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Newman House upgrade just one visible sign of LaMarche legacy

By Hope Green

There's a new look at Newman House, home of the Catholic Center at Boston University. The Archdiocese of Boston has given its century-old Bay State Road brownstone a badly needed facelift, with fresh paint, new decor, a relocated and larger chapel space, and an elevator to make the building fully accessible.

	Jane LaMarche.

While she tends to deflect praise from herself, the person widely credited with shepherding the project along is Jane LaMarche, a University chaplain. After six years at BU, she is leaving for a promotion within the archdiocese.

"The renovation is really her parting gift to the students," says Father Paul Helfrich, also a chaplain, who has worked with LaMarche at the Catholic Center for two years. "She has been one of the prime movers in encouraging the archdiocese to spend the money on it. She worked very hard to keep the costs within our budget, and she even went out and shopped for the furniture."

Cardinal Bernard Law appointed LaMarche (STH'94,'97) to director of campus ministry last July. For the past year she has been at BU two days a week, helping to ease the transition for Helfrich before she settles full-time into an archdiocese office in the Back Bay.

With the new post comes greater authority. LaMarche, the second woman ever to hold the job, is in charge of pastoral staff at 20 colleges and universities. But she says she will miss BU, where among other duties she taught Catholic adult education classes, ran retreats, and supervised seminarians in their fieldwork. She also met weekly with BU's eight other University chaplains to discuss such matters as eating disorders and suicide prevention.

"Jane has made a tremendous impression, not only with students but with fellow chaplains and with the University administration," Helfrich says. "People tend to seek her out for advice."

At the Catholic Center, she has taught a yearlong Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults course, which prepares participants to be baptized and confirmed. "You don't have to fight to get them to come to class," she says. "We're not out selling it or recruiting. They come every week for an hour and a half, faithfully, and they're eager to learn."

Many of her students were young lapsed Catholics who returned to the Church of their own accord after a year or two at college. "This is something I've seen in great numbers students who have been away from the Church in grammar school or high school, and they make a decision here that this is important to them, that their spiritual life takes precedence for them now. So this program has been large."

Confirmation, a rite of passage for young adults in the Church, traditionally takes place in one's sophomore year of high school. "But sometimes there's a situation when the parents want it to happen for the child and it comes down to a choice between attending confirmation classes or ballet or football practice," LaMarche says. "Many are not being confirmed in high school because of that. Others, but relatively few of them, are not making confirmation at that time because they are mature enough to say to themselves, 'I don't know what this means to me and I know it's significant, but I don't want to go there now.' Then when they arrive on a college campus, especially as they become upperclassmen, there might be some defining event that leads them to this place where their relationship to God becomes important to them."

Two years ago LaMarche conducted a focus group of 100 students who identified themselves as alienated or disenchanted Catholics. They spoke of their frustration with Vatican positions on abortion, contraception, divorce, and homosexuality. Yet the dialogue was constructive.

"It was amazing to see, with just an invitation to come and talk about the issues, how open the students were," LaMarche says. "Some came in angry, some came in rebellious, but they wanted me to hear them. When I explained the Church's position on these issues, most of the time they said, 'I never understood that, and while I still don't agree with it, it makes sense to me now.'"

Several members of that focus group subsequently became active in the Catholic Center.

Students often describe LaMarche as a maternal figure in their lives, which is not surprising: she is the mother of nine children, eight of whom she and her husband, David LaMarche (GSM'71), adopted, including Erin (STH'02). For a time LaMarche worked as a registered nurse, but the rotating shifts and holiday hours became unmanageable as her family grew. Later she went back to school for a bachelor's degree, a master's in education, and a certificate in managerial studies. She worked at a Burlington, Vt., Catholic high school for 14 years before enrolling in the doctor of ministry and master of sacred theology programs at STH.

Although the Vatican still prohibits the ordination of women, it had begun to relax other gender-based restrictions just before LaMarche arrived at the Catholic Center in 1995. Among her more rewarding tasks has been to prepare young women to assume leadership roles in their parishes, whether by serving as a member of a pastoral council, as a Eucharistic minister, or as a server at mass.

One who has benefited from her tutelage is graduate student Jennifer Sennott (COM'01), editor of the Catholic Center's newsletter for worship services, the Sunday Bulletin. "She's very inspiring to young women," Sennott says. "It's so encouraging to see that a woman who is not a nun can still be so involved in the Church."

Besides her work with students, LaMarche will miss the regular opportunities for interfaith fellowship among the chaplains. By all accounts the feeling is mutual.

"Six years ago I came here from Texas and didn't know very much about Catholicism, which is much more common in New England," says chaplain Peggy Peek, a Baptist minister. "Jane and I learned to understand each other's perspective on Christianity, and she has helped me to see how much our denominations have in common.

"She also has a great sense of humor and a great passion for students," Peek says. "Just watching her ministry has inspired me in a lot of ways."

27 April 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations