Mortimer Adler, (December 28, 1902 – June 28, 2001) professor, educator, author, once claimed to be the most highly paid philosopher in the world. That may well be true as he was a long time professor at the University of Chicago, a popular lecturer and teacher, and author of over 50 books. He first burst into public consciousness with his best-seller non-fiction book, How to Read a Book, in 1940. His last book, Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary, was published in 1995.
I first met Dr. Adler at the University of Chicago when he and Milton Mayer were teaching a course on the Great Books. Unregistered students were allowed to sit in during the classes and enjoy the interaction as Adler and Mayer sat at the head of a long rectangular table with registered students seated all around it. I kept attending because I found the discussions fascinating and I could enjoy them without fear that I would be called on. My interest must have been obvious because at one point a note was sent from the head of the table to me, seated off to one side. It read: “Why are you here?” Under that I wrote: “Trite as it may seem, I’m seeking the truth” and sent the note back on its way.
That little incident seems to what led to my being invited to work for Mr. Adler as the Syntopicon was being put together. The Syntopicon was an index to the 102 ideas in the 54 volume set of The Great Books of the Western World, the first edition published in 1952.(Here is a link to our picture in LIFE magazine on 1/26/48.) The job certainly was nothing I applied for–I did not know there was such an opening or even that such a thing was happening. (See my previous post on evolution.)
I soon married and started having children but still followed Adler’s career with interest. He was fond of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas and there was talk, even then, in the 1940’s, about his being seen praying in a Catholic church. I learned he was accused of converting students to Catholicism because he taught St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica and Jews and Protestants were turning Catholic. He preferred to blame this on his friend Dr. Herbert Schwartz, a Jew who also had converted to Catholicism.
The truth of this is demonstrated in the following quote from The Night is Large by Martin Gardner:
Many of Adler’s students who converted were Jewish. Although Adler’s rhetoric played a role in these conversions, there were others on the campus who were even more influential, such as Adler’s close associate William Gorman, an Irish Catholic from birth, and Herbert Schwartz, a Jewish convert to the church who had obtained his doctorate at Columbia under Richard McKeon. Schwartz, whose official position at Chicago was on the faculty of music, had an enormous influence on the Jewish students who converted. Later he became the leader of a Catholic community in New Jersey. He died in 1981 leaving a raft of manuscripts that his disciples published in a periodical called Filioque. Other Jewish converts included Herbert Ratner, Kenneth Simon, Janet Kalven, Peggy Stern, Paula Myers, and Alice Zucker, all of which have retained their faith. Ratner, who became a medical doctor, was director of public health,Oak Park, Illinois, and editor of Child and Family Quarterly. Simon became Father M. Raphael at St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, Massachusets, and a Trappist monk.
I was amazed to learn that among the Jewish converts to Catholicism at that time was my old friend, Dr. Herbert Ratner! Dr. Ratner was so helpful and influential in my life that I actually started this blog so I could post a tribute to him. Now, fifty years later, I learn that Adler and Ratner were friends during my Chicago years and were cut from the same cloth!
I was delighted to find on YouTube a video clip of Mortimer Adler taken in 1990, during a C-Span interview. How wonderful to see him looking so good and making so much sense at the age of 88!
I cannot resist adding this quote from Janet Kalven, one of Adler’s students, showing the challenging and Catholic-friendly intellectual climate at the University of Chicago in the 40’s and 50’s.
The thirties were a time of extraordinary intellectual ferment at Chicago, in large measure due to Hutchins [president of the University at the time] and Adler. Their stance ran counter to the prevailing campus culture and was propaedeutic so far as Catholicism was concerned. From them I learned to question the received wisdom of the semanticists, psychologists, sociologists, cultural relativists; to respect the intellectual rigor of the Greeks and the medievals; to suspect the reductionism of the physical and biological scientists; to read a text on its own terms, define a concept and analyze an argument. I cut my intellectual teeth, so to speak, on all the big questions: the nature of language, knowledge, truth, the nature of man (I was not a feminist then), of society, of justice; the existence of God….The Hutchins-Adler training was a necessary but not sufficient condition for conversion. It made Catholicism intellectually respectable, but it did not make anyone become a Catholic. A much more powerful and intimate witness is necessary, I think, to enable people to act as contrary to our upbringing and education as our little group did.
When Dr. Adler died in 2001 Ralph McInerny wrote In Memoriam:
Adler was regularly asked how he could know so much about Catholic theology without accepting it as true. He gave what he called a Thomistic answer. He had not been given the grace of faith. But that, one might say, is a Calvinist rather than Thomist reply. The grace of faith is not offered to a select few and withheld from the rest. It is offered to all, but each must accept it himself. Eventually, Adler became a Christian. Finally, he became the Roman Catholic he had been training to be all his life. That a number of prominent notices of Adler’s death failed to mention this central event in his life is a distressing sign of how peripheral religion has become for many in our time.
And on the death of Dr. Adler, Chuck Colson wrote: “Adler was such a prominent thinker and educator that the New York Times devoted some forty column inches to his obituary. They covered his life, his writing, his teaching career, and his work as a director for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
“An amazing career! Yet for all their coverage they never mentioned the most significant thing in his life…….
“Adler’s move from belief in “the god of the philosophers” to the God of the cross was a long time coming. But he recognized that if the God he knew must exist really did exist, he would have to make the leap from logic to faith.
“In 1984 — bedridden with illness — Adler made that leap. Seeking solace in prayer, he received what he called the “gift of grace” and professed belief “not just in the God my reason so stoutly affirms,” as he said, “but the God . . . on whose grace and love I now joyfully rely.”
“Adler showed us that faith does indeed have its reasons — and in that he was a wonderful model for worldview thinking.
“Maybe that’s why the media ignored his conversion. The idea that the Christian faith is logically coherent and reasonable was too great a leap for secular-minded journalists to make.”
In his tribute to Mortimer J. Adler, Peter Redpath (Philosophy Department, St. John’s University, and Chairman of The Angelicum Academy) wrote:
In 1983 Dr. Adler formally converted to Christianity, specifically to the denomination of his wife, who was Episcopalian. Sixteen years later, in December, 1999 in San Mateo, California where he lived and shortly thereafter passed away (d. June 28th, 2001), he was formally received into the Catholic Church by His Excellency, Bishop Pierre DuMaine, of San Jose, CA, who was a long-time friend and admirer of Dr. Adler.
Adler quotes:
“We acknowledge but one motive – to follow the truth as we know it, whithersoever it may lead us; but in our heart of hearts we are well assured that the truth which has made us free, will in the end make us glad also.”
“Articles of faith are beyond proof. But they are not beyond disproof. We have a logical, consistent faith. In fact, I believe Christianity is the only logical, consistent faith in the world. But there are elements to it that can only be described as mystery..”
“My chief reason for choosing Christianity was because the mysteries were incomprehensible. What’s the point of revelation if we could figure it out ourselves? If it were wholly comprehensible then it would be just another philosophy.”
For fifty years Mortimer Adler has been my model of rigorous thinking and intellectual integrity. It gives me comfort that he was finally not only a Christian but a Catholic, not because I feared for his soul (he followed Truth to the end) but because it’s not easy these days being Catholic. There’s comfort in numbers and I’m glad Mortimer Adler decided to join us!
~~~
[Though] he be dead in the sense of not jolting us out of lethargy by his living presence, he is dead in no other sense. To dismiss him as dead in any other way is to repeat the folly of the Ancient Athenians who supposed that Socrates died when he drank the hemlock. – – Peter Redpath.
Thank you for today’s post.
From PHILOSOPHY PIONEER ENTERS CHURCH
by Brian McGuire, National Catholic Register Staff Writer
Max Weismann, co-founder, with Adler, of the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas in Chicago, went a step further than McInerney, saying of Adler: “He was always a Catholic at heart.”
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We are a not-for-profit educational organization, founded by Mortimer Adler.
We have recently made an exciting discovery–three years after writing the wonderfully expanded third edition of How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren made a series of thirteen 14-minute videos on the art of reading. The videos were produced by Encyclopaedia Britannica. For reasons unknown, sometime after their original publication, these videos were lost and are now available.
For those of you who teach, this is great for the classroom.
I cannot over exaggerate how instructive these programs are–we are so sure that you will agree, if you are not completely satisfied, we will refund your donation.
Please go here to see a clip and learn more:
http://www.thegreatideas.org/HowToReadABook.htm
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Dorothy Vining reply on January 15th, 2009 7:52 pm:
Mr. Weisman’s link (above) leads to another clip of Mr. Adler discussing How To Read a Book!
Dr. Adler’s essays, discussions, and other items are copyrighted material. They are reproduced in the Mortimer J. Adler Archive (http://radicalacademy.com/adlerdirectory.htm) by permission of Mortimer J. Adler, Max Weismann, and the Center for the Study of The Great Ideas. The archive includes fascinating memories by Adler’s secretary, Nancy Olson, who died in 2005.
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Thanks, Dot! This is a great tribute to yet ANOTHER hero you and I share — though I never had the privilege of meeting Adler personally. I just finished a book on angels, for which I leaned a bit on his volume The Angels and Us. In that book, written in the 1970s (I think), he refers to himself as “pagan.” What a difference a decade makes.
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I like the theory of Adler, but it is a little bit too docmatic for my taste.
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Herbert Ratner, M.D. shared an office with Mortimer Adler at the University of Chicago in the year 1938, the same year Dr. Ratner, influenced by his friend Herbert Schwartz, became Catholic. Although they shared an office Dr. Ratner’s relationship with Adler was more of an aquaintanceship rather than a friendship. They never became close.
Quite the contrary was Dr. Ratner’s relationship with Herbert Schwartz who had been an intimate friend since their undergraduate days at the University of Michigan. Dr. Ratner came to the University of Chicago on a graduate fellowship at Herbert Schwartz’s urging. Herbert Schwartz taught an extracurricular course in Thomistic philosophy at the University of Chicago which was attended by Herbert Ratner,Alice Zucker Quentin Ogren, Janet Kalven, Winston Ashley (later Father Benedict Ashley, O.P.) and others who became Catholic. It was primarily Herbert Schwartz’s influence that led these persons to become Catholic.
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Dorothy Vining reply on January 13th, 2009 5:43 pm:
I am happy to have this clarification from Dr. Ratner’s daughter, Helen. Another daughter, Mary Tim, e-mailed me to say she enjoyed the post, especially the video clip of Dr. Adler. “What he had to say about speed reading was wonderful!”
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Mary Tim Ratner Baggott reply on March 15th, 2011 10:23 pm:
Peter Maurin, founder of the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, wrote two pieces relating to Dr. Ratner’s conversion and titled eponymously. My source is _Catholic Radicalism: Phrased Essays for the Green Revolution_ by Peter Maurin. Catholic Worker Books, New York, N.Y., August 1949.
Under “Judaism and Catholicism” on p. 148:
Dr. Herbert Ratner
of the University of Chicago,
became a Catholic
two years ago.
His father, a Russian Jew,
gave him the name Herbert
in the hope
that he would keep up
with Herbert Spencer.
He tried to get
what modern liberals,
including Herbert Spencer,
had to offer.
He was not satisfied
with what modern liberals
had to offer.
He now says:
“We were not
attracted to the Church
by Catholics;
we were pushed
into the Church
by non-Catholics
who did not have the stuff.”
Under “Birth Control” on page 151:
Dr. Herbert Ratner
is a convert
from Judaism.
The study of sex
brought Dr. Herbert Ratner
into the Catholic Church.
As a scientist
and as a philosopher
he maintains
that the Catholic Church
is foolproof
in the matter of sex.
He intends
to teach biology
and to lecture
on marriage.
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Dorothy Vining reply on March 16th, 2011 7:22 am:
Mary Tim – I am delighted to have Peter Maurin’s writings on your Dad on my blog. Thank you so much. He was such a blessing to me as a doctor. I imaging he was a great father!
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As a non-believer who has looked upon Mortimer Adler’s writings as remarkable guides to understanding, I have been both intrigued and perplexed by his acceptance of a conscious creator. Faith in such a “god” is a humancentric reaction to the unknown, and what we will never know; namely, the answer to the question of first cause. What seems clear to me — that we created god to explain the unexplainable — is a perspective that requires use of our power of self-contemplation. I continue to wonder how Mortimer Adler came to subordinate his lifelong attachment to objective reasoning to a faith in beliefs based on superstition.
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Dorothy Vining reply on January 13th, 2009 3:44 pm:
I have to wonder what you think of Jesus Christ. Was he a liar, lunatic, or Who he claimed to be? Maybe Adler wouldn’t call him a “superstition.”
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[…] an interesting remembrance of Mortimer Adler and his late conversion to Roman Catholicism by a blogger who knew him and worked with him. Neat […]
Dorothy, what a great post! It’s delightful that you and so many other people blog. The internet is a wonderful thing – it provides so many opportunities to spread knowledge and reach people.
I have been reading Dr. Adler’s essays in the Syntopicon and find him to be a tremendous scholar, indeed a scholar among scholars. So much knowledge and so many different views are given in his short 10-12,000 word essays. In fact they are more informative than a mountain of certain books. If only these essays could gain the public attention that the pseudo-intellectual books of today are getting – books by Richard Dawkins and/or Christopher Hitchens – horrible philosophers, narrowminded and blind thinkers, and just plain rude men.
Somehow we need to lobby for *real* literature that combats this shallow-mindedness, because people of today do not think much for themselves and take as gospel what is current and popular.
I have a question though, and the reason I post this is because I see that Max Weismann has left you a note, and he (or you) may know the answer. Is there any way I can purchase a collection of Dr. Adler’s essays, which were updated for the second edition of the Great Books? Currently I own the first edition, but the second edition I deem has some great additions. I was wondering if you knew of a place I could buy them? I know that the essays were updated and the additional authors were incorporated into the essays.
And as to the poster above who seems to be stunned at Dr. Adler’s confession of faith… What do you make of this? I would indeed call it a miracle, although you probably dismiss miracles as impossible. But what does that say about the possibility of miracles?
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Tom reply on April 18th, 2009 1:21 pm:
The Great Ideas: A Lexicon of Western Thought
by Mortimer J. Adler
1992 by MacMillan Publishing Company
Hardcover, 958 pages
Out-of-print but used copies available
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Great blog, Dorothy – subscribed!
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Dearest Dorothy and Chris,
From another pea of Adler’s pod, please accept this kindly: (I borrow from Wikipedia)
1) Superstition is a belief or notion, not based on reason or knowledge.
2) Religious believers have often seen other religions as superstition.
3) Religious practices are most likely to be labeled “superstitious”…when they include belief in extraordinary events (miracles), an afterlife, supernatural interventions,…or the efficacy of prayer…
4) The word is often used pejoratively…
Isn’t it really #4 which bothers you?
Hurt feelings aside, there is an ethic to disbelief. It is a discipline. Once one ventures down a road of faith, objectivity is lost and the flaw (of not being objective) is compounded continuously. I think this is why a disciplined thinker may become more willing late in life to stray into the comfort of faith; the indulgence is then not likely to influence significantly the vector of one’s life. There must have been a reason Adler would not committ earlier. I believe that he didn’t want to compromise his sense of “truth” by introducing what he himself thought of as superstitious belief (though one he had a fondness for). It would be like a nutrition expert choosing to succumb to a yen for hot dogs and ice cream in the twilight of life. One who studies the expert’s work, should not infer a professional revelation by this practical lifestyle change. Just recognize that Adler was a human after all.
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Dorothy Vining reply on August 13th, 2009 7:52 am:
Dear pea of Adler’s pod: Yes, Adler was human. My guess is that he thought Jesus was as real as Thomas Aquinas and as worthy of a hearing. It’s hard for a world-famous philosopher to finally yield to what he really believed – that there is a living, caring, calling God.
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Hi, this is really an inspiring peace of information and a great video. And this at such a high age – amazing!
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And this is why I like http://www.musingsat85.com. Fascinating post.
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Mrs. Vining,
I wanted to thank you for this post because it introduced me to the life and work of Dr. Adler. I have now started on “How to Read a Book” and wish I had known about him when I was at university. I think I would have got more out of my time there.
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Dorothy,
I was delighted to find this post that mentions both my mother, Paula Myers (Ogren), and my father, Quentin (Bud) Ogren, two of Adler’s students who later converted to Catholicism. My parents met in the Young People’s Socialist League at the University of Chicago and, though Catholicism later became the driving, unifying force in their lives, it was always informed by a deep sense of social justice that sprang from their days as young socialists.
Our family was active in the Civil Rights Movement, and I vividly remember Sundays during the fall of 1964 when my parents would schlep my brothers and me off to Catholic churches in conservative Orange County, CA to pass out literature opposing a state ballot initiative that allowed discrimination against Blacks when selling one’s house. As a child of eight, I was bewildered at the hateful responses I received from some of the parishioners exiting Church. It seemed so clear to me in my simple understanding that we were on the side of the righteous. How could my fellow Catholics not agree?
I’m equally bewildered to read your blog and to realize that you and my parents all identify (identified, in my parents case) as Catholics, ostensibly believing in the same God, the same living Christ. How is it possible that this shared belief led you and them to such different conclusions about how to live in this world among our fellow human beings?
My father died on Christmas 2008 at 93, and my mother died last summer, just shy of her 92nd birthday. They were daily communicants for as long as they were able, and found great comfort and strength in their faith til their dying days. Yet both were advocates of gay marriage, felt tremendous sadness at the pedophilia scandals and the Church’s response, and were deeply frustrated with the Church’s intransigent position on women’s ordination. Their understanding of the Gospel required that they be ever-mindful of the poor among us, those on the margins of society, and work for a more equitable distribution of God’s blessings. I wonder how you and they came to practice your faith in such disparate ways.
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Dorothy Vining reply on September 20th, 2011 11:54 pm:
Dear Mary Rose – Thanks so much for such a nice comment – I’m happy that your parents found comfort in Catholicism, as did Adler. That they, as Catholics, advocated gay marriage and women’s ordination puzzles me – that is not a Catholic stance as you can see if you visit my other posts. But, alas there are many “cafeteria catholics,” who pick and choose among Catholic doctrines. God bless you and yours and may you love truth as Adler did.
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Dear Dorothy,
I remember in high school describing my parents’ faith to a friend who attended my Catholic girls’ school in Hollywood with me in the 70s. “They’re Cafeteria Catholics,” she said. Of course, I took offense, just as I did briefly when reading your response. On the other hand, I recall my mother saying many times, “I’m catholic with a small c.” Both my parents were clearly Catholic with a capitol C as well — always active in their parishes, tons of priest-friends regularly coming to dinner and to the immense gatherings of far-flung Catholic families in our backyard, the house filled with books on Catholic thought. They also had a catholic interest in pursuing truth and justice (and interesting stories, of course!). They were indelibly influenced by Mortimer Adler, Robert Maynard Hutchins, Herberts Schwartz and Ratner, Winston Ashley, one of my Dad’s roommates, and countless others at the University of Chicago. The 30s at Chicago holds a mystical prominence in the story my parents passed down to my siblings and me.
My father was especially influenced by Adler. All of his well-read Bibles are well-marked up, as Adler advocates doing with any book you hope to “make a part of yourself.” (I was really tickled to see last week that my son, a senior in a public high school, had been assigned Adler’s chapter “How to Mark a Book”) And I remembered with a smile a family story, on seeing Janet Kalven’s wonderful quote that refers to “read[ing] a text on its own terms.” One 4th of July, Daddy had us all reading the Declaration of Independence and singing patriotic songs. My teenage daughter was assigned “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” She was so offended that women were excluded, that she said she was going to read “all men and women…” Daddy would have none of it. She had to read the text as it was written. My daughter reluctantly gave in when we reached the compromise of holding a discussion afterwards. So Adler’s influence passes down through the generations!
But, back to your lament that my folks were “cafeteria catholics”: I think, as converts (Mama from Judaism, Daddy from Swedish Protestantism) and as students of Hutchins and Adler, they had to be. My mother loved to quote G. K. Chesterton who said, “If truth be in a dungheap, I will embrace it.” She often felt that the Catholic Church was much like Chesterton’s dungheap. She embraced it wholeheartedly to the end because it held an essential truth for her, but there was always much room for improvement. Though she did tell my brother a month before she died that, if she were searching for a religion as a young woman today she didn’t know whether she would have ended up Catholic, the Lord was definitely present when she roused from her coma a few days before she died to say the Our Father with those of us gathered with her pastor for the Last Rites. A breathtaking moment to witness.
Even if she’d wanted to, she couldn’t abandon her roots in Judaism with its tradition of questioning and challenging as a means to finding truth. I’m sure, for her, this was much of Adler’s appeal — his Jewishness. Jesus was Jewish; he understood that human beings are rational animals who, in their drive to understand, need proof. And that was precisely what Adler advocated, from what I can tell: to argue with the author, to struggle with the text in order to distinguish truth from fallacy (or, more charitably, misguided attempts at finding the truth!). We call Thomas the Apostle “Doubting Thomas,” as if doubting were a bad thing. I remember being struck and a little grossed out as a kid on first hearing that Jesus told Thomas to stick his hands in His wounds so he could believe that Christ had actually risen. Jesus didn’t seem to mind. He understood that Thomas needed an extra nudge to overcome his skepticism. Granted, Jesus did say, “Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed,” but He didn’t hesitate to offer Thomas the proof he professed to need. As an adult, I came to find the Catholic Church’s position on questioning its doctrine profoundly off-putting. It’s wrong even to question? Jesus didn’t act that way; why should His Church?
Which brings me to women’s ordination. I’d love to hear your argument for why it should not be welcomed as an opportunity to revitalized a struggling institution and, why on Earth, it’s forbidden even to discuss it.
Thank you for challenging me to think deeply about my parents and their faith, and my own. It took me a year to respond to this post that I was so thrilled to find soon after Mama died. I didn’t know what to do after I read your other posts and was so flabbergasted at your politics! Now I realize I can just talk to you. Hope you feel the same.
In the spirit of mutual understanding,
Peace,
Mary Rose
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Dorothy Vining reply on October 24th, 2011 1:22 pm:
Finally have time to think about this note which is much appreciated! Love Chesterton’s quote: If truth be in a dungheap, I will embrace it. Might just use that on Facebook. And flabbergasted at my politics?? Methinks they my politics are consistent with my Catholicism. And my Catholicism is consistent with the Bible. You don’t find Bible-believers on the Left (Pelosi, Biden and Obama don’t count as Bible-believers.) Who do you admire in the political area — and why? I’d really be interested in finding out. See my last post on the Occupiers. Are you with the TeaPartiers or the Occupiers?
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Dear Dorothy,
Regarding Mortimer Adler’s conversion to Christianity, I understand that his Episcopalian wife, (she was his second wife I believe,) had been previously married and divorced which was an impediment to either of them entering the Catholic Church. It was after the death of his wife that Adler was accepted into the Catholic Church.
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Dorothy Vining reply on January 27th, 2014 7:33 am:
Thanks, Helen, for this clarification. (Helen is the daughter of Herbert Ratner, M.D., friend of Dr. Adler, who is also a Jewish convert to Catholicism.)
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