F. E. Peters On His Time At Regis In New York City

I cannot speak for the present, but the Jesuit educational system was once unabashedly based on privilege and its denial, and Regis was its most finely calculated and most successful example. We were all there on privilege, we were told, a privilege costi ng us nothing and won through a competive exam. That privilege, once bestowed, was then constantly threatened with withdrawal. A lapse below 75 in any one subject meant instant probation; in two, summary dismissal. Blown away. Gone. The brave among those discharged wretches picked up the shattered pieces of their lives and begged admittance to Xavier or Fordham Prep or some other Jesuit high school where you could shamefully buy yourself a place by paying tuition; the desperate disappeared into the flaili ng arms and ravening jaws of the Christian Brothers at All Hallows or Saint Anne's or, God help us, La Salle. Regis alumni still suffer a little frisson, I am sure, when they open the sports pages of the New York Times and their eye chances to light on an obscure high school boxscore and the name "La Salle Academy".
Or so it was supposed, since the losers in that all-win Regis universe were banned from human intercourse as totally as if they had been excommunicated or assassinated. No one ever dropped back and told us what All Hallows was like. The survivors, on the other hand, though annually dimished in number, waxed fat, as survivors will, in wisdom and age and grace, and by their senior year they were even permitted access to those gleaming marble stairs, though not to the facade entrance and never ever to the Sa int Lawrence girls across the street. When Socrates had his shackles removed in his Athenian prison, he rubbed his hairless leg and remarked how marvelously like pleasure was to pain. There was a lot of leg-rubbing at Regis high School between freshman an d senior year, and yes, the pain was much like pleasure.
The pain came first, as it inevitably must in that calculus. The Jesuits, embarrassed at being anticipated by the Dominicans in the invention of the Inquisition, riposted by devising the half-sheet, which, like its older and better known counterpart, was administered to those of the faithful suspected of temerarious theology or faulty syntax. Like all works of genius, it was a simple contrivance, a sheet of ordinary lined notepaper torn neatly --"neatly, Driscoll"-- in half, and on one half was indited ea ch day at the beginning of every class the principal parts of parco or the pluperfect subjunctive of faire or whatever other piece of obscure or troublesome information was demanded by the dangerously unpredictable Mr. Torquemada, S.J. or old Father Sache r-Masoch, S.J., fresh in from the Austrian province on the Society of Jesus. "Time's up. Pass to the front of the room." In that fashion the young scholars learned not only the principal parts of parco but the rapid and careful calculation of just how man y of those fatal half-sheets one could blow before descending below the ominous 75 and a future at Power Memorial High School.
The Jesuits made their students produce, daily, weekly, monthly, and on command. Each weekend the future cream of the FBI propped a copy of Father Donnelly's English Composition before them on dining room tables from Staten Island to Larchmont and wrote c harming paragraphs on the Council of Trent or the Second Punic War in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson or John Cardinal Newman. And at lunch hour we assembled on our own time in the school cafeteria and prolonged the exercise by composing charming if s currilous passages on the Jesuit faculty in the manner of James Joyce. Our mentors made us what we were, voluable, ironical, sarcastic wise-mouths; masters of the one-liner, the epic send-up, the sly put-down; clever sophists, charming cavilers. Much like the Jesuits themselves, in fact.

Read F. E. Peters full essay entitled, "A Season In The Sun" (here).