These undeniably turbulent times seem to have spawned a renewed interest in Dorothy Day and the radical Christianity that she has come to symbolize in the thirty-six years since her death. Day received an affirmative nod from Pope Francis during his 2015 address to the US Congress, and has been recently invoked in a cornucopia of presidential election memes and posts circulating on social media. Benjamin Peters offers us a deep and illuminating study of one of her foremost spiritual influences, John J. Hugo (1911–85). Hugo was a diocesan priest from Pittsburgh who became a prominent voice for evangelical Christian pacifism, but he is probably best known as a primary architect of a contemplative program that Day referred to simply as “the retreat.” Indeed, the admittedly meager amount of historical scholarship to date on Hugo examines him almost exclusively through the lens of his relationship with Dorothy Day. Peters’ work looks much farther, and situates Hugo within the broader context of twentieth-century trends in Catholic theology, making a persuasive argument for Hugo's persistent importance in contemporary radical Christian thought.
Hugo was a magnetizing and controversial figure, as was his mentor Onésime Lacouture, SJ (1881–1951), who developed “the retreat” as a variation of the Ignatian Exercises. Peters presents readers with an encyclopedic treatment of Hugo scholarship that lays a rock-solid foundation for his somewhat revisionist work. During his lifetime—and in subsequent historical studies of US Catholicism—Hugo was maligned by critics as a dour “Jansenist,” whose ascetic theology verged on the extreme. Peters rejects these claims and locates Hugo squarely within the ressourcement tradition most closely associated with Henri de Lubac, SJ, with whom Peters finds great affinity—particularly in their shared rejection of the once-dominant “pure nature” hypothesis. In addition to its great value as the first and only text devoted to mining the full measure of Hugo as a theologian, this book presents readers with a thorough—and fascinating—study of the Jesuit spirituality that deeply impacted Hugo.
While he mounts a compelling and rigorous argument for Hugo's intellectual significance, Peters also provides substantial archival treasure. This treasure includes details from Hugo's retreat outlines, which take the reader through the weeklong program of twenty-five conferences. There's also a critical diagram that Hugo used as a conceptual aid in describing the threefold levels of living: sinful, natural, and supernatural. Hugo was a dogged proponent of a maximalist Christianity that emphasized the supernatural destiny of humanity, along with the rigorous—if not rigorist—moral responsibilities that entailed. We see these teachings in action in Peters’ massive (and massively rewarding) appendix, which contains Dorothy Day's retreat notes—which are themselves a marvel for Day enthusiasts. This is a valuable piece of historical scholarship that certainly should be required reading for serious students of the Catholic Worker movement, but also those who want to track the development of modern Catholic theology, and contemplate its application to contemporary Christian discourse.
