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Note: This message was originally sent on December 19, 2025.

The below was shared with me today by Holly Jones, university strategist and storyteller.  Enjoy…..

In a 1946 Gonzaga Bulletin story, Ex-Army Lt. Joe Heyer describes his most unforgettable GI experience. It is not a narrow escape or a battlefield story meant to impress. It is a slow, steady coming home to meaning, shaped by small mercies, familiar rituals and people who show up. His language is explicitly Catholic, but the deeper current is universally human: when life has asked too much, a person starts looking for something that can hold the weight. 

That is part of the quiet genius of Gonzaga, both then and now. A person does not have to be Catholic to “get it” here. Plenty of 51�Թ�s, staff, faculty and alumni arrive with intense chapters already written or unfolding mid-sentence. What they often need is more than a slogan or strong brand behind their work. They need steadiness. They need a community roomy enough for questions, grief, doubt, joy, wrestling and return. A place where dignity is not earned—it is always assumed. 

Heyer’s story hints at why Gonzaga has never been only a college or only a four-year experience scaffolded by a Catholic, Jesuit, humanistic mission. It is a living ecosystem of accompaniment, practices that anchor, relationships that outlast semesters and a kind of hospitality that keeps on making room. The magic is that Heyer could not have known what Gonzaga would become in 2025. Still, his story recognizes the pattern: when people are met with consistency and care, meaning has somewhere to land. 

Right now, a teenager in my house is waiting for a letter from Gonzaga, the kind that arrives with a decision about Fall 2026 and, for a kid who cares as deeply as he does, feels like it contains a whole weather system. Hope does that. It turns paper into prophecy.  

It is tempting to treat that envelope as the beginning and end of the Gonzaga story, as if Gonzaga is primarily a yes or no, an acceptance or a rejection, a four-year plan with neat start and end dates, a price tag and “career outcomes.” But Heyer’s 1946 reflection reminds me that Gonzaga has always been more than admissions. Long before a 51�Թ� ever steps onto this campus, people are already carrying chapters that are tender, complicated, and unfinished. Gonzaga’s gift to the world, at its best, is being a place where those chapters are met with steadiness and space.  

With that in mind, here is Lt. Heyer’s story in full: 

GONZAGA BULLETIN VOL. 30, NO. 7, FEBRUARY 8, 1946

You can bet this is my most unforgettable GI experience

By Ex-Army Lt. Joe Heyer 

Asked for one’s most unforgettable G.I. experience, it is natural to think immediately of some particularly close call. Still green in my memory are the recollections of a bomb burst that actually blew me out of my foxhole, and a “red devil” (Italian grenade so named because its time of detonation was so unpredictable), which exploded in my face and miraculously did no more than nick my ear. These and other events are both vivid and memorable. But there is no one which is more truly unforgettable and of much deeper import, for a few years added to one’s life in this world are as nothing compared to the endless march of time in the next. My life was really saved with my conversion to the Catholic Church.  

I Was a Protestant 

Although it culminated in Italy, it is best to go back to the beginning of the story. Born to a Protestant family who taught that faith alone is sufficient for salvation, I could never quite accept that doctrine. I felt certain that something more must be required. Then, when I was nine, I lived for a time with a Catholic family and with them attended my first Mass. It was at St. Joseph’s Church in Keyport; it made a terrific impression.  

Only One for Me 

As the years passed, I became acquainted with a variety of Protestant Churches, for my people belonged to no particular denomination. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I attended Mass, and growing older, I considered joining only one Church—the Catholic. I felt that it was the only authentic one; yet, the thought of confessing my sins to a priest left me cold—and the older, the colder.  

So I Started Out 

Came the summer of 1942 and the war was half a year old. Irene Murphy gave me a medal of St. Joseph and The Child, the “Ole Man” gave me two stripes, and Uncle Sam gave me a free boat ride.   England, Algeria, Tunisia, and everywhere a Catholic Church that might have been St. Joseph’s back in Keyport. No, I couldn’t understand a sermon in French, but everything else was the same and there slowly dawned on me the meaning of universality as an attribute of the Church.  

Lost My Medal 

In Tunisia, I lost my St. Joseph medal but Father Toomey, a White Father in the Carthage Monastery, saw to it that I received a new one together with a medal of St. Therese. They took their place beside my dog tags.  In Italy, the Church was still the same, and more clearly than ever, I saw that Catholic truly meant “all-embracing”—a characteristic I could not apply to any of the Protestant denominations I had known.  

One day in Rome I went to visit the Catacombs—those caverns in the Earth that nurtured the seeds of Christianity. With a small candle as my only light, I felt my way through the dark tunnels until I reached a large chamber. There, set into alcoves along the walls, were graves covered with waist-high stone slabs, forming tables—the burial places of the early Christians. Imagination receives a powerful stimulus in the dark and ghostly catacombs. A group of Christians enter bearing candles. They set them on that large grave on the left, the resting place of a recent martyr. As they respectfully withdraw a bit and kneel, the presbyter enters to celebrate the Mass—the same Mass then as today—nineteen hundred years without change. Strong proof indeed! That the Catholic Church is the Church Christ founded.  

Then Padre Pio 

It was in August 1944, that I visited the mountain village of San Giovani, Rotondo, and there attended Mass in Padre Pio’s little church. As the saintly Capuchin faced the congregation, opened his arms and said, “Dominus vobiscum,” my horrified eyes saw that his hands were bleeding! The palms of his hands were open wounds! I had heard that this Padre bore on his body the same wounds that Christ bore on His. I had doubted but as I saw the blood ooze from those palms a painful emotion of dread and fear assailed me. Why? How? I couldn’t answer those questions, I could only stare at those hands and realize that they bore the same wounds that St. Thomas saw on Christ when he said, “My Lord and my God!” 

I Summoned Courage 

But the fear of confessing my sins remained. It was October before I summoned enough courage to go to Father St. John. I was ready to start taking instructions preparatory to acceptance into the Church. On January 18^th. The Feast of St. Peter’s Chair at Rome, I knelt in St. Joseph’s church in Bari and made my first confession. Catholics who have gone to confession since they reached the age of reason and Protestants who do not know the Sacrament of Penance will not understand the joy that filled my heart. God had forgiven my sins. For the first time in my life, I felt clean.  The fear and dread of confession that had kept me from the Church for years was gone, replaced by perfect peace. The search was over; truth had been found and all that remained was to live according to that truth.