Lumen Gentium Award Winner: Thomas Becket Foundation

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PROVIDENCE — Megan O’Brien Crayne recalled a young student who in high school was trying to decide whether to attend Georgetown University or Brown University.
“Multiple people told him, ‘If you go to Brown, you will lose your faith. Don’t do it. It’s not worth it,’” said Crayne, the campus minister at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
That student ended up choosing Brown University.
“He came to Brown anyway, and now he talks about how his faith has unexpectedly been strengthened… Students, their lives and their faith, are really transformed through their interactions with our community,” said Crayne, who three years ago became the campus minister for the Brown-RISD Catholic Community. “Finding myself at Brown has felt like divine providence,” Crayne said.
Crayne’s hiring to lead the Catholic campus community at Brown and RISD was made possible by the Thomas Becket Foundation, a Rhode Island nonprofit that provides financial support for the campus ministry.
“Megan was hired after a national search,” said Glenn Creamer, the president of the Thomas Becket Foundation’s board of trustees, which was nominated for the Lumen Gentium Award for Administration and Stewardship.
The Thomas Becket Foundation is made up of Catholic alumni, parents and other supporters of the Catholic campus ministry at Brown and RISD. The foundation celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019.
Father Albert Duggan, O.P., the Catholic chaplain at Brown and RISD, said the campus ministry is a vital resource for Catholic students at both universities to learn and grow in their faith, and to find a supportive community. That ministry has been able to accomplish that mission without ever having its own space. Father Duggan, 39, graduated from Brown University in 2003 with a degree in biomedical ethics.
“Having a space where students can come and be with other Catholics is essential,” he said.
Father Duggan and Crayne spearheaded a capital campaign to purchase a home near the Brown University campus. The home, at 51 Prospect St., is now being readied to serve as the campus ministry’s new Catholic Center, a place for worship, study, fellowship and Eucharistic Adoration.
“For the first time we’ll have a chapel with the Blessed Sacrament in it,” Crayne said. “As of now, students don’t have a place to go in between classes to pray before the Blessed Sacrament. That alone, even without the rest of the building, is huge.”