By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
There has been an ongoing discussion in recent editions of First Teachers about what one of our correspondents called the “Jesuit trajectory” toward secular liberalism at their universities. He meant by that everything from the awarding of honorary degrees to pro-abortion politicians, to regular performances of The Vagina Monologues, to explicit cooperation with the agenda of LGBTQ activists, to course offerings with a strong modernist bent.
In line with this theme is a letter First Teachers recently received from a husband and wife who are graduates of Fordham University in the 1960s. They were contemplating a sizable donation to the school, but were concerned about stories they had read in the press about the school’s chairman of the theology department, J. Patrick Hornbeck, being married to another man.
The couple gave First Teachers permission to publish the response they received from Bob Howe, the university’s special adviser to the president & senior director of communications, which included Fordham’s official press release about Hornbeck:
“While Catholic teachings do not support same-sex marriage, we wish Professor Hornbeck and his spouse a rich life filled with many blessings on the occasion of their wedding in the Episcopal Church. Professor Hornbeck is a member of the Fordham community, and like all University employees, students and alumni, is entitled to human dignity without regard to race, creed, gender, and sexual orientation. Finally, same-sex unions are now the law of the land, and Professor Hornbeck has the same constitutional right to marriage as all Americans.”
Howe went on to say, “For the record, we believe the statement reflects what it means to be a Catholic, Jesuit university in the capital of the world. We believe the statement shows compassion, care for the individual person, and a respect for human dignity. Those are Catholic values, too.”
Howe sought to assure the potential donors that he “can guarantee that Fordham’s Jesuit, Catholic identity permeates everything we do. I’d ask you to consider the University’s mission and the spirit in which we carry it out. We want nothing less than to change the world. Toward that end, we educate leaders who are competent, compassionate, and deeply informed by their Catholic faith and the Jesuit tradition. They are also, like their Jesuit forebears, worldly and cosmopolitan.
“We believe our students receive as rigorous a Catholic education at Fordham as they would at any Catholic university in the country — the extent to which they avail themselves of it, of course, is up to them. We spread out before our students the banquet of Catholic, Jesuit teachings with an eye to making them as accessible and as tempting as possible; few refuse the feast altogether, but everyone digests the meal at their own pace. We let them do so. We encourage them to do so. As a result, our alumni are stronger and more committed to their faith, and more able to bring that faith to bear in their various enterprises.”
Is there something to be said for Howe’s position on the “banquet of Catholic, Jesuit teachings” that Fordham offers its students? There is. For example, the university offers a course to undergraduates that centers on a “historical and critical study of classical theological texts of Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Anselm, Bonaventure, and Thomas Aquinas; the Doctrine of God; the human person and Christ; the relation of theology and philosophy.”
Sounds good. But it must be stressed that similar elective courses can be found at many large private and state universities. Shouldn’t a Catholic university do more than make our Catholic intellectual heritage another sampling on the smorgasbord of courses available to its students? Is Howe being sincere when he says that the school is committed to making the courses with a distinctly Catholic content “as accessible and as tempting as possible,” or is that little more than the kind of rhetoric one would find in the promotional literature for the school designed to attract Catholic parents?
Look: Hornbeck is not a professor in the business school or an instructor in physics or mathematics. He is the chairman of the university’s theology department. That sends a message.
What message? Would the university have made such a strong commitment to “showing compassion, care for the individual person, and a respect for human dignity” if it had been discovered that Hornbeck was a member of a study group with a fondness for the Joel Chandler Harris’ books about Uncle Remus, or if had joined the Society of St. Pius X, the Catholic traditionalist group founded by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre?
I suspect that in the above cases — and many others that readers of this column could come up with, if asked — the school would have met privately with Hornbeck and sought to persuade him that in his position he has to think about the university’s public image, as well as his self-interest. I am not saying that Fordham would have fired him if he did not seek to be discreet about his personal life, but the university would not have issued such an effusively congratulatory statement in reaction to his behavior.
It is difficult to come to any other conclusion than that the university does not consider Hornbeck’s public dissent from Church teachings to be out of line from what Fordham sees as its modern sense of mission. Parents of prospective students are entitled to draw their own conclusions.
Another correspondent, Terence O’Flanagan, a retired physician who attended a Jesuit high school, college, and medical school, does not mince his words. He accuses Jesuit colleges of “rewriting religion in politically correct terms.” He is convinced that there are “black sheep within the fold, all too willing to reduce our religion not to revelation but to referendum; to voting God out of office if and when secular law conflicts with His.”
O’Flanagan accuses modern Jesuits with encouraging a “reexamination of values” regarding marriage. The “mistake is to think of marriage as merely a laudable objective. This leads to the notion that it is merely one among many alternate lifestyles that we are free to choose, or reject, like a tasty ice cream cone.” O’Flanagan continues, “Marriage is not a laudable objective; it is a necessary condition for the stability of society. It is God’s will for mankind.”
Dr. O’Flanagan points to the “fatuous contemporary notion that man’s objective in this life is ‘happiness.’ What a cruel recipe, what a guarantee for unhappiness! It leads us to believe that absent ‘happiness’ we’re being cheated. No wonder so many modern people are unhappy. They live in a world where self-indulgence is placed above a sense of responsibility to others, without a concept of duty and self-denial. It creates a nursing of the shallow in life. Happiness isn’t or shouldn’t be an objective. If it comes at all, it comes as a consequence, a dividend, as a reward for living a virtuous life.”
O’Flanagan asks us to keep in mind Lucifer’s words: “Ye shall be as gods.” Then adds, “No wonder he got booted out of Heaven.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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