Regis: “Bring a pen, two #2 pencils and a brain . . .”

Regis: “Bring a pen, two #2 pencils and a brain …”

This weekend my two older sons are sitting for the Regis High School entrance exam – the closest thing to an autumn rite in the annals of Jesuit education in New York City.

I came late to Jesuit education: I’d never met a Jesuit priest, and hardly knew what one was, until I applied to Fordham in 1983. That may be why Regis – a tuition-free Jesuit high school just off Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side – has always seemed to me a New York institution that was there from the beginning, like the Metropolitan Museum, Central Park, and Grand Central Terminal.

Of course, those institutions were not there from the beginning: they had to be instituted, and then developed, expanded, maintained, and guided so that (in Lampedusa’s famous formulation in The Leopard) they could change in order to stay the same.

Regis’s story is told in Teach Me to be Generous, by Anthony Andreassi, an historian who teaches at Regis and is also the associate pastor at the Brooklyn Oratory; and it’s told in Father Andreassi’s distinctive voice, as when he observes in a passage about the Regis endowment that “unfortunately, the early 1970s was a terrible time to get into the stock market …”

To spend a few hours with the book is to realize how quirky and un-inevitable the history of even rock-solid institutions like Regis can be. I wouldn’t have guessed that the school is named not for some Latin variant of Christ the King but for a Jesuit saint, John Francis Regis; or that it was founded by the widow of a mayor of New York, who was its sole and anonymous funder for half a century; or that she was one of twelve children from a Catholic family in Troy; or that (anticipating an issue that, when it concerns public schools, has gone to the courts) she forbade the use of the school building for non-educational purposes; or that (again anticipating a current trend) Regis wound down its football program to focus on basketball as early as 1930; or that the current dress code (coats and ties) was a relaxing of the original dress code of collars and cassocks; or that – today – students come to the school daily from Connecticut, Long Island, Westchester, and New Jersey as well as the five boroughs, or that there is no daily Mass schedule.

Or that the head writer of Saturday Night Live, the brothers who run the Elias Sports Bureau, and the National Book Award-winning writer Phil Klay went to Regis; or that Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta – Lady Gaga – used to come over from Marymount to star in the school’s plays; or that the school had Manhattan’s first “green” roof. These things I learned from the slide show given at the school’s open house – a striking contrast to the dreary recitations at some other schools.

But the most affecting aspect of the book – and of Regis High School, evidently – is suggested by its title. Teach Me to Be Generous comes from a prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola, and it is echoed in Andreassi’s dedication: “To my parents, from whom I first learned what it means to be generous …”

Teach me to be generous: What more could a student – and the student’s father – ask of a secondary school than that?