50 Years a Jesuit in 2025
Father Michael Chesney, SJ, celebrates his Golden Jubilee in 2025. In five decades as a Jesuit, Fr. Chesney has taught in Jesuit high schools and ministered to Spanish-speaking Catholics around the United States, currently in El Paso, Texas.
Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, Fr. Chesney entered the Jesuit novitiate at St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, in 1975. He completed his undergraduate studies in Spanish at Loyola University New Orleans in 1981 before serving his regency at Jesuit High School in New Orleans. After obtaining graduate degrees in Latin American Studies and theology, Fr. Chesney was ordained a priest in 1991.
Father Chesney has taught theology and Spanish at Strake Jesuit College Preparatory in Houston (1988 – 1990), Jesuit College Preparatory School of Dallas (1991 – 1995 and 2001 – 2009), Jesuit High School of Tampa (1996 – 2001), and Belen Jesuit Preparatory School in Miami (2009 – 2012).
From 2012 to 2019, Fr. Chesney served as associate pastor of Sacred Heart Parish, the Jesuit church in El Paso, Texas. He then served as assistant director and director of the St. Alphonsus Rodriguez Pavilion, the Jesuit infirmary located in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, from 2020 until 2023. Father Chesney moved to Puerto Rico in 2023, where he served as parochial vicar at Parroquia San Ignacio de Loyola and assisted with care for senior Jesuits in the Jesuit Community of Puerto Rico until this year.
Father Chesney returned to Sacred Heart as associate pastor this summer.
Fr. Mike Chesney’s Reflection on 50 Years as a Jesuit
In August 1975, I was the youngest first-year novice privileged to join a class of 14 in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, hoping to imitate the capable novice masters Fr. Joe Doyle, SJ, and Fr. Jerry Fagin, SJ, in the school of the heart. After meeting Jesuits and colleagues in many places during my lengthy studies and apostolic assignments around the province, I have learned that hope and trust have a lot more to do with Christ himself than with the good men and women among whom we work. I am confident, remembering Gamaliel’s advice to the contemporaries of St. Paul: “if it is of God, you cannot overthrow it” (Acts 5:39). God affirms his mission in the created world, the missions of the Society of Jesus, and my small place in it; I am happily one who serves. May God grant that many more undertake this mission and bring success to the works of our hands.
