The real deal: how a philosophy professor with a checkered past became the most influential Catholic layman in George W. Bush's Washington

National Catholic Reporter, August 27, 2004 by Joe Feuerherd

Editor's note: Deal Hudson announced Aug. 18 that he would be giving up his position with the Republican National Committee in reaction to questions posed by "a liberal Catholic publication." In recent days, NCR has tried repeatedly to meet with Hudson to get his response to questions about his departure from Fordham University in 1994 following allegations of an inappropriate sexual relationship with a freshman female student. The university said Hudson "surrendered" his tenure. He also paid a settlement of $30,000 to terminate a lawsuit that the student brought against him on the basis of these allegations.

This past March 17, having paid tribute to the saint who drove the snakes from Ireland, George W. Bush--first lady to his left, Irish prime minister to his right--bounded off the Roosevelt Room podium. As he began to work the crowd of Irish Americans and Gaelic-wannabes, the president noticed a familiar face, a fellow Texan, among those assembled at the annual St. Patrick's Day White House gathering.

"Immediately after George Bush spoke," recalled former U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Ray Flynn, "the first person he greeted was Deal Hudson."

Heady stuff, perhaps, to be the first among the gathered Catholic glitterati to be singled out by the most powerful man in the world. But by now Hudson--publisher of the conservative Catholic monthly Crisis, Bush political operative, and one-time philosophy professor--was accustomed to the treatment.

Hudson, a 54-year-old, thrice-married former Baptist minister, is a regular White House visitor, a leading Bush campaign Catholic proxy, and a widely quoted partisan unafraid to use his pen to serve the Bush cause.

In more than two-dozen interviews conducted by NCR over a four-and-a-half-month period, mostly with former friends and Hudson's ideological kin, a complicated portrait emerged. Though few of those interviewed would speak on the record, many of them painted a far less flattering picture of Hudson than his public moralizing would suggest, and several raised questions about the allegations that ended his academic career.

Still, Hudson does not shy away from the political limelight. In May he told The Washington Post that Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry should be denounced from the pulpit "whenever and wherever he campaigns as a Catholic." Politics and religion fully meshed earlier this year when Hudson led an effort to oust a low level employee, Ono Ekeh, from his job at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Secretariat for African-American Catholics (NCR, April 23) because Ekeh hosted a "Catholics for Kerry" Web site.

"Look," wrote Hudson in his widely circulated e-mail column, "it's one thing for a Catholic to be a pro-life Democrat--that in itself is a perfectly legitimate position and consistent with our Catholic faith. However, it's completely unacceptable to follow Ekeh and trade away our pro-life responsibilities."

Ekeh was forced to resign.

Politics aside, did Hudson have any personal regret that Ekeh, a father of three young children, had lost his job? Not in the least.

"If you're going to play in the sandbox," Hudson told NCR, "then you have to take the consequences of your public utterances and your public actions." In a recent fundraising letter, Hudson pledged that Crisis would be taking "a close [emphasis in original] look at some of the bishops who are allowing their local politicians to get away with" the "deception" of calling themselves Catholic while voting for abortion rights.

"They [the bishops] are scared of him, afraid that he's going to attack them," says a leading Republican Catholic layman with close ties to the American hierarchy.

Hudson's rise to influence and his status as public arbiter of Catholic morals is all the more remarkable given that almost 10 years to the day of the 2004 St. Patrick's Day celebration, the then-Fordham University philosophy professor stood accused of breaching the bounds of the professor-student relationship. According to documents obtained by NCR, Hudson invited a vulnerable freshman undergraduate, Cara Poppas, to join a group of older students for a pre-Lenten "Fat Tuesday" night of partying at a Greenwich Village bar. The night concluded after midnight in Hudson's Fordham office, where he and the drunken 18-year-old exchanged sexual favors. The fallout would force his resignation from a tenured position at the Jesuit school, cost him $30,000, and derail a promising academic career.

It threatened public disgrace.

But that was not Hudson's fate. Instead, he got another chance--and made the most of it.

Power in Washington is directly related to access--the ability to get phone calls taken by influential senators, key cabinet officers, top name journalists, well-wired lobbyists, and, most important, access to that disembodied entity known as the "White House."

Hudson's got A-list access.

On Jan. 8 he was in the East Room for a presidential meeting with leaders of the National Catholic Educational Association. Later that month, on the day of the annual antiabortion March for Life, Hudson hosted the kick-off of the Republican National Committee's "Catholic Outreach" effort, where his leadership was praised by RNC Chairman Ed Gillespie.