Things are developing in the Jesuit world that are having a significant impact on the way education happens in the vast array of Jesuit school around the globe and, from my personal perspective, in North America and more specifically in Canada.

I am President of St. Paul’s High School, a mid-sized Jesuit school in Winnipeg, MB, the geographic centre, but hardly the economic or political centre of Canada.  In some ways, you might expect that we would consider ourselves quite isolated from the mainstream of Jesuit apostolic activity in general, and Jesuit educational activity in particular.  But that would be far from the truth.

Over the past thirty years or so, the Jesuit way of doing things has changed quite substantially, with much greater emphasis on collaborative interaction within apostolic sectors, and across apostolic sectors.  Around the world the Society of Jesus reorganized itself to create Conferences that group together the Jesuit Provinces in various regions.  The intention of this is to encourage greater collaboration among the Provinces so that the Society can better fulfill its apostolic goals.

The Canadian Provinces are johnny-come-lately participants in this new structure, formally becoming part of a new Conference of Canada and the United States (JCU) only a few years ago.  One immediate consequence that has had an impact on me personally is the appointment by our Provincial Superior of a number of Assistants for various aspects of Province life.  I became the Provincial Assistant for Secondary and Pre-secondary Education (PASE) in 2014.

That has linked me with several people who hold the same position in their respective Provinces in the US.  This group was commissioned by the newly formed JCU to work on the formation of a new network grouping all of the Jesuit schools in the Conference. 

Thus the Jesuit Schools Network (JSN) was created officially in October of 2015 as a network of networks, leading and serving the apostolate of Jesuit education in all its forms in all of the countries that come within the ambit of JCU: Canada, the United States, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Haiti, Belize.

At the same time, it has promoted a stronger bond of collaboration among the Canadian schools, of which there are now five, collectively called the Education of Youth Sector.  Only two of these would be considered traditional Jesuit schools, St. Paul’s in Winnipeg and Loyola in Montreal. 

Added into the mix are three quite unique and innovative approaches to education in the Ignatian way: St. Bonaventure’s College in St. John’s, NL, Mother Teresa Middle School in Regina, and Gonzaga Middle School in Winnipeg.  The latter two are Nativity-model schools serving the urban poor, while St Bon’s, a K – 12 school, offers the only Catholic education available institutionally in St. John’s.

But the collaboration doesn’t stay only within the confines of the JSN.  The networking extends globally with the development of connections with other networks; such as, FLACSI, which groups all of the schools in Latin America, JEA, for India and South Asia, and similar networks in Asia and Europe.  And connecting all of these is a new effort called Educate Magis, which is essentially a web-based forum for the exchange of information, reflections, best practices, and new initiatives on a global scale.

What does this all mean for us in Winnipeg?  It means that we can avail of excellent resources within our Conference for all aspects of school life.  But it also means that our teachers and students can connect with peers around the world for conversations on things that are important to them.  Just as one example, some of us have recently participated in a world-wide conversation on global citizenship.

It is indeed a brave new world out there and Winnipeg is right in the thick of it.  Now that’s exciting!