McGrath Institute Blog

Dear graduating seniors, 

Finally, high school is over and you are FREE!!! Congratulations! Eat some cake. Now, get excited because college is just around the corner!  

If you’re anything like I was, you can’t wait to get to college. People told me my college days would be some of the best of my life. It was true! What I didn’t expect, though, was how my faith would change while I was there. For the first time in my life, my parents weren’t blasting me out of bed for church on Sunday, my youth minister wasn’t there to make sense of things, and my best friends weren’t sitting in the pews behind me. It was all up to me. 

Although anytime is a good time to learn more about the Catholic faith, the present is a particularly opportune time for deepening one’s intellectual and spiritual appreciation of it. Some of us may find that the cancellation of graduations and other spring events provides extra time for learning. Others, troubled by the unfolding world events, may feel a need to consider how the Catholic faith sheds light on personal experience. And still others—for example, parents, students, and teachers who are involved in remote learning—will require access to high-quality theological content that “thinks with the mind of the Church.” One opportunity that will appeal in all of these instances is an educational offering made available by the McGrath Institute for Church Life called “The Pillars of the Church.” This web-based video series, available at no cost until July 1, presents the four sections (referred to as “pillars”) of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, adapting them for a general audience and featuring faculty members affiliated with the University of Notre Dame’s Department of Theology.

As a kid, I would wake up early before school. Because my Mom and Dad were getting ready, they were always looking for ways to occupy me so I didn’t get in their way. Many days, my Mom would lead me downstairs, my eyes and brain somewhere between being asleep and being awake. I would lie on the scratchy green couch in our living room as I watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the local PBS station.

Thirty years ago, we stood with Ray Kinsella in an Iowa cornfield, where we heard a voice say for the first time, “If you build it, he will come.” Hailed by sports and cinema enthusiasts alike as one of the greatest baseball movies of all time, Field of Dreams has consistently moved audiences precisely because it’s about so much more than baseball. It’s about hearing, accepting, and sharing a call. It’s about perseverance in uncertainty and adversity. But more than anything, it’s about reconciliation.

Over a kosher breakfast several months ago, a good friend and I—both new mothers and in transitory phases of life—speculated about where we might eventually settle down and what our ideal geographical and social living situations would look like.