American Priest: The Ambitious Life and Conflicted Legacy of Notre Dame's Father Ted Hesburgh

by Wilson D. Miscamble C.S.C.

Overview

A provocative new biography probes deeply into the storied life of Father Ted Hesburgh, the well-loved but often controversial president of Notre Dame University.
 
Considered for many decades to be the most influential priest in America, Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, played what many consider pivotal roles in higher education, the Catholic Church, and national and international affairs. American Priest examines his life and his many and varied engagements—from the university he led for thirty-five years to his associations with the Vatican and the White House—and evaluates the extent and importance of his legacy.
 
Author and Notre Dame priest-professor Wilson D. Miscamble tracks how Hesburgh transformed Catholic higher education in the postwar era and explores how he became a much-celebrated voice in America at large. Yet, beyond the hagiography that often surrounds Hesburgh’s legacy lies another more complex and challenging story. What exactly were his contributions to higher learning; what was his involvement in the civil rights movement; and what was the nature of his role as advisor to popes and presidents?
 
Understanding Hesburgh’s life and work illuminates the journey that the Catholic Church traversed over the second half of the twentieth century. Exploring and evaluating Hesburgh’s importance, then, contributes not only to the colorful history of Notre Dame but also to comprehending the American Catholic experience.
 
Praise for American Priest

“An excellent, engaging biography . . . [Miscamble] deftly captures the ‘whole Hesburgh’ in a fair and thorough portrait.” —Catholic Philly
 
“Excellent . . . the story that Father Miscamble tells is an all-American story—the rise of a Catholic of relatively modest background, close to his immigrant roots, to a place of prominence among the nation’s elite.” —Public Discourse

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781984823441
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/12/2019
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	464
Sales rank:	878,670
File size:	20 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

REVEREND WILSON D. (BILL) MISCAMBLE, C.S.C., joined the permanent faculty in the History Department at Notre Dame in 1988. He chaired the History Department from 1993 to 1998. He also served as Rector and Superior of Moreau Seminary (2000 to 2004), the principal formation site for the Congregation of Holy Cross in North America. Fr. Miscamble's primary research interests are American foreign policy since World War II and the role of Catholics in 20th-century U.S. foreign relations.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Preparation of a Priest-President

FAMILY AND FAITH

Theodore martin hesburgh grew up in modest but comfortable circumstances in Syracuse, New York, and enjoyed a typical boyhood for an American Catholic lad of his generation. The years spent in upstate New York from his birth on May 25, 1917, until his departure in the fall of 1934 to enter the formation program of the Holy Cross order laid firm foundations for him in terms of both his family and his faith. The roots planted remained strong and helped nourish him throughout his whole life.

In his family tree Father Hesburgh seemed most fascinated by his paternal grandfather, named Theodore, as was his father. The captivation with his grandfather grew out of the elder Hesburgh’s career as a teacher and a journalist and from his having graduated from college. It gave him a sense that he had some “learning” in his background, and an ancestor who had a noted facility with languages. Perhaps there also was some special interest because of the tragedy that afflicted his grandfather and which so weighed upon his own father’s childhood. Within a two-week period, Grandfather Hesburgh’s wife and two of his three children died in sudden and heartbreaking circumstances. In a state of deep grief and distress, he took his remaining son, who was just three years of age, away from New York City and improbably traveled to Bellevue, Iowa, to join some distant relatives there on a large farm. He taught in a one-room school, and his son remained there with him for seven years before a concerned aunt brought the boy back to New York and raised him. After being rescued by his aunt, Theodore Bernard Hesburgh worked hard and managed to graduate from high school, which was an accomplishment, given all he had been through. The serious and deeply religious young man then began his work with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, where he remained throughout his working life. He eventually gained a promotion to serve as the manager of the company’s warehouse in Syracuse, where he and his wife raised their family in a very Catholic household.

Father Ted knew that his father, Theodore Bernard, was a “highly principled man” who worked extremely hard for his family. He admired him for this, but he never managed to forge a close emotional bond with his father. He always seemed perplexed that his younger brother (Jimmy), seventeen years his junior, eventually managed to do so. Perhaps some rather simple factors offer part of the explanation. The young Ted never shared his dad’s interest in either the Yankees or Notre Dame football. The boy proved a particularly inept athlete and never played on any serious teams after grade school. Rather he developed a lifelong love for hunting and fishing during these years, and his father worried about his interest in rifles. As he grew older he rarely engaged his father on political or other serious issues. The disaster of the Great Depression dominated American life during Father Ted’s teenage years. The devastating collapse of the economy following the stock market crash in 1929 caused widespread unemployment and immense social hardship. It broke the presidency of Herbert Hoover and eventually brought Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal to Washington, D.C. Given the immensity of human suffering that the Depression caused, it is surprising what little impact it had on the teenage Hesburgh’s thinking. He was not shaped noticeably by this national trauma and the political turmoil it produced.

He certainly did not adopt his father’s passionate political perspective. He remembered: “My dad was a very conservative guy. He hated Franklin Roosevelt. He hated the New Deal. Of course, it caused him a lot of trouble. He was managing a Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company warehouse in Syracuse, with thirty or forty people working for him. Every week, the New Deal would come in at the beginning of the week with a new list of regulations, which would drive him up the wall. . . . I can remember my father opening up those regulations every week and just about going through the roof because it just complicated his life to no end. So he hated Roosevelt. That’s a strong word. I don’t mean that technically, maybe ‘abhorred’ him would be a better word. But he was a Republican, and, if anything, more strongly when they were very conservative.” The son would eventually head in another political direction, but during the 1930s he seemed rather apolitical. In this area, as in much else, he felt closer to his mother.

Ted Hesburgh always felt a deep connection to his lively and outgoing mother, Anne Marie (Murphy). She was quite short, just five foot one, but blessed with a beautiful voice and a gift for friendship. She too shared the deep religious faith of the tall (six foot two) young man whom she married and whom she complemented well. She devoted herself to forging a happy home for her husband and the children that soon came along—Mary, the oldest (in 1915), and then Ted (1917), followed by Elizabeth (1920), Anne (1925) and, after a substantial gap, James (Jimmy) in 1933. Her first son said, “I probably inherited a lot more of my mother’s genes than my father’s. That’s probably not scientifically true, but the fact is that I was the only one in the family who had black hair like her and black eyes like her. My father was blue-eyed and so are my sisters. And, I think, temperamentally, I got more of the Irish of the Murphys than I did of the German-French of the Hesburghs. I just think that for some curious reason, I probably was closer to my mother than to my father.” While not wanting to get too Freudian about it, he noted that he was the only one of the children that she nursed, and he speculated that this deepened his bond with his mother. And, no doubt, the young Hesburgh found much to love in his mother, especially her vivacious nature, the aura of joy that surrounded her, and her wonderful laugh. As he recalled: “Everybody loved mother. The nuns all liked her, the priests all liked her, the people in the neighborhood all liked her. We never had any problems with the neighbors—back and forth. She was just a very pleasant, likeable human being.”1 She also had lessons to teach her son about basic kindness and standing against prejudice such as in the way she favorably treated a young Jewish woman who was otherwise ostracized in their majority Protestant neighborhood of Strathmore.

Such lessons helped ensure that the young Ted grew up a well-mannered and generous boy. He gave his parents little trouble at any stage. He related well to his sisters, and his closest relationship was with his older sister, Mary. He built model airplanes, which presaged his adult interest in flight. In 1927 on a visit to New York he caught a glimpse of Charles Lindbergh as the young pilot who had flown his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis nonstop from New York to Paris and returned back to receive a hero’s reception in a tickertape parade up Broadway. Seeing the adulation for Lindbergh the ten-year-old boy could have been easily forgiven if he entertained thoughts of emulating his feats. But he already had determined that he was called not to be a daring pilot but rather a Catholic priest.

Hesburgh grew up in Strathmore, a new residential subdivision in the southwest of Syracuse, and home to middle- and upper-middle-class families. The marketing materials for the new development advertised that it contained “no smoke, no dirt, no fogs, no two-family or apartment houses, no business places of any kind, nothing but homes.” While their immediate neighborhood was not a Catholic enclave, the Hesburghs were part of a vibrant Catholic subculture, rather typical of the period, that centered on Most Holy Rosary Parish and School. The young Ted spent twelve years there and benefited from the devoted labors of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) nuns who taught him. The sisters helped create a veritable culture of vocations, which led to a sizable number of their graduates studying for the priesthood or becoming religious sisters. Perhaps one of the IHM sisters first planted the idea of the priesthood, although Father Ted never identified any individual as decisive. He just knew from an early age, as a surprising number of future priests do, that he was called to serve God at the altar.

When Hesburgh was in the eighth grade and assisting in his parish as an altar boy, four priests of the Congregation of Holy Cross came to preach a mission at Most Holy Rosary. Hesburgh’s words can give details of how their visit influenced him: “It was a very popular mission. When one priest was out there giving the parishioners hell and damnation, as they always did in those missions, one of them stayed with us [altar boys] in the sacristy and would regale us with stories about Notre Dame, Deer Park [the Holy Cross retreat property in western Maryland], and the camps they had and all of the stuff that went on in the seminary.” Fr. Tom Duffy impressed the young Hesburgh, who revealed his hopes to serve as a priest someday to the Holy Cross mission giver. Duffy took it upon himself to visit the Hesburgh household to pursue the matter further. Thereupon occurred a notable exchange that Father Ted loved to retell: “So he went out to visit my mother at the house. He said to her, ‘Ted tells me he thinks of being a priest. Why don’t you send him out to Holy Cross Seminary at Notre Dame? He could go to high school and the seminary.’ She said, ‘A young boy’s place in his teenage days is home with his family.’ He said, ‘Yes, but if he stays here, he may lose his vocation.’ And my mother, being a tough Irish gal, said, ‘If he grows up in a Catholic family, all practicing Catholics and good with the sacraments, and he’s going to Mass every day at school, and he is going to a Catholic high school, if he loses his vocation, let me tell you something about it: he doesn’t have one.’ And that was the end of that argument.”2 Father Hesburgh’s mother insisted he complete high school in Syracuse, where he performed well.

The retort of Mrs. Hesburgh proved only a temporary deterrent to Father Duffy, who stayed in touch with Ted Hesburgh as he navigated his way through his high school years. He wrote two or three letters a year to keep alive the possibility of joining Holy Cross before the young man, whom he sensed to be a fine prospect for his order. His persistence eventually paid off because the future Father Ted decided to enter the seminary at the end of his senior year. The graduating senior knew that he was well prepared by his high school education to begin his undergraduate studies. Well over sixty years later he recited with pride the course of studies he had completed: “Four years of Latin, three years of French, algebra/geometry, chemistry (I skipped physics because I wanted to get a third year of French, which was probably a good bet, although I got to learn a lot of physics later), art two years, religion four years, history three years, English four years, a lot of writing.” Only art caused him difficulties, and he readily conceded that his sister Mary got the measure of artistic talent that had thoroughly escaped him. He performed strongly in Latin and studied Virgil’s Aeneid, Cicero’s letters and speeches, and Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), whose opening words, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres” (“All Gaul is divided into three parts”), he relished reciting. He graduated third in his class.

His talent for languages, similar to his grandfather’s, and his love for words, shared with his father, were evident at this point and always remained with him. He also possessed a genuine intellectual curiosity. As a youngster he read the Encyclopedia Britannica volumes his parents had purchased for their home and developed an interest in many areas. This too stayed with him, and his interests would always be wide-ranging even if his knowledge might be rather modest in a given area. He fancied himself a serious reader, preferring books with a strong moral message or that included characters worthy of emulation. Yet no particular author or body of literature grabbed him deeply and shaped his intellectual outlook at this point. Rather he possessed a breezy confidence that he could learn well, and even master, whatever came before him. He also developed his practical skills and honed his ability at using the second-hand typewriter purchased originally for Mary. By his junior year of high school he “could easily bang out an essay or a story.” He was to bang out many such essays in future years.

Success in his studies, his emergence as a popular and very handsome young man, and the affirmation of his teachers all contributed something to the development of a remarkably self-assured person as he completed his final years of high school. He was neither obviously cocky nor arrogant, but his confidence combined with his earnestness to produce a readiness to proffer advice to others. In his senior year, Hesburgh helped edit The Rosarian, his school’s newspaper. “In one remarkable article,” Michael O’Brien noted in his biography of Father Hesburgh, “he brashly challenged his fellow students to elevate the quality of their reading.” He counseled against the “dime novel” and instead recommended that they “read books ‘that will elevate your ideas, enlarge your vocabulary, and widen your perspective.’ ” As O’Brien’s fine account makes clear, while the student editor’s intentions were undoubtedly noble, he verged toward pretentious self-importance as he challenged his classmates to avoid wasting their time on frivolous reading while the “world of adventure, history, romance and culture beckons.”3 We don’t know if any of his fellow students responded positively to these Hesburghian recommendations. What we do know is that subsequently he never lost his confidence that he could address a situation judiciously and then forge positive recommendations for the betterment of others.

The confident high school senior also proved to be a young man ready and willing to take on leading roles. It was no surprise when he was cast as Christ in his school’s Passion play during his final year at Most Holy Rosary. It was a demanding part in a large production. The one-time lead actor remembered: “You had to put on a moustache, and I remember putting a damn beard on and off every night with stickem. We had these crazy robes we had to wear, but the thing that was incredible was I practically had to memorize the life of Christ right out of the Bible. I went on for about two or three hours. The big pitch that everybody remembered was when I was hanging on the cross—they got a life-sized cross and they still have it there behind the altar—and I had to cry out, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ You know the whole house kind of fell through the floor. But again, it was a dramatic moment. Even to this day when I read the Passion that stands out for me, that moment.” Father Ted would eventually come to stand in persona Christi in a real enactment of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, but his high school performance pointed to a strong disposition that never left him: to play the leading role. It would always be more difficult for him when he was cast in a minor part.

Editorial Reviews

"Very few men, clergy or lay, have shaped the American Catholic experience of the last century more powerfully than Notre Dame’s Theodore Hesburgh. Priest, religious, educator, visionary, builder, emissary, celebrity – he inhabited all these roles with exceptional passion, skill, and commensurate ambition. The author captures the complicated genius, and the equally complex times, of Hesburgh the man with exactly the right balance of admiring and critical eye. This is a deep, rich, superbly engaging biography of a force of nature on the post-conciliar American Catholic scene."—Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap., Archbishop of Philadelphia 

"Fr. Wilson Miscamble is uniquely qualified to tell the story of the legendary Fr. Hesburgh. Balanced, thorough, and gracefully written, this remarkable biography will be of interest to anyone who wants more fully to understand American Catholicism in the twentieth century."—Robert Barron, Auxiliary Bishop of Los Angeles and author of To Light a Fire on the Earth
 
"An incisive portrait of Theodore Hesburgh as the influential embodiment of one way of being Catholic and American in the last half of the twentieth century."—George Weigel, author of The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II - The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy

"In this ground-breaking, clear eyed biography of Father Theodore Hesburgh, we finally have the man in full.  With charity and historical candor, Father Wilson Miscamble takes readers inside the glories and contradictions of this renowned man of faith—caught between the world and Notre Dame. Through personal interviews with Hesburgh and careful reportage, Miscamble reveals the Hesbergh legacy from the inside, fearlessly exposing unexplored corners of Fr. Ted’s story that hold important lessons for anyone who cares about education, faith, and The University of Notre Dame."—Raymond Arroyo, New York Times Bestselling Author, Fox News Contributor, EWTN News Managing Editor 

"Fr. Hesburgh was the most influential and remarkable man I have ever met. Reading American Priest helped me understand him better, both his struggles and his many accomplishments."—Coach Lou Holtz

"With the scholarly acumen of an accomplished historian and the personal commitment of a Holy Cross priest, Miscamble has crafted an important, critical re-telling of the life and work of Father Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C. This is not hagiography, nor historical biography in the conventional sense. This is an extended conversation, at times a candid debate, concerning what both author and subject care about most: Notre Dame, Holy Cross, national and international politics, and how Catholic higher education can best fulfill its mission of serving the church and the world and thus giving glory to God."—Michael J. Baxter, Ph.D., Director of Catholic Studies at Regis University

“Ambitious . . . [Reverend] Miscamble skillfully guides us through the jungle of campus politics.” —The Imaginative Conservative

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