Teach, Pray, Live

The new eco-friendly residence for Jesuits at Fairfield University in Connecticut is centrally located in the hopes of increasing the priests' visibility on campus.

WHEN 10 Jesuit priests moved into their new home at Fairfield University about a year ago, some of them couldn’t fit their old desks into their new bedrooms. And “we live out of our desks,” says the Rev. Mark P. Scalese, who teaches at the university. He was referring to the Jesuits’ penchant for learning, as reflected in a 10-year training period known as “formation” that includes extensive graduate education. Many end up with three or four advanced degrees.

Expansive yet modest, the residence has a chapel and large social hall.

But if the Jesuits at Fairfield had to sacrifice their old furniture, they were doing so to magnify their presence. Their new residence, boldly contemporary and centrally located, was designed to increase their visibility at a time when the number of Jesuits on campus has been falling.

At Fairfield’s leafy campus in southwestern Connecticut, the Jesuits teach subjects as diverse as philosophy and film production, while trying to help students develop “spiritual depth,” in the words of the Rev. Dr. Paul J. Fitzgerald, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs. Their goal is to remain relevant, a problem on a campus where student concerns range from the shortage of parking spaces to rules forbidding the distribution of condoms.

Once there were nearly 100 Jesuits — members of an order founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century — at Fairfield. Today, there are 22. Only six are professors; the others are administrators, or retired. That means some of the university’s 3,200 undergraduates will make it through four years without having a single Jesuit professor.

The graying of the Jesuit population is felt at each of the 28 Jesuit-run institutions of higher learning in the United States, from Georgetown University in Washington, founded in 1789, to Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia, established in 1954. Nationwide, the number of Jesuits has declined, to under 3,000 from about 10,000 in 1965. More than half are over age 60. That they aren’t being replaced by younger Jesuits is the result of social and economic circumstances, including increased opportunity for poor Catholics and the stringent requirements of the priesthood. (“In my experience, mandatory celibacy is far and away the biggest deal breaker,” says Father Scalese.)

But the declining numbers “don’t mean we’re all sulking off into the sunset,” says the Rev. Dr. Charles L. Currie, president of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

Fairfield’s new Jesuit home, a 22,000-square-foot eco-friendly building, is part of an effort to reach out to students and non-Jesuit faculty. Unlike their previous house, in an isolated spot on the periphery of campus, the new structure commands a prominent hillside overlooking a main thoroughfare.

“There was a conscious desire to have a front door that opens to the campus,” says Father Scalese, who was on the committee that helped plan the new building. It was designed by Gray Organschi Architecture, a New Haven firm, as both a symbol of openness and a tool for reaching out to the university community. The building contains a chapel, counseling rooms and a large social hall. “We can have people over, to talk about how, together, a small group of Jesuits and hundreds of faculty and staff do the Jesuit university thing,” Father Fitzgerald says.

The Jesuit university thing, he says, includes helping students avoid fragmented lives — “when they party with their friends, they are tempted to have one personality and set of values, and then in class they have a second personality and set of values, and then they come home to see their parents for holidays, and they have a third personality and a third set of values.”

ONE way Fairfield hopes to help is by requiring freshmen to take classes with their dorm-mates, so that they live and study with the same group. Sophomores choose dorms with themes derived from Jesuit teachings, including justice, leadership, environmental stewardship and creativity. One with a religious focus offers monthly mentor meetings to discuss such questions as “Who am I called to be?” Seven Jesuits live in apartments in the undergraduate dorms, where they hold weekly Mass and open-door hours.

Fred A. Bernstein is an architecture writer based in New York.