Robert F. Drinan, SJ, former dean of Boston College Law School, five-term Congressman from Massachusetts, and Georgetown law professor, died on January 28, at age 86. His life was recollected at the funeral Mass in St. Ignatius Church on February 3: 

Fr. Bob Drinan was not one of those lawyers who loves human rights but not human beings. My family first met him in the late 1950s shortly after my father, then a South Korean graduate student, received his doctorate from Harvard. Because of the precarious political situation in Korea, my father felt he also needed an American law degree; he visited Dean Drinan at Boston College Law School to explain his situation. As a law dean now, were I to get a similar visit from a foreign student, my first impulse would probably be to tell him to go to the admissions office to fill out an application. But Fr. Drinan agreed to enroll my dad in BC’s evening law program, on the spot.

Three years later, after receiving his BC law degree and returning to South Korea to help Chang Myon win the country’s first democratic election, my dad proudly visited Fr. Drinan again with his family to tell him that he had just been appointed acting ambassador from Korea to the United States. I was just six years old. My parents made me wear a necktie.

Nearly four decades later, after I was confirmed as assistant secretary of state for human rights in 1998, I was invited to speak to Fr. Drinan’s human rights class at Georgetown Law School. I reminded him of our first meeting many years earlier, and he roared with laughter and threw his arms around me. “Harold, were you that little boy wearing the necktie? I felt so sorry for you having to sit there listening to us grown-ups.” That tells you why this man was so beloved: Like Jesus, he instinctively saw every scene from the perspective of the smallest and meekest person in the room.

In Congress, Fr. Drinan helped to enact the key human rights legislation of the post-Vietnam era. He wrote a dozen books, taught thousands of students, and traveled on humanitarian missions around the globe while advocating for human rights in the Soviet Union, South Africa, El Salvador, Chile, the Philippines, Cuba, and Darfur.

I last saw him in October, at the dedication ceremony for the Robert F. Drinan, SJ, Chair in Human Rights at Georgetown Law School. At the dinner afterwards, Bob rose and said, “People ask me how I got so much done in my life. The answer is simple: celibacy.” The place exploded with laughter and love for a man who understood that all his accomplishments ultimately came from sacrifice.

And so the celibate Bob Drinan became a father figure to the many he touched and a proud parent of the global human rights revolution. One of Bob’s last books, The Mobilization of Shame (2001), argues that the death penalty violates international law. It also calls for a right to food and for regional tribunals for human rights. For generations to come, our Fr. Robert Drinan will live on, through the continuing power of his inspiration and his ideas.

Harold Hongju Koh is a professor of law and dean of Yale Law School.