Father John Brown, SJ, didn’t know the Jesuits when he was growing up at St. Edmund’s Elementary in Eunice, Louisiana, but he knew the Jesuit Blue Jays – and he couldn’t help but like them. Raised not far from the former novitiate and Jesuit retreat houses in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, Fr. Brown spent summers working alongside students from Jesuit High School of New Orleans at a camp for disabled children. The students left an impression.

“These guys were hard-working men, men for others, men of faith. I couldn’t help but admire them and think to myself, ‘Whatever is going on at that high school in New Orleans, it is special,’” he said. Today, as the president of Jesuit High School, New Orleans, Fr. Brown knows a lot about what makes the school so special.

He has been missioned to Jesuit since 2012, serving first as a teacher, then as interim president in 2020 and president since 2021. He leads the school in fulfilling its almost 200-year legacy of rigorous formation that produces remarkable young graduates.

Father Brown is enthusiastic about his work with young people, particularly guiding young men during their adolescent years of “tremendous growth.”

“The love of learning at that level is very palpable; you can feel it. It gives me life,” he said.

He witnessed that love of learning firsthand in the classroom, where he taught computer science and web design, Spanish, art and theology. “They are ready and willing to soak up knowledge,” said Fr. Brown. “It is a really special time to be in a young man’s life.”

It is not a time without its challenges, he added.

“There’s kind of a crisis right now in our culture, especially for young men, that they don’t know what life is supposed to be about. They are offered a lot of different alternatives for what masculinity looks like, what manhood looks like, what fatherhood looks like. They need some help recognizing what God has called them to do in their own lives,” Fr. Brown said.

“And that, to me, is just a very special process to be part of, as a person, as a teacher, and right now, as an administrator at Jesuit High School.”

Clarity about the school’s mission – “to develop in its students the competence, conscience and compassion that will enable them to be men of faith and men for others” –

is for Fr. Brown the key to that process. The means is “the best secondary education that you can possibly do,” he said.

“The difference in a young man between the ages of 13 and 18 is tremendous. We focus on where they are, what they need to be prepared for, and how they need to be formed so that they’ll be able to discern the good from the bad in everything that comes their way,” he said.

Academic rigor and high standards for conduct and achievement are part of this picture. But Jesuit education “for the greater glory of God” isn’t just a slogan for Fr. Brown or Jesuit New Orleans. It is a lived reality.

“For you to achieve great things, to live up to your potential, is not so that you can get a trophy,” he said. “When you glorify God in all that you do, you are taking on the weight of bringing God into the world made more manifest each day. You’re taking part, in a sense, in something like the incarnation.”

In this, Fr. Brown leads by example. Discernment and a ministry of reconciliation have shaped his approach to leadership.

“My priesthood and the Jesuit charism, those two things have formed me in the way that I’m going to make any decision, work with people and try to build bridges between them.”

He regularly celebrates the sacraments at the school, guiding the students in the integration of faith and intellectual life. In addition, Fr. Brown ministers to the Servants of Mary, Ministers to the Sick in New Orleans and at St. Nicholas of Myra Byzantine Catholic Church and even tries to build bridges online through a small YouTube channel, Qué Viva! With Fr. John Brown.

“I see myself as a ‘man for others,’ wholly and completely the property of God and therefore the property of the people that God has asked me to minister to,” he said.

For many of his 25 years as a Jesuit, he has been called to serve the community at Jesuit High School in New Orleans. His profession of final vows in 2019 took place during an all-school Mass.

“There’s nothing secret about my love for the Society of Jesus, or my love for the Church, or my love for the service I’m able to perform here at Jesuit High School,” he said.

“It was a confirmation of what had been in my heart since the beginning,” he said.

Reflecting on that beginning, Fr. Brown said it was the Jesuit saints and St. Ignatius himself who spoke to his heart.

“I felt like the Jesuits have such great saints, and often those saints came to the table without all the gifts that you would imagine they’d need, but the Jesuits somehow gave them that charism to be those saints. I thought, ‘Maybe they can make a saint out of me.’”

After 25 years, Fr. Brown’s enthusiasm for his vocation continues to grow. He looks to the future and the promise of the young men entrusted to Jesuit High School with hope.

“I feel so alive by all these things that are part of a Jesuit vocation,” he said. “I cannot help but want to light other fires with the fire that’s been lit in me.”