RAN - Summer 2005 08.indd - Regis High School

Summer 2005 3
Letter From
The President
Regis High School bade farewell to the Class of 2005 on
Saturday morning, June 4, in commencement exercises
held in the great Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. Despite
ominous warnings earlier that day of possible thunder
storms, the sun shone brightly on 84 th Street as the
families and friends of the 2005 Regians walked across
from the Church to a reception in the Regis auditorium
and quadrangle. On the preceding Thursday night, June
2, a baccalaureate Mass was held in the Church, with a
reception at Regis afterwards. Thursday’s crowd of family
and friends was somewhat smaller but no less engaged
and enthusiastic.
As has happened so often in the past year, my mind
wandered back 57 years to my own graduation from
Regis. I don’t believe we had anything like a baccalaureate
Mass. Friday morning Mass in St. Ignatius Loyola Church
was a weekly event, not the grand occasion it now is in
the Regis school calendar. The commencement exercises
were held not in the Church but in the Regis auditorium
with its great vaulted ceiling that reached up two floors
through what is now our much needed gym. In the 1940’s
the Regis graduation was always held on the evening
of June 16 th , then the feast of St. John Francis Regis.
Alas, liturgical reformers, always a dangerous lot, have
relegated our patron saint to another date in the calendar,
one that he must share with a few other blessed. But in
1948, if memory serves, we wore the same white dinner
jackets that the Class of 2005 sported at their graduation,
and we certainly sang “our marching song” with similar
gusto.
Since I finish my one-year assignment in the President’s
office at the end of this school year, I consider myself a
honorary member of the Regis Class of 2005. This time
around there was no pressure to make the transition to
Sophomore Year as there was in 1945, when the war had
just ended and the Jesuits imprisoned in the Philippines,
whose names were listed in the Regis library, came home
and spoke at our assemblies during that Sophomore year.
It’s a different world that today’s men of Regis inherit and
create, but the Regis idea is alive and well on 84 th Street.
Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J.