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Canisius High School Today
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s a high schooler, Dennis Baker was profoundly impressed by the question asked of all
Canisius students: What kind of man are you becoming? Even more relevant for this particular
student, perhaps, was the follow up query: What is God asking you to do with your life? The rel-
evancy becomes obvious when you look at Baker’s path on the road to his future vocation as a
Jesuit priest.
After Baker graduated, he went to his grandfa-
ther’s almamater, Fordham. He had fallen in love
with New York City as a teenager and thought
continuing his Jesuit education in the Big Apple
was ideal. “The intellectual curiosity and ques-
tions about what I would dowithmy life got a lit-
tle more force and intention in college,” he says.
After Fordham, he taught at a Catholic grammar
school in Lewiston, N.Y., and studied criminal
justice administration at Niagara University. He
also taught at Canisius during his second year at
Niagara.
Baker’s next step was not what he expected.
His plan was to work while he waited for a posi-
tionwith the Secret Service, which had recruited
him at Fordham. Life intervened, however. “I fell
in love with teaching and felt like that life would
be more fulfilling. I could also still use the crimi-
nal justice degree, which goes a long way when
you teach in a Jesuit high school,” he jokes.
Around that time, he began thinking about
the Jesuits as a possible vocation. “I had kicked it
around in my head, but didn’t have the guts to
pursue it,” he admits. The guts kicked in during a
trip to Ireland, where he realized he didn’t want
to “wake up at 55 years old wondering what
would have happened if I had given it a shot.”
Determining whether the Jesuits were the
right choice reminds Baker of the ways he was
asked to question his life during high school, i.e.,
you have one life—what will you do with it? He
was most attracted by the chance to have a deep
impact on others’ lives and have those relation-
ships affect his life. Baker’s path since making
his decision? He took his vows after serving as
novice, then continued his studies at Fordham.
Today, he’s a Jesuit scholastic during regency,
teaching at Xavier High School in New York City.
This period of work, he explains, precedes
more study, ordination as a priest and more
Jesuit training. “Your superiors want to know
what your desires are for the future. Part of the
charm is there are so many things we do. If your
skill set matches what needs to get done, you can
do it. I just want to be useful.”
And useful he seems already to have been.
Among other duties, he has worked in jails as an
inmate advocate, in hospitals and hospice care
and with gangs in East Los Angeles. He taught
and worked inMicronesia and did a series of pil-
grimages in Japan. The theme running through
all this work is “being open to growth,” Baker
says.
Perhaps more important, though, is the mo-
tif of joy in his life: “All the self-examinations
and tests, the questions I was made to wrestle
with everywhere—we do those things in a quest
for joy. This is what makes me most joyful, that
works best for me.”
✠
“I look back at our years at Canisius High School as the time when we
learned to wrestle with big questions. Tat’s important in this world.”
Dennis Baker, S.J., ‘98
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