It is with deep sadness that the Thomas More College community has said goodbye to a longtime friend and teacher. On Saturday, December 17, 2022, Dr. Patrick Powers, Teaching Fellow of Thomas More College, passed away. His wake and funeral were held on December 28 and 29, respectively, at his home parish of St. Theresa’s Church in Henniker, NH. A link to his full obituary can be found here.

Patrick Powers was educated at Assumption College, the University of Notre Dame, and the Université de Fribourg (Switzerland). He received his PhD in Government and Political Philosophy from Notre Dame, after completing a doctoral thesis entitled “Kant’s Philosophy as Political Philosophy.”

During his distinguished teaching and administrative career at Assumption College, the University of Notre Dame in the Program of Liberal Studies, Magdalen College, and Thomas More College, Dr. Powers received fellowships and grants from the Bradley and Earhart Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and donors supporting the Fides et Ratio Seminars. An experienced professor of philosophy, theology, political thought, literature, and the Great Books generally, his academic interests were truly Catholic. These ranged from the thought of Aristotle on the soul in the De Anima, to the Greek Church Fathers and St. Augustine with a focus on their accounts of the Trinity, to the rise of Christendom in the medieval period from St. Benedict to St. Bonaventure. In a literary vein, he mentored students on the great epics of ancient and medieval times, as well as on the dramas of Shakespeare.

As Executive Director of the Fides et Ratio Seminars at the Faith and Reason Institute since 2006, he co-mentored a series of summer seminars on the Catholic intellectual tradition for college, university, seminary, secondary, and primary school faculty and administrators from across the United States and overseas.

Over the course of his life, Dr. Powers became conversant with the modern novel, including the twentieth-century works of Mauriac, Greene, Waugh, Percy, Faulkner, Lampedusa, and Endō, as well as the Russian masterpieces of Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Solzhenitsyn.

Dr. Powers’ heart, soul, and life were dedicated to teaching. He commented to me on more than one occasion that as a young man living and working in Washington, DC, he had to choose between a life dedicated to politics and action, or the life of a teacher, pursuing wisdom. The multiple generations of students that he taught and mentored for the last fifty years are grateful for his decision.

I can remember asking Dr. Powers once, many years ago, “What do you think makes a great teacher?” In response, I anticipated a long discourse, explanation, or at least a discussion. He replied, “A new teacher teaches more than he knows, a good teacher teaches what he knows, and a great teacher teaches what his students need to know.” And this was the secret of his craft; he did not worry about prestige or concern himself with what others thought of him. He concerned himself with the one needful thing for a teacher: his students’ learning.

Requiescat in Pace,

Mr. Paul Jackson
Executive Vice President
Thomas More College