Word: jesuitically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Lunch period at an inner-city all-boys school is an event associated with the sounds of chaos, not classical music. And yet there are definitely strains of Beethoven coming from the piano in the cafeteria at the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy. Behind the pianist, another student waits patiently for his turn. Upstairs in the art room, a senior is using the lunch hour to apply more brushstrokes to a portrait. A few kids are playing pickup ball in the gym, but more are crowded in the library...
Detroit was once heavily Catholic, dotted with parochial schools in well over 100 parishes that served the Irish and East European immigrants who built the city. Of those, the oldest was the University of Detroit, founded as a Jesuit high school and college in 1877. Elmore Leonard wrote theology papers there before the detective novels that made him famous. The school produced Congressmen, state supreme court justices and a president...
...Jesuits tend to roll their eyes at portrayals of their order's missionary zeal. (Jeremy Irons' action Jesuit in The Mission, says Father Patrick Peppard, one of the school's theology teachers, was "a bit romanticized.") Still, by any measure, U of D's service to the city of Detroit since the Jesuits decided to remain has been remarkable. During a period in the late 1970s and early '80s, the school's president, Father Malcolm Carron, was even made a Detroit police commissioner. (See pictures of the remains of Detroit...
...Jesuit ideal can also be found in more recent graduates like Will Ahee and Tom Howe. Both grew up in tony communities - Grosse Pointe and Birmingham - that may be geographically close to Detroit but are worlds away culturally. Through U of D, they volunteered with Earthworks, an urban garden project that is reclaiming for sustainable agriculture some of the thousands of acres of abandoned lots in Detroit. When they graduated a few years ago, Ahee and Howe could have had their pick of universities. They chose to stay in Detroit and attend Wayne State University, where they study comprehensive food...
...original version of this article suggested that the University of Detroit Jesuit High School and Academy is the only Catholic college-prep school in Detroit. That was based on a definition of college prep as a place where 75% or more of students take college-prep courses and go on to college. In fact Detroit Cristo Rey, a Catholic high school launched last year, aims to be a college-prep school as well, though it has yet to graduate a class...