Jesuit high schools aim for heaven, with fewer Jesuits

National Catholic Reporter, March 30, 2001 by Arthur Jones

It's not what parents paying $5,100 a year in tuition for Loyola High School freshmen expect to hear. At their introductory session with the Los Angeles Jesuit prep's lay principal, Bill Tomason, he tells them, "We think our mission is to get your sons into Heaven, not Harvard."

In San Jose, at a Jan. 11-13 faculty and staff gathering for the California Jesuit Province's five prep schools -- four in California, one in Arizona -- Tomason told NCR that pushing heaven "really is a challenge, because I don't think there's too many 13- to 14-year-olds who walk in our door with that vision in their own mind. We have to instill and cultivate it, nurture it. But when they leave we hope they own it," he said, "and that's a much tougher job than teaching them foreign language and science."

Naturally, Tomason, principal for nearly four years, is not abashed when Loyola's graduates do head for Harvard and other top Ivy League and Catholic universities. That isn't his point. Ensuring their faith endures is.

The gathering's keynote speaker, Jesuit Fr. Stephen Privett, president of the Jesuit-run University of San Francisco, got straight to the point: "Just do the numbers -- whatever else Jesuit schools will be in this third millennium, they will not be schools run by members of the Jesuit order. We're all concerned about strengthening the Ignatian character of our schools." And the heart of it, he said, is faculty, staff, students and parents working in partnership "to produce what Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises intends to produce: persons of profound integrity with the courage of their well-tested and tempered convictions."

Already, each of the five prep schools -- Bellarmine (San Jose), Brophy (Phoenix), Jesuit High (Sacramento), Loyola (Los Angeles) and St. Ignatius (San Francisco, the only coed prep) -- has a lay principal, though all still have a Jesuit president and up to a half dozen Jesuit faculty and staff.

The California province, in gathering its schools together as a unit, is picking up on a process successfully inaugurated a couple of years ago by the Oregon province, said Gall Harrison, California province's coordinator for secondary education.

The tradition continues

Under these circumstances, how do Catholic schools founded by religious orders "pass it on"?

Jesuit Fr. Ed Fassett, a fulltime administrator and admitted "nerd" at St. Ignatius, explained: "Jesuits started out with our first school in Messina, Sicily, in 1548. As Jesuits we're formed in the Spiritual Exercises, the heart of the Ignatian way of teaching. As our numbers have diminished and more and more lay people join us in this work," he said, "there's been one thing missing all along. We've kind of relied on osmosis for the Ignatian spirituality we share to enliven our staffs. It's important we give them a kind of Jesuit mini-formation."

Faculty and staff, Catholic and non-Catholic, engage in "evenings" using Ignatian heritage videotapes produced by St. Louis University. Plus, "this year, for the first time," said Fassett, "we had a one-day seminar for new faculty: Ignatius in the morning and pedagogy, why we teach the way we teach, in the afternoon."

Loyola's Tomason tells new faculty members, "We're not hiring you just to teach. You have to get deeper than that: How is this experience going to change [the student] as a person, to be more open to growth, to develop as a leader?"

NCR asked Bellarmine principal Mark Pierotti why non-Catholic administration people and kitchen staff would even care about the school's Ignatian heritage. "They know it's part of the mission of the school. Many have been here a long time. They remember when the place was filled with Jesuits, and now we're some Jesuits and a majority of lay people. They understand the culture from earlier days and see it changing, and see the lay people being asked to take a more hands-on approach."

The culture of a Jesuit school centers, Pierotti said, on the "value of reflection -- taking time to think back on what is happening in your own life and in the life of the community, as St. Ignatius would do, and then to set a plan for the future -- here are the things I've done well, here are some things I need to work on."

"Another value of reflection," he said, "is that often in life you're faced with a lot of good options. Rarely does evil confront you. You have to choose among many goods to find God, to find what you're supposed to be doing."

It goes beyond prayer, said Pierotti. It has to do with "being inspired through prayer to work for others -- as in social justice ministry. All our schools do that. We're witnessing to the community in very practical ways that keep the charism alive and the school alive, keep us centered.

"These kids today, compared to the mid-'80s, are more socially responsible. I've found that not only here in the West but in the East, too, at Georgetown Prep and Loyola in Baltimore," where Pierotti previously taught.

They're more politically aware, too, he said. "We've students who've gone to Fort Benning [Ga.] to protest, students who spend weekends in homeless shelters -- you would not have seen that 15 years ago, and not 25 years ago when I was in high school. There was talk of community service then but it wasn't given this practical reality."