Reflections

Our St. Paul campus erupted in celebration on May 8 as Pope Leo XIV was announced. A packed viewing party at Scooter’s, our own Popemobile parade, and even white smoke emanating from a chimney built for the occasion above our SJV seminary marked a jubilant day in history. Only time will tell how this papacy will shape the Catholic Church and the broader world, but it is not too early to comment on the significance of the new pope’s first decision: his name.

In choosing to be called Leo XIV, he is demonstrating a commitment to continue the legacy of Pope Leo XIII, who served from 1878 to 1903. Why should we care? One interesting connection is that the name of our university was almost certainly due to Leo XIII. In 1879, he called Catholics “to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas [Aquinas], and to spread it far and wide.” And he instructed “universities already founded or to be founded [to] illustrate and defend” the wisdom of his teaching. Six years later, Archbishop Ireland opened the doors of a new Catholic college in St. Paul – it would have surprised no one at the time that we were named for St. Thomas.

But of deeper relevance to us is the fact that Leo XIII laid the foundation for Catholic social teaching in his landmark 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum. At a time when the Industrial Revolution had displaced and upended the lives of millions of workers around the world, Leo XIII charted a path that rejected both socialism and laissez-faire capitalism. He defended private property rights, insisted on the dignity and rights of workers, championed the importance and goodness of labor, and advocated for a living wage. The encyclical’s impact was significant – in fact, the moral theologian and St. Thomas alum Fr. John Ryan credited Rerum Novarum with shaping his economic views; President Roosevelt credited Fr. Ryan, in turn, as a key influence on his “New Deal” programs. Has the time come to return to these issues? As Cardinal Blase Cupich (archbishop of Chicago and another St. Thomas alum) remarked on Friday, “We might have a Rerum Novarum 2.0” from Pope Leo XIV given threats to the dignity and rights of workers in a rapidly changing world. Indeed, Leo XIV remarked that the Church’s social teaching must respond “to developments in the field of artificial intelligence that pose new challenges for the defense of human dignity, justice and labor.”

Whether or not Leo XIV tackles workers’ rights, his embrace of Leo XIII is important. Rerum Novarum spawned a body of work to which nearly every subsequent pope has contributed, addressing social issues through the seven themes of what is now known as Catholic social teaching: 1) life and dignity of the human person; 2) the importance of family, community and participation; 3) rights and responsibilities; 4) the preferential option for the poor; 5) the dignity of work and the rights of workers; 6) solidarity; and 7) care for God’s creation.

For a Catholic university, the Church’s social teaching is an inescapable reminder that the faith that drove our founding and animates our mission today can never be a rationale for withdrawing from the world around us. We are compelled to care about justice. We are compelled not only to engage in charity, but also to analyze and improve systems that marginalize. We are compelled to care for the environment. We are mindful of the world to come, but we are also compelled to do all we can to contribute to human flourishing in the here and now.

We are just starting to get to know Pope Leo XIV. He hasn’t produced an encyclical or offered a major address. But his name itself speaks volumes. Disconnection from the world’s suffering can be a temptation for academics (“the ivory tower”) and for religious believers (being “so heavenly minded as to be of no earthly good”). Catholic social teaching makes plain: that is not an option for St. Thomas. If you pray for our new pope, please also pray that we will be up to the work he has already set before us.

With warm regard,

Rob

At an event earlier this month, I met a member of the class of 1952. He told me about his long career spent leading large, complex organizations. I asked him about his time at St. Thomas, and he responded, “I didn’t like it. I’ve never enjoyed being told what to do.” While I was pondering an appropriate follow-up, he filled the silence with a tentative reflection: “You know, I guess St. Thomas did help me figure out some boundaries between right and wrong, and I relied on those in my work.” “Kind of a moral compass?,” I asked. “Yes, you could say that.”

Sometimes when I welcome alumni back to campus, they have a hard time getting their bearings because so much of the physical environment has changed since they graduated. Fortunately, even though many of the buildings are new, I’m able to identify key aspects of their own St. Thomas experience that haven’t changed – and must never change. These are the threads that run all the way back to 1885.

My conversation with our alum about his moral compass reminded me that one central thread is the whole-person formation of our students – i.e., we don’t just care about what you know or can do; we care about who you’re becoming, about the person you aspire to be. Today our students experience that through story-telling initiatives, conversations on vocation and purpose, the exploration of character and virtue, and so much other work that takes place both inside and outside the classroom. The ways that formation happens vary widely over time and from student to student, but the thread is unmistakable.

Our commitment is reflected in the care we show for the type of person our students are becoming, but it’s also reflected in the recognition we extend for the type of person our graduates have become. Consider the honorees we will celebrate at St. Thomas Day on April 23:

• Charles Morgan Kisitu ’10, founder of See Them Grow Foundation, dedicated to support the health and well-being of women and girls in Uganda.
• Brian McEnaney ’85, a healthcare executive who has served on our CAS advisory board and as a longtime, dedicated mentor for many St. Thomas students.
• Dr. John B. Molidor ’73, has helped shape future generations of physicians with leadership roles in medical education and as founder of the Brain-Based Leadership Institute.
• Teron Buford ’10, ’18 MSWA, leads diversity, inclusion, and belonging efforts at a leading Minnesota company while giving his time and attention to our current students.
• Aidan McGill ’25, a student leader and academic standout who serves in the Army National Guard and exemplifies “responsibility, teamwork and a strong work ethic.”
• J. Roxanne Prichard, PhD, a professor of psychology who devotes her time, expertise and energy to helping improve sleep health among college students.

When we are faithful to this dimension of our mission, we’re advancing the common good far beyond our campus boundaries through the wide-ranging impact of our graduates. And we’re also contributing to our graduates’ own lifelong well-being. A growing body of research is confirming that formation matters. In one recent Harvard study, researchers found that strong moral character (defined in the study as knowing the right thing to do, being willing to do what is right, using one’s strengths to help others, being kind, and embracing delayed gratification) leads to better mental and physical health.

Are prospective students and their families responding to what we offer? Over the past five years, our undergraduate applications are up 22%.

Our mission, our business model and the best interests of our students point us in the same direction: our work is formation. We will prepare students to thrive in their careers, to be sure, but our deeper aspiration is to empower them to flourish as human beings. I’m grateful for all you do to keep this aspiration vibrant and vital at St. Thomas.

With warm regard,
Rob

As millions around the world continue to pray for Pope Francis, I’d like to take the opportunity to reflect on his legacy. In my view, his lessons for our time are best reflected in his encyclical (i.e., papal letter), titled “Fratelli Tutti,” on the theme of “fraternity and social friendship.” Though he wrote it “from the Christian convictions that inspire and sustain me,” he explained that “I have sought to make this reflection an invitation to dialogue among all people of good will.” He published the letter in October 2020, at a time when a global pandemic, racial injustice, economic uncertainty, and growing political polarization were straining our social ties. Several lessons are of direct relevance to the challenges our St. Thomas community faces today:

Dialogue is difficult but essential: Pope Francis wrote that dialogue “calls for perseverance; it entails moments of silence and suffering, yet it can patiently embrace the broader experience of individuals and peoples. . . . [when our conversations] revolve only around the latest data; they become merely horizontal and cumulative. We fail to keep our attention focused, to penetrate to the heart of matters, and to recognize what is essential to give meaning to our lives. Freedom thus becomes an illusion that we are peddled, easily confused with the ability to navigate the internet. The process of building fraternity, be it local or universal, can only be undertaken by spirits that are free and open to authentic encounters.”

We are to shoulder the responsibilities of life as it is: Faced with “so much pain and suffering, our only course is to imitate the Good Samaritan,” as to do otherwise “would make us either one of the robbers or one of those who walked by without showing compassion for the sufferings of the man on the roadside.” We must remember that “a community can be rebuilt by men and women who identify with the vulnerability of others, who reject the creation of a society of exclusion, and act instead as neighbors, lifting up and rehabilitating the fallen for the sake of the common good.”

We are all responsible for keeping real people at the center of our work: “Solidarity finds concrete expression in service, which can take a variety of forms in an effort to care for others ... In offering such service, individuals learn to ‘set aside their own wishes and desires, their pursuit of power, before the concrete gaze of those who are most vulnerable ... Service always looks to their faces, touches their flesh, senses their closeness and even, in some cases, ‘suffers’ that closeness and tries to help them. Service is never ideological, for we do not serve ideas, we serve people.”

Our respect for the dignity of others must be unconditional: “At a time when various forms of fundamentalist intolerance are damaging relationships between individuals, groups and peoples, let us be committed to living and teaching the value of respect for others, a love capable of welcoming differences, and the priority of the dignity of every human being over his or her ideas, opinions, practices and even sins” despite the “forms of fanaticism, closedmindedness and social and cultural fragmentation [that] proliferate in present-day society.”

Our ambitions must not distract us from the needs of others: Pope Francis puts it simply: “loving the most insignificant of human beings as a brother, as if there were no one else in the world but him, cannot be considered a waste of time.” We must realize “that what is important is not constantly achieving great results, since these are not always possible. . . . it is truly noble to place our hope in the hidden power of the seeds of goodness we sow, and thus to initiate processes whose fruits will be reaped by others. Good politics [and good university education!] combines love with hope and with confidence in the reserves of goodness present in human hearts.”

Kindness, kindness, kindness: The practice of kindness can “help make other people’s lives more bearable . . . it involves ‘speaking words of comfort, strength, consolation and encouragement’ and not ‘words that demean, sadden, anger or show scorn.’ . . . Kindness frees us from the cruelty that at times infects human relationships, from the anxiety that prevents us from thinking of others . . . . Kindness ought to be cultivated; it is no superficial bourgeois virtue. Precisely because it entails esteem and respect for others, once kindness becomes a culture within society it transforms lifestyles, relationships and the ways ideas are discussed and compared. Kindness facilitates the quest for consensus; it opens new paths where hostility and conflict would burn all bridges.”

In the coming week, what simple steps might we take to integrate the Pope’s reminders with the work we have before us? As our world reels from anxiety, violence, uncertainty and loss, what might it look like for us to “combine love with hope and with confidence in the reserves of goodness present in human hearts?”

With warm regard,
Rob

Dear alumni,

If you’re on campus in the coming days, I encourage you to visit the Hoedeman Gallery in our Iversen Center for Faith. We have a new exhibit on the parable of the Good Samaritan. It is powerful and worthy of our time and reflection. As is often the case, this sacred art conveys challenging truths about the faith on which our university was founded and which still animates our mission today.

Jesus shared the parable of the Good Samaritan in response to an expert in the law, who asked, in reference to the scriptural command to love our neighbors, “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus told the story of a dying man on the side of the road who had been attacked, beaten, and stripped by bandits. The first two men who came upon the scene were religious leaders, but they kept right on walking. The third was from a group (the Samaritans) that Jesus knew would not have been deemed friendly by his audience. Nevertheless, the third traveler stopped, bandaged the man’s wounds, and took him to an inn to care for him at his own expense.

This is not a long-forgotten Bible story. This lesson remains at the heart of any meaningfully Catholic engagement with the world. If I am tempted to define my neighbors as those who think like me, look like me, talk like me, vote like me or worship like me, the parable of the Good Samaritan provides an emphatic, “No!” Pope Francis explains that Jesus takes the question, “Who is my neighbor?” and turns it around. The parable cautions us against “classifying others by sight [as to] who is neighbor and who is not.” Instead, according to Francis, “you can become neighbor to any needy person you meet, and you will know that you have compassion in your heart, that is . . . you have the capacity to suffer with the other.”

Other popes have also underscored the importance of this parable. Saint John Paul II, for example, affirmed: “The neighbor is every human being without exception. It is not necessary to ask his nationality, or to which social or religious group he belongs.” If a person “is in need,” that person “must be helped.” And Pope Benedict explained that the parable “abolished” the old concept of neighbor, which used to be understood to refer “to the closely-knit community of a single country or people.” And now, the concept of neighbor is “universalized, yet it remains concrete. Despite being extended to all mankind, it is not reduced to a generic, abstract and undemanding expression of love, but calls for my own practical commitment here and now.”

Who is my neighbor? And how does that neighbor call me to a practical commitment here and now? Our mission does not permit us to dodge these questions.

With warm regard,

Rob

Dear alumni,

I recently spoke to a group of St. Thomas alumni who work for one of Minnesota’s largest employers. Several alumni stayed after to ask me questions. As the group began to break up and return to work, one woman lingered behind. She introduced herself and began to share her story with me. An immigrant from a South American country, she came to St. Thomas even though she had never been to Minnesota because we offered her a generous scholarship. Despite the winters, she found a warm and welcoming community here, and she never left. She graduated thirty years ago, has raised a family here, and talked about the many ways she has tried to give back to the Twin Cities over the decades as a way to pay forward what St. Thomas did for her.

Our conversation was yet another reminder for me: the immigrant story is central to the St. Thomas story, and always has been. Our founder, Archbishop John Ireland, was born in Kilkenny, Ireland, and was motivated to bring recent immigrants into the mainstream life of the Church and nation through a high-quality Catholic education. In the early years – before 1900 – a visiting dignitary noted in his journal that there were eight different languages spoken at the ceremony welcoming him to our campus. Many of the luminaries who were formed by a St. Thomas education over the past 140 years were not born in the United States. Today so many of our brightest, most mission-driven students are immigrants, as are many of our world-class faculty, staff and administrative leaders.

We should always be asking ourselves whether we are living out our mission in ways that meet the needs of our students and the world around us. Is our mission a statement on a plaque or an engine driving us forward? When you look at our history, one defining thread over all these years is our dedication to living out our mission, in part, by ensuring that immigrants can thrive at St. Thomas.

That dedication emerges directly from our Catholic identity. Pope Francis has reiterated that welcoming those from other countries is “a requirement of charity but foremost a matter of justice,” and the need to do so is “very urgent today.” This emphasis is not unique to Pope Francis, of course. Pope John Paul II spoke of the importance “to involve in this work of solidarity those Christian communities frequently infected by a public opinion that is often hostile to immigrants.” The Catholic bishops of the United States have called “all people of good will . . . to welcome the newcomers in their neighborhoods and schools, in their places of work and worship, with heartfelt hospitality, openness and eagerness both to help and to learn from our brothers and sisters of whatever religion, ethnicity or background.”

I have a message for those of you who came to our campus from other countries around the world: I am grateful for you, and I am glad that you are part of our community. I know that this is a time of uncertainty and anxiety surrounding the future of immigration policies and practices. There is room at St. Thomas for good-faith disagreement about ideas for reforming the U.S. immigration system. But what is beyond debate is our longstanding and unshakeable commitment: we will welcome, respect and celebrate immigrants. And we will be stronger for it.

With warm regard,

Rob