Eileen C. Burke-Sullivan

Though she left formal religious life without taking vows, Eileen’s journey entailed a profound religious vocation with roots reaching back into her childhood. She fell in love with liturgy and liturgical music in her Benedictine boarding school, where she also studied the documents of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) as they became available in English. But the turning point in her vocational story occurred when she made the full thirty-day retreat known as the “Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola” under the direction of Rev. Edward Kinerk, S.J. at Sacred Heart Retreat House in Sedalia, CO – the first lay woman to do so at that retreat center and one of the first in the United States. Utilizing the guidelines for discernment laid out in the Exercises, she moved beyond conventional careers for women and became the first diocesan director of the Office of Liturgy and Worship for her home diocese of Cheyenne, WY. That position was followed by stints implementing the liturgical directives of Vatican II at St. Margaret Mary parish in Omaha and in the Archdiocese of Omaha. She later served as director of the National Christian Life Community movement – the renovated lay Ignatian sodality – in St. Louis, MO.

After her marriage to Michael J. Sullivan in 1982, the couple eventually settled in Dallas, TX, where Eileen taught theology for several years at the Ursuline Academy and then directed the office of liturgy and worship at All Saints Parish in Dallas. In 1997 Eileen and Michael relocated to the Boston area as Eileen began advanced theological studies at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, MA, completing her dissertation, Congar’s Catholicity in Communion: Actualizing Faith in the Mission of God’s Spirit to the Church (2003) under the direction of Fr. Roger Haight, S.J. After joining the theology faculty at Creighton University, in addition to her undergraduate teaching, Dr. Burke-Sullivan led the Master of Arts in Ministry Program, served as director of the Christian Spirituality Programs, and was named the inaugural Barbara Reardon

Heaney Chair in Pastoral Liturgical Theology in 2011. She became the Vice Provost (later Vice President) of Mission and Ministry in 2014.

Recognized as a leading authority in Ignatian Spirituality and especially in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius, Dr. Burke-Sullivan authored numerous articles and book chapters, co-authored The Ignatian Tradition (2009) with her brother, Kevin Burke, SJ, and The Church in the Modern World: Gaudium et Spes Then and Now (2014), with her Creighton colleagues Michael Lawler, PhD, and Todd Salzman, PhD. At the time of her death, she had just completed her work as General Editor of Volume II of The Jesuit Spirituality Reader (forthcoming). In addition to her scholarly work, teaching, and mentoring, we knew Eileen as a talented and caring spiritual and retreat director, an energetic champion of Christian Ecumenical dialogue and Jewish Christian dialogue, a brilliant liturgical theologian and liturgist, and a wise leader of multiple Ignatian pilgrimages. Likewise, as a singer with a beautiful soprano voice, she brought joy to many people and connected them with God through her music.