ARTICLES

Telling the Truth

SAN FRANCISCO PHILOSOPHER'S DEFENSE OF UNBORN CHILDREN

By George Neumayr

The vast majority of American intellectuals devote their careers to writing and speaking to other intellectuals. Not so with Ray Dennehy, a prominent American Thomist at the University of San Francisco. The fruit of his intellectual labor is not found in obscure academic journals but in the public square where he uses Natural Law philosophy to defend the right to life of unborn children.

"That's how I define myself," he said in a recent interview. "I really feel like I am doing something important, giving witness to the truth in a public forum. I love the prologue to John's Gospel: the light shone in the darkness but the darkness could not engulf it. If you were to go into the blackest part of the universe and light a match, that light would eventually suffuse the whole universe. That is the way it is when you give witness to the truth. My view is, just as the eye spontaneously turns towards the light, so the intellect spontaneously turns towards the truth."

Dennehy takes this philosophy each year into the Roman Colliseum of abortion politics--UC Berkeley's annual forum on abortion. "My goal when I go over to Berkeley is to make sure that no one will ever think the same way about abortion again."

Dennehy's love of verbal combat and fair fights dates to his youth. Born in 1934, he grew up in the blue-collar Irish neighborhoods of San Francisco, devoting much time to amateur boxing and weightlifting. Though an avid reader, he languished in San Francisco's parochial schools: "I was a mediocre student.... My parents would ground me and I didn't care. I would stay home and read."

After graduating from Sacred Heart High School, Dennehy worked as an office boy for Southern Pacific Railroad and then joined the Navy at the height of the Cold War. Aboard a cruiser in the Pacific off Asia, Dennehy had plenty of time to read books like Tocqueville's Democracy in America and discuss philosophy and politics with accomplished shipmates. "When you are crossing the ocean from Long Beach to Hawaii to Japan, there is nothing to do. There were very smart, cultivated guys on board--lawyers, architects. We would have conversations. So that was part of my education."

At the age of 24, Dennehy enrolled at the University of San Francisco, motivated in part by a priest at St. Gabriel's who encouraged him to pursue his intellectual talent: "I make my confession and the priest says, 'That was a very intelligent confession, and the more intelligent you are, the more you are responsible for.' For an Irish Catholic boy growing up in the pre-Vatican II Church to hear that, I knew I was going to college."

Dennehy excelled at USF. He became president of the Thomists, a USF philosophy club. He recalls the authentically Catholic character of the school at that time, with church bells ringing before and after class, teachers "happy enough to teach Catholicism," and first-rate classmates like historian Kevin Starr and Dublin Trinity professor Dennis Kennedy. The Jesuits of that era loved debate, provoking students so as to sharpen their intellectual skills: "The Jesuits took their educational philosophy very seriously. Everybody had to take 24 units of philosophy." Dennehy remembers a Jesuit rebuking him for not turning on a light after entering the classroom. "Were you born in a barn?" he asked Dennehy. "I'm 24 years old and I'm not going to take this. So I say, 'If it is good enough for Christ's father, it is good enough for me.' From then on, we were good friends."

With the GI bill in hand, Dennehy left USF to pursue a graduate degree in philosophy at Berkeley. A resolute Thomist, Dennehy felt like a prostitute "in church" at the secular humanistic Berkeley philosophy program. Nevertheless, he absorbed a lot, taking courses with grandees like Karl Popper. He finished his graduate work in philosophy at the University of Toronto, writing his dissertation on the metaphysics of Jacques Maritain.

He returned to the Bay Area at the tail end of the 1960s to teach at Santa Clara University and immediately entered the burgeoning abortion debate. He spoke in schools and parishes first and then moved to television and radio. He debated Derek Humphrey, the founder of Hemlock Society, so often on TV that he once found himself driving the "enemy to the airport."

Never a joiner, Dennehy nonetheless signed up with San Francisco's United for Life, a pro-life group formed in response to the first California abortion legislation. An Italian gardener in the fledgling group approached Dennehy and said, "You got to be part of this group, then generations will look back and see we did something." Dennehy knew then that he "had to draw up my plough, in my case books, and go to work" to defend unborn children.

In the early 1970s, Dennehy left Santa Clara, sensing its movement towards "neo-paganism," and moved to USF, where he helped found the St. Ignatius Institute, a Great Books program loyal to the Jesuit ratio studiorum formula of education.

Dennehy's pro-life work has continued unabated since. He could care less what his left-wing colleagues think of him. "I'm like a [burp] at a dinner party.... It has never occurred to me to wonder what people think of me.... And if it does come up, I say, well who the hell are these people?"

Though optimistic about the pro-life movement("more and more people are sympathetic"), Dennehy is convinced that the Catholic Church in America is signficantly responsible for the moral and spiritual free-fall of American society. He refers to the post-Vatican II church as the "big sell-out," surrendering a generation of young Catholics to the corrupt ethos of the world. Many of the clergy "avoid all the tough questions," offering the faithful only pablum-filled homilies on "safe issues like racism."

A recent poll on CNN, showing that over 80 percent of Catholics think dissent from Church teaching is acceptable, particularly angers Dennehy. "The bishops and priests are directly responsible for this." Dennehy knows that such observations anger the clergy, but their anger pales in comparison with the anger of a "father" who saw his "four children" receive heretical education at the hands of priests and nuns.

Catholic higher education, another subject on which Dennehy debates, is heading for the abyss, unless, says Dennehy, the Pope's apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae is implemented soon. "These places are going to turn to dust and blow away."

Dennehy remembers a conversation he had with a woman who, to her emotional devastation, procured an abortion. A product of the post-Vatican II Church, she lamented that a moral authority didn't confront her and say, "Don't."

"I strongly suspect that there are a large group of young adults in a state of invincible ignorance, receiving communion regularly, even though they are living with each other. Nobody tells them anything. Catholic schools and pulpits have ceded that function to the media."

Timid clergy praise Dennehy for taking a stand, but they themselves won't take an out-front stand. The same clergy who talk ad nauseum about the evils of discrimination won't "protest at an abortion clinic," he says. It is time for the clergy to say, "My job is not to please people, but to save souls."

Dennehy returns to the theme of John's gospel, the light in the darkness. "It saves lives," he says simply.