Reunion 2025, Part 2: Father Ted Said, Bridge Builders

Episode Topic: Bridge Builders

Around the world, many observers are concerned about losing a sense of community as fewer and fewer people feel a responsibility to care for others. With a growing and often welcome emphasis on individual rights and freedoms, how should we—individually and collectively—think about our responsibilities to one another? In a world where ideological and cultural divisions seem to have deepened and caused terrible suffering, we are called to build bridges between people to face the challenges of our times. Be inspired by our speaker lineup of alumni and faculty who are bridge builders in a fractured world  – just like Fr. Ted.

Featured Speakers:
-Rev. Austin I. Collins, C.S.C. ’77, Vice President for Mission Engagement and Church Affairs, University of Notre Dame
-Elizabeth (Betsy) Bohlen ’90, Chief Operating Officer, Archdiocese of Chicago
-David Go ’01, Vice President and Associate Provost for Academic Strategy, University of Notre Dame
-Edward Hahnenberg ’95, ’97 M.A., ’02 Ph.D., Author of Theodore Hesburgh, CSC: Bridge Builder (2020), Breen Chair in Catholic Theology, Chair of the Department of Theology & Religious Studies and Director of the Tuohy Center for Interreligious Understanding, John Carroll University
-Tracy Kijewski-Correa ’97, ’00 M.S., ’03 Ph.D., William J. Pulte Director, Pulte Institute for Global Development; Professor of Engineering and Global Affairs; University of Notre Dame

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Fr. Ted Said.

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Transcript

Welcome and Introduction

1 0:06

I'm Dolly Duffy, the executive director of your Notre Dame Alumni Association and a member of the class of 1984. Thanks so much for coming to the Father, Ted said speaker series. the idea behind Father Ted said is relatively simple. We choose a topic that Father Ted was passionate about and invite experts from the Notre Dame family to deliver brief personal talks on all different aspects of that topic. The series is covered themes such as peace building and security, civil and human rights. The 50th anniversary of co-education at Notre Dame, and last year we celebrated the hundredth anniversary of God Country Notre Dame, the inscription above the World War I Memorial Door at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Through this series, we hope to shine a light on experiences and work of the Notre Dame family and all through it. Honor Father Ted's legacy. This year is no exception. We explore the theme of bridge builders. It's an important topic at a critical time. You may have noticed in your own lives and observations, a growing sense of the loss of community in favor of individualism. It's a phenomenon that touches all of us, as it seems, fewer and fewer people feel a responsibility to care for others while ideological and cultural forces seek to divide us in his own time. Father Ted saw these forces and called on Notre Dame to be a leader in creating unity, a university. He once said, quote, should be a bridge across all chasms that separate modern people from each other. It is this principle that guided father Ted throughout his life as a priest, academic university, present president and civil rights leader. He often spoke of a priest as a pontifex, a Latin word, meaning bridge builder, and certainly he lived up to that calling today. That remains Father Ted's legacy at his funeral. Former Notre Dame President Father John Jenkins reflected on his memory and how Father Ted modeled this role as someone who quote builds bridges between people to draw'em together to serve the common good. In his inaugural address. Last fall, university president, father Bob down, called on us to continue to look to this example he cited for tellie, the encyclical by Pope Francis, in which the Holy Father to encourage us. To be more like Mary, to quote, build bridges, to break down walls, to sow seed of reconciliation. Put another way. Father Dow said to build bridges is to be an imitation of our lady, of to embody the very spirit of Notre Dame. It is a theme of such importance that it continues to be emphasized by our new Pope Leo iv, who has spoken of the need to build bridges between nations, religions, and communities. Today's program truly could not have come at a better time. I hope you'll leave inspired by our speakers, all of whom are bridge builders in their own rights. And I'm so excited about this lineup of speakers. I think it'll be an afternoon really well spent. So without further ado, I will hand it over to our host, father Austin colleagues, a member of the class of 1977, and Notre Dame's, vice President for mission engagement and church affairs Father Austin.

Notre Dame's Role in Global Development

2 (2) 3:59

Thank you, Dolly. As Pope Leo stepped onto the balcony in St. Peters Square and addressed the world for the first time, he said, we are all in God's hands. Therefore, without fear, united hand in hand with God among ourselves, let us move forward. We are disciples of Christ. Christ precedes us. Us. The world needs his light. Humanity needs him as the bridge to be reached by God and his love. Help us too and then each other to build bridges with dialogue and encounter. Uniting us all by one people, always in peace. Thank you, Pope Francis. This is the call building Bridges. Christ reminds us the dialogue to encounter our central parts of all Christians. Pope Francis. On July 13th, 2013, just a few months into his path to sea, he visited an island, a major transit point for refugees trying to reach Europe. While there, he prayed for those who had been lost at sea trying to make the dangerous journey. One of the central messages of Pope Francis Papay was outreach to the people on the margins who are often overload. As a Catholic university, Notre Dame is charged to reach out to those on the margins, building bridges within our own community so that we do not create margins within the Notre Dame family or church. Encouraging interfaith and ecumenical dialogue is a key part of Notre Dame's identity. Notre Dame's Contour Institute. Ecumenical Institute, which is located outside of Jerusalem, plays a key role in bringing people from different faith traditions together. And to learn and to pray alongside each other. In a similar vein, my office runs regular seminars for faculty and staff to explore not Dame's Catholic and Holy Cross Mission, and to examine how everyone working on this campus, regardless of their faith tradition, might help further the mission of this university. Creating opportunities for dialogue and bridge building is essential. Part of Notre Dame's mission as a Catholic university in building these bridges within our community is often important, is building them to people who might be considered outside it. One of the key roles of our office plays as a connector between Notre Dame and the broader church, including the US Bishops. And also all those who work at the Vatican. Cultivating these relationships allow us to connect our faculty with the Vatican and the broader church resources that might not otherwise have access to, to help the church take advantage of the expertise of Notre Dame's first class faculty. While building bridges may be a new way of talking about what we do at Notre Dame. It's been a long each opportunity for this university, a long tradition way before me or Father Bob, or even Father Ted. It continues with all of you. I am excited to hear from our alumni today as they share with you building bridges after graduating from Notre Dame. Father Ted would be so proud of these members of the Notd Dame family. Get ready to be inspired by their stories

8:27

We may wise up enough to start working together for a better world, for a better material Ambience, first of all, in which human dignity is possible. It's hard to have human dignity if you're an economic or physical slave. If you don't have enough to eat or drink. If you. Are cold when it's cold and wet when it's raining'cause you've got no shelter when your children have no possible hope for an education when you never see a doctor from the day you're born to the day you die and there's no medicine around, even if there isn't a doctor, when all of your hope is shriveled up because people are taking the good things of the earth, including intelligence and talent, as well as treasure. And spending them mostly on machines of destruction where we might be spending'em on education and health and, and, uh, creating a better world.

4 (2) 9:17

Please welcome the William J. Poole, director of the Poole Institute for Global Development, professor of Engineering and Global Affairs and Triple Domer, Tracy Kaki, Karea of the undergraduate class of 1997, master of Science from the class of 2000 and PhD from the class of 2003.

5 (2) 9:54

I grew up in East Chicago, Indiana, and like Rudy, my family worked at Steel mills when they were thriving and when they closed, I watched my community crumble. My grandfather stepped up to raise me when my father left. He saw a little girl who loved to solve problems and shared his passion for Matt. He took me under his wing. And he entertained my countless questions about how things work and why things are the way they are. And I'll never forget the day I confronted the question that changed my life forever. I was 10 years old watching on TV as crews were digging furiously for survivors after an earthquake hit Mexico City. And I looked at my grandpa and I said, if we could build the skyscrapers in Chicago, why can't we build hospitals not to collapse in an earthquake? And my childlike mind had no idea that poverty was the reason why. So my grandpa saw potential in me, and so he pushed me to do something. No one in my family ever did attend college, and he planted the seeds of Notre Dame in my mind. But when my high school was shut down by gang violence and lost its accreditation, it seemed that dream might be out of reach. But Notre Dame saw the potential in me. And I learned to fight then very young, and that fighting spirit, it carried me through, not one, but three degrees from Notre Dame and eventually even onto its faculty. My desire to not just study problems but solve them will that attracted me to engineering and specifically a civil engineering. Eventually, my career would be devoted to helping build that better world that fathers had talked about by going to places that are vulnerable to disaster and helping them. I actually arrive on the morning after I hear their hopes, their dreams, and their fears on what is the worst day of their lives, and it's up to me to dig through that destruction and find solutions that help them build back better and with dignity. I still think about my toughest assignment that was Haiti after the great earthquake in 2010. And I'm coming back on the airplane after surveying the damage for the first time. And all I could keep thinking was, how are we gonna solve this? And that little girl, she's in my head saying, why? Why? Or as we say, in Haitian Creole, Pooky saw, why did all those buildings collapse? Actually, the technical reasons for that are quite clear, but the real why, well, that is a complex story intertwined with the history of the first slave colony to free itself, only to become the poorest nation in the west. Years later, a major hurricane that hits Haiti again, devastation, why I'm out there surveying the damage again. And this time of mother, she jumps up off of the stoop of a collapsed home and runs toward me. No words, just a look of devastation in her eyes and just hands me her child, that mother. Just like so many other Haitians didn't expect to ever get out of poverty and certainly not recover from that disaster. And in that moment, father Ted's teachings came to life that showed me how poverty and equality, they strip our basic human dignity. And in the case of that mother made her so vulnerable that she would give her most precious, give her child to a foreigner because she, like every mother just wants a better life for her child. Our time in Haiti was marked with many moments like this. Yet in that destruction I saw great potential. You see the people of Haiti, they do a lot with very little every day. By necessity, they are the world's natural problem solvers. And I can still remember the day I realized this. I'm walking down a busy street when I see a man with a wooden cart, the axle breaks and there he is. No tools, no resources, not a helping hand in sight. And then. He crafts a solution back on his way. I saw Haiti with fresh eyes in that moment there behind all that hustle and bustle on that street was ingenuity, creativity. It was untapped, it was raw, it was limitless. It was potential we would need to harness. Harness. So we started inviting people to come with us regardless of their education level, their social status, their gender, come to our incubator and work beside us and eventually lead us in finding solutions for your community. Now, little did we know that at night they were leaving our incubator and going back to their neighborhoods, and they were training others in what would be called the innovation process. So one night, as I'm walking out of the incubator after another long hot day, one of our local facilitators, his name is Elle, he says to me, you know what? Even the mothers are talking, my mother asked, where did you learn this radical way of problem solving so quickly? And I'll never forget what he told me. He said, I told my mother, the solution was always inside of us, but no one ever bothered to show us that night. All I could think about was Oell. We would need to build an army of young leaders like him. And so we did those incubators, eventually gave birth to what was called the Innovation Clubs of Haiti, and they would unleash the great potential in that country. And because we chose to see the dignity in them, chose to see them as active participants rather than passive victims. Well, that built lasting bridges between them and Notre Dame. Bridges that we would use for years to come to rebuild that country in more than material means, and it would change forever the way I work in communities across America and around the world. Sometime later, Scott Applebee, the founding dean of the New Keo School of Global Affairs, calls me with an interesting proposition. He says, come with us. Come help us launch the first new school in a hundred years at Notre Dame, a school that is interdisciplinary and has a preferential option for the poor. Founded on Father Ted's legacy of peace building, human rights and democracy, Scott saw the potential in me to build a platform so much greater than anything I had ever imagined. And to build bridges to countries well beyond Haiti. We never know where God is going to lead you, because now I'm the director of the Pulte Institute for Global Development, and I have the honor of leading an entire team of bridge builders. Passionate faculty and staff who have built bridges to 70 countries connecting with the frontline partners who are working in the war against poverty. Now, the solutions and the needs of each of those countries is unique, but our approach remains the same. We see the potential in every citizen because we understand that the solutions, they reside in those closest to the problem, but only when you walk with them, only when you listen to them, and only when you see the inherent dignity in them. Today I'm surrounded by so many bridges that were built on the foundation that is strong because someone saw the potential in me and I saw the potential in others, and seeing that potential in someone, their dignity, regardless of their circumstances. That is how bridges are built and that is how change is made. So remember. The work of bridge building, whether figurative or literal, it always relies on strong foundations that are rooted in seeing the potential in every human being. So do all that you can to see the dignity in others, because if you do, you just might find yourself like me, surrounded by bridges.

The Importance of Lay Ministry

17:57

I think it was probably one of the most important things that happened in the history of higher education and also other large Catholic institutions that are today largely run by lay people. Uh, how it happened, I guess if I take it back to the oak tree, is the fact that I did my doctoral thesis in theology on the place of the layman in the church. And of course, uh, I was greatly heartened when during Vatican two, uh, that was quite a few years later. They came out and practically paralleled and almost repeated what I had said in my thesis that lay people should be given significant tasks in the church, commensurate with their competence, uh, their intelligence, their dedication to the Kingdom of God. And they're very special knowledge of things like television, for example, or how to run a, a golf course or how to build a good building and do it reasonably. Architecture, a hotel, I mean, you took it a modern university. It has just everything apart from the central core of the academic development.

4 (2) 19:06

Please welcome Triple Domer Edward Hanenburg from the undergraduate class of 1995, master of Arts class of 1997 and PhD class of 2002. Ed is the director of the Tuy Center for Interreligious Understanding at John Carroll University and is the author of Theodore Hess's, BSC Bridge Builder.

Interfaith and Interreligious Understanding

7 (2) 19:41

Now, anyone who ever encountered Father Ted walked away with a story. Here's mine. When I was a graduate student here, I had a study car on the 12th floor of the library. It was a really small space, just big enough for a desk, but it had a spectacular view of campus. It was the same view I bragged to my friends that Father Ted had, whose much larger office was directly above mine By then in his eighties, father Ted still came into work just about every day, and one of the great things about working on the 12th floor is that I often got to ride the elevator with him. Now, father Ted loved to talk to students and share stories. And he used to begin by asking some unsuspecting undergraduate, so what are you studying today? And if the student said, well, I've got a physics exam tomorrow, he would say something like, hell, I was never much into science until the Pope asked me to represent the Vatican on the International Atomic Energy Commission. Or if her student said she had a paper to do for a history class, he would say, I don't think I ever really appreciated history until I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. So I'll never forget the time that Father Ted turned to me in the elevator and said, so what are you studying today? And I said, I am. I'm working on my dissertation in theology. Really? My dissertation was in theology. What's your topic? I'm writing on lay ministry in the Catholic church. Really? My dissertation was on the laity in the church. And you know, in those days it was a very controversial topic. This was the early 1940s, and no serious theologian was talking about the leg. My advisor told me to pick another topic, but I knew it wasn't too important, and so I pushed ahead and finished that thesis, got it published, and soon then after I got a letter from the holy office in Rome asking for a copy to review, I thought for sure I was going to be censured. It used to be called the Holy Office of the Inquisition Bureau, but I sent him the copy and never heard back. Well, eventually Tus to 12th died and the Cardinals elected John the 23rd who surprised everybody by calling the second faculty council. The first time in a hundred years that council had been called and what do you know was on the agenda? I'll never forget that reading that document on the lady when it came out, they stole all my ideas. It was a great story and it was, clearly a story that, father Ted loved to tell. No doubt it got better over time. and though it might be too much to conclude that Father Ted was the unknowing ghost writer of Vatican II's decree on the lay of postulate. His choice of the thesis topic was prescient. 20 years before the theme would burst out at the Second Baptist Council. Father K was interested in the active role of the land. He was convinced that the people in the pews can't be silent spectators, that they are called to leadership and service in the church and in the world. 60 years after he finished his dissertation, I finished my own. And, I didn't get a letter from the holy office in Rome. but I have had, been able to spend the last 25 years studying lay ministry in the American Catholic Church. And for me, it has been an endlessly fascinating phenomenon. to get to know so many of these incredible laymen and laywomen who are, responding to a call to serve their church and their community. As pastoral associates, as capital leaders and youth ministers, as outreach coordinators and in many other roles, there are over 40,000 professional lay ministers of staffing Catholic parishes in this country. They outnumber parish priests by a wide margin. They outnumber religious sisters, they outnumber religious brothers and permanent deacons combined. As I said, it has been an endlessly fascinating phenomenon to follow. So has Father Ted. After that elevator ride, I read his dissertation and went on to read just about everything he ever wrote. I was interested in him as a theologian and so I wrote a couple of articles on his theological sources and published this book, Theodore Hesberg, CC Bridge Bill. That subtitle, Bridgeville, during the theme of our event this year, captures so much of what Father Ted was about. When he was asked what he wanted written on his headstone, father Ted famously answered one word, priest from the age of six to the day he died. Father knew he was called to be a priest. He also came to learn through his theological study that St. Thomas Aquinas defined a priest as a mediator, as someone who stands between God and humanity, someone who serves in the middle, spanning the gap between two realities trying to bring together to unite that which is apart. That's what it means to stand in persona, Christy in the person of Christ it is to imitate Jesus the great high priest who was the ultimate bridge goat. And the point of Father Ted's dissertation was to say that all Christians are called to be priests. All Christians are called to the priesthood of all the faithful to be bridge builders, to step into the breach, to bring people to together. It was that call that inspired me to undertake a new initiative at John Carroll University. Having set the collaboration between lay ministers and ordained ministers within the Catholic church, I wanted to extend that spirit across religious boundaries. And so with my colleagues, I established the two center and inter-religious understanding and a month into, directing that new center on October 7th, 2023, Hamas attacked and, early killed innocent civilians in Israel, launching the war in Gaza, and unleashing the Really a horrific, heartbreaking, loss of life that has, you know, continues to this day. We in the center quickly, quickly realized that even on the quiet campus of John Carroll University tuck into the suburbs of Cleveland. We had Muslim students who had extended family starving in refugee camps in Gaza. We knew Jewish students who didn't feel safe on campus, so we worked hard to support our community in ways that we could. We brought Muslim students, faculty, and staff together with Jewish students, faculty, and staff for regular lunch conversations, just to build relationships. In the aftermath of the DA's decision, we invited scholars of Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam to talk about how their traditions understand the dignity of human life, especially the lives of mothers and their children. We looked at how these three traditions understand the violent passages within their own sacred texts. We created a calligraphy course that teaches both Hebrew script and a Arabic script as a way to enter into the world of another. We partnered with mosques and synagogues churches in order to foster collaboration. I have found the toy center and the center to be a place of deep conviction where we don't have to check our beliefs at the door, but we bring them with us in order to learn from one another and find common cause. Father Ted was a bridge builder who never sacrificed, who never compromised his deeply held Catholic commitments. He stood in the middle, but he stood for something that was his legacy as a priest. As a mediator. And I think if he were with us today, he would want to remind us that we are all priests. We are all called to be bridge builders. We are all called to be saints of the center, bringing people together. And that's a call that belongs as much to the lake as it does to the ordained. So I invite you all to reflect this afternoon, throughout this program and afterwards, what have we done? What are we doing? What can we do to tear down barriers between people? What can we do to build bridges? What better way to follow where Father Ted led and to respond to what Father Ted said,

28:31

Let us agree that we shall never forget one another and whatever happens, remember how good it felt when we were all here together, united by a good and decent feeling, which made us better people, better probably than we would otherwise have been. I think that expresses as well as anything from literature can. The feeling of this particular hour. We trust that the values you've learned here, the joy of truth, the exhilaration of beauty, the strength of goodness, the passion for justice, the quiet courage, born of prayer, the love and compassion we owe our fellow human beings, the modesty and humility. That our human frailty dictates to us. We trust that all of these intellectual and moral qualities will take deeper root in your lives and that they will grow through you and in you and all the days ahead. I.

4 (2) 29:40

please welcome John Scully of the class of 1980. John played football with the Atlanta Falcons for nine years and is the lyricist and co composer for, here Come The Irish.

8 (2) 29:59

Thank you. Thanks so much. From the first day that I put a football helmet on until the final day when I took it off again was an interval of 20 years, which my body tells me is longer than the recommended lifetime allowance. But having played at both Notre Dame and in the NFL, it is what I'm best known for in the outside world. But not so much here. It's always been my music that's gained the most attention, even when I was a freshman in 1976. And I'm sure you can appreciate from a novelty perspective alone, watching a offensive lineman played the piano is a little bit like watching a gorilla, riding a motorcycle around you. you can't take your eyes off. But I've always been closer to music temperamentally, and, next year will be, my 60th anniversary as a musician. I was very, I just tipped off how old I was, by the way. I was very lucky after I retired from football to meet a guy named Jim Tulio, a Grammy award-winning producer outta Chicago. And over the years, I worked with Jim and we built. Really a tremendous body of work together, all vary in nature between commercials and recording projects and corporate videos. One of our projects in 1997 was a song called, here Come The Irish. Now if the title is not immediately familiar to you, you have likely heard the voice of our friend Kathy Richardson, belting it out somewhere at a tailgate, hundreds of videos, broadcasts in the stadium and opening kickoff, and even out the diaspora at one of countless weddings and funerals where it's brought both joy and comfort to people on some of the best and some of the worst days of their lives. Like it or not, that song has become my identity here on campus. and that's fine with me. It's been a wonderful experience. But sometimes the level of emotion, the reaction, can throw me a little bit off balance. When people explain to you with tears in their eyes, what a song that you wrote to them, you might start asking yourself questions like, what the heck is going on here? We didn't really go to a ton of trouble, or Unusual trouble to write here can be Irish. Jim and I as usual employed our workaday approach to writing music. Somebody comes up with an idea that we both like and then we just build on it. You wanna write a song about Notre Dame? Yeah, sure. That's what it amounted to. We quickly came up with, a musical approach that we felt was right. And scheduled a recording session for a few days later. Before I got to that session, Jim had already crafted a masterful opening to the track and in the car ride up with a pen and paper next to me. I wrote the bulk of the lyrics. We invited Kathy Richardson in to sing it, and we were done another project in the can. So what ended up being so unusual about this song, you look at it on paper and there's not much there, A nice melody, but very simple, nice lyrics, also very simple, leaves falling, music calling. It just sounds like an ordinary day on campus. But the thing is the ordinary days on campus. Is where the rubber hits the road for most of us. The great thing about subject matter that's both compelling and self-evident is you don't have to manufacture a bunch of bladder around it. You just point to it and you say what it is? Sacred waters, sons and daughters. We don't know what that means. You don't have to explain anything but each sparse phrase, bereft of detail, though it may be recalls a very personal experience for people and the simple nature of the song leaves us all plenty of room to draw in our own characters to the script and maybe even to have us gain a sense of co-authorship. In the larger story of our institution. If every single person at Notre Dame thought that here from the Irish was written about them, they would actually be absolutely right because the Notre Dame experience is not a single story. It is tens of thousands of stories all told in unison, which yields at, sa tore singular effect that Father Hesberg a few moments ago, described so well in the citation of ky. Whatever happens. Let us remember how good it felt when we were all here together, united by a good and decent feeling, which made us better people. There's no question in my mind that I'm a better person for my long association with the people of Notre Dame. And in keeping with today's theme of bridge building, I'm hopeful that here from the Irish provides a sort of notional bridge that connects all our individual stories into a sense of shared purpose and our ongoing endeavor to always become better people. After all, it's on that journey that you discover the magic in the sound of our name. Thank you all very much.

Fr. Ted Video 36:54

No matter what the crisis, no matter what the challenge, no matter what, somehow irks you or bothers you, or pesters you or discourages you, you've got the same simple answer, come Holy Spirit, and I promise you on the words of God himself that he will be with you. He will bring you strength. Especially, he will bring you light to see as well as strength to do. He will become a very important part of your life. So important that when you open your eyes in the morning becomes a simple thing to say, come Holy Spirit, that he might be with you through the day, whatever

1 37:40

that means.

4 (2) 37:42

Please welcome Betsy Boland of the class of 1990. Betsy is the Chief operating Officer of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

Challenges and Renewal in the Catholic Church

38:01

Good afternoon. I start by thanking the University of Notre Dame. So many of the joys in our family's life stem from my time here on campus. Particularly the lifelong friendships that formed here have been so important to our life all the way through. My first year on campus was Father Ted's last year as president, and so I'm grateful to have witnessed his leadership. I pursued a business career for many years after Notre Dame, first in investment banking and then in management consulting at McKinsey Company. My career took an unexpected turn when I came to the Archdiocese of Chicago, but I recognize now that calling was written into my life all along and that the seeds for it were planted here on this campus. Back then, I was wondering why I felt drawn to the role in investment banking and the Holy Cross priest helped me understand. That those desires in my heart were God's way of calling me to develop business skills. Later at McKinsey, I became involved in pro bono work for the Archdiocese of Chicago, and while I felt a tug to do work at the Archdiocese, I would say I was still living life my way, engaged in an active business career, but helping the archdiocese on the side. I prioritize my faith, but I also could be over-focused on accomplishment. Too busy to see all around me and too self-assured about the source of my own gifts. I remember a long plane fight once when I was planning to work on two separate efforts, a pretty interesting growth strategy for a paying client, and a pretty mundane pro bono effort for the Archdiocese of Chicago. I was surprised how often I kept being drawn to work on the archdiocese and effort, even though it inherently was less interesting. That was the beginning of a long journey of being tugged to the archdiocese until eventually I joined first time, full time. Overall, I would say I never chose that career shift. It chose me. The Archdiocese of Chicago is one of the largest not-for-profits in the city of Chicago and one of the largest diocese in the us. We have over 200 parishes, 150 schools, 40 cemeteries, and over 11,000 employees. In my role as Chief Operating Officer, I oversee all administrative operations and also support pastoral initiatives. We have a great team at the archdiocese called to serve the church at this moment in time, and many of them are donors for which we're very grateful. Those of us on the ground living the, the experience of the church every day, serve a wounded church during difficult times. A lot of what we do involves painful and difficult topics. We spend a lot of our time closing ministries or putting our fingers in the DS of challenged operations or coming to grips with fewer resources. Often we spend time going through painful details as we continue to help the victims of the child's sex abuse scandal. We come to work living the wounds of the church every day, but I know in my case it helps me only love her more deeply. St. Paul reminds us that hope does not disappoint, and I'm confident the church will emerge stronger. In my business career, I would've focused on achieving impact as fast as possible, but I've grown into surrendering to God's will and God's timeline knowing that a lot of our work will never see the fruit of, or the benefit of, and knowing that we're meant to bring, be a bridge builder to a future generation of Catholics who will actually benefit from our work. I often keep in mind the Archbishop 200 years from now. Who will benefit from our work. Now, while we may not see the fruit of our work during our lifetimes, the time for action is actually now we all know people close to us who don't actively practice their Catholic faith. We may also recognize the broad trend away from religion, but we may not really understand the magnitude of the shift. In 1987, when Father Ted was his last year as president, the large majority of Catholics regularly practiced their Catholic faith. Today, among younger generations of people raised Catholic, for every 100, only nine attend mass on a weekly basis. That's nine out of 100. That trend is not just a trend unique to Catholics, it's a trend that's affected all of institutional religions as then there's this mass exodus from, institutional religion, and the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. As our older generations who practice more are replaced by our younger generations who do not. The impact has been devastating already. In 1975, there were 455 parishes in the Archdiocese of Chicago. We have since restructured our way down to about 215, less than half of the original number, mostly because of these trends. At our peak, we had 429 Catholic elementary schools. We are now down to 159. This same pattern is played out in diocese all across the United States, across Christian history. There have been times and places when diocese cease to exist. The Catholic Church remembers those diocese in special ways in its history and in certain events. At the rate we are going there, many US diocese will be remembered in name only. The Catholic church will flourish, but that does not necessarily mean that every time and place. So how do we build bridges back to the church? The good news is there are signs that people are hungry and hungry for more people who don't practice a religious faith still describe themselves as spiritual and spiritually hungry. They report that something is missing in their lives with high rates of anxiety, depression, and loneliness, and in their search for deeper meaning. They are trying all sorts of spiritual practices. There's been explosive growth in things like car part reading, spirit stones, nature rituals, and even psychedelic mushrooms. There's a lot of experimentation on spiritual practices. Our call is to invite people back to the foundations of our faith, to the true source of deepest fulfillment that comes with the relationship. With an intimate, all loving God, and we have a renewal team at the Archdiocese dedicated to this work. When we think about renewal, our first instinct actually is often to jump to hymns, homilies, and hospitality. If the parish just had better homilies or just had different music or just had more hospitality, more people would come. Those things are important, but they, the problem actually goes much deeper to the heart of Christian belief of people who don't regularly practice their Catholic faith. The majority, would say that would not believe that God is actively present in their lives. The majority also believed that Jesus was a good moral leader, but not the son of God. Our renewal team therefore goes back to the beginning, helping people on a faith journey. Me that we don't assume that there's an act of faith life. We go to the very beginning and help people recognize the movements of their heart as signs of God. And we help people through a pattern, what we call, soft entry, point of discernment, reflection, and prayer, to the meaning of life. And what is the meaning of life. A very basic thing. Ultimately, though we come to the person of Jesus Christ in our church as CS Lewis said, Jesus is either very unimportant or very important. The one thing he cannot be is moderately important. We help people come to know the person of Jesus Christ and develop a relationship with the person of God. We help them know Jesus, not know about Jesus. obviously not about Jesus at some point, but know Jesus before they know about Jesus. And then we come to a relationship with the church even when she's wounded. For 2000 years, our path to holiness was much more fruitful through the church. Even when she's been wounded, that sacraments, scripture and a regular faith community formed our path to holiness. With God's grace far more than we ever could on our own, we invite people back to the church. For centuries, our faith has been passed on from generation to generation. It is now our turn, whether you practice or not. I hope something about this talk has touched something in your heart to ask God for your next step. To explore faith, to growing faith, to share faith, come Holy Spirit, Catholic means universal. That means we're open to the world, that we're open to all truth, that we're open to all kinds of peoples and cultures and nations and all kinds of knowledge. That's what university means. It's uni veritas. It's a universal conglomeration of people, subjects, ideals. So that's number one. It's gotta be. International. It's gotta be fundamentally Catholic. Then it's got to be, I think as we've talked so much international and it's gotta be open to all kinds of knowledge. Catholic doesn't restrict you. It opens it up being universal, and I think it also has to be a welcoming place on here and be welcome and find people sincerely happy to talk to you, learn from you, and maybe even teach you.

4 (2) 48:06

Please welcome Notre Dame's, vice President and Associate Provost for Academic Strategy and Professor of Mechanical Engineering. David, go of the class of 2001.

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My first and only encounter with Father Ted enforced in me how much of a bridge builder he was. It was the late nineties. I was an undergraduate student from right here in South Bend, majoring in mechanical engineering. I worked in our office for information technologies and one day our chief information officer came to us and said, I need a student worker to pick up a computer. So off I went to go pick up what I thought was an ordinary computer. And the CIO says to me, well, we're gonna go visit Father Ted in his office.'cause he is a computer. He wants to donate to the OIT. I was shocked there. I was probably in shorts in the T-shirt. I definitely had long hair. I looked like a hip me and I'm about to encounter Father Ted for the first time. Well, we get up to his just impressive office and he welcomes us in so graciously, and sure enough, he had this old Apple computer he wanted to donate, but this computer had a story in the eighties. Father Ted was working on nuclear dis discernment, and he had to communicate with the premier of the Soviet Union Hel Gorbachev. Now, you don't just send hel Gorbachev a postcard, you send him a letter, it gets stopped at our border. Someone opens it and reads it, and then it gets stopped at their border and someone opens it and reads it, and then it may eventually get to Gorbachev and vice versa. It's extremely inefficient while someone at Apple had heard about this and offered Father Ted a computer so he can try this new thing called electronic mail to communicate with mc. When I reflect on that story first, I'm just astounded about how easily. Father Ted welcomed in a very uncooked student, but also how even then he could reflect on how he wanted Notre Dame to be a bridge builder, and he was using that platform to just tackle some of the most important problems in the world. How inspirational it would've been if I had switched majors, done something like Peace Studies and followed in Father Ted's footsteps. Alas, I did not. My story took a slightly different path. I graduated in 2001 and I went to work for General, general Electric Aircraft Engines, has a design engineer. I thought I, I eventually want to become a professor'cause I'd like to teach, so maybe I'll work for a while, get my PhD, and then go teach somewhere. But while I was working, I learned something about myself. I really wanted to just be curious in a way that I couldn't get working at this company. Me, I wanted to ask questions about the world and how to make it better. I wanted to stretch and exercise my sense of wonder. And so I did leave to go get my PhD from Purdue University of Mechanical Engineering, but I actually never taught in graduate school. I only did research, but by doing research I could ask questions and pull an intellectual threads and just feed my thirst for discovery. In 2008, Notre Dame beckoned me home to South Bend as a professor, and I got the chance to go do research and teach, to be curious and to help others be curious. I started a research group and we studied things like low temperature plasmas, the kinds of plasmas you might find in a plasma screen or a fluorescent light bulb and heating and cooling technologies, and 3D printing and even devices to detect cancer. And I got to ask all sorts of interesting questions. And seek all types of interesting answers. But while I could ask if or how or why, I quickly learned, I could not always answer if or how or why I needed help. So I started to build bridges. For example, I reached out to Mohan Sanker, a professor at Case Western Reserve University. I cold called him and said, I have a question about writing proposals. And that has led to a 15 year collaboration where we studied how plasmas can make chemicals more sustainable. I took the elevator down two floors from the third floor of Fitzpatrick Hall and Cold called Jason Hicks, a new professor in chemical engineering, and said, you work on catalysts. I'm curious, how did the plasmas and catalysts work together At any time I had a question or an idea that I wanted to pursue. I asked someone and I didn't know how to answer it. I asked someone who did know how to answer it, or at least was willing to work with me to find an answer. As I reflect on my career, there have been literally dozens and dozens of collaborators, of mentors and mentees and students that I've worked with, and I owe my entire career to these intellectual bridges that found that, that allowed me to just be curious. And I'm proud to say that for the last decade I've not had a single grant, a project that I've been doing by myself. In 2022, our provost, John McGreevy, reached out to me for a discussion. He was in his first year's provost and one of his main goals was to develop what would ultimately become our strategic framework. Program. We were talking about how we needed to work better as a university, be more collaborative across units and across disciplines, to be more connected, to be more coordinated in order to go further faster. And he asked me if I wanted to join him in the provost office and lead that effort. And I admit I was curious, but instead of research questions, I was now asking institutional questions. How do we connect ourselves? How do we build bridges between different disciplines in different units and order to make Notre Dame the force for good? We all aspire for it to be

6 (2) 54:43

okay.

10 54:45

Our strategic framework outlines two important points. First, Notre Dame must be the leading global Catholic research University on par with, but distinct from the world's best pregnant university. Great universities shape our world through their work and through their graduates. They shape our government policies. They shape our economies, they shape our technologies, but they also help us understand truth and justice and dignity. If we believe, as Father Ted did that the world needs a Catholic voice to help shape it. It needs a great university. It needs Notre Dame and becoming the Notre Dame. The world needs we, we will require the university to become better at thinking as an institution. The problems the world faces can't be answered in isolation by one person or one discipline, or one perspective. No, we need to bring all of our talent to be creative and collaborative, to bear on these important problems. In order to truly affect and impact the world's lives. So how do we do that? Well, we have been developing these cross university initiatives in areas like poverty and ethics and democracy and sustainability that gather together our faculty, our students and leaders around important priority areas, important common causes. For example, in our ethics initiative, we have formed a nationwide network of faith leaders and technological leaders to create new frameworks for how we develop and deploy artificial intelligence, both ethically and responsibly, and our poverty initiative. We have launched projects with the states of Ohio and West Virginia to understand their programs that they've developed in order to uplift those most affected by the opioid epidemic. And we've done similar things in sustainability and help and democracy. That is in essence what I do. I get to build these bridges across the university so that we make the university have stronger foundations, stronger pillars, and stronger trusses so that we can be a greater bridge to the rest of the world. And what a great job for someone who, at the end of the day is just curious about the world and how to make it better. And what a wonderful thing for me to work with the Notre Dame family on all these challenging problems to help us realize our aspiration to be a force for good. So my question for you is this. What are you curious about and how are you going to use it to make the world better?

4 (2) 57:59

Please join me in thanking our inspirational speakers for the generous gift of their stories. If you would like to connect with our speakers, you can find them in the Debar Lo Performing Arts Center atrium, just outside Leighton Concert Hall after we close our program. But before we go, let's hear from Father Ted one last time.

58:25

I had like to say to all the alumni who are engaged in service, the poor, the needy, those who people don't think about or forget, but we don't. To all the efforts they put into service and to all the good they do, I can only call upon them the blessing of God, which I do in Sing Almighty God, father, son, holy Spirit, bless all of these good alumni. Bless their efforts, bless their families, bless their lives because they are following the greatest mandate of the good Lord himself who said whatsoever you do, for one of my least brethren, not the best, but the least. You did it for me. And that's a great motivation and the alumni have really taken it to heart and I'm mostly proud of them for their lives of service. It's beyond recall and it's beyond my thanks. But I do thank them with all my heart. I.

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The.