Oceanside — “St. Ignatius said that Jesuits should be ready to go anywhere in the world to do any work that they’re asked to do at a moment’s notice,” noted Jesuit Father Patrick Sullivan. “One of the first things we’re taught is that we’re an international order and that this is a missionary order.”
Father Sullivan, 67, who just celebrated his 50th anniversary of entering the Society of Jesus on Sept. 21, took that missionary directive to heart, spending nine years serving in Micronesia, a group of islands just north of the equator in the Pacific, before becoming associate pastor of St. Anthony’s Church here.
Father Sullivan, who grew up in Brooklyn, felt the call to a priestly vocation early in life. An altar boy and a student at the parish school of St. Jerome, he recalled that the parish priests “were just the best, and I think it was because of them that I wanted to be a priest.”
As a student at Brooklyn Preparatory School, a Jesuit-run high school, he said, “I really felt called to be a Jesuit priest.” He also had the example of his older brother. “He entered the Jesuits five years before I did. We visited him at the seminary, and so I really got to know the Society and the teachers and the schools. I was very much surrounded in my life by the Jesuits.”
Father Sullivan entered the order in 1958 right out of high school. After several years of studying and formation, including teaching English and Latin at Regis High School from 1965-1968, he was ordained in 1971.

He served at Xavier High School in New York City from 1972-1988 and followed that with a sabbatical year, spending time studying in California and Rome before making a trip to the Jesuit mission in Micronesia, where he would spend the next nine years.
“That job in New York as president of Xavier High School was exhausting,” he noted. “It was really hard. And when I had a chance at the end of it to take a sabbatical year, it was with a sense of ‘Can I get far enough away?’ The mission of Micro-nesia was an assignment that the general of the Society had given to the New York Province. This was ours. There was both a sense of leaving New York and getting someplace that the Society and the New York Province was supporting and where I thought I could help.”
And after working in New York for so many years, “I wanted to do something different,” he said. “I wanted to get away from this high-powered New York City thing. So I made the trip to Micronesia. You fly to the West Coast, and then you fly to Hawaii. If you want to take a direct flight to Guam, it’s seven hours. I spent about a week or two in Guam; I cannot specify (what it was), but I knew I was being drawn to this. Many Jesuits are parish priests out there, but I knew I wasn’t going to learn one of the local languages. But there was St. Ignatius House of Studies, a place where I think I was qualified to do the job as an administrator and a spiritual advisor.”
St. Ignatius House, where Father Sullivan served as the director from 1989-1995, took men from the surrounding islands who felt they wanted to be priests “and our main task was to improve their English,” he explained. Since they all came speaking very different native languages, English was the common language taught and used to ready them for college and eventually the seminary. “Of course in the house, we had a spiritual dimension, too — Mass every day, prayer and spiritual direction and living in community. I taught English for my career earlier on, but it was interesting to not teach English to English-language students but to help these young men as second language English students.”
“After six years there, there was a Jesuit who was born and raised in the islands who they felt was ready to become the director,” he said. “That’s the purpose of going there, to have a local person take my job. I would have come home except the director of Xavier High School in (the nearby island of) Chuuk was on his way to do his last year of formation, and they needed someone to take his place as the director of the school. They asked me if I would go there to take his place for a year.” Father Sullivan ended up staying for three.
“It’s always an adjustment (to get used to someplace new) when you’re not on vacation,” Father Sullivan said. “When I went out there, the one thing people kept telling me was to pay attention to the local scene. You are not there to make them Americans. You are there to help them to live in the world we’re all living in now. Those people out there could live the way they’ve lived for the past 1,500 years except the world changes. To tell you the truth, it was harder to come back. It was very painful. Part of it is that when you go out there, it’s an adventure. It’s new and exciting. And then you live there, and you get into that rhythm and into that lifestyle. They’re not frantic New Yorkers; they’re very laid back, and you’ve kinda sunk yourself into that.
“The best thing about coming back was going back to work. That’s what snaps you out of it. It was the getting back to work and getting into the rhythm of things that helps you get over the despondency you have (over leaving).”
Father Sullivan served as director of Loyola Retreat House in Morristown, New Jersey from 1998 until 2004, when “after 16 years, I got another sabbatical, which was very kind (of them),” he joked. He studied pastoral ministry at Fordham University and began pastoral work in local parishes, before “the provincial asked me if I would come here to work in the parish.” He joined St. Anthony’s, a Jesuit-run parish here, as associate pastor in 2005. “All of a sudden I’m doing something I had never done, but it was a very pleasant transition. I think it was because the pastor and the staff were very welcoming. A classmate of mine asked me what I like best about the parish, and I said, ‘saying Mass’ and everything that that means.
We have a family Mass, which I have been doing frequently and that’s been just the best fun in the world. I get the kids at the family Mass on the altar. When you get children close to you like that, you look at them and they are absolutely fascinated (by what they see) and they’re interested.”
Father Sullivan celebrated a family Mass for his anniversary, and at the reception that followed, the parish “presented me with a stole,” he said. “On one side are the children of the world, and if you turn it over, it’s the animals of Noah’s Ark. It’s absolutely stunning. I was flabbergasted. Every now and then you get the absolute perfect present for someone at the right time, and this was one of them.”
He noted that he told the parishioners at his reception, “if you look at this list of places that I’ve been, in every place that I’ve been as a Jesuit, lay people surround you — parents, alumni, friends, benefactors, staff, volunteers. It is astonishing how lay people are attracted to help us, and I told them if you didn’t have lay volunteers, you wouldn’t have an apostolate. Here, they are really generous and fun to work with. And it gives you energy. That’s why you get up the next morning because they’re there, and you know you’re not alone in this thing. But the lay people have been simply marvelous everywhere, no matter where I’ve been, whether it’s been 10,000 miles from home or around the corner.”