The Priest Who Listens
COLUMN — On the first Monday of Advent, in the gold-domed capital of American Catholic respectability, a soft-spoken priest from South Bend walked into the Basilica of the Sacred Heart and picked a fight with the entire idea of throwing people away.
Father Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C. is not built for spectacle. He doesn’t boom from the pulpit. He doesn’t perform. He has the voice of a guy who would rather be at the back of the room, listening — which is how I met him.
Dowd was my priest-in-residence in St. Edward’s Hall when I was an undergrad at Notre Dame. If you were having the worst week of your life, you could crack open his door, sit down, and talk. He’d lean back, fold his hands, and let you empty the drawer.
One of the best listeners I’ve ever met. You’d forget, for long stretches, that under all that Midwestern low-key humility was a man who devoured political science texts for fun and spent his life figuring out how to help kids like us become the sharpest, freest, most decent versions of ourselves.
That same man is now the 18th president of Notre Dame.
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