Amid the ferment and tumult in the Catholic Church in the years following the Second Vatican Council, a number of the council’s theological consultants (periti) became figures of note in their own right, at least among Catholics with a close or vested interest in the council and its implementation. Readers of America are likely to be familiar with many of their names: Murray, Rahner, Ratzinger, de Lubac, Congar, Häring, Baum, Küng. There was a time in the late ’60s when any of them could easily pack a lecture hall at a Catholic university in the United States. 

Among the Anglophone periti in those years was a young (well, 40s) British priest, Charles Davis, who was considered by many to be Great Britain’s leading Catholic theologian and who had advised the British episcopate during the council. Davis’s name was easily found in the American press from 1963 through 1966, in Catholic journals like America and Commonweal but also in secular outlets like The New York Times and Time. From June 1963 until October 1966, Davis wrote a regular column for America, “Theological Asides,” that functioned as a sort of council update but also a space for more high-brow theological explorations. He was, by most accounts, considered a progressive but sober-minded scholar, firmly in the camp of those in the church whose instincts were not for revolution but renewal. 

Many Catholics were shocked, then, by a press conference Davis gave on Dec. 20, 1966, followed by television appearances and print interviews. He himself summarized what had happened in an article in The Observer on Jan 1, 1967:

On Sunday, three weeks before Christmas I got up from my desk and went to the chapel. I knew that the end of my struggle had come. I intended to leave the Roman Catholic Church.

Among Davis’s reasons were a loss of belief in the church’s authority and papal primacy—specifically in the case of the assertion of infallibility in the declaration of the dogmas of the Assumption and the Immaculate Conception—and an increasing perception that the Catholic Church had no special claim to any elements of Christianity that were commonly held to be essential. He also strongly critiqued what he saw as the church’s preference for control at the expense of the truth, including on the question of artificial birth control. 

Davis’s critique was sharp, almost condemnatory; a departure from his usual tone. “I have acted from a conviction that I could only find Christ and God and lead others to do so, if I were willing to find myself and be true to myself,” Davis concluded in The Observer. “That I could not have done, had I remained a Roman Catholic.”

Further, Davis wrote, he had plans to marry. The next year, he was wed in an Anglican service to the American-born theologian, community organizer and activist, Florence Henderson (No, not that Florence Henderson). He wrote in his essay for The Observer that he thanked God “that he sent me someone through whose love I was able to find my liberation.” 

The announcement was a bombshell in the press. “For Catholicism,” the Guardian columnist Geoffrey Moorhouse wrote, “it is a blow as bitter as the one Anglicans sustained 100 years ago when John Henry Newman departed for Rome.” The official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, quoted Cardinal John Heenan, Davis’s bishop: “His conscience and his personal relationships are his own concern. We can best prove our friendship by praying that God will guide him in all his undertakings.” Even The New York Times jumped into the fray with two stories in a matter of weeks. Davis’s defection was treated in some corners of the church as less of a betrayal than a tragic loss, one that had its own lessons for the post-Vatican II reality. 

Who was Charles Davis, and why was he praised so fulsomely by a church that doesn’t always take it all that easy on those who flee the flock? He was born in Swindon, England, in 1923; raised Catholic, he was ordained a priest in 1946 and sent to Rome to study at the Pontifical Gregorian University. From 1952 to 1965, he taught at St. Edmund’s Seminary in Ware. In 1965, he moved to the Jesuit-run Heythrop College in London. 

Davis’s books before the council included Liturgy and Doctrine: The Doctrinal Basis of the Liturgical Movement, Theology for Today and God’s Grace in History. He was for a number of years also the editor of Clergy Review (now The Pastoral Review). After his departure from the church, he published an autobiography in 1967, A Question of Conscience. Davis taught at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, for several years before becoming a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, where he would spend more than two decades. He published six more books. In 1991, he moved to Edinburgh, Scotland.

In a long editorial in the Jan. 7, 1967 issue of America after Davis’s public renunciation, the editors wrote of their concern for Davis but also implicitly addressed Davis’s assertion that the church had a credibility problem when it came to the assertion of some of its propositions:

To Charles Davis himself, in this painful hour, we express only our deep esteem, our warm gratitude and our firm hope that God’s providence and grace will restore him to our midst. To ourselves, editors of America, we address, in no maudlin fashion, the admonition to fulfill our journalistic task better than we have, in loyalty to the Church and its institutions, indeed, but also with a more vigorous and courageous effort to combat (first of all in ourselves) whatever lack of concern for truth and for persons dishonors and betrays the Church. 

The editorial was simply titled “Wounded Priest, Wounded Church.” 

Part of the problem was that many Catholics did not see Davis as one among what Father Andrew Greeley had earlier called in America the “The New Breed,” the generation of more radical priests and men and women religious who were inspired by the council. In a 1967 review of A Question of Conscience in The New York Times, reviewer Edward B. Fiske wrote that Davis “was always orthodox. In protest his manner and methods remain the same, only the conclusions have been changed. His testimony, therefore, is not that of the impatient youth or the frustrated liberal but of the well-trained company man who is unable to visualize a middle ground between orthodoxy and anarchy.”

Commonweal noted that Davis’s departure was “particularly painful,” given that Davis was a major figure in the renewal of English Catholicism, was well-known in both the United States and Great Britain for his lectures, articles and books and was also not considered anything close to a rogue theologian by most. “No one could possibly dismiss him as an unstable young rebel, as an erratic and irresponsible critic of the institutional Church, or as someone ignorant of the theory and reality of Catholicism,” Commonweal’s editors wrote on Jan. 6, 1967. 

“On the contrary, of all the younger theologians who have made a mark for themselves during the past few years he has been unusually free of the standard criticisms leveled at the young by the old, at reformers by bureaucrats,” the editors continued. “Balance, restraint and sensitivity marked all of his work (sometimes, indeed, to the frustration of the more restless and aggressive reformers).”

The editor in chief of America at the time, Thurston N. Davis, S.J., weighed in again in the opening pages of the magazine soon after Charles Davis’s announcement. Noting that mentions of the moment had provoked “almost innumerable letters that poured in—and that continue to come,” Father Davis recognized that Davis’s departure had “touched a raw nerve that apparently runs through large areas of the Body of Christ.”

He continued:

The undeniable tendency of so many devout Catholics to insist that they do not regard Charles Davis as just another “defector” deserves close attention. It calls for much soul-searching on the part of those whose lives and work are taken up with the “institutional” side of the Church’s life. Have we who are enmeshed in the Church’s contemporary structures become remote, impersonal, lacking in charity? Are we overly involved in purely Church affairs and too uninvolved in the deep, personal concerns of those outside—and even inside—the narrow limits of parish, school, college or chancery office? Evidently, a lot of the people of God have the notion we are, and it behooves us to do something about it.

In November 1967, Avery Dulles, S.J., reviewed Davis’s A Question of Conscience for America. Though Dulles was critical of the book and of Davis’s “creative disaffiliation” from the church, Dulles concluded with solid praise—in words that might scandalize Dulles’s devotees today:

In a most compelling way, he calls attention to the dangers of an excessive concentration on the hierarchical and institutional aspects of the Church. He shows beyond doubt that those still championing non-historical orthodoxy and clerical paternalism are gravely jeopardizing the Church’s mission in the world today. He successfully brings out the value of flexible and provisional structures with limited scope and commitment. In these and many other respects this book points out directions in which I hope and expect that the Catholic Church will move. For mature and theologically sophisticated readers, a careful study of this clear and thoughtful work will be amply rewarding.

After Davis’s death in Edinburgh in 1999, his family (including his daughter, Claire Henderson Davis, herself a theologian) and friends noted that he had reconciled himself to the Catholic Church to some degree. “While he never regretted the stern decision of 1966, which brought him personal liberation and much happiness,” wrote Adrian Hastings in an obituary for The Independent, “Charles Davis was able in his final years to become a very regular communicant at Catholic eucharists both in Cambridge and in Edinburgh, where he died after struggling for eight years with Parkinson’s disease.”

That return was anticipated somewhat by the noted British Dominican Herbert McCabe, who wrote in New Blackfriars in 1967: “It is not out of the question that Charles Davis should find himself with us once more in an altered and more human Church.”

Of course, the question Charles Davis might ask is this: Are we, 60 years on from his departure, an altered and more human church?

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Our poetry selection for this week is “The World Gives My Mother Back to Me,” by Mia Schilling Grogan. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.