Apologia: A Memoir
Fr Aidan Nichols
Gracewing, £12.99, 164 pages
With St John Henry Newman, Fr Aidan Nichols has found the “need to be similarly apologetic” about his life and theological work. Mostly “a human story”, the tale gives him an opportunity to justify some of his actions, as well as to make “an appeal to the Church universal”.
A widely respected academic, in 2019 Fr Nichols was among 19 signatories of an open letter to the bishops of the world which urged them to ask Pope Francis to clarify certain aspects of his teaching. Since then he has found his concerns and criticisms to have been “life-changing”.
In Apologia: A Memoir, Nichols now seeks to offer an overview of his life, and how it led to that point. For readers eager for gossip, this book is not exactly a juicy “reveal all”. Nevertheless, it is thoroughly candid, and worthy of careful reading.
As with most biographies, one learns much about the past 70 years through Nichols’s anecdotally rich accounts of his youth and formation at Blackfriars in the 1970s. One learns, for example, of the actively pro-Communist fathers of the Priory who earned it the nickname “Redfriars” for a time, and whose activities led to a small bomb blowing in the parlour windows.
With cosmopolitan experience as a Dominican in England, Scotland, Norway, Ethiopia, Rome, and a handful of other places, Nichols’s writing career began in the 1980s and has continued ever since. The book gives him a happy opportunity to trace the arc of his extensive oeuvre and to explain his deep exploration of and admiration for certain modern theologians such as Balthasar, Congar and Ratzinger.
Essentially, he saw himself as continuing in the line of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which Nichols characterises as “inhibit[ing] the further development of ecclesially damaging trends” through “stabilising the doctrinal consciousness of the Church”.
As a young convert from Anglicanism in the 1960s, Nichols finds “doctrinal confusion” considerably depressing, eliciting a sense of “out of the frying pan into the fire” for those “who made considerable sacrifices to ‘come over’”.
For Nichols, the message of the Church that “theologians convey must be both rich and clear”. Richness includes “learning diachronically from other generations of the Catholic Church and learning synchronically from non-Catholic Christians, notably the Eastern Orthodox and Anglicans”.
For the Faith that glories in calling itself apostolic, Rome is the source from which clarity comes. When Nichols signed the 2019 letter it was because of this: Rome could not be a source of confusion except as an anomaly. It seemed to the Dominican theologian that the “gains in charity made by the previous two pontiffs were at stake”, and that “the seriousness of the situation called for a kind of description that eschews diplomatic formulae of an ambiguous kind”.
Nichols expected (naively, he wonders) that a substantial portion of the hierarchy would “take a stand on the chief issues involved”. He talks of the “deafening silence” that followed the letter’s publication, which he found “disorienting, not to say subversive”.
A “significant preliminary” to signing the letter was the encouragement Nichols received from Archbishop Augustine Di Noia, Adjunct Secretary of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, regarding Nichols’s analysis of Amoris Laetitia in a controversial lecture given in 2017.
The lecture noted how Amoris Laetitia implied positions previously rejected by the Church. Not only that, it seemed to say “that actions condemned by the law of Christ can sometimes be morally right or even, indeed, requested by God” and that it might be impossible for a Christian in a state of grace to observe the commandments.
Archbishop Di Noia later requested the script and, after reading it, told Nichols that “it was the most satisfactory account of the document he had seen”. These words, “coming from so informed a source, made a profound impression” on Nichols, especially as they were followed by the Abu Dhabi declaration, which seemed to contradict the “Great Commission” of spreading the Gospel to every creature.
They bred in Nichols “a resolve to do, in this ‘New Church Crisis’, whatever might be in my power.” As it happened, this included a journey to Moscow to ask Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev whether or not the Church of Russia could ask the Church of Rome to renew its commitment to “proclaiming the shared evangelical faith”. Although the proposition was positively received in a private meeting with the Metropolitan, Nichols does not know whether or not anything came of it.
Nichols’ signing of the 2019 letter elicited displeasure from his superiors: an “exile” to a seminary post in Jamaica followed, as well as the realisation that he was no longer welcome in England, leading to a search – still underway – for a new home in which to spend the twilight years of his life.
Since the 2019 letter, other prominent figures have also expressed concern. Cardinal Robert Sarah recently asserted in Rome that there is a “crisis of the Magisterium” and Cardinal Gerhard Müller, a theologian so esteemed by Benedict XVI that he became Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, has said that there is scope for more than just confusion in the way that some of Pope Francis’s statements are formulated.
Nichols’s “most immediately pressing concern” is that the Holy See “cannot sacrifice its reputation for doctrinal clarity and expect to hold its place in the confessional scheme of Christians”. Although the 2019 letter was reported as a “traditionalist” initiative on account of signatories like my father, Peter Kwasniewski, Nichols’s confrere Fr Thomas Crean, and Fr John Hunwicke, it should be clear from this book that Nichols himself is not a traditionalist in the conventional sense.
Nichols deserves a hearing from everyone, precisely because although he comes to some of the same conclusions as traditionalists, he comes to them by a somewhat different path which includes extensive use of modern theology arguably at its best. As Bishop Paul Swarbrick comments in his short foreword: “I am happy to offer it [this book] my personal commendation largely because of the challenge it presents to me.”
Thanks to Nichols’s Apologia, we have not only an entertaining story of the author’s life and journey to offer a context for his many books, but also a reminder of the “practical corollaries” to which love of the Church’s mystery sometimes leads. “All who truly love the bridal Church have the capacity, in their time, place, situation, to awaken the sleeping beauty with a kiss,” Nichols writes on the last page.
Beyond the visible aspect of the Church and her teaching office lies the “mystery of the Church as Bride of Christ”. Fostering a deeper love for her will lead us both to work for the healing of her earthly condition, bound up as it is with the supernatural destiny of souls, and to remember that this earthly wounded reality is not the only facet of the Church, which in her perfection in heaven, and in the saints, is the immaculate spouse of Christ.
Nichols’s “Amen” to GK Chesterton’s desire for a “Church that will move the world” rather than be moved with it ought to be ours also, if by “Catholic Church” we mean anything coherent with the institution founded by Christ and existing for the past 2,000 years. Anyone desirous of uttering a similar “Amen” in the course of life, yet confused as to what that might entail, could well benefit from reading this autobiography.
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