After serving as President of Loyola for 20 years, Fr. Gregory Goethals, S.J. ‘73 will conclude his tenure this June. Throughout his leadership, he has guided Loyola through various challenges, including the 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Long regarded as the “face of Loyola,” Goethals has changed Loyola’s reputation, currently considered one of the top high schools in Southern California. At the forefront of his leadership has been the core belief that every person needs and is deserving of unconditional love, something that has guided him at Loyola and in all areas of his life.

To understand who Father Gregory Goethals is and what drives him requires returning to his work before leading Loyola. He began as a law student at Loyola Law School in downtown Los Angeles, but he said it was not long after beginning law school when he realized that this kind of work was not for him.

“I had this epiphany where I really thought, and I kind of heard God’s voice, which sounds woo woo, but, you know, ‘Okay Greg, you hate this, it’s time to come, it’s time to come be a Jesuit,’” explained Goethals.

Through his Jesuit work, Goethals explored many places and held many roles, including attending Fordham University in New York, teaching at Brophy High School in Arizona, and studying theology at UC Berkeley. However, it was not until he began his work on AIDS that he began to feel the full impact of his labor.

This work began with an old college friend, who he met up with in New York and stayed with for some time. During this time, Goethals found out his friend was gay, and even after returning to the West Coast, he stayed in contact with him. It was not until a frantic call from a neighbor of the friend that he learned he had been diagnosed with AIDS.

“He was my first funeral, but the point of all that is, that summer, I got to do a lot of AIDS work and we were kind of in the belly of the beast at that point. Lots of people dying,” explained Goethals.

This was when he decided to shift the focus of the next decade of his life to tending to HIV/AIDS patients through organizations like the Shanti Project and the AIDS Health Project. This time was emotionally taxing, since there was little work that could be done to fight the disease.

“I lost all kinds of friends, lost Jesuits that I knew that had AIDS,” described Goethals.

The most difficult part was fighting through the Catholic Church’s view on gay marriage, attempting to reconcile his role as a Jesuit with the work he felt was so important. To make sense of this difference between the Church’s opinion and personal view, he reflected on Pope Francis’ message of non-judgment, which returned to his personal theme of unconditional love.

“We open our doors every day to give everyone the most profound, life-changing experience of God’s unconditional love possible, and that means that everybody gets that,” Goethals affirmed.

It was through this experience, which he described as the “most important work he has ever done in his life,” that Goethals established his philosophy to lead Loyola.