By CHRISTOPHER MANION
This week marks the fortieth anniversary of the death my father, Clarence Manion. It is also the hundredth anniversary of his leaving the U.S. Army and commencing a long and fruitful teaching career at the University of Notre Dame. His life reflects the virtues of a Catholic patriot, steadfast in a world of turmoil and war. His mission, inspired by the Church and the Constitution, was embodied in his inspired defense of the natural law. It merits a moment of reflection.
Dad was born in Henderson, Ky., an Ohio River town. He was the youngest of nine, three of whom had already died when he was born in 1896. That was an all too common circumstance in the nineteenth century, but the ever-present prospect of death nurtured uncommon, even heroic virtue among Catholic families of the age.
Holy Name was the only parish in Henderson County, but it had a high school as well as a grade school, and the valedictorian each year was awarded a scholarship to St. Mary’s College. So Dad went upriver to this liberal arts school, nestled among Kentucky’s “knobs” a few miles south of Louisville near the Abbey of Gethsemane.
During Dad’s senior year, a pioneering effort was under way in faraway Baltimore, Md. The cardinal archbishop there — one James Cardinal Gibbons, known as the Primate of America — had assembled a group of donors to endow a Knights of Columbus graduate fellowship at Catholic U, where the “Knights Scholars” would learn about U.S. history and use their newly acquired knowledge to serve their fellowman. Dad was awarded one of the first K of C fellowships and began his graduate studies in 1915.
It’s worth noting the goals of Catholic education a century ago.
Msgr. Thomas A. Shahan, rector of Catholic U, challenged the students to be “warriors” in “the daily warfare along all the lines of contact with the secular temper, society, and ideals.” And who was the enemy? The “prophets, reformers, and agitators” who appeal to “passions of Demos that time and again have wrecked states and civilizations or put them on the path of decay.”
Anyone watching the recent debates among Democrat contenders for the party’s 2020 presidential nomination will find Msgr. Shahan’s reading of the lay of the land to be prescient indeed.
In addressing the students, Msgr. Shahan praised “patriotism, that passion of all noble souls, American State, its history, spirit, and institutions; its providential rise and purpose in the divine plan; its great works and its high ideals.” He challenged the Knights Scholars to go forth and perform “signal and resounding deeds for the highest welfare of the Catholic Church and the United States.”
God Draws Straight With Crooked Lines
Dad was in his second year of studying for a doctorate in American History when the United States entered the Great War in March 1917. Catholic U was forced virtually to shut down as most of the lay students prepared to enter the Armed Forces.
In May, Dad’s studies came to an end, but he continued his work as a faithful Knight of Columbus. When war was declared, the K of C quickly organized efforts to support the troops, both at home and abroad. “Everyone Welcome, Everything Free” was the sign above the Knights’ huts that sprung up in the military camps. Dad was assigned to serve in camps in Gettysburg, Pa., and Jacksonville, Fla., as the K of C coordinator. When it came time for him to suit up, he was commissioned a second lieutenant and became the liaison between the K of C and the Army.
When his unit’s turn to be sent abroad came around, they were standing in line to board the ship. A senior officer approached the group and said, “Major, I need two officers.”
“Yes, sir,” the major replied. “Jones, Manion — over here!”
And the rest boarded the ship and sailed away.
Dad later recalled that he faced a tough decision when he was mustered out of the army at the end of the war: Would he go to law school, or would he go to Vaudeville (he was a piano player and an “end man” in several musical reviews)? The decision was made when Fr. John W. Cavanaugh, CSC, the president of Notre Dame, sent him a simple telegram: “Welcome to Notre Dame!”
In 1919, Dad began teaching history in the high school on the Notre Dame campus, which at the time had as many students as the college, while working his way through law school. When he received his degree, he began his teaching career, specializing in Constitutional Law. He quickly implemented Msgr. Shahan’s directive and strived to impart in his students a love of the truth and a commitment to work “for the highest welfare of the Catholic Church and the United States.”
Natural Law: Defend It Or Lose It
Having lived through two world wars, by 1949 Dad recognized that Msgr. Shahan’s challenge was a distant memory to many American Catholics. Law had become a battleground in the U.S., with many advocating what had come to be called Legal Positivism.
Austrian Professor Hans Kelsen had propounded this theory early in the twentieth century. He argued that there was no higher law than whatever statutes might be adopted under the existing legal order of the state. Kelsen lived to survive both wars, and in his old age he was asked to address the atrocities committed by Hitler and Stalin. This was his answer:
“The legal order of totalitarian states authorizes their Governments to confine in concentration camps persons whose opinions, religion, or race they do not like; to force them to perform any kind of labor, even to kill them. Such measures may be morally or violently condemned; but they cannot be considered as taking place outside the legal order of those states. . . . We may regret it but we cannot deny that it was law.”
To confront legal positivism, nominalism, and other modernist errors, Dad founded the Natural Law Institute at the Notre Dame Law School in 1949. At its inaugural session, Bishop (and later Cardinal) John O’Hara, former president of the university, observed that “the very existence of the Natural Law is challenged, even in the highest courts of the land. What five men think is the will, or even the whim of people, may come to have the force of statute. The ‘divine right of kings’ was not a more pernicious doctrine.”
Pernicious indeed. And that invocation delivered seventy years ago can be seen as prophetic, as the courts have become the battleground for Msgr. Shahan’s “warriors,” where “what five men think” has replaced natural law, common sense, and the “highest welfare of the Catholic Church and the United States.”
In his encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope St. Paul VI carefully articulated the importance of the natural law in affirming the truths of the faith and their role in guiding the family in “the daily warfare…with the secular temper, society, and ideals.” Many law schools assign Aquinas’ Treatise on Law in their jurisprudence courses, but since the mid-sixties, few seminaries have done so. Unfortunately, while in seminary, many of today’s clerics and prelates were simply told to ignore Humanae Vitae, because it would eventually be overturned.
Efforts to do just that continue today, and have received new life in recent years, at home and abroad. We’re still at war, and we still need warriors.
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