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Fortunate Pilgrim

2024; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 110; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2024.a921692

1534-0708

Bernard McGinn,

Religious Tourism and Spaces

Fortunate Pilgrim Bernard McGinn (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Bernard McGinn At age eighty-five I have lived longer than I had ever imagined. I am also conscious of having long resisted the requests of friends who suggested I write some kind of memoir. So I feel some amusement, perhaps even embarrassment, to find myself sitting down to write even a brief account of my life as an historian of Christianity for the series, "Journeys in Church History," in The Catholic Historical Review. Why have I decided to do this? Perhaps because I've grown increasingly conscious of the debt of gratitude I owe to so many people who have helped shape my academic life and thinking. I also realize that I would like, for one more time, to try to convey to readers and students my excitement for the things I have studied and written about over more than six decades. To be able to do this is a blessing, which is why I choose the title of "Fortunate Pilgrim" for what follows. Over the years I've sometimes been asked, "Why did you become a medievalist?" My "smart-aleck" answer often was, "Oh, I was born in the twelfth century." There was a grain of truth hidden in this flippant response. Those of us who grew up in the traditional pre-Vatican II American Catholicism of the 1940s and 1950s did, indeed, share much with some (not all) aspects of medieval Catholicism, or at least what we imagined medieval Catholicism to be. Perhaps this is why I've always felt an affinity with the Middle Ages. [End Page 1] Early Years When I was a schoolboy in St. Mary's School in Yonkers, New York— the oldest Christian Brothers Grammar School in the United States (since closed), which my parents and grandparents had attended before me—I loved to read, mostly history and mythology (both Classical and Irish). Life revolved around my parish and school, the traditional Irish Catholicism then already more than a century old in Yonkers. In 1951 I entered Cathedral College, the Minor Seminary of the Archdiocese of New York, where I spent the next six years. Minor seminaries are now (rightly) almost extinct, but seventy years ago they were a significant part of the Catholic educational system. Cathedral College provided an excellent education, at least for someone like me who loved history, literature, and languages (it was not strong on sciences and math; nor was I). In 2003, the year that I was President of the ACHA, I paid heartfelt thanks to two of the history teachers I had at Cathedral College, both active members of the Association: Joseph N. Moody (d. 1994, President of the ACHA in 1978), who was a noted historian of Modern France, and Florence D. Cohalan (d. 2001), who later wrote the standard history of the Archdiocese of New York. They differed on many things (Moody was a liberal activist, Cohalan a staunch conservative), but they both inspired at least some of their rambunctious students to love history. With their encouragement, I began to read more serious material (much of which was beyond me). Cohalan was a fan of Christopher Dawson (d. 1970), and I devoured Dawson, whom I still think of as one of the greatest historians of the past century. When Dawson visited New York to give lectures at Union Theological Seminary in 1955, I and several seminary friends attended, only to be somewhat chagrined when we realized that, "miked-or-unmiked," noone could understand what he was saying (he mumbled in Oxford-ese). Later, some of us went to Cambridge to interview him when he was the first Stillman Professor of Catholic Studies at Harvard Divinity School. He could not have been more welcoming and gracious in answering our often naïve questions. During those formative years (1951–57), I began reading some major theological works I would treasure all my life, such as Augustine's City of God, as well as the writings of classic mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, and Meister Eckhart, whose faint odor of heresy I found quite attractive. Contemporary religious...