People have long confused me, Bernard George Prusak, with my father, Bernard Patrick Prusak, who died on January 18, 2026, at the age of eighty-seven after a brief and sudden illness. Who could blame them? With my immediate family, relatives, and family friends, the difference was clear enough. My father was Bernie, and I was Bernard or Bern. I introduced some ambiguity by going by Bernie in high school and college, but any confusion could be quickly resolved by asking something like, “Do you want the father or the son?” Confusion became harder to dispel once I started writing for Commonweal, which published my first article in 1997 and has published more than fifty others since. This wasn’t a good way to make a name for myself, so to speak. My father began teaching theology at Villanova University in 1969 and retired only in 2021. He was a prolific scholar, a gifted and inspiring teacher, and a well-known member of the theological guild. Among other contributions, he and his Villanova colleague and friend, Dr. Rodger Van Allen, cofounded Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society in 1974. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I was working on my PhD in philosophy and struggling to begin my teaching career, I was no one to anyone in the theological guild. Readers of Commonweal who knew, or knew of, my father understandably attributed my articles to him.
It didn’t help that, from 2005 to 2012, I taught at Villanova myself, as a post-doc in its great-books program. My father was then the chair of the department of theology and religious studies, and he got much more interesting work emails than I did, which I forwarded to him after telling the senders that they were intended for Bernard the Elder, not Bernard the Younger. What’s more, my father began writing for Commonweal during this period, publishing at least ten articles in these pages between 2005 and 2014 on such topics as the reception of Vatican II, the resurrection of the body, and Christology. When the theologian Bernie McGinn refers, in his foreword to the 2021 festschrift for my father, One Bread, One Body, One Church, to his “challenging journalistic pieces in Commonweal,” he likely had in mind some pieces by Bernard the Elder and some by Bernard the Younger.
In response to the news of my father’s death, his friend and onetime classmate Fr. Ken Lasch wrote me, “You are your father’s son.” Being “your father’s son” in the sense Fr. Lasch meant has to do with following in your father’s footsteps, emulating his example, and carrying on his legacy—representing him, more than being related to him biologically. Ironically, for much of the 1960s, it didn’t appear my father would have any children. (He had two in the end: my sister and me.) He entered the seminary as a teenager in the 1950s; was sent by the Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, to study in Rome; was ordained to the priesthood there in 1962; and, after serving for a year as an assistant pastor back in New Jersey, was sent to Rome again in 1964 to do doctoral studies, which he completed in 1967. He then returned to New Jersey to serve as co-vice-chancellor, with Fr. Lasch, for the diocese.
My father’s time in Rome coincided with the Second Vatican Council, and he discusses his experience of it in his most personal Commonweal article, “Turning Point: A Theologian Remembers Vatican II,” which was the cover story of the September 28, 2012, issue. In that article, he also discusses, briefly and discreetly, meeting my mother in New Jersey, apparently in 1968, when she was a young Benedictine sister who had yet to take her final vows. The tone of “Turning Point” is, to my ears, muted and pensive. That was surely due in part to his grief over my mother’s death in January 2012 from ALS. But it was also due to his disappointment and sorrow with the “turn” the Church had taken under John Paul II and Benedict XVI. As my father saw things, it was a turn away from the boldness and promise of the council, which he writes “changed the course of [his] life,” and back to a more rigid, authoritarian defensiveness. He could not then have anticipated Benedict’s resignation the following year, or the pontificate of Pope Francis.
In going through my father’s papers the day after his death, my sister and I came across his letter to Pope Paul VI requesting dispensation from the discipline of celibacy in order to marry. The letter presents an impassioned explanation of both the personal and theological reasons for his request. The Vatican’s July 1970 response granting the dispensation ignores his reflections on the priesthood and the married state and instead instructs him, in flowery Latin, to avoid places where he had been known as a priest and to keep his wedding ceremony quiet, lest the faithful be scandalized. I also found a 1970 letter from the Diocese of Paterson, whose bishops were good to my father, asking him to set up a repayment plan for his seminary education. According to the business manager, my father owed $5,559.34—roughly $46,000 today. His salary at Villanova for the 1969–1970 academic year was $8,200. The letter is torn in two, but taped back together. I’d bet he paid.
That letter seems to me a fitting symbol of my father’s relationship with the institutional Church in his later years. It frustrated him! He’d had such hopes for it in the late 1960s and ’70s. But he wasn’t about to throw away his ties to it—or, for that matter, let it break his faith. The last article he was working on, intended for a publication like Commonweal, is bluntly titled “Vatican Rejection of Women’s Ordination Is Unfounded.” The subordination of women in the Church deeply troubled my father; he was worried that the Church had alienated women of my sister’s generation with repercussions for generations to come. The article takes issue with the argument that Jesus chose only men as apostles, and that therefore (skipping a premise or two) the Church today, out of faithfulness to Jesus, has no choice but to limit the ministerial priesthood to men. My father’s rejoinder, supported by scriptural and historical research, is that there’s no correspondence between the twelve apostles and the later tripartite leadership structure of the Church, consisting of bishops, presbyters, and deacons. In other words, it’s just a non sequitur to hold that, because Jesus chose only men as apostles, only men can be ordained in the very different roles that we know today. He might have ended the article with the same point that he made at the end of “Turning Point”: our moment in history poses challenges “that the past cannot answer for us”; in the face of these challenges, true fidelity to the past may now require innovation.
Nearly half of my father’s seventy-plus classmates at the North American College in Rome from 1959 to 1963 left the priesthood to marry. To my knowledge, there’s been little research about the experience of such men, in particular how they participated in the Church after their marriages and how they passed on the faith to their families. That’s a shame. I imagine they might have valuable lessons to teach, which will be lost after they die. Despite my sharing so much with my father, and even being confused with him, he was a man of his own generation—but also very much his own man. May he rest in peace.
