Fr. Edwin Leahy
Episode 307
16 DEC 2024
He has been the headmaster at Saint Benedict’s Prep in Newark, New Jersey, for more than 50 years. He is a graduate of that school and has been featured on “60 Minutes” and on FOX News. On the sports side, he wrestled, played football, and captained the tennis team, and went on to coach wrestling for Saint Benedict’s Prep. Over six years ago a video went viral of him on the basketball court, hitting a hook shot from three-point range, wearing his clerics. Meanwhile, he received the first Robert F. Kennedy Award for Urban School Leadership from the national Schools That Can organization in 2014 and was named a New Jersey Icon by NJBIZ in 2020.
Notable guest quotes:
“Especially my grandmothers, were pray-ers. So, from the time I was – I can remember – I remember them praying. And my dad was that way too. I used to, saw my father every morning and every night before he went to work, and it might be before he went to bed, kneeling at the side of his bed praying. So, I grew up around pray-ers.”
“My grandmother actually had a unique – and I studied a lot of theology, and I used to say, nah, this can’t be, this is not true – but she had a unique relationship with the Blessed Mother. She could change the weather, she could get all kinds of favors done. It was unbelievable to have the experience with her.”
“The locker rooms, any really, really good team, the locker room is critical, right? So, I learned a lot from the conversations and the encouragement that came from coaches before games, before practices. And this coach… had a huge influence on me and the way I looked at building a team, working as part of a team, giving up what I want for what we need.”
“I really don’t remember wanting to do or be anything else… I grew up with priests around me all the time… So, I admired them, and I said, ‘Well, maybe I can do that’! I can remember as a little kid celebrating Mass in the house, making my sister attend. And my sister would be in the assembly, and I would celebrate the Mass.”
“I had no idea about being a monk or a Benedictine, until I came here to St. Benedict’s. And then I combined my experience with the priests in the parish with my experience here.”
“How God works in our history is really, really important to realize.”
“We were blessed here in the monastery with one of the monks, priests, who was a Notre Dame graduate, was doing a PhD in Physics at Columbia University. And he knew he wanted to enter the monastery. So, he never did the final research project. He entered the monastery. He had been a former Boy Scout leader… And he developed– well, we did it actually together – the leadership structure in the school. And the mantra was, don’t do for kids what kids can do for themselves. So, that’s kind of what we’ve operated on.”
“One of the signs you see around the place all over is, whatever hurts my brother or sister hurts me. So, to try to get the understanding of the responsibility for the other; that God loves us as we are, and He said love one another as I have loved you, which means to accept the other the way the other is, not the way that we’d like them to be.”
“Don’t make decisions in anger that affect not only you, but everybody else around you.”
“It’s real important that kids be invested in something, and that causes them to give up themselves for the sake of a common goal.”
“I could not be a Christian on my own because I’m just not strong enough to do that. I have the blessing of living in community with 13 other monks.”
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