Down from the hill: Ateneo’s Ignatian reckoning

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Cura personalis – “care for the whole person” – is the phrase Jesuit schools stitch onto their banners and recite at every orientation. On the afternoon of June 8, 2026, two young men in the care of the most famous Jesuit university in the country drowned in the sea off Dipaculao, Aurora, during a basketball team-building activity. The distance between the phrase and the fact is where any honest reckoning has to begin.

Rene Clert Baterbonia was a teenage standout from Agusan del Sur who had just led Davao Region to gold at the 2025 Palarong Pambansa. Chukwuemeka Divine Adili was a 21-year-old Nigerian who had worn the Blue Eagle in UAAP Season 88. They were, in the exact language of the doctrine, the whole persons the institution exists to form and to keep.

A widely circulated essay by journalist Howie Severino has framed the crisis that followed as a problem of leadership supply: that Ateneo confines its presidency to a graying, shrinking circle of Jesuits and should open it to laypeople, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. There is real force in that argument. But the tragedy points to something a governance argument can underplay. An institution can have the right person at the top and still betray its own spirituality if it has quietly stopped practicing it. The sharpest critique of what happened is not imported from outside the Society of Jesus. It is available entirely from within it.

Consider cura personalis first, because it is the one most directly wounded. Surviving players told a town hall on June 17 that they had been directed to jog in ocean water near the shore, that the waves pulled them farther out, and that the coaching staff had been told beforehand that Adili could not swim. The Criminal Investigation and Detection Group has since reported inconsistencies in the accounts of players and staff, so the full sequence remains contested and properly belongs to the investigation, not to an essay. Yet if even the broad outline holds, it describes the precise inversion of care for the whole person: the person reduced to a body in a drill, the swimmer and the non-swimmer sent into the same surf.

Consider, too, magis — the restless Ignatian reach for “the more,” the greater good, the higher standard. Magis is the engine of Jesuit excellence, and there is nothing wrong with wanting to win. The danger is in its shadow. Under a demanding, celebrated program, the “more” can become limitless, and a culture built on pushing past limits eventually stops asking which limits exist for a reason. Ignatius understood this, which is why he paired magis with a quieter principle: tantum quantum, use things only insofar as they serve the true end, and hold them loosely. A championship is a thing to be held loosely. A life is the end, never the means. A program that places athletic achievement above the safety of the athlete has reversed the order that the spirituality was built to protect.

Then there is the Examen. Ignatius asked his followers to close each day by reviewing it honestly, naming where they had failed, and resolving to amend. What the Ateneo community has been demanding since June is, in substance, an institutional Examen: the graduating class called for a full, independent, and exhaustive accounting, to be given first to the families and then to the public. What it says it received instead, in the first days, were statements it described as distant, sterile, and devoid of humanity. More than three thousand students, alumni, and faculty signed an open letter to that effect. The Examen is exactly the discipline the early response is accused of lacking, and the community noticed because the school itself had taught it the discipline.

Discernment completes the indictment. Jesuit decision-making prizes discernment over both panic and paralysis, the patient weighing of a path against the pull of consolation and desolation. The criticism of the university’s response — that it was hesitant, fragmented, and reactive — is not that it discerned too slowly. It is that it mistook caution for discernment at a moment that called for clarity. Pastoral gentleness and institutional accountability are not the same instrument, and a community formed by Jesuits could tell the difference.

In 1973, the Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe told an alumni congress that the purpose of Jesuit education was to form “men for others,” a line now rendered more justly as men and women for others. It is the sentence every Atenean carries. The hardest version of the present demand is simply that the institution be, before anything else, for the two it failed, and for their grieving families, before it is for its own name. The walkout on June 19 marched under the slogan “Down from the Hill.” Whether the students intended it or not, the phrase is profoundly Ignatian. The hill is Loyola Heights, but it is also the elevation and detachment that the spirituality is supposed to cure. Finding God in all things was never a practice to be done from a height.

This is where the leadership question and the spiritual one finally meet, and where the essay that started this conversation is both right and incomplete. If the Ignatian ideals are real — care for the whole person, the unflinching Examen, formation for others — then they are not the private property of the ordained. That is the strongest argument for the wider, lay-inclusive leadership the essay urges. Not merely that the Jesuits are too few, though they are. But that the values were always meant to be carried forward by anyone formed in them. A lay president, a woman, a layperson who runs an honest Examen and refuses to reduce a student to an asset would be more Ignatian than a cleric who does neither.

The investigation will run its course. The police are weighing possible criminal liability, including under the Anti-Hazing Act, and the assignment of fault belongs to the courts, not to a column. What a column can say is narrower and far older. An institution is judged, in the end, not by the doctrine on its banners but by what it does with the persons placed in its care. Two of them went into the sea and did not come back alive. The most demanding question Ateneo now faces is the one its own founder would have asked at the close of the day: where did we fail, and what will we change. That answer cannot be handed down from the top of the hill. It has to be carried up to the families, in person, with the whole heart the doctrine always promised.