Norbertine priests and NFL players will be working side by side on campus for the next two weeks. Thanks to Fr. Jim Baraniak for providing this fitting illustration: No stranger to either group, this Norbertine is chaplain to the Green Bay Packers. (This striking image was shot by Jerry Turba ’74, with art direction by Scott Mueller, creative director of The Abbey magazine.)
Rubbing shoulders on our 108-acre campus for the next two weeks, the Green Bay Packers and 120 delegates from Norbertine abbeys, priories and convents around the world. The Norbertines convene this weekend for the General Chapter of the order, held every six years and only once before held outside Europe. And, the Packers move in Monday for their 55th training camp at the college. Two groups of roughly the same number; each identified by the uniform of their trade; each committed to a life lived more in community than out of it; each, for these two weeks in particular, more than usually occupied, more than usually committed to their common purpose. They’d just better all get along!
Actually, one of the nice things about hosting these two groups in particular is that they include many who are already friends and others whom we are glad to meet. The Packers have multiple connections with the college. Aaron Rodgers and Graham Harrell are members of our chapter of Tau Kappa Epsilon, for heaven’s sake! And in our Summer 2012 issue we ran an interview with Fr. Rowland De Peaux, reminiscing about when it was Vince Lombardi who was on campus with the team.
Abbot general of the Norbertine order, the Most Rev. Thomas Handgrätinger, O.Praem.
As for the Norbertines, they are of course friends and confreres of the priests at our abbey, but many are familiar faces to the rest of us on campus, too. We’ve run into them when they have been visiting the De Pere abbey or improving their English at our ESL Institute – or when those of us who have participated in the Cornerstones seminar and study tour have had the chance to visit them, at their home abbeys. It is a pleasure to be able to extend hospitality to them in our turn.
