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Gabriel
Gibbs:
FROM HARVARD TO HARVARD: THE STORY OF SAINT BENEDICT CENTER'S BECOMING SAINT BENEDICT ABBEY (2006) Reviewed by Patrick Killough I. For amazon.com
Title of this review: From religious combat through utopia into a Benedictine abbey, July 13, 2008 Reviewer's rating of HARVARD TO HARVARD: * * * * FOUR STARS A reviewer might ask himself about this book as about any other: who would profit from reading HARVARD TO HARVARD and why? Offhand, I cannot imagine more than a couple of thousand people willing to read HARVARD TO HARVARD without previous knowledge of the once notorious event early in the history namely, "The Boston Heresy Case." Ideally, readers of Abbot Gabriel Gibbs's new book, HARVARD TO HARVARD will first have read two earlier and more scholarly (or at least journalistic) surveys of the same ground: -- George B. Pepper: THE BOSTON HERESY CASE in View of the Secularization of Religion -- A Case Study in the Sociology of Religion (1988) and -- Gary Potter: AFTER THE BOSTON HERESY CASE (1995). Does the Boston Heresy Case sound unfamiliar? If so, then conjure up Cambridge, Massachusetts 1940 to 1958. Greater Boston was in some sense America's most Roman Catholic city. From another perspective, however, its jewel was America's greatest center of secular learning: Harvard University with its Radcliffe College for women. And, after nearly three centuries of hostility, the Catholic Church and Harvard University were only just beginning to show respect for each other's hugely different values and world-views. Avery Dulles, son of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, enters Harvard in 1936, is led through very positive Harvard epiphanies into Roman Catholicism in 1940. With two or three other Catholic laymen he founds The Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, just outside a main gate into Harvard. Dulles goes off to war as a naval officer. While he is gone his co-founder Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke and other laymen turn the Center into a pulsing powerhouse of somewhat nostalgic Catholic intellectual life. At war's end the State of Massachusetts grants the Center the power to bestow academic degrees. The GI Bill gives returning service men and women the means to attend Saint Benedict. Prominent young men and women abandon Harvard and Radcliffe for the Center. They are attracted to the Thursday evening theology lectures by one of the two or three most famous Catholic priests in America, the Jesuit Father Leonard Edward Feeney, who in late 1944 is appointed the Center's first and only chaplain. Ardent young men and women study languages, liturgy and, notably, philosophy with a brilliant Lebanese Catholic professor, Fakhri Maluf. They embed themselves fraternity-like into an affordable two years of excitingly orthodox Catholic mini-renaissance just outside secular Harvard University. The dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan in August 1945 was widely applauded by Americans as a war-shortening tactic. But it appalled the moral sensibilities of a hundred or more members of the Center. They at once set to work to analyze what was wrong with an America that could unleash such an atrocity. And why was the American Catholic hierarchy not up in arms against this unprecedented slaughter of non-combatants? Center members appealed unsuccessfully to Pope Pius XII to denounce heresies being taught or tolerated by Catholics in Greater Boston. Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston in 1948 placed the Center under interdict: Catholics were forbidden to have anything to do with it. Father Feeney was expelled from his Jesuit Order in 1949 and excommunicated from the Catholic Church by Pope Pius XII in 1953. He was reconciled to the Church by act of Pope Paul VI in 1972 and a majority of his young lay followers shortly Feeney soon after. Much more detail by me would be to provide "spoilers" of the author's own craftsmanlike telling of the story of Saint Benedict Center and how its early moral revulsion from atomic bombing quickly enough led into "the Boston Heresy Case." Suffice it to say that this was a rocky time of roller coaster ups and downs. Every Sunday afternoon for 7 1/2 years Feeney and scores of adult followers preached their views of salvation in Boston Common, often protected by mounted Boston policemen. Jews and Masons were occasionally singled out as special enemies of Jesus, his mother and the Catholic Church. Then, in 1958, 100 or more Center people (including 12 married couples and their 39 children) decamped into the countryside west of Boston at Still River, a rural part of the town of Harvard. There they created, contrary to Catholic canon law, novel American experiments in vowed monastic living. All the married couples accepted celibacy and their children were then raised by a handful of women who were not their parents. In time the majority of Saint Benedict Center people made their peace with Rome. Some did not. One group, the largest, eventually became Catholic Benedictine monks. Most children, as they grew up, left the Center for the world. This is the chronicle that is unfolded by Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, who had been virtually "present at the creation" of Saint Benedict Center. HARVARD TO HARVARD is the most recent book-length overview of a story which continues to fascinate such another early participant as theologian and now Cardinal Avery Dulles, as well as students of church history, sociologists, psychologists and researchers into religious utopias. Abbot Gibbs's narrative is clear, peaceable, detailed, only moderately opinionated and amply illustrated. The author tries to be ultra-fair to disagreeing participants and sub-groups in the Center's often controversial experiments in monastic community for both men and women. While not reflexively polemical, neither is the chronicle remotely detached. Who should read HARVARD TO HARVARD and why? That is hard for me to say. But I hope that you have reason to decide whether enough is now enough with HARVARD TO HARVARD or if you care to pick up the book and read it. I predict that if you do elect to read this book about Saint Benedict Center, you will enjoy it and will not stop there. Before you know it you will find yourself into other writings: about Christian tolerance and intolerance, the Second Vatican Council, the theological views of Cardinal Avery Dulles and also the rich and still growing learning experiences of the Center and its several offspring scattered across America, including some much sought after schools. -OOO- Your Tags: history, gabriel gibbs, religion, utopias, catholicism, avery dulles, leonard feeney, catherine goddard clarke, richard cushing http://www.amazon.com/Harvard-Story-Benedict-Centers-Becoming/ dp/0911218475/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1215971100&sr=1-1 Product Details * Paperback: 280 pages * Publisher: Ravengate Pr (November 30, 2005) * Language: English * ISBN-10: 0911218475 * ISBN-13: 978-0911218473 * Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.9 inches * Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds ==-=--=-=-=---= II. For epinions.com Title of this review: "EXCITED ABOUT SALVATION" Reviewer's Rating of HARVARD TO HARVARD: * * * * FOUR STARS "EXCITED ABOUT SALVATION" by aohcapablanca, Jul 16 '08 Massachusetts has two Harvards. One is the university in Cambridge. The second is a nearby town in Worcester County. The book HARVARD TO HARVARD is about Saint Benedict Center, a militant, idealistic Roman Catholic religious community. It was created by Catholic laymen, including the future Cardinal Avery Dulles, in Cambridge in 1941 and moved to the Still Water district of Harvard in 1958. Under new forms and new names, that Center lives and has grown into seven separate communities of adult men and women. Scholars see in Saint Benedict Center a fascinating, partially failed, dogmatically conservative experiment to purify the American Catholic Church. There must be something about the town of Harvard that attracts experimenters in novel community living. That town has sheltered at least four utopian communities: --(1) Harvard Shaker Village, founded 1781 by Mother Ann Lee herself as the second community for men, women and children of the United Society of Believers. --(2) Fruitlands, 1843 brainchild of Amos Bronson Alcott, father of Louisa May Alcott. She wrote an 1873 satire about it in TRANSCENDENTAL WILD OATS. Fruitlands lasted for all of seven months. --(3) Tahanto Enclave, founded in the early 20th Century by Bostonian Fiske Warren, a follower of economic thinker Henry George as one of several "single tax zone" experiments in America. --(4) Saint Benedict Center. That is the community of roughly 100 which moved from HARVARD TO HARVARD. Unlike the first three long dead utopias, the Center has evolved and its spirit and some organizational structures thrive today. HARVARD TO HARVARD is narrowly focused chronicling, not wide ranging history. You will find nary a word about Shaker Village, Fruitlands or the Tahanto Enclave in this 2006 book by Benedictine Abbot Gabriel Gibbs. It treats rather narrowly and not always deeply of the 1941 creation of Saint Benedict Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, its removal in 1962 to the Still Water district of the town of Harvard and the painful succession by seven religious communities. Think of HARVARD TO HARVARD as a sometimes flashingly good but very long monograph about one small Catholic community that at its height, before fragmentation, never enjoyed a hard core of more than around eighty adults. Saint Benedict Center had two abiding and dominant leaders, lay co-foundress Mrs Catherine Goddard Clarke, who died in 1968, and its first clerical chaplain, the Jesuit Leonard Edward Feeney. Feeney died in 1978. For most of that time he was the Center's only priest. At Mrs Clarke's death, the absence of her deft hand at the administrative tiller quickly revealed Father Feeney's weak management skills and initiated a period of internal drift and division. Early on, adult members had sworn private vows to obey Feeney and to dedicate their lives to defend the Catholic Church and its ancient dogma, "outside the Church there is no salvation." Single men and women also vowed celibacy. HARVARD TO HARVARD chronicles nearly six decades of a tiny ultra-conservative movement in American Catholic church history beginning in 1941 with the founding of Saint Benedict Center in Harvard Square, Cambridge. In 1947 and later the Center threw down the gauntlet to church officials in Boston and Rome over salvation and whether non-Catholics had any slightest chance to be saved. Their answer: the saved would number only baptized Catholics who accept the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Pope. In reaction, the Archbishop of Boston placed the Center off limits to all Catholics. Father Feeney, their chaplain and leader, was expelled from the Jesuit order and in 1953 excommunicated by Pope Pius XII. For 7 1/2 years 80 or so adults were led every Sunday afternoon by Father Feeney across the river to Boston Common where they preached "the doctrine:" i. e., that outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation. Protected by mounted Boston policemen, the Center spokesmen exchanged taunts with hecklers, often waxing hot in denouncing Protestants, Masons, Jews and weak-kneed leaders of the Catholic Church in Boston. HARVARD TO HARVARD then removes the Cambridge community in 1962 to a rural setting in the town of Harvard, a farm originally intended as a recreation area for the 39 children of the Center's 12 married couples. When the mothers and fathers eventually all took private vows of celibacy and no longer lived as a family, their 39 children were taken at age three, schooled and raised communally as if in a permanent New England boarding school. Parents had no special role in their upbringing. By 1971 many children and some parents were in rebellion against harsh child-rearing and began to depart the center to live again in the world. The decision by a majority of men to support this voluntary exodus and to provide financial support for the "Little Brothers and Sisters" who would leave was the first crack in the Center's hitherto militant solidarity. The book's story is well conceived and crafted, though with a taste for exclamation points stronger than many might prefer. The story of Saint Benedict Center and the once notorious "Boston Heresy Case" which it begat has been told often and from differing points of view. No published account is remotely "definitive." Here is my impression after reading quite a few of those accounts: HARVARD TO HARVARD tells the truth but selectively less than the whole truth. Its principal author, Abbot Gabriel Gibbs, takes pains to offend no one, at least none of the still living survivors from among the original 100 or so Center adherents. If there are villains, they are mostly long dead, starting with Leonard Feeney's brother Tom, who was a Jesuit priest and claimant of his estate as well as Cardinal Archbishop Richard Cushing of Boston. Cushing was a onetime high school classmate of Leonard Feeney but unloaded very gun he had against the famous Jesuit priest over alleged preaching of general intolerance of Protestants, Jews and non-Catholics. Only toward the end does Abbot Gibbs lift his eyes from chronicling and provide enough sense of the Center's place in general Catholic and American history. And then he does so very well indeed beginning at page 224, Part VII, "Ebbs and Flows." The author deftly lays out a general mood swing in how Catholics now (compared to the early 1900s) prefer to theologize, to rule the Church and to reason. No more tight syllogisms producing clarity and certitude but rather unending dialogue among "sincere" people and exercises in "pendulum governance" (p. 238) by, for example, by Pope John Paul II -- i.e. staying in charge by swinging back and forth without choosing between contradictory interpretations of dogma or moral truths. Catholics now live in the age created by genial Pope John XXIII who "once
quipped that he had to be the pope of both those with their foot on the
accelerator, and those with their foot on the brake" (p. 239).
The Benedictine monks in Still Water (Harvard, Massachusetts) admit to being old fashioned and conservative. Everything they do, every prayer they say or sing is for their own and the world's salvation. They are "excited about salvation" (242). This broader perspective and big picture analysis, even so late in the book, gives the book its appeal to non-specialized readers. But such philosophizing does not entirely make up for its general absence from the beginning to that point. HARVARD TO HARVARD remains a chronicle, not Thucididean history. Both its players and its author are retroactively shown as displaying from 1941 to 1971 and later little if any curiosity about wider trends in the world, Vatican governance, the Cold War, the death throes of Soviet Communism, or even the seminal Second Vatican Council of the early '60s. When they weren't absorbed in defending "The Doctrine," Center members seemed content simply to concentrate incuriously on themselves and their individual and collective pursuit of salvation. The Benedictine monks in Still River, as the largest of the seven successors to Saint Benedict Center, have also retained title to the Center's own publishing house, Ravengate Press. HARVARD TO HARVARD is one of its handsome productions. The print is large, the errata few. Is this a book for narrow specialists in church history, evolution of dogma or dogmatic interpretation, religious psychology and sociology, utopias and cults? Yes, absolutely. Does it also have wider appeal to general readers? Yes. But to prove that assertion I invite you to an imaginative experiment. A few days ago my wife and I watched a BBC mini-series CRANFORD, with Judi Dench. It stages a smashingly good piece of fiction recently stitched together from three Victorian novellas by Elizabeth Gaskell. If a gifted writer among us were to pull together the scattered fragments of the true, often angry and occasionally intolerant story of Saint Benedict Center, it would make fascinating reading and watching. It would have hunger for God, the comradeship of battling for an ostensibly lost cause against long odds, humiliation, defeat, survival, allegations of child abuse, cultism, conscience versus blind obedience and on and on. You write that story and I will review it. -OOO- Pros: Congenially selective retelling of an often ferocious story of crusading passion. What is religious intolerance? Cons: A chronicle not a history. The theme of religious salvation is sometimes submerged in details. The Bottom Line: Want to save your soul? Curious about better and worse ways to do so? Read HARVARD TO HARVARD for one controversial utopian experiment by Catholic men, women and children. Recommended: Yes http://www99.epinions.com/content/write.html/tnode_~1272007201665 Black Mountain 07/16/2008 http://www.patrickkillough.com/books/gibbs_harvard.html |