 Boston’s Immaculate Conception Church (right), dedicated in 1861, gives a hint of the age of urban Jesuit parish ministry in the United States. Dating from 1641, St. Ignatius in Port Tobacco, Maryland (below), is an indication of Jesuit parish ministry in rural areas at the onset of their work in the United States. |
|
|
JESUIT. The word conjures up many images. Professor. Teacher. Missionary. Theologian. Preacher. Martyr. Retreat director. Parish priest. Parish priest? Jesuit parish priest? The terms may seem to be mutually exclusive. The fact is that Jesuits in the United States have long served in parishes, either their own or ones belonging to dioceses. Jesuit parish ministry is so varied, in fact, that it would be impossible to highlight each of the 83 Jesuit parishes in the United States. We do know, however, where Jesuit parish ministry in this country began: English Jesuits arrived with the Catholic colonists in Maryland in 1634. In a sense, parishes were the first ministries of the Jesuits in what only years later became the United States. Right after missionary Fr. Andrew White, SJ, celebrated the first Jesuit mass in English North America on St. Clements Island in 1634, he and other English Jesuits began establishing a number of Catholic sanctuaries in what later became Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New York. Among them was St. Ignatius in Port Tobacco, Maryland (dating from 1641, one of the oldest parishes in continuous service in the country) and Old St. Joseph’s, the first Catholic church in Philadelphia. This tiny chapel tucked way down Willings Alley deserves the “old” in its name, having been founded in 1733. |
St. Francis Xavier St. Louis In 1836, Jesuits got permission from the bishop to found St. Francis Xavier in conjunction with Saint Louis Uni-versity. The current church has been serving school and city since 1884. |
What looks like a Model-T truck (foreground) underscores the age of St. Francis Xavier Church, completed in 1882. Decorated with Tiffany stained glass and Carrera marble, it is nonetheless a parish with a crammed calendar of events, spiritual groups, and a heavy weekday and weekend mass schedule. |
Many Jesuit parishes are closely linked with Jesuit schools. St. Francis Xavier, next to Xavier High School, and St. Ignatius Loyola, next to Loyola School and Regis High School, are in New York. St. Francis Xavier, in the midst of Saint Louis University’s campus, is a parish and university church. Brophy Prep and St. Francis Xavier in Phoenix grew up together since the early 1930s, while Holy Trinity Church, just off Georgetown University’s campus in Washington, D.C., was once the university church. Just as it did at its inception at the end of the eighteenth century, Holy Trinity serves households in Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia. Five Jesuits staff the parish, still very much linked with the university through its affiliation with the university’s Jesuit Center for Spirituality and the Georgetown Center for Liturgy.
Another of the many Jesuit churches associated with schools is St. Ignatius Loyola in Boston. Built in 1949, it served Irish domestics living in the neighborhood and also Boston College. Today’s congregation, from single college grads to younger and older families, comes from throughout the Boston area and includes many Jesuit alumni. One sign of modern times: parishioners have the option of making weekly donations via automatic bank transfers and credit cards instead of more-traditional parish offerings that land in baskets. According to pastor Fr. Robert VerEecke, SJ, St. Ignatius is a “microcosm” of Jesuit ministries, offering education, social outreach, and spiritual development programs.
You’ll find a good number of Jesuit parishes downtown as well. New Orleans’s Immaculate Conception, in the central business district, ministers to hundreds of homeless men and women in its parish outreach center and sponsors Café Reconcile, a restaurant that trains the poor for positions in the hospitality industry. St. Michael’s, in downtown Buffalo, is staffed by eight Jesuits who range in age from 64 to 87.
One of the unusual stories the pastor, Fr. Ronald Sams, SJ, relates involves a homeless man who stays at the church every day from 6:30 in the morning until late afternoon. He knows where in the city to go for meals and sleeps at night under the stairs of the downtown Episcopal cathedral. He is always in church praying before the Blessed Sacrament and serves as an usher whenever needed. He is indeed a faithful parishioner, even though he lacks an address.
|
Sts. Peter and Paul Detroit Sts. Peter and Paul, dating from 1848, is across the street from Detroit’s much newer landmark, the Renaissance Center. The parish warming center and its 7:35 P.M. “last mass in town” on Sunday for restaurant goers are among the ways it serves its city. 
|
Detroit’s Sts. Peter and Paul, across the street from the city’s famed Renaissance Center, is the city’s oldest church building (it opened in 1848). It was the bishop’s cathedral until Jesuits arrived to begin their educational ministry with the University of Detroit, founded in 1877. Today, only the university’s law school remains next to the church, whose principal ministerial outreach is to the indigent population of the neighborhood.
In its 143-year history, the Church of the Immaculate Conception (also known as the Jesuit Urban Center), in Boston’s historic South End, has seen its share of changes in clientele and in ministry: the church today is a center for ministry to those with AIDS. It is, in fact, a church committed to being a place of welcome for not only all lesbian and gay persons but for all who feel in any way particularly challenged living in the contemporary Church.
In downtown El Paso, a mere four blocks from the international bridge leading to Mexico, is Sacred Heart Parish, one of a number of Jesuit parishes founded by Fr. Carlos Pinto, SJ, in the 1890s. Jesuits once staffed almost every church in the city; today’s Sacred Heart is the last of these, and it is one of the poorest worshiping communities in the United States. It must be the only Jesuit parish that employs a chef/manager—necessary for the Tortilleria Sagrado Corazon, a tortilla factory and restaurant that helps support the church.
Jesuit parishes also came into being as a direct result of requests from bishops. Saving St. Agnes in San Francisco from extinction in 1994, the Jesuits responded to a call from San Francisco’s archbishop and assumed responsibility for this parish in the famous Haight-Ashbury district. The parish has the distinction of having an Episcopal priest as director of its spiritual life center. The predominant ethnic groups in the parish are Anglo and Filipino. St. Agnes is a “blending of old and young families, a healthy and growing young adult population, and an inclusive congregation with regards to our gay and lesbian sisters and brothers,” says Fr. J. Cameron Ayers, SJ, pastor of this parish whose Sunday mass attendance has grown from around 70 when the Jesuits arrived to about 550 today.
It was another diocesan request that got Jesuits to staff St. Peter’s in Charlotte, North Carolina, in 1986. Established in 1851, St. Peter’s, another downtown church, was the first Catholic church in the city and the only one there until 1939. The parish’s 830 families come from all directions, even nearby towns, and are undertaking a capital campaign that will expand church facilities and programs.
St. Patrick’s in Oakland, California, established in 1879, became a Jesuit parish in 1999 through a unique agreement between Berkeley’s Jesuit School of Theology and the Oakland diocese. Jesuit theology students participate in St. Patrick’s parish life, gaining practical experience in ministry to a congregation that is now mainly African-American and Hispanic.
Another diocesan parish later entrusted to the Jesuits is St. Anthony, on Long Island, 24 miles east of New York City. This middle-class suburban community is evenly divided among Catholics, Jews, and Protestants. Founded in 1927, St. Anthony’s became a Jesuit parish in 1978 and today is a parish of 4,800 families, mostly Anglo but with active Hispanic and Filipino minorities. The parish’s level of activity is apparent in the twelve masses each weekend and the fact that 1,600 children are enrolled in religious education.
Sts. Peter and Paul Mankato, Minnesota German Jesuits from the Buffalo area, responding to a request from the St. Paul bishop, arrived in 1874, the year Sts. Peter and Paul was completed, to minister to the area’s German populace. |
Requests from dioceses for staffing are far-from-recent reasons for parishes to become Jesuit ministries. Sts. Peter and Paul in Mankato, Minnesota, for instance, was entrusted to the Jesuits in 1874, twenty years after the parish was established. Descendants of the original parishioners, German-speaking farmers, are still represented in today’s congregation and augmented by others who descended from later Irish immigrants and much more recent groups of Lebanese, Vietnamese, and Hispanics—even some from East Africa—to constitute the parish’s 1,300 households.
In 1871, at the invitation of the local bishop, the Jesuits founded St. Joseph in Yakima, Washington. Today’s congregation comprises 3,500 families, the majority of whom are Mexicans who immigrated to the area in the ’60s and ’70s; the Anglos in this older part of Yakima are usually elderly. Its twelve weekend masses are split between Spanish and English in this church that accommodates a thousand. Built in 2001, it replaced a 1905 edifice destroyed by fire in 1999 (though the new building incorporates the older facade).
A number of Jesuit parishes began as ministries to distinct ethnic communities. A good example is St. Rita of Cascia in Tacoma, Washington. Founded in 1922 to serve specifically the area’s Italian immigrants, it became a geographical parish in 1979. While the congregation is still predominantly Italian-American, it has welcomed a number of Vietnamese families. With 283 registered households, affording a real chance for members of the community to get to know one another, St. Rita has a genuine sense of a family.
The names of St. Rita’s pastors—Bruno, Biagini, Baffaro, and today’s Carmine Sacco—reflect its roots as a Catholic “national” parish, one that ministered to a distinct nationality, in this case Italians. |
St. Charles Borromeo, in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, is a parish in a rural area. Founded in 1819, it was staffed by Jesuits starting in the 1830s when they established St. Charles College. During the segregation era, St. Charles became Sacred Heart, the white parish; Christ the King Church was built for African-Americans. Now there is but one church, St. Charles, whose mission is in Bellevue, a more-rural area. While some parishioners have adopted the church because the area is a bedroom community for the nearby cities of Lafayette and Opelousas, many others come from farms in this southern section of St. Landry Parish (as counties are referred to in Louisiana).
In 1939 the bishop of Raleigh, North Carolina, asked the Jesuits to undertake an African-American apostolate in Durham. The first masses were held at a “beauty parlor training school.” Thus was Holy Cross Catholic Church born, still today a predominantly African-American parish.
Though St. Ignatius Loyola, in Spring, Texas, outside Houston, is a relatively new (founded in 1985) suburban parish, its more than 3,000 registered families are a mix of Anglos, Asians, Hispanics, and African-Americans. Already building a second church in 2003 to accommodate this burgeoning suburb, the parish has adopted a clearly Jesuit motto: “A people for others.” With only two priests, St. Ignatius depends upon the assistance of literally hundreds of volunteers. One program with a very unusual name, Ignites, is one of weekly recreation and faith-sharing geared toward high schoolers.
University Heights, Ohio, an overwhelmingly Catholic and Jewish community named for John Carroll University, is home to Gesu Parish. Virtually every ethnic group finds representation in this congregation: Irish, German, various Slavic groups, Filipino, Lebanese, African-American, even Nigerian. Gesu’s social outreach programs include sending groups of up to 40 parishioners, assisted by the Cleveland Clinic, to staff medical and dental clinics in rural Honduras three times a year. One way the parish grade school has benefited from the proximity of the university is that many John Carroll education students do practice teaching there; some of them become faculty members after they graduate.
|
Day care, adult education, an alternative school for at-risk youth, a job center, clothes and food for the homeless—Dolores Mission lives out a true mission for L.A.’s Hispanic residents. 
|
Jesuit parishes, like the Jesuits who serve them, come in all sizes, shapes, and ethnic backgrounds. Every Catholic parish desires to be a welcoming community where the gospel of Christ is proclaimed so that all may hear it and accept it in their lives. Jesuits bring to parish work their own particular spirituality, especially that which is centered on the Kingdom of Christ. The priests and brothers in parish work seek to offer experiences in which their worshiping communities may see Christ more clearly, love Christ more dearly, and follow Christ more nearly—day by day. 
Fr. Donald Hawkins, SJ, is associate pastor at Holy Name of Jesus Church in New Orleans and archivist for the New Orleans Province.