When Mike Graham was a University of Michigan graduate student, he accepted a classmate's invitation to a rigorous Jesuit retreat.

        That decision was pivotal in the journey of the scholar who today becomes the 34th president of Xavier University. Now the Rev. Michael J. Graham, S.J. and Ph.D., he will be installed at a 2 p.m. Mass at St. Xavier Church, 607 Sycamore St., where local Jesuit ministries and XU began in downtown Cincinnati.

Flynn

Graham

        The classmate, Thomas F. Flynn, now president of Presbyterian-affiliated Millikin University in Decatur, Ill., will be in the pews where all 550 seats have been allocated to students, alumni, faculty, staff, friends and family, and others in the Xavier community.

        “We don't have much family and Mike was the one who sat with my wife and son at my inauguration,” Dr. Flynn said Thursday. “I will be sitting with the family.”

        Their friendship is so close that Father Graham is godfather to the Flynns' son, Daniel.

        Their Jesuit connection began before the men met at Ann Arbor, where, as Dr. Flynn put it, “Mike saw the light” and left psychology for American studies.

        Dr. Flynn was educated by the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. One of his Jesuit uncles was a friend of the Rev. Tom Gannon, S.J., then head of the Loyola University sociology department.

        In common with many Jesuits, Father Gannon led retreats and Tom Flynn, in search of a spiritual director who would help him sort out his 20-something religious conflicts, called him.

        “It was time to get serious or not deal with it,” Dr. Flynn said this week.

        Father Gannon offered an eight-day retreat and Tom Flynn invited his classmate. “I thought there was safety in numbers,” Dr. Flynn said jokingly.

        Coincidentally, Mike Graham was trying to sort out his religious conflicts and it was a good match.

        A quarter-century later, Mike Graham would refer to Tom Flynn as “the older brother that my parents didn't give me and so God just had to make sure I had.”

        Both young men relished the retreat and, during the train ride to Ann Arbor, they talked about the spiritual exercises through which Father Gannon led them.

        “He had a big impact on both of us,” Dr. Flynn said. “We had a lot of fun and a lot of reflection.”

        Father Gannon, who now runs a Jesuit-supported policy research center, recalled this week that Mike Graham obviously “was looking for some direction in his life and it was clear that God was moving Mike in some direction.”

        Of the two young men, Father Gannon said, only Mike Graham was drawn to the religious life and possibly the priesthood, but it would have been too easy to confirm those choices and “reel him in.”

        Further retreats followed. “I make them work. I didn't give him the answers.”

        That was the right approach with Mike Graham, who decided the religious life among the Jesuits and the priesthood were his vocations.

        And he asked Father Gannon why he had to jump through so many hoops if the priest saw it coming.

        Father Gannon said he told him, “I saw where it was that the Lord was leading him but I wanted him to come up with the answers.”

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