By John Garvey, President
The Catholic University of America Magazine, Summer 2014

We used to live in Kentucky, in an old house built in 1823. When the family got too big for it we bought a larger place on Tates Creek Road. It took some getting used to. The lady next door, Mrs. Beaumar, used to shoot squirrels out her window with a .22, and we would have to call the children inside when that happened. The upstairs, where most of the bedrooms were, felt a little empty and smelled a little like an attic.  

After we had lived there for a year or two, Clare, our fifth and youngest child, was born. I remember bringing her back from the hospital and installing her crib in our bedroom. Little and inarticulate as she was, she transformed the house into a home. Our bedroom felt full because she was there. It smelled like a new baby. We had an old rocker that I would sit in to give her a bottle. It had low arms, just the right height for feeding. I loved to sit there.

Clare got married on campus in St. Vincent’s Chapel on Saturday, June 14. It was the most beautiful day of the year. One of our students sang and another played the piano. Instead of the traditional processional, Clare wanted to have the “Maestoso” from Saint-Saens’s Organ Symphony. (It’s the theme song from Babe.) All 15 of her nieces and nephews had parts. Father Jude, the University chaplain, concelebrated the Mass with the priest who had presided at Jeanne’s and my wedding.

After the wedding we had a reception in the atrium of the Columbus School of Law. In keeping with Clare’s approach to life, it was simple. There were paper plates and hamburgers (really good hamburgers), several kinds of beer and wine, and dancing to music loud enough to drive the parents and their friends outside. Which was perfect, because the law school courtyard was as pretty as the atrium, the temperature was 70 degrees, and there were no bugs.

We have been living in Nugent Hall for four years now. It has been the perfect place for us. We get to see students walking around the campus. We can have dinner in the Pryzbyla Center if we don’t feel like cooking. We can go to 5:10 Mass at Caldwell Chapel. And my commute from home to office is a walk downstairs. That adds an extra hour or two to my day — the time I would otherwise spend driving from Silver Spring or wherever.

But the campus now feels like a home. Mircea Eliade, in his book The Sacred and the Profane, says that there are different kinds of spaces. In the profane experience of the world, space is a geometrical idea and nothing more. It is homogeneous and neutral. In the religious view of the world, some places are special because God has touched them. Something like that happened at Clare’s wedding. The campus is now, for us, a more special place than it has ever been.