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Public Service. Keeping this fine-tuned institution going is a fulltime job for Hesburgh. But he can and does manage another big job: an intensive career of public service. As a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Hesburgh gives special emphasis to Christian action, last year wrote a notable attack on police brutality against Negroes. As a member of the National Science Board, Hesburgh votes on multimillion-dollar federal research projects. As a board member of the Rockefeller Foundation, he votes on another $40 million in medical and social welfare projects. As the Vatican's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, he goes to Vienna each September for an annual meeting at which he is considered a quietly effective negotiator.
By now Hesburgh has visited almost every country in Africa, Asia, Europe and South America. When he does get time for play, he generally slips off to a favorite Mexican fishing village with a few old friends (one: C. R. Smith, president of American Airlines).
Habitually, Hesburgh works until 3 in the morning, with Brahms and Beethoven humming on his stereo set if he is in his office. "Some people are unwinders," he says of his late hours. "I'm a winder as the night goes on." He sometimes winds right through the night, rising from his desk at dawn to go to church and the first round of his daily 2½ hours of prayers. The type who breakfasts on a vitamin pill and fruit juice, Hesburgh lives a spartan life (salary: nothing), sleeps in a brown iron bed in a bare room, where the furnishings consist of two chairs and an old Royal typewriter.
For all his comings and goings, Hesburgh is abidingly devoted to the glory of the University of Notre Dame. Every conceivable improvement is on his mind, from painting the front door of the main building to launching a new Center for the Study of Man in Contemporary Society, a project that he hopes will draw theologians into the problems of cities, civil rights and developing nations.
"A Possible Renaissance." By such efforts to join faith and reason, Hesburgh embodies an intellectual maturity that long seemed beyond U.S. Catholic education. At least in theory, such maturity is bound to spread. Socially, politically and economically, U.S. Catholics are now strong and secure. If money, drive and ambition can create great universities, Catholics will sooner or later have them. What critics still challenge is whether the peculiarly American heritage of Catholic anti-intellectualism will so hobble scholarship that greatness is out of reach. Mortimer (Great Books) Adler charges, for example, that Catholics still "often appear to think that all the truth worth knowing is already completely known and in their possession."
Hesburgh stands for probing all truth on the ground that there cannot be a conflict in truths. Some Catholics fear that this might push Catholic colleges toward secularism and deprive them of their reason for being. Yet the faith-and-reason approach might flower in the nation's first significant generation of Catholic intellectuals. Carefully keeping his claims moderate, Hesburgh foresees only "a possible renaissance" of Catholic education.