Jesuits of the California Province - Our Centennial

Profiles in Province History

During the California Province Centennial, 1909-2009, Father Gerald L. McKevitt, S.J., profiles the province’s rich history in a series of vignettes illustrated with rare images from the archives of Jesuit institutions. Click on the chapter headings below to read the full text of each profile.

On December 3, 1849, Michele Accolti and Giovanni Nobili, missionaries of the Society’s Rocky Mountain Mission, boarded a lumber ship bound down the Columbia River for California. Accolti, the initiator of the project, reported their arrival to Father General Jan Roothaan soon after landing. “Here we are in California,” he announced with characteristic gusto, “come not to seek gold” but “to do a little good.”

Launching a new ministry is one thing; keeping it afloat is quite another. The modest enterprise set in motion at Mission Santa Clara by Michele Accolti and Giovanni Nobili struggled to keep afloat. Enrolling students was easy; finding faculty was difficult. The fledgling school limped along with a handful of laymen and Jesuits from the Rocky Mountain Mission who were no longer suited for missionary labor. After numerous written appeals failed, Accolti lit on another stratagem to find teachers. In 1853 he returned to Europe to filibuster on behalf of his California college. “You can accomplish more in one conversation,” he concluded, "than with a hundred letters.”

In 1834, Jan Roothaan, the Jesuit superior general, outlined his expectations for the newly restored Society of Jesus in the United States. “I desire that in all things the Society assume the same form and proceed in the same manner as in Europe,” he wrote. “As far as circumstances will permit, let nothing new be introduced.”

The early California Jesuits, although focused on the education of youth, engaged in a wide range of pastoral activities. Following the tradition of the Society of Jesus, their colleges served as centers for all of sorts of ministries. As the Jesuit Juan de Polanco had explained in the sixteenth century, the order embraced schooling so that “the people of the area will be helped” and so that charitable works might be undertaken in the region. Thus the typical Jesuit college church served as a base for social outreach within the local community as well as a hub for education in the faith that extended beyond the city limits.

“The number of people that come to our church is incredible,” an Italian Jesuit wrote from San Francisco in 1862. “Last Sunday more than a thousand people left because they could not find a seat.” The packed pews of St. Ignatius Church testified not only to Christian piety, but also to the high priority nineteenth-century congregations placed on pulpit performance. As a visiting European priest once observed, “One thing is certain, the Americans will always go where the preaching is best.” Every Sunday, stirring rhetoric drew standing-room-only crowds of Protestants as well as Catholics eager to hear sermons of great length that were reprinted in the city’s newspapers. Of Michele Accolti, a contemporary once said, “It was enough to know that he was preaching and the church was filled with Protestants.” The Italian priests, however, were by their own admission “not very good preachers” in English, which impelled them to import helpers who were.

The final decades of the nineteenth century ushered in a period of challenge for the California Mission of the Turin Province. Educational practices whose value had long been taken for granted came under increasing scrutiny. The colleges in San Francisco and Santa Clara found themselves in competition with a growing number of state institutions that were publicly financed and cheaper to attend. At the end of the century, enrollments began to slip at both of the Jesuit schools. The unpopularity of Latin and Greek and increasingly anachronistic codes of student discipline were partly to blame. Alarmed at plummeting enrollments, St. Ignatius College, in 1893, tried to entice students by offering free tuition to those who enrolled in the classical course--only to abandon the experiment three years later due to low response.

“At 5:15 this morning there occurred a fearful shock of earthquake lasting about 48 seconds.” With those words, a teacher at St. Ignatius College hastily recorded the historic temblor that shook San Francisco on April 18, 1906. “An awful rumbling sound as of a mighty wind and the rocking and twisting of the huge fortress-like building made me realize that we were in the throes of a fearful earthquake,” another priest wrote. “Through the window I could see mighty buildings rocking and fires breaking out everywhere. . . .I thought my time was at hand.”

The conclusion of the Spanish-American War in 1898 signaled the emergence of the United States as a world power. Long reliant on outsiders for support and oversight, the American Catholic Church enjoyed fresh prominence as a result of the nation’s new standing. In 1908, the missionary status of the church and its dependence on Rome’s Congregation for Propagation of the Faith ended. Between 1903 and 1914, thirteen new American dioceses were announced. At the same time, missionary jurisdictions of the Society of Jesus, formerly administered from Europe, were elevated to the status of independent provinces. In 1909, the California and Rocky Mountain missions, together with the Alaska Mission, became the California Province.

Jesuits were not the only ones who sustained works started by the Society of Jesus in California. Although their numbers were modest compared to the present day, laypersons were indispensable to Jesuit ministries from the beginning. Without them, the schools would never have been launched. Lay instructors staffed classrooms at both Santa Clara and St. Ignatius colleges from their inception. In 1856, one-third of Santa Clara’s trustees were laymen, including Governor Peter Burnett who helped draft the institution’s articles of incorporation. During periods when anti-Catholic opposition and financial trouble threatened the schools, attorneys and businessmen aided the foreign-born clergy with valued counsel.

The remarkable emergence of Southern California in the late nineteenth century gave vital new direction to the California Province Jesuits. Long isolated from the rest of the state, the region south of the Tehachapi Mountains was transformed in the 1880s by the advent of transcontinental rail communication. During the real estate boom that ensued, Los Angeles, an agricultural town of 5,700 inhabitants in 1870, emerged in 1900 as a major urban center with a population of 102,479. Drawn to the city’s evolution and promise, the Jesuits sought to gain a foothold there.

Since ancient times, fermented juice of the grape has been praised for its therapeutic properties. “Use a little wine for the sake of your stomach and your frequent ailments,” the Bible advises (1Timothy 5:23). Wine, of course, is also a necessary element in the celebration of the Eucharist in the Catholic Mass. The Italian founders of the California Province believed in wine’s beneficial properties. Soon after opening Santa Clara College, they began growing grapes, thus inaugurating a commitment to winemaking that would engage the California Jesuits for the next 135 years.

“Half the year the highest paid lecturer in the world, the other half a wanderer among treacherous craters and glaciers.” With those words, the 1937 Literary Digest of New York described Bernard R. Hubbard, one of the best-known California Jesuits. Born in 1908 and raised in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains, young Hubbard joined the Jesuits at the age of twenty. Sent to Austria in the 1920s to complete his theology studies, he spent his spare time exploring and photographing the Austrian Tyrol. It was there that he was dubbed “The Glacier Priest,” a nickname that he carried for the rest of his life.

America’s entry into World War II had an immediate impact on every campus and parish associated with the California Jesuit Province. In the panic that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, invasion of the mainland did not seem beyond possibility. “Should, which God forbid, our coast be bombed,” provincial Francis J. Seeliger wrote in 1941, “let all be ready to give all-out aid to the sick and wounded, and help; by word and example to keep up the morale of the people.” After a blackout was imposed on San Francisco, the illuminated towers of St. Ignatius Church were turned off for the duration of the war.

“We are on the threshold of a new era.” In 1947, Father William C. Gianera, president of Santa Clara University, summed up expectations for his school after the end of World War II. The striking transformation of the postwar period--sometimes referred to as California’s second gold rush--brought unprecedented growth. Numbering less than 7 million people in 1940, California’s population soared to 20 million thirty years later.

Revolution is not too strong a term to describe what the Catholic Church experienced after the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965. In the wake of that international synod, Catholic institutions strove to adapt to the needs of the modern world. Under the leadership of Basque-born Pedro Arrupe, who was elected Superior General in 1965, the Jesuits convened a series of general congregations in Rome to globally update the Society of Jesus.