CALIFORNIA PROVINCE CENTENNIAL PROFILES

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.

9. LAITY: INDISPENSABLE PARTNERS

By Gerald L. McKevitt, S.J.

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 number of lay teachers was never large. Because the schools were perennially short on cash, if a Jesuit could be found to fill a vacancy, he, rather than a salaried layman, was hired. The latter usually taught courses for which Jesuits were either unavailable or untrained, such as bookkeeping, music, dance, and preparatory subjects. St. Ignatius College in San Francisco boasted that its Commercial Course was “taught exclusively by secular professors.” By 1890, Jesuits outnumbered Santa Clara College’s half-dozen lay teachers by a 4 to 1 ratio. Not until the colleges expanded their curricula to embrace professional education in the early twentieth century did lay teachers reach numerical parity with Jesuits. The opening of law schools depended on lay leadership, as at St. Ignatius College where the Sullivan brothers, Jeremiah and Matthew, both lawyers, played founding roles.

All institutions sponsored by the Jesuit order relied heavily on lay benefactors. Every Jesuit institution in the Santa Clara Valley benefitted from the philanthropy of Myles O’Connor, an Irish-born mining magnate. Women, too, provided essential financial assistance. In 1925, the Loyola Guild, a confraternity of women was formed to provide financial support to the University of San Francisco and St. Ignatius College Preparatory. Bertha Welch, who had opened her home to Jesuits displaced by the 1906 earthquake, remained for decades a major benefactor of the two San Francisco schools. A gift of $250,000 to Santa Clara University from Deliah L. Walsh in 1948 constituted the largest single bequest the institution had ever received. A few years later, three sisters, Mary, Anna, and Nora Desmond, provided much of the $500,000 needed to build Loyola University’s Sacred Heart Chapel.

The most generous supporter of the University of San Francisco for over three decades was Bertha Welch, the widow of a businessman who made a fortune in sugar production. In 1890, she donated $50,000 for the decoration of St. Ignatius Church, an amount equivalent to nearly a million contemporary dollars. Other momentous contributions followed, including $200,000 in 1920 for the construction of a new faculty building that served as the Jesuit residence for the next half century. So significant was Welch’s support that in 1898, Luis Martín, the Jesuit superior general, named her a benefactor of the world-wide Society of Jesus.

SOURCES: Gerald McKevitt, Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848-1919 (Palo Alto, 2007), 215, 221-22; Gerald McKevitt, The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851-1977 (Stanford University Press, 1979), 110, 269; Alan Ziajka, Legacy and Promise: 150 Years of Jesuit Education at the University of San Francisco, 26, 56-7, 93-4, 125-6.