“Orlando was a quiet, thoughtful leader who was committed to the idea that we can keep each other safe and hold one another accountable without resorting to punishment,” said Professor of Sociology Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D. “He was someone who supported all students and his junior colleagues.” 

A Symbolic Cup of Coffee

In 1987, Rodriguez joined Fordham as senior research associate at the University’s former Hispanic Research Center, where he studied mental health in Latinx communities. From 1990 to 1997, he served as the center’s director. Rodriguez also taught in the Sociology and Anthropology Department at Rose Hill, serving in several positions, including department chair, until his retirement in 2020. 

He and his wife experienced a devastating loss during the 9/11 terrorist attacks in New York City: the death of their son, Gregory, who worked on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center. Four days later, they penned an open letter, “Not In Our Son’s Name,” asking the U.S. government to resist calls for military retaliation. Their letter was included in the book Voices of a People’s History of the United States (Seven Stories Press, 2004), inspiring a series of public readings on stages nationwide, as well as the 2009 film “The People Speak.” The story of their response to their son’s death was also spotlighted in the 2015 documentary “In Our Son’s Name,” aired on PBS. 

Despite his pain, Rodriguez was resilient. “He would bring me a little cup of espresso in bed every morning before I got up,” said his wife, Phyllis Schafer Rodriguez, his partner of nearly six decades. “We both felt hopeless and devastated after Greg was killed. The next morning, after hardly sleeping … he walked in with two cups of espresso [for us]. That’s emblematic, in a quiet way, of who he was.”

At Fordham, Rodriguez turned his grief into action. With adjunct professor Kerry Sweet, he created and co-taught the course Terrorism and Society, profiled by The New York Times, which aimed to help students better understand terrorism. He was also instrumental in creating the Peace and Justice Studies minor program and the criminology course Harm and Justice, Crime and Punishment. 

‘I Credit Him with the Person I Am Today’ 

Among his mentees was Tia Noelle Pratt, GSAS ’01, ’10, who said Rodriguez saved her career. He helped her to navigate a complex administrative issue, allowing her to finish her dissertation. And when she became temporarily homeless due to a fire, Rodriguez and his wife gave her a place to stay—their home. 

“He taught me to keep going, even when it looks like you won’t get there,” said Pratt, who earned her master’s and doctorate degrees in sociology. 

He championed scores of other students, including Stacy Torres, Ph.D., FCLC ’02, connecting her with life-changing opportunities, counseling her through personal issues, and helping her family deal with their post-9/11 grief, all while tending to his own. 

“I credit him with the person I am today, and for helping me to reach my current position as a sociology professor myself,” said Torres, who now teaches at University of California, San Francisco. 

Rodriguez was born in Havana, Cuba, on Feb. 22, 1942, to Marta Iglesias, a seamstress, and Jesus Rodriguez, a cracker salesman. When he was 13 years old, the family of three moved to New York City. Rodriguez graduated from Samuel J. Tilden High School in Brooklyn. He went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in sociology from City College of New York and a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University. Besides working at Fordham, where he spent most of his academic career, he taught at Brooklyn College and conducted research at the Vera Institute of Justice. He also taught sociology of religion at the Green Haven and Sing Sing correctional facilities in New York state as a volunteer at Rising Hope, a college-level certificate program.

In his day-to-day life, Rodriguez was a quiet man who spoke judiciously, while entertaining people with his dry sense of humor and witty one-liners, said those who knew him. He was also an avid reader of fiction, nonfiction, science fiction, and detective novels. He attended the Memorial United Methodist Church in White Plains, New York, and participated in Braver Angels, an organization that promotes civil conversations across political differences. 

Rodriguez is survived by his wife; daughter, Julia E. Rodriguez and her husband, Charles B. Forcey; daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Soudant; and three grandchildren. He is predeceased by his son. 

A private burial was held on Jan. 13 at White Plains Rural Cemetery. A public memorial service will be held this spring. Donations in his memory may be made to Rising Hope or Peaceful Tomorrows.

Watch the documentary trailer for “In Our Son’s Name” below. 

The documentary, entitled In Our Son’s Name, follows the journey of Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D., professor of sociology, and his wife, Phyllis, to reconcile the death of their son. Gregory Rodriguez died in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The documentary tells the story of a friendship that formed following the tragedy between Gregory’s bereaved parents and the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, one of the 9/11 conspirators.

In Our Son’s Name premiered at Fordham in the spring of 2015. Since then it has been shown at numerous film festivals, academic institutions, churches, and mosques. It was one of the selections shown in the Global Peace, Peace on Earth, and Atlanta Film Festivals, and has been called: “a compelling message that further violence does not ease the pain of victims’ family members…” complete list of air times can be found at www.inoursonsname.com/tv.php

Locally, the documentary will air on New York stations WLIW21 and on  WLIW21.3 – see air times below.

WLIW21 – September 8 at  2 pm
September 15 at 2 am

Related Articles:

Couple’s Strength Fosters Forgiveness After 9/11

Professor Finds Restorative Justice and Reconciliation After 9/11

But a new documentary titled In Our Son’s Name chronicles the couple’s uneasy journey from victimhood to valor, in which the two steadfastly refuse to buy into a national narrative of war and revenge.

Among the many instances of empathy shown in the film, which had its premiere at Fordham on Feb. 24, the friendship between the Rodriguezes and the mother of one of the suspected terrorists, was perhaps the most poignant.

The event was sponsored by the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.

The film initially focused on a friendship that developed between Phyllis and Aicha El-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker”. But director Gayla Jamison said that, in the more than seven years it took to make the film, the relationship between Gregory, Phyllis, and Orlando—a professor in Fordham’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology—gradually became more central to the story.

“Orlando is an intellectual who may not have nurtured his emotional side,” Jamison said. “But that was who his son was.”

Gregory emerges in the film as a rather colorful character that had more than a few brushes with trouble before finding his way to a prestigious job at the World Trade Center. Their own son’s difficulties helped the Rodriguezes identify with Aicha El-Wafi’s agony, the film reveals. It is also what helped them identify with men incarcerated for murder at Sing Sing prison.

In a somewhat surprising segue, the couple visited with convicted felons at the prison to discuss their pain, while the prisoners talked about their remorse. Father Ron Lemmert, who came to the screening, arranged the visit.

“The men were profoundly moved by this,” said Father Lemmert, who serves at St. Teresa of Avila in Sleepy Hollow, N.Y. “They still talk about it.”

Phyllis Rodriguez said that making the film exposed old wounds.

“It was always difficult, but it was tempered by the fact that it will open different ways of thinking for other people, especially in this country’s violent culture,” she said.

She added that after 9/11 there was much talk about giving the death penalty for suspected terrorists, but she and Orlando held fast to beliefs they held before the event, no matter what the public thought.

“There was a lot of talk about the death penalty and let’s get it done fast,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Do you think you’ll feel better? Do you think it’d bring your son, or daughter, or husband back?’”

“I have violent thoughts and vengeful thoughts,” she said. “It’s not a question of having those thoughts; it’s human to have them.”

“[But] it’s acting on them that’s the problem,” she said. “We just wish that our nation would understand that.”

Orlando Rodriguez, a professor of sociology, immigrated to the United States four years before the Cuban revolution began. He says “all in all, it’s a good thing for the Cuban people.

“There will certainly be more economic opportunity for them, although ironically they will most likely lose their privileged status in United States U.S. immigration policy. More than anything, I’m worried about threats to Cuba’s ecology under normal tourism. And like in China, having friendly economic relations doesn’t mean that the benefits spread evenly to the poorest,” Rodriguez says.

(Check out this 2003 piece Rodriguez wrote about sociology in his homeland.)

The new U.S.-Cuba relations has raised research questions for Rose Perez, an assistant professor at Fordham’s Graduate School of Social Services, whose work throughout the past few years led her to interview several older Cuban-Americans who left Cuba in the early years following the 1959 revolution.

“Most told me they would only return to Cuba to visit if Cuba returns to a democracy,” she says. “I’ve been wondering all day how they are feeling.”

While interviewing her subjects in 2011, Perez found that many still hold poignant feelings about leaving the island.

“There is a strong attachment to the culture,” Perez said in an interview with Inside Fordham in 2013. “A lot of the participants I interviewed were the ones whose lives were changed by the Cuban revolution [which brought Fidel Castro to power], so they all describe this collective frozen grief about the year 1958 and they remember Cuba as a paradise. For them, it’s like a paradise lost.”

During the interviews, the participants’ grief manifested often. All had Cuban memorabilia in their homes and many of them said they dream of returning to the island one day when Castro’s system of government has ended.

Perez links their homesickness to the theory of ambiguous loss, a kind of loss that can paralyze the grieving process and prevent closure. It signifies that either the lost person, place, or thing is physically absent, but psychologically present—for instance, a mother longing for a missing child; or the lost person, place, or that the thing is physically present, but psychologically absent—for instance, a husband grieving over a wife with dementia.

The first of these definitions applies for Cuban immigrants, said Perez.

“Cuba is physically gone for them but it continues to have a psychological presence, and this important story has yet to be explored in research,” Perez said. “Something I might look at is measuring this experience of loss and its ramifications on well-being in a scientific way….”

Perez has a forthcoming article on this work, which will be published in the Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment in January 2015.

Ten years ago, Orlando Rodriguez, Ph.D., was teaching at Fordham on the day his 31-year-old son, Gregory, an assistant vice president at Cantor Fitzgerald, died in the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Through the awful, lasting grief of losing a child, through searing emotions and sobering realizations, Rodriguez and his wife, Phyllis, transformed their pain into a restorative brand of justice that would bring meaning and dignity to their son’s sacrifice.

Rodriguez’ journey from anger and grief to forgiveness, acceptance and hope, he said, comes from “right out of the Gospels.”

“I can’t tell you that on September 11, 2001, I consulted the Gospels and thought, ‘This is how to act,’” he recalled. “But now, 10 years later, I can see that my journey took me in the direction of peacemaking. It sounds trite—turn the other cheek, judge not lest you be judged, examine yourself—but these kinds of honest examinations were the kinds of emotions that went into what we decided to do.”

In the days after the attacks, the couple wrote a letter titled “Not In Our Son’s Name,” which called on the United States government to reject military reprisals against the Afghan people. Its popularity on the Internet led Rodriguez and his wife to meet like-minded people who also lost family members in the attacks. Together they founded the group September 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows.

Then, in November 2002, they and some others were invited to meet the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called “21st hijacker,” who faced the death penalty for helping to plan the 9/11 attacks.

At Moussaoui’s sentencing trial, Rodriguez gave a victim impact statement on behalf of the defense, describing, among other things, the course he co-taught in the spring of 2002 on terrorism and society. The defense’s intention—successful, as it turned out—was to show jurors that many families of 9/11 victims were able to turn their grief into productive action.

Ultimately, Moussaoui was spared the death penalty and sentenced to life in prison.

It was a huge emotional challenge to testify, said the professor of sociology and criminology, but he had come to view his son as one of many victims of unjust wars and incursions waged in a “mad century of mutual violence.”

“Nearly 3,000 of our people, including Greg, were killed in that first incursion, and then many more than 3,000 Afghan and Iraqi civilians were killed next, and since then it has only climbed,” Rodriguez said. “Is my son’s death more meaningful than the death of some poor Iraqi boy who happened to be in the wrong place when a bomb fell? Or that of one of our soldiers killed by a roadside bomb?

“Honestly, I can’t say that it is. I have learned to equate their suffering with losing Greg.”

The couple’s story is being captured in the documentary film In Our Son’s Name. Produced and directed by Gayla Jamison and funded by the Catholic Communication Campaign and Al Jazeera English, it details the couple’s decision to befriend Moussaoui’s mother and to testify in the sentencing trial.

“We didn’t want to do the movie at first,” Rodriguez said. “We knew it was going to heighten the feelings we had experienced, just make them more raw.

“But we also knew there was potential here for opening people up, especially Americans, to the fact that there is such a thing as reconciliation and restorative justice.”

Once the film is complete, Rodriguez said he would like to show it at Fordham because it offers what he calls a teachable opportunity for students who were children when the attacks happened; and he is a teacher, after all.

“Ten years ago, the media showed us a lot of images of Arabs dancing in the streets after the towers fell,” Rodriguez recalled. “When Bin Laden was killed, I was taken aback by the fact that people who were 9 or 10 years old on 9/11 were cheering, celebrating—almost treating it like a sports event in which the United States had won. How is that different from Arabs dancing in the streets?

“I believe that there are a lot of misconceptions about political violence and terrorism, and that the message in this film can show students that there is another way of thinking about 9/11 and its aftermath.”

Rodriguez spent the 10th anniversary of his son’s death participating in a Fordham memorial event at Rose Hill, and he and his family also had a private gathering at his son’s gravesite. It was a day, he said, that was guaranteed to open wounds, but it was also a day to create opportunities to offer comfort to others.

“A lot of things have happened since 9/11,” he said. “But in some ways, it just happened yesterday.”