On Spending Three Days with a Couple of Thousand Jesuit Students

I GOT TO spend a couple of days this autumn at the 25th annual Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice — it was the first time I’d been there, and it cheered me immensely. Formed in the 1990s in response to the murder of Jesuit priests and lay leaders in El Salvador, it was originally held outside the School of the Americas at Fort Benning in Georgia, where the officer corps of often-repressive armies trained (including the Salvadoran military who murdered the Jesuits). Civil disobedience was often a feature of the Teach-In.

Now, it’s held in D.C., and mainly young people attend: a couple of thousand students at Jesuit high schools and colleges across the nation. This year’s participants were a diverse bunch, and extraordinary in the quality of their attention and engagement. I came away heartened, even amid the political chaos of the moment.

I also came away impressed at the role that memory plays in the network. Though these kids were born after the civil war in El Salvador had ended, speaker after speaker reminded them of the martyrs of that day and age, and it was clear that upholding their memory cast an air of real purpose over the whole affair.

The Catholic Church, it seems to me, does a much better job at memory than most Protestant sects (a clear exception are the Anabaptists, with their deeply grooved recollections of the European martyrs of their early years). At several points, the familiar face of Archbishop Óscar Romero flashed up on the screen at the giant auditorium, and I was shocked back into those hideous days around his death. I hadn’t thought about him for a long time. But in 2018, Rome canonized Romero, and as a saint his story will be repeated year after year, in perpetuity. (The Anglicans have also put him on their list of saints, and the Lutherans honor him in the liturgical calendar.)

We’re in a period when we look askance at honoring people: These days, we’re probably more interested in displacing people from pedestals than in erecting new monuments. That’s understandable, but it’s also a loss — the point, perhaps, of the lives of the saints is to remind us that it’s possible for us to do much more than we do, because someone else already has.

The kids gathered in that auditorium — focused on issues of race, of climate, of social justice — won’t live through the same history that made martyrs of Romero and the Jesuits. But they are informed now by that history, at least in the loose and informal understanding that conviction can come with a cost, and that those who pay that cost for us will be remembered.