The following story was written by Ava Green '25 for her Magazine Writing Class (JRN 322) taught by Adjunct Professor of Communication Bruce Andriatch. Ava is a journalism major and editor-in-chief of The Griffin.
Buffalo, NY - Father Fred Betti, SJ, became the chaplain at Canisius University in 2023 and has been a practicing Jesuit since the late 1970s. He lives on the third floor of the Canisius’s Loyola Hall, with the rest of the Jesuits; and he says at night, the floodlights that illuminate the iconographic “dome” atop of Canisius University’s Old Main bounces off of the building, goes through his window, bounces of his sink, and fills the whole room with a soft glow if he doesn’t draw the blinds.
He begins his long to-do list every morning by leading the 7 a.m. Mass for the sisters at the Response to Love Center and closes out the day with the 7 p.m. one. He feeds the hungry, he prays for the poor; and he told senior Maddy Lockwood over the phone that he never forgets a conversation, and certainly not the one where she said she wanted to go under the dome before she graduated. He called her just days after they spoke to figure out how he’d sneak her in. “Tomorrow. 2 p.m.,” Fr. Betti said.
“The word that Ignatius used when he gathered the first men who became Jesuits,” he said, “was ‘compañeros’ – companions.” And he felt it was his Jesuit duty to accompany Maddy to the dome.
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Philippians 2: 4-5: “Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.”
Jesuits take the three vows: chastity, obedience and poverty. They don't own anything personally and agree to live as, and in a community – typically, the community they’ve committed themselves to serving. Jesuits are members of the Society of Jesus, founded by St. Peter Ignatius of Loyola – patron saint of education.
One of St. Ignatius’s strongest beliefs was that educated young people would create strong, loyal parishioners; so he and other Jesuits, like St. Peter Canisius, came up with the idea to structure a school around teaching students a curriculum centered in Jesuit values, and made it common practice for Jesuit communities to be housed at schools and universities.
The first group of Jesuit priests that came to live at Canisius moved in around 1911 – 38 years before Loyola was built. The Jesuits originally lived in Old Main, the campus’s central academic building. Specifically, they lived on the fourth floor, where just a level above, over 100 years later, Maddy and Fr. Betti would both take their first steps inside of the dome of the building.
Pretty consistently, about 40 priests would live in Old Main at any given time. After World War II though, the school and the Jesuit order both expanded, and it was clear that this growing group of men needed a space of their own. So, in 1949, Loyola Hall was erected and occupied, and made room for their mission and membership, which they assumed would keep growing.
But today, in 2024, 11 Jesuits live in Loyola Hall. Their living quarters hardly fill one of the three floors, and their mission has momentarily shifted to reminding the surrounding community of their presence. This is a mission mostly headed by Fr. Betti, the teacher, the doer; the companion.
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Ephesians 4:1-6: “Live a life worthy of the calling you have received.”
Fr. Betti is a small man. He stands at no more than 5 feet and 4 inches, and walks with small, intentional steps on small, ever-outturned feet. He’s never seen in clothes other than his black, creased trouser pants and black, button-up, short sleeved clergy shirt, which are never seen with a wrinkle in them. He wore this even at 9:30 p.m on a Wednesday night, as he mingled with the few students who were still lingering in the chapel after being inducted into Canisius’ DiGamma Honor Society.
He explained to the students that he missed their ceremony because he was out bargaining a catering order for a cultural event he was planning, “and boy, are those Nigerian ladies tough,” he said as if just recalling his evening at the restaurant re-exasperated him. But he was there to “close up shop” for the night and see to it that everyone got home safe.
As they all spoke, he led them out by taking those small, intentional steps toward the doors until the students subconsciously followed him. Once he successfully got them outside the chapel, he stood at the threshold with arms outstretched, holding the doors open. He warned them to be extra cautious when crossing the road. He raised his eyebrows, stuck out his neck and opened his eyes wide, looking at them like a mother who’s saying, “Now honey, did you wash your hands?”; like these students were known for ignoring right-of-ways and he knew they would ignore them this time too.
Those wide-open eyes are also small, and hidden behind thick-framed spectacles that kind of remind you of the browline glasses from the 1960s, and that sat atop his clean-shaven baby face. “Baby-faced” isn’t quite right though. He has deep crows feet and smile lines, a crease between his brow, indicating how often they’re furrowed in concern; and a perfectly side-parted, pristinely white, one-inch-tall, pompadour hairstyle that made the glasses feel on theme. Perhaps it’s his small stature, but despite it all, he still looks youthful, almost like a little boy.
“Little boy” isn’t quite right either. Many people’s faces and features change drastically as they grow and mature, but something about Fr. Betti makes it seem like his dimples; the way his lips curl in and eyes nearly closed when he smiled, how those eyes shimmered with hope behind droopy lids; his kind of sloped nose and kind of low-set cheeks, have been that way since they first became pronounced. Like if you saw his elementary class photo you’d be able to spot which one he is instantly, and you can. Like he wasn’t meant to become “Fr. Betti”, but he always has been. And I think he always was.
“I remember being at a concert with my mom one time, and I spotted a teacher who taught me in high school who I hadn't seen in, like, 20 years. So, I went up to him and I said, ‘Oh, Mr. Dennehy.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, Fred Betti.’ He said, ‘Well, you became everything we always thought you would.’ I said, ‘Really?’ He's like, ‘Absolutely.’ I didn't know what to make of it at the time. But then afterwards, I thought, ‘Okay, I guess they saw something then that I didn't know.’ So, I guess I've always been this way. I've never changed. I wear my life on my sleeve.”
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Jeremiah 22:3: "Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow.”
Fred Betti grew up in South Buffalo in the 1960s and he’s always found himself to be very blessed. When he was seven years old, the Vietnam draft was enacted across the country. Young men across America would spend their 16th birthdays not buzzing with excitement over taking their driver’s permit tests; but were filling out their draft registrations, wondering whether they’d be going from South Buffalo to South Vietnam after senior year. Fred Betti, like most American high school juniors in the 1970s, was sent to his guidance counselor’s office figuring out how to fill out the form, instead of figuring out his college major. By some grace of God, the draft was put out of use just months before he’d have to sign up.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” was not a question that was asked then, so Fred spent his high school years doing the things he wanted to do when he grew up. He wrote and directed school plays, managed the basketball team; and held a seat in student government, where he served the very same students of color that his mother went to city hall to complain about as she advocated against integration.
His childhood was also the time of the “Great Migration,” when more African Americans were moving from the South into Northern cities – including South Buffalo, which was then known for massive grain and steel plants – for job opportunities. Fred Betti watched his city succumb to “the urban blight and the white flight to the suburbs,” as he said, that destroyed a bustling East Side he only knew briefly.
“Remember, I’m 67 years old. When I was a little kid, all these neighborhoods were failing – things were changing. I grew up in a working class environment. You cannot ask for a more narrow minded, just like real American staunch, you know, people who had very biased, prejudiced views. There was still a lot of racial tension. There was massive racial prejudice when I was growing up. I mean, my grandparents were amazing, wonderful people. My father was an amazing person, but they were the classic American racists because we grew up in an all white neighborhood. So, in a lot of ways, I inherited that outlook from my grandparents, and back then, I didn't have the perspective to look outside of it, you know, and see what was wrong with it.”
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Matthew 25:35-40: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me."
“Where we’re going now, at one time, Buffalo’s Galleria Mall was down here in the 40s and 50s – the Broadway-Filmore district used to be famous. But now, you know, it's like, ‘Nope!’,” he said, with an exaggerated “-ope.” “‘Cause everything went to the ‘burbs.”
Where he was going then was the Response to Love Center (RTLC), in the eye of the East Side storm. It’s where Fr. Betti, being a first hand witness to the decline in the quality of life there, decided to devote much of his service efforts; specifically, from about 7 a.m ‘till noon, Monday through Thursday. There, he serves the poor – sometimes it’s personally checking in with the poor in spirit, sometimes it’s performing an at-home mass for the meek of heart; but mostly, it’s in a hairnet and apron at the RTLC.
In what used to be a gymnasium at the RTLC, are structurally unsound, painstakingly color-coded piles of Christmas toys, children’s clothing, outerwear and home essentials to be given to people in need. About eight plastic shelving units are lined up in a row with plaid pajama sets for kids in a range of color and sizes – a display any department store would envy. On top of organizing and distributing these items, Fr. Betti also organizes the volunteers, assigning them tasks around the center during service hours and keeping an eye on daily operations.
He’s constantly on the prowl for those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; who may be quenched by volunteering at the RTLC. “Geez! You’re good at this! You free the rest of the week?” he stopped to ask me as we tried to get our two-man vegetable-sorting assembly line oiled well enough to keep up with the line of now 10 RTLC members, who remained “patient and kind”, not envying; not self-seeking and not easily angered.
“That's part of my vocation as a Jesuit. You know, we're called to be with the poor, but I get so angry when I see how these people are being victimized and abused. Why should they have to live like that?”
He finds jobs and resources for people in need. He takes those without cars to doctor’s appointments. He visits the most dilapidated houses, filled with far too many people, and refuses to stand idly by while his community suffers.
He greeted the line of people that had been waiting at the door – some of them as early as an hour before they start serving at 9 a.m. – for what’s likely their only hot meal of the day. Remembering their stories and struggles, which are usually overlooked, Fr. Betti checks in on members’ families, how their work is going, if they ever got that weird tickle in their throat looked at.
He agonizes over the fact that the sisters have to spend the weekend tracking and replenishing inventory, and can’t give out food those days; the thought that many of them won’t eat another meal until Monday keeps him up at night, so Fr. Betti does all he can at the center during the day.
As the sisters pass out food to the people registered at the center, Fr. Betti will man the market table with other volunteers, like Ann Marie, who had a bright smile that took up half of her face, and had been volunteering there for about three years.
“He just has all the energy in the world,” she said. “This is an everyday behavior for him. It’s his real day. It’s real. He’s real.”
That day the sisters handed out halved wraps and servings of soup that were left over from an event the night before at a local church; but most of the meals are made by the sisters, with groceries supplied by local organizations or bought with proceeds that the center receives. Ingredients are stored in large industrial freezers that were installed during a complete updating of the center in 2021, and they have rooms set up upstairs to look like grocery stores where people can bring home food – along with the produce they get at Fr. Betti’s table – to make when the center is closed
The market table cycles out different items that they give for free to people who stop by – sometimes fresh fruits, sometimes vegetables, paper products; sanitary products. Today was carrots, celery, collard greens, tomatoes and broccoli heads. They wouldn’t be offering winter gloves that were donated by a local manufacturer until the next day; but when a tall, skinny man, weathered by more than old age, said he needed gloves today, and that his hands were still shaking from the cold, Fr. Betti, threw his vow of obedience to the wind and got the man gloves. He had keen enough eyes to notice that the man left a cart of bottles outside of the church when he came in to eat. Knowing the man would be on his way to return bottles to make money, and knowing the closest bottle return was almost a mile away, Fr. Betti said, “It’d be a sin not to get him some gloves.”
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Matthew 11:28-30: "Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
The area around Buffalo’s Sycamore Street on the East Side is lined with houses owned by landlords who are hardly around to see the state of the properties they own. They pay only the essential expenses, and pay no mind to the well-being of their tenants. They’re the real estate equivalent to deadbeat dads. Most of them have never been to Western New York, buying up huge pieces of property from remote agents, and managing them completely online. Many houses on the East Side don’t have ovens; no heat or insulation. Just the bare bones of a roof and four walls; and not even those are always a given.
“Yeah, there’s organizations that are supposed to help people who are homeless,” Fr. Betti said. “And I mean, they do decent things. They did help me get a man into housing. But people laugh now. They said, ‘Oh, Father can't call there anymore. He yelled at that guy. That guy said the priest is mean.’ Well, yeah, I yelled at him. I was even swearing at him because he's like, ‘No, we can't do this’, but they never understand how urgent the need is, and they never see how horrible these houses are.”
These houses stand like weary soldiers, exhausted from years of neglect and struggle. These homes are the ghosts of a once hopeful past, crumbling beneath the weight of their own survival. Each house tells a story with layers of paint chipping away at the front, revealing years of neglect that have been momentarily covered by hasty hands.
Ginger – an older woman eating at the RTLC, tattooed from neck to knee, with a stocky build, long wisps of blonde-ish grey hair, and a dispirited look on her face – lives in a house like these ones. Hers is one of few in her neighborhood with any stitch of yard space, and one of many that Fr. Betti makes visits to.
“I’m not scared of anything,” he says.“But it’s so scary to see how some people are forced to live. And my God is it sad. Us Jesuits are adaptable though, and so you have to be adaptable to the situations of the people and their needs. You just listen to the people and you do what they ask. They don’t always ask though, so you pay the closest attention.”
Most of the houses on the East Side stand shoulder to shoulder; you could practically look right into your neighbor’s window from your own. But Ginger had a small patch of grass on the right side of her house – no bigger than 10 ft by 12 ft. Although she never owned a car, the “yard” had tire tracks and bald spots where the grass wouldn’t grow, made up of cigarette butts just as much as gravel. The air smelled smoky too. Maybe the scorch marks on the sides of her patio and so many others were left more often and more recently than I thought, but it was probably just the cigarette butts.
Ginger brought her grandson there to eat with her that day – a little boy named Joey, her physical opposite. He had to be at least 6 years old, but was as tiny and toothpick legged as a 4-year-old. His smooth, tan skin was covered in peach fuzz and scabby scrapes. Joey and Ginger share the house with his four sisters, who she fought for custody of after her daughter’s fifth drug-related arrest.
“Yesterday was crazy,” she said. “We have the house inspectors coming this week, so the landlord’s been coming by, scrambling, trying to do the things he never did. But he’s coming at, like, 9:00 at night. So, I told him, I said, ‘Listen, my kids go to bed early – you’re not staying past 7:00. You’re disrupting my house.’”
Her house, like many on the East Side, is stooped and weary, leaning toward the earth, tired after the years that had not been kind to them. There’s something triumphant about their disrepair – something raw and real about the lives lived there, marked not by wealth or comfort, but by grit and survival. They hold the tales of those who’ve made homes in them, and who’ve persevered, dreaming through cracked windows.
“Yeah, sure,” Fr. Betti replied. “Having four girls running around, and this one,” he said, turning to Joey, noticing his secondhand Spider-Man pajama pants and light-up sneakers, and trying to come up with a topic change that would lift their spirits. “He’s running around trying to get dressed. You dressed yourself this morning?” Joey nodded, pleased, but still focused on spooning the soup into his mouth full of missing teeth. “You gonna show me your cool shoes?” And Joey got up from his seat wordlessly, stomping and strutting like a toy pony as the lights in his shoes flickered on and off. The joy burst out from inside of him as he began to run and skip, weaving in and out of the tables filled with people eating.
Fr. Betti walked away, leaving the pair to share Joey’s joy; lightly he said, “Boy, are they resilient? She’ll just make the best from anything,” he said.
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James 1:22: “Be doers of the word, and not hearers only. Otherwise, you are deceiving yourselves.”
Jesuits are required to do at least some traveling as a part of their devotion to service. Their travel starts during the first stage of becoming a Jesuit, called a “Novitiate,” but many refer to it as “the school of the heart”. Regardless of which city they’re from, all Jesuits in this two-year phase on the East Coast have to move to Syracuse, and live at St. Andrew Hall. It’s where they “learn to pray,” said Fr. Jason Downer, SJ, who also lives at Loyola Hall, and who currently holds the position of Jesuit Superior, in charge of all of the Jesuits in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. “We learn how to live as Jesuits. And it's a real time of discernment. To say, ‘Is this the life that I want?” And hopefully, ‘Yeah, this might be it.’”
If they make it through, the men are then sent to a Jesuit university where they study philosophy and theology – Fr. Betti chose to study at Fordham in New York City, and said it was the first time in his life that he struggled with grades. He’s actually spent a lot of his life in the city, and looks back fondly at the years he spent teaching at Regis High School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the most prestigious high schools at the time. There, he had the home room that every student prayed they’d be assigned to for the semester, advised the school newspaper, and organized the senior pranks. Oh yeah, he taught some classes there too.
“I actually invented the senior course I taught, which you'll laugh at. I invented it because I felt it was very much a need for young men. The technical title of my course was ‘Human Sexuality in the Christian Context’, but in those days, with the way computers work, on the schedule, all it said was, ‘Sex with Father Betti’. I would have guys introduce me to their girlfriends, saying, ‘This is Fr. Betti, my sex teacher.’”
At Regis, Fr. Betti gave the boys he taught more freedom than they were likely to experience in any other academic setting. He was a nuisance to administration, but an advocate for experience-based education – something of a pillar when it came to the Jesuit mission, in accordance with the “action-oriented” element of the five making up the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm. Fr. Betti sees God not only in the catechism, but in the concrete; in the everyday encounters with the world.
“The newspaper office had been newly renovated before I took over, so of course, this was their clubhouse. In those days, there was a very famous actress who was very popular at that time. She was foreign born, and she was very provocative and very beautiful – Natassja Kinski. She had done a spread for Playboy magazine where there was a very famous picture of her, and all she was wrapped in was a boa constrictor.”
One day, the boys came into the newspaper office with a huge copy of the photo that they made using the club’s supplies, planning on hanging in on their walls. Fr. Betti asked them what it was and what they were doing with it, and the boys promised him it would only go in the back left corner. The back corner constantly drew the boys’ attention, and eventually drew the attention of the members of Regis High School’s Board of Trustees when they toured the school. The principal called Fr. Betti to his office, where he fought for the newspaper staff to escape any repercussions; and later delivered a homily – which he naturally spews at the mention of anything that impassions him – and preached about what the boys should learn from the whole ordeal.
This learning method is not just practical, it’s profoundly spiritual. Every experience is treated as an opportunity for transformation – very project, every failure, every triumph, every moment of doubt. It involves not only action, but careful reflection. The Jesuit process of discernment, called the Jesuit Examen – a time to pause and self-evaluate. “We begin with the Examen”, he says at the start of every mass he gives, “a moment to review how God has been present in our lives, or to ask for His Grace.”
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James 1:5: "If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach, and it will be given him."
Fred Betti always did well in school, but was never a good test-taker. So, when he sat for the final step before he could make his Jesuit vows – an hour long, oral examination, where three head Jesuits could ask him anything they wanted – he was tongue-tied, fast-talking, and quite literally twiddling his thumbs as he always does when he’s trying to think. One of the Jesuits picked up on this, and paused a few minutes into the conversation.
“He said the greatest thing in the world to me. He said, ‘Calm down, calm down.’ He said, ‘You're a good Jesuit. You did everything the society Jesus asked you to do. You've done your studies. Who the hell cares what your score is? You’ll go out and do great things.’ And I just needed that. Someone to tell me I’d be good at this whole thing I got myself into.”
Fr. Betti is a teacher at heart. He finds lessons, lectures and sermons everywhere he looks. His mind is filled with libraries of scriptures and information gathered from a life dedicated to studying and service. He delivers these impromptu, involuntary sermons with an heir of confidence and all-knowingness. He even did this as he stood atop the roof of Old Main, standing by the dome of the building alongside Maddy, a few other students, and the school’s facilities director – a first-time experience for all of them, and a first-time experience in general. As Facilities Director, Joe Snodgrass, explained, in what’s been close to a decade working for Canisius, no one had ever asked for him to use his personal access to the roof
Fr. Betti, however, made it seem like he frequented the roof quite often, retelling stories of the structures’s history, how it was built, and antics that had taken place there – like a senior prank where the entire contents of one of the classrooms was set up on the roof in the middle of the night, and noticed only by people on the higher floors of surrounding buildings the next day.
But that day, Fr. Betti made another classroom on the roof, prompting subtle Jesuit Examens in between the bits of information he shared. He asked the students their thoughts on the experience – how the zoomed out view of the campus resonated with them; what it felt like to be a part of such a unique experience. When the students turned the same questions to him, he gave stock answers. “Oh, it’s just great to be here with all of you,” and “I’m so glad we could make this happen.” “How cool?”, “How wonderful?” he’d say. But during a brief moment where the students were preoccupied, Fr. Betti stood at the far, left edge of the roof, where you can see all of Forest Lawn Cemetery.
He started making his way down the perimeter of the top of the building, nodding with a never-fading, satisfied smirk, making it hard to believe that he’d never been up there, and even harder to believe that he wasn’t just meant to one day. He looked out on the campus with the confidence of Batman on the rooftops of Gotham City, awaiting a signal for his help. It was the face of a man conflicted – reveling in the awe of the rare bird’s eye view; but deep in thought. He was asking himself the same Examen questions that he asked the students, and the same Examen question posed after every experience he faces: How can I use this to help others?
Afterall, that’s kind of the whole shtick of the Jesuits. Even though he may not have been able to find a concise answer as he took in the beauty of his community, overwhelmed by the now visible vastness of the amount of people potentially in need of his help; he knew that, in a way, he helped the students that went to the roof with.
“Maddy really, really wanted to do this,” Fr. Betti said to Snodgrass, “But people aren’t always good at asking for things,” so he opts for an expansive, inclusive view like the one Fr. Betti got from Old Main that make it easier for him to spot the unnoticed and un-asked for needs.
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1 Corinthians 10:31 says, "Therefore, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all things for the glory of God"
Fr. Betti is a man that appreciates routine. He’s had to establish a pretty solid one to pull off everything he gets done in a day. Every day starts and ends the same, with mass. What happens in between depends on what his community needs from him that day, but the routine of his masses comes to him like muscle memory.
“We begin with the Examen, a moment to review how God has been present in our lives, or to ask for His Grace,” he said on this Sunday and every other one, in the same sing-songy, soft spoken tone he always has at Mass.
After sitting through the Responsorial and the Prayers of the Faithful, Fr. Betti finally gets to the homily. He spends the week praying over what he wants to teach his parishioners, and delivers the lesson with the enthusiasm of a kid at show-and-tell.
He began telling a story of two members of the RTLC. A few weeks ago, the people there to get their meal of the day got to choose between Oreos or Lorna Doones as their dessert. One man, Fr. Betti said, “who was perpetually grumpy. I mean, always had something to complain about,” came through the line and chose Oreos. Shortly after he got his food, an older woman was making the same dessert decision he just made. After begging for and being denied both cookie options, the man got up and told her to get the Lorna Doones. Confused, she made her choice and went to sit down. The man followed her to her table and slid her his Oreos. Fr. Betti said that was when he saw the man smile for the first time.
I went to the altar to receive communion, and before giving me the wafer, he put his hand on my shoulder and bowed his head. He looked back up, and after a deep breath and a small grin, said, “The body of Christ,” and placed it in my hands, folding them shut.
All of his Masses end the same way too. “Go in peace,” he’ll say, taking the orans posture of his hands out and upturned.
“Now, I know I’m no Mother Teresa or anything,” Fr. Betti likes to joke. But standing up there in his immaculately white robe, with his arms raised to the ceilings of Christ the King Chapel; and with all that I knew about Betti – Fred and Father – his sanctity was undeniable.
