“I entered the Catholic Church in college. I love being Catholic, but I’m also proud of where I come from, both the secular and Protestant aspects. My grandmother was a lifelong leader and activist at First Congregational United Church of Christ, which was founded in 1865 by abolitionists as the first racially integrated church in Washington, D.C.”
Will spend the summer in pastoral work at St. Peter Catholic Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, before starting doctoral studies in the history and philosophy of science at the University of Notre Dame this fall.
Joseph B. Lorenz, SJ, grew up in Takoma Park, Maryland, and attended Montgomery Blair High School in nearby Silver Spring. During high school, Joe started attending his grandmother’s Congregational Church in Washington, D.C., where he was baptized at age 17. While at Williams College in western Massachusetts, Joe became interested in the Catholic Church and reached out to the pastor of the local parish, who happened to be a Jesuit (Fr. Mark Burke, SJ). Joe entered the Catholic Church as a senior at Williams, before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Arabic and religion. He then joined the Jesuit Volunteer Corps and worked for two years as a caseworker at Catholic Charities’ center for immigrant legal aid in Houston. In 2012, Joe moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to complete a master’s degree in Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School. During that degree he discerned joining the Society of Jesus and entered upon graduating in 2014.
Joe then went to the Jesuit novitiate in Syracuse, New York, finishing with a “long experiment” at what was then Wheeling Jesuit University in Wheeling, West Virginia. For first studies, he was sent to Loyola University Chicago for three years to complete a master’s degree in social philosophy. He then taught religion and Spanish at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx, New York, where he also assisted the cross-country team and the dramatic society. For his third year of regency, Joe was sent to Beirut, Lebanon, where he taught English at the Jesuit schools Collège Saint-Grégoire and Notre-Dame de Jamhour. Joe has just completed three years of theology study at Facultés Loyola Paris in France and is preparing for further academic work in moral theology. After ordination, his first pastoral assignment will be at St. Peter Catholic Church in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Bachelor’s degree, Arabic and religion, Williams College; Master of Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School; Master’s degree, social philosophy, Loyola University Chicago; Bachelor of Sacred Theology, Facultés Loyola Paris
One interesting fact about me that not everyone would know is that I didn’t grow up Catholic. I entered the Catholic Church in college. I love being Catholic, but I’m also proud of where I come from, both the secular and Protestant aspects. My grandmother was a lifelong leader and activist at First Congregational United Church of Christ, which was founded in 1865 by abolitionists as the first racially integrated church in Washington, D.C.
I’ve long admired the Servant of God Dorothy Day. She was a journalist and activist in the early 1900s who became Catholic. In 1917, she was imprisoned for her activism in the cause of women’s suffrage. In the 1930s, she and fellow activist Peter Maurin established the Catholic Worker Movement, a pacifist movement that combines direct aid for the poor and homeless with nonviolent direct action on their behalf. In his address before the U.S. Congress, Pope Francis named her along with Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr. and Thomas Merton as one of four exemplary Americans who “built a better future.”
Her book “The Long Loneliness” was one of the major inspirations for my own conversion. Before joining the Jesuits, I participated in Catholic Worker’s Faith and Resistance retreats in Washington and spent a summer at Jonah House (a Catholic Worker house in Baltimore) and a summer at Casa Juan Diego (a Catholic Worker house, migrant shelter and advocacy center in Houston). Dorothy Day remains a model for me of a Catholic faith that is deeply socially and theologically engaged.
Candlelit wonder.
Monastery homecoming
pilgrimage family.
Three surprising places my Jesuit vocation has taken me are Wheeling, West Virginia; Beirut, Lebanon; and Paris, France. I spent my final semester of the novitiate at what was then Wheeling Jesuit University (financial problems led the university to cut humanities programs, resulting ultimately in the loss of its affiliation with the Jesuits). Wheeling was not too far from Maryland, where I grew up — there were even fellow Washington football fans there! — but it was a very different world. Wheeling is a small town with a strong sense of community, and I loved the people I got to know there. There was also a lot of poverty in the region, a rural/small-town poverty that I had never seen before. I helped run service immersion trips, where students from other universities would come and meet with and volunteer at local organizations. Those experiences taught me a lot about West Virginia that I hadn’t known, including its history of labor activism. My time in Wheeling was a window on a different America from the one I knew growing up.
It wasn’t necessarily surprising that I got sent to Beirut for my third year of regency — I had majored in Arabic in college and asked the Jesuits to send me to the Near East — but it was certainly a memorable experience. I was fortunate to be busy with a full teaching load while I was there, since they needed someone to replace a teacher on maternity leave who then went on to move her family to the United States. I was also fortunate to have had two years teaching experience at Fordham Prep prior to going to Lebanon, where conditions were more challenging. I had eight sections of around 35 students each, which would have been almost unthinkably massive at an American school like Fordham Prep where there is more homework and grading to do. I learned a lot about classroom management! But the students were great, as were my colleagues. Their generosity of spirit was all the more remarkable given the ongoing economic crisis there. The whole experience was a humbling encounter with human goodness and resilience.
As I was preparing to go to Lebanon in 2021, an American Jesuit in Beirut encouraged me to think about Paris for theology. He told me that French remained important for the Jesuit Near East Province (the Beirut school where I taught was Francophone) and that most of the Near Eastern Jesuits studied theology in Paris. Improving my French for future work in the Near East and maintaining connections with Near Eastern Jesuits made Paris an attractive option. I’m happy the Jesuits saw Paris as a good option, too, and decided to send me here. I don’t think I’ve ever lived in a more beautiful place — if I crane my neck, I can see the Eiffel Tower from my window! These last four years abroad have been rich and have shifted my perspective on the world and on the Society of Jesus.
The road has taken an unexpected turn again, since I now don’t anticipate returning to the Near East any time soon. I was advised to consider what I want to do before deciding where to do it, with the result that I’m hoping to pursue a higher degree in theology back in the U.S. I’d be very open to it taking me back to the Near East one day, but as my experience in formation has shown, these things are hard to predict!
