Jesuit Order Looks To The Future With Fewer Priests To Run Schools

Among the 28 Jesuit universities and colleges in America, only one has a president who is not a Jesuit priest. She’s a nun.

Jesuits throughout the country are debating whether they can afford to continue the tradition of restricting the job of chief executive at their schools to those who are members of the Society of Jesus.

While there is no agreement on that issue, the reality is that there are fewer and fewer Jesuits to apply for such positions - fewer than 4,000 in the United States.

“It will happen - there’s a real probability that lay people will become presidents at Jesuit colleges,” said the Rev. Paul Locatelli, chairman of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and president of Santa Clara University in California. “But not soon.”

One of the smallest Jesuit schools, Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Mo., is considering just such a move.

Last week, the Rev. Peter Ely, former rector of the Spokane Jesuit community and Gonzaga vice president, resigned in the wake of faculty opposition. He had been in office for only 10 months.

John Hayes, chairman of the Rockhurst board of trustees, said he has directed his search committee to examine the possibility of hiring a non-Jesuit.

“We’ll change the bylaws if the committee concludes we need to go beyond the Jesuit community to find a president,” he said.

During the previous search for a president at Rockhurst, there were only two applicants.

It used to be that most of the professors as well as administrators at Jesuit schools were priests. That gradually changed as the number of men joining the priesthood declined dramatically beginning in the 1960s.

Despite that, Jesuit schools have managed to retain their religious nature and identity.

Locatelli said keeping Jesuits in the presidency has a lot to do with that.

“There’s no reason to think that lay people cannot carry out the Jesuit principles,” Hayes said. “We shouldn’t decide the presidency of a college based on Jesuit or non-Jesuit status. It needs to be someone who has a deep foundation of (Jesuit) principles.”

Locatelli acknowledged that small schools, particularly those that have experienced recent controversy, may have a difficult time attracting applicants. The board of trustees at Gonzaga, who fired the most recent president because he didn’t get along with some trustees, will limit its search for a new president to Jesuits.

Locatelli said that before abandoning the Jesuit-only rule, he hopes colleges first will attempt to aggressively recruit qualified Jesuits.

“There is a pool of Jesuits to become college presidents,” Locatelli said. “How boards recruit those people is going to be important.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo