Interview: Mary Kate Holman

Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P. and His Continuing Theological Legacy

This week the newsletter features an interview with Dr. Mary Kate Holman, an assistant professor of theology at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. We discussed the twentieth-century French theologian Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., as well as Dr. Holman’s research and writing about him. The conversation covered Chenu’s roles as a scholar who revolutionized the study of the medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas and as a theological guide for the worker priest movement in post-World War II France. We also discussed the part Chenu played at the Second Vatican Council and his relationship with liberation theology in the years that followed. We ended by discussing Chenu’s continuing relevance, particularly as a source of wisdom as we experience increasing religious disaffiliation in the United States.

You can listen to the interview by clicking on the audio file below. The interview is about the length of a typical podcast, and you should be able to listen on your computer or phone. A full transcript of the interview is also published below for your reading convenience, along with some links and notes not available in the audio. (The transcript may be cut off in your email, but you should be able to click where it says “View entire message” to see the rest of the transcript.)

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Mary Kate Holman

MATTHEW SHADLE: So I’m here with Mary Kate Holman, an assistant professor of theology at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois, and we're going to talk about the theologian Marie Dominique Chenu, and her . . . We're going to highlight her work on Chenu. So just to start us off, Mary Kate, tell us a little bit about yourself.

MARY KATE HOLMAN: Sure. Well, thanks so much, first of all, for your interest in my work, and, more importantly, even, your interest in Chenu, Matt. I'm excited to chat with you about this. So yes, as you mentioned, I'm an assistant professor of theology at Benedictine University in Lisle, Illinois. I am originally from the East Coast, and have been educated by the Jesuits, actually, my whole life. I have degrees from Georgetown, and Boston College, and Fordham, so to be here now in the Midwest, at a Benedictine university, is a new experience. My research focuses more broadly on questions of ecclesiology. Chenu is the first thinker that I've seriously engaged to unpack those questions of . . . especially questions of justice and reform in the twentieth and twenty-first century Catholic Church. I also have interests in feminist theology, the role of women in the church, that's a direction that I see my work moving, and because I teach at a smaller university, I've really taught a variety of courses beyond the scope of just ecclesiology. So, I teach classes on spirituality. I have a particular interest in Ignatian spirituality. A course called Theology of Justice, a course on Jesus, a course on the church, so sort of a Jack of All Trades in my current position in Catholic theology.

SHADLE: Okay, very nice. And you were talking about your Jesuit education, but now teaching at a Benedictine university. But also Chenu was a Dominican, and that's . . .

HOLMAN: I know!

SHADLE: We might talk about it later, but that’s very important to his theology, too.

HOLMAN: Yes.

SHADLE: So you’ve got a mixture of charisms there. So just for the sake of the audience, a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned in the newsletter that one of the things I want to focus on is highlighting, not obscure theologians, but theologians who maybe don't get the attention they deserve. And so I'm sure you would agree Chenu is in that category.

HOLMAN: Yeah.

SHADLE: So, he's really important for the trajectory of twentieth-century theology, but doesn't really get the attention of Rahner, or de Lubac, or Balthasar, or Gustavo Gutiérrez. So how did you first become interested in Marie-Dominique Chenu?

HOLMAN: That's a great question. Because you're right, he doesn't . . . he's very understudied in comparison to that pantheon of other great thinkers. I first heard Chenu’s name when I was an undergraduate taking a course on Vatican II with the late, great John O'Malley,¹ and O'Malley was emphasizing the theological precursors to Vatican II. So, you know, I think historiography has written a story of the Catholic Church being very anti-modernist, very authoritarian, and then almost out of the blue, the fresh air of Vatican II comes and changes everything. But, of course, there were thinkers who had laid the groundwork for that shift that takes place at Vatican II, and so O'Malley had mentioned Chenu and Congar, and a host of other French theologians, in this movement, pejoratively at the time, called the nouvelle théologie, new theology, and I remember my interest was piqued. I had already studied French, and so France was already on my radar as a potential research interest. But my research was, I mean, my interest was really piqued, in particular, around questions of where do fresh, new, life-giving ideas come from, even in a stifling, or arid, or authoritarian environment, the way that the Catholic Church was portrayed in early twentieth-century theology. So Chenu first came on my radar in that Vatican II course, and then when I was doing my doctorate, I ended up chasing that interest in an independent study with Brenna Moore at Fordham University.

SHADLE: Oh wow.

HOLMAN: Yeah. So we did a whole semester, just the two of us, a directed reading on the thinkers of the nouvelle théologie. And what I always really appreciate about Brenna, as a theology professor with a degree in history, she very much emphasized the life story of the people we were studying, and how their ideas really emerged from the context in which they lived, and to which they were responding. And so, you know, we did read Congar and de Lubac, some of these bigger thinkers, and we also read Chenu. We also read some of the thinkers that she has now recently featured in her new book, who were . . . her book is called Kindred Spirits . . . but lay people who were not really considered to be quote unquote theologians, but who really contributed to this Catholic revival in the early twentieth century in France. And so . . .

SHADLE: Can I interrupt?

HOLMAN: Sure!

SHADLE: So, her book is . . . it really focuses on the role of friendship in the development of theology, and it's been very well-received, and just as a side note, you know, that reminds me of my conversation with the editors of the Journal of Moral Theology, that they talked a lot about how one of the surprise aspects of their job has been developing friendships and seeing this role of friendship in the promotion of theology. So, I just wanted to throw that in there. Did you want to continue?

HOLMAN: I would love to, and I'm excited that you mentioned that, because I would love to go down an entire tangent about friendship, because I do think, you know, so many of the ideas that germinated in my independent study with Brenna, and then among my cohort of graduate students, was framed by the work that Brenna was doing as she was writing this book on friendship. I remember very distinctly a very animated conversation we were having about spirituality in a doctoral seminar, and she said, “This is how movements start.” And it was in the conversations of friendships, etc., that we were living while we were also studying these figures.

SHADLE: Wow!

HOLMAN: But in any case, so Brenna was the one who planted the idea in my head that writing an entire dissertation on Chenu would be a viable and exciting project, because, especially, of his life experience, not just his ideas. And she suggested to me that since I spoke French, and since Chenu was understudied in this world, that I might be able to get research funding to go to France and go to his archives. And I already loved his ideas, I loved the idea of a summer in France, paging through his archives, and so I jumped at the opportunity. And so yes, that's sort of the long arc of my interest in Chenu, it was shaped by mentors that I've been in conversation with along the way.

SHADLE: Alright. So you've already touched on this a little bit, but what has been the focus of your research on Chenu?

HOLMAN: So . . . It has really . . . I think that my approach to Chenu is different than other things I have seen that have treated his thought, in English scholarship on Chenu, in that I'm really focused on the context of his theology, and how his ideas emerged from his life experience. Chenu lived from 1895 to 1990, and so he serves as a really helpful prism for understanding the massive shifts that we see in the twentieth century, in the Roman Catholic Church. He lived through and played a role in many of the evolutions of the church over that century. And so I trace the evolution of his thought over the course of very distinctive episodes in his life, and I pay particular attention to the relationship that he had, that was sometimes very fraught, with ecclesial authority, because I think that to understand his ideas, you have to see how they play out in the broader Roman Catholic Church. Chenu was once outright condemned, and then once sort of implicitly chastised by the Vatican, and yet his ideas did end up having immense sway a few decades later at the Second Vatican Council, and so focusing not only on the evolution of his theology as an abstract series of ideas, but rather ones that are responding to his own life experience along the way.

SHADLE: So . . . and there's a certain cleverness to what you're doing that, you know . . . You said you're looking at the historical context of Chenu's work, and that was such an important part of his own work, looking at the historical context of theologians and theological development, and especially Thomas Aquinas, that we'll talk about in just a second. But I just really appreciate that about your work.

HOLMAN: I apply his method to himself.

SHADLE: Yeah, applying his method. I also appreciated your point that he lived through so much, and the way I think of it is, it's almost like he lived three or four lives, like he packed a lot in, in terms of things he was involved in that are historically notable. So, let's take a look at that early period, so . . . And that was where a lot of his focus was on studying Thomas Aquinas.

HOLMAN: Yes.

SHADLE: So, what . . . in your view, what were a couple of his most important insights into Aquinas and his works?

HOLMAN: Yeah. It’s going to pick up right on what you were just mentioning, right? I mean, the main innovation that Chenu had in the approach to Thomas Aquinas was in historically contextualizing Aquinas's thought. Obviously, Thomas Aquinas, at this point in Roman Catholic history, is known as the Angelic Doctor, the theologian of all theologians, is seen as the starting point for all seminary education. But the way that early twentieth-century seminary education dealt with Aquinas was to deal with commentaries on Aquinas's thought and to approach Aquinas's ideas as first principles from which we can deduce conclusions. And Chenu flips that on its head and says the greatness of Aquinas lies in his ability to synthesize the Christian theological tradition with the philosophy that became popular in his own era. And that's Aristotelian philosophy. And so he paints this historically contextualized portrait of Aquinas as someone who is responding to the intellectual Zeitgeist of his own era. So the paradox here is that Chenu’s argument is that to be a faithful Thomist in the twentieth century, one does not read commentaries on Aquinas. One engages with the philosophies that are au courant in one's own era. Famously, one of the philosophers that Chenu engaged with very critically is Marx. You know, and his argument there was basically Aquinas was dealing with Averroes.² I never know how to pronounce that, I’m bad at Latin. Averroes.

SHADLE: Averroes, yeah.

HOLMAN: . . . who was at the time, according to Christians, in Chenu’s language, the quote paragon of all error. And so, you know, he says, Aquinas is engaging with this thinker. We need to engage with Marx. And so Chenu sort of takes these insights about the medieval era and Aquinas and applies them in a way that empowers us to deal with the questions of our own era. So, to be a good Thomist is, in the twentieth century, not to repeat Thomistic principles, as if they had dropped from the heavens, but to, rather, in that same spirit of Aquinas, engage the philosophies of our own day. Chenu framed this, as . . . He many times refers to Thomas Aquinas as having the spiritual freedom that a theologian needs to have in order to do good work. And so there's an invitation for contemporary theologians to have a spiritual freedom à la Thomas Aquinas.

SHADLE: And it's interesting that Chenu’s work, and the work of others who are doing similar things, was so influential that we just take this for granted. I mean, even the most conservative Thomist today would, you know, take for granted that you have to understand Aquinas in his context. It's just kind of unimaginable to go back to the way it was taught before . . .

HOLMAN: Yeah.

SHADLE: . . . thanks in large part to Chenu. So was there anything else you wanted to say about his work on Aquinas?

HOLMAN: I'll just emphasize the point that you just made, which I think is a really good one, that when I was first writing about this, I almost thought, is this even worth noting, because it seems like such an obvious method. But there's another parallel that Chenu draws, actually, that's worth noting here. He points out that the discipline and the study of grammar was actually something new in the medieval period, and that was something that Aquinas really played with in his own engagement with the Christian tradition. Similarly, it's not really until the nineteenth century that the notion or the contemporary discipline of history, as we now understand it, becomes an academic discipline, you know, in its own right. And so in a similar way, if Aquinas is making use of the intellectual tools that are new in his era, Chenu thinks it's really important that we make use of the intellectual tools of our own era, history being paradoxically a very new discipline when he's working on this. And so yes, that . . . It did occasion a great deal of push back from the Vatican, who, I think, saw the historical contextualization of Thomas as a relativization of his authority. But of course, that was not Chenu’s intent. It was to engage Thomas on his own terms.

SHADLE: Well, that's a good point, and we don't need to get into this, but it's also worth pointing out, in the previous generation, there had also been this issue of the historicizing of the Bible . . .

HOLMAN: Yes.

SHADLE: Right, in the Modernist controversy, and so the Vatican and conservative theologians had been very suspicious of historicizing, for the very reason you said, it seems to relativize truth in the form of the Scriptures.

HOLMAN: Exactly.

SHADLE: But even for authoritative figures like Aquinas, too, it was a controversial move that Chenu was making at the time. Okay. So, moving on through his career, Chenu becomes involved with this group called the worker priests. So who are the worker priests? And what was Chenu’s connection to them?

HOLMAN: Yes, I love talking about the worker priests! So, in the . . . So I’ll just contextualize this in the history of Chenu’s life, which is that he writes a text when he is the master of Dominican studies at Le Saulchoir, their house of studies, about this method that he's using to approach Aquinas. That text gets put on the Index of Forbidden Books, and he gets removed from that post. So, he gets quote unquote exiled to Paris, which again, a place I would love to be exiled to some day.

*Laughter*

HOLMAN: But he gets moved from this rather insular environment of a house of studies of a religious order into the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, which is this hub of industrial poverty. And the worker priests were a group of clerics who saw a real need to evangelize the working class. In Paris at this point, secularism was extremely strong, and the Catholic Church had frankly failed to reach out to and make a case for why the poor, industrial laboring class ought to practice Catholicism. And so while a lot of the hierarchy lamented this, as if the working class had apostasized, the worker priests saw their role as one that would take seriously the lives and experiences of the workers, and would bring the Gospel to them by taking their lives seriously, not trying to evangelize them. So, the worker priests divested themselves of all clerical trappings. They would . . . Oscar Arnal's book calls them “priests in working class blue,”³ because they would notoriously wear the denim factory uniforms rather than wearing, you know, the cassocks that were very typical of twentieth-century French clergy. They took on full-time jobs that were extraordinarily taxing manual labor, whether that was working at the docks in Marseille or working in the factories in Paris. And they would not identify themselves as priests in the community that they were serving. They wanted to gain the trust of the working class, who were extremely suspicious of Catholicism, and only once they had connected with the people that they felt they were there to serve would they begin to do things like celebrate the sacraments for them. So Chenu himself was not a worker priest outright, but he served as the movement’s sort of theologian-in-residence. So he would have these reflection days, and would go and actually helped the founder of the worker priest movement to develop education days for the priests that were joining them. And he would theologically reflect with the worker priests on their own experience. Chenu also did this, I will say, with lay working-class communities, and that is where a lot of his ideas come from in a later text called The Theology of Work.⁴

SHADLE: Right.

HOLMAN: Yeah. So the worker priests ended up being shut down by Rome because they were perceived to be too radical. A lot of them got very involved with labor movements that were seen to be too aligned with communism. And obviously this is during the Cold War. And most crucially, the worker priests were shut down because it seemed as if they had dissolved the line between the secular and the sacred, between clergy and laity. Chenu wrote a defense of the worker priest movement which led to his second quote, unquote exile, where he was removed from Paris, and removed from connection with these communities as a result. But this experience really shifted his understanding of theology, of the Christian life, and what is appropriate fodder for theological reflection.

SHADLE: So a couple of points here. So one is that I think people tend to think of secularization or religious disaffiliation as a . . . for Catholics, as a post-Vatican II phenomenon. But here we really see the French church, I mean, to use a contemporary phrase, freaking out that they have lost the working class, that . . . and this is, you know, the 1930s and 40s. And so, as you pointed out, there are all of these creative attempts to reach out to the working class. And so I think that's worth pointing out, and we can come back to that issue as well, but . . .

HOLMAN: Yeah.

SHADLE: But also the worker priests are not the first group of Catholics to be reaching out to workers. You had groups like the JOCists, the Young Catholic Workers.⁵ But there's a shift in the method, right? So some of these earlier groups associated with Catholic Action⁶ have this motto of “the conquest of the working class,” those kind of militant terms. And there's a lot that's amazing about these groups. But Chenu takes . . . Chenu thinks that's a mistaken approach, and you mentioned this, more of this approach of accompanying workers.

HOLMAN: Yeah.

SHADLE: So do you want to say any more about that?

HOLMAN: Yes, I think that’s a really excellent point. I think Chenu’s concern with the JOCists, whom he was actually very involved with and really admired during his time prior to Paris. He never condemned them. But I think that he . . . This idea of conquest, he eventually found problematic . . . He eventually found problematic. I think that it fundamentally comes down to, you know . . . I make the argument in my forthcoming book that Chenu’s theological method became increasingly inductive over the course of his life, so, rather than applying top-down principles to a situation, to become immersed in a situation and theologically reflect from the grassroots, from . . . I hesitate to use the spatial metaphor of bottom up. But in a way, that is, I think, what he's doing, and I think that he was very wary of any approach that would seem to be imposing ideas onto someone's reality. And so, having workers reflect on their own experience and arrive at their own insights, felt better to him than a situation where it would be like, you know, imposing Christian principles onto their experience. I think he also saw the JOCists as fundamentally tied to the parish structure.

SHADLE: Oh, yeah.

HOLMAN: And the parish structure had already lost the working class in the first place. You know, the working class were in union halls, they were not going to parishes, and so any attempt to try to bring them into the parish structure, instead of bringing Christianity into the union halls instead, for him, for Chenu, felt like an imposition rather than an invitation.

SHADLE: That’s a really interesting point. So one last point about the worker priests, and this is more about them than Chenu himself. So the idea here is, like you said, the priests become one of the workers, you know, they dress like them, they work in the factories, they become union leaders. And the idea, the theological idea . . . they appeal to this metaphor of the yeast or the leaven in the dough, and Chenu uses that, too. A question I've always had is, isn't there something kind of clericalist about that? I mean, this is, like we've been talking about, this is the same time where the lay apostolate is growing and gaining autonomy. And so this idea that priests have to go in and be the leaven in the dough, isn’t there something clericalist about that?

HOLMAN: I love that question! I've been asked that question before, and I think fundamentally we are dealing with a broken system in which “sacred” gets associated with “clergy,” and then “non-sacred” or “secular,” whatever the opposite of . . . “profane,” right, gets associated with “laity.”

SHADLE: Yeah, exactly. Or that the church means . . . the church going out into the world means priests going out into the world.

HOLMAN: Right, right. And so I think both approaches play into the same flaw, but differently, you know, even in, for example, the documents of Vatican II, in Gaudium et Spes, it's kind of like, Well, here's the special role of lay people, it’s to go out and evangelize the world, because priests are doing this secret, sacred, other thing, you know, that is separate. So I really appreciate all the movements towards lay empowerment, and I think that the hesitation of the worker priests would be to say, fundamentally, priestly ministry and sacramentality, should be immersed and infused in the lives . . . We shouldn't be separating out the sacred and the profane. So I think that, fundamentally, until we resolve—and I don't know if we ever will resolve, right?—our tendency as a church to . . . maybe our tendency as human beings to want to separate those two out. Either model capitulates to clericalism, either by saying clergy are separate and sacred, and do this thing that's separate from evangelizing the working class, or only priests can do it. But I think that there's almost a deeper issue at play here that clericalism is a symptom of, rather than the ultimate cause of. That's an excellent question, and one that . . .  I mean, I think about in terms of ministry in our contemporary world, too, because we're still in the structures of the church that we've got, you know, that that do tend to make these distinctions, which . . . Yeah, I'll leave it at that. But it's a great question.

SHADLE: Yeah, that was interesting because, and maybe I’m oversimplifying what you said, but it’s like, looked at from one angle, yes, it appears to be clericalist, but looked at from another angle, it could be understood as the opposite, as saying that we need to understand priests, as not in the sacred realm, but they need to be immersed in the world.

HOLMAN: Yeah. And I'll say one more point on that, that I think has reframed my thinking on this. At the end of the worker priest experiment . . . Well, at the end of that most radical instantiation—it came back, but it was sort of defanged of some of its original radicality—in that original experiment, once it was shut down and people were asked, did it succeed, a lot of the worker priests pointed out, “I don't know how many more Christians we added to the numbers of the church, but that experiment changed us.” And in that sense it was a great success. And so, I think, thinking of this transformative understanding of ministry in terms of how it converts the church and converts church leaders is as important as thinking about how many people we evangelized, or got to convert, or got to be baptized, or whatever.

SHADLE: Yeah, that's a great point. Okay, so let's move on. So, we've seen Chenu run into some trouble for his historicizing tendencies. And, like you said, he gets exiled to Paris. But then in Paris, he runs into problems eventually, by the 1950s, because of the worker priests. So then how does he end up at the Second Vatican Council?

HOLMAN: Great question . . .

SHADLE: So that's just kind of a lead in. So what was his role at the council, and what influence did he have on some of the documents and teachings at the council?

HOLMAN: Yeah, great question. So there were so many theologians that had been under suspicion, or if not outright condemned, had run ins with the ecclesial authorities, who all were sort of equally surprised when, over the course of less than a decade, John XXIII gets elected, calls the Second Vatican Council, and invites a lot of these marginalized figures to serve as official theological experts at the council. That happened to Rahner, that happened to de Lubac, that happened to Congar. Chenu, though, I think his reputation was a little bit more battered than theirs.

*Laughter*

HOLMAN: He was not invited to be an official peritus at the council in the same way that those thinkers were. But a former student of his, from his time at Le Saulchoir, was the bishop of Madagascar, or a bishop in Madagascar.

SHADLE: Yeah.

HOLMAN: And again, this is where a colonialist, global understanding of Catholicism comes into play, because it was a French bishop who got sent to Africa in order to be a bishop. And so he invited . . . This guy, Claude Rolland was his name,⁷ invited Chenu to be his sort of personal expert at the council. And so Chenu ends up at Vatican II kind of on the margins, which I just think is so interesting because that’s sort of his story in terms of his historical method, that ends up being his story in terms of his socially engaged theology in Paris, always looking to be on the margins, and then when he's invited to Vatican II, again, he's sort of on the margins.

SHADLE: So let me cut in. If I'm remembering correctly, I think John Courtney Murray at first played a similar role. He was a personal theologian for Archbishop Spellman from New York, but then he was promoted to a peritus and then ends up actually drafting a document and everything,⁸ but Chenu never got promoted.

HOLMAN: He never got promoted . . . So his influence on the council was really indirect, and it was very . . . How do I want to phrase this? It was through social networks and conversations, and he would hold these lectures and seminars that bishops would come to, to learn about theology during their time in Rome. I think John O'Malley made the point that most of these bishops hadn't studied theology since their time in seminary memorizing the Thomistic manuals. And so Vatican II became this immersion in contemporary theological reflection for them, as well. They were there learning from experts. So Chenu . . . I see his influence at the council in two main ways. The first is at the very beginning of the council, the initial schemas that were drafted by the Preparatory Commission for Vatican II, those schemas were in the same style as those neo-Thomist manuals. They were very . . . They reaffirmed church teaching. They were very dry, very legalistic. And when most of the periti and what O'Malley calls the majority of the bishops received those initial schemas, it seemed as if Vatican II was dead in the water before it started. It was just going to be a, you know, a reaffirmation of all the things that had already been said by Vatican I. And Chenu was part of this network of theologians and bishops who were really worried about that, and wanted there be a shift in tone at the beginning of the council. So, there's this great archived letter that Chenu writes to Karl Rahner expressing his worry about the preliminary schema. Chenu ends up drafting what’s called “The Message to the World,” which is this document that he thinks, if the bishops put out at the very beginning of the council, it will express an openness to learning from the outside world. It will express a tone of welcome and gratitude, a more global tone. And that draft ends up getting circulated among the French bishops. But Chenu’s name is taken off of it because he's too persona non grata for them to take it seriously if he is attributed as the author. And anyway, that document gets revised significantly, and it does get published as the first . . . It's not one of the documents that gets published in Flannery's compendium of the Second Vatican Council, but it was technically the first document put forward by the bishops at the start of Vatican II. And it did shift the tone, and it did inaugurate this more dialogical approach to writing in these future documents. And so Chenu's ghostwriting of that text, and his impulse to shift to more openness, I think, did help. I don't think . . . You know, it might have happened without him, but it certainly helped and contributed to the tonal shift that does then take place at Vatican II. His other contribution comes at the very end of the Second Vatican Council.

SHADLE: Okay.

HOLMAN: He was eventually invited to be on a sub-commission that was working on, basically, a few paragraphs of Gaudium et Spes. And these are the paragraphs that deal with the church's duty to read and respond to the “signs of the times.”

SHADLE: Okay.

HOLMAN: I will, as a sort of confession of my own research approach . . . Maybe this will make other doctoral students who are just getting started on their dissertations feel better. I started my doctoral research thinking that Chenu was the person that brought that phrase to Vatican II. I titled my dissertation “The Signs of the Times in the Life and Thought of Marie-Dominique Chenu,” because I thought he was the person responsible for that phrase. My research and my time in his archives revealed that that phrase was very important to him, but I can in no way attribute the advent of that phrase at Vatican II, which is obviously a, you know, a rephrasing, a quoting of two stories from the Gospel.  But Chenu was not the primary impetus behind that phrase.

SHADLE Was there some other specific person who was, or was it just sort of a collective effervescence?

HOLMAN: I think it was more of a collective effervescence. There are notes in Chenu’s . . . like he has handwritten little scraps of paper that have the quote from the Gospel of Luke on it, you know, like, “You can't read and respond . . .” I forget the exact quote. It's basically like, “This generation,” you know, “you cannot read the signs of the times.”⁹ So he clearly cared about that phrase, but I don't think he introduced it. I don't think he had enough power to introduce it.

SHADLE: Yeah, that’s true.

HOLMAN: But anyway, he was a big promoter of the particular version of Gaudium et Spes that did end up, you know, coming out of Vatican II. That document was extremely controversial. Joe Komonchak has a great article about how the progressive majority at the council really split over that document. But the finalized version that did come out, I think Chenu was a fan of, and a shaper of the ideas that did end up making it into that document.

SHADLE: Yeah, and I feel like . . . You know, some people may be familiar with Joseph Ratzinger’s hesitations about Gaudium et Spes, that it's too optimistic. I think Rahner actually makes similar points, and they complain about the French. I’m fairly certain Chenu is one of the people they are criticizing there. He does have this fairly optimistic or progressive view of history.

HOLMAN: Exactly.

SHADLE: The German theologians had a more mixed, you know . . . more conscious of the effects of sin on human history than Chenu.

HOLMAN: One hundred percent. Yes, in the German-French divide, it's Congar-Chenu versus Rahner-Ratzinger, for sure.

SHADLE: Alright, so getting closer to the end of Chenu’s life . . . I mean, actually given some of the things we talked about, not all that surprising, but it is kind of striking, that he develops a relationship with Latin American liberation theology. So, tell us about that. What was his relationship to liberation theology?

HOLMAN: Yeah. So he . . . I have seen other people refer to him as the grandfather of liberation theology. And I think that is an overstatement.

SHADLE: Yeah, I would agree with that.

HOLMAN: Yeah, I think . . . I do think Chenu’s method that was historically conscious and socially engaged definitely helped pave the way for some of the liberationist methods. But I . . . there were a lot of other things going on there, so I wouldn't say Chenu was the grandfather of liberation theology. That being said, Gustavo Gutiérrez actually studied in France when he was a young priest in training, and he and Chenu definitely had a relationship of some kind. I have seen people say that he studied with Chenu. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how that was possible, because he studied with the Jesuits, not the Dominicans, at this time, but he . . . Gutiérrez has gone on record as saying that Chenu was the most influential theologian on his work and on his method. Gutiérrez told me, and a group of folks, that, when he came to speak at Fordham right when I was at the beginning of my project on this. He said, “Oh, Chenu was my greatest influence.”

SHADLE: You were like, “Oh, thank you! Thank you!”

*Laughter*

HOLMAN: Oh, I know, I know! I never got it on the record, but I . . . But, you know, I think Dan Groody¹⁰ has mentioned this in an interview with America Magazine, if I'm not mistaken. So Gutiérrez has said, on repeated occasions, that Chenu was his greatest influence, so to that extent, I think Chenu did have a pretty big impact on liberation theology. I think what's interesting, though, is how much of an influence liberation theology had on Chenu’s late work.

SHADLE: Yeah, exactly.

HOLMAN: Yeah. So, it's sort of like a mutually influential kind of work. In 1973, the French bishops asked Chenu to write a primer for them on Latin American liberation theology.

SHADLE: Oh, fascinating.

HOLMAN: Yeah, I don’t . . . I've never seen anyone else comment on this. It's in the archives, so . . . To be published in my forthcoming book. But Chenu was very interested in liberation theology, and clearly was then seen among the hierarchy in France as an expert that could help them understand it. And so I know that . . . Sorry, to go back to Gutiérrez for a second. Gutiérrez became a Dominican rather late in life, and I think that he has said off the record that one of the reasons why was because he wanted to pay tribute to his mentor and the theological influence of Chenu.

SHADLE: Oh, wow.

HOLMAN: They both also wrote somewhat extensively on their fellow Dominican Bartolomé de las Casas. Chenu wrote more sort of anecdotal articles, whereas Gutiérrez has an entire book on this figure,¹¹ but I think they both share an affection for Las Casas. That’s one of many other commonalities that that they share. Yeah. So I think that Chenu’s work helped pave the way for a kind of liberationist methodology in that it took seriously lived reality as fodder for theological reflection. But Chenu’s later work was very evidently influenced by the liberation theologians. Chenu starts using words like “praxis” in the last two decades of his life that he had never used before, and I would contend that Chenu develops a more structural understanding of injustice in the last couple of decades of his life, as well, which I think we can attribute to the insights of liberation theology.

SHADLE: Yeah. And Chenu also has this book, I forget the exact date, but I believe it's in the seventies. I don't think it's ever been translated, but it translates to “Catholic Social Doctrine as an Ideology.”¹²

HOLMAN: Yeah, 1979.

SHADLE: Okay, thank you. And so, I mean, it's kind of full circle, because it's very much tied to his earlier work on Aquinas and historicizing, but also very much influenced by liberation theology. And so he criticizes the earlier social teaching, like Leo XIII and Pius XI. What he means by an ideology is it seems to present this ideal, you know, universal picture of society that’s valid for all times and doesn’t consider how society evolves, the role of history and progress.

HOLMAN: Exactly.

SHADLE: And so, you know, you talked about how he uses the idea of practice or praxis. He says that . . . Well, you also mentioned the inductive method.

HOLMAN: Exactly.

SHADLE: He says that the Catholic Church’s social teaching should be inductive, that it should arise out of praxis, rather than you start with doctrine and then put it into practice. And so . . . And actually, I know others have written about this, but Paul VI had said something very similar to that in Octogesima Adveniens just a few years earlier. But then Pope John Paul II. as part of the polemic against liberation theology, says, No, you know, we start with doctrine, and so . . . Alright, so let's close with a couple of questions . . . So, these theologians that we're highlighting that have been neglected, I think it's also important to say not just what is their historical importance, but how do they continue to be relevant? So, I just picked out a couple of things, and hopefully I think our conversation has already shown some ways that Chenu continues to be relevant. But in the United States, we are experiencing a rise in religious disaffiliation. We talk about the rise of the “nones,” people who, you know, have no religious affiliation at all. So how can Chenu help the church navigate this situation that we face in the contemporary U.S.?

HOLMAN: Yeah. I love this question, because it so resonates, I think, especially with Chenu’s period collaborating with the worker priests. Chenu and the worker priests diagnosed the disaffiliation of the twentieth-century French working class for the first time using the language of how the church failed, as opposed to . . .

SHADLE: Oh, yeah.

HOLMAN: . . . this is all the fault of the French Revolution, or this is all the fault of the Industrial Revolution, you know. Prior generations and a lot of Chenu’s contemporaries were blaming outside factors for this disaffiliation and seeing the church as a victim, whereas the worker priests, and, you know, Chenu reflecting with them, came to see that actually the church had not responded adequately, especially to the population shifts, the urbanization, the industrialization that were happening in France as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And so they identified the church's fault in losing these populations, and so, instead of just lamenting, they suggested we need to do some soul searching and do some creative ministry to respond to the signs of the times, and I very strongly feel that the church in the U.S. in particular could learn from this. You know, if we just lament that secularization is something that is so overpowering, and people have lost our sense of the sacred or whatever, we're failing to understand how much authority the church has lost on questions of, for example, sexual ethics, the way the sex abuse crisis has led people to rightfully distrust a lot of the Catholic Church. The way that, you know, a lot of pastoral ministry is repeating old formulae instead of responding to the signs of the times. So, I think Chenu and the worker priest movement more broadly can help us do some soul searching about how the church itself may have failed. And I think acknowledging that is a really necessary first step, and then thinking about how we might do better. I will also say, to my earlier point about what counts as success, I don't think that we can think about success as a Catholic Church in terms of how many people are attending Mass, or how many people are baptizing their kids, or how many people in a Pew survey say that they believe in transubstantiation, or anything like that. Right? You know, I think that measuring success in terms of encounter, in terms of, you know, authentic experiences of the divine, that's something that's much less quantifiable, but I think celebrating those moments, and not running our church as if it's some kind of corporation . . . Shifting what we think of as the metrics of success could also be something that would be fundamentally more Gospel-oriented.

SHADLE: Those are really great points. And also I’m going to add something, too.

HOLMAN: Please, do.

SHADLE: So, you know, doing my homework to prepare for this, there was something that struck me, too, that I guess I had not noticed before, but Chenu also makes this point that, you know, people in his time said, “Oh, we've lost the working class,” but he says, “Well, no, we didn't lose the working class. We never had them.”

HOLMAN: Right.

SHADLE: Because the working class is something new. It did not exist before, and that's part of his point, that in modern times, the world is constantly changing, and so there will be new social situations that arise that may, at one level, lead to a loss of faith or de-christianization, but at this deeper level it appears that way because it is this new reality the church has never faced, right. And so, I was just thinking, how could we apply that. So we say, “Yes, you know, young people, we're losing young people.” But really, did the church ever have a hold on youth culture? No, no, right? Or the internet, right? That was my big thought is, you know, people . . . The internet is now such a big part of culture and is tied in with religious disaffiliation. But it's like this whole new world. It's not as if we've lost the internet culture. We never had it.

HOLMAN: We never had it. Yeah, that's such a good point. And even, you know . . . Right, like the “nones,” Gen Z, there are just so many new things. And instead of thinking about . . .  Like, I think it's a very quote unquote Christendom mentality to think we used to have everybody, and then, whoever isn't with us anymore, we “lost,” instead of just thinking about . . .

SHADLE: Exactly. I like your point about Christendom. And it's very geographical.

HOLMAN: Right, right, right.

SHADLE: But if you learn to think in another way, in terms of culture, in terms of institutions, you realize that that's a misperception.

HOLMAN: Exactly.

SHADLE: These were never our people to begin with.

HOLMAN: Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate your framing of this question because it's helping me to think about Chenu in new ways that are exciting.

SHADLE: Very cool. Okay, and then also, it strikes me that there are some parallels between Chenu’s thinking and Pope Francis’s thinking, and I really don't know if Pope Francis is familiar with Chenu’s work, but there's some similarities. And I know I’m putting you on the spot because this was my insight, but what are one or two areas where you see some overlap between Chenu’s theology and Pope Francis’s theology.

HOLMAN: Yeah. There is one major one that you alluded to earlier when you mentioned Chenu’s 1979 book about Catholic social doctrine, because I think that Chenu’s suggestion that . . . Again, he would say, “Catholic social doctrine” is a problematic phrase, but “Catholic social teaching,” which is less top down, authoritarian, where do you start from? That would be his way of framing it. So, a method in Catholic social teaching that is inductive, that starts with, Where are we? What's the reality? And from there converses with the Gospel, as opposed to starting from first principles and applying them or idealizing them. I think that's what Pope Francis is doing in some of his social teaching documents. I think Laudato Si’ is a really clear example of this, maybe more so than anything else, in that Francis starts with several chapters that are just describing what the reality is, in conversation with scientists, in conversation with global experts. He's not applying an idealized understanding of the globe, or the climate, or whatever, onto our reality, but starting with a description of reality and going from there. And so, I think that this inductive method that I see Chenu developing over the course of his life, and as explicitly articulating in 1979, is something that Francis seems to be doing in his work, in his development of Catholic social teaching.

SHADLE: Yeah, I would agree with that. Anything else? Any other overlap?

HOLMAN: I think that they are both very open to encounter. You know, that is a word that I associate more with Francis than I do with Chenu, but so much of Chenu’s theology emerges from his lived experience, from his encounters with other people. You know, Chenu was not a capital “s” systematic theologian, because he wasn't really developing a system. He was responding to the people that were before him, and the relationships and insights that emerged from those. And I think that Francis's emphasis on encounter mirrors that pastoral dimension of Chenu’s theology that made him less of a philosophical and systematic thinker than some of his contemporaries were, I think.

SHADLE: Oh, sure. Sure. Yeah. Well, I was also thinking of “encounter” in a somewhat different way, but also with his reflections on the worker priests . . .

HOLMAN: Yeah.

SHADLE: . . . of not preaching to the workers, but actually accompanying them. So that's something Pope Francis is sympathetic to, as well.

HOLMAN: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good point.

SHADLE: Okay. So that's all I have. Are there any last thoughts that have come to you as we've been talking, that you just want to get out there?

HOLMAN: I will just thank you, Matt, because some of the questions that you've asked that . . . In terms of Chenu’s life, you've framed it very much in the four movements that I have in my forthcoming book about Chenu’s life. Those are the four main episodes. But then your other questions about his contemporary relevance really re-energized me to be thinking of him, not as a dead, historical figure, but as someone that is worth continuing to work on. So, you have helped re-energize my thinking on this, and I appreciate it.

SHADLE: Oh, that's great. Well, tell us a little bit about the book. And I know you told me that it's just in the embryonic stages and you don’t have a publisher, so I know it's kind of hard for you to talk about so early.

HOLMAN: Oh, no! I can tell you about . . . so there are two Chenu projects that I'll mention that . . . One is more embryonic, and the other is very much forthcoming. So the book that Chenu originally was put on the Index of Forbidden Books for, Une école de théologie: Le Saulchoir, I have for the last five years been collaborating with Fr. Joseph Komonchak on a translation of that text which is now forthcoming, I believe this summer actually, from ATF Press in Australia, so it will be available globally. But in terms of a text that's very important by Chenu that has never actually made it into the English-speaking world before . . . Yeah, my translation with Fr. Komonchak is forthcoming imminently.

SHADLE: Earlier you said that Chenu is understudied, but that's a big part of it, it’s just he's never been translated, at least into English. So, that's a good . . . that's a great benefit to the rest of us. So, thank you.

HOLMAN: Yeah, we're hopeful about it. There's a very, very extensive introduction and more footnotes than I care to count. So we made a critical edition of it. So that is forthcoming. We’re in . . . Our final text is in to our editor, and we're excited for that to see the light of day. And then yes . . . So I am in the process of turning my dissertation into a book. I have a bite from a publisher that I’m just in the process of finalizing a contract with. But the . . . Yeah. I think it will be, it will frame Chenu’s theology in a way that is historically contextual. So, it will trace the evolution of his thought in conversation with these key historical events to which he was responding. And I trace the evolution towards the more fully inductive method that . . . I think that method has been largely influential on our generation of thinkers in ways that we sometimes don't even realize. So, I’m hoping to put Chenu back into the conversation of at least the English-speaking world of Catholic theologians. And yeah, I hope that hopefully will come out in the next year and a half, two years.

SHADLE: Yeah, however long that process takes.

HOLMAN: However long that takes. Yeah.

SHADLE: Alright. Well, thank you, Mary Kate. This has been a great conversation here, so . . .

HOLMAN: I appreciate the opportunity. And yeah, the work you're doing on Window Light, I find it all very exciting. So, I'm really grateful.

SHADLE: Oh, thank you very much!

1. John W. O’Malley, S.J. (1927-2022), church historian and University Professor at Georgetown University until his retirement in 2020.

2. Averroes, or Ibn Rushd (1126-1198), Muslim author from Cordoba (in present-day Spain), best known for his philosophical works incorporating Aristotelian ideas into Islamic thought.

3. Oscar L. Arnal, Priests in Working Class Blue: The History of Worker-Priests (1943-1954) (New York: Paulist Press, 1986).

4. Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., The Theology of Work: An Exploration, trans. Lilian Soiron (Dublin: Gill and Son, 1963).

5. The Jeunesse Ouvrière Catholique (JOC), or Young Catholic Workers, was established by Fr. Joseph Cardijn in Beligum in 1925. A French branch was founded in 1927.

6. "Catholic Action” was the umbrella term for a number of lay apostolates, particularly prior to the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965).

7. Claude Rolland, M.S. (1910-1973), Bishop of Antsirabé, Madagascar from 1956 until his death.

8. John Courtney Murray, S.J. (1904-1967) was a co-author of Vatican II’s Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom.

9. Luke 12:56, RSV: “You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky; but why do you not know how to interpret the present time [i.e., the “signs of the times”; see Mt. 16:3]?”

10. I think this is a reference to this interview with Daniel Hartnett (not Groody), where Gutiérrez explains the influence of Dominican theologians, including Chenu, Yves Congar, and Edward Schillebeeckx, as a reason why he himself decided to join the Dominicans.

11. Gustavo Gutiérrez, Las Casas: In Search of the Poor of Jesus Christ, trans. Robert R. Barr (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993).

12. Marie-Dominique Chenu, O.P., La ‘Doctrine sociale’ de l’Église comme ideologie (Paris: Cerf, 1979).