July 13, 2018
Arguably the most prominent media evangelist of the 20th century, Bishop Fulton Sheen, ordained Paulist Fr. Kevin Lynch and his classmates in 1953. It was an auspicious and fitting start to Fr. Kevin’s long career as a Paulist priest and media innovator.
While Sheen used the radio and TV to share the faith, Fr. Kevin’s medium was the book. He started working at the well-regarded Paulist Press in 1957, and was its president from 1969 to 1998. While there, he oversaw a veritable encyclopedia of religious figures called the Classics of Western Spirituality. The first volume featured the mystic Julian of Norwich.
Fr. Kevin says the books were meant to bridge cultural misunderstandings, and give Catholics the background to communicate their faith.
“There had been, particularly in the latter part of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century, a good deal of antagonism towards Catholicism,” Fr. Kevin says. “Immigrants who were coming in from Catholic sections of Europe … were threatening the status quo. They were coming in great numbers and with a good deal of energy. But they didn’t always have a sense of how to how to hit the right buttons as far as speaking to the broader Catholic society. So that– that’s what appealed to me. That challenge and the reason that I suggested doing the classics of western spirituality was precisely for that reason.”
An impressive 94 volumes were published under Fr. Kevin’s oversight. The last book published during his tenure was Jewish Mystical Autobiographies.
Fr. Kevin says the volumes were enthusiastically received by Catholic as well as Protestant and Jewish clergy.
What was the spiritual takeaway for Fr. Kevin from producing all these works?
“You get the depth of of Christian belief–how deep it goes,” he says. “The ultimate meaning of your life–that’s what they’re dealing with. What does this life–what’s it all about? And how do we grow?”
Books figured prominently from an early age for Fr. Kevin, who was born in 1925. He was one of four children, and the family lived in Belmont, Massachusetts. Fr. Kevin says the town had an excellent public library.
“We were always encouraged during the summer to stop listening to the ball game–the baseball game on the radio in those years–and to go to the library and get out some good books,” Fr. Kevin says.
He read a broad range of topics.
“The first book I took out when I was in the third grade, which meant I was eight or nine years old, was a book called We by Charles Lindbergh, who had flown the ocean as an individual, as just a lone pilot who flew an old plane from New York to Paris and he came home a great great hero in the late 1920s,” Fr. Kevin says. “It was the story of that flight. And I can remember reading it and enjoying it no end.”
Fr. Kevin’s family, particularly his dad, had great educational aspirations for his children.
“He always wanted his sons to go to Harvard,” Fr. Kevin says about his father. “I was approved for Harvard but also he had a very close friend who had a son who had just gone to West Point. … I overheard this man say to my father, ‘John, it doesn’t cost you a dime. They pay for everything–even all the uniforms.’”
The cost savings appealed to Fr. Kevin’s dad, a life insurance executive who also wanted to send his only daughter to a prestigious finishing school. And so Fr. Kevin’s dad arranged for this son to take the civil service exam–which the young man aced–to enter the United States Military Academy. Father and son were thrilled at the prospect of a long Army career.
But while Fr. Kevin was at West Point, something changed. He spent a lot of time at the chapel. When he returned from a Christmas break his final year, after one of his classmates had gone to a seminary, a priest asked a pointed question.
“He said to me, ‘Now what about you?’” Fr. Kevin recalls, knowing the older man could see the possibility of priesthood in him. “I said, ‘I haven’t thought about that too much.’ And so after I thought about it for several weeks and I thought, really, this is what I should do. And I remember praying. But I had the strong inclination that maybe this is right.”
He had known a former Paulist Father once as a child, and he liked that the community was founded by converts.
“I was interested in outreach, not only to Catholics, but to people who were searching,” Fr. Kevin says. “I had sensed that among a number of those cadets (who were) very high-minded but they didn’t have much in the way of a religious background. And we would talk religion a lot. And they had an interest in the Church because they saw that the Catholic cadets were very committed and kind of good-living, high-living.”
When Fr. Kevin entered the seminary, he made a great friend in Fr. Alvin Illig (who died in 1991). As a young man, Fr. Alvin was brimming with energy and ideas. He was the one who invited Bishop Sheen to conduct their ordination. And he convinced Fr. Kevin of the value of bringing new life to Paulist Press.
After Fr. Kevin spent a few years at his initial ministry in Berkeley, he was asked to return East to join Fr. Alvin at the Paulist Press in New Jersey. He spent the bulk of his active ministry in publishing.
While he’s best known for his focus on classic spiritual writers, Fr. Kevin is also impressed by newer thinkers.
The modern spiritual writers, he says, are “deeply influenced by the enormous growth of psychological knowledge in the 20th century.”
“It’s given a much broader span to spirituality and there are some old timers who don’t like that at all. They just want to hang on to the old old old classics,” Fr. Kevin says. “But it seems to me you have to grow.”
Fr. Kevin lives today at the Paulist Fathers Motherhouse on West 59th Street in New York City.
Jennifer Szweda Jordan is a writer and audio producer based in Pittsburgh.