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Prep Magazine: Hand-in-Hand with History

Prep Magazine: Hand-in-Hand with History


Faith-based, values-laden education is the DNA of the Xaverian Way. With the Brothers now few in number, devoted men and women stay the course toward Ryken’s truth north.

Working for the Jesuit Volunteer Corps at a new high school tucked in a narrow residential neighborhood between the Seattle airport and Lake Washington is not something Kyle Hackett ’20 envisioned when he came to the Prep as a freshman. All the same, he’s now facilitating college-prep education and an innovative work study program at Cristo Rey Jesuit Seattle from 6 am to 5 pm every day.
 

Above: Kyle Hackett ’20 with a Cristo Rey colleague.

“I just can’t get away from the idea of wanting to be involved in education and forming and shaping the minds of our young people,” he says. “It feels important. It feels like something I’m good at. And it feels like something that brings me joy, too.”

Hackett pinpoints time spent in the Prep’s Br. William Drinan, C.F.X. Center for Campus Ministry and during multiple Prep service trips as inspirations for his current whereabouts and happenings. The Xaverian spiritual value of compassion simply took hold during his teen years. “It’s the one I focused on the most, the one that resonated with me the most, and it’s the one that’s been guiding a lot of what I’ve been doing.”

Anecdotes like this are proof of concept for St. John’s Head of School Dr. Ed Hardiman P’19 ’21 ’26. Both from a theological (more on that later) and practical perspective.

“A big part of Xaverian education is accompaniment. Walking with people,” he says. “I think a lot of what we do, especially in the context of educating young men, is to place an emphasis on listening. You’ve got to be in a relationship with others and you’ve got to accompany others so that you can see the world through the lens of others.

“When you talk about community and brotherhood in the Xaverian tradition, that’s about standing with each other, being with each other, learning with each other, learning from each other, adapting, and being present to one another. That’s what we’re called to do as a school for boys that’s embracing the inclusive Catholic teachings and traditions of the Xaverian Brothers.”

Pope Francis has said as much out loud, observing that “to be a teacher is to live a mission.”

School counselor Melanie Paresi bears witness to this mission in action on a daily basis. Despite the workaday, transactional nature of a college-prep environment—a letter of recommendation, clearance to take a class, a transcript that needs sending—Paresi says the Prep’s school culture elevates to a higher plane.

“When you’re in high school, oftentimes relationships are built around need,” says Paresi. “At our core, we’re a college preparatory space, but students leave here with a genuinely relational perspective. The bigger idea at the Prep is providing students opportunities for both reflection and action that allow, enable, invite, and encourage them to ‘show up’ in people’s lives. And that takes shape in a lot of different ways. For Prep kids, it’s not just ‘what I’m doing and what I’m learning.’ It’s what I’m doing with what I’m learning.’

Put another way, the Xaverian spirit is living within students’ interactions both inside and outside of school, aligning St. John’s activities with a mission of broader societal engagement.

Owen Gaffney ’20 is another example of Hardiman’s hard evidence. The recent Holy Cross graduate returned to St. John’s as a campus ministry fellow this fall. A psychology and studio art major, Gaffney undertook ample reflection before accepting the role.
 

Owen Gaffney ’20 sits with seniors Jack DiFilippo (left) and Jack Prokopis.

“I reminded myself that this [Campus Ministry] was my place when I was here,” he explains. “The mentors I met shaped my outlook. Since coming back, I’ve tried to be as visible as possible and just be available.”

It’s not an entirely unfamiliar vibe. A volunteer with the Beverly Recreation Department since the age of 13, Gaffney has spent the last few summers as a paid staffer responsible for vetting and hiring high school students for various jobs.

“I try to guide those kids the best I can and I believe very strongly in my own faith and spirituality, so the Prep 2.0 made sense. Early on, I’m not even sure the students comprehended that I’m not currently enrolled here. The job is really about being present and picking up on stuff, and then having them be comfortable with you.”

Gaffney has already built positive student-staffer relationships. He’s enrolled in an art class and he’s assisting instruction in the Religious Studies Department’s Early Church curriculum.

“I figured the only way to get better at this work is to do it,” he says.

Guide, Not Mold

Principal/Associate Head of School Dr. Keith Crowley believes there’s power in the Prep’s time-honored messaging. Yet the School’s most influential work, he says, lives within the subtext of Xaverian spiritual values: the presence teachers and staff demonstrate toward the young men who attend school here.

“Our ability to recognize them as unique individuals and affirm that uniqueness is the secret to our success,” he notes. “As opposed to saying, ‘You need to change into this,’ we convey that people are interested in them and their uniqueness and that we want them to be the best version of themselves for their own benefit. I think that this sense of possibility impacts the boys the most. The alternative can be very confining.”

In Crowley’s world, this process of formation is really about the accompaniment that Hardiman mentioned. It’s what Pope Francis called for in the lead up to October’s Synod of Bishops: that the Church continually renew its mission by strengthening its relational nature, emphasizing the significance of lay participation and the
journey of learning through collaboration.

“One of the blessings we have at the Prep is a wide array of adults who have varied interests and experiences, and bring that uniqueness to campus every day,” says Crowley. “By modeling authenticity, vulnerability, and accountability in a relational and relatable way, it reflects care and compassion for all of the Xaverian spiritual values.”

Therein lies the theological tie-in for Hardiman, who participated in the Xaverian Brothers International Assembly in Rome last summer. That work owed from a three-year prelude to a broader 2024 Synod (a gathering of prayer, reflection, and collaboration) convened by the Pope for the universal Catholic Church.

“The participants in the Assembly—myself included—were transformed, energized, and empowered by our connection with the Xaverian Brothers,” he says. “We shared common gratitude for their legacy and a deep desire to carry on this extraordinary tradition of inclusive, Catholic, and Xaverian education.”

“I reflected on how often we focus on the decreased number of Xaverian Brothers in the U.S., and, in many ways, we speak nostalgically about their past,” Hardiman continues. “But through listening to the experiences of others, I was inspired by how wholly the Xaverian Way is alive and well. To use the metaphor of Catholic Christian sacraments, I believe the Assembly called us to see these times we are living not as an anointing for a dying age, but rather a baptism for what can be.”

In the Eternal City, Hardiman found even greater clarity on the health of Xaverian education, both broadly and specifically at St. John’s. It is vibrant, strong, dynamic, and sowing the seeds of a new era reflecting centuries-old values. Once again, Pope Francis provides the ecclesiastical taproot for Hardiman’s evocation of accompaniment.

Above: This stained glass panel featuring the Xaverian Brothers’ crest can be found adjacent to the design featured on the cover of this issue of Prep magazine. The Latin motto reads, “In harmony, small things grow.”

“Educating is not a profession but an attitude, a way of being,” writes The Holy See. “In order to educate, it is necessary to step out of ourselves and be among young people, to accompany them in the stages of their growth and to set ourselves beside them… To educate is to transmit to others what we are inside. Educators pass on knowledge and values with their words; but their words will have an incisive effect on [young people] if they are accompanied by their witness [to the] beauty and goodness of creation and [humanity], which always retains the Creator’s hallmark.”

JeffHatgas, assistant director of campus ministry for community formation, is on the front lines of turning inspiration into action. “How do we translate this wonderful mission, these wonderful pieces of scripture and tradition, and help students understand that these are not just platitudes on a page, but things that we can live out?”

Hatgas says the role and function of upperclassmen at the annual Freshman Retreat is a perfect case study, allowing the high school’s newest community members to encounter peers who were once in their shoes and who faced similar challenges and opportunities.

“For them to be able to see themselves in student leaders who are talking about what they’ve learned about themselves and the world around them and what it means to them to be compassionate or to trust, et cetera, that goes beyond the theoretical,” he says. “Here’s a schoolmate a couple years ahead of me who’s turned these words into a disposition. An attitude for life.”

Director of Campus Ministry Rob Tyler points to the Relational Dynamics course in the junior curriculum, which focuses on the importance of relationships and how they form us, as another example of mission in action. “It allows kids to be authentic and vulnerable without being judged. Instead, that act of sharing and giving themselves grace is celebrated.”
 

Father James Ronan ’62, the school’s chaplain who also works in Campus Ministry, can draw a straight line from what Hatgas and Tyler are describing to the Pope’s Synod. “The recent Synod on Synodality was essentially the Church deciding to place great emphasis on a structure of listening to each other around themes or issues that come up so that we can understand more clearly from a broad spectrum of people what the deepest meaning is of that topic,” he says. “The underlying premise here is that no one person has all the truth. Everybody has a piece of the truth, and to get to the truth, you have to speak to everybody. That’s synergy, and that’s what Pope Francis asks of us.”

There’s that notion of accompaniment again.

“I think the boys are continually learning that how we reflect and what we do shapes our personhood,” adds Religious Studies Department Chair Sean Sennott P’24, who teaches ethics. “We lead with prayer [which Tyler says is a two-way conversation where you should do just as much listening as you do speaking] and we add intellectual rigor, a willingness to be vulnerable and care for each other, and then we concretely care for others through service projects. I think St. John’s does an outstanding job at helping boys connect those different parts of their identity to begin creating a meaningful, purposeful whole.”

Paresi says this goes behind being intentional.

“It’s woven into who we are here. It’s woven into what we ask of kids and what we give them the space to do. Might this happen in other school environments? Maybe. But here, those are things that I think are part of a deeper call in a faith-based environment. To me, we teach the value of showing up in people’s lives, not just in their school lives.”


P.S. Read more about how St. John’s Prep programming is engineered to meet young men’s needs. 

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