Three Maryknolls

Maryknoll, soon to celebrate its 100th birthday, has sent forth thousands of missionaries…each entirely distinctive and unique. Nevertheless, like any community or organization, it does develop a shared or corporate personality. I have known three distinct Maryknolls:
- The original Maryknoll of the founders: China-loving, anti-modernist, Tridentine Maryknoll.
- Transitional Maryknoll of the 1945-65 years after World War II: modern, Latin America-loving, Americanist, social action Maryknoll.
- The declining Maryknoll after Vatican II: multicultural, post-modern, leftwing, psychology-as-religion Maryknoll.

The Maryknoll of Price/the Walshes/Ford was a classic expression of Tridentine Catholicism as it emerged from the combatative, countercultural immigrant American Church. This Church was reactive against a hostile Protestant culture and therefore fiercely loyal to the institutional aspects of counter-reformation Catholicism: the sacraments, moral teachings, hierarchy, and traditions of piety including love for Mary. The primary focus of their mission activity was pagan China which needed to hear the Good News and to come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ as mediated in the one, only, Catholic and apostolic Church. This Maryknoll might be described as anti-modern at least in the sense of anti-modernist in theology. Its concern was to bring the Catholic faith to unbelievers and was in no way enamored with nationalism, politics, technology or social engineering. It was classic, traditional, sacramental Catholicism …nothing more or less.

The end of the war found Maryknoll expelled from communist China and refocusing, largely on Latin America. This was a Catholic continent, not in evident need of evangelization, but plagued with material poverty. By contrast, America was now THE superpower, materially, economically, technologically and culturally. American economic expansion in those two postwar decades was something extraordinary: surely unparalled, in sheer quantity and mass, by any period in the history of the world. Maryknoll shared this American confidence and therefore entered into mission with a great concern to feed the hungry and clothe the naked using all our cultural resources (credit unions, cooperatives, etc.) In this period, Catholicism became widely accepted within American society and the Church in turn took a positive view, free of ambivalence, of America and all the modern developments including democracy, free markets, trade unions, and the secular academy. Maryknoll Magazine was everywhere and full of inspiring stories of confident, virile missionaries teaching the natives agricultural methods or how to form coops or credit unions or trade unions. At this point there was no break with tradition or hierarchy as the fundamentals of Catholicism (pro-life and pro-family, sacraments, etc.) coexisted peacefully with the dominant revivalist values of the USA of Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The Church was no longer at war with a Protestant America but was becoming enamored of her and would finally fall into bed with dominant elite culture at the close of the Vatican Council. Ivan Illich was possibly the most incisive critic of Maryknoll as a vehicle for American cultural imperialism and his work was one of many forces that worked for Maryknoll’s rapid deconstruction after 1965.

1965, the close of the Council, is the beginning of end of Maryknoll as she joined most of the Catholic elites in opening wide the windows for renewal, understood as mimicking a secular world that was rapidly turning agnostic, relativist, and post-modern. An enchantment with change spread through Maryknoll in a radical disconnect from tradition, authority, pious customs, and traditional sexual morality. Maryknoll is not a religious order and never had a distinctive unifying spirituality but the late-Tridentine piety of the founders was clear, deep, and motivational. In the late 60s this piety was scornfully dismissed. A collage of fashions was to take its place: liberation theology, humanistic psychology, and alertness to God’s presence in other cultures and religions. Maryknollers continue to do beautiful work with the poorest of the poor all over the world. Indeed, the word “beauty” might best characterize their work. Maryknoll Magazine always offered splendid images, especially of the human face in all its agony and magnificence. This tradition continues. For example, the mission museum at Maryknoll is filled with such photographic icons. But noticeably missing from that collection is any real focus on the dogma, the morality, or the liturgy of the Church. The beautiful has become detached from the true (dogma…which is a dirty word for the postmodern), and from the good (morality, which is scorned as moralism when it shows its absolutism). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is this disconnect: beauty is accepted but truth and morality as absolute claims are rejected. The only absolutes are tolerance, relativism, and inclusiveness.

This soft, inclusive, aesthetic Maryknoll, uprooted from authority, tradition, and law cannot attract our young. It lacks the virile backbone of the earlier Maryknoll as well as its gentle Marian piety. It is a neutered, de-gendered, sterile and impotent hybrid, similar to its Episcopalian sister, champion of contraception, choice, homosexuality and (the latest fad) masculine, Episcopal nuns. (I am not making this up.)

Maryknoll as an institution does not seem to have much of a future. Surely, we will never again see the “glory days” of the mid-twentieth century and the remarkable synthesis of American confidence and Catholic piety. Nor can we return to the Tridentine Church of the founders. The drastic decline of the society over the last ½ century is a sorrow for those who have loved her.

The future of mission is, however, another story. Institutions, like Maryknoll, come and go but the Church will endure until the end of time. The Church is a garden that is ever new and fruitful, giving birth to new orders and movements in every age. The spirit of the founders of Maryknoll, the love of Christ specifically IN His Church, is alive in a new flowering of groups fiercely loyal to Mary, apostolic authority and the sacramental life. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Catholic life as the bridal Church is being aroused with a fervent love of the Bridegroom who loves her so intimately in sacrament, apostolic Word, prayer, and Marian holiness. Some disparage this renewal as “Romantic Conservatism.” Nevertheless, the founders, heroes and martyrs (“witnesses”) of Maryknoll must smile as they look down on the corporal acts of charity still practiced by aging but faithful Maryknollers as well as the flourishing of Catholic life and mission in so many new, thrilling expressions under the shepherding of John Paul and Benedict.