By Robert Royal.

But first a note: We're making steady progress in our fundraising, but we're behind last year. And you all know that nothing has gotten less expensive in the past twelve months. I won't belabor a point that you already understand. We can only come to you every morning, 365 days a year, if you are generous towards us during the two times a year that we ask for your support. Please, be generous and hopeful - hopeful that the work we do here will help both the Church and the world. There's the button. There's you. There's the future of The Catholic Thing.

Now for today's column...

I don't remember precisely how I came to know Virgil Nemoianu, who died on June 6. Even his widow, Anca, isn't exactly sure. It must have been at the kind of informal salon that Jude Dougherty, legendary dean of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America for three decades, hosted at his home. D.C. locals and visiting eminences from Rome, Poland, the U.K., etc., would rub shoulders there. But somehow - Divine Providence often works through people and things that may never rise to great public prominence - we met. And Virgil became an intellectual inspiration, later my dissertation director, and - for forty years - my friend.

Back then, I was a youngish vice-president for research at the Ethics & Public Policy Center in Washington. My then-boss and founder of EPPC, Ernest Lefever, was a distinguished Protestant foreign-policy expert. He instructed me one day that it was "unseemly" that I had researchers working under me with PhDs, while I had left mine unfinished to become a magazine editor at Princeton, before moving to the Center. Jude Dougherty wouldn't let me do philosophy, unless I quit my job to study full time (an impossibility for a father with children). But Virgil stepped in.

He was chairman of the Comparative Literature department at CUA, which was more in my wheelhouse anyway. I'd been studying Dante and literature in a couple of languages earlier. But unbeknownst to many, even at the university, he was also Secretary General of the World Comparative Literature Association, which is to say the biggest of the big fish in the discipline. And he generously made it possible for me to finish doctoral work without too much stress on the family.

He was also, for me in particular, a bit of a Godsend in that, as a native of Romania (communist when he was growing up), he had little patience with people in the academic or political worlds who were soft on the Soviets or who flirted - and more than flirted - with various forms of Marxism and socialism. He'd seen what all that led to up close, and wasn't about to indulge it in conditions of freedom where we had the gift of speaking the truth about poisonous intellectual and political illusions.

At the same time, he was intellectually sophisticated and disturbingly well-red in what seemed, at times, everything. And he fought for the proper life of the mind. For instance, the "canon wars" were roiling university campuses - leftists at universities were arguing even back then that the great books included in the curricula of most programs in Western civilization were (sigh) sexist, racist, imperialistic, etc. ad nauseam. He decided that we should jointly edit a volume of essays making a different case.

We rummaged around looking for a suggestive title and he found, in Shakespeare of course (Coriolanus I:10), exactly what we wanted: The Hospitable Canon. The unusual word "hospitable" here suggesting that, in fact, the great Western texts invite in everyone who wants to become a participant in "the best that has been thought and said." The canon was even open to new writers and thinkers - if they could survive the competition to become part of the great human cultural legacy.

Notably, Virgil also developed what he called the "theory of the secondary," by which he meant that the proper role of literature was not to become part of the dominant political and social culture,...