New Jesuits Ordained at University Church

Congratulations to three new Jesuits who were ordained on June 14 at the University Church. The Most Reverend Matthew H. Clark, bishop emeritus of the Diocese of Rochester, N.Y, ordained  Mario Powell, S.J., Sam Sawyer, S.J., and Tom Simisky, S.J. The three are pictured below from left to right.

Russo Lecture Features Theologian Esteemed by Pope Francis

Cardinal Walter Kasper and ethicist Cathleen Kaveny
Photo: Leo Sorel

Fordham's Center on Religion and Culture regularly presents programs that shed light on the complex relationship between religious faith and contemporary society. On May 5, it brought together two renowned theologians for an engaging talk on living a Gospel life.

The annual Russo Family Lecture—held at the Lincoln Center campus—featured Cardinal Walter Kasper, a theologian and former Vatican official, and Cathleen Kaveny, ethicist and legal scholar at Boston College. The topic was Cardinal Kasper’s new book, Mercy: The Essence of the Gospel and the Key to Christian Life (Paulist Press, 2014), which, on its cover, has a quote from Pope Francis: “This book has done me so much good.”

The director of the center, James McCartin, Ph.D., said he has long wanted to host the cardinal at one of its events because of the cardinal's "very persuasive approach to thinking about God and the Church, and especially his insights about not devaluing the importance of local communities of faith as they relate to the Holy See in Rome." McCartin was able to arrange the appearance because the cardinal was in town to publicize his book.

McCartin chose Kaveny to engage with the cardinal because he was well acquainted with her scholarly acumen, having known her since his graduate school days.
 

The discussion touched upon the work of Elizabeth Johnson, C.S.J., Distinguished Professor of Theology at Fordham, according to an article from Religion News Service.

“They were just very natural and engaging . . . it was exactly what we aim for at the Center on Religion and Culture,” McCartin said.

You can watch the discussion in its entirety here.

                                                           

                                                                                  -- Chris Gosier

                                                          

Revisiting the Relationship of a Lifetime

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s most most recent book of poems, Waking My Mother (Word Poetry, 2013) tackles the complexity of the often fraught relationships between mothers and daughters. O’Donnell, the associate director of the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies,

grew up in Northeastern Pennsylvania in a family of working-class Italian-Americans. Her mother, however, would “never submit to the yoke the old Italians typically placed on their women.”

Widowed at a young age with five children, Marion Salvi Alaimo took on some destructive habits, O’Donnell said, that led to emotional and financial hardships. “We essentially grew up in a household in which the parent-child relationship was adversarial and in which the children play the role of adults.”

Many of the poems in O’Donnell’s book reflect those years, in which she and her siblings often clung to each other in absence of any family stability parents are normally tasked with providing.

Alaimo said she wrote most of the poems four years ago when her 82-year-old mother took a turn for the worse after breaking her hip. “For 48 days, she was bed-bound in a Florida hospital, nursing home, and, finally, hospice room,” wrote O’Donnell. “During that time, my sisters and I cared for her. Ours had never been conventional mother-daughter relationships. Our mother had been a difficult person to live with, and we had had more than our share of bitter disagreements over the years.  But these 48 days proved to be a kind of Kairos time for us.  Her suffering broke us all open, enabling us to practice mercy, obtain mutual forgiveness, and experience healing of old wounds.”

She says the poems in Waking My Mother are an attempt to redeem the brokenness that characterized her relationship with her mother, “but consolation comes only through desolation.”

“The book tells our story—but it also tells the story of every family that has endured hardship and division yet still, somehow, has managed to remain whole.”

Poem on Waking (by Angela Alaimo O’Donnell)

Today I woke to talk with my mother.

Her face appeared clean as a dream,

erased of age and any trace of grief,

my mother as I wanted her to be.

She seemed to long to speak to me of love,

and I of mercies I had lately learned.

Her eyes smiled, although her mouth stayed closed,

as if all that need be, might be said through those.

I searched my purse and palmed my silent phone,

touched the icon box marked with her name—

then saw the stranger living in her house

and knew that she was gone, once again.

The voice I’m waiting for, still unheard.

For all my life, not one more word.

Shakespeare, Papal Power, and the Death of Kings

In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Marcellus declares, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” Published in 1603, at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the tragic play can be read as a reflection of the politics of the day in England, said Arthur Marotti, Ph.D., FCRH ’61, a Shakespeare scholar, in a lecture at the Rose Hill campus on Oct. 22.

“In the last years of Elizabeth’s rule people believed something was rotten in England—though perhaps not rotten enough to justify regicide,” as in Hamlet, “a play inordinately preoccupied with king-killing,” said Marotti, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Wayne State University.

In his lecture “Shakespeare, Tyrannicide, and the Papal Deposing Power,” Marotti laid out the prominent religious and political struggles of late 16th-century England and discussed how they informed Shakespeare’s plays.

“William Shakespeare repeatedly dramatized king-killing and the planning of king-killing,” Marotti said, a dangerous act in a country that could stretch the definition of treason to include even thinking about the death of a monarch. “Perhaps this is one reason why the act itself often takes place offstage, instead of being presented vividly onstage for absorption in the memory and imagination of spectators.” Regicide is depicted or alluded to in many of the bard’s plays, including Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Hamlet, and King Lear, with threats to nobles in Henry IV, Part 1 and The Tempest.

William Shakespeare

In Richard II, for example, Shakespeare depicts a weak monarch, King Richard II, who is succeeded by a strong leader, King Henry IV. Henry takes the crown following an onstage assassination “prompted by a clear signal from the new king that [Richard] needed to be killed—though Henry pretended he had expressed no such wish,” said Marotti.

Richard II was written and performed during an especially tumultuous time in England, when assassination attempts on Queen Elizabeth abounded. It was also a time of great tension between Catholics and Protestants. In 1570, Pope Pius V issued Regnans in Excelsis, a papal bull formally excommunicating the Protestant queen, declaring her a heretic and absolving her subjects of any allegiance to her.

Marotti said that the papal bull was “an extreme case of [the Catholic Church] using the power the papacy claimed it had,” the power to exert both religious and political influence in England. But it was “a watershed event” for the country, contributing to “the nascent historical narrative of England as a fundamentally Protestant nation threatened by international Catholicism.”

When Pope Gregory XIII came to power in 1572, he tried to ease the bull’s harsh effects on English Catholics, who feared retaliation from authorities. Marotti said that Catholics were urged by the papacy to continue practicing their religion, but, if possible, should work to overthrow, or even kill, the queen as a “heretical tyrant.”

The queen was haunted by worries of assassination. Religious fanaticism in the late 16th century brought about the deaths of several European rulers: Henry III and Henry IV of France and William of Orange. But killing a reigning monarch, because it was both morally wrong and sacrilegious, said Marotti, required compelling political and theological justification.

“On neither side was toleration or religious pluralism a desirable policy since all conceived of church and state as inextricably bound,” Marotti said.

Where did Shakespeare’s sympathies lie? Recent scholars conclude that it’s impossible to determine whether he was a Protestant or a Roman Catholic based on his writings, said Marotti, but the plays do show sensitivity to his religiously mixed audiences.

“He consistently avoided crude religious or political propagandizing,” Marotti said. “Political resistance, regicide, and tyrannicide were for him good dramatic materials, but they led him to explore their human, social, moral, and religious dimensions and to engage his audience in this effort.”

Four hundred years later, Marotti said, the playwright’s words continue to test theatergoers’ moral imagination.

“The prompts are Shakespeare’s; the conclusions we reach are ours.”

The lecture was sponsored by the Department of English, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. It marked Marotti’s first time back on the Rose Hill campus since 1961, when he earned a bachelor’s degree in English. He spent part of the day touring the campus and meeting with students at the University and at Fordham Preparatory School, his high school alma mater.

“I spent eight years here and they did leave an indelible mark on me,” he said before his lecture in Tognino Hall. “I learned how to study, how to work hard, and those qualities …. have stayed with me since that time.”

—Rachel Buttner