On any given day across the Seton Hall campus, members of our community live out the Catholic faith in myriad ways. They attend daily Mass in the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. They gather for weekly Bible study. They attend Thursday night events organized by Campus Ministry. And they spread out across New Jersey and around the globe on mission trips that hearten those most in need of a helping hand.
We set out to chronicle how faith comes alive at Seton Hall. This is what we found.
Kennedy Dierks
As a high school senior, Kennedy Dierks ’23 had already committed to UCLA, a public university with more than 45,000 students in her hometown of Los Angeles. But in the spring of her senior year, she met an admissions counselor from Seton Hall, and she agreed to fly across the country and visit the campus in South Orange, 2,500 miles from home. The impact was immediate.
“As soon as I stepped on campus, I felt like I was home,” she says. “I can’t explain it, except that I’m convinced that it was God working in some way in my life.”
Dierks visited campus on April 29, which meant she had 24 hours to make a decision. She committed to Seton Hall from her hotel room before boarding her flight home.
Once enrolled, she gradually found herself attending Mass regularly and getting involved with Campus Ministry. Two study abroad trips to Italy, organized by the Office of International Programs — “Following in the Footsteps of the Saints” in 2023 and “Foundations of Christian Culture” the following year — proved essential to her academic career and her faith journey.
She was also influenced by the priests she encountered on campus. “It was the first time I’d ever seen young priests,” she says. “One thing they all have in common is they are real people. I have been really lucky to see the humanity of these priests. They connect with students in and outside the chapel, try to know us, who we are as people.”
Dierks graduated in 2023 with dual bachelor’s degrees in biology and Catholic studies. This fall she is scheduled to receive her master’s degree in health administration. Recalling her unlikely pivot on her path to college, she says: “I made a plan. I knew what I was doing. And then God laughed at me and said, ‘Here’s Seton Hall.’”
Kayhlynn Dickey
“When I came to Seton Hall,” Kayhlynn Dickey ’27 says, “I was not religious.”
Her family had shifted among different Protestant faiths, Dickey says, in between what she calls “periods of no belief.” In fact, as a high school senior, Dickey felt disinclined to apply to Seton Hall once she realized it was a Catholic university.
But her first year at Seton Hall brought her into contact with Campus Ministry. She began attending its Thursday night events — a barbecue one week, a cornhole tournament the next — and making new friends in the process. Her University Core courses helped her learn about faith — and about opposing opinions.
She encountered God, she says, “in a very deep and real way,” and found many people on campus, religious and otherwise, who taught her about the world, about God and about herself. At the start of her first semester on campus, she could not bring herself to walk into the Chapel of the Immaculate Conception. “By the end of my first year,” she says, “I basically lived there.”
This spring Dickey was baptized on campus, having gone through the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults to become a member of the Catholic Church. Today, she’s working toward her bachelor’s degree in theology, with a minor in Catholic studies. She sometimes leads prayer groups and Bible studies, and she’s also part of the Campus Ministry support team.
“Seton Hall didn’t just play a role in my journey of faith. With the Holy Spirit, Seton Hall brought faith to me and then held my hand as I began to walk towards God. Seton Hall pulled me out of myself and helped me grow in ways I didn’t think were possible.”
Erich Sanders
Erich Sanders ’25 arrived at Seton Hall in the fall of 2021 having chosen to study Catholic theology, yet still unsure whether he had chosen the right college. His already strong Catholic faith had always made him feel like an outsider, even at his Catholic high school in northern New Jersey, and his closest friends had traveled far beyond the state to pursue their college careers. “In short,” Sanders says, “as I started my Seton Hall journey, I was worried that it really was not the place for me. Yet nothing could have been further from the truth.”
A friend introduced him to Campus Ministry, where Sanders found his footing and his people. “People really seemed to enjoy talking about things that I enjoyed talking about,” he says. “My freshman year in Campus Ministry helped me to open up and see that living my faith was not something which would sequester me but was instead a way of authentically engaging with the world.”
Sanders’ work on campus as a sacristan only deepened his connection to his faith. As a sacristan, he was responsible for preparing chapels for Mass twice each week — lighting candles, watering flowers, cleaning up. And his professors — Eric Johnston, an associate professor of undergraduate theology, was especially influential — helped him make connections between his academic life and his faith life. This fall he starts a joint master’s program in philosophy and theology at Boston College.
“The academic study of theology and philosophy helped me to grow in my faith,” Sanders says, “because it allowed me to come to a deeper and more intimate knowledge of the Church and her tradition, along with my place in it. The education I received in my degree program was not only of the mind, but of the soul.”
Jonathan Wallace
When he arrived at Seton Hall in the fall of 2022, Jonathan Wallace ’26 had no intention of getting involved with Campus Ministry. In his hometown of Plano, Texas, his parents had attended a Baptist church, then joined a non-denominational congregation. He considered himself a Christian, though not a Catholic.
Yet his freshman year found Wallace attending many events organized by Campus Ministry. In time he asked himself why he felt pulled to keep returning: “I concluded that it was because I wanted to be known,” he says. “And the intentionality that people would have whenever they would talk to me, it was pretty clear that they genuinely care about me and I’m not just a number.”
Wallace came to understand that the missionaries and priests and others he encountered through Campus Ministry were, he says, “here to show me the love Christ has for me.” It was a learning process, with many firsts — his first Mass, first Eucharistic Adoration, first time praying the rosary.
One day Father Nicholas Sertich, the director of the Office of Campus Ministry, asked Wallace if he ever thought about being Catholic. Wallace resisted, concerned about his parents’ response. But a two-week trip to Rome and Portugal in 2023, sponsored by the Community of Saint John and culminating at World Youth Day in Lisbon, proved pivotal. “That’s when I felt that desire to making this leap of faith,” he says.
When Wallace had his first Communion on campus in April, his parents and younger sister were in attendance.
“This year,” Wallace says, “my role has been about being that same mentor as many were to me and giving back the same love that others have shown me throughout my years here so far.”
Sister Angel Marie Capdeville, Campus Minister, Community of Saint John
“I work as a campus minister. Being the Order of Christian Initiation of Adults coordinator since 2021, I am especially dedicated to welcome all the students who have the desire to complete their sacraments or to become Catholic. There is a great awareness of God’s work acting in the hearts of these young people. I have been privileged to see how many students have been led by the spirit of the Lord to start their journey in the Catholic faith, but also to see them being transformed throughout the journey, and then become leaders in their faith within the community.”
Father John Francis, Campus Minister, Community of Saint John
“My title is campus minister. I’m a listening ear for students, providing spaces for them to encounter each other and discover a life of faith. I work with people who are not only Catholic or Christian, but any student who wants to go deeper in their own journey, who needs support in one way or another. I very intentionally spend my office hours, if you will, all over campus and public spaces making myself available to students. We are in close contact with the kind of people whose faith journey is extremely alive — not only alive, but intentional.”
Dylan Lanoue, Campus Missionary and Team Leader with the Fellowship of Catholic University Students (FOCUS)
“FOCUS missionaries work with Campus Ministry. The three parts of our mission are walking with the students in authentic friendship, divine intimacy — a personal friendship with Jesus — and what we call the little way of evangelization, which is formed after Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. Her way was investing in a very small number
of people. It’s kind of modeled after Jesus. Jesus invested strongly in a few that affected many. At Seton Hall, the community has really boomed this year. The number of students who have been to Bible study at least once has almost doubled since last year.”
Ted Reinhardt, Missionary, Saint Paul’s Outreach
“I’m grateful to have come up here to Seton Hall and been on a mission these past two years. The Lord has opened my eyes to the challenge of evangelizing and spreading the Gospel. Sharing His word and sharing His love, that’s been the biggest theme of my time here. This is really good work. It’s hard work, but it’s work that’s necessary. It’s work that, when done right, and when done with the right heart, can yield a lot of fruits in others’ lives, but definitely in our own.”
Benjamin Root ’26, Student, Biology
“A Seton Hall missionary invited me on a mission trip the summer after my sophomore year to serve the homeless for a week, and it changed my life. I was able to see the Holy Spirit at work and was in an environment that was so pure and joyful that I could never forget. This mission trip brought me so much faith from my firsthand experiences of the Holy Spirit and left me with the knowledge that God has a lot in store for me. Following the mission trip, I began my own Bible study here on campus and began trying to live my life in the eyes of God.”
Skylar Smith ’26, Student, Biology
“I just kept asking questions, but nobody around me was really into faith or knew answers. I go to Mass one day with my friends, and Father Nick held up the Book of Gospels to do the Gospel reading, and I felt tears come in my eyes and my throat kind of get a little tired, like I’m about to start crying. I was just like, ‘What is this feeling? I was super-overwhelmed with feeling the love of God in that moment.’
“If I chose another school, there’s a chance I never would have found my faith or found these people calling me forward. In my eyes, in my heart, it was the Holy Spirit telling me, ‘Just wait a little bit, see what’s in store for you here.’”
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