During the 31st annual John Carroll Society Awards Dinner on May 6, John Garvey, the president of The Catholic University of America, reflected on the “invisible line” that drew him toward his call to teach at Catholic universities.
Garvey began his career in education teaching in law schools at public universities, and was doing what he loved, but said he “hadn’t given much thought to what the job had to do with my salvation.”
He and his wife of 42 years, Jeanne Walter Garvey, have five kids, and Garvey said he thought he was doing his “paternal duty” by taking his kids to Mass and praying with them, but as he was doing so, “Their innocent faith and hope brought me closer to God.” Meanwhile, his intellectual interests began to align more closely with his faith and he “started to think in a Catholic way about legal pursuits,” he said.
He noted how when multiple people are working on a jigsaw puzzle, greater progress is made when doing the work in sight of each other. Likewise, he decided he wanted to work at a Catholic university “where people are working on the same puzzle as me.”
The more than 400 people gathered at the dinner, held in the Four Seasons Hotel in Washington, were there to celebrate four educational leaders for their dedication to Catholic high schools in the Archdiocese of Washington.
During the dinner, Thomas M. Loughney, the president of the John Carroll Society, recognized Paula Valenzuela, a freshman at Archbishop Carroll High School in Washington, for receiving the Agnes E. Vaghi and Joseph P. Vaghi Scholarship, and Olivia Young, a student at the Academy of the Holy Cross in Kensington, for winning the Margaret Mary Missar High School Essay Competition for her essay on service as a path to holiness.
Msgr. Peter Vaghi, the John Carroll Society chaplain who serves as the pastor of the Church of the Little Flower in Bethesda, and Cardinal Donald Wuerl, the archbishop of Washington, joined Loughney on the stage to present the John Carroll Society Medal to Catherine Ronan Karrels, the first lay head of school at Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Bethesda; Daniel M. Kerns, Jr., the head of school at Georgetown Visitation Preparatory School in Washington; Jeffrey Mancabelli, the first lay president of St. John’s College High School in Washington; and Kathleen Ryan Prebble, the president of the Academy of the Holy Cross in Kensington.
Loughney noted that each honoree plays a critical role in building the Church and serving the archbishop, which is the mission of The John Carroll Society. The society was founded in 1951 and named after the first Catholic bishop of the United States.
Congratulating the honorees, Garvey noted that each of these educational leaders often send their students to Catholic University for college, and then they in turn often send them back their graduates as teachers.
In the process of his work of helping Catholic universities build their Catholic identity, Garvey said he has found that, “God’s grace, like the Chicago river, sometimes runs in a direction opposite what you would expect.”
In his current role, Garvey focuses on hiring faculty dedicated to their field and to their faith, but also spends time with students, and teaches a three-credit class where he is frequently inspired by the essays that he reads from students. In the summer of 2016, he accompanied a group of students to Kraków, Poland, for World Youth Day.
While he frequently gets complimented for doing those things, he said he always comes away from the experiences “convinced God has put me there for my own benefit, not for the students.”
Quoting Simone Weil, Garvey said, “For nothing among human things has such power to keep our gaze fixed ever more intensely upon God than friendship for the friends of God.”
“If I should get dragged across the finish line to heaven, it will be because God made me a teacher and gave me the blessing of friendship with the young friends of God,” Garvey concluded.
