Gregory Baum

Gregory Baum was one of the twentieth century’s most consequential Catholic theologians, a German-born refugee who helped rewrite the church’s relationship with Judaism, embraced liberation theology and critical sociology, and spent a long career insisting that God’s grace was not the property of any institution.

He was born Gerhard Albert Baum in Berlin on June 20, 1923, to Bettie, née Meyer, and Franz Siegfried Baum. His father was Protestant and died early; his mother was Jewish and possessed a deep feeling for medieval art, introducing her son to Gothic and Romanesque architecture on trips through Europe. That early formation in beauty across traditions was perhaps the least likely seed of what became a lifelong theological method: finding sacred meaning in places the institution hadn’t yet sanctioned. Beauty, it turns out, doesn’t ask for a membership card, and neither, Baum eventually concluded, does grace.

When the Second World War began, his mother sent her seventeen-year-old son to England to keep him beyond the reach of the Nazi racial laws. She stayed behind, working as a nurse, and contracted pneumonia in the hospital where she was employed. She died during the war without seeing her son again. In England, British authorities interned Baum along with other German nationals, many of them Jewish scholars who volunteered to teach in the camps. He found the intellectual atmosphere exhilarating rather than punishing.

In 1940 he was transferred to Canada, arriving by boat at Quebec City and then moving through a succession of internment camps: Trois-Rivières, then New Brunswick, then Farnham, and finally Sherbrooke, where he was held between 1941 and 1944. Conditions were austere by any measure. Inmates wore prisoner-of-war uniforms marked with a red-orange target on the back, outgoing and incoming mail was intercepted, exits from the camp were forbidden in the early years, and unannounced dormitory inspections were standard practice. Canada had no refugee law at the time, and a federal official of the era reportedly summarised official sentiment in a phrase: zero of these refugees on Canadian soil was already too many. Yet Baum, speaking to Le Devoir at the age of ninety, said the period had been, in his words, “une incroyable aventure”: at seventeen, with everything still ahead of him, the camp intellectuals who set up informal educational programmes gave him precisely the formation he needed. He recalled a “remarkable woman” who visited the camp, lobbied the Canadian government, and assembled scholarships to allow some of the younger internees to leave for university. It was through her intervention that he was eventually sponsored to attend McMaster University in Hamilton, where he studied mathematics and physics.

At McMaster he also started reading Catholic philosophy, Thomas Aquinas among others, and felt himself drawn toward both Catholicism and the seminary. He converted to Catholicism during the war years and joined the Augustinian order in 1947. He went on to study theology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, a rigorous academic environment that sharpened his already restless interest in the church’s relationship with the wider world. He was ordained a priest in 1954. Four years later he published That They May Be One (1958), an early and substantive treatment of Catholic ecumenism that drew attention in North American theological circles and established his reputation as someone who took seriously the possibility of genuine dialogue between churches that had spent centuries treating each other as adversaries.

That reputation brought him to the attention of Cardinal Augustin Bea, then president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and a close ally of Pope John XXIII. Bea was looking for Catholic theologians with credible expertise in Catholic-Jewish relations, and he found Baum. In November 1960, Baum attended his first session of the Secretariat in Rome. He later recalled, in an interview with The Catholic Register in Toronto in 2012, that Cardinal Bea opened that meeting with a direct message from the pope: the Secretariat was to prepare a statement rethinking the church’s entire relationship with the Jewish people. St. John XXIII’s grief over the murder of six million Jews in the heart of Christian Europe was, Baum understood, among the primary forces propelling the whole council. He had already been publishing in academic journals on Catholic-Jewish relations, so the assignment fitted his existing work exactly.

Baum wrote the first draft of what became Nostra Aetate, the “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” and was later among the small group of theologians who worked through the fourth and final draft before its promulgation. The document ended the church’s centuries-old teaching that held Jews collectively responsible for the death of Jesus. It also expanded, in subsequent drafts, to address the church’s relationship with all the world’s major religions, a broadening of scope that turned a pastoral gesture toward one community into a structural rethinking of how Rome related to human religious experience as a whole. Baum attended all three sessions of the council as a peritus, or theological expert, and his consultative work covered three conciliar documents: Nostra Aetate, the Decree on Ecumenism, and the Declaration on Religious Freedom.

He founded The Ecumenist in 1962, a journal dedicated to exploring the connections between theology and the fields of sociology, politics, and culture, and he edited it without interruption until 2004. Forty-two years of editorial work. That’s not a side project; it’s a sustained act of intellectual institution-building, running parallel to everything else he was doing.

After the council, Baum taught theology and ethics at the University of St. Michael’s College in the University of Toronto. His years there marked a decisive pivot in his intellectual interests, away from the theology-and-philosophy pairing that dominated Catholic academic culture and toward a sustained engagement with classical sociology. He spent two years studying at the New School for Social Research in New York in the 1970s, working through the core tradition: Marx, Tocqueville, Durkheim, Weber, and Tönnies. The move wasn’t a defection from theology but an enlargement of it. Baum’s central claim, developed across multiple books and articles through the 1970s and 1980s, was that a sociological analysis of how ideology shapes and distorts religious thought was itself a theological act, not a reductive secular one. He also became absorbed by the work of Karl Mannheim, and from Mannheim’s sociology of knowledge he developed a programme of ideology critique aimed at identifying and removing the prejudicial elements that had accumulated in religious teaching over centuries, the way doctrines could sanctify existing social arrangements by presenting them as expressions of divine will. He left the priesthood in 1974 and in 1978 married a former nun.

The philosophical anchor for all of this was Maurice Blondel, the early-twentieth-century French philosopher whose work Baum encountered and never stopped returning to. Blondel argued that God’s redemptive activity was not confined to the visible church or to explicitly religious experience but was at work within human history itself, within genuine human transformation of any kind. For Baum, this was a genuine reorientation. It meant that grace could be present in falling in love, in political solidarity, in collective struggles for justice, anywhere people were genuinely changed for the better. Mary Jo Leddy, a scholar at Toronto’s Regis College, summarised Baum’s version of the idea as an “insider God”: God working from within the texture of ordinary experience, not descending from outside it to intervene. The Catholic scholar Michael Higgins described Baum’s encounter with Blondel as his “Copernican revolution,” after which his research, teaching, and political commitments all moved in the same direction: an ever-widening account of where God could be found. His book Man Becoming: God in Secular Language was the fullest expression of this theology, engaging Blondel’s ideas at length and extending them into a systematic account of divine presence in secular life. Higgins put it plainly: it wasn’t a large step, he wrote, from Blondel’s inclusivity to Baum’s conclusion that God was mediated by all manner of things beside the institutional church. But it was a step, Higgins added, that many theologians could never bring themselves to take.

This theology of grace as ubiquitous had direct practical consequences. If God’s redemptive work didn’t depend on the institutional church as its sole channel, then the church had no coherent warrant for excluding those it had historically condemned. In the February 15, 1974 issue of Commonweal, Baum published “Catholic Homosexuals,” the first defence of same-sex relationships by a Catholic theologian. He’d arrived at the piece through an unusual route: in 1973, the Rev. Pat Nidorf, the founder of Dignity, the Catholic pastoral organisation for gay and lesbian Catholics, sent Baum a copy of Dignity’s faith statement for theological evaluation. Baum’s assessment became the Commonweal article. He argued on two separate grounds. First, he held that calling homosexual love “unnatural” was a cultural judgment dressed up as a moral one: as he put it, the definition of human nature tends to reflect the self-understanding of the cultural elite, and to call homosexual love unnatural was to make a cultural statement, not a moral one. Second, drawing directly on his background in interfaith relations and on his work on Nostra Aetate, he argued that the church’s rhetoric against homosexuality had produced a culture that persecuted gay people and fostered self-doubt and self-hatred in gay men and women; the remedy Christ’s own commandment demanded was a thorough review of how the church treated any marginalised group. He later described himself as the first Catholic theologian who publicly defended the ethical status of homosexual love. Two years later, in 1976, the Jesuit John J. McNeill published The Church and the Homosexual, the first book-length theological critique of the ban on same-sex relationships; Baum had arrived at the same position in print first, by a different route and with a different argumentative emphasis.

His own identity was a part of this story he didn’t disclose publicly for decades. In his autobiography, published in 2016, he wrote of falling in love with men on several occasions in his younger years, with what he described as “great joy in the presence of the beloved and great pain because my love could not be received.” He reflected on his vow of celibacy and concluded that it had functioned not as a genuine religious commitment but as a means of bracketing his sexuality entirely, of refusing to engage with its meaning. He’d kept silent about his own homosexuality in public because, as he put it directly, such an act of honesty would have reduced his influence as a critical theologian. That calculation, right or wrong, is at least honest, and it’s the kind of honesty only a ninety-two-year-old has nothing to lose from.

Baum was also associated, reputedly as a contributor, with the Winnipeg Statement of 1968, the declaration in which Canada’s Catholic bishops distanced themselves from Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae vitae, which had prohibited artificial contraception. His precise authorial role in the statement was never formally confirmed. Conservative critics in both English Canada and the United States found in all of this, the Winnipeg Statement, the Commonweal article, the support for liberation theology, the sympathetic writing on Islamic reformer Tariq Ramadan, sustained grounds for attack. Msgr. Vincent Foy, a Canadian theologian, published repeated articles denouncing Baum as a “Marxist ex-priest” and promoted the argument that Baum had excommunicated himself by marrying before the Vatican had formally recognised his laicization. Baum’s advocacy for the ordination of women and for gay marriage widened the target further. He remained, in his own account, essentially undisturbed. “I live in a dream world in Quebec,” he told The Catholic Register. “I still belong to a wide network of progressive Catholics. I never meet any conservatives.”

In the 1980s and 1990s, Baum’s ideology-critique programme deepened as he integrated the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory into it. He connected the Frankfurt School’s concept of “the end of innocent critique”, the recognition that no critical standpoint is itself free of ideological contamination, with liberation theology’s preferential option for the poor. The result was a theological politics that acknowledged its own partiality and rooted that partiality in solidarity with the marginalised rather than in claims to neutral authority. He welcomed liberation theology’s insights at a time when Rome was actively working to contain them, and his writing consistently defended the social-justice dimensions of the Gospel against what he regarded as an excessively institutional and hierarchical reading of Christian authority. He believed the Catholic Church needed urgently to decentralise, and he said so in terms borrowed from management theory as much as from theology: any consultant, he wrote, would look at the church’s structure and conclude it simply couldn’t be administered from a single centre.

In 1986 he moved to McGill University’s Faculty of Religious Studies as professor of theological ethics. Montreal became his permanent base. He joined the Jesuit Centre justice et foi there and remained associated with it until his death, continuing to write and engage publicly with questions of Quebec politics, multiculturalism, and the economics of late capitalism.

His 2014 book Truth and Relevance, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, brought together his work as an interpreter of Catholic theological writing in Quebec since the Quiet Revolution. The book’s project was specific and pointed: after the Quiet Revolution, the Catholic Church lost its institutional stranglehold in Quebec, and yet the Catholic thinkers who emerged in the space left by that withdrawal produced, Baum argued, some of the most intellectually adventurous theology in the Western world. He showed how these theologians, energised by Vatican II, uncovered the social dimensions of the Christian message and used them to address the realities of contemporary Quebec society, supporting the province’s new cultural nationalism under certain conditions, criticising the unregulated market, demanding gender equality, confronting the destructive individualism and utilitarianism of modernity while simultaneously recognising modernity’s genuine humanistic achievements. The book’s aim was also strategic: to bring this body of French-language thought before an anglophone readership that had largely missed it. Lee Cormie of the theology department at the University of St. Michael’s College described the resulting work as a “pathbreaking and fascinating study” that wove together theological and sociological reflection in a way that immensely enriched the telling of the story. Truth and Relevance was Baum’s most sustained act of translation, in the broadest sense: making one tradition legible to the members of another, which had been his vocation from the start.

There is something worth sitting with here. Baum’s entire intellectual arc tracks a specific kind of movement: a child born at the intersection of two faiths his century wanted to destroy, educated informally by scholars in an internment camp, converted in a country that didn’t quite want him, present at the moment the Church finally renounced its theological case against his mother’s people, and then committed, decade after decade, to pushing further through the door that moment opened. The fact that a man with a Jewish mother wrote the first draft of the document that ended the Church’s centuries of theological anti-Judaism isn’t an irony; it’s the kind of thing that only happens when a tradition is finally honest enough to draw on what it previously excluded. Every tradition that contains within itself the tools for its own critique is, in some sense, still capable of repair.

Named an Officer of the Order of Canada in 1990, Baum was the author of more than twenty books across a career spanning six decades. In 2016, at the age of ninety-two, he published his autobiography, The Oil Has Not Run Dry: The Story of My Theological Pathway, through McGill-Queen’s University Press. It was, among other things, an account of a life structured around a series of forced and chosen crossings: from Berlin to London to Quebec, from Protestant-Jewish origins to Augustinian priesthood, from the clerical institution to the academic one, from silence about his own sexuality to a late and careful public disclosure. New Ways Ministry, which had invited Baum to speak at their Fifth National Symposium in 2002 on the theme of lesbian and gay Catholics in the Vatican II Church, described the autobiography as an inside look at “a very gentle soul” whose keen mind had always been inseparable from a particular quality of interior attention.

He entered St. Mary’s Hospital in Montreal on October 8, 2017, and chose not to resume the dialysis that had sustained him through four years of kidney disease. Friends came from across Central and Eastern Canada to be with him. Mary Jo Leddy, who was among them, found him sunny, genial, and serene. He told those around him he was “disappearing inside.” He died on October 18, 2017, in Montreal, of kidney failure. He was ninety-four.