Rev. Terrence Devino, S.J. and Rev. Mark McGregor, S.J joined the ranks of Jesuits at Fairfield this year and filled positions vacated last year by Rev. Thomas J. Regan, S.J. and Rev. Gregory Grovenburg, S.J.
Last year Devino was at the Jesuit Urban Center in Boston, Massachusetts, an inner city, non-traditional parish. This year he’s become associate director of the campus ministry team.
But don’t try to tell Devino he’s got it easy at Fairfield.
“I don’t think any ministry work is cushy. The goal of a Jesuit education is always to broaden a person’s world view and to prepare them to be men and women for others,” he said. “If that’s just jargon, then we’ve failed. But if we believe and we work each day to improve the lot of this world, then it’s never cushy.”
The position at Fairfield was brought to Devino’s attention by the Provincial because he had had campus ministry experience at Boston College before he worked at the Boston Urban Center.
At the Boston Urban Center Devino was about as far removed from Fairfield as it is possible to be.
“It wasn’t a traditional neighborhood parish with boundaries,” Devino explained. “It’s not what you’d see in most neighborhoods.”
At the parish, Devino worked on outreach programs for people with AIDS, the homeless, and the marginalized.
Despite the differences in Devino’s experiences, the mixture of campus life on Fairfield as well community service projects run by Fairfield students in Bridgeport seems to be the perfect combination.
Devino’s duties will involve ministry work to the community of Fairfield, organizing the freshman retreat, establishing a new retreat called Kairos, and heading up the RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) program.
In contrast, McGregor comes to Fairfield all the way from the west coast, specifically a Los Angeles suburb, by way of Australia. McGregor worked as a chaplain in a juvenile jail in east LA and then went on a seven month retreat in Australia before settling at Fairfield.
Of the juvenile center McGregor said, “I got a couple godsons and some little brothers along the way” and of the retreat, “it’s hard to imagine me not talking for 30 days.”
McGregor is the new residential priest in the Ignatian Residential College and will teach classes in the Visual and Performing Arts department. Rev. Jim Mayzik, S.J. and Rev. Thomas J. Regan, S.J. were instrumental in recruiting McGregor for the job and acclimating him to Fairfield, as well as the east coast.
Juvenile center or not, it’s hard to believe that anyone would abandon Los Angeles for dreary east coast weather, but McGregor insisted that between the media center and the care taken to introduce him to Fairfield, the choice was obvious.
“They [Regan and Mayzik] weren’t just trying to sell the job to me, they really wanted me to meet Fairfield University, the students, and the professors,” he said.
McGregor is teaching a class on screen writing this semester and will be offering a class on American Films of the 90’s for the Ignatian Residential College next semester.
“A lot of academia think badly of the media because it makes a person passive, what I’m trying to do is work with people to educate them so that they’re not just looking at media, but that they’re being creative,” he said.
McGregor’s classes could easily become very popular, considering the fact that he sometimes assigns the program The Simpsons as homework in an effort to promote interaction with film and TV instead of passivity.
The position McGregor fulfills on the Ignatian Residential College Staff is mostly residential. “I love my neighbors. I feel that the students want to give me the chance not just to be part of the college experience with them, but to also be a teacher to them.”
McGregor wants to let the students of Fairfield know that he’s from the Northwest and that “I have the old pioneer attitude of ‘what do we have to do, and let’s go do it,'” which he will translate into, “what are we going to do at Fairfield.”
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