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Nevertheless, Hyde still hopes for the conversion of even those who are legalistically pro-choice: "You've got to believe in redemption, you've got to believe in Saul of Tarsus, you have to believe that people will change their minds." Good teaching in churches is vital, he believes: "We need prophets and emissaries of transcendence, rather than people who compromise with the world." A major problem, however, remains "the quality of clergy emerging out of the sixties and seventies."

In Catholic churches, Hyde complains, "You have bishops lobbying for female priests and homosexuals. You have a Catholic press that is a great occasion of sin, a way to lose your soul." Many of the church's clergymen and even some cardinals, Hyde says angrily, "lack moral energy," and "the big Catholic colleges are a great place to lose your faith; you send your kid to Notre Dame, and he comes out an agnostic at best."

After graduating from a Catholic high school in 1942, Hyde went on to receive B.S. and J.D. degrees from Georgetown University and Loyola University School of Law; in those days, he emerged from schooling with a strong faith and a strong body. Now Hyde walks the floor of Congress with burly grace, but almost a half-century ago, during the last half of a 1943 NCAA playoff game, Hyde at 6'3" and 180 pounds ran the floor of a basketball court well enough to hold DePaul great George Mikan to one point.

Hyde has similarly outplayed top-rated liberal politicians year after year, so that even Cokie Roberts of Left-leaning National Public Radio grudgingly admits, "Hyde is one of the smartest men that ever walked."

Nevertheless, the task gets harder each year, and he comments, "You can show the truth to people, you can rub their face in it, but if their will isn't ready to accept it, they're not going to accept it."

In recent redistricting based on the 1990 census, Illinois lost two seats, and the Republican Hyde could have been gerrymandered out of a job by a Democratic legislature. But the respect he has engendered proved greater than the political desire to eject a troublemaker. And Hyde plans to persevere. Each time he talks about abortion on the floor of the House, he implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) hurls a question at his colleagues: "Do you want to continue to deceive yourselves?" In the back of Ted Kennedy's mind, Hyde believes, "way back, hidden away in a closet somewhere, is the realization that he is dead wrong on abortion—dead wrong." The hope of engendering a conversion keeps Hyde soldiering on, even when the pilgrim's political progress of the 1980s seems to be turning into the regress of the 1990s.

Hyde has been married to one woman for 43 years. He has four children, five grandchildren, nine terms in the House, and a bit of disappointment at having to remain the gadfly rather than the seat of power himself. But he carries around quotations in his coat pocket, and pulls out a favorite one— "This is great stuff," he says—about the Illinoisan who suffered many disappointments until lightning struck: Lincoln "hid his bitterness in laughter … and met recurring disaster with whimsicality. … Out of a tragic sense of life he pitied where others blamed [and] endured humanely his little day of chance power."

Marvin Olasky is editor in chief of World, provost of The King's College—New York City, and a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of 20 books includingCompassionate Conservatism and The American Leadership Tradition.

Copyright © 2007 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Henry Hyde died at 3 AM this morning at age 83. The Associated Press, CNN, and others have published obituaries.

Congress has a short biography.

He received a Presidential Medal of Freedom on November 5.

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November (Web-only) 2007, Vol. 51