A Brother to the End

October 28, 2026

Marquette Knight Andy Rajec lived a vocation of friendship and died on the feast of Blessed Michael McGivney

By Scott Warden

October 28, 2026

Andy Rajec (left) and Sam Castillo attend a football game at Notre Dame Stadium in South Bend, Ind., in an undated photograph. (Courtesy of Michael O’Neill)

In the last days of his life, Andy Rajec’s room was so crowded that visitors stood shoulder to shoulder. About 25 men had come from across the country, and his parents sat among them. Rajec, 52 and dying of melanoma, held court the way he always had. His friends begged for the old stories one last time, like the softball he once drilled off a congressman’s head or the night he escorted Miss Wisconsin to a presidential inaugural ball.

“The room was full of laughter,” said Michael O’Neill, a member of Holy Ghost Council 4977 in Palatine, Illinois, and a longtime friend of Rajec. “And then we had the Mass and the last rites, and it was very somber. And one by one we went up, and we told him we loved him.”

In turn, Rajec told each man what he loved about him. “We were all bonded forever from that moment,” O’Neill said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Rajec died in hospice care in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, on Aug. 13, the feast of Blessed Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus.

His public service spanned the legislative and executive branches of the federal government, including work at the Labor Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development during the George W. Bush administration. A proud Slovak American, he later served as director of independent agents for the First Catholic Slovak Union and as president of Cleveland-Bratislava Sister Cities. But most of all, he embodied Father McGivney’s mission of building up brothers in the faith, as evidenced by the men who crowded into that room.

“His final days were an example of a man who faced death armed with his Christian faith,” said Jesuit Father Michael Maher in his homily at Rajec’s funeral Mass. “In this, he left a challenge to all his friends: ‘I can face death as a Christian; so can you.’”

‘HE NEVER MISSED A ROSARY’

Conor Dugan, a member of Msgr. Raymond J. Sweeney Council 17970 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, met Rajec in 2002. In a tribute published in Catholic World Report, he reflected on his friend’s Christian witness.

“The reason you should know Andy isn’t because of his earthly accomplishments,” he wrote, but “because of how he lived and died and his contagious Christian witness.” Rajec, he added, was a reminder “that Christian heroism isn’t just for the lofty, but for all of us.”

Andy Rajec is pictured with Jesuit Father Michael Maher at Marquette’s Donald Schneider Chapel. — Andy Rajec is pictured with Jesuit Father Michael Maher, chaplain of Marquette University Council 6883, at Marquette’s Donald Schneider Chapel in an undated photograph. (Courtesy of Michael O’Neill)

That witness took root in the Knights of Columbus. Rajec joined the Order in 1994 at Marquette University in Milwaukee, where Father Maher, now chaplain of the school’s Council 6883, met him during Rajec’s sophomore year.

Drawing on Aristotle, Father Maher described Rajec as an example of the “friendship of virtue,” in which friends seek what is best for each other and help each other live virtuously.

“He considered it his obligation to remind others that we are called to be friends with Jesus,” the priest said in his funeral homily. “How dedicated he was to our weekly Saturday night rosary at Joan of Arc [Chapel] with his fellow Knights of Columbus. He never missed a rosary.”

Rajec served as grand knight in 1995 and later became a Fourth Degree member of Bishop Henni Assembly 1196 in Milwaukee. It was among fellow Knights, Dugan wrote, that Rajec “more deeply encountered Christ and his Church. They became his lodestar throughout the rest of his life.”

O’Neill, who met Rajec when both stood as groomsmen in a friend’s wedding, sees his friend’s life as a calling of its own. “In our Catholic world, we sort of highlight vocations to the priesthood and religious life and family life,” he said. “Andy was neither a priest nor a father nor a husband. … But he had the vocation of friendship. … He lived that vocation of friendship to the highest degree, more than any person I’ve ever known.”

‘THE TRUE SCHOOL OF FRIENDSHIP’

Rajec practiced his faith without fanfare. Friends grew used to texts from Holy Hill, the Basilica and National Shrine of Mary Help of Christians near Milwaukee, with a photo and a note that he was praying for them. “Andy was not hyper-pious,” Father Maher said. “There was something just sort of solid about him. His faith was there. … He led a good moral life, and that was attractive to people.”

In his last days, Rajec urged friends to return to confession, Dugan recalled in his tribute. “Do not be ashamed of your sins,” Rajec told them. “In other words, do not be afraid to bring your sins to the Lord.”

“Andy was a regular guy,” O’Neill said. “But he sure died well.”

Andy Rajec stands overlooking the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in an undated photograph. (Courtesy of Michael O’Neill)

Sam Castillo, a former deputy grand knight of Marquette University Council 6883, recalled Rajec’s loyalty in a memorial book compiled by O’Neill. “Dozens of friends, many of us still close after more than 25 years, wanted to be there for him because Andy had spent a lifetime being there for us,” he wrote.

In the same book, Keith Alexander, a longtime friend and past grand knight of Council 6883, noted that he met Rajec as a freshman, when Rajec was a senior leading the council. Rajec continued attending council meetings, retreats and First Degree exemplifications after graduation. At one meeting a few years later, he tearfully encouraged the younger men to remain friends so they could still gather for games and drinks decades later. Nearly 30 years later, Alexander wrote, Rajec died on the feast of the Knights’ founder “with so many Marquette Knights visiting him to say goodbye.”

In October, two months after Rajec died, Council 6883 welcomed 40 young men into the Order.

“Andy loved the Knights of Columbus at Marquette because it was in the Knights that a community of men recognized that, through good friendship, friends help each other, and that the true school of friendship is helping each other become friends with Jesus,” Father Maher said in his funeral homily.

“From his sick bed,” he added, “he gave me my marching orders: ‘Help young men in Christian friendship.’”

*****

SCOTT WARDEN is managing editor of Vibrant Catholic, the quarterly magazine of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, and a member of Holy Trinity Council 12741 in New Haven, Ind.

Father Tom Colucci, pastor of Most Precious Blood Parish in Walden, N.Y., displays his FDNY captain’s helmet before Mass at the parish in August.

A Brother to the End

‘HE NEVER MISSED A ROSARY’

‘THE TRUE SCHOOL OF FRIENDSHIP’

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