Thomas Worcester, S. J. | College of the Holy Cross

The Ignatian Legacy in Worcester
and at Holy Cross

     Ignatius died in Rome in 1556; by then there were about one thousand Jesuits in the world. Ignatius was succeeded as superior general of the Society of Jesus by Diego Laynez. Under Laynez and his successors, Jesuits flourished in many parts of the world, founding schools, building churches, preaching, teaching, and giving the Spiritual Exercises.

     Yet Jesuits never lacked for opponents, many of them motivated by envy of Jesuit success and influence. By the mid-eighteenth century, governments in many Catholic countries sought to bring church institutions under state control. Jesuits, with their international network of highly-respected schools, were a special target. In 1773, under intense pressure from several kings and emperors, Pope Clement XIV formally “suppressed” the Society of Jesus. But the Jesuits nevertheless managed to survive, in some places, such as the Russian empire of Catherine the Great.

      The nineteenth century saw not only the restoration of the Jesuits—by Pope Pius VII, in 1814—but their growth in numbers and activity, including in parts of the world where they had had little or no presence previously. Massachusetts was one such place. The College of the Holy Cross was founded in Worcester, in 1843, by Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick, S.J. (1782-1846). It was the first Jesuit school and first Catholic college in New England. Offering an education to the sons of Irish and other Catholic immigrants, Holy Cross was initially both a secondary school and a college. In the early twentieth century, all but the college was phased out, leaving the Jesuits in Worcester to focus their energies on undergraduate education. The Holy Cross curriculum was directly inspired by the ratio studiorum (or plan of studies), a curricular blueprint adopted by Jesuit schools from the 1590s on. It emphasized classical languages, rhetoric, and philosophy, but also made room for sciences and other disciplines.

      But neither the Jesuits and Holy Cross nor the city of Worcester lived in an antiquarian bubble. The nineteenth century was an age of technological developments; photography, discovered in England and France, crossed the Atlantic. A camera club for Holy Cross students is but one example of interest in photography in nineteenth-century Worcester. As Jesuit spirituality had always had a strong visual dimension, it is no surprise to find that the camera was welcome and appreciated on the Holy Cross campus.

      By the 1960s Holy Cross was moving to update itself to reflect the mainstream of American higher education, while at the same time preserving the best of the College’s traditions. Jesuits on the faculty were joined by increasingly diverse colleagues, men and women, and including Catholic laity as well as Jews, Protestants, and others. From 1972 Holy Cross admitted women students, and thus made perhaps the biggest and most significant change in its history.

      Visual culture has remained a strong component of a Holy Cross education. In 2005, the College of the Holy Cross collaborated with Clark University and the Worcester Art Museum in sponsoring a major loan exhibition, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500-1800. Curated by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, the exhibition stimulated reappraisal of the interaction of art, religion, illness and medicine, in past times, and in our own era.

      In the seventeenth century, Daniel Seghers celebrated the education of Mary with a floral garland; much more recently, the Jesuits of Holy Cross have promoted the education of both women and men, giving them a first-rate liberal arts education, as well as opportunities to experience the spiritual heritage of Saint Ignatius and the Society of Jesus. Just as early Jesuits traveled to many parts of the world to put their talents to use, Holy Cross graduates may today be found across the globe, engaged in the widest array of professions.