Driven

Chris Collins, SJ, a second-year novice in St. Paul, spent this spring at Holy Rosary Mission in South Dakota, teaching religion to juniors and seniors and helping with retreats at Red Cloud Indian School. He also took some students on a road trip to Creighton University in Omaha, where they were thinking of applying. This was Chris's long experiment, a time during noviceship when novices fan out to live in community with other Jesuits and work in various ministries for about five months. Scott Myslinski, SJ, a novice from California, was also at Holy Rosary Mission, working at Our Lady of the Sioux in Oglala.

Chris's other duties at Red Cloud included driving the school bus. He needed a commercial driver's license for that and passed the test on his first try. On his afternoon run, which takes about an hour and a half, he drops students off at ranches. "There's plenty of time on the way back for contemplation," he says. "It's beautiful up here."

Audience

"No one will ever forget the visit with the pope," says Ken Bartosz, head of the music department at Loyola Academy (Wilmette, Ill.). The band toured Italy this spring, with stops in Sicily, Florence, Naples, Siena, Pisa, and Rome, where they played for the papal audience and, later, for the pope, who blessed the students and chatted with them.

Convocations

If you live and work in such a way that proclaims you have values in your lives, that proclaims the worth of other persons, that proclaims that you are using your education in the service of others, that proclaims you are a humane leader, then we can say that we have given you an education in the Jesuit and Catholic tradition.

--Fr Michael Morrison, SJ
president of Creighton University
at the school's 106th spring commencement

Commencement speakers at other Jesuit colleges and universities this spring:

Boston College

Janet Reno, U.S. Attorney General

Canisius College

Most Rev. Henry Mansell, Bishop of Buffalo

College of the Holy Cross

Martin Lee, chair of Hong Kong's Democratic Party

Fairfield University

Tom Brokaw, NBC News anchor

Fordham University

Mary Higgins Clark, mystery writer

Georgetown University

Franklin Raines, director of the Office of Management and Budget

Gonzaga University

Fr. John O'Malley, SJ, professor of Church History

John Carroll University

Tim Russert ('72), host of NBC's Meet the Press

Le Moyne College

Fr. Walter Burghardt, SJ, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center

Loyola College, Baltimore

Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press

Loyola University Chicago

Antonia Novello, former Surgeon General of the United States

Loyola University New Orleans

Tim O'Brien, ABC senior correspondent

Marquette University

Most Rev. Rembert Weakland, Archbishop of Milwaukee

Rockhurst College

William McSweeney, Jr., former publisher of the National Catholic Reporter

Spring Hill College

Colman McCarthy ('60), syndicated columnist

University of Detroit Mercy

Elmore Leonard, novelist

University of San Francisco

Robert MacNeil, former coanchor of PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report

University of Scranton

Tim Russert, host of NBC's Meet the Press

Wheeling Jesuit College

Haynes Johnson, journalist with the Washington Post

Xavier University

Cokie Roberts, ABC News senior correspondent

Shakedown

The shady figure who approached Fr. Antanas Seskevicius, SJ, (right) in March in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and demanded protection money from the Jesuits at St. Joseph Parish did not know who he was tangling with.

As a young Jesuit, Antanas was studying philosophy in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1938, when Hitler's armies occupied the school; he and classmates continued studies in Italy. Back home in Lithuania in 1940, he was continuing preparation for priesthood when Russian armies occupied the country; his provincial gave him 1,000 rubles and told him to find his way to the West to finish his studies. Alone, he crossed a frozen river and was captured by German soldiers, who sent him to Berlin for interrogation. Antanas made his way back to Austria to study theology and was ordained there in 1943. To celebrate his first mass in his home village, he again crossed battle lines and recrossed them later to take some final courses back in Austria.

He returned to Lithuania and in 1949 was arrested by the KGB and sentenced to 25 years in concentration camps. One of his jobs was to measure the level of methane gas down in coal mines.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Fr. Seskevicius was released. Unable to work as a priest in Lithuania, he went to Siberia, where priests were needed; he was arrested and sentenced to seven years in a labor camp back in Lithuania. In 1970 he was arrested a third time for teaching catechism and sentenced to one year hard labor. He was able to breathe easier only when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991.

So Fr. Seskevicius was hardly going to be intimidated by a 40-year-old thug demanding $150 upfront and $50 more each month to keep the church safe from criminals. Instead, he shouted at the man that he should go to confession and reported the encounter to Fr. Algis Baniulis, SJ, the pastor.

Fr. Baniulis reported the shakedown to local police, who advised him simply to pay the demand. He then went to the Ministry of Interior Affairs in Vilnius. Word of this spread worldwide through the Hartnett Jesuit News Service and other communications networks, and pressure came to bear in Vilnius. As a result, two police officers in Klaipeda were arrested, as was the man who approached the Jesuits with his demands. It is not known if he went to confession.

Graduate

Joseph Lam Yau, graduate of St. Ignatius Loyola Academy in Baltimore, receives a certificate of excellence in mathematics from Fr. Bill Watters, SJ, founder and president of this Nativity-style middle school that opened in 1993.

Joseph, among St. Ignatius's first graduates in May '96 just finished his first year at Boys' Latin in Baltimore; fifteen of the sixteen in his Loyola Academy class received full high school scholarships.

Last May, fifteen more students enter the ranks of Academy alumni, almost all on full scholarships to private schools, including the Jesuits' Loyola Blakefield in Towson, Md., and Georgetown Prep in North Bethesda, Md.

Making Music

Christ, Be With Me, a CD of music by the Concert Choir of Loyola High School (Los Angeles), came out in 1995. It was their first recording. They have recorded another of Christmas music; a third, comprising secular and sacred music that the choir performed this last academic year, will be recorded this summer.

Director Fr. Thomas Carroll, SJ, leads this choir of about 60 and also the Madrigal Singers, who number about 20. He recruits sopranos and altos for both choirs from among the young women who attend area high schools. Their repertoire, which ranges from chant and classical pieces to contemporary compositions, delights the audiences at their concerts and the congregations at school liturgies.

Malacology

That word threw us, too. But it refers to the branch of zoology that studies mollusks. Fr. Adolfo López de la Fuente, SJ, is the director of the Malacology Center at the Jesuits' Central American University of Managua in Nicaragua. Researchers there have discovered and catalogued a new species of snail to which they have given, for obvious reasons, the scientific name Aragonia jesuitarum.