Unique program at Butler helps students deepen their faith

Dr. Paula Trzepacz and Dr. Robert Baker, a Catholic couple from Indianapolis, have contributed to a program at Butler University that provides paid internships to students to serve in Catholic agencies and organizations as a way to deepen their faith. (Photo by John Shaughnessy) Click for a larger version.

By John Shaughnessy

She knows how easy it can be for college students to slip away from their faith.

He knows how they can get so caught up in tests, papers, friends, and concerns about their futures and college costs that their relationship with God suffers.

So Dr. Paula Trzepacz and Dr. Robert Baker—a Catholic couple from Indianapolis—decided to help establish a program that would encourage college students to deepen their faith and live out their values in faith-related settings.

For the past two years, the couple has been a major contributor to the Fund for Discernment in the Catholic Tradition at Butler University in Indianapolis.

So has Father Thomas Baima, a 1976 Butler graduate and priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

The fund provides paid internships for Butler students to serve in Catholic agencies, organizations and other settings.

“This is a critical stage in life for young adults in college,” Trzepacz says. “They can get so focused on their grades, studies and careers that it’s very easy to lose the sense of their spiritual side. This is a concrete way for them to live their faith by working in Catholic agencies, schools and monasteries. And they will be working around people who will model their faith for them.”

Baker nods and adds, “We don’t have kids of our own, but we’re happy to support things that benefit the next generation. It’s an important time in their lives where they are exploring things that will matter to them for the rest of their lives—to do things for others, that life isn’t just self-focused. It should be focused on others.”

Mallory Winters is one of three Butler students who has benefited from the fund that is administered by Butler’s Center for Faith and Vocation. In the fall semester of 2011, she served as an intern for the Sisters of St. Benedict at Our Lady of Grace Monastery and the Benedict Inn Retreat and Conference Center in Beech Grove.

“The internship gave me a much greater sense of calm,” says Winters, a Butler senior from Commerce City, Colo., where she is a member of Shrine of St. Anne Parish. “As a senior, it is very easy to get caught up in nerves about what direction my life is headed. But it gave me a faith and a belief that if I make

God-minded decisions in my life, things will work themselves out. It also put me in an environment where I was surrounded by people of extreme faith.”

The internship also gave her the opportunity to use her major in electronic journalism. Winters often worked on marketing projects that promoted programs at the Benedict Inn. She also helped to create a new website.

“The opportunity was wonderful,” Winters says. “It is very easy for a faith or religious life to get put on the back burner because there is so much else going on. The internship gave me the chance to put my faith back in the forefront of my mind as well as let me see faith at work in a daily, real-life scenario. It gave me a chance to form wonderful relationships with faith-filled people who I know I can turn to when issues of life and faith will inevitably face me.”

As the director of Butler’s Center for Faith and Vocation, Judith Cebula sees another benefit for the students in the internship program.

“They are trying on work in organizations rooted in Catholic teachings and seeing that people can make meaningful lives in these faith-based work places,” says Cebula, a member of St. Thomas Aquinas Parish in Indianapolis. “The students are considering that it is possible to serve others through their faith lives while they make a living.”

While the paid internships benefit students spiritually and financially, they also signal that the work being done is important to society, the doctors say. The couple also encourages other Catholics to support this kind of effort, whether it’s at Butler or any other college.

“There’s nothing about this idea that has to be just Catholic or just Butler,” Baker says. “We’d like to see it get bigger.”

The couple’s association with Butler developed through Trzepacz serving on the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Board of Visitors. Both doctors work for Eli Lilly and Company. She is a senior medical fellow in neurosciences research while he is a global development leader of the psychiatry and pain disorders team.

The connection with the college students has had an impact on the faith journeys of the two doctors, who are members of both SS. Francis and Clare of Assisi Parish in Greenwood and St. Agnes Parish in Nashville.

“Even though we’re older and have a better sense of our own faith, we get busy with our own jobs and slip,” Trzepacz says. “To get involved with these young people strengthens our resolve. They’re a witness to us. I imagine they’re a witness to the people they work with, too. Everyone needs to be refueled in their faith.” †