Religion Matters — A Catholic Life
Apologia: A Memoir by Aidan Nichols
This book will have limited appeal to those outside of a narrow category, namely Catholics wondering where their church is heading. Yet, I found the story Aidan Nichols tells about his life to be generally interesting as a window into the lives of obedient, non-radical Catholics since 1960.
Aidan Nichols was born in 1948 to an Anglican family. After a visit to an Orthodox church where he was moved by the sublime beauty of more liturgical churches, he entered the Catholic Church as a teenager, over the vehement objections of family and the threat that there would be an interruption of his conditional baptism by the police. Nichols had decided to enter a religious life. Eventually, he selected the Dominicans — the Order of Preachers (“OP”) — as fitting his interest in liturgy and scholarship.
Nichols’ life thereafter consisted of teaching and writing. His bibliography is extensive and well-received.
Most of the book follows Nichols’ life as a world-traveling educator and writer. The memoir drops names like a rainstorm. As a student, Nichols knew Herbert McCabe, Kallistos Ware, Yves Congar, and Richard John Neuhas. These are important names to those who read theology but may be unknown to the public.
Nichols provides several revealing anecdotes about some of these figures. He says that Herbert McCabe—a leading Thomistic thinker of the last 50 years—combined Irish Nationalism with Marxism. Apparently, this combination was quite common and explains the Marxist orientation of the Provisional IRA. Nichols shares an anecdote about the foundation of Communio Review as a counterweight to the Marxist/Leftist Concilio Review. Yves Congar never jumped from Concilio to Communio because Concilio would be so much worse without him.
Toward the end of the book, Nichols moves into the papacy of Pope Francis. It is fair to say that he is very concerned about the direction of the Catholic Church under Francis. Nichols signed the statements objecting to the 2016 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia and the 2019 Abu Dhabi Declaration made between the Roman pontiff and the Grand Iman of the Al-Azhar. Nichols views both as undercutting the clawing back of Catholic theology from the “relativistic fog” that had penetrated Catholic thinking. Nichols extols “richness” and “clarity.” Richness is found in the multiple strains of thinking that fund Catholic thinking, including, in his experience, Anglican and Orthodox thinking. “Clarity” means consistency in thought, not only across geography but across time. His thinking has led him to the understanding that the meaning of the expression “The Roman See is judged by no one” is that Rome is the final appeal in canonical matters but does not refer to doctrinal matters.
Nichols was also concerned about the Pachamama affair, in which an Earth Mother goddess idol was introduced to a South American papal ceremony. Nichols reasonably points out that South American Protestants exploited this affair to undermine the Catholic Church. The affair was a scandal and dispirited the faithful and encouraged anti-Catholics.
In short, Nichols became a critic of the papacy. This was a surprising development for him since he was best known for his book on the theology of Benedict XVI.
The Catholic hierarchy has been strangely unable to control priests and bishops who advocate the normalization of same-sex ceremonies, Marxism, or feminism, but against Catholics who advocate, well, Catholicism, the Church is quite effective. Nichols has been made to withdraw from teaching assignments and official positions in the Dominican Order. When he decided to join the Norbertine monastery in Orange County, the local bishop issued a prohibition preventing Nichols from teaching anyone within the local diocese. The expressed concern was that Nichols might become a lightning rod for opponents of Francis.
Concerning the Norbertine Order, Nichols provides interesting background information on the 11th-century St. Norbert, who founded the Order of Premonstratensians. He also provides information on the order, which has had ups and downs, and eventually founded a monastery in California when refugees from Communist Hungary escaped Hungary and left for more congenial environments.
Nichols is an educated, erudite man. His memoir captures the last 60 years of Catholic confusion and ebbs and flows.
