Merton, an influential Catholic monk and writer, was well known for works such as No Man Is an Island and The Seven Storey Mountain, an autobiography that sold more than 1 million copies. Merton wrote more than 50 books in addition to hundreds of articles on issues such as civil rights, nonviolence, nuclear arms, and interfaith understanding. However, Merton is sometimes considered controversial, not only for his writings, but also for an affair he had when he was in his 50s.

In the summer of 1966, as he was recovering from back surgery, Merton met a nurse called “M,” in her early 20s and the two had a relationship that lasted several months.

This affair has made some Catholic leaders and authors turn away from him, while others gloss over it in their pieces about Merton, who died not long after the affair in 1968. But for Hillis, author of Man of Dialogue: Thomas Merton’s Catholic Vision, the affair is a central part of who Merton was and how we understand him.

“The reality is Merton acted irresponsibly, and without a full appreciation of the power differential that existed between him and M—none of this can and should be ignored,” said Hills in a lecture for the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies on Jan. 31. “But I do think it merits a more serious exploration. None of [the writers]examine Merton’s agonized details or thoughts about his love for M, her love for him, and the threat that this relationship posed to his vocation.”

Hillis spoke in detail about Merton’s journals from this time, while acknowledging that M’s side was never told. He explained how Merton’s passages sounded more like “the reflections of a heartstruck teenager than a 51-year-old respected monk and writer.”

“His account shows him at his most selfish and self-absorbed, but it also shows him grappling with his own evident shortcomings, with what I think is honesty and humility,” said Hills, who also spoke about Merton’s affair with students in Professor Angela O’Donnell’s class earlier that day.

Merton often wrote pieces that showed his conflicting feelings, and his love for M was no exception.

“There can be no hesitation about my position here. I have vows and I must be faithful to them,” he wrote in April 1966. “Once again it was clearer than ever that we are terribly in love, and it is the kind of love that can virtually tear you apart.”

While the affair was known before, more details and his inner conflict became clear after Merton’s journals were released 25 years after his death.

“It’s the forthrightness of his journals that continues to attract readers like me,” Hillis said. “Merton allowed himself to become an open book, warts and all.”

Merton even acknowledged this himself, stating that he planned to keep all the references to M in because he “wanted to be completely open both about my mistakes, and about my effort to make sense out of my life.”

Hillis said that this humility showed “the complexity of who he was as a human being striving to do God’s will, and often failing.”

Personal Appreciation for Merton

For both Hillis and Michael Peppard, Ph.D., professor and associate director for prestigious fellowships for the Curran Center, Merton played a central role in their careers.

“Thomas Merton is responsible for me getting my first job out of college,” Peppard said, adding that he was a finalist for two jobs after he graduated, one in Washington, D.C., at a place with a “decent salary and some cultural status,” and another teaching at a Jesuit high school.

“I had a decision to make, and what did I have on the airplane with me on the way to that final interview? I had Merton’s No Man Is an Island collection of essays,” he said. The essays, which featured passages on service, inspired him to accept the Jesuit teaching job—if it was offered.

“My final interview was with the department chair, and he asked me who my favorite theologian was. I wanted to say Merton, but I was a little bit nervous because Merton is not everyone’s cup of tea,” he recalled. But he said it anyway. “The department chair smiled very broadly and it turns out he went on to become a scholar of Merton and is currently the president of the International Thomas Merton society, so it was the right answer.”

Hillis said that Merton also helped him get his job. He had been having a “vocational crisis” when he was in his 20s and read The Seven Storey Mountain, which “is all about someone having a vocational crisis.”

“I started reading everything that Merton wrote, and in what I call ‘fit of youthful exuberance,’ I got a tattoo of a drawing that Merton did of a monk,” he said. “I mentioned this to the search committee at Bellarmine, and I think they thought, ‘we should probably get the guy that has Merton literally tattooed on his arm.’”

Merton wrote that “too often our saints are portrayed in a way that masks their humanity,” and Hillis said that it’s precisely Merton’s humanity that attracted people to him.

“Each time I got to the Abbey of Gethsemani and make a visit to Merton’s grave, I’m struck by the ways in which pilgrims venerate his burial place; marking his resting place are rosaries, prayers, guitar picks, sobriety tokens, art, and wood carvings,” Hillis said. “There are many, and I include myself among them, who understand Merton to be the kind of Christian who speaks profoundly to them, precisely because he was human.”

“We are delighted to be afforded this opportunity to serve as stewards of the endowment and to promote the work of America’s most distinguished Catholic writer,” said Alaimo O’Donnell, “and to help shape the future of Catholic literary studies.”

The Curran Center’s application was one of several submitted when the trust conducted a search for a university or center for Catholic studies to house the endowment. The application was accepted last December, and a formal agreement was signed on May 15.

The nearly $450,000 in funds—$50,000 a year for nine years—will allow the Curran Center to sponsor conferences, symposia, and other events that promote scholarship devoted to O’Connor and to Catholic writers who have left a mark on the American canon. A portion of the money will be used for programming while the remaining funds will continue to build the endowment.

Alaimo O’Donnell said trustees of the estate were impressed with the Curran Center’s work promoting Catholic writers, particularly last year’s conference, “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination,” which featured 60 Catholic writers and attracted 400 attendees, and the 2012 symposium, “Still Alive at 60: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.”

For her part, Alaimo O’Donnell, has delved deep into the Catholic legacy of O’Connor in her book, Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (Liturgical Press, 2015). She said that O’Connor has served as a gateway to literature for many Catholics who might not otherwise have found their way to the rich body of work written by Catholics. She described O’Connor as a Southern and Catholic writer, though not particularly influenced by her Irish heritage. The author’s work and life are also of great interest in the field of disabilities studies, Alaimo O’Donnell said, since she was diagnosed with lupus at the age of 26. She would die of the disease 13 years later.

“She lived with the daily reality of death; she lived the cross,” said Alaimo O’Donnell. “She wrote like her life depended on it, because it did. Writing kept her alive.”

The disease forced O’Connor to abandon the social aspects of her fledgling career, which included a post-graduate fellowship at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a residency at Yaddo, the famed artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In the course of her career she would complete two novels and 31 short stories, most famously “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” She also wrote hundreds of letters, several to well-known literary figures, including her friend Robert Lowell and poet Elizabeth Bishop, and many to people who were not so well known, like Elizabeth Hester, a file clerk who admired O’Connor’s work. The letters were compiled after her death in a book titled The Habit of Being.

“She knew she was good,” said Alaimo O’Donnell. “Some writers stumble around trying to find their subject and their voice, but not O’Connor. Even in her letters she knew she was writing for posterity.”

“I was told that my great-grandfather cobbled the shoes of the Jesuits there,” says Quinn, who earned a master’s degree in Irish history at Fordham in 1975.

Four years later, he left academia to become a speechwriter for New York governors—first for Hugh Carey until 1982, and then for Mario Cuomo. Quinn was a key contributor to several of Cuomo’s most memorable speeches, including his July 1984 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention—widely regarded as one of the most powerful of the past four decades.

Quinn left the governor’s office in 1985 to become the chief speechwriter for Time Warner—a transition he made while working on Banished Children of Eve: A Novel of Civil War New York, which won a 1995 American Book Award.

He followed that with a collection of essays, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America (2007), and a series of historical novels—Hour of the Cat (2005), The Man Who Never Returned (2010), and Dry Bones (2013)—all featuring private detective Fintan Dunne.

Quinn and his wife, Kathleen, have two adult children, both of whom are Fordham graduates. He recently met with FORDHAM magazine to discuss his family history, his writing, and more.

How much did you know about your ancestors when you were growing up? Did your parents talk much about them?
No. I mean, I heard anecdotes and I always knew I was Irish—our Catholicism was our Irishness. But I think my parents’ generation felt, “We’re moving into America. That is the past. There’s no need to have it beyond St. Patrick’s Day.” You’re very proud of being Irish, but the particulars of it were not of interest. I think in my parents’ case, and their parents’, they pushed their children ahead, you know, and made sure that they went to college. I only knew one grandparent, and they never talked about Ireland. Never. And I think they loved cities—you know, the whole Irish farming experience hadn’t been too great.

Your great-grandfather Michael Manning, how much do you know about what brought him to America?
It was the famine that would have brought him. He would have been one of the 2 million Irish who left in 10 years.

When did you really delve into that history and learn more about what the immigrant experience must’ve been like for him?
Well, that’s how I wound up writing a novel. I was studying for a Ph.D. in Irish history with Maurice O’Connell at Fordham. Then I left the academic world to go into politics, and I used to go to the state library to research speeches. I found this housing report for 1855 that was like a description of Dickensian London. I recognized that this is where my great-grandparents lived, and I had never heard anything about it. So then I began to look into that, the conditions in New York in the 1840s and ’50s. It had an infant mortality rate like the third world. It didn’t have a sewer system. So I realized, in a sense, why they didn’t tell us all this growing up. What was the use in knowing that?

Do you think there is a tendency to romanticize the immigrant experience generations later, and do you see a danger in that?
Oh, yeah, it’s a human tendency. It becomes part of a sentimental path rather than a reliving of the brutal reality that so many people go through.

And I think the danger is that you can lose sympathy with people in poverty and difficult circumstances now, thinking, “We were more noble the way we did it.” You forget the people who didn’t survive, who were victims of a lack of opportunity, poverty. We tidy it up. I always say America loves immigrants, but they have to be here two or three generations before anybody loves them.

People lose sight of the kind of labels and stereotypes that have been attached to new immigrant groups. The Irish, their disease was cholera. People thought they carried it with them. It came from tainted water, but people didn’t want to live around the Irish because they thought it was their disease, and they were judged to be mentally inferior to Anglo-Saxons. It’s like IQ tests, when they were first used at Ellis Island: They felt that Italians and Jews would bring down the national IQ. So you just see these things, and I don’t know how you cure it.

I think if you’re Irish and if you understand your history, if it doesn’t leave you with sympathy for the underdog, I don’t know what would.

You’ve written—both in Banished Children of Eve and in Looking for Jimmy—about the pivotal role Archbishop John Hughes, Fordham’s founder, played in galvanizing “the Irish-American process of reorganization” in the mid-19th century. How would you sum up his contributions?
I always say he was as much an Irish chieftain as a Catholic churchman. He’s the stem of the whole flower, the central figure, or however you want to describe it. He was here when a million Irish came out of Ireland from the famine, essentially skill-less, impoverished, and he was the mainspring of their reorganization. I always say that the Irish experience in America was about reorganizing. They were a mob when they came here. They had no financial resources. They had no education. They had no skills.

The engines of reorganization were the Catholic Church, the Democratic Party (which called itself the “Organization”), and the labor movement. The thing was to know the community was there, and it held together. Things cohered.

How did you go from grad school at Fordham to political speechwriting?
I wrote an article for America magazine in 1979 called “An American Irish St. Patrick’s Day.” I submitted it because, I didn’t know it at the time, but I was fascinated by this Irish-American experience that seemed to me to be going away without having been examined. We never looked at ourselves. Now we were moving to the suburbs. We were losing that thing I was talking about; the coherent thing was falling apart. But where was the record of it? Supposedly the Irish are great writers, but I couldn’t find any novels about the Irish-American experience. One, Elizabeth Cullinan, she wrote a beautiful novel, House of Gold, about the Bronx parish that I grew up in. But I remember everybody was horrified that she wrote it. She was putting out the family laundry. My mother was like, “How could she do that?”

So I wrote the article about this, and a Fordham alumnus read it and gave it to [New York Governor] Hugh Carey, who knew my father and was looking for a speechwriter. Out of the blue, they asked me to write the Fordham Law School commencement speech for him. I’d never written a speech. But I was looking for a job, and I didn’t want to be underemployed, so I wrote the speech. They really liked it and eventually offered me a job. I said I’ll do it for a year and then go back to academics. That was almost 40 years ago.

What did you learn from your experience in Albany?
To work in politics behind the scenes, you learn so much about the dynamics of human interrelationships, how much is based on personal relationships. Merit and hard work are no match for it. You know what was the great motto of the Albany machine? Honesty is no substitute for experience.

At what point did an academic career recede in your rearview mirror?
It receded when I got my second raise. I was making about twice what I’d been making. And then I got married. My wife is from the Bronx. We knew each other 14 years before we got married. That’s what’s known in the west of Ireland as a “whirlwind courtship.” She had moved to Albany for graduate school. She was a rehabilitation counselor. We reunited and got married. Finishing the doctorate would have been taking a big step backward. And some part of me always wanted to be a writer. It was an ambition.

Tell me about the genesis of Banished Children of Eve. I understand you initially thought you were going to write a history of the Irish in New York. Is that right?
I was an ex-academic. I still have a big interest in history. I used to send away for remaindered books. As I began to think about the experience of the famine Irish coming into New York, I realized there was really no central history written of it, this big event. I got one book on the Draft Riots, The Armies of the Streets [by Adrian Cook]. This historian did what no historian had done before. He went down and got the records from the morgue. They used to say a thousand people died in the riots. He could identify a hundred and something people. One of the names was Peter Quinn. My Quinn ancestors weren’t here yet. They didn’t come until 1870, but I was like, “Whoa, who is he?”

The personalization of history struck me. There were no diaries, no records. Nobody wrote. There’s not a scrap of paper in my family of anybody’s experience. So I wanted to write a history, but I began to realize the voices I wanted were not recorded. Then I found out that this songwriter, Stephen Foster, was in New York at the time of the Draft Riots. I went down—I think he committed suicide in the New England Hotel on the Bowery, and I stood in front of it. Every novelist is part psychotic; we hear voices. And standing there, I kind of felt I knew who he was. I had never written fiction, not a lick of it. But I said the only way I reach those voices is in novels.

How conscious were you of the fact that as a novelist you were drawing from your work experiences—for example, from the time you worked as a court officer in the Bronx?
At some points I was, absolutely. Dealing with a city, I felt like it was in extremis [as it was during the Civil War]. Being in the South Bronx in the ’70s in a uniform and sitting in a courtroom with 150 people and saying, “Well, you know, these people look poor and strange to me. And this is what my ancestors looked like to the people who were wearing the uniforms at that time.”

I figured it wasn’t just an Irish story I was telling at that point because once you stepped off those boats, you’re no longer Irish. You’re still Irish, but you’re becoming something else. And part of that experience is you have to interact with people you never had to interact with before. You might hate them. But you have to live with them, and some part of you is going to rub off on each other. That dynamic hasn’t changed.

Since 2005, you’ve published a trilogy of historical-mystery novels featuring the Irish-American detective Fintan Dunne. Do you see those books as part of a continuum that began with Banished Children of Eve?
Yes, Fintan Dunne is a descendant of Jimmy Dunne [in Banished Children of Eve], but I don’t know how. He’s a cousin somehow. The idea was that they would be three books that would stand alone, but in a way tell the history of New York from the First World War to the Cold War. And the thread would be this Irish-Catholic guy, Fintan Dunne.

I love Raymond Chandler. I always felt his character Philip Marlowe, he’s really Irish American with his hard-edged blend of cynicism and idealism, and he belongs in New York. So that was the inspiration for Fintan Dunne. I knew people that lived in that New York, and the thing about New York is, you never have to look for a story to tell. It’s right there in front of you.

How do you go about conducting research for your novels? When do you know enough’s enough?
I love doing research. Every writer wants excuses not to write, and research is the best excuse to have because you’re still working on the book. What I would try to do is immerse myself to the point where I would feel that I have some sense of that world. Then I would start to write, and if I had to look for other pieces, I would.

When I was researching Banished Children, my wife and daughter were away for the summer at Shelter Island. I would go out on weekends, but every night after work, I’d go to the newspaper division of the New York Public Library. I read all of the newspapers from the Civil War. I remember sitting there, and the air conditioner wasn’t working. It was August. I said, well, now I’ll read all of Harper’s Weekly. Then I realized I can either write this or research it for the rest of my life because the research is quicksand; it’s so interesting.

Did it get harder to stop researching for the Fintan Dunne books because it’s just so much easier to find things these days?
Oh, yeah, it’s unbelievable. I used to keep a list at my desk. I’d write down things to look up. Then at lunch hour—I was working at the Time-Life building—I’d run to the library. Now you just go online. It’s so much easier but not as much fun. It was so much more like detective work before. You were like Fintan Dunne. You were a gumshoe tracking stuff down.

What does it mean to you to be an American of Irish ancestry born in New York? What kind of cultural inheritance do those three things imply?
My father once said to me that the legacy of being Irish is having a sense of humor and rooting for the underdog. And if you’re going to live in New York City, those are two necessary things!

And I think the great thing about being Irish and Catholic in New York is you don’t have to be. Everybody can choose what they want to be. It’s not an identity imposed on you. Tomorrow, I could be an American Buddhist. To me, that makes it so much more valuable, you know, that freedom to be what you want to be that New York confers, I think, as much or more than any place in the world. I can be this. Then I can admit other people’s rights to their choices.

You’ve talked about storytelling as a noble occupation, something that unites us all. Would you elaborate on that?
You grow up, and you think there are serious jobs—accountant, lawyer, business CEO—and then you realize, the most important thing human beings have, the thing that makes us human, are stories. The first thing we did after we sat around campfires was to tell each other stories. It is essentially what it is to be human.

In every human society, one of the most important persons has been the storyteller, the seanachie in Irish. Before the Bible was written, it was spoken. Every religion is organized around a story. Every nation is organized around a story. Every family has its own myth.

Now I think there are bad stories. There are stories that are written or told badly, and then there are stories that are bad, like eugenics. That was a bad story. It was essentially a story that was used against other people to commit mass murder. Stories are very powerful.

One of the things I learned in writing speeches was that a good speech is a good story. And [Ronald] Reagan, one of his powers as president was, he had a story. He had the story of the frontiersman and the lone pioneer. One of the reasons why Cuomo is remembered is he had a story too—family, mom and pop. That’s what people listen to.

Do you ever itch to be back where you were—
To be young with hair? Sure, everybody does.

I mean, as a political speechwriter, having the opportunity to help tell a story in that way?
No. I’m really glad I did it. It was a defining experience. It helped me be a writer in ways I can’t describe. But I would never, ever want to do it again. For five minutes, I wouldn’t want to do it again. And I do think you have to be young to do it. It’s physically taxing. And it’s an exercise in anonymity.

Next month, you’ll be participating in a Fordham conference on “The Future of the Catholic Literary Imagination.” How would you define that term, and do you think of yourself as a Catholic writer?
When I’m writing, I never think about being Catholic. It’s just who I am. I’m not advancing any dogmas.

I have an essay in Looking for Jimmy where I said there are three elements to the Catholic imagination: sin, grace, and mercy. I wrote that years ago, and Pope Francis, the word he uses all the time now is mercy. We don’t want justice. We want justice for other people. We want mercy for ourselves. In politics, there’s not much mercy. It’s always been an in-demand commodity in the world, and it always will be, because it’s such a leap. Mercy is not deserved. It’s freely given, and there’s no rationale for it.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Ryan Stellabotte.

Watch Peter Quinn’s New York, a five-minute video in which Quinn talks about his noir-tinged Fintan Dunne series and the city as muse. “For me,” he begins, “New York City isn’t so much a setting as it is a character. It destroys some people, elevates others. But one thing New York won’t do is leave you alone. It’s always changing.”

“This is my apple, but there is nothing in the apple that says it’s mine,” he said. “There’s nothing in the apple that says you can lease it or buy it, that you can sell it or mortgage it. There’s none of that. Apples don’t say things.”

“For the world, the real economy is here,” he said lifting his wallet, “not here.” He pointed to the apple.

God gave us the apple, said de Soto, and we gave ourselves the wallet “to help organize.”

De Soto’s lecture, titled “How Can Markets Help Close the Gaps Between Rich and Poor? The Power of Documents,” was the opening salvo in a conference marking 125 years of modern Catholic social teaching sparked by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum (On the Condition of Labor), which brought the church in dialogue with the challenges of modern industrialized economies.

In greeting the conference attendees, Joseph M. McShane, SJ, president of Fordham, said the encyclical allowed the church to engage with the broader world to espouse natural rights amidst modernization.

“This is a conference that honors the 125th anniversary,” he said. “But it’s also one that challenges the church now, a church preparing for a future we cannot conceive of, [and]for a new encounter with the modern world

Father McShane hinted of Americans coping with changes induced by the digital age, and de Soto spoke of indigenous people in Peru coming to grips with globalization.

As a Peruvian economist and president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Lima, Peru, de Soto has worked toward expanding property rights for the poor. He explained how indigenous communities in his country viewed their land as the apple, but quickly became acclimated with the wallet when a U.S. mining company wanted to buy their land.

He said the subsoil of their properties, which contained gold, belonged to the state, and the state sold the subsoil to the U.S. company.

The topsoil, however, had to be negotiated with community leaders and then each individual plot owner, de Soto said. The U.S. companies had managed to obtain formal paperwork by “understanding informal customs,” and in the process walked away with deeds to all the properties.

As the farmers continued to live on their land, the company reaped $6.5 billion in investments internationally on their initial investment of $150 million. Through a bilateral investment treaty, the deal was sealed so that even the Peruvian Congress would could not reverse the deal and nationalize the properties.

“Titles matter,” he said. “Whoever’s got the title has got the power. The world is owned by those who have a title on the asset, provided it’s a good title.”

He said the indigenous people didn’t fully comprehend the sale, or, for that matter, the exorbitant profits made after their initial sale of their land. He said that such global moves promote instability, because the indigenous people “understand the land but not the deed.” He noted that the Arab Spring uprisings were rooted in property being taken away from people, too.

He said that for the sake of stability it is in the interest of the state to document property ownership; otherwise, terrorists who “protect the assets of the poor” will become increasingly popular.

In the struggle against the Shining Path terrorist group in Peru, he said, solidifying the documents for land ownership for the poor worked toward stability in the region.

“That’s why it’s important [for the states]to record the assets, because it’s not about the apples you can show, it’s about this!” he said lifting his wallet.

The Building Good Economies Conference is sponsored by the The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. It continues through Friday, April 22 at the Lincoln Center campus. 

“[I]t was amazing to have a video you produced watched by over a million people and exciting to be part of such a crazy, whirlwind world,” says Sawyer, but “I kept coming back to this nagging desire to do something that … allowed me to connect with people in a deeper way.”

She’s found that as a digital content producer at Busted Halo, an online magazine for young adults exploring their spirituality.

“I’m doing social media, I’m writing and producing some video, and doing some strategic planning—basically giving my voice of how we can reach more people in their 20s,” she says.

The Massachusetts native came to Fordham with a faith she practiced “out of tradition, but never really something I thought deeply about” until she got involved with two Fordham programs: Global Outreach, which is a cultural immersion and service program, and the University’s Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.

“I was drawn to how much the professors really invest in you as a student,” she says. “We had this all-encompassing way of experiencing our faith and studying our faith.”

The Curran Center offers lectures and public conferences on myriad topics in Catholicism. It also offers a concentration in American Catholic studies, which Sawyer combined with a major in communications and a minor in sociology.

As a member of the Curran Center Advisory Board, Sawyer recently came back to campus to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the naming of the center. The gala event honored the center’s benefactors, John Curran, PhD, PHA ’66, and Constance Curran.

“It’s been thrilling to see [the center] grow and to meet some of the students currently in the program,” she says. “And to reconnect with [founding director Mark Massa, SJ,] and the people who made it a really special place.”

During her sophomore year at Fordham, Sawyer took a kind of leap of faith—even flying on a plane for the very first time—when she participated in two Global Outreach (GO) trips, first to Mexico and later to Glenmary, a missionary farm in rural Kentucky.

“At Fordham, I developed this awareness of the injustices happening everywhere—from our community in the Bronx to our country to outside of it. I think the Jesuits really brought to the surface this [idea that we should] go out into the world and be with people who are most in need,” she says.

Sawyer says the service trips made her “a better leader” and spurred her to chaperone GO Navajo in 2011, “a fantastic experience … to be with students who were experiencing a lot of those feelings and questions that I had as an undergrad.”

She also found a Fordham home away from home with The Ram. She joined the student newspaper staff two weeks into her freshman year, and it “evolved into one of the greatest parts of my time at Fordham,” says Sawyer, who held various editorial roles for four years.

She also practiced her journalism training through internships—at a local newspaper in Massachusetts, a small PR agency, and the Martha Stewart Show, where Sawyer returned for a full-time job after graduating from Fordham in 2009. There, she helped produce cooking and health segments until the show ended its run in 2012, when she moved on to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and the Cooking Channel.

Sawyer, who had originally envisioned a career writing at a magazine, embraced this new path: “It’s still storytelling, just in a different way and a different medium.”

She spent two years at Yahoo as a producer on the celebrity interview show Daily Shot with Ali Wentworth and a photography show called the Weekly Flickr. She also worked with Katie Couric on news videos.

But a feeling of restlessness troubled Sawyer. “I kept coming back to the question, ‘Am I doing the most good that I can in my job?’”

She found an opportunity to combine her faith and her media background at Busted Halo, which is published by the Paulist Fathers with offices at St. Paul the Apostle Church, across the street from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus.

Sawyer says that St. Paul’s “allowed me to continue the same sort of spirit that Fordham did in terms of keeping my faith in check and meeting a slew of amazing young adults doing great things.”

“If I can help other young adults have those conversations in the way Fordham allowed me to see how relevant faith is in my daily life,” Sawyer says of her job at Busted Halo, “that’s exciting to me.”

With a heart for serving others and an interest in travel, Sawyer regularly volunteers in communities locally and abroad. She’s traveled with her church to Nicaragua, worked at a Catholic children’s camp in Mississippi, and done several service projects in New York City.

“[P]art of how I found my way in my career as a storyteller is because I love to connect with people and love to get to know their backgrounds and where they come from,” Sawyer says, “and experience life as they do.

– Rachel Buttner

On May 2, 2011, thousands of revelers flooded the World Trade Center site to celebrate the U.S. military’s killing of Osama bin Laden. Teenagers with little memory of a world without the Al-Qaeda leader swung from street signs. Newscasters swooned.

Though Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez had lost their son, Gregory, in the attacks of 9/11, they did not celebrate. Celebrating revenge, they say, is not in their makeup.

Phyllis is a self-described secular Jew brought up in an activist family that eschewed religion. Orlando, who calls himself a “secular rationalist,” is a professor in Fordham’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

The two never figured that they would become the voice of nonviolence and forgiveness in the face of unspeakable horror. But with the premiere of a documentary about them—titled Not in Our Son’s Name—coming up at Fordham on Feb. 24, the role is befitting. The film portrays an unlikely friendship that developed between the Rodriguezes and the mother of one of the terrorists. Gerry Blaszczak, S.J., will moderate a question and answer session after the screening.

“We had the same position against violence on September 10,” said Phyllis, “but it wasn’t until afterward that people listened to us.”

The documentary takes its name from a letter the couple penned to The New York Times following the 9/11 attacks. The letter argued against starting a war in response to the attacks, saying it would “not avenge our son’s death” and would only add to the “dying, suffering, and nursing [of]further grievances against” the United States.

The couple went on to befriend Aicha El-Wafi, the mother of Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20^th hijacker”. Orlando even testified for the defense in opposition to giving Moussaoui the death penalty following his conviction.

The film, which will be shown on Feb. 24 at 5:30 p.m. in Keating First Auditorium, documents the couple’s journey from grief and rage to forgiveness.

“It’s a great opportunity when you’re challenged by someone who says, ‘So you think Moussaoui should go free?’ to respond, ‘No, I do believe in justice, but not putting him to death,’” said Phyllis. “The best way to deal with such questions is nose-to-nose.”

Indeed, the film is the couple’s way of going nose-to-nose with a wide viewing audience in an ongoing effort to stop the cycle of vengeance, even though they initially did not want to get involved.

“In doing the film, we thought we were going to have to stick our face out there and have people judge us again,” said Orlando. “But we felt it was our duty to do it—just like testifying at the trial was, and having a friendship with Aicha was the right thing to do.”

Both Orlando and Phyllis believe that it is also in one’s self-interest to find ways to forgive.

“It means not allowing ourselves to be consumed by hate and vengeance every day,” said Phyllis.

A specialist in criminology, Orlando said his research into terrorists’ motivations helped him to understand and, eventually, to forgive.

“In the social sciences, we’re trained to be empathetic,” he said. “We try to look at a situation and ask, ‘Why did this person do that?’ But in the end, empathy has to come from within.”

The Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies contributed to the production and is hosting the film screening.

“We wanted first to support our colleague and to make sure the film would be completed,” said Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, the Center’s associate director. “But it’s also such a testimonial to set aside one’s personal grief and make so much good come out of the worst thing that could happen to a person. The world should know that certainly, but Fordham should know about it first.”

“Fordham takes its mission seriously,” Orlando said, recalling that, during the initial days of the tragedy, the outpouring of support they received from members of the Fordham community was considerable. “They acted as Christians.”

Although he approached the tragedy personally as a father and professionally as a secular rationalist, he said that over time Christianity “had more to say to me about it than any secular philosophy or science.”

“It has a profound understanding of human nature and the way in which our violent nature can be addressed,” he said.

In December 2009, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s already-frail mother took a bad fall and broke her hip. Forty-eight days later, she was gone. Mortal Blessings is the story of how the author and her siblings cared for their mother in that short, sacred time span, when mundane acts of caregiving took on divine grace. O’Donnell, associate director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies, divides this memoir into chapters named for newfound sacraments. There’s “The Sacrament of the Cell Phone and the Wheelchair,” for example, an account of regular calls to family members and daily strolls around the hospital that “served as a kind of communion for us,” writes O’Donnell. “We moved up and down those hallways as one, two parts of a single whole.” Even their ritual of enjoying pie together had become “Eucharist by another name.” And like the Eucharist, O’Donnell writes, her sacramental witness to her mother’s final days “was one more way of affirming life in the face of apparent death.”

O’Donnell, associate director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies and a member of the English & American Catholic Studies faculty, had already turned to poetry—her field of expertise—with Waking My Mother (WordPress, 2013).

But after a 2010 essay that she wrote for Commonweal Magazine received positive feedback, she decided to revisit the topic. The result, Mortal Blessings: A Sacramental Farewell (Ave Maria Press, 2014), is equal parts memoir and meditation about the short but intense time when her mother Marion suffered a fall and died 48 days later.

As O’Donnell and her sisters tended to her mother in the hospital, she began to see connections between the rituals that they practiced every day and the sacraments of her Catholic faith. Going through the motions of helping her mother ride around the hospital in her wheelchair, or feeding her a piece of pie, helped ease the trauma, she said, even if the rituals were unspoken at the time.

“I thought I’d meditate on the nature of sacrament, and the ways in which human beings, whether they’re Catholic or not, devise rituals to get us through difficult situations,” she said.

“I’d read a lot about sacramentality, and thought I could incorporate all of these elements theoretically. But I realized as I was writing it that unless it was tied to something concrete, readers were not going to be very interested in something abstract and theoretical. Who cares about a book like that when you’re talking about the experience of watching someone die?”

In addition to the Catholic Churches’ seven sacraments, O’Donnell added additional ones, such as the “sacrament of the cell phone.” She also sought and received permission from her sisters to reveal details that would not have otherwise been revealed through poetry. Details like the fact that, her mother was not a, shall we say, an easy-going sort.

“We didn’t see eye-to-eye with her on anything,” she said.

“I felt privileged to be back there in these circumstances, where really there was an unspoken forgiveness of all the years of neglect, and the years of being at odds with each other just sort of disappeared.”

The chapter that she would call “the sacrament of the beauty” was the breakthrough chapter for her. O’Donnell’s mother was devoted to beauty in her own way, and she said she and her sisters did all they could to help her by decorating her hospital room.

“Saint Augustine was always in my ear at that point—‘Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new; late have I loved you,’” O’Donnell said.

Caring for someone who cared for her when she was a child also made O’Donnell realize that the tables could very well be turned later in life. And although her normal response would be to not make herself too much of a burden, she said her mother’s “spunk” made her rethink this attitude.

“One of her favorite expressions was, ‘I’m the important person here.’ That used to drive us crazy. But when she was sick and really needed help, I kind of admired that she just demanded to get attention. She wasn’t just going to lie there and be neglected,” she said.

“She was terribly diminished by what was happening to her [but]her spirit wasn’t diminished. I admired that in her, and I hope we all have a little bit of that undiminished spirit in us.”

A month later, the Diocese of Savannah held a statewide day of fellowship in the town of Perry. Each parish brought a colorful banner to display its name. The one that stood out to Bishop Boland, however, was the white sheet tied to a tree branch with the name “Sandhill” handwritten on it.

The display was humble, but the message was clear, Bishop Boland said. Regardless of its size or the structure of its church, Sandhill parish was a proud part of the Catholic family.

Serving the Church on the Margins

Bishop Emeritus Boland was one of three alumni from the Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education (GRE) who gathered at Rose Hill on Oct. 22 to share their experiences of working with the poorest of America’s Catholics. Bishop Boland, GRE ’91, was joined by Shay Auerbach, S.J., GRE ’92, of the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia, and Veronica Rayas, Ph.D., GRE ’07, of the Diocese of El Paso, Texas.

The event, “Fordham Serving the Church on the Margins in America,” was a joint effort between Fordham and Catholic Extension, a papal society that supports dioceses in need, including those in which the three Fordham alumni serve.

Founded in 1905, Catholic Extension serves 13 million Catholics in 94 dioceses around the United States and has provided more than $1.2 billion in grants. The organization also awards scholarships for diocesan workers to attend schools such as Fordham for training in religious education and leadership. Fordham alone has received $5.5 million in scholarships from the organization to educate lay ministers and clergy working in Catholic Extension dioceses.

This educational component is critical to the Catholic Extension mission because most poor, rural dioceses lack access to religious leadership, said Father Jack Wall, president of Catholic Extension.

“Sometimes it’s hard for those of us from New York, Chicago, and Boston, where the church is so well established, to conceive of the experience of Catholicism in places where there’s not an abundance of parishes, schools, clergy, and diocesan instructors,” Father Wall said.

“These are places where there’s a great distance between neighboring parishes, where Catholic worship on Sundays often takes place in double-wide trailers, and where there’s one priest for every 7,000 Catholics.”

Bishop Boland said that this has been his experience serving in the Diocese of Savannah, which covers 90 counties in southern Georgia. The diocese extends more than 37,000 square miles, all the way to the borders of Alabama to the west and Florida to the south.

“The diocese is bigger than the entire country from which I came,” said Bishop Boland, a native of Ireland.

Extending a Welcome to Migrants

Distance and limited resources are not the only challenges at hand, the panelists said. Forty percent of the families in Catholic Extension dioceses live below the poverty level. Many are migrants who have fled violence in Mexico and Central America. Because the majority of these migrants are Catholic, they find refuge in the parish communities.

“In El Paso, the parishes pulled together to receive the migrant families who were released from [U.S.] detention centers,” Rayas said. “People came forward to give these families a place to sleep and to take a shower, to help connect them with family members, help get them plane or bus tickets, and to just listen to their stories.”

C. Colt Anderson, Ph.D., dean of GRE — who himself grew up in Savannah and attended a parish supported by Catholic Extension — emphasized the impact of the organization’s work and the importance of its relationship with Fordham.

“The educational resources I had access to were because of Catholic Extension,” Anderson said. “The resources it provides strengthen the whole church and open up opportunities to people everywhere.”

“Our graduates are out there with Catholic Extension and they’re turning faith into action. It’s a powerful story, and it’s a story that we need to tell and to spread.”

The event was co-sponsored by GRE and Catholic Extension with support from the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.

You can view it here.

Fordham University’s Jesuit community aired the first in its 28-part Jesuits in Conversation series in November 2010, with a video interview of the late Charles Beirne, S.J.

Jesuits in Conversation introduces the Jesuits working at Fordham to the larger University community and the public. The interviews include Jesuit priests at Fordham, Jesuit visiting scholars, and young Jesuits-in-training (called scholastics). Joseph Koterski, S.J., and Father Lombardi coordinated the production with Matt Schottenfeld of Fordham’s television studio in the Walsh Family Library. Tim Valentine, S.J., wrote the original theme music.