John Leo: Principle and Prescience
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John Leo: Principle and Prescience Maureen Mullarkey
Accepted: 29 July 2020 / # The National Association of Scholars 2020
When I learned that John Leo had retired as editor-in-chief of Minding the Campus, my thoughts leaped to T.S. Eliot’s final prayer at the end of Ash Wednesday: “Suffer me not to be separated.” The news came as a wrench, a decisive twist to the bolt on a repository of shaping memories. His writing was at the center of much that had stamped my wits and my interests over decades. The man entered my life through a Xeroxed copy of his December 1, 1965 column in the National Catholic Reporter. It had been handed to me by a Fordham student on the sidewalk outside the Catholic Peace Fellowship on Beekman Street. As much a j’accuse against the New York chancery as a brief in support of Daniel Berrigan, S.J., it was a rousing thing to read. A Jesuit provincial had just ordered the charismatic activist/poet/priest out of the country for his role in the anti-war movement. In passionate defense of Fr. Berrigan, Leo opened with a description of him as “one of the most Christ-like men I have ever met,” one who “disturbed the slumber of lesser men.” He called Berrigan a “marked man” hounded by “a naked and arrogant exercise in authoritarianism.” The column was intoxicating to an idealistic Catholic-schooled girl high on Yeats: The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere/the ceremony of innocence is drowned. For so many of my generation at the time, Berrigan presided as the conscience of the innocent. And squinting through the prism of youthful conceit, we saw lesser men slumbering everywhere.
Maureen Mullarkey is a painter and a critic. A member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), she writes on art and its intersection with religion and politics; [email protected]. Her essays have appeared in various publications, including the Nation, the Atlantic, the Hudson Review, Arts Magazine, Art & Antiques, and American Arts Quarterly. Currently, she is a senior contributor at The Federalist. She keeps the weblog Studio Matters.
M. Mullarkey
Cardinal Spellman was an outspoken hawk on the Vietnam War; Dan Berrigan spoke otherwise. His reassignment to Latin America for a mandatory cooling off was believed to have been the Cardinal’s doing. Leo’s “Thinking It Over: The Case of Fr. Berrigan” appeared together with a front page story in the same issue of NCR. A cause celebre was launched. Eleven days later, the New York Times followed with an open letter to the archdiocese and New York’s Jesuit community. Signers were a stellar roster of Catholic intellectuals. To this reader, in that day, Leo’s column brought Catholicism alive as something more than a system of inherited beliefs. Suddenly, it became interesting. Historian Rodger Van Allen has since denied Spellman’s responsibility for Berrigan’s exile. (He pronounced it an in-house Jesuit affair, one the Cardinal simply lacked the appetite to oppose.) Moreover, hindsight gave cause to regret the cult around Berrigan. Idolization of
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