Three Catholic thinkers are starting small but aiming high:
the re-evangelization of New England along Christian principles.
The scholars kicked off the Center for the Restoration of
Christian Culture with a press conference and social gathering
Monday night at Mercy Hall in Nashua, New Hampshire, a building owned by Thomas
More College.
Left-leaning, highly secularized New England wouldn’t seem the
most fertile ground for Christian culture, but that’s part of the appeal for
the three founders, all of whom have longstanding ties to the area.
They are William Fahey, president of Thomas More; Philip Lawler,
editor of Catholic World News; and Anthony Esolen, a teaching fellow at Thomas
More who taught English Renaissance and classical literature for many years at
Providence College.
They plan to host activities usually associated with academic
institutions, such as lectures and seminars, but they also want to engage
people of various walks of life with concerts, performances, art, and even
brown-bag lunches.
Lawler, an author (The Faithful Departed), editor,
and columnist who has also run for public office in Massachusetts, has often
taken part in what he called “pitched battles” over political, social,
religious, and moral questions.
“And the problem is more often than not we’re outgunned,” Lawler
said during the presentation. “The media is not sympathetic. Academia is not
sympathetic. So how do you win that war of ideas? Well, you win the war of
ideas, I believe, by forming the agenda of discussion. If you can determine the
agenda of ideas being discussed, you’re already halfway to winning the debate.”
He sees the new center as making common cause with other
like-minded or at least somewhat sympathetic people, “and try to get ideas in
circulation that will be the hot-button-ideas not of this year, but of two or
three years down the road.”
“We want to frame the agenda for New England,” Lawler said.
The founders didn’t mention specific topics during the press
conference, and they stressed that they’re still in the early stages of
planning. No events are scheduled yet, though they expect to have at least one
during the spring semester.
Lawler, asked after the presentation for an example of what the
center might do, suggested a brown-bag lunch in Boston offering practical ideas
for mothers who want to stay home with their children – offering a Christian
response to a social need instead of secular approaches such as government
subsidies for day care.
Thomas More, founded in 1978, is a four-year liberal-arts college
with about 100 students with a main campus in South Merrimack, about two and a
half miles up the road from Mercy Hall in Nashua, where the center will be
located.
Fahey, who is the college’s third president, said his predecessors
always imagined launching an affiliated institution to try to influence the
region.
“Now the center is the college’s way of engaging New England,”
Fahey said during the event, “especially in those areas that were of interest
to our spiritual patron, St. Thomas More: The life of the family; liberal
arts education for all ages; culture; the engagement of the political order, of
civil life from a Christian perspective; and especially a steadfast defense, a
loyal defense, of the constant teachings of the Catholic Church.”
“It’s a natural outgrowth of the college to do this,” he said.
“We’re privileged to have the space to do it in.”
The building is one of the stars of the show. Built around the
early 1900s for a mill-owning family in Nashua, the brick, three-story Beaux
Arts mansion was eventually sold to Francis P. Murphy (1877-1958), the first
Catholic governor of New Hampshire. The Sisters of Mercy later acquired it and
ran a girls school there, and subsequently used it as a residence for retired
nuns, before selling it to Thomas More College about four years ago.
The former home has a large open space by the front door designed
for public gatherings, bedrooms on the second floor that will serve as offices
(including one with a black wall safe for its original owner, Frank E.
Anderson), and a colorful ballroom on the third floor used by Thomas More
undergraduates for dances.
The Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture expects to
invite members of the public to cultural activities in the stately building.
Lawler, who taught a course at Thomas More on the founding of America
last year, said he first started thinking about starting the center when he
heard Fahey give a talk several years ago calling for re-evangelizing New
England.
But the catalyst was the arrival of Esolen, a rock star in
Catholic academic circles for his translation of Dante, his cultural critiques
in opinion journals, and his battles in recent years with administrators over
the Catholic identity of Providence College, which is run by the Church’s
Dominican order.
Esolen’s decision earlier this year to leave Providence for Thomas
More College is an unprecedented coup for Thomas More, and it led Lawler and
Fahey to think they could raise interest and money to launch and sustain the
new center.
“I am very much interested in this center here, and hope that this
becomes the seedbed of other centers like it across the country, because we
desperately need them,” Esolen said during the press conference.
The center’s founders emphasize that it isn’t just wrongheaded
political or social ideas or faulty religious doctrine that leads to problems
in society, but also a lack of authentic culture, which particularly damages
young people.
In the absence of culture, Esolen said, “Something else will rush
in.”
That something, he said, is often ugly, shallow, and destructive,
created by people who don’t have uplifting the human soul as a goal.
“And they form the core of these precious beings, our children,”
Esolen said. “… So their imaginations are formed by mass media, and the worst
things that can be found on the Internet.”
The new center is attracting interest elsewhere.
Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in
Washington D.C. and Editor-In-Chief of The Catholic Thing web
site, called the Center for the Restoration of Christian Culture “one of the
most promising initiatives in decades.”
“Lots of people have written and spoken about what’s gone wrong
with Catholic thought — as well as ways of life and community. This is one of
the few things I’ve seen that may actually do something about bringing them all
together again in a faithful and viable whole,” Royal said in a written
statement. “And it’s right to begin with a specific region in mind. Given the
scope of problems we face, they can only be dealt with first at a more local
level. I hope that this project not only grows rapidly, but that it is imitated
and adapted to many other parts of the country, and the world.”
While situated in New Hampshire, the new center’s founders expect
to venture elsewhere in New England, particularly to Boston, the commercial and
cultural capital of the region.
Andrew Beckwith, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute,
which advocates for Judaeo-Christian values on Beacon Hill, said he welcomes
the new center at Thomas More.
“We live in a culture obsessed with novelty and progress, but
without a moral compass. This is why it is so important for people of
faith to intentionally unearth the treasures that have been buried in the ash
heap of secularism,” Beckwith said in an email message to New Boston Post. “We
must do this now, before their memory is entirely erased, if we hope to
bequeath them to our children.”
During the center’s kickoff event Lawler, expanding on the
benefits of spotlighting truth, order, and beauty, said authentic Christian
culture is attractive because it appeals to what he called “normal human
impulses.”
“The great strength that we have is the truth of human nature,
which won’t be denied,” he said.