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.The golden age of Jesuit higher education expansion came to aclose with the founding of the last three new institutions FairfieldUniversity in 1942, LeMoyne College in Syracuse in 1946, and Wheel- 196 The Golden Ageing College, later University, in 1954.All were in suburbs rather thancities, in very beautiful settings, with, inevitably, modern buildingsbuilt on hilly land where architecture and landscaping could providethat welcoming atmosphere, a message to a student that he or she willboth be breaking into a strange new world and yet feel at home.Fair-field s campus, less than a mile from U.S.95, combined the propertiesof two old estates.LeMoyne, named for the Jesuit missionary SimonLeMoyne, a contemporary of Issac Jogues, is in Syracuse, upstate NewYork, not very far from the Mohawk Valley and Auriesville, whereJogues and Goupil were killed.The Maryland Province accepted theinvitation of Wheeling s Bishop Swint because they shared his convic-tion that the coal-mining country of West Virginia should have a Cath-olic university.Now it was as if the academic frontier had closed.America had as many Jesuits colleges and universities as it could ab-sorb.Now the system could not expand; but, in many ways, it stillhad to grow.In 1991, William Sullivan, S.J., Seattle s 20th president, finished his20th year in office on the university s 100th anniversary.He spoke formany presidents in the introduction to his own university s history:Almost the entire first century of Seattle university has been a time ofstruggle.The lack of resources from the beginning, the dearth of stu-dents, the exodus to Roanoke Street for 13 years, the impact of worldWar II and the Vietnam War, the rapid turnover of presidents in thelate Sixties and early Seventies all these factors paint a picture ofadversity far greater than that experienced by many other Americanuniversities.The one clear lesson of this history, he says, is that the will to sur-vive and faith in a mission can carry through troubled times.Since1941 the G.I.Bill and the Second Vatican Council have brought irre-versible changes.Meanwhile, a university is necessarily dynamic, butit must preserve the way in which it differs from other institutions likeitself.What he wrote about Seattle in 1991 described the past and thefuture of perhaps all the other Jesuits across the country at the end oftheir common golden age of growth. PART IVThe Modern Society Emerges 13Freedom from FearShaking Off the SuppressionIn general, novices in the late 1950s knew nothing that was going onin the outside world, outside the gates of the country novitiate, untilthe novice master at the morning conference dropped headlines onthem from papers they were not allowed to read and radio reportsthey were not allowed to hear.But 1958 was a hot news year by anystandard.On October 9 they learned that Pius XII had died.Those who hadbeen reading the secular press before they came in may have knowntwo things: this pope had been most unsympathetic to the movementof the worker priests, where, in Europe, priests took off their collarsand took on factory jobs as a way of reestablishing contact with theworking masses alienated from the church.He had also, in 1955, in anexhortation to the Society, said: Among the superfluous things that aJesuit could very well do without is the habit of smoking tobacco. Clearly, this was something which Jesuits who had his ear had askedhim to include in his talk, to give teeth to the injunctions FathersLedochowski and Maher had proclaimed to deaf ears.Novices whohad read Time magazine before entering knew that two Vatican starsnamed Tardini and Montini, Montini the more liberal of the two,were in the wings as a future pope.On October 28, 1958, Cardinal Angelo Roncalli, 77 years old, ofwhom no one had heard, was chosen.At first, hearts sank.How couldthis old man give vigorous leadership? Then the letters from homesnuck in old photos of Roncalli the diplomat at a reception in Turkeywith a cocktail in one hand and a cigarette in the other.There washope.On July 25, 1959, Roncalli, now John XXIII, announced that he wascalling an Ecumenical Council, Vatican II, the first since Vatican I, in1870, which, against resistance from some of the American hierarchy,199 200 Freedom from Fearhad proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility and set the tone forthe defensive, walled-off mentality which was to characterize thechurch until this moment.Now he famously opened the windows and let in the intellectual and cultural history of the last hundredyears the impact of Darwin, Marx, and Freud, and also John Dewey categorized in philosophy classes as adversaries to be refutedrather than as geniuses with insights that must be understood.Withina few years the Society of Jesus the young men had joined would beradically changed.Statistically, the American Society of Jesus was at its apogee.In1950, there were 6,897 American Jesuits; by 1960 the number rose to 8,338.It never reached that peak again.In 1970, there were 7, 055.Whilethe number of priests from 1960 to 2000 was well over 4,000, the num-ber of scholastics plummeted precipitously from 3,116 in 1960 to 714 in1980.Ironically, however, regardless of the dramatic plunge in mem-bership, which can be explained in many ways, the perspective ofhistory marks these years as a revolution, renaissance, rebirth, as in the Greek myth of Anteus, who, every time in combat he wasslammed down against his mother earth, gained new strength for thebattle.The principal catalytic element, from one point of view, was Vati-can II and Jesuit participation in this astonishing event.But the seedsof the flowering had been planted years before.A fundamental stepfor American Jesuits in joining the silent revolution was shaking offthe psychological wounds of the 19th and early 20th centuries thathad rendered them timorous and unmanned.Samuel K.Wilson, S.J
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