Janice Farnham, R.J.M., professor of church history at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.:
I suppose the question before all of us is, "What does it mean to be Catholic?  What does it mean to be Jesuit and to be a university or to be a college?"  The challenge for the Society of Jesus, and really for all those who are working with Jesuits, is how is the style of the Jesuits, which has been so important over a 400-year history, how is that style going to be translated into the world of the third millennium?

Thomas Landy, director of the Collegium program at Fairfield University, Fairfield, Conn.:
We thought we knew rather clearly what Catholic or Jesuit higher education was about.  We focused on scholastic philosophy, we worked out a core, and we had a pretty clear set of ideas that were supposed to be fixed for all time.  And as we came out of that in the '60's and '70's, I'm not sure if we really knew where to go.

Lisa Sowle Cahill, professor of theology at Boston College in Chestnut Hill, Mass.:
I think what Jesuits are bringing to higher education in North America that's really distinctive is a refusal to fragment intellectual disciplines and to let the professions become mere professionalization.  Jesuit universities are places where professional education, where intellectual inquiry, where publication, and where teaching never lose sight of the bigger questions of human meaning and commitment and human values that give intellectual study its real meaning and its ultimate value.

Joseph Tetlow, S.J., director of the Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality, Rome, Italy:
So we've come to the point now where the Jesuits have almost finished turning over our schools to our lay colleagues.  We are now the helpers and more than that, we are now having to say to our lay colleagues, "What do you want us to do?  How can we help?"

And what we're discovering is the thing that we bring is what we've brought all along.  The sort of crust of our education - whether you do this course or that course and how much philosophy - that is the crust, and that is not what we really brought.

We're looking back now and saying, "Hey, we borrowed that anyhow.  Our universities and our colleges in America are much more American than they are Jesuit."  So we're saying the heart of the matter is spirituality.

Most Jesuits that I know feel, "Yeah, you know, we did it well.  We did well.  Look at the terrific people whom we invited into this 'compañia,' as it were, who really want the school to remain Catholic and to remain Jesuit."

So now we need to find out, "Ok, what is the next step?"

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