'God Does Not Need Our Lies.' (Catholic Scholar John Tracy Ellis)(Column)

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Forty years ago, Monsignor John Tracy Ellis wrote an essay, "American Catholics and the Intellectual Life" (Thought, Fall 1955), that left a lasting impression on American Catholicism. A major theme in the essay was the need for intellectual integrity in Catholic scholarship. One of the first places where Ellis ever spoke his mind publicly on this subject, however, was in the pages of Commonweal in an article that appeared on February 2, 1934.

At that time Commonweal was only ten years old, and Ellis was Mr. John Tracy Ellis, an obscure twenty-nine-year-old layman who was teaching European history at the College of Saint Teresa in Winona, Minnesota (population 20,850). The Catholic press had recently been surfeited with articles commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Rerum novarum, Pope Leo XIII's seminal encyclical on Catholic social …