The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski

Paul Mankowski, S.J., who died unexpectedly four years ago this past fall, was the kind of priest who seemed to spring from pages of the best Catholic fiction—a larger-than-life character stitched together by seeming paradoxes.

He was an ardent Jesuit who nonetheless spent most of his life being disciplined, even silenced, within his religious order. He was among the best stylists alive of the world’s reigning living language, English, yet he was also, in his day job, a master of ancient tongues, some long vanished from the earth. Renowned among the Catholic cognoscenti for his intellect, he was first and foremost a humble priest; one of my favorite emails from him was a diary he kept during a summer spent touring orphanages in Romania with the Missionaries of Charity.

Even so, for all the characteristics that could have made him legendary, Paul Mankowski, today as in his lifetime, is not well known in the United States outside a small circle of tradition-minded Catholic intellectual types. Thus, it was all the more wonderful to discover, two years ago on my first trip to Australia, that this remarkable priest is remembered Down Under—not only at Campion College, where he was on the Board of International Advisors, but elsewhere. One of my most vivid memories from that visit is of a couple in Melbourne who introduced themselves after a talk and asked with tears in their eyes whether I’d ever known the late, great Fr. Mankowski.

Did I know Fr. Mankowski? The answer is no—and yes. Despite mutual friends and occasional attempts, we never did manage to meet in person. But from the time we began corresponding until the year of his death, he was a confidant, advisor, powerful influence, and friend. My tribute to him is brief—briefer, certainly, than he deserves. Even so, a few lessons drawn from his life and letters might do him a modicum of justice.

The first lesson begins with a personal story. Mankowski and I were first connected by email by another friend, Peter F. Ryan, S.J., a professor of moral theology now teaching at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit. Those fortunate enough to have corresponded with Mankowski will know the feeling. I was instantly hooked. Every email he sent sparkled with erudition, energy, impudence—an intoxicating mix. And so we began bantering back and forth in the ether.

Then something happened that was not so funny. A short time after our correspondence began, an essay I’d written on the erosion of the taboo against pedophilia infuriated a prolific journalist known for his advocacy of same-sex marriage. At that time, I was relatively new to the internet, among the last in our crowd to use it regularly. One morning the phone rang—back in the days when phones actually rang—and a friend said, “Stop what you’re doing and look at the web. So-and-so is blogging nonstop about your essay. He’s really, really, angry. He’s making you sound like a monster.”

As anyone who’s ever been flamed on the internet will understand, being attacked in public in front of this journalist’s many virtual fans was not only frustrating, but unnerving. With every word he committed to the ether, my anger and desire to react grew. But as it happened, being cursed out online wasn’t the only problem on that particular morning. Our youngest child was then a baby. As I was frantically staring at the desktop screen, trying to follow the calumnies being issued for posterity, the baby began to cry. And as I looked back and forth, between the screen I wasn’t very adept at and the crying baby, frustrated beyond all measure, something else happened: A new email popped into my inbox.

It was from Mankowski—who incidentally was thousands of miles away at that time, in Rome. He was writing to say that he’d seen the same furious blog posts. It seems impossible to capture from this distance in time just how eerie was this sudden appearance in cyberspace by Fr. Paul Mankowski, on a morning that was unfolding worse than most. To see this priest weighing in at that moment, of all moments, was uncanny.

He said something in that email I have never forgotten. In some way I will never be able to explain, he had zeroed in on the fact that this woman—whom he didn’t know, apart from our jesting correspondence—was also a mother, at home. And he wrote something that became an enduring consolation, not only in that moment, but on later occasions throughout the years. Dismissing the enraged interlocutor and citing Jesus instead, Mankowski wrote, “Mary, never forget that you have chosen the better part.”

This was the first lesson I learned from Fr. Paul Mankowski: Never, ever lose sight of what’s most important about your time on this earth. There was nothing more critical in that moment than the crying little baby. How the priest pierced through the ether to that core reality, from time zones away, to provide spiritual counsel to someone he didn’t know: All that remains an impenetrable mystery. But however he did it, his intervention worked.

The earthly truth was that I could have spent that day, even that week, responding online point by point—perhaps even gaining some evanescent support. And the transcendent truth, the truth to which Mankowski drew attention, was far different. The baby whom no one else could see or hear, the crying baby who was keeping me from building up my worldly self, was infinitely more consequential than any hostile interlocutor on the internet. Mankowski’s email conferred something I hadn’t thought was possible that morning: peace.

Young readers, heed Fr. Mankowski. For those of you who will go on to marry and have families, nothing, absolutely nothing, will be more important to your happiness and your sanctification. Maybe someday when you feel torn between your duty and your self, you’ll remember this story. Maybe that priest’s spookily timed and true words will help you, too. Have confidence that you can live up to your call to love others—and for those who are blessed to know the joys of marriage and family, let nothing get between you and your family, on the internet or anywhere else.

A second, and very different, lesson, taught tacitly by the late priest was that not only is there no contradiction between intellect and faith, there is no such thing as good writing that is distinct from good thinking. The two are one and the same. To think clearly is to write clearly, and vice versa.

Comparisons are notoriously slippery, but his eulogists agree that Mankowski was one of the finest masters of prose since Evelyn Waugh. In an extraordinary essay in First Things titled “Waugh on the Merits,” the priest himself penned these observations of his subject:

Sometime between the ages of fifteen and seventeen, he acquired an almost freakishly mature mastery of English prose. For the remainder of his life, he was all but incapable of writing a boring sentence. Even in his commonplace and perfunctory communications—business correspondence, military reports, letters to agents and headmasters—Waugh wrote a clean, elegant, beautifully precise English that is appetizing in the most unpromising circumstances.

As George Weigel observed of this same passage, “I don’t know at what age he acquired the skill, but the same could be said of Paul Mankowski, whose sentences sparkled as well as instructed.” And so they do. Sometimes I go back through his emails for a lesson about how wit that looks effortless is in fact painstakingly, albeit invisibly, constructed.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, these literary delights are no longer confined to the inboxes of Mankowski’s friends. Since his death, two posthumous collections of the priest’s work have let his wit loose in the wider world: Jesuit at Large: Essays and Reviews, edited by George Weigel, and Diogenes Unveiled: A Paul Mankowski, S.J., Collection, edited by another of his friends, Phil Lawler. These books should be required reading at all Catholic colleges. If they become so, undergraduates will never enjoy required reading more.

This brings me to a third lesson taken from this great priest’s life. The example he leaves can be summarized in a single word: courage. As former Prime Minister Tony Abbott put it in his elegant eulogy for Mankowski, also published in First Things: “His ability to keep the faith through thick and thin and to live a life of relentless self-discipline must have required singular inner strength.”

Just how singular defies easy summary. It could not have been easy to know oneself gifted with one of the finest minds inside the Anglosphere, as Mankowski must have known—only to be ordered by religious superiors to keep that dazzling light out of view. It could not have been easy to observe that certain men of the cloth were violating their vows, and to say so aloud, as he often did—only to be called a traitor behind closed doors. Above all, it could not have been easy to feel the weight of intellectual and spiritual injustice during years scarred by scandals caused by other priests—and still manage to make sensational fun of the whole catastrophic scene, as if the Church’s travails in the twentieth century were mere comedies by Boccaccio. There is only one word that knits these raveled realities together, and it is courage.

A fourth and final lesson is bittersweet: Don’t wait till tomorrow to comfort that friend, share that thought, or do that good deed that you mean to do. As the Gospels teach more than once, the day is short. In the case of Fr. Mankowski, there something I regret not having shared with him before he died—something I was saving to tell him until we met in person, a day that never came. It was an odd bit of personal history that would have amused this amusing priest. And I missed my shot at sharing it with him.

As Tony Abbott mentioned in his eulogy, Mankowski was a boxer during his student years at Oxford University and elsewhere—as was Abbott. What I neglected to tell the priest during the years of our correspondence was that this fact gave us an unusual connection. My maternal grandfather was a heavyweight fighter of world renown (in addition to playing football in the NFL). His name was Steve Hamas (you can blame Ellis Island for the spelling, which is a far cry, presumably, from the Ruthenian original). His boxing career began during the Great Depression. It carried him in the course of four years to leading contender for the heavyweight crown. At different times in his relatively brief career, Steve Hamas beat men who had been world champions, great fighters like Tommy Loughran, Max Schmeling, Art Lasky, and others. Eventually, he himself would be beaten in a return match with Schmeling in Hitler’s Germany—after which my grandfather retired from the ring, though not from athletics, for good.

This grandfather had a profound influence on my life. Not only was he gentle and wildly humorous, as men who are thoroughly confident in their faith and their purpose can be. He was also devout, a Catholic born into the Byzantine rite. He wore a Miraculous Medal at all times, and he was often a daily communicant. And he behaved as if the achievement that had made him famous—his boxing career—were a mere bagatelle, apart from the trove of amusing stories it left behind.

From the time that Fr. Mankowski began cutting a swath on the internet, I felt the oddest familiarity with him—as if one protective boxer from my childhood had been followed by another in my middle age. Both men scanted their prodigious worldly gifts to bear witness to something otherworldly: the truth that nothing trumps Christ and his Church.

The last word belongs to another boxer, Jack Dempsey, winner of the world heavyweight crown from 1919 to 1926. Dempsey once defined that word “champion” in this way: “A champion is someone who gets up when he can’t.” And so Fr. Paul Mankowski did. He was a priest in full, and a prophet without honor in an age when both prophets and honor are thin on the ground. He had to be down for the count more than once. The cross that he carried within his religious order alone might have pinned him to the mat for good. But it didn’t.

Fr. Paul Mankowski not only got back in the ring every single time, he made it look easy. He made it look grand. He was irreverent as only a truly reverent soul can be. And if, during the last four years, angels have been missing harp notes here and there, there’s a reason. It’s because they’re laughing.

This essay is adapted from a speech delivered at Campion College, Australia, on Sept. 11, 2024.

Image by Aberro Creative, via Creative Commons. Image edited.

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