February 1, 2018 marked the passing of Germain Gabriel Grisez, a man of the Church and one of the greatest thinkers of our age.
I met Grisez in 1999, during my sophomore year at Mount St. Mary's College in Emmitsburg. John Paul II's encyclical Fides et ratio had been promulgated in the fall of my freshman year, and as a sophomore I found myself seeking answers to life-orienting questions, some of which were still only inchoately formed. I had learned of Germain Grisez from the discussion of miracles in Bill Portier's Tradition and Incarnation, and I was impressed by the copies of The Way of the Lord Jesus I had seen on display in the college bookstore. Each morning, I saw Grisez and his wife, Jeannette, faithfully take their usual seats at daily Mass in the college chapel. When enrollment opened for Grisez's course in Vatican II Documents, I signed up. Though I could not have imagined it then, the professor about whom I had read, and whom I encountered in the chapel and the classroom, would become a friend who changed my life forever.
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