The Green Revolution

by Ralph McInerny

  In the fall of 2007, he was offering a course on Catholic involvement in the revival of interest in the liberal arts, and the concomitant rise of interest in the great books of the Western tradition, that had taken place in the 1930s. In this he was aided greatly by having as his friend Otto Bird, the founder of what was now called the Program of Liberal Studies. Otto had known personally many of the pivotal figures in that revival, and he had worked with Mortimer Adler at the Encyclopedia Britannica, editing the Great Books of the Western World in each volume of which he himself published a lengthy, impressive essay on one of those great books. To Roger’s wondrous delight, two of those essays had been thorough yet compact studies of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Dante’s Divina Commedia. As it happened, Otto was visiting Roger when the 2007 season began its slow descent.

  There were philosophical fans who could take comfort in the adage that you win some, you lose some. Philip Knight was not among them. There were fans who attributed misfortune on the field to biased officials, probably in the pay of the National Council of Churches. Philip was not among them either, although he sometimes sympathized with the sentiment. The group that included Philip looked beyond an undeniable defeat to the golden prospects of the next weekend when all would be made right, much as, until the eighth race is run, losing gamblers summon hope and throw good money after bad. It was precisely this eternally rising hope that proved to be all too temporary as the tragic season unfolded. And soon would come the games that even pessimists expected the Irish to win.

  The sardonic billed it as the battle of the titans. Navy had not beaten Notre Dame since the days of the immortal Roger Staubach. Their 2007 season equaled that of Notre Dame in pathos, though less had been expected of the team from Annapolis. The bruised and battered Notre Dame fan felt, not without reason, that here at last, however equivocally and against a lesser opponent, something like redemption must come. Not even the prescient could have known that when the four regular quarters of the games had been played out the two teams would find themselves tied. Not even Cassandra could have foreseen that the Navy game would go into overtime. Into three overtimes, in the last of which Navy would score and hope would finally die in Philip’s breast and in those of many others.

  But all that lay in the future.

  Otto and Roger were in the study leafing through an ancient folio volume, a product of the first generation of printing, the commentary of Thomas Aquinas on all the epistles of St. Paul. Otto was now in his nineties, his health not good but his mind clear and his zeal for learning unchanged. He was disposing of his considerable and valuable library.

  “I want you to have this,” he had just said to Roger.

  “If only I could afford it.”

  “I meant as a gift.”

  Roger’s astonishment was as great as Philip’s when he burst into the apartment, returning from the stadium where Notre Dame had just lost to Southern Cal, though that of one brother was the astonishment of pleasure, that of the other the astonishment of the betrayed.

  “We lost!”

  Otto Bird, one of the great figures on the Notre Dame faculty during the past half century, always impeccably dressed, easily one of the most learned men Roger had ever known, looked at Philip in surprise.

  “We lost again!” Philip’s voice had dropped to a horrified whisper, his expression that of the devout when they repeat a heretical phrase.

  “What was the score?” Roger asked, his pudgy hand moving reverently over a page of the volume he had just acquired, feeling the imprint the letters had made centuries ago on the paper.

  “We should have won!”

  Otto’s interest in the athletic fortunes of the university to which he had devoted a long lifetime was, not to put too fine a point upon it, minimal, but he had become accustomed to outbursts such as Philip’s over the years. He had found that sympathetic silence was the best response, a silence that could be interpreted as acquiescence in the burden of the outburst. His benign expression had not altered on autumn Mondays when all around him in the faculty lounge each play of the previous Saturday’s game was subjected to professorial if not professional analysis. Well, why not? Noncombatants write the history of battles, outwit Napoleon while comfortable at their desks, say yea or nay to Churchill’s plan for a second front in World War II, not across the Channel but up through the “soft underbelly of Europe.” Wars are more easily waged in retrospect, and games that had been lost on Saturday are turned into possible victories on Monday. Otto did not condescend to such colleagues. After all, what is teaching but a long retrospective conversation about the achievements of others?

  It was clear that Roger and his guest were not to be let off easily. A thoroughly disenchanted review of the game followed.

  “We could have won it if only…”

  The sensible course Philip outlined had not been followed by the coaching staff. How could their decisions be attributed to misfortune? Only inepititude on the sidelines could explain such a failure to win the game and winning was the expected ending of every Notre Dame game.

  Eventually Phil fell silent, and into the silence Otto introduced the games Aeneas had scheduled for his crew, bringing their ships ashore and letting the contests begin. Afterward, there was a massive feast for the contestants.

  “I have often thought,” Otto said softly, “that we are unwise to reverse that order. Our feasting and burnt offerings come before the game.”

  “There will be no feasting and celebrating tonight,” Phil said. He rose and wandered off, and Roger and his guest returned to a discussion of the early days of printing, with especial reference to the folio volume that Otto had given Roger as a gift.

  When the phone began to ring, Roger did not answer, assuming that Phil would take the call. Many rings sounded before Roger picked up the phone to hear Father Carmody on the line. Father Carmody, a more eminent figure on the campus than even Otto Bird, had been Roger’s champion for the Huneker Chair, and since he had connections with the Philadelphia family that was putting up the money, his wishes had overridden those of a faculty committee that had been formed to offer advice on potential occupants of the chair. The name of Roger Knight had not been on their list. It was unlikely that any members of the committee had even heard of the author of the monograph on Baron Corvo. Thus it was that Roger had arrived on campus with a sizable number of unknown enemies who resented his hiring. Meanwhile, Father Carmody had become a friend of the Knight brothers. From time to time, he had also availed himself of Philip’s role as private investigator.

  “How is Phil taking it?”

  “He’s upset.”

  “So were we.”

  3

  In the Psalms that Father Carmody read daily, old age was accounted one of God’s blessings. For Charles Carmody, it had come to seem a mixed blessing. Throughout his long career in the congregation of Holy Cross, much of it spent on campus, some of it in Rome when he served as right-hand man to the superior general of the order, he had relished the role of the man behind the scenes. Long before his reddish hair turned white, he was known as an Èminence grise, a kingmaker but never a king. And long after his coevals had disappeared from the scene, called to God, or debilitated, drooling denizens of the final station in the life of a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Father Carmody remained active, playing a discreet role, advising a series of presidents he had difficulty taking completely seriously. To the old, the young inevitably seem mere parodies of the giants they have succeeded. Still, when his advice and counsel were asked for they were gladly given. The personnel changed, but the university to which Charles Carmody had devoted himself wholeheartedly remained. The first time he had come along Notre Dame Avenue and seen the great golden dome lift above the trees, he had fallen in love as other men fall in love with mortal women. He became a champion in the service of the Lady atop the dome.

  Remaining as active as he had, Carmody had resisted any suggestion that he was ready for Holy Cross House, the low build
ing on the far side of the lake to which retired and ailing and senile members of the congregation went. All very well for them, of course, and thank God there was such a bright efficient place in which they could live out their final days. He knew it was pride that prevented him from seeing himself among the residents of Holy Cross House. Eavesdropping on his inner thoughts, he feared that he heard the voice of the pharisee in the gospel thanking God that he was not like the rest of men. And then one surprising day, without fanfare, Father Hesburgh took up residence in Holy Cross House. Father Hesburgh! If the fabled longtime president of Notre Dame could live in Holy Cross House, who was Charles Carmody to resist? Besides, there was the fact that Hesburgh remained active, on campus and abroad, his demanding schedule seemingly unaltered by retirement from the presidency. Ted’s failing eyesight was a handicap few even knew of, but each day he went off to his offices on the thirteenth floor of the library named for him. This seemed the best of both worlds to Charles Carmody, and soon he followed the precedent of Ted Hesburgh and moved into Holy Cross House. For a time, the parallel worked. Like Hesburgh, Carmody continued to be summoned to the main building when matters became too difficult for the youngsters there.

  Undeniably, however, there had been a falling off of such summonses of late. There were dark times when Carmody felt that he was on the shelf for good, like the other residents of Holy Cross House. It was more and more difficult to think that he, like Hesburgh, was an exception. He even found himself reviewing his memories with an eye to listing the times when he had pulled the administration’s chestnuts from the fire, alone or, recently, in tandem with Philip Knight. It did not help that, surveying the record of the new administration, he felt that they could only benefit from calling on the wisdom and experience of Charles Carmody.

  No need to give much thought to how easily he might have spared them the ignominy of pursuing coaches no longer on the market or letting out the astronomical salary that had lured Weis back to his alma mater. Carmody remembered that the most Ara Parseghian had ever been paid as head football coach was thirty-five thousand dollars. Doubtless those who had offered the princely sum to Weis had taken comfort in his early performance. Incredibly, they had extended his contract for ten years after what increasingly looked like a lucky first season. Hubris and folly were to take their lumps in 2007.

  Alumni were on the phone to Carmody increasingly as the horrors of 2007 unfolded. Ever the loyalist, Carmody had calmed the angry, encouraged the despondent, appealed to the apparently bottomless love of their alma mater in the graduates of Notre Dame. But in the private forum of his mind he permitted critical judgments to formulate themselves. This was no ordinary string of bad luck. History of the worst kind was being made by the multimillionaire head coach. Of course, Carmody kept such thoughts to himself.

  * * *

  Iggie Willis, an alumnus whose devotion to his alma mater bore some relation to his not undistinguished four years on campus, had been roused to unusual ire by the collapse of the football team. After the first loss, to Georgia Tech, Father Carmody had counseled him to take comfort in the fact that lowly Appalachian State had beaten archrival Michigan. Whatever temporary solace this afforded Willis, it evaporated when Michigan trounced Notre Dame in Ann Arbor. At least the slaughter had not occurred in the very stadium, however altered, that Rockne had built.

  “Something has to be done, Father,” Willis growled after the loss to Georgia Tech. They were in Leahy’s, the bar of the Morris Inn, if not drowning their sorrows then dowsing them with the balm of oblivion. At least Willis was. Carmody, as was his wont, nursed a single drink, all things to all men except in sin.

  “It’s only a game, Ignatius.”

  “Life is a game, Father,” Willis said in homiletic tones. “A game we’re meant to win.”

  “The stakes are somewhat different.”

  “Three quarterbacks, Father. Three quarterbacks! What in hell have they been doing during training?”

  “Do you know what you get back when you give a dollar for a seventy-five-cent purchase, Willis?”

  “You find me a quarterback for that price and I’ll buy him.”

  Father Carmody offered Willis the consolations of philosophy, or the Leahy’s equivalent thereof. He recalled with uncanny accuracy past troughs in the record of Notre Dame football. What were a few losses against such memories of redemption?

  But the opening loss had been followed by another and another and another … Willis began mobilizing fellow enraged alumni; he initiated a Web site and asked fellow Domers to subscribe to the expression of outraged disappointment, which, as the weeks went by, began to seem almost moderate. After the fourth loss, there were more than ten thousand subscribers to Willis’s Web site. This development filled Father Carmody with foreboding. The mark, the essence, of a Notre Dame graduate was unquestioning, even blind, allegiance to the great university that had improbably arisen on the shores of St. Mary’s and St. Joseph’s lakes, the bifurcated bodies of water created from the one lake that figured in the original title of the institution, Notre Dame du Lac. Now on Willis’s Web site began to appear what were, let us hope, unserious suggestions that Chicago alumni might know how to arrange for taking out a contract on the now odious coach whose own contract and compensation were subjects of morose delectation. Of such things did alumni chat without inhibition on CheerCheerForOldNotreDame.com, the italicized adjective meant to refer to the golden era before the present debacle.

  Not unsurprisingly, Father Carmody eventually got a call from the Main Building. Not from the president. Not from the provost. Not from the inflated platoon of assistant and associate presidents and provosts, not even from Genoux, his onetime protégé who was now special advisor to the president, but from one Kevin Dockery who identified himself as in the foundation and was calling on behalf of the administration.

  “And what can I do for you, Mr. Dockery?”

  “Are you aware of the Web site CheerCheerForOldNotreDame.com?”

  “Tell me about it,” Father Carmody suggested, decades of experience counseling the wisdom of indirection.

  Dockery told him. “They’re killing us, Father. Any number of promised donations have been put in escrow until something is done about the football team.”

  “I am sure the lads are doing their best,” Father Carmody said, employing a Leahy’s designation for the players.

  “It’s the coach they’re after.”

  “So what are you doing?”

  “The question is, what can we do?”

  “Who suggested that you call me?”

  This flustered Dockery. Whatever the urgency of his concern—the current drive for contributions, one of a continuous series—it did not emanate from him.

  “Perhaps you should have them get in touch with me,” Father Carmody suggested and said good-bye to Kevin Dockery with a satisfaction that would become a prominent item in his next examination of conscience.

  Within the hour, his phone rang again.

  “Father Carmody?”

  Ah. Genoux. “Is that you, Neil? How long it’s been since we talked.”

  “You above all know the ceaseless business of administration, Father.”

  “Ah, but that is all long since, Neil. I find myself increasingly content with the inactivity of this place. The soul, Neil. The soul. One must prepare himself to meet his maker.”

  “We need your help, Father.”

  “Mine?”

  How sweet it was to hear the desperation in the voice of the young man, once a protégé, now all but a stranger since he had entered the inner circles.

  “You know Ignatius Willis. You can get through to him.”

  “Oh, I hear from him regularly.”

  “You do!”

  “The loyalty of old students is a touching thing, Neil.” The knife being in, he twisted it gently. “Most old students.”

  Carmody let Genoux cajole and woo him for fifteen minutes before he agreed to do what he could do to get Iggie to
call off his assault on Notre Dame football. As it happened, Iggie planned to fly in during the coming week.

  “But you’ll be too busy for us to get together,” Father Carmody had suggested when Iggie called.

  “Too busy! Father, I’d cancel appointments to visit with you, and you know it. Besides, I want to give you a report on the Web site.”

  “What brings you to South Bend? You’re not just pretending other business in order to accommodate me.”

  “Oh, no. There’s other business. But that, too, can wait.”

  4

  Father Neil Genoux occupied an office not far from that of the president in the Main Building. His title, special advisor to the president, had a political redolence to it, fittingly enough no doubt. His was the kind of job that Father Carmody had done informally for years and years, through administrations from Cavanaugh’s to the present. No title for Carmody, no office either with his name on the door, nor, Genoux was sure, had Carmody been treated so peremptorily by those he served. There were times when Genoux felt like lifting his arms before his chest, curling his hands downward, and barking. There was an old country-western song that had stuck in his memory. “Take This Job and Shove It.” Or words to that effect. After barking, he would belt out that song and walk out the door, cashiered, reduced to the ranks, free.

  Up is down in academe and vice versa. Malcontents on the faculty regard the administration as the owners, the bosses, and themselves, more improbably still, as working stiffs. They look with resentment on those who wield, as they think, absolute power over them. Power! Those in the administration are the playthings of forces they cannot control, actors in a drama they have not rehearsed, menaced by faculty, alumni, staff, donors, conscience. More and more, Genoux found himself envying the blissful lives of the faculty. Study, teach a few courses a week, loll around chatting with students or colleagues, criticize the administration—lives of total tranquillity. Genoux had taught, he knew better, but his longing swept away realistic memories and he imagined himself back in his office in Decio, chair tipped back, looking out the window, just watching the grass grow. He would never have heard the name of Ignatius Willis then. Or even of the Weeping Willow Society.