A number of years ago, an America editor was asked by his colleagues for his final thoughts upon his retirement from the magazine. “I’m not quite sure why I should retire,” he said. “I’m only 90.”
He had a point, seeing as he was a veritable youngster compared to contributors like Ladislas Orsy, S.J., the legendary canon lawyer and author who died last week at the age of 103. Let me put it this way: Ladislas Orsy was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, a theological expert alongside scholars like Joseph Ratzinger and Hans Kung. Father Orsy was older than both.
Orsy himself finally retired from teaching a few years ago at the age of 99, having spent more than 70 years in the classroom. Upon Orsy’s death on Apr. 3, 2025, William M. Treanor, the dean of Georgetown University Law Center (where Orsy taught for 30 years), wrote that “He was, in every way, a giant, and a truly lovely person, and his legacy is a great one.”
Father Orsy was born in Egres, Hungary in 1921, and grew up in the city of Szekesfehervar. He entered the Society of Jesus while a college student in Budapest in 1943,shortly before German forces occupied the country during World War II. Orsy later remembered the rapidly advancing Soviet army arriving in his town on Christmas Eve that year.
Orsy studied in Rome after the end of the war (remembering the city as a poor and desperate place in the aftermath of that conflict), then at the University of Leuven in Belgium. He earned a master’s in law at Oxford University (the equivalent at the time of an American juris doctor degree) and a doctorate in canon law at the Gregorian University in Rome, where he also taught. Ordained in 1951, Orsy came to the United States in 1966, teaching at Fordham University and then for many years at The Catholic University of America.
In 1991, Orsy retired from Catholic U.—only to begin a second career a few years later at Georgetown University, spending another three decades teaching courses in the university’s Law Center on canon law, Roman law, philosophy of law and human rights.
In 2018, Georgetown University hosted a conference on “Vision, Law and Human Rights: A Celebration of the Work of Professor Ladislas Orsy, S.J.” After each panel, Orsy—then 96 years old—responded with his own reflections.
Father Orsy authored nine books and hundreds of articles on theology, canon law and Vatican II over the course of his life, including more than 50 articles for America, where his writing appeared for six decades. His first article, “Looking Back at Pope John,” appeared a few weeks after the death of Pope John XXII and offered an appreciation of his contributions to the church and the world. His last, in 2012, considered the accomplishments and failures of the church in implementing the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. Orsy had been a peritus to the Archbishop of Salisbury (what is today Harare, in Zimbabwe) during the council.
His goal in that retrospective, Orsy wrote, was “not so much to celebrate the past as to look to the future,” and the article’s “point of departure is in the diagnosis: the council lives and its vital signs can be seen all around. The task of our generation is to labor in the field of God, nourish the plants and support the fledgling trees. As for the rest? Let us leave it to the Lord of the harvest.”
“For Father Orsy, there were two approaches to interpreting the council,” wrote the Rev. Stuart W. Swetland in a 2023 article for America:
One was to see it as a past event that left us a body of documents to be read, studied, interpreted and implemented. This approach saw the council as an event finished and complete that only has to be studied and obeyed. The second sees the council, as Father Orsy puts it in his book Theology and Canon Law, as an event marking “the beginning of a new movement.” Beyond the constitutions, decrees and statutes was the dynamic process of consultations, reflection, revision and argumentation that went into their development. For Father Orsy, the latter is as important, if not more, than the former.
In the years after the council, Orsy was often called upon by the editors of America to parse difficult or nuanced theological subjects. These included a 1968 essay bringing up potential areas of conflict in the interpretation of the recently-released encyclical on artificial birth control, “Humanae Vitae,” a 1970 essay on papal infallibility, and several articles in 1989 and 1990 on the relationship between theologians and the church’s magisterium. He also wrote a number of articles on the authority of bishops and bishops’ conferences, particularly as those topics intersected with canon law.
In 2000, Orsy and Cardinal Avery Dulles, S.J., participated in an exchange of articles on the role of the papacy vis-a-vis regional and local churches (partly in response to Pope John Paul II’s encyclical, “Ut Unum Sint,” and the pope’s request for proposals on how the Petrine ministry might better be exercised). After each of the two Jesuit scholars had written lengthy articles on the topic for the magazine, they each contributed a further response. Reading their responses, one gets the distinct sense of two great scholars who, while in profound disagreement, expressed their differing views with charity and politesse.
Father Orsy died on April 3, 2025, at Murray-Weigel Hall in the Bronx. His funeral was celebrated this morning. Despite a peripatetic life—born in Hungary, educated in Rome, ordained in Belgium, taking final vows in Ireland and spending most of his life in the United States—he remained a member of the Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus until his death.
In addition to his academic work, Orsy also contributed a number of spiritual reflections to America and other journals over the years. In a Christmas reflection in 2005, he wrote the following:
Because we are invested with divine nature, because we received our share in a wonderful exchange, we have a mission, the same one that brought the child to Bethlehem. We are sent into a broken world to bring hope to “those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:79). In a world torn by violence we are called to be witnesses to the tender mercies of God. The perfection of love comes in the undertaking of this mission.
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Our poetry selection for this week is “Pomegranate,” by Gerald McCarthy. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.
Members of the Catholic Book Club: We are taking a hiatus while we retool the Catholic Book Club and pick a new selection.
In this space every week, America features reviews of and literary commentary on one particular writer or group of writers (both new and old; our archives span more than a century), as well as poetry and other offerings from America Media. We hope this will give us a chance to provide you with more in-depth coverage of our literary offerings. It also allows us to alert digital subscribers to some of our online content that doesn’t make it into our newsletters.
Other Catholic Book Club columns:
The spiritual depths of Toni Morrison
Doris Grumbach, L.G.B.T. pioneer and fearless literary critic
What’s all the fuss about Teilhard de Chardin?
Moira Walsh and the art of a brutal movie review
Father Hootie McCown: Flannery O’Connor’s Jesuit bestie and spiritual advisor
Happy reading!
James T. Keane
