I love the Jesuits. I pray for their conversion
daily.
Maybe my prayers are going to be answered. While lounging
in my hotel room last week, on a business trip to Boston, I was
jolted, upright, by the TV news announcer who related that Boston
College, a flagship of the Society of Jesus, i.e., the Jesuits,
had placed crucifixes in 151 classrooms at the school over the
Christmas break. This was done,
reportedly, at the instructions of President Rev. William P.
Leahy, as a means of reconnecting with the college’s “Catholic
Mission.”
As one who attended a Jesuit high school, college and law
school, during the long, slow downward trajectory of the 1960s
and 1970s, who cringed at the once proud order’s flirtation with
heterodoxy and secularism, this was an astounding turn of
events.
Imagine: a Jesuit school embracing the cross. This was so
un-hip, so un-modern, so un-American, so…Catholic. And I mean
Roman Catholic.
I am the third generation of my family to attend
Jesuit schools in this country. Between my father, my grandfather
and me — forget about my uncles and cousins — we have close to
40 years logged in Jesuit institutions if you throw in medical
school internships and residencies. We all owe a great debt to
the many fine men of faith, who also valued knowledge, learning,
and scholarship; who saw no inherent conflict between reason and
revelation; and who were lived a distinctly Catholic form of
pietas as first embodied by Virgil’s
Aeneas about whom we all read in Jesuit prep
schools.
I have known or known of Jesuits who worked on Indian
reservations, in psychiatric wards, in the stacks of the Vatican
library (my alma mater, Saint Louis
University, had the whole collection duplicated on microfilm!),
in classrooms, and laboratories. There was one who could spend a
whole semester demolishing every rational proof for the existence
of God, only to spend the closing weeks of class arguing for the
reasonableness of Scripture (interpreted through Tradition, of
course).
I knew another Jesuit, whom I never had in class, who
coached high school debate and oratory, sort of. He really just
asked penetrating questions, listened, patiently, to our
obnoxious pontificating, and kept forcing us to learn through
trial and error and honest self-criticism. He helped me put
together a reading list for the summer between my first and
second years of college that was better than any one syllabus I
ever had thereafter.
But, as the dreary decades wore on, many
prominent members of the order seemed to specialize in dissent
and even outright opposition to the Church and its magisterium
which they had vowed to
serve. Moreover,
following their issuance of the 1967 Land O’ Lakes (WI)
Statement, the Jesuits turned over their colleges and
universities to lay boards in order to curry favor with Caesar
and make peace with the Zeitgeist. With the
decline in vocations, the institutional and Christian culture of
their schools was diluted even further.
There are many exceptions, individual and institutional. My
old high school actually sends a good number of students to the
local archdiocesan seminary.
Catholicism is a sacramental religion. Placing the crucifix
at the center of its intellectual life, nay, amidst all its
labors of both mind and body, is most appropriate since it
reminds us of the ultimate sacrifice by the One who, to use a
phrase common to the Jesuits, is truly a man for others.
So bravo for the Jesuits of Boston College! The Lord does
work in mysterious ways.
