LAETARE MEDAL / Che Gioia: For 2010 Poetry Trumps Politics

Topping the news on this Laetare Sunday, the winner of the Stateside church's most prestigious prize is a first: an American Catholic poet. And an appointee of the last administration, to boot. On Sunday, the University of Notre Dame announced that Dana Gioia will receive the Laetare Medal at the Golden Dome's 16 May commencement. Instituted in 1883, the medal's next honoree is traditionally revealed on this "Rose Sunday" of Lent.

From the beginning, the Laetare was envisioned as an American answer to the Golden Rose -- the venerable honor given by the Popes to Marian sanctuaries and Catholic queens for the better part of the last millennium. Reserved to the laity alone until 1968, the Medal's recipients have come from practically every walk of the nation's ecclesial life, from the prolific church-builder Patrick Keely (1884) to the nation's first Catholic president (1961) and his successor on TV (2008), the novelist Walker Percy (1989) and pro-life activist Sr Helen Prejean (1996) to Dorothy Day (1973) and Cardinal Joseph Bernardin (2005). Amid the heated controversy over last year's choice of commencement speaker by the Fighting Irish, the 2009 Laetare Laureate -- former US ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon -- declined the prize a month after being announced as its recipient, three weeks before the mid-May graduation.

For his part, the 59 year-old 2010 Laureate -- a Californian of Italian-Mexican descent with degrees from Stanford and Harvard -- worked as a marketing executive at General Foods until resigning in 1992 to devote himself full-time to the craft. A Republican of working-class roots who once told the New York Daily News that he was "enough of an environmentalist" to donate to the Green Party, in 2003 former President George W Bush named Gioia to chair the National Endowment of the Arts, with the poet pledging to remove the oft-controversial agency "from the culture wars" and "restore the endowment to its rightful place as one of the premier institutions in the United States." Midway through his second four-year term, Gioia left the NEA chair early last year to return to California and writing verses.

Comprised of a gold medal with aspects unique to the profession of the recipient, the Laetare is bordered by the traditional inscription Magna est veritas et praevalebit ("Truth is mighty, and will prevail"). Following the medal's presentation, its recipient traditionally offers an address alongside the commencement's main speaker -- an honor that, this time around, falls to Brian Williams, anchor of the NBC Nightly News.

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