I think about my father a lot these days. He would have loved the dignity and stateliness of former First Lady Barbara Bush’s Episcopal funeral last week. The Bush’s were, and are, Dad’s kind of Republican: civil, courteous, generous, motivated by a sense of responsibility for the common good, not in spite of their wealth and privilege, but precisely because of it: noblesse oblige, not unlike the Kennedys and Roosevelts.

At the time, Dad was an anomaly: a blue collar railroader, union member, who voted Republican. He used to tell me that our Presbyterian Church was “the Republican Party at Prayer.” He loved Richard Nixon and, thankfully, did not live long enough to witness Nixon’s disgrace.

I am daily grateful that Dad never had to witness what has happened to his beloved Republican Party. He would have been appalled at our current President. The cruel, juvenile insults hurled at anyone and everyone, most recently “sleazy slime ball” at the former Director of the FBI, would have offended him deeply. Dad loved J. Edgar Hoover so much that he and I always listened to the weekly radio program “The FBI in Peace and War.” Dad valued hard work, honesty, kindness, good manners and, above all else, responsibility for one’s family, community, church and nation. I’m glad he did not have to witness his president’s assault on our precious values, his involvement with a pornographic film star, and his Republican Party’s deafening silence.

I wonder if we will recover, if the daily damage to traditional norms of decency, civility and respect will prove to be permanent.

The congregation that gathered in that large Episcopal church to honor Barbara Bush gives me hope. There wasn’t a hint of diversity, of course, but I want to believe that among all those men in blue suits and women elegantly attired and coiffed there are enough traditional, reliable Republicans to recover their party, their decency, their soul.