College Inducts D’Amours into Order of St. Albert at Commencement 2025

At the fourth annual New England Commencement on May 24, Thomas Aquinas College inducted Michele and Donald H. D’Amour into the Order of St. Albert.

Established in 1998, the Order of St. Albert is named for St. Thomas Aquinas’s own teacher. Membership recognizes those benefactors who have shown exceptional generosity to the College and its program of Catholic liberal education. Members receive a cast-bronze bust of St. Albert the Great, and their names are engraved on the base of a statue of the saint that occupies a corner of the California campus’s academic quadrangle.

This year, the College extended membership to a couple that has demonstrated remarkable commitment to Catholic education, health, and the arts.

Married for over 52 years, Michele and Donald H. D’Amour are accomplished business leaders and generous philanthropists. In 2019, both retired after decades-long, fruitful careers with Big Y Foods Inc., a privately owned grocery chain in the Northeast, where Dr. D’Amour served as chairman of the board and chief executive officer and Mrs. D’Amour as the educational partnership administrator.

Initially, Dr. D’Amour had planned to become a theology and philosophy professor but just before doing so, his mother fell ill. In honor of her dying request, he instead took charge of his family’s grocery chain. “Instead of following his passion in academia,” said Mrs. D’Amour, thanking the College on behalf of her husband, “he joined the family business and continued his father’s legacy, with a moral compass that stems from his parents’ deep belief in the Creator, coupled with his excellent education in the Catholic intellectual tradition — and with not one business course.”

Inspired by Pope St. John Paul II’s 1998 encyclical on faith and reason, the D’Amours founded the Fides et Ratio grant competition for small Catholic colleges — of which Thomas Aquinas College was a top recipient — as well as the Fides et Ratio summer faculty seminars under the auspices of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington D.C., which began in 2001.

Residents of the Northeast, Dr. and Mrs. D’Amour were thrilled when Thomas Aquinas College announced it was opening a second campus in Northfield, Massachusetts, in 2019. They have given extensively to facilitate building restorations and acquisitions on the New England campus, including funding renovations to Bolger Art Center and providing the lead gifts toward the purchases of several buildings. Additionally, they have helped fund the next generation of TAC-New England students through the College’s financial aid program.

“At the core of the D’Amours’ beneficence is a firm belief in the value of Catholic liberal education here at Thomas Aquinas College,” said Scott Turicchi, Chairman of the College’s Board of Governors. “We are happy to stand with them as partners in this shared mission. Those of us who have labored on this campus and for this campus must express our deepest thanks to the D’Amours for blessing our community with their generosity.”