We ended up with more than 10,000 names, addresses and phone numbers of Jesuit alumni living in Arizona (most of them in the Phoenix area). With a postcard, we invited them all to a wine and cheese party, got a turnout of several hundred men and women, who were delighted to find so many people who shared their values, and their strong emotional ties to the Jesuits.

We gave ourselves the name JAAZ, elected a board and some officers and grew an organization that proceeded to do a great many things together – in fact, we had some kind of program almost every month. We had lectures from visiting Jesuits, a Zen-Jesuit retreat, a picnic in the left field bleachers of Bank One Ballpark. We secured a big block of seats for an Arizona State vs. Notre Dame football game. We had two St. Ignatius Day dinners. We took a trip to the Vatican Observatory in Tucson. One night more than 500 of us gathered in the Central High School Auditorium and had a panel discussion with one of the Jesuit producers of “Nothing Sacred,” sandwiched between two segments of the ABC-TV show, which we watched on a giant TV screen. (For good or for ill, we didn’t get into Church politics, and we didn’t get into city or state politics either.)

We never asked for money. We wanted to give something to our alumni, not take from them. We didn’t even collect dues. Some of our alumni told us our activities recalled their Jesuit roots, made them proud to be part of a thinking Church, and brought them closer to their own alumni organizations.

The organization faded in 2000. Now resurrection, and a new era, when the Church is faced with new challenges. We’re coming back to see how we can help meet some of those challenges, because, after all, this is our Church, too. There may be a million Jesuit alumni in the U.S. alone who owe some of their identity as thinking Catholics (or simply thinking persons) to the Jesuits. They are a great, largely untapped potential to help christify the universe (a Teilhard expression that still works for some of us), or, to be less poetic about it, they are men and women who want to be part of a cause bigger than themselves. Our main goal in Arizona: to help create a thinking Church.

Our secondary goal: to raise friends, for ourselves, and for the Jesuits. As far as we know, there aren’t too many other active all-Jesuit alumni groups anywhere in the U.S. Eventually, our JAAZ group may offer a model to other cities in the U.S., particularly in the Sun Belt where so many alumni come from somewhere else, and are looking for “community,” i.e., like minds and willing hearts.

November 2005