In the 800 block of North Jefferson Street in Huntington, Indiana, stands one of the most impressive homes I have ever seen. At roughly 17,000 square feet, the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House is a two-and-a-half story Romanesque Revival/Châteauesque style brick-and-stone building. With its two towers—one rounded, and one octagonal—and a slate roof, leaded and stained-glass windows, and multiple chimneys, the Purviance House feels like a castle snatched up out of a European countryside and set down in this small city 20 miles southwest of Fort Wayne. Built in 1892, when the population of Huntington was somewhat less than half of the 17,000 souls that it is today, the Purviance House is one of the most impressive structures in the city of Huntington—indeed, in all of Indiana—but it is by no means an anomaly. Right next door is the Taylor-Zent House, another Romanesque Revival building that is a few years younger but no less impressive; unlike today’s suburban McMansions, both houses were built not just for a lifetime but for the ages.
The Purviance House and the Taylor-Zent House are just two of the 701 contributing properties in Huntington’s North Jefferson Street National Historic District, which includes a remarkable variety of buildings in a dozen or so architectural styles, including both of Huntington's Catholic churches—Saints Peter and Paul, originally a German parish established in 1844, and Saint Mary’s, a parish willed into existence by an Irish farmer in the 1890’s when he got tired of worshiping with the Germans. The two parishes—both still active and independent of each other today—are literally a block apart; their front doors face each other across the residential block in between. Like the Purviance House and the Taylor-Zent House and the many Georgian and Italianate and Victorian and Stick Style and Queen Anne and Craftsmen homes in the North Jefferson Street Historic District, Saint Mary’s and Saints Peter and Paul were built to last by people for whom the very idea of disposable houses and churches and courthouses and libraries was quite literally unthinkable.
When I say “quite literally unthinkable,” I don't mean it the way most people would use that phrase today—in other words, that the folks back then thought about the idea of disposable buildings and rejected it as abhorrent; I mean that the idea could never even have entered their minds, because the culture in which they were formed valued the future as an extension of the past, what Chesterton meant when he called tradition “the democracy of the dead.” In such a culture, people do not disrespect their ancestors by suggesting that all their efforts have led to a world in which nothing needs to be built to last because something better is always coming.
The builders of the houses in the North Jefferson Street Historic District were economical in their efforts, saving the best wood and brick and stone for those areas of their buildings where people might see them, and using wood with less interesting grain and uneven brick and mottled stone in areas where only homeowners and sacristans and librarians and clerks were likely to stumble on them. They weren’t spendthrifts, but they also weren’t cheap, because to be economical is something very different from being cheap. The men of this era built these structures to last because these houses and churches and public buildings were—and still are—the concrete manifestation of the things most valued by the Germans and Irish and English and Miami Indians who built the Lime City from the ground up: hearth and home; family and faith; community and continuity.
Most Americans continued to value those things up through the first half of the 20th century. But in the postwar economic boom—well before the social upheaval of the mid to late 1960’s and the economic crises of the 1970’s and early 1980’s—the increasing affluence of the working class and the expansion of the middle class had a strange effect: Rather than strengthening the bonds between generations, this newfound wealth encouraged mobility. People were “going places,” and if they themselves could not, they wanted to make sure that their children could and did. In Huntington, Indiana, and thousands of other small towns and cities across the United States, the children of farmers and factory workers, department store owners and bank clerks, restaurateurs and tavern owners went off to college, seldom to return. And the newer homes built in the wake of their departure reflected this reality: They were smaller and architecturally less interesting—even though those who built them were generally more affluent than their ancestors were—and many of these houses were intentionally built to last not much longer than a 30-year mortgage.
The David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House and the Taylor-Zent House could reasonably be described as mansions at the time that they were built. But most of the other homes built in the North Jefferson Street Historic District from 1860 to 1930 would not have been so described at the time, though many people call them mansions today. Rather, these were single-family dwellings, but a “single family” back then did not mean simply a father and a mother and 1.7 children. The “nuclear family” was a product of postwar affluence, a reflection of cultural changes that had already occurred, and an indication of changes that were still to come. Many of us think fondly of the era of Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best without realizing that these seemingly idyllic nuclear households were themselves a symptom of changes in the culture that would eventually lead to unprecedentedly high levels of contraception, abortion, and divorce, and historically low levels of marriage and even lower birthrates among native-born Americans—Catholics included.
When the houses in the North Jefferson Street Historic District were being built, the family stretched across generations and down through many branches. Brothers built houses next to each other, and across the street from their parents. Children often moved freely from house to house, counting their cousins not only as kin and friends but as erstwhile roommates. Family dinners were not Mom and Dad and Johnny and Susie in front of a TV, but Grandma and Grandpa and Mother and Father and Aunt and Uncle and cousins, spilling out of the formal dining room into the parlor and, in warm weather, onto the porch. As they do now, Thanksgiving and Christmas came only once a year back then, but the central experience of those celebrations—the reason we regard them as the quintessential family holidays—happened every Sunday, and for quite a few families even more often than that. Many Americans today will reach middle age before having as many dinners with what we now call “extended family” as the Purviances or any of their neighbors likely had in just a year or two.
About a mile northwest of the Purviance house, as the crow flies, another impressive structure—a home of a different kind—rises above the Lime City. Saint Felix Friary was erected in 1928 by the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin. A year before the stock-market crash plunged the country into the Great Depression, the Capuchins were building for the ages, too. Somewhat larger than 62,000 square feet, Saint Felix Friary could hold almost four Purviance Houses, and, as originally constructed, the friary had cells to house over 120 friars. The Capuchins intended Saint Felix Friary for the ages not simply in its architectural details but in its mission as well: The friary was designated as a novitiate, a center for the training of young men to enter the Franciscan brotherhood and the priesthood. Saint Felix Friary was never meant to be a place to retreat from the world, to withdraw from struggles of life, to keep oneself pure from the moral turpitude of the Roaring 20’s. It was, rather, to be a training ground to prepare to engage the world, to establish a firm spiritual foundation for going forth in response to Christ’s Great Commission: to baptize all nations in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.
And for 50 years, Saint Felix Friary did just that. Fr. Benedict Groeschel is the best known of the men who entered the Franciscan life at Saint Felix Friary, but he is only one of hundreds to do so.
And 50 years later, it all came to an end. There are many reasons for the collapse of vocations and the crises within the various religious orders in the second half of the 20th century, but I’m not going to go into them here. Suffice it to say that I am sure we can all agree that many things went horribly wrong, and another 50 years down the line, the Church and society as a whole are still suffering the consequences. By 1978, the Capuchins could find no one who was interested in becoming a novice, and the older friars were dying off or leaving the religious life, and in 1980 the order sold Saint Felix Friary to the Church of the Brethren.
Shortly thereafter, the owners of the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House, who had earlier divided this grand mansion up into nine apartments, boarded up the windows and locked the doors. Up and down North Jefferson Street, many glorious old homes had fallen into disrepair, as the families who had given them life left town or simply died away.
Small towns and big cities; religious orders and secular organizations: All have life cycles similar to those of the men and women who bring them into existence. Like children, they experience periods of rapid growth; if all goes well, they have many years of stable community life; and then time catches up with them, and they go through periods of decay. And because these cycles of life remind us of the lives of men and women, we all too often see a town or a city or a religious order in a period of decay, and become convinced that nothing can be done; the end, it seems clear to us, is nigh. When we say that an elderly man has entered his second childhood, we don’t mean that his youthful vigor has returned, and his best days once again lie ahead. We know that he will return to the dust from which the Creator fashioned the first man.
And so we tend to get pessimistic when we drive down Main Street and see empty storefronts, or we hear of factories closing, or of a religious order collapsing, and a jewel like Saint Felix Friary passing out of the hands of the Church. We may see a certain nobility in those who cling to the past, but all too often we regard them as dreamers at best, and sometimes as fools. “Change is inevitable,” we say; “You can't stop the march of progress.” “Time moves on.”
And yet, down deep inside, our very nature rebels against the idea that this is really progress, especially when the changes we see in the physical world are reflected in the moral and spiritual and religious worlds. We know that something is wrong when men and women no longer get married; when those who do get married no longer have children; when those who do have children no longer baptize them; when those who do baptize them never bring them back to church. We see the sustained assault of the secular and political world on believers and the Church; we may even begin to wonder, Christ’s promise to Saint Peter notwithstanding, whether the gates of Hell might in fact someday prevail against it.
We look around us at a world gone mad, in which an increasing number of people seemingly believe that the sky is green and the grass is blue and a man can marry a man and a girl can have two mothers and a boy can grow up to be a woman if only he sets his mind to it. Even if we aren’t familiar with the term, we recognize that we live in the aftermath of the Long March Through the Institutions, a 50-year campaign in which the political left successfully captured and subverted all of the primary institutions of culture, including many of the human institutions surrounding the Catholic Church. Our whole being urges us to fight back, but we cannot do so effectively, because our own minds have been subverted in such a manner that the only way we can think of to try to take back the institutions of culture is through politics. And yet the history of the modern world, from the time of the French Revolution on, has shown that politics is always the domain of the left, of the forces of revolution. That is why the chief objective of the Long March Through the Institutions was to draw the institutions of culture into the political arena. Politicize the family, the schools, the churches, and the forces of revolution win every time. When we try to fight back politically, we only strengthen the forces of the left, because we are fighting on their battleground. Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges were far closer to the end of the battles over abortion and homosexual marriage than they were to the beginning; the cultural seeds had been sown for both many decades before. As we used to say at Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture during my years as executive editor, “There are no political solutions to cultural problems.”
And so we see a world that’s gone to hell in a handbasket, yet we still want to believe that there is something that we can do. So perhaps we start planning for the long term. We talk about building an ark—call it the S.S. Benedict Option—that can carry cultural memory forward until a day, many decades or perhaps even centuries from now—in any case, long after all of us in this room will be dead—when the world might return to something closer to normal, and the cultural riches of the Christian Faith might once again be appreciated. In the meantime, that ark will protect us and our families from the deluge around us. We may not be going out and baptizing all nations, but at least we can save our souls and the souls of our children. We tell ourselves that this is exactly what Saint Benedict, the father of Western monasticism, was doing in the wake of the collapse of the Western Roman Empire.
But was it? Looking backward, it may seem like it was, because we know that the monasteries of Western Europe became cultural repositories that saved, among other things, many classical manuscripts that might otherwise have been lost. They became centers of the Christian Faith for the communities that surrounded them. They created agricultural techniques that helped Europe become a true, settled, stable civilization. In the late Middle Ages, they spawned the first hospitals and universities. Monasteries were, in short, remarkable agents of tradition and of civilization.
But it is a logical fallacy to assume that, because all of these things happened as a result of the monasteries, Saint Benedict must have intended each of them. There’s no reason to believe that he did. Rather, like all saints, he had one overriding purpose in everything that he did. As St. Francis de Sales would put it a thousand years later, “Serve and love God well. This should be our only intention.”
To serve God well, we must serve our fellow man. To love God well, we must love our fellow man. Even cloistered monasteries are places of service and love, through the prayers and liturgies that they offer on our behalf. Down through the centuries, much of the life of the average monk has consisted of work on behalf of his fellow man—not the men of some far-flung future, the object of a “Benedict Option,” but the men of his day and age.
Very few of us are called to the religious life, to be monks or nuns. But every one of us is called to the same process of conversion and renewal that monks and nuns exemplify. Through the grace of God, we must discern His will and remake our own lives in the image of Christ. And as we renew our lives, we not only can but must renew the world around us.
Faith leads to charity, to love of God and neighbor; and both faith and charity are animated by hope. No matter how bad things may seem at any point in time, we know that the victory is already won. Christ conquered death, and in doing so, He made the restoration of the world possible. The work of that restoration lies in our hands.
The subversion of the culture through the Long March Through the Institutions has filled too many of us with despair, which is the opposite of hope. If we indulge it rather than resist it, despair is also one of the greatest of sins. But when we look at all that there is to do, we feel small and powerless, and with good reason. How can we renew the culture, when the culture is so far gone?
The first step in doing anything is recognizing that we cannot do everything. Pregnancy care centers throughout the United States have saved many babies from abortion since 1973, but if all of those who have put their efforts into those organizations had convinced themselves that there was no sense in saving one baby unless they could save them all, no babies would have been saved. Every baby saved is a mother saved as well, and perhaps a father. And every baby and every mother and every father saved opens up new possibilities that we cannot see at the time, and that we ourselves may never see, but which set the world on a new path and open it up to new infusions of grace. At the national level, in the world of politics, [in 2017] the pro-life movement continues to lose, pro-life Supreme Court nominations notwithstanding; but at the local level, outside of the realm of politics, lives are saved, lives are changed, and the culture is renewed.
In 2000, after sitting empty for 20 years, the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House was condemned, and came within weeks of demolition. A businessman from North Manchester, Indiana, stepped in, purchased the property, and began its restoration. Fifteen years later, after restoring most of the exterior, he sold it to someone else, who has taken on the task of restoring the interior. The possibility that it may be restored to its former glory is one of many little things that has brought new life to the North Jefferson Street Historic District. Other houses are being restored; new families are moving in; a city that 35 years ago many said would never recover has new reason for hope. A new generation of young people is finding value in older buildings, and in small-town life, and in the hearth and home, family and faith, community and continuity that they represent. The politicians in Washington, D.C., don’t spend any time thinking about Huntington, Indiana, but for the residents of Huntington, that’s not a bad thing.
In 2010, a decade after the Purviance House was pulled back from the brink of oblivion, the Church of the Brethren in Huntington could no longer afford the upkeep on the former Saint Felix Friary, and so they were looking to sell. A Catholic businessman and investor from Fort Wayne came out to take a look. Over the years, the Church of the Brethren had combined a number of the monastic cells of the friary to make larger rooms; but there was one cell that had never been touched. The door had been padlocked, and the interior of the cell was just as its former occupant had left it when he departed Huntington in 1956.
The friar whose brown robe is still draped across the small bed in his humble cell was the Venerable [now Blessed] Fr. Solanus Casey, the porter of Saint Bonaventure Monastery in Detroit, friend of the poor, and worker of wonders both during his life on this earth and after it. Father Solanus, who will be beatified in Detroit later this year [2017], lived at Saint Felix Friary for ten years, from 1946 through 1956. During Father Solanus’s final year at Saint Felix, a young man named Ron Rieder entered the friary. Fifty-five years later, Fr. Ron Rieder, then the pastor of Saints Peter and Paul Church in Huntington, would introduce John Tippmann, the Catholic businessman from Fort Wayne, to the life of Father Solanus.
Captivated by the story of the humble friar and wonderworker, Mr. Tippmann vowed to purchase Saint Felix Friary with the intention of restoring it and returning it to the Catholic Church. Meanwhile, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Bishop Kevin Rhoades had erected the Franciscan Brothers Minor, a private association of the faithful dedicated to living the Franciscan life according to Saint Francis’s Rule of 1223. When Bishop Rhoades was transferred to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend in 2010, he brought the Franciscan Brothers Minor with him. You can probably see where this is going . . .
Today, Saint Felix Friary has been lovingly restored. It functions as a Catholic center and retreat house, and it is one of five friaries in the Diocese of Fort Wayne and South Bend of the Franciscan Brothers Minor, who have grown from eight men in November 2009 to more than 50 brothers today.
When the Capuchins built Saint Felix Friary in 1928, they could not know where their efforts would lead. They weren’t creating a “Benedict Option” community; they were simply serving and loving God and their fellow man. But they set into motion a chain of events that bears spiritual fruit to this day. All of the Saint Felix Capuchins from 1928 have gone on to their eternal reward, but their actions back then continue to redeem the culture right now.
But wait—there’s more. I mentioned that Fr. Benedict Groeschel entered the Franciscan novitiate at Saint Felix Friary. It was there, in 1950, at the age of 17, that he first met Fr. Solanus Casey, and that encounter would mark him forever. Throughout Fr. Benedict Groeschel’s life, Father Solanus would remain a touchstone for his understanding of what it meant to be a Franciscan. And that example would lead, in 1987, to Father Groeschel’s founding of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal, along with seven other Capuchin priest friars, including, of course, Fr. [now Bishop] Bob Lombardo, who addressed this group last month. While I don’t need to tell you the great fruit that has resulted from Father Bob’s work in founding the Franciscans of the Eucharist of Chicago, I will reveal one personal grace: I am certain that without the powerful intercession of the sisters at the Mission of Our Lady of the Angels, I would not be moving to Huntington this weekend to start my new position at Our Sunday Visitor on Monday. In July, my family and I will move into our new home just a few doors up the street from the David Alonzo and Elizabeth Purviance House, and within easy walking distance of Saint Felix Friary, where I expect to go frequently to pay my respects to the humble friar whom my grandmother had met, and whose beatification and eventual canonization she prayed for every day of her life, never realizing the role that Father Solanus would one day play in mine.
There are no political solutions to cultural problems; but there are no cultural solutions to cultural problems, either. Cultural problems require a religious solution: Walking in the way of faith; asking God for forgiveness and begging Him for His grace; doing the right thing without thought for tomorrow or despair for today, because, while we may never know in this life the chain of events that the most humble of our actions may set into motion, God knows. We don’t have to fix everything; we cannot fix everything. All we can do—all we are called to do—is to love God, and to love our neighbor, wherever that may take us.
I will close with four short quotations, the first three from Fr. Solanus Casey, and the last from St. Josemaría Escrivá, because I think that, taken together, they sum up perfectly the principles that should guide us as we begin the Countermarch Through the Institutions, the restoration of culture by enshrining Christ first in our hearts:
From Father Solanus:
We are continually immersed in God's merciful grace like the air that permeates us.
We must be faithful to the present moment or we will frustrate the plan of God for our lives.
Do not pray for easy lives; pray to be stronger people. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks.
And from St. Josemaría Escrivá:
The task for a Christian is to drown evil in an abundance of good. It is not a question of negative campaigns, or of being anti anything. On the contrary, we should live positively, full of optimism, with youthfulness, joy and peace. We should be understanding with everybody, with the followers of Christ, and with those who abandon him, or do not know him at all. But understanding does not mean drawing back, or remaining indifferent, but being active.
This speech was delivered in Chicago on June 9, 2017, to the Catholic Citizens of Illinois. It is published here for the first time.