The Transformative Power of Grace

Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,

Some words stay with us—not because they are new, but because they name something we’ve known in the silence of our hearts. I had that experience recently while attending a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Robert McElroy of Washington, DC. His homily lingered with me long after the final blessing, not as a set of arguments, but as a way of seeing, one that clarified questions I have been carrying in my own heart—and also writing to you about from time to time. Those questions center on community, responsibility, and what it means, on our small campus and beyond, to live well together in a fractured world.

February often invites us to think about love, though usually in narrow and sentimental forms. Yet the vision I heard that day pointed toward a more demanding and enduring understanding of love—one less about feeling and more about how we order our lives, our institutions, and our commitments to one another. It was a reminder that love, at its deepest, is not merely personal or private. It is a way of choosing community and encounter—choices that shape both who we are as individuals and who we become together.

The Cardinal’s homily turned on a simple but searching distinction: that there are, in every age and in every community, two different ways of moving through the world. One way is driven by the instinct to secure and to protect what is ours at almost any cost. It prizes certainty and control, and it can slowly and sometimes imperceptibly harden our hearts toward the lives of others. The other way is more patient and more demanding. It asks us to look outward rather than inward and to understand our lives as bound up with one another in ways we did not create but are nonetheless responsible for.

Cardinal McElroy framed these two "ways" in the theological language of the "order of nature" and the "order of grace." The order of nature names the ordinary contours of human life—shaped by instinct, habit, and social structures—good in their origin but, in a wounded world, often marked by self-interest and competition. The order of grace transforms this human reality, drawing us toward mercy, forgiveness, and the recognition of God's beauty in one another. Community, peace, and human dignity emerge as the center of our common life. 

The central reading for that Sunday three weeks ago was one we know, perhaps some of us even by heart: the Beatitudes, from the fifth chapter of the Matthew’s Gospel. But I was struck by Cardinal McElroy’s insistence that the “Sermon on the Mount” is not a poetic aspiration or a spiritual comfort for difficult times but rather a moral framework for real lives in a real world. The Beatitudes invert stereotypical measures of success—blessing the merciful, the peacemakers, the poor in spirit, and those willing to endure loss for the sake of what is right. To take the Beatitudes seriously is to allow them to shape not only our private convictions, but our shared life—how we speak to one another, how we disagree, and how we decide what really matters.

This is where the life of a college like Saint Mary’s comes into view. We are, in our own small way, a community asked to practice this inversion every day: to prize encounter over efficiency and belonging over dominance. In classrooms and residence halls, we are called to resist the easy temptation to judge or dismiss those who see the world differently.

As we enter the season of Lent, I am heartened by Pope Leo XIV’s Lenten message. He writes: “I would like to invite you to a very practical and frequently unappreciated form of abstinence: that of refraining from words that offend and hurt our neighbor. Let us begin by disarming our language, avoiding harsh words and rash judgment, refraining from slander and speaking ill of those who are not present and cannot defend themselves. Instead, let us strive to measure our words and cultivate kindness and respect in our families, among our friends, at work, on social media, in political debates, in the media and in Christian communities. In this way, words of hatred will give way to words of hope and peace.”

This is the true order of grace, the wider vision of love and intellectual hospitality that February invites us to reclaim—not as sentiment, but as practice. I see signs of this order of grace lived out every day at Saint Mary’s, often quietly and without recognition, in the care our community extends to one another and in the seriousness with which we engage the world. For this, I am deeply grateful. It gives me hope not only for our College but also for the wider world our graduates will help to shape—by choosing, again and again, the harder and more generous work of living well together.

Warm regards,

Katie Conboy, Ph.D.
President

February 23, 2026