On Thursday, August 28, Jesuit gathered students, faculty, and alumni from the Classes of 2006–2010 for a 20-year Katrina Memorial Assembly that looked unflinchingly at the past and squarely toward the mission.

The program opened with an invocation from Fr. John Brown, S.J., who prayed words adapted from the Church’s baptismal rite: “O God, who in many ways have used water, your creation, to show forth both trial and grace… look now with mercy upon us as we recall the storm that devastated our city and our coast… Grant that the waters which once brought destruction may remind us of the living water that flows from Christ’s side.”

Setting the tone, Christian Bautista ’06, Jesuit’s director of institutional advancement who moderated the morning, told students that the assembly was “not to dwell on tragedy from 20 years ago,” but to draw out what the storm revealed about Jesuit’s identity.

“Some think greatness is inevitable or far off,” Bautista said. “This is not what Jesuit teaches. Jesuit is here to teach you that great men are made for all times and that all times will be hard in some way… those times will need Blue Jays.”

He pressed a second point: Jesuit is more than buildings and even its current students and faculty; it is “thousands of people in your corner—parents, alumni, benefactors, and friends—who say, ‘It’s not about me. It’s about glorifying God… being a man or woman for others.‘” He anchored that call with the words of the Suscipe prayer of St. Ignatius: “Take my memory, my understanding, my entire will. Do with it what you will.”

“Grateful, Resilient, Adaptive”

Former president Fr. Anthony McGinn, S.J. ’66 widened the lens before narrowing it back to student responsibility. He began with three watchwords, “gratitude,” “resilience,” and “adaptation,” and first offered thanks “to the faculty at that time, the parents, the students, the wider community, all those people who helped us to return.” He then turned to “you who are in khaki,” reminding students that “the future of Jesuit High School is you.”

From there, Fr. McGinn traced the storm’s hard facts and the choices that followed. Days before landfall, Katrina’s cone of uncertainty shifted; with less than two days the city faced Category 5 warnings and a late evacuation. “Somebody made a mistake in the forecast,” he said, and other choices—like unused buses—compounded the harm. The core lesson was not recrimination but response: “We adapted to the results of someone else’s poor choices.”

A history teacher by training, Fr. McGinn pulled the thread back to 1718, when Bienville sited the city “where the land’s a little bit higher,” yet in a bowl ringed by swamps and yellow fever. New Orleans endured by adapting with A. Baldwin Wood’s pumps that made Mid-City, Lakeview, and Gentilly livable. But later “miscalculated” levee design and shallow sheet piling left outfall canals vulnerable; after the storm passed, Lake Pontchartrain surged and the walls failed.

“That’s life,” Fr. McGinn said. “Life is adapting ourselves to other people’s mistakes, not complaining about it, whining about it, catastrophizing about it.”

He pressed a clear choice on students consuming Katrina retrospectives and, more broadly, facing their own trials. One path is “self-pity and blame, which leads to paralysis and hopelessness and helplessness.” The other is to be “grateful, resilient, and adaptive.” His counsel was blunt: “If it’s all self-pity… if it’s all victimization… ignore it. What is worth your time is themes of resilience, gratitude, and adapting.”

Fr. McGinn closed with a prayer for precisely those virtues, “that the Holy Spirit may make us grateful, resilient, and adaptive,” so that Blue Jays meet others’ errors and their own not with excuses, but with the steady work of rebuilding.

Welcome the Neighborhood, Restarting School

Longtime teacher and administrator Michael Prados ’83 recalled remaining on campus as water rose “when it should be going away, not coming up.”

When flooded neighbors arrived by boat at “our boat dock, which was the steps by the Mary statue,” Prados and Fr. Richard Hermes, S.J., brought families inside: “We talk about being men for others… we welcomed these neighbors into the school, found them some food, and we got them out safely.”

Days later, a text reached the campus holdouts: “We have 200 students in Houston. We’re starting classes at Strake Jesuit and we need teachers.” Prados said before pausing and music gravely, “I have never felt the call to be a teacher more in my life.”

What followed was the work of rebuilding school itself at night, in borrowed spaces.

Peter Kernion ’90 described arriving at Strake expecting “about 20 students” and instead facing “as many as 200… which grew to about 400,” all to be scheduled “without a computer program.” Faculty “rallied,” he said, despite “flooded houses, young children, and a lot of issues,” because the goal was simple: “create as normal an experience as we could.” Later, when night classes also opened at St. Martin’s in Metairie, Kernion repeated the scheduling grind there as well: “It was a lot of time hours and hours of going through all of these schedules… the toughest time, both personally and professionally.”

Kathy Juhas evacuated, then went to Houston to help organize Strake operations, eventually serving as acting principal: “We didn’t have a full faculty, so I was also disciplinarian, a P.E. teacher, and a math teacher. I wore many hats.” She even briefly served as the school’s acting principal, the only woman to occupy the role in the school’s history.

Jack Culicchia ’83 remembered the campus-wide selflessness, from setting up lighting for an evening school to the generosity of Strake families: “In the auditorium lobby, they had hundreds and hundreds of book bags… with cash, PlayStations, books… It was unbelievable. It is a memory that I always can look back on to remember that we do take care of each other.”

At St. Martin’s, now-retired English teacher Tim Powers recalled the city’s stench when he first slipped past barricades to reach Carrollton & Banks: “Men in hazmat suits” were already at work. Night classes in Metairie ran “from 4 in the afternoon until 10 at night,” with dinner at 6 p.m. in the courtyard featuring “those never-to-be-forgotten MREs.”

Powers noted the grit of students who arrived “thoroughly exhausted” from gutting homes by day and studying by night. He called the eventual return to campus “a very, very emotional experience,” with Culicchia adding, “The real hero is Fr. McGinn. He actually saved the school.”

Bautista paused the program to recognize faculty who served during Katrina and alumni employees from the Class of 2006, Scott Delatte, James Linn, Patrick Cragin, and Darrell O’Neill. Also currently working at Jesuit are D.J. Galiano ’07, Wade Trosclair ’07, Daniel Devun ’08, Danny Fitzpatrick ’09, Cameron Eckholdt ’09, Peter Flores ’09, Roger Bacon ’10, and Matt Firmin ’10, all of whom were students during Katrina.

An Anchor, a Compass, and a Map

James Linn ’06, now Jesuit’s alumni director, offered a student’s vantage and the texture of those months.

Linn recalled the moment the tone changed at home: his mother was up late watching meteorologist Carl Arredondo as the track shifted toward New Orleans. The family fueled up at 11 p.m.: “There was no one in line. By the time we finished, the line was around the corner.” The next day’s evacuation took “eight hours to get to Baton Rouge,” followed by watching “with horror on TV as the city filled with water.”

For weeks, communication was mostly “text or email” (and “texting at the time cost 25 cents per message”) while many students had only “the clothes on our backs.” The questions were blunt: “Was there going be a New Orleans to come back to, and was there going be a Jesuit to go back to?”

At Strake in Houston, the rhythm settled in: “night classes” during the week; weekends driving back to “gut houses,” then returning Sunday to start again.

When the Class finally returned in January, “we finally got our senior rings.” With the Roussel Building heavily damaged, “the homecoming game [was] at Brother Martin,” where a last-second win led to cathartic court-storming despite coach Chris Jennings ’78 yelling to clear the floor: “At that point, we had been through enough. There was no way that was gonna happen.”

Graduation brought Fr. McGinn’s Commencement speech and a charge that Jesuit had given the Class “an anchor, a compass, and a map,” to Linn’s recollection. Years later, Linn said, the insight finally clicked: “The anchor was Jesuit.”

Echoing Fr. McGinn, Linn urged students to reject the easy posture of grievance. “Self-pity destroys confidence and ambition,” he said, urging them to trust Providence: “God ultimately has a plan for each of us. The sooner we stop fighting it, the happier we’ll be.”

The task, he added, is to keep passing on “the great Jesuit tradition of being men of faith and men for others,” through “more hurricanes, pandemics, and even a flood or two here on Banks Street.”

“No White Flags”

The assembly closed with a tribute and then a special talk from Steve Gleason, whose blocked punt on September 25, 2006, became a civic emblem of rebirth.

Gleason, a graduate of Gonzaga Prep, a Jesuit school in Spokane, WA, addressed students directly: “Our power doesn’t come from size or strength. It comes from your mindset, and from the trust and commitment that you build with the people around you.”

In 2005, he said, New Orleanians had to “love the life they had, practice radical acceptance, reimagine their future, and transform their mindset to return and rebuild.” That choice to “love and serve even so-called enemies” is what he calls no white flags: “May we never surrender our ability to unconditionally accept our circumstances… then transform ourselves to love the life we have while serving and loving others.”

The blocked punt, he added, “is a symbol of the commitment of the people who chose to return and rebuild… their commitment and strength was far greater than any of the players on the field.”

Gratitude and Mission

From Fr. Brown’s prayer to McGinn’s insistence on gratitude and adaptation; from Prados’s makeshift boat dock and open doors to Kernion, Juhas, Culicchia, Powers, and so many faculty and staff stitching school back together at night; from Linn’s “anchor, compass, and map” to Gleason’s call for hope, the assembly traced a single thread. As Bautista told students at the outset, Jesuit does not wait for great men to arise. It forms them for all times.

And when hard times come, whether floodwaters on Banks Street or the ordinary trials of life, Blue Jays are called to respond with competence, conscience, and compassion: no self-pity and no white flags.