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	A 'Voice for Social Justice' Dies Bellarmine Founder Led School 23 Years By Paula Burba The Courier-Journal [Louisville KY] August 24, 2005 Monsignor Alfred F. Horrigan, a well-known Louisville human-rights advocate and founding president of what is now Bellarmine University, died yesterday after a long illness at age 90. Horrigan lived his last days at Nazareth Home, a healthcare facility overlooking the Bellarmine campus that he nurtured from its founding in 1949 as an all-male Catholic university and led for the next 23 years as president. "Our church has been gifted by his life and leadership," Archbishop Thomas C. Kelly said in a statement released yesterday. "We release him with gratitude to our loving Creator." Kelly once called Horrigan "my definition of a wise man," adding, "I believe that he is the most highly respected priest we have, and although you can't please everybody, he has come awfully close." He said Horrigan was long considered "bishop material," but had not been appointed because of "timing, that's all." Bellarmine President Joseph J. McGowan yesterday called Horrigan "a wonderful friend, a strong and courageous champion for social justice, a distinguished intellectual and educational leader, an excellent priest, a superb raconteur and a hearty baritone." When he resigned from the Bellarmine presidency in 1972, a Courier-Journal editorial noted that Horrigan and Bellarmine "are so closely linked that it is difficult to imagine one without the other." Horrigan was insistent that Bellarmine be a place "open to exploring the truth wherever it led you," according to the Rev. Clyde F. Crews, a church historian and Bellarmine graduate who now teaches there. "The fact that he chose the motto for the college, 'In Love of Truth,' is significant." Horrigan was ordained in 1940 and proceeded on an unconventional, albeit distinguished, career path that included being named a domestic prelate, or Monsignor, in 1955 by Pope Pius XII. He had been an assistant pastor at Holy Spirit and the Cathedral of the Assumption early in his priesthood, but did not take his first full-fledged pastorate until 1976, when he was 61 -- and 36 years into the priesthood. He served as pastor of St. James Catholic Church -- the Highlands church he had attended as a child. He also was a charter member of the Jefferson County Human Relations Commission, founded in 1962, and served as its chairman from 1965 to 1968 -- during the peak of the community's racial unrest amid the civil rights movement. Horrigan was a former editor of the Archdiocese of Louisville's weekly newspaper, The Record. He taught at the old Flaget High School, and later in higher education, including at the old Nazareth and Ursuline colleges and the University of Louisville. He was a regular from 1974 to 1996 on the old WHAS radio and television show "The Moral Side of the News." 'The will of God' In "High Upon a Hill: A History of Bellarmine College" by Wade Hall, Horrigan is quoted as recalling once asking an archbishop for permission to become a Jesuit. The archbishop, who was not identified, declined the request. "If I had become a Jesuit I would probably have become an educator," Horrigan said in the book, adding that he believed his later appointment to Bellarmine "was the will of God for me. … You see, I am enough of an old-fashioned Catholic to believe that my religious superiors represent the will of God." Appointed to the Bellarmine post by the late Archbishop John A. Floersh, Horrigan and the late Raymond Treece, who was named vice president, developed the school's philosophy and curriculum, hired the faculty and accepted the first class -- 115 full-time students who began classes in 1950. Part of the mission statement, co-authored by Horrigan and Treece, declares an ecumenical intent: "It is our confident expectation that it will serve the best interests of the entire community. … We feel that its accomplishments in the course of time will prove a source of gratification to all the people of Louisville of whatever faith." By 1951, before its first freshman class had graduated, the college began a community education program that Horrigan declared open to anyone, "regardless of age, sex, race, religious affiliation or previous schooling." In his history of the school, Hall describes the bookends of Horrigan's presidential tenure, from the early tensions over the military draft and Korean War to the struggle of independent colleges against "reduced contributions, growing inflation and fewer students" in the 1970s. Despite those challenges, the school, which still identifies itself as an independent Catholic university, continued to grow. Ursuline College, a women's college founded in 1938 by the Ursuline Sisters of Louisville, merged with Bellarmine in 1968 to form a coeducational institution. The school changed its name to Bellarmine University in 2000 to reflect a broadened mission. Horrigan did draw some criticism after the sexual-abuse scandal erupted in the Archdiocese of Louisville in 2002 -- well after his retirement. Horrigan testified in a deposition then that he took no action against a priest accused of molesting a girl. He acknowledged that the girl's parents had accused the Rev. Kevin Cole, then a Bellarmine professor, of molesting their daughter in the early 1960s and that he took no action after Cole assured him that he had an appointment with a psychiatrist. Cole went on to molest at least four other girls, according to lawsuits filed against the archdiocese. Cole died in 1991. Defender of civil rights As chairman of the Louisville Human Relations Commission, Horrigan spoke in support of open housing in the 1960s, supporting an ordinance to enforce it as "the right thing to do." He later worked at smoothing unrest over busing for school desegregation and urged political and business leaders to accept ordinances that had been passed to desegregate restaurants and housing. "He was a prophetic voice for social justice, especially in the area of race and civil rights," Kelly said yesterday. He sought meetings between city officials and civil-rights leaders at a time when groups of more than 1,000 hecklers would throw rocks, bottles, food and firecrackers at open-housing demonstrators in the city. "A lot of the mail he got at that time was … hate mail," according to Alma Schuler, who was Horrigan's long-time secretary. Later, after his retirement in 1984 from St. James, he returned to human-rights work as a leader of the Louisville Council on Peacemaking and Religion in the 1980s and early '90s. Horrigan received numerous awards for his civic service and in 2003 was inducted into the Kentucky Civil Rights Hall of Fame. Horrigan also played a central role in bringing the archives of the late Thomas Merton, the world-renowned author who was a monk at the Abbey of Gethsemani outside Bardstown, to Bellarmine. "He'd first met Merton in the '50s, when Merton led a retreat at Gethsemani for Bellarmine faculty," said Paul Pearson, director and archivist for the 40,000-item Thomas Merton Center. "He has always remained a great supporter of the Merton collection," Pearson said, after seeing it "through the proper channels to become a reality." In 1990, St. James parishioner Marilu Dauer Luckett published a collection of Horrigan's homilies entitled "Do Whatever He Tells You." The collection reflects his love of reading and travel, and his intellectual versatility -- revealing influences from Merton to Albert Einstein to Cesar Chavez. "Every form of community, neighborhood and personal activity which attempts to establish the peace and reign of God in the world is an authentic expression of ministry," Horrigan is quoted in the book as saying. Mass is Saturday Horrigan, a native of Wilmington, Del., came to Kentucky with his family at age 5; they soon settled in Louisville. When he was a boy, his family nicknamed him "Shadow," because he was always hanging close to his mother, who often read to him about the legends of King Arthur. The nickname, later shortened to "Shad," stuck for life, according to his family -- as did his interest in the Arthurian legend, as evidenced in Bellarmine's nickname, the Knights; its newspaper, The Concord; and its yearbook, The Lance. Horrigan graduated from St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana and earned his doctorate in philosophy The Catholic University of America in Washington in 1944. His funeral Mass will be celebrated at St. James Catholic Church, 1826 Edenside Ave., at 11 a.m. Saturday. Visitation will be held at three locations: Ratterman Funeral Home, 3711 Lexington Road from 3 to 9 p.m. tomorrow; St. James from 1 to 5 p.m. Friday; and at Our Lady of the Woods Chapel at Bellarmine University, 2001 Newburg Road, from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday. Memorial gifts may be made to the endowment fund of Our Lady of the Woods Chapel or the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine.
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