Fr. Tom Carroll, S.J.

Fr. Thomas Carroll entered the Society of Jesus in 1974 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1984. Accompaniment in spiritual direction, leading retreats, and giving the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises have for decades been central elements in his ministries as a Jesuit. He continues these ministries at LMU in association with Fr. Randy Roche, University Chaplain.

Fr. Carroll’s undergraduate years were spent at the University of San Francisco (B.A., English). As a Jesuit he studied philosophy at Gonzaga University, Spokane, theology at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology (M.Div.), Cambridge, and spirituality at Santa Clara University (M.A.) He spent a sabbatical year at Boston College in an intensive study of the Spiritual Exercises under the guidance of Fr. Howard Gray, S.J.

Fr. Carroll taught for fifteen years at Loyola High School of Los Angeles, offering courses in the English, Theology, and Fine Arts departments and directing broad programs in choral and liturgical music. Next he spent five years as the director of Boston’s Jesuit Urban Center and Church of the Immaculate Conception, ministries focused on New England’s gay and lesbian communities and on care for those living with HIV/AIDS. Returning to California, he served five years as executive director of El Retiro, the Jesuit Retreat Center of Los Altos, where he initiated a three-year program forming new directors of the Spiritual Exercises. He then found himself at the Collegio Bellarmino in central Rome, where he enjoyed a decade as a Spiritual Father for the Jesuit graduate students in that quite international and intercultural community and as a spiritual director for others, women and men, serving the Church in Rome.

Email: thomas.carroll@lmu.edu