Father Joseph Fessio, S.J.: California Blackrobe
By Cornelius Michael Buckley. S.J.
Ignatius Press, 2024.
Hardcover, 379 pages, $27.95.
Reviewed by Lee Oser.
“Fessio.” The name has become a test. The first card the reviewer lays on the table will evoke a smile or a sneer. The passions lurk like wild beasts at the name of Fessio. Be careful what you say. You will be judged by it, if not gored by a tusk.
He is an old man now. His long life stretches from the San Francisco of his birth to his Jesuit high school, to his entering the Jesuit novitiate, to his further education under the tutelage of nouveaux théologiens Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI), to his founding of the Saint Ignatius Institute (SII) at the University of San Francisco, to his founding of Ignatius Press, to his chancellorship at Ave Maria University, to his partial retirement in California. The main lesson of this sympathetic biography is by no means that Fessio was a saint. It is that the liberal Catholic defenders of American pluralism viciously pursued the root-and-branch destruction of Fessio’s orthodox works, violating the tenets of the pluralism they proclaimed. This habit of overkill, the blood rite of a self-congratulating Catholic elite, is one cause of the calamitously divided America we inhabit.
My own response to Fessio is mixed. I find his account of himself painfully void of what the poet John Keats called “negative capability”:
I could never understand people who call themselves Catholic, but do not understand the teachings of the Church. What is the problem? Women priests? Don’t you get it? Christ is the bridegroom! Homosexual unions? Don’t you understand the human body and its reproductive system? It is hard for me to get into the minds of people who think much differently from the way I think. So maybe I have been inoculated against heterodoxy by my lack of ability to understand the positions of other people.
Author Cornelius Buckley describes Fessio as an admirer of C. S. Lewis. And yet, Lewis could understand homosexual unions, as any reader of Surprised by Joy will recall. To understand is not necessarily to approve. It is, however, a spiritual step toward a fellow human being—a step that the command to love your neighbor does not forbid. I add that Thomas Aquinas’s understanding of “the human body and its reproductive system,” insofar as it is unjust to the intellectual gifts of women, need not inspire genuflection. I say this in the thorough belief that Aquinas was a genius and a saint.
Buckley characterizes Fessio variously as “a pelican, Don Quixote, the toreador Don José, Bertie Wooster” and other things. I assent to these comparisons, but my main impression is of a middle-class striver, who overcame the emotional bruises of his parents’ separation to realize his enormous managerial abilities. To be clear, his management style grew out of sincerely held and profound beliefs. Unlike millions of managers, Fessio is a man of principles. Though not an artist or an original thinker, he is discerning and highly intelligent. Common sensical and task-oriented, he gets things done, steering clear of the impressionistic mire and the sociable pleasures of aesthetic dilettantism. His weakness is an obsessive streak, which got him fired at Ave Maria. He comes across as tough, willful, charismatic, and energetic. His life as a priest has brought him into close and repeated contact with the poor and disadvantaged, and he seems always to have remembered his priestly calling and his vow of obedience. He remains grateful to God. I am sure I would find him difficult and exhausting.
Buckley, whose charity towards his opponents endows these pages with hospitable warmth, shows that the Jesuit-led demolition of Fessio’s Saint Ignatius Institute was a test case for the reception of Ex Corde Ecclesiae and subsequently for Catholic higher education. Pope John Paul II published Ex Corde in 1990, aiming for hierarchical rule over thousands of dissenting theologians, who were as inimical to papal authority as porcupines to roundups. Intellectual history proceeds via hearse, and, existentially, at least, the pure products of American theology would have it no other way. My mother was a great admirer of Charles Curran, and there is always Newman raising his glass: “Conscience first, and the Pope afterwards.” But I spoke of the Jesuit-led demolition of Fessio’s Catholic Great Books Program, which was a tremendous success from every point of view, and indeed a suitable image for it might be Monte Cassino, except the abbey’s reconstruction after the war went much better than the reconstruction of SII after Fessio’s departure.
For decades, liberal Catholicism has advanced “the Spirit of Vatican II.” Because this spirit is congenial to the “social justice apostolate,” it is congenial to most Jesuits. Buckley paints a complex portrait of SII-destroyer Reverend Stephen Privett, S.J., who was friends with the six Jesuit priests and two female coworkers slain by Salvadoran Army thugs in 1989. He was incensed by the U.S. role in Latin America: “If the United States insisted on sending items to Latin America, why were they not sending refrigerators and air conditioning units? Why military weapons? [Privett’s] conclusion: Unrest in Central America ‘clearly arose from repression, not Marxist ideology’…and…it was plain that the American government was largely responsible for such repression.” When he took the job of president at USF, Privett was a man on a mission. He went after Fessio and his crowd with a vengeance, and he had both his Jesuit-run Theology Department and a salivating press cheering him on. In a world of infighting and intrigue, he played his cards well, outmaneuvering Fessio at the height of his powers and influence. But this stands out about the two rival priests: Fessio was defending the thing he loved, and Privett was attacking the thing he hated. If Philip Larkin is right that “What will survive of us is love,” it is fair to say that Fessio’s influence will live on in the classical Christian education movement now sweeping the nation, while Privett’s legacy lingers in the prolonged suicide of Jesuit colleges and universities, reduced to the ignoble task of DEI indoctrination.
Throughout the book, Buckley wears his immense learning lightly. He joins sparkling wit and serious scholarship with clear steady writing. Father Joseph Fessio, S. J.: California Blackrobe filled in many interesting gaps for me, and the average reader will find it an excellent guide to the territory it covers. I wish I could say that the recent history of Catholic higher education in America made sense, but, thanks to Father Buckley, it makes more sense to me than it used to.
Lee Oser is the author, most recently, of Christian Humanism in Shakespeare: A Study in Religion and Literature and Old Enemies: A Satire. A former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers (ALSCW), he teaches at College of the Holy Cross. His record album, Windmills on the Moon, is due out with Regional Records later this year.
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