The Drama of Salvation

The Philelectic Society & Becoming Who We Are Made To Be

BY DANIEL FITZPATRICK ’09

In the second half of June in the year 1580, two Jesuits, Fr. Robert Persons and Fr. Edmund Campion, entered

England by way of Dover. Fortyfive years had passed since St.

Thomas More was executed under the reign of his friend King Henry

VIII, and his daughter Elizabeth was in the midst of her long rule.

Fr. Campion had met the Queen nearly fifteen years prior, when he had delivered the welcome speech in honor of her visit to Oxford. Her majesty was much impressed. Now, having converted from Anglicanism to Catholicism and having taken orders in the Society of Jesus, itself only forty years old, Edmund

Campion returned to England in order to bring back as many souls as he could to the Catholic faith.

Campion harbored no illusions about his mission, which would almost certainly end in death and which might well bear little outward fruit. Yet his mood as he landed at

Dover, labored in secret in London, and moved clandestinely between the houses of Catholic recusants, far from one of defeat, was one of joyful courage. And his joy was exercised in part through one of several expedients he employed to stay alive: he acted. Most famously, he adopted the persona of Mr. Edmonds, a jewel merchant, and played the part well enough to convince first the Dover port authorities and later a good many would-be informers, betrayers, and jailers.

Acting was, in a sense, nothing new within the still-young Jesuit tradition. The Spiritual Exercises laid out by St. Ignatius call for contemplative identification with Christ, the saints, Mary, and even God the Father. Ignatius asks the exercitant to see creation, scenes from scripture, and the realities of heaven and hell through the eyes of others. By becoming someone else through the use of the imagination, Ignatius hopes to lead us to become who we are meant to be.

Nor did Jesuit thespianism die with Fr. Campion, arrested a little more than a year after his arrival in England and executed in London that winter, just a short way from the place where St. Thomas More

Man of La Mancha

Twelfth Night

Technicolor Dreamcoat

Cabaret had been martyred. Fr. Campion’s companion, Fr. Persons, would go on under the patronage of Philip II of Spain to found Stonyhurst, now the oldest operative Jesuit school in the world. There, amidst the lovely scenery of Lancashire, students to this day take part in a rich dramatic tradition. Every graduating student will at some time in his career assist in a theatrical show, whether on stage or in production.

That tradition thrives, too, at Jesuit New Orleans, where the Philelectic Society remains a creative touchstone for the school and the broader community. No other organization has seen as many of Jesuit’s 175 years as the Phils. The name Philelectic, the brainchild of a classically minded Jesuit father, means, as nearly as anyone can tell, “love of speaking,” though perhaps the late Br. Billy Dardis, S.J. ’58 best describes the Society as “happy people telling stories.” At any rate, while the Phils moniker dates back to about 1916, the school’s drama program can trace its lineage to at least as early as 1852, just five years after the school’s founding. Having survived Hurricanes Katrina and Ida as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, the Phils even claim a place as the oldest surviving arts organization in New Orleans.

Many place the high water mark of Phils history in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the 1970s and 80s. The list of titles produced during this period is astonishing in its span and in its daring. William Shakespeare shared the stage with Richard Rodgers, the Marx Brothers with Lloyd Weber, The Who with the Pirates of Penzance. Audiences enjoyed everything from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Man of La Mancha to Chicago and Cabaret. Student performers were as likely to learn Romeo’s lovestruck soliloquy in the House of Capulet as “Hello, Dolly!” Through the Phils, the Jesuit community has enjoyed an acquaintance with almost five hundred years of the dramatic tradition, reaching back in concert with the English department as well as taking the pulse of contemporary theatrical trends.

The Phils have done their part not only to uphold the time-honored favorites of the stage but also to shape the history of drama, music, and even local politics. While many of the society’s performances have showcased the classics, it has not shrunk from putting on relatively little-known shows. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, for instance, though it enjoys a high profile today, was not performed on Broadway until 1982. It showed on Jesuit’s stage for the first time in December of 1980. Some claim that the resurgence in the musical’s popularity can be traced back to Jesuit High School.

More even than for its influence over the dramatic landscape, the Philelectic Society has been known for its role in shaping the careers of the students who have built and decorated its sets, performed its musical numbers, and delivered its monologues. There are big names to be mentioned, of course. Long before Mitch Landrieu ’78 served as mayor of New Orleans, he played the title character in Jesus Christ, Superstar, in 1978. And Harry Connick, Jr. ’85, who has gone on to sell almost 30 million albums worldwide, played in several Jesuit productions in the 80s. Connick likewise co-founded the Krewe of Orpheus in 1993.

But the heart of the Phils has not rested only, or even primarily, with its members who have won dramatic and musical fame. The vast majority of the young men and women who once played Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or Don Quixote or Julius Caesar have not proceeded to careers in the stage but instead enjoy success as architects, classics scholars, theologians, attorneys, and teachers.

Marc Belloni ’83 has had as long and varied an acquaintance with

Godspell

the Jesuit stage as anyone. Though he knew from a young age that he wanted to be an attorney, he spent much of his five years as a Blue Jay as a Phil and went on to earn a drama degree at Loyola. He returned to Jesuit as Phils director and Law Studies teacher from 2007 to 2010. He says that one of the greatest benefits of the Phils is that it gives students the confidence to take on personal and professional roles they might not otherwise have thought possible. Belloni himself has enjoyed a consistent musical sideline since his time in the Phils, when he learned that he could sing, and while some of his peers and students have made their way in the American stage and screen industries, he takes a special delight in seeing young men and women thrive by stepping out of their comfort zones and into someone else’s shoes.

Kate Arthurs-Goldberg has directed the Phils since 2010, though she’s been a fixture on the New Orleans dramatic scene for many years, having seen Landrieu on stage and having spent a semester at Loyola with Connick and even having taught a young Amy Coney Barrett to sing the role of Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors. Like Belloni, Arthurs-Goldberg enjoys seeing students develop as men and women of competence, conscience, and compassion through the myriad opportunities afforded by Phils involvement. The experience, she says, is co-curricular in the deepest sense, with the stage providing a space for mathematics to come into conversation with English, history with theology, science with music. And whether the young men she teaches go on to performing arts careers or simply enjoy the experience of becoming someone else for a few nights each semester, she sees the Phils as a forum in which students can be trained in virtue by imaginatively living out the moral choices of characters on the stage.

As Catholics, this departure from our customary habits and dispositions is at the heart of our calling. We are all asked to act, to put off our old selves and put on Christ so that over the course of our lives our union with him becomes ever more natural, more fluid, more graceful. In demonstrating to the Jesuit community how to set ourselves aside and become for a moment someone else, the Phils provides a model for how we might become who we are made to be.

It was such a model that St. Edmund Campion followed when for a short time before his death he became Mr. Edmonds the jewel merchant. The faith he brought to England, the faith for which he was martyred, was indeed a pearl of great price. His zealous labor and his joyful proclamation of the Gospel even to the gallows continue to vivify the Jesuit tradition and give witness to the drama of salvation. All are called to a role in that drama. After 175 years, Jesuit continues to form young men for their roles. 