Jesuit Education: Thriving in Tension

I write this from a dimly lit hotel room in Chicago, where representatives from all the Jesuit high schools in our province discuss how we can best share the Catholic faith with the young men and women in our care. My weather app tells me that it is 4° outside with nearly a foot of snow on the ground. Only God knows why they decided to hold this conference in early February in the Windy City.

 

What the Jesuits may lack in meteorological acumen, they compensate with mission and vision for their schools. A danger of Catholic education is falling into the trap of value extremes: Should we prioritize rigor or compassion? Standards or flexibility? Discipline or accompaniment? Our conference roundtables made it clear that the Jesuits have found a way to live and thrive in these tensions. 

 

This spring marks the end of my 20th consecutive year in Jesuit education. At Jesuit High School in Sacramento, I saw retreats encouraging boys to be boys while drawing them toward a deeper sense of manhood. At Loyola Marymount University, I saw service projects that erased social margins by bringing the marginalized into the Church at the center. At Santa Clara’s Jesuit School of Theology, I saw liturgies that expressed a confident humility, recognizing the brokenness of Catholics while affirming the divinity of our Church (for it is only in the light of the Divine that we can recognize our brokenness at all). 

 

In the Strake Jesuit theology classroom, we don’t debate whether to emphasize a personal relationship with Christ or an academic understanding of the Catholic faith – it is precisely through that rich understanding that we encourage students to find their personal relationship with Christ. More broadly, we see no contradiction between our care and concern for the whole individual person and opening our doors to 1,400 young men each year. We see no contradiction between holding firm on Catholic social values and a true conception of social justice that fundamentally affirms the dignity of every person and community. We boldly invite non-Catholic students to engage with our Catholic truth without forcefully imposing that truth over and against their own cultures and creeds. We maintain high expectations of discipline and self-control while acknowledging the invisible backpacks that our students carry and accompanying them through their emotional journeys. 

 

Every Jesuit high school student makes a Kairos retreat during their junior or senior year. It is such a ubiquitous experience for Jesuit students that there is an instant sense of community later in life when students (or teachers) from different Jesuit high schools cross paths. One theme of Kairos is that the last day of the retreat – the Fourth Day – never ends. We should take our personal, communal, and spiritual growth and bring it home with us, living in God’s time even as we return to our daily work and routines. 

 

The Fourth Day represents this harmony of the extremes that makes Jesuit education so unique. We are called to be in the world but not of the world. We do not live in the “either/or” dichotomies that define secular culture but in the “both/and” truth of a Catholic worldview.