Province History

The Chicago Province was founded in 1928 by Fr. General Wlodimir Ledochowski, SJ, but Jesuits have been serving in the area that today comprises the Chicago Province since 1673. Please help yourself to the materials below to learn more about the history of Jesuits in the Midwest and the history of the Chicago Province.

75th Anniversary Historical Video and Brochure
In 2003, the Chicago Province celebrated its 75th Anniversary. To commemorate 75 years of service, the Province and Loyola Productions (a California-based Jesuit film production company--www.loyolaproductions.com) produced a 43 minute video and a companion brochure. To learn more about the Province's history, you can watch the video on the Province's video gallery page or download a PDF version of the 75th anniversay brochure. If you'd like a hardcopy of the video (in VHS or DVD format), please contact Eileen Meehan at (773) 975-8181 or at eileen@jesuits-chi.org.

PARTNERS Magazine Timelines
PARTNERS, the Province's magazine also produced a series of timelines chronicling the history of Jesuits in the region that now makes up the Chicago Province. You can use the links below to download and print PDF versions of the 4-part series.

Part I (1673-1928)
Part II (1928-1969)
Part III (1969-1993)
Part IV (1993-2003)

A Brief History of the Chicago Province
by Fr. Edward W. Schmidt, SJ

On June 17, 1673, two canoes glided out of the Wisconsin River and into the Mississippi. They bore seven Frenchmen and their provisions for a summer of exploration. Louis Joliet commanded the expedition with a Jesuit companion, Jacques Marquette, as spiritual leader. They were the first Europeans to leave any record of exploring the Mississippi River.

Fr. Jacques Marquette drew this map after his summer of exploration in 1673 with Louis Joliet. Fr. Marquette was the first Jesuit to explore what eventually became the Chicago Province.

For a month they moved south, winding with the river's course, racing as the stream picked up volume from the Missouri or the Ohio, drifting as it broadened over surrounding plains. Curious about every detail of the land, they made notes about animals and plants and geographic features. And they greeted and exchanged gifts with the friendly native peoples they met along the way. Reversing their course on July 17, they paddled upstream, took the Illinois River northeast, and reached the Jesuit mission St. Francois-Xavier on Green Bay in late September.

In those days there were no maps, let alone the boundary lines that later generations would draw on maps. There was an enthusiasm for exploration and conversion that later generations might question. And there was wonder about the vast, unspoiled beauty of God's creation that later generations would envy.

Early History
Marquette was not the first Jesuit in what we call the Midwest. French Jesuits were already established at St. Ignace (in today's Michigan) and at the mission of St. Francois-Xavier (in today's Wisconsin). But Marquette was the first Jesuit to explore that part of the Midwest that in the Jesuit administrative structure is the Chicago Province, which comprises all of Indiana and Kentucky, the northern and eastern three-fourths of Illinois, and the archdiocese of Cincinnati in Ohio.

The year after his trip on the Mississippi, Marquette went back to work with the Illinois peoples. Plagued by bad health and unable to travel, he spent the winter (1674-75) with two French companions in what is now Chicago. His journal entry for the day he arrived in Chicago, December 4, rings very true: "more snow there than elsewhere."

Holy Family Church, built in 1860, is the oldest building in the Chicago Province. The church's first pastor, Fr. Arnold Damen, SJ, founded St. Ignatius High School next to Holy Family on Chicago's near west side; from that institution grew Loyola University and Loyola Academy.

In the spring, Marquette was able to preach and visit with the Illinois, but his health deteriorated. His two French companions paddled him along Indiana and Michigan shores of Lake Michigan hoping to get him to St. Ignace, but he died on May 18, probably near the mouth of the river that now bears his name, the Pere Marquette.

After 1763, the Jesuits' work became very difficult. The Illinois country passed from French domination to British, and French settlers gradually withdrew across the Mississippi. The French government also banned the Jesuit order. In the end, only one Jesuit, Sebastien Louis Meurin, worked both sides of the Mississippi, spanning sovereignties and church jurisdictions; he continued his work even after the suppression of the Society in 1773.

Fr. Meurin holds another distinction as the first Jesuit recorded as working in what is now Indiana: the church documents of the settlement of Vincennes show a marriage on April 21, 1749; it is signed by Pere Meurin. (There are indications that an earlier Jesuit, Pere Mermet, had founded a mission there in 1710, but records are ambiguous.)

The Jesuits Return
Renewed Jesuit work in this area begins with the name of Fr. Charles Nerinckx, an energetic Belgian missionary in Kentucky. Nerinckx was not a Jesuit, but he actively recruited candidates to the newly-restored order. He returned from a trip to Belgium in 1815 with eight candidates for the Jesuit novitiate in Georgetown; six years later, a trip to Belgium netted three recruits. Among these recruits were James Oliver Van de Velde, destined to be the second bishop of Chicago, Piet de Smet, famed missionary of the West, and John Anthony Elet, remembered as the founder of Jesuit education in Cincinnati.

While the numbers were strong, the order could not really handle so many new recruits. The financial situation was so troubled that the superiors in the Maryland area decided to close their novitiate: the men were living on potatoes and water and there was not hope in sight. Salvation came in the person of Bishop L. William Du Bourg of New Orleans, who wanted Jesuits to work in Missouri, then part of this diocese. Fr. Charles F. Van Quickenborne, the novice director, did not like the idea, but the young Belgian novices did-after all, they had come to America to work with Indians. Most important, the Maryland superior, Fr. Leonard Neale, agreed to the plan.

So it came about that on April 11, 1823, Fr. Van Quickenborne and his seven novices set out to reestablish the novitiate in Florissant, Missouri, accompanied by the assistant novice director and three brothers; six slaves were part of the party. Proceeding overland to Wheeling (now West Virginia), then by flatboat down the Ohio River to Shawneetown (Illinois), then overland again, they crossed the Mississippi to St. Louis on May 31, eventually settling in Florissant, today a St. Louis suburb.

The Chicago Province
The Society grew and prospered from this adventuresome beginning; and with growth came changes in administrative structures. What was first the Missouri Province was divided in 1928 to create the Chicago Province; this province was divided again in 1954 to create the Detroit Province.

Of the works now part of the Chicago Province, St. Francis Xavier Parish, St. Xavier High School, and Xavier University in Cincinnati trace their Jesuit origins to the work of Fr. John Anthony Elet. Fr. Elet had been one of the novices on Van Quickenborne's epic journey in 1823. He returned to Cincinnati in 1840 to become president of the college founded there by Bp. Edward Fenwick in 1831.

This college-in those days a college usually meant a six-year program-later evolved into the high school and university bearing Xavier's name. Xavier University moved to its present location in 1912. St. Xavier High School moved to its location north of the city in 1960, leaving a parish church at the original downtown location.

In 1848, James Oliver Van de Velde, the Jesuits' major superior in the Midwest, was named bishop of Chicago. During Van de Velde's term in Chicago, a number of Jesuits conducted missions and retreats there, but a permanent Jesuit apostolate did not begin until his successor, Bp. Anthony O'Regan, succeeded in getting Fr. Arnold Damen to begin full-time work in Chicago in 1857. From Fr. Damen's vision and energy grew a Jesuit parish and school on Chicago's west side. And from St. Ignatius College, opened in 1870, grew Loyola University and Loyola Academy on the north side of the city; Loyola Academy moved to Wilmette in 1957. St. Ignatius parish was begun around the Loyola University campus in 1907.

The province's fourth Jesuit high school, Brebeuf Preparatory School, opened in Indianapolis in 1962.

Part of the yearly schedule at a Jesuit college in the early days included some kind of retreat. And individual Jesuits often conducted retreats as part of their regular ministry. Some of this work grew into the retreat centers of the province. A retreat house for men at Milford, Ohio, led to the founding of a second retreat facility there for students; this later gave birth to the Milford Renewal Center. In Barrington, Illinois, a retreat center began after World War II.

The Society assumed responsibility for Catholic chaplaincy at Cook County Hospital in Chicago in 1902; that ministry continues today. Jesuits maintain this ministry in other hospitals throughout the province.

Jesuits continued scholarly and devotional writing often as a supplement or aid to other work. Fr. Daniel Lord widened the reach of his own sodality work with his writing. Loyola Press in Chicago continues the tradition of Catholic textbook publishing as well as devotional and scholarly books; the Press is also home to PARTNERS magazine.

And just as the first Jesuits in this area came from far-off lands, the Society here grew and matured to the point where it was able to send some of its members to work for God's kingdom elsewhere, first in India, Nepal, and Japan, and later in Peru. The Church has prospered in those areas to the point where Jesuits from there have now come to cooperate in ministry in the Chicago Province.

The Chicago Province today continues much good work from the past. Yet none of this work serves the Church simply by repeating what went before. If anything characterized the work of the pioneer Society of Jesus here it was an ability to modify plans as needs changed, to dig up stakes and move on if the work of God's kingdom demanded it. These Jesuits' dreams sprang from solid needs, and reality shaped their growth.

In education, for example, St. Xavier was not the first Jesuit school in the province. In 1831, two French Jesuits from Louisiana arrived in Kentucky to assume direction of St. Joseph's College in Bardstown; as it happened, they took over St. Mary's College in Lebanon County instead. In 1842, the French Jesuits opened a college, St. Ignatius Literary Institution, in Louisville; this survived only until 1846, when all the French Jesuits withdrew from Kentucky, accepting an offer from Bp. John Hughes of New York to take over his young Fordham College, which they determined to be a greater need.

In 1848, Missouri Jesuits took over St. Joseph's in Bardstown; they also accepted responsibility for a "free school" in Louisville, which they named St. Aloysius. Their work in Louisville lasted only ten years, victim of financial and personnel troubles and of misunderstandings with episcopal authority; their presence in Bardstown ended in 1861, a casualty of the Civil War. St. Ignatius College in Chicago opened a branch on north La Salle Avenue in 1888 but closed it only a couple of years later.

Bishops pressed the Society to establish colleges in Indianapolis, Rock Island, and elsewhere. Bp. Simon Brute of Terre Haute made a firm offer of land for a college, a beautiful tract at the south bend of the St. Joseph River, which the Jesuits had to decline; this land formed the basis of the Holy Cross fathers' Notre Dame.

In missions and parish work, the Society also shaped its ministries to changing realities. In 1696, near where the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan, Fr. Pierre Pinet founded Guardian Angel mission to work with a local Miami tribe; he survived political pressure but closed the mission in 1700 because of Indian migrations.

After the suppression, Jesuits ran many missions that later grew into diocesan parishes or faded away as old needs disappeared, in places like Terre Haute, Indiana; Quincy and Alton, Illinois; Lexington and Covington, Kentucky (Covington's first bishop, George Carrell, was a Jesuit and was able to secure some Jesuits for work in his diocese); and White Oak, Ohio.

The early history of Jesuit work in this area is filled with more requests, more demands than resources allow. This remains true today. Occasionally superiors can say yes to starting a new ministry, such as the Heartland Center, begun in northern Indiana in 1987, or to helping with an ongoing one, like a new Jesuit presence at the diocesan Catholic high school in Lexington, KY. Sometimes they have to decline very good new opportunities or even face the pain of withdrawing from some work that has been successful.

These decisions are not easy, just as the work is not. But the Society commits itself knowing that it does not work alone, knowing that its success or failure belong to a wider community of friends and family. The first missions in the Midwest had help from Jesuits in Europe, the first missionaries here relied on a wider group to share their dreams and their lives. When Marquette died on a lonely riverbank in Michigan, he was not alone; the two Frenchmen who paddled his canoe and cared for his failing health were very much a part of his heroic spirit. The life of the Society of Jesus has never succeeded without this same vital Jesuit partnership.

Fr. Edward W. Schmidt, SJ, was one of the two original staff members at Company, a magazine of the American Jesuits. He is currently the provincial of the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus.