Belief and Practice Animate Our Work
Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,
Recently, it was my turn to offer the “mission moment” at the weekly meeting of my Executive Team. We begin each meeting this way because, amid the decisions and demands of leadership, we want to remember what animates our work and why it matters. I have a great team of people who truly advance the strategy for Saint Mary’s every day.
As I searched for inspiration, I found it at a moment when I wasn’t looking: during Mass at the Church of Our Lady of Loretto. At the 10:30 Sunday Mass, we often stand to say the Apostles’ Creed. Perhaps because I grew up more accustomed to the Nicene Creed, I often find myself paying particular attention to the differences, and feeling aware of the repeated words: I believe. I believe. I believe.
On this occasion, I remembered a conversation I had years ago with a friend who is an Orthodox Jew. At some point, somewhat to my surprise, he told me he wasn’t sure he believed in God. I must have looked puzzled. His whole life seemed organized around religious observance. So I asked him about it. He shrugged and said something I have never forgotten: “Judaism isn’t really about belief. It’s more about practice. I’m practicing.”
I thought about that as we recited the Creed, and I have been thinking about it since—not so much as a theological argument, but as a lesson about leadership and mission. Because I think both belief and practice are essential.
Leaders have to believe in things we cannot yet see. We have to believe in the student who has not yet discovered what she is capable of. We have to believe in programs that are still being imagined, buildings that have not yet been built, resources that have not yet been raised. We have to believe that Saint Mary’s can become something that does not yet fully exist while remaining deeply and recognizably itself.
Not long ago, we experienced one of those wonderful moments in the life of a college: the beginning of a new academic year, when that dynamic between belief and practice is put to the test. There was energy and ceremony and possibility everywhere. We welcomed our students. We rang the Le Mans bell. We watched The Avenue fill up again. Beginnings signal a kind of belief, and that kind of belief matters. Institutions need people willing to say, I believe the future is possible.
But then we have to practice. And most of the time, practice does not look very dramatic. Another Monday comes. The meetings begin again. The budgets have to balance. The difficult conversation has to happen. Someone has to answer the email, solve the problem, make the decision, teach the class, comfort the student, raise the money, repair the building. But maybe that is where the mission is most alive—not only in the moments when we proclaim what we believe, but in the thousands of small ways we practice it.
We have celebrated some exhilarating moments recently, including the public launch of our campaign in June. And we have others ahead of us. The campaign continues, and we are pursuing ambitious goals through our strategic plan, Revere and Revise. We have ideas about what this campus and this College can become, and there will be wonderful occasions when we gather to celebrate what we have accomplished.
But most days between here and there will be practice.
Belief gives us a horizon; practice is how we move toward it. Perhaps leadership—and perhaps a life shaped by mission—asks us to hold the two together: to keep believing in something just beyond our reach while doing, faithfully and sometimes quite routinely, the work that brings it a little closer.
My hope for all of us is that what we believe will shape what we do—and that what we do, day after day, will make visible what we believe.
Warm regards,
Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President
September 28, 2026