Bishop Gumbleton to be Spring Commencement Speaker
April 1, 2003
Bishop Thomas Gumbleton of Detroit will be the keynote speaker for Ohio Dominican University's 79th Annual Spring Baccalaureate and Commencement Ceremony on Saturday, May 17, 2003.
The ceremony will begin at 10:00 a.m. on the Oval in front of Erskine Hall on Ohio Dominican's main campus, 1216 Sunbury Road. (In the event of inclement weather, the ceremony will be moved to Alumni Hall, west of Sunbury Road.)
In addition to serving as auxiliary bishop of Detroit, Bishop Gumbleton is the pastor of St. Leo Church, an inner city parish. He is well known as an advocate for human rights. In 1972, four years after his appointment as bishop, he became the founding president of Pax Christi USA, the national Catholic peace and justice organization. In 1983, he served on the committee that drafted the bishops' pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace."
He is founder and co-chair of Catholic Caucus of Southeast Michigan, and past president and board member of Bread for the World. He is also a member of Pastors for Peace, Call to Action Michigan and Detroit Catholic Pastoral Alliance. His weekly Sunday homilies are published on the National Catholic Reporter's Website, www.nationalcatholicreporter.org/peace/.
Bishop Gumbleton has received numerous awards including the Humanitarian Award from the Michigan Coalition of Human Rights; the National Peace Foundation Award of Peacemaker/Peacebuilder; and Public Citizen of the Year by the National Association of Social Workers, to name a few.
His many visits oversees include excursions to Vietnam, Latin America, and the Middle East, where he served in a peacekeeping capacity.
During the ceremony, Bishop Gumbleton will be awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Divinity Honoris Causa from Ohio Dominican University.
Also at the ceremony, Sr. Ruth Caspar, O.P., professor of philosophy, will be awarded an honorary degree, Doctor of Humanities Honoris Causa.
Sr. Caspar has taught in the humanities program at Ohio Dominican since 1968. She is a Dominican Sister of the congregation of St. Mary of the Springs. Sr. Caspar holds a B.A. in English from the College of St. Mary of the Springs; and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame. She has done postdoctoral work in Bioethics at the University of Virginia, the Kennedy Institute at Georgetown, and the Hastings Center. She was the first recipient of the Ohio Dominican Master Teacher Award (1992), which recognizes senior faculty members for the role they have played in developing the distinctive character of the institution.
Sister Caspar has served as a consulting ethicist for various Catholic health care organizations, and has been published in many academic and professional journals. She has currently finished working on a chapter for a book featuring Dominican contributions to social ethics in the 20th century.
