Hesburgh, 79, calls for revival of common good, voluntarism

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 15, 1995 by Georgie Anne Geyer

His face still has the smooth look of fine porcelain, with only the slightest touch of aging. He still stands straight and tall, and his sharp moral intelligence is undimmed by the years.

As he approaches his 80th year, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh remains as compelling a figure as he was the day in 1952 when he assumed the presidency of the University of Notre Dame - not to speak of that day shortly afterward when he asked the gaggle of sportswriters following him everywhere whether they wanted to talk about education. When they said no, Hesburgh announced, "Men this news conference is over."

And Notre Dame, the football school of Knute Rockne fame, was never to be the same again.

One of the first things the legendary "Fr. Ted" did after we sat down for lunch and chat at the campus' Morris Inn this fall was to quote Thomas Aquinas on the society of law: "A rational order promulgated by those in charge of the community and ordained to the common good of that community."

It is perhaps no mystery, then, that Hesburgh's greatest concern - indeed, his almost obsessive concern -- is over the death or near death of the "common good" in America.

"I really worry about that," he began, as starry-eyed admirers made pilgrimages to our corner table to greet him. "What makes us a civilized country is respect for the law among citizens.

"Yet in Congress today, there are 1,000 lobbies making laws, and they care not a whit about the common good. We're invaded by 80,000 people pushing for their part when we need the common good. We can't go on this way and have a rational society.

For our society to be a good society, it has to be an ordered society. I think the problem for America today is to hear more about the common good and less about the individual."

Notre Dame is pioneering new ways of service to the community, with thousands of students serving voluntarily over their summers, working directly with the poor.

"Voluntarism," Hesburgh said, "is at the heart of what America is. De Tocqueville said a century ago that when you had a problem in France, you called upon the government - in America, the next morning a phalanx of people arrived to help.

Voluntarism is the ultimate answer to the good society. The bad society is when you exploit each other."

Probably no one in the world has a better right to talk about the common good, given Fr. Ted's accomplishments. When he took over the "sports school" in 1952, Notre Dame had an operating budget of under $10 million; it has soared to more than $200 million now. It had an almost nonexistent endowment; now its close to $1 billion.

And he is as proud of the approximately one-third of Notre Dame students who volunteer to work for the poor as part of the school's Summer Service Projects as he is of the priests, sisters, astronauts, generals and 800 CEOs (and sports figures, of course) that Notre Dame has produced.

But Hesburgh is not resting on his laurels. He speaks, travels, teaches. He believes - warns - that "the world is at a monumental crossroads, because we have gone from a bipolar good-and-evil type of world to a new set of values called ethnicity, relativism, tribalism."

"Peace," he said, "is a function of collaboration and cooperation in the world, but those other values are separating people. The result has, been that ethnic conflict has broken out all over the world. Peace is the tranquillity of order, but tranquillity is a function of justice and peace is the work of justice."

Observing these frightening developments in the world, this man - who has held 14 presidential appointments and has received more than 100 honorary degrees but has never wanted "anything but to be a priest" - has come to believe that the world needs a United Nations pre-emptive force to "use massive force before problems start."

His voice changes as, contemplating the havoc of the world outside Notre Dame, he suggests that if a dictator even raised his head, the Security Council should call up elite soldiers from each member state, drop them into the dictator's camp and tell him, "If you don't like it, call an election."

"I say we need a reorganized world order that must put a stop to. aggressions before they start."

And so our lunch ends, with one of the most remarkable men of our time turning out to be as provocative as ever - but also reminding us, lest we forget in this age of shabby celebrity, that goodness can indeed go hand in hand with greatness.

Georgie Anne Geyer is a columnist syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate.