Steady

The following speech by Gerard V. Bradley was given on the occasion of Professor Bradley receiving the Cardinal Wright Award in 2005, and originally appeared in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars Quarterly, Issue 28, No. 4, Winter 2005. In this speech, Professor Bradley pays special tribute to Fr. John Harvey, OSFS, as an example of strength, courage, and steadiness.

I am profoundly grateful to the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars for this award. I am especially indebted to the Board of Directors. They elected me to a distinguished company of faithful Catholic men and women, all outstanding scholars whose published work reflected their faith and enriched our lives. Just considering my immediate predecessors—Sister Mary Prudence Allen and Dr. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese—I am compelled to say that my humility outstrips even my gratitude. These two great Catholic women have recently brought out truly pathbreaking works of scholarship. I have in mind Sister’s second volume of her magisterial treatment of the concept of woman in history, and Betsey’s huge volume—written with her husband Gene—on the mind of the slaveholding class in the antebellum South. Glancing further down the list of previous Cardinal Wright Award winners deepens my feelings of modesty.

Our President Bernie Dobranski furthered these feelings of humility by sharing the news that, in my case, the election was hotly contested and carried in the end by a slim margin. But, hey, who remembers that Al Gore actually won the popular vote in 2000? Bush is President and Gore is lecturing in the wilderness. That’s all history will care to remember.

Most specially of all I wish to recognize and thank my bride of 24 years, Pamela Vivolo Bradley, for her support and her love. She is my number one gal and I am so glad she is able to be here tonight.

I owe a different debt of thanks to His Eminence Ralph McInerny. Not only did he draw the short straw this evening, and come under an obligation to introduce me. He got me into this in the first place. It was Ralph who conspired with our founder of such happy memory— Monsignor George Kelly—to make me President of our Fellowship in 1995. And it was Ralph who tabbed, or nabbed, me to speak at the Cardinal Wright Award Banquet for the very first time, way back in 1994.

I remember the occasion well. I do not well recall my remarks, which were (I think) a desultory mix of pieties and jabs at Ralph. Mercifully, no text survives. In fact, there was none—and therein lies the tale.

Our 1994 meeting was in Corpus Christi, Texas. Our host was the servant of Christ, His Excellency Rene Gracida. Bishop Gracida invited the Board to a reception before the Banquet; I attended because I was then Vice-President. The reception was a well-watered one, in the upper room of a local Mexican restaurant. After about two hours of enjoying our host’s Latin hospitality, it was time to move on to the Banquet. As I danced my way to the head table, Ralph McInerny—then our President—stopped me short and said: “I would like you to speak after dinner”. I stammered something like, “But, er, Ralph, I haven’t prepared anything. I don’t really know.” Ralph ever-so-coolly cut me short. He assured me that my remarks need not be too long or erudite, just a few remarks would do. I continued with ineffectual resistance to the idea. But Ralph cut that short, too. “There is just one thing,” he said. “What’s that Ralph?” “Just be very, very funny.”

I tried to be.

The next year was different. No surprises. In the interim I had succeeded Ralph as President. I knew I would host the Banquet, present the Cardinal Wright Award (to the redoubtable Monsignor William Smith, in fact), and say more than a little throughout the evening. I tried to be funny, again, but events nearly overwhelmed the effort. (So much for no “surprises”.)

We met in 1995 in Minneapolis to discuss the condition of Catholic colleges and universities. Then as now there was much to discuss: Catholic higher education was—and is—in a parlous state indeed. That meeting was extra-special for me because my wife Pamela was able to wrest herself from the duties of mothering six children to join me at the convention. As we entered the dining room, Pam and I encountered our friend Germain Grisez. We had known Germain for years and we both had come to treasure him as friend and counselor. Because I had to emcee the proceedings from the main table, Pam had to find another seat. She took one next to Germain, at a table right down in front of the podium.

My dinner partner was our host, Archbishop Harry Flynn. It was time to call the assembly to order; then as now, it’s a task better accomplished with a bull horn and a German shepherd than with gentle pleas. When I was just about to introduce the Archbishop to give the blessing, our friend Bill May walked up to the podium. Within eye and earshot of the Archbishop, he declared (and I quote Bill, verbatim): “A man left this knife in my room.” Professor May handed over a menacing looking weapon. Bill wanted me to make a “lost knife” announcement to the crowd. No one claimed it.

[Postscript: At the 2005 Banquet when I delivered these remarks, Bill May spoke up at this point in the story. In more than a stage whisper Bill confirmed the story, and insisted it was “only” a Swiss Army knife. What a member of the Swiss Army was doing in Bill’s Minneapolis hotel room that night in 1995 remains as an enduring mystery of our Fellowship.]

The Minneapolis banquet went downhill from there. After the knife announcement and the Archbishop’s invocation, we sat to eat. I then noticed that Germain was engaged in animated conversation with a woman I did not know, a woman seated to his left. (Pam Bradley was to his right.) I later learned that his conversation partner was a former student of Germain’s, Jo Horsy, then working for the Diocese of Fargo. Archbishop Flynn was also an old friend of Grisez’; in fact, Grisez held the Harry Flynn Chair of Christian Ethics at Mount Saint Mary’s because the Chair was established while Harry Flynn was Rector of that Seminary. I turned to Archbishop at this point and asked him: “Who is that woman sitting next to Germain?” He looked at me as if he were a deer caught in headlights, or maybe a cow which has been lobotomized. Archbishop Flynn said to me very, very deliberately: “Professor Bradley, I believe that woman is your wife.”

I am grateful to the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars not only for this award. I am also grateful to the Fellowship for the great help it has been to me. Because I served as President for several years, that last part might sound odd. It might seem that I am the one who has given, not received. It is true that often enough some of you have said thanks for my contributions to our Fellowship’s activities. But I am the one in debt, and I am in debt to all of you. The help of which I speak is your example of faithful witness to the truth in your work as scholars. It is more than that, too: your work precisely as Catholic scholars has so often been unwelcome, controversial, a grounds for mistreatment or neglect—even in those institutions listed in the Kennedy Directory as “Catholic” colleges and universities. Your Catholic scholarship is said, to be divisive. And your Catholic scholarship is, perhaps most sadly, ignored or even denounced by some of those we most earnestly wish to serve—the successors of the Apostles, the guardians of the faith in our time, the American episcopacy.

You deserve better. But you understand that on this earth it tends to be that no good deed goes unpunished in this vale of tears. Still, your work—our work—is, intrinsically, hard. It is made harder by the icy reception of it among those who should know better. Your example of patience and charity and, most of all, steadfastness is a great help to me. For it I am and shall forever be most thankful.

Steady. Steady was the key word last year in Pittsburgh when Monsignor William Smith spoke of our dear, departed Monsignor Kelly. Charity within patience was the key description of our first President, Father Ronald Lawler, when we were privileged to honor him two years ago in Arlington, just before his death later that year. But Father Lawler was no lamb; at least he was not docile. He was always steadfast—firm, determined, even feisty—when it came to the faith. Steady have you all been in the face of contradiction. And this has been a great consolation to me.

We all have a greater example of steadiness. Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI addressed a group of about 140 Italian priests last July 25. They were all residents of the Valle d’Acosta region of Italy, where the Pope was vacationing at the time. His main text was the Parable of the Sower. It is, the Holy Father said, a parable of suffering, of courage, of consolation. But as he described the deeper message of the parable it occurred to me that it was about being steady in faith.

“The Lord’s work had begun with great enthusiasm. The sick were visibly cured, everyone listened joyfully to the statement, ‘Thekingdom of God is at hand’. It really seemed”, Pope Benedict said, “that at last the sorrow of the people of God would be changed into joy. . . [T]hey then saw that the sick were indeed cured, devils were expelled, the Gospel was proclaimed”.

But, he continued, the “world stayed as it was. Nothing changed. The Romans still dominated it. Life was difficult every day”. What then are we to make of the power of the gospel? The gospel did not come as a thunderclap. It is not (as Benedict told the priests) a “messenger of God whom they supposed would take the helm of history in his hand”. The power of the gospel was instead the“power” of the seed, “a really tiny thing in comparison with historical and political reality”. But in the seed, the Word, is the bread of life and thus the life of the future.

We too are sowers of the seed. We Catholic scholars know that the faith includes true propositions to which we assent, and that these truths can—and do—shape our whole intellectual horizon. These truths shape our world and our work. But the gospel seems to be almost nothing; much of it falls on barren or rocky soil. What falls on fertile ground might take years to bear fruit, and then we might be dead. The Parable of the Sower enables us to understand, the Pope concluded, that we must “be courageous, even if the word of God, the kingdom of God, seems to have no historical or political importance”.

We must hang in there, be strong, be steady. And we can help one another to be strong, and courageous, to be steady. The Fellowship has done so for me. And I shall name here two examples—both very near at hand—of those who have shown me what it means to be steady.

One is Father John Harvey, OSFS. Father Harvey has labored more than most of us in the heat of the day. In his case it is not the sunlight that burns. It is, first, the intractability of his work. It is also the heat of criticism. Father John is widely criticized for his unsurpassably valuable work ministering to homosexual men and women. In our culture, that is no surprise. But the criticism comes from within the Church more than without. Even some bishops refuse to permit Father to set up Courage chapters in their dioceses. A few of these men may oppose Courage’s goals. More commonly (I suppose) reluctant bishops prefer to avoid stirring the pot of controversy when it comes to this issue—as if one could save souls for Jesus without causing a little commotion.

Most of you know that Father John founded Courage many years ago to fill a void; he was the first to address in any organized way the pastoral needs peculiar to those with same-sex attractions. He remains the Director and guiding spirit of the group. Father John and Courage have done more for the cause of truth when it comes to homosexuality than anyone or anything else in the Catholic Church, at least during my lifetime.

It was my privilege to speak to the Courage annual meeting this past August. I spent several hours visiting with those attending. Most were Courage members, and thus experience same-sex attraction. But these were not “gay” men and women. They were gay; that is, well-adjusted and even happy. That is because they are Christians. They did not identify themselves with their sexual disposition. They understood (because Father John and his collaborators taught them) that everyone has crosses to bear in life. Theirs happens to be same-sex attraction. One’s struggle with one’s particular cross imposed—and not the cross itself—defines the person. And struggling with the cross for Jesus’ sake defines one as Christian.

He accepted his call, and has remained steady in it despite contradictions that would have soured the faith of lesser men and women.

Father John Harvey was the first person in the Church to identify ministry to homosexual men and women as a distinct kind ofcalling. But it was not a call of his own making. Father John was trained as a moral theologian and achieved renown as a scholar. Early in his career he wrote an article on homosexuality. He did not intend the article to be the launch of a career. Quite the contrary. But then Father John Ford, S. J., perhaps the greatest moral theologian in the Church at midcentury (and also a previous winner of the Cardinal Wright Award) spoke to Father Harvey. As Father Harvey tells it, Ford said to him, “John, I hope that you will continue to write on the subject. No one else is doing it. No one else will be able to do it as well as you already do anytime soon. The Church needs it”. A few years later another great Jesuit theologian by the name of John Courtney Murray delivered much the same advice to Father Harvey. And then Terence Cardinal Cooke asked him to found the group which we know as Courage.

The nub of it is that Father John Harvey never set out to do what he has done. But he always wanted to do what needed to be done for the Church—which means what Jesus wants for the sake of the Kingdom. He accepted his call, and has remained steady in it despite contradictions that would have soured the faith of lesser men and women.

The second example is Bill May. This distinguished moral theologian is competent to do more than handle sharp instruments. He is, in fact, one of the most distinguished and most productive scholars within our membership. His scholarly work has been a great gift to the Church. The steadiness for which I mean to cite Bill occurred at our last meeting, in Pittsburgh. Actually, it was Bill’s unsteadiness which is illustrative.

Our host last year in Pittsburgh, Bishop Donald Wuerl, is a long-time member of the Fellowship. He has known Bill May (and others among our stalwarts) for decades. He (Wuerl) hosted our meeting in 1992, too. Bishop Wuerl said Mass for us on Sunday morning last year, near the close of our gathering. He was ready for the final blessing. I happened to be looking right at him when he paused in his progress towards dismissing the assembly. He looked right at Bill May, kneeling there directly in front of him, as Bill struggled to his feet for the final blessing. Bill’s legs are not what they once were; he hobbles. I could tell at that moment that Bishop Wuerl was (for lack of a more precise term) affected by Bill’s struggle.

Bill made it to his feet only to be motioned to sit. As were we all. Bishop Wuerl had decided on the spot to say something to us exactly as a fellowship of Catholic scholars. Bill May triggered it. Those of you who were there in Pittsburgh may remember that Bishop Wuerl then said that Bill exemplified the witness, the spirit, the steadiness, of our group. He was, of course, quite right.

Ten minutes later I arrived at table to have breakfast with Bishop Wuerl. Before I was seated he broke into a narrative of how much it meant to him to see Bill May, a man whom the Bishop had known through thick and thin and from a time when each was a young man, stay the course. And Bishop Wuerl proved it, in a way: when I returned to my office two days later there was already in the mail a check from Bishop Wuerl, for a perpetual membership in the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars. ✠