Controversy arose early this summer as rumors reached the ears of students, faculty and alumni that Georgetown’s administration is considering renaming the Walsh School of Foreign Service after the late Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Reactions to these rumors have been largely negative, and for many Catholic students, it seems to be another diminution of the role of Catholicism in the University’s identity.
The university system itself is a child of Catholic civilization. The oldest universities, like those in Bologna, Oxford and Paris were formed in the early and high medieval periods to educate men for the priesthood. While the nobility would typically have private tutors for their children, poorer families would often send their sons to join the clergy, whereby they would receive an education typically unavailable to most people.
The university was truly a gift to Christendom ex corde ecclesiae — from the heart of the Church. It was this unity of grace and knowledge in Catholic education that buttressed the Counter-Reformation period as well. St. Ignatius and the Jesuits followed the view of St. Thomas Aquinas, who held that human nature was still fundamentally good, though flawed, and could be improved with the help of divine grace. Education formed a critical part of the Jesuit program because it was one of the ways in which our human nature could be refined.
This stood in contrast with the Protestant notion that human nature was irredeemably and totally depraved. For the Jesuits, this meant that action could be taken in the world for the purpose of sanctification, and that God could be found in worldly acts of service.
Fr. Walsh was an exemplar of this. His experience in the First World War—a war which was primarily the result of a failure in diplomacy—inspired him to create the School of Foreign Service. Like many others who experienced the war, Fr. Walsh sought to do what he could in order to avoid a similar catastrophe. By creating the SFS, Walsh sought to infuse the diplomatic arena with a breath of fresh air from souls formed in a Catholic education with the aid of divine grace to create a less bellicose future.
Through the rest of his life Fr. Walsh practiced what he preached. He was involved in Catholic relief efforts in the early Soviet Union where he made two important contributions. One such contribution was his assistance in the establishment of the Russian Greek Catholic Church with Blessed Leonid Feodorov.
Additionally, by contributing to this project, he also was witness to the beginnings of the brutal persecutions which Catholics would face in the USSR. He sounded the alarm about these abuses in the west, which may have contributed to the American refusal to grant diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union.
He also served as Pope Pius XI’s chief diplomat with the Mexican government during La Cristiada (1926-1929), a war between faithful Mexican Catholics and the oppressive and masonic Calles regime who effectively made the public practice of Catholicism illegal. On the Pope’s behalf, Walsh negotiated a peace deal between the two parties.
While I, and many others with the benefit of hindsight, ultimately see the deal as a betrayal of the cristeros, the deal brought an end to the war and reestablished freedom of worship for Mexican Catholics. The deal does, however, reflect the ways in which Walsh’s work was perhaps infected with the spirit of Americanism, which I reflect on in a previous article.
Additional accomplishments include his efforts during the Second World War and the Nuremberg trials. Most important, however, was the school which came to bear his name only two years after his death. It is one of, if not the single most important facet of Georgetown’s undergraduate prestige. The SFS grew into the role of producing functionaries for the Cold War fight against communism. This legacy profoundly bears the character of Fr. Walsh.
In our present age, universities are tempted to separate education from grace. This is an age-old temptation; almost immediately in the 13th and 14th centuries, academics like William of Ockham succumbed to it and propagated man-centered “wisdom” meant only to satisfy man’s pride rather than to humbly approach the mystery of creation. For Adam and Eve, the temptation to this hubristic form of knowledge took the form of an offer from a serpent. For Georgetown, this same offer presents itself in seeking knowledge without humility and without reference to the Creator.
While the anti-Catholic elements inherent in the proposed name change are subtle, they do reflect how Georgetown has, in large part, also succumbed to this temptation. Fr. Walsh, while certainly a diplomat of high caliber, was first and foremost a Catholic priest. Any political solutions he offered were only offered with the knowledge that no lasting peace could be established without Christ at its heart. This was a self-evident assumption for Catholics before the Second Vatican Council.
However, the utopian optimism promised by the post-war period into the 1960s promised a world with no quarrels but also no God; the anthem of that world would be John Lennon’s Imagine. This misplaced optimism snuck its way into Vatican II and has led to clerics putting their “trust in princes” rather than in the Almighty for peace.
While I doubt the proposition to change the name of Walsh’s school consciously bears this intention, it is a symptom of this larger trend. Albright, who forsook the Catholic faith, was a diplomat of this brave new world which mistakenly trusts in itself for the establishment of peace. For Georgetown to dismiss Fr. Walsh’s authentically Catholic and Jesuit legacy in favor of this error would simply be another betrayal of the University’s supposed Catholic and Jesuit identity.
A Catholic University’s privileged task is “to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.”
St. John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 1990
