Is a Jesuit education special?

Within the first couple years of my joining the faculty of Saint Louis University, a Jesuit Catholic University, my chairman asked me to attend a dinner sponsored by the Jesuits. The goal of the dinner was for the Jesuits to assess the Jesuit mission at the School of Medicine.

After dinner, we were each asked to introduce ourselves. One after the other, the faculty said they had attended Jesuit universities and/or medical schools and asserted that that experience conferred a special concern for ethics and morality that they carried since. I was the only member of the party that, while having been raised Roman Catholic, only trained in secular universities. I told everyone that I felt my training also prepared me for a moral and ethical life, and I couldn’t discern anything unique about the morality of Saint Louis University faculty.

After I went home, I pondered this idea and came up with an experimental test. Over the 40-year span of the Tuskegee syphilis study, there must have been hundreds of physicians involved. Did Jesuit-trained physicians participate in this atrocity? Where they under-represented compared to their secular peers? I put this challenge to the head Jesuit later, and never heard back.

Now, we have a lawless, immoral administration in our country. Are Jesuit-trained people participating in an administration that supports and funds ICE and acts of war?

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