Adorable Jesuit Has Ideas About How the University Should Be Run

Anthony Basso, S.J., seen here showing off those precious widdle cheeks.

JES RES—For much of its history, Georgetown University was run by Jesuit priests.  The entire administration was Jesuits.  All the classes were taught by Jesuits.  The sports were coached by Jesuits.  Jesuits janitors cleaned the bathrooms and Jesuit cops broke up parties in Henle.  Jesuits, not koi, lived and swam in the pond next to White Gravenor.  Jesuits date-raped the girls at Rhino’s, dealt the pot, and counseled students at the LGBTQ Center.

These days, however, you may never even see a Jesuit during your years at Georgetown.  But one Jesuit has burrowed out of his room in the Jesuit Residence and is speaking out on how Georgetown is administered.  Fr. Anthony Basso is his name, and just days after Jes Res employees threw him and his little Jesuit friends a party for his 81st birthday, Anthony spoke in ICC 107 Thursday all by himself about how he thinks the University should be run.

At just 5’2”, Anthony is the littlest Jesuit in the bunch, but that didn’t stop him from getting out there in that big world of ours and trying to make his speech a success.

“I saw him up at one of the walls in Red Square trying to staple his fliers into the brick, and I thought it was just about the cutest thing I had ever seen,” said Hannah Schultz (COL ’12), who showed up to see the adorable career-scholar’s speech.  “I was going to help him put his posters up, but then I realized they had all been scrawled with a fountain pen held in his tiny, wrinkly, arthritic hand, so I took him to the library to show him how to make posters on the computer that people can actually read.”

Schultz was one of only six people, four of them female undergrads, to show up to the event.

A series of calls by Anthony to the Office of the President to request postcards be sent to students notifying them to the event went unreturned, said a Jes Res employee, David Ramis, who eventually lied to Basso about the postcards being made because he didn’t want to crush the little guy’s spirit.

“He really thinks he can influence how decisions are made around here, bless his heart,” Ramis said.

Anthony also apparently tried to phone the leader of the Georgetown Knights of Columbus, but the student he had in mind graduated in 1993, and the number was for an apartment in Village A that does not currently have a landline phone connected to the jack.

The other two attendees were Anthony’s friends, Fr. Cormac O’Flannery, 85, and Fr. Ian MacDonald, 97.  Both sat still for the duration of the speech in the golf cart the trio got permission from Jes Res employees to drive over from the Jes Res and into the first floor of ICC. Anthony’s other friend, according to Jes Res employees, is Fr. James Long, 88, who couldn’t make it to the speech because he came down with a cold after the four friends were roughhousing in the cafeteria Wednesday and Ian spit in his fruit cup when he wasn’t looking.

James couldn’t miss his daily nap on Thursday, Jes Res employees told him, to make sure the cold didn’t get worse.

Upon hearing this, the four students stopped Anthony in the middle of his opening remarks to ask him if he had a photo of his best buddy James. Anthony oblidged, pulling a photo out of his velcro Spiderman wallet.  The girls’ “awwwww”s upon seeing the photo interrupted him a few more times.

In his opening remarks, according to those who said they could understand his cute, quiet mumbling and wheezing, Anthony said that decades ago, before anyone still here was at Georgetown, he was a high-level administrator opposed to the vast influx of lay people into the faculty and administration.  But whatever else he said was drowned out by further “awwwww”s at how much the loveable mini Jesuit cared about the University.

Just five minutes into the speech, someone from the Muslim Students Association came in to turn on the projector and prepare the room for their group meeting, and Anthony had to leave.  Anthony had tried to reserve the room with the help of the Jesuit in the home who knows how to use computers, Fr. Franklin Hamm, 72, but only current faculty, student groups, and administrators have the capacity to reserve rooms.

Anthony silently put on the mittens that were tied to the ends of the sleeves on his coat, packed up his thermos of milk, got into the golf cart, and rode back with his friends to the Jes Res, never to be seen again.