The Lessons of Fr. Paul Mankowski

Paul Mankowski, S.J., who died unexpectedly four years ago this past fall, was the kind of priest who seemed to spring from pages of the best Catholic fiction—a larger-than-life character stitched together by seeming paradoxes.

He was an ardent Jesuit who nonetheless spent most of his life being disciplined, even silenced, within his religious order. He was among the best stylists alive of the world’s reigning living language, English, yet he was also, in his day job, a master of ancient tongues, some long vanished from the earth. Renowned among the Catholic cognoscenti for his intellect, he was first and foremost a humble priest; one of my favorite emails from him was a diary he kept during a summer spent touring orphanages in Romania with the Missionaries of Charity.

Even so, for all the characteristics that could have made him legendary, Paul Mankowski, today as in his lifetime, is not well known in the United States outside a small circle of tradition-minded Catholic intellectual types. Thus, it was all the more wonderful to discover, two years ago on my first trip to Australia, that this remarkable priest is remembered Down Under—not only at Campion College, where he was on the Board of International Advisors, but elsewhere. One of my most vivid memories from that visit is of a couple in Melbourne who introduced themselves after a talk and asked with tears in their eyes whether I’d ever known the late, great Fr. Mankowski.

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