While fundraising for a brand-new Catholic chapel at Yale in 1937, Father T. Lawrason Riggs wrote: “The [Yale] students’ spiritual needs are of a special sort. Except for those residents in New Haven, they are citizens of the University…Their esprit de corps needs to be utilized for religious purposes by enabling them to worship together, amid inspiring surroundings, and to hear sermons adapted
to their special problems and outlook.”
Fr. Riggs, the first Catholic chaplain at Yale, was writing about the pastoral needs of his community from the particular context of late 1930s Yale University, and yet, the astuteness of his words touches on one of the most important ideas of God’s Quad: look for and identify the particular needs of your community, especially with the input of young people on campus, and respond to them accordingly through outreach, ministry, programming and service to others. With contributors from five continents, God’s Quad offers the reader a myriad of ways to approach and establish structures of ministry within a campus community through small, faith-sharing groups. In the Yale University context, they are best known as Small Church Communities, or SCCs.
The book is divided into fifteen stand-alone chapters, each one profiling the ministry and outreach of small, faith-sharing groups on campuses across the world. The book concludes with six appendixes—guides and resources for the reader to establish and run their own faith-sharin groups.
God’s Quad is a thoughtful, intimate look into the work and ministry of the Church’s laity, especially at the campus level. Throughout its pages, God’s Quad draws attention to the needs and realities of the “student church” through the first-person accounts and case studies of good practices from those doing the ministry. Many of the voices in the book contributed to a document that editors Kevin Ahern and Christopher Derige Malano presented at the Vatican as part of the 2018 Synod of Bishops, which focused on the vocation of young people in the Church, this past October. It also is an important book for the STM community, allowing us to celebrate and remember a significant aspect of Father Bob’s ministry (and legacy) at Yale. In 1995, he established the SCC structure on Yale’s campus, which he recounts in his chapter entitled, “From Small Church Communities to Vibrant Catholic Life at Yale University.” In his chapter, he discusses one of the main reasons he thought it was important to establish a SCC structure at Yale: to empower the laity to minister to each other, as the Second Vatican Council document, Apostolicam Actuositatem articulated (158). Fr. Bob finally saw this vision become a reality a few years after the SCCs began when the father of a student died after a prolonged illness. Though Fr. Bob could not attend the funeral due to the death of his uncle, the members of the student’s SCC attended the services in his stead (159).
It is rather striking how the present can often carry so many echoes of what has been—this is a musing many at STM are currently thinking upon while celebrating the Chapel’s eightieth anniversary and mourning the loss of Fr. Bob. And still the SCCs, now an integral part of STM’s Catholic life, meet every week—continuing to be spaces of thoughtful conversation and support; continuing to be an extension of Fr. Bob’s ministry in his absence.
STM will have a book party and Sunday dinner discussion celebrating God’s Quad this spring. Dates forthcoming.
