Class Notes - April 21, 1999
Class notes features
Sydney Woodd-Cahusac '40, second-career
priest
Eleven days after Sydney WooddCahusac '40 retired on December 31, 1983,
after a long career as a lawyer and financial officer, he enrolled at Yale
Divinity School. He was ordained an Episcopal priest at St. Barnabas Church
in Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1986 when he was 68 years old.
The cathedral in Hartford named him an honorary canon "for service to the diocese" in 1995, and he is now on the staff of Christ Church in Greenwich.
Did Princeton's compulsory chapel rule affect his choice of a second career? Not at all, he said. "I hated it. I wanted to sit in the back and read The New York Times like some of the others, but I never did."
Although his parents did not attend church when he was growing up in Brooklyn, by the time he was in high school, WooddCahusac was going occasionally on his own. (The genes were there -- among his distant ancestors are six generations of Church of England priests.) He was baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal church when he was 26 years old and a Marine during World War II. It was not a foxhole conversion, but happened in California thanks to a Navy chaplain. Later, both his parents became active church members.
After the war, WooddCahusac went to Yale Law School and worked for 14 years as a lawyer for, then as treasurer of, American Standard. Two years with a law firm followed, and then a long stint as Rockefeller University's treasurer and counsel.
After he and his wife, Jean, moved to Greenwich in 1956, they became rather desultory members of Christ Church. It was in July 1969 that he decided to go to church regularly every Sunday. The decision startled his wife, Jean, but after a few weeks, she began going with him. Woodd-Cahusac became an usher, a fund-raiser, a member of the finance committee, and a vestryman.
When he was accepted as a candidate for the priesthood, the bishop suggested he spend only one semester at seminary. Life experience, he said, would make up for the other five semesters. WooddCahusac had to take the same exams that other candidates took, and after passing them, he began a clinical pastoral stint at Yale University Hospital, learning to be a hospital chaplain. His first job was at St. Barnabas, where he was ordained.
At Christ Church, where he works four days a week, he does hospital visiting, counseling, weddings, funerals, and baptisms, sharing fully in the work of the fiveperson clerical staff of Christ Church.
When associated with a cathedral, a priest usually has certain specified duties, but WooddCahusac says he's "more like a utility outfielder."
Ordination, WooddCahusac says, was his proudest achievement. And he has no plans to retire from this second career, but he wants to continue "living the faith fully and celebrating the Eucharist with all its mystery."
-- Ann Waldron
When Sara Love '89 took a job in Washington, D.C., as the legal director
of the National Abortion Clinic Access Project for the Feminist Majority
Foundation, she wasn't surprised when her new boss wanted to do a sniper
assessment of her apartment. Just the week before, a sniper had killed a
clinic doctor in New York State. She had already observed that her boss,
who had personally recruited her away from a Chicago law firm, wore a bulletproof
vest and traveled with a bodyguard. What motivated Love to leave her relatively
safe and secure practice was the chance to use her legal expertise to help
end violence against abortion clinics and providers.
She is the first legal director of the National Abortion Clinic Access Project and the only attorney on staff. She has another job as well -- first and only general counsel for the National Women's Health Foundation, which gives legal and educational support to the eight clinics of the National Women's Health Organization, as well as other clinics. She divides her time between working directly with clinics and local attorneys on their various suits to allow unhampered access to clinics, and working on issues that can affect the clinics more generally.
"Many anti-abortion extremists who blockade the clinics and threaten patients and doctors assign their personal assets to friends and relatives so that when they're sued by the clinics they have no resources," Love says. "We've had a number of favorable judgments, and I'm trying to figure out how to collect."
Another of her current projects is to help the Justice Department evaluate which clinics are deserving of federal funding for enhanced security. She also tackles such issues as the refusal of Yellow Pages in many areas of the country to list abortion clinics, lumping their ads in with "escort services." She writes requests for funding, speaks publicly and to the media on abortion-related violence, and recently advised a Portland, Oregon, clinic in its civil action against anti-abortion extremists for threatening doctors and staff.
"We've seen an overall drop in the level of clinic violence from 51 percent of clinics reporting three or more incidents in 1994, down to 22 percent in 1998," says Love. "That's progress, but not enough. Anti-abortion extremists have frenzied themselves up. They're engaging in more covert terrorist activities -- witness the sniper murder. Clinics have had to install metal detectors -- where else in our society do you have to go through a metal detector to see a doctor?"
Love is the daughter of Norris Love '58, and she has seven other relatives who are Princetonians. Raised in Chicago, she majored in American history and as a student worked for Princeton Pro-Choice. When she is not spending time with her family and friends, or training as a triathlete (she prepared for her first Ironman along the wintry shores of Lake Michigan), she presides over her class as president. A graduate of Northwestern Law School, she joined the largest majority-woman-owned firm in Illinois, Robinson, Curley and Clayton, doing a combination of commercial litigation and civil rights. It was while working on a trial involving NOW v. Scheidler (a class-action suit against anti-abortion extremists for extortion) that she first met and impressed her new bosses. Love says moving to the Feminist Majority Foundation was a natural transition: "My mother is active in woman's issues, and my grandmother was, too. I felt I had to take these jobs -- to be able to do something about these injustices!"
-- Dan White '65
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