DAVIS, HENRY

Jesuit moral theologian; b. Liverpool, England, Dec. 1, 1866; d. Heythrop College, Jan. 4, 1952. Educated at St. Francis Xavier's College, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1883; and after the usual course of training, during which he took a bachelor's degree in classics at London University, he became prefect of studies at Stonyhurst in 1903. In 1911 he began his life's work—40 years as professor of moral theology, first at St. Beuno's College and then at Heythrop. In addition to lecturing regularly during the years when he was training successive generations of Jesuit priests, he wrote numerous articles and small books on topical and moral problems, e.g., birth control, eugenics, artificial insemination, and sterilization. But his major production remains his Moral and Pastoral Theology (4 v. London 1935), which he personally revised and brought up to date in five subsequent editions.

The most industrious and fruitful years of Davis's life were passed at a time when the moral theologian was required to train both clergy and laity (but especially the clergy) in a traditional body of doctrine, based on the Fathers and the great classical moralists. His four volumes bear witness to this attitude of mind. Reliable, even cautious, in their approach to pastoral problems, they form a complete compendium of the Church's official teaching, before the word aggiornamento had been given currency.

Yet it would be wrong to give the impression that Davis merely repeated the views of others, with no additions of his own. Certainly, in his lectures and in private discussions, he manifested a genuine independence of outlook and a truly pastoral solicitude based on a lengthy experience of the confessional and a profound sympathy with the difficulties of the ordinary Catholic layman.

That his interests were not confined to the technicalities of moral theology is shown by the work he put into revising the edition of Suárez's De legibus (1944), published by the Clarendon Press as one of the Classics of International Law. His last important work was an edition of St. Gregory's Pastoral Care (1950).

As a man, he combined intelligence and erudition with a natural simplicity and modesty that won him the affection, no less than the respect, of his many pupils. He was certainly one of the outstanding Catholic moral theologians in the English-speaking world in the second quarter of the 20th century.

[t. corbishley]