Are We Building a Tower of Babel Or a Movement of Saints?
by Rosie Chinea Shawver, MDiv
On Tuesday, I sat at the Los Angeles Catholic Prayer Breakfast and listened to Amy D'Ambra, founder of My Saint My Hero, tell the story of how her company was born. Kneeling at the altar of St. Giovanni Giuseppe on the island of Ischia, she asked God a simple question: What can I do for you? The answer came back just as simply: Share our stories so we can be an inspiration to others. Let the saints be the heroes of today. My Saint My Hero, the Wearable Blessings, the Benedictine bracelets, the woven pieces that now come from women in Medjugorje and Uganda, all of it started in that one moment of listening prayer.
That story landed differently for me this week, because I've also been sitting with Pope Leo XIV's new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas. The Holy Father asks whether we are building a new Tower of Babel, a single grandiose ambition, efficient and impressive, that sacrifices the human person along the way, or building the kind of city where God and humanity dwell together. He points to Nehemiah, who didn't rebuild Jerusalem's walls by decree. He fasted. He prayed. He called every family to their own section of the wall.
Put those two things side by side and campus ministry comes into focus. We are not building towers. We are building people, one relationship at a time, and the material is always the same: ordinary students who are closer to sainthood than they know.
We are the saints
Amy's founding insight was that saints were not a separate category of human being. They were people who said yes, in the middle of ordinary lives, to a friendship with Christ. That's the whole premise of My Saint My Hero, and it's the whole premise of what happens on the front lines of a college campus. Your students are not waiting to become someone else before God can use them. They are the saints of this generation, in formation right now, in your office hours and your Bible studies and your 11pm phone calls.
Amy shared a line from her own prayer life that a St. Benedict's medal captures well: Back away, Satan, Christ is my guide. It's not complicated theology. It's a posture. And it's the posture we're trying to form in students who are surrounded, every day, by voices telling them who to be and what to want.
A spiritual revolution, personal and communal
Amy was direct about the scale of what's needed: a spiritual revolution is the only thing that will save us from where the world is heading, and it has to happen on both levels at once, in the individual soul and in the community around it. That's the both/and we live inside of every day. Connection without personal conversion is just programming. Personal conversion without a community to sustain it doesn't survive senior year. Campus ministry works because it holds both.
She also read a line she's been sitting with: Humanity is not evolved enough to grasp the magnificence of what we are looking at. Her response wasn't despair. It was an invitation, let's get evolved enough. That's not a bad description of formation itself. We are trying to grow students into people who can actually receive the magnitude of what they've been given.
Enter the center of your soul
For the practical and the interior together, she turned to St. Teresa of Ávila: absolve yourself for missing the mark again and again, waste no time, enter the center of your soul, and meet him there. Believe that you are the way God sees you, not the way your GPA, your Instagram feed, or your worst semester sees you.
That's worth two questions we could put in front of every student we serve, and honestly, in front of ourselves first: How am I nourishing my soul? And how am I showing God's love to others? Romans 12:2 sits underneath both, do not conform to the world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind. That's the actual curriculum.
The invitation
Amy closed by telling the room they were the spiritual revolution the world needs, that they were born to be saints, and to believe it. I'd say the same to every campus minister reading this. You are not administrating a program. You are handing 18-to-22-year-olds the same truth Amy heard at that altar: the saints are not behind us. They're in your small groups, your dorms, your dining halls, right now, becoming who God meant them to be.