The Sound of Silence:
The Life and Cancelling of a Heroic Jesuit Priest
by karen hall
crisis, 240 pages, $18.95
Near the start of this book, there is an unexpectedly absorbing digression on the subject of the late Paul Mankowski, S.J.’s shirts. In a letter about clerical clothing, Mankowski explains that he owns “a total of about six shirts, four of which are wearable in public and the others of which are greyed and frayed enough for use while I’m laundering the others or just hanging around the house.” On average, the Jesuit writes, he buys a new shirt every eighteen months, “cycling the new one into the closet and the old one into the community rag bag, and roughly the same with trousers. Mean annual clothing expenditure: say, $90; if shoes were included, $140.” He could put some more effort in, he admits, “but personally I’ve never trusted a priest who wasn’t at least a little bit seedy.”
In the first place, we are reminded how seriously he took his vow of poverty. After Mankowski’s death from a brain aneurysm in 2020 at the age of sixty-six, one friend, Kenneth Craycraft, recalled that he had once given the priest the Collected Works of Flannery O’Connor, a Mankowski favorite. “He received it graciously, but promptly gave it away to someone else, consistent with his vow of poverty. Later, when we knew one another better, he explained to me that the entirety of his personal possessions fit in a medium-sized suitcase, and that’s how it would always be.” Another friend, Phil Lawler, remembered asking Mankowski for a restaurant recommendation in Rome, only to find the Jesuit drawing a blank. “Is there another priest who, after a few years in Rome, cannot tell a friend where to get a spectacular dinner?” (Mankowski was, however, reportedly a fine cook.)
The excursus reveals something else. In the letter, Mankowski is discussing why he always wears clerical dress; he speculates in passing that many Jesuits don’t because “they’re embarrassed by the Catholic Church and want to be able to choose the when, the where, and the how of their public association with her.” Here is the voice of Mankowski as Catholic readers came to know it, and as the Jesuits came to be appalled by it: the implacable critic—and acute psychoanalyst—of the liberal-Catholic mind, who frankly declined to take it at its word. Yet, the letter goes on, when speaking to a fellow Jesuit on the subject, he wouldn’t always be so blunt; the $90-a-year angle was a gentler way to put it. He could be tactful when he wanted to be, Fr. Paul Mankowski. He just didn’t always want to.
And then there’s a third reason why the shirts matter: because that precision (“cycling the new one into the closet and the old one into the community rag bag”), that willingness to make just the right use of what one is given—no more, no less—is a defining feature of his prose. Mankowski admired Evelyn Waugh’s care over his materials: nothing wasted, nothing out of place, every joint fitted exactly, every seam finished. The comparison doesn’t disgrace him.
Karen Hall’s book joins two posthumous anthologies, George Weigel’s Jesuit at Large and Lawler’s Diogenes Unveiled, which have already told some of Mankowski’s story. He grew up in South Bend, Indiana, raised by devout, intellectual parents amid a blue-collar Catholicism that remained, for him, one standard by which parish life should be judged. (“Few fathers who earn their living with their hands and shoulders are going to smile on the prospect of their sons’ leading a congregation in ‘Eagle’s Wings.’”) After a carefree, sports-mad youth, he decided to pursue an academic career before, to his dismay, hearing the call to become a Jesuit. On his entering the Society, he and his superiors embarked on a tragicomically mismatched relationship:
The priest-formatores at the novitiate, who included some prominent liberal Jesuits, liked me and were encouraging. With the advantage of hindsight, I realize they were somewhat amused by my old-fashioned scruples but were confident that I’d lose them in time and get with the program. A misjudgment. I was, in turn, shocked by the opinions I heard—or thought I heard—from the mouths of the Jesuits, but I figured I must be misunderstanding their real meaning and at some deeper level they were doing what Jesuits always do and rooting for Holy Mother Church against her enemies. Why else would someone become a Jesuit, after all?
The deadpan sentence in the middle of that paragraph—“A misjudgment”—summarizes a lifelong struggle. Rigorously orthodox, a scholar who would casually bring Wittgensteinian linguistics into conversation and who once wrote a pioneering monograph titled Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew, an old-school priest who would spend his Christmas holidays helping Mother Teresa’s sisters in dirt-poor Eastern European towns, Mankowski found himself in an order that—as far as he could see—was exchanging its patrimony for moral laxity and intellectual fog. He wanted nothing except to be a Jesuit, yet his superiors viewed him, naturally enough, as a problem, and for long years he was alternately cold-shouldered and subjected to Kafkaesque disciplinary procedures. It was, he told his friends, like being married to a woman who had become severely schizophrenic: an agonizing, perplexing trial that only a coward would walk out on. The full story was reserved for a few confidants, hence the joke that “the most coveted item in Jesuitdom was Paul Mankowski’s hard drive.” Curiously enough, a few minutes after his death, his computer seems to have disappeared; his family, according to this book, have still not received it. (The Jesuit archives in St. Louis tell me that it is now in their collection.)
Hall relates all this in some detail. Among her revelations is Mankowski’s tale of a discovery that, early in his Jesuit career, floored him: a passage in which St. Ignatius, founder of the Jesuits, recounted his youthful ambition to join the most corrupt religious order he could find, ideally one that had forgotten “its fervent beginnings and . . . the observance of its rules.” What better place to serve the Lord than someplace where you could properly suffer for him? When he read that passage, Mankowski realized that he had a chance to fulfill Ignatius’s unmet aspiration. As ever, he drew deeply on the Jesuit past: St. Edmund Campion going to the scaffold, or St. Isaac Jogues preaching to the Mohawks who would torture him to death, were as present to him as any of his contemporaries.
This wasn’t escapism; it was one source of a mental strength on which others came to rely. Hall was one of them: a distinguished screenwriter—M*A*S*H, The Good Wife, seven Emmy nominations—who was finding her way back to a more serious faith when she met Mankowski at a conference. Over the course of their friendship, she became convinced—she wasn’t the only one—that he was not just the cleverest but the holiest person she had ever met. He was also “the life of any party,” who proved “that a person can be saintly while also loving football and Maker’s Mark and even while having a wicked sense of humor.”
Along with the inevitable reminiscences, this book rightly includes a lot of Mankowski’s prose—emails, speeches, and previously unpublished writings, some of them evidence of unusual spiritual discernment. In an after-dinner address to students at Thomas Aquinas College, Mankowski reminds his listeners of Psalm 51: “A clean heart create within me, O Lord, and a steadfast spirit renew within me.” Okay, but what would that mean in practice?
First, that at the end of four years, you find adoration of the Blessed Sacrament more fascinating—fascinating in the pedantic sense in which it “binds to itself ” your imagination and your intellect in mysterious ways—than [you] did before. Second, that each year you make better confessions than you did the year previously. For almost all of us, making a better confession will mean confessing more sins, not fewer sins, as it means that we discover and repent of truths about ourselves to which we were blind before, working hopefully toward the time in which the whole mass is leavened.
More than a polemicist, then—though the reader will find the polemical Mankowski here in full spate. With the caveat that I am not worthy to iron a single sleeve of Mankowski’s most threadbare shirt, I do wonder whether it was good for him to spend quite so long immersed in everything that most offended him: to brood so often over cowardly bishops, pro-choice politicians, and liturgical abuses. Writing of Benedict XVI’s kindness to liberal professors, Mankowski once confessed that he couldn’t quite “acquit himself of a strain of pharisaism here (‘This man welcomes Swiss theologians and eats with them!’).” And in response to a 2020 New Year’s email from Hall that said “Here’s to surviving the next decade,” Mankowski shot back:
Are you sure you want to? The pope’s pick Cardinal Tagle is to the episcopacy what Barry Manilow is to the entertainment world. I pray that long before 2030 I’m on the third tier of Purgatory extracting broken arrowheads from my carcass with a grapefruit knife, in reparation for sins of detraction against the editorial staff of America—and of sloth.
Perhaps he would have been happier if he had blocked every Catholic news site on his browser and devoted himself to bass-fishing and ancient philology. On the other hand, Mankowski’s responses to these outrages are, for the ordinary confused Catholic, a potent antidote to this era’s confusions. There is, of course, much to be said for open dialogue, for patient listening, for trying to make the best of an opponent’s argument, and thank God for the people who practice those habits. But such virtues can also be exploited—and that was one thing Mankowski spotted in the sad headshaking, pious tut-tutting, fake concern, accidental-on-purpose confusion, and doctrinal evasiveness of liberal-Catholic rhetoric. Mankowski was a skillful defender of the faith—nobody could construct a more satisfying case that the Bible is inerrant or that same-sex marriage is a contradiction in terms—but what makes his prose so fortifying is that he refused to go on the back foot. No, he implied, it’s not for me to prove that I’m a nice guy despite being a conservative; perhaps it’s for the critics of Church teaching to show that they don’t have ulterior motives of their own. It’s not for me to defend every fact in the Old Testament; it’s for you to present a watertight philosophical argument for the antecedent improbability of miracles. A bold stance, yes. He was one of the few who could pull it off.
He was also aware of how, in the name of kindness, Christians might concede ground without realizing it. In a 2008 column, Mankowski reflected that “in all things, charity” was an excellent rule, but could be misleadingly applied in theological disputes.
The gauge of authentic benevolence is not courtesy in the face of hostility, where the issue at stake is peripheral. We need to examine the case where the whole purpose and meaning of a man’s life is overthrown by the position espoused by his opponents, and especially where his opponents are on the brink of success. In such circumstances 16th-century Christians took up pikes and battle-axes against their Christian adversaries—all sides with the enthusiastic blessing of their clergy. If today’s blogger forbears to take an axe to his opponent but indulges in unlovely sarcasm at his expense, we can admit that he fails in graciousness, but are we certain that he fails in charity?
One aspect of Mankowski’s achievement was to be able to write a phrase like “the whole purpose and meaning of a man’s life” and make you feel what it meant. Not much writing can do that. This book, like the recent collections of his journalism, deserves to be a roaring success, and to prompt a flood of Mankowskiania to the point where we can take no more. We need a full-length biography, and another few anthologies, and conferences and websites and social media quote-of-the-day accounts, and above all we need The Selected Emails of Fr. Paul Mankowski. “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth light unto all that are in the house.”
Dan Hitchens is a senior editor at First Things.
Image by Lumen Christi Institute. Image cropped, filer added.
