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By Donald N.S. Unger
What's
Changed and What Hasn't
 Most of them share Latin Mass as a childhood
memory, the priest with his back to the congregation. But
for all of them, having been ordained in the aftermath of
the Second Vatican Council, when they've presided over
Mass themselves, it has always been facing the congregation
and in the local language, as priests presiding among, rather
than presiding over.
Up through the late 1960s, Jesuit faculty at Holy Cross
walked Mount Saint James in the cassock. In the early 1970s,
as a result of Jesuit response to Vatican II, this custom
came to an end. Some Jesuits wore black and the Roman collar;
most simply donned the jackets and ties of their lay colleagues.
Today, that stylistic blending is near total: Jesuit faculty
wear liturgical vestments when presiding in the campus chapel;
some make a point of wearing the Roman collar for certain
classes - some religious studies courses, for example - or
as a matter of respect, and as a teaching tool; but walking
into one of the departmental lounges on campus on an average
day, one is hard pressed to sort who's who by appearance,
whether the dress is suit jackets or button-down shirts or
jeans.
But ask William Clark, Brian Linnane, James Miracky, Paul
Nienaber, William Stempsey or Thomas Worcester, the younger
six of the dozen active Jesuit faculty, or Gerard McKeon
'76, an associate chaplain, about the ways in which the younger
Jesuits - those under age 50 - are different from
the Jesuits that came before them and the ways in which the
vocation has changed, and one would be more likely to draw
a smile and a gently amused response, than either defensiveness
or a reprimand.
As historian Fr. Tom Worcester puts it, "The
notion of tradition is one that's organic and growing
and changing, but within that there is a basic commitment
to an optimistic assessment of the dignity of the human person,
of reason as not a threat to religion."
Jesuits have
always worked to fit themselves into the culture in which
they live and work, you would be told; their worldliness
has long been something from which they have drawn strength
and which has attracted criticism.
A common description
of how the order has often seen itself - this
metaphor came up, in one form or another, in virtually every
conversation - is that Jesuits are positioned along edges
and fault lines, interpreting in more than one direction,
explaining the Church to the world and the world to the Church.
And, while certainly acknowledging change, all of the Jesuits
named above and discussed on the following pages would be
more likely to point to deeper continuities, paramount among
them the ongoing commitment to the ideals that informed the
founding of Holy Cross and of other Jesuit institutions,
academic and otherwise.
"We give glory to God by developing
our intellectual capacities," Fr. Gerry McKeon says. "We
give glory to God by developing the whole person. Educating
the whole person: spiritual, intellectual and physical. That's
very much part of our tradition."
Their clothing is
different; their pedagogical and scholarly methods are everything
from traditional to modern to postmodern - or
sometimes all of those things, and sometimes in the space
of the same class. Their goals, however, whether spiritual
or intellectual, and their underlying faith - these things
have not changed.
Donald N.S. Unger is a free-lance journalist
from Worcester, Mass.
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