Weigel profiles founder of St. Thomas Catholic Studies program Don Briel on his death

Death With Real Dignity: The remarkable last days of the Catholic educator Don Briel
Talk of “death with dignity” these days tends to be yet another expression of the Culture of Me: I, the imperial autonomous Self, get to decide when, and how, I die, and the state, by legalizing euthanasia, has a duty to facilitate my “right to die.” The sad emptiness of those claims, and the deep truths about the human dignity of our suffering and dying, were on display these past few weeks, the last days of the consequential life of my friend Don J. Briel, who died on the evening of February 15.

His was not a household name in America, but Don Briel was one of the most important and effective Catholic educators of the past quarter century. As too many Catholic colleges and universities careened into the incoherence that marks so many of their secular counterparts, Don Briel set about creating “Catholic Studies” programs that would restore Catholic intellectual, cultural, and lifestyle identity to institutions of higher learning that bore the name “Catholic” but didn’t seem to know what that meant. Don Briel did.

continue at National Review

HT BL

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