c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) At this time when many observers bewail the lack of great leaders, a truly great one, Father Theodore Hesburgh, is celebrating his 90th birthday (May 25). Now president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame, which he led for 35 years, Hesburgh could still take on the papacy or the presidency and lead the Catholic Church or the United States with great distinction.

Unlike many aspirants to high office, Hesburgh has never revised, qualified, or redefined his religious beliefs. Instead of explaining _ as Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani or even John F. Kennedy did _ that his religious convictions would never interfere with his implementation of public policy, Hesburgh has built his service on the foundation of his faith.

“Most of the things I have been a part of,” he once told me, “I have not only been the only priest but the only Catholic present. And my value … came from trying to bring some deeper dimension of faith. These people did not expect me to express belief in the Trinity, I don’t mean that. But they did expect that I would reveal the human values that the gospel illumines for us“

He recalled what a fellow commissioner said to him when, as chairman of the Civil Rights Commission, he was working on voter registration in the white hot South in the Sixties: “`Padre, give them a little Christianity,’ and that was right. These people in the South remember their Bible and they would say to me, `I know you’re right but I just can’t change my feelings.”’

It may have been his forthright commitment in faith to this cause that led President Nixon, immediately after his re-election landslide in 1972, to fire Hesburgh from the Civil Rights Commission.

He smiled a little ruefully as he reflected on the administration that had already taken its first steps into the Watergate quicksand: “Thoreau once said that the best place for a man when the government is unjust is in jail. Being cut off like this is a way of saying to me, `You’re not so bad.”’

Hesburgh has, in fact, had 16 presidential appointments over the years. These included not only his active role in the battle for civil rights, immigration, Third World development, and the peaceful uses of atomic energy but his election as the first priest to serve on the Board of Overseers at Harvard University. At the age of 77, he became chair of the board for the first of two terms.

As president of Notre Dame, Hesburgh worked in his office well after midnight. The door was always open, however, to the many students who knew that they could come and talk to him about their troubles or their dreams at any hour. Notre Dame theologian Richard McBrien has said, on behalf of all who know Hesburgh, that he is “as great a man close up as he is from a Mount Rushmore distance.”

The recipient of more than 150 honorary degrees, Hesburgh was honored for what he values most _ being a priest _ by President Clinton, who awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal. Clinton noted how Hesburgh’s authority is linked with his core identity as a priest. “The greatest honor you’ll ever wear around your neck,” Clinton said, “is the collar of a priest.”

Almost 64 years after his ordination and heaped with honors, Hesburgh would choose a single word as his epitaph: “Priest.” Although he still looks like a matinee idol whose silver hair has turned him to character roles, Hesburgh remains vitally involved in bringing the light of his faith to bear on the great causes of our day. You never notice, when you are with him, that this man who sees so deeply into things has suffered the loss of most of his sight.

He never murmurs or complains but speaks of things outside himself. “What we need,” he says, “is an understanding that we are just in the middle of the story, that it is a story far from ended, and that we have to contribute our part to keep it moving upward and outward.”

Happy 90th birthday, Father Hesburgh. Let’s blow out the candles for a great priest who may have lost some of his sight but none of his vision.

(Eugene Cullen Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author of “Cardinal Bernardin’s Stations of the Cross,” published by St. Martin’s Press.)

KRE/RB END KENNEDY750 words

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