At the end of the 2023-24 academic year, Rev. Jose-Luis Salazar, S.J., known affectionately as Father Lito, stepped down as Executive Director of Campus Minister after eight years. Salazar, who was also the resident Jesuit of Loyola Hall, is being succeeded by Rev. Philip G. Judge, S.J.
Judge, a native of Queens, is a double alumnus of Fordham with degrees in English and Philosophy. Previously, he worked at various Jesuit high schools, including Regis, Fordham Prep and McQuade.
“In some ways, I think I’m closer with kids transitioning from high school to college,” Judge said. “I think I know that experience and will be helpful coming at it [with my] high school experience.”
Father John J. Cecero, S.J., vice president for Mission Integration and Ministry, spearheaded the search for the new executive director. After difficulty finding a Jesuit for the role he reached out to Judge.
“I had been thinking about spending more time in parish work, and this would give me more of that,” Judge said.
Judge decided to be a Jesuit while still in high school after realizing that the traditional 9-to-5 structure didn’t appeal to him.
“The 59th Street train station had this really huge escalator, and I’d come in the mornings and see these people with jackets and ties like lemmings going up these elevators, looking really hangdog and not at all happy going into work, and I thought, ‘I don’t really want to do that for the rest of my life,’” Judge said. “When I was in school, there were a bunch of Jesuits who were teaching, and I was really turned on by watching them work together and how excited and happy they were in the work they were doing, in contrast to people I saw going up and down the escalator every day. And I said, ‘You know that’s something I think I could do.’”
Judge has always focused on teaching in his various roles, “Even when I was a principal and a president, I taught while I was at it.”
He hopes to continue teaching at Fordham, though it may look different.
“I think this job is gonna have a lot more teaching in a more informal sense of seminars and things and religious growth and prayer. So I think that may satisfy me and that impulse there,” he said. “I’d like to encourage people to be seekers; I think we sometimes don’t think about how to talk to people who are ‘nones.’ Not people who have rejected churches but people who just don’t know it at all… So how do we invite people into looking at the world of spirit, looming at the world of faith and looking at their own growth in that area?”
Currently, Campus Ministry is working to transition to a more multifaith campus ministry by hiring its first Rabbi, Katja Veehlow, and Imam, Ammar Abdul Rahman.
“It’s a new experience for all of us, so it’s kind of exciting to be on the ground floor of something. We really don’t have much experience in this country,” said Judge. “We have very few multifaith campus ministry programs that are anything other than having different chaplains.”
Judge hopes to make the department approachable to students.
“I hope people see us as accessible; it’s not like we have office hours; we’re here all the time. And we run an incredible variety of programming. We have a pretty big staff for a university of our size… I hope people see us as willing to experiment and willing to be responsive.”
Overall, Judge wants people to feel comfortable with Campus Ministry and New York as a whole.
“I’m a lifelong New Yorker, so this is really like coming home again,” he said. “I love this city; it’s a great, vibrant, open place, and for those people who are new to Fordham or new to New York, I hope they take advantage of it. It really is a crossroads of the world.”
