Last week I traveled to Creighton University in Omaha, Neb., to attend an international conference on social justice in Jesuit higher education. Stemming from a desire to collaborate more fully across our network on issues and challenges facing our institutions, church, and world — poverty, marginalization, commercialization, war, famine, disease, human trafficking, exclusion — the conference brought together scholars from Ignatian schools and organizations around the world.
The conference’s theme was taken from St. Ignatius’ supposed words to St. Francis Xavier: “ite, omnia incendite et inflammate” (“Go and set the world ablaze”), thus this year’s gathering was titled “Justice in Jesuit Higher Education: On Fire at the Frontiers.”
Luminaires from Jesuit and Catholic higher education who are at the frontiers of ethical reflection and peacemaking efforts — David Hollenbach, Margaret Farley, Michael Garanzini, Gerry Blaszczak, Kristin Heyer, Thomas Smolich — presented keynote and plenary addresses to the hundreds of faculty, staff, students, and alumni of Jesuit colleges who came together to celebrate a shared focus on a “faith that does justice.”
My panel included professors from Fairfield, Loyola Chicago, and Santa Clara universities discussing Catholic social teaching’s connection to the political, legal and sociological dimensions of Ignatian participation in comprehensive immigration reform. The highlight of our session was undoubtedly the tearful personal narrative given by an undocumented student who fled near starvation in Mexico and owes his “chance at a better life” to the Jesuit community at Santa Clara’s financial aid and scholarship program.
The conference included an untold number of such moving autobiographies and insights, with people from every imaginable corner of the world discussing their work to eradicate prejudice, poverty, injustice and hatred, both within and outside of the institutionally Catholic context. The conference was a tremendous reminder of what is distinctive about Jesuit education, the Catholic embrace of all that is true and holy in the world, and the distances and challenges ahead in realizing what privilege is and what it demands.
I could wax poetic on the signature characteristics of Jesuit higher education (and in past writings for this paper already have done so). But let me highlight three such dimensions here, which apply not only to our schools but to all people touched by one of the most influential saints in the history of the Catholic Church, an important figure who is today again reinvigorating the world and redefining its frontiers through the current pontificate.
St. Ignatius called his followers to be “contemplatives in action.” That is to say, to pray as if everything depended on God, and to match that prayer with a work ethic as if all the outcomes depended on you. More than anything else, it is this prayerful and practical engagement with the world — in its cities and slums, in the desert of sub-Saharan Africa, the tundra of Alaskan villages and the great universities of Europe, in advocacy with influential powerbrokers and in interpersonal accompaniment of its forgotten victims — that defines our schools and the men and women they produce.
Second, the Jesuit motto calls us to find God in all things. That is to say, in science and technology, the arts and history, culture, holiness, pain and human frailty, fear, doubt, fellowship, laughter, meals, friendship, love and loss, the “joys and hopes, griefs and anxieties” of our world as Vatican II puts it. In these and all experiences, silent or not, God is present. The Jesuit outlook on life is to seek him where he may be found and then to be inspired to act accordingly.
Lastly, I will offer no gloss or commentary on the following but let Ignatius speak for himself in words that have inspired countless generations of selfless men and women and that set the tone for this conference:
“Teach me, good Lord, to serve you as you deserve. To give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed the wounds, to toil and not to seek for rest, to labor and not to ask for any reward, save that of knowing that we do your will.”
Michael M. Canaris is an administrator at Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life and is on the faculty for the Department of Philosophy, Theology, and Religious Studies at Sacred Heart University.
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