WINTER 2025
Light to a Legacy
Remembering the important human rights work of Fr. William Lewers, CSC
- Story by Jessica Murphy Moo
Left to right: Rev. Howard Kenna, CSC (outgoing Provincial), Rev. James Anderson, CSC, Rev. Edward Mallow, CSC, Rev. William Lewers, CSC (incoming Provincial), June 1973
WILLIAM LEWERS, CSC, is no longer with us, but the legacy of his human rights work still very much is, and I want to take a moment to hold that legacy up to the light.
I came across his name during some research I’d been conducting about Loving v. Virginia, the US Supreme court case that ultimately made interracial marriage legal everywhere in the United States. Fr. Lewers wrote and submitted a voluntary amicus brief on behalf of Mildred and Richard Loving, an interracial couple who had been arrested and banished from Virginia for getting married in DC and returning to their Virginia home. In 1967, Richard and Mildred Loving won their case by unanimous Supreme Court decision.
When I saw Fr. Lewers’s name and the religious order “CSC” noted on the brief, I felt a sense of gratitude to him. Do we know if his document held any sway in the Supreme Court decision? No, we don’t. The ACLU lawyers who represented the Lovings for so many years did the heavy lifting on the case. But I do know that nearly 60 years later, my interracial family and I are among the countless people who enjoy the rights the Lovings were fighting for. I’m glad to know there was a Catholic voice standing up for love.
Fr. Lewers wrote this brief relatively early in his life as a priest. A convert to Catholicism, he was ordained a priest in the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1965, after working for many years as a lawyer and professor of law. Catholic social teaching had drawn him to the Church and in time he became the director of the Office of International Justice and Peace for the US Catholic Conference, advising Catholic Bishops in the United States on how to live out the tenets of Catholic social teaching for the dignity of all people, and particularly for those who had no power. In the 1980s, he was behind the push by US Catholic bishops to divest from companies that supported apartheid in South Africa.
We are living in a moment of a whole lot of change. It can feel a little dizzying. One thing I’m trying to do to keep an even keel is to look to those who also lived through moments of great change. I’m taking inspiration from how they stayed true to their ideals, how they stood with people who were vulnerable, as Catholic social teaching challenges us to do.
Fr. Lewers is one of those people. I’m learning from his example, and I’m grateful for it.