To the editor:
1. I do not want to argue here the pros and cons of putting crucifixes on the walls of classrooms at BC or anywhere else, except to point out that there are good pastoral reasons on both sides of this issue – something your editorial writer does not seem to recognize.
2. Nor do I wish to defend here “some BC professors” or “many BC professors” against the various, high decibel charges made against them in your editorial: they are well able to defend themselves if they wish.
3. What I do want to do is to signal to your readers several offensive and unjust parts of your editorial:
– The title of the editorial is a gross overstatement and involves a close to blasphemous use of ‘crucifixion.’
– The statement that Boston College “...long strived to subdue its Catholic identity” is a calumny, pure and simple. So too are the editorial writer’s claims that Boston College, especially “the faculty,” “needs to recover the essentials of the Catholic faith” or “needs to recover a sense of the scandal of the cross” or that “anti-Catholicism” is a feature of the faculty lounge at BC.
– In contrasting and opposing “The Jesuit Fathers who administer and teach at BC” on the one hand, “the faculty” on the other, your editorial writer is both illogical – the Jesuits who teach at BC are of course faculty – and ill-informed – some Jesuit faculty also question President Leahy’s policy of placing crucifixes in the classrooms.
Worse: in pitting Jesuits against faculty, in clearly suggesting that it is the lay faculty that is the source of the protests and critical comments re crucifixes in the classrooms, in claiming that these protests are an “insult to every Jesuit priest who ever taught at Boston College, every student who ever studied in a classroom at Boston College”, your editorial writer does a serious injustice to every lay faculty member, Catholic or not, who teaches at BC, who cherishes the institution, and who has devoted his or her life to the mission of the university. Need I also point out that the editorial also reeks of the most blatant type of clericalism?
Thomas Ewens
Middletown
P.S. No, I am not an alumnus of BC, nor am I a faculty member there. I am a graduate of Georgetown and Louvain and also a professor emeritus of philosophy at RISD.
