With great enthusiasm, the Alumni Association welcomes Rev. Steve Gibson ’66, C.S.C., as our new Alumni Chaplain.
Fr. Steve is a remarkable homilist and a person blessed with immense creativity who is beloved by young and old. The co-producer of the pray.nd.edu music videos, Fr. Steve also has been the director of Fatima Retreat Center for 19 years.
As an undergraduate, Fr. Steve became involved with the Council for the International Lay Apostolate, one of the precursors to the Center for Social Concerns. This cross-cultural experience led him to an interest in the overseas apostolate of the Congregation of Holy Cross.
He went to Uganda, East Africa in 1969, and was ordained to the priesthood there in 1970. Returning to Notre Dame in 1977, he worked at Fatima Retreat Center until it was turned into a retirement home for Holy Cross Religious in 2006. Since 1986 he has been involved in video production for the Congregation of Holy Cross and Family Theater Productions, founded by Rev. Patrick Peyton, CSC. He is still very active in the retreat ministry, giving retreats and parish missions in a wide variety of places to a wide range of age groups.
Since so many of the people who came to the retreat house for so many years are Notre Dame alumni, and since he frequently meets Notre Dame graduates at parish missions, he has already been ministering to our alumni.
As we prepare to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ this Christmas, Fr. Gibson offers the following blessing:
The real blessing at Christmas is to recognize that Christ lives within us. The God that we have learned about from Jesus is a God of our lived experience. We experience God and God’s love for us by experiencing the love of those around us. For many of us, the Christmas season is the time when we are most likely to be surrounded by those whom we love. Therefore, it should be the time when we, more than ever, experience the God whom we have come to know and love. Our hope and our prayer is that we will all be blessed this Christmas by finding the Christ who dwells in us all.
Sincerely,
Fr. Steve Gibson, C.S.C.
