In Memoriam: Daniel Raymond Fleury (Class of '02)
(Winter 2001-2002 Newsletter)
One semester at a large state university was enough for
him. A very bright student from an honors magnet medallion
program in Las Vegas, and MVP of its Varsity Quiz Team, he
had already become disillusioned with the state of formal
education. "America's schools," he said in an application
to Thomas Aquinas College, "now have nothing to do with
the time-honored tradition of studying the rich culture which
sustains their very existence."
He did have a class in Plato. That got him to think. "Maybe
there really is an order to the world, after all?," he
thought. For the agnostic he was, this was a major concession.
He came across the reading list at Thomas Aquinas College.
It was what he was looking for. "Academically, the only
alternative to the social activism and narrowing specialization
of the modern university is the traditional liberal arts curriculum
such as offered at Thomas Aquinas," he wrote.
"I wish to attend your college with my only presupposition
being the wisdom which stems from knowledge of my own ignorance.
All I truly desire in this world is an attempt at objective
truth in a world of nihilistic relativism, and I feel my only
recourse to satisfy this urge rests in the texts of the past
rather than in the so-called experts of our time."
With this passion for learning and openness to truth, he
showed up on the College's campus in the fall of 1998, a freshman
in the Class of 2002. It was his first visit. "I don't
think he realized how Catholic it was," said his roommate,
Andrew Simone ('02). "He didn't even know there was a
dress code!"
Not surprisingly, more than just dress codes came as a shock
to him. Yet he acquiesced to those and other Catholic communal
standards for the sake of a chance to read great books.
He took nothing for granted; he probed and questioned everything,
sometimes to the irritation of his classmates. "In Freshman
theology, he would love to look for contradictions in the
Bible," said Simone. "And he could be very critical
of ideas that were foreign to him - as so much of Catholic
thinking certainly was to him at that time. But if you gave
him a rational, coherent argument about a position to the
contrary, he would listen; you could sway him."
He immersed himself in his studies, absorbing readings from
Homer's Iliad to Euclid's Geometry. But as much as the readings
would captivate him, it was the discussions with his friends
outside the classroom that held him more.
"Inside class, we were mostly taken with what the author
was saying; outside class, we'd talk about whether the author
was right," said Simone. "He simply wanted to know
what was true."
"No matter what the subject was with him, you'd always
come back to talking about philosophy and theology,"
said Matt Peterson ('01). "He had this great probing
mind and was one of those people you wanted around when a
conversation got 'deep' or a debate heated up."
"Every conversation with him was a great conversation,"
said classmate Luke Hobbs ('02). "You'd go from ethics
to politics, from girls to faith, from the serious to the
hysterical and back again." "From the inane to the
sublime," adds Simone. "Mostly, the sublime."
Says Peterson: "His hilarious sense of humor and wry
sarcastic wit always had the guys laughing."
"Pretty much every night was a late night with him,"
said Simone. "We'd debate, we'd discuss, we'd laugh,
we'd cry, many times 'til 4 or 6 in the morning. We'd snooze
for a couple of hours and then race off, bleary-eyed for an
8:30 a.m. class."
Sophomore year, St. Augustine got to him. He was fascinated
by Augustine's rhetoric and his theology, a balance between
emotions and intellect. His friends observed that the anti-Pelagian
treatises had forced him to think about the human mind and
the human will as never before. The Confessions made him ponder
God as a reality, and not just as a mystical idea. More late
night discussions ensued.
"One day, he came into my room and said, 'Tell me why
I should be a Protestant and not a Catholic?" Simone,
himself a Presbyterian, said, "I had forgotten by this
time he was not a Believer! Of course, I couldn't convince
him. These were things he had thought through himself."
Quietly, he began taking instruction in the Catholic faith
from Fr. Wilfred Borden, O.M.I., one of the College's chaplains.
A die-hard Minnesota Vikings fan, he and other sports enthusiasts
would spend time at Fr. Borden's residence, the only place
on campus with satellite TV.
However discreet he may have been, classmates became curious
when they saw him making the Sign of the Cross during class-opening
prayer. Then they saw him praying along.
That Easter he entered the Church. Said Simone, "For
many people, a conversion is not necessarily a 'new' thing.
For him, considering what he used to believe, this was radically
new."
"One of the main things that struck him was how healing
Confession was," said Hobbs. "After his first Confession,
he felt as if all this weight had been taken off. He was amazed
at how beautiful the reality of the Church was."
Junior year was his. He lived for the readings - Aristotle's
Ethics and Politics, those of Locke, Rousseau, Shakespeare,
the Federalists, and others. "The whole class knew he
was by far the most dedicated, intelligent, and prepared for
those readings," said Hobbs. "He felt a huge sense
of completion going through those readings," said Simone.
And his faith matured noticeably. "Probably the most
powerful impression on my life," said Hobbs, "was
watching someone come as far in the Faith as he had from so
little. For a cradle Catholic like me, I was awestruck by
it. This was a guy who was not only extraordinarily intelligent,
but who had a very good heart, too."
He had become famous for his "Fleuryburgers," a
concoction of meat, sauce, and condiments he would grill at
off-campus barbeques. Vegetarians secretly succumbed to them.
He was hoping to go to law school. He had been attracted to
the law even before he came to the College, and he saw it
as a way of helping to provide for his mother and step-father.
He aimed to study for the entrance exam over the summer.
This past summer, before his senior year, he and several
classmates found work at a flight camp in Winona, Minnesota.
They were serving as dormitory guardians for teenage boys.
One week into the camp, at about 11:30 at night, he was returning
from the local airport in a rental truck full of luggage when
a semi-truck and trailer pulled broadway into the middle of
a divided highway in a badly-lighted section just past a bend.
He hit the trailer full-speed. No skid marks. Killed instantly.
Taken at exactly 22 and one-half years, his life seemed shortened.
Yet for those who knew him, it was completed.
He used to joke with his friends that he wanted Siegfried's
funeral march played at his funeral. It was. "Of course,
you realize, I'd have to do something great with my life,"
he would quickly add. He did.
Says Peterson: "I thought about all the 'great' things
he probably thought, like me, about doing. It seemed such
a bitter tragedy he never got the chance. Yet after a time
I realized that while all those 'great' things are good, even
if achieved, they don't matter at all in the scheme of things.
"In the end, it comes down to oneself and God, and
the acceptance of Him. And this is no small thing - to seek
Truth, to pursue it, and to change your life in humility before
it because it is true. What Dan did is more than a great thing
- he attained salvation."
Dan Fleury. May you rest in peace.
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