St. Ambrose Legends Retire - St. Ambrose University

A Vision is Born
A year earlier on his farm near Stockton, Iowa,
Fr. Grant awoke one morning and thought: “We are
the only St. Ambrose University in the world. Saint
Ambrose is the most neglected father of the Church.
He is the least translated, the least represented in
art, the least recognized. If you ask people who the
fathers of the Church are, he is consistently eclipsed
by Augustine.
“Why,” Fr. Grant wondered of the university
whose theology department he joined in 1994, “aren’t
we committing our work, our lives, to this man?”
That morning, he took the idea of a center, a
physical home for the study and scholarship of
Saint Ambrose of Milan, to Aron Aji, PhD, dean of
St. Ambrose’s College of Arts and Sciences.
“Why didn’t we do this a hundred
years ago?” Aji asked him.
The vision had been born: To
build a true home. To form a
place—the place—in the Englishspeaking
world where students
and scholars and religious men and
women would gather to collaborate,
share and learn about a man who
became a bishop under the most
extraordinary of circumstances.
Two years later, the vision is
closer to reality.
“As we mold this center,”
Fr. Grant said, “St. Ambrose
University will be the source of
Ambrose scholarship in the liberal
arts. It will be a focus for our identity as a diocesan
university in the Catholic intellectual tradition. And
it will be an investment in our commitment to being
a leading Midwestern university, to defining what it
truly means to be Ambrosian.”
Young Alumni Make Commitment
to Ambrose Center
Lauren Bryner ’13 had
never felt prouder to be a St. Ambrose University student than
the moment she walked through the doors of the Basilica Sant’
Ambrogio in Milan this winter.
“Standing in the center of that church and knowing the patron
saint of my school designed and built it, and then walking down
into the crypt and seeing his body, it finally made me stand
behind my decision to attend St. Ambrose 100 percent,” she
acknowledged.
It’s that type of student experience that has propelled five
St. Ambrose graduates to support the center for the study of
Saint Ambrose of Milan with pledges of more than $40,000
toward an endowment goal of $250,000. The group—which
includes Dorothy Anello ’02, Deanna Bott ’01, Matthew
Ehlman ’02, Ted Stephens iii ’01, ’04 and Karen (Clark)
Brenot ’01, DO, and her husband Matthew—hopes that Bryner’s
experience will be just one of thousands such revelations for
Ambrosians everywhere as they gain a more intimate relationship
with the university’s namesake.
“If you graduate from St. Ambrose and don’t have a sense of
who Ambrose really was, you miss out on a critical component
of your educational experience,” explained Anello, a teacher
in Des Moines, Iowa. “By supporting this center both through
active involvement and our financial commitment, we know the
spirit of Ambrose will be there. It will live there.”
Bryner couldn’t agree more. “I came to St. Ambrose from
Indiana on a whim,” she said. “At the time I had no idea it was
the only St. Ambrose University in the world, but now I care so
much about this place because I understand what he stood for
and how Ambrose the man shows us what it really means to be
an Ambrosian.”
The donations from the group of alumni will go toward
funding scholarly research, lectures and a yearly symposium, as
well as providing a scholarship for deserving students like Bryner
to travel on the yearly winter interim trip to Italy.
Learn how you can support the center for the study of Saint Ambrose of Milan
at sau.edu/scene.
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