My Teacher ... Dr. Alice Jourdain      Alice Jourdain von Hildebrand was born in Belgium March 11, 1923. She came to the U.S. in 1940. Soon afterwards she met Dietrich von Hildebrand and began philosophy studies at Fordham University as his student where she took nearly 18 courses with him. Later she became his secretary and collaborated with him in the writing of a number of his books. Starting in 1947, she began teaching at Hunter College in New York City. She was eventually appointed Professor of Philosophy at Hunter where for 37 years she was an extraordinarily successful teacher. A number of her students converted to Catholicism under her influence, despite the anti-Christian spirit at Hunter. She married Dietrich von Hildebrand in 1959. Upon her retirement in 1984 she was given a special award by Hunter in acknowledgment of her great distinction as a teacher. Dr. von Hildebrand counts it as one of the great and ironic moments of her career that the award, which is made on the basis of student evaluations, was presented to her by then-President of Hunter, Donna Shalala, who later served for eight years as President Clinton's Secretary of Health and Human Services. Dr. von Hildebrand is the author of numerous books, including Introduction to a Philosophy of Religion, Greek Culture, By Love Refined, By Grief Refined, The Soul of a Lion, and The Privilege of Being a Woman, as well as numerous philosophical papers. Since her retirement she has been active in the Catholic world as a lecturer on countless topics and her journeys have taken her to South America, Canada, to thirty-five U.S. states, and to many European countries. In her very active television career, she has made over eighty appearances on EWTN and two hundred and sixty at the Apostolate for Family Consecration in Ohio, many of them about her husband. She has devoted her entire life to making known the thought and witness of her husband, Dietrich von Hildebrand. Now a personal note ... I have no regrets having studies philosophy with this very outstanding teacher. I sat in some and was registered in her courses including Philosophy of Ethics, Philosophy of Aesthetics, Social Philosophy, Philosophy of Plato, and Philosophy of Religion. Even in those years when there was so many outstanding college teachers and study was taken seriously, one was lucky to have one or two really great teachers ... and Dr. Jourdain surely was one of them. The only problem I have is reconciling the greatness that I saw in this teacher with her commitment to the Roman Catholic Church while knowing about the horrible history of repression and torture it represented during all the many centuries it existed. My own people were victims of their crimes and if I am holding a grudge, then so be it. I know her husband, the great Catholic philosopher, Dietrich von Hildebrand, left Germany in disgust with the way the German Catholics were accepting the new Nazi leaders but I also know that had the Vatican (Pope Pius II) spoken out more vociferously against these criminal German leaders, the German Catholics "might" not have been as accepting as they were and Hitler might never have gotten into power. To explain this, a ... Case Against Christianity ... (really meant to be a case against the Vatican), should be of some help, and should Dr. Jourdain ever get to see these pages, I apologize. But nevertheless, her Church's history leaves much to be explained, and until I understand it, I'll always see it in a poor light. |