Supporters of Catholic education spent the evening of March 10 expressing their gratitude at the 36th annual Salute to Catholic School Alumni Dinner.
The event is the largest fundraiser of the Catholic Education Foundation, which provides tuition assistance for Catholic school students. This year, the sold-out event held at the Galt House Hotel in downtown Louisville raised $1.8 million for tuition assistance, setting a record for the 17th consecutive year.
Richard A. Lechleiter, the foundation’s president who emceed the event, said enrollment in the archdiocese’s Catholic schools is rising and that “more and more families are realizing the tremendous value of Catholic education.”
“For the 11th year in a row — 11 — every single family who reached out to us qualified for tuition assistance in fact earned an award, every single one,” he said.
He also told the crowd that the $100 million capital campaign —“The Answer is Yes! For Everyone. Forever.” — has raised $96 million thus far. The campaign’s public phase was announced by the CEF during its 2025 Salute to Catholic School Alumni Dinner.
Archbishop Emeritus Joseph E. Kurtz also spoke at the event, telling the crowd, “The more I think about my Catholic education, the more grateful I am.”
“I counted the number of years that I sat in a desk in a Catholic school: 22,” he said.
With a laugh, he told the crowd, “If somebody said, ‘Well, archbishop, you’re not so perfect.’ I would say to them, ‘You should see what I would be like if I didn’t have a Catholic school!’ ”
The event celebrated the achievements of six alumni of Catholic schools: Diane M. Gahafer, David A. Koch, Edward J. “Jody” Meiman III, Michael T. Paradis, Katherine Wintergerst Rogers, and Father Charles D. Walker.
St. Rita parishioner and schoolteacher Deborah A. Tucker was awarded the Father Joseph McGee Award and Michael A. Pollio, retired senior associate athletic director of the University of Louisville and parishioner of St. James Church in Louisville, was awarded the Community Service Award.
The dinner also honored nine high school students presented with Father John H. Morgan Scholarships. The chosen students will each receive $10,000 in college scholarships.
They are: Leah Dale Johnson of Assumption High School, Catherine Grace Osborne of Bethlehem High School, Bryston Crain Wechter of DeSales High School, Jenna Riley Campbell of Holy Cross High School, Molly Elizabeth Bales of Mercy Academy, Madeline Claire Galligan of Presentation Academy, Lila Jane Burke of Sacred Heart Academy, Ethan Miles Bell of St. Xavier High School and Zachary David RoBards of Trinity High School.
Laughter rippled through the ballroom as keynote speaker Adriana Trigiani, a “New York Times” bestselling author, related her childhood stories of attending public school as a Catholic in the town of Big Stone Gap, Va., where “less than one percent of the population is Catholic.”
One year, after learning that the school was serving hamburgers for lunch on Fridays during Lent, her father approached the public school’s principal, asking him to switch the burgers out with a vegetarian meal, she recollected.
As her father “expounded upon no meat on Fridays, and suffering, and Lent,” the principal interrupted her father to say, “We don’t have a problem here.”
“You’re going to switch the hamburgers off of Friday?” her father asked.
The principal replied, “There ain’t no meat in them burgers.”
Thanking the crowd for their support of Catholic education, Trigiani noted that to have faith, and to be Catholic, poses the question, “How can I pay it forward?” she said.
Faith “was described to me this way from my grandmother. She said, ‘It’s your rope. You gotta hold onto that rope.’ … That rope is what saves us. And the best thing we can do is hand it off to the next group,” Trigiani added.
