Father Joseph Koterski Exemplified the Best of the Society of Jesus

National Catholic Register, 17 August 2021

The longtime Fordham philosopher died Aug. 9 at the age of 67.

My friend Father Joseph Koterski died suddenly last week. The Jesuit priest’s funeral was held Tuesday at the university church at Fordham University, where he taught philosophy for 30 years, lived in the student residences and carried on a peripatetic ministry throughout New York’s communities of women religious. 

Never has a man in perpetual motion seemed so serene.

“Koterski never sleeps,” the president of Fordham, Jesuit Father Joseph McShane, liked to say. It seemed the only explanation for how he could squeeze his sacramental ministry, spiritual direction and retreat preaching into an already-full life as a university professor — teaching, academic publishing and mentoring of students as a kind of don in residence at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus. He even took on his share of duty on that bane of every academic’s existence, the university senate.

Father Koterski found time for mission trips to Haiti, all the more poignant to recall this week, as another set of natural disasters has tormented that afflicted country.

The well-known Latin motto, fac omnia bene (“do all things well”) described his Jesuit life, well lived.

I recall one Sister of Life telling me that Father Koterski, when preaching retreats that they would host, would come — after celebrating Mass, hearing confessions, doing spiritual direction and preaching conferences — into the kitchen to help with the dishes. 

“Well, of course he does,” I replied. “Father Koterski does everything.” He did everything well, even the dishes, with a cheerful generosity of spirit that made the sacrifices he made for others hard to notice.

“I have never met anyone so generous — in his thought, in his person, in giving of himself to anyone and everyone,” Mother Agnes Mary Donovan of the Sisters of Life told Kathryn Jean Lopez for America magazine. 

In recent years, the most famous American Jesuit has been Father James Martin, chosen as a sort of flagship Jesuit by Pope Francis for his pontificate. Pope Francis would have done better to choose Father Koterski to exemplify what is best about the Society of Jesus, but Father Koterski did not seek the limelight.

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