SHARING THE GIFTS GOD HAS GIVEN US

D.C. COUPLE GIVES TIME AND TALENT TO JESUIT CAUSES

By Alan Dessoff

Michael and Kathleen Curtin met one month into their freshman year at LeMoyne College, on a date Mike remembers well—October 30, 1958. “For what it is worth, it was at a Halloween dance called the ‘Hobo Hop,’” he says. It was worth plenty to Mike and Kathleen, who have been together ever since.

Married in July 1963 after Mike’s first year at Catholic University’s Columbus Law School, they embarked on developing Mike’s professional career while raising a family of five children, who have given them nine grandchildren, with a 10th expected this summer.

Throughout the years since their undergraduate days at

LeMoyne, one significant theme has underscored how the Curtins have lived their lives: their belief in the Ignatian charism and their support of Jesuit-related institutions with their time, talent and financial gifts. In fact, Mike and Kathleen have been heavily and enjoyably involved in all things Ignatian. Among other things, Mike has served on the board of LeMoyne (which he also chaired) as well as the boards of Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C., and the Jesuit schools his children attended in the area. He is currently a member of the board of trustees of the Ignatian Volunteer Corps (IVC) and on the board of visitors of Catholic University’s Law School. He previously served on and chaired the board of the Woodstock Theological Center.

“I grew up with the Jesuits. I went to a Jesuit high school and college and I have little doubt but that for the Jesuit training and education I received, I wouldn’t have the life I have today,” says Mike, a partner in the firm of Curtin Law Roberson Dunigan & Salans in Washington, D.C. “I have received many gifts from the Jesuits, and my work with and for the Jesuits now is, in a sense, paying back for what I received.”

Listed annually since 1987 in Best Lawyers In America, Mike Curtin believes lawyers have a responsibility to serve their greater communities. With a well-earned reputation as an expert in trusts and estates, he has responded to many calls to advise, assist or handle matters in that field for a wide range of Washington-area organizations including the Archdiocesan Legal Network, part of the Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of Washington.

His volunteer service in that capacity earned him The John Carroll Society’s Pro Bono Legal Service Award in 2002. He has provided similar services for Legal Counsel for the Elderly, an AARP-affiliated organization, and the Columbus Law School. He is particularly proud of the services he has provided over many years to So Others Might Eat, a Washington group that serves meals to the homeless, which honored him with its “CARING” award in 2002.

Kathleen, meanwhile, has responded in her own ways, for the last seven years as a spiritual director and retreat director for the IVC and also for parishes, prayer groups and families. She is in her third year as a trustee of the Washington Theological Union (WTU), where she is an instructor in the spirituality division of its Leadership Institute for Social Justice, a joint effort of the WTU and the Archdiocese of Washington. She also is a board member of the Loyola Retreat House in Faulkner, Md., and an adjunct spiritual director there.

For more than 30 years, much of the time while raising her children, Kathleen served as a catechist in the parishes where she and Mike lived. At the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, she was director of religious education and also of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults program, which she continues to serve today as guest catechist.

LeMoyne honored Kathleen with its Ignatian Award for Community Service and also has honored Mike with its Distinguished Alumni Award and an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree. Catholic University and the Columbus Law School presented Mike with their Distinguished Alumni Award as well.

Mike and Kathleen Curtin see their involvement in Jesuit and broader community causes as a natural extension of their Ignatian spirituality. Part of its charism, says Kathleen, is “the desire to reach out to those who have been left out by society. That is what Mike’s pro bono work is all about.”

Kathleen says her faith was energized when she made the 19th Annotation of the Spiritual Exercises in 1999. “That really changed the entire focus of everything I do,” she says. “I knew I had a lot of gifts as a wife and mother and religious educator but I don’t think I ever would have known what gifts I really had if I had not made the Spiritual Exercises and identified the way God wanted to use me in the world. It was a total surprise to me.”

The Curtins believe there is a need for more lay people to volunteer as they have in the Church as well as in the broader community. In the Church, partly because of the decline in the number of priests, “there definitely is a call and urging for more collaborative work between lay and Jesuit colleagues,” Mike says. “We’re all taught in the same kingdom. We all have gifts and we all have to use them.”

Meanwhile, they are proud that their own children are serving others in their own ways. Son Michael is chief operating officer of the non-profit D.C. Central Kitchen in Washington. Another, a former Jesuit, Kevin, runs a disability program in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Daughter Colleen works in early education policy at the Department of Health and Human Services. Another daughter, Christine, is at home in Michigan raising her children “as I did,” says Kathleen. Their youngest son, Matthew, a new lawyer, has joined his father’s firm, where, Kathleen says, “he can learn, by being mentored by his father, that the legal profession is noble when you use it to serve others.”

Concludes Mike: “The Jesuits opened my eyes to the fact that there is goodness in all people.”

Alan Dessoff is an independent journalist in Bethesda, Md.

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