A Given Life

Reverend Richard Berg, C.S.C. is a Portland native, attending Columbia Prep ’54 for high school, Notre Dame for seminary, and the University of Portland for a PhD in Psychology ’69.  The career circle coming full and fulfilled by serving as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences from 1978-1991; and as emeritus professor since 1998.  Except that for Fr. Berg, Consecrated Life means that your horizons sometimes expand when you are not looking and without consideration of the neat lines of your career-planning.

From 1952 onward, Pilots have been involved in volunteerism and social outreach to the poor, outcast and helpless through Blanchet House in the Old Town area of central Portland.

In 1991 while he was still CAS Dean, Fr. Berg was asked by the Archbishop of Portland to administer the Downtown Chapel in Old Town.  A package deal for the Archbishop.  An opportunity for UP.   Because through friendship, knowledge of the school, and administrative connections, the University created new student internships in Social Work and Nursing programs at the same time.  That is, Fr. Berg brought students right alongside him in direct collaboration working among the lost, sick, forgotten in Portland.  The UP Mission elements of Teaching and Learning operating in direct contact with the mission practice of Service and Leadership.

On June 18, 2008 Mary Sue Richen and Fr. Richard Berg received an achievement award from the Coordinating Committee to End Homelessness.  The award was presented by Portland’s mayor Tom Potter and Multnomah County Commissioner Ted Wheeler.  From the citation:

‘This brother-sister team has spent 20 years ministering to the frail and poor of downtown Portland.  Dick established the Macdonald Center with innovative financial and care models, including outreach to those isolated in residency hotels.  Mary Sue has been there since day one and has made overcoming social isolation one of the Center’s primary missions.  Dick’s vision and creativity are well complimented by Mary Sue’s gentleness and compassion.  Together they have made a lasting difference in the lives of the city’s most vulnerable residents.’

(The Macdonald Center was founded in 1978 by Maybelle Clark Macdonald; who together with her family, is a major benefactor of the Clark Family Library.)

Sources: The Beacon, February 22, 1990, p. 2; March 21, 1991, p. 4; October 10, 1991, p. 9; October 31, 1991, p. 7; November 18, 1993, p. 8.
(cf. Portland Magazine, Autumn 2008, p. 47)

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In the 1950s Rev. John Molter, C.S.C. (1905-1960) created a campus botanical garden beside Christie Hall.  Planted with his own hands, working together with students, the wild-flowers gathered representatives from every section of the state.  A zoologist by training, Fr. Molter was a man of science, inspirational in both the lab and classroom.  But in the most well-told story, Fr. Molter’s faith is balanced against scientific skepticism.  Don V. Romanaggi, M.D., class of 1956, claims he once won a silver-certificate dollar off Fr. Molter by beating the odds and earning an A in his science course (histology!).  Gaining not only the dollar, but also AP-credit later getting him exempted from tissue classes in medical school.  (Science Hall where the future physician studied with Fr. Molter was renovated in 2010 and renamed for Dr. Romanaggi.)

The University’s first endowed chair was established in 1995 supported by a cross section of alumni, and science graduates in particular.  Dr. Steven Kolmes, the first and reigning occupant of the Rev. John Molter, C.S.C., Chair in Science at the University of Portland, continues Fr. Molter’s legacy in the zoological sciences. Dr. Kolmes is Director of the Environmental Studies Program and Professor of Biology with interests in combining ethical and scientific analyses in environmental policy discussions, from salmon recovery to pesticide contamination.  Fr. Molter’s life — dedicated to science, faith, environment, and students — has given UP a harvest handed down across generations.

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For those in religious life, their life is not their own and they are often transported to areas or parts of the world where culture and language are not familiar.   Consider the journey of these religious sisters.  The Sisters of Mary of the Presentation were exiled from France in 1901 when an anticlerical government enacted legislation to weaken the influence of the Catholic Church in France.  Though just passing through, Rev. John A. Zahm, C.S.C., learned of the Sisters’ situation from the Holy Cross superior general in France, and Fr. Zahm offered the sisters employment at Holy Cross institutions in the United States, including the University of Portland.

Thus Fr.  Zahm, arranged the Sisters’ travel and personally met the first contingent of Presentation Sisters in New York in June 1903.  Then from New York to Notre Dame.  Three sisters remained at Notre Dame while twelve traveled to Portland and the new University beginning there.   The sisters resided temporarily in West Hall until the construction of a Convent was complete.  The three-story convent building (with a porch) was semi-secluded, located in a grove of trees at a spot that today is green-lawn inside the Academic Quad — west of St. Mary’s and the Chapel of Christ the Teacher, north of the Commons.  The St. Mary’s Convent was meant to serve as a residence for the Sisters while also accommodating a small school for small boys (a plan which never materialized).  Instead, the children’s wing became the student infirmary.

The Sisters served the teachers and students through duties variously exercised in the kitchen, dining room, laundry, infirmary, and poultry yard.   Their wages in 1903: annual payment of only 300 francs, thus in American terms, about $58 a year, including room and board.  Jim Covert writes about the Sisters in A Point of Pride— “Various views have been recorded about their cooking.  Some claimed the meals were exceedingly frugal and the diet too frugal, but others took delight at their tables, especially praising the pastry”.    Brother David Martin, C.S.C., arriving at UP in 1928, recalled how “the waxed floor of their recreation room would always stay spick-and-span [because] they moved around in this room by skating along on small pieces of carpet when they needed to go from one part of the room to another. . . .  Despite their constant work they never seemed to get sick.  I asked them about this once or twice to which they responded that they didn’t have time to get sick.”

The Presentation Sisters (a rotating membership, renewed beyond the original twelve?) remained on the Bluff until 1940 when they were recalled by their religious community.

Sources:
Presentation Sisters in Holy Cross Apostolates 1903-1963 by Brother Franklin Cullen, C.S.C., p. 1-4

Rev. Barry Hagan, C.S.C. recollections

The Cross and Anchors rests at the center of the University seal, the symbol of the Congregation of Holy Cross who were intended for the University from the beginning.  The Seal is fixed to the right hand pillar of the main campus entrance on Willamette Boulevard.  As consecrated religious Holy Cross members live by the three vows of the evangelical counsels: poverty, chastity, and obedience.  One consequence of obedience is not having a choice of career ambition or in selecting your job.  Meaning that competence is often rewarded with greater burdens.  The University of Portland has long been a training ground for leaders in the larger Holy Cross community.   The current leadership team for the United States Province includes the just ‘retired’ Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C.; 19th president of the University of Portland, and also Brother Donald Stabrowski, C.S.C., who was poached from the Provost’s Office in 2012.  Past UP Presidents, Frs. Mehling, Kenna, and Tyson (the 11th, 14th, & 18th presidents, respectively) were promoted to province leadership from the UP president’s office.  Fr. Paul Waldschmidt, C.S.C., was translated direct from the UP presidency to the office of Auxiliary Bishop in the Archdiocese of Portland in Oregon.  With the new Recreation & Wellness Center advancing toward completion, Brother Donald (acting president, fall semester 2003) is the last of these distinguished academic leaders lacking a building on campus.

For more pictures and history of University Presidents visit the Clark Library’s Digital University Presidents Collection, displaying images of photographs and objects held by the University Archives and Museum (with descriptions from the Archives and Museum).

Related post:  In the Beginning: Rev. John A. Zahm, C.S.C., Name-dropper, Promise Keeper, which shows how during the first year of the University’s existence, Archbishop Christie was actively courting Holy Cross.

A genial and irrepressible Holy Cross priest, Fr. John Delaunay’s life had a tendency to spill-over into the lives of peers and students, and across borders, national and academic.  A consecrated religious and UP professor who was hard to sum up or contain.

Fr. Delaunay was born in Paris, educated at the Sorbonne, came to the United States as a refugee in 1903, and after studies at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. became a Holy Cross priest in 1909.  One of his first assignments, therefore (?), sent him to the mission territories that are now Bangladesh.  He arrived at UP to teach languages, moving thence to the Departments of Philosophy and Education, and in 1949 became Professor of Psychology — having had to found the Department of Psychology to achieve this goal.  The faculty and students of the Psychology Department immediately created a pioneer program in clinical psychology, the Child Guidance Center, to provide counseling services for the greater Portland area community.  At first housed on campus, the community services section evolved into an independent organization.  After a half-century of family counseling, this legacy of Fr. Delaunay closed in 2003.

Fr. Delaunay died in 1953.  His name survives in a building we never built, and hundreds of alumni lives.  In 2012, alumnus E. John Rumpakis ’54 endowed a Professorship in Hellenic Studies at UP, remembering Fr. Delaunay, who “believed in educating the whole man,” Rumpakis said.  “It still resounds in my mind.”  (Furey, 05-22-2012); http://www.up.edu/shownews.aspx?id=4605 ).

Fr. Delaunay’s services to the University are legend; see the profile of the man in Portland Magazine, Winter 1998, pp. 14-19.  For a history of the Delaunay Institute, see The Beacon, 30 March 1973, p. 4; for a personal history and account of the Center’s closing, see also the note from Dr. Paul Myers, Director, University Health Center, in Portland Magazine, Summer 2003, p. 8; who quotes Fr. Delaunay as writing: “My life ambition is to make my psychology department the leading social work center in the Catholic West.  I am very hopeful that it shall do its share toward child delinquency prevention.  I shall have a special room for the direction of parents, since there are more problem parents than problem children . . .”

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Holy Cross religious call themselves Educators in the Faith, and are consecrated to their students’ good.

At the University’s Centennial, 1901-2001, the Board of Regents offered thanks to the more than four hundred Holy Cross religious who have served on the Bluff throughout that history.  Some were just passing through, on their way to other posts and assignments.  Some stayed long, and are part of the very roots of the University.

The Proclamation of Recognition voted by the Board accents how the character of the University and the Holy Cross religious have twined together in a century of living together, writing: “the University would be much reduced without the character and personality and courage and energy of the Holy Cross men who have been the best and brightest among us for a century”.

And indeed there have been many characters among the religious over the last century.  For more than a century, the Holy Cross community has stood behind the University as a living endowment offering teaching and services (and refusing salaries too!) to keep the place going (see the interesting arithmetic in the remarks of the fourteenth president, Fr. Kenna, The President’s Message to Alumni, Academic Bulletin, 1956).  How were they paid?  By always holding first that the health, life, treasure and purpose of the University is the student — the student as individual, and the student body together.  The same students who become our graduates.

A value cleanly expressed in a 1949 letter to Alumni from Fr. Mehling, the eleventh president, “You are our best salesmen’; repeated in 1956 by Fr. Kenna who reminds alumni that the tree is known by its harvest, ‘You are the criteria and the critic.’

These two notes from two middle presidents in UP history state the Holy Cross educational philosophy in brief.  The service of Holy Cross instructors and residence hall chaplains ought to disappear into the background of memory (a sort of humility of purpose); but it is not against the Catholic mission and values to recruit new students by encouraging the alumni to brag about themselves!

[sources/notes] The text of the Board of Regents proclamation is on display in the Holy Cross Lounge, 3rd floor, Franz Hall.  There you will also find the list of names of Holy Cross brothers and priests who have spent some part of themselves in this work from 1902 to today.  Archives reference for Mehling letter, BG81x4, file 7, document 109.  Kenna letter, Alumni Bulletin, February 1956.