Remembering Joe Reich, ’57
Joe Reich, ’57, a founding board member of Sycamore Trust, our long-serving Vice President, and good friend to many, has died, and we want to say a few words in tribute and gratitude about this fine man and loyal son of Notre Dame.
After graduation from Notre Dame and service as a Naval officer, Joe returned to his Colorado Springs home, where he became a prominent businessman and leader in his community, his diocese, and the Notre Dame Alumni Association, for which he served as the only two-term president in its history.
His Catholic faith was dear to him, as Joe’s obituary recounts,
He was most proud of time served as a member of the Bishop’s Council for the Diocese of Colorado Springs. He was designated as a Knight of the Holy Sepulchre in acknowledgment of his faith and service to the Catholic Church.
That service included his central role in establishing Catholic Charities of Central Colorado, a project in which he collaborated with his wife Ann – “a family affair,” as Catholic Charities said in its 50-year anniversary commemoration.
To us, as a “start up” in uncharted waters, as vice president Joe offered wise counsel, encouragement, credibility – and a friendship we will treasure always.
We say farewell to Joe in the spirit of a message of faith and comfort from Rev. Karl Rahner, S.J., that may resonate broadly with you, as it does with us:
I have often reflected upon the surest comfort for those who mourn. It is this: a firm faith in the real and continual presence of our loved ones; it is the clear and penetrating conviction that death has not destroyed them, nor carried them away. They are not even absent, but living near to us, transfigured: having lost, in their glorious change, no delicacy of their souls, no tenderness of their affection. On the contrary, they have, in depth and in fervor of devotion, grown larger a hundredfold. Death is, for the good, a translation into light, into power, into love. Those who on earth were only ordinary Christians become perfect. Those who were good become sublime.
With our prayerful good wishes to all of you.
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