Father Peter J. Verhaegen, S.J.,
First Jesuit President of Saint Louis University
In 1826, the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) accepted Bishop Du Bourg’s invitation to assume control of the struggling St. Louis College. The group of 12 Jesuits who had arrived in St. Louis in May 1823 were operating a seminary as well as a school for Native American boys in Florissant, Missouri, a few miles to the northwest of the College. In November 1829 St. Louis College began that year under Jesuit administration with Father Peter J. Verhaegen, S.J., becoming the school’s first Jesuit president. Verhaegen, like all of the Jesuits who came to St. Louis in 1823, was from Belgium. In addition, he and most of the other Belgian Jesuits were very young men when they came to America. Verhaegen was only 29 years old when he assumed the presidency. Saint Louis University received a formal charter from the State of Missouri in 1832 making it the oldest University west of the Mississippi River. Saint Louis University became the second university operated by the Jesuits in America (Georgetown College opened in 1789). Even in 1829, the Jesuits operated hundreds of schools in dozens of countries all around the world. These schools followed a plan of studies articulated by St. Ignatius Loyola as early as 1551 and eventually formulated in the Ratio Studiorum, promulgated in 1599. The overarching purpose of Jesuit education is to teach young people how to become practical, socially responsible, humanistic and spiritual human beings. This value-centered approach to education still drives Saint Louis University as it approaches the new century.
