By John T. Sebastian
Thirty years ago, over 800 educators from Jesuit colleges and universities gathered at Georgetown University for Assembly ’89, an occasion both for reflecting back on all that Jesuit education had achieved since John Carroll had founded Georgetown two centuries earlier and for looking forward to new trials that lay just over the horizon. An address by Jesuit Superior General Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., anchored the meeting. He identified several features that should define Jesuit education: an orientation toward values, interdisciplinarity as a means of pursuing a more comprehensive truth, collaboration among different Jesuit works, an international outlook, and a commitment to evangelization in partnership with the church. He also named several obstacles, including the need to increase access to Jesuit institutions and ensuring that personnel are adequately acquainted with our institutions’ Catholic and Jesuit mission and identity. And more than once he acknowledged that the Society’s explicit commitment “to the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement,” ever since the 32nd General Congregation threatened to displace the traditional primacy of the Jesuits’ educational ministry.
The characteristics enumerated by Father Kolvenbach remain desiderata of Jesuit education in the United States in 2019, while many of the challenges he articulated still alternately daunt and inspire leaders of Jesuit universities. What, then, is the legacy of the Georgetown meeting 30 years later? Were we today to convene a similar summit, what realities might command our attention and imaginations?
For starters, the work of forming lay faculty, staff, administrators, and trustees as stewards of our Ignatian heritage has only grown in significance. Many of our schools have discussed or even implemented policies regarding “hiring for mission.” But mission-conscious hiring cannot take place in a vacuum. It must reside on a continuum that also includes orienting, developing, and rewarding for mission, so that faculty and staff can connect the dots between “mission questions” raised during the interview process and the lived reality of mission in their daily work. While many of our schools have in recent years developed local versions of national projects like the Ignatian Colleagues Program and Jesuit Leadership Seminar to support ongoing formation, these initiatives are, for the most part, optional. In the coming years, we must weave formation into the regular work of our institutions. The three-year faculty development program at Regis University described by Kari Kloos in the Spring 2019 issue of Conversations provides one possible model.
In the years since Assembly ’89, Jesuit generals have also challenged our schools’ self-conception not only as colleges and universities but as true intellectual apostolates. The current Superior General, Fr. Arturo Sosa, S.J., who prior to his election held positions at several Venezuelan universities, announced what could be interpreted as a universal mission statement for all Jesuit colleges and universities:
Our intellectual work is an apostolate if it is carried out with depth, openness to the world and an orientation towards social justice and reconciliation between people and creation, always in dialogue with other believers and non-believers, by accepting with joy the richness of cultural diversity
He prods us to think beyond curricula and rankings to what makes an institution not just a university but an intellectual apostolate aimed at responding to and transforming social realities in order to bring about the kingdom of God in this world. Yet responding to this call is often easier said than done; real social transformation is not achieved through eloquent mission statements and Latin mottoes deployed across marketing materials.
Continuous reflection on the nature of this apostolate is visible in recent efforts, such as the “Mission Priority Examen” intended to help institutions discern how best to promote their Jesuit identity in response to local conditions. Meanwhile, the newly-formed International Association of Jesuit Universities articulated several priorities intended to spur international collaboration, including efforts to increase access to higher education among those living on the margins, to form political leaders to serve the common good, and to promote interreligious dialogue. More recently still, the Society has established a set of four “Universal Apostolic Preferences” that invite us into the work of sharing the gifts of discernment and the Spiritual Exercises, walking with the poor and marginalized, protecting and renewing creation, and accompanying young people in imagining a hope-filled future. These are all noble goals, but we must take care not to get caught up merely in discerning how to choose among priorities in the coming years!
Theology professor Otto Hentz, S.J. Photo courtesy of Georgetown University.
As heirs to the delegates who attended Assembly ’89, we certainly have our work cut out for us. We are ever more challenged to respond to a deteriorating national discourse that promotes political and cultural tribalism, an erosion of trust in the church on account of pervasive sexual abuse and a pernicious form of clericalism that prioritizes perpetrators over victims, and an academic environment hostile to the liberal arts and person-centered models of education. Indeed, the highest hurdle to clear may be maintaining our own sense of hopefulness in the face of proliferating and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Still, nearly 500 years of constant reflection on education as ministry has prepared us for this work.
At the conclusion of a graduate seminar I recently taught on leadership in Catholic higher education, my students submitted papers on current opportunities and threats facing our sector, including support for undocumented students, students’ mental-health needs, recruitment of Latinx students, collaboration with community colleges, creating a welcoming environment for LGBTQ students, and adjunctification and fair-labor practices. Throughout, they found in our distinctive identity and mission potent resources for sustaining our work in the educational apostolate. So as we look back to Assembly ’89 and ahead to a future in which the only certainty is uncertainty , let us remember the hard-earned lessons of our predecessors, let us heed the call of the Spirit resounding in new priorities, and let us hold fast to hope as we seek to make our own humble contributions to Saint Ignatius’ project.
John T. Sebastian, Ph.D., is vice president of Mission and Ministry at Loyola Marymount University.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Georgetown University.