Mary Ann Glendon, former US ambassador to the Vatican and current Learned Hand Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, spoke this past week to Boston College students and faculty on the topic of “Cicero and Burke: Politics as a Vocation.” Inaugurating the final year of the Bradley Lecture Series, the talk focused on how one can be true to personal values while also being successful in political life.
Former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican, Mary Ann Glendon during the “Politics as a Vocation” speech.
Glendon began by reflecting on the “relationship between the calling to politics and the calling to philosophy – the two vocations that Aristotle called the most choice worthy.” She said that “Cicero and Edmund Burke would qualify under both headings.”
She explained that both Cicero, an orator and politician during the late Roman Republic, and Burke, an eighteenth century Irish born politician in England, “emphatically gave priority, unlike Aristotle, to politics as the more choice worthy” vocation when compared to philosophy, because politics was the way in which philosophical ideas were put into action.
The lecture was more than a history lesson though. Glendon explained that “what interests me, in connection with Cicero and Edmund Burke, are the great numbers of young men and women who come to law school saying they want to go into politics, and…something happens so that by the time they graduate they change their minds and they will give you a lot reasons … [but] the most intelligent and principled young men and women say they turned aside from politics after wrestling with questions like these: How can I handle politics of personal destruction, or is politics such a dirty business that I would become contaminated… would I betray my principles to the point where I might even lose my soul as I endeavor to get and keep public office?”
This question of politics and personal values is one that Glendon has been forced to wrestle with in her own life. Less than six months ago, Glendon was to receive Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, considered one of the highest awards given to American Catholics. However, when it was announced that President Barack Obama, a vocally pro-choice politician, would be giving the university’s commencement address and receiving an honorary degree, Glendon decided to decline the award.
In her April 2009 letter to Fr. Jenkins, President of Notre Dame, she explains that commencement “is not the right place…in disregard of the settled position of the U.S. bishops—to honor a prominent and uncompromising opponent of the Church’s position on issues involving fundamental principles of justice.”
Glendon said she thought it “might be interesting to interrogate the biographies of people like Cicero and Edmund Burke, to see how they dealt with problems that are in many respects similar…to those our students have faced, especially the more difficult ones: how far can you go in compromising before losing sight of everything that got you into politics in the first place?”
Burke, for example, had to balance his Irish Catholic heritage with political success in a Protestant England hostile to Catholics. Cicero was forced to balance his love of republican values with political opportunity in an increasingly authoritarian Roman government.
To conclude her lecture, she asks what Ernest Fortin, a theology professor at Boston College and co-founder of the Bradley Lectures, who passed away in 2002, would have thought of this topic. Quoting from one of his writings, she says he would have offered another option to traditional philosophy and politics that “is between a philosophy that owes its highest dignity to its status as the handmaiden of theology and one that refuses to bow to any higher authority.”
The lecture was followed by a question and answer session, and later with dinner and discussion at the McElroy Faculty Dining Hall. Glendon will be back on campus in the spring to help wrap up the year of Bradley Lectures by chairing a round-table discussion on the works of Fortin.
