Amidst the battered “Veritas” of Harvard, there are a few still heroically walking in the footsteps of their Catholic predecessors.
It is ironic and risible in the extreme that the motto of Harvard University is “Veritas” because that once-illustrious institution has long since abandoned any belief in objective verity. It has ceased to seek answers to Pilate’s question, Quid est veritas? and only asks it in the rhetorical sense that it is unanswerable. Abandoning the noble quest for truth, it now pursues relativism while simultaneously tolerating the absolutism of radical Islam. It’s all a long way from the vision of its founders or the vision of the generations of students who have studied in its once-hallowed halls.
As far back as 1978, in his famous commencement address at Harvard, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had warned of the rise of relativism and had prophesied its destructive consequences. “The motto of your university is ‘Veritas,’” he began, taking “truth” as his theme and its abandonment as his cautionary lament.
“It is time, in the West,” he said, “to defend not so much rights as human obligations.” The demand for “rights” and the rejection of moral responsibility was leading to “the abyss of human decadence.”
With the wisdom of hindsight, and surveying the philosophical and cultural meltdown that has happened at Harvard and other Ivy League schools since then, it is easy to see or hear Solzhenitsyn’s prophetic lament as a threnody, a mournful dirge for an academic culture in terminal decline.
It was not always so. There have been happier times at Harvard which are worth celebrating, not least of which are those alumni who have converted to the Faith. The most celebrated, and perhaps the most worth celebrating, is T.S. Eliot, even though he is technically a convert to Anglo-Catholicism, the “Catholic” wing of the Anglican Church, and not to the Church per se. Other well-known Harvard alumni who were converts include Marshall McLuhan, whose praises we have already sung earlier in this series; Walker Percy, whose novels are among the finest of the 20th century; and Avery Dulles, who became a Jesuit priest, a cardinal, and a formidable theologian. Clare Boothe Luce, writer and congresswoman, is not an alumna of Harvard but was a significant benefactor.
In addition to these celebrated Harvard converts, whose praises have been widely sung, it behooves us to celebrate another who is not as well-known.
Chauncey Devereux Stillman (1907–1989) graduated from Harvard in 1929 and converted to Catholicism ten years later. A wealthy philanthropist, he would become a significant benefactor of Catholic causes, which included the endowing of a chair of Catholic Studies at Harvard. Stillman’s conversion was driven by a reaction against the relativism and secularism of the modern world and through the influence of Catholic thinkers, especially Jacques Maritain, as well as by the aesthetic and moral coherence of the Catholic tradition.
He founded the Wethersfield Institute and other projects to promote Catholic education, sacred music, traditional liturgy, and moral philosophy. He supported numerous important Catholic apostolates, such as Ignatius Press and Crisis Magazine, as well as being a vocal advocate of the Latin Mass and traditional Catholic art and architecture, helping to foster the Catholic cultural revival. Taking great saints as his spiritual mentors—especially Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Henry Newman—he reflected their own belief that beauty was a powerful doorway to truth.
Upon his death in 1989, Chauncey Devereux Stillman left most of his considerable estate to Catholic institutions and cultural preservation projects. His Wethersfield Foundation still funds Catholic education, pro-life causes, and traditional liturgy. In 2021, his cause for canonization was informally discussed, and it might be hoped that this great-hearted supporter of the Faith might yet be raised to the altar.
Apart from these notable Harvard converts that have now gone to meet their reward, there are those who are still very much with us. Roy Schoeman, a convert to the Faith from Judaism, graduated from MIT and from Harvard Business School. Following his conversion in 1992, he became a Catholic author and apologist, known especially for his work on Judaism and Christianity. His work has received particular praise from Cardinal Burke:
Roy Schoeman’s work, Honey from the Rock illuminates the essential link between the Jewish faith and Catholicism through the lives of those who were born into the Jewish faith and have come to know the fulfillment of their faith in Christ and His Catholic Church.
Karin Öberg is a Swedish-born astrochemist who is currently a professor of astronomy at Harvard University. Her conversion was influenced by both C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton, the latter’s Orthodoxy being particularly important. She now serves on the board of the Society of Catholic Scientists.
Adrian Vermeule graduated from Harvard College in 1990 and then attended Harvard Law School, graduating in 1993. After serving on the faculty of the University of Chicago Law School, he became a professor of law at Harvard Law School in 2006, a position he still holds.He announced his conversion to Catholicism in 2016, citing the influence of St. John Henry Newman. In an interview given shortly after his reception into the Church, he explained the scriptural and historical reasoning behind his decision to embrace the Faith:
Raised a Protestant, despite all my thrashing and twisting, I eventually couldn’t help but believe that the apostolic succession through Peter as the designated leader and primus inter pares is in some logical or theological sense prior to everything else—including even Scripture, whose formation was guided and completed by the apostles and their successors, themselves inspired by the Holy Spirit.
These past and present Harvard converts witness to the enduring power of authentic “Veritas” to attract those who genuinely seek it. As Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard commencement address, “the human soul longs for something higher, warmer, and purer than what is offered by today’s mass Western lifestyle.”
The thirty or more current Harvard students who were received into the Church this past Easter are living proof that Solzhenitsyn was right. With these new converts in mind, we’ll pay tribute to the great Russian writer’s wisdom by ending our tribute to the unsung heroes of Harvard with more words from Solzhenitsyn’s Harvard address:
If, as is claimed by humanism, man were born only to be happy, he would not also be born to die. Since his body is doomed to death, his task on earth must evidently be more spiritual: not to gorge on everyday life, not to search for the best ways of obtaining material goods and then to consume them eagerly, but to bear perpetual, earnest duty, so that one’s entire life journey may become, above all, an experience of moral ascent—to leave life a better human being than one started it.
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Republished with gracious permission from Crisis Magazine (June 2025).
This essay is part of a series, Unsung Heroes of Christendom.
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The featured image is Richard Rummell’s iconic landscape watercolor view of Harvard University, 1906, courtesy of Arader Galleries. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
