Sammons returns to campus,
where his spiritual journey began

When Charles Sammons '94 was a freshman at Connecticut College, the first war in Iraq was just beginning, and he was very aware that he was the same age as many of the soldiers going overseas.

He felt uneasy about others going off to fight in a war that many people thought had no justification. "I began to feel a strong dissonance in my heart," Sammons said.

For many people, college serves as a time to find themselves, and this was certainly the case for Sammons. He arrived on campus as an agnostic. He asked a lot of questions and pushed for answers that felt authentic.

While searching for the right way to live, he found his faith and began down a path he never would have imagined – toward the priesthood. Sammons was ordained Sept. 8, and readily agreed to return to his alma mater to celebrate Mass at Harkness Chapel at 5 p.m. on Sept. 15.

"A lot happened for me at Connecticut College," Sammons said. Watching and reading the coverage of the war led him to what he calls "an existential crisis of responsibility."

"I felt as though I had to do something responsible with the privileges and education I had received in life," Sammons said. "I used to ask myself, 'what is the right way to be a human being in this violent world?'"

Sammons said that his college courses helped him begin to answer the questions he was asking about responsibility. A number of teachers – including the late philosophy Professor Lester Reiss; Professor Emeritus of Philosophy J. Melvin Woody; Eugene Gallagher, the Rosemary Park Professor of Religious Studies; and Garret Green, the Class of 1943 Professor of Religious Studies – introduced him to Western reflections on the human predicament.

Sammons also says the Rev. Laurence LaPointe, the College's Catholic chaplain, was a constant help, and he remembers hearing about St. Francis of Assisi for the first time in a course with Fred Paxton, the Brigida Pacchiani Ardenghi Professor of History.

"That was clearly an important moment because I decided to live my life as a Franciscan friar," he said.

Sammons became a friar in 2000 and began to think about becoming a priest. He spent five years studying for the priesthood at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass., earning a Master of Divinity and a Licentiate in Sacred Theology.

In February 2006, a member of the Catholic Community gave a talk on campus about C.S. Lewis. Here is the College's press release:

CC celebrates 'Narnia' and other works
of C.S. Lewis with tea, talk

The life and writings of C.S. Lewis, the acclaimed British author whose work ranges from fantasy to spiritual treatises, will be celebrated at Connecticut College on Monday, Feb. 27, with afternoon tea, a lecture and discussion.

The event marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of the last book in Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia series in 1956. The first of those seven books, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, was made into a popular film released last December.

The tea and talk will begin at 4 p.m. in the Ernst Common Room of the Blaustein Humanities Center. Daniel J. Varholy of Mystic will speak and lead the discussion. His talk is titled, "Literary Studies: The Labor of Scholarship and the Labor of Faith in the Works of C.S. Lewis."

Varholy holds a doctoral degree in English language and literature from Oxford University. A native of Connecticut, he has a bachelor's degree from Middlebury College.

Varholy was a member of Oxford's Magdalen College, where C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was a fellow and tutor from 1925 to 1954. It was at Oxford in 1931 that Lewis was converted to Christianity by his close friend, J.R.R. Tolkien. Lewis is the author of such classics as The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity and A Grief Observed.

Varholy brings with him a wealth of personal experience. At Oxford he tutored children through a program sponsored by the college's Joint Action Committee against Racial Intolerance. He also has directed a film for Catholic Solitudes, a contemplative community based in Texas.