Faith In Action
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Jim ToweyCEO, Aging with DignityJim Towey was a trusted advisor and personal friend of Mother Teresa of Calcutta for twelve years and did the first reading at her Mass of Canonization in Saint Peter’s Square.
Towey’s career spans four decades of leadership in the government, non-profit and higher education sectors. Highlights include his four-year tenure as head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under George W. Bush where he served on the president’s senior staff. Towey was president of two Catholic colleges for thirteen years, served a seven-year stint as a U.S. Senate staffer, and once led Florida’s 40,000-employee health and human services agency.
In 1996, with Mother Teresa’s encouragement, he founded the nonprofit advocacy organization Aging with Dignity and created the Five Wishes advance directive, which has sold over 40 million copies and enjoys a nationwide network of thousands of distributors. He currently serves as the organization’s CEO and Chairman.
Towey is the recipient of seven honorary doctorate degrees, including ones from Catholic University of America and Franciscan University. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II awarded him a papal medal for distinguished service. He has been pro bono legal counsel to the Missionaries of Charity for 40 years and was in Calcutta three months ago in that capacity. He currently is a trustee of The Papal Foundation.
Towey authored, To Love and Be Loved: A Personal Portrait of Mother Teresa, published by Simon and Schuster (September 2022), which is now available in five languages. He and his wife, Mary, are donating the book’s royalties to charities affiliated with the saint’s work. Towey met his wife in Mother Teresa’s Washington, DC, AIDS home and married her in 1992. They have five children and four grandchildren and reside in Falls Church, Virginia.
About the Event
The Faith in Action lecture series, an initiative of Catholic Law’s Center for Law and the Human Person, seeks to provide students with living examples of lawyers who witness to their faith through their vocation to law.
