A Book Review… Hesburgh: Devout And Delightful, But Sadly A Dissenter
By JOHN LYON
(Editor’s Note: John Lyon holds a doctorate in history from the University of Pittsburgh and has taught at seven colleges or universities, as well as at Providence Academy in La Crosse, Wis.)
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Wilson D. Miscamble, CSC. American Priest: The Ambitious Life and Conflicted Legacy of Notre Dame’s Father Ted Hesburgh. New York: Image Books; 2019
Leaving Sacred Heart Church on the Notre Dame campus after his Ordination to the priesthood on June 24, 1943, Fr. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, CSC, paused to consider the bas-relief sculpture and inscription on the East Portal, dedicated to those from the university who served in World War I. The inscription read simply: “God. Country. Notre Dame.” To that trinity, with all its complex internal dynamics, Fr. Hesburgh decided to dedicate his life.
It is hardly the task of the reviewer of Fr. Miscamble’s fine biography to determine the adequacy of Fr. Ted’s personal service to God. From all evidence offered by the biography, however, he thought of himself as first and foremost a priest, and was by all reports exemplary in this role, mediating things divine to man through the sacraments, through professional and personal counseling, through service to the poor, and through obedience to his superiors. There is no suggestion offered in the biography that he was anything but chaste, and despite his international prominence he lived in comparative poverty. He celebrated or concelebrated mass daily so long as he was physically able to do so.
There is of course controversy about the adequacy and propriety of his public service and policy decisions as regards the relations of Church and university, and his dissent from certain moral stances of the Church. But more of that soon.
Fr. Hesburgh’s devotion to his country, the second person in his chosen trinity, only a curmudgeonly iconoclast could doubt. Though frustrated in his desire to serve as a Navy chaplain (his religious superior needed him elsewhere), for over thirty years he served on innumerable federal commissions, accepted particular duties from virtually every president from Eisenhower to Clinton, and worked steadily in responsible roles with ever-rising duties on private foundations and national corporations (e.g., TIAA). His endurance was extraordinary, the stress entailed in his interminable duties alleviated by moderate assistance from good cigars and fine Scotch.
It is in the details of how Fr. Hesburgh measured his devotion to the Catholicity of Notre Dame and its relation to the corporate Church that his “conflicted legacy” largely lies. He possessed an endemic optimism, the sense that good men working together could solve all problems, as Fr. Miscamble notes.
One must always define one’s terms, however. In this case “good” is the verbal axis about which much action will turn. As my friend Mr. Dooley once said, “A fanatic is a man that does what he thinks the Lord wud do if He knew th’ facts iv the case.” It is hard to call Fr. Hesburgh a fanatic, but he certainly acted for change, with good men, presumably on the basis of what he thought the Lord would do if He knew how liberals saw the facts of the case.
He was brought into Notre Dame’s theology department in 1945, and four years later was moved into the administration of the university as executive vice-president under the president, Fr. John Cavanaugh. He succeeded Fr. Cavanaugh in 1952, and remained as president of the university until 1987, when a restive and active retirement followed until his death at the age of 97 in 2015.
Liberal by many metrics from the beginning, Hesburgh moved directly against obvious conservatives on the faculty, and did so with determination, as he perhaps thought the Lord would do. The retirement of Dean Clarence Manion of the Law School (1924-1952) and the extrusion of Fr. Edward Keller, outspoken conservative economist, were early actions, followed by the complicated exit of Fr. Thomas McAvoy, CSC, from his position as chairman of the history department in 1960. McAvoy, as Fr. Miscamble notes, had made the history department the “strongest department in the College of Arts and Letters.” He was moved to the Archives.
Fr. Miscamble notes that Fr. Hesburgh recalled later in life that at the time of the Second Vatican Council, when perhaps lines of individual discrimination were not so firmly set in his mind, he tried to cajole a peritus at the council to come to work in the theology department at Notre Dame. The theological adviser’s name was Josef Ratzinger, who politely refused on the grounds of limited linguistic ability in English.
Instead the department got Fathers Burrell, Burtchaell, and McBrien, men of a distinctly different caste. How different things might have been!
From the beginning also Hesburgh appears to have been determined to move Notre Dame away from collegiate identity and toward the model of a research university exemplified by the likes of Harvard, Princeton, Yale, or Stanford. This was not a move de novo, but built on the initiatives of previous presidents of the university. The reach of these men exceeded their grasp, however. Hesburgh would see that the reach had no merely metaphorical consequences.
A Holy Cross priest, friend and teaching associate of mine and not given to conservative causes, recently lamented moderately that Notre Dame could have become the exemplar of collegiate education in the country, had not Fr. Ted sharply moved it toward an ever-aspiring research university, aping the mores of its secular betters.
The crises largely shaping the university and its relations with the Church for the future came in the 1960s, particularly in the years 1965-1968. Student revolt was controlled on the campus, though Hesburgh was taken aback by the form of some student opposition. He oversaw the transfer of ownership and control of the university from the Holy Cross order to a complicated structure dominated by a lay board, with the expectation that a Holy Cross priest would always be president.
This transfer, in addition to making Notre Dame more attractive to various sources of state, federal, and private funding, was designed to make the university and its president more independent of the Church’s authority, whether located in Rome or Ft. Wayne, or vested in the religious superiors of the Holy Cross order, for these agencies tended to have distinctly different ideas of what the Lord would do if He knew the facts of the case. It also necessarily, if not intentionally, made the university increasingly dependent on the goodwill of federal agencies and a new class of private donors to the university.
Escape From
Ecclesial Control
He also called and appears to have dominated the meeting of American Catholic university presidents or deputies which met at the Holy Cross property at Land O’Lakes, Wis., in 1967. “The Catholic University in the Modern World” was the resultant statement, proposing a new independence of such universities from ecclesial control — a position to which Hesburgh and others held despite, for example, the subsequent papal document, Ex Corde Ecclesiae of Pope John Paul II in 1990.
The great problem here was, as Fr. Miscamble points out, that while admitting that the Catholic university was where the Church did its thinking, the Land O’Lakes statement “never effectively reconciled how the very entity that supposedly did the Church’s ‘thinking’ was somehow independent of the body it supposedly thought for.” Ex schizophrenia ecclesiae.
And then came Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI’s reiteration of traditional Catholic doctrine on sexual ethics, in 1968.
At the time that he returned to the Notre Dame campus in 1945, Fr. Hesburgh rapidly became the unofficial chaplain of “Vetville,” recycled prefabricated military housing for married students on the east edge of the campus. At the same time he came to know Pat and Patty Crowley of the Christian Family movement in Chicago, who remained good friends and later came to be members of the papal commission reporting to Paul VI on matters of family regulation (and through whom Hesburgh came to know the interior working of the commission on matters sexual).
His experiences as “chaplain” and friend seem to have convinced him that something had to give in the Church’s teaching on sexual ethics for the married. Later, as president, he facilitated a series of conferences on Notre Dame’s campus between 1963 and 1967 under the direction of George Shuster, special assistant to the president and celebrated liberal Catholic. The conferences were rather obviously designed to soften up the Catholic stance on contraception and birth control.
Consequently, when his friend Pope Paul VI refused to ratify the majority report of his commission, Hesburgh was blindsided, and felt betrayed. He seems to have found the central difficulty to lie in the distinction the Pope’s encyclical made between morally licit “natural” or temporal means of contraception, and morally illicit chemical and mechanical means to the same end. He felt that the encyclical led to a rolling crisis in American Catholicism and to a general “breakdown of the Church’s teaching authority.” Hesburgh lay back, however, and “never directly criticized Pope Paul.”
This prudential restraint has similarities to his general stance on abortion. He seems to have backed off public support of pro-life issues, particularly after being hissed by female members of the audience during his expressed opposition to the substance of Roe v. Wade during his Terry Lectures at Yale in 1973, only months after the Supreme Court’s decision. Yet his reservations to Gov. Cuomo’s celebrated graduation address at Notre Dame in 1984 brought a more direct response. The governor proclaimed his loyalty to the faith but, appealing to “Catholic realism,” declined to try to legislate morality when there was no broad public consensus to back up restrictions on abortion. Hesburgh published an op-ed piece, variously reprinted, expressing definite reservations about Cuomo’s stance. Hesburgh argued that consensus is not simply a given, but can be created, shaped, or restored.
To illustrate the rolling crisis and disruption of the Church’s teaching authority, soon after the issuance of Humanae Vitae Rev. James Tunstead Burtchaell, CSC, chair of the theology department and soon to be provost of the university, gave a public lecture titled “The Bitter Pill,” in which he called the encyclical “grossly inadequate and largely fallacious,” dealing as it did largely with “sexual plumbing.” The talk was soon disseminated nationally.
Burtchaell was not the sort of person who would have felt it necessary to ask presidential approval of the talk, nor Hesburgh the sort of president who would require prior submission. The same sort of relation apparently prevailed in the Cuomo affair, with Theology Chair Richard McBrien having some sort of intermediary role between the president and the governor. Both situations clearly illustrate Hesburgh’s academic stance, to the delight of Catholics of a certain disposition, and the dismay of others.
The task of composing a biography of a man as important and controversial as Fr. Hesburgh that is not discordant to the mental ear is an imposing one. Fr. Miscamble produces an engaging, provocative symphony here. Despite the fact that the author was known to the subject of the biography as a public opponent of some of the latter’s actions and policies, he cooperated with the biographer in sharing personal recollections, which the author taped.
Even with Fr. Miscamble’s predilections he comes across to the reader (who in general would not know of them) as eminently fair. There is mutual respect here. The account of Hesburgh’s public life is clear and above-board. (One does wonder if Fr. Ted had a private life; but then it is rather difficult to imagine in just what that would consist: late-night conversations with important and influential friends about matters civil, social, and academic?)
The amassing of extensive bibliographical sources and their successful composition into a believable narrative is a most strenuous task. It is done with grace. The biography is no partisan gig.
Bracketing Hesburgh’s unquestioned service to state and civil society, and leaving to God the determination of the facts of the case, it is virtually impossible for an outsider, even one who was an insider in some of the days the biography chronicles, to come to some vast, yeasty generalization concerning the scriptural, theological, philosophical, ecclesial, and moral liceity of Hesburgh’s stance and actions concerning Church and university.
At least since the Baconian revolution and the Galileo affair, and accentuated by the adoption of the scientific method by historians in their criticism of the Bible culminating in the modernist movement, there has been, however, a vast and yeasty sense in the Church that, if she would speak effectually to the contemporary world she must devise an apologetic other than that enshrined in scholasticism and an imagined “Medieval synthesis.” For each of these was dependent on a basically a-temporal, static view of the universe and a geologically and biologically untenable schema of our species’ monogenetic creation and fall in the blink of a temporal eye. Hesburgh would probably have seen himself as a significant, yeasty player in facilitating the development of at least the academic side of such a new apologetic.
At Least Naive
As noted earlier, Fr. Miscamble points to Hesburgh’s endemic optimism, to his sense that good and intelligent men working together could solve all man’s problems. Prescinding from theological reflections about Pelagianism, and sociological reflections about the proclivities of “the greatest generation,” this sounds at least naive. It was in actual practice of course partisan. Good and intelligent men tended, in Hesburgh’s mind, to be liberal in outlook. As God would be, if He knew the facts of the case.
Hesburgh had, for example, little attachment to or sympathy with the grand strategies of either President Reagan or Pope John Paul II. His endemic optimism focused on disarmament talks and other forms of eirenics, rather than on forcing the Soviet Union out of Eastern Europe and into financial bankruptcy by more direct means.
This failure of sympathy bespeaks no ill will on Hesburgh’s part, but perhaps a shortsightedness, a certain liberal cast in the eye, because such a strategy did not fit into his overall liberal scheme of things. Prayer, cigars, corporate and academic action suffice not to move some mountains, it would seem; and though “Malt does more than Milton can/ to justify God’s way to man,” that is little solace to us if our destination lies somewhere beyond Ludlow Fair.
I was a student during the first years of Hesburgh’s presidency at Notre Dame, and recall some international conference or symposium there, presumably on nuclear disarmament, in which a Soviet speaker was asked by a member of the audience what the USSR’s response would be to a U.S. statement that we had decided, as regards nuclear weapons, to disarm unilaterally. The Soviet spokesman responded immediately that they would not believe us. You would secretly reserve a few nuclear weapons, he replied, and then use them when you thought it necessary. After which, he suggested, you would go to confession.
Fr. Hesburgh’s delightful optimism does seem to have led him to believe that intelligent men of goodwill could solve all human problems without resort to destructive action and consequent confession. God, presumably, and his country almost certainly, have liberally rewarded him for this insight. His university wrestles uncertainly with the consequences of his delightfully engaged but perhaps more than moderately reformist person and actions.
Fr. Hesburgh was a delightful man. May God have mercy on him.
