Because of its role in fostering the spiritual growth of the members of the Notre Dame community, The Office of Campus Ministry is central to the mission of the University. In his first academic year as Director of Campus Ministry, Fr. Jim King, C.S.C., looks to increase the breadth and value of outreach to all students.
“I have four larger goals for undergraduate ministry,” Fr. King said in an email interview with The Rover. Fr. King described the first of his four goals for Campus Ministry thus: “I keep saying our students want ‘meat.’ I think they are hungry for programs with real theological content that explain what the Church teaches and why it makes sense. For example, I love how ND Vision has made the stories of saints relevant and central to its catechesis, and I want to see us do more pilgrimages too. We’re working on a ‘Pope John Paul II tour’ to Poland, and I hope we can make it fly for next year.”
“Second,” he continued, “we need to challenge and assist students who have the capacity and hunger to bring Christ to others with opportunities to engage others seriously about their faith. The most effective kind of evangelization is peer to peer.”
“The third [goal] follows from the first two. We need to do a better job of tapping into what students need and not be wedded to sustaining programs because that’s easier on us,” he explained. “We’re always going to have Confirmation and RCIA classes, and I’d love to see those grow larger because ultimately we need to bring people to the sacraments.”
Beyond the concrete and expected ministries, though, Fr. King also emphasized a need for addressing the less predictable needs of students. He said that Campus Ministry is committed to addressing difficult but relevant questions, asking: “How can we adapt quickly and flexibly to the real stuff that is going on in students’ lives, whether it’s freshmen feeling pressured to come up with a career – as opposed to discerning their true vocation – or seniors nearing the end of the road and panicking because they don’t know where they will be next year and think they are alone when hundreds are feeling the same anxiety?”
Rather than focusing on such anxieties, Fr. King envisions Campus Ministry as enabling students to grow into wholeness while receiving their education at Notre Dame. “My Moreau quote for this year is ‘education is the art of helping young people to completeness.’ That’s the purpose of a Notre Dame education, and Campus Ministry should be helping them achieve it [so they can] leave here as people who know their faith and are equipped to share it, along with their knowledge and skills, with the world.”
Fr. King’s last goal involves taking advantage of the myriad of other resources available to Campus Ministry in the form of people, information and ideas. “The fourth [goal] may sound more boring, but it’s important: we can’t do this alone and have to partner more effectively with other departments, faculty, staff, and people with common interests. [We also] have to figure out how to do a lot better with our ministry to graduate students too because at Notre Dame everyone matters, whatever group or classification they fall into.”
Working towards these goals will help Campus Ministry to fulfill its twofold mission, which Fr. King describes as attending to the personal needs of students and educating them in the faith. “First, there is the individual component of pastoral care and attentiveness to personal needs which comes in many forms but is essentially distilled from the corporal works of mercy: care for the sick and suffering, the grieving, the lost, the lonely, and the struggling. There may not be a lot of Notre Dame students who are ‘poor’ financially, but I’ve yet to meet one who didn’t hit a wall in at least one of those areas at some point.”
“The second [component] is the broader dimension of what Blessed Basil Moreau meant when he exhorted the members of Holy Cross to ‘make God known, loved, and served.’ It represents the obligation to be about the work of the Church in educating and evangelizing the next generation in the faith which takes many forms including retreats, music ministry, the sacraments of initiation, and conversations that spur people to think more intentionally about their faith,” said Fr. King.
Within the tradition of the Congregation of Holy Cross, Campus Ministry hopes to create a sense of family often talked about as associated with Notre Dame residence halls. Fr. King explained, “ [W]hen students walk into Campus Ministry I want them to have the same feeling as when they walk into their dorm — like they have just come home. I don’t want them to feel like they are walking into an office to conduct business with us. They shouldn’t think they are distracting us from our work when they are our work.”
“After twenty years living in dorms,” he continued, “I’ve learned that having your door open and being there to open up the mail room ten times a day often leads to nothing more than a lot of packages getting delivered, but sometimes it ends up in deeper conversations about life, love, and faith even confessions that wouldn’t have happened otherwise.”
Fr. King explained, “Holy Cross’s legacy to this place is the sense of family that permeates it and comes straight from the founder of Holy Cross, Blessed Basil Moreau, who was from a large family that struggled financially but was rich in faith. Studying theology while tending his father’s cows taught him how the sacred often arises out of the mundane grist of everyday family life, and that’s true at Notre Dame too. I’m reminded of the gospel story of the woman at the well — living water can come from seemingly ordinary encounters. It happens all the time here simply by being available and attentive and willing to take time to listen to students.”
“The door of Campus Ministry is open to everyone, so stop by 114 CoMo and bug us anytime. And if you see a guy in a collar sitting in a lawn chair out [in] front of CoMo,” he joked, “it’s probably me trying to avoid office work!”
Joe Mackel is a senior Biology major who dreams of working on a tea farm. If you have one and need a hand then contact him at jmackel@nd.edu.
