The Slow Fruitfulness of His Heart of Mercy: L. Brent Bozell, Jr.

Through the prompt kindness of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, I recently received a gift copy of Daniel Kelly’s book that they had just published on L. Brent Bozell, Jr., entitled Living on Fire After at once reading the book, whose author died in late 2012, I decided that, instead of writing a fuller book review, I would propose to mention some things about Brent Bozell which might not be so well known, not even, perhaps, to Daniel Kelly himself, although he had generous access to many of Brent’s private letters and files. It is my intention, therefore, to speak especially about Brent’s growing understanding and life of the Catholic Faith: his “Fides quaerens intellectum” and his living more fully Christ’s lengthy and very importantly Self-explicated Parable of the Sower: the cultivation of the soil and thus the soul. For, we either continue to grow in our understanding of the Faith, or we shall lose it.

For, though I had met Brent Bozell briefly (and rather uncomprehendingly then on the Feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas on 7 March 1962 in New York City when I was a young 19-year-old Cadet at West Point, I came to know him quite deeply only later, both in the U.S. and in Spain, especially during two intervals of his deep and deepening life (1973-1975, 1984-1991); and then less often and somewhat intermittently thereafter, but only because of me, after my own family unexpectedly broke up in 1991.

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