I dropped out of the hellish university at the end of freshman year. I heard (about five years after graduating the prep school that my very best teacher had suffered a serious stroke, could speak with difficulty but was just barely able to receive visitors at the magnificent Rice Mansion that was the Jesuit residence. I suspected that he might die and I wanted to get the benefit of his wisdom before he did.
He was no socialist and certainly no agnostic and he was every inch a man's man. He was a professional baseball player (left hand pitcher) to the age of 42 and never got a cup of major league coffee even in spring training but, until his arm was just about falling off, he was stubbornly following his dream of MLB.
Then, single and unable to pitch, and quite Irish Catholic he determined to enter the priesthood and chose the Jesuits because "This time I was going to start in the major leagues."
Only five years after my graduation, he told me that the prep school I knew was no more. "Baking classes! Modules in Modern Dance!...."
The Superior General (the "Black Pope) in the mid-1960s until the early 1980s) was the Basque Pedro Arrupe, until now, the single most despicable excuse for a Superior General in the entire history of the Jesuit Order. Arrupe effectively the Jesuit Order and they have een laying low ever since. Now under Frankie the Phony they are apparently ready to become a full-fledged menace.
If you attended a Jesuit secondary school in the Northeast in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the experiece was overwhelmingly positive. Those dedicated Jesuits, often Irish-Americans such as your role model, took working class kids, strove mightily to inspire them to become “Christian cultured gentlemen” and teach them a love of learning. They were proud Catholics and made no apologies and were not afraid to be counter cultural in the best sense of the word. It is with the greatest sadness to observe the descent of the Jesuit order. Frankly any parent who sends his child to a Jesuit college or university for a Catholic education is being defrauded. The secondary schools have declined as well.