Nate Friday (left) is shown with Kairos Retreat leaders in 2018 while campus minister at Dominican High School, Whitefish Bay. (Submitted photo)
Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay launched Nate Friday’s faith journey. It set him on an unlikely course to inspire other young peoples’ faith journeys, both as a fellow student and later as a faculty member.
Now, Friday is inspiring educators at Dominican schools throughout the United States.
“I work with principals, boards of directors, presidents, campus ministers on how is the school living out its Catholicity and its unique Dominican charism,” said Friday, the director of formation for Dominican Veritas Ministries.
He is a 2009 graduate of Dominican High School who is a parishioner at St. Anthony on the Lake, Pewaukee. He also attends St. Eugene in Fox Point, where his wife teaches.
Friday said DVM embodies what the Church calls a “pontifical public juridic person,” a mostly lay-led organizational model that helps lead Church ministries. DVM oversees each of the schools’ finance, governance and mission, the last of which he considers the most important.
“We’re the sponsor of 13 Dominican K-12 schools across the country. For years, Catholic schools have been either sponsored by the diocese themselves with the archbishop or bishop as the technical sponsor, or by organizations where the religious order or congregation is the sponsor,” he said.
“There were a number of organizations across the country where fewer and fewer women were discerning a call to religious life. A number of the Dominican congregations across the country recognized that and still wanted their schools to not only stay Catholic but to maintain the Dominican charism.”
Friday’s role allows him to infuse into Dominican educational leaders the same spirit infused within him, carried into his life through the prism of the four pillars of Dominican spirituality: faith, study, community and preaching.
“I would almost call it a radical level of invitation,” he said.
“It’s infused in that community. We want you to be a part of it, whether that’s playing soccer or football or basketball, or being part of campus ministry and participating in the Mass, that radical sense of invitation.”
Friday said he received that invitation at Dominican, at a time when engaging in a deep lifelong Catholic faith wasn’t for him.
“It was a campus minister who kind of saw some leadership potential in me, saw what might be there, that I didn’t even really recognize or see myself,” he said. “He extended that invitation to be part of retreat leadership. I was saying, ‘Are you kidding me?’ Faith was not really a thing for me, to put it bluntly, but he still saw something there,” Friday said.
“My brashness against the faith did not in any way turn or push him off, but almost was a challenge saying, ‘Nope, we’re going to invite you anyways.’ That really turned me to immerse more deeply into just about everything in faith, and then of course the Dominican charism thereafter.”
Friday saw God merging that skill of radical invitation within him, fusing faith and a personal charism of preaching into relationship as a life mission.
“I had experiences to eventually lead retreats for other students and saw that, gosh, through the Holy Spirit working through me, I can lead other folks, and that inspires them. My ‘aha’ moments came through getting to witness and lead others in theirs, and how they experienced the Holy Spirit,” Friday said.
“Then it was further impacted a little bit later in college. I was drawn to education, and through coaching to education. I eventually got into parish work where I started my career, but eventually working at Dominican for nine years as a campus minister and administrator.”
As Friday professionally developed — he showcases what he calls a “hot-off-the-presses” master’s degree from Notre Dame — he witnessed that even the professional development of his Dominican school colleagues involves a sense of community, a merger of faith development and molding preachers through their educational calling.
“One of my favorite quotes from the Sinsinawa Dominican Sisters, their work, is ‘Relationship is the heart of ministry.’ It’s something I’ve always come back to. How do we build, foster, create relationships?” he asks.
Everything from bus trips with entire staffs and board members from Dominican schools to the home of their religious order in the small southwestern community of Sinsinawa, to post-conference hangouts at Milwaukee taverns with his colleagues from across the country and being present to their own faith — all these ways evoke the way he has connected people to God for nearly 20 years.
“Just that culture of someone (saying), ‘Let’s go grab a beer, grab a cup of coffee, grab some lunch, whatever it is, and get to know each other on an individual basis. Or, ‘Let’s meet each other as people in the same mission, break bread together informally, has kind of been how the Spirit’s most really worked through me,” he says.
“I love everything about the Dominican charism.”
