Fewer Jesuit priests this Easter, but more people learning Jesuit ideals

When John Langan came to Georgetown University in 1975 as a young Jesuit priest, he was one of 112 brothers from the Catholic order on campus. Jesuit Robert Drinan, a Massachusetts Democrat, was in Congress, and Jesuit John McLaughlin had recently been in the West Wing advising Republican President Richard Nixon.

Today there are barely half as many Jesuits at Georgetown, the order’s flagship university. Gonzaga, a Jesuit high school in Northwest Washington, is down to 17, compared with 43 in 1970. There’s talk that St. Aloysius, a Jesuit parish in the District known for its social justice efforts, could close when the last remaining Jesuit leaves. And there are no full-time Jesuit staff members at the Washington Jesuit Academy, where the board chairman is Jewish.

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 Starting with Palm Sunday, area Christians celebrate the tradition-filled run-up to Easter Sunday.

Jesuits are vanishing from the Washington area, where they established the first Catholic parish in the Colonies.

When Langan’s fellow Jesuits gather Thursday for an annual post-Easter dinner at Georgetown, a topic of table chat will be transition. The regional Jesuit office is in the midst of merging with two other shrinking offices to create one that extends from Maine to Georgia.

“If I haven’t been in a place for a while, I have a sense of shock when I walk in and realize the Jesuits are now gone, or there are only a few,” said Langan, a philosophy professor and rector to the Jesuits at Georgetown.

Looking at the Jesuits’ slip from public life is particularly poignant during Holy Week — when Catholics believe Jesus created the priesthood — and especially so in the Washington region, where Jesuits essentially laid the foundation for Catholicism in the English-speaking Colonies.

As the first Catholic priests in the Colonies, Jesuits created the country’s first Catholic parish in 1641 in St. Mary’s County. American Jesuits call the D.C.-Baltimore branch of the order “the mother province.”

Some of Washington’s most esteemed institutions are Jesuit: Georgetown University and Georgetown Preparatory School, Gonzaga College High School, St. Aloysius Gonzaga Church and the 10,000-member Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown.

Part of Washington’s fabric and pride is Jesuit, or what some in the order call the “Jesuit brand,” or “Jesuitica” — an ethos of people who are highly educated and activist. Jesuits are the archetype of priests with PhDs who protest in the streets or otherwise advocate for causes, often politically liberal ones.

The trend of fewer priests isn’t unique to the Washington region or to the Jesuits. The number of Catholic priests in the United States has been falling for decades.

But even as the Jesuits brace for near-extinction in this part of the world, their ideals are spreading.

The lack of new priests, they say, must be part of God’s vision for lay people. So rather than mourn, the Jesuits have been busy building an elaborate system for passing along their beliefs and unique meditative rituals, imaginative prayer known as the “spiritual exercises.”

In recent years, the Jesuits have started programs to teach the ways of their founder, 16th-century theologian Ignatius of Loyola, to administrators of Jesuit schools, lay people who run Jesuit parishes, Catholics and even non-Catholics.