KARL JASPERES FORUM

TA1 (Muller)

Commentary 29 (on Adler (C26))
IT'S OFFICIAL: ADLER FINALLY CONVERTS
by Martin Gardner
2000, posted 21 May 2002

In 1940, when I was working in the University of Chicago's Press Relations Office, famed philosopher Mortimer Adler was giving speeches in which he sounded exactly like a Roman Catholic whose mentor was Saint Thomas Aquinas. Wags on campus called him a "Peeping Thomist." Under his influence many of his students became Catholics. One became a monk; another became a nun.

On December 13, 1940, The New Repblic published the following letter from me under the heading "The Road to Rome": The text of timer Adler's recent paper, "God and the Professors" (to which Sidney Hook replied in the October 28 issue of your magazine), has just been printed in full in the student newspaper of the University of Chicao.) and I have just finished reading it.

As a former graduate student in the positivistic-minded philosophy department of the University and a present resident of the campus community, I would like to make a plea to the readers of The New Republic.

Pray for the conversion of Mr. Adler.

Mr. Adler has stated many times that he intellectually accepts the doctrines of the Roman creed, but that he lacks the divine faith necessary for conversion and entrance into the church. There is strong traditional precedent for such an attitude. (Gilbert Chesterton, for example, wrote his Orthodoxy one of the greatest of modern Catholic apologies, almost fifteen years before he joined the Church.

So let us unite in prayer for Mr. Adler. And on the date that he enters Rome, let academic circles proclaim a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving. For Mr. Adler's brilliant and exasperating rhetoric will at last have found a home; and out of the dialectic fog will emerge a shape definite enough to be recognized, and solid enough to he worthy of honorable combat.

In December 1999, at age 97, Adler was finally received into the Catholic Church as a convert. "Philosophy Pioneer Enters Church" was the headline over an article by staff writer Brian McGuire in The National Catholic Register (July 1, 2000). "It's not the Road to Damascus," said Notre Dame philosopher Ralph McInerney "but it seems in retrospect to have a certain inevitability about it. It was all those years waiting in the wings."

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My letter, of course, was tongue-in-cheek. It took 60 years for the prayers finally to be answered. fi

Free Inquiry, Buffalo, Fall 2000, Vol 20, #4, p.9

Copyright Council for Democratic and Secular Humanism Fall 2000

FI Senior Editor Martin Gardener is a columnist and author writing on science, the supernatural, and the social issues.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner.

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David Herman