Men Astutely Trained by Peter McDonough

Author:Peter McDonough
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press A Division of Macmillan, Inc.

IV

When ISO attained its peak manpower in 1951, the staff totaled ten Jesuits including the editor and assistant editor of Social Order. By 1960 the number of Jesuits assigned to ISO had dwindled to five. The next year a subcommittee appointed by the provincials recommended discontinuing publication of Social Order and cutting the staff of ISO further. The downsizing was put off by Father Janssens, who would not countenance a drastic curtailment of the social apostolate on the part of the American Jesuits in the same year that John XXIII had issued Mater et Magistra to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the previous social encyclical. 59 Ten years later, in 1971, having moved from St. Louis to the East Coast and having changed its name to the Cambridge Center for Social Studies, the operation was disbanded.

When the institute was reorganized in 1947 it set its sights not on action but on ideas. Original scholarship was to be the chief product and influence on policy the eventual result. The institute was supposed to advance sociological knowledge and to extend the application of Catholic thought to social policy without controverting the received teaching of the church. These presumptions became increasingly difficult to credit. While the norm persisted that the crux of the social magisterium should be approximately universal with respect to time and place, this criterion served less as a positive guide than as a stricture on adventurous thinking. 60

The hope was that hard work and the requisite talent, supplied by Jesuits, would produce something very close to an unassailable synthesis of social thought. The talent was considerable, as was the zeal, but the output was largely mediocre. The logics of doctrine, scholarship, and problem solving did not so much collide, either fruitfully or in combat, as go their separate ways. By the end, around Vatican II, the Jesuits were shrewd enough to recognize that the doctrine, far from being immutable, was undergoing substantial renovation. Yet few Jesuits associated with ISO tapped into the anomalies between ideas and perceptions of social realities that provoke intellectual breakthroughs, and their religious and their secular sensibilities remained apart at the wellsprings of creativity. 61

The schools of social work set up by the American Jesuits in the first half of the century provided a service: training in community organization, therapeutic intervention, and the like. The service was educational rather than direct; very few Jesuits were social workers or community organizers themselves. At the same time, practical rather than theoretical knowledge was transmitted. Though the schools did not fit the humanistic template of the liberal arts colleges, they did not pioneer in original thought. The schools of social work delivered a service—training in skills useful for whitecollar occupations—and they succeeded on their own terms. Their clientele was composed of lower-middle-class Catholics striving after upward mobility. Graduates could do well by doing good. The schools had modest intellectual ambitions, acting as certifying agencies, professional gatekeepers, rather than stimulants of original analysis or creativity. They found an institutional home in the preexisting Jesuit educational apparatus.

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