Derry Connolly and his wife, Lidy[/caption]
Derry Connolly’s life reads like the synopsis of a movie screenplay. An Irish graduate student arrives at Caltech in Pasadena with no place to stay. He knocks on the door of the first Catholic church he finds and asks if there is an Irish priest he can talk to.
The priest takes him over to the recently emptied convent, where he is letting students from a fledgling Catholic college live. They have room for one more. One of those students has a sister and Connolly finds his true love. They have been married for 43 years.
But this “screenplay” does not end there.
Years later, Connelly found himself escorting his daughter on a college tour at Franciscan University of Steubenville in Ohio. A few moments in the school’s adoration chapel changed his life.
Connelly was not sure if the university was the right school for his daughter. He was a man of science, and educated in secular academia. But when he made his visit to the chapel and marveled at the number of young, energized Catholic men and women, he felt he was being called by God to do something with what he saw as an untapped spiritual natural resource.
He was unsure what exactly he was being called to do, so like many of us, he put God on hold. A few years later, God called back, and this time Connolly had an idea. He had always been inspired by St. Pope John Paul II’s exhortations on how it was important for Catholics to be engaged with the real world, such as mainstream media.
The pope’s message at World Communications Day in 1992 seemed to be predicting where Connolly was heading in the early 2000s: “The Christian response to evil is, above all, to harken to the Good News and to make God’s message of salvation in Jesus Christ ever more present. Christians have a ‘good news’ to tell. We have Christ’s message — and it is our joy to share it with every man and woman of good will who is prepared to listen.”
Through prayer and a little assistance from John Paul’s legacy, John Paul the Great Catholic University in Escondido was born. It would be a place where young creative men and women could hone their skills and learn new ones, in all the major disciplines of media arts, directing, acting, cinematography, animation, screenwriting. This school would send them forth into the “mainstream” culture and give the culture what it lacked — voices coming from a theological and philosophical viewpoint centered on Christ.
Connolly’s idea was not initially met with resounding cheers and applause. To think one was going to make a dent in an often anti-Christian media landscape seemed like a fool’s errand. He thought his own bishop might think so as well, but was caught off guard by the Polish pontiff’s simple summation: “If it is of God, it will succeed; if it is not of God, it will fail.”
Since 2006, Connolly’s university has flourished. What began in a building at an industrial park and a film school with no camera equipment, has grown to a student body of 273 with an $18 million expansion underway that aims to more than double the school’s academic footprint….
Half of the 273 students come from Southern California, with the other half from just about everywhere else….
From Angelus News
Can anything good come from Steubenville?
(Paraphrasing St. Nathaniel in John 1:46
and, full disclosure: my wife and I and some children and children-in-law are alumni.)
May God bless and protect all faithful Catholic institutions.
A good man in a long list of great Irish men named Connolly.
Except JPII is not “the Great” by any official designation.
Oh, but they’re trying to be “on the right side of history.”
It’s dumb when liberals do it. Just as dumb when conservatives do it.
What would have been wrong simply with JPII University?
According to at least one article, “It is not an official ‘title’ that is awarded by the pope or the Vatican, though at times this may happen, as with Pope Benedict XIV who was the first to call St. Gertrude of Helfta ‘the Great.’ According to various Church scholars, it is a title that is given by historians many years after the death of the individual. This gives historians the ability to see the life of a specific saint in a larger context, and allows them to track their influence as the years progress. … Yet, this too does not always follow protocol. For example, St. Albert was nicknamed ‘the Great’ before he died for his amazing intellect and deep spiritual life. He had an encyclopedic knowledge that covered a wide range of topics, which led some people to call him ‘the Great’ during his lifetime. The nickname stuck and church historians agree that he is worthy of the title. Most recently, many in the Church have awarded St. John Paul II the title of ‘the Great,’ though it’s generally the result of popular appeal than any pronouncement by an academic Church historian. Nevertheless, the title is one way to recognize the profound impact a saint has on the Church and world and signals them out in a particular way as a saint worthy of imitation.”
Maybe it’s similar to Saints who’ve been “made”/titled through popular acclaim of the faithful and not necessarily the canonization process. For about half of the Church’s history, there was no formal canonization process.
It could be “Saint John Paul University” (and that’s an official title) and that would be fine, but it wasn’t founded that way. It seems the founders were trying to commend this recent Saint.
Who have liberals titled “Great?”
James Martin the Great? Joe Biden the Great? Gavin the Great? Hans Kung the Great? Cardinal McElroy the Great?
Nope. Don’t remember any of those.
Those liberals do call names though. I know.