Jesuit Journeys
fall 2004

Photos By Jason Bash

Maureen McCann Waldron conducts an orientation session for new Creighton University employees.

Singularly, they are a Jesuit priest of Italian descent and a wife and mother of Irish heritage, disparate backgrounds they tend to joke about. Combined, they are like hydrogen and oxygen-based rocket fuel – mix them together and things just take off.

“We’re so different, and I think that’s a good thing,” says Fr. Andy Alexander, SJ, director of Creighton University Office of Collaborative Ministry.

“And it’s at the heart of our challenges,” adds Maureen McCann Waldron, assistant director and the other half of a seamless team that works with an energetic spirit and desire to make their corner of the world at Creighton and beyond a better place.

The Creighton University Office of Collaborative Ministry is staffed by (from left) Carol Krajicek, Fr. Andy Alexander, SJ, and Maureen McCann Waldron.

Challenged or not, for the past seven years Fr. Alexander and Waldron have collaborated to:

• Build a long-term orientation program (two sessions every month) that for the past six years has introduced all new university employees to the missions and shared vision of the school and the Society of Jesus and their role in those missions.
• Provide a wide range of support programs to spiritually enrich and advance the university mission.
• Maintain a website averaging more than 800,000 hits a month from people worldwide who come there to read daily reflections.
• Offer an online retreat at the site based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, making them available to rich and poor around the world with the click of a mouse.

For faculty, administrators, and staff at Creighton University, Fr. Alexander’s and Waldron’s efforts have meant a clearer awareness, directly for them and indirectly for students, about what it means to be a Jesuit, Catholic university.

Ethnic origins aside, Fr. Alexander (the family name was originally Alessandro) and Waldron have similar roots. Born in Omaha, he graduated from Creighton Prep in 1966 and entered the Society of Jesus later that year. Ordained in 1979, Fr. Alexander taught high school on the Indian missions and served in a wide range of administrative and pastoral roles, including six years as pastor of Gesu Parish in Milwaukee before becoming Creighton vice president of University Ministry and Collaborative Ministry director in 1996.

Waldron graduated from Creighton University in 1975 with a B.A. in journalism. After a number of successful years in corporate public relations, she shifted gears. As the desire to do more with her life grew, she pursued a master’s degree in Christian spirituality part time and became Creighton Prep’s director of public relations in 1992 before joining Fr. Alexander at Creighton in 1997.

“People told me if I did nothing else, hiring Maureen would be enough,” he says.Working together to introduce people to Ignatian spiritual and social traditions helped solidify not just a strong working relationship, but also a personal one.

“In our time together Andy’s dad was sick and died. His mom became a close friend. She became sick and died and a month later my father died. My mom has Alzheimer’s. We support each other in our personal stuff, we talk about it, we pray about it,” she says.

What’s exciting to me is the Society has been saying we have something here to celebrate – lay persons have a unique place in the world, and help us understand it and bring that very Ignatian sense of being rooted in the world,” – Fr. Andy Alexander, SJ

Their partnership provides a peek at how high the laity and the Church can soar in the post Vatican II era of growing lay collaboration, a hope echoed in Jesuit guiding documents (Decree 13 of General Congregation 34) calling for greater cooperation with the laity in mission. That doesn’t mean for

“It (Decree 13) says cooperating with the laity is a constitutive element of our identity. That’s as strong a statement as has come out of the Society in generations.

“Doing it together models something that is part of the message.” – Fr. Andy Alexander, SJ

“These past 40 years have seen a challenging transition in the Church and the Society. Jesuits have experienced a diminishment in numbers. It would be easy, natural, and understandable for anyone to say something is dying. What’s exciting to me is the Society has been saying we have something here to celebrate – lay persons have a unique place in the world, and help us understand it and bring that very Ignatian sense of being rooted in the world,” says Fr. Alexander.

“I think what [the Jesuits] are doing is animating,” says Waldron. “They’re sharing their gift of the Exercises. They’re sharing the gift of Ignatian spirituality and animating us as lay people, saying we can go out now and share this same gift.”

Waldron and Fr. Alexander emphasize the point at their orientation sessions by displaying a large red pie chart with a thin yellow sliver. The red represents 2,700 lay employees, the yellow line the 30 Jesuits who work at Creighton.

“We say if this is going to be a Jesuit university, it’s not because of that thin band of yellow, it’s because all of us here are going to contribute to this mission that is both Jesuit and Catholic,” says Fr. Alexander, who leaves much of the presentation for Waldron.

“Doing it together models something that is part of the message. When people hear Maureen talk about our mission and identity it’s quite different from hearing ‘Father’ talk about it, which would come off as me talking about the Jesuit thing. With Maureen it becomes ‘our’ thing, meaning us as lay persons. And she’s talking as a wife, as a mother, as a person who has made the Exercises, has directed them, who has experience in this vision, who has wrestled with these issues, and who joins me in going around to various departments in the university talking about mission statements, personal struggles, and doing ministry.”

“The Jesuits are sharing the gift of Ignatian spirituality and animating us as lay people, saying we can go out now and share this same gift.” – Maureen McCann Waldron

That sense of shared life issues as well as a shared mission contributes to the ongoing success of the Collaborative Ministry website. Waldron explains that the site began evolving in 1997 with a series of daily Lenten reflections on the web. “When we took them down after Lent, people asked us to put them back up again, so we kept writing them until the end of that May. We talked about it all summer and decided to gear it back up in August, and we’ve continued them ever since.”

Daily Reflections are now written by a diverse group of more than 50 contributors, including Jesuits and lay persons.

“One day it’s Dan from the registrar’s office who writes about h is seven boys. Or Joan from across campus who writes about her life and marriage,” says Waldron. Even university President Fr. John Schlegel, SJ contributes. “We’re talking about the universal struggles, our lack of time, family issues. We all have messy lives and it’s about finding God in the middle of those messy lives. That’s a universal experience whether you live in Kenya or Cleveland, Ohio, or a ranch in western Nebraska; everyone has those things that they have to deal with and this is a support to deal with it.”

“So in some ways it’s the most collaborative thing we do,” Fr. Alexander says.

The online retreat was also a matter of adapting to demand. As the orientation sessions and supporting programs built a greater awareness of St. Ignatius Loyola, a thirst developed to know more about his life and the Spiritual Exercises.

“We had lots of people in these orientations say to us, ‘you know those Spiritual Exercises sound really interesting, where could I read that book?’ And we’d say it’s not a book to be read; it’s an exercise book to be done.” says Fr. Alexander. “We felt like we were telling people they couldn’t have access to the Exercises, because there was no way we could schedule enough weekend retreats or 8-day retreats for 2,700 employees.”

But because the daily reflections adapted so well on the web, they prayed and worked on a way to develop an online retreat.

“I wish we could say we were brilliant and clever and had a strategic plan, but we were just responding to what people were asking us to do and saw the potential for it on the web,” Fr. Alexander says.

Over time they began hearing from people who stumbled upon the website. They received e-mails about how something in a reflection or someone who had made the online retreat had a transformative experience. So one day they posted an offering for groups of people to make the retreat online together and share their experiences as part of the Exercises. When 50 people signed up the first day, they quickly removed the posting and formed five e-mail groups of 10 participants.

“We had someone from South Africa, an 87-year-old woman from Glasgow, an attorney from Manhattan, an emergency room nurse in Chicago, a businessman from Dallas,” says Waldron about the mix in one group. “We went through this experience together and we never saw them face to face.”

The results were as amazing as the numbers were unanticipated. But just as amazing is the humility with which Fr. Alexander and Waldron evaluate their work. For all their success and peer recognition, they prefer to talk less about their accomplishments and humbly suggest it’s the mission that matters.

“There’s nothing magical about what we do,” insists Waldron, naming individuals and other lay and religious colleagues working together in the Jesuit network and accomplishing just as much.

Maybe so, but there is something about the Irish in Waldron that is liquid oxygen, and something about the Italian in Fr. Alexander that is liquid hydrogen, that when you put them together, you can’t help but see a special fire their spirits ignite.

FR. PETER-HANS KOLVENBACH, SJ PROFILE: Born Nov. 30, 1928 in the village of Druten, some 12 miles northwest of Nijmegen, Holland, Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ attended Canisius College, Nijmegen where his studies concentrated on modern languages. He entered the Society of Jesus in September 1948 at the Jesuit novitiate in Mariendaal. Following philosophy studies completed at the Berchmans Institute in Nijmegen, he went to Lebanon where he earned his doctorate in theology at St. Joseph’s University, Beirut. He was ordained a priest in 1961. From 1963 to 1976 Fr. Kolvenbach studied and taught general and Oriental linguistics in diverse specialized institutes in La Haye (Holland), Paris, and Beirut. He also worked in the theology of spirituality at Pomfret, Connecticut, in the U.S. More recently, he was professor of general linguistics at St. Joseph’s University in Beirut and was the provincial (1974-81) of the vice-province of the Middle East. He went to Rome in 1981 and became the rector of the Pontifical Oriental Institute. Fr. Kolvenbach was elected 29th superior general of the Society of Jesus on Sept. 30, 1983 during the 33rd General Congregation of the Order.

Through their work at the Creighton University Office of Collaborative Ministry, Maureen McCann Waldron and Fr. Andy Alexander, SJ are helping prepare for the October visit of Jesuit Fr. General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ to the Wisconsin Province – a fact that seems especially fitting given the occasion will include a major address titled “Jesuits and Lay Partners: Cooperating with Each Other in Mission.” The head of the worldwide Society of Jesus, Fr. Kolvenbach, whose home office is in Rome, will be in Omaha Oct. 7-8. Wisconsin Fr. Provincial James Grummer, SJ decided to use the occasion of the 125th anniversary celebrations of the Jesuits coming to Omaha, and the upcoming 50th anniversary of the beginning of the Wisconsin Province, to invite Fr. Kolvenbach to come to Omaha, to visit Jesuit sponsored ministries, and to give a major address, which is open to the public, at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 7 in the Creighton University Kiewit Fitness Center.

The topic of his address comes from the theme of the visit, “Celebrating 125 Years of Jesuit Lay Partnership in Omaha,” a very timely theme in light of the dates and recent Jesuit history. The 34th General Congregation of the Society, which met in Rome in 1995, issued a document, (Decree 13) titled “Cooperating With the Laity in Mission.” It was written by Jesuits, for Jesuits. Fr. Alexander says those he spoke to who helped write the document have a similar story.

“They had a tough time because they started out writing it the way we normally did, asking how do we include these lay people in our ministries? They finally scrapped that approach and started all over from a different perspective, asking how can we support the lay people. There is a big difference because we’re no longer talking about our works as belonging to the Jesuits. It’s our works in a whole different, shared meaning,” says Fr. Alexander. “It says cooperating with the laity in their mission is a constitutive element of our identity as Jesuits. That’s as strong a statement as has come out of the Society in generations.”

Though Fr. Kolvenbach will be in Omaha, Waldron and Fr. Alexander are extending the reach of his visit via the web. They have prepared a page (www.creighton. edu/CollaborativeMinistry/Kolvenbach/) which includes details of the visit along with a comprehensive listing of articles and other facts about Fr. Kolvenbach. They also plan to make his Omaha address and other events available both audibly and visually at the site.

Go to www.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/ for more about the Creighton University Office of Collaborative Ministry.

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