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It is customary on occasions such as this to begin by stating what an honor it
is to have been asked to speak. And the challenge with which I find myself
confronted is how to express to you my deep sense of privilege without it
sounding in any way perfunctory.
The best way in which I can do that is, perhaps, indulgent, but being a
Catholic, I tend to believe in indulgences, within the requisite
boundaries—and I consider this occasion to meet that standard.
I was born not more than fifty miles due south of this compound, at the Brooklyn
Jewish Hospital, into a hard-working, blue-collar Italian family. I went to
school in a multicultural and ecumenical context, long before the words multicultural
or ecumenical were employed in common parlance.
I will relate only one of the images etched in my mind which formed the initial
soil that would harbor and nourish the seeds which would come to fruition at a
somewhat later date seeds which this institution, in general, and Edmund Opitz,
in particular, had something to do with scattering and planting.
The image to which I refer is of an elderly Jewish lady who lived across from my
family’s railroad flat above Coney Island Avenue. Mrs. Snyder had, what seemed
to a child of six, the magic ability to cause the most luscious, aromatic, and
sweet smells imaginable to emanate from her old Wedge-wood stove.
I recall sitting at our kitchen window as she would gather and pour all her
ingredients into a large mixing bowl, creating a doughy substance, which she
would then pluck from the bowl, piece by piece, and place on a cookie sheet.
This she would then place into the oven which, in a short time, would result in
an aroma that was so rich that you could almost see it wafting between our two
windows.
A few minutes later, which seemed like an eternity, Mrs. Snyder would remove
that tray, replacing it with another, and place the now finished product on her
windowsill to cool.
I watched this ritual intently, and when the temperature of the cookies had
dropped, but not so much that they weren’t still warm, Mrs. Snyder would
beckon me in her thick Central European accent: “You’ll come and I’ll give
you some.” I hopped out my window and walked—floated is perhaps a more apt
word to describe the sensation—the few feet to her window.
One summer day when Mrs. Snyder, in a short-sleeved calico dress, filled my
hands with a napkin overflowing with her treasures, I noticed something on her
forearm.
I didn’t say anything to her, but when I climbed back into my kitchen, I asked
my mother why Mrs. Snyder had numbers on her arm.
My mother explained, as best she could to one so young, that because of their
religion Mr. and Mrs. Snyder had been treated like animals and branded.
That remembrance of the attempt to use force over the human conscience stays
with me to this day. But, at the time, and for many years after it, I found
myself confused when I tried to make sense of the interrelationship of liberty
and religion.
It was when I was in my mid-twenties, still not having made a coherent
connection between these ideas, that a friend visited. (It was my birthday.) We
had had numerous conversations, indeed arguments, about philosophy, economics,
politics, and religion.
I was, at the time, I confess, ensnared in the fog of socialist rhetoric, there
being little else intellectually about socialism to ensnare one. The birthday
present my friend arrived with that day was a small library of books and
magazines. Among them were titles with which this gathering will be familiar: Socialism,
by Ludwig von Mises, Capitalism and the Historians and The Road to
Serfdom, by F. A. Hayek, The Law, by Frederic Bastiat, The
Freeman, and, of course, Religion and Capitalism: Allies, Not Enemies,
by Edmund Opitz.
In a short period of time the fog cleared, proving once again the truth of the
old saying: “You may be a socialist when you’re young because you have a
heart, but you won’t be a socialist when you’re older if you have any
brains.”
Thus, I began to read The Freeman and have been assisted in ways too
countless to enumerate by the wise, prudent, temperate, and erudite
contributions of Ed Opitz.
Not only his scholarship, but his very example as a Christian gentleman assured
me of the possibility of integrating virtue and liberty in one’s life and
society.
It came to pass that I recovered my earlier faith, and thanks in significant
part to the existence of The Foundation for Economic Education and the
cogitations of Ed over the years, I was duly inoculated against the specious
claims of the left by the time I entered seminary to study for the priesthood.
But you, of all people, have heard this kind of story many times over. And this
is because The Foundation for Economic Education, and Ed Opitz, have simply
become a part of the landscape of liberty in this century.
In the days when central planning was the unquestioned course of public policy,
and when religious leaders taught variations on the theme that socialism was the
practice of which Christianity was the religion—there was Ed Opitz, in a
plethora of articles, boldly, yet calmly, adamantly, yet with respect,
indicating with the most gentle and genteel of manners, that, in point of fact,
the Emperor had no clothes. Before there was such a thing as liberation
theology, Mr. Opitz provided the antidote to that theological and economic
heresy.
Not more than four years ago, Europe was in the literal death grip of
history’s most brutal institutionalization of collectivism. With great
prescience Ludwig von Mises, of esteemed memory, and no stranger to these very
corridors, demonstrated in the 1920s that socialism would fail because it
interfered with the coordination of information as expressed in the free
market’s pricing system. In the late 1980s, that economic insight was combined
with the spiritual nudge which caused the colossal wreck of Communism to cave in
on itself.
This was the very integration made flesh—whether the Pentecostals in Russia,
the Soviet Jews, the Evangelicals in Hungary, or the Catholics in Poland this
was the incarnation of the theory of the alliance of religion and freedom which
formed the leitmotif of Ed Opitz’s work over the years.
If this venerable institution on the Hudson is the mother of all free-market
think tanks, then Ed Opitz is one of the patriarchs of liberty-promoting clergy.
I am, in a sense, an heir to his legacy, and it is with an overwhelming sense of
gratitude to Almighty God that I am aware of being merely one of Ed’s
intellectual descendants, though luckier than the others, because it is I who
have the honor of giving voice to what I feel sure each of them would say.
Ed, in my person, your children rise up to call you blessed. In their name, I
thank you.
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