John A. O'Brien

Reverend or Father John A. O'Brien (1893–1980), whose full name was John Anthony O'Brien, was an influential progressive American Catholic scholar, pamphleteer and writer.

Early life O'Brien was born on 20 January 1893 in Peoria, Illinois. He was ordained as a priest of the Diocese of Peoria by Bishop Edmund M. Dunne. He served as chaplain for the Catholic students at the University of Illinois and earned a Ph.D. in psychology there. He started the Newman Foundation at the University of Illinois.

Career In total, O'Brien published over forty books. Among them were The White Harvest (1927) and Catholics and Scholarship (1938), influential collections of essays by participants at symposia he organized. In 1938 he published a book about Catholicism directed at non-Catholics called The Faith of Millions, which became a best-seller. Also among his most popular publications were the five books in a series called The Road to Damascus, published between 1949 and 1956, in which seventy-eight prominent converts to Catholicism gave accounts of what had led them to the Church. The contributors included Evelyn Waugh, Clare Booth Luce, Avery Dulles, Dorothy Day, Raïssa Maritain, Thomas Merton, Ronald Knox and Leonard Cheshire. O'Brien remained at the University of Illinois for twenty-two years. In 1939, he spent a year at Oxford University and published Thunder from the Left, a critique of communism. For the rest of his life he taught at the University of Notre Dame and wrote. His work often focused on the compatibility of science and Catholicism. He published two books on evolution, Evolution and Religion (1932) and God and Evolution (1961). O'Brien's psychological approach was influenced by the thought of the German Catholic ethicist Dietrich von Hildebrand, who argued in his 1928 book In Defence of Purity that, besides its procreative aspect, marital sexuality plays a vital role in enhancing the unique interpersonal union that gives marriage its greater meaning. O'Brien's views, however, clashed with those of conservatives in the Catholic Church, who promoted total abstinence as exemplified by the encyclical Casti connubii (1930), which restated the objection to artificial conception.