Professor of Biblical Theology
The other day, my 11-year-old son, Joe, asked me, “Do people know about Franciscan, Dad?”
I told him yes, and then he, of course, wanted to know why. After thinking about it for a minute, I said, “It’s because we are today what every Catholic university was 50 years ago.”
Think about that. Fifty years ago, Franciscan University would have been just one of many Catholic colleges and universities. But today, because we think with the Church and put forward that which the Church puts forward—the divine, the eternal—we stand out and are really leading a new movement in Catholic higher education.
It’s more than just what we teach though. I’ve taught at Franciscan University since 1990, and through the years I’ve seen that what this University does, more than anything else, is change lives. It affects the students, their parents, their brothers, and their sisters. And the marriages and vocations that come out of this place are unlike anything you see coming from any place else.
There are so many of our graduates who are doing incredibly important work as Catholics, not just as priests, deacons, or DREs, but as Catholics in politics, as Catholics in education, as Catholics in all kinds of areas around the country. We really are making our mark.