Inaugural Lecture Series - Spring 2005
“The University and the Human in a Pluralistic Age”
Celebrating the Inauguration of the Rev. Kevin Wm. Wildes, S.J., as 16th president of Loyola University New Orleans, October 15, 2004
“Quinine, Ballet, Cicero, Tyrannicide and Prayer:
The Jesuit University as University and Jesuit”
The Rev. John Padberg, S.J.
Director and Editor-in-chief of the Institute of Jesuit Sources
Saint Louis University
February 16, 2005
The Rev. John
Padberg, S.J., is director
and editor-in-chief of the
Institute of Jesuit Sources.
Padberg has degrees in
classics, philosophy,
modern European history,
and theology from Saint
Louis University, and he
received a doctorate in
intellectual history and
history of ideas from
Harvard University. He
was founding chair of the
National Seminar on
Jesuit Higher Education
and is a former editor of
Conversations on Jesuit
Higher Education. He has
served as a trustee on the
boards of numerous Jesuit
universities, including
Loyola University New Orleans.
Padberg’s lecture will
explore The Jesuit University,
as it engages in the
imparting of knowledge, the
arts, social concerns and
professional competence,
scholarly investigation and
research, and an understanding
of humankind and
the world it inhabits. He
will examine why and how
Jesuit institutions of
learning, as Jesuit, have
done these things through
the centuries, and why and
how they try to do it today.
Let me begin with a confession and a hope. First, I did indeed choose the title of this presentation and the order in which the words appear, “Cicero, Ballet, Tyrannicide, Quinine, and Prayer," to pique your curiosity and because that order had a certain lilt to it. But I also did so, more importantly, because I hope that each of those words and the realities behind them respond to the overall theme of this whole inaugural lecture series here at Loyola University, “The University and the Human in a Pluralistic Age.” They also respond to the subtitle of my presentation this evening, “The Jesuit University as University and as Jesuit."
Now let me say something very briefly, to begin with, about those five words and how they are involved in Jesuit education. Cicero, the name of the great Roman orator, statesman, and philosopher, comes first as evocative of the context for this presentation, Jesuit education, and symbolic of the central, basic academic concern of the early Jesuit schools, and of what Jesuit schools want today, too. It was, quite simply, that the students achieve “eloquentia." But in its original meaning, “eloquentia” was not simply facility at speaking but rather the ability to think through a position, to order it in accord with what result you want to produce, and to present it so effectively that it moves your hearers to action. Cicero was a statesman, a politician of the highest order, a philosopher, a man who thought out the nature of and the reasons for the human condition and for the societies in which men and women live, an orator who moved people to action.
Ballet is second in the list as symbolic of the various arts that flourished in the schools of the Society of Jesus before the temporary suppression of the Jesuits in 1773. Those artistic endeavors were sadly lacking in contemporary Jesuit schools until the recent past. After all, the Jesuit school of Louis le Grand in Paris for more than a century mounted full-scale student ballet productions every year, examples of physical grace and beauty and of music. And they were also immensely popular. The public flocked to them.
Tyrannicide is next, the question of whether it is in certain circumstances legitimate to assassinate a tyrannical, seriously unjust ruler. The Jesuits did not regularly teach and certainly did not at all practice it. However, the question is one example of what always got Jesuits into trouble: They asked questions. And, of course, a university without serious questions, without serious freedom of inquiry, is not a serious university. But in raising the question, the term is provocatively symbolic of the Jesuit attempt to produce a political philosophy that took account of the real, the social, and political circumstances within which they and their schools lived, as we should also do today.
Next comes quinine as symbolic of both the missionary outreach of the society and its contribution to the sciences. Quinine came from Peru, a missionary country, from the bark of the cinchona tree, hence the name “Jesuit bark,” or “Jesuit powder.” It was promoted by the Jesuits after observation and experience of its curative effects on malaria. Observation and experimentation are central to the scientific endeavor.
And then, finally, prayer comes last because, especially in the form of the Spiritual Exercises, it was the underpinning, the foundation of the spirituality, that fashioned who the Jesuits were and how they did what they did, and most importantly, why they did so. And what they did was, in the original words of Ignatian Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, “ayudar las almas”—to help people. I hope that is still true today.
To turn now directly to Jesuit education itself, it began with experience. It began not from a priori principles but from experience and from reflection on experience, the mutual experience of what was a tentative venture, a gamble, an experiment.
As far as we know, the first corporate experience of the Jesuits in education took place in 1537, actually three years before the society was officially recognized by the Church. At that time, the companions of Ignatius Loyola were with him in Rome and the then-Pope, Paul III, asked that two of them carry on what we might at the present day call a continuing education course for the papacy. He asked them to engage in scholastic theological disputations in his presence at his first meal early in the day. What you might think of that I do not know, but as I said in a video presentation of some years ago, “Shared Vision,” to hear formal theological disputations at breakfast seems to me something akin to pouring gin on corn flakes.
As I proceed, I would, first, like to say something briefly on the Society of Jesus in general and, then, much more importantly for our purposes here, on Jesuit higher education.
The Society of Jesus itself formally came into existence in 1540 as a community of 10 companions united in understanding and affection. Under the influence and guidance of Ignatius Loyola they resolved to serve their fellow men, to serve the Church, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, and in the very act of so doing, to further their own growth in the Christian life. Both of these they were to do with God’s grace in following the teachings of Jesus Christ as they were lived out in the Church.
They were all university men, with excellent educations and advanced degrees from what was then the greatest university in the world, the University of Paris. In the 1530s they first gathered into an informal community, originally pledged to go to Jerusalem. When they could not go to the Holy Land as originally planned, they put themselves at the service of the Pope for the good of the whole Church. Arriving in Rome in 1537, they engaged in a series of works that ran from preaching, informal teaching, catechism, to simple works of charity such as taking care of the poor and the sick in the hospitals. Paul III was impressed enough with their work and their zeal that a year later he appointed two of them to teach theology in the Roman University. Their tenure there was quite brief, however, and formal academic teaching as a type of Jesuit work disappeared for a while.
Between the official approval of the society in 1540 and 1547 there was no such thing as a Jesuit school for laypeople. Immediately after the foundation of the society, a whole series of requests flooded in on its members through the 1540s for Jesuits to work in places as different as Ireland and Abyssinia, Latin America, the Indies, and the Council of Trent. The first companions of Ignatius had been university people, but many of the new recruits were not. So, the society had to arrange for their education. Ignatius took a very bold and, at the time, quite novel step. He insisted that these new Jesuits study the humanities, both for their own intrinsic worth and for their usefulness, before they began theological studies. So he sent these young men to the best of the universities— Paris, Louvain, Alcala, Coimbra—where they attracted other young men with interest in and eventual entrance into the society. The next step was the founding of colleges for these Jesuit students in towns and cities where universities were not already existent. The third step followed fairly soon after that when families in those particular locales requested admittance for their sons into these previously exclusively Jesuit schools. So, in 1546, for the first time, lay students entered classes along with Jesuit students.
One year later, in 1547, the Spanish viceroy of Sicily requested that a college be set up in Messina. Why? For the reform of the island of Sicily, he said. That college, founded in 1548, was the first school set up by the Society of Jesus explicitly for lay students. Ignatius sent there 10 of the very best men he had in what was still a very small society and told them as they left Rome for Messina, “If we live for 10 years we shall see great things in the Society of Jesus. At the end of 10 years, by 1556, the year Ignatius died, there were 40 colleges spread throughout Europe and already in parts of the New World, in India, and a few places in Africa. So great was the need for an organized system of education and so great its desirability that, from then on, the Jesuits were everywhere throughout Europe and in mission lands besieged with requests to start institutions.
They also received requests that they become members of the faculty or administration of already existing institutions, which were not specifically Jesuit. At this point, I want to pause and tell you a story about the first Jesuit to be rector or president of a university. I suspect that you may recognize the case as similar to your own present experience. His name was Peter Canisius, now St. Peter Canisius, elected by the faculty to the office of rector or president in our terms today, at the University of Ingolstadt, not a Jesuit school, in October 1550, 455 years ago. In a letter to Ignatius Loyola in Rome a few weeks later, Canisius told him what in practice the office of president involved. Let me read a quotation from his letter:
“Governing this place is bringing me a good deal of
trouble and precious little so far in the way of obvious results.
The rector’s [for our purposes, read president’s] principal
duties are to enroll new students, to force debtors to pay their
bills, to listen to the complaints which men and woman
citizens of the town bring against the young men, to arrest,
reprimand and jail the students who get drunk and roam
around the streets at night, and finally to preside at official
festivities and at academic functions connected with the
conferral of degrees…They say, and it’s true, that the lawyers
run the place.”
Have things really changed so much over the centuries? In a later letter Canisius cited particular examples of events clearly showing that many of the students had no decency, manners, or respect. Some of those examples:
“In barbarian packs students are roaming the streets
and firing off gun powder charges [rather like cherry bombs]
not only during the day but even at night, too, when God
himself wants quiet for every living thing. Others are
disturbing the neighbors by blowing horns and acting like a
bunch of drunken madmen.”
He also wrote a letter about the faculty, but we won’t go into that now.
Within 50 years of the Messina foundation, by 1600, there were some 240 Jesuit schools around the world. They were a combination of what we would now call secondary and higher education, and 15 of them were specifically universities. By 1740, 200 years after the founding of the society, there were 700 schools for lay students and 175 seminaries and houses of study for those preparing for the priesthood, all run by the Society of Jesus, convinced of their usefulness from the experience of the good they produced.
Those schools were all based in their operations on that famous manual of procedure, the Ratio Studiorum. It appeared in its definitive edition only in 1599 after 45 years of constant revision in the light of what the Jesuits were actually doing in their schools.
One of the earlier editions of the Ratio has as its preface a general essay by a famous Spanish Jesuit educator named Diego Ledesma in which he stated the purposes which the Society of Jesus had in conducting schools and universities. Let me quote him directly:
“The society was to run schools, first, because they
supply men with many advantages for practical living;
secondly, because they contribute to the right government of
public affairs and to the proper making of laws; third, because
they give ornament, splendor and perfection to the rational
nature of man; and fourth, and what is most important,
because they are in the bulwark of religion and guide man
most surely and easily to the achievement of his last end.”
In its somewhat ornamental language, I suspect it says things that make a Jesuit university today both university and Jesuit, in all its multiplicity of schools and departments and institutes. In contemporary terms one might put those four ends of Jesuit schools as follows: First, because these schools help to educate for a productive career (and they might be careers in anything from engineering to ballet, to teaching, to physical therapy, to business administration, to music, to law, to English literature). Secondly, Jesuits sponsor schools because they provide education for social and political responsibility, contributing “to the right government of public affairs and to the proper making of laws.” The Jesuits early recognized that any community is held together both by law and, much more, by the shouldering of responsibilities which come from community consensus on the rightness of that law. Because they were so convinced, a tradition of political philosophy and its legal and theological implications took root, exemplified in Francesco Suarez of Spain, Robert Bellarmine of Italy, or, more recently in the United States Jesuit, in John Courtney Murray, one of the men most responsible for the document of the second Vatican Council on religions, liberty, and freedom of conscience.
The third reason, that of giving “ornament, splendor and perfection to the rational nature of man,” might well be put as the development of the totally human person in the humanities and the sciences. That surely resonates with the overall theme of this lecture series. The fourth reason, “because they are the bulwark of religion and guide man to the achievement of his last end,” says that these schools want to give an education for a particular perspective on the ultimate nature and destiny of the human person, beyond simply the human. For Jesuits themselves this is unabashedly a Christian and Catholic perspective. But as Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the superior general of the Society of Jesus, recently noted, “Some of our treasured colleagues and friends follow others' faith traditions” and he thanked them “for the perspectives and learning [they] have offered and continue to offer, for [their] contribution to our common mission." I would, of course, have to leave it to you to decide whether what Ledesma said in 1597 and Kolvenbach in 2004 is at least in its essentials consonant with what it is that you wish to do here and now at Loyola University.
Let us return now for a few more minutes to history. We left the Society of Jesus in 1740 with 700 schools. By 1773 these were all destroyed by the suppression of the Jesuits by the Church at the insistent instigation and, indeed, under threats of schism in the Church, by the Bourbon monarchies of France, Spain, and Naples, aided by Portugal.
Sixteen years later, in 1789, the French Revolution began. It is very difficult for us today to recognize the institutional havoc not only in France but also across all of Europe from Spain to Russia that the revolution caused. It affected especially the Church which had depended upon those institutions for the very structures and support of its existence for better than 1,000 years. To give only one example, taken not from Jesuit history but from that of the Benedictine order, before the French Revolution there were in Europe about 2,000 then-functioning Benedictine houses. Some were large, some small, some rural, some urban, some rich, some poor, some lax, some strict, some men, some women. At the end of the Revolution only 20 of those houses were fully functioning. A wholesale confiscation swept away much of the lands of the Empire upon which the Church had depended for support from the time of Charlemagne.
At the time that the French Revolution was coming to an end, the Society of Jesus, partly restored in the turmoil of the early 1800s, had 12 small, struggling schools. Five were in Russia, four in Italy, two in France, and one in the United States, Georgetown, founded by former Jesuits and again a school of the society with the Restoration. The society was fully restored to existence in 1814, 191 years ago. Everywhere people immediately asked it to take up the task of education again in a world that had been radically changed. Within the first 10 or so years after that restoration, in France alone, to take but one example, 87 school foundations were proposed to a Jesuit province which consisted only of about 350 members. Fortunately, they took on only about a dozen.
With a world that had changed so drastically between 1773 and 1814, especially through the French Revolution, the Society of Jesus at its restoration wanted to be not a new society but the original old society. So it went back to all of the letter of the law, all of its old regulations, ordinances, and customs. Unfortunately, at least for quite a while, there was too little of the adventurous spirit and the reflection upon experience that had made the early schools and the early documents of the society about those schools so pertinent and so successful. Through the 19th century there was no ballet to be sure, and little of the arts. Conservative political ideas were the order of the day. On the other hand, foreign missionary work expanded rapidly, and Jesuit colleges in the United States were overtaken by the multiplicity of needs and requests that fashioned most of them into universities.
On a lighter note for the moment, I might mention also that there are certain old traditions—or experiences—not necessarily always of excellence which, I suspect, are perpetuated even today in Jesuit institutions. For example, the Student Services office at any Jesuit university might take comfort in the story from one of the Jesuit schools in the 1830s, where in the dining hall one day the students staged a grand disturbance, hardly able to be quelled by the prefect, as they banged on the table with their mugs and shouted in unison, “More beer, more beer.” For your further comfort, I should tell you that those were 14-year-old students. Or a program for physical expansion of a college or university might take heart in the story of the Jesuit rector-president of one institution who was told by both his provincial superior and the Jesuit superior-general in Rome that under no circumstances was he to try to put up another new building. He, in response, said, “Well at least they didn’t say I couldn’t do this,” and so he went out and bought a million bricks and stored them on the property, awaiting a better day. Or finally the imaginative abilities of the students were perhaps as equally evident 150 years ago as now when more than one inspection of a building revealed “words scrawled on the walls of certain necessary rooms in the school which bring a blush to decent cheeks.”
I have said a lot here about the background in the Society of Jesus apart from the United States. I think it was perhaps necessary for some understanding of what the Jesuits did in this country when they took up the work of education. To turn to United States history, at the time of the independence of this country, Roman Catholics were a small and suspect minority, 30,000 people out of 3,000,000, about one percent of the population. Only in Pennsylvania did they fully enjoy a history of toleration. They were regarded by most of their neighbors, quite frankly, as members of a church called regularly in some of the public school books used then and through the 19th century “the whore of Babylon and the harlot of Rome.“ The Church was defensive, and understandably so. Add to that the problems raised as immense waves of immigrants came to this country.
The Church had to turn most of its energies to the overwhelming task of assimilating those immigrants into the mainstream of American society. As part of that effort and in response to widespread requests, the Society of Jesus was called upon or took upon itself the foundation of schools and colleges. For example, of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in which the American Society is now engaged, 12 of them came into existence between 1814 and 1864, one almost every four years. Between 1864 and 1914, another 50 years, another 11 schools were founded, Loyola University New Orleans among them in 1912. In the 25 years from 1914 to 1939, possibly because of the First World War and the Depression, only one college was founded. In the years from 1939 to 1964, another 25 years, four new colleges were founded. By now, in addition to the current 28 Jesuit colleges and universities, there are 60 high schools which the society also sponsors.
Certainly, at least up until the Second World War, the colleges heavily concentrated in their undergraduate programs on a liberal arts curriculum, sometimes quite narrowly conceived. Where they went beyond undergraduate schools, they were very heavily involved in professional education in such areas as law and business and sometimes engineering and, in a few instances, medicine. Formal graduate teaching and research came late in this development. Another salient feature of those schools was, of course, a teaching body almost exclusively Jesuit. That circumstances obtained all the way up to the end of the First World War, changed gradually up to the Second World War, and changed rapidly in the 60 years since then.
It is important to recognize, too, the changes in this country itself in those years from 1814 on up to the middle of the 20th century. The United States itself changed overwhelmingly from an agricultural to an industrial society, and in the last 25 years, in addition to being an industrial power, to a country in which manufacturing has often given way to service industries. We changed from a country in which immigrants flowed in unchecked up to early 1920s to one with a rigidly restrictive and unjust immigration policy until fairly recently. The schools of most religious denominations, through the 19th century, not only the Catholic schools, saw themselves as places where the faith of their students was to be protected and where both a humanist education and a formation in virtue were to be given.
Meanwhile, as many of you know, the American college and university developed from the late 19th century in a way unlike the older European models. It took on a dizzying variety of programs, departments, institutes, schools through which to perform its self-appointed and self-acknowledged three-fold function of teaching, research, and service.
In addition, Jesuit institutions and Jesuit colleges and universities increasingly were caught up in the midst of an overwhelming increase in numbers in the post-war years. For example, in 1970 there were four times as many college and university students in Jesuit institutions as there had been in 1940. That is, in terms of student population, as if in those 30 years the society had founded another 100 schools. Increasingly, too, as I said, it was clear that there was no way in which the schools would be served simply by Jesuit personnel, and increasingly lay men and lay women became part of the common enterprise at Jesuit schools. Often enough, at first this took place without a clear rationale in the minds of the Jesuits or non-Jesuits as to the position each was to be asked to occupy in this work of Jesuit education.
As though all of this were not enough to create a sense of vertigo, Vatican II, from 1962 to 1965, to use Pope John XXIII’s phrase, “opened upon the world the windows of the Church.” What might have been over a long period and in small drafts a refreshing breeze of change turned out in the aftermath of the Council, in the short period of a few years, to be a hurricane blast. Forces of renewal and reform that had long been pent up burst upon the Roman Catholic Church. To this you might add all the social, political, intellectual, emotional, artistic changes of the last three to four decades in this country. No wonder, then, that it has taken some time to sort things out.
So much for a rapid account of how we got to where we are the Jesuits are, and what has been going on in Jesuit schools that led up to this institution, Loyola University, as university and as Jesuit. Let me turn now to some remarks as a background to values explicit and implicit in the Jesuit tradition of education. I want to make a set of eight simple statements.
First, of all education provides the means by which one acquires power. And power is not a bad word, since it simply means “the capacity to be someone or do something.” Second, any educator worthy of the name, be it faculty member or administrator or parent, has to ask himself or herself, “What do I want my students (for a parent, my children) to be and to do, and what means do I think are appropriate for those ends?” Third, Jesuits have regularly in the past said that their educational ventures as part of their life and work arise out of an experience, the experience of the Spiritual Exercises. That experience, of course, is in itself multifaceted and open to differences of emphasis in different times and circumstances. Fourth, that experience basic to the whole Jesuit enterprise affirms the radical goodness of the world and the goodness of human means, expressed in the term “humanism” before it was hijacked by religious fundamentalists as a club with which to beat opponents. But, fifth, any Jesuit is convinced that anything human, however good it may be, is essentially incomplete. Sixth, education means much more than fact alone. It also explicitly includes values, and Jesuit schools have said values are of utmost importance in the educational experience they wish to provide for their students. Next, fact and value must lead inevitably to a further step, choice, and any education worthy of the name has to give help toward enabling students to grow in the ability to make free choices. And eighth and last, whatever kind of rational one puts together for this whole educational endeavor, a rationale that grows out of experience, it has to be one which is intellectually coherent, psychologically satisfying, and practically implementable. Why you are doing what you are doing has to make sense in itself; it has to make sense to you; you have to be able to put its implications into practice.
If such is the case, then those involved in living out such a rationale and in working in its atmosphere need to examine how they are so doing. For example, in any Jesuit institution, a faculty, Jesuit and lay, has to ask how they are living and working together as a community of communities. The Jesuits, as what might be called the original foundation and inspiration community of that institution, have to ask themselves how they are living out their lives and doing their work as Jesuits, and how they are learning from the lay men and lay women and other religious who together with them are colleagues and partners in a common enterprise. At the same time, those non-Jesuit partners have to ask how best they might come to know and appreciate what it is that makes a Jesuit be what he is and what brings them as a society to their corporate work of education.
I frankly think it is of the utmost importance that the non-Jesuit members of such a Jesuit educational community become increasingly familiar with what makes Jesuits tick, what motivates them to enter the society, to live in it, to work in it, to have a certain style of doing things. This, then, obviously involves serious effort on the part of the Jesuits to share with their colleagues their central heritage, experience, and outlook.
Central to that heritage is the experience of the Spiritual Exercises, and it seems to me that it is imperative that the Jesuits grow in the ability to impart to their colleagues a familiarity with that experience by their words, their deeds, in their community lifestyle, in everything that makes it clear why we are who we are and why we do what we do. In addition, and most importantly, the Exercises are not an asset or a treasure particular to the society. They are meant to be available to all who wish to make use of them.
The Spiritual Exercises come to life only in their experience, not in their reading. They are first and foremost the matrix of a deeply religious experience, an experience that privileges certain values. But the Exercises say something, too, of abiding human and humanistic value. On several such human values and their appropriateness for a university such as this I want now to say a few words. I draw my remarks here in part from reflections of a Jesuit colleague, Howard Gray. The Exercises represent three such important values for those engaged in the ongoing education and formation of the American mind and heart: (1) the need to experience a tradition; (2) the meaning and experience of love; and (3) the call to a social concern. Together they contribute to what might be called the Jesuit style in education.
First, tradition stands for the cherished realities which generations pass to one another: our art, music, and literature, our science and philosophy, our religion, our system of government. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola presume that the Judaeo-Christian past should affect the present, that such an affect demands a personal investment of time, energy, and psychological attention, and that, given such personal investment, one becomes integrally part of the tradition and committed to its values. Tradition is more than acceptance of what has been; it is living what has been proved to be worthwhile. That kind of personal contact with and personal assimilation of one’s tradition frees a man or woman to discriminate what within the contemporary world genuinely gives life and hope and truth. Remember, too, as Jaroslav Pelikan, the historian of theology at Yale once put it in distinguishing tradition from traditionalism: “Tradition is the living voice of the dead; traditionalism is the dead voice of the living."
Second, the Spiritual Exercises explore the meaning and experience of love and prompt a person to experience himself or herself as both loved and capable of loving. They lead to a love which, in imitation of God in Christ, expresses itself in deeds more than in words, in doing that good to others which is deepest and most enduring. The need both to be loved and to be able to love in return is elemental to our human existence. But what the Spiritual Exercises represent is an experience which founds love on personal worth and responsibility, not simply on appetite. There is enduring worth in such experience. Colleges are not religious houses and classes are not sensitivity sessions, but they are locales where young men and women can come to comprehend their worth and their responsibility for others. The Spiritual Exercises are part of that tradition which takes seriously the power which love has to give life to ideas and to values.
Finally, the Spiritual Exercises are a call to responsible service, to a life of sustained human and Christian labor. The Exercises, as text and as experience, stand in that educational tradition which argues that those on whom talent, opportunity, and grace have been bestowed have a responsibility to work for a society and a world both more faithful and more just, for a true social ecology. As one writer on the early Jesuits and their schools put it, Jesuit education arising out of the Spiritual Exercises should help to foster a “civic spirituality."
To come near to my conclusion, I hope that I have helped you to learn something of the who and the what and the how and the why Jesuits got into education, and something of its experiences and principles and how they help shape Loyola University New Orleans today. I hope that this has been not simply knowledge for its own sake, but that it will help you as partners in that enterprise to deepen your own sense of your own values and vision here at this university. I am convinced that such vision and values, if they are to be effective, have to include knowledge of the past in Jesuit history and Jesuit education and of the principles arising out of that experience, reflection on the present experience of your own institution here, Loyola University New Orleans, and just as important, confidence in your future.
All of you present here, friends, faculty, students, administrators, benefactors, staff, have the opportunity for yourselves to ask how being a Jesuit institution influences your mission, your friendship, your support of this university as university and as Jesuit in a pluralistic age. You are the ones to ask how the Jesuit style makes a difference in undergraduate education and in professional programs and in research. You will make the decisions on how this school lives out the Jesuit mission in education. I cannot tell you your explicit responses to those opportunities. You are the experts. You will have to make “Cicero, ballet, tyrannicide, quinine, and prayer” come alive here.
And now a brief conclusion. One of the greatest Jesuits of the past was Matteo Ricci, linguist, mathematician, explorer, first Christian missionary ever to get to the imperial court in Beijing. Most importantly, he was the first and one of the very few Westerners who took Chinese culture and Chinese civilization on their own terms and treated them with the admiration that such a millennial tradition deserved. He is one of the “good Westerners” still respected in Chinese history and tradition. After a lifetime of incredible labor joined to high intellectual achievement and always productive imagination, he lay dying in 1610 in Beijing. Gathered around him in his last hours were his Jesuit brethren, already apprehensive about the future without Ricci. In his last words to them he said, “You will still experience problems and trials and unforeseen circumstances in your work here in China. But, I leave you, my dear brethren, standing before an open door.”
As for sustaining a vision of education and of its values here and now and in the future at Loyola University, that is fundamentally Jesuit, truly befitting the human condition, and worthy of what a university should be, there will of course be problems and trials and unforeseen circumstances, but—I leave you standing before an open door.
