Hope and Healing

Experience the Event

Presented by The Office of the President

“I wanted to go to college, do my four years, get out, and start making a bunch of money,” Dr. Tom Catena told a capacity crowd in November 2025 at the Institute for Social Concerns’ 2025 Rev. Bernie Clark, C.S.C., Distinguished Catholic Social Tradition Lecture, part of this year’s Notre Dame Forum exploring the theme “Cultivating Hope.” “So what did I do? I went to school for the rest of my life, and I don’t make anything.”

Now having worked for 17 years as the only full-time physician at Mother of Mercy Hospital that serves over three million people in the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan, Sudan, Catena shared that he has no regrets. Listen in to his conversation with Suzanne Shanahan, the Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director of Institute for Social Concerns, to hear Dr. Tom Catena reveal how he finds hope and joy each day amidst the challenges of serving others at “the end of the world.”

To read a recap of the event, click here.

Since its establishment in 2005, each year the Notre Dame Forum invites campus-wide dialogue about issues of importance to the University, the nation, and the larger world.

This year’s theme is Cultivating Hope. In a world where hope is too often in short supply, our goal is to invite reflection about how each of us can be “seekers of truth, sustainers of hope, and builders of bridges.”

To learn more about the Notre Dame Forum 2025-26, please visit the Forum website.

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Meet the Speaker: Dr. Tom Catena

Since 2007, Dr. Tom Catena, a Catholic missionary from Amsterdam, New York, has been the only doctor permanently based in Sudan’s Nuba Mountains, serving a population of more than a million people. Dr. Catena attended Brown University where he earned a degree in Mechanical Engineering, but felt called to missionary work. He decided to pursue a medical career instead and attended Duke University School of Medicine on a U.S. Navy scholarship. After graduating, he completed his Navy commitment and later began missionary work in Africa.

Dr. Tom volunteered at St. Mary’s Hospital in Nairobi for six years before helping establish Mother of Mercy Hospital in Sudan’s remote Nuba Mountains. “I asked, ‘where was the greatest need?” he said. The hospital is the only trauma center within a 300-mile radius, and represents a place of hope. Patients have been known to walk for many days to be treated here. One father pulled his son in a wagon for 150 miles to find help for his child. The hospital relies on Sudan Relief Fund for nearly all its medicine and supplies.

Dr. Tom treats up to 400 patients a day and remains on call 24/7. Giving up the comforts of the western world, he lives in a small hut adjacent to the hospital so he can respond to emergencies at night. Every year the hospital treats up to 75,000 patients and he performs 1,500 surgeries. Says Dr. Tom, “You stay strong for the next person who needs you.”

Meet the Faculty: Suzanne Shanahan

Suzanne Shanahan is Leo and Arlene Hawk Executive Director and Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns Shanahan’s research focuses on understanding the refugee experience in East Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia with special attention to how displaced persons construct moral boundaries around what is right, just, and fair. Her current research also examines the causes and consequences of domestic child sex trafficking for children and families in the United States. Shanahan serves as Director of the Virtues & Vocations Initiative—a national forum seeking to cultivate character, purpose and meaning in pre-professional and professional education. She has a BA from Johns Hopkins and a Ph.D. from Stanford.