Leo O’Donovan, S.J., (CAS ’56), 47th president of Georgetown University, returned to campus Nov. 4, defining home as a religious and social place of belonging and calling for its protection and cultivation.
The Dahlgren Chapel Sacred Lecture, titled “Coming Home,” was part of celebrations of Jesuit Heritage Month organized by the university’s Office of Mission and Ministry, which provides resources to support Catholic and Jesuit identity. O’Donovan, who graduated from Georgetown in 1956 and served as president from 1989 to 2001, discussed the Jesuit perspective he gained as a student and the biblical stories and values that continue to bolster his faith today.
O’Donovan said Georgetown was an academic and spiritual home for him and that he was grateful to come back to campus to speak.
“Indeed, in many ways I feel that I have been invited home,” O’Donovan said at the lecture. “Not only because I love this chapel, but also because it is the center of a home for wisdom where I began a journey to become a faithful adult and to which I looked back so often.”
O’Donovan added that his uncertainty as a student informed his belief that home serves as a place of origin, transformation and purpose.
“I worried where it was I wanted or felt told to be,” O’Donovan said. “Home as where we begin. Home as where we learn to be ourselves. Home as where we are called to be.”
O’Donovan said the Christian values demonstrated in the story of Joseph, Mary and Jesus fleeing to Egypt support the idea that everyone should have a home as their starting point and as an anchor to return to.
“Growing up in Morningside Heights in New York, I have no experience of displacement,” O’Donovan said. “But the memory of the Holy Family should show the attention of all of us to those in our own country who for whatever reasons, have nobody here to take them in.”
O’Donovan, who also became the director of mission for the Jesuit Refugee Service USA, a refugee displacement advocacy organization, said cultivating homes for those in physical or emotional need must be a priority in politics.
“We have all hymned America as the home of the brave and long may it be so,” O’Donovan said. “But any country that is truly under God must seek to be the home of the helpless, the unfortunate, the seemingly expendable ones. This is the very essence of the Bible and how God deals with us all. If this sense of responsibility for one another fades from the American dream, we will be left with the nightmare of selfishness.”
O’Donovan also said he believes the process of maturing and growing as a person, while difficult, can be accelerated by finding a home within religion.
“To become an entire human takes time and is seldom accomplished without suffering as well as success,” O’Donovan said. “But truly, there is one constant: the patience and fidelity of God. The humanity of Jesus was not complete at first, as ours. There were years yet for Jesus of unseen labor: There was his testing in the wilderness, his healing of the sick, his mastery of the natural world. More and more clearly, it appeared who this unique man was and who he presented himself as.”
O’Donovan called for interfaith unity and intrafaith unity within Christianity, saying the Catholic Church should reach out to people globally.
“It matters profoundly that we heal the division among Christian churches and also with other religious communities on this earth. It is inherent if, according to the Second Vatican Council, we are truly to be the sacrament of the unity of humanity, that we be a global church. We must be a democratic church.”
O’Donovan said that, although heaven serves as a religious home for Christians, it is also important to actively work towards a physical world that better resembles that ideal.
“Many prayers of our masses urge us to turn from earthly things to those that are eternal,” O’Donovan said. “Those prayers risk overlooking that God calls God’s creation good, and that Christ redeems it. We, limited and wayward though we may be, have contributions to make to a heavenly home. We are working toward a home to be much more than we are hoping for a home already ready.”