Anthony Esolen on Reclaiming the Forgotten Wisdom of a Bygone Era

"These last few years, my wife and I have been restoring an old Victorian house that once was a rectory on our island in Nova Scotia, where we live in the summer. I would like to draw an analogy between what we have done so far and what should be done in the Church. We might call it de-novation: the removal of worthless or banal or ugly stuff, once hailed as new, in order to reveal de novo the good things that have been hidden or forgotten. So when we tore out the old linoleum and plywood, we found, lying beneath, original maple floors, laid in strips to make parquet patterns of squares and diamonds. Beauty, buried.

"The last dweller in the rectory was a dear friend, Father J. J. MacDonald. He was one of the chief players in the credit union movement in Canada; a founder of the local hospital and of our island's television station dedicated to local affairs; a Scot who taught himself to speak French with ease; a farmer from youth and by avocation; a liberal in politics when that did not imply Moloch or Sodom; and a faithful son of the Church.

"When he left the rectory, he let the parish sell most of the things he owned. . . . When we bought the house itself, we inherited also several hundred books that the parish could not give away. Many of these are pastoral works, from Father's early days, the 1950s and 1960s. They were the meat and potatoes, the bread and beer of a priest's life, or of a Catholic parishioner's life, just before the linoleum and plywood and wall-to-wall plush carpet renovation.

"The book I have before me is Talking to Teenagers, by F. H. Drinkwater. Mine is the third printing and second and amplified edition, 1964; it was originally published in 1954, with material that Father Drinkwater says went back to the 1930s. He had published many books for Catholic children and youths, as did his friend Monsignor Ronald Knox, and he and Knox share an immediate, amiable address to young people that neither patronizes them nor takes them for granted. They also shared a fully social world that was about to be destroyed."

In a recent commentary, Anthony Esolen, Professor and Writer in Residence at Northeast Catholic College in Warner, New Hampshire. reflected on Father MacDonald's advice to teenage boys (including getting a right attitude towards girls) and girls and on the importance of common sense and common decency..

To access Professor Esolen's complete post, please visit:

Crisis Magazine: Reclaiming the Forgotten Wisdom of a Bygone Era (8 JUL 19)