RAN - Summer 2005 08.indd - Regis High School
RAN - Summer 2005 08.indd - Regis High School
RAN - Summer 2005 08.indd - Regis High School
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<strong>Summer</strong> <strong>2005</strong> 3<br />
Letter From<br />
The President<br />
<strong>Regis</strong> <strong>High</strong> <strong>School</strong> bade farewell to the Class of <strong>2005</strong> on<br />
Saturday morning, June 4, in commencement exercises<br />
held in the great Church of St. Ignatius Loyola. Despite<br />
ominous warnings earlier that day of possible thunder<br />
storms, the sun shone brightly on 84 th Street as the<br />
families and friends of the <strong>2005</strong> Regians walked across<br />
from the Church to a reception in the <strong>Regis</strong> auditorium<br />
and quadrangle. On the preceding Thursday night, June<br />
2, a baccalaureate Mass was held in the Church, with a<br />
reception at <strong>Regis</strong> afterwards. Thursday’s crowd of family<br />
and friends was somewhat smaller but no less engaged<br />
and enthusiastic.<br />
As has happened so often in the past year, my mind<br />
wandered back 57 years to my own graduation from<br />
<strong>Regis</strong>. I don’t believe we had anything like a baccalaureate<br />
Mass. Friday morning Mass in St. Ignatius Loyola Church<br />
was a weekly event, not the grand occasion it now is in<br />
the <strong>Regis</strong> school calendar. The commencement exercises<br />
were held not in the Church but in the <strong>Regis</strong> auditorium<br />
with its great vaulted ceiling that reached up two floors<br />
through what is now our much needed gym. In the 1940’s<br />
the <strong>Regis</strong> graduation was always held on the evening<br />
of June 16 th , then the feast of St. John Francis <strong>Regis</strong>.<br />
Alas, liturgical reformers, always a dangerous lot, have<br />
relegated our patron saint to another date in the calendar,<br />
one that he must share with a few other blessed. But in<br />
1948, if memory serves, we wore the same white dinner<br />
jackets that the Class of <strong>2005</strong> sported at their graduation,<br />
and we certainly sang “our marching song” with similar<br />
gusto.<br />
Since I finish my one-year assignment in the President’s<br />
office at the end of this school year, I consider myself a<br />
honorary member of the <strong>Regis</strong> Class of <strong>2005</strong>. This time<br />
around there was no pressure to make the transition to<br />
Sophomore Year as there was in 1945, when the war had<br />
just ended and the Jesuits imprisoned in the Philippines,<br />
whose names were listed in the <strong>Regis</strong> library, came home<br />
and spoke at our assemblies during that Sophomore year.<br />
It’s a different world that today’s men of <strong>Regis</strong> inherit and<br />
create, but the <strong>Regis</strong> idea is alive and well on 84 th Street.<br />
Joseph A. O’Hare, S.J.