Gustave Weigel

Background

Gustave Weigel was born in Buffalo, N. Y. , the son of August Weigel and Louise Leontine Kiefer. His parents, who had immigrated to the United States in 1902 from Alsace, remained un-Americanized throughout their lives. Alsatian was spoken in their simple and frugal home.

Education

Weigel attended Catholic primary and secondary schools in Buffalo. During these years he developed special interests in public speaking and writing. In 1922 he entered the Jesuit novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, near Poughkeepsie, N. Y. There he sought to transcend the limitations of his background through his studies and developed an Oxford-like accent. Weigel's philosophical and theological studies for the priesthood were done at Woodstock College in Maryland between 1926 and 1934. He became particularly intrigued by epistemology and the quest for "the True" and "the Real" after reading the works of Immanuel Kant and Joseph Maréchal. Weigel learned to appreciate Platonic and Augustinian epistemologies and became sympathetic to subjectivism, relativism, and the theory of innate ideas. "I need a powerful vision of the truth, " he wrote in his diary in 1934. "The truth will make me free but I must see it. Truth can give vision. " Weigel carried out his search for truth in an independent fashion. His need for freedom was expressed in a poem criticizing what he saw as his inadequate theological formation at Woodstock. The "system" attempts to stifle the individual. Therefore, Weigel sought to be linked to it only loosely. He lived, he wrote, "parasitically on the whole and the whole leaves him alone for he is in it but not of it. He has grown big by it. But he never grew into it. " Weigel's impatience with traditional intellectual and spiritual paths was stated clearly in his 1934 diary: "I am making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius on the basis that they leave the soul in freedom. I use my own ideas in these meditations. I know that the ways taught me years ago are impossible. I shall trust the Spirit. " Throughout his life he struggled with the problem of the surrender of his will to authority while preserving his treasured liberty intact. Weigel pursued graduate studies in dogmatic theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome between 1935 and 1937. He received the S. T. D. for a dissertation (completed 1937; published 1938) on the fifth-century theologian Faustus of Riez, whose writings during the Semi-Pelagian controversy Weigel had studied at Woodstock.

Career

Since his scholarship was not judged totally satisfactory, Weigel was assigned to teach dogmatic theology at the Catholic University of Chile at Santiago. Impatient to get on with something more real, Weigel did not give his research sufficient attention, and his dissertation was lacking in acute theological analysis. It was "history as it ought to have been, not as it was, " according to Weigel's friend and colleague John Courtney Murray. He served there from 1937 to 1948, teaching courses in Christology, soteriology, sacraments, Oriental theology, Thomistic metaphysics, and religious psychology. He was dean of the theological faculty from 1942 to 1948. His teaching style was Socratic, probing students to get them to ask ever deeper questions in search of truth. With his impressive communicative abilities, disarming frankness, and simplicity, Weigel charmed both Catholics and Protestants in the English and American communities in Santiago. His popularity led to his removal from Chile in 1948; he simply did not fit the confining mold of the Chilean Jesuits. The order's provincial wrote: "The reasons are brief and almost exclusively for fear of that great 'liberty' which you radiate, perhaps innately from your temperament and formation and the lack of adaptation to the many customs and manners of being and working which is ours and which can be dangerous especially because of the influence that your Reverence has due to your great talents and qualities which few others possess. " Weigel returned to the United States in 1948, depressed, bitter, and without direction in his life. But a new impetus came when John Courtney Murray invited him to become the specialist in Protestant theology for Theological Studies. With great energy Weigel wrote extensive articles, analyzing the writings of Protestant theologians and Protestant ecclesiastical structures. He became a pioneer in the promotion of ecumenism in the United States. Weigel became professor of ecclesiology at Woodstock College in 1949. His theology was quite traditional except for his emphasis on the church as mystery. He stressed that the Roman Catholic Church, as the Mystical Body of Christ, is a divinely instituted society and that the truth of that claim can best be demonstrated by the moral miracle of the church's united and effective existence in the world. In 1954, Weigel nearly died of complications following surgery for a benign tumor. He died suddenly in New York City January 3, 1964.

Achievements

• He was a pioneering advocate of ecumenism and played a key role as interpreter and liaison for non-Catholics at the Second Vatican Council.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Modern God Faith In A Secular Culture

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Religion And The Knowledge Of God

    ( This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)

  • Churches in North America: An introduction

    (Dustjacket tattered, torn, and price clipped.)

  • Catholic Theology In Dialogue

    (Christian Studies, Religious Studies)

  • The Modern God
  • American Catholics: A Protestant - Jewish View
  • Catholic Primer on the Ecumenical Movement Woodstock Papers no. 1

Religion

Afterward his interest in scholarship and teaching declined, and he became an activist in behalf of ecumenism. His ecumenical style was based on his remarkable memory and his magnetic personality. Ecumenism to him meant a kind of conversation between brothers. It was a pursuit of religious truth always coupled with love. In his ecumenical work Weigel was doctrinally uncompromising. In fact, the position he presented in his course on ecclesiology was fundamentally antithetical to Protestantism. Yet he held that, despite seemingly insuperable differences, he was, in some mysterious and truly real way, at one with his separated brethren. He suggested three possible paths to unity. One was compromise: through give and take, a common basis is agreed upon and all melt into one church. Another was comprehension: certain basic principles are accepted but interpreted differently by various churches. The third was conversion: all churches disband and join one all-embracing church. All of these ways Weigel found wanting. He preferred the path of convergence, in which the churches would move closer and closer to one another. It was this coming together, not the achievement of unity, that was the true purpose of ecumenicism. Weigel's final contributions centered on the Second Vatican Council (1962 - 1965). Between 1960 and 1962 he served as a consultant to the Secretariat for the Promotion of Christian Unity. During the council he made three outstanding contributions. First, he was a popular expositor of the purposes of the council to American audiences. Second, he was a member of the U. S. Bishops' Press Panel during the second session of the council in 1963. Third, he was an interpreter for the English-speaking ecumenical observer-delegates to the council. Weigel was not initially optimistic about the council's chances for achieving serious reforms, but he took new hope from the positive, pastoral, and ecumenical approach of Pope John XXIII. The third session in 1963, under the more curial leadership of Pope Paul VI, revived Weigel's pessimism. He was exhausted by the divisive debates and their meager results, which were, he said, "not good enough but far better than we deserved. " Weigel was determined not to return for the council's fourth session. Although tired and disenchanted with conciliar processes, he had an abiding confidence that God's Spirit would straighten out any mess that men could make.

Connections

Father:

August Weigel

Mother:

Louise Leontine Kiefer