During the revelations of the degeneracy of the jocks at Georgetown Prep during the Kavanaugh hearings I tried overcoming my disgust at the likes of Kavanaugh being the product of elite Catholic education by beginning to notice other such products of elite Catholic educational institutions. Other Jesuit and other prep-schools and universities such as Georgetown seem to produce levels of Republican-fascist depravity that I generally associate with the Ivy Leagues and the secular, private Ivy-equivalent universities and, especially their law schools.
In addition to Brett Kavanaugh, a Republican-partisan political hack in service to the formerly worst president in our history, then a judge who has amassed a record of cruelty as well as service to Republican-fascism, an open and public perjurer, during his travesty of a confirmation process, so many other really disgusting lawyers seem to come from that world of elite Catholic education, though Kavanaugh is also a Yale product. There are many graduates of Catholic prep-schools and colleges who also are formed by the elite Ivys.
The criminal and decades long international tool of mass murderers and gangsters, Paul Manafort is a product of the now closed St. Thomas Aquinas High School and the renowned Jesuit university Georgetown, where he got both his undergraduate and law degrees.
The most recently exposed Kevin Downing went to a Jesuit school, Saint Joseph's University, where he got a degree in accounting, though he got his law degree at New York University School of Law. I will confess that he is one of a large and growing number of lawyers I'd love to see disbarred and imprisoned. The revelation of his professional misconduct (may he be disbarred for it) with Rudy Giuliani (St. Annes School, Manhattan College) and other lawyers working for Trump was what inspired this post.
You could probably produce a very long list of that quality of graduates of Catholic schools where, presumably, the students are supposedly given a Christian, Catholic education in line with such figures as Ignatius - lying scumbag and criminal, Jerome Corsi is a Harvard product, though he went to a Jesuit prep-school, Saint Ignatius High School, in Cleveland - schools which proudly claim to be heir to the long tradition of Catholic scholarship as well as a program of moral development. Well, that list proves that they are doing a really shitty job of doing what they claim to do.
There is some evidence that the exposures from, at least, Georgetown Prep during the Kavanaugh hearings were enough for some Jesuits to raise questions about the character of the schools they run but I doubt that those who are made uneasy about such revelations will be the majority of the faculty, administration and graduates of such institutions. Honestly, considering the prominence of such sports as American football at such institutions, a sport which is all about violence, sex and entitlement* (you can also say "money"), considering their pride at maintaining football programs, selling their schools through that, their athletics programs instead of their moral and intellectual excellence, that proves they are part of a particularly corrupt racket.
You wonder how their practice of Ignatian sprituatlity could have failed to produce a crisis of conscience over decades of witnessing what they were turning out. That failure is a legitimate impeachment of their claims both in terms of morality and intellectual honesty. They, like so many other elite institutions are not genuinely educational, if character formation is considered to be a vitally important aspect of education, they are the conferrers of credentials for future crooks, gangsters, servants of dictators and dictators.
I think the best thing the Jesuits could do with elite institutions like Georgtown Prep is to sell its grounds and buildings and use the money to found a free open-to-all high school in some blighted urban center where the kind of people who the Kavanaughs of the world delight in holding down and beating up would be served. There should be no sports program, those are a waste of money and too prone to the kind of corruption that almost always comes with sports. Their idea of how to produce "men for others" has failed the test of time in many different institutions. It doesn't work to produce better men and women, only better off ones.
* Kavanaugh is only one of many, many such prep-prepared men with a grotesque sense of entitlement who bring up having played football as a claim to that entitlement in such entirely irrelevant contexts. That they would feel that was some kind of claim to privilege is all anyone needs to know about the real nature of it. And what can be said of football is, to some extent, true of all school sports programs. That point is one I first figured out when I heard a defense of the part of Title IX which covered women's sports. One of the big selling points for equality in funding for women's sports was that sports were a building block in that kind of life of personal entitlement and empowerment through networking, creating an old-girls net to go with the existing old-boys net. Which, I have to say, doesn't strike me as a proper goal of egalitarian democracy. I think the United States would be a lot better off if the connection between team sports and education was cut off entirely.
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