Judge Guido Calabresi '53 '58 LL.B. shares a moment with Professor Douglas Kmiec before his lecture.
As the snow fell on a winter night in New Haven, STM was packed to capacity for the Judge Guido Calabresi Fellowship in Religion & Law lecture, delivered by Professor Douglas W. Kmiec and entitled “Faith, Politics and Heresy.” Not only the Caruso Family Chair and Professor of Constitutional Law at Pepperdine University School of Law, Kmiec also served Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush as Assistant and Deputy Assistant U.S. Attorney General. He is a retired United States Ambassador, nominated for foreign service to the Republic of Malta by President Barack Obama.
Sister Jenn Schaff, O.P., opened the evening by observing that we were also marking another special occasion: the first day of our newly appointed Chaplain, Reverend Ryan Lerner, whose arrival we celebrate as he succeeds our legendary, beloved Fr. Bob.
Professor Kmiec’s lecture was an extraordinary tour de force of modern Catholic history in the United States. He spoke of being only a boy when he campaigned with his father in Illinois on behalf of John F. Kennedy, the Senator from Massachusetts who would become the first Catholic President in American history; of Kennedy’s searing loss three years later on that fateful day in November; and, how he found in his own grief over Kennedy’s loss a conduit to radical solidarity with the suffering in the United States and around the world.
He shared what it was like to experience firsthand being denied Communion when his conscience demanded he support a candidate who had “the wrong view on life but the right views on everything else.” And, in profoundly personal terms, he expressed the toll the ensuing hatred that was directed against him took on his own marriage and his family.
Turning to our own time, Kmiec directed the audience’s attention to the disturbing fact that a majority of American Catholics supported the candidate who now sits in the office once held by John F. Kennedy.
He warned that a “grand Faustian bargain” has been made in which all too many have “traded away our integrity, our commitment to truth, our commitment to working with one another, our commitment to forming community in exchange for the Federalist Society judges that can be appointed[.]” It is, he observed, “a terrible quid pro quo.”
Furthermore, he explained, there is a parallel attack underway led by an American Cardinal among others, against Pope Francis that seeks nothing less than the wholesale repudiation of Vatican II itself. On the threshold of Lent, Kmiec closed by inviting the audience to follow Jesus into the wilderness, urging us to remember the offer given to him there.
There was a discernable resonance in Kmiec’s lecture with Pope Benedict XVI’s reflection on the third temptation in the desert in his study of Jesus of Nazareth (Doubleday, 2007). As he explains:
“This temptation to use power to secure the faith has arisen again and again in varied forms throughout the centuries, and again and again faith has risked being suffocated in the embrace of power. The struggle for the freedom of the Church, the struggle to avoid identifying Jesus’s Kingdom with any political structure, is one that has to be fought century after century. For the fusion of faith and political power always comes at a price: faith becomes the servant of power[.]”
It is this insight that constantly reverberated in Professor Kmiec’s recollections and account of American Catholicism.
Patrick McCormick GRD '20 poses for a photo with Professor Kmiec.
