The foreword written by Rosemary Hugo Fielding, Fr. John J. Hugo’s niece, provides some context and background to the controversy which is the subject of Nature and the Supernatural: A Defense of the Evangelic Ideal. This Foreword is copyright © 2020 Castle of Grace.
FOREWORD
Though Fr. John J. Hugo compiled Nature and the Supernatural: A Defense of the Evangelic Ideal in 1950, the individual articles had been written at different times and in response to different writers. Designating the manuscript ad usam privatum (for private use), Fr. Hugo privately passed around copies of it to fellow priests. Because he had targeted the book to a small, specific audience, its publication, some fifty years after its first limited distribution, needs to be placed in historical context, so that its purpose does not remain obscure. Those readers not familiar with Fr. Hugo or his books would also benefit from some further background information.
As Fr. Hugo explains in his preface in more detail, he wrote Nature and the Supernatural to defend “the doctrine set forth in Applied Christianity” against four attacks. Applied Christianity, written by Fr. Hugo and published in 1944,contains the conferences of a seven-day, silent Ignatian retreat first given in the 1930s by the French-Canadian Jesuit priest, Fr. Onesimus Lacouture. Fr. Hugo, a native of Pittsburgh, made the retreat under Fr. Lacouture in 1938 and then went on to teach it regularly, mostly to the laity. In addition, during his life, Fr. Hugo wrote more than a dozen books on the doctrine of the retreat.
The most famous promoter of the retreat was Dorothy Day, co-founder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker. She made the retreat many times, several times under the instruction of Fr. Hugo, and she wrote about it and its priests, including Fr. Lacouture and Fr. Hugo, in her books. She remained friends with Fr. Lacouture until his death and with Fr. Hugo until her death.
Because Fr. Lacouture himself never published any books, one must revert to Fr. Hugo's writings to learn about the teachings of retreat, the attacks on its doctrine, and the defense against those attacks. Because Nature and the Supernatural directly addresses the attacks of Catholic theologians, of all Fr. Hugo’s books it provides the most thorough and in-depth theological defense of the doctrine of the retreat.
It is worth noting that, under most circumstances, Nature and the Supernatural would be best read and understood after first reading Applied Christianity. (Available from Castle of Grace LLC are Applied Christianity, You Are Gods, which expands on the first sixteen retreat conferences, and A Sign of Contradiction, which is Fr. Hugo's first history of Fr. Lacouture and the retreat.) It is also worth noting that when, in the 1980s, Fr. Hugo wrote a new set of books on both the history and the doctrine of the retreat, and included his experiences and knowledge gained in the intervening forty years, he had not changed his convictions recorded in Nature and the Supernatural. He wrote in 1985 of the calumnious and malicious attacks against the retreat and the priests who gave it as something still incredible to him. If anything, he sounds even firmer in his convictions, as when he writes that, in seeking recourse to Church authority to address the grave injustice done to them by the attacks, he and the other priests had learned one thing: that “there is no such thing in the Catholic Church as recourse.”
A Church Horror Story
Fr. Hugo recounts in other books that when he returned from Fr. Lacouture's retreat in 1938 as a young priest two years out of seminary, he had joyfully offered an apostolate to his Church: to offer Fr. Lacouture’s retreat for the evangelization of the laity. When he did so, he found a surprising force of opposition. Because of misreadings of the teachings of “the two ways” and detachment from “creatures” (explained in this book), critics’ “implications” that the retreat taught serious heresies had already begun to hurt the reputation of Fr. Lacouture and his work. This kind of shadowy and vague cloud of suspicion now settled over Fr. Hugo. Some of the attacks were against the retreat, some against the books he had gone on to write. He was accused—though not always by name—of propagating in Applied Christianity Jansenism, Manichaeism, Quietism, Lutheranism, Methodism and/or Presbyterianism.
Since Fr. Hugo had to go to such lengths to defend himself and his fellow retreat priests against these charges of heresy, it is important to note that Applied Christianity was granted an imprimatur from the archbishop of New York, Francis J. Spellman, and that many clerics at that time—priests and bishops—also defended and highly recommended the retreat. As part of his experience at this time, he and another priest, Fr. Louis Farina, sought adjudication from the Apostolic Delegate and the Prefect of the Holy See. They were unable to meet with either of the two prelates.
In this book Fr. Hugo demolishes the accusations against his book. He also expresses in a measured way his outrage that these “fellow priests” could be both so wrong and at the same time so ready to smear another priest publicly in what Fr. Hugo termed a “heresy hunt.” He makes clear that it was indeed a very careless and shoddy heresy hunt—a “phantom heresy,” he writes, using a term from Abbé Felix Klein’s book on another Church controversy. Fr. Hugo writes of one critic that “there is scarcely a word of truth or soundness in all that he has written.” This same critic, he says, had a “strange nominalist twist” in his thinking. Another critic, he concludes, clearly had not even read the book, and then Fr. Hugo proves that this was the case. At three different times, Fr. Hugo shows that the critics calumniated him, adding at one point he “grieves that a brother priest” would do so.
Fr. Hugo writes in 1985 that “I was stunned by the false and unjust charges made by scholars who (whether they would acknowledge it or not) were older brother priests and teachers to whom I looked for encouragement in what I had considered a common apostolate.” He and the other priests who gave the retreat were called “Hugonuts” or “Lacouturmites.” At times they were called “Holy Rollers” because of their insistence on the scriptures’ application to Christian life.
Though Fr. Hugo notes several times that the critics, showing their contempt for the retreat priests, had not taken the time to either read his book or read it carefully enough to comprehend it, he answers each criticism carefully, with composure, charity, and knowledge. He mounts a brilliant defense, proving without a doubt that the charges were callous, unjust and wrong. The portrait emerging from these pages is of a man who stands with remarkable and admirable integrity against a kind of cerebral bullying that itself demonstrates significant errors.
Many years later, another eminent scholar and priest mounted a significant defense of the retreat. Renowned Jesuit scripture scholar, the late Fr. John L. McKenzie, came out swinging for Fr. Hugo. Fr. McKenzie made the Lacouture/Hugo retreat sometime in the 1980s. I was introduced to him at the retreat (although I myself did not attend this particular retreat but was picking up a brother who had). In 1987 or thereabouts, Fr. McKenzie wrote a review of Your Ways Are Not My Ways, Volume I, Fr. Hugo's 1985 book on the history of retreat. (Volume II of this book presents the retreat conferences.) He could not get a publisher for it before he died, but he sent me a copy of the book review. In this multi-paged defense of the retreat, Fr. McKenzie writes: “Permit me to say that during nearly thirty years as a priest of the Society of Jesus, I presented the Spiritual Exercises (the eight-day version) twenty-seven times, the last time to a Jesuit ordination class, always given by invitation...From that experience I affirm flatly that the criticisms leveled against Lacouture and Hugo arose from an incredibly vast ignorance of the New Testament, the classic spiritual writers, ancient, medieval, and modern, an ignorance which is frightening when it is manifested by bishops, higher level Jesuit superiors, and professors of theology at the Catholic University.” He also calls the treatment of Lacouture and Hugo by Church authorities a “Church horror story.”
“It was a painful time,” Monsignor Joseph Meenan recalled years later about this horror story. A Pittsburgh priest and lifelong friend of Fr. Hugo, Msgr. Meenan had also given the retreat during these years. “Suddenly you realize you are a member of a small minority; you’re isolated and friends distance themselves,” he told me in an interview. “We were looked at as kind of extreme. There was witch-hunting in the hierarchy; our careers were damaged.” Msgr. Meenan returned to giving the retreat after Fr. Hugo’s death and did so until he could no longer.
Fr. Lacouture was punished severely. After allowing the retreats for ten years, his Jesuit superior in 1939 forbade him to give the highly successful retreats, even though they yearly drew greater numbers of priests. (Several bishops also attended, and Fr. Hugo writes that none of them ever complained about the doctrine.) At this time, the superior also took away Fr. Lacouture's priestly faculties. He ultimately sent Fr. Lacouture to live out his last years on a Canadian reservation for Native Americans, where Fr. Lacouture acted as procurator. The location, Fr. Hugo notes, was “an excellent place for exile.” It was extremely difficult to get to, and Fr. Lacouture was forbidden, under pain of sin, to communicate with any of his former retreatants by letter. “Yet once more,” writes Fr. Hugo about the superior’s actions, “the powers of darkness prevailed, and one of the most wonderful spiritual enterprises this continent has ever witnessed came to a stop.”
A few years after Fr. Lacouture’s punishment, Fr. Hugo felt the heavy hand of disapproval. Forbidden in 1944 by Bishop Hugh Boyle of Pittsburgh to give the retreat without express permission, Fr. Hugo was at that time abruptly reassigned from teaching at Mount Mercy College (now Carlow College)—“diverted from my original hopes,” he said—to begin a series of short-term, small-parish assignments as an assistant to the pastors. He terms those years his time of “exile.” In 1949, when Bishop Boyle died, Fr. Hugo could once again continue giving the retreats when he had time to do so. But he was mostly occupied in caring for his parishes. Patient and consistent throughout this period, he pastored his people with care, and, in his free time, he wrote books on the teachings of the retreat and then typed the manuscripts (which are virtually flawless), printed them on his own printing press and distributed the books.
Fr. Hugo's sister (and my paternal aunt) Cecilia Marie Hugo told me that the calumnious attacks—verbal and in print—and the punishing exile distressed Fr. Hugo’s family and friends. During that period, my grandmother, who was deaf and therefore anxious about the many things that she could not easily understand in her daily life, worried about her oldest child. “Lawrence, is John going to be okay?” she would frequently ask my grandfather. And my grandfather, a man of great faith, would answer, “Yes, Mary, he will be okay.”
And my grandfather was right. In all that followed in his life and after his death, Fr. Hugo was vindicated. The painful punishment came to an end, and Fr. Hugo was called upon by his bishops in Pittsburgh to do important pastoral and ecclesiastical work. The voices of the critics, Fr. Hugo writes in 1985 (the year of his death), “bounced off the wall since neither I nor any of the other priests involved (apart from Fr. Lacouture) were ever forbidden to preach or teach. That I was temporarily told not to conduct retreats was itself a contradiction; if my doctrine was false, why was I permitted to preach to Catholic congregations all those years?”
Fr. Hugo ended his period of “exile” in 1957 when Bishop John Deardon assigned him to be the founding pastor and builder of St. Germaine Church in a suburb of Pittsburgh. Later, Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh began to quote Fr. Hugo's writings and then nominated him to collaborate on the writing of a new catechism, The Teaching of Christ, published in 1976 by Our Sunday Visitor. He also commissioned Fr. Hugo to write a book on St. Augustine in defense of Humanae Vitae (St. Augustine on Nature, Sex and Marriage) andpraised Fr. Hugo's scholarship in a preface to that book. Fr. Hugo wrote homily keys for his brother priests and served as chairman of both the worship and theology commissions of the Pittsburgh diocese.
The documents of the Second Vatican Council gave further support to the retreat when the Council affirmed that the laity and not just the religious were called to holiness, a truth that the Church had always taught but that those charged with that teaching had often ignored. After Vatican II, and with a kind of joyful vindication, Fr. Hugo would tell his family, his retreatants, and his congregations that the Council had once again emphasized the essential nature of this teaching.
He began to give the retreats regularly again in 1976 and continued until his death in 1985. He was killed in an automobile accident two days after he had finished teaching a retreat and on the day that he had finished writing his 1985 book on the history of the retreat (punished posthumously).
Why the Controversy?
What did this controversial retreat teach? There are many answers to that question, though they all amount to the same essential thing: how to be holy, how to practice the moral virtues and be receptive to the theological virtues, how to be united to God, how to practice both ascetical and mystical theology, and how to live on the “supernatural plane.” Fr. Hugo has said all these things. But one of his favorite expressions to describe Fr. Lacouture’s retreat, an expression he used throughout the decades he gave the retreat, was that the retreat, using scripture and the writings of the saints, presented the “whole panorama of the Christian life.”
The retreat, then, was an endeavor that one would have thought should find nothing but support from all bishops, priests and Catholic theologians. Why then did these teachings bring on such attacks and accusations? Or, as Fr. Hugo once asked, “Why were so many Howitzers trained on one country curate?” In the end, the only answer is that the retreat was considered extreme because it focused on a practicable approach to Christianity: the retreat masters taught both the priests and the laity a concrete and systematic way to practice holiness that required holy detachment from the world. Although it was precisely this practicable teaching on how to live supernaturally while still in the world that caused many retreatants to love and revere the retreat, this clearly challenging spiritual direction also caused many clerics to take up arms against it.
From the welter of accusations that was thrown at the retreat, Fr. Hugo from the beginning pinpointed the overriding reason for this opposition: it was the retreat’s “condemnation of worldliness, especially the worldliness of the clergy.” Anyone who rebuked his fellow priests for their worldliness, he said, “had to be silenced at all costs.” When priests left the retreat, many of them, such as Fr. Hugo, changed their ways dramatically, practicing detachment, mortification, renunciation and penances, and these actions were also taken as silent rebukes to fellow priests. Thus, both Fr. Hugo and Fr. Lacouture suffered not only for condemning this worldliness, but even for bringing it to light.
In his 1985 book, he again explains that “there were no real doctrinal issues in this controversy. The differences were in the existential order, that is, they were found only in concerning practical consequences and certain axioms related to translating the Creed into practice.” The retreat, he continues, taught that the truths of the faith must be realized and daily lived to a greater “degree and depth” than the Critics apparently thought should be the case. The Critics, however, chose to imply that the retreat presented doctrinal errors, and this implication was an injustice that Fr. Hugo believed he had to correct. The imputation of heresy, he said, is an accusation that no priest can let stand.
Not the Post-Vatican II Battle Lines of Novus Ordo and Traditional Latin Mass Catholics
Though the condemnation of worldliness and the pagan mentality may have been the offense that provoked the attacks and caused their fiercely hostile nature, readers should know that the attacks were never couched in such straightforward and untheological terms. In defending his book, Fr. Hugo must address complex, profound and technical theological concepts. While first reiterating that Applied Christianity “was intended to be a manual of piety, not a textbook of philosophy,” Fr. Hugo proceeds to argue theological and philosophical questions with precision and acumen.
According to Fr. Hugo’s preface, the six critics (all priests) to whom he is responding were high-placed theologians, some of them teachers at the Catholic University of America. Dr. Francis J. Connell, Dr. Pascal Parente, Dr. Joseph Clifford Fenton, and Fr. Gerald Vann mounted the most significant attacks on Applied Christianity. Dr. Paul Hanly Furfy “repeated” one of the charges in a book. Fr. Joseph P. Donovan lit into a pamphlet written by another retreat priest but edited by Fr. Hugo. In his preface, Fr. Hugo acknowledges their “high station” in Catholic academia, but reminds his readers that “a few theologians are not the Church.”
Among those that Fr. Hugo quotes in his defense are St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, St. Alphonsus Ligouri, St. Bernard, St. Francis de Sales, St. John of the Cross, Thomas à Kempis, Pius VI, Pius IX, Pius XI, Pius XII, Fr. Augustine Baker, Fr. Frederick Faber, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Père Grou, Fr. Louis Lallemant, Fr. Edward Leen, Abbot Columba Marmion, Fr. Joseph Noldin, Fr. Fernand Prat, Canon A. Saudreau, Fr. Pierre Pourrat, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and E.I Watkins. (St. Thomas Aquinas holds pride of place in this list, as the index shows.)
For the more traditionally-minded, the names in both the above groups signify Catholic orthodoxy. As Fr. Hugo wrote and said many times, both he and his critics gave equal assent to every speculative truth of the Catholic Faith. “Despite the insulting and sinister allegations made by these critics,” he writes, “I am a loyal child of the Catholic Church.” In another book, he writes, “I would have allowed [the opponents] to write my profession of faith, such confidence did I have in their orthodoxy and in my own.”
There is, therefore, in these attacks and the defense, no question of the post-Vatican II battle lines of progressives versus traditionalists. All involved in this debate were orthodox Catholics. For this reason, Nature and the Supernatural provides insights into issues that today affect the two main groups of Catholics that belong to a now-divided Church. Those groups are the Novus Ordo Catholics and the Traditional Latin Mass (TLM) Catholics.
As referenced above, the primary issue is worldliness, first of the clergy and then of the laity. Connected to this is “pious naturalism,” a false idea of the Christian life leading to Catholics finding nothing wrong with living a completely natural and even extremely worldly life—as opposed to a supernatural and holy life—as long as they “get to the sacraments.” Fr. Hugo preached against this mentality repeatedly in his books and in his retreats. This book attests that worldliness and pious naturalism were prevalent attitudes in 1950; his 1985 book again attests to this fact, and in that book Fr. Hugo criticizes Vatican II for not addressing this greatly corrupting attitude in the Church. And I (and many other Catholics) can attest that during my lifetime right up to the present time, pious naturalism has remained a prevalent attitude in Catholic parishes that fall on any point on the spectrum of liberal to conservative, Novus Ordo to traditional.
He writes in Nature and the Supernatural about this prevailing yet submerged philosophy as one that constantly undermines the teaching of Jesus Christ and His Church and makes “applied Christianity” impossible. In speaking of Catholics who lead a life of pious naturalism, he writes, for instance, that “for them it is perfection enough to live with reason, with, of course, some decorative liturgical adjuncts and a system of sacraments whose only purpose, they think, is to assist them in this.” At another point, he teaches that although the sacraments are a means and not an end, Catholics have been taught somehow to see them as an end, and therefore are using “the means without intending to go anywhere.” And by “anywhere,” he means the true end of union with God in this world and the next. Referring to a prevalent spirit in Catholicism that lays great emphasis on the giving and receiving of sacraments but little or no emphasis on the practice of charity, he feels compelled to point out that “there is no sacrament or ceremony in the Church that dispenses from charity; it is necessary for salvation.” The mentality of pious naturalism, he writes, results in Catholics who show “a tendency to externalism and legalism.”
Fr. Hugo writes that he assumes that every Catholic knows the Church’s doctrine of the sacraments and the visible Church. Taking that as a given, he seeks to provide the necessary spiritual direction for the Catholic laity to grow in perfection and holiness; he gives his attention to the “invisible and mystical element” in the lives of Catholics. (See pages 235-242 for his teaching on the visible and invisible Church.) For as Fr. Hugo writes—and as Catholics know from experience—the reception of sacraments does not automatically lead to holiness. Fr. Hugo teaches directly from scripture, that is Jesus Christ’s own words, as interpreted by the Church, and he emphasizes the need for a strong identification with and knowledge of Jesus Christ and an ensuing love of Our Lord, as well as a life of prayer. He taught retreatants to seek in prayer a closer union with God and the voice of the Holy Spirit. To his amazement, because of this guidance and the fact that he did not talk chiefly about the sacraments and special devotions, his critics accused him of sounding like a Protestant. They found in these directions, for instance, a way to fasten on him Luther’s error of the “invisible church.” In another instance, one critic said that “apart from certain passages,” his book could have been written by a “fervent Methodist or Presbyterian.” In rebutting these charges, Fr. Hugo shows that the critics themselves demonstrate either ignorance and error or the malicious arrogance of not bothering to read his words.
For those of us who have been convinced by Fr. Lacouture’s retreat and Fr. Hugo’s books, these critics’ insistence on a certain type of Catholicism sheds a light on one reason that Vatican II has had such a disastrous result, namely, the near-collapse of the Catholic Church worldwide. In reading Fr. Hugo’s books, many Catholics—especially Baby Boomers—may find that the words of the critics reveal the pharisaical attitudes that drove so many Catholics who had grown up in the pre-Vatican II Church to leave in the post-Vatican II era. Baby Boomers know that countless numbers of our acquaintances, friends and family left the Catholic Church after Vatican II because, as they told us over and over again, sometimes angrily, they were never taught in the Catholic Church that they had to have “a personal relationship with Jesus.” In Protestant churches, they said, they learned how to love Jesus Christ. Ex-Catholics preached to us about Protestant churches releasing Catholics from a deadening “legalism” and “total concern with externals.” (For a summary of the deficiencies of the Catholic formation that the Baby Boomers received in the pre-Vatican II years, read pages 266 and following.)
The subtitle of the book—A Defense of the Evangelic Ideal—shows that Fr. Hugo prophetically understood what needed to be done at a pivotal time—before Vatican II—in the Church, when modernism needed to be addressed. The “evangelic ideal” is a life lived according to the teachings of Jesus Christ. It is the putting into practice the “good news” that we have been made partakers in the Divine Life through the work of Our Savior. (“Evangelic,” like “Gospel,” means the “good news.” To forestall any confusion, it is better to state the obvious: Fr. Hugo was not making a reference to Evangelical Protestantism.) The failure to teach this ideal—the good news of our sharing in the Divine Life of the Trinity—Fr. Hugo believed, would leave Catholics unprepared to live the Gospel in the world. The years following Vatican II showed that his assessment was correct. Furthermore, his books—with their blend of doctrine, spiritual direction, defense and history—also show that the post-Vatican II loss of millions of Catholics to atheism, agnosticism, Eastern Mysticism, the New Age or Protestantism, had its beginnings long before. Living through the unthinkable changes and resulting sense of liberation that followed Vatican II, countless shell-shocked Catholics seemed to realize that in the pre-Vatican II Catholic Church they had been given no idea of how to live a spiritual life. The Council seemed to give them the permission to seek such a life elsewhere—and they did. This means that the experience of many Catholics in the 1960s and 1970s gives witness to the importance of Fr. Hugo’s books. It was this spiritual life that Fr. Hugo tried all his life to get his Church to teach to the laity and that he himself taught so brilliantly to small groups for so many years. And it is this spiritual life that he was forced to admit, 20 or so years after Vatican II, was still not taught by the Church-at-large to most Catholics. But Fr. Hugo made sure to leave clear instructions in his books.
The main title of this book—Nature and the Supernatural—shows the Catholic character of Fr. Hugo’s answer to the quest for Gospel holiness. It was essential, he taught, that Catholics know the difference between living on the natural level and living on the supernatural level, and this is because God demands that His adopted children (His Son’s followers) live on the supernatural plane. Only the Catholic Church teaches according to this understanding of the natural and supernatural modes of being, a conception which is so beholden to Thomistic theology.
Fr. Hugo quotes in several of his books the statement of Pope Pius XI in the 1922 encyclical Ubi Arcano Dei: “The habit of life which can be called really Christian has in a great measure disappeared.” One hundred years later, the disappearance has become even more drastic. Fr. Hugo’s books prompt the thought: the Christian habit of life is fading away because modern culture has seduced even the most orthodox of Catholic teachers—our priests and bishops—into living “on the natural plane” and to teach others to do so as well.
Fr. Hugo fought during his entire life to ensure that the evangelic ideal—a life lived supernaturally—was taught to all Catholics. He showed his greatest anger towards those priests, bishops, theologians and other teachers who opposed teaching this ideal to Catholics. He observed such as those rise through the ranks in the pre-Vatican II Church and to continue to do so in the post-Vatican II Church. The Church for a long time seems not to know how to give us a different kind of teacher; and from my experiences—many years after Fr. Hugo’s death—this deficiency occurs in both Novus Ordo and TLM parishes.
In Nature and the Supernatural, Fr. Hugo, who is indeed a different kind of teacher, directs to such teachers the words of Jesus Christ, spoken to the scribes and Pharisees: “Woe to you lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge: you yourselves have not entered in, and those that were entering you have hindered.” (Luke: 2, 52)
Writes Fr. Hugo:
“This quotation...is a warning...a warning spoken not by me, however, but by the Master of us all: and not only to the Jewish lawyers, now long since passed to their ‘reward,’ but to all those who use knowledge in order to evade the truth. Let them look to it, these Critics, as they stand like grim sentinels, directing the picked Catholic youth of the nation, for whose instruction they are responsible, to vain fables, cold speculations and the ethics of reason; while at the same time warning them zealously away from the personal knowledge and love of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is to be purchased only by renouncing affections and attachments for the things of this world, as also by abandoning the merely natural motives in which these affections manifest themselves.”
The full meaning of these words and others—terms such as “natural,” “supernatural,” “affections,” “attachments,” and “motives”—are opened by Fr. Hugo's books to Catholics who seek to live a holy, and, therefore, supernatural, life. Nature and the Supernatural defends the evangelic ideal so that Catholics will be assured that Fr. Hugo’s books—and Fr. Lacouture’s retreat—are sure guides. The books continue to offer to Catholics a Catholic guide for conforming to Christ’s teaching in a world that has turned against Christianity, so that when the Son of Man returns, He will find faith on earth.
Rosemary Hugo Fielding (niece of Fr. Hugo)
Feast of the Precious Blood of Jesus
July 1, 2020
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