FINDING GOD ON PARK STREET
Dive into the heart of the Catholic experience at Yale University with host Grace Klise, Director of Alumni Engagement at Saint Thomas More. In each episode, Grace and her student co-hosts engage in conversations with students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members. Together, they discuss the nuances of living out the Catholic faith in today's world, culminating in the question, "Where have you found God?" This podcast offers a space to explore the intersection of spirituality, community, and education, providing listeners with personal insights and meaningful perspectives. Subscribe now to join the journey of discovery and connection.
FINDING GOD ON PARK STREET
Father Pat Reidy: Answering A Call Within A Call
Here, at Saint Thomas More, we love our priests. And when one of those priests is carrying a backpack and going to classes and pulling all-nighters to finish a paper, we love them even more!
Fr. Pat Reidy, a priest from the Congregation of Holy Cross, has spent a lot of time around Yale and Saint Thomas More the last five years. Before he moved away from New Haven to return to the University of Notre Dame this past summer, we spent time with him reflecting on his life as a priest and law student/now lawyer. Fr. Pat’s “call within a call” to study law as a professed religious has not been without its challenges, some of which he describes in this conversation.
This is Finding God on Park Street, a podcast from Saint Thomas More Yale's Catholic Chapel and Center. I'm your Grace Klise with my student co-host, Mary Margaret Schroeder. Thanks for joining us. At Saint Thomas More we love our priests, and when one of those priests is carrying a backpack and going to classes and pulling all-nighters to finish a paper, we love them even more. Father Pat Reidy, a priest from the Congregation of Holy Cross, has spent a lot of time around Yale and STM the last five years before he moved away from New Haven to return to the University of Notre Dame. This past summer, Mary Margaret and I spent time with him reflecting on his life as a priest and law student, now lawyer. Father Pat's "call within a call" to study law as a professed religious has not been without its challenges, some of which he describes in this conversation. Let's dive in.
Fr. Pat Reidy:I've had the great privilege of studying law here at Yale for four out of the last five years. I did my JD at Yale Law School and graduated in 2021. And then I've been back here for this past year as a fellow in private law and a visiting lecturer in law. I'm a property wonk. I study how the Church uses its property and try to help the Church think about how to use properties that are maybe underutilized, unutilized, for better purposes.
Fr. Pat Reidy:I had the great privilege of knowing Grace Carroll, first as the little sister of one of my freshman residents in Soren College when I was a senior RA. He moved in next door to me and the Carroll family all moved their eldest brother in, and there is little Grace. But then, more joyfully, as a senior, Grace was the director of our freshman retreat program at Notre Dame that I, as a newly ordained priest, was the director. We worked together for the fall semester on that and then collaborated for a pretty landmark spirituality study that campus ministry put on trying to figure out how to meet the needs of our students, and so Grace and I collaborated with a few other students to really look at what other college campus ministries were doing, including St Thomas Moore at Yale. So my first encounter with Yale University and St Thomas More was actually while still working in campus ministry, long before I thought that law school was a possibility for me. So there's a lot, of a lot of providence in sharing this conversation now.
Grace Klise:Yeah, coming from full circle in in many ways. Now, something that I think a number of our students at STM are a little confused about is what does it mean to be a religious versus Father Ryan and the past chaplains at Saint Thomas More have been priests of the Archdiocese of Hartford. You, though, are not, so could you explain what it means to be part of the Congregation of Holy Cross and how that is different from being an archdiocesan priest like Father Ryan?
Fr. Pat Reidy:Totally so, in broad strokes, within Roman Catholicism you have religious order priests and diocesan priests. Diocesan priests are priests of a particular place. So Father Ryan is from Manchester, Connecticut. He joined the Archdiocese of Hartford that serves in Manchester and Hartford and also here in New Haven, and so he is largely obedient to his local bishop, his Archbishop Blair, and receives his assignments from them. So he prepares for ministry within the Archdiocese. Most diocesan priests tend to be parish priests. In Father Ryan's case, he's a university chaplain and the pastor of New Haven, Connecticut.
Fr. Pat Reidy:Religious order priests, conversely, respond to particular needs of the church in the world at different points in history. And so you think of some of the bigger, better- known religious orders the Dominicans, the Benedictines, the Franciscans, the Jesuits. Those were all communities that were founded at a particular time. There were holy men and women who saw the needs of the church or the needs of the world and said here's what I think we can do to respond. And so those orders, you can know them in many respects, based on their history, based on the need of the church or the world at the time and how that need has evolved over time. You get to know their religious founders, who they were. As people, they're all saints, right? So some of the great saints of the church were founders of religious orders who saw that initial need and gathered men and women around them to respond to that need.
Fr. Pat Reidy:For my own religious order, the Congregation of Holy Cross were literally the association of San Qua.
Fr. Pat Reidy:We're from a neighborhood outside of Le Mans in France called San Qua, holy Cross, and like many Catholic religious orders, we were founded after the French Revolution in the early 19th century.
Fr. Pat Reidy:Our founder, blessed Basil Moreau, almost a saint, was a diocesan priest himself and a university professor, and he saw that after the French Revolution there wasn't a lot of sacramental ministry happening in France. There also wasn't a lot of education happening in France, and so he gathered priests and religious brothers together, and eventually religious sisters, and said you know, this is what we can do for our community here in Le Mans. We can preach at parishes, we can gather brothers together to teach in schools and, over time, other bishops you know, in in parts of the world caught on that this little Holy Cross community was pretty good at what they did, and so they invited Holy Cross to serve in their dioceses in Africa and the United States and in Haiti and eventually in Bangladesh and India and South America. And so our founding in the United States, at the University of Notre Dame, was in response to a bishop in Indiana who wanted some of Father Moreau's priests and brothers to come and serve. So here we are.
Grace Klise:So that's how you first came into contact with the congregation of Holy Cross was while as an undergrad at the University of Notre Dame.
Fr. Pat Reidy:Yep, exactly so. I grew up in Denver, colorado. I knew mostly diocesan priests growing up. I met the Jesuits in high school and went to Notre Dame, largely because I was discerning religious life in priesthood but very quietly, I mostly just wanted to go to college and receive a good education, hopefully have a decent sports team to cheer for. And so I went to Notre Dame and that's where I discovered the Congregation of Holy Cross.
Mary Margaret Schroeder:That's awesome. Do you have a favorite part about being a Holy Cross priest?
Fr. Pat Reidy:Oh, I have many favorite parts. Ultimately, the thing I would say my favorite part is also the reason why I joined Holy Cross and discerned, kind of a way from other religious orders. We're a teaching order that's modeled on the Holy Family. I grew up in a tight-knit Irish-Italian family. We had dinner together every night growing up and I knew that I didn't necessarily
Fr. Pat Reidy:you know, pretty early on I had a sense I didn't necessarily need to be married or have kids of my own. But wherever I was in life, whatever I was doing, I needed to be a part of a family or something like a family. And so looking at the diocesan priests I knew growing up, looking at some of the religious orders that I knew they were doing amazingly inspiring work, I liked their job description. But I didn't necessarily see that community, that family that I needed. And you know it's a part of our religious constitutions that we live together in community, that we pray together, that we eat together. It's what makes these couple of years that I've been at Yale sort of weird right, like I'm not living together with Holy Cross community. I receive permission from my community so that I'm able to study here at Yale. But it's all the more reason why it was so important for me to have a community at St Thomas More and to have Father Ryan as a dear friend and brother priest in that community.
Grace Klise:Yeah, and when I first knew you, Father Pat, when I was a senior in college, I knew you as a priest involved in campus ministry and you were overseeing a men's dorm on campus and then it seems like there was almost this call within a call. You were a priest of the congregation of Holy Cross, but when did law school come into the picture, where you always passionate about neglected and underutilized church properties?
Fr. Pat Reidy:No, no, not in the slightest. And even it's sort of funny, even within the legal world, to introduce myself as a scholar of property law. You know, teaching land use in the fall it's, you know, it's like, yeah, it's sort of like the nerdy subject within a potentially nerdy subject. No, I, so I thought about law school off and on from kind of middle school onward. I've always been a social studies nerd. I've been blessed with wonderful social studies teachers from grade school onward, and so law was something that was interesting and I would say during my time in undergrad that was sort of publicly what I would say I was thinking of doing. Privately. I was discerning seminary, but you don't get dance dates or you know really any opportunity to date somebody if you say like, yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm going to become a priest, but you want to hang out and get coffee, and so law was always there, but just as sort of an idea.
Fr. Pat Reidy:I studied political science as an undergrad and then, and then really got to senior year and was like I need to give the seminary thing a shot. I've thought about it and prayed about it my whole life. Maybe it's wrong, right that I can give God a year, and if it's wrong then I can get on with my life. So then fast forward, you know, through seminary, through ordination, for a couple of years working on campus, and my religious superiors, starting in seminary, but really after I was ordained, had been saying you know, Pat, we need you to think about going back to school. We're not going to force you into anything, but we love you. You're kind of a nerd. We think you actually have the capacity to do higher-level academic work. We think you would actually love being a teacher. We think you'd be a very good professor. I did not see that in myself, necessarily, but in wanting to be open to that conversation that's very much what our vow of obedience is, is sort of a vow to listen and to be involved in mutual listening with our superiors. And so I came back to them and said look, I'm not convinced that I'm supposed to do a PhD or really any advanced study. But let's hedge our bets a little bit. What if I did a law degree? Best case scenario I become a law professor. Not worst case scenario, but different case scenario I have a legal education that can be put to good use by Holy Cross, by our institutions. That's a subject that I'm actually interested in. I've got some questions that I could explore. But so I went to law school with no research agenda. I had no idea what I was doing really, except that I wanted to train my mind to be of service to Holy Cross.
Fr. Pat Reidy:And the Church property happened really because I was running away from Yale a little bit. I had a bit of a tumultuous first semester, and Yale is one of the few law schools in the world that doesn't actually require property. Almost every law school does because it's on the Bar exam, it's a constitutive subject in the law and so I decided to take it as a second- semester law student, sort of as my little mini rebellion against all of my classmates who were not studying it, and I fell in love with it. I had a marvelous, marvelous professor who took an interest in me. I had the opportunity to write a paper. He suggested that maybe I could explore issues involving Church property, which I was able to do. Yeah, I look back on it and it's totally providence right? There's no reason why any of that should have happened except for providence. But yeah, that's how I end up as a land use professor.
Mary Margaret Schroeder:That's awesome. Speaking of providence, Father Pat, I don't know if you remember this, but the very first time I ever visited Yale, my dad and I were walking up Wall Street after doing our campus tour and he was asking me, Mary Margaret, what do you think about Yale, do you think that this is a place you could see yourself applying to? And I said, gosh, Dad, I don't know. It seems like a really great place, but I don't know what it would be like to be Catholic here. And, as if on cue, as we passed the law school, you walk out of those doors in your blacks. And my dad said I wonder what Father Pat would have to say about this.
Mary Margaret Schroeder:And I got to meet you and that ended up being one of the main reasons why I came to Yale, having that conversation with you. But I'm very curious if you could tell us a little bit more about what it was like being a priest at Yale Law School, especially during the years that you were there were in our country a little more tumultuous. So what was that experience like for you?
Fr. Pat Reidy:Yeah, I'm very heartened to know that walking out of a building at a providentially ordained time played a role in your own discernment, because, Lord knows, you've been such a gift to this community. It's hard to say what Yale Law School was like because for half of my time in law school I wasn't in the building. COVID shut the world down early on in my second year and so a lot of classes moved to Zoom that semester certainly but even the following year a lot of classes were over Zoom and so, having been a guy in formation, having gone through the novitiate, it was fairly easy for me to transition into a sort of alone studious experience at St Thomas More. But you're right, the years at Yale Law School were tumultuous for our country. They were tumultuous for the law school. The first semester I was there, the school was deeply frustrated with the state of the country, the former president, any number of things going on in the judiciary, and I was only vaguely aware of a lot of that. I didn't come in with the Justices trading cards or really know what different levels of judges were or what firms were more attractive or paid more. I'd run a dorm, I'd been a campus minister at Notre Dame, I was chaplain to a law school so I knew that it was stressful for students, but I didn't really know a whole lot about the dynamics that seemed to have a lot of my classmates hot and bothered all the time. One of the gifts of that experience and again this is absolutely providence at work, when I'm in an uncomfortable place, I lean into the things that I know best. I think most of us do this, but the thing that I knew best at that point in my life was how to be a pastor. I didn't know anything about the law I was still relearning how to be a student because I hadn't been in a classroom for a decade but I knew how to be a pastor.
Fr. Pat Reidy:And for my classmates who were very angry justifiably or unjustifiably they were very angry about a lot of things going on in the world and at the school, and so my disposition towards them became one of listening how are you doing? What's going on? I'm sorry that hurts. That must be really frustrating. And without needing to get into any kind of judgment about whether I thought they were right or wrong to be bothered about things or whether I agreed or disagreed with them, it's a funny thing when you ask someone how they're doing and they're really bothered.
Fr. Pat Reidy:They're not necessarily always in a place to return the question and so in some ways, some of the maybe harder conversations early on about being a priest or Catholicism or differences in the way that we might view the world, those kind of passed by.
Fr. Pat Reidy:There were some opportunities to share commonality with professors and with classmates, to be able to delve into the beauty of our church's social tradition, to be able to speak about our beliefs involving human dignity and the common good, but early on there wasn't a lot of room for that.
Fr. Pat Reidy:What happened over time was that as my classmates came to see I think I hope that I'm largely harmless, that I'm not much of a bomb thrower in conversations and that I genuinely do care for their well-being that then there were opportunities to engage in some of those deeper conversations, to go out for coffee or grab a beer, or it was funny to correct for them the fact that I could drink beer, that in fact I drink a little bit of alcohol every day as a constitutive part of one of our sacraments. They just didn't know, and a lot of them just didn't know anything about Catholicism or the priesthood, and so to be able to remember that in conversations too, that there is no grammar or vocabulary for this. So if I get a question that seems sort of awkward, that's coming from, I'm going to presume at least, that's coming from a desire to understand and a sort of lack of conversationality with it.
Grace Klise:And I'm just thinking of your wonderful 9 pm homilies, which we heard the last one last evening at the last 9 pm Mass of the semester, as your days are numbered here in New Haven as we're wrapping up this spring semester. But you often would reference in your homilies some of the joys and challenges of being a student at Yale, which you have a really unique perspective on amongst the chaplains, although you don't officially hold that title at STM, you are a pastor to this community and have been over the last five years. So how has that experienced the joys and challenges of being a Catholic at Yale yes, at Yale Law School? How has that been able to serve you in relating to and encouraging the students who walk through the doors of STM every day?
Fr. Pat Reidy:Yeah, it's hard not to see myself, as a student but even as a professor this year, to not see myself in total solidarity with our students. When I was the chaplain at Notre Dame Law School for the last couple of years that I was ministering on campus, my heart would break for students in the midst of their stress and anxiety and disappointment and everything else, but there was a way in which I was always sort of other to them. You know, empathy could only bridge the gap between their experience and mine. So much this time around, every time I encountered a student who was worried about something, I knew intimately what it was like to be worried about it because invariably I was also stressing about something similar, right, a writing deadline that I was behind on, an idea that was just not crystallizing in a paper and exam that I was invariably going to be destroyed by, like those realities, even in our Masters of Divinity program, right, like you're, basically by the third year of the program, you're basically done with the arduous academic coursework unless you choose to enter into it freely. So it had been some time since I'd really been been playing school in any kind of hard-nosed way and that, yeah, that stress that you know, moment of panic in wondering if I really, you know, know what I'm doing in this and, to some extent, the larger, the larger existential questions of discernment that come with it. Right, maybe not as much for the undergrads, but in graduate school you are constantly reminded of the fact that you chose to be there, right, in undergrad you have the great privilege of being there, but I think for a lot of our undergrads there's a there's sort of a presumption like well, this is what you do after high school, right, you continue to educate yourself. You have the great joy and privilege of receiving a wonderful education. When you're in graduate school, you may have left another career. In my case, I left a job that I loved and was, you know, serviceably decent at to enter into an academic program that, at least initially, I felt like I was terrible at and had no idea what I was doing.
Fr. Pat Reidy:I I go back often to that first semester of law school, the first year, but especially the first semester, in reflecting on how to be a better pastor for students, and especially students in in kind of high achieving environments like Yale or Notre Dame, because I think it could be easy to look at somebody who's graduated from law school now, who has a couple advanced degrees and who's a so-called professor, and imagine that like, oh, they must have always had this all figured out.
Fr. Pat Reidy:They must know exactly what they're doing. You know, cool that you have this like research trajectory that you discovered really early on. Like it's hard to explain to people just how much that wasn't the case during the first year of law school. And so, whether it's in the context of confession, right, receiving the moments of brokenness that are almost always symptomatic of somebody's insecurity or anxiety or stress, or preaching to the needs of a community that is navigating the crests and troughs of an academic year, that experience of having been a student in this place that very much tried my soul in a lot of ways has enriched, I hope, the way that I try to minister.
Mary Margaret Schroeder:Yeah, thinking about difficulties as a student, I think back to a couple specific homilies that you had at Daily Mass and on Sundays about the Constitutions of the Holy Cross, especially the eighth one talking about suffering and the cross. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Because I think you always do such a good job explaining it so beautifully.
Fr. Pat Reidy:Oh sure, I mean so we have eight constitutions in our congregation: the first on God's call, the last on the cross, our hope and all in between. Like every religious order, there are constitutions that define our common life and who we are as a community and our mission.
Fr. Pat Reidy:But I think constitution eight, in a particular way, names what has been and should always be true of our ministry that we are intimately involved in standing side by side with people who suffer, which is sort of a funny thing to think about when you are part of a university that has a golden dome or has some of the smartest and most talented students in the world, until you encounter them with their first moment of failure. You encounter them, you know a B-. It's the first time they haven't gotten an A on something. You encounter them the first time they make a mistake with alcohol or sex or they break up with a long- time significant other or their parents are going through a divorce or a loved one is sick. Those moments of suffering are just as real whether or not your institution has a multi-billion dollar endowment. You don't have to go to Bangladesh or Haiti or Peru to encounter real suffering, which is not to say that the very, very abject material poverty of those places is somehow, you know, is somehow the same as getting a B- right?
Fr. Pat Reidy:But there's a truth to what our eighth constitution says, that is, that there is no failure the Lord's love cannot reverse. That
Fr. Pat Reidy:there's no humiliation that the Lord cannot exchange for blessing, right?
Fr. Pat Reidy:There's no anger that can't be dissolved by God's love.
Fr. Pat Reidy:That is at the core of our faith, that is the Easter hope that we are baptized into and that we make our lives about.
Fr. Pat Reidy:And I think every Christian we encounter at Notre Dame or at St Thomas More sort of knows that in their mind, but whether they always believe that, and particularly whether they believe that in those moments when they encounter the cross, you know, even those of us with the deepest faith doubt. When we're hurting right, we wonder if we'll see light again when we're in the midst of darkness. And so it matters to me as somebody you know, following the last question, as somebody who has known moments of real trial here, right—a gain, not a struggle with access to clean water, not a struggle with violence against myself or my community, not a struggle to practice my faith, but struggles that get at the core of vocation and discernment and being in this world as a Christian. Being able to draw on that eighth constitution as a source of wisdom and hope for myself, as something that I vowed my life to and hold on to in moments when I doubt. To be able to share that gift with others is a cause of hope.
Grace Klise:And now there's a whole group of people here in New Haven that know about constitution eight.
Fr. Pat Reidy:Praise God.
Grace Klise:So it really seems like you have clung to these in your time, apart from your community, and although you haven't been living in community with brothers in Holy Cross, you've been living in community with Father Ryan, especially during COVID.
Fr. Pat Reidy:We were each other's COVID bubble.
Grace Klise:So what was that experience like? How have you grown in your spiritual life and then, as a priest and pastor too, through that friendship with our chaplain, Father Ryan?
Fr. Pat Reidy:Yeah, no, I mean Father Ryan is, Father Ryan is God's greatest gift to me in these last five years. I would not have survived law school, I would not be a professor at this point, if not for the friendship and brotherhood and community, for the opportunity to return to this place. You know it's no secret that I contribute relatively little to the pastoral ministry to the Catholic community in New Haven as compared to Father Ryan or some of his other amazingly hardworking diocesan priests in this community, and he's been okay with that, right? He's been entirely supportive of me in moments where I've needed to say I need to focus on writing, I need to finish this paper that's constitutive of my job interview to be a professor at Notre Dame. I need to figure out how to survive this exam. You know to have somebody who is all things to all people be that for me too and at the same time always invite me into his pastoral ministry, inviting me to share with the community of St Thomas More and greater New Haven, to think with me about ways that I might be able to uniquely contribute to ministry, to our students ministry, to our wider New Haven community, and to do all of that in the midst of sharing a life in the residence. That's just fun, right, like I feel tremendously, tremendously fortunate to have had the quote, unquote "COVID bubble. That I did right.
Fr. Pat Reidy:We, early, early on, when we were trying to figure out with the rest of the world what this pandemic was and what we needed to do to keep each other and others we loved safe, we created something of a routine that has basically persisted since then in terms of, you know, sharing meals together, sharing you know, a nightcap together, processing each other's days. You know, from everything that's going on in the Church in New Haven to whatever craziness is happening at Yale Law School. We've covered a lot of shows together, some that we had seen before, others that were new, most of which are not necessarily appropriate for sharing with our daily or Sunday Mass crowds. But yeah, in that friendship and in that brotherhood, I have known very much what I fell in love with, with the congregation of Holy Cross. And while Father Ryan isn't technically a CSE, I think if he were to come and visit Notre Dame he would fold right into our community.
Mary Margaret Schroeder:That's awesome, Father Pat. It sounds like, yeah, your friendship is such a witness to God's love in our lives. I know that you, because you've lived in the residence, have had a special peek into finding God on Park Street because you have had that experience of living right here. But thinking about our last question that we like to ask all of our guests, where have you been finding God recently— whether that be on Park Street, right where you're living, or otherwise in your life?
Fr. Pat Reidy:Yeah, in two ways in the same place.
Fr. Pat Reidy:So the chapel at St Thomas More is a space that I grew in fondness for early on in law school because it was one of the few places where things were still, where it was quiet, where it was peaceful, where obviously we know our Lord was present and in many ways I needed him to be present, and so I've continued to find God in those quiet moments, often late in the evening, after the center's closed and students have gone home and I'm trying to figure out what's happening with zoning restrictions in some part of the country, I'll often take little breaks and wander from the residence into the chapel and many nights we'll just sit on the floor in the center aisle and stare up at the crucifix and talk with God about where we are, where we've been, where we're going.
Fr. Pat Reidy:To juxtapose that with, then, the experience of daily Mass and our 9 pm Mass, which has been my regular favorite, and having a community of faith that regularly sits in the same spots in the chapel that you can sort of predictably identify people and be able to build that kind of relationship as a preacher, as a presider, to know that while I'm presiding over the liturgy, I'm very much sharing in a communal celebration of Eucharist that draws us all together as one body in Christ and that ultimately sends all of us forth to be Christ's hands and feet in the world. And so to juxtapose that same space at 268 Park Street, both the quiet, peaceful moments of contemplation in the evening and the more beautiful but sometimes boisterous moments during Mass, that moment of being wound up to be sent forth, with God's grace, into the world, that's where I've been finding God.
Mary Margaret Schroeder:Gosh, that's beautiful. Well, thank you so much, Father Pat, for being with us, not only today, but for all that you've been to me and Grace and our whole STM community. I definitely, last night, at your last 9 pm homily, was getting a little misty-eyed thinking about STM without you, because I think it's been such a highlight of my whole time at Yale having you here with us. So just really grateful for your presence in all this.
Fr. Pat Reidy:The joy is mine truly.
Grace Klise:We're really excited for the future too. Earlier you described returning to Notre Dame as a law professor as the best- case scenario, and that is, in fact, what you will be doing. So just know that the prayers of this community go with you into this next chapter, and we're so grateful that you have called STM SDM a home the last five years and hope that you'll continue to call it a home and pop back in next time that you are in New Haven.
Fr. Pat Reidy:Absolutely. You better believe it.
Grace Klise:Thanks, Father Pat, and thanks to all who listened today. We will see you next time on Finding God on Park Street. If you enjoyed listening today, please share this episode and leave us a rating and review. The producer of this podcast is Robin McShane, Director of Communications at STM. Sound mixing and editing are by Ryan McEvoy of Yale Broadcast Studio and graphics are by Mary Lou Cadwell of Cadwell Art Direction. We hope this podcast encourages you to seek God's presence in your everyday life. Thanks for listening and be assured of our prayers.
