Project MUSE - The Rev. John W. O’Malley, S.J. (1927–2022)

John W. O’Malley, S.J., died on September 11, 2022, in Baltimore, aged 95, after a brief illness. A scholar of Renaissance humanism, Fr. O’Malley numbers, internationally, among the most distinguished church historians of his generation. Reflecting both his scholarly accomplishment and his talented commitment to the sodalitas litterarum, he held the presidencies of this journal’s sponsoring organization (1990) and of the Renaissance Society of America (1998–2000). He was an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1995), the American Philosophical Society (1997), the Accademia di San Carlo (2001), and corresponding fellow of the Pontifical Committee for Historical Sciences (2012). Both societies of which he was president offered him their lifetime achievement awards (2012 and 2005, respectively), as did the Society for Italian Historical Studies (2002). In 2016, the graduate school of Harvard University awarded him its highest prize for scholarly achievement by a graduate, the Centennial Medal.

Fr. O’Malley was born in 1927 in Tiltonsville, Ohio, the only child of Charles O’Malley, a candy merchant, and his wife Elizabeth. His entrance into the Jesuit order in 1946 was delayed by a semester after his high school graduation so that he could remediate his deficient Latin, and he was ordained a priest in 1959. He earned his doctorate in 1965 at Harvard University under the direction of Myron P. Gilmore with a dissertation on church reform in the thought of the Augustinian churchman and Renaissance humanist Giles of Viterbo. Archival research into Giles’s thought brought him to Rome while the Second Vatican Council was in session, and this exposure to the council shaped his life-long passion for church [End Page 838] councils and reform, historical and contemporary. He participated in two of his order’s General Congregations (1975, 1983), both of which he attended with Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, and the latter of which brought the papal intervention into the order’s governance to an end. His principal faculty appointments were at the University of Detroit (1965–1979), Weston Jesuit School of Theology (1979–2006), and Georgetown University (2006–2020).

Fr. O’Malley’s name appears as author on the covers of twelve monographs and five volumes of his own collected works. He edited or co-edited eleven additional volumes. He penned over 150 articles, both scholarly and popular, innumerable book reviews, and a memoir. His name graces the front matter of a book series he founded and a Festschrift dedicated to him. A full review of his scholarly contribution cannot be achieved in a single tribute; here it will be epitomized with reference to four major scholarly themes. First, built on the groundwork laid in his study of Giles, Fr. O’Malley’s second monograph, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome (1979), investigated sacred oratory at the papal court in the decades on either side of the year 1500 according to variations in style that he identified as thematic and panegyric. Praise and Blame underscored fundamental associations between reforming agenda and rhetorical style. The twenty pages of its second chapter, which elucidate the epideictic sermon according to six characteristics, exemplify hallmarks of Fr. O’Malley’s own expository style, consistently incisive and light-some such as is rarely found simultaneously in academic prose. Praise and Blame also planted seeds that came to later fruition in Four Cultures of the West (2004) and constructed the barbican from which he assayed the three councils—Trent, Vatican I, and Vatican II—in courses he taught for decades to Jesuit scholastics and other students at Weston and in the writing that occupied him especially in late career. Indeed, his last published article, appearing in the Jesuit periodical America this past June, was on the history of papal power in relation to these three councils.

Second, fourteen years separate Praise and Blame from his next monograph The First Jesuits (1993). This work situated the foundations of the Society of Jesus in the context of a developing Renaissance culture, which both...