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Page 11 text:
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FOUR YE. HUNDRED RS OLD By Very Rev. Robert M. Kelley, S.J. In the United States the celebration of a centenary is a notable event. After all we have been a nation only a little over a century and one-half, a mere youth in the family of nations. Last year when Regis College had its golden jubilee the alumni, faculty and friends felt that the College had become of age. Yet considering the age of most insti- tutions of higher education such an anniversary is not considered distinc- tive. This calendar year, however, an event closely concerned with the Col- lege is being commemorated which is both ancient and unique. It is the four hundredth anniversary of the estab- lishment of the Society of Jesus, i his event calls attention to the fact that this College, manned by Jesuits throughout its existence, is fifty years young and four hundred years old. The Year Book of the College, al- though dealing mainly with the pass- ing events of the previous academic year, should not let such a venerable anniversary pass without notice. The mere fact that an organization has ex- isted for four hundred years is in itself a significant thought. The sifting proc- esses of time have a way of disposing of trivial and unsubstantial enterprises. The further fact that this organization has continuously played a vigorous and influential part in world history, partic- ularly in the fields of education and for- eign missions, for four hundred years, is a tribute to the wisdom of its founder, Ignatius Loyola, and the religious in- spiration which guided him in writing its constitutions. After all many are the governments which have failed within four hundred years and many are the constitutions which have been rewritten. While the membership of this Society, nearly twenty-six thousand scattered throughout the world with Very Reverend Robert M. Kelley, S.J. PRESIDENT over five thousand in the United States, is more numerous than it has ever been through the four centuries, it is still loyal and faithful to the ideals em- bodied in its rules and its constitutions. These facts have a practical bearing for the faculty and student body of Regis College and Regis High School. It should inspire the faculty, religious and lay, to rededicate themselves to the high purpose of Christian education; it should give the students assurance that the education they receive at Regis will fit them, as it has fitted so many thousand other Jesuit boys and young men, for the real and difficult warfare of life and for the desirable victory which should crown their years of ef- fort in the army of their divine Leader. In the course of this coming academic year it is planned to celebrate this note- worthy anniversary in a way somewhat worthy of its importance, to revive and renew the spirit which has caused the Society of Jesus to be both loved and hated but never to be ignored. Page 7
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Page 10 text:
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of our humanist classical education are for the most part attributable to that pedagogic activity which at one time was spread by the Society of Jesus over all the countries of the world. Indeed, so closely were the Jesuits almost from the beginning identified with educa- tional work, so magnificent and arresting was their far-flung line of colleges and uni- versities in Europe before the Suppression, so impressive today by sheer force of num- bers are the sixty thousand secondary and college students in their American schools alone, so ardent has been their champion- ship of the classical tradition against the utilitarians throughout their long history, that the Society is universally spoken of as a teaching order. Yet it is clear that Ignatius had no intention at the beginning of making his followers schoolmasters. It was not until the Founder and his early associ- ates glimpsed the possibilities for the greater glory of God in a well-planned sys- tem of education, a well-trained body of educators that — almost reluctantly, it would seem — they undertook the work for which they became most noted, the work of con- ducting schools and colleges. But education to St. Ignatius, as to his sons today, is always a means, never an end. Archbishop Goodier in his charming sketch, The Jesuits, quotes with approval a signifi- cant remark made by a Hindu professor in an Indian university, who had observed and admired Jesuit schools in India and Europe. No, said the Hindu, the fathers of the Society of Jesus are not educators. They may have the best schools; they may attract greater numbers by giving the best lectures; they may record the greatest successes; they may discourse better than others on educa- tion itself. But for all that they are not educators, as we of the profession under- stand the word. Their object is not to edu- cate but to do something else. Education to them is not an end; it is not, as it is to us, something to live for; to them it is only a means to an end, a means to win people to their Christ. In the same vein, Christopher Hollis in his Saint Ignatius remarks: One is tempted to the paradox that the great su- periority of Jesuits over other (secular) schoolmasters has arisen from the fact that the Jesuits alone have never believed in Education — have never believed in it, that is to say, as an end and a religion with cap- ital letter and bated breath. They ' have never made the mistake of worshipping the means to the neglect of the end. CI, assroom Heroes 11, Father Laynez, of the first Jesuit gener- ation, is reported to have said that few great men had so few ideas as St. Ignatius, but that still fewer had been more thoroughly earnest in the realization of these ideas. One of these, indeed the most important one, was the notion of engraving in the heart, imagination, will, intellect, the whole being of each of his sons the glowing golden let- ters A.M.D. G. that they in turn might impress upon others the same device, to the greater glory of God, and thus help in realizing the Saint ' s dream of winning the world to Christ. To the Jesuit, teaching has ever been an apostolate, the classroom just as hallowed a place to win souls for Christ as the far-off missionland of India. Rightly, Jesuits can take pride in the prestige and efficiency of their schools, a prestige and efficiency pur- chased through self-sacrifice and a deathless enthusiasm, despite il terribile cotidtano of classroom routine, a routine, however, that becomes a glorious adventure to Jesuits trained in the Ignatian ideal of the apostolic work of teaching. Enlivened Method The Jesuit method was perhaps not al- together new, but the lofty purpose back of their method made schoolmastcnng not merely a profession but an honored and envied work in the Church of God. As Evelyn Waugh says so- finely in his Ed- mund Campion: It was their classroom method that won them the supremacy which they enjoyed throughout Europe . . . until the eve of the French Revolution, so that even at times of the sharpest religious difference Protestant parents could be found sending their sons to them. Their own acute training gave them particular insight into the habits of the mind, and to them may be credited the discovery and application of the principle, now universally accepted, that a pupil will be able to retain more in his memory when he has acquired it in a mood of curiosity and imagination . . . The Jesuits sought to present everything as having an immediate and intrinsic in- terest; they fostered competition and argu- ment with the result that the driest gram- matical questions became the subjects of hot debate. Wherever they went they encour- aged oratory and acting; they paid partic- ular attention to style of language and dex- terity of wit but chose the material of their exercises so that, in the course of them, knowledge was acquired almost without ef- fort. Jesuit teachers of today glory in their past, the rapid spread of their schools in that first century; a progress comparable to nothing save perhaps the rise of the Em- pires of Alexander and Napoleon. The Jesuit teachers of our times and our country can glory, too, in the fact that they are handing on a glorious four hundred year old name untarnished to their successors. The Jesuit educational ideal presented to the world by Ignatius and his companions in the sixteenth century still glows brightly in twentieth century America. In a world of educational chaos, in a world that values things more than ideas, that sets a higher price upon the useful than it does upon the true, the beautiful, the good, in such a world Jesuit education has kept alive the ideal of a liberal education, has given proper emphasis to things of the mind. Sane, Solid Training Not unfitting then is it that during the fourth centenary of the Society ' s foundation a fleeting tribute be paid to its work in schools, a tribute most of all to the countless unsung heroes of the classroom whose names are known to God alone but whose word and example have been a lasting in- fluence on the lives of generation upon gen- eration of Catholic boys and Catholic men throughout the world. A just pride the Society may well take in its educational history. The education it has imparted has ever been sane, solid, and in the best tra- dition of Christendom and the western world, a tradition that even in our contem porary America is coming to be regarded with a nostalgic wistfulness. Most of all, the Society can glory in the fact that God and Christ, His Son, have always had prominent place in her schools and universities. Her object throughout these centuries has ever been to impart truth to her students; yet she has never lost sight of the fact that there is no truth worth seeking if He who is Truth itself is ignored. Information alone has never been the aim of the Society ' s schools: rather it has been the formation of Christian scholars and Christian gentlemen. More than that; her aim has been, so to speak, a transfor- mation of the youth entrusted to her care into saints and apostles, who, because of the knowledge they acquire of Christ our Lord, will love Him and follow Him always — Christian gentlemen who will always put first things first and regard solid and perfect virtue of greater moment than learning or any other natural endowment. Page 6
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