Andrew Senior on John Senior, Proponent of Beauty & Tradition

My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, goodness and beauty. Beginning with his own conversion, he was an instrument of God in converting many others.

As I continue to ponder the ideas of the influential Catholic educator and author John Senior on modernity, technology, and Christian culture, I find myself ever more convinced that his work deserves to be better known. Earlier this year, while on a road trip from Texas to Nebraska, I was able to visit his grave, located in a cemetery in St Mary’s, Kansas. In April I wrote an article on Senior’s life and work,^[*] and shortly thereafter a friend put me in touch with his son, Andrew.

When I approached Mr Andrew Senior about the possibility of answering some questions about his father, he kindly agreed. Having already written on some of these topics elsewhere, a few of the answers are adapted from Ave Atque Vale Pater, an article by Andrew Senior which appeared in The Remnant, and a reminiscence he wrote for the Spanish edition of The Restoration of Christian Culture.

Julian Kwasniewski: Andrew, thank you for agreeing to this interview. I wanted to speak with you about the work and legacy of your father, John Senior, an influential educator and writer whose vision has inspired several generations of Catholics since the peak of his career in the 1970s. Can you introduce your father to our readers, briefly sketching his life?

Andrew Senior: As my father so often said, citing Aristotle and Thomas, beginnings contain ends. In 1960 my father reached the end of a long and zealous search for truth, being received into the Catholic Church. In 1999 he ended his earthly labors and began his eternal life. The events of the intervening thirty-nine years are legendary.

My father was first and foremost a true philosopher, a lover of wisdom, a student, a seeker of truth, and in addition to this and as a necessary result, he became a great teacher, and more than that, a converter. Everyone who ever met him, even briefly, was affected by his intense love of truth, goodness and beauty. Beginning with his own conversion, he was an instrument of God in converting many others.

After joining the Church while teaching English at Cornell University, he moved to Laramie, Wyoming where he taught at the University of Wyoming. As he said so many times, no sooner was he on board the Barque of Peter than he realized it was time to man the pumps. No sooner had he finally come home to Tradition than he saw her being discarded. Joining the Church at a high tide of conversions and vocations, he soon experienced the massive sea change upon which we are all still trying to keep afloat. He was widely known and respected in the traditionalist movement around the globe; he was among the early great pioneers. He knew and counted as friends men such as Archbishop Lefebvre, Walter Matt, Michael Davies, Fr. Harry Marchosky, Fr. Vincent Miceli, Fr. Urban Snyder, Dr. William Marra, Hamish Fraser, et al.

In 1967 my father left Wyoming for Kansas. For the next sixteen years he struggled through the labors for which he is perhaps most well known. Shortly after coming to the University of Kansas he became acquainted with Dr. Dennis Quinn and Dr. Frank Nelick. With these kindred spirits, though as those who knew them can attest they were temperamentally very different men, he founded what came to be known as the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP).

What began as an “experiment in tradition” under an attempt on the part of a modern university to improve the life of undergraduates with an administrative re-arrangement of deck-chairs soon became, in the hands of my father and his colleagues, a program that channeled grace into the hearts of hundreds of beautiful, innocent young souls. What began as a trickle soon became a torrent, and the Legions in power were not long in noticing and reacting violently. As long as students were just skipping class and bombing buildings and following Abbie Hoffman and Jane Fonda, all was well. But here was a real crisis—students were joining the Catholic Church, and worse yet, some of them were becoming priests, monks and nuns! The inquisitorial University officials discovered that these professors dared to say that there was such a thing as the truth, and that honest and diligent students could find it.

Nonetheless, in spite of existing in a constant state of struggle and the eventual closing of the IHP, miracles occurred.  There were so many conversions that to this day nobody knows the real number, and those converts became fruitful and multiplied. Their children and friends continue to be instruments of God in converting others.  There are innumerable good souls in various orders, monasteries, convents, dioceses, parishes, courts, colleges, schools, and of course families, throughout the world, who began to fight the good fight back in those good old days in Kansas.

JK: How would you summarize his educational philosophy? He wanted to help his students return to ancient wisdom and pre-modern contact with nature, but wasn’t he actually innovating in trying to create a new mode of education for modern man that had never existed before historically?

AS: I wouldn’t say he was an innovator. I think rather that he re-discovered something which had been lost. Have you ever heard of W. H. D. Rouse and his colleagues (and later Hans Ørberg), who are credited by some with “inventing” the idea of teaching Latin as a living language? If you read Rouse, he says he did not invent it, but re-discovered it. What is now accepted in most schools as the norm is really a modern innovation. In Europe, not just Latin, but all classes were taught in Latin until the end of the 19^th century and in some places the old traditions held out even longer.

My father did the same thing with teaching in general as Rouse did with Latin. He went back to the way things were before they were “improved” with modernism. My father didn’t just do this with Latin, he taught all of his classes in the old ways, before the whole modern edifice of education had been constructed. He didn’t teach his students how to “get ahead,” to get better grades, to get into better graduate schools; he didn’t burden or befuddle them with all of the apparatus of modern research methods and scholarship. He purposefully ignored all of that. He had no elaborate schemata or special methods. He simply sought to get his students to see the truth, to know the good, and love the beautiful. He once said that all he really did was read good books and have conversations about them.

JK: He wanted to put modern man back in touch with the real. How was his conception of wonder in the face of nature related to regaining the common sense necessary to think correctly?

AS: One of the definitions of insanity is not being in touch with reality. Psychosis is a complete cutoff from reality, neurosis is a bad fit, where one is always trying to make reality conform with one’s disordered wishes. The reason they used to send people to a rural environment (the “funny farm”) was to put them back in direct contact with nature. Knowledge begins in the senses, in the particular, and ends in the intellect, in the universal concept. But it is not so simple as connecting two things. Between the senses and the intellect, the memory and imagination, and the passions, are operative. This is why my father spent so much of his effort on trying to get people in touch with created reality, to fill their memory and imagination with things based on reality, and properly order their passions. Only then can the intellect do its proper work of abstraction.

JK: Wyoming Catholic College’s vision was largely inspired by John Senior’s. How do you think it continues his legacy?

AS: Wyoming Catholic College is doing an admirable job of carrying on my father’s ideas and legacy. Firstly it is doing so by its location, far from the madding crowd of the modern world. Merely spending a little time immersed in such rugged beauty is medicinal. Being exposed to the immediate experience of God’s creation, filling the memory and imagination with wholesome goodness, and diligently reading the Great Books with wise teachers is the best possible education.

JK: Your father was famous for his anti-technology stance. Do you think his attitude would be different were he alive today? Do you think his analysis has only been confirmed?

AS: Perception and the use of words is a curious thing. The press always says anti-abortion, never pro-life. Was my father anti-technology? No, he was pro-reality. Insofar as anything separates us from reality, or distorts our experience and use of it, he was against that. I would say that in general he did not think the Industrial Revolution was an unmitigated good. He believed it was the cause of many problems.

Perhaps a few examples would be helpful. My father never really liked cars. He always said the world was better when men had horses. When he bought a car, he did not want one with a radio, and he never had one with an automatic transmission. And even after we moved to the warm climate of Kansas in 1967, he did not want a car with air conditioning. He finally got one in 1981, only because his cardiologist told him he had to. And even then he didn’t use it much.

When we lived on our little ranch in Wyoming, everyone else had a pickup truck, usually a fairly new one, with a factory-made metal stock rack on the back.  My father managed to find an old 1948 Chevrolet, which had been gently used for many years. He built his own wooden stock rack on the back. We used to ride in it on the way to school, seven miles to town, even on very cold Wyoming winter mornings.

JK: The smartphone and accompanying social media were invented after your father’s death. If he were alive today, do you think he would have countenanced its use in certain circumstances? Or seen it as something that could be abused, but was also capable of promoting good things?

AS: My father said the purpose of a web or net is to capture something. This was in the early 1990s, when it was a conspiracy theory to think that everything was being recorded.

JK: John Senior is often viewed as an escapist—just ignoring and hiding from modernity, from technology, rather than trying to baptize it or convert it. Do you think this is an accurate perception of his thought? Or do you think that this is a valid approach to modernity?

AS: The word “escapist” by itself implies something negative, a sort of failure and defeat. This was not my father’s way. Retreat might be a better word, as he was certainly a fearless fighter. He did however believe that the modern world had become so thoroughly corrupt that, like the Cities of the Plain [i.e., Sodom and Gomorrah], the best thing to do would be to leave. He also always thought rural life was healthier for most people than city life. When we lived in Wyoming, I remember him becoming very upset trying to teach Chaucer. He discovered, in the story of Chanticleer, that the problem wasn’t the difficulties of Middle English, the problem was that none of the students knew anything about chickens.

As far as escapism, my father thought that man had gone too far in using technology in trying to escape from reality, resulting in insanity. He wasn’t trying to lead anyone into hiding from technology, but rather freeing ourselves from it, to stop trying to hide from reality.

As concerns smartphones and social media, even the modern world is starting to realize that they have done great damage to man as a social being. Man lived for centuries without such distractions, now he is killing himself with them.

JK: Senior wrote in “The Last Epistle” that “whatever any work of man achieves, it’s worth is measured by the lady who inspires it.” What work did your mother inspire? She seems like a hidden character, but must have had a deep influence on so much in his life.

AS: My father led a public life, my mother led a very private life. She was a very intelligent, wise, loving, hard-working, and valiant woman. She was also, like Our Lady, a very quiet, interior person. So, I would rather say only that much, and leave my father as the main subject.

AS: Your father was deeply suspicious of thinkers like Maritain and the Von Hildebrands. What was his attitude towards John Paul II’s “Theology of the Body”? How would you characterize your father’s theology of marriage and family life?

When John Paul II was elected, my father said that he hoped he was another Cardinal Mindszenty, who, having suffered under Communism, would rid the Church of Modernism. As the years wore on, my father was bitterly disappointed by John Paul II. Along with Archbishop Lefebvre, he was utterly scandalized by the placing of a statue of Buddha on an altar at the ecumenical meeting in Assisi in 1988.

My father’s ideas on marriage and the family were simply traditional: a man is the head of his family, a woman’s place is in the home, the primary end of marriage is children, etc. For more on this see his article “Revolution in the Home,” in the posthumous collection entitled The Remnants.

JK: What was the home life that he tried to cultivate like? Did he play and sing with the family, as he recommends? How did you see his educational and disciplinary philosophy play itself out concretely in bringing up his own children?

AS: We never had a TV in our house when I was young. We spent our evenings gathered around the hearth of our old Franklin Stove, now condemned as inefficient! As we listened to the soothing sounds of the howling Wyoming wind, we prayed the Rosary, and then my father would read aloud to us. I remember Robinson Crusoe, Treasure Island and Kidnapped, Ivanhoe, Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, and many others. Later in life I was (and remain) quite astonished that we were able to understand and follow the story. We always begged for just one more chapter. He also played the guitar and harmonica, and sang old cowboy songs to us.

Occasionally my father took us camping in the mountains, but not like everyone else. He would have nothing to do with store-bought sleeping bags and tents. He considered them a modern invention for softies. We had to use tarpaulins, which consisted of a large canvas sheet, doubled over, and two thick wool blankets, one under and one over. This was how he had slept under the stars when he was a young cowboy in North Dakota. If a tent was needed, another large canvas piece was propped up, with branches cut from trees. The other kids in school, who had all the modern equipment, thought we were a bit odd, but we were proud of it! They all had the modern Coleman lanterns, we had old-fashioned kerosene ones.

JK: Your father converted to Catholicism on the eve of Vatican II and was deeply critical of the new rite of Mass promulgated by Pope Paul VI. What do you think was his biggest objection to it? What would have been his reaction to Summorum Pontificum and Traditionis Custodes?

AS: The one thing he was most passionate about was the Catholic Church. From the time of his conversion it consumed most of his time, thought and attention. Alas, as soon as he had entered the Church he saw it begin to be betrayed and destroyed by the very forces he had fled in the world. From the calling of the Council through the slow piecemeal introduction of the New Mass, his life in the Church was a constant Calvary.

He never accepted the New Mass. As he wrote in The Restoration of Christian Culture: “From the cultural point of view, the New Catholic Mass established in the United States has been a disaster.” He agreed wholeheartedly with the often-quoted words of The Ottaviani Intervention: “The Novus Ordo represents, both as a whole and in its details, a striking departure from the Catholic theology of the Mass as it was formulated in Session XXII of the Council of Trent.” And the word of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre: “The Novus Ordo Missae, even when said with piety and respect for the liturgical rules, is impregnated with the spirit of Protestantism…. It bears within it a poison harmful to the Faith.”

Some have said that he was content with the New Mass, that he only preferred the Old Rite and only began to attend it due to weakness in his later years. This is most emphatically not true! He was never weak, he remained quite strong all the way until his last moments, and he loved the Old Mass above all things.

As for Summorum Pontificum, I think he would have happily accepted its statement that the Old Mass had never been abrogated, and I am sure he would have been happy to see more Old Masses being offered, but he would not have accepted the modern reasoning process of proposing that there can be two forms of the Roman Rite, and especially the idea that Old Mass is the “Extraordinary Form.” I think he would have predicted the publication of Traditionis Custodes.

JK: Your father is buried in St Mary’s, Kansas. Can you comment on his involvement with the SSPX? Would he have considered himself “one of them” by the end of his life? Why did his attitude toward them change over time?

AS: In the early stages, when the worst of the changes had not yet occurred and because there was simply no alternative, he suffered along for a while with the slowly changing New Mass,  but as soon as there was an alternative he immediately voted with his feet, and with his body and soul. He was extremely grateful to the Society of St. Pius X for continuing to provide the Mass and Sacraments, and to Archbishop Lefebvre himself personally, whom he met on a few occasions. He attended Mass at St. Mary’s gladly and was happily buried there. The last letter he wrote was a short note to Fr. Ramon Angles, Rector of St. Mary’s, thanking him for the Old Mass.

He made a definitive break with the New Mass in 1983. After his heart attack and surgery, while he was recovering in a nominally Catholic hospital, the Chaplain came around to visit him. He asked my father if he was afraid. He replied in the affirmative. The Chaplain advised him to have no fear. “After all,” he said, “no one knows what happens after we die.” Weak and feeble as he was, my father raised his voice and demanded that the man leave the room, informing him as he did so that he was not only not a priest, but not even a Catholic. He then said: “I may have lived awhile with the New Church, suffered under it, but I will not die in it.” On another occasion he said. “If I am not given a fully traditional Requiem Mass I will sit up in my coffin and complain.” Deo gratias, he did not have to!

JK: Of your father’s books, which do you think is the most important? How do you think he wished to be remembered: as a poet, an author, a teacher, a philosopher?

AS: The Restoration of Christian Culture is the most popular of his books and seems to have had the greatest effect.

Poetry was his first and last love, being a cowboy was his youthful dream, being a teacher was his life’s passion, and like Socrates, he was a true lover of wisdom. But I think he would like to be remembered simply as the kind, gentle, humorous man that he was.

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^[*] Julian Kwasniewski, “John Senior: Prophet of Tradition and Realism”, OnePeterFive, April 25, 2023. https://onepeterfive.com/john-senior-prophet-of-tradition-and-realism/