On September 17, Catholic Law welcomed Jim Towey, Founder and CEO of Aging with Dignity, for an insightful Faith-in-Action discussion. The Faith-in-Action lecture series is an initiative of Catholic Law’s Center for Law and the Human Person. It is designed to offer students living examples of lawyers who witness to their faith through their vocation to law.

In his lecture, "What Mother Teresa Taught Me About Life and Being a Lawyer," Towey shared lessons from his time as a trusted legal advisor to St. Teresa of Calcutta.

Towey shared stories from his book, To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa (Simon & Schuster 2022), highlighting how Mother Teresa shaped his life and gave him a unique perspective on what it means to serve and love through the legal profession. He shared some of Mother Teresa’s words of wisdom, including her “five-word Gospel” (“you did it to Me”), the radical trust embodied by her preferring to rely on the “insecurity of Divine Providence,” and her admonition to “choose not to have.”

Jim Towey was legal counsel and close advisor to Mother Teresa of Calcutta for 12 years and did the first reading at her Mass of Canonization in St. Peter’s Square. He has been pro bono legal counsel to the Missionaries of Charity for 40 years. He previously headed the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under George W. Bush for four years and served on his senior staff.

His career spans the presidency of two Catholic colleges for thirteen years, a seven-year stint as a US Senate staffer, and the leadership of Florida’s 40,000-employee health and human services agency. In 1996, with Mother Teresa’s encouragement, he founded the nonprofit advocacy organization Aging with Dignity and later created the Five Wishes advance directive, which has sold over 43 million copies.