From the President

In our freshman women’s residence hall, an image hangs of a young mother, the sun washing over her face and the faces of her young children.

Her famous quote hangs next to her, “Love and sacrifice are closely linked, like the sun and the light. One cannot love without suffering, and one cannot suffer without love.”

These were her words in the years leading up to her decision to give her life for her baby, choosing to go through with a life-threatening pregnancy that did, ultimately, take her life. We know hernow as Saint Gianna Beretta Molla.

Halfway across the world, in a small Guatemalan village, a man of the same generation was also giving up his life: Blessed Stanley Rother, a priest from Oklahoma who was killed for his faith and unyielding ministry in 1981. He spent his years serving his people as their pastor but also as their craftsman, carpenter, and electrician.

His words in the months leading up to his death, “My life is for my people. I am not scared.”

We’re preparing this summer for two long-awaited ribbon cuttings in the fall, within weeks of each other: one to officially rename the Saint Gianna School of Health Sciences, the other to officially open the Hamm School of Engineering.

And as the doorstep to the School of Health Sciences bears Gianna’s name, as a teacher and witness to our health care students, just through the doors to the Hamm School of Engineering hangs a plaque, bearing the story of Blessed Stanley Rother — an inspiration to our engineering students preparing to take up much of the same work as Father Rother.

Two beautifully different people, but not entirely so. Both had reasonable opportunity to avoid personal sacrifice, to fixate their minds on their own shortcomings or weaknesses, to choose a course of treatment or a ministry that would secure their lives. But both decided that what they’d given themselves to — a child or a whole village — was worth the gift of their lives, worth a measure of risk and dauntless sacrifice, and that such sacrifice was possible. Their faith was generous, and in their gift of self they began to shine, such that their names are now incandescent, written across the heavens.

In such hearts we find what these ribbon-cuttings really mean for our students. In their classrooms and labs and clinicals now, we hope to teach them a truth that will change their whole perspective on their lives and careers to come: that when we really give ourselves to something, regardless of how poor or limited we feel inside, we’re changed deeply within. Every great and noble task, everything we do with devotion and commitment, everything that causes us to set aside our limited interests and sacrifice and suffer, all of that causes a change within us, oftentimes when we’re looking the other way.

And that inner transformation is what makes the difference in a world sorely in need of people willing to give everything for the great and noble work entrusted to them.

And this is what fills our minds this summer, as we praise God for the chance this spring to send out our largest ever graduating class, with more than 1,000 degrees conferred, and the chance to welcome another class to these prairies in the months to come. We praise Him for the lives and witness of the alumni in these pages, too, who manifest the best of what we’re hoping to give them. And we praise God for you, our friends and supporters, who make possible all of the ribbon-cuttings, all of the dedications, all of the transformation happening in the generations of students following you.

Saint Gianna also used to say, “The secret of happiness is to live moment by moment and to thank God for all that He, in His goodness, sends to us day after day.”

In that wisdom, today and every day, for all you’ve done to bring us to where we are — thank you. You’re ever in our prayers!