Nineteen years after becoming Catholic, George Harne became the president of a Catholic college.
“It’s very unlikely and I could never have predicted it,” said Harne, who assumed the duties as the new president of Christendom College in Front Royal July 1. “It should inspire confidence in providence.”
While he does not normally hear divine voices or locutions when praying, he experienced such a moment when prayerfully deliberating on a final decision to move to Front Royal. “There was a back and forth, and I heard the words, ‘So now are you going to trust me?’ ” he said. “I struggle with trusting God, and this was just one more way in which God worked things out beautifully.”
Harne was trained as a classical musician. He spent the bulk of his career as a professor of music history and served the previous four years as the executive dean of the School of Arts and Sciences for the University of St. Thomas in Houston. The grandson of a pentecostal pastor, his low-church Protestantism was upended when he attended a Catholic liturgy on the feast of Corpus Christi. He describes his conversion experience as being “mugged by beauty.”
“There was a procession, and I was struck by how beautiful it all was and how it all centered on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,” said Harne. “I thought I was just going to witness a beautiful service, a beautiful liturgy, and had no intention when I walked through those doors about changing anything about what I believed, but beauty snuck up on me. There was a kind of leap in my heart from non-belief to belief and that leap took place because of the beauty of the liturgy. It opened up my heart in ways that my mind had to race to catch up.”
Bishop Michael F. Burbidge will celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit with the Installation of Harne as president at Christendom’s Christ The King Chapel Aug. 25 at 10 a.m.
He is the fourth president of the college that was founded in 1977 and has earned a reputation as a respected Catholic liberal arts school. Harne thinks the potential is enormous. “Part of the vision for the future is to expand Christendom’s reach,” he said. “While we’re committed to remaining a humane-sized college where mentoring can happen, we want to take the riches that are here at Christendom and extend them through the church.”
With the completion of the grand, gothic Christ the King Chapel in 2023, under the leadership of former President Timothy O’Donnell, Christendom earned national attention and hit its enrollment cap of 550 undergraduates, fulfilling the vision of the college’s founders. Harne assures that the mission of forming and sending students will remain the same.
“Fidelity is at the very center of the plans for the future,” he said. “One of the biggest challenges is that reputation is often developed indirectly. You don’t necessarily raise a reputation by going after it. What you do is you double down on being excellent at what you do — at being the very best, faithful Catholic college that we can be — and then from that excellence in the classroom, in student life, the chapel, all the things we seek to do (is) for the glory of God. Those things over a period of time will bring people’s attention.”
There’s a palpable feeling of excitement at the school that was founded by the esteemed Warren Carroll, whose masterful five-volume “History of Christendom” remains in print.
“I think when the history of Catholicism in this country is written in a hundred years, Christendom is going to warrant a substantial section,” said Harne, who is delighted to call the Shenandoah Valley home, with his wife, Debbie, and five children. “God is at work. The seeds are here and the first shoots of what Pope John Paul II called the New Evangelization are here. The springtime is happening, and the evidence is here.”
Hale can be reached at [email protected].
