At this point, Edna Mae began to weep. Almost silently my dear wife pressed a tissue against her eyes with bowed head and her shoulders quivering, as if she might shrink from anyone who tried to comfort her. And so I did not touch her, sitting with my face warm, and my blood beating hard, scarcely hearing the Professor’s words though I did not turn my eyes away from his face as he stood at the podium above me, speaking with the calmness of rectitude.
Much of what the Professor said was difficult to follow. In our church, it is not in the nature of our ministers to reason in such ways. And so it was clear, the difference between the Roman Catholic professor and the others of us lay in such reasoning, that you could follow, to an extent, as the Professor spoke; but you could never recall what he said afterward, still less repeat it to another person. For the Professor took up “natural law” as a way of refuting those who argued for abortion—“It is their error to claim that the fetus, which is formed of the female egg and the male sperm conjoined, and is thus an entirely new entity, is not a human being, in embryonic form; and then, when this claim is answered, they argue that, yes, a fetus is a human being, but it is not yet a person in a legal sense.”
Professor Wohlman paused, to allow his audience to register the outrage of such a statement; then he continued, “Such an argument would allow society to dispose of human beings who are not deemed fully ‘persons’—children born with physical and mental disabilities, adults who have suffered strokes and other impairments, the elderly who can no longer fend for themselves but must depend upon others. Once you argue that one class of human beings has the right to pass judgment upon all other human beings, to declare which are, and which are not, ‘persons,’ you have opened the door to the Nazi Holocaust—to genocide—to the power of the State to determine our lives. This must not be allowed to happen. The butchery of each innocent infant must not go unacknowledged—unmourned.”
Trying to follow the Professor was like making your way through a marshy area where suddenly your foot might sink. For it seemed, the Professor quoted Latin—(or so it seemed, these foreign-sounding words had to be Latin); he spoke of a “Church father”—(a name pronounced as “Au-gus-tin”)—and to a Catholic theologian of the medieval era—(“Thomas A-qui-nus”). Both of these were, the Professor said, saints.
Saints! In the New Testament, all Christians are saints.
This is a strange idea to us, that some human beings are claimed to be saints in a way not taken from the New Testament. For in the New Testament it is clear, there is only one way to God, and that is Jesus Christ who is our Savior, but who is not a saint.
It was a new thought to me, that the approach to God might not be so easy as we had been taught. Even in the ministry school in Toledo, you would take your subject from the Bible, that would be the center of your sermon so that you would read these familiar verses to the congregation, and talk about the story in the verses, and even that had been a challenge to me for I did not have any original ideas about any sermons, but could only imitate sermons that I had heard, or that were given to me to study as good examples of sermons, and sometimes even then I would not know what to say, my tongue seemed to swell inside my mouth and my mind would be blank. But Professor Wohlman did not read a single verse from the Bible!
Professor Wohlman did not have a Bible with him at the podium, it appeared. How strange this was, I did not have time to consider at the time.
Across the aisle from Edna Mae and me, in the first row of seats, sat an older woman whom I had reason to believe was Professor Wohlman’s wife. Mrs. Wohlman was a heavyset woman with a white skin that looked glazed, as with tiny wrinkles. She was stern-faced, somber. Her thin lips were pursed tight as she gazed upward at her husband standing at the podium, bathed in light. I wondered—was Mrs. Wohlman proud of the Professor? Could she understand him?
In the Coalition newsletter I’d learned that the Wohlmans had been married for forty-six years. They had had seven children of whom two had died prematurely—one, of childhood leukemia; the other, in a transportation accident involving fellow American soldiers, in Vietnam.
I wondered if the Professor had a way of reasoning, with his special insight, that might better explain the death of a young person, than the ways in which a Protestant might reason.
In the Coalition newsletter I had learned that Willard Wohlman was the “preeminent” Christian conservative philosopher of our time. At an “Ivy League university” (as it was called) the Professor taught courses in moral philosophy, political theory, and jurisprudence—(which I had to suppose dealt with juries and the law). One of his former Jesuit instructors at Loyola of Chicago had said of Willard Wohlman that he was “the most brilliant student” he’d ever encountered.
In an interview, Wohlman was asked why he had left the seminary without becoming a priest. His reply was a humble one—“I was made to realize that God had another plan for my life.”