Long postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Mass was concelebrated by 15 Jesuit priests, including current Fordham president Joseph M. McShane, S.J., and Joseph M. O’Keefe, S.J., provincial of the Jesuits’ USA East Province. It marked the first public remembrance of the University’s longtime leader, whose multitudinous achievements included the construction of the William D. Walsh Family Library and the building of the first student residence hall at the Lincoln Center campus. 

In attendance were several members of the O’Hare and Scesney Families, which include Father O’Hare’s nieces and nephews; Fordham trustees; faculty and staff members; and several Jesuit leaders, including Fordham vice president for mission integration and ministry John J. Cecero, S.J., former provincial of the USA Northeast Province, and America magazine editor-in-chief Matthew F. Malone, S.J.

“Joseph Aloysius O’Hare was a leader not only at Fordham University for 19 years, but also for other Catholic and Jesuit universities as well as for his native place, the City of New York,” said homilist Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. 

Tracing the life and august academic career of Father O’Hare from his time as a student at Regis High School in Manhattan through his nearly two-decade-long administration of the Northeast’s oldest Catholic university, Father Ryan, who first met Father O’Hare in 1962 at a now-closed seminary in Shrub Oak, New York, provided personal recollections of a visionary pastor with patrician sensibilities and a wry, irreverent wit. 

“He was never a ‘king of the Gypsies,’ but he could dance very well without stepping on women’s feet, a virtuoso technique I never mastered,” said Father Ryan. “Joe danced so well that he took a future Rockette to his Regis senior prom.” 

From 1975 until 1984, when he assumed the presidency at Fordham, Father O’Hare served as editor-in-chief and frequent columnist at America magazine, a New York-based Jesuit publication focused on politics, faith, and culture. As president of Fordham, he led multiple building projects, including the creation of four new residence halls; helped to triple the number of undergraduate applicants; helped grow the University endowment from $36.5 million to $271.6 million, and launched a successful $150 million fundraising campaign.

“Though he was undeniably proud of the many ways Fordham flourished publicly during those years, he was also privately gratified by his work with faculty, staff, and students to live out the principles of peace, justice, and respect for all people,” said Gregory Scesney, a nephew of Father O’Hare, during the eulogy. 

Father Ryan called Father O’Hare the “University’s consoler-in-chief” during times of crisis. As Fordham’s president, he shepherded its community through difficult periods of shock and mourning, including the sudden death of undergraduate football player Bill Tierney in 1996 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

“The presidency of Fordham is not just a type of corporate leadership. The president of Fordham holds the shepherd’s crook to guide the flock into green pastures beside restful waters,” he said. 

Father O’Hare’s influence extended beyond the verdant fields of Fordham and into New York political life during his tenure as founding chairman of the city’s Campaign Finance Reform Board, which he led for 15 years under mayors Edward I. Koch and Rudolph W. Giuliani. A member of numerous civic organizations, he facilitated the board’s first public funds payment in 1989 and caught the ire of Mayor David N. Dinkins when the board fined his campaign $320,000 for illegal overspending. 

“Joe O’Hare was simply the most famous Jesuit in the capital of the world, a man who could tame wild beasts and mayors with the flick of a pen,” said Father Ryan in his homily, noting that New York politics maintained “a reputation for financial skulduggery, especially in mayoralty campaigns.” 

For his moral leadership, Father O’Hare won the friendship and lasting respect of his colleagues at the Campaign Finance Board, including current Associate Justice of the Supreme Court Sonia Sotomayor, who called him “one of my heroes” at the time of his death. Several of those colleagues were in attendance. 

Scesney said the family “learned early on that Uncle Joe was a man who listened to all sides and spoke from an educated position.”

Born into an Irish American family in the Bronx during the early years of the Great Depression, Father O’Hare entered the Society of Jesus in 1948 and was ordained at the Fordham University Church in 1961. The son of a New York City mounted police officer and a public school teacher, O’Hare spent time as a Jesuit scholastic in the Philippines, where he later taught at the Jesuit-established Ateneo de Manila University and met influential political figures ranging from Benigno S. Aquino Jr. to Imelda Marcos. (As head of Fordham, he awarded Philippine President Corazon Aquino an honorary doctorate in 1986.) 

At the conclusion of the Mass, Father McShane encouraged congregants to honor the memory of Father O’Hare in a way he would approve: Not with mourning and tears, but with stories and laughter. 

Ryan Di Corpo, a former O’Hare Fellow at America, is a freelance journalist and co-coordinator of Pax Christi New York State. 

This conversation is more critical than ever, said keynote speaker, Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society. In the wake of the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal, it is important to recognize that sexuality has a sacred meaning in each religion.

“I want to draw your attention to how very human forces, male and female, interact with each other in the imaginative creation of worlds of faith, worlds of spirituality,” Father Ryan said. “How, in particular, do our understandings of human sexuality color how those of us who are Jews, Christians, and Muslims think about God?”

The Bible says that God created Adam, the first human being, as both male and female. (Eve was created from one of Adam’s ribs.) This duality continues to be found in all aspects of life, including marriage, Father Ryan said. It can also be seen in male and female images in the Book of Genesis and the Song of Songs. But one of the most important texts in Judaism, the Zohar, takes a step further and suggests that humanity itself “mirrors and magnifies the Lord God,” he said.  

In the same vein, Christian texts show spirituality through sexuality. For example, an autobiography by Saint Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Christian mystic and writer, portrays the soul and God as passionate lovers, Father Ryan said. She uses graphic imagery to show the angelic piercing of her heart with the spear of God’s love: “When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them  [her entrails]out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love for God.”

The Quran also denotes spirituality through sexual language, he said. The basmalah blessing, which begins every chapter of the Quran but one, uses words that associate “the mercy of God” with a mother’s womb.

“To connect the mercy of God with a feminine physical characteristic is to understand God’s perfection as including all that is most tender in created reality, including the generative and loving characteristics of others,” Father Ryan said.

Although much of the main lecture focused on heterosexual love, respondent Amir Hussain, Ph.D., professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, took a detour from the night’s discourse to reflect on the dangers faced by the LGBTQ community.

“I think of Islamic psychologists from Los Angeles, where I live, who worry about losing their license if they are anything but heteronormative,” he said. “And I wonder how we got to that place where we can hate people for the love that God has put between them.”

For Hussain, it’s a personal issue, as he was an undergraduate at the University of Toronto during the “plague years” of the ’80s, when he said he attended one too many funerals for his friends who died of HIV and AIDS.

“We have to speak out when our gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and bisexual brothers and sisters are threatened,” Hussain said. “We have to lift up the work and voices of LGBTQ scholars and activists, such as Scott Kugle at Emory University, who remind us of the inherent dignity of all of us—regardless of our sexuality.”

The scholar who delivered the Jewish response, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Ph.D., assistant professor of theology at Fordham, compared two Biblical texts from the Old Testament: Song of Songs and Ezekiel 16. Both stories use the metaphor of a romantic partnership to show God’s relationship with Israel, she said. Only one relationship is healthy though, while the other is marred by manipulation and abuse.

Gribetz’s juxtapositions were often stark. In Song of Songs, the narrator portrays a romantic relationship between a man (God) and a woman (Jerusalem as the spouse of the Lord). Gribetz described the scenes that unfold between the lovers: “A series of kisses, love described as sweeter than wine, fragrant oils, and secluded chambers.”

Ezekiel 16, by contrast, takes a tragic turn. In it, God (a man) saves the people of Jerusalem (a woman) from slavery in Egypt, but is betrayed by the very people he rescues. The text is fraught with dark imagery: an unbathed newborn lying in the blood of her after-birth, nakedness, suffering, and violent threats.

But in these two texts, there is something to be said about humanity, Gribetz said. The stories paint a realistic portrait of the possible intersections among sexuality, spirituality, and love of God—both positive and negative.

“I chose to share with you this evening not only the positive but also the negative, not only the benevolent but also the malevolent, to highlight the empowering dimensions of religious texts, but also to acknowledge those parts of our traditions that are most problematic,” Gribetz said.

“So that we can imagine and construct together models of partnership—human and divine—that are based on mutual love and consent, rather than abuse of power and violation of dignity.”

It has been an exciting week for theology professor Michael Peppard.

When news broke on Sept. 18 that Harvard professor Karen King revealed an ancient scrap of papyrus that claims Jesus Christ had a wife, Peppard, as he wrote in this blog post at Commonweal, was “giddy like a child.”

As a reader/teacher of Coptic and trained papyrologist, Peppard settled in to assess the newly revealed papyrus.

“After scrutinizing the wonderfully high-resolution photograph offered in Laurie Goodstein’s New York Times piece, I would like first to commend Karen King of Harvard for the ways in which she has presented this fragment to the world,” he wrote in the blog. “Nowhere in her quotations or the manuscript of her forthcoming article does she engage in the kind of grandstanding that would be so tempting in her situation.”

Peppard was interviewed by a few media outlets. He told the Catholic News Service that a belief in asceticism saw rapid development in the second to fourth centuries, especially in Egypt where Christian monasticism was born.

“The new text published by King may be a sign of early Christians ‘pushing back’ against asceticism and moving closer to mainstream Jewish attitudes ‘of blessing sex and procreation,’” Peppard said.

And in this interview that aired on CBS 2 New York, he said “It has the appearance of a middleman who had one papyrus, wanted money, chopped it up, chopped up to get higher value for resale,”

The interview also featured McGinley Chair Father Patrick Ryan, S.J., who said the papyrus does not prove Jesus had a wife.

”Well, the trouble is that’s all there is,” he told CBS 2’s John Slattery. “’My wife the Church’ could be the next word. We don’t have the next word.  We just have ‘Jesus my wife.’”

-Gina Vergel

But the challenge that Patrick Ryan, S.J., recently posed to believers was to examine a more unusual source.

What, he asked, can atheists teach believers about their faith?

“The Atheistic Imagination: A Challenge for Jews, Christians, and Muslims” examined this unusual stance for the annual Spring McGinley Lecture, held April 24 at the Lincoln Center campus and April 25 at Rose Hill.

As a starting point, said Father Ryan, the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society, the atheistic perspective can offer members of the three Abrahamic religions just that: another perspective.

“Men and women of faith—Jewish, Christian, and Muslim—sometimes need to see ourselves as others see us,” he said.

He drew on the works of three contemporary authors to illustrate common critiques of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The first, the American Jewish author, Philip Roth, cites a struggle that both believers and nonbelievers face: how to reconcile the presence of evil in the world despite an allegedly benevolent God.

“The great novelist intends to expose the cruelty of God, the capriciousness of the world in which we live,” Father Ryan said. “Roth’s is a dark vision, imaginatively and superbly conveyed in [his]two recent novels. Glibly expressed faith needs to pause in the presence of this darkness—pause and reflect.”

The second author, Colm Tóibín, voices concern about his Irish Catholic faith. Through his writing, it is clear that Tóibín, who is gay, feels a deep dissatisfaction with the Church’s teachings on sexual morality. He also criticizes the institution’s austere nature.

“Tóibín has been criticized by some Catholics for the aestheticism of his attachment to Catholicism, combined with his distaste for the Church’s teaching on sexuality,” Father Ryan said.

Through his creation of secularized Muslim characters in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, author Salman Rushdie contended that religion, at best, comforts believers and, at worst, “infantilizes” them.

The book provoked an Islamic fatwa, or legal pronouncement calling for his death, from Imam Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s Supreme Guide at the time.

“He admitted that, ‘I can see it being valuable to other people, like a consolation in difficulty,’” Father Ryan quoted Rushdie. “ ‘For myself, I don’t feel the urge. There’s no hole in me that it needs to fill.’ There is not much room for dialogue with an atheist who says things like that, and, alas, it must be admitted that Rushdie is not alone in this absolute rejection of God.”

Responding to Father Ryan’s talk were Rabbi Daniel Polish, Ph.D., spiritual leader of Congregation Shir Chadash in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Amir Hussain, Ph.D., professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University.

According to Polish, atheistic remarks from Jews come within a wider context, because being Jewish encompasses more than holding certain religious beliefs.

“Jews are a people,” Polish said. “The religion of that people is Judaism, but the identity is conferred by being part of that people, or participating in that civilization.”

Consequently, the atheistic imagination expressed by writers such as Roth does not necessarily contravene Jewish identity.

“It includes the freedom to abandon God altogether, or, at least to be deeply disappointed with God, to argue with God, to call God to the docket as the accused,” he said.

Hussain echoed Polish’s contention by pointing out that atheism and secularism are not synonymous—a nuance that Rushdie does not recognize in his absolute atheism.

“When we say that [for instance]North America is secular, that does not mean it is a society of atheists,” he said. “What we mean by secular is that there is no official state religion.”

Even the most rigorous of atheisms have something to offer believers, Polish said, for, if God is absent, humans are left with certain “moral imperatives.”

“Atheism teaches that when you see someone in need, you cannot just walk by and say that God will take care of him,” he said. “If there is no God, then how much is expected of us.

“If we cannot depend on God to prevent another Auschwitz, then we have to take that responsibility on ourselves. If we cannot depend on God to feed the hungry, it is we who must rise to the challenge.”

The fall McGinley Lecture examined a complicated theological matter from a point of view to which anyone can relate—food.

Patrick J. Ryan, S.J., focused his lecture, “Law and Love: Jewish, Christian and Muslim Attitudes” on the laws and customs concerning food prohibitions in the three religions. He also presented theories for the origins and purpose of the prohibitions from relevant scholarship.

Father Ryan said that while Islamic and Jewish traditions hold a favorable perspective on the law and those who study it, Christians tend to have a prejudice against religious law that spills over into civil life.

“We tell more jokes about lawyers than we do, for instance, about butchers, bakers and candlestick makers,” he said.

Father Ryan spoke about the Christian reversal of Jewish food prohibitions outlined in the New Testament, including Peter’s dream in the Book of Acts, Chapter 10, where all food was declared acceptable to eat.

Though Christians are traditionally thought of as not having food prohibitions, modern Christian movements have included Catholic prohibitions on meat during Lent and America’s alcohol prohibition in the 1920s.

Father Ryan suggested that the failure of Prohibition demonstrates that law alone is not enough to maintain strict abstentions.

“It is only love for that which transcends the individual—God and one’s community—that can motivate any variety of food prohibition or any type of total abstinence,” he said.

Claudia Setzer, Ph.D., professor of religious studies at Manhattan College, and Amir Hussain, Ph.D, professor of theological studies at Loyola Marymount University, responded to Father Ryan’s lecture with Jewish and Muslim perspectives, respectively.

Setzer said that food and beliefs about it are a powerful representation of a person’s religious and personal identity.

“How we deal with [food], talk about it, prepare it, restrict it, or refuse it to others reveals our deepest values and sense of ourselves,” she said.

For example, Setzer said gratitude for food is a strong Jewish value, bearing a stark contrast to the fear-based approach to calories in our modern diet-conscious society.

Father Ryan said the law and its study are highly esteemed in Islam, which established itself as a “civilization of love based on law.”

“Jurisprudence has been at the center of Muslim intellectuality ever since [its early days]—not theology,” Father Ryan said.

Though its focus on the law is perhaps better known, Hussain said that a close study of the Koran reveals it as a “book of love.”

“It will surprise most non-Muslims, and unfortunately some Muslims, that Islam is a religion with a strong emphasis on love,” Hussain said. “How many of us, Muslim or not, think about love as the first word that comes to mind when the Koran is mentioned?”

Food prohibitions have a distinct place at the intersection of law and love, and can play a role to greater understanding amongst the three religions, Father Ryan said.

“Laws regarding what we eat and what we don’t eat unite us as communities of faith, but also divide us from other communities of faith, simultaneously promoting love in our community and discouraging love for other communities,” he said.

Despite the deeply varying perspectives amongst world religions, the dinner table still has the power to bring people together.

At the recent Assisi Interfaith Summit, while no common prayer was shared, a lunch accommodating various religious restrictions was served to all summit delegates.

“Law and love—lawyers and lovers—can sit down at the table together if the buffet is sufficiently varied,” Father Ryan said.

The McGinley Lecture is delivered biannually as part of the Laurence J. McGinley Chair in Religion and Society. Father Ryan has held the chair since 2008. The lecture endeavors to facilitate a “trialogue” between people of Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths.

The McGinley Chair, previously held by Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., was founded in 1988 to attract distinguished scholars interested in the interaction of religion with the legal, political and cultural forces in our pluralistic American society.

– Jennifer Spencer

The Veronica Lally Kehoe Studio Theatre was made possible as part of a $2 million gift from her husband, John P. Kehoe (FCLC ’85, FCRH ’60). The ceremony, held at the Center Gallery, was marked by a wellspring of warmth for Lally Kehoe, a theatre patron who died in April 2007 after a two-year illness.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, remarked that the busy Lowenstein Center was a fitting place for the dedication.

“There are six schools coming and going on the outskirts of this gathering,” Father McShane said. “There are stories being told. There are secrets being shared. There’s gossip that’s being spread. And this is where we gather to remember and to honor Veronica—at the intersection of life and art.”

Although John Kehoe did not speak at the dedication, Lally Kehoe’s daughter, Allise Dickson (FCLC ’95), shared some fond reminiscences about her mother.

She remembered how Lally Kehoe, a graduate of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and founder of the nonprofit Gypsy Road Theater Company, would make up songs and games with her. She encouraged her daughter to be spontaneous, sometimes illustrating her point by breaking into dance on subway platforms.

“My mom loved the children in her life. She saw them as a pure form of creative expression,” Dickson said. “She really fostered their imagination and encouraged them to fully express themselves through whimsy and play, and we can never have too much of that.”

The venue named after her is, in every sense of the word, state of the art, said Matthew Maguire, head of Fordham Theatre. Once the location of Fordham’s Black Box Studio Theatre, the space has been thoroughly transformed.

In addition to stadium-style seating with new accommodations for the handicapped, top-of-the-line soundproofing in the walls and ceiling has all but eliminated background noise from a nearby machinery room.

An arched Venetian plaster façade has replaced a nondescript hallway door, storage space has been added under the seats, and lighting and sound systems have all been upgraded.

Maguire also recalled the time he spent with Lally Kehoe, whom he worked with closely while she earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in religious studies and art history. From the beginning, her mission was to help young artists, he said, and there was no more concrete way to do that than to build them their own theatre.

“Veronica was a model of how to be in the theatre and in the world. I was inspired by her optimism and her courage. She had such an open and youthful spirit,” Maguire said. “It’s my sincere belief that Veronica has infused this theatre. Everyone who makes art and watches it in the theatre will be blessed by her spirit. Thank you Jack, for this deep and precious gift.”

Scores of friends and admirers attended the early afternoon Mass, which was held at the University Church on the Rose Hill campus.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J. president of Fordham, thanked them for coming together at the end of the traditional one-month mourning period to pray for Cardinal Dulles, whom he called a dear friend, brother and mentor.

“As we do so, we know that he has spent his first Christmas in heaven, something that he looked forward to, that he spoke of often in the last year of his life,” Father McShane said.

In his homily, Patrick Ryan, S.J., vice president for University mission and ministry, drew upon the readings of the Mass—Deuteronomy 30:15-20 and Ephesians 1:3-10, as well as the Gospel, John 1:35-39—to show that Cardinal Dulles was part of a long line of men who heard the call of God and accepted the challenge to answer it.

Cardinal Dulles’ path in his early years was particularly inspiring, Father Ryan said. He went from an atheist at Harvard University to a deist, deist to Catholic, and then after several years in the Navy, membership in the Society of Jesus.

“He chose life, loving the Lord his God, obeying him and holding fast to him, and that meant life for him, and length of days,” Father Ryan said.

He noted that the Gospel of John was particularly instructive for Cardinal Dulles, as it entailed an encounter in which Jesus confronts two disciples following him, asking, “What do you want?” Sheepishly, they could only ask where he was living, to which he replied warmly, “Come and see.””On a February afternoon 70 years ago, Avery Dulles began to hear the Lord’s question. He began to come and see,” Father Ryan said. “He began to find out what he was looking for. Now, at long last, he has found where the Lord is staying.”Jenny Portillo (FCRH ’11) was in attendance last fall at Cardinal Dulles’ final lecture as the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham. An English/history double major with a concentration in American Catholic Studies, Portillo served as an usher at one of the Masses for Cardinal Dulles that took place at the University Church in the days following his death.”He was an amazing man, and it’s fantastic that he was so devoted to Fordham and to the students,” she said. “Everyone knew that he was all about Fordham and about giving back to the community and the students.”Margaret Hughes, a third-year philosophy student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, paid her respects at the Month’s Mind Mass.”Cardinal Dulles has been such an admirable and solid presence at Fordham for so long, so I came out of gratitude for his life,” she said. “Many times over the past month, I’ve talked with people about his final lecture, and particularly the end of the lecture, how he talked about how he was entering a new phase in his life, when he identified very closely with the cripples in the Gospel.”