A second-rate Catholic education is no more acceptable today than was the practice denounced in the Old Testament of offering God the maimed and disfigured animals from the flock," said Fr. Bernard Lonergan, SJ, in a 1949 lecture, when he was beginning his great work Insight: A Study of Human Understanding.

"Frankly . . . the present work may be reproached for excessive ambition. But . . . one has to strive to mount to the level of one's time," said Fr. Lonergan four years later in his completed Insight.

These remarks define Lonergan's vocation: to be a Christian thinker, to rescue Catholic thought from the slump it fell into after Thomas Aquinas, to restore it to the place it deserves as heir of the Middle Ages, and to mount to the level of the times.

Those who write lives of saints tend to find the mature saint in the infant. There is the same danger when it comes to the life of a scholar; we are apt to think of Lonergan as someone born with an intellectual vocation and someone who followed it steadily, constant as the North Star, throughout his life.

Wrong on both counts! First of all, he was not born with that vocation. He was born the way the rest of us were; he went to grade school, was an altar boy at his church, and found Sunday vespers there as tedious as did other servers. He once told about how his father, home for the winter from surveying western prairies for the government, harnessed the horses one Sunday afternoon and took his sons on a sleigh ride, freeing them from at least one tedious tour of duty at vespers.

And he got into mischief as other kids do: he taught his two younger brothers to play poker, took their money like a veteran riverboat gambler, and restored it only when they threatened to report it to their parents.

Wrong on the second count too. His intellectual vocation, when he found it, did not run smoothly from start to finish. His studies of Aquinas, his Latin treatises on the Trinity and the Incarnation, his two masterpieces (Insight and Method in Theology), his lectures and essays, his courses on economics -- none of these rolled out in order, as if planned by computer. No, he was feeling his way as he went; there was a series of hurdles to surmount and, in the end, an unfinished task.

Take a minor hurdle to begin with. Bernard attended Loyola High in Montreal and promptly became a loafer -- his own word! He blamed it on the Jesuits, who, he said, did not know how to make him work. Take that with a grain of salt -- he was reminiscing 60 years later; he went through four years of high school in two years, which means he must have done at least some work; and he respected the Jesuits enough to join them in '22.

Anyway, he entered religious life and left behind his loafing days, if they ever existed. After the novitiate in Guelph, Ontario, he started juniorate studies there. By year two he was teaching languages to the novices and math to fellow juniors and was "beadle" (the go-between between the rector and fellow scholastics). He was also keeping up his Latin, Greek, and English studies and taking part in Christmas plays, elocution exercises, and other sidelines. Jesuits knew how to make him work!

But a second hurdle he faced was serious. For members of a religious order, a vocation to be a thinker is a vocation within a vocation; their primary call is to the order; they do not decide to be pastor, teacher, missionary, or anything else by themselves. Lonergan had to receive a mandate for the job he was ultimately to take on, and that was not a simple matter.

When humanities studies at Guelph were over, he was sent to England for philosophy studies at Heythrop College and for additional studies at the University of London. Four years there brought him face to face with his intellectual vocation. Fine, that's what such studies are for. The trouble was that his thinking had already taken such long strides that he was out of touch with his superiors.

Returning to Canada in 1930, he taught at his alma mater in Montreal for regency and promptly got into difficulties worse than any boyhood mischief. His rapport with his rector was on the minus side, two of his best friends left the Society, and he himself had a vocation crisis over what he considered an unjust ruling: his superiors postponed his theology studies for a year.

His vocation survived (he later said the crisis taught him to pray), but at a price. He wrote in a letter two years later: "I had regarded myself as one condemned to sacrifice his real interests and, in general, to be suspected and to get into trouble for things I could not help and could not explain."

What saved him from a life of frustration was his provincial's decision, when Lonergan was in theology studies in Montreal, to send him to Rome for a doctorate in philosophy. This unexpected move had high symbolic value for Bernard. "Here was a magnificent vote of confidence," he wrote, "which after years of painful introversionwas consolation indeed."

But a third, quite different obstacle threatened his work years later: a brush with death just when he was ready to cap 40 years of work with what he meant to be his masterpiece. He was teaching at the Gregorian in Rome, a mini-sabbatical had been promised him, and in 1964-65 he got down to work.

Well, not quite. Hindsight is an extremely accurate but entirely useless intellectual talent. Lonergan's letters of 1965 contain what hindsight recognizes as ominous signs. In January: "Started to try and get Method off the ground; still on runway, motors hummed a bit, but no movement yet." In February: "I had last class on February 1 and have been trying to get off ground ever since." In March: "There is not the same old drive."

The old drive was gone indeed, and for a reason. Home in Canada for the summer and fall of 1965, Lonergan went for a routine checkup. They discovered lung cancer, and the affected organ was removed. Infection set in, further surgery was necessary, and after a protracted stay in hospital he went home for a year of recovery.

His full strength never returned, and he labored under the threat of cancer lodged elsewhere, waiting to break out anew. How much time did he have? In fact, almost 20 years, but he did not know that. It seems that he gave himself five years, trusting God to allow him that much, and, indeed, after five years of painful work he finished Method in Theology in 1971.

Would this elderly man, a "loafer" in high school, call it quits on his intellectual vocation and live out his days in retirement? As far as we know, this never occurred to him; he debated whether to go back to Christology or to take up an early interest he had in economics, but not whether to retire.

Economics won the debate. It was fitting that it should, but to understand that we have to go back to the 1930s, to that formative decade in which, however, he published hardly anything, to his thinking before his dissertation on Thomas Aquinas, and long before his great books Insight and Method.

A file of his work in the 1930s includes essays that reveal an interest underlying his great work on cognitional theory, epistemology, metaphysics, and existential ethics. This interest shows up in that formative period as cultural, social, political, and economic rather than cognitional and metaphysical. His area is history rather than the great chain of being. His partners in dialogue are Hegel and Marx rather than Aristotle and Aquinas. His sphere is the world we live in rather than the world we think in, though to think about the world we live in remained his vocation.

These documents make clear that Lonergan's interest and his work in Insight and Method can be regarded as instrumental to that underlying and strictly pastoral concern. This makes sense of his decision, when Method was published, to spend the time he had left on economics, a topic that had engaged his study from 1930 on.

His final active years (1975-1983), spent at Boston College, were devoted to economics. It was his view (and this is one of the clearest clues we have to what was the driving force of his life work) that the moral precepts we issue in this field are quite useless unless we solve the problem of economics itself, and that science was in a total mess -- it was not only Catholic thought that needed to mount to the level of the time. Lonergan said of his work in general that it would not catch on for 100 years, but of his work in economics he said, "It will be 150 years before this takes hold." But his work in economics was a close partner to his pastoral theology and was undertaken, he said, so that "the widows and orphans won't starve."

The great Catholic thinker was, in his own way, a great Catholic pastor too.

Fr. Frederick Crowe, SJ, professor of theology at Regis College, works with fellow member of the Lonergan Research Institute Fr. Robert Doran, SJ, editing the collected works of Fr. Lonergan.