Fordham Jesuits Lead Celebration of Life for One of Their Own

Father Hegyi in 1974 with then biology chair Ruth Witkus, Ph.D.

For a brief moment on Jan. 21, the swirl of snow on the Rose Hill campus served as backdrop to the foundational Jesuit spirituality. On that day, as a massive storm threatened to shut down the city, a Mass of Christian Burial was celebrated for Father Márton (Martin) A. Hegyi, S.J., a longtime member of Fordham’s Jesuit community and a faculty member in the Department of Biology, who died on Jan. 17 at Murray-Weigel Hall. Fifteen of his Jesuit brothers flanked his casket and guided him from the University Church for the last time.

Tradition would normally dictate that the Jesuits sing Salve Regina just outside the church doors, but the snowstorm halted the procession at the vestibule. There, the celebrants sang in ancient cadence as the casket was hoisted onto shoulders and the bell tolled. The doors flew open and Father Hegyi was carried from the darkness of the church interior out into the white storm.

Born in Hungary on October 15, 1932, Father Hegyi entered the Society of Jesus in 1952. By several accounts at the service, his decision to remain with the Jesuits came at a tumultuous time in Hungary’s history—and at no small risk to his personal safety.

Father Hegyi, left, with Father McShane in 2007.

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, described Father Hegyi’s escape from the Communist Hungary as “harrowing and heroic,” but not a story that could easily be coaxed from him.

The fact that he was reluctant to discuss his personal experience came as no surprise to those who knew him, describing him as a man more inclined to listen to others, than to talk about himself. 
Ladislas Orsy, S.J., said that Father Hegyi “emanated a radiant goodness” and was possessed of three cherished qualities: simplicity, fidelity, and magnanimity.

“His simplicity of purpose was on view for all who came in contact with his fidelity, of whom there were many,” he said, adding that even magnanimous giving was closely tied to his ability to receive and listen to people.

After leaving Hungary, Father Hegyi received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in zoology from Oxford University.  He received his doctorate in biology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville in 1973.  His research centered on molecular biology, more particularly on Holopedium, a zooplankton found in the Great Lakes.

His time at Fordham began in the Department of Biological Sciences in 1967. He once described his primary academic challenge as “bridging the tension between science and religion.”

“It was never just biology for him, it was about creation,” said Cheryl Badolato, FCRH ‘78, GSAS'82 who served as a teaching fellow under Father Hegyi and to whom he teasingly referred to as “my penance.”

His quiet charm drew drew fellow biologists to the University as well, said Amy R. Tuininga, Ph.D., associate professor of biology and dean for strategic initiatives at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

“There was something bigger that came from him than from your average human being, a certain power, serenity, and peacefulness,” she said. “He made you feel that there was more than just the biology that you were studying, and that your job as a professor was to look out for your fellow human beings.”

In 1996, on the occasion of receiving an award for excellence in teaching, Father Hegyi was described by Father McShane as “a consummate educator and a gifted mentor” who “introduced countless Fordham pre-meds to the mysteries of general biology.” In 2007, as Associate Professor Emeritus of Biology, he received the Bene Merenti award for his 40 years of service to the University. And in 2009, due to failing health, he moved to Murray-Weigel, the Jesuit infirmary abreast of the Fordham campus, to undertake his new mission of prayer for the church and the Society of Jesus.

In the end, the Jan. 21 Mass celebrated Father Hegyi’s total of 61 years as a Jesuit and 50 years as a priest.

“Martin loved God and God loved Martin,” said Father Orsy. “That’s the whole story.” 

-Tom Stoelker

Book Graffiti for the Renaissance

Some call it “doodling;” librarians might even brand it “defacing.”

But to historians, it’s “marginalia.”

On Nov. 12, reading historian Bill Sherman, Ph.D., professor of English at the University of York, delivered the fall Southwell Lecture on visual responses to texts, as expressed in the margins of more renowned Medieval and Renaissance publications.

Erasmus

He framed his talk through the words and works of Erasmus, the Dutch humanist, Renaissance philosopher, and Catholic priest, to illustrate the shifting relationship between reading and seeing in the 16th century, during the advent of printing. 

While Erasmus, it turned out, was a lousy doodler himself (and warned against profane use of religious imagery,) ironically his own image was widely reproduced in his time—through book drawings and doodles, on a coin, and most famously, in a painting (depicted here) by Hans Holbein the Younger. Some of Holbein's earliest surviving work, in fact, is itself marginalia--a set of some 80 drawings (one pictured above) in the margins of one of Erasmus's most famous books, In Praise of Folly.

Erasmus believed that the visual was part of the imagination, and that skillful illustration was a part of storytelling in print. While teaching at Oxford he was also said to have encouraged his students to mark, within the books they read, brilliant passages or maxims.

Manicules (Bembo)

Currently, said Sherman, generalizations about Renaissance marginalia are hard to come by, as “there are a lot out there still to be seen or discovered.” He shared his own enthusiasm for an early printed book, housed at Stanford University, of Pliny the Younger’s Letters in which Italian humanist Bernardo Bembo has added ostentatious pointing fingers (“manicules”) and staring eyeballs (“opticules”) to the margins to accentuate certain passages. He also showed slides from a 1481 copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy with 19 printed illustrations, but which also contained hundreds of visual marginalia by artists—including an “extraordinary map of hell.”

Marginalia, Sherman concluded, do not often compete with the beauty and craftsmanship of great medieval scribes and illuminators. However, they offer a sense of the new mode of interaction during the time, which draws on medieval models but which is also part of an emerging culture of print, as well as the rise of humanism and “commerce with the classics.”

“Even the crudest ones give us a sharper image of  the period eye,” he said. “Like great art, good marginalia have a peculiar power to deliver intimate glimpses of the Renaissance world. And this sense of intimacy is, in the end, the most striking feature in these visual modes of reading.

“[We’re being] allowed to look over the shoulders at the hands of long-dead people, and, with this material, it is beginning to feel as if we might be able to see through their eyes.”

The St. Robert Southwell, S.J., Lecture, given once in the spring and once in the fall, is administered by Susan Wabuda, Ph.D., associate professor of history (wabuda@fordham.edu.)

--Janet Sassi

Theologians Weigh In on Newly Revealed Papyrus

 

(Photo via CBS News)

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