Fr. Mike Vincent, S.J.

I’m Father Mike Vincent, S. J., a member of the Detroit Province of the Society of Jesus. I teach Latin to sophomores and juniors at Saint Ignatius High School in Cleveland, Ohio. 

My home town is Detroit. I attended University of Detroit Jesuit High School there, graduating in 1969.  I would say that many of my teachers, and in particular several Jesuits, really were an example and an inspiration to me, helping me to believe that God was calling me and giving me the strength to follow through with a life of service to young people as an educator.  Fr. Patrick J. Rice, S. J., my freshman Latin teacher, and Fr. Richard G. Polakowski, S. J., my English teacher in my junior and senior years of high school, were those examples, along with several other teachers, both Jesuits and laywomen and men.  I think I would never have become a high school teacher if I hadn’t had the privilege of studying at U. of D. Jesuit.  As a student, I was involved with the school yearbook and Student Senate, and those experiences stayed with me for many years.

Halfway through college at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., I began to see a spiritual director, Fr. Bill McFadden, S. J., one of my theology professors. I had thought of becoming an architect, and had also considered following in my father’s footsteps as an attorney, but God had something different in mind. Fr. McFadden helped me to discern my call to the priesthood and to the Society of Jesus, and worked with me the last two years of college.  This gave me the courage to approach the Detroit Province Vocations Director, Fr. Jim Von Tobel, and I eventually joined the Jesuit novitiate at Loyola House in Berkley, Michigan in September, 1973.  As a novice, I made the Spiritual Exercises and did work in a hospital and a high school.

My theological studies were in Chicago and at Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass.  I worked in several Campus Ministry Programs in both Chicago and Boston, and did a few years of hospital chaplaincy at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston. 

After teaching for a few years at St Ignatius High School, in 1993, I began Tertianship, the last phase of Jesuit Formation.  I made the Spiritual Exercises for the second time, and had the opportunity to do something I had not done before:  to be involved in the formation of younger Jesuits for one year, and in a distant place.  I worked with an inspiring novice director from Canada in a newly-established novitiate in Kalimpong (Darjeeling Province), India, and with American Jesuits who ran a training center for young Indian and Nepali Jesuits in Kathmandu, Nepal.  My experience and my prayer during that time made me very eager to return to high school teaching. Being a teacher is like walking a tightrope: you must be simultaneously fair and demanding.  I hope that I’m the kind of teacher for my students today that Fathers Rice and Polakowski were for me. 

I have been a Jesuit for almost 35 years, a priest for almost 26.  I have strong friends among former students and their families, and have found that my greatest friends are other Jesuits who have shared periods of their formation and their apostolic lives with me, but I am closest to the Jesuits with whom I live and work now.  Being a member of an apostolic community linked with this school and other Jesuit missions has been a great privilege.  My life is in a real continuity with my first experiences of Jesuits – in a Jesuit high school, and I have worked with wonderful people whom I will never forget, but cannot take for granted.  I hope that there will always be Jesuits in the years ahead to work with and inspire young people at critical times in their lives in our high schools and universities. 

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