Father Theodore Hesburgh, who died Thursday at 97, was no longer Notre Dame’s president by the time I enrolled in 1994, yet he remained a campus legend, instantly recognizable in his crisp black shirt and clerical collar and with his shock of white hair. I knew he’d done important things — advised six presidents, chaired the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under Nixon until his policy disagreements got him demoted, and transformed Notre Dame into an academic powerhouse, independent from Rome. Read full article »
by Ken
"Father Ted" Hesburgh -- more properly the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh CSC, though he signed himself "Father Ted Hesburgh") -- served as president of Notre Dame so long (1952-87), and was so visible in that position, that it would have been hard for anyone who lived through any significant part of that period not to have been aware of him. I don't know a whole lot more than that about him; I just remember him as being a highly decent and compassionate individual, and about as good a public face as American Catholics had in my memory -- note the end of the paragraph quoted above, crediting him with "transform[ing] Notre Dame into an academic powerhouse, independent from Rome."
Beyond that, I wouldn't be "remembering" Father Ted now if I hadn't encountered the above blurb and link in this morning's Washington Post "Headlines" e-mail.
I can't speak for you, but I couldn't resist. The blurb turns out to be the first paragraph of a "PostEverything" piece by Jenny Shank, identified as "a faculty mentor at Regis University in Denver and the author of The Ringer." In the piece Jenny tells us about her 2001 encounter with Father Ted, which began at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and the impact it had on her life, an impact that seems fairly represented in the title of her piece. This part is interesting, and I can imagine you'll want to read about it. However, I'm not as interested in the life lesson as in the encounter itself.
On one level, it's just a conversation two strangers had during a three-hour plane flight, but I think it's pretty darned charming just on this level. For me at least, the interest compounds considerably when you consider the formidable history Jenny's travel companion carried with him, and who he was at the time of this encounter.
After that opening paragraph, sketching Father Ted's Notre Dame history and her own, Jenny writes, "Father Ted remained an abstraction to me until I recognized him at O’Hare airport in 2001."
I was 24, waiting for a plane home to Denver. He would have been unmistakable even without his blue and gold Notre Dame bag, bedecked with shamrocks. I introduced myself, and he asked whether the flight attendant could switch my seat to be next to his. He told me he suffered from macular degeneration, was blind in one eye and could barely see out of the other. Despite near-blindness, he was traveling across the country without an assistant.
I helped him present his ticket and find our row. I stowed his leather Mass kit, and sat quietly as he said a blessing as our plane taxied down the runway. “How’s that?” he asked me.
“Good,” I said.
“No one on an airplane has ever refused it,” he said.
When our food was served, Father Ted asked me to identify his fork, napkin, mustard and macaroni salad. He placed the fork in his right vest pocket and the napkin in his left so he could keep track of them.
My three-hour conversation with Father Ted took on a “My Dinner with Andre” quality. He described the time he was a guest on a nuclear submarine and a ride he’d taken on the fastest airplane ever built. He spoke 20 languages “with varying levels of fluency.” He gently interrogated me about my love life and advised me to marry a Notre Dame alumnus. “Fifty percent of marriages don’t work out,” he said, “but 93% of Notre Dame marriages last.” (He didn’t mention the source of these statistics.)
He had known all the presidents since FDR, and gave me his opinion of Kennedy and Carter. Father Ted met Condoleezza Rice for the first time when she was 19, an accomplished ice skater and pianist. He advised her to learn Russian so she’d be a step ahead of the competition in the field of foreign affairs. “I always wondered why she never got married,” he added, “with her cute dimples and all.”
He’d met Mother Theresa in the Seychelles once: “It’s stupid that the Church doesn’t go ahead and make her a saint, but you have to wait five years before anything begins to get done.” I asked whether people needed to attribute miracles to her before the canonization process could begin and he waved this off, as if impatient with the thought, and said, “Her whole life’s a miracle.”
He asked me what I did, and when I told him I was a writer, he said, “That’s a hard business.”
When we arrived at the Denver airport, Father Ted had to find the gate for his flight to Vail, where he was going to visit his brother. I was eager to assist him make his way through the terminal, but then a young man came up and said, “Father Hesburgh!” He was a Notre Dame alum, too. Father Ted explained that this happens to him all over the world. I left them so the young man could have his own encounter with the illustrious priest.
It struck me then what an act of absolute faith it was for Father Ted to travel across the country alone with faltering sight. He trusted that if he carried that Notre Dame bag, someone would approach and provide any help he needed.
I don't suppose there's anything earth-shaking here, just a charmingly human encounter. It made me feel better about . . . well, maybe just better. I think perhaps I'm less impressed by Father Ted's "act of absolute faith" in traveling alone than by his act of humility in not availing himself of special privileges that almost certainly would have been readily available to him. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that for this trip to visit his brother in Vail he could easily have had every manner of VIP assistance the whole way.
That just doesn't seem to have been who he was. Thanks for sharing this, Jenny, and good luck with the new book!
Obama Should Have Played The Impotent Sea Snakes For The Notre Dame Graduates
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And Maybe If The Graduating Class Was Capable Of Critical Thinking They Would Have Protested Something Else
I don't know who gave the commencement address at "my" graduation. One step ahead of the law, I had already left the country in the spring and was in the Atlas Mountains south of Marrakech on graduation day. I called a couple of college friends and none of them could remember who spoke; Taroundant, where I spent that week, was amazing. I still have a small white stone statue I watched someone carving and then got from him by exchanging some detritus from my old life.
A decade later I was back in America, living in San Francisco and playing punk rock on KUSF, the radio station owned by the University of San Francisco, not just a Catholic university-- a Jesuit one. The school's mission statement:
VISION:
The University of San Francisco will be internationally recognized as a premier Jesuit Catholic, urban University with a global perspective that educates leaders who will fashion a more humane and just world.
MISSION:
The core mission of the University is to promote learning in the Jesuit Catholic tradition. The University offers undergraduate, graduate and professional students the knowledge and skills needed to succeed as persons and professionals, and the values and sensitivity necessary to be men and women for others.
The University will distinguish itself as a diverse, socially responsible learning community of high quality scholarship and academic rigor sustained by a faith that does justice. The University will draw from the cultural, intellectual and economic resources of the San Francisco Bay Area and its location on the Pacific Rim to enrich and strengthen its educational programs.
I never took any classes there. I was the radio station's "professional advisor," or something like that. I didn't get paid. I just had a chance to play music I loved on the radio. Earlier I had been fired by KSJO for having the Sex Pistols live on the air-- the show is part of a bootleggish release, Big Tits Over America-- and then from KSAN for... gee, I don't remember. There were so many firing offenses every week that I can't even recall which one they finally got me on, months and months after every other free-form dj on the station had been cashiered by the new (corporate) regime. That was because I was on after midnight and none of the new bosses had ever heard my show so when they first told me I was fired I asked why and they didn't know so they actually let me stay until something outraging their sensibilities reached them.
But KUSF, the Jesuit station never bothered me. Well... almost never. I just couldn't resist playing a tape I had gotten in the mail from a band in Tampa called the Impotent Sea Snakes. A more accommodating dj would have just stuck to something less offensive, like "I Wanna Fuck Your Dad," but I only wanted to blast "Pope John Paul Can Suck My Dick," over the Catholic airwaves. Every time I played it I would get a note asking me to please not play it again, which, of course, encouraged me to play it again and again and again.
Have you watched any of the prissy little assholes being interviewed on CNN about how they don't want President Obama coming to their campus-- another Catholic school-- to give a commencement address because they disagree with his policies? My blood boils as I look at the ugly, distorted faces of future torturers, banksters, Klan sympathizers and Evan Bayh supporters. If they don't want a gay marriage they shouldn't have one. If they don't want an abortion, no one is forcing them. If they don't like stem cell research I hope they have the courage of their convictions to die a miserable and painful death from a combination of Huntington's disease, Parkinson's disease, diabetes, a spinal chord injury and cancer.
And why not? They're so sure they're going to be playing harps in the heavenly clouds while the rest of us burn in hell, they should just leave us alone on earth and keep their ignorant, primitive superstitions, religionist quackery and Know Nothing prejudices to themselves.
If you want to protest something about Obama, how about something real? John Cusack wrote about A Hollow and Horrible Equivocation, the subject of which would have certainly caused protests at my college in the mid-60s. Personally I have very mixed feelings about the release of the pornographic torture photos because of my concern for the young men and women fighting overseas. I have a tendency to want the photos to be seen only by a jury debating whether Bush, Cheney and their co-conspirators should get life imprisonment or... something that better suits their crimes against humanity. On the other hand, I agree with everything Cusack says.
The release of the photos was won by ACLU lawyers who have fought to bring to light the full extent of the brutality and torture that U.S. Army and intelligence services have perpetrated against human beings in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay and at CIA "black sites" around the world. Torture that was sanctioned and effectively legalized under the former administration, and that, if we are to be honest, most Americans knew-- or should have known-- was being carried out in our names.
Only now is the knowledge starting to give rise to the widespread outrage and calls for accountability that such crimes against humanity deserve. Growing numbers of citizens are demanding the independent investigation and prosecution of the members of the Bush administration responsible for the vitiation of fundamental legal principles like habeas corpus and the flagrant violation of both international and domestic laws against torture. The pundits, hacks and shills who dismiss these calls for investigation and prosecution-- integral to any serious definition of accountability-- disgrace themselves and their country.
The situation in which we now find ourselves is so bizarre, it's hard to fathom. New revelations continue to surface-- we learn that Vice President Cheney's office ordered and specified how a man was to be tortured, and mounting evidence suggests the United States tortured to extract false confessions that would justify preemptive war on Iraq. Yet a Democratic president leads a Democratic congress to whitewash institutionalized torture and in effect trash any conceivable notion of the rule of law, all in the name of "looking forward."
One more thing about "Catholic teaching," while supporting every travesty in the history of what horrors man could visit on his fellow men-- from torture and slavery to global imperialism and subjegation of women and the poor-- Catholic teaching should now be about learning, as Pope John Paul suggested, from its own mistakes so it stops committing them some day. These arrogant and over-wrought assholes should start over in kindergarten:
Obama didn't play the Impotent Sea Snakes for them. Instead, he made a gracious, memorable and challenging address that I'm sure the ones willing to listen will remember for their whole lives. Here's just a very few paragraphs:
Your class has come of age at a moment of great consequence for our nation and the world – a rare inflection point in history where the size and scope of the challenges before us require that we remake our world to renew its promise; that we align our deepest values and commitments to the demands of a new age. It is a privilege and a responsibility afforded to few generations – and a task that you are now called to fulfill.
This is the generation that must find a path back to prosperity and decide how we respond to a global economy that left millions behind even before this crisis hit – an economy where greed and short-term thinking were too often rewarded at the expense of fairness, and diligence, and an honest day’s work.
We must decide how to save God’s creation from a changing climate that threatens to destroy it. We must seek peace at a time when there are those who will stop at nothing to do us harm, and when weapons in the hands of a few can destroy the many. And we must find a way to reconcile our ever-shrinking world with its ever-growing diversity – diversity of thought, of culture, and of belief.
In short, we must find a way to live together as one human family.
It is this last challenge that I’d like to talk about today. For the major threats we face in the 21st century – whether it’s global recession or violent extremism; the spread of nuclear weapons or pandemic disease – do not discriminate. They do not recognize borders. They do not see color. They do not target specific ethnic groups.
Moreover, no one person, or religion, or nation can meet these challenges alone. Our very survival has never required greater cooperation and understanding among all people from all places than at this moment in history.
Unfortunately, finding that common ground – recognizing that our fates are tied up, as Dr. King said, in a “single garment of destiny” – is not easy. Part of the problem, of course, lies in the imperfections of man – our selfishness, our pride, our stubbornness, our acquisitiveness, our insecurities, our egos; all the cruelties large and small that those of us in the Christian tradition understand to be rooted in original sin. We too often seek advantage over others. We cling to outworn prejudice and fear those who are unfamiliar. Too many of us view life only through the lens of immediate self-interest and crass materialism; in which the world is necessarily a zero-sum game. The strong too often dominate the weak, and too many of those with wealth and with power find all manner of justification for their own privilege in the face of poverty and injustice. And so, for all our technology and scientific advances, we see around the globe violence and want and strife that would seem sadly familiar to those in ancient times.
We know these things; and hopefully one of the benefits of the wonderful education you have received is that you have had time to consider these wrongs in the world, and grown determined, each in your own way, to right them. And yet, one of the vexing things for those of us interested in promoting greater understanding and cooperation among people is the discovery that even bringing together persons of good will, men and women of principle and purpose, can be difficult.
The soldier and the lawyer may both love this country with equal passion, and yet reach very different conclusions on the specific steps needed to protect us from harm. The gay activist and the evangelical pastor may both deplore the ravages of HIV/AIDS, but find themselves unable to bridge the cultural divide that might unite their efforts. Those who speak out against stem cell research may be rooted in admirable conviction about the sacredness of life, but so are the parents of a child with juvenile diabetes who are convinced that their son’s or daughter’s hardships can be relieved.
The question, then, is how do we work through these conflicts? Is it possible for us to join hands in common effort? As citizens of a vibrant and varied democracy, how do we engage in vigorous debate? How does each of us remain firm in our principles, and fight for what we consider right, without demonizing those with just as strongly held convictions on the other side?
Nowhere do these questions come up more powerfully than on the issue of abortion.
As I considered the controversy surrounding my visit here, I was reminded of an encounter I had during my Senate campaign, one that I describe in a book I wrote called The Audacity of Hope. A few days after I won the Democratic nomination, I received an email from a doctor who told me that while he voted for me in the primary, he had a serious concern that might prevent him from voting for me in the general election. He described himself as a Christian who was strongly pro-life, but that’s not what was preventing him from voting for me.
What bothered the doctor was an entry that my campaign staff had posted on my website – an entry that said I would fight “right-wing ideologues who want to take away a woman’s right to choose.” The doctor said that he had assumed I was a reasonable person, but that if I truly believed that every pro-life individual was simply an ideologue who wanted to inflict suffering on women, then I was not very reasonable. He wrote, “I do not ask at this point that you oppose abortion, only that you speak about this issue in fair-minded words.”
Fair-minded words.
After I read the doctor’s letter, I wrote back to him and thanked him. I didn’t change my position, but I did tell my staff to change the words on my website. And I said a prayer that night that I might extend the same presumption of good faith to others that the doctor had extended to me. Because when we do that – when we open our hearts and our minds to those who may not think like we do or believe what we do – that’s when we discover at least the possibility of common ground.
That’s when we begin to say, “Maybe we won’t agree on abortion, but we can still agree that this is a heart-wrenching decision for any woman to make, with both moral and spiritual dimensions.
So let’s work together to reduce the number of women seeking abortions by reducing unintended pregnancies, and making adoption more available, and providing care and support for women who do carry their child to term. Let’s honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion, and draft a sensible conscience clause, and make sure that all of our health care policies are grounded in clear ethics and sound science, as well as respect for the equality of women.”
Understand – I do not suggest that the debate surrounding abortion can or should go away. No matter how much we may want to fudge it – indeed, while we know that the views of most Americans on the subject are complex and even contradictory – the fact is that at some level, the views of the two camps are irreconcilable. Each side will continue to make its case to the public with passion and conviction. But surely we can do so without reducing those with differing views to caricature.
Bolstered By Their Newest Star, Newt Gingrich, The Catholics Are Attacking
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Damn, I wish I had an mp3 of the Pop O Pies classic "The Catholics Are Attacking" so I could turn it into a videoclip starring Catholicism's newestpervert convert, Newt Gingrich. I released it on my indie label, 415 Records, in 1982, when Gingrich was just a Southern Baptist congressional backbencher and still only on his second wife.
They got a big a big contingent Over 10 million strong. Someday they're taking over You know it won't be long
The Catholics are attacking If the people only knew
They say their girls are virgins And I believe them too 'cause I have seen the harm The lack of sex can do
The Catholics are attacking If the people only knew
They eat no meat on Friday They have no fun on Sunday They think they fool themselves But they feel like shit on Monday
The Catholics are attacking If the people only knew
The Catholics eating hearty They're eating Shake 'n Bake But at the Nazi Party They eat ice cream and cake Well they most want your children Before the age of six So they can break their brains up To pull off future tricks
I used to play it, frequently, on KUSF, a Jesuit-owned radio station. They were actually pretty forgiving. Catholics tend to be. In fact, they've announced that all of Gingrich's many sins have been forgiven too, now that he's renounced the Baptist heresy and joined the One True Faith (today).
You see it isn't only a crazed reactionary cardinal and a pacel of child-molesting bishops who're kicking up a shit-storm about Notre Dame inviting President Obama to speak and receive an honorary degree, Newt has been twittering his disapprove as well: "It is sad to see Notre Dame invite President Obama to give the commencement address since his policies are so anti-Catholic values." I'm sure the Catholics are delighted to take whatever they can get, even a bomb-thrower like Gingrich and, besides, he has some experience dealing with being invited-- and unwanted-- at Notre Dame.
A similar kerfuffle erupted over the former House Speaker in 2005 when he spoke at Catholic University. Students then said Gingrich's support for the death penalty and his well-publicized marital infidelities violated the school's prohibition against speakers with positions contrary to Vatican teachings.
Somehow the Catholics never really cared that much about politicians embracing the death penalty and sexual exploits, not the way they get all out of their minds over women's choice. Today Max Blumenthal speculates that Gingrich intends his odyssey from "Republican pariah into a voice of conscience for the badly demoralized conservative movement" to a shot at the worthless Republican presidential nomination in 2012.
Catholic conservatives like Deal Hudson are brimming with excitement. Hudson was the most important Catholic political advisor to President Bush and Karl Rove, founder of the seminal Catholic journal, Crisis magazine, and self-described “theocon,” contends that Gingrich’s conversion represents more than a concession to his wife; it signals a dramatic break from the past, both personally and politically.
“From a Catholic point of view,” Hudson told me, “Newt’s sins no longer exist–they’ve been absolved. He’s made a fresh start in life. So Newt will continue to sin and confess but there aren’t going to be a lot of Catholics who will hold that against him. They understand why being a Catholic makes a difference.”
The Catholics celebrated the absorption of Gingrich with a snide and nasty attack on Hillary Clinton whose respectful visit to the Basilica of Our Lady in Guadalupe they attempted to turn into a typical right-wing political putdown, worthy of Bishop Mussolini.
