April 4, 2025
Visiting Professor Rev. Ladislas Orsy, S.J. died on April 3, 2025. Dean William M. Treanor shared the following remembrance with the Georgetown Law community:
Dear Georgetown Law Community,
It is with great sadness that I share the news that our celebrated and beloved Jesuit scholar, canonical theologian, and long-time member of our faculty Rev. Ladislas “Les” Orsy, S.J. passed away on April 3. He was 103 years old, and he taught here until the age of 99. He was, in every way, a giant, and a truly lovely person, and his legacy is a great one.
He led an extraordinary life. His more than 70-year career includes serving as a bishops’ expert adviser at the Second Vatican Council and working on the preparation of the new Code of Canon Law, adopted in 1983.
Father Orsy, who grew up in Hungary, entered the Society of Jesus in 1943. He was ordained to the priesthood in Louvain, Belgium, in 1951 and came to the United States in 1966. In the meantime, he earned an M.A. in Law at Oxford University and a doctor of canon law at Gregorian University in Rome. He also earned degrees in philosophy and theology in Rome and Leuven, Belgium, allowing him to teach at Catholic universities worldwide.
A world-renowned scholar, he published more than 200 articles and nine books, including Theology and Canon Law: New Horizons for Legislation and Interpretation and Receiving the Council: Theological and Canonical Insights and Debates. Father Orsy joined the Georgetown Law faculty in Fall 1994 at the age of 73 after (supposedly) retiring from Catholic University of America. He previously taught Canon Law at the Gregorian University in Rome, Fordham University, and the University of Fribourg, Switzerland.
At the Law Center, Father Orsy taught Roman Law, Great Philosophers on the Law, and Canon Law. In 2018, still going strong at the age of 96, Father Orsy taught two courses: one on Roman Law and one on the role of the Vatican and the Holy See in international law, looking at their relationships to the United Nations. That same year, Georgetown Law hosted “Vision, Law and Human Rights, A Celebration of the Work of Professor Ladislas Orsy, S.J,” which examined Father Orsy’s scholarship on Vatican II, canon law, and international human rights — as well as his life as a professor, lawyer, and priest. After each panel, Father Orsy responded on the spot to every presentation, with his characteristic intelligence, wit, and passion.
He loved teaching, and at every event where he spoke or gave the benediction, he reminded his colleagues what a blessing it is to have the opportunity to teach.
He also had a wonderful sense of humor. I will never forget sitting next to him at his 100th birthday party. He told me that he had recently visited his doctor’s office. He said that his doctor, in order to test, as Father Orsy put it, his “mental acuity,” asked him if he could count from 1 to 100 backwards. “Certainly,” Father Orsy responded, and then he asked: “ In what language?”
He will be greatly missed. Please keep his family and the whole Jesuit community in your thoughts.
Sincerely,
William M. Treanor
Dean and Executive Vice President
Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair
Please share your own memories and tributes. They will be added below.
I first met Fr. Orsy as an undergrad at Catholic University, then as my professor at Georgetown Law Center. We stayed in touch through the decades. In our last meeting at the Jesuit residence on the main campus, Fr. Orsy told us the story of facing the occupying Russian forces in post-War Hungary. He was faith-filled and curious, a courageous citizen of the world, and a humble man of God.
As an undergraduate at Catholic University, I took every opportunity to hear Fr. Orsy as a speaker and homilist. Fr. Orsy was inspiring in both word and experience. He always impressed me and left me with an indelible memories. I had a particularly memorable experience when I spotted him in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. I approached Fr. Orsy and explained how I knew him. We sat together for a while and talked about the history and experience of being in that sacred place. Thank God for Fr. Orsy and his contributions to Vatican II and the entire Church.
I remember when Pope John Paul II had issued a scary missive on Catholic higher education that suggested new oversight of universities by bishops. Some Georgetown faculty and administrators held a meeting at which we discussed worst case scenarios and what kinds of resistance to mount. Fr, Orsy spoke near the end: "My advice is to do absolutely nothing." He suggested that factions within the Vatican were divided over any course and that probably there would be no significant hierarchical follow-up. He indicated that some gestures of control over universities surfaced in the church every century or two and that this one would come to very little unless officials felt their status publicly challenged. He was right, of course.
Father Orsy was an amazing man and scholar. Some of us will remember him leading a Roman Law reading group for the faculty, giving a few of us,with our Board of Visitors, a historical tour of Rome, lecturing at CTLS on the early origins of human rights law. He was my friend and my teacher and,like our also departed Fr. Drinan, our link to what was important and potentially good in our Catholic connections. He was a Georgetown treasure in a golden age.
Les was not only brilliant, witty and kind, he was for me a dear friend and my "Hungarian Uncle." When I first joined the faculty in the late 90s, he came up to introduce himself and said, “Naomi Mezey, do you know you are Hungarian?” I told him I did, and he then asked, “But do you know what your name means?” I told him I understood that it meant field or meadow. Ever the pastoral scholar, he said, “well, it's nicer than a field, but not as nice as a meadow.”
I often checked in on Les when he was at Georgetown and always asked him how he was doing. He liked to note he was aging from the feet up and usually responded with something like, “above the hips I’m perfectly fine.” One day, as his 100th birthday approached, he said in response to this question, “They can’t seem to find anything the matter with me. The specimen does not know what to make of it himself.” On another occasion, he asked how I was. I told him I was despairing for my country. He told me about being in Hungary at the end of WWII and “being liberated by the Russians.” He went on, "At that time everybody was looking to the US to save Europe from the mess they had made. If you wore an American uniform they would kiss you. That is why I am here.”
He had amazing stories on every possible topic but many good ones of being in Budapest when the Red Army entered. A group of Russian soldiers entered the seminary where he was studying, lined up the seminarians and went down the line liberating them of watches and rings. Eager to save his wristwatch and toward the end of the line, Les dropped his watch down his cassock. He gleefully told me that despite risking his life, that watch worked for him for another 45 years.
There is so much to say, but I will end with what he said to me almost every time we said goodbye. Knowing that I spoke Spanish, he would say "hasta la vista" when we parted. This delighted me in part because when said in his Hungarian accent, he sounded surprisingly like Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Terminator. Hasta la vista, Les. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to be your colleague and friend.
Father Orsy was a treasure who embodied all that is good about our Jesuit identity. He was an exceptional scholar, and also exceptionally thoughtful and kind. Rest in peace.
Les was something very special. Maybe a decade ago we had an event at the Library of Congress. David Mao was then the Law Librarian of Congress and laid out an amazing display of old legal books and documents. Les and I were wandering past them and came upon a thick 15th Century illustrated manuscript of bound vellum. Les took a look at it and exclaimed, “I wrote my dissertation on this!” As a young man he attended the Second Vatican Council and said the experience remained with him the rest of his life. His book on the interpretation of canon law argues that the text should be understood through the spirit of that moment. What a privilege to have been his colleague.
Kind, brilliant, and extraordinary scholar of ancient Roman and canon law, Fr. Orsy shared his knowledge with colleagues and librarians at the law school. As a Georgetown law librarian collecting and curating topics in legal history, I gained new perspectives on foundational legal principles in the ancient and ecclesial contexts he illuminated so well for us. In seminars and presentations that he graciously provided, upon occasion, to the librarians and others, he generously shared this knowledge and time outside of and in addition to his teaching and research. I am so grateful to have had the benefit of this generosity.