Bishop Andrew Cozzens, a proud graduate of Benedictine College in Atchison Kansas, served as a missionary for young people with both Twin Cities based NET Ministries and the national college ministry Saint Paul’s Outreach before entering seminary. He was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis in 1997 and after serving in two parishes was sent to Rome for doctoral studies, where he completed a doctorate degree in Sacramental Theology focusing on Saint John Paul II’s theology of the Priest as the Bridegroom of the Church. His book A Living Image of the Bridegroom: The Priesthood and the Evangelical Counsels was published in 2020 through the Institute for Priestly Formation out of Omaha, an organization for which he also serves as president.

After teaching in seminary formation for 8 years Bishop Cozzens was ordained to the episcopacy in 2013 as an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis. On December 6, 2021, he was installed as the 8th bishop of the Diocese of Crookston in northern Minnesota.

He currently serves as the chair of the USCCB Committee on Evangelization and Catechesis where he has been tasked by the Bishops with leading a three-year National Eucharistic Revival which seeks to impact the US Church at every level strengthening Eucharistic belief and practice. As part of the Revival, at the direction of the Bishops, he has founded and is the first President of the National Eucharistic Congress Corporation and is overseeing the organizing of the first National Eucharistic Congress in the United States in almost 50 years.

Monsignor James Patrick Shea serves as president of the University of Mary. Monsignor Shea was inaugurated in 2009 as the sixth president of the university and, at the age of 34, became the youngest college or university president in the United States.

He succeeded Sister Thomas Welder, who had served as president for 31 years.

The oldest of eight children, Monsignor Shea grew up on a dairy and grain farm near Hazelton, North Dakota, just 38 miles from the University of Mary’s main campus. He began his undergraduate work at Jamestown College, majoring in English and history. He then entered the seminary for the Diocese of Bismarck, earning a bachelor’s degree and a pontifical master’s degree (licentiate) in philosophy at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. He studied classical Greek at the University of Texas at Austin and continued at the Vatican’s North American College, studying theology at the Gregorian and Lateran universities in Rome. He has studied management at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business and is also an alumnus of the Institutes for Higher Education at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University.

Michael S. McGinniss is Professor of Law and J. Philip Johnson Faculty Fellow at the University of North Dakota School of Law, where he joined the faculty in 2010 and served as the Dean from 2019 to 2022. He currently teaches courses on Professional Responsibility, Conflict of Laws, Advanced Legal Ethics, and Federal Courts. He serves as Faculty Advisor for the North Dakota Law Review and the UND Law Federalist Society student chapter, and received a 2023 UND Outstanding Advisor Award for his work with the Federalist Society. In 2024, he was selected to serve on the executive committee for the Federalist Society’s Practice Group on Professional Responsibility and Legal Education.

In June 2022, Professor McGinniss received from the State Bar Association of North Dakota (SBAND) its Distinguished Service Award, the highest and most prestigious honor given by the Association. This Award, which is not given every year, is selected by the SBAND Board of Governors to recognize the efforts of its most outstanding members, and it honors a member of the profession who has provided outstanding service to the state and legal community over an extended career. He currently serves on the North Dakota Joint Committee on Attorney Standards, where he previously served for nine years as a member and two as the Chair, and on the Operations Committee for the North Dakota Lawyer Disciplinary Board. He also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the North Dakota Catholic Conference.

Professor McGinniss’ research and scholarship interests to date have focused primarily on questions concerning the professional, ethical, and moral responsibilities of lawyers. His law review article Expressing Conscience with Candor: Saint Thomas More and First Freedoms in the Legal Profession, was published in the HARVARD JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY, which is Harvard Law’s top-ranked specialty journal.

Professor McGinniss and his wife Maureen are parishioners of St. Michael’s Catholic Church in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where they reside.

Judge Erickson serves as a United States circuit judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.