To join the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, Sr. John Thomas Armour, OP, BA ’01, had to first go to Rome.
She was an undergraduate majoring in English and theology, winding through the Rome Program with her cohort. Fundamentally, though, she describes her journey as a search for something more.
“I was with a great community of fellow truth-seekers,” Sr. Armour says, “people falling in love with truth, recognizing that truth is the person of Jesus Christ. All of that was happening for me during my time at the University of Dallas.”
During this search, the course of her life began to clarify in an encounter with the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia, a Due Santi women’s retreat with artist and theologian Sr. Mary Angelica Neenan, OP, STD. Through her witness, Sr. Armour saw a community of women who seek to know God through beauty. She joined the order in 2002, and the order joined the Irving campus in 2016, not long before Sr. Armour would return as a student to seek truth anew, to teach and, with fellow men and women religious on campus, to inspire the next generation of professants. The Nashville Dominicans are the latest of several religious orders who teach students of all levels at the university, the origin of which — traced back to the Sisters of St. Mary of Namur in 1955 — is commonly known. Less familiar, perhaps, are the consecrated men and women themselves who teach today.
To Know the Lord
Every religious order in the Catholic Church claims a particular charism, a gift from the Holy Spirit that characterizes the order’s identity. Traced back to Dominic, the patron saint of natural scientists, the Dominican charism is particularly academic.
Br. Benedict Gregory Johnson, OP, BA ’22, is an alumnus, frequent Cap Bar patron and novice of St. Albert the Great Priory, a community of Dominicans near campus. He wears black Clark Kent glasses and, behind them, a sense of smiling assurance that he shares with the other Dominicans; in loose, white sleeves, he handles his speech as he talks, turning it over like a jeweler.
“There is a deep commitment to truth at the University of Dallas,” Br. Johnson tells me by the fountain in the Braniff lobby. “At UDallas, you're not satisfied with what people say about the great works; you want to delve at the heart of that mystery. And that very much ties into one of the Dominican mottoes, which is veritas, truth.”
The seven-volume corpus of Thomas Aquinas in the library testifies to the Dominican effort, not least because each book is the width of a baseball plate. However, a single charism can take different forms. The relentlessly rigorous, almost mathematical efforts of Aquinas are widely known, but Sr. Armour says the Sisters of St. Cecilia follow Dominic’s call to know God by way of artistic beauty.
“I think the gift that we’ve received from St. Cecilia’s patronage is really the role that beauty plays in helping us make truth known,” Sr. Armour says.
Like Sr. Armour herself, most of the Sisters of St. Cecilia who graduated from UDallas were English majors.
“There’s something about that dynamic of the beauty of art in literature … . It’s able to manifest those universal truths in a particular way,” Sr. Armour says. “In the way that the English program at UDallas operates, I think it really fosters that encounter with truth.”
Same Spirit, Varied Gifts
The Order of Cistercians enjoys perhaps the closest association with the university, having neighbored the campus since its earliest days.
Room 318 in the Braniff Graduate Building is home to a tea cart, a shelf sagging under the complete works of William Faulkner, and English professor Fr. Stephen Gregg, OCist, PhD ’22, when he’s not at Our Lady of Dallas Cistercian Abbey just across the road. Art prints behind his desk include a Byzantine Madonna and a page from a medieval Gospel: Et ipse Iesus erat incipiens … His office phone, the missed call button alight, sits meekly on the floor.
A Dallas native, Fr. Gregg grew up “more or less” Episcopalian while attending Cistercian Preparatory School.
“I went to a Catholic school surrounded by these monks, so my approach to becoming Catholic was closely involved with the monastery from the beginning,” Fr. Gregg says. “For me, a lot of why I became Catholic at all, or why I’m a Christian at all, is wrapped up in being a monk.”
Even as an undergraduate at the University of the South, he felt an enduring connection to the monastery and a call to its charism of simple service.
“You have religious orders that are named after people, like the Franciscans and the Dominicans. The Jesuits kind of cheat, because they're named after Jesus,” Fr. Gregg jokes, “but still, the idea is clear.”
By contrast, the character of the Cistercians is defined by stability. For Fr. Gregg and his brothers, that means stability in Dallas.
“If your order is named after a person, you’re imitating that person. We’re named after a place; ‘Cistercian’ is from our first monastery, Citeaux, in France. So we are living the life of a place,” Fr. Gregg says. “What am I supposed to do? I’m supposed to be in that place and live the life of that place. It’s about stability and staying there, being there, and making my work and my spiritual life mesh with what this place is doing.”
Called on Campus
Unlike the farms and cloisters where many Cistercian communities live out their charism, Our Lady of Dallas is immersed in a community of education. Such a territory — urban, somewhat insular, skewed young — comes with occasions for certain kinds of ministry. At most of these occasions, you’ll find Campus Minister Karen Bless, CV, BA ’15.
Bless joined the Ordo Virginum, the Order of Virgins, this summer with a consecration ceremony at the Church of the Incarnation. Unlike the Cistercians and Dominicans, members of the Ordo Virginum do not live in a distinct community; like the Apostle Paul, Bless hopes to live and move in the world, serving as a witness to the university community at large.
“The vocation to consecrated virginity is actually one of the oldest rites of the church,” Bless points out. “If you look back at many of the early virgin martyrs, they were consecrated virgins. They gave their lives to the Lord and wanted to just be people, to dedicate themselves to Him and to the service of the church.”
Many UDallas alumni, like Sr. Armour and Br. Johnson, discerned the call to religious life by the example of men and women religious they met here. That’s not quite how Bless’ discernment went, but she hopes that she can be that kind of model for students after her.
“I actually discovered the vocation to consecrated virginity a little bit by accident. I was reading about the gift of celibacy as a way to understand better the vocation of many of my friends who are priests. … Reading some of those books, I felt a strong pull on my own heart to pursue that path,” Bless says. “The thing I’m most grateful for in being on a college campus is my hope that I can be a witness and an example to this generation.”
Diligent Discipleship
Students considering a life of ascetic devotion to God can enjoy conversation with a breadth of witnesses at the University of Dallas. In some measure, all at the university are ecumenically joined in the task, the occasion, the gift of seeking truth; in their continuing efforts as learners, the men and women religious of the university remind us where truth begins and guide our exploration toward it as fellow travelers.
Today, Srs. Armour and Neenan are peers at the Irving campus. When she’s not wrangling freshmen in Lit Trad, Sr. Armour is still a student of literature, now in the Braniff Graduate School. I’ve had classes with Sr. Armour; she has a habit of closing her eyes when she asks questions, not bent in concentration but projecting upward, grasping for the answer somewhere else, intangible, invisible, up there; and one wonders whether this posture endured the process by which she shed her worldly identity, whether the undergraduate in Rome also looked beyond sight for the answer. In her dedication to the university as a community of learning, a community in which she and her fellow Sisters of St. Cecilia form one of many joyful parts, her search for truth continues.
