Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J. And Life At Ave Maria University

High-profile priest on the inside and on the outside of life at Ave Maria
A year after his firing and re-hiring by Ave Maria University, the Rev. Joseph Fessio remains happy, but acknowledges differences with school administration
By LIAM DILLON
Friday, April 11, 2008
The publishing house founded and operated by the Rev. Joseph Fessio owns a home in Ave Maria town, which has a view of Ave Maria University’s oratory outside its window.

The home has become an East Coast base for Fessio’s company, Ignatius Press, which is the principal United States publisher of the writings of Fessio’s friend, teacher and mentor Pope Benedict XVI. It’s been a little over one year since Fessio, 67, was fired as Ave Maria’s provost and re-hired a day later in a newly-created position without administrative duties.

The house’s location serves as an apt metaphor for Fessio’s position at Ave Maria, and perhaps even his entire professional life. Where before Fessio was central to the school’s daily operation, he now is on its fringes, devoting much of his time to projects independent of the university. His nebulous role at the school continues a pattern that has held for much of Fessio’s colorful career: In many ways he’s the ultimate church insider, but his relentless outspokenness and promotion of his views has often put him outside the smaller systems he’s trying to effect.

“In a lot of ways Father Fessio is a kind of entrepreneur,” said Ignatius Press President Mark Brumley, who corresponds with Fessio a couple times a day.

“You often have people who are very passionate, very intelligent, very committed, who often rub up against people who take that the wrong way.” In the past year, Fessio said his relationship with Ave Maria University President Nick Healy has become virtually nonexistent. Fessio now acknowledges the two didn’t agree on liturgical matters prior to his dismissal. Fessio’s university office space is a shared room in the corner of the academic building. Though he’s asked for one, Fessio hasn’t been given a reason for his dismissal, other than “irreconcilable administrative differences,” the ambiguous statement which Fessio recently paraphrased from a March 2007 university press release.

At the same time, Fessio lives and works out of a university dormitory. Ignatius Press is a supporting partner in a theater company that plans to build a $2 million town theater that will primarily benefit university students.

University students and alumni appreciate his continued dedication to the school and its students. “He’s a spiritual father of course as a Catholic priest, but he looks out for everyone as a father, too,” said Mary Delgado, 24, a 2006 university graduate who now works for Fessio’s theater company. “His contribution is priceless and so precious to us.” And, Fessio said, he is happy. “It’s a great blessing to be at the university, to be living where the students are,” Fessio said. “To be able to say Mass, hear confessions, counsel students, teach a couple classes, but not have all the meetings and reports and responsibilities that I had before. I think providentially it’s been something that’s been a benefit for me.”

It’s hard to put into context Fessio’s influence in the Catholic world, particularly in the American church. The pope, then-the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, was Fessio’s thesis director at Germany’s University of Regensburg in 1975. Fessio, who grew up in the San Francisco area, wrote his thesis on the Rev. Hans Urs von Balthasar, considered one of the major Catholic theologians of the 20th century.

Fessio’s publishing house has helped publicize Balthasar’s work in addition to Ratzinger’s. Ignatius Press is wildly successful for a small publishing company, printing 1.6 million books and videos this past year primarily out of a small office in San Francisco. “If (Fessio) had done nothing other than establish Ignatius Press, he would go down as someone of historic consequence in the church in America,” said the Rev. Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic magazine editor named one of the 25 most influential Evangelicals in the country by Time magazine and a member of Ave Maria University’s Board of Regents. But Fessio has done much more than that.

A prominent Vatican journalist, John Allen, called Fessio “orthodoxy’s ultimate champion” in a 2000 biography of Ratzinger. Allen added, “It is difficult to find many American Catholic controversies in the last 20 years in which Fessio has not been involved.”

Allen cited Fessio’s fingerprints in Rome’s rejection of a Bible translation approved by American Catholic bishops that used non-gendered terminology. Fessio also supported an effort to rebuke a lengthy pastoral letter by Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop of Los Angeles. And Allen was writing before one of Fessio’s more famous dust ups.

Fessio, a Jesuit, had founded a small, conservative enclave at the University of San Francisco, called the St. Ignatius Institute. The institute taught an Ave Maria-style Catholic education and served, Fessio said, as an “implicit criticism” of practices at the rest of the university, which is Jesuit-run. In 2001, after 25 years in operation, the university’s president removed two directors of the institute close to Fessio, contending the program was too “isolationist.” Fearing the dismantling of the institute, Fessio appealed to Ratzinger, then a high-ranking Vatican official, and then-Pope John Paul II. Through Ignatius Press, Fessio, along with a former St. Ignatius director, opened a college with a curriculum similar to the institute’s. Its location was just a few blocks from the University of San Francisco’s campus. Fessio’s Jesuit superiors ordered him to stop working at the new college and reassigned him to a hospital chaplaincy in the Los Angeles area, a move Fessio believed to be a banishment.

Neuhaus has remained sharply critical of the university’s handling of the situation. “It’s one of the truly sad and scandalous events in recent Catholic history that the university killed an effort of such prominence and importance,” Neuhaus said. Fessio is unapologetic about his behavior at USF.

Link to the full article (here)