A Man of Fortitude & Fidelity

An energetic, entrepreneurial American man decides to join a once venerable but now sluggish religious order. What ensues? The order provides him with a worthy education and space to evangelize. But its leaders often seem exasperated by this man of action and, consequently, are less than admiring of his efforts. Yet, despite working under unsupportive superiors, our man presses on to found institutions that strengthen the faith of countless Catholics here and abroad.

American Catholics of a certain age know of his efforts. Our hero’s name is a household name, at least among the faithful who read books: Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J. A fellow Jesuit, Fr. James V. Schall, once called Fr. Fessio “something of an entrepreneurial genius.” A read through Fr. Cornelius Michael Buckley, S.J.’s biography of Fessio, California Blackrobe, shows Fr. Schall’s words to be something of an understatement. Fr. Buckley’s narrative describes Fessio’s 58-plus years of tireless work defending Catholic orthodoxy and properly shepherding those entrusted to his care.

Young Joseph Fessio, born in 1941, grew up in a solid, pre-Vatican II educational milieu. He attended Jesuit institutions and was taught mostly by Jesuits. His Jesuit prep high school in San Jose, California, was a key influence in his decision to join the order, as many of his peers and acquaintances were doing the same. Buckley, Fessio’s longtime friend (and a charming biographer, to boot), relates a number of amusing anecdotes from Joseph’s teen years. Readers can consult the book for these; suffice it to say, he pursued good, clean fun at a breakneck pace. The 1950s American Catholic subculture in which Fessio flourished — in that time before TV screens and their evil progeny would eat away at social interaction — strikes this reviewer as wonderfully wholesome. Fessio attended nearby Santa Clara University and majored in engineering. The skillset of an engineer would remain indispensable throughout his life and was key to the success of his many audacious quests.

In his 20th year, Fessio entered the Jesuit novitiate in Los Gatos, California. The campus included extensive vineyards in which the 82 first- and second-year novices would labor at harvest time. From there he went north to Mount St. Michael’s in Spokane, Washington, for scholasticate, then to Gonzaga University, where he earned his M.A. in philosophy in 1967. Now ready to teach, he went back to the philosophy department at Santa Clara University.

Fessio’s capacity for endeavors beyond his teaching duties led to his first missionary creation: an intervention program for urban public-school eighth graders with college ability, called Project 50. These children would be among the first beneficiaries of Fessio’s prodigious energy and ability. California Blackrobe includes several pages of photographs from Fessio’s life; one that might surprise is of our subject in shorts and sandals playing guitar for kids in the Project 50 program. Buckley reports that around that time Fessio sported a Fu Manchu moustache. Well, this was the late 1960s, and in California. But taking on hippie ways would not be Fessio’s problem.

No, the source of his eventual challenges would be older Jesuits who found him “arrogant,” a bit of a hotshot. Here we can only observe that there are men who cling to institutional structures and “the way we’ve always done things,” and then there are those who are born entrepreneurs and leaders. The latter don’t seem to fare well among the former. Fessio’s natural talent attracted attention and followers; his peers didn’t appreciate that. In any event, the theme of an ever creative and productive Fessio scraping against more “establishment” men repeats throughout the book. Opposition pushes him in unforeseen directions but never seems to stop him. He presses ahead with his plans.

Young Mr. Fessio’s Jesuit education was not yet complete, so he was sent to study theology in France. There he was mentored by august theologian Fr. Henri de Lubac, who grappled with tensions in the French Church that presaged what would follow in the United States. After Fessio was ordained a priest in San Francisco in 1972, he returned to Europe — this time to Regensburg, Germany. His formation there included weekly sessions with Joseph Ratzinger, future cardinal and pope, and friendship with Christoph von Schönborn, future cardinal and editor of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Fessio finished his doctorate and then was off to the University of San Francisco (USF) in 1974. The completion of his education in Europe ends a certain charmed era and begins another marked by confrontation with heterodox philosophies that today’s faithful American Catholics will recognize in our recent past and present.

Several years having passed since Vatican II, a certain cultural corruption was advancing at USF, Fessio’s new home. In Buckley’s description (he was also posted there), the Jesuit school’s faculty “was fragmented and confused about the mission of the university and the nature and purpose of a core curriculum.” University leadership met to discuss the school’s crisis of Catholic identity, its financial woes, and ways to attract Catholic students. Buckley relates that USF’s president at the time, Fr. William McInnes, had voiced his ambition “to make USF the Harvard of the West.” Fessio, in contrast, set his mind to realistically solving USF’s problems. While in prayer on a pilgrimage to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico, he fleshed out an idea for a special academic program inspired by St. Ignatius’s foundational documents. McInnes looked to Harvard; Fessio looked to Ignatius and appealed to Our Lady. His brainchild, the St. Ignatius Institute (SII), would be an integrated Catholic liberal arts core curriculum for students from various majors who aimed to acquire familiarity with Catholic cultural and intellectual life. Thanks to his well-conceived and detailed proposal, the plan was approved. But USF’s theology department opposed him from the outset. Promotion of “social justice,” you see, was their dawning concern.

To populate SII with students the following fall, Fessio went on a recruiting adventure, Buckley reports, visiting “every Catholic high school in California and Arizona, as well as some in New Mexico, one hundred and five total.” He attracted 64 enrollees, plenty. He had hired two men to help run SII: John Galten and Dennis Bartlett. Fessio always could plan, budget, and bring on board competent players to run with the ball. Around this time, he began one of his many side projects. He’d recognized that most of Hans Urs von Balthasar and Adrienne von Speyr’s works were unpublished in the United States. In discussing this fact, Galten said, “If no publishing house will print them” — because Balthasar and Speyr’s books were pre-Vatican II vintage — then “we ought to start our own press.” Fessio took this in, but the idea lay dormant.

Then, in 1977, another Jesuit, Fr. Kenneth Baker, recommended to the head of the world’s largest private Catholic charity, the De Rance Foundation, that Fessio receive seed money to start a press. He did, and Ignatius Press (IP) was born. Around the same time, USF got a new president who told Fessio that “the Press was in no way to be associated with the university.” IP was, in fact, organized under a separate corporation, which in the long run would prove to be a wise move. In 1978 IP published its first books. Buckley reports that in 1979 IP sold 3,000 books, and “that number doubled each year until 1986, when the ratio tripled to almost one million, and after that it continued to double annually for several more years until the rate finally leveled off.” IP would publish the lion’s share of important Catholic books in English from then on, educating innumerable Catholics of all ages and all stages of growth in the faith.

Fessio found himself in disagreements with a number of Jesuits over the years, but it must have come as a shock when in 1980 the new Jesuit vice-provincial directed him to resign as head of the press. IP survived and hummed on. SII would not be so lucky.

For a number of reasons, including his hosting an extensive tenth anniversary celebration of Humanae Vitae in the USF gym, Pope John Paul II’s Vatican knew and approved of Fessio’s doings and praised SII. Alas, even Rome’s power would go only so far. The USF theology department for years had been filing grievances, and Fessio had defended his work. Buckley describes him as a coolheaded and virtuous debater: “In Father Fessio’s mind, the person with whom he differed had no connection with the issue at hand.” Yet his superior arguments and respect for his interlocutors would avail little. In 1987 he was fired as director of SII, and a “committee” was established to ponder its future. Here again readers are directed to the book to learn SII’s fate — or to Michael Torre’s NOR article “The Dismissal of John Galten & The Demise of the Saint Ignatius Institute” (Oct. 2002).

In 1990 Pope John Paul II issued Ex Corde Ecclesiae, his apostolic constitution on Catholic higher education, which generated hope, as did favorable feedback from the highest echelon of the Church and passionate advocacy in American newspapers. But the final battle over the fate of SII would expose a Church hierarchy undone by unprincipled campus heads and an equivocating local archbishop. The university administration’s tactic of a long, drawn-out death by “dialogue,” plus the Vatican’s failure to act, sealed it. Inasmuch as the whole affair was a test case for the application of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the message received by all U.S. Catholic colleges enjoying varying degrees of dissent was: You’re free to ignore it.

Our hero would never sit about sulking, and in any event, important work at IP remained. By this point, it had a yearly income of $2.6 million. Buckley relates that “the more success and admiration the publisher met with, the higher rose the wall of hostility from his critics.” Fessio was forced by “policy” to leave the Jesuit residence and began sleeping on a futon in his IP office. By 1999 IP would hit one million books sold. Amid nonsense such as “inclusive language” and other threats to the transmission of God’s word, IP, in collaboration with Mother Angelica of EWTN, would reprint the Revised Standard Version (RSV) Bible. IP then published the Second Catholic Edition of the RSV — the “Ignatius Bible” — which has sold well ever since. Although there was some drama surrounding translation and rights for publishing the Catechism of the Catholic Church, in 1994 IP would publish the 800-plus-page English edition. Fessio contracted with Cardinal Ratzinger to translate into English and publish The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000), and many Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI titles followed. Buckley tells the humorous story of how Fessio landed the publishing rights of the youth catechism YOUCAT, which would sell nearly one million copies in English, plus some spinoff books. In 2002 IP’s dollar sales surpassed $10 million, and nine years later “that figure was almost doubled.”

Space here does not allow mention of all Fessio’s doings. His many side pursuits include the Ratzinger-centered Schülerkreis in Europe, tertianship in Siberia, the Adoremus Society for the Renewal of the Sacred Liturgy, a chancellorship at Ave Maria University in Florida, IP’s various magazines and websites, the Faith and Life catechetical series, and ties with Lighthouse Catholic Media and the Augustine Institute. IP is currently ramping up Ignatius Book Fairs for schools as an alternative to the Scholastic Book Fairs that now offer culture-of-death garbage to young children. And then there’s Sweetwater, a retreat house Fessio designed and built in 1990. Situated on 156 acres in a California mountain range, it’s an ongoing labor of love, a sort of nest egg Fessio has cultivated for his IP family and close collaborators. In 2010 he planted a vineyard there, then an orchard, and he turned a former vegetable garden into a plot of wheat for use by local sisters to make eucharistic hosts.

As the book’s photo section attests, Fessio has famously done all this hard work — planning, building, teaching, publishing, traveling, fundraising, planting, harvesting — in black clerical garb and Roman collar. These, Buckley points out, remind him who he is: alter Christus and shepherd to his flock, as far-flung as they might be. Whatever the number of students (and others) he personally led to Christ, there are many, many more he’s helped evangelize through IP and related media. Speaking as one who discovered in the 1990s that any and all substantial catechesis had been thrown out just before I and my cohort were born, I quickly realized that IP is a godsend. Fr. Fessio, the tireless “problem-solver,” has provided two generations of Catholics with reliable resources to educate ourselves in the faith. At age 84 he is still working, and I daresay he’s made many a blackrobe of yesteryear proud.

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