren’t.

Conveniently brought to you by the graduate of a Catholic college as HHS secretary ….

“The fundamental problem here is that the government has no business deciding who is religious enough to qualify for their exemption,” Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, who has sponsored conscience-protection legislation in the House (first introduced before this HHS mandate controversy blew up), tells National Review Online in response to today’s rule finalization. ”This is a matter of deeply-held principle, the right of conscience, and religious freedom. The government should be upholding these essential rights, not coercing people to act against them.”

But here we are. Employers with religious objections to abortion, contraception, sterilization have no religious-freedom claim in the eyes of the Obama administration, despite pleas, despite good-faith discussions, despite assurances by the administration...

The Nature and Mission of Catholic Universities: According to Pope Benedict

A review of what sounds like an interesting book brought up some interesting historical notes. Excerpts:

...[A] revolution took place in 1967 that changed Catholic higher education radically, but we hope not forever. It was known as the Land O’ Lakes Conference, for that is where a group of Catholic college presidents and academics undertook a revolution in Catholic education that hopefully will someday (soon) be rolled back.

The Land O’ Lakes document began this way:

“The Catholic university today must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic excellence. To perform its teaching and research functions effectively, the Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself. To say this is simply to assert that institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth and indeed of survival for Catholic universities, as for all universities.”

Now compare this with Pope Benedict’s address to Catholic educators at Catholic University in Washington on April 17, 2008:

“It is the case that any appeal to the principle of academic freedom to justify positions that contradict the faith and the teaching of the Church would obstruct or even betray the university’s freedom and identity and mission: a mission at the heart of the Church’s munus docendi and not somehow autonomous or independent of it...”

I simply don't understand the basic premise of the Land O' Lakes document. "[T]he Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself." Authority of whatever kind? Really. And yet they don't complain about accrediting organizations, like the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, or even the most basic accreditors of colleges. But perhaps they would argue that such organizations speak from within academia, and as such cannot conceivably violate academic freedom. They maintain academic standards, right? They make sure the unqualified are not admitted to the hallowed halls of academe. They, in fact, test for the right teaching of the professors at a university. They check them for academic orthodoxy.

Why is it a problem for the Church to regulate the teachings of her theologians again? 

More from the review:

...I found most interesting those talks in England, on the occasion of his trip to beatify Blessed John Henry Newman, with whom Pope Benedict had a special relation as a fellow theologian. In his homily, Pope Benedict used Blessed John Henry’s own words to describe the goal of Catholic university professors:

“I want a laity, not arrogant, not rash in speech, not disputatious — but men who know their religion, who enter into it, who know just where they stand, who know what they hold and what they do not, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it, who know so much of history that they can defend it...”

The Secret of Notre Dame, Patroness of the United States of America

George Weigel on how Catholic thought offers authentic intellectual underpinnings for the best of America. Excerpts:

...The nineteenth-century U.S. bishops and intellectuals whose enthusiasm for American democracy Russell Shaw now views skeptically (and, yes, they did go over the top on occasion) did get one crucial point right: the American founders “built better than they knew,” i.e., the founders designed a democratic republic for which they couldn’t provide a durable moral and philosophical defense. But the long-despised (and now despised-again) Catholics could: Catholics could (and can) give a robust, compelling account of American democracy and its commitments to ordered liberty.

Mid–twentieth-century Catholic scholars like historian Theodore Maynard and theologian John Courtney Murray picked up this theme and made it central to their reading of U.S. Catholic history. Murray presciently warned that, if Catholicism didn’t fill the cultural vacuum being created by a dying mainline Protestantism, the “noble, many-storied mansion of democracy [may] be dismantled, leveled to the dimensions of a flat majoritarianism, which is no mansion but a barn, perhaps even a tool shed in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged.”

That is the argument the U.S. bishops have mounted in their challenge to the Obama administration’s demolition of civil society through the HHS mandate on contraceptives and abortifacients: What is the nature of American democracy and the fundamental freedoms government is created to protect? Who are the true patriots: the men and women who can give an account of freedom’s moral character, an account capable of sustaining a genuine democracy against a rising dictatorship of relativism, “in which the weapons of tyranny may be forged”?

The argument today isn’t about assimilation. The argument today is about who “gets” America.

This seems much like C. S. Lewis's differentiation in That Hideous Strength. Excerpts:

"It all began," he said, "when we discovered that that the Arthurian story is mostly true history. There was a moment in the Sixth Century when something that is always trying to break through into this country nearly succeeded. Logres was our name for it – it will do as well as another. And then...gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting."

"What haunting?" asked Camilla.

"How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? After every Arthur, a Mordred; behind every Milton, a Cromwell; a nation of poets, a nation of shopkeepers; the home of Sidney – and of Cecil Rhodes. Is it any wonder they call us hypocrites. But what they call hypocrisy is really the struggle between Logres and Britain."

...This haunting is no peculiarity of ours. Every people has its own haunter. There's no special privilege for England – no nonsense about a chosen nation. We speak about Logres because it is our haunting, the one we know about.

The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost, which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China – why, then it will be spring.

Americanism versus patriotism; assimilation versus new evangelization; the slavers and occupiers versus the United States of America.  Our sins and our potential, a potential which will be actualized when we say to the Truth at the heart of reality, "Thy will be done."  Here's one of the Catholic patriots of the modern day calling us to remember under whose patronage the United States of America (and the rest of the Americas) has been placed:

New Evangelization in France

Awesome.  Excerpts:

...Deconstructing this article has proven to be a hard task. On the surface the story of the Cathos 2.0 generation is so strong that it cannot be killed by a skeptical or hostile presentation. It is a French man bites dog story — student revolutionaries in Paris as ultramontane Catholics.

On the surface Le Nouvel Obs seems to have framed the story against the interest of the subject. While it allows the young Catholics to tell their own story, the analysis and commentary is drawn from the left — academics and liberal Catholics who bemoan the conservative political and doctrinal views of Cathos 2.0. Nor do we hear from the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in France. This packaging should have made the issues unattractive and painted the subjects in an unsympathetic light. But  by the end of the story these young people come off well. You like them...

The presentation and the structure the first three quarters the story follows the conventional secular thinking of the French elites. Yet by the end of the piece you’re hooked by these kids – – their enthusiasm, their excitement, their faith. I cannot tell whether this was an accident or was calculated move to bring the reader on board. Perhaps what we are seeing here is a conscious bait and switch.

How do you get a middle-aged left-liberal secular audience to read a story about a youth movement that detests the values and agenda of the ’68 generation now in power? You do it by couching the story in tropes and phrases that are comfortable to the audience — and then you slip them a story about young attractive — chic — students at elite universities whose faith is changing France and shaking up the church...

This might explain this.

'29 Signs You Attended a Catholic University'

Heh. Yes. Yes, in so many ways, especially 3, 20, 28, and probably 29.

Catholic Memes

Beauty, Truth, and Education

The importance of an education into the true, the good and the beautiful. Excerpts:

..."Dale," I said, "My actress is driving me crazy.  No matter what we've seen on this trip, she can't appreciate it.  She's either itching for a smoke or on the phone with somebody.  She's not a bad person, and she has a sensitive soul, but she simply can't appreciate beauty - natural or man-made.  She can't see it.  She's blind to it.  She's constantly bored.

"It's a problem of education," I went on, "No one has ever bothered to instill in her anything that would allow her to receive and understand the things around her.  It's like a child that no one ever speaks to, and who never learns a language - like a kid who's been raised by wolves..."

Fromm, who apparently knew my actress and my tutoring student personally, though he died before they were born, continues ...

Many of the younger generation tend to have no character at all. By that I do not mean that they are dishonest; on the contrary, one of the few enjoyable things in the modern world is the honesty of a great part of the younger generation. What I mean is that they live, emotionally and intellectually speaking, from hand to mouth. They satisfy every need immediately, have little patience to learn, cannot easily endure frustration, and have no center within themselves, no sense of identity. They suffer from this and question themselves, their identity, and the meaning of life ...

And they can't tell a beautiful lighthouse from an ugly water tower.

It's a problem of education...

Catholic Identity in Institutions

An interesting perspective.

...The battle against parochial schools began to be waged. The still existing bond between school and Church was now to be dissolved, and the school’s spiritual foundation was no longer to be the Christian faith but the ideology of the Führer. With great intensity the bishops led the battle for the preservation of parochial schools and for the upholding of the concordat, and the pastoral letters on this subject that our pastor read in church made a deep impression on me. Already then it dawned on me that, with their insistence on preserving institutions, these letters in part misread the reality. I mean that merely to guarantee institutions is useless if there are no people to support those institutions from inner conviction .....To be sure, teachers could be found…who had deep convictions of faith ..... But in the older generations there existed an anti-clerical resentment [and] in the younger generation there were convinced Nazis. So in both these cases it was inane to insist on an institutionally guaranteed Christianity...--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Milestones: Memoirs, 1927-1977 (Ignatius Press, 1998), p.15

For a present day application of this principle, see Dr. Freddoso's paper on the Notre Dame controversy of 2009.

Muslim Students, Catholic Universities, and Secular Hospitality

Where do you really feel at home? Excerpts:

"... At any of the countless secular universities she might have chosen, religion — at least in theory — would be beside the point. But she picked one that would seem to underline her status as a member of a religious minority. She enrolled at the University of Dayton, a Roman Catholic school, and she says it suits her well.

“Here, people are more religious, even if they’re not Muslim, and I am comfortable with that,” said Ms. Alhamad, an undergraduate in civil engineering, as several other Muslim women gathered in the student center nodded in agreement. “I’m more comfortable talking to a Christian than an atheist.”...

Kathleen Sebelius, Religious Liberty, and Constitutional Law

Hm.  Well, that's quite interesting.  Excerpts:

...HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is a continuing insult to the beliefs of traditional Catholics. Testifying at a recent House hearing, Sebelius admitted that she had consulted no constitutional precedents and asked for no legal advice from the Justice Department while making her decision on the contraceptive mandate. “Congressman,” she explained, “I’m not a lawyer and I don’t pretend to understand the nuances of the constitutional balancing tests.”

Franciscan University and the Health Care Law

Well.  They have been clear.

Now, they begin to react.  And I quote

Why Thomists Disagree With Intelligent Design Theorists

Dr. Stephen Barr, author of Modern Physics and Ancient Faith, lays out the crucial distinction in the understanding of creation which leads to the disagreement.

The Bible, Modernity, and Catholicism

An interesting discussion on modernity and biblical criticism by Dr. Scott Hahn and Father Robert Barron.

The Marxist Lens

During World War II, a French Communist wrote an article reprinted in the New Masses which emphasized the need for a Communist in the Sorbonne or any other college to teach history or science from a Communist point of view.  The party never misses the dominant importance of philosophy.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 227

This is, of course, still done.

"Their Faith Confirmed," Not Deconstructed

...Many college students and graduates came to live with us and to help us.  It was usually the war or marriage which caused them to leave, or other opportunities for interesting work.  But they always left with what they called their positions, their basic principles, firmly fixed in their minds, their faith confirmed, their lives in a way integrated.--Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 202

Catholic Identity

A fascinating round up of Roman news from John Allen.  The whole thing is well worth a read, but I was especially struck by the following:

...For those who have been following Catholic affairs, the prospect of some Catholic charities throwing in the towel on formal institutional sponsorship bears comparison to conversations taking place in other arenas.

Some women’s religious communities in the United States upset over the current Apostolic Visitation, for example, have pondered the prospect of “going non-canonical,” continuing under some other guise but not formally tied to the institutional church.

In the wake of a recent case in Phoenix in which the local bishop declared a hospital no longer Catholic, some church-affiliated hospitals and health systems find themselves asking if the challenges associated with their connection to the institutional is really worth it. Would it be easier, they ask, simply to declare themselves “in the Catholic tradition” but independent of the church?

It remains to be seen how real any of those prospects are, especially given that in each case, responsible people on both sides of the relationship seem committed to holding things together. Still, it’s tough to avoid the impression that we’re entering a period in which questions over Catholic identity are no longer theoretical. Increasingly, people and institutions within the church are being forced to choose.

Whether that amounts to a regrettable fracturing of Catholic unity, or a long-overdue calling of the question, may be open to debate. In any event, it seems to be the temper of the times...

Well, I've got to say, there's few things like the feeling of suddenly realizing home is not home any more, that you're in the midst of a battlefield and there's incoming all around you when you thought you'd actually arrived in the family estate. In other words--what about the lay people who trust the appellation "Catholic" and then find themselves in for the fight of their lives for their faith and the Church?  If I wanted to be Protestant, I'd go and be a Protestant.  I do not expect to discover people working at a Catholic institution who want nothing to do with the Church, can't stand the Pope, can't stand the hierarchy, wish the Church would "catch up with the times" and all the rest.

I guess what I'm really saying is let the bottle labeled "Catholic" contain something that's joyfully Catholic, not something bitter because it wishes it weren't.  People tend to feel really betrayed when they take a drink.

Keeping the Faith in Catholic Schools

Mark Shea gives some helpful hints.  Excerpts:

...The trick will be not so much to remain orthodox (that’s fairly easy, considering how dreadfully dull the theological legacy of the Pepsi Generation is).  Rather, the trick will be avoiding becoming a bitter Pharisee who turns Catholic faith into a particularly nasty and uninviting sort of Protestantism.

What do I mean?  I mean that you cannot build a life on protest, not even a protest against heresy.  If your Catholic faith is primarily a reaction against Those People Over There (whoever They are) then it is not about Jesus Christ, but about anger over some human hurt you have received (like the hurt of getting drivel from teachers who have betrayed their office and used it to subvert the gospel).  The Catholic faith is not a mere reaction to this world.  It is about God breaking into this world with joy in order to save it.  It is hell, not the Faith, that is on the defensive.  That’s why “the gates of hell” (a defensive image from siege warfare) shall not prevail against the Church.  So the trick is to be joyful, not angry and bitter, in your work of subverting the dominant paradigm.  Have worldly teachers sold the Faith for a pot of heterodox message?  Sure!  What did you expect the world to do?

But the good news is, not only is that project failing, but the gospel is emerging stronger than ever because Jesus Christ lives.  Brickbats and crosses it shall endure till That Day, but it remains full of joy, not bitterness, till then.  So the approach we take is not the mere anger of the Revolutionary against the Old Regime, but the gladness of the saint.  As Jesus put it:

I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. Behold, I have given you authority to tread upon serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall hurt you. Nevertheless do not rejoice in this, that the spirits are subject to you; but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” (Luke 10:18-20)

This mistaken focus on defeating the spirits rather than rejoicing in Heaven is the central mistake that many of those concerned about retrieving the Tradition from the vandals have made.  They have become so focused on their anger over the vandalism that they have forgotten that it’s not about defeating Hell, but about rejoicing over the triumph of a Heaven that has already defeated Hell on Easter.

So do your subversive work joyfully, fixing your eyes on heavenly things and not on earthly ones.  You will receive all the opposition and hostility that are the saint’s badge of honor.  Take it to God and do not let Hell take away your joy.  It’s your birthright in Baptism.

One last thing: cultivate friendships with whoever in your life is on the same page.  Be proactive about that by seeing what you can do to create a bit of community around your interests.  Maybe fellow students, maybe fellow parishioners, maybe people on the web.  Flesh and blood is better, but wherever you can find it, support is good...

For more along those lines, see Disorientation: How to Go to College Without Losing Your Mind, The Snakebite Letters: Devilishly Devious Secrets for Subverting Society As Taught in Tempter's Training School, and Letters to a Young Catholic (Art of Mentoring).

A Eulogy for Thomas Aquinas

by another large genius:

In 1274, when Aquinas was nearly fifty, the Pope, rejoicing in the recent victory over the Arabian sophists, sent word to him, asking him to come to a Council on these controversial matters, to be held at Lyons. He rose in automatic obedience, as a soldier rises; but we may fancy that there was something in his eyes that told those around him that obedience to the outer command would not in fact frustrate obedience to some more mysterious inner command; a signal that only he had seen.

He set out with his friend on the journey, proposing to rest for the night with his sister, to whom he was deeply devoted; and when he came into her house he was stricken down with some unnamed malady. We need not discuss the doubtful medical problems. It is true that he had always been one of those men, healthy in the main, who are overthrown by small illnesses; it is equally true that there is no very clear account of this particular illness.

He was eventually taken to a monastery at Fossanuova; and his strange end came upon him with great strides. It may be worth remarking, for those who think that he thought too little of the emotional or romantic side of religious truth, that he asked to have The Song of Solomon read through to him from beginning to end. The feelings of the men about him must have been mingled and rather indescribable; and certainly quite different from his own. He confessed his sins and he received his God; and we may be sure that the great philosopher had entirely forgotten philosophy. But it was not entirely so with those who had loved him, or even those who merely lived in his time. The elements of the narrative are so few, yet so essential, that we have a strong sense in reading the story of the two emotional sides of the event.

Those men must have known that a great mind was still labouring like a great mill in the midst of them. They must have felt that, for that moment, the inside of the monastery was larger than the outside. It must have resembled the case of some mighty modern engine, shaking the ramshackle building in which it is for the moment enclosed. For truly that machine was made of the wheels of all the worlds; and revolved like that cosmos of concentric spheres which, whatever its fate in the face of changing science, must always be something of a symbol for philosophy; the depth of double and triple transparencies more mysterious than darkness; the sevenfold, the terrible crystal. In the world of that mind there was a wheel of angels, and a wheel of planets, and a wheel of plants or of animals; but there was also a just and intelligible order of all earthly things, a sane authority and a self-respecting liberty, and a hundred answers to a hundred questions in the complexity of ethics or economics.

But there must have been a moment, when men knew that the thunderous mill of thought had stopped suddenly; and that after the shock of stillness that wheel would shake the world no more; that there was nothing now within that hollow house but a great hill of clay; and the confessor, who had been with him in the inner chamber, ran forth as if in fear, and whispered that his confession had been that of a child of five...

McInerny: Thomist, Thinker, Friend

One of the good guys, from the sound of it. A former student and friend of Ralph McInerny tells the story. Excerpts follow:

Ralph McInerny’s middle name was Matthew, but it might as well have been Magis, Latin for “more.” The beloved Notre Dame professor taught for more than 50 years, wrote more than 50 books in philosophy and other disciplines, penned more than a thousand essays, short stories, columns and poems, authored more than 90 fiction books, and directed more dissertations than anyone in the history of Notre Dame, 47 to be exact.

When I mentioned to my mother that his funeral included 28 priests and a military color guard playing taps because he was also a Marine, she responded, “Is there anything that man didn’t do?”

His academic achievements are well known — eight honorary doctorates, presidential and pontifical appointments, Gifford Lectures and teaching stints from Argentina to Oxford. His man was, of course, Saint Thomas Aquinas, but not only Thomas. The New York Times obituary noted that Ralph “wrote on the sixth century philosopher Boethius, the 12th-century Spanish Arabic scholar Averroes and later thinkers and theologians, including Cardinal Newman, Kierkegaard, Pascal and Descartes.”

The Los Angeles Times obituary focused on him as “the prolific author of approximately 100 novels. Beginning with Her Death of Cold in 1977, he wrote more than two dozen mysteries featuring Father Dowling, which led to the 1989–91 Father Dowling Mysteries TV series starring Tom Bosley."

Indeed, The Times of London was not the first place to note Ralph’s extraordinary productivity. “George Orwell, who famously, and wrongly, concluded that the Billy Bunter oeuvre was too vast to have been written by one man (Frank Richards), would have had a similar problem with the output of Ralph McInerny, the American Catholic scholar and writer of detective fiction.” But Ralph was much more than a prolific author.

Part of the “more” — unquantifiable but no less real — was how Ralph treated people and how they responded to him. Among his students, he commanded universal respect...