Presume the good: Dominicans offer unique campus ministry approach

Photo caption: Dominican Brother Patrick Tobin talks with Indiana University student Greg Jansen, part of the Dominicans’ efforts to share the faith on college campuses.

By John Shaughnessy

BLOOMINGTON—They have just passed by a group of Indiana University students—including one dressed in a Tigger costume trying to raise money for a children’s hospital—when the conversation turns to the ethics of a college hiring a basketball coach who has violated recruiting standards at his former school.

As Dominican Father Bob Keller and Dominican Brother Patrick Tobin near the Indiana Memorial Union on a 60-degree autumn day, they talk about IU’s hiring of new basketball coach Kelvin Sampson and the recent news that the men’s basketball players where he previously coached—Oklahoma University—had a graduation rate of 41 percent.

As Brother Patrick raises his eyebrows about the recruiting violations and the graduation rate, he seems ready to question the hiring but then he catches himself, remembering a phrase that has been drilled into him during his education as a Dominican.

“Presume the good,” Brother Patrick says.

Presume the good that Sampson will have a different approach at Indiana. Presume the good that Indiana will demand that different approach from Sampson.

Indeed, ever since the Dominicans began directing Catholic campus ministry at IU in July of 2005, their approach has been a combination of “Presume the good” and “Meet people in the places where they are.”

So it is on this Thursday that Father Bob and Brother Patrick walk across campus from their offices at the St. Paul Catholic Center to celebrate Mass at noon in a classroom at the Memorial Union, the university’s student union building.

Creative loitering

“We want to be the Catholic presence to higher education—students, faculty and staff. To do that, we think in terms of programming and creative loitering,” Father Bob says with a smile. “I’ll go onto campus and go to an office to visit a professor. I don’t have an agenda. I’ll just see where you work. Or we’ll go over to the food court and just sit there and hope to meet students. It’s not an agenda. It’s just being there.”

Just being there has made a difference, according to Catholic students and professors at IU who feel blessed by the Dominicans’ presence.

“It’s just a wonderful thing that St. Paul’s is doing now to have a strong outreach to the campus community,” says Nathan Shier, an Indiana professor of nutrition science. “Thursday Mass on campus is a time I really enjoy, escaping from the regular hustle of the job to have a few moments of quiet repose and prayer. It also gives the students a little time during the school day to find God.”

It’s time he desperately needs, says IU student Ryan Dix.

“With the kind of schedules a lot of college students have, it’s difficult to make time for God and Jesus,” says Dix, a 21-year-old junior from Mishawaka, Ind. “To be able to take half an hour, relax, forget about the stress and be with God, it’s important. Having the Mass here makes it easier to get here, celebrate the Eucharist and get back to class.”

Freedom and challenges

On this Thursday, 10 students, professors and staff members show up in the classroom where Father Bob uses a red marker to draw the outline of a cross on a white marking board and where he places the chalice of wine and a bowl of Communion wafers on a desk. The turnout is miniscule on a campus of about 38,000 students—just one of the challenges that the five Dominican priests and brothers face in college campus ministry at IU.

“When you’re dealing with students of that age level, they have a tremendous amount of freedom,” Father Bob says. “To get their attention and be persuasive is a challenge. They have a lot of groups interested in them.

“The other challenge is to be intellectually in pace with them. You can’t say, ‘The Church has always done this or the pope says this.’ You can’t lose credibility with them. One of the things I find a lot—which I’m happy about—is there’s a consciousness of justice. They aren’t satisfied with the way things are. They want to make a better world.”

The Dominicans had that same goal when they wrote to Archbishop Daniel M. Buechlein and other Catholic bishops across the country, telling the Church leaders they wanted to focus their mission on campus ministry at colleges and universities. Besides IU, the Dominicans also serve in Indiana at Purdue University in West Lafayette.

“They [Church leaders] were looking around for ways to get more priests, and we wrote to the bishops telling them we were interested in campus ministry,” says Father Bob, who leads a staff at St. Paul’s that includes Father Rich Litzau, Father Stan Drongowski, Brother Benedict Baer and Brother Patrick. “We’re realizing that if our charter is for preaching, theological education and justice, university parishes are an incredible confluence of those three. It’s a natural fit.”

That natural fit has touched the lives of IU students Greg Jansen and Kelliemarie Sorg. After the Thursday noon Mass, they join Father Bob and Brother Patrick for lunch in a food court at the Memorial Union.

“I absolutely love having them here,” says Sorg, a 21-year-old math education major from Fort Wayne, Ind. “They’re available to talk to and be around on campus and at the church. They relate to us well. They have had a huge, huge influence on my faith life. The biggest way would probably be making me feel secure in my faith—helping me to have an understanding of it in relation to society, and why the Church has different expectations of me.”

Jansen talks about his high school years as a time when he made poor choices and had little interest in his Catholic faith. Now, he credits the Dominicans with helping him deepen his faith.

“They’ve made it really personal,” says Jansen, 20, a sophomore who is a member of Our Lady of the Greenwood Parish in Greenwood. “I’ve come to the point in my life where my faith is one of my top priorities. It’s very hard at times to juggle the studies and the extracurriculars and to keep God at the center of your life. It’s almost at times that you feel God has to take a backseat to get all the other things done. But I need my faith in my life. It gives me such peace.”

Struggles and hopes

As they sit at the food court table, the conversation turns from faith to Sorg’s cold to Jansen’s radio sports talk show to Father Bob’s mention in his homily of having vinyl record albums when he was in college. Laughter and comfort mark the conversation which, in a way, shows how much Father Bob and Brother Patrick care about the students.

It also helps that their own college years were marked by struggles with their faith.

Brother Patrick recalls his years at Mary Washington College in Virginia when he struggled with questions of what it meant to be a Christian as others challenged his faith. He remembers having intense discussions with a young woman of the Jewish faith, discussions that challenged both of them to look deeper at their beliefs.

“Now, she’s becoming a rabbi, and I’m studying to become a priest,” says Brother Patrick, who is 31.

These days, Brother Patrick literally wears his faith on his sleeve. He moves through the IU campus wearing the white habit of the Dominicans, drawing even more curious looks than the student who wore the Tigger costume.

“You get a lot of quizzical glances and stares,” he says. “I have people subtly taking pictures of me on their cell phone cameras. I have people come up and ask, ‘What are you?’, ‘Is that a costume?’, ‘Are you a monk?’ I tell them I’m a friar.”

Questions about faith also filled Father Bob’s years as a college student at North Dakota State University. A 1975 graduate, he remembers being a “practicing, theologically naïve young man” whose faith was deepened by his involvement with the college’s Newman Center.

“It was wonderful,” he recalls. “A lot of energy that comes from my gut came from that ability to live the faith.”

He and the other Dominicans try to provide a similar positive experience through their efforts in campus

ministry at IU and St. Paul’s. The center offers weekday morning Masses, a meditation prayer service on Tuesday evening and Bible study groups on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The weekend schedule provides six regular Masses, including a Spanish Mass. A Korean Mass is celebrated every two weeks.

About 1,200 Indiana students attend Mass during the weekend, Father Bob says. The goal is to reach all of them, to help them continue their Catholic faith and deepen it.

“We want them to stay connected to the Church in a meaningful way,” Father Bob says. “The hope would be that you’d be different than when you arrived.”

Brother Patrick adds, “I really hope that I may bring students close to the Lord at a crucial time in their lives. This is the time in their lives when they’re often being challenged to think more about how they live, what they do and what they believe in.

“That’s a good function of education, but it can also lead them to doubt their faith. My hope is that being here in campus ministry I can walk with them during this time and help them see they’ve been given a reasonable faith and it can withstand the challenges the world offers.

“As they come through all of this, their faith will be strengthened and they will leave as well-formed Catholic Christian adults. They will enter with the faith of their family and they will leave with a faith that’s firmly rooted in their experience of God.”

That’s the hope.

Presume the good. †