Alliance for Catholic Education
“Last night I called my best friend and college roommate Billy,” the evening’s guest speaker says from a wing-backed chair at the front of the ballroom, “Billy is now a bishop,” he interjects. “I told him I was speaking at ACE tonight. Bishop Billy says, ‘that’s the best organization in America.’”
The Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) at the University of Notre Dame sustains and strengthens under-resourced Catholic schools through leadership formation, research, and professional service to ensure that all children, especially those from low-income families, have the opportunity to experience the gift of an excellent Catholic education.
The ballroom, overlooking Notre Dame’s famous stadium, holds more than 250 Catholic school educators from all levels; from fresh college graduates about to embark on their first year of teaching with ACE Teaching Fellows, to seasoned principals and diocesan leaders, earning advanced degrees from the ACE Remick Leadership Program. Both Remick Leadership and Teaching Fellows bring their graduate students to Notre Dame each summer for two months of rigorous academic formation. On this night, the two programs join one another to hear from Mark Kennedy Shriver, the president of Don Bosco Cristo Rey High School in Maryland, and a lifelong advocate of children and youth issues.
“So I wrote this book about my dad,” Shriver begins, eager to share about his parents’ remarkable lives, and referencing A Good Man: Rediscovering My Father Sargent Shriver. Shriver’s conversation-style address is hosted by ACE’s John Schoenig, who sits alongside him in another, similar armchair. Shriver’s life and work is driven by the legacy, energy, and faith of his influential parents, Eunice Kennedy Shriver and Sargent Shriver. Both high-powered individuals, Shriver’s father Sargent helped establish the Peace Corps, Head Start, and was the architect of the War on Poverty, while his mother Eunice founded the Special Olympics. After his father’s death, strangers approached Shriver to remark on what a “good man” his father had been. This prompted Shriver to ask himself the question, “What made him good?”
Sargent, a man who ran in elite circles, “treated everyone the same.” Shriver was also struck by the great sense of joy with which both his parents lived their lives. They “went to work every day happy.” Shriver turns from John to the audience as he shares the answer he discovered while on his quest to understand his father: “My parents went to mass every day. It was his faith in God.”
“You see,” Shriver stresses, “this wasn’t just ‘happiness,’ but joy. Joy that goes deeper than pain and grief.” Shriver inserts, by way of illustration, that his father was one of the few people who organized “the only ever Catholic funeral for a president of the United States,” upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Sargent’s brother-in-law and Shriver’s own uncle.
Shriver relishes telling stories, and never getting bogged down in the dramatic, pivots to a humorous anecdote from his own life. Being connected to the Kennedy political family, Shriver was once a guest of the Bushes (“an incredibly nice family”) at a formal dinner. Shriver found himself in Texas being introduced to a room of 20 guests by Neil Bush. During Neil’s polite introduction, “about half way through, Barbara Bush goes, ‘Tell him the truth. We needed a democrat and nobody else would [show up].’”
Laughter rolls through the room and Shriver plays off the energy: “I get back to my hotel, and this big guy with a cowboy hat says, ‘do people ever tell you you look like a Kennedy?’
“Yeah I get that,” Shriver responded. “He says, ‘Damn, that must make you so mad.’”
John Schoenig laughs and then prompts Shriver to “back up” and tell the room more about his young life and the beginnings of his current work in education.
“I didn’t have a Road to Damascus moment.” Shriver preempts. While not a miracle moment, he does credit a silent Ignatian retreat with giving him some direction at the end of college. His plan, before the retreat, had been to join the Peace Corps, which his father helped found. But it became clear to him on the retreat that he was not going to do that.
Shriver was touched by the positive way his father handled hearing the news that Shriver was abandoning that path. “He just said, ‘that’s alright. What do you want to do?’”
It was then that Shriver began his advocacy and charity work with incarcerated youth through the Maryland Juvenile Justice Advisory Council. Shriver “never had a five year plan;” rather, he simply took opportunities as they presented themselves. Shriver served for a short time in the Maryland House of Delegates, but he does not dwell on his time as a politician, and instead skips ahead to the beginning of his work in Catholic education. An old colleague from his time working with incarcerated youth, whom he had hired, called him and asked him if he would take a leadership role at one of their Cristo Rey schools, Don Bosco.
“I prayed about it for six months,” Shriver recalls. It was a big decision “from a résumé point of view.” After working on government commissions and organizations that spanned the country, leading a Catholic school with a staff of around fifty people seemed like a potential downgrade. “But,” Shriver turns to the audience of teachers and educators, “We are doing the most important job in the world.” A palpable sense of simultaneous comfort and enthusiasm sweeps over the room as people nod their heads and smile in agreement. “We get our teeth kicked in in Catholic education a lot,” Shriver empathizes with the crowd, “but we remember what we’re doing and why it’s important.”
This year, Shriver’s school, Don Bosco, saw 19 of their kids join the Church. “My parents were on their knees every day,” Shriver says. He believes the Jesuit Little Examen to be a powerful practice. And while he wishes he prayed it himself every day, he exhorts the room to aim to spend just five minutes each day recognizing God’s presence.
Schoenig asks Shriver what he has found to be “the most pleasantly surprising aspect” of his work in education. Shriver responds without hesitation, “The positive energy.” His school’s mission to “make a difference” and “move forward” is reminiscent of his own father’s outlook on life. “My parents didn’t think about work as work,” Shriver explains, “They both had this unfailing belief that you are loved and unique.” Shriver’s mother, Eunice, founded the Special Olympics in a time when “people with developmental disabilities were hidden away.” His goal as an educator is to recognize each child as infinitely valuable and loved: “My mother said ‘no’ to [hiding them away]. She said, ‘Let’s bring them out.’”
When Schoenig asks for a final reflection on what Shriver considers his greatest hope for today’s Church, Shriver responds, “This,” making a sweeping gesture toward the room, “You’re impacting thousands of children’s lives. This gives me hope.”