Archive for the ‘Education’ Category

During the twelve years that Jesuits are in formation, they participate in a series of what are called “experiments.” These experiences were designed by the founder of the Society of Jesus, St. Ignatius of Loyola, to test if these men who are in formation, also known as “novices,” can do what Jesuits do and live as Jesuits live. One of these experiences is called the “long experiment,” and is a time when each Jesuit novice does five months of full-time apostolic work while living in a Jesuit community.

For his long experiment, Jesuit novice Tim Casey taught at Yap Catholic High School in Micronesia. In this shortened piece below, you can read about Casey’s experience. The full piece can be found on this page of the New York,  New England and Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus’ vocations website.

Before I entered the Jesuits, I had been a high school teacher. I worked in two affluent school districts in the metro-Boston area and I felt confident that I had become a good teacher. I knew that there were better teachers than I, but I was confident that I was good. And so when the novice director asked what I wanted to do for long experiment, teaching was not at the top of my list. In the novitiate, I had enjoyed branching out into other ministries. I had worked in the jails and prisons of New York State, I had helped administer an annotated version of the Spiritual Exercises and I had worked as a hospital orderly in the Bronx. I remember feeling lukewarm about returning to my former profession, and made my preferences known to the novice director about what would be best for long experiment.

The Jesuits have an old Latin expression, agere contra, which roughly translated means to go against the grain. By this, St. Ignatius of Loyola meant that if you feel a certain resistance to something in your life, then it might be beneficial for you to engage those feelings, trying to see what you are resisting and why you are resisting it. And so when my novice director asked me to teach during my long experiment, I said that I would be willing, but I was not particularly excited about the prospect. However, I did make one request of him: Could this teaching position be in some way unconventional and different from my former career? He honored my request. I was sent to a remote island in the North Western Pacific Ocean to teach in a newly established high school in Yap, Micronesia.

Yap is part of the Federated States of Micronesia, a place that has been called “The edge of the world,” by a Jesuit who spent most of his life here. It is one of four states that make up the FSM. I didn’t know much about Micronesia, except that the Jesuits ran a prestigious school on the island of Chuuk called Xavier High School. But that was not where I was headed. Where was this place?

The local church on Yap had been trying for a number of years to open a Catholic high school. In the summer of 2011, two New York Province Jesuits were sent to Yap to make good on the promise of Catholic education and opened Yap Catholic High School in August of that year. They had four teachers (including themselves), two borrowed classrooms, and 34 students. I would become the fifth teacher, teaching Science, Social Studies, moderating the robotics club, acting as an assistant basketball coach, and doing a variety of other odds and ends to aid them in getting this school off the ground and running.

It is an intriguing place, a place that seems to be unencumbered by the events that have transpired in the other parts of the globe. The expression, “An island onto itself” seems to be fitting in more ways than one.

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A British Jesuit with broad experience in European and international justice issues as well as grassroots work with the poor will be the University of San Francisco’s Lane Center Summer Scholar-in-Residence this month.

During his time on campus, Jesuit Father Frank Turner will deliver three free public addresses: “Catholic Social Thought and Magisterial Claim to Authority in Ethics” ; “Catholic Social Thought’s Claim to Universal Relevance” on July 18; and “Modes of Christian Ethical Participation in the Global Discourse” on July 25.

As its general director, Fr. Turner led the Jesuit European Office (OCIPE) from 2005 until last year and is currently affiliated with its successor, the Jesuit European Social Center in Brussels, Belgium.

His work has taken him to Iraq, Colombia, Syria, Lebanon and Israel-Palestine, where he has conferred with a range of people, including community leaders, voluntary workers, cardinals, patriarchs and the leaders of several governments.

From 1997 to 2004, Fr. Turner was the assistant general secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales.

“The core of that job was to brief and represent the bishops of the 22 dioceses of England and Wales on matters of international justice: regional issues, such as relations between Israel and the Palestinian territories, or the Church’s advocacy to government about the Western allies’ path to war against Iraq,” Fr. Turner wrote on the website Jesuit Vocations: Britain.

From 1981 to 1986 and 1990 to 1994, the priest did “community-based work in the poorer parts of Liverpool and Manchester” while also teaching part-time at Manchester University, he told National Catholic Reporter.

Past scholars-in-residence have included Mary Jo Bane of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government; Jesuit Father A. E. Orobator, provincial of the Jesuits’ East African Province; Margaret O’Brien Steinfels of Fordham University Center for Religion and Culture; Jesuit Father James Keenan, professor of theological ethics at Boston College; and Jesuit Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University.

[National Catholic Reporter]

Nearly 1,000 mourners said goodbye on Monday to Jesuit Father John E. Brooks, the former president of the College of the Holy Cross who boldly broke gender and race barriers at the once all-white male school and who is credited by many with pulling the liberal arts institution from the brink of financial collapse.

St. Joseph Memorial Chapel was packed with mourners, who attended the 90 minute funeral Mass.

The 88 year-old Fr. Brooks, who served as president from 1970 to 1994, died July 2 at the UMass Memorial Medical Center — University Campus, where he had been undergoing treatment for lymphoma.

Fr. Brooks is credited with a number of achievements at the school but he is particularly well-remembered for traveling up and down the East Coast in the late 1960s in search of black high school students who might be interested in attending Holy Cross and in making the school co-educational.

In his homily, Jesuit Father Earle L. Markey, associate director of admissions for Holy Cross, recounted the many initiatives Fr. Brooks undertook in making Holy Cross a nationally-renowned liberal arts college: recruiting an excellent faculty and bright students, adding new buildings, introducing new academic programs and building the endowment — all while staying true to the College’s Catholic roots.

“In the midst of great change, John always confirmed that the college remains a Catholic college,” he said. “He never wavered from his view that the College of the Holy Cross served the Church as an instrument of intellectual competence, where the Church met the world and world met the church. It was a place where faith and reason could meet and be reconciled each to the other.”

Related Information:

• College of the Holy Cross memorial: “In Memoriam: Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J. ’49, 1923-2012“
• New England Province of the Society of Jesus memorial: “Fr. John E. Brooks, SJ dies at 88“
• WBUR’s “Here and Now,” July 5: “Remembering Father John Brooks”
• The New York Times, July 5: “The Rev. John E. Brooks Dies at 88; Widened Paths to Holy Cross”
• The Boston Globe, July 5: “John E. Brooks, 88; led Holy Cross for 24 years and diversified the college”
• Catholic Free Press, July 5: “Father Brooks saw many changes at Holy Cross”
• “Today,” July 4: NBC’s ‘Today’ Show Features Holy Cross and ‘Fraternity’
• BusinessWeek, July 3: “Reverend John Brooks Changed Lives and the Course of History”
• Telegram & Gazette, July 3: “Rev. Brooks left an indelible mark”
• Telegram & Gazette, July 3: “Slideshow: Rev. John E. Brooks, 1923-2012″
• Telegram & Gazette, July 9: “Rev. Brooks mourned at Holy Cross funeral”
• Telegram & Gazette, July 9: “Slideshow: Rev. John E. Brooks mourned”
• College of the Holy Cross, July 9: “Former Holy Cross President Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J. ’49, Laid to Rest”
• Welcome Remarks by Jesuit Father Philip L. Boroughs
• Homily by Jesuit Father Earle Markey
• Eulogy by Jesuit Father P. Kevin Condron

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) included the Jesuit community’s building at Fairfield University as among its 2012 Ten Best Houses as one of 10 recepients of its 2012 Housing Awards. The AIA’s Housing Awards Program, now in its 12th year, was established to recognize the best in housing design and promote the importance of good housing as a necessity of life, a sanctuary for the human spirit and a valuable national resource.

From The Huffington Post:

Jesuit priest, geologist and author James W. Skehan, a Boston College professor emeritus who served as the longtime director of the University’s geophysical research observatory, has been honored with the unveiling of a bronze bust in his likeness at an event celebrating his 89^thbirthday.

The sculpture was created in clay by local artist Janie Belive, who works at Campion Center in Weston, Mass., where Fr. Skehan is in residence. Vincent J. Murphy, James Lewkowicz and Robert O. Varnerin—longtime friends of Fr. Skehan—commissioned the bronzing of the sculpture. The bust’s base, from the Le Masurier Family Quarry in North Chelmsford, Mass., is made from Chelmsford Granite, one of Fr. Skehan’s favorite rocks. The bust is on display in BC’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, which was founded (as the Department of Geology) by Fr. Skehan in 1958.

Many colleagues and friends joined Fr. Skehan at the Apr. 25 event. John Ebel, Boston College Earth and Environmental Sciences professor and Weston Observatory director, gave an address that served as a retrospective on Fr. Skehan’s career. A reception with birthday cake followed, hosted by BC’s Jesuit Community and the Earth and Environmental Sciences Department.

Fr. Skehan is a renowned geologist whose research has focused on the history of the Avalon terrane, the geological micro-continent stretching from Long Island to Belgium upon which Boston lies. From 1973 to 1993, he directed BC’s Weston Observatory, which monitors seismic activity around the globe.

He is the author of Roadside Geology of Massachusetts, a 400-page illustrated guide to the geological history and makeup of the Commonwealth. He followed that with Roadside Geology of Connecticut and Rhode Island.

Fr. Skehan has been honored in special ways during his storied career. In 2003, Mount Holyoke College paleontologist Mark A. S. McMenamin named a new genus of trilobite in Fr. Skehan’s honor. Skehanos is a marine arthropod that lived more than 500 million years ago and whose fossil was discovered in Massachusetts.

Author Sarah Andrews created a fictional Fr. Jim Skehan character for In Cold Pursuit, her mystery novel set in Antarctica. Fr. Skehan is also the recipient of the American Institute of Professional Geologists’ Ben H. Parker Memorial Medal, honoring individuals with long records of distinguished and outstanding service in the field of geology, among other honors.

A man of science, Fr. Skehan is also a man of deep faith. Growing up, his family said the rosary regularly after dinner. He entered the Jesuit order in 1940 and was ordained in 1954.

A noted retreat and spiritual leader, he is the author of Place Me With Your Son: Ignatian Spirituality in Everyday Life and of Praying with Teilhard de Chardin, on the life and thought of French Jesuit paleontologist and philosopher de Chardin. The convergence of geologist and priest was profoundly on display when Fr. Skehan said the first Mass on the volcanic island Surtsey soon after it rose off the coast of Iceland.

Fr. Skehan sees no conflict in his devotion to both science and faith, telling the Boston College Chronicle:

“If you look at a beautiful sunset, or how mountains are formed, or observe how continents move, you can view it either as science or as God speaking to you, or both. I do both. What I do as a scientist is no different from what I do listening to the cosmic word of God. It’s nice to have both [science and faith] – in fact, it makes everything so exhilarating. What could be more marvelous?”

[Boston College]