Regis College - Ranger Yearbook (Denver, CO)

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lAJe a. once: Very Reverend Father General WLODIMIR LEDOCHOWSKI of the Society of Jesus who this year celebrates the Fiftieth Anniversary of his entrance into the Society and the Twenty-fifth Anniver- sary of his election to the Generalate. OF GREATER MOMENT THAN LEARNING •n By W. J. McGucken, S.J., Prefect General of Studies of the Missouri Province Nothing is more difficult for a Jesuit, his critics notwithstanding, than to sing the praises of the Society he loves so well. He may and does think with justifiable pride of the temporal and spiritual glories of this least Society of Jesus and its four cen- turies of work and prayer, of its long roster of saints, martyrs, doctors, missionaries, sa- vants, and its vast army of unknown sol- diers — brothers, scholastics, priests who have fought during these four hundred years ad majorem Dei gloriam. What Jesuit, moreover, does not thrill at the memory of all these glorious golden deeds for Christ, his Captain and Leader! A Jesuit who could remain unmoved at the thought that he, though all unworthy, has been called to membership in this branch of Christ ' s army would be, as calumny repre- sents him, a dead corpse indeed. From Bacon on The Jesuit contribution to the history of education during these four centuries has been not inconsiderable. Men from Bacon to Fulop-Miller, some grudgingly, some willingly, have paid glowing tribute to the work of the Society in this field. It would be impossible to deny it. Ever since the foundation of the Society the whole pattern of secondary and higher education has been influenced by Jesuit ideas. From the sixteenth century on, wher- ever the classical tradition persisted in the schools — and until a generation or so ago it was the only tradition — Jesuit theory and practice were factors to be considered. The lycee and college of contemporary France, bear astonishing resemblance in curriculum and method to the seventeenth century Jesuit school. And little wonder. For in the days before the Suppression of the Society in France in 1762, the Jesuits had almost a monopoly of secondary education. Many traces of Jesuitic influence, says Fulop- Miller, no friendly voice, remain in the schools. It should not be overlooked that the advantages as well as the disadvantages Page 5

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LJ0J !V F ' V- yotewccJL St. Ignatius of Loy- ola, Founder of the Society of Jesus. The fourth centenary of the Society is com- memorated this year. The statue whose pic- ture appears here is located on the Regis campus. The Ranger of 1940 attempts to epitomize the past school term in providing each student with a permanent record of his com- panions and associations at Regis. That it may in future years serve to recall more readily scenes and events of a not-to-be-forgotten period of his life on the crest of the west is our since wish. J aqe

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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