The Letter Killeth by Ralph McInerny Page B

something was missing. You have to take a course in Dante from a professor, and a good professor, too, who shares none of Dante’s religious beliefs, to know what I mean. A man can teach Shakespeare well and yet not inhabit in any way the world of the poet’s real beliefs. So, too, with Chaucer, Milton, Browning. It is of course far worse in philosophy. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, certifiably mad, read as guides to what? The tail end of modernity makes clear that it was rotting from the head down.”
    â€œSo what happened?”
    A radiant smile. “I read Chesterton. I read Belloc. I read Claudel. I read Maritain. Then I knew what was missing. I became a Catholic.”
    â€œAnd came to Notre Dame.”
    â€œEventually. It was a bit of a shock to find almost the same assumptions and outlook that I was fleeing here. It would be too much to say that people were ashamed of the faith; the fact is, many of my colleagues haven’t the least inkling of the tradition in which the university allegedly stands. They have been trained as I was and simply accepted it as the way things are. It is tragic. A whole patrimony is ignored or, when taken into account, treated in the way I found so dissatisfying.”
    â€œAnd you are offering an alternative.”
    â€œIn a small way.” He patted his middle. “Insofar as I can do anything in a small way.”
    Roger tried discreetly to learn just what it was Fred did with his life, how he spent his days. He dodged the questions, again characterized himself as one of the idle rich. Much as Roger impressed him, stirring as what he had said was, Fred was not prepared to speak of his religious enthusiasms.
    In the lobby, dressing to face the elements, Roger wrapped an Observer into his clothing and then, attended once more, went outside to where his golf cart awaited him. Fred waved him off and went up to his room. A message. He checked it out and groaned. Bastable.

7
    Hugh Bastable was in a rage. He paced from his study through the dining room and into the living room of the town house overlooking the St. Joseph River to which he and his wife, Florence, had moved with the idiotic notion that they would end their lives pleasantly near the institutions that, with the passage of years, seemed to have been the scene of the best years of their lives. They had come fleeing what seemed the debacle of their family. Young Hugh—he was thirty-seven now—had come out of the closet, as he put it (“The water closet!”) and was now tossed about by the zeitgeist. Myrtle, their daughter, had married, three times so far, and had one neglected child for each of her discarded spouses. Florence subsided into silent resignation, but Hugh disowned them both, sold out, and moved to South Bend with Florence.
    What had he expected to find? Florence had returned from her one and only visit to St. Mary’s in wordless shock. And Notre Dame! What in the name of God had happened to Hugh’s alma mater? During his active years, he had paid little attention to what was happening to the Church in the wake of Vatican II. The truth was that he hadn’t been much of a Catholic, too busy, too successful, too whatever. There were disquieting moments when he wondered how responsible he was for the directions his children’s lives had taken. But self-knowledge was not prominent among his gifts. He needed an external enemy, and by God he had found it. Day after day, he fed his discontents, and reading the benighted Observer was a reliable negative stimulus. Today’s issue had provided a sympathetic portrait of the professor whose car had burned near the library. Izquierdo! Was the poor fellow the victim of some bigoted student, the reporter asked? That the man was an atheist and was noted for heaping abuse on the faith in his classroom was conveyed without the least hint that there was something odd about this. Surely this was the last straw.
    The difficulty was that