‘Athletics for Good’: Performance and Physical Fitness in U.S. Jesuit Education

This paper investigates how U.S. Jesuit colleges from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries integrated physical education into their long-standing performance traditions. Building on pre-suppression Jesuit pedagogy—linking bodily grace to rhetorical eloquence—Jesuit educators staged gymnastics, calisthenics, social dances, and athletic exhibitions alongside music, theatre, and interpretive movement. These events framed physical fitness as a performative act that reinforced mens sana in corpore sano while shaping national, religious, gender, and immigrant identities. In an era of nativist suspicion, such performances aligned with broader movements like muscular Christianity yet retained distinct Catholic and humanistic inflections. Archival evidence reveals how Jesuit schools used embodied displays to negotiate masculinity, demonstrate patriotism, and compete with Protestant institutions, while preserving an educational ethos that fused intellectual, moral, and physical formation.

Keywords:
physical education; performing arts; masculinity; nineteenth-century American colleges

[Editorial Note: In November 2017, at the American Society for Theatre Research Conference, the author presented this essay in the working session “Extraordinary Players: Sports, Physical Training, and Performance.” Part of a larger inquiry into Jesuit performance traditions, it explores the interplay between physical education and the performing arts in U.S. Jesuit colleges at the turn of the twentieth century. Presented here with revisions, the piece retains the clarity, focus, and spirited engagement that distinguished its original delivery.]

Introduction

For more than two decades, the artistic investment of the Society of Jesus in educational, pastoral, and missionary works has been the object of sustained scholarly attention. The extensive Jesuit engagement with music, theatre, and dance has captivated students of Catholicism and culture as well as historians and practitioners of performance.^[1] These very compelling investigations of Jesuits and the performing arts consider the work of the “old Society,” that is, the Society prior to its suppression in 1773. Less well known, and certainly less adequately considered from an academic point of view, are Jesuit experiments with performance in the United States after the universal restoration of the Society of Jesus in 1814. Archival research affirms that the founders of Jesuit colleges and universities employed a variety of performance forms in their educational projects during the later 19^th and early 20^th centuries; however, the character, quality, and effect of such performances have not been sufficiently researched or analyzed.

Part of a larger project on the retrieval of Jesuit performance traditions, this paper focuses on the intersection between performance and physical education in U.S. Jesuit institutions. Rooted in the pre-suppression insights that (a) eloquence was as much a matter of the body as of the tongue and (b) bodily health was a prerequisite for any effective engagement with Early Modern society, the Jesuit concern for “physical fitness” migrated across both the Atlantic Ocean and the North American continent, taking different shapes in the American, Catholic, and immigrant contexts. I contend that the performance of physical fitness in Jesuit schools was directly related to the order’s historical investments in traditional performance forms (theatre, music, and dance.) Further, I argue that these performative displays of physical wellbeing served an educational project that aimed to shape national, religious, geographic, and gender identities.

Traditions of the “Old Society”

At the time of the suppression of the Society of Jesus by Pope Clement XIV in 1773, the Jesuits’ educational network included more than eight hundred schools across nearly every part of the world.^[2] By the end of the 16^th century, despite the anxiety that they sometimes generated, theatre, music, and dance became staples of Jesuit education. These performing arts served to advance the primary aim of the schools and colleges: forming students to be maxime humanissimi ad maiorem Dei gloriam.^[3] This process of becoming “most highly humanized” so as to give glory to God through virtuous engagement with the world required the integrated education of the mind and the heart, the will and the imagination, the spirit and the body. Theatre not only exercised students’ growing competence in eloquentia perfecta Latina but also deepened their understanding of human and Christian virtues by allowing them to experience, through the embodiment of dramatic characters, the challenges of choosing well. Despite (or perhaps because of) its overt sensuality, music became increasingly important in Jesuit schools and colleges as a means of touching and stirring the affect in both liturgical services and theatrical productions. Dance, present in a variety of forms throughout the Jesuit network, was particularly significant in France where Jesuits like Claude-François Menstrier, S.J., became early theorists and historians of the ballet. Central to the use of ballet in French Jesuit schools was the understanding that it was “physical rhetoric.”^[4] According to Judith Rock, the undisputed expert in French Jesuit ballet,^[5] the “cultural reason for this training in physical rhetoric was that in the adult lives of upper class students, physical self-presentation and mastery in dancing would be critical for achieving a place in society, maintaining reputation, and forming social relationships.”^[6]

The suppression of the Society closed the worldwide network of Jesuit schools and colleges^[7] and ruptured the performance practices that were so critical to their pedagogical vision. By the time of the universal restoration of the Order in 1814, Jesuits had no lived experience of their educational or artistic traditions for nearly forty years. Still, theatre, music, and dance managed to cross the Wagnerian gulf of this bleak period, reemerging (among other places) in North American educational institutions founded and developed throughout the 19^th century. Though they bore a resemblance to their pre-suppression counterparts, especially in the driving concern to encourage integrated humanistic learning, these latter day appearances of the performing arts manifested some intriguing differences. Dance, particularly as a vehicle for cultivating physical eloquence and grace, migrated across the Atlantic in less than obvious ways.

Performing Physical Wellbeing in the United States

Even in the earliest educational foundations like Georgetown College (1789) and St. Louis University (1818), theatrical and musical performances emerged in easily recognizable forms, but dance entered the scene more stealthily. In most circumstances, “dance” referred mainly to social rather than theatrical dancing (i.e., circle, line, or couple dancing undertaken for recreation or celebration in a group context rather than formal choreography aimed at presentation before an audience). For example, at St. John’s College (later Fordham University) in New York, the all-male student body enthusiastically participated in “hops,” especially during the winter months when outdoor physical recreation was curtailed. Writing in The Fordham Monthly, one of the students describes the activity thus:

The dancing fever is at its height, and serves the double end of affording amusement to the whole division, and of giving the members of the dancing class a grand opportunity of pracitising [sic] their weekly lessons . . . The ‘hops’ take place on Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, from four until six; and on Sunday evenings after supper.^[8]

In addition to revealing that the students of the Jesuits took dancing classes to prepare them for their future social obligations, this excerpt underscores the not insignificant investment of time made available to this diverting physical activity.^[9]

More intriguing, however, than these instances of social dancing are the formal performances of physical wellbeing. In the mid- to late-19^th century, Jesuit institutions began taking more seriously the physical education of their students, building and outfitting gymnasiums “with all the modern appliances for muscular development.”^[10] At various times throughout the academic year, students performed their emerging athletic competencies in gymnastics, weightlifting, boxing, wrestling, running, and the like. As Jesuit pedagogy operated under the two interrelated assumptions that (1) the active performance of knowledge most effectively consolidated learning, and (2) competition pushed students to do their very best work, exhibitions and contests in the entire range of subjects—including physical education—were part of every student’s education. These exhibitions or “entertainments” as they were often called mingled physical exercise with traditional performing arts (like music and theatre). The program for the Calisthenics Entertainment given by the Senior Athletic Association at St. Mary’s College, Kansas on March 3^rd, 1899, reflects an educational integration that joins a long-standing Jesuit commitment to graceful and cultured eloquence to physical fitness. The program began with the Overture from Donizetti’s Lucia di Lamermoor performed by the college orchestra. The music was followed by the horizontal-bar exercise after which one of the students “illustrat[ed]” a song. In the wake of this solo interpretive dance, all the seniors engaged in an unaccompanied physical drill and a dumb-bell drill that were followed immediately by soft shoe dancing. The second part of the evening continued in the same rhythm, alternating interpretive movement with declamation, a parallel bar exercise with tumbling, until the evening finally came to a close with a march accompanied by the college band.^[11]

The Jesuits’ inclusion of some sort of physical education in their schools and colleges in the 19^th century United States is not surprising given that even pre-suppression institutions built time into the scholastic day for “bodily recreation.” Such activity was considered “as useful for the body as for the studies, to which one returns with more of a disposition to make progress, when preceded by some honest bodily exercise.”^[12] In fact, despite expectations to the contrary, Catholics in general rarely manifested the animus toward the body as did more rigorist Protestants for whom sport and recreation were thought to literally waste time and dangerously indulge physical pleasures.^[13] More noteworthy in the 19^th century context is the curricular placement of physical education at some Jesuit schools. At St. Louis University, for example, “calisthenics,” along with “gesture drills,” was part of the five-course sequence in elocution, a fact that reveals the enduring connection in Jesuit education between verbal and physical eloquence.^[14]

The public performance of athleticism and bodily competence likely sought to accomplish more than the integration of mens sana in corpore sano. Displays like the Calisthenics Entertainment at St. Mary’s College deliberately situated physical education within a traditionally artistic frame, literally performing the continuity between art and athleticism. In so doing the Jesuits highlighted that athletics and sport were more than simply diversions from a relatively exacting academic schedule; they were part and parcel of an integrated pedagogical approach that sought to prepare students for “this American life.” Though not all students at Jesuit colleges were Catholic^[15] or from immigrant families, most were. And even in those cases where the Jesuits were educating non-Catholic Americans, they had a significant stake in demonstrating that they could impart as effective an education for public life as their Protestant counterparts, particularly at times of nativist unrest.

As American educators began to emphasize the importance of bodily health during the 19^th century, Jesuits leveraged their own educational tradition to affirm goals similar to “nineteenth-century social reform movements that connected physical and moral perfection.”^[16] Like Protestantism’s “muscular Christianity” which developed in England in the early years of the 19^th century and had a significant effect on American education, particularly regarding sport and physical fitness,^[17] “athletics for good”^[18] in Jesuit circles implied that virtue was a physical as well as a spiritual reality and could be cultivated by attending to the body. Jesuit colleges seeking to educate virtuous Catholic “gentlemen” for the American polity had to form their students in both “gentility” and “manliness.” The classical curriculum employed by the Jesuits (with its additional emphasis on theatrical and musical performances) imparted values like clear and elegant self-expression, intellectual and emotional understanding, the capacity to choose well, and the willingness to engage society—to “act” virtuously so as to take up one’s part in the “theatre of the world.”^[19] Further, the spirituality providing the foundation for Jesuit education hinged on the cultivation of an affective sensibility; through retreats and spiritual lectures the students learned to pay attention to their hearts so that they could discern the spirits moving them to act in accordance with God’s will.

At the same time, and unlike muscular Christianity, the Jesuits’ devotion to both intellectual humanism and emotional sensitivity risked blurring some American gender boundaries. Curious apologias for the brand of masculinity cultivated in Jesuit schools appear in a variety of college publications. In an article entitled “Let Us Be Manly,” for example, a student at St. John’s College, Fordham insisted that “[m]anliness does not consist, as some seem to think, in the possession of physical force—trained though it be.”^[20] He goes on to advise that

[o]ur ideal should not be, for example, the boxer, proficient in the so-called ‘manly art of self-defense.’ Nor should it be the blustering bully, nor any of those hundred and one other types which immediately suggest themselves to the mind of every reader. No!—such as these are notable only on account of those attributes which are common to us with brutes. We are men through the possession of the higher powers of the soul—the understanding and the will. If we make use of these as they should be used—for the conquest of our evil habits—we shall be men, and moreover, heroes in the most sublime meaning of the word.^[21]

In other words, one’s character—polite, respectful, civil—made the man. These sorts of defenses suggest an emerging anxiety around the performance of masculinity that the elaborate performances of physical fitness aimed to assuage. Students demonstrated publicly the manliness deliberately downplayed in the preceding passage. At the same time, boxing, wrestling, weightlifting, calisthenics, etc., were framed by and with traditional performing arts so as to keep them tethered to the integrative aims of Jesuit education.

Though performances of physical fitness occur in nearly all the U.S. Jesuit colleges, especially in the later 19^th and early 20^th centuries, they gain a particular prominence in the American west. The 1905 Washington’s Birthday Celebration at Gonzaga College in Spokane, Washington began with a grand march played by the college band after which took place the first half of a basketball game. At the half, a student vocal quartet performed an a capella medley that was followed by the second half of the basketball game. The college orchestra then played a series of patriotic songs that served as a prelude to the musically-accompanied Indian club drill. After an instrumental trio and an accompanied calisthenics drill, the orchestra played “For Home and Country.” The gymnastics portion of the program, also accompanied by the orchestra, rounded out the physical displays, and the evening concluded with a military drill and the singing of the national anthem.^[22] Offering “educational opportunity in regions that otherwise would not have been served,”^[23] Jesuit schools attended to diverse populations in relatively rough and tumble environments (at least compared with those east of the Mississippi). For both students and Jesuits, a certain physical endurance was required to live in the Rocky Mountain Mission, Washington, California, and the New Mexico Territory. The integration of physical fitness into the educational experience proved apt (and necessary). Further, according to historian Gerald McKevitt, because of the scarcity of public education in these regions, Catholics competed with Protestants “for the spiritual conquest of the American continent” and “[e]ach church sought to muscle its rivals out of the academic arena.”^[24] As a result the Jesuits competed with Protestant counterparts to deliver a Catholic education that would effectively integrate students into the American landscape. In the face of charges that Catholics would eventually undermine American public institutions, performances of physical fitness publicized not only educational integration and a certain conception of masculinity but also patriotism and national loyalty.

Conclusions

As this paper is only a first foray into the topic of physical education in American Jesuit colleges, these conclusions serve less to sum up findings and more to raise further questions about the direction of the research. Sport and physical education grew in prominence at the end of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries at all U.S. educational institutions, including colleges and universities. Intramural and interscholastic athletic teams began competing in baseball, football and rugby (particularly in the years before World War I when football had been abolished by colleges and universities because of its brutality), and the extent to which a school could compete in intercollegiate sport became one measure of its prestige. In the increasing commitment to sport, Jesuit institutions were no different than their non-Catholic counterparts. However, the theatrical performance of physical fitness, the framing of bodily strength, flexibility, balance, and health within the traditional performing arts, makes a different and more compelling case for what Jesuit education was attempting to impart to its students as the students and institutions themselves sought to become “Americans.” Some questions that remain to be considered on this score: (1) What are the correlates to these theatricalized performances of fitness in other institutions of higher education?; and (2) Do they differ in kind or degree from those taking place at Jesuit institutions?

The national origins of the Jesuits who founded and taught at the various schools and colleges throughout the United States are not insignificant when considering the style with which they undertook their educational projects. Even though there were systematizing educational regulations promulgated by the general curia of the Jesuits in Rome, the French in New York, the Belgians in Missouri, the Germans in Ohio, the Italians in California, etc., all brought different experiences to bear on their educational work. Further the national origins and immigration status of the students (many of whom, but not all, were Catholic) most certainly shaped the education offered and received. In this regard certain questions arise: (1) How did the Jesuits’ commitments to performance and physical education vary according to their own national origins?; (2) Did the Turner movement have any significant effect on Jesuit education among German immigrants in the area of physical fitness (particularly since the liberal politics of the Turners would have collided with the experience of Jesuits who were expelled from Europe as a result of those politics)?; and (3) How, specifically, did the Jesuits stage the integration of immigrant populations into American culture?

Questions about gender (and race, for that matter) have been arising consistently in this research. These all-male institutions produced significant numbers of plays in which female roles needed to be excised or rewritten (Portia became Portio, in some productions, and Lady Macbeth became Macbeth’s brother or confidant). For a period in the early twentieth century, however, young men began “crossing the stage” to play women’s roles (seriously and not in burlesque). In 1926 the College of the Holy Cross, for example, staged an ancient Greek language production of Euripides’ Hecuba that became an acclaimed part of the national sesquicentennial celebrations in Philadelphia. All the characters in the play, save two, were women. The very important chorus of captive Trojan women were all played by young men—most of whom were athletes—trained under the guidance of Helen A. Curtin of Buffalo, New York, “one of the leading instructors of Greek choral dancing in the United States.”^[25] In the context of these gender crossings, what performances of masculinity were employed to keep the gender train from going off the rails?

As the 19^th century wore on, Jesuit institutions lagged behind their counterparts in endorsing the most recent educational trends. Their continued reliance on a required classical humanistic curriculum long after it had been abandoned by other American colleges and universities “in favor of a more varied and more utilitarian schedule”^[26] certainly distinguished Jesuit education, and in the eyes of some, like Harvard President Charles Eliot, also made it insufficient for seeing to American needs.^[27] Eventually, however, in the early decades of the 20^th century, Jesuits began assimilating to the dominant educational culture. The period of “distinction” seems to be the period in which Jesuit education tried to perform differently than its counterparts. How did the performing arts and the performance of physical culture demonstrate distinctiveness and when did their prominence dwindle?

Notes:

^[1]          Consider, for example, this sampling of book-length studies: Judith Rock, Terpsichore at Louis-le-Grand: Baroque Dance on the Jesuit Stage in Paris (Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996); Gauvin Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (University of Toronto Press, 1999); Johann Herczog, Orfeo nelle Indie: i gesuiti e la musica in Paraguay, 1609–1767 (M. Congedo, 2001); Giovanna Zanlonghi, Teatri di formazione: Actio, parola e immagine nella scena gesuitica del Sei-Settecento a Milano (Vita e Pensiero, 2002); Anna Harwell Celenza and Anthony R. DelDonna, Music as Cultural Mission: Explorations of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North America (St. Joseph’s University Press, 2014).

^[2]          John O’Malley, S.J., “How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education,” in The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400^th Anniversary Perspectives, ed. Vincent Duminuco (Fordham University Press, 2000), 65.

^[3]          The expression “maxime humanissimi” (“most highly humanized”) seems to originate in the work of the second-century Roman grammarian Aulus Gellius who in his Noctes Atticae attempts a very early definition of “humanities” emerging from the correct usage of Latin. See Nicolas Walter, Humanism: Finding Meaning in the Word (Prometheus Books, 1998), 12. As the early Jesuits were humanists, they connected a commitment to becoming fully human with service to the common good and living the Christian life for the greater glory of God.

^[4]          Judith Rock, “The Jesuit College Ballets: What We Know and What’s Next,” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): 433, https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-00403004.

^[5]          See Rock, Terpsichore.

^[6]          Rock, “Jesuit College Ballets,” 436–37. Rock notes that “the test for taking one’s place at Louis XIV’s court was to dance with a partner before the king, with all the courtiers watching. There is a story of one young man who had not practiced enough, fell on his face, and was sent abroad by his father until the considerable scandal died down and he could try again. There is also a story of a boy from a highly placed legal family who was expected to go into the army. His dancing master had to inform the boy’s father that the boy was simply incapable of learning to dance. Which meant that he could not be an army officer, because he would be excluded from the balls and social occasions at which most of the important necessary communication took place among the officers.”

^[7]          As Catherine the Great of Russia did not want to lose the Jesuit school in Kiev, she refused to promulgate in her territories the Bull of Suppression (Dominus ac Redemptor); hence, a “skeleton crew” continued to exist in Russia until the universal restoration of the Society in 1814.

^[8]          Fordham College Monthly 2, no. 4 (December 1883): 135.

^[9]          It is also interesting to note that as Jesuit schools were for boys and young men only, the dance classes and ordinary “hops” were same-sex affairs.

^[10]         Fordham College Monthly 2, no. 6 (February 1884): 158.

^[11]         St. Mary’s College Bulletin (1898–99), 73–74.

^[12]         Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu quoted in Patrick Kelly, Catholic Perspectives on Sports from Medieval to Modern Times (Paulist Press, 2012), 54.

^[13]         Robert A. Mechikoff and Steven G. Estes, A History and Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education (McGraw Hill, 2002), 218.

^[14]         St. Louis University Course Catalogue (1889): 43.

^[15]         In the 1860’s and 1870’s, for example, less than half the student body at Santa Clara College (founded in 1851) was Catholic.

^[16]         Mechikoff and Estes, 176.

^[17]         Mechikoff and Estes, 234. “Developed in England by Bishop Fraser, Thomas Hughes, Charles Kingsley, and Charles Wordsworth, muscular Christianity associated godliness with manliness . . . and the ideas of muscular Christianity permeated [English public schools].”

^[18]         See St. Mary’s College Catalogue (1897–98), Prospectus, 7–8. “While holding athletics to be of secondary importance in the work of the college, the Faculty are not insensible to the influence of athletics for good, when rightly directed and under proper control.”

^[19]         RR. James S. M. Lynch, Commencement Address in Fordham College Monthly 14, no. 1 (October 1895): 6.

^[20]         Fordham College Monthly 3, no. 3 (November 1884): 5.

^[21]         Fordham College Monthly 3, no. 3 (November 1884): 5.

^[22]         Gonzaga University Catalogue (1905): 54.

^[23]         Gerald McKevitt, Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848–1919 (Stanford University Press, 2007), 230.

^[24]         McKevitt, Brokers of Culture, 231.

^[25]         Worcester Evening Post, May 28, 1926.

^[26]         Gerald McKevitt, The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851–1977 (Stanford University Press, 1979), 56–57.

^[27]         See John T. McGreevy, American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global (Princeton University Press, 2016), 155. According to McGreevy, “[i]n the United States, the most prominent dissenter from the ideal of the classical curriculum was Harvard president Charles W. Eliot. Eliot loudly proclaimed the virtues of student curricular choice, and in 1893 the governing body of Harvard Law School, under Eliot’s aegis, quietly decided not to admit the graduates of Jesuit colleges, given the classical focus of their curricula and what Eliot deemed an insufficiently varied ‘programme of studies.’ He thought the education available at Jesuit colleges ‘the education of priests.’”

Bailey, Gauvin. Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773. University of Toronto Press, 1999.

Celenza, Anna Harwell and Anthony R. DelDonna. Music as Cultural Mission: Explorations of Jesuit Practices in Italy and North America. St. Joseph’s University Press, 2014.

Herczog, Johann. Orfeo nelle Indie: i gesuiti e la musica in Paraguay, 1609–1767. M. Congedo, 2001.

Kelly, Patrick. Catholic Perspectives on Sports from Medieval to Modern Times. Paulist Press, 2012.

McGreevy, John T. American Jesuits and the World: How an Embattled Religious Order Made Modern Catholicism Global. Princeton University Press, 2016.

McKevitt, Gerald. Brokers of Culture: Italian Jesuits in the American West, 1848–1919. Stanford University Press, 2007.

McKevitt, Gerald. The University of Santa Clara: A History, 1851–1977. Stanford University Press, 1979.

Mechikoff, Robert A. and Steven G. Estes. A History and Philosophy of Sport and Physical Education. McGraw Hill, 2002.

O’Malley, John, S.J. “How the First Jesuits Became Involved in Education.” In The Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: 400th Anniversary Perspectives, edited by Vincent Duminuco. Fordham University Press, 2000.

Rock, Judith. Terpsichore at Louis-le-Grand: Baroque Dance on the Jesuit Stage in Paris. Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996.

Rock, Judith. “The Jesuit College Ballets: What We Know and What’s Next.” Journal of Jesuit Studies 4, no. 3 (2017): 431–52. https://doi.org/10.1163/22141332-00403004.

Walter, Nicolas. Humanism: Finding Meaning in the Word. Prometheus Books, 1998.

Zanlonghi, Giovanna. Teatri di formazione: Actio, parola e immagine nella scena gesuitica del Sei-Settecento a Milano. Vita e Pensiero, 2002.

APA

Zampelli, M. A., S.J. (2025). ‘Athletics for Good’: Performance and Physical Fitness in U.S. Jesuit Education. Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 1(3), 385–395. https://doi.org/10.51238/59ro0p3

CMOS

Zampelli, Michael A., S.J. 2025. “‘Athletics for Good’: Performance and Physical Fitness in U.S. Jesuit Education.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1, no. 3: 385–395. https://doi.org/10.51238/59ro0p3.

MLA

Zampelli, Michael A., S.J.“‘Athletics for Good’: Performance and Physical Fitness in U.S. Jesuit Education.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., vol. 1, no. 3, 2025, pp. 385–395. https://doi.org/10.51238/59ro0p3.

Turabian

Zampelli, Michael A., S.J. 2025. “‘Athletics for Good’: Performance and Physical Fitness in U.S. Jesuit Education.” Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 2nd ser., 1, no. 3: 385–395. https://doi.org/10.51238/59ro0p3.