April 7 marked the 500th anniversary of the birth of St. Francis Xavier, a companion of St. Ignatius of Loyola and a founding member of the Society of Jesus.? And tomorrow, April 13, marks the 500th anniversary of another founding member of the Jesuit Order, Blessed Peter Favre. For this reason, the Father General of the Society of Jesus, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J., announced to the Jesuit order in December that the year 2006 “invites us to examine and intensify our fidelity to the call of the Lord that they were the first to discern and that they followed in such a creative fashion that it continues to challenge us, their companions of the third millennium.”

At Saint Louis University, we are included in this invitation.? We define ourselves by those companions of St. Ignatius.

Greater glory of God.?Men and women for others. We invoke these ideals on our edifices, in our classrooms and in our publications-often on these very pages. But 466 years after the Societas Iesu was officially founded, we challenge ourselves to find fresh meaning in them.

We must ask ourselves: What does it mean to receive an education at a Jesuit university?

Well, it’s easy to say what it doesn’t mean. That members of the Society of Jesus oversee some operations of SLU doesn’t make us Jesuit. This fact may contribute to our identity, but our administration is not solely Jesuit. In 1967, SLU expanded its Board of Trustees to include non-Jesuits, and lay members oversee many other aspects of SLU’s operations. While Jesuit ideals should guide our administrative decisions, many decisions are no longer made by men obediently tied to the Jesuit order.

No longer do most of our professors wear collars, either-we are not defined by our faculty. In the last century, the number of Jesuits teaching at this university has decreased and SLU’s lay professors hold a diversity of religious beliefs.

So what does it really mean to receive an education at a Jesuit university? The question is more difficult than it appears.

What SLU offers-what Webster University, Washington University or any state school do not-is its mission statement.

We lay forth our goal: “dedicated to leadership in the continuing quest for understanding of God’s creation, and for the discovery, dissemination and integration of the values, knowledge and skills required to transform society in the spirit of the Gospels.” And different even than other Catholic institutions, our pursuit is “guided by the spiritual and intellectual ideals of the Society of Jesus.”

That’s why it is important that we remember St. Francis Xavier and Peter Favre. We remember the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, the foundation of the Jesuit practice:

“Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul. And the other things on the face of the earth are created for man and that they may help him in prosecuting the end for which he is created. From this it follows that man is to use them as much as they help him on to his end, and ought to rid himself of them so far as they hinder him as to it … desiring and choosing only what is most conducive for us to the end for which we are created.”

SLU’s Jesuit identity stands to provide students the opportunity for this pursuit. It’s our chief aim. And so, as an insitution, we provide a forum for this aim, and we live it, providing an example to others.

Most important, it’s that we call on his aim when we make our decisions.

Greater glory of God. Men and women for others. Those phrases matter when we invoke them.

These are what define our duties of education, and our duties to the greater society. They are uniquely Jesuit.

And that we hold these as truth makes us what we are. It might seem circular to say that we’re a Jesuit institution because we abide by a Jesuit mission. But that’s the point. That’s the whole point.

How do we keep the lessons of the Jesuit founders modern? We’re still working that out. Maybe we’ll always be.

From a student’s perspective, college is a time when we try to figure out the world and what it means. Attending school at a Jesuit university-and likewise discerning all the while exactly what that means-we feel right at home.