OPINION:
As a college student, I volunteered at a soup kitchen that decided one day to remove “saint” from its name. I later read that a donor had made that a condition of a large donation.
I faulted the donor, whether he was religious or secular. That was my first encounter with Christian erasure. Now you can search online all the charities and schools that have similarly sold out.
I recalled this when I heard that Joel Hellman, dean of Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, the nation’s first American college dedicated to international affairs and diplomacy, was hustling the idea of renaming my school for Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton’s second secretary of state.
The school was founded by Walsh in 1919 and named for him in 1958. I don’t know Mr. Hellman, I don’t know whether he is religious or secular, and I don’t know who vetted him for hiring without conveying to him the American Catholic exceptionality of the Georgetown story.
The Catholic bishop who founded Georgetown in 1789 placed in it all his “hope of permanency and success for our Holy Religion in the United States.”
It was one in a series of efforts that John Carroll and his cousin Charles and brother Daniel made in reaction to a prior century when English Catholics in Maryland and everywhere could not vote, hold public office, celebrate public Mass or educate their children, among other repressions.
Twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, another Carroll had traveled to Paris seeking a French land grant so that Maryland’s Catholics could resettle along the Arkansas River. The next generation, three Carroll cousins would instead lead a revolution, place three religious liberties into a new Constitution, and establish a college in the new nation’s capital.
Georgetown became a symbol of Catholic achievement. Yet less than a hundred years ago, anti-Catholic bigots still rode about in white sheets or posted signs saying, “Irish need not apply.” That exclusion didn’t aim at Celts; it aimed at Catholics. Mackerel-snappers.
Irish and Catholic, the Rev. Edmund Walsh went from lowly priest to the most prominent unelected Catholic in American public affairs of the 20th century.
Founding the School of Foreign Service was just one amazing thing he did. He was like Forrest Gump.
Enter Mr. Hellman. He denies that there is a large donation behind his overreach. That would be a greater “scandal.”
Albright lived in Georgetown, he argues. So did Walsh, but more humbly.
Albright was the first female secretary of state, but she was hardly exemplar for glass ceiling shattering. She was a child of privilege, even before she went to Wellesley and married a wealthy scion. Her father had a school of international affairs named after him.
When she was hired by Georgetown, after being a White House staffer, Albright had never taught.
The enormous negative reaction to Mr. Hellman’s folly has focused on her foreign policies, from Madeleine’s war on Serbia to her insensitivity to the death of Arab children. But that is not what makes Albright the secretary of death.
Earlier I used the word “scandal.” I meant it in the Christian sense. Madeleine Albright was an extremist abortion advocate. A lifelong Democratic operative, in 1999, while secretary of state, Albright gave a speech to the extremist National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League.
In 2006, she published an op-ed in The New York Times in which she condemned the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act. She argued in favor of late-term abortion. That is the third-semester “procedure” that involves sucking out a fetus’s brain after killing it.
In 1991, the cardinal archbishop of Washington, James Hickey, declared that Georgetown’s funding of a pro-abortion student club was “inconsistent with Georgetown’s Catholic identity.” He later ruled that Georgetown possessed a pontifical charter and punted the scandal to Rome.
Pope John Paul II promptly ordered Georgetown to reverse course.
The man who funded the pro-abortion advocacy club is now Georgetown’s president, John J. DeGioia. For 30 years, Jack has distanced himself from the funding decision, blaming his predecessor. We’ll see. Renaming a school for a pro-abortion extremist is worse a scandal to the faithful. It would be unforgivable.
Perhaps Mr. Hellman was misled. In the “woke” era, Georgetown has renamed three buildings, one chapel, and removed 34 portraits of prominent Catholic alumni and priests. But he and his allies have whispered that Walsh had issues, referencing the very anti-Catholic tropes with which Walsh had to contend.
Edmund Walsh’s issues are that he was a vocal foe of communism and Nazism, but he did not inspire McCarthyism. Walsh is faulted for pointing out that the Soviet revolution had anti-Christian aspects. It did, and for good reason.
Muck critics ignore that Walsh was a close friend of leading Jewish leaders, organized Catholic relief for Jewish refugees, and spoke publicly to condemn antisemitism. He hired Jewish professors and appointed his school’s second dean, William F. Notz.
Notz was the first Jewish dean at any of Georgetown’s schools and served in the post for 12 years.
Besmirching Walsh to promote Albright lacks decency, and it is also unforgivable.
Mr. Hellman got Jesuit leaders to sign off on his Catholic erasure. Not a surprise. Jesuits are now few and tepid. The vice president for mission, a Potemkin title for sure, just went along. The decision now goes to the board of directors.
Renaming a school to honor a pro-abortion political hack, however, is not up to Georgetown alone.
In 1991, Pope John Paul II invested the local bishop with ensuring that “any official action or commitment of the University is to be in accord with its Catholic identity.”
In Georgetown’s pontifical case, it is also up to the pontiff, Pope Francis. If Cardinal Wilton Gregory or Pope Francis allow Joel Hellman to redefine Georgetown surreptitiously, the two will surely not win the Catholic vote.
• Manuel A. Miranda is a 1982 graduate of the School of Foreign Service and served on its executive committee.
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