Rev. James Kelsey McConica, CSB, O.C. (1930–2023)

Rev. James Kelsey McConica, CSB, O.C. (1930–2023) James K. Farge CSB Click for larger view View full resolution Rev. James Kelsey McConica, CSB, O.C. (1930–2023) Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Officer of the Order of Canada, Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Corresponding Member of the British Academy, Foreign Member of the Royal Belgian Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Chaplain of the Sovereign and Military Order of Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem, Rhodes and Malta, Guggenheim Fellow, holder of honorary degrees from six universities, Director of the Canadian Rhodes Scholars' Foundation, Chair of the Editorial Board of the Toronto Collected Works of Erasmus (CWE), James Kelsey McConica was born in Luseland, Saskatchewan. After taking his B.A. in History and Philosophy from the University of Saskatchewan in 1951, he earned the Oxford B.A. (1954) and M.A. (1957). He taught as an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Saskatchewan until 1962, when he returned to Oxford to earn the D.Phil. (1963) with a thesis entitled "The Continuity of Humanist Ideas during the English Reformation to 1558." His first book, English Humanists and Reformation Politics (Oxford, 1965; reprinted 1968) established him as a leading authority in the field of Renaissance humanism. He and Natalie Zemon Davis co-founded the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium in 1964 and its bilingual quarterly journal Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme. With studies at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, he earned an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1964, submitting a thesis titled "St. Thomas Aquinas's Doctrine of Analogy in the Commentary on the Sentences." End Page 452 Having been received into the Catholic Church in 1957, he had a growing conviction that he was called to the priesthood. He joined the Congregation of St. Basil, a teaching community that had founded St. Michael's College, Toronto, in 1852. After three years of theological studies, he was ordained in 1967. Using the Guggenheim Fellowship and two other grants, he did further research in Princeton and Oxford, returning after each research break to teach at the Pontifical Institute. In 1970–71 he was a Fellow of the Shelby Collum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton. From 1984 to 1990 Fr. McConica was President and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St. Michael's College. It was a difficult period of financial constraint, during which he used three outlets to lessen the burden of administrative duties: he helped prepare particularly promising students in competition to win a Rhodes Scholarship that had been so advantageous to him; he enhanced the St. Michael's campus by planting trees, roses, and other perennials, and he worked to make the campus ministry more relevant on campus and in St. Basil's Collegiate Church. From 1990 to 1997, Fr. McConica was once again a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. In those years he was a non-stipendiary member of both the Faculty of History and the Faculty of Theology. He was the first Roman Catholic priest to preside at All Souls Evening Prayer service and and helped in ministry to prisoners in the Oxford jail. For recreation he helped organize and train the Oxford rowing team. As Chairman of the Editorial Board of the Collected Works of Erasmus since 1975, he was constantly on the watch for good translators of Erasmus' Latin prose into contemporary English and then for editors who could put those volumes of correspondence and of educational, biblical, and controversial texts into a factual context. The CWE series, having now published 74 volumes of its eventual 87, is considered by many to be among the most ambitious and most successful publishing ventures in the past century. In 1996, Father McConica was elected Praeses, or President, of the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Founded in 1929 as the first humanities research institute in Canada, it was in serious financial straits. Reluctantly, he replaced the elaborate Gilsonian graduate teaching program with a smaller one in which fewer Fellows, while doing their own research, supervise the research of young post-doctoral Fellows. Through...