The Board of Trustees of the Gregorian University Foundation is delighted and honored to name as the recipients of 2011 William R. Grant Award for Exceptionally Generous Leadership Mrs. Mary Higgins Clark and her husband and partner in faith Mr. John J. Conheeney. The recipients of this award must have distinguished themselves through lives that exemplify Ignatian spirituality, that is, shown themselves to be men and women for others. Through their lives of faith and charity, Mary and John have shown concern and rendered loving assistance for their fellow human beings.

Their personal styles of kindness, humility and openness make them icons, much like William R. Grant, of generosity in Catholic charity, particularly in the New York area. The Gregorian University Foundation is among those institutions fortunate to count them as friends and supporters. Mary and John are models of what Jesuit education seeks as the ideal.

Mary, a Dame of the Papal Order of St. Gregory the Great, began her distinguished writing career in 1956. Her first suspense novel, Where Are the Children?, was published in 1975 and was an instant bestseller. In 1979, she earned a philosophy degree from Fordham University. She is a wonderful storyteller and has written over 40 fascinating suspense novels that have sold over 100 million copies in the United States alone. In France, she is the bestselling fiction author; in the associations of mystery writers, she has been the Chairman of the International Crime Congress and President of Mystery Writers of America where she was the inspiration for their Mary Higgins Clark Award. Mary’s memoir, Kitchen Privileges, was published in 2003.

John Conheeney, the elder statesman of the futures industry, was in the commodity business for over 40 years and a member of all major U.S. future exchanges. He spent most of his career at Merrill Lynch, where he began as a trainee and retired as CEO of Merrill Lynch Futures, Inc. He served on the Chicago Board of Trade for 11 years, in which position he attracted much attention with his famous “black box” speech in 1981 that predicted the future success of electronic exchanges over open outcry. He was instrumental in the formation of the National Futures Association in 1982 and served as its chairman from 1990 to 1994. He was chairman of the Futures Industry Association from 1982 to 1984 and served on numerous FIA committees. From 1996 to 2005, he served on the board of the New York Mercantile Exchange as a public director.

Mary and John have surely been involved in assisting their fellow human beings, Their many charities include the Archdiocese of New York, the Archdiocese of New Jersey, Fordham University, Inner-City Scholarship Fund of New York, the Franciscan Friars of Graymoor, St. Francis of Assisi Bread Line, the Dominican Sisters, St. Patrick’s Home and other Carmelite Homes and Fraxa Research.

Because of Mary Higgins Clark’s and John J. Conheeney’s impressive faith life and their love of family and the Church and their many and varied charitable activities to benefit the less fortunate, the Board of Trustees of the Gregorian University Foundation has unanimously approve awarding them with the 2011 William R. Grant Award for Exceptionally Generous Leadership.