boston college jesuit mission

Jesuit education, Butler said, has six core elements: Care of the person. It offers a startling menu of ideas, but agrees on little that it considers essential for students to know. He is zealous for what gives greater glory to God, what is more conducive to the spiritual good of men and women, what demands more generosity from his followers, activities that are more likely to have an influence on the world. Student life is another area where numerous structures and programs attempt in varying degrees to make social, moral and religious values explicit. Which ones, or which combination, will enable us to carry on most effectively the ministry of the word that flows from Ignatian spirituality and has been central to Jesuit work since its beginning? But a university founded on a religious view of life also proposes that students' moral and spiritual development is inseparable from their intellectual development. In addition, Boston College encourages members of its community to be attentive to their own experiences, to reflect on them, and to use their talents to respond to the world’s needs, based on the conviction that God can be found in all human activity, especially in the search for truth and meaning. Learn about benefits. Founded by the Jesuits in 1870, Canisius College is an independent, co-educational, medium-sized, institution of higher… All the academic disciplines, therefore, contribute to the intelligibility of the world in their own proper ways and play a key role in making theology intelligible. All universities do this to some extent, but a countercultural and prophetic stance should play a distinctive role in a university responding to the imperatives of the Gospel. Some of these institutions, like Boston College, became universities with national reputations and distinguished programs and faculties. He presided at the University's centennial convocation, with President John F. Kennedy as featured speaker. Widespread and influential as these schools were, they existed in the context of intellectual and political forces that greatly shaped their destinies. This ambition imposes on the university the responsibility of embodying in its own behavior — of its members towards one another and of the university towards it neighbors — the ideals it espouses. Although Boston College is classified as an R1 research university, it still uses the word "college" in its name to reflect its historical position as a small liberal arts college. To fulfill that mission, we welcome and embrace the contributions of a diverse student body from many faith traditions. Jesuits across the world today are conducting a debate about the mission of higher education and Jesuits' roles in it, especially as the declining number of Jesuits calls into question the priorities we are used to taking for granted in our work. This distinctive attitude ought to be evident in how we deal with some of the important issues in contemporary university life: how to enable students to experience a campus life that facilitates their full intellectual and spiritual development; how to help students imagine career choices that respond to their own ideals and to the needs of the larger community; how to mitigate the tension faculty members experience between scholarship and service; how to mentor younger colleagues in the face of a competitive and individualistic professionalism; how to support scholarship and professional work that benefits the common good and enhances solidarity between intellectual and cultural elites and those most in need; how to put institutional resources at the service of our neighbors in the communities around us. Are they all healthy and well supported? It also welcomes all faith traditions and encourages students to explore their spirituality and engage in discussions of faith-based issues. But the long creative tradition of Catholic theological thought was thus cut off from the most formative intellectual developments of the 19th and early 20th centuries; neither influenced the other significantly. Also relevant in this context are graduate service programs, especially the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and the Jesuit International Volunteers. This is a demand of the prophetic tradition of the Hebrew scriptures. Robert J. Morrissey, a Boston College (BC) alumnus (class of 1960), is a founding member and senior partner of the law firm of Morrissey, Hawkins & Lynch in Boston. It urges students to reflect deeply on who they are and how they want to live their lives. He was one of six sons and one daughter of his father, Edward, a family … Messer, Paul A. This competition hastens the attenuation of any distinctive institutional mission and identity. Jack Butler. Boston College wants its students to connect their talents and strengths to the needs and opportunities of wider society through classes, curricula, and student formation efforts. Only nine of the 44 trustees are Jesuits. Graduates of these schools played a central role in the evolution of 17th- and 18th-century thought in Europe and in the New World. And he was part of that tradition that had for centuries seen theology as the enquiry that was the culmination of the intellectual enterprise and that integrated all the parts of the intellectual life. Living at the point of tension may be the inevitable vocation of those who want to take both religious belief and contemporary intellectual life seriously. And how does this vision guide the choices we make as Jesuits about our work here? Also Father Joseph Appleyard, of the English department, formally Director of the Arts & Sciences Honors Program and previous Rector of the Jesuit Community. For the humanists these were the subjects that opened the mind, sharpened wits, deepened human sympathy, developed clarity of thought and force in expressing it. In 1950, 13 of 14 department chairmen in the College of Arts & Sciences were Jesuits. A gift from the Jesuit Community, matched by the University, established the Jesuit Institute to promote research on the relatedness of Catholic traditions of Boston College to the universe of scholarship and learning. Boston College was founded by members of the Society of Jesus (“Jesuits”) in 1863 as a liberal arts college for men in the South End of Boston. Ancient religious and cultural traditions cannot avoid new forms of interaction and the need for new understanding of each other. The richness and flexibility of these structures certainly suggest that at Boston College we are still operating from a position of strength. Telling our stories is a time-bound activity. This attitude suits a university, whose mission is by nature a collaborative project, one that has to take account of all the knowledges and points of view that we can articulate. To these characteristics that Ignatius prescribed for the Roman College should be added a fourth one, evidenced in the history of Jesuit schools and one that is especially instructive for our own time. Boston College enrollment was under 200 students during the 19th century, with a faculty of 10 to 15 Jesuits. In the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas drew on intellectual resources he had learned from Jews and Muslims in developing the most influential strand of Catholic theology yet formulated. In 1870 he became president for ten years, left Boston, and returned for a second three-year presidency in 1888. This community experiences his power through the symbolic activities that shape its life: baptism, marriage, holy orders, and so forth, but especially around the Eucharistic table where Jesus' own life and death are recalled and represented. Pursuit of such a cross-cultural and global understanding is in deep continuity with the Catholic and Jesuit traditions. As a Jesuit, Catholic university, Boston College is rooted in a world view that calls us to learn, to search for truth, and to live in service to others. Boston College Founded in 1863, Boston College is committed to maintaining and strengthening the Jesuit, Catholic mission of the University, and especially its commitment to integrating intellectual, personal, ethical, and religious formation; and to uniting high academic achievement with service to others. It is a pedagogy of the heart, a pedagogy of spiritual formation and of action. Reborn in 1814, its schools in Europe regained something of the prominence they had had in the 200 years following Ignatius's death, but they were heavily implicated in the agenda of restoration and of resistance to modern thought that was characteristic of so much intellectual life in 19th-century Catholicism. Every interchange — in offices, in dining rooms, on playing fields, in student residences — can advance or hinder this development. Today, it is a vibrant, coeducational, national, and increasingly international university enrolling approximately 14,000 students on a campus of 240 acres located about six miles from downtown Boston. 150 William T Morrissey Blvd Dorchester MA 02125-3313. In the past Jesuits' most distinctive commitment was to forming undergraduates intellectually and morally for the lives they would later lead. Finally, Father James Woods, long-time dean of what was the Evening College, now called College of Advancing Learning and the Summer School, whose vacation, according to a colleague, is to put on a sports shirt and go to the office. Two questions intersect here: How do Jesuits envision Boston College's identity as a university that is Catholic and Jesuit? Thus, this pamphlet. In time this was to become their characteristic work. If the university is to be Catholic, it must be catholic or universal in ways that reflect this global reality in its research, its teaching, and the concerns that animate the people who give it life. How can Jesuits best contribute to this mission? Whether they share our religious faith or not, our colleagues nourish our reflection as Jesuits, as we hope that our dialogue is sustaining for them. Nation-states are beginning to recognize that transnational problems like environmental degradation, the forced migration of refugees, and threats to human health such as the human immunodeficiency virus and the drug trade require transnational responses. Each student has to grow through a trajectory of development that takes many forms but has one goal, mature understanding and the wisdom to use this understanding well. We speak for ourselves, the Jesuits working here in 1994. As a Jesuit, Catholic school, we strive to reflect the diversity of our church and community. Jesuit Community Ot Boston College Chestnut Hill, MA. St. Ignatius thought the Examen was the most important prayer one could offer. Amid this intellectual turmoil universities struggle to find niches that will enable them to survive stringent economic pressures. Paradoxically, as the world grows more interconnected by communications and trade its citizens feel more oppressed by its complexity and more divided from one another by chasms of history, religion, and ethnic loyalties. Animated by Boston College’s Jesuit roots, Campus Ministry’s retreat program meets students where they are at. A number of programs, initiatives, and structures have come into existence, which can be grouped together as attempts to embody ideas of education and of the social use of knowledge based on a transcendant vision of human life and work. Father Monan's successor, Father William Leahy, is from the Wisconsin Province, as is Father William Neenan, Dean of Faculties. Mission Statement Boston College High School is a Jesuit, Catholic college preparatory school. Or, more practically, among the existing programs and structures that seem to embody a distinctive vision of Boston College's identity, do we know which ones really work? The perspective that can bring them together is the principle that the dynamism inherent in the desire to know is completed only in the self-disclosure of God, and its corollary, that faith necessarily evolves towards its own self-possession in understanding. This word "more" is central in Ignatius' spirituality. In the late twentieth century, cross-cultural encounters and political–economic interdependence have become facts of life for ordinary men and women as never before in human history. These sentiments should color all that we do in a Jesuit university. Ruling year info. Everyone in the university community contributes to it. When the mind frames inquiries, develops hypotheses, follows evidence, and critiques accepted understandings in order more adequately to express the truth, we believe that the truth that it is moving towards is the gift of God's self-disclosure. The Jesuits became known as the schoolmasters of Europe, and over time emerged as the largest religious order in the Catholic Church and one of the greatest influences in Western civilization. The Jesuit community made two major gifts to Boston College in the 1980s that promote the Jesuit traditions of the University. The community endowed the Thomas I. Gasson, S.J. Catholic colleges and universities held onto a distinctive character longer by emphasizing philosophy, especially ethics, and by fencing out modernity and contemporary secular culture so far as possible. These institutions mirrored the original movement of the population westward as well as the later waves of European immigration to the urban centers of the East and Midwest. Christianity is a religion of the book. The Jesuit Ordo contains the Order of Celebration for the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours for Jesuits in the United States. Chartered in 1863, the College and high school opened in September 1864. These offer us an opportunity to realize again the aspiration of every academic community — to grasp hold of the truths our times require — and the dream that we envision in the image of God's kingdom — to have a share in creating a world that will participate in perfect charity and justice. A particular version suits a historical moment and its issues. Their education should help them deepen their sense of wonder and curiosity, cultivate their ideals, widen their understanding of human life and their sympathy for others, and form principles that will enable them to choose how best to live for their own good and the good of other men and women. This point of view discloses God to the discerning eye and discloses God drawing all that is of our world and all that is human into God's own life. Endowments from civic leaders and benefactors enabled them to charge no fees, so they made education accessible to large numbers of the less well off. Dziak served as the president of the school, which is located in Kingston, Jamaica. Some of the legendary Jesuit figures of the twentieth century at Boston College: Father J. F. X. Murphy, History Professor of encyclopedic memory and inexhaustible speech; Father Patrick McHugh, beloved dean, 1920–1935; Father Martin Harney, historian, author, promoter of Irish culture; Father Francis McManus, benevolent yet whip-cracking Dean of Men in the College of Business Administration, later indefatigable Chaplain of the Alumni Association; Father John A. McCarthy, admired Professor of Philosophy, priestly witness at countless alumni marriages. The character of Boston College matters because of the central role universities can play in the struggle of men and women across the world to achieve lives that befit their full dignity as human beings. After World War II, the School of Nursing was opened in 1946, with Father Anthony Carroll as regent and Mary Maher dean. Center for Ignatian Spirituality Programs At Boston College High School, we follow the Jesuit ideal of living compassionately in service of others. Do we have the freedom and the confidence in our beliefs to open up these questions to one another's experiences and convictions and to seek a common understanding of the issues and what is at stake in them? Jesuit astronomers, dramatists, theologians, linguists, painters, architects, mathematicians and scholars of every stamp were immersed in the intellectual movements of the day. We might even say that it is a consequence of the very idea of education. Under his direction, the Society of Jesus established schools throughout the continent beginning in Messina, Sicily, in 1548. The most concretely visible way of doing this is to foster the kind of discourse that brings religious concerns into dialogue with the disciplines of knowledge. It requires humility in the face of our own ignorance and reverence before a mystery that is always disclosing itself in ways that surprise us. How do those of us who spend our lives in universities embody a vision like this concretely? And no other institution is so clearly suited to bringing critical intelligence to bear on the longings and struggles of men and women to achieve a world that befits their dignity. In the 1990s, the argument would go, these institutions offer upper-middle-class students a vaguely liberal education colored by a rhetoric of spiritual values whose most visible embodiment is a chaplaincy, a theology department, and volunteer service programs. Jesuits founded this college in the South End of Boston in 1863 to give the sons of immigrants an intellectual formation that would provide a Catholic moral and religious framework for their lives and prepare them to be citizens of the growing American republic. Father Monan, who came from the New York province of the Society of Jesus, highlights how Boston College has benefited from the exchange of Jesuits across province boundaries in recent decades. ... Summary Programs + Results Financials Operations. The more we know about the suffering of men and women and the causes of these ills, and the more we can imagine ways of remedying them, the closer we come to the imperative to use our knowledge in action. In the US alone, the Jesuits sponsor 28 colleges and universities and 47 high schools, while worldwide they educate approximately 1 million students in 2,300 schools. In the 17th century religion and reason began to take different sides in arguments about the world, human nature, and political society. Do we have the will and the intellectual means to move in a contrary direction? A prominent figure of the 19th-century Boston College Jesuit Community was Father Robert Fulton, who was the first dean. A recent and strikingly different notion of educational mission has led some Jesuits to see universities as instruments of cultural, social, and political analysis in the service of a biblical vision of justice and as means of educating students to an awareness of these issues. Perhaps an answer can only be given in some such form as this, by pointing to concrete examples of a vision at work. When in 1547 Ignatius was asked to open a school in Sicily for young men who were not Jesuits, he seems to have seen the opportunity as a powerful means of forming the mind and the soul. True to their heritage, Jesuits remain contemplatives in action who, like their founder, engage critical challenges of the world. The university has an indispensable role to play in shaping responses to these challenges. The prosperity of the few coexists with the suffering of the many. Paradoxically, however, these disciplines have forced into the light precisely the issues their descriptive and quantitative methodologies had originally aimed at avoiding: the problem of the concrete choosing subject, of how meaning is constructed that can guide choice, and of the consequences of constructing meaning in different ways. Yet another model is represented by the numerous service programs (undertaken by the chaplaincy, Student Affairs offices, and others) in the city and in other parts of the country and abroad, which students and faculty and staff participate in. They gave students an adroitness of mind in meeting new questions, a foundation from which to explore the more important questions they would come to later in their studies. That preference disposed them to accept the care of schools when unexpectedly the opportunity was offered. Few of the hundreds of American colleges and universities founded with a religious vision have kept their identities intact. The oldest model of a religiously oriented education that we can see operating at Boston College is the most generic. But would we really say that we have squarely faced all the implications of the drastic separation of religion and the life of the mind in contemporary intellectual culture? The intellectual criteria for judging this formation, from the first undergraduate years to the highest level of professional and graduate education, are familiar to anyone immersed in university life. It does this in various ways: by bringing the disciplines it studies into dialogue with religious faith in its different forms, by creating a place for this dialogue in the curriculum, by stimulating the kind of research that brings this dialogue to bear on current public issues, by giving serious attention to theological reflection, by educating men and women for ministry and leadership in religious organizations, by fostering a lively liturgical life on the campus, by providing pastoral support for the spiritual development of its members, and by giving them opportunities to express their convictions in service to others. A university realizes this principle if it is a community of inquiry whose disciplines are constantly in dialogue with one another to formulate the central questions that move men and women to wonder about the world and their lives and to find ever more adequate answers for these questions. A Jesuit priest who founded a Catholic service group resembling the Peace Corps before facing complaints of inappropriate conduct at Boston College and Loyola University is now accused of raping a subordinate on a volunteer mission. Many of these changes have taken place in the last twenty-five years, symbolized by the inauguration of a predominantly lay board of trustees in 1971.

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