Called to a ‘Faith That Does Justice’: Jesuit Law Students Reflect on Serving as Priests, Legal Advocates

As ordained members of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits, Lamanna and Ntungu are guided by the spiritual and social mission of their religious order, which was founded by St. Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century and today boasts more than 14,000 members worldwide who dedicate their lives to values such as cura personalis, or “care of the whole person.”

Unlike parish priests, who serve a particular congregation, many Jesuits serve their communities through work as lawyers, teachers, chaplains, doctors and more.

As current law students, Lamanna and Ntungu are also among the most recent Jesuits to embrace their dual vocation as priests and legal advocates at Georgetown Law.

Founded in 1870, the Law Center was the first law school created by a Jesuit institution of higher learning in the United States. Professors such as Francis E. Lucey, S.J., C’32, L’41, H’49, who served as regent from 1931 to 1961, and human rights advocate and former U.S. Representative Robert F. Drinan, S.J., a member of the faculty from 1981 until his death in 2007, have long shaped Georgetown Law’s Jesuit mission and values.

“The Jesuit tradition — including its call for interreligious collaboration — is at the heart of the spiritual life of Georgetown Law,” says Georgetown Law Director for Mission & Ministry Amy Uelmen, C’90, L’93, L’16. “Our Jesuit faculty and students past and present embody these values, helping our whole community to better see how to be ‘people for others’.”

In honor of Jesuit Heritage Month, celebrated each November by Georgetown University’s Office of Mission & Ministry, Lamanna and Ntungu reflected on their vocation as priests, their work as law students and the role of Jesuit lawyers in advancing the pursuit of justice.

Mike Lamanna, S.J., L’25

Now a third-year law student, Lamanna knew he wanted to be a lawyer before he decided to become a priest. The Albany, N.Y. native was even accepted to law school in 2010 — but ultimately forfeited his spot in order to apply to the Jesuits.

“If I don’t take this leap of faith and see if this is what God is calling me to, I’ll never do it,” Lamanna recalls thinking, noting that it wasn’t until his college years at Syracuse University that he began to grapple with his Catholic faith and consider what life as a priest might look like.

That leap of faith paid off: Lamanna entered the Jesuit order in 2011 and began the years-long process of spiritual formation and theological studies that members undertake before their ordination to the priesthood.

For Lamanna, the formation process would take him as far away as Yap, a Pacific island in the Federated States of Micronesia, where he taught math, history and religion and oversaw extracurriculars at a Catholic high school some 8,000 miles away from his home state.

Prior to formation, around the same time his curiosity about the priesthood was growing, Lamanna’s interest in migrant and refugee rights — a main focus of his legal studies and advocacy work at the Law Center — was also deepening.

“I was always very interested in how human geography and physical geography overlapped,” says Lamanna, who studied economics and geography as an undergraduate and worked in refugee resettlement before he entered the Jesuit order.

In reflecting on his family history, Lamanna can trace many of the same social and political forces that he encounters in his studies and work: His maternal grandmother was a World War II refugee who spent time in a displaced persons camp before immigrating to the U.S. from Poland, while his paternal great-grandparents settled in an exclusively Italian immigrant neighborhood in New York.

“Being from upstate and seeing the pockets of different communities sparked my interest in how people set roots and assimilate,” he says. After spending a summer during his Jesuit training helping provide humanitarian migrant aid along the Arizona-Mexico border (and witnessing immigration court proceedings first-hand), Lamanna knew it was time to once more pursue law school — this time, with the approval of his Jesuit superiors.

At Georgetown Law, he has continued his migrant advocacy work through a range of experiential learning opportunities: Last year, he and his clinic partner successfully won asylum for their client as part of the Center for Applied Legal Studies, in which student pairs represent refugees seeking political asylum in the U.S. This semester, he spends two days a week assisting immigration court judges in Hyattsville, Md. as part of a legal externship.

Outside of his studies, Lamanna finds time to lead Jesuit-focused events on campus, such as a recent trivia night in which teams of priests and students competed to answer questions about the order, and a walking tour of Jesuit sites of interest on campus and the surrounding neighborhood.

He also regularly returns to the parish in Richmond, Va. where he served as an associate pastor for the year following his ordination. There, he performs weddings and baptisms and participates fully in the sacramental life of the church.

“As difficult as it can be to give your life to an institution, the Eucharist is the thing that keeps me here and deepens my faith,” he says of the central act of Catholic worship.

After graduation, Lamanna plans to practice immigration law in the U.S. The Jesuit emphasis on faith in practice, he notes, is at the core of his commitment to legal advocacy on behalf of vulnerable communities.

“Jesuits have a commitment to a faith that does justice,” he says. “If justice is done without faith, something is missing. And if faith is done, and there’s no justice, then something is missing.”

Rodrigue Ntungu, S.J., L’22, L’27

Although he’s been a Jesuit for 25 years, Ntungu doesn’t mind if people don’t call him “Father.” In fact, he prefers it.

“That’s the way I evangelize: by being simple,” says the Doctor of Juridical Science (S.J.D.) student. “I want to keep contact with people, and not create barriers.”

For Ntungu, who grew up immersed in the Catholic faith in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the call to religious life felt all but assured. The third of four children — and one of two to pursue a religious vocation — he recalls nuns and priests as regular visitors in his family home.

But teaching, not the priesthood, was the first vocation he was drawn to. “Where can I find a vocation that combines both priest and teacher?,” he remembers thinking. “When I see students grow … that’s really my legacy.”

While attending minor seminary, a type of boarding school that prepares young men for the priesthood, Ntungu started to read about the lives of Jesuit saints such as St. Aloysius Gonzaga, S.J. and St. Francis Xavier, S.J. — and started to notice that the initials “S.J.” also appeared on many of his textbooks, from biology and mathematics to Latin.

“I started searching: Who are these ‘S.J.’s who have been writing all our books?,” he says of seeking out more information about the Jesuits, who have been linked to educational efforts, and to institutions of higher learning in particular, since the order’s founding.

Ntungu’s interest in law emerged while he was a B.A. student completing the second stage of his Jesuit formation at the Université Loyola du Congo. Then the editor of a Jesuit community magazine, Afrique d’Espérance, he was required to appear in a civil court case connected to the publication of a photograph without the subject’s informed consent prior to his tenure.

The experience gave him first-hand insight into bribery and corruption within the Congolese judiciary — and inspired him to pursue the study of law as a means to help advocate for a robust justice system in his home country, and, through his focus on business and investment law, on economic development in Africa more broadly.

“We have so much wealth naturally,” he says, referring to Congo’s mineral reserves, “but the country is poor. People don’t benefit from our natural resources.”

Ntungu’s legal studies first brought him to Cameroon, where he studied business law with a focus on arbitration law, and then to the University of San Francisco (USF), where he earned an LL.M. in international transactions and comparative law in 2020 before earning an LL.M. in ​​international business and economic law at Georgetown Law in 2022.

Now in the third year of his S.J.D. studies, Ntungu’s forthcoming dissertation,“The Right of the State to Regulate under the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement,” will address legal concerns around the new trade agreement, which went into effect in 2019.

Following his time at Georgetown Law, Ntungu looks forward to returning to teach at the Université Loyola du Congo, where he serves as associate faculty and has taught since 2011. Although Ntungu has lived in the U.S. since 2017, the position has helped him avoid homesickness: He typically returns every other summer to teach courses in contract law.

Above all, Ntungu points to the concept of discernment — the Jesuit spiritual practice of attentiveness to one’s inner thoughts and feelings, or, in his case, the process of navigating moral issues in both a spiritual and legal context — as central to his work as a lawyer and priest.

“Legal studies, or the legal profession, is about discerning issues related to people’s lives,” he says. “Discernment plays a big role in the process of trying to understand people.”