Respecting both the sacred and the secular: An interview with Theodore M. Hesburgh

Educational Forum, The, Winter 2002 by Mabie, Grant E

Theodore M. Hesburgh is President Emeritus of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Educated at Notre Dame and the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., he returned to Notre Dame in 1945 as a faculty member. In 1952, Hesburgh was named the 15th president of the University.

Hesburgh has served in a wide variety of ecumenical and advisory positions, including roles at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, the Commission on Civil Rights, the U.S. Institute for Peace, the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the U.N. Conference on Science and Technology for Development. He has also served as Director of the Chase Manhattan Bank and President of Harvard University's Board of Overseers. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson awarded Hesburgh the Medal of Freedom. In 1970, the American Association of University Professors awarded him the Meiklejohn Award, which honors those who uphold academic freedom. Hesburgh also was inducted into Kappa Delta Pi's prestigious Laureate Chapter in that year. In 2000, he received the Congressional Gold Medal for his lifelong work in the area of civil rights.

Though retired, Hesburgh continues to meet with students and faculty members in need of his insight and assistance. He also maintains a busy schedule of lectures and addresses both on campus and around the nation-and he recently served as a torchbearer on the route to take the Olympic flame to Salt Lake City for this year's games. Managing Editor Grant E. Mabie talked with Father Hesburgh for a telephone interview in November 2001.

Q: One of the chief complaints of fundamentalists is that theories like evolution and the Big Bang are often presented in pubic schools as fact. How accurate is this criticism from the fundamentalists? Why hasn't the notion of science rooted in theory been better presented?

A: Well, I think science is based on facts. It can seem like a house of cards, if you will, at first, but each fact upholds another fact, and you build on them until you come to a conclusion. So when teachers of science speak of evolution they're presenting the facts they know and how they're interpreted. Now you can disagree with that if you want, but they can't be asked to say something they don't believe in anymore than if you're teaching history you're going to say that the Indians won the war with the Europeans when we arrived. So that doesn't bother me. I think science is looked upon as factual, but it's also looked upon as interpretation of facts-which may not always be 100 percent true but generally are.

Q: There's a public perception, however, of a disparity. How do we do a better job of explaining this distinction as you just presented it?

A: Well, I think one can say quite aptly there are people that don't believe either these facts or the conclusions we draw from them. It's hard to argue with the facts, so I don't take that part seriously, but, as you interpret them, you have to lead where the facts lead-and I think that, in looking at the facts of evolution, the credibility of the evidence is there. You examine a fossil: you can carbon date it, you can put a year fairly close to when it was there. Even if you have a whole series of fossil findings, you still may not interpret exactly when man arrived on earth. I believe that happened when the beings that came before us, through great anthropological evolution, got to a certain point, and God decided that man was advanced far enough to endow him with a soul. Doing this also endowed him with immortality, with the power to think and the power to be free. We are the only creatures on earth that are completely free.

Q: Given the widely divergent perspectives in this country on how humankind came to be here, how should an educator properly cover issues of science?

A: Well, I think one has to be honest to one's own intelligence, education, and religious convictions. We all have to be honest with ourselves and what we perceive to be the truth, especially if we're teaching that to youngsters. I respect everybody who is religious, and when it's a question of education I respect everybody taking into regard their own reason and convictions about how things happen. Consider the Big Bang-there's a lot of theorizing about it. That's true of many parts of science; people say, "Evidence seems to lead that way, but I don't believe it." If you're going to deal with science, all you can do is hand out the evidence and say this is how we interpret it. You're free to disagree, but the great majority of people in the world believe in evolution without leaving God out of it. We say it happened because God wanted it to happen and at a certain point he wanted it to become the culmination of evolution, the human being whom God granted a soul. Without that happening, we wouldn't have had science or any of the other knowledgeable things that we study in education.

Q: Have schools done an adequate job of either removing religion or respecting religious diversity in their curricula?