[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 185 (Wednesday, December 5, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Pages S14782-S14783]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
(At the request of Mr. Reid, the following statement was ordered to
be printed in the Record.)
REMEMBERING BROTHER J. STEPHEN SULLIVAN
Mrs. CLINTON. Mr. President, on January 9, 2007, Brother J.
Stephen Sullivan, Manhattan College's 17th president from 1975 to 1987,
passed away at the age of 86 in Lincroft, NJ. A noted teacher, scholar,
theologian, and administrator, Brother Sullivan served Manhattan
College tirelessly for more than a quarter century. A champion for
Catholic higher education, he was dedicated to establishing new
programs, which enhanced the landscape of the college. He is credited
with fully implementing the transformation of Manhattan College into a
coeducational institution and ensuring the integration of women into
the entire curriculum. The college had become coed just prior to
Brother Sullivan's move into the president's office. Brother Sullivan
touched and enriched the lives of so many, and I am pleased to ask to
have the below moving tribute to the life and accomplishments of
Brother Sullivan, written by Brother Luke Salm, F.S.C., a longtime
professor and trustee of Manhattan College, printed in the
Congressional Record.
The material follows.
The Late Brother J. Stephen Sullivan, F.S.C., President, Manhattan
College, Bronx, New York
``What is so rare as a day in June?'' says the poet. June
25, 1920 was a rare day, indeed, that saw the birth of
Jeremiah Thomas Sullivan to the delight of his parents,
Bridget Quirk and John Joseph Sullivan. The child grew in
wisdom, age and grace in a typical Irish Catholic family in
the Boston suburbs, a family that would give to the Church
not only this Christian Brother but also a Jesuit priest and
a Sister of Charity. In due time, young Jeremiah attended the
distinguished Boston Latin School, but after two years,
contact with the Brothers in nearby Waltham was the
instrument of Providence that led him to heed the divine call
to become a disciple of St. John Baptist de La Salle. With
joy and fervor he entered the junior class in the Barrytown,
New York, juniorate in 1936. The novitiate inevitably
followed, where, on September 7, 1938, he was invested with
the religious habit and given the name Brother Casimir
Stephen.
In those days, the year of novitiate in Barrytown was
followed by the scholasticate at De La Salle College in
Washington in an extension program of The Catholic
University. The scholasticate was supposed to continue the
spiritual formation begun in the novitiate, while at the same
time and often more successfully, providing a solid academic
grounding for future assignments to classroom teaching.
Brother Stephen was one of those chosen souls, lured by
Brother Charles Henry, into the major in Latin and Greek that
was usually reserved for the intellectual elite. Brother
Stephen did very well and graduated magna cum laude and Phi
Beta Kappa.
There was more to the scholasticate experience than prayer
and study; manual labor and recreational activities provided
humanity and balance. In the early 1940s, Brother Abdon Lewis
presided over the student tailor shop where Brother Stephen
was assigned to the ironing board. Monastic silence was
rarely observed and duels were fought, sometimes with words,
sometimes with yardsticks. In a student production of
Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Brother Stephen played the cameo
role of Cicero opposite Brother Leo Chorman's Cassius.
Although always willing to wax eloquent as occasion
warranted, Brother Stephen never attained the oratorical
eloquence for which the historical Cicero has been known
through the ages. Student athletics were also much in vogue
in those days, with organized leagues on Thursday afternoons
and in the summers, but Brother Stephen, like most of his
fellow Latin majors, such as Austin O'Malley, James Kaiser,
Joseph Warganz and Luke Salm, never got beyond handball and
an occasional try at the free-for-all version of basketball
known as horse-O. Leo Chorman was an exception.
After four years, the carefree student days, as all good
things do, came to an end. In September 1943, Brother Stephen
and his classmates set forth to face the challenges of the
classroom, extracurricular activities, graduate study and
community life. For Brother Stephen, the venue was St.
Peter's in Staten Island, where he taught mostly Latin, his
major, but also, as needed, algebra, geometry, English,
history and French. After school and during summers, he
pursued successfully a master's degree in Latin at Manhattan
College under the direction of the rigorous and relentless
Brother Alban Dooley. In 1948, Brother Stephen was assigned
to St. Mary's in Waltham, Massachusetts, as teacher and sub-
director of the community. He was, thus, able to be close to
his family and at the same time attend courses at Boston
College, earning a second M.A., this time in philosophy.
With such a strong background in classical languages and
philosophy, in 1953 Brother Stephen was sent back to The
Catholic University to study for the doctorate in sacred
theology, a program only recently made available to the
Brothers. In addition to full-time study, the assignment also
involved full-time teaching of the classics and theology to
the scholastics and, in due time, administrative duties as
pro-director and director of studies. One of his signature
courses was on God, One and Three, that earned for him the
nickname ``God.'' When Brother Cornelius Luke, the Visitor
General, heard of it, he was not amused. Writing under the
inspired direction of Father Eugene Burke, Brother Stephen
successfully defended his thesis on what the Council of Trent
had to say about grace and merit, was awarded the STD degree
in 1959, and then assigned to Manhattan College.
At Manhattan, Brother Stephen was an important addition to
the department of theology, still in the process of becoming
an academic department with a qualified and professionally
active full-time faculty. Brother Stephen regularly attended
the meetings of the Catholic Theological Society and the
College Theology Society for which he served as treasurer
from 1960 to 1970. He authored the article on merit for the
New Catholic Encyclopedia and his collection of articles
entitled Readings in Sacramental Theology was published by
Prentice-Hall. Meanwhile Brother Abdon Lewis was nudging
Brother Stephen in the direction of administration, at first
having him assist in the dean's office, then urging Brother
Gregory to name him academic vice president and later
executive vice president and Provost. Thus, Brother Stephen
became a hands-down choice to become president of the College
when Brother Gregory Nugent resigned in 1975.
By that time, the student unrest of the late 1960s had
pretty well quieted down, the cooperative program with the
College of Mount St. Vincent was well underway, and Manhattan
itself had officially gone coed, bringing and ever-increasing
number of female students to the campus. In 1978, Brother
Stephen presided over the celebration of the College's 125th
anniversary that was followed in the next year by the
construction of the Draddy Gymnasium. During his presidency,
programs for teaching the handicapped were introduced, as
well as an M.B.A. program and courses in professional ethics,
biotechnology and computer science. In 1979, he was awarded
an honorary doctorate of laws by La Salle College in
Philadelphia. Determined to keep the Brothers in the
forefront, he commissioned Fabian Zaccone to paint a new
mural for the reredos in the College chapel, which was
renamed the Chapel of De La Salle and his Brothers. He had
the same painter do a mural for the president's dining room
depicting the successive Brother Presidents and their
contributions to the College. For the tercentenary of the
Institute in 1980, he sponsored a series of lectures that
were then published. In addition, he made arrangements to
have the shrine of St. De La Salle in St. Patrick's Cathedral
redecorated to include the newly canonized Brothers Miguel
and Mutien-Marie.
Although Brother Stephen certainly enjoyed being president,
not all his record breaking twelve years in that office were
full of sweetness and life. There were the inevitable
conflicts with administrators and faculty, and some serious
problems with a declining enrollment and consequent financial
strain. He had always been close to his family and in
constant touch with his brother John, a Jesuit priest at
Boston College, and Sister Margaret de Sales, who was then
principal at Paramus Catholic High School. He felt very
deeply the deaths of his mother, his older sister, and that
of his brother John. In 1980, Brother Stephen suffered the
first of a series of heart attacks that eventually required
surgery. After having organized and financed the first
session of the Buttimer Institute of Lasallian Studies, it
was a disappointment for him when the facilities of the
College proved inadequate and the program was moved to
California. Eventually it became clear to Brother Stephen
that he no longer had the energy to complete his third five-
year term. On his retirement from office in 1987, more than
600 guests gathered at a banquet in the Draddy Gymnasium to
honor his achievement. In that same year, the College of
Mount St. Vincent honored him with the honorary doctorate in
humane letters.
After leaving Manhattan College, Brother Stephen moved to
Lincroft, where he took charge of the development office. He
initiated an outreach program to the entire
[[Page S14783]]
Lasallian family, especially relatives of the Brothers and
former Brothers, based on the concept of stewardship for the
Lasallian tradition. ``Associates in Stewardship'' was a
constant theme in his quarterly publication called Lasallian
Notes. He took special care to celebrate the lives of the
deceased Brothers and to keep in contact with their families,
most notably through the annual Memorial Mass. Involved as he
was in public relations for the district, Brother Stephen
never lost his association with Manhattan College. He rarely
missed a formal college event, alumni gathering, funeral or
social occasion, traveling from Lincroft by hired limo when
he could no longer drive and serving as a kind of informal
public relations person for the College. When the strain of
his very active retirement proved to be too much for his
declining physical resources, he retired reluctantly but
gracefully in 2004, at age 83, and took up residence in De La
Salle Hall. There, he died peacefully on January 9, 2007.
--Luke Salm, F.S.C.
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