Word: priestly
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Notre Dame's incoming president was holding one of his first press conferences. Only sportswriters had shown up, one of them carrying a football, which he tossed to Father Theodore Martin Hesburgh, with a request that the priest assume the hike stance. "I'm not the coach," snapped the new leader of America's foremost collegiate football power, "I'm the president!" And he strode from the room. "That happened only once," recalls the 69-year-old Hesburgh, who is now preparing for his retirement; it will come next week, after a reign that is the longest and, by some...
...more important to Hesburgh have been the changes in Notre Dame's governance and its amalgam of scholars. In 1967 he persuaded the Congregation of Holy Cross, his order of priests and the founders of Notre Dame, to cede control of the institution to a lay board of trustees, though the school would remain Catholic and its president a priest of the order. This was a radical step in Catholic education, where virtue and even legitimacy are often judged by proximity to the church hierarchy. To Hesburgh, however, ecumenical leadership was essential to turning the university's vision outward toward...
This was not Hesburgh's first exchange with the Vatican. He declined a Cardinal's red hat from his friend Pope Paul VI. His commanding presence also elicited an offer from Lyndon Johnson to run the space program, which Hesburgh declined, commenting that a priest with poverty vows should not be running a $6 billion agency. He also rejected a Nixon proposal to head up the poverty program. "I never wanted to be a sort of Cardinal Richelieu," he commented of these Government offers. However, he has sat as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and as a board member...
Through all the hoopla, as through all the years and honors before, Hesburgh has not wavered from his inner call. "I always wanted to be a priest, ever since I ever wanted to be anything," he says. "Faith keeps him going strong," confirms Georgetown's Healy. "He says Mass like the day he was ordained. That's his real greatness. He's what the Irish call a darlin' man." And, by every appearance, a deeply fulfilled...
...Pope will be further drawing his church into a dispute that seems to be aggravating Rome's history of strained relations with Jews. John Paul will be stepping directly into the controversy on his West German visit, during which he will also beatify Rupert Mayer, a German Jesuit priest who opposed the Nazis and died...