Click here to listen to the episode on Spotify
In the fiftieth and final episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Rev. Brian J. Shanley, O.P., President of St. John’s University. Shanley begins by discussing the origins of St. John’s University. As the population of immigrants coming to New York City surged in the late 1800s, Shanley notes Bishop John Loughlin turned to the Vincentians to provide these new citizens with educational opportunities. While the nations of origin changed over the decades, Shanley contends that the university’s commitment to the education of the city’s newest residents remains the same. As a result, St. John’s stands today as one of the most ethnically diverse student bodies, many of whom are also the first in their families to attend college. Shanley then discusses his own education as an undergraduate at Providence College where, toward the end of his time as a student, he discerned a calling to serve as a priest and as a member of the Dominican order. After completing his education in theology and philosophy, Shanley returned to Providence as a faculty member until being surprised one day when he was appointed president. Within months of completing his tenure as Providence’s longest-standing president, Shanley then accepted an appointment to serve as president of St. John’s. Shanley talks at length about what he has learned as a Dominican who is now called to lead a Vincentian university. Due to the changing nature of the landscape of higher education in the United States, Shanley discusses how St. John’s has revised its most recent strategic plan. The one constant, however, is the commitment St. John’s makes to supporting its diverse array of students, many of whom also keep a myriad of family and work commitments. Shanley then closes by assessing the landscape in which the Church and Church-related universities find themselves and the need to speak with a unified voice.
Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.
—
Our guest is Father Brian J. Shanley, President of St. John’s University. Thank you for joining us.
Brian J. Shanley: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Todd Ream: In 1865, Bishop John Loughlin asked members of the Congregation of the Mission, popularly known as the Vincentians, to found a day college where the youth of the city might find advantages of a solid education. Today, St. John’s University serves approximately 16,000 undergraduate students and 4,000 graduate students on its main campus in Queens as well as campuses on Manhattan in Paris, Rome, and Limerick, Ireland.
In what ways would you contend the Vincentians answered Bishop Loughlin’s request, through what became St. John’s University?
Brian J. Shanley: I’m Dominican, so my knowledge of the Vincentians is not as strong as my knowledge of the Dominicans, but it’s been one of my blessings being here is to learn something about their charism. And St. Vincent DePaul, who founded the Congregation for the Mission, was a parish priest who was living what I would call a kind of cushy life as, you know, sort of a chaplain to a wealthy family and had a kind of conversion experience where he realized that he needed to minister to the poor, to orphans, to widows, to the sick and the outcast. And so the original impetus of the Vincentians was to serve the poor.
But the same time, Vincent also realized that there was a crisis of preaching, because parish priests were not well educated. And this is where the kind of the intersection of the Dominicans and the Vincentians, because that was Dominic’s intuition was the Church doesn’t have enough good preachers, so he founded an order of preachers. And so the Vincentian charism has kind of oscillated between educating priests.
So Vincentians has done a lot of seminarian work and also ministry to the poor. And so they founded many colleges in Europe and when the Bishop of New York was wanting to found a university in Brooklyn because that’s where we started, and we migrated to Queens, he asked the Vincentians, who had already founded seminaries in the United States to come.
And what started at a little one room house is now a 125-acre campus. We migrated from Brooklyn to Queens. We’re actually on an old golf course, and we continue to serve that ministry. We have 40% of our students are Pell eligible, so we continue to be an engine of social mobility.
And you know, the whole original impetus of Catholic higher education was to educate first generation students. And I think the Vincentians both here and at DePaul and Niagara have stayed extraordinarily dedicated to the original mission whereas some Catholic schools have kind of migrated up the path that Catholics have taken in the United States. The Vincentians have stayed true to we’re gonna concentrate on the first generation students and their social mobility.
And that goes with the idea that the single biggest, if you will, gift that you can give to people who are poor is an education because that’s gonna change everybody’s life. And that’s what we try to do at St. John’s.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Shortly after you were appointed president at St. John’s, you announced the university would participate in a strategic planning process, a process that led to what is now known today as A Five-Year Plan for St. John’s Future. One of those goals, the first actually, is student success, which reads, “We will provide an outstanding educational environment for all students.” Now, St. John’s student body, as you echoed, is also one of the most diverse bodies by any measure.
In what ways is St. John’s seeking to provide such an educational environment for all its students, especially when there’s so many different kinds of students who come to the university and call it home?
Brian J. Shanley: Full disclosure, we’re already revising the strategic plan after three years because the higher ed landscape is changing so much right now. But I can tell you that as we look at revisions, student success is still number one because it’s attracting and graduating and launching students that is our number one priority.
And because our students come from mostly first generation Pell eligible backgrounds, there are unique challenges in serving them that I didn’t find, for example, at Providence, which serves a different kind of population. And so, 60% of our undergrads are still commuters, so they’re coming from home. They’re not living on campus. Some do, but mostly they don’t. They’re juggling jobs and family obligations, and so trying to find the right support for them.
And I would say frankly, first and foremost is financial aid because our students can’t afford, I mean, what most people don’t know is hardly anybody pays the sticker price. Everybody looks at the sticker price and they go, oh, higher ed is just too expensive. But we discount at a significant rate in order to help these students to come here, and then we try to provide comprehensive services from advising to mental health, to internships and everything in between to help these kids, to, particularly the ones that are juggling so many other responsibilities and don’t have the luxury of being a full-time residential student. That requires a kind of holistic care that is labor intensive, but it’s, you’re gonna take them in, you’ve gotta graduate them and that’s what we try to do.
Todd Ream: Yep. I would surmise then that that sense of holistic care that you seek to offer is also one of the ways that the Vincentian charisms animate the university still to this day.
Brian J. Shanley: Yes. I mean, I think that’s part of Catholic higher education is the Jesuit term is care of the whole person, that you’re not just educating people to get degrees or to get jobs, but you want them to have spiritual lives. You want them to have careers. You want them to find meaning in their life. You want them to find a sense of community and you want them, ideally at a Catholic school, to find a vocation. Like what gifts did God give me, and what am I supposed to do with these gifts?
Todd Ream: Yep. Thank you. I want to ask you now a couple of questions about your own formation as a scholar, as a priest, and as an educational leader.
You earned an undergraduate degree from Providence College in 1980 and then earned a licentiate degree in philosophy from Catholic University of America, a master’s degree, and a licentiate degree in sacred theology from the Dominican House of Studies there across the street from CUA in Washington, DC and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto. You were ordained a member of the Order of Preachers in 1987.
Would you please begin by describing the discernment process that led you to your calling to the Church as a priest, and then also in particular as a member of the Order of Preachers?
Brian J. Shanley: So I went to Providence College because my mother was on the faculty and I got free tuition. So my parents basically said to me, you’re gonna go to Providence College because it’s the best deal. And at the time I wanted to be a lawyer. My parents said, if you do this deal at Providence we’ll pay for you to get out of the house. So I lived there even though I was living 15 miles away. And so I had a residential experience, and my parents got the best deal out of this because I never ended up going to law school.
I joined the Dominicans instead. And I would say my journey to being a Dominican started the first day I arrived at Providence College which is run by the Dominican order. And I met a Dominican priest who spent a lot of time talking to me about what I was going to do and he said, what are you majoring in? And I told him I wanted to major in political science. And he said, why? And I said, because I want to be a lawyer. He goes, you could major in anything and be a lawyer. He said, what do you like? And I said, well, I love history.
And so I changed right then to being a history major. And he put me in his class, a kind of introductory theology class, and he blew me away as a professor and made me think about theology in ways—I went to public school. I had never even thought about theology. I was a regular churchgoer, but I didn’t consider myself particularly pious and certainly wasn’t thinking about the priesthood. And then at some point in the first semester, he said to me, you should think about being a priest. And I said, thanks, Father, but I don’t think that’s in the cards.
So I’ll spare you the gory details of my struggle through four years to deal with that haunting question of his, like, should I be a priest? And after thinking I was, and then thinking I wasn’t, my senior year, I realized I think this is what I was supposed to do. And so I joined the Dominicans. I graduated in May. And August, I’m sitting in the novitiate and here I am many years later.
And so I never thought about being a priest. What drew me to the Dominicans was they were great preachers, and I heard sermons like I’d never heard before. And secondly, the ones that I got to know were brilliant teachers too. And that vocation of being a preacher and a teacher was extremely attractive to me. And it’s at the heart of Dominican life, and I’ve had some mixture of the two of those things.
I still help out in a parish on Sunday. So I preach every week and I still teach a class. But I’ve lost my mind being a college president, so I don’t write and publish like I used to. But the Dominican charism fit who God made me to be, and I’ve just had a wonderful life as a Dominican priest.
Todd Ream: Are there any other mentors that you would mention who helped steward that calling along the way?
Brian J. Shanley: I would say when I was at Catholic University, I had some amazing priest professors Father John Wippel, Robert Sokolowski. There was a former Dominican, Thomas O’Brien. There were, there were priest scholars who kind of modeled the marrying of an intellectual vocation and a priestly vocation for me that were very inspirational and formational, if you will, and in my deciding that these two parts of my life could fit together.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Authors to whom you turned and prove formative in your vocation, and perhaps also continue to nourish it to this day?
Brian J. Shanley: Well behind me here is a wall of Thomas Aquinas which was mother’s milk for me. It would be hard to underestimate the influence of Aquinas. We’re, you know, as Dominicans it’s what we’re fed. And so my mind is initially formed by the thought of St. Thomas.
But I would also say too, and this has been part of even my experience here at St. John’s, I’ve learned a lot from the Jesuits. I’ve done the Ignatian Exercises. I’m a big devotee of Benedictine spirituality. I think there’s the Vincentian spirituality. There’s such a richness in the Church that I feel like been able to draw from a lot of different sources.
But intellectually, there’s no question if you just count the books on my bookshelves, besides, it’d be Aquinas and then it would be Augustine. Those are the two people that I have the most books about on that shelf.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You mentioned your scholarly work. You’re the author and editor of three books, as well as numerous articles. And your interests and expertise, arguably reside at the intersection of philosophy and theology.
In your estimation, what’s the proper relationship between these two disciplines that have shared such a relationship for so long?
Brian J. Shanley: When I joined the Dominicans, or when I decided to join the Dominicans, my senior year at Providence, I started to do a tutorial with a Dominican priest who gave me, I said, I need to know some more theology than I do. And he gave me some really hard stuff to read, like Karl Rahner and Schillebeeckx and all that stuff. And I’m, I’m saying to myself, I can’t understand these guys unless I know more philosophy.
When I joined the Dominicans, I actually asked to do more than the usual amount of philosophy. So I did a licentiate in philosophy. Normally we would just do one year of like introductory philosophy and then you start studying theology. So I got into philosophy with the idea that this is the only way I’m gonna understand theology. And then I studied theology for quite a while and got all licentiate in that.
But I realized what I really loved was more the philosophical side than the theological side. And also in my province at the time, there weren’t a lot of guys that were interested in philosophy, and we needed philosophy teachers. So it was like, I raised my hand, I said, I’ll do the philosophy thing.
And so, you know, I did a PhD in philosophy, but to me, you know, philosophy is the language that theology works in. And, you have to be philosophically literate if you’re gonna do theology, whether it’s systematic or moral or, or anything else. So I’ve always kind of gone back and forth between those worlds because they seem like, to me, they, they just belong together because, you know, the harmony and faith and reason stuff that Aquinas and Augustine believed in is part of the way the Church looks at the world.
Todd Ream: Yep. Is there a point in time in history that you look back to and think that the relationship between philosophy and theology was perhaps most properly ordered or more properly ordered than we may find today?
Brian J. Shanley: Well, I’m biased. Of course, I think it’s in Aquinas. After Aquinas, it’s all downhill. But you know, it’s really the Middle, the Middle Ages, you know. And the first book I ever read about the relationship between philosophy and reason was Gilson’s lectures about the relationship between faith and reason in the Middle Ages, and then once Modernity starts, those two things start to pull apart. But we don’t need to rehearse that story as well.
But I would, you know, in my chauvinistic ideal, and I think the Church still believes this, Aquinas was the kind of, best, if you will articulation of the relationship between faith and reason.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.
In what ways is that relationship that’s expressed there between theology and philosophy for how we organize or fail to organize today’s Church-related university and the domains of knowledge that exist?
Brian J. Shanley: Yeah, I mean, I’ve given talks on this topic a bunch of times, and in some ways it comes back to John Henry Newman’s, you know, The Idea of a University and the ideal of a Catholic university is that somehow, knowledge fits together as a coherent, cohesive whole, and that includes theology and philosophy, and includes science, it includes the humanities, that somehow, since God is the source of all truth, this somehow fits together.
And I think that is what distinguishes a Catholic university from other universities, because I think most other universities, the oneness just isn’t there. It’s like you, you study one thing, you study another thing. And this is hard because, historically, the tension, particularly between science and faith has been a tough nut to kind of figure out, well, how does it cohere?
And it’s why Catholic universities have core curriculums, that they make even the biology kids study theology and philosophy and read literature and learn something about history in order to be well-rounded, and also to understand that the deepest purpose of education is not so you can find a job, but it’s because then you can live a meaningful human life and find out what the meaning of your life is.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As you mentioned, you served as a philosophy professor in particular at Catholic University of America from 1994 to 2005, and in 2005 you were appointed president of Providence College.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to make the transition from serving as a faculty member to serving as a senior administrator?
Brian J. Shanley: Yeah, I’m not sure discernment is the right word. I’ll, I’ll just tell you the facts.
So at that time, the Providence College job, which is our Dominican college in Rhode Island, I happened to be on the board of trustees there. And by statute, the president has to be a Dominican, and the provincial at the time said to me, I need a bunch of candidates to give to the board. And so I want you to throw your hat in the ring. And I said, sure. I took a vow of obedience, like, yep, I’m in.
I was 45 years old at the time. I had never been an administrator. I’d been an editor of The Thomist and a college professor, but I wasn’t a dean. I wasn’t a chair. I wasn’t a provost. I thought, there’s no way in the world they give me this job. And then lo and behold, I got the phone call one day. The board has chosen you. And I’m like, what? There was somebody I thought was much more qualified than I was for this job, but they chose me.
And so I went from being a philosophy professor, I ended in May and then July 1st, I’m the president. So I went from a professor to a president with nothing in between. And I tell people—you listed my history of all the degrees I have. I’m a good learner. So I faked it until I figured it out, and I’ve been doing it for close to 20 years now, and I’m still faking it and figuring it out.
Todd Ream: Yeah. 15 of those 20 years as a president, of course, were at Providence College, which makes you the longest serving president still in Providence’s history. And during that time, Providence experienced an unprecedented season of growth, both quantitatively and qualitatively by various markers. You also preached 475 homilies, presided at 40 weddings and baptisms and 232 Providence students also reportedly received the sacraments through the right of Christian initiation for adults.
How do you make sense of your tenure of service at Providence College?
Brian J. Shanley: I don’t know if those facts are all true, because I have no idea over 15 years what I did and didn’t do. And something I’ve come to believe in and I preach a lot is, if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans. So when the Providence College job became open, I had just signed a book contract to write the book that I thought was going to be my reason for living an intellectual biography of Thomas Aquinas. And then this job happened and I was finishing a book at the time and I’ve never written another book since because I don’t have the time to do it.
I thought I was gonna have this scholarly career and then I became the president of Province College and God opens doors, so when I finished at Providence, I was gonna take a year off. And then a month after I retired, they called me about St. John’s. And are you interested? And I said, well, send me some stuff. I knew it from the Big East and when I read about it, I thought, this is a challenge very much different Providence, but it’s Catholic. It’s a big university. It’s a different set of challenges. And so I said yes.
So I just go with the flow. When I ended Providence, I just said to God, I have no plans. You just open a door for me. And the door opened. I went through it, and it’s been an incredible blessing to be here. So I don’t have a plan.
I don’t even know how I’ve been successful, except I think, the most important role I think of a president at, at a Catholic university is to provide some kind of vision about what you think this place could be, and that’s where being a preacher and being a teacher, I’m good if you put me in front of people about saying, I think this is where we need to go. And I’m smart enough to have people around me that do the detail stuff that I’m not good at. I’m the big picture vision, relationship person.
And I’ve also found the Dominicans were founded as a mendicant order, which means we’re supposed to beg our way through. And so I found fundraising taps right into the Dominican charism. It’s like, I don’t mind begging for my, my universities, Providence and St. John’s, and I have found that if you can give some kind of a vision to people about what you hope to see this place become, that they’ll be generous.
And the success I had at Providence and whatever success I have here is largely attributable to the generosity of other people who have said, I want to help you do what you want to do.
Todd Ream: In terms of that vision that presidents are called to cultivate and then communicate, what did you see in Providence College in terms of its potential as you sort of walk through your early years as president?
Brian J. Shanley: What I saw was that we were behind the people that I thought were our competitors. So I was chasing Holy Cross and Villanova and Boston College for the whole 15 years that I was there. And a lot of it was getting the right kind of resources for our students. So fundraising frankly was a big piece that I didn’t think Providence had reached its full potential about fundraising. And fundraising enabled us to build better facilities. We started to look like a school that was as good as Holy Cross and Villanova and Boston College, recruiting faculty of really, really high quality.
And although, you know, some people don’t like to hear this getting good at basketball was helpful. And so it took us a while, but we got good at Providence and trying to replicate that at St. John’s this year we got really good at basketball and.
Todd Ream: It’s important in the Big East to be good in basketball?
Brian J. Shanley: That’s right. We were the MVP this year and it got people excited. It gets you name recognition, and I’m pretty shameless about anything that’s gonna help St. John’s. I’m going to work on it.
Todd Ream: Yeah. As you echoed your long-earned sabbatical from that presidency of 15 years, it lasted a whole total of five months as you were appointed president of St. John’s in November of 2020. So in the teeth of the pandemic, arguably there globally, but also in New York.
Would you describe a little bit more the process that led to that appointment, especially the transition—you echoed some of these details already—but the transition from a Dominican institution to a Vincentian institution and the learning process that you put yourself through?
Brian J. Shanley: When I stepped down at Providence, I had some headhunters call me about jobs, and they just seemed too much like Providence College all over again. And I felt like I had done that and I said to God give me something different, that will take what I’ve learned at Providence and force me to grow and evolve and be challenged.
And so when the St. John’s job came my way, and here’s how it works in the providence of God, they, they were in a search, and an alumnus of St. John’s, whose kid went to Providence, said to her father, why aren’t they looking at Father Shanley? And so he said something to somebody and then the head hunter calls me and I’m like, yeah, send me the stuff. And then I said, well, I had been here once in my life when we actually had a meeting here when we dissolved the old Big East, and I said I want to meet the board chair.
So I took a ride, came down here. I played golf with the board chair, then I had dinner with him. And I drove home and I said to myself, this is the challenge that Providence prepared me for because it’s just bigger, it’s more complicated. It’s New York City. I think what I learned in getting Providence to where we got it is what I needed to know to help this place. And I just knew immediately like this is the place that I’m supposed to be. And so I said, okay, I’m in. And then I got the job.
And, to your earlier point, I came here during COVID and I had to quarantine for like five days in a house here and nobody was on campus. It was really a strange experience. It took me two and a half years to really feel like, oh, I’m starting to understand this place. And now that we’re back to quote “normal,” I’m seeing more and more clearly the potential that we have and the challenges that lie ahead of us.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Can you say a little bit more about that potential? So going back to, you know, presidents cultivate a vision for an institution and communicate it, create buy-in for it, what is the potential that you see at St. John’s that fuels that vision? What do you see as its unique qualities or characteristics?
Brian J. Shanley: I think it’s our students. Our, our, the students that come to St. John’s, because so many of them are first generation, their socioeconomic status is not like it is at Georgetown or Providence or Nova. They are, my word for our students is that they are gritty. They work really hard. They have no sense of entitlement. And employers, I think, love our students, because they bring that grittiness.
And the other thing to be honest, is that, you know, we’re majority minority without even trying, because we live in Queens, and Queens is the most incredibly diverse place in the United States. It’s like every other neighborhood. Things change. And so I think that we produce students that have big hearts and a lot of grit and determination, and that’s something that I think is unique coming out of St. John’s.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you.
As our time begins to become short, I want to transition now to asking you about the academic vocation, you know, as one who lived that full-time as a philosophy professor and as a journal editor and as an author, but now in terms of how you see it as a president and as a president who served two institutions, how do you define the characteristics or the qualities of the academic vocation, Catholic academic vocation?
Brian J. Shanley: So I recently read a book called Lost in Thought, and it’s about the value of thinking for its own sake. My specialty in philosophy was like, God, so, you know, the most abstract and complicated thing in the world is, God. And you know, I think the value of thinking for its own sake as opposed to educating people for a job is an important value.
And I think it’s something I’ve lived before I became a president and had to get really practical. I thought about, mostly like theological, philosophical, ethical questions and that capacity to do that, and I still teach an ethics class because I think our students, and I tell them they don’t believe me, but like, this is the most important class you’re gonna take at this place, because you need to think about what it would mean for your life to turn out well. And that’s the way Aristotle frames things in the Nicomachean Ethics and that capacity for reflection, the capacity for, if you will, bigger pictures, understanding what goods are really important, what goods are intermediate goods, and that capacity I think is important in every life.
And you know, the motto of the Dominican order is “Contemplata aliis tradere” which is to contemplate and to share with others the fruits of your contemplation. So I’m big on contemplation between prayer and reading and everything else, thinking and praying and just trying to understand the way the world works and the way God is, that’s more important than anything else in your life, and I have the luxury of being able to live that out, and that’s the great grace of the vocation I have.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. For educators then who are invited to serve at St. John’s what do you see as the most significant practices as you form them toward an understanding of the academic vocation? Are there any particular practices that prove most important?
Brian J. Shanley: Yeah, we try to help them to understand the Vincentian charism and in particular, I think it’s the idea of social justice of, if you will, hands-on encounters with the poor and the needy and to see how, what it is that they’re studying, whatever that is, can contribute to the common good. And, and that it has some, we kind of require our students to have a service learning component of what it is that they do.
And we try to educate our faculty to help our students and the faculty to reflect on the meaning of the, the service-learning that our students are doing and that it is just as much as I love contemplation, you’re also supposed to change the world and try to figure out how what we’re doing as a university can have that impact on the community that’s for the good of other people.
Todd Ream: Yeah. When seeking to exercise such an understanding of the academic vocation and cultivate it, are there any virtues that you believe are more important than others to cultivate?
Brian J. Shanley: Well, I mean obviously wisdom is, is the number one virtue to cultivate. And I would say as a president, prudence, trying to figure out what is the right thing to do in the circumstances that you’re in, particularly these days with so many changing aspects. It’s like every day I pray to God, like, help me to see what’s the right thing to do for St. John’s because this job has never gotten easier. It’s only gotten harder. So I think I pray for wisdom and prudence more than anything else.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.
In the larger environment in which we live and in which the academic vocation is exercised here, are there any vices that you believe are most important to confront, that can prey upon academic life?
Brian J. Shanley: If I had to choose one, I might say cynicism, like nothing really matters and I’m smarter than you, like when you’re a professor, or I’m smarter than you all are. I think, optimism and hope about the future and about the value of education, that this can really make a difference not only in your life but in the life of our country, our city, our church, and the world that, the few professors that I’ve had that are world wary and cynical, it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t really play well. So I think besides Cedia getting lazy is maybe the other one. Off the top of my head, I would say those two are the ones to guard against the most.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.
As we close our conversation now, I want to ask about the relationship that the Church-related university shares with the university, and within the context of the academic vocation, in what ways is its health reflective of the health that the university, the Church-related university, shares with the Church?
Brian J. Shanley: I was at a meeting of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. I’m on the executive board. I know you, you interviewed Donna recently and we were talking about this literally yesterday at our meeting. And I think particularly in the world that we live in right now, trying to achieve a greater harmony between colleges and universities and the bishops about the Catholic voice in America is a challenge, both for the bishops and for us so that we can speak with one voice about the things that matter to the Church.
And I think now having an American Pope, and you know, at, at our, I showed you this earlier at our Big East meeting, last week, the president of Villanova was all full of himself, obviously, because he’s graduated of the Pope there, and so it’s like Big East Pope one. Everybody other else is zero.
I think this is a moment, hopefully that for the Church in America to kind of come together in a way that maybe only an American Pope can help us to see what our peculiar vocation to our nation might be. And the voice that we have needs to be a voice that speaks in unity. And so I’m optimistic that perhaps going forward we’ll figure out how to have one voice.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.
Are there any ways in particular that you think that the university could be of greater service to the Church then in this moment and vice versa?
Brian J. Shanley: I think the universities need in some ways to remember, and, and now I’m, I’m preaching out of my experience here to, to not forget our vocation to the poor and to first generation students because the largest growing population in the Catholic Church is Hispanic, and it is our largest growing population here at St. John’s. And when Providence College opened it doors, it was French-Canadian, it was Irish, it was Italian. Now it’s people coming from Mexico and South America.
And our attitudes in this country about those people is challenging right now. And I think, it’s important for the Church going forward both as an institution but also in terms of Catholic higher ed is to be that engine of social mobility, like the Irish and the Italians and the French-Canadians, everybody’s moved up the ladder, and we need to make sure that we continue as Catholic universities to be that change engine for first generation students in our country.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has been Father Brian J. Shanley, President of St. John’s University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Brian J. Shanley: Thank you for having me.
—
Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.
