Homily for Jim Loughran, President and Friend

Saint Peter the Apostle Statue adorned with flowers and candles following Father's funeral mass

Funeral Mass of Christian Burial
December 30, 2006
Homily delivered by Raymond A. Schroth, SJ.

Saint Paul says that when we are praying and don’t know what to say, we should let the Holy Spirit speak for us. Today, when our hearts are heavy and our tongues are stuck, the Spirit speaks in the scripture — in Isaiah, Paul, and John. Isaiah was the prophet who pointed to the Messiah and whom Jesus read and from whom, Jesus took his own identity as the suffering servant. But Isaiah was also the prophet of hope and triumph, who teaches that the kingdom of heaven is a feast on a mountain top where the Lord will spread out rich food and choice wines. He will wipe away our tears and destroy death forever.

When I read Isaiah’s description of God’s Kingdom as a feast, I see Jim Loughran in the Guarini House dining room, presiding at the end of the dinner table, with its rich food and choice wines, where he has gathered 12 faculty, family members, old friends and benefactors to honor them, to make them feel loved and appreciated, and he is at that moment the happiest man in the world.

Often Jim was literally bursting with his loves and enthusiasms. For his family: his mother Ethel and father Jack who, with Jim, 30 years ago entertained me in their Brooklyn home when my book on the Brooklyn Eagle was published; his brother Jack, whose son and daughters are here today; his sister Marylou, whose husband Jim Kelly will speak to you later; his dear friends like the McCues and Carringtons, who would celebrate his birthdays or join him on his annual New Year’s Day excursions to climb hills, visit historic sites, or explore the exotic hidden corners of Jersey City or Bayonne. Then we would end the day with lasagna in the house where he worked, lived, and died.

Jim loved Brooklyn, where he grew up and went to school; and Plato, whose dialogues he loved to teach; and France, where he studied theology and played basketball, and which he revisited last summer.

Yet we all know that Jim’s personality had, if not contradictions, its paradoxes. He was fiercely proud of his athletic prowess — at tennis and especially basketball, sponsoring during his Fordham years the annual LIT, the Loughran Invitational Tournament, for would-be pro jocks of his generation who would beat up one another on the b-ball court and then drink beers together. Yet he was a severe critic of what he saw as the abuses in the professionalization of college sports. In his public persona he was articulate, even eloquent, outgoing, gregarious. Yet he could be withdrawn, silent, a private person. How could these tensions, which all of us share, coexist in a creative way?

The answer is in the reading from 2 Timothy chapter 4. It is the teacher’s manifesto. Timothy, says Paul, must teach, teach, teach, no matter what. Convince, reprimand, encourage. If you don’t, people will get led astray, they’ll stop listening to the truth. We must run the race, keep the faith, Paul says, until, at the end we are “poured out like a libation.”

Young men of our generation became Jesuits because we were inspired by our Jesuit teachers who “ran the race” at Brooklyn Prep, Holy Cross, and Fordham. Our vocation was to do the same, keeping the faith till the finish line.

But Jim had a special gift and a second calling within his vocation to the Society. It was the call to leadership. During the second half of the 20th century, there was a cultural shift, a renaissance, in which the Jesuit universities transformed themselves, raised standards, grew, increased scholarship, attracted the best students and, at the same time, reached out to the poor and disadvantaged in their commitment to justice and peace.

Jim became a leader in this movement as a dean, academic vice president, and finally president, beginning as dean at Fordham, then to Loyola Marymount as president, then as acting president at Emmitsburg and Brooklyn, and finally president of Saint Peter’s. Our lifetime has, in many ways, been a golden age of Jesuit colleges and universities; and here Jim Loughran literally poured himself out in love and work for this school.

College administration is inevitably a lonely work, where every step forward risks alienating someone who resists change. Every leader deals with this phenomenon in his own way; but, however Jim handled it, he never got small, never ceased to heap praise on the good work of men and women who might not agree with his policies.

Jim was proud that Saint Peter’s had the most racially, economically, and ethnically diverse collection of students in the country. He and the faculty have both loved every student as he or she is today but challenged each one to be a better student tomorrow. As the year ended Jim and the trustees and staff had their eyes set on a bright future: a new student center, a new emphasis on faculty research and on Jesuit identity.

The afternoon of the day he died Jim was in high spirits, relishing the good company of his coworkers at the end-of the semester Christmas party. As far as we know, he retired to his upstairs apartment, did paperwork late into the evening, ate dinner alone in front of the TV, looking forward to dinner in New York the next night with dear friends.

John tells us in the gospel reading that the night before he died Jesus, at some length tried to explain what death was and what his own death meant to his disciples, all twelve, gathered around the Passover table. Jesus had run the race and was to be poured out. But the last thing he wanted was for his disciples to be emotionally paralyzed by his departure. He was leaving them so much work to do. “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” he said. He was going home. Death meant going home. Heaven is a home — a home with many houses, houses with dining rooms and tables rich with good food and choice wines, surrounded by family, beloved friends, fellow teachers who have kept the faith and taught the truth with love.