Thanksgiving Day, when most of the U.S. was attacking a turkey with trimmings, John Courtney Murray, S.J., and TIME Associate Editor Douglas Auchincloss sat down to scrambled eggs and Chesapeake Bay crab in a lonely roadside restaurant outside Baltimore. Being members of professions that work on holidays when there is work to be done, they were at work—on this week’s TIME cover story.
The long discussions between priest and writer, the source of much of the story, began the day before, when Father Murray met Auchincloss and Researcher Paula von Haimberger Arno at Baltimore’s Pennsylvania Station. Driving his 1960 Dodge through the city’s hilly outskirts to his headquarters at Woodstock College, Father Murray pondered the rapid disappearance of the U.S. countryside and good-naturedly brushed aside Mrs. Arno’s apology for “wrecking his schedule.” Replied the Jesuit: “What of a little wreckage? There is nothing but wreckage around us today.”
Once inside one of the seminary’s U-shaped, granite buildings, the energetic theologian turned to the question of church and state, and the discussion reached back to Thomas Aquinas and back to the transitional thought of 16th century St. Robert Bellarmine.* At one point. Father Murray had to interrupt the interview for his afternoon lecture to some 200 young seminarians. Mrs. Arno, who earlier in the day had mistakenly entered a cloistered area of the tree-lined campus, was not allowed to attend the class; Auchincloss went, admitted to his host that he had some difficulty keeping awake during the half of the discussion on the Arian heresy conducted in Latin, although he had struggled with the language for a dozen years at Buckley School, Groton and Yale.
At times, the talks eased away from the deeper subject matter to such topics as the effect of drugs on the human consciousness, and the effects of Parisian restaurants on the palate. When his conferences with Father Murray were finished. Auchincloss returned to his Manhattan apartment to pore over volumes of research and finally to write. As is his practice, he wrote at home on his electric Olivetti, stopping from time to time to make himself some hot soup.
It was Protestant Douglas Auchincloss’ 17th TIME cover story (among the others: Protestant Theologian Paul Tillich, Rabbi Louis Finkelstein, and the Dead Sea Scrolls) in 14 years as TIME’s Religion writer. Of this one, Auchincloss had an impression he will not soon forget: “The most relentlessly intellectual cover story I’ve ever done.”
* The title page of Volume 1 of the complete works of Bellarmine (seven volumes) in the Fordham University Library forms the background of Artist Boris Chaliapin’s cover painting.
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