Notre Dame Grad Is A Jesuit

Wearing his white shirt and tie, Fr. Christopher Devron, S.J. looks very much like the lawyer he seemed destined to be after graduating from the University of Notre Dame in 1989.

"At Notre Dame, when you're a liberal-arts major, everyone went to law school, it seemed," says Devron, who grew up in Palatine, took the train to his summer internship at a downtown law firm and was on the path to being a partner in a top firm with a corner office sporting a mahogany desk and view of the lake.

That's not the life he chose.

"I can't imagine anything as exciting and grace-filled as my journey as a Jesuit," says a beaming Devron, 41, having changed into his priestly collar as he sits in his makeshift office with peeling paint and furniture that was cheap when it was new in the 1970s. "This is really what being a Jesuit is about."

Father Devron, ordained as a Catholic priest in 2001, just finished his inaugural year as president of Christ the King Jesuit College Preparatory School, a revolutionary new high school in the West Side community of Austin, one of the poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhoods of Chicago. Modeled after the Cristo Rey Jesuit High School, which opened in 1996 in the Pilsen neighborhood where Devron lives, Christ the King partners puts students to work five days a month in the corporate world as a way to offset the cost of their education.

"It costs $13,000 to educate one student," Devron notes. "Through their work, each student earns more than half of that."

Standing next to a chart showing how his job earned $7,200 for his school, the aptly named Deon Hope, 15, says he's proud of his part-time work. His mom, Diane, drives at least 30 minutes in traffic to bring Deon from their home in Bellwood to the school by 8 a.m. She picks him up when school ends at 4 p.m. On Fridays, Deon gets out of school at 6 p.m. or later after a long bus ride from his job at the prestigious insurance brokerage firm of Arthur J. Gallagher in Itasca.

"How many kids get to put that on their college applications?" Devron quips.

In his suburban cubicle with a view out the floor-to-ceiling windows on the 22nd floor of the plush Gallagher building, Deon jokes with Gloria Lozano, an administrative assistant from Mount Prospect.

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