Rebel With a Collar
As a seminarian in the order, I heard whispers of the conservative titan among the ranks of Midwestern Jesuits. Everyone I trusted told me I needed to meet him. While in Chicago, I met an unassuming priest who introduced himself simply as "Paul." We spoke briefly and parted ways. I was told later that I’d met the Father Paul Mankowski, S.J., about whom I’d heard so much.
That was in 2013. The following year would find me leaving the order, and our paths never crossed again. In 2020, that priest fell dead of an aneurysm at the age of 66.
Telling Fr. Mankowski’s story is a challenge, in part because his life was cut too short, but more so because he was prevented from telling it himself: His voice was suppressed by religious superiors who wished to be rid of a meddlesome priest.
The son of a working-class family from South Bend, Paul Mankowski earned degrees from the University of Chicago, Oxford, and Harvard. He received his doctorate in Comparative Semitic Philology for a dissertation titled "Akkadian Loanwords in Biblical Hebrew." Outside academia, his byline appeared in publications like the Weekly Standard, the American Spectator, and Commentary. By all measures, he should have been a leading voice in the public square.
But Mankowski was always a gadfly among Jesuits, and this boiled over in the 1990s. While doing research in his order’s New England archives, he unearthed documents that directly implicated local Jesuit leaders’ dishonest—dare I say Jesuitical—behavior in their dealings with both local bishops and Jesuit higher-ups in Rome in helping Father Robert Drinan get elected to Congress as a Massachusetts Democrat (after Drinan’s decade in office, Barney Frank took his seat). For readers in blissful ignorance, Drinan’s pastimes included an unbridled zeal for abortion access. Drinan’s writing and interviews—especially on rationalizing his enthusiasm for abortion—provide a politician’s masterclass in doublespeak, equivocation, and naked lying.
But Drinan left office in 1981. Mankowski, thinking its relevance had eclipsed, set aside his evidence of Jesuitical malfeasance. That was until 1996 when Drinan took to the New York Times to defend late-term abortion. This was a bridge too far. Mankowski shared his discoveries with a friend, who in turn published them in the Catholic World Report. Having had the integrity to affix his name to the revelation, Mankowski suffered accordingly.
As with all whistleblowers, the powers that be took offense not at the inconvenient truths at which he pointed, but rather at his nerve for pointing them out at all. The Jesuits’ response was both Orwellian and draconian. Mankowski was forbidden from publishing under his name anything other than academic work. He spent years fighting for his place in the order to which God had called him—one that he loved, warts and all.
Drinan published freely until he died in 2007. He was eulogized by senators and university presidents. The Georgetown Law Center gives an annual Fr. Robert Drinan, S.J. award, as does the American Bar Association. The law faculties at Boston College and Georgetown have chairs named in his honor.
Faithful to his vow of obedience, Mankowski followed his orders to the letter. He published pseudonymously as "Diogenes" before his superiors caught on and forbade that, as well. The last decade of his life saw his byline only on occasional book reviews, mostly in First Things. His energies centered on teaching and serving as a pastor—including to Karen Hall, whose book The Sound of Silence is the latest to give Mankowski a voice from beyond the grave. It joins two other posthumous collections edited respectively by George Weigel and Philip Lawler (Weigel’s includes an absolutely necessary account of the Drinan controversy—and a vindication of Mankowski’s actions).
Hall’s story likely involves too much inside baseball for non-Catholic readers, and even this sometime altar boy found himself wearied by Hall’s fawning over "Holy Mother Church." But her journey is moving. Hers is the searcher’s life: years of unbelief, adolescent rebellion, divorce and remarriage, adult disillusionment, all woven together with the yearning for peace and meaning.
Into that journey entered one of the most singular Jesuits to ever pick up a pen. Hall pays him a debt of gratitude by letting him speak in death in a way he couldn’t in life. Mankowski was not forbidden from corresponding with friends, and his exchanges with Hall give a taste of the volumes of prose we were all denied. To take just a few examples:
On dealing with his superiors: "I’ve come to regard the libs (collectively) as a kind of impersonal vexation, as a soldier might regard the icy water that pours in over the top of his boots and makes his uncomfortable day more uncomfortable still. … To complain to my superiors about Brokeback Lent and NARAL at Holy Cross is as futile as a buck private complaining to his colonel about the weather, so I’ve just given up."
On how he might respond to another Jesuit if he lost his temper: "In moral and human terms, I regard you all as Styrofoam packing pellets; every breeze of fashion carries you where it wants. You are pro-gay among gays, pro-feminist among feminists, pro-statist among statists. No opinion you hold is worthy of respect because your every opinion is held by the same reasoning you refrain from white slacks after Labor Day."
On unwillingly being upgraded to business class: "I was beginning to attract unwanted attention and decided to bow to fate. I hold in contempt priests who fly upgraded and it was uncomfortable to find myself in that category myself; this discomfort was only partially relieved by Tanqueray and the inexpressible luxury of flying supine."
The Jesuit cancellers did their worst to a priest who’s now accountable to God alone, and we can only hope that more collections of Fr. Mankowski’s miscellany now find their way to the press. In death, maybe this future patron of squeaky wheels and gadflies can encourage those who look at a deranged world and dare to say the emperor has no clothes. May his tribe increase.
The Sound of Silence: The Life and Cancelling of a Heroic Jesuit Hero
by Karen Hall
Crisis Publications, 240 pp., $18.95 (paperback)
Max Bindernagel is a teacher who writes from Alexandria, Va.
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