Azucena “Ceni” De La Torre graduated from DePaul in 2014. She’s been busy since then. She’s received two advanced degrees—one in theology and another in mortuary science. Now she serves as a ministry coordinator for Catholic Campus Ministry, working on retreats and faith formation. She can easily pull the thread tracing her trajectory from her undergraduate studies to her current work: an attention to the turns of the heart.
During her mortuary program for example, Ceni embalmed bodies of persons who were unclaimed. “They must have had stories. It’s no one’s goal to end up on a table for students to practice.” For her, this was the corporal work of mercy in burying the dead. Embalming helped her understand her own faith better. She cites Psalm 139: “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you who knit me together in my mother’s womb.” As she studied people from the inside out, she came to see us as very much knit together.
Ceni reappeared on the radar of Catholic Studies for more than one reason. She has returned to to work in campus ministry. She is also one of the intended celebrated speakers for TEDx DePaul University 2020. The event was scheduled for late April 2020 and has been cancelled to prevent the spread of COVID-19. In her talk, she planned to discuss the burning question, “How’s Your Heart?” She hoped to draw others to Cardinal John Henry Newman’s conviction that heart speaks to heart, cor ad cor loquitur. This was Newman’s motto that he chose upon his appointment as Cardinal, adapted from a latter in the 17th century by Francis de Sales. Ceni’s own work has borne out this fundamental principle of the faith in attending to the ways that love and loss help overcome barriers despite differences.
Ceni grew up in Logan Square, watching its gentrification through the lens of her family’s funeral home. From the well of her experience, she regrets our society’s struggle with death. “We need to normalize death.” She cites the change of language from ‘funeral’ to ‘celebration of life.’ It’s an understandable attempt to sanitize the experience of loss, she admits, but has long-term effects in circumventing the natural process of grief. In helping walk mourners through tragedy, she became convinced of the worth of studying something that matters. For her, that was theology.
She chose Duke Divinity School, which was once nicknamed “Mother Duke,” due to its vibrant Catholic connections among the theological faculty, students, and intellectual tradition. Yet she also embraced the aspects of her minority identity, seeking out Duke as a new challenge. She was the only Catholic woman in her Master of Theological Studies cohort.
One of the key features in her return to DePaul is her understanding and appreciation of these markers of difference. She has learned that she doesn’t need to reserve any part of herself when she steps into a space. This includes the fullness of who she is—her education, her life experience, and her faith. She cites Duke professor emeritus Stanley Hauerwas, who critiques modernity in stating:, ‘We live at a time when we believe we should have no story, except the story we chose when we had no story.’ Ceni knows differently: “God doesn’t waste anything.”
College is often a time when students are trying to shed their stories. Ceni’s work in CCM is an opportunity to encourage students to embrace those different aspects of their identity, of themselves, helping them integrate the different aspects of their experience as they find their way in the world. Today’s undergrads at DePaul are “struggling with issues of identity that may have not been in previous years the central focus,” she remarks, “now, there is a space for it in our faith communities.” They struggle with the harm and great sin of sexual abuse in the Church, the MeToo movement, the intense political climate that brings immigration and marriage to the fore. There are “timely ways that {these have} unearthed a whole world of pain. Now we’re coming into naming it and healing it.”