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

Some time ago, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis--to remind me ever so gently of my own mortality-gave me, for insertion into my breviary, a Xerox copy of a prayer which he told me he had been saying every day for several months. Characteristically, he had identified the printed source of the prayer by chapter, verse, page number, date of publication, etc., as he had taught his students to do, even in routine term papers, during his long and distinguished career in the classroom at The Catholic University of America and, for a time, at the University of San Francisco. It is a prayer for a happy (and, in his case, a speedy) death. The prayer, which Saint Bede is reported to have said as he was dying, reads as follows:

Now is the time, if it be my Maker's will, for me to be set free from this flesh and to come to him who fashioned me from nothing when as yet I was not. I have lived a long time and my merciful judge has ordered my life well. The time of my delivery is at hand for my soul longs to see Christ my king in his glory.

All of Ellis's friends knew, of course, that for several months he had been praying that, God willing, he might be permitted to die as soon as possible. He felt that the time of his delivery was at hand, and his soul longed to see Christ his king in his glory. His prayer was mercifully answered at 6:00 A.M. on Friday, October 16, when he peacefully went to the Lord. Like Saint Bede, he had lived a long life--eighty-seven years, to be exact-- and could say in all humility that his merciful judge had ordered his life well.

Ellis's entire adult life, both before and after his ordination to the priesthood in 1938, was devoted almost exclusively to the study and teaching of church history. He was the supportive mentor of numerous aspiring historians, lay and clerical, who received their professional start under his generous guidance and wise direction and, without exception, remained his devoted friends for life.

It will be appropriate, then, to say a word at the outset about Ellis's approach to history. He was guided always by what Pope Leo XIII said with reference to historians on the opening of the Vatican Archives: "The first law of history is not to dare to utter falsehood; the second, not to fear to speak the truth."

It would be frivolous, of course, to suggest that these few words--which Ellis himself helped to make familiar to all of us by dint of constant repetition--adequately summarize his contribution to American Catholicism during the past fifty-odd years. At the very least, however, they bring to mind the one quality above all others that many would undoubtedly single out as his distinctive trademark--the quality of intellectual honesty which, as Leo described it, is both a negative and a positive virtue. In short, Ellis never dared to utter falsehood and, even more to his credit, never feared to speak the truth.

It might be argued, of course, that that is the least that one could expect and demand of any historian worthy of the name and that it really tells us very little, if anything, about Ellis's distinctive contribution to American Catholicism as compared, for example, to the contribution made by his confreres in the field of church history or by his counterparts in other scholarly disciplines or pastoral occupations. The point is well taken. Yet, without making comparisons--least of all odious comparisons--I would argue that, given the ecclesiastical and cultural climate in which he had to function during the middle years of his priesthood, and given the fact that in his later years he was an outspoken and rather controversial commentator on the present state of American Catholicism and not merely a chronicier of our Catholic past, his intellectual honesty was almost sui generis and had a significant impact on the life of the church in this country.

Offhand I can think of more than a few people in high places who, thirty of forty years ago, would not have agreed with me in this regard. But, as Ellis and his professional peers are wont to remind us, time has a way of putting things in focus and perspective. Recall if you will, in this connection, the angry reaction on the part of certain ecclesiastics to Ellis's articles and speeches during the fifties on the failure of American Catholicism to encourage and to nurture intellectual excellence. The fact that his frank but reasoned treatment of this subject created such a furor, coupled with the fact that an equally frank discussion of a comparably delicate problem in 1992 would hardly cause a tipple, is one indication of how far we have come post if not propter Vatican II.

I do not mean to suggest that intellectual honesty of the kind that Ellis consistently exemplified is everywhere revered or honored in today's church. But surely things are better in this regard than they were when he first began to speak out in public on a wide range of previously unmentionable subjects or, as his critics at the time might have put it, when he first began to wash some of our dirty linen in public. If we are more sophisticated and more relaxed in this respect than we used to be, and if we have developed a certain sense of cultural maturity in the American Catholic community, much of the credit belongs to Ellis. For this reason, among many others--including his willingness to pay a certain price for his convictions--we honor his memory with gratitude.

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 .... "

If I understand what Ellis was saying in some of his more recent interviews (and he was forever being interviewed until his final illness), I have the impression that, like many of the rest of us, he was yearning for a moratorium on strife and contestation in civil society as well as in the life of the church-- yearning for a greater measure of charity, civility, and peace. Who can blame him for entertaining the prayerful hope that this might come to pass? And yet, thanks to his sense of history, he knew better than most of us that our hoped-for second spring, like the one that his favorite author, John Henry Newman, envisioned for England in the nineteenth century, is likely to be "an uncertain, anxious time of hope and fear, of joy and suffering, of bright promise and budding hopes, yet withal of keen blasts, and cold showers, and storms." He was not discouraged, however, by this somber prospect. To the contrary, he would undoubtedly have agreed with Newman that "unbelief is in some shape unavoidable in an age of intellect and in a world like this .... (and that) it is one great advantage of an age in which unbelief speaks out, that faith can speak out too; that, if falsehood assails truth, truth can assail false-hood."

I recall, in this connection, Ellis's telling me a few years ago that, despite his anxious concern about the future of the church and the future of our society, he fully agreed with Saint Augustine who cautioned the faithful of his own time, fifteen hundred years ago, not to indulge in pessimism or romantic nostalgia:

So we must not grumble, for as the Apostle says: "Some of them murmured and were destroyed by serpents." Is there any affliction now endured by mankind that was not endured by our fathers before us? What sufferings of ours even bear comparison with what we know of their sufferings? And yet you hear people complaining about this present day and age because things were so much better in former times. I wonder what would happen if they could be taken back to the days of their ancestors-- would we not still hear them complaining? You may think past ages were good, but it is only because you are not living in them.

When I quoted this text to Ellis, not too long before he died, he emphatically--and not with great good cheer--seconded Augustine.

I quoted Newman above as having said that in our age "truth can assail falsehood." The word "assail," as used in this context, would be too aggressive if applied to a man of Ellis's delicate sensibilities. Whatever of that, we honor him as a priestly scholar who, in the spirit of Newman, spent his entire priesthood not assailing, but irenically countering unbelief with faith and falsehood with truth or, in the words of Saint Paul, "Doing the truth in charity."

He was a man of exquisite courtesy, the quintessential but relaxed and affable gentleman, a good listener, a delightful conversationalist and raconteur, an ecumenist before his time, a strong supporter of women' s fights and of lay initiative and leadership in the church, and, last but not least, a man of profound and persevering prayer.

Ellis seldom if ever concluded an address or a homily without quoting his beloved Newman. As we fondly bid him farewell, then, it will be fitting to say with Newman: "May God support us all the day long 'till shadows lengthen and the evening comes and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over and our work is done. Then in his mercy, may he give us a safe lodging and a holy rest and peace at the last."

We thank God that Ellis has found that holy rest and that everlasting peace.

Msgr. George G. Higgins of The Catholic University of America was a personal friend of John Tracy Ellis for more than fifty years.