When the Mass concluded it came up in conversation that my wife Maureen was expecting our first child. Fr. Hesburgh asked me where she was and stated that he had a special blessing for expectant mothers. My wife came over and Fr. Hesburgh delivered a blessing in Latin. We were so moved and grateful, but unfortunately unable to understand the exact meaning.

My classmate Marie Halvorsen-Ganapola e-mailed me a few days later with this message:

Hi Adam and Maureen,

I think I found out some information about the blessing in Latin that Fr. Hesburgh gave your baby. In his autobiography, in the third chapter, entitled "Teaching," he writes:

"One very worrisome problem among the married vets was the high incidence of miscarriages. I really had no idea what to do, but I thought I ought to do something. I dug around and found an old ritual blessing for pregnant women, and then put the word out that on the first Monday of the month any woman who was pregnant, or even thought she was pregnant, should come to Apartment 1A at one in the afternoon to be blessed. We did this every month and, believe it or not, the miscarriages stopped just like that. We kept careful track and we had thirty-nine normal deliveries in a row without a single miscarriage."

That's really beautiful!

Love, Marie

Fr. Hesburgh’s blessing of my wife and our baby was a profoundly personal spiritual experience. Yet, Marie put it in the context of years of Notre Dame spiritual history. In addition to her MBA studies, Marie made it a priority to learn about the life of Fr. Hesburgh and his impact on the lives of Notre Dame students throughout the years. The time she invested made my experience with Fr. Hesburgh even more powerful.

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