This competition hastens the attenuation of any distinctive institutional mission and identity. The Core Curriculum provides a common intellectual foundation for undergraduates, and seeks to expand their horizons and promote the integration of knowledge, belief, and action. A gift from the Jesuit Community, matched by the University, established the Jesuit Institute to promote research on the relatedness of Catholic traditions of Boston College to the universe of scholarship and learning. To these characteristics that Ignatius prescribed for the Roman College should be added a fourth one, evidenced in the history of Jesuit schools and one that is especially instructive for our own time. Jesuits are a small minority of the faculty and staff here, some 45 in full-time positions and another 15 or so who work part-time, many beyond normal retirement age. Oppression, violence, the absence of the minimal conditions for well-being, are the ordinary lot of vast numbers of people across the globe. Those who make them are helped to be aware of how God is acting in their lives and to choose what to do in response. Whether they share our religious faith or not, our colleagues nourish our reflection as Jesuits, as we hope that our dialogue is sustaining for them. Arturo Sosa, S.J., of … The first Jesuits founded colleges to educate the young men flocking to join the new Society. Jesuits in the Community serve on the University faculty or staff, are involved with St. Ignatius Church, engage in various ministries in the Boston area, or are retired. Their education should help them deepen their sense of wonder and curiosity, cultivate their ideals, widen their understanding of human life and their sympathy for others, and form principles that will enable them to choose how best to live for their own good and the good of other men and women. The plight of hundreds of millions of very poor people in less-developed countries is directly affected by fluctuations in global financial and commercial markets that can be rightly called hegemonic. In time this was to become their characteristic work. Also relevant in this context are graduate service programs, especially the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and the Jesuit International Volunteers. The outcome of this struggle depends in great part on the kinds of knowledge a society has at its disposal and the quality of education it gives to its young. Drawing on the heritage of St. Ignatius Loyola, Boston College invites students into a conversation that asks enduring questions and promotes engagement with the complex problems in today’s world. A commitment to the defense of non-European peoples against misunderstanding, exploitation, and even enslavement was one of the factors that led to the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773. It does this in various ways: by bringing the disciplines it studies into dialogue with religious faith in its different forms, by creating a place for this dialogue in the curriculum, by stimulating the kind of research that brings this dialogue to bear on current public issues, by giving serious attention to theological reflection, by educating men and women for ministry and leadership in religious organizations, by fostering a lively liturgical life on the campus, by providing pastoral support for the spiritual development of its members, and by giving them opportunities to express their convictions in service to others. Many of these changes have taken place in the last twenty-five years, symbolized by the inauguration of a predominantly lay board of trustees in 1971. Only nine of the 44 trustees are Jesuits. Some of these institutions, like Boston College, became universities with national reputations and distinguished programs and faculties. It is a pedagogy of the heart, a pedagogy of spiritual formation and of action. We do not speak for the whole community that is Boston College. St. Ignatius thought the Examen was the most important prayer one could offer. Boston College celebrates its Catholic faith in many ways, including daily Mass and the annual Mass of the Holy Spirit. If he were speaking to our situation, he would begin by urging us to see the light surrounding the sometimes too-evident darkness. One way of formulating its central question for ourselves at Boston College might be: Is there a model of university work, appropriate to our American context, that takes seriously the spiritual and intellectual development of students and also puts the structures of knowledge and investigation proper to the university at the service of a vision of a just human community? Individual Jesuits were involved in the court politics of 18th-century Europe and thus drew the criticism of powerful figures in both church and state. Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises are about prayerful reflection and decision. Georgetown was the first Jesuit institution in 1789, Boston College the 11th when John McElroy and his companions received a charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1863 to found a college for the growing Catholic population of Boston. A number of programs, initiatives, and structures have come into existence, which can be grouped together as attempts to embody ideas of education and of the social use of knowledge based on a transcendant vision of human life and work. At their best, however, these traditions have sought relationships with peoples with different histories and identities based on mutual understanding. The Jesuits first became established in Boston in 1847, when Archbishop John FitzPatrick invited Father John McElroy and several associates to take charge of St. Mary's Church in the North End of Boston. [Nursing, Social Work?]. But it opens one to a reverence for all God's gifts and Ignatius taught his friends and followers to have a special reverence for intelligence and for learning. ... Summary Programs + Results Financials Operations. Claim your profile for free. A university realizes this principle if it is a community of inquiry whose disciplines are constantly in dialogue with one another to formulate the central questions that move men and women to wonder about the world and their lives and to find ever more adequate answers for these questions. The oldest model of a religiously oriented education that we can see operating at Boston College is the most generic. Yet another model is represented by the numerous service programs (undertaken by the chaplaincy, Student Affairs offices, and others) in the city and in other parts of the country and abroad, which students and faculty and staff participate in. The more we know about the suffering of men and women and the causes of these ills, and the more we can imagine ways of remedying them, the closer we come to the imperative to use our knowledge in action. By the death of Ignatius in 1556 there were some 35 Jesuit colleges (we would call them secondary schools today) across Europe, and 200 years later more than 800 in both the Old and New Worlds. What is the mission of Boston College in this needy and discordant world? With the explosion of undergraduate enrollment to well over 5,500 in the 1950s, there was a growth in the Jesuit faculty, which numbered in the 90s during the 1960s and early 1970s, with of course a much larger proportion of the faculty being lay professors. A Basque courtier and soldier, Inigo de Loyola was gravely wounded during the battle of Pamplona in 1521. The richness and flexibility of these structures certainly suggest that at Boston College we are still operating from a position of strength. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas drew on intellectual resources he had learned from Jews and Muslims in developing the most influential strand of Catholic theology yet formulated. USA East Province of the Society of Jesus, Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, Jesuit Interreligious Dialogue and Relations, Office of Social and International Ministries, Sacred Space - Daily Online Prayer from Irish Jesuits, Pray As You Go - Podcast Prayers from the British Province, Office of University Mission and Ministry, Center for Human Rights and International Justice, Church in the 21st Century: from Crisis to Renewal, The Center for Ignatian Spirituality at Boston College, Copyright © 2021 Trustees of Boston College, Debating the Jesuit Mission in Academic Life. The institutional community we live in will always fall short of our ideals in noticeable ways, but it makes a great deal of difference if we consciously propose these ideals as standards by which to measure our behavior as a community. In 1929 the Law School was started, with Father Creedon as regent and Dennis Dooley dean. As a Jesuit, Catholic school, we strive to reflect the diversity of our church and community. At Paris he had learned that subjects should be studied in an orderly way, languages and humanities preceding the sciences and philosophy. Though the nature of knowledge and the biblical picture of God's kingdom would both seem to lead to this conclusion, universities have traditionally proposed to students a largely disengaged appreciation of the humanities and the sciences. Theology, focusing on the questions at the center of the mystery of God's self-disclosing activity, completes and integrates the knowledges developed by all the other disciplines of the university. New forms of interaction across the boundaries of nation and tradition open formerly unimaginable possibilities for true community among the men and women of the earth. No doubt because of this leadership, it was Father Brosnahan who spoke for Jesuits nationally the year after he left Boston College, in the effective reply to an attack on Jesuit colleges that Harvard's president Charles W. Eliot published in the Atlantic Monthly. We try to put into words our vision of Boston College and the questions we have about how to work here effectively as Jesuits. It requires humility in the face of our own ignorance and reverence before a mystery that is always disclosing itself in ways that surprise us. The Jesuits became known as the schoolmasters of Europe, and over time emerged as the largest religious order in the Catholic Church and one of the greatest influences in Western civilization. Father McElroy gathered funds from the poor immigrant Irish people of Boston to purchase property for a college and collegiate church, but for years his plans were delayed by anti-Catholic opposition. A Jesuit priest who founded a Catholic service group resembling the Peace Corps before facing complaints of inappropriate conduct at Boston College and Loyola University is now accused of raping a subordinate on a volunteer mission. For the humanists these were the subjects that opened the mind, sharpened wits, deepened human sympathy, developed clarity of thought and force in expressing it. How can Jesuits best contribute to this mission? The outcome of this story is by no means predictable. Do we have the will and the intellectual means to move in a contrary direction? The Jesuit Community at Boston College High School Inc Dorchester, MA. Our experience unfolds and develops, however, so we are always refining the plot of the story and emphasizing new themes. The third distinctive feature was the integration and order that Ignatius envisioned among the subjects to be studied, leading from lesser to more important ones, culminating in the study of theology. Global economic interdependence calls the very idea of a "domestic economy" into question and invites us to recognize that the good of each is linked to the common good of all. An idea of the university that proposes that students should study the best of human culture, relate this to their experience of God, use their knowledge for the common good, and imagine themselves as citizens of a global culture concerned about the well being of all its people, is certainly relevant to the needs of our own time. We return, therefore, to the two questions with which we began: As Jesuits how shall we envision Boston College's identity as a university, and how does this vision suggest ways of working here as Jesuits to realize it? Jack Butler, a Jesuit priest at Boston College, was in his office Wednesday when he overheard students gathered around a television set down the hall, buzzing about a new pope. Morrissey served as a Boston College Trustee from 1980-2014, chairing its Committee on Investment and Endowment. They gave students an adroitness of mind in meeting new questions, a foundation from which to explore the more important questions they would come to later in their studies. We need a process of collaborative dialogue with the men and women in the university who share our concerns about contemporary culture, about the role of education in it, and about Boston College's mission as a university founded on a religious vision of life. The Church is often described as a community of disciples, gathered through faith in Jesus. With 50 members in residence, the Jesuit Community at Boston College is one of the largest apostolic communities in the Society of Jesus. Do we have the freedom and the confidence in our beliefs to open up these questions to one another's experiences and convictions and to seek a common understanding of the issues and what is at stake in them? Their ideals took shape in continuity with the vision of Ignatius 300 years earlier but under the influence of a different time and different needs. Realism requires us to acknowledge that both of these traditions have sometimes shared in historical actions shaped by the impulse to cultural, economic, and religious domination. Jesuits across the world today are conducting a debate about the mission of higher education and Jesuits' roles in it, especially as the declining number of Jesuits calls into question the priorities we are used to taking for granted in our work. This requires a delicate pedagogy that aims at both informing and forming, which cannot be the preoccupation only of the classroom. We need to find words that suit our experience in 1994. Research, critical reflection, pedagogy, and practical experience should be connected in the kind of informed action that brings about a society where all men and women can share fully in the blessings that should be theirs as human beings. That identity we invite our colleagues to join in discussing and in bringing to reality. When in 1547 Ignatius was asked to open a school in Sicily for young men who were not Jesuits, he seems to have seen the opportunity as a powerful means of forming the mind and the soul. The influence of Jesuit schools and their successes were resented. Frs. At the same time a Catholic university must manifest its religious identity as a community; otherwise its identity is merely notional and not functional. Often the first dictionaries and grammars of the languages of these peoples written for Europeans were written by Jesuits. The Second Vatican Council has made it clear that it is the Church's task to bring the Gospel into relation with all of human culture. The Boston College School of Theology and Ministry (STM) is the Roman Catholic graduate theological school at Boston College in the Chestnut Hill and Brighton neighborhoods of Boston, Massachusetts.It is an ecclesiastical faculty of theology that trains men and women, both lay and religious, for scholarship and service, especially within the Roman Catholic Church. We might even say that it is a consequence of the very idea of education. Today, it is a vibrant, coeducational, national, and increasingly international university enrolling approximately 14,000 students on a campus of 240 acres located about six miles from downtown Boston. The Church in the 21st Century Center promotes engagement of issues in the contemporary Catholic Church through lectures, symposia, and publications, as well as through informal gatherings for students about faith and life, such as the Agape Latte program. As Jesuits we want to realize in a way suited to our own time the hopes that led our predecessors to establish this institution 130 years ago. Many cite common themes—the charism, community, and traditions of BC —that helped support their vocation to the priesthood. Examples would be the Emerging Leader Program, in residence halls the Faculty Fellow Program, and distinctive living arrangements such as the Salt and Light Company and substance-free floors. The word humanitas translated the Greek word paideia, which had come to mean both the process and the studies that developed moral goodness, devotion to truth, and a disposition to act for the civic good: languages, poetry, history, rhetoric and logic, along with mathematics, the sciences, and philosophy of nature. But the long creative tradition of Catholic theological thought was thus cut off from the most formative intellectual developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries; neither influenced the other significantly. Our age has its own agenda and its own challenges. All the academic disciplines, therefore, contribute to the intelligibility of the world in their own proper ways and play a key role in making theology intelligible. But would we really say that we have squarely faced all the implications of the drastic separation of religion and the life of the mind in contemporary intellectual culture? Today, the Society of Jesus totals 17,000 members who minister in 112 countries through education, advocacy for the poor, and missionary work. The Graduate School of School of Social Work opened in 1936 with Father Walter McGuin as dean, and two years later the School of Management opened with Father James Kelley as dean. This principle has been the core of the effort of Christian thinkers, from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Karl Rahner, to work out a synthesis of faith and intellect. Universities mirror the confusion of this rich, fast-moving, often unreflective, certainly unequal society. Boston College and the world around us are different places today. For the better part of a hundred years Boston College was a small, street-car institution, directed and largely staffed by Jesuits, with a curriculum saturated in scholastic philosophy and theology. This mystery at the heart of our existence invites discovery and, as we discover it, compels us to ground our lives in its truth and to speak about it to a world hungry for meaning. Mission. He was one of six sons and one daughter of his father, Edward, a family … Messer, Paul A. If the university is to be Catholic, it must be catholic or universal in ways that reflect this global reality in its research, its teaching, and the concerns that animate the people who give it life. A second feature is the concept of the humanities that formed the central disciplines studied in a Jesuit college. Jesuit education, in Rome and elsewhere, was a network that transcended boundaries of language, culture and nationhood, one that was intercultural and global in perspective. He set high standards for the College and refused to have philosophy, the capstone of the curriculum, taught until 1876. Everyone in the university community contributes to it. This conversation is not something new. Graduates of these schools played a central role in the evolution of 17th- and 18th-century thought in Europe and in the New World. For four years while St. Mary's Hall, their new residence, was being built, the Jesuits commuted from their quarters in the South End. Ignatius Loyola, who founded the Jesuits in 1534, lived in a world no less troubled by change and competing truths than our own. Students should find in classes and in the involvements of campus life challenge and support for their growth in judgment and in action that shapes the ethos of their lives. In 1773 the Society was suppressed by order of the pope. The most explicit examples would be entire academic programs that are based on a religious or social view of human good, such as the Institute of Religious Education and Pastoral Ministry or the Graduate School of Social Work. These are the signs of a genuinely Catholic university. After World War II, the School of Nursing was opened in 1946, with Father Anthony Carroll as regent and Mary Maher dean. In the late 20th century these are the questions that are at the center of intellectual debate. A recent and strikingly different notion of educational mission has led some Jesuits to see universities as instruments of cultural, social, and political analysis in the service of a biblical vision of justice and as means of educating students to an awareness of these issues. Thus, this pamphlet. Christianity began as a small Jewish Palestinian sect but quickly incorporated wisdom drawn from Greek and Roman thought into its self-understanding and theology. Here, you’ll ask tough questions in class, engage in meaningful service projects within your local community and in the far-flung corners of the world, and begin to integrate the quest for justice into all you do. degree was conferred upon nine young men. Among living legends: Father Francis Sweeney, for over four decades teacher of English letters, advisor to the student literary magazine, whose Humanities lectures have introduced students to literary giants from England, Ireland, America. 150 William T Morrissey Blvd Dorchester MA 02125-3313. The character of Boston College matters because of the central role universities can play in the struggle of men and women across the world to achieve lives that befit their full dignity as human beings. The distinctive quality of relationships among men and women in a Jesuit university should be care for each person's good; respect for the freedom each one needs to grow intellectually and spiritually; and concern for the good of the communities, local and global, of which we are a part. This community experiences his power through the symbolic activities that shape its life: baptism, marriage, holy orders, and so forth, but especially around the Eucharistic table where Jesus' own life and death are recalled and represented. The questions are inseparable and yet they cannot be answered by Jesuits alone. It seems to underline a spiritual emptiness that hungers for a nourishment that we do not even know how to name. Historically, however, it has proven difficult to hold its two elements in productive tension. In the U.S. most of the colleges founded by Jesuits for this purpose have grown into universities with graduate and professional programs. Christianity is a religion of the book. and Rev. To this end, we suggest the following six propositions about Boston College as a Catholic and Jesuit university — not to foreclose discussion but to stimulate a conversation about the themes that can define the mission of Boston College and engage our idealism as Jesuits. The future shape of Jesuit presence in this university will almost certainly be different from what it is today. In the 1990s, the argument would go, these institutions offer upper-middle-class students a vaguely liberal education colored by a rhetoric of spiritual values whose most visible embodiment is a chaplaincy, a theology department, and volunteer service programs. Retreats provide important opportunities to pause, step back, reflect, and be refreshed.
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