Jesuit Father James Schall (1928-2019): Noted Catholic Intellectual Dies Holy Wednesday

The beloved Georgetown professor has written over 30 books and countless articles for many publications including the National Catholic Register.

Father James Schall, S.J., who died April 17, 2019.
Father James Schall, S.J., who died April 17, 2019. (photo: Photo courtesy of Ignatius Press)

SAN JOSE, Ca. - Jesuit Father James Schall, a longtime professor of philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of numerous books and essays, died Holy Wednesday at the age of 91.

Father Schall was born Jan. 28, 1928, in Pocahontas, Iowa, and after high school, he spent time at the University of Santa Clara and in the U.S. Army.

He entered the California Province of the Society of Jesus in 1948, receiving a master’s degree in philosophy from Gonzaga University in 1955 and a doctorate in political philosophy from Georgetown University in 1960.

Father Schall was ordained a priest in 1963 and earned a master’s degree in theology from Santa Clara the following year.

Before his appointment as a professor at Georgetown in 1978, he taught at the University of San Francisco and at the Pontifical Gregorian University. He taught in Georgetown’s Department of Government until his 2012 retirement.

Father Schall served on the National Endowment for the Humanities’ National Council on the Humanities from 1984 to 1990 and was part of the Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace from 1977 to 1982.

He spent his last years at the Jesuit retirement home in Los Gatos, California, where he had lived as a novice more than 60 years earlier. He continued to write during his retirement. He died April 17 after a short hospitalization.

A highly regarded intellectual, he wrote for several Catholic publications over his career, including the Register.

Perhaps his best-known book is Another Sort of Learning, published in 1988.

Father Schall spoke to CNA in 2013 about some of his recent books, Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading and Reasonable Pleasures: The Strange Coherences of Catholicism, which were guided by the thought of Plato and Aristotle, respectively.

The priest told CNA that in “all the dialogues that Plato wrote, he asked the question, ‘Was it necessary that Socrates be executed by the best city?’” which question he called “the foundation of political philosophy.”

Father Schall explained that a Christian reading Plato will be struck by the fact “that the death of Christ and the death of Socrates are paradigmatic to each other: … They are both in a trial; both are in the best cities of their time.”

“So the question” central to political philosophy is: “How is it possible that the two best men were killed by a trial?”

“That enigma of the similarity in their deaths has always been in my mind the link between reason and revelation,” he said, “and why (the two deaths) must be considered both together and uniquely in themselves.”

The deaths of these just men raise this problem, Father Schall explained: “The just man will be persecuted, and the unjust will have rewards in this life.”

“The question (of injustice in the world) is unanswerable without revelation, but revelation’s idea of the resurrection of the body brings to completion several strands of thought,” he said. Christianity “says the resurrection of the body, once it is revealed to you by the source of intelligence, is understandable to you if you are asking the right questions.”