Fr. Charles Marie Rooney, O.P., was ordained a Catholic priest in May at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.  During the summer of 2024, he served as a chaplain at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.  He is currently back in Washington for the academic year to finish a final year of graduate studies in theology. Fr. Charles has taught in parishes, published over 25 essays and articles both online and in print, and worked in palliative hospice care with the Hawthorne Dominican Sisters, founded by Rose Hawthorne, the daughter of American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Fr. Charles was a 2017 Mitchell Scholar and earned a Masters in Philosophy of Religion at Maynooth University, where he wrote his dissertation on the contributions that St. Edith Stein’s phenomenological approach to philosophy can make to St. Thomas Aquinas’s classical account of the human person. As an undergraduate at Duke University, Fr. Charles completed a self-directed Program II major entitled “Markets, Society, and Personalism,” served as the Director of Academic Programming for the Duke Catholic Center, and ran for four years on Duke’s NCAA Division I cross-country and track & field teams. He also served for two years as an Editorial Board member of Duke’s student newspaper, The Chronicle, where he wrote a biweekly column (“The Imago Dei”) during his senior year. Prior to studying in Ireland on the Mitchell, he served for 6 years as a firefighter with the Noroton Fire Department in his hometown of Darien, CT.