John Tracy Ellis, R.I.P.: a well-ordered life

Up to this point I have been talking specifically about Ellis's distinctive contribution as a controversial commentator on the state of American Catholicism or, if you will, his contribution as an effective publicist or pamphleteer. Others are much better qualified than I am to speak about his more lasting contribution as a productive scholar--a truly professional scholar and author--in the field of American Catholic church history. Speaking as an amateur, I would simply say, in this connection, that the church in the United States owes a great debt to Ellis and to his colleagues in the field of church history for having kept alive a sense of history among their fellow-Catholics during the darkest days of what many have described as the era of nonhistorical orthodoxy. One of Ellis's younger colleagues in the field of American church history, Eric Cochrane, in urging his fellow-historians to redouble their efforts to implant a sense of history among American Catholics, indicated some years ago why this work is so important. Our neglect of history, he complained, has permitted Catholics in general to attribute infallibility to doctrinal pronouncements which, however theologically impeccable, are utterly devoid of specific references to concrete historical situations; and it has enabled them to ignore, or bury in platitudes and abstract formulae [some of the] pressing problems of their own time .... It has encouraged American Catholics in particular to ignore their own specific experience and simply to import acritically the answers to their theological questions from the very different environment of Western Europe. It has impeded the progress of ecumenical dialogue. And it has left any number of so-called "Progressive Catholics" from Pentecostals and commune members to liturgical reformers and social activists--bereft of the experience accumulated over two millennia by such of our forerunners as Teresa of Avila, Benedict of Nursia, Philip Neri, and Joseph of Calasanz.

We are indebted to Ellis for all that he did to help the church in the United States redress the balance in this regard.

I have said that many of us would undoubtedly single out intellectual honesty as Ellis's distinctive trademark. And so it was, in my opinion. I should like to add, in a more personal vein, that his professional work as a historian and as a scholarly journalist was at all times a very priestly work. What the Italian historian, Professor Giuseppe Alberigo, has said with reference to historians in general is eminently true of Ellis: "All historical research conducted with scientific rigor is a spiritual adventure; and research into the history of the church is also a religious experience."

In Ellis's case, it was precisely that--a spiritual adventure and a religious experience or, in the words of Professor Cochrane, "a holy occupation."

The late Belgian theologian and spiritual writer Pierre Charles made this point many years ago in Teilhardian language that would have resonated with Ellis. Father Charles rejected the notion that a good intention on the part of a scholar was enough to integrate his research with his religious values. "If," he said in one of his published prayers, "Truth is not an abstraction; if it is a Person and my Redeemer, then quite independently from the intention, knowledge is in itself good, even for a mortal man, and to know is to build up Truth and therefore to build up Christ among men .... Wherever Truth is spoken we stammer something of the Person of the Word who is the Truth .... "