Reunion 2026, Part 2: Fr. Ted Said: Cultivating Hope

Episode Topic: Fr. Ted Said: Cultivating Hope

In his inaugural address, University President Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., called us to be “sustainers of hope and builders of bridges.” But in a world where optimism often feels in short supply, where do we find the inspiration to keep nurturing the good? Plant those seeds through a revitalizing experience where you can pause, exhale, and allow your spirit to blossom. Come hear this calling echo in powerful, personal stories from Notre Dame alumni and faculty who are living examples of what it means to cultivate hope—just like Fr. Ted.

Featured Speakers:

• Dolly Duffy '84, Executive Director, Notre Dame Alumni Association, University of Notre Dame
• Michael Schreffler, Art History Professor, Director of the Notre Dame Arts Initiative, Associate Dean for the Arts, College of Arts and Letters, University of Notre Dame
• Mike Brown '01, Former Notre Dame Leprechaun, Speaker, Author, Founder of Soulstir
• Glynnis Garry Bann, M.D. '11, Assistant Professor, Principal Investigator, Departments of Internal Medicine and Molecular Biology at UT Southwestern Medical Center
• Jennifer Burke Lefever '98 M.A., '00 Ph.D., Managing Director, Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic, University of Notre Dame
• Rev. Pete McCormick, C.S.C., '06 M.Div., '15 MBA, Assistant Vice President of Campus Ministry, University of Notre Dame
• J. Martin (Marty) Regan, Jr. '76, Senior Staff Attorney, City of Memphis, Lewis Thomason

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled Reunion 2026.

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Transcript

Speaker 16 0:00

as long as we cherished our humanity and we cherish that wonderful inner spirit that gives us a sense of nobility as human beings, that somehow in a world however dark, however difficult, however trying, there's always hope out there on the horizon. There is always a chance to make life a little better. There is always someone you can smile at and love as a child loves his parents and his friends. But when all is said and done, uh, life is more than dreariness and despair and darkness. When we work together for higher goals, life can be brilliant. It can be satisfying. It can be, as I feel at this moment, well worth living.

Dolly Duffy 0:59

If you listen to that quote, the line was, "There's always someone you can smile at." And as I look out over this crowd, I can't help but smile that you're all here. I'm Dolly Duffy, the executive director of your Notre Dame Alumni Association, and a member of the class of 1984. Thanks for coming to the Father Ted Said series. You may already know it, but the idea behind this series 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 different aspects of that topic. The series has covered themes such as peace building and security, civil and human rights, the fiftieth anniversary of co-education at Notre Dame, the hundredth anniversary of the God, Country, Notre Dame door, and last year, we celebrated bridge builders. Through this series, we shine a light on the experiences and work of the Notre Dame family, as well as to honor Father Ted's legacy. This year, we will explore the theme of cultivating hope, which was also the theme chosen by Father Bob Dowd for this year's Notre Dame forum. So without further ado, I will hand it over to our host, Michael Schreffler, director of the Arts Initiative, professor of art history, and associate dean for arts in the College of Arts and Letters. Michael?

Michael Schreffler 2:36

Well, thank you, Dolly, and good afternoon, everyone. It's a great pleasure to welcome you to the twenty twenty-six edition of Father Ted Said. When the Alumni Association asked me to be here, it was easy for me to say yes. Uh, in my role as director of the Notre Dame Arts Initiative, I've seen the way the arts spark imagination and hope, um, even as we face challenges that are as present in our world today as they were twenty years ago when Father Ted spoke in the clip we saw just moments ago. The optimistic vision of the future that Father Ted laid out in that speech is central to Notre Dame's mission, which calls on us to foster human solidarity and disciplined habits of mind, body, and spirit. This principle has guided our efforts in the Arts Initiative in the two years, uh, since its establishment. We've done things like fund innovative faculty research, exploring questions on the arts and the environment, migration, and faith. We've provided hands-on and close-up experiences for students, uh, with the arts and artists. And we've been planning the inaugural Notre Dame Arts Biennial, a festival that draws on our talents and traditions to create community and enduring collaboration through the arts. The Biennial will take place here on campus and at locations, uh, throughout South Bend and the region from January to June twenty twenty-seven. And I hope you will visit us at arts.nd.edu for information on how to join us for this historic celebration of the arts at Notre Dame. When I speak publicly about the Arts Initiative, I'm often asked how I became interested in the arts and how I came to Notre Dame. A-as a child, uh, attending mass in my parish church in Eastern Pennsylvania, I was always fascinated by the vaulted ceilings and the stained glass windows of the church, uh, the nearly life-sized statues of the saints, and the liturgical music. Uh, I was even a budding organist, uh, though I now realize I was not a very good one. Uh, I eventually went on to study the history of art as an undergraduate and then later as a graduate student at the University of Chicago. I, uh, I developed a research focus on Latin America, uh, where, as I'm sure many of you know, some of the most stunning Baroque cathedrals and altarpieces and pipe organs survive to today. I'm proud to be part of a university that sees value in this kind of historical research, not only for the sake of knowledge itself, but also for its demonstration of great human achievement, resilience, and commitment to the principles of faith with origins in the distant past and relevance to our present and to our future. Study in the arts, um, has been a part of the Notre Dame education since the time of our founder, Father Sorin, in the 19th century. And as in all things Notre Dame, Father Ted also plays an important role in this story. He recruited the internationally famous, uh, sculptor Ivan Mestrovic to join the faculty in the 1950s, and it was during Father Ted's, uh, tenure as president that theater performance, uh, which had been flourishing in Washington Hall since its opening in 1882, was integrated into the curriculum But perhaps Father Ted's greatest legacy to the arts at Notre Dame is the 11-story mosaic mural, Word of Life, by Millard Sheets, installed in 1964 on the south facade of the library. We know it today as Touchdown Jesus, and I know you can all picture it. A towering image of the risen Christ with a procession of 50 or so smaller figures of saints and scholars representing the fields of human- humanistic inquiry that are at the heart of the Catholic intellectual tradition. For many, uh, the mural expresses our collective hope for victory on the football field. But at the time of its unveiling, it was a manifesto of sorts. Father Ted's declaration that a modern academic culture of research in science and technology could not exist at Notre Dame in the absence of rigorous inquiry in the arts and the humanities. In commissioning the mural, Father Ted understood the power of the arts to communicate important ideas, to give shape to an institutional identity, and to serve as a communal point of reference for, by now, generations of Domers. And so today we find ourselves more than 60 years after the unveiling of the Word of Life at a Notre Dame that has in many ways fulfilled the hope that Father Ted cultivated. A core curriculum ensures that all students, regardless of their major, study theology, philosophy, and the other disciplines of the liberal arts. And the Arts Initiative, together with the other initiatives of the strategic framework, provide an institutional structure for research, teaching, and outreach in these areas. Father Ted's hopes for Notre Dame's future, first articulated decades ago, continue to guide us in the 21st century. In just a moment, we'll hear personal stories from five members of our Notre Dame family who have lived out Father Ted's legacy of cultivating hope. I invite you, as fellow members of that family, to find inspiration in their stories and contribute to cultivating hope in your own communities. And now, on with the show

Speaker 8:48

tackling problems that affect the whole world. I think you have to say that it's been a, almost a magical story of what happened, and it-- to have been a part of it, of course, is something for which I'm deeply grateful. But I'm grateful to the Mother of God for making it happen. I, and I would be a fool to say that it happened because I was here so much or so long or did so many different things. Uh, you can do everything in the world, but if you don't have that strong direction, blessing, and follow-up, uh, grace with it, it's, it's not gonna be around very long

Juliana 9:22

Please welcome author, entrepreneur, CEO of Solster, and former Notre Dame Leprechaun, Mike Brown of the

Mike Brown ’01 9:37

class of 2001. All right. All right. So the former, the former Notre Dame Leprechaun part, I gotta get this out the way. When I say go, you say Irish. Go! Irish! Go! Irish! Go, go! Four times, all right? Here we go. Go, go Great job. Great job. Great job So, so Hebrews 11 and 1 says, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen." I went to church four days a week growing up, and that's a scripture that I'm very familiar with, but I commonly focus on the faith part. Today, I wanna think about, uh, the hope side, and what happens when hope becomes something that stirs in your soul, and how then faith becomes a substance of, of things that are hoped for. What are the things that we hope for? Do we hope for a new job? Do we hope for a new car? Maybe we hope for a new home. For me, when I was a student, I hoped to pass Econ 101. Amen. Please. I hoped when I was in technology sales, I hoped to close a lot of deals. And there was a time then when I came back and worked in development that I then hoped to unlock the grace of giving in others and have an impact on students. Fast-forward, Father Ted, in 2015, passed away, and the university celebrated his passing with a memorial service that was held right there in the Joyce Center. I was living in Chicago at the time, and the memorial service was live-streamed. As I was watching it, something really began to stir in my soul. I was at the height of my sales career, but that particular service moved something in me, even virtually. I called a few friends to let them know how much that memorial service meant to me, and an opportunity then presented itself for me to come back to Notre Dame. There was a pull for that to happen. I hoped then, again, to have an impact on the lives of others Fast forward another five years. There was a global health pandemic. People felt hopeless and isolated. There were a lot of social injustices. There had, there had been a lot of heightened awareness of social injustices in our country and across the world. There was a election that year that divided our country like no other. Simply put, there was a lot of hate stirring across, again, the country and in the world. How could I do something to address that? How could I do something to help really address all the hate that was going on? During the pandemic, I made up my own half-marathon, and as I was training for this marathon, on one of these runs, I had something hit me. Something began to stir in my soul I have a cousin. Her name is Jeanetta Robinson. Her nickname is Little Netta. Little Netta's birthday is December 27th, and it was at her sixth birthday party that there were friends that did not get gifts for Christmas. Little Netta recognized this, and without being told, gave her gifts to those friends Three years later, little Netta, at age nine, was tragically murdered along with her mom, Cheryl. I was four years old, and that's the story I've, I've heard all my life. The story of her giving her gifts away and the story of her and my Aunt Cheryl being murdered While I was then on that run, it came to me. I can honor little Netta's memory by sharing her story. I can share her story of hope. I can share her story of love. I can share her story of compassion for others, and I can do it in the form of a children's book. So I started writing. As I wr- wrote that story, there was things that I tried to put in it and things that I really didn't know what should be included. Do I talk about her murder, do I not? But it was a children's book. But it was my hope that this children's book would help break cycles of hopelessness, break cycles of hate, and create cycles of love, cycles of bringing joy to children to help read I then also had the idea to give that book away to children for free. I worked with my dad, and we came up with a plan, and we ultimately started what's called the Little Johnnetta Robinson Gifts of Love program. Through that program, we give away gifts to children in my hometown, Milwaukee, and we give it away as a Christmas gift. I hoped we would be able to do that. I had faith that we would be able to do that. And with the support of so many people in our community, we did. That year, we gave away almost... it was almost a thousand gifts. But it was through the development of that program and through the sharing of Little Netta's story that I started a company, and that company is called Soulstir. Soulstir exists to create experiences that inspire empowerment and action. Empowerment and action, meaning knowing and helping people know they have power. You have power to make a difference in the world. But not only do that, but we now have to take that power and put it to action. We have to do something. And that was the entire reason why the company was started. So far, we have worked as an organization to give away-- We've now published eight books, and we've given away almost ten thousand copies of that book. But it wouldn't happen, and if we didn't have the support of the community, and it wouldn't have happened if people weren't inspired to create then empowerment and action Through Soulstir and now the Soulstir Foundation, it is our hope that we continue to serve, and it's our hope that we continue to give away more and more books, and it's our hope that we continue to inspire empowerment and action, not just to any of you that are in this room, but to people all across the world. My question for you is what is stirring in your soul? What's that small voice you're hearing, and what action can you take? Let's go.

Speaker 14 18:05

Jesus put it very simply: "I was hungry and you gave me to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me to drink. I was alone and, and homeless and you took me in. I was in prison and you visited me." And then he says, "Whatever you did for one of these, my least brethren, you did it for me." And that is at the heart of, of being a Christian in our day. Out of the heart of our religion comes understanding, comes support for those who need support, uh, companionship for those who are lonely, uh, food for those who are hungry, drink for those who are thirsty, and that we do it because in doing that, we are loving God and we are serving God.

Juliana 18:52

Please welcome Jennifer Burke Lefever, who earned her Notre Dame master's degree in 1998 and her Notre Dame doctorate in 2000, and who now leads Notre Dame's new Wilma and Peter Veldman Family Psychology Clinic as its first managing director.

Glynnis Garry Bann, M.D. ’11 19:20

It's been a busy few weeks for me. A few weeks ago, I was able to move my son home from his first year at Notre Dame. Last weekend, I was down in Terre Haute, Indiana, uh, as my older son graduated from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. And then just this week, on Monday, we opened up the Velma and Family Psychology Clinic. This is a new institute at the university that we've built in the community just south of campus, and we have goals with this, with this new clinic that we are gonna do research to help us understand mental health issues. We're gonna train up the next generation of care providers, and we will also provide high-quality care to those in our community with a focus on those who may not otherwise receive care. And I sometimes just wanna pinch myself that I get to get-- I get to have this role as the make-it-happener at this new clinic because I still see myself as this poor farm kid. 'Cause I was born the youngest of 10 children, uh, on a farm in the middle of nowhere in northern Illinois. So I grew up running through cornfields with my siblings and climbing trees and playing in the creek. Uh, I even as a one-- as a young girl, I tried to nurse a runt piglet back to health after it had been smooshed by a much larger pig. And so even then, I had my eye out for the little guy. And I've been able to make my career of keeping an eye out for the most vulnerable with a focus on children in poverty. And so, uh, I've, uh- And people, uh, will ask me, "How do you keep your energy level up when you're facing these, uh, these, uh, insurmountable issues?" And I tell them that sometimes it feels a bit like you're heading out to a forest fire and you're armed with a squirt gun. And I, and I tell them, "You can cultivate hope through action and energy," and I learned this from my mother. So you can imagine a woman who is, uh, reigning in the chaos of this large family on an active farm, that she would have to have an inordinate amount of energy, and she did. And she did this all while working. She would teach catechism. She sang in the choir. She was president of my PTO. Uh, she was the one, if there was anybody who had lost a family member or was sick at church, she was bringing meals. If she knew of a neighbor who had hit hard times, she was bringing them groceries. I watched as she took care of all of my elderly relatives. And then my mother thought that she should solve the homelessness problem in the tiny town near our farm, and she brought home this, uh, young man that she had found out had been sleeping in a tent. And 14-year-old Jen was mortified at this. I was way more concerned about what that was gonna do to my image to be associated with him, rather than whether he had somewhere safe to sleep that winter And my mother would get so frustrated with me. She'd be like, "Jennifer, Jesus did not call on us to judge other people. His best friend was a prostitute." Now, that is likely a more colorful interpretation of the gospel than what you just heard from Father Ted. But it burned into my young teenage brain. And through my mother's example, I learned that you cultivate hope in others through action, that you notice when someone else is suffering, and you step in, and you do something useful. And I couldn't tell you how many times that with my large family, when we would face a, a daunting task, that we were able to make short work of it because we worked on it together. And so I brought this ethic, my big farm family ethic, to Notre Dame with me, and I've been able to help build something here shaped by the legacy of Father Ted Hesburgh. 'Cause Father Ted is the reason that we have a psych department here because when leadership was debating about whether we should have a geology department or a psychology department, our departmental lore says that Father Ted said, "People are more important than rocks." I agree, Father Ted. He was also the force behind having, uh, therapy be an area of study within our department because he had a deep understanding that if this university is gonna be a powerful means for good in this world, that we need to be serving people. And I think that we are living that out through the Velde Family Psychology Clinic. I think we are doing this in a particularly Holy Cross brother kind of a way in that we are first using our wisdom to see and then our courage to act. We use our wisdom to do research, to, uh, answer questions like, how do we best serve the most vulnerable children and families? How do we welcome marginalized people into care who may not historically felt like they were welcome there? And then we need that courage to act and serve those who need us most because you don't cultivate hope by pretending that a problem doesn't exist. You cultivate hope by walking alongside people, treating them as if they are worthy of care and knowing that your actions matter. The other way that we bring our Catholic values into our work is by recognizing the importance of family. In our culture, we often treat mental health issues as if they are an individual issue, that it's your diagnosis, it is your burden to bear. Even at a time when those, those folks who are struggling may not have the wherewithal to advocate for themselves or do what they need to do to help themselves feel better. We know that it's not an individual issue, that anytime anyone is struggling, their whole family is impacted. Everyone who loves and cares for them is impacted, and those relationships can also be a source of support and healing for that person. Now, this is a particular point of passion for me because of my experience as a mother. When one of my sons was transitioning into high school, he started to have mental health struggles. And even though I'm a psychologist, and my husband at the time was a child therapist, we still felt lost. We weren't sure how best to take care of him and keep him safe. And this was a life-altering change in perspective for me, 'cause nothing will knock you to your knees faster than when you see someone who is most precious to you in the world suffering, and you don't know how to fix it And it was quite shocking to me the lack of resources available in our community. That if you were lucky enough, you could get your child into an hour a week of therapy with a high-quality therapist, but then the next step is hospitalization, and there was nothing in between. And then there literally was nothing for us as a family. In fact, that was the most horrific part, is I often felt like I was treated as if I was the problem and that I was not a source of love and support for my son. But I think at Notre Dame and at the Belmond Family Psychology Clinic, we are able to do things a little differently, and we're able to think a little bigger. And so sometimes now that we just opened this clinic, I, I think that maybe if I was riding that elevator up to the 13th floor with Father Ted again... Uh, for those of you in the audience who are a little younger, we actually used to have to go to the library to get physical books- and papers. And psychology books were on the same floor as Father Ted's office, so I would get to ride the elevator with him on occasion. And so I think he would say to me, "Jen, don't get too comfortable. We just built you this beautiful new building. What are you gonna do with it?" And I will tell you, I'm gonna put that building into action. I'm gonna gather people to come work with me and face this mental health crisis with curiosity and compassion and no judgment. I want to get people to work collaboratively and welcome people into care so that they feel respected and cared for, and this is my work. So I'm gonna head back out to that forest fire armed with my squirt gun. And if you wanna join me, and you happen to have a squirt gun, maybe you have a shovel or a bucket or maybe a fire hose, I want you to grab them up and let's go.

Speaker 19 29:11

To have a country that has, in a sense, a microcosm of the whole world and all its diversity and all its color and all its beauty, because God didn't make people beautiful just because they were this or that color. He made... Everything he made was beautiful. And when you see it all together in one country, and everybody making it, not just these kind of people making it or that kind of people making, but everybody having the opportunity, and everybody getting educated, and everybody having work to do, and everybody developing a sense of family life and, and neighborly life and, and a beautiful environmental life, which we're kind of learning more about these days. I think that that would be a tremendous example, 'cause they can look here and say it's possible. It's only possible for all these people to grow together and get educated together and be successful together. It's possible for them to be happy together

Juliana 30:01

Please welcome proud member of the 50 year celebrating class of 1976, J. Martin "Marty" Regan Jr., who is a nonprofit leader and partner in the law firm of Lewis Thomason in Memphis, Tennessee.

Rev. Pete McCormick, C.S.C., ’06 M.Div., ’15 MBA 30:26

I'm from an Irish Catholic family that settled in the river town of a small city along the Mississippi, Memphis, Tennessee. And I know at least four of you have been there before visiting. For those of you who haven't, it has been a small river town that has had its share of problems, but also a tremendous amount of hope from different people. I'm the product of five generations of Irish Catholic men and women who have devoted their lives to a multitude of things, whether healthcare, medicine, teaching. But each generation had its own problems, but each had a tremendous optimism for the city and most importantly, for the people of the city. And through that, there's one person who really stands out in my mind. It's the matriarch of the family, Mary Coyle Shea. She was my great-grandmother, lived to be a hundred and three years old. Interestingly, she was born before Lincoln was president. She witnessed the Civil War with gun battles on the river, battles in the downtown of the city. She always was happy and joyous, and despite whatever the adversities were, she always was loving to everybody. And one of the most significant things she and her mother did was that in the 1870s, there was the yellow fevers. It came up the Mississippi River from New Orleans and wiped out twenty-five percent of our city, and most of the family died in it. She never complained. She nursed the people. She went on to raise nine children. But most importantly, even when she was a hundred years old, she wanted to be with young people. She was heavily involved with a Catholic Dominican grade school, a Catholic college for women. And through that All of her descendants sort of revered what the family could do for the city of Memphis. It did have its problems. When I was a grade school kid, I would go to get uniforms for grade school, for St. Dominic Dominican School, and I noticed on the door there were signs, "Whites only." And I'd ask my parents, "Well, how did the African Americans get in here?" "Well, they had to go in the back door." The restaurants, the movie theaters were all whites only. There were hotels that would not even admit African Americans. And I struggled as a kid with that. And I remember watching Walter Cronkite, and there is this Catholic priest from University of Notre Dame, Father Ted Hesburgh, and he's marching in Chicago with a young African American reverend, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. I got to know the name more prominently in the city of Memphis because shortly after that, we had a series of sanitation strikes and marches, and Dr. King marched quite frequently in the city. And in the leadership was a Catholic bishop, Catholic priests, Catholic nuns, Catholic brothers. And the real debate was, we were only five percent Catholic, what are the Catholics doing in politics? Why don't they leave it in the church? And following that, I entered the University of Notre Dame, and I started learning about social justice and political activity. And as I arrived on campus, the first person I met truly was Walter Cronkite. And he put a microphone in my face and said, "What's it like being on campus with women?" And I had to admit, "Sir, I've never been here before. I don't know." They brushed me aside, ran over to find an upperclassman and asked that. But I thought, there Father Ted goes again. And I remember his remarks of saying he looked up atop the Golden Dome and said, "Mary, I apologize that it took so long Well, not only was I a student interested in studying, but it was my first exposure to roommates other than an older brother. And each of us got involved in service. And I know Bob McDonald here got involved in ROTC. And each of us, Mike Laird and Mike Apfeld and Jim Keegan, we all got involved with Tim Scully, and there was a program called the St. Joe Bail Bond Program. And there were other programs that people got involved in, Logan Center. And it was interesting to be living with people that had a mission, but at the same time, service was important, as important as everything else we did. And we went on and we had magnanimous professors. We had Father John Dunne, who talked to us through biographies of other people and what they had done. We had a very interesting Professor Basil O'Leary. And Basil was here from the Milwaukee Fourteen that protested the war in Vietnam that was raging when I was a student. And the interesting thing was he was part of a peace and justice program that Father Ted had created at the university despite political pressure because he felt like that's what the church should be doing. Well, I went on from that through law school and came out, and my first client was the Catholic Diocese of Memphis. And I think with this hope that springs, we were able to get involved in working with the federal government, the state government, and we got funding for housing for the elderly, and we got funding for programs for alcoholism and programs for behavioral health, a multitude of programs that all were social service. And through that, I became sort of a nonprofit lawyer that was willing to work pro bono. And through that pro bono work, I was contacted by these two wonderful anonymous donors. We called them Anonymous Donor One and Anonymous Donor Two. They contributed over a hundred and fifty million dollars to reopen nine inner-city Catholic schools. And fortunately, we had this fascinating, wonderful African American bishop, and his history was that his parents were sugarcane sharecroppers in Basse Terre, Louisiana. He never spoke badly about any of that, but if you knew sugarcane workers in Mississippi or in Tennessee or in Louisiana, it was not much different from slavery. But as I said, Bishop Styve never complained, but he always challenged. And there's a lot of debate because school systems nationwide were suffering for money. But he always said, "What we do for those in the east side," which was the richer side, "we're going to do for those in the inner city." And the debate was, "But Bishop, these children are not Catholic." And he said, "Of course not, but we are. That's why we do it, because we are Catholic." And so we went on from creating a school system that educated thousands of inner-city children through the Catholic schools. And through that program, I had an opportunity to spend a day at one of the schools, St. Patrick's Catholic School. And at this school, I'm with the principal. There's a young student, third-grader Marcus. Marcus always asked for an extra sandwich, and he took that and his bag of chips and put it in the backpack. And finally, the principal said, "Marcus, are you hungry?" And he said, "No, my little brother at home is and has nothing to eat." And that awakened in me the real challenge that poverty is not something on TV. It's in your neighborhoods, it's in your city, and it's something we can do about it. And so that becomes one of the challenges where we all need to hope that there are things we can do. The flip side of that story that brings encouragement to me was somehow I'm not a sportsman, but I got involved in bringing a basketball team, pro team, to the city of Memphis, the Memphis Grizzlies. And I was not one to really go to a lot of sports games, but I took Bishop Stieber one day, and we get on an elevator, and there is an elderly Black lady who says, "Bishop, can I hug you?" And Bishop Stieber opens his arms and says, "Why would you wanna hug me?" And she said, "Bishop, you educated my children. You educated my grandchildren." I didn't know that she knew the word trajectory, but she said, "You have changed the trajectory of my family for generations to come." And that brings tremendous hope to what you and we can do and how great the need is. And I went from working in education to there was a wonderful woman that I worked with at Catholic Charities who ended up going to work for the governor. And through that, we learned the word collaborative. And in the collaborative, we were able to get funding for mental health, and we built a brand-new forty-five million dollar mental health facility, the largest in West Tennessee for behavioral health We recently got four hundred million dollars from the state and from local government for a new med school. And through that, University of Tennessee School of Medicine has agreed to be in a collaborative with Catholic Charities, with our behavioral health entity, Alliance Healthcare. We brought in the number one optometry school in the country, Southern College of Optometry, and we brought in the food bank. And we've brought these campuses to where the people are that need them. And through that, I have realized the strength that you don't have to be a leader, but it sure helps to be a collaborator. And when you do that, it's a tremendous reward to you individually. And it makes me recall the words of our Father Hesburgh, who said, Following Christ does not have to be a burden. It can be the purest joy you ever experience. And I can't tell you how much joy I derive from seeing programs that help people with the philosophy, you don't have to be the leader. Just collaborate and help your fellow citizens and follow the Lord and do things remembering social justice, remembering humanity, and realizing it's not just your parochial problem. There's enough for all of us to do something. And so I will end with the challenge of what brings you joy and what do you do that makes you happy, that helps the people in the future? It's just like the Notre Dame question, what is worth fighting for for you? And so I leave you with that. And also, as much as I've done these things, I think that each one of you from Notre Dame has been doing the same in your own lives. So I congratulate you and say, go Irish and go Notre Dame.

Speaker 12 42:24

It's an evolving world, and it's always a larger world each year, and it's a world with increasingly complicated problems. But that's why we have universities. We stay on the brink of knowledge and push it forward, and I think we, we extend the frontiers of, frontiers of our learning and our possibility of changing the world, if you will, or evolving the world. I think universities are places of great hope. They're not something to just continue the status quo, but tell young people they can have their own dreams and vistas of a better future and work towards that with competence.

Juliana 43:05

Please welcome Glynis Gary-Band, MD, of the class of 2011, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Internal Medicine and a member of the Division of Cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas

Glynnis 43:31

We all inherit things from our families, our faith, our values, the way we laugh, the food that we eat. Some of the things that we inherit, we choose to carry forward with us, and some of the things that we inherit, we don't know that we're carrying at all. One of the things that was passed down to me was Notre Dame. Every summer from when I was two until I was twenty-five, my grandfather, Mike Gary, class of nineteen forty-five, would gather his eight children and thirty-some grandchildren, and he would bring us to campus every year for a week. We stayed in Alumni Family Hall, and with all of the charms of dorm living that I'm sure you can all imagine, it was absolutely perfect. Like many of you, Notre Dame was not just a place that I went to college. It is home. It's where I learned how to ride a bike, where I learned how to fish, where I learned how to pray in the grotto. But we don't just pass down our faith and our values and our love of a place. We also pass down our DNA. I never met my grandmother. She died at fifty-eight from heart failure. She had a genetic condition called familial hypercholesterolemia, which is a genetic mutation in her DNA that causes extraordinarily high levels of cholesterol, and that leads to heart attacks and heart failure within the second and third decade of life. She left behind her a family with her mutation, and in my family alone, there's over five generations and nearly a dozen relatives affected. In her lifetime, there were no drugs to treat this condition. But in fact, the year that she died, the first statin drug came to market, and that was one of the most consequential medical breakthroughs of the twentieth century. Because of statin drugs, they were able to lower my family's cholesterol enough in order to prolong survival of an entire side of my family tree. But the science didn't just stop there. Just this month, researchers published the first-ever gene editing of a cholesterol pathway in humans that allows for a single treatment to permanently lower cholesterol. Take that in. My family's disease cured in my lifetime. I think something has shifted in medicine that we really don't talk about enough. When I was a medical student, we often talked about managing disease, that we could slow it down and try and control it. We thought it was often, you know, a little ridiculous to say, "We can cure this," but we say that now. Children with sickle cell disease are being cured with a single gene therapy. Hepatitis C is now eliminated after eight weeks with a pill. Cancers that were death sentences fifteen years ago are now being survived with for decades. The medicine that really seemed like far-off, futuristic kind of care is now, in many cases, the standard of care. We are living in one of the greatest eras of biomedical discovery, and the work that we're doing in laboratories right now is what the next generation will inherit I'm a cardiovascular physician scientist, so that means I treat patients with heart failure in the hospital, but then I also run a research laboratory that asks a very fundamental question: Can we teach the human heart to heal itself? Heart failure kills more people than all cancers combined. Fifty percent of people with heart failure will be dead within five years of their diagnosis, and the only cure that we currently have for this devastating disease is heart transplantation. We perform over four thousand transplants a year in this country, but four hundred thousand people in the United States will die every year without access to this rare resource. So this field is really in need of novel and curative strategies. The most common cause of heart failure is a heart attack. So after you have a heart attack, millions of heart cells die, and they don't come back. Scar cells take over in their place, and the heart is a muscle that doesn't regenerate at all, and instead, the scar is permanent, and so it weakens the heart because of it. So our laboratory asked a very fundamental question: Can we rewire the DNA of these scar cells and coax them or reprogram them into changing their identity into a contracting heart cell? To test this, we tested over fifteen hundred different proteins, and we found one protein, PHF7, that very effectively converted these scar cells into contracting heart cells. When injected directly into the heart, PHF7 was able to do this within hours of delivery, and in preclinical models, it improved overall ejection fraction or cardiac function and improved survival after heart attack. So we're now carrying these studies forward to, uh, further testing, um, prior to translation of this therapy. Looking forward, we're looking for structurally similar proteins to PHF7 that may be able to work in a same way but either achieve different types of reprogramming or do it more powerfully or more precisely than what PHF7 does now. We're also asking, can these same principles of cellular reprogramming be applied to other contexts, like congenital heart disease? Asking whether we can reprogram or teach a heart that was never built correctly in the first place to rebuild or remodel itself. So this is our frontier: reprogramming a heart to heal itself. Father Ted believed that there was no conflict between science and faith except where there was bad science or bad theology. He fiercely defended scientific inquiry at this university because he knew what science is, that it's not certainty or control, but it is a humility before a truth that is much, much larger than yourself. He defended this university's scientific mission because he believed that as a Catholic institution above all other institutions, that we should be eagerly pursuing truth, that every discovery, every protein, every molecule was in fact a glimpse into what God has already known. I think one of Father Ted's greatest legacies, and I'm sure you've all heard this many, many times, was his constant direction to us students and alumni to invoke the Holy Spirit. He would say before every consequential moment or meeting the three words, "Come, Holy Spirit." These words are alive in our families. They're alive in our text chains. I say them before I walk into patient rooms with news that I don't want to deliver or before I begin an experiment that I don't think or know will work. I know I did not plan to become a physician scientist. I did not plan to work on these proteins or to work on the disease that took my grandmother. I know that nothing was planned, and I'm sure many of you have had this experience where you felt that everything that has worked out was rather given, given through doors that were opened after I had stopped looking for them or through mentors and collaborators who showed up at just the right moment. Father Ted's three words are not a passive resignation, but they're an act of trust, of trust that we are not working on this alone, trust that the Spirit moves in laboratories, in hospital rooms and financial offices and legal suites in the same way that it moves in the grotto, and trust that the work that you've been given to do is worth doing faithfully up until the end. So we all inherit things from those who came before us, and we'll all pass down things to those that come after us. But what we are doing today in laboratories is what we will leave behind to the next generation, the cures that we discover and the questions that we leave for those after us to answer. So that is our legacy, that is what we were taught to do at this university, and that is what we will pass down. So come, Holy Spirit

Speaker 21 52:06

One of the happiest times of my life was living in a residence hall. Was the first rector of 330 freshmen over in Farley Hall. Well, with 29 halls, it's a very lively place, but the nice thing is it's a very friendly place. You walk across this campus, and kids say hello to you. And this isn't just because I'm wearing this collar, because if it's dark at night, they still say hello. I have to say that they're a wonderfully generous group of youngsters. I used to go to the halls every Sunday night for one of those Sunday night masses, and I can't hardly remember a hall that wasn't not just all fill up in the pews, but overflowing down the aisles, and everybody receiving communion

Juliana 52:51

Please welcome Notre Dame's Assistant Vice President of Campus Ministry and Chaplain of the Notre Dame Men's Basketball Team, Father Pete McCormick, CSC who, who holds a 2006 Master's of Divinity degree and a 2015 EMBA, both from Notre Dame

Rev. Pete McCormick, C.S.C., ’06 M.Div., ’15 MBA 53:18

It's so great to be with you all this afternoon, and I just wanna start and make sure that I hit the main point first, which is, what is my reason for hope? Why is it that I stand here in witness to what it is that I believe most profoundly? Well, first and foremost, it's Jesus, that Jesus overcomes sin and death, but a way that I see that lived out most expressly on a daily basis is our students. And I wanna talk a little bit with you about a particular experience that I had with the Notre Dame student body this past year. It's an experience that some of you might have seen in the news or might have seen on social media, and that was St. Olaf's Mass, or also known as the Ice Chapel Mass, that occurred in mid-February this past year This is how it all came about. I was minding my own business on a very cold Thursday night, and I received an email from two seniors living in Coyle Hall. These two seniors were also RAs. One happened to end up becoming the valedictorian. Martin Soros is his name, and Wesley Bonerbo. These two send me a note, and they say the following in the title, all caps, "Crazy idea:" and then it says, "Outdoor mass!" And I thought to myself, "Well, that's an email that I wanna read." So I dug into this thing, and I got a sense of, like, what it is that they were proposing. Now, truth be told, as the director of campus ministry, I had heard about or- outdoor masses in other venues, in other places outside of the university. I always thought to myself, "How cool would it be if we couldn't do that here? If we could make that happen some way, somehow." And then all of a sudden, that incredible gift showed up in my inbox that night. So with a few details that I had to manage, I quickly responded back to them and said, "Absolutely. Count me in." And then as soon as I finished that, I started to think how many articles of my own personal clothing could I get on underneath my alb 'Cause it was a historic cold this partic- particular year. So things begin to unfold in a very unique and special way over the course of the next few days. The students, in a way that only students can do, begin to promote this, whether this be via social media, but they also went old school. They constructed a rather crudely designed sign, and it said, "Outdoor mass, Monday night, 10:00 PM with Father Pete." Now, students didn't necessarily think that this was true. They thought that they were getting spoofed somehow, some way. And so ultimately, on Sunday night, I had to come back out after mass and BP at 8:30 at night, and I had to say to everyone on social media, "I'd like to welcome you and invite you to come to mass tomorrow night at 10:00 PM, right here at what is now known as St. Olaf's." What was really cool is, is that begins to spread the word. Energy, excitement, anticipation. But the whole time, and I mean this, and this is where I just didn't cooperate well with the Holy Spirit. The whole time I thought, tops, we're getting 500, maybe 700 crazies who are willing to come out late at night and attend mass. After all, we have a lot, and I mean a lot of chapels on this campus. So why we couldn't use any one of them, I don't know. But here we were in the middle of North Quad, praising God out at St. Olaf's. So I round the corner. I'm making my way, uh, from Baumer Hall, which is in the way south part of campus, all the way to the north, and I make my way and I round into North Quad and I see an incredible number of people. But you really can't tell exactly how many people are there because they're all, like, together. They're all like, "Hey, listen, if we stand close enough together, we're all gonna keep each other warm." So, uh, what ends up happening is we roll into this mass. Now, you should know, just to set the scene, it's 19 degrees out. Um, it is also a night in which we have somehow, some way assembled what seems to be a professional student choir. They just emerged out of nowhere. Uh, and so they're singing and leading us. In addition, um, the architects, these two, Wes and Martin, had thought through every single detail. So we literally processed in between all of the students with t- two things that I probably will never see the rest of my life. One is an icicle crucifix. And icicle candle holders. One funny story is, is one of the old boys who was serving forgot his gloves, so he was barehanded. He was barehanded the, uh, the candle, and I just thought to myself like, "Mad props, buddy. Mad props." There's no way in heck I would ever do that. Um, I don't love Jesus that much. So the moment which we get a sense of how many people are actually there, we had anticipated, in fairness to us, we had anticipated, we thought about 1,600 individuals would ultimately show up to this thing. Now that, by that I mean we had 1,600 consecrated hosts, but we did not think that many, but we wanted to be just ensured, protected, just in case. Well, anyways, we start handing out communion, and what we begin to find rather quickly is that, well, we didn't plan enough. I ended up handing out in a line, and I started with full-size hosts, generous. And then I look at down the line and I think there's no way this is gonna work, and so I start breaking them in half. And then at that point, I look down the line, it's still long, so I start breaking them into quarters. And at that point, the line keeps trucking, so I start breaking the quarters into halves. At one point, there's a young man who comes up to me, and he is, uh, he is so reverent and so prayerful, and I have the smallest piece. And I say to him, and I look him in the eye and I say, "This one's really small." And I say, "Body of Christ." That particular night was profound for so many reasons. But I think I wanna compare it now with a moment in my own experience with Father Ted. When I entered into, uh, the Corby Hall community with all of the priests, it was 2006. At that point, Father Ted's legacy had largely been established, right? He had done the civil rights, he had received a Congressional Gold Medal of Honor, he had more honorary degrees than he could count, and the list went on and on. Who was I? I was some random kid from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who had just been ordained and was serving as an assistant rector in Dillon Hall. And so in a way that I said yes and participated when Wes and Martin reached out, with Father Ted, I kinda minded my Ps and Qs. And I think to myself now, what is it that I missed by not engaging this individual, who, by the way, who had spoken about his own personal priesthood as a bridge builder? He was an individual throughout the globe who had established relationships and mentored and guided. Why I didn't take him up on that opportunity, I will never know. But it's something that I will live with, and it's something, by the grace of God, I have ways of learning from what it is that he taught by other Holy Cross priests, and certainly by the great institution that is Notre Dame and the way that we share his legacy over and over. But what I would say to all of us is, is as we think about our own lives, there are moments that we can no doubt begin to reflect and think, "Yeah, I participated in grace at that moment. I said yes when the Spirit prompted. I-- even though the odds seemed to be against me, I said yes, that I would be willing to do this thing, even though it didn't make any real kinda sense." And there are gonna be other times in your mo- in your life where you say, "Ah, you know what? I was too conservative. I was too risk-averse." And for those moment, we have to recognize that in both instances, they teach in their own way. They afford us a chance by having not taken a particular path to, in the future, be mo- be more attentive and focused on what it is that the opportunity is before us. But I also wanna point out something else, and this is why these students are such incredible beacons of hope for me. Because they also knew, they were aware that this work that they were doing to build St. Olaf's, it wasn't gonna last forever. Invariably, St. Olaf's would melt. Invariably, it would just become a random spot on North Quad where there's a patch of grass that, to the untrained eye, no one was ever going to be able to appreciate or understand what had happened in that precise moment, in that time, in that place, in the way that these people participated so profoundly and beautifully with God's grace We can't get caught up in the legacy, friends. We have to get caught up in participating with what it is that God is inviting us into each moment. That's a lesson that I've learned throughout the course of my life. It's a lesson that all of us are invited to continue to reflect upon. The invitation for us is always and will always be, how is it that we use the time that we've been afforded? Not to worry about how it is that people will remember us, but the fact that we participated in the promptings of the Holy Spirit, that we were faithful disciples of Jesus, that we sought to use our gifts, our talents, our skills to be able to bring hope to people that so often and desperately need it. These students reminded me what it is that my source of hope is. Through giving praise to the Lord, drawing a community together, they not only inspired this campus community, but frankly, and I don't think I'm being over the top here, I think they inspired the world. And so thank you so very much for the witness that all of you give in your own communities. Let us pray that we don't get caught up in legacy building, but instead that we continue to focus as Father D- Father Ted and so many others have focused on, giving praise to Jesus, seeking to proclaim the kingdom, and to allow those who are desperately in need of that message to hear it, to receive it, to draw strength from it, and in all things, to give praise to God because of it. Thank you so very much for your time today, and God bless you. Go Irish.

Juliana 1:02:54

For the generous gift of their stories of cultivating hope before we go, please rise for the alma mater filmed live at the outdoor mass at St. Olaf's Ice Chapel on February 2nd, 2026. Go Irish!