Monika Hellwig died last week. She was a Georgetown professor who changed my life. Luckily, I had the good sense to tell her that a couple of years ago when I bumped into her in Red Square.
I first met Professor Hellwig when I signed up for her course, History of Christian Thought, in the fall of my junior year. I took the course because previous theology classes had piqued my interest in theological questions in general and in the Catholic intellectual tradition in particular.
Looking back, one of the several markers that indicate to me that the Georgetown tradition “worked” in my case is that by the time I was a junior, I knew that I wanted to know more about my own faith and its intellectual content.
I took Professor Hellwig’s course because I wanted to be smarter about my Catholicism. I wanted to know not just what I believed, but why I believed it. She and her course did not disappoint.
In all honesty, I have to say that Hellwig’s teaching style was not exactly electric. I remember her sitting at the desk, with hands folded, for most of every 75-minute class period. She taught in a hushed voice and paused often to clear her throat in what seemed to be a nervous habit. She would occasionally sip from a glass of water.
I always stopped at Wisey’s for a jumbo java on the way to class.
The thing I liked most about the class was that we were forced to wrestle for ourselves with the original texts and controversies of early Christianity. I remember Hellwig’s quiet but adamant insistence that people of religious faith ought to be well versed in the intellectual heritage, history and complexity of their faith. She told us we had to get used to spending hours grappling with theological ideas and their implications, or else run the risk of going through life with a child’s understanding of what we believed.
I don’t remember her exact words (in fact, I don’t think I remember the exact words of any of my Georgetown professors), but I remember their import: “You owe it to yourself and to the Church to become a man whose faith is intelligent, historically informed and well reasoned. And you owe it to God who gave you the curiosity and capacity to do so.” She convinced me to give it a try. I’m still working at it.
Still, the class time and the reading were not the whole story. The payoff came when I went back to my room in Copley and re-read my class notes. Without fail, I found them to be rich and clear. Class by class, week by week they helped me put together a mosaic of the intellectual framework of my faith.
But even that is not the whole story. There was more to Monika Hellwig the professor than that. She may not have been an entertainer but she was, in the fullest sense of the term, a Catholic educator – a woman whose course and whose example led me to deeper intellectual and spiritual maturity. I came to Georgetown with the faith of a high school student. I left with the faith of an adult. Monika Hellwig helped make that happen.
It has been daunting to be reminded of the power inherent in the teaching of theology as I prepare to teach Problem of God next semester. I want to be a worthy inheritor of the legacy Professor Hellwig passed on to me. I want to be a credible and effective teacher of theology for the generation of Hoyas entrusted to me as she was for me and my generation of Hoyas.
My hope is that today’s Hoyas, both in Washington and in Qatar, will recognize the great gift that is theirs for the taking: an undergraduate education that includes the opportunity to lay intellectual claim to your own faith tradition and prepares you for the sort of inter-religious dialogue the world so desperately needs.
Reflecting this week on Monika Hellwig and her place in my Georgetown education has been good for me. It’s made me even more grateful for the ways Georgetown has helped shape my life and for the fact that I crossed paths with this good woman.
Monika Hellwig taught me that a believer can be faithful and intelligent, devout and questioning, pious and pragmatic. I guess I could have learned the same things by looking seriously at the lives of my parents but, when you’re 20, there are some things you’re just not ready or willing or able to learn from your parents. So I learned them from someone else’s mom.
I learned them from Monika Hellwig.
Resquiescat in pace.