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A Community Center at St. Thomas More
July/August 2006
by Peter Alegi '56, '59LLB

Peter Alegi recently retired from private practice as a lawyer in Rome. He has been active for 35 years as chair of the Alumni Schools Committee in Italy and is a member of the AYA Board of Governors.

Park Street will soon have a new landmark, the Thomas E. Golden Jr. Center at More House. At its dedication on December 1, the bells of its campanile will be ringing out, a wonderful addition to the St. Thomas More complex and the Yale community. This has a special significance for me in this, the year of my 50th reunion.

When I was an undergraduate most Catholic students from New Haven, myself included, continued to attend their home parish churches. I learned of the existence of the Chapel of St. Thomas More during my sophomore year and began to go to Mass there, as much for its architectural and artistic beauty as for its liturgy.

During my senior year, American Studies professor Norman Holmes Pearson suggested that I write my honors paper on the chapel. Thus began the most satisfying research I have ever undertaken. The work, conducted principally at Sterling Library, the Library of Congress, and the chapel archives, helped create a deep attachment to St. Thomas More—a bond that for 50 years has often brought me back to Park Street and to Yale.

I learned that the chapel had been founded by Reverend T. Lawrason Riggs '10 and that there were only eight Catholics in his class. After graduation Riggs went to graduate school at Harvard, where his musical interests reconnected him with a Yale acquaintance, Cole Porter '13. (Riggs and Porter collaborated on See America First, Porter’s first Broadway show.) After World War I, Riggs attended seminary and was ordained in Hartford. In 1922 he became the first Catholic chaplain at Yale. Father Riggs inaugurated the present Chapel of St. Thomas More in 1938 and planned to add a student center, but World War II intervened. In 1943, Father Riggs died at the age of 53.

Here my paper ended. I had absorbed a great deal of Yale history—as well as insights into Catholicism—which remain with me.

There were, of course, more Catholics at Yale in my day than during Riggs’s time. Many were the children and grandchildren of immigrants—a wealth of cultural backgrounds united by faith. Belonging to the diverse community at St. Thomas More was a major part of my Yale experience, and I have stayed involved as a volunteer and supporter of the chapel, even though I lived abroad.

One memorable event for me as an alumnus was the celebration of the chapel’s 40th anniversary. Daylight savings time had just started, and President Bart Giamatti arrived an hour early. Reverend Richard Russell, the chaplain, was tied up with liturgical matters, so he asked me to keep Giamatti company. Bart and I began a long friendship that morning with discussions of religion, Yale, and the Red Sox versus the Yankees.

My experience with Yale and the chapel convinced me that St. Thomas More had a role to play in the Yale community beyond its liturgical one. Soon after Reverend Robert Beloin became chaplain in 1994, we met and he discussed ways to expand the program of St. Thomas More to encompass a range of student activities. Not much later the chapel’s board of trustees, of which I became a member, resolved to raise funds for maintenance and a possible student center. Yale generously granted, at nominal rent, a 99-year lease of land adjoining the chapel as a site for the center (Light and Verity, March/April 2004).

Architect Cesar Pelli designed a building whose beauty and qualities would complement the existing chapel. As building committee chairman, I have returned even more frequently to New Haven from Rome as the project has moved from contracts and blueprints to brick, Minnesota granite, and glass. When it opens this fall, the center, named for Thomas E. Golden Jr. '51, '52MEng, will welcome students and others in the Yale community to a 250-seat auditorium, a meditation room, a cloister, a library, a student lounge, and dining and recreation areas. The center will be the largest Catholic facility on a non-Catholic campus in the United States.

Father Riggs is buried on the chapel grounds. From the glass-covered cloister of the new center one can contemplate his tomb. I hope that it will serve as a reminder that faith and scholarship can go hand in hand at Yale. The Golden Center will be a living embodiment of that truth.

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