All Heart

Michelle Loris has made a career out of asking questions and a life out of challenging answers

Feature article from the Fall 2020 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine

“I was a bit of a rebel,” Michelle Loris begins. This is Professor Michelle Loris, licensed clinical psychologist, marriage and family therapist, doctor and professor of both modern American literature and clinical psychology, associate dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, chair of the Department of Catholic Studies, 2013 Connecticut Professor of the Year, 2018 Connecticut Distinguished Woman in Higher Education Academic Leadership Award recipient—and these are just the highlights. The accolades and accomplishments are seemingly endless. “I always did well in school,” she concedes. But then, “I also got a lot of detentions.”

She recounts a time with the Sisters at Notre Dame Catholic High School.

“We wore uniform jumpers and they had to be a certain length to cover our knees. We were measured weekly. One week the length of my jumper did not meet standards, so Sister ripped the hem down.” When teenage Michelle Loris stapled the hem back in place, “Sister said this was—I was—detrimental to the Mystical Body. I replied, ‘How can staples made of metal be detrimental to the Mystical Body, a spiritual entity?’”

The answer somehow involved three Tuesdays after school transcribing the Code of Behavior Handbook.

That Loris has a longstanding penchant for questioning authority may come as something of a surprise to her students. That her definition of teenage rebellion would be to challenge the metaphysical inconsistencies in Catholic school doctrine will be a surprise to exactly no one.

Loris is a local girl. Born into a large Catholic Italian immigrant family in Bridgeport’s North End, the traditional values of love and loyalty to family, practice of the Catholic faith and a fierce work ethic were life’s first les-sons. An avid reader by the age of 4, young Michelle would accompany her aunt to the library where she cultivated a fourth passion—learning. It’s no exaggeration to say that these four mainstays—family, faith, work and learning— would become the foundation on which Loris’ entire life would be built.

Of them all, her insatiable curiosity for learning is perhaps the trait most easily documented. She became the first in her family to go to college—at a small, local commuter college on the Bridgeport-Fairfield border that had opened its doors only a few years before. Calling up her family’s immigrant work ethic, Loris took every job she could find, working 40-plus-hour weeks while carrying 18-credit semesters to pay her own tuition and graduate in three and a half years. With honors, of course.

“Sacred Heart became my intellectual and spiritual home,” she says. “It formed me.” There she was taught by young, smart, vibrant faculty—“Commonweal Catholics,” she calls them—“who inspired my mind and challenged my heart in and out of the classroom.” She and a group of students would spend Saturday evenings at these faculty homes discussing books, films, civil rights, the Vietnam War. Again a rebel, Loris and these students and faculty attended marches and rallies to protest the war, once even being “collared by the New Haven police,” Loris admits.

Graduating from Sacred Heart, she applied to three different grad schools in three different disciplines because she couldn’t decide what she wanted to study next. She started by earning her master’s in English and immediately joined the faculty at Sacred Heart. A doctorate in American literature from Fordham followed. Curiosity unabated, she obtained a master’s in marriage and family therapy, followed by a Psy.D. in clinical psychology. Now she’s “toying with the idea of maybe, just maybe, doing a master’s degree in theology,” she says. “Not really sure ...”

Such is the life and career of Michelle Loris. If true heroes are the ones who run toward danger when others flee for safety, then true teachers are the ones willing to wrestle with the most uncomfortable questions while the rest of us would prefer to recline in the reassuring comfort of answers. And any conversation with Michelle Loris reveals that wrestling with the Big Questions is a full-contact experience she relishes.

“Why do we hate?” she asks. The question is something of an intersection of so many of Loris’ professional interests. In literature, her passion has been to grapple alongside the authors and poets to make sense of the human condition and human nature. Clinically, she’s fascinated by human character and behavior and, from her area of expertise, how humans process abnormal levels of psychological pain. As a matter of faith, the Catholic intellectual tradition has long struggled to balance the belief in God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and ultimate goodness while facing the certainty that evil persists in the world.

“Temper is something different,” she continues. “Anger is something different. Why do we hate? And hate so virulently that we harm others with cold cruelty? How did we, as humans, develop that capacity?”

The question is central to the Heart Challenges Hate series of panel discussions and lectures originated by Loris through the Center for Catholic Studies at the University. Seeking to better understand what divides us, Loris and invited speakers and panelists tackle everything from hateful rhetoric in media to the psychological roots of what seems an instinctual distrust and fear of the Other. For example, in “Wrestling with the Legacy of America’s Original Sin,” panelists weighed in on slavery, white privilege and the Church’s own checkered legacy with racial justice—itself a challenging topic which Loris is willing to face head on.

“Did I struggle with my faith? Almost always,” she says, and immediately rattles off a litany of familiar contradictions between an exclusive magisterium of the Church and the abundantly welcoming Christ. Why couldn’t a remarried Catholic receive Communion? Is the entire LGBTQ community to be sent to hell? Why can’t women be deacons or priests?

“Then, by the grace of God and the incredible Vatican II spirit of inclusivity at SHU, I finally got it. The Church is us,” she says, “and not just the magisterium. Jesus—whose challenge to live a life of love is hard enough—hung out with the marginalized, not the officials of his time.”

This challenge—to always weigh faith not only personally but also against an evolving understanding of the world—is fundamental to the Catholic intellectual tradition that lies at the heart of everything Michelle Loris does. In an attempt to see that tradition carried forward, Loris and her spouse of 27 years, attorney Victoria Ferrara, have made a matching gift of $500,000 to the University to serve two distinct purposes. First, it goes to provide the Center for Catholic Studies with the funds necessary to ensure that its programming and projects continue as long as they are needed. Second, the gift creates an endowed scholarship for an undergraduate woman majoring in English and/or minoring in Catholic Studies. Loris and Ferrara hope to inspire other University donors to help build the combined endowment to a full $1,000,000, thus securing it in perpetuity.

The gift does something else, too. It opens the door to finally talk about family. Because, given her credentials and career, it’s easy to become distracted by accolades, awards and achievements. But without family, there is quite simply no Michelle Loris. For her, family is the given. It is the essential. Family is the oxygen she breathes. Family is not a thread adding color to the tapestry; family is the cloth through which every other thread is woven, by which every other color is measured. Family is the fabric on which the tapestry itself hangs.

“I was just mystified that someone could be so courageous,” Loris says of Ferrara, speaking with the sort of tender adoration one witnesses in couples who, back-to-back, have faced the world and seen it all. The couple have two sons: Sal, now 25 and pursuing his MBA at SHU, and Nick, 20, a junior at Mitchell College. At the time of Sal’s birth, Connecticut did not allow same-sex couples to both be parents. So the couple moved to Massachusetts. From there, Loris commuted to SHU to teach while Ferrara, who specializes in assisted reproductive law, argued a landmark case before the Connecticut Supreme Court and changed the law in Connecticut, creating a legal pathway to parenthood for parents through gestational surrogacy. But in truth, Victoria is an Indie-Rock singer-songwriter. “Vic is the cool one,” Loris quips with obvious affection. “I am a nerd,” she says.

Together Michelle and Victoria built their family. “Since they were babies, we have taught our sons that family is most important, and that if you do something, you do it 100 percent. You do the right thing and you do it with passion and love.

“For me, that is the heart of Christianity,” she says. “Love passionately, with your whole heart and soul.”

And that, one can be sure, is a rule she won’t be breaking.