Priest Profile

What a Rhodes scholarship and a commission in the U.S. Navy couldn't do for Msgr. Stuart Swetland, the Catholic faith and priesthood did.

He became a Catholic while studying at Oxford University in England because he found peace and certainty in the teachings and traditions of the Church. He became a priest because of his love for Jesus in the Eucharist.

Ordained in 1991 for the Diocese of Peoria, Ill., Msgr. Swetland is director of the Newman Foundation and chaplain to Catholic students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is an associate professor at the secular university and serves the diocese as vicar for social justice.

The Newman Foundation, which was founded at the university in the 1920s, is campus ministry writ large. The foundation operates two dorms, Newman House and Newman Hall, which house 335 students, and administers St. John's Catholic Chapel and the Institute for Catholic Thought. Msgr. Swetland teaches a three-credit course in religious studies that is open to all students.

Up to 3,000 students attend one of the six weekend Masses at the chapel. Three Masses are offered each weekday and, the monsignor says, “There are long lines for confession.”

Jennifer Cutts, a senior majoring in physics, says Msgr. Swetland “is an extremely effective and dynamic leader, and he is highly regarded and widely respected by students at St. John's.” She remarked on “his insightful and often entertaining homilies, his effectiveness as a teacher, [and] his kindness and sensitivity as a confessor or spiritual director.”

Cutts was a Lutheran when she got involved with the Newman group and “came to the realization that God was calling me into full communion with the Catholic Church. This was an extremely difficult time for me, but it really helped to have Monsignor to talk to.” “Monsignor has done more for the spiritual and intellectual body of the university than anyone I can think of,” says Josh Shasserre, an Illinois graduate who is now at Ave Maria Law School in Ann Arbor, Mich. “Not only has he made the Catholic voice on campus stronger through gathering more faithful into his flock but also by powerfully speaking out on moral and ethical issues.”

The power of Msgr. Swetland's intellect is attested to by Princeton University professor Robert George, one of the nation's leading law scholars who also served on President Bush's bioethics panel. George met Msgr. Swetland while also studying at Oxford, and he served as Swetland's sponsor when he was received into the Catholic Church in 1984.

“Msgr. Swetland possesses the twin gifts of superior intellect and a profound faith in Jesus Christ,” George says. “Faith and reason are integrated in his life in precisely the way Pope John Paul II says they should be. They are ‘the two wings on which the human spirit ascends to contemplation of the truth.’”

Msgr. Swetland recalls “long dinners” at Oxford, talking with George and Dermot Quinn, now a professor of history at Seton Hall University. Msgr. Swetland had been brought up in a devoutly Protestant home but began to question the Protestant interpretation of Scripture and authority while he was an undergraduate at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he majored in physics. At Oxford, he studied liberal arts and found that Catholic thinkers had the best answers to his searching questions.

“I started to go to Catholic Mass and to pray,” he recalls. “I was drawn to something there in church. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was the Real Presence. My skepticism was overcome.

“The biggest question for me was authority,” he adds. “What makes you a Catholic is not that you agree with what the Church teaches. You can agree but not have faith. You truly become a Catholic when you believe that Church teaching is inspired by the Holy Spirit. It's a whole different level of assent.”

After earning a master's degree in politics, philosophy and economics at Oxford, he continued his naval career, serving as a lieutenant in the Mediterranean in the 1980s. He sought and received an honorable discharge in 1987 and, in January 1988, entered Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Md. After ordination he studied at the John Paul II Institute for the Study of Family and Marriage in Washington, D.C., earning a licentiate in moral theology and a doctorate in Catholic social teaching. He served as chaplain at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., and pastor of a parish before coming to the Newman Foundation in 1997.

“This college generation is really interested in what the Church has to say,” he says. “We proclaim here quite openly the teachings regarding sexuality, based on John Paul II's theology of the body, including chastity and natural family planning. The young people wonder why nobody ever told them these things before.

“We emphasize the basic teachings of Jesus: he lived, died and rose. In his life and death, he taught us how to live and die. He teaches us an adult commitment, to pour out ourselves for others. We stress that everybody is called to holiness.”

The results have been impressive. Since 1997, some 40 Newman men have begun seminary studies and 10 Newman women have entered religious life.

Shawn Reeves, a 1999 graduate who found his vocation in marriage, serves as director of religious education for the Newman Foundation on campus.

“Every year I see hearts changed and lives given meaning through the RCIA program,” Reeves says. “Students yearn more and more for meaning and knowledge of the truth.”

Msgr. Swetland, who has traveled the inquirer's route himself, is there to guide them.

Stephen Vincent is based in Wallingford, Connecticut.