c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Eugene Kennedy, a longtime observer of the Roman Catholic Church, is professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University in Chicago and author most recently of”My Brother Joseph,”published by St. Martin’s Press.)

(UNDATED) Death took a harvest of the benevolent this past weekend, of good men whose keen eyes saw deeply into our imperfect nature, with its large and small vanities, and who loved us the more for it. The world at large knew cartoonist Charles Schulz better than it did moral theologian Richard McCormick.

Laboring hard at different tasks into their 70s, both men tapped into a vein of the eternal so that their gifts to us can never be damaged by time. They remain forever youthful because they believed in ordinary people, concerned more about their possibilities than their liabilities.

Let me tell you a little about the great man called home on the same day as Schulz by a God who understood what good companions they would be. Let me tell you about the greatest moral theologian American Catholicism has ever produced, Father Richard McCormick.

Father McCormick, son of a physician from Toledo, Ohio, became a Jesuit priest whose theological specialty, although not limited to it, extended to bioethics, that vast area that encompasses all the critical questions about health care. These included many that are superficially debated in sound bites and headlines about our own human choices as patients, acceptable medical procedures, and the transformation of health care by economic considerations.

In his long, productive career he produced numerous books and articles, each rooted in the Catholic tradition and each bearing his unique stamp of tight reasoning and splendid wording. Everything McCormick did was right to the point, just as he was in person.

Blessed are the pure of heart, we say, but who are they anyway? We find out by meeting men like McCormick. For purity is a rich concept that is diminished if we make it into a one-dimensional assessment of virtue. Purity is a function of how we do what we do best.

In the pure of heart, we encounter the full realization of Hemingway’s often quoted but only partially developed idea of “grace under pressure.” In McCormick we experienced amazing grace under pressure in his readiness to draw from his deepest core and to use himself up in love and work. His pure heart is what killed him. Those of us less pure of heart cover our bets to protect ourselves, always holding something back so we have the cab fare home if the discussion becomes too hot.

That ungiven self betrays our fears as it shrinks our love and leeches the heart out of what could be our best efforts. The ungiven self is the scourge of a self-conscious country in which people can become so absorbed with how they look and what others will think of them that they cannot easily be themselves and lose track of what opinions they must hold. How sad such hearts are because their hearts are made impure not by lust but by fear.

In McCormick we experienced the quality Henry James identified in creative persons: that they “be all there” in whatever they do. McCormick was “all there” in everything he did, his heart and mind completely given over to the issue at hand. He was pure as great artists and athletes are, making an indelible impression because he was not out to make any impression at all. He was too un-self-conscious to court a compliment, too free of affectation to make a calculation of the effects he produced in his brilliant body of work or in his equally luminous relationships with colleagues and friends.

McCormick’s purity of heart was clear in his great love for the church he served so wholeheartedly, in his love for the Society of Jesus, in his love for Notre Dame where he last served so well, and in his love for his family and friends, among whose great number my wife and I were blessed to find ourselves.

Meet him yourself in these words about the American obsession with “choice”: “(I)f the … exclusive emphasis is on autonomy, we will have excluded … those goods and values that make choices right and wrong … the key factors that make bioethics a moral enterprise. For they are the factors that support or undermine, promote or harm, the person. When the rightness or wrongness of choice is reduced to … this individual’s choice, morality has been impoverished.”

Not as long, however, as we have the works and words of Richard McCormick to grant us light and courage.

DEA END KENNEDY