As a men’s residence hall rector, I start over each August with a new staff and about 1/3 new residents.
It’s a little like coaching a football team, a different roster every season. One never knows what the group chemistry will be, what issues will emerge, whether our hall sports teams will win any championships, or how students will end up becoming champions in some other aspect of their lives.
You’d be hard-pressed to find another religious community with brothers and priests running university residence halls, but Holy Cross has always prioritized living among students, both as rectors and in residence, striving to create intentional faith communities with Sunday Eucharist as the centerpiece. It’s not a coincidence that when one asks students what’s most distinctive about this place they typically mention their hall. Graduates frequently note that Sunday Mass at Chicago, LA, or New York parishes rarely provides the same sense of communion they experienced worshiping together in hall chapels.
Residential ministry reflects Blessed Basil Moreau’s insistence that education takes place not only in classrooms but through life lessons gained outside of them. Butting up against roommates and others sharing the same corridor with different personal habits, values, and opinions often proves more challenging than a chemistry final – and dealing with one’s own failings after a stumble even more so.
Many students face academic struggles, family deaths, disciplinary problems, mental health issues, personal doubts about faith, a relationship or a career path, or other obstacles that cannot be predicted at the year’s outset, but they also know there is a sacramental life and a ministerial presence both day and night to support them within the walls where they dwell.
Having spent nearly half his life residing in a French boarding school, I’m confident Fr. Moreau would be pleased that when most of us assigned here head “home” it’s to a dorm full of Undergrads.
That’s more than collegiate housing management. Here it’s about shepherding and is quite possibly the most distinctive element of our ministry at Notre Dame.
Fr. Jim King, C.S.C.
Published 31 July 2024
