When Peter de Keratry arrived at Texas A&M University in 1993, College Station, Texas was hardly a bastion of Catholicism.
“It was largely Mass and pizza,” said de Keratry, who took over as chief development officer in the diocese in October. “We had one campus minister and a total staff of four with a budget of less than $200,000.”
Today, the St. Mary’s Catholic Center at Texas A&M is one of the largest and most dynamic Catholic campus ministries in the country with a staff of 70 and a budget of more than $3 million, impacting hundreds of coeds every year. As a 21-year-old student, de Keratry helped lay the groundwork for the success of the ministry when he stumbled onto his first fundraising job.
“It started with this priest saying to me, ‘Hey, we don’t have anybody to help build this building.’ And I said, ‘I’ll help build it,’ not knowing what I was getting myself into,” said de Keratry. “The building had been built in 1954 and was leaking since the day it had been built, and we just wanted to build some ministry space.”
The tall Texan from Amarillo got a crash course in fundraising and found his calling, helping to raise nearly $5 million on the way to transforming the religious landscape in the heart of the Baptist Bible belt. Aggie Catholics are now a recognized force in American Catholicism.
The course was set for de Keratry who would go on to lead major fundraising campaigns for the St. John Paul II National Shrine in Washington and the Blessed Stanley Rother Shrine in Oklahoma City, where he also served as executive director of development for the archdiocese there since 2016.
When he talks about his new job and getting Catholics in the pews fired up for the Bishop’s Lenten Appeal, de Keratry sounds like a high school football coach at halftime, challenging his team to dig deeper.
“How do we take it to the next level is what I want to know,” he asked. “We have tremendous talent, we have tremendous people, we have tremendous wealth. How do we take those gifts and return them with abundance?”
The Bishop’s Lenten Appeal, made to every parishioner in all 70 churches and six missions, begins in earnest soon and is vital to sustaining more than 40 programs throughout the diocese.
The new development chief is not doing it alone. His first job was to recruit new team members. Samantha Donohue is the new senior director of development. She was most recently associate vice president for administration at Belmont Abbey College in Charlotte, N.C. In her new role, Donahue will oversee the Catholic Foundation of Arlington and the Scholarship Foundation of Arlington, which raises money through the Virginia state tax credit scholarship program.
Robert Jurman is the new director of annual appeal programs, including the Bishop’s Lenten Appeal. Jurman had been running the annual appeal in the diocese of Venice, Fla. He also worked in the Archdiocese of New York where he helped raise more than $23 million for the annual appeal.
Juanita Padgett has been promoted to the role of manager of development services. After more than 20 years at the diocese, she will lead the team of people responsible for gift processing and acknowledgment. The diocese processes more than 30,000 pledges and tens of thousands of payments and one-time gifts each year.
When the job in the diocese became available, de Keratry wasn’t eager to leave the job he loved in Oklahoma City, an archdiocese known for its strong Catholic identity. “It was a difficult decision. My son is 17 and a senior in high school. My older son is in college. And we’ve got two younger daughters. I accepted the job, started in October, and my family won’t be moving up here until June.”
But the opportunity to make a lasting impact in a nationally influential diocese was the right choice for de Keratry and his family. “There’s tremendous wealth and tremendous potential here,” he said. “I’ve worked in a lot of places and have been very fortunate to work as a consultant all over the country, and I will tell you that not everywhere is there a healthy, positive presbyterate. When you have a group of guys who love being priests and who love being with your people as priests, then you tend to have dynamic, thriving Catholics. It’s exciting to be here.”
