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“TRIBUTE TO FATHER ROBERT DRINAN” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S1381 on Jan. 31, 2007.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TRIBUTE TO FATHER ROBERT DRINAN
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, last October, my alma mater, Georgetown Law Center, established an endowed chair in human rights in honor of Father Robert Drinan. At the ceremony, Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh called Robert Drinan ``a father in more senses than one.'' Dean Koh said:
He is the father of a remarkable revolution--a human rights revolution--a person of simple, radical faith.
Sunday night, at the age of 86, Robert Drinan died. The world has loss a courageous champion for justice, human rights, and human dignity.
I just missed Father Drinan. I graduated from Georgetown Law before he joined the faculty, and he left Congress before I arrived. So I never had the chance to study and work with him directly. But like a lot of others, I was inspired and challenged by him.
Georgetown University estimates that Father Drinan taught 6,000 students in a teaching career that stretched over more than five decades. But those are just the students who enrolled in his classes at Boston College and, later, at Georgetown. In fact, he taught a lot of people. He taught all of us about the responsibility each of us has to speak out for the voiceless and the oppressed, not just to speak, but to work for justice.
In the 1960s, as dean of Boston College Law School, Father Drinan showed courage by calling for the desegregation of Boston's public schools. He challenged his students at the law school to become active in the civil rights movement.
In 1970, the people of Boston's western suburbs elected Father Drinan to represent them in Congress, making him the first Catholic priest ever to serve as a voting Member of Congress. He ran as a strong opponent of the Vietnam war. He was the first Member of Congress to call for the impeachment of Richard Nixon, but not over Watergate, rather over the undeclared war against Cambodia. He fought to make human rights the cornerstone of American foreign policy and to establish a bureau for human rights within the U.S. State Department. He fought against government abuses of power and led a successful battle to finally abolish the House Internal Security Committee, formerly the Un-American Activities Committee, which we recall was responsible for so many unjust findings by this Congress, ruining the private lives of so many American citizens.
In 1975, he became the first American to receive his own CIA and FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act. With Congressman Frank Church and others, he worked to safeguard our right to privacy.
Father Drinan was elected to five terms in Congress, each time by larger margins. Finally, in his last race in 1978, he didn't have an opponent. He would have been reelected again in 1980, but he was forced to step down when Pope John Paul II barred Catholic priests from holding elective office. Father Drinan left office, but he never left the struggle. He continued to work and speak out for justice until the day he died.
In 1981, he took a post at Georgetown Law Center where he taught human rights, civil liberties, and government ethics. He taught his students that the central commandment of the Bible is that ``the people of God must be devoted to justice in every way.'' He taught that it is a sin that 31,000 children die of starvation every day in this world. He urged his students, all of us: ``Sharpen your anger at injustice.'' Use the talents God gave you to make this world better.
Two months ago Father Drinan told a reporter that he hadn't given any thought to retiring; there was just too much left to do. And, he said,
``Jesuits don't ordinarily retire. We just do what you do.''
Earlier this month Father Drinan was called on for a particularly symbolic ceremony. He celebrated Mass for Speaker Nancy Pelosi at her alma mater in Washington, Trinity College. It was a special mass in honor of ``the children of Darfur and Katrina.''
Father Drinan spoke to our conscience. He spoke for the overlooked and underpaid, for those who were too poor or too weak to speak for themselves. He spoke out in passionate defense of the great moral and political values of our Nation.
In his lifetime he received many awards. Last May he received Congress's Distinguished Service Award for his service in the House. The American Bar Association honored him with the ABA medal for his work on behalf of human rights. He was a founder of the Lawyers Alliance for Nuclear Arms Control; president of Americans for Democratic Action; a member of the national board of Common Cause, People for the American Way, the Lawyers' Committee for Human Rights, the National Interreligious Task force on Soviet Jewry, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.
He received 22 honorary degrees from colleges and universities. One of those degrees, given to him by Villanova University in 1977, hung on the wall of his office in the House of Representatives. It read:
Your life's work has provided proof that service to God and country are not inimical.
How true.
In his sermon on the mount, Jesus told us:
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice: for they shall have their fill.
Robert Drinan is, indeed, blessed, and we were blessed to have him serving America for so many years. Those of us who admired him and loved him were saddened by his death. But we take comfort in knowing that just as his influence in Congress has lasted beyond those 10 years of service, Robert Drinan's influence on this world will continue to be felt long after we are all gone.
I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
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