If you’re a college basketball fan, you will, over the next couple weeks, pay a lot of attention to Gonzaga University, a small Jesuit liberal arts university of a little over 5,000 undergrads in eastern Washington State.
On Selection Sunday, the Spokane school was chosen as the third seed in the West Region. They play Kennesaw State in the first round on Thursday.
This is the 27th consecutive season that Gonzaga has qualified for the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament, one of the longest streaks of all time. Yet despite the team’s long term-success, Gonzaga has never won a national championship. That means, if you’re a fan, you might even find yourself praying for Gonzaga: Please, God, let this be the year they go all the way.
If you’re honest with yourself, you might also have some doubts about this approach. Is it really O.K. to pray for victory?
Yes, says Bryan Pham, S.J., chaplain of Gonzaga’s men’s and women’s basketball and baseball teams. “Of course I pray for us to win,” he says.
God, after all, is in all things, even winning.
“But I pray for other things, too. I pray that our players find their human dignity” amidst the pressure and money of big-time college sports, adds Father Pham. “I’d like for them to see themselves as more than just basketball players.”
In his career as a Jesuit, the 50-year-old Father Pham has delved into ministry after ministry that tackles the question: What, actually, is success?
In addition to serving as chaplain at Gonzaga, Father Pham is responsible for the shareholder advocacy program for the Jesuit province to which he belongs, Jesuits West. In that arena, the province buys shares in companies with questionable ethical, health or environmental practices, and then lobbies the firms to treat people more humanely. Currently, he and the province are managing small stakes in, and leading advocacy work for best practices within GEO, a private prison operator, and Meta, which operates Facebook and Instagram.
In addition, the province is partnering with other groups to advocate for change at Westlake, a plastics producer with a controversial environmental record and CoreCivic, another private prison firm. It is a ministry that engages with the capitalist system and challenges corporations to see their mission as more than just high profits.
Father Pham participates remotely as a judge for a marriage tribunal based in Los Angeles that helps people seeking annulments. Because it’s L.A., he often encounters celebrities after their divorces. Father Pham won’t name names, but recent celebrities publicly known to have received Catholic annulments include Gwen Stefani and Megyn Kelly. It’s a “side gig, what I do at nights and on weekends, but I love it,” he says. “It’s a ministry of accompaniment, helping people get right with God. It’s very healing for people, and very healing for the church.” He currently has 120 active cases.
In addition, Father Pham is the supervising attorney at Gonzaga’s General Public Practice and Indian Law Clinic that helps Native Americans on nearby reservations, and well as indigents of all backgrounds, who are trying to win in court. Gonzaga’s team of legal interns helps people with legal issues ranging from custody battles and guardianship to drug possession and drunk driving. “Essentially, we are the appointed public defender in Tribal Court,” Father Pham explains.
Finally, Father Pham serves as a chaplain in the freshman dorms at Gonzaga. He likes to hold court in the common area between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. That is when students are likely to be open to discussing deep questions about their life, their passions and God.
Game time
I spent a couple days with Father Pham in February, flying on a Friday before a men’s basketball game against University of the Pacific, a 72-to-61win that raised the team’s record to 27 and 2. I arrived on Gonzaga’s campus in Spokane around noon on a Friday and headed straight for the law school building, a brand-new rectangular corporate structure across a parking lot from the baseball stadium that recently received a $10 million renovation.
As Father Pham listed job after job, I couldn’t believe how he fit everything in. He has an “irregular sleep schedule,” he confesses. It would be difficult, he added, for him to be a monk. “It’s a good thing I’m a Jesuit, because we don’t have routines.”
Father Pham was born in Vietnam and came to the United States with his father as a refugee when he was 7. At age 17, after several years at a boarding school in Wisconsin, he joined the Jesuits after learning about the six Jesuit priests murdered by military forces in El Salvador in 1989. “You only get one life, and I wanted to live a life that was so meaningful, I’d be willing to die for my faith and what I believe in,” he says.
Initially, he wanted to be a doctor, but during trips to a leprosy colony in India and a refugee camp in Nepal, he realized that he preferred a more independent vocation. “If you’re a doctor, you depend on a hospital, and nurses,” he says. “You can wreak havoc as an attorney by yourself.”
After long stints in academic institutions in the United States, Rome and Canada, Father Pham arrived at Gonzaga in 2019. The year before, he had been assigned to the Jesuit Committee on Investment Responsibility. He had been working as an immigration attorney, and during Donald Trump’s first term, “GEO operated immigration detention centers, and there were family separation policies implemented by ICE that were very concerning to the Jesuits,” he says.
In the 1960s, students and activists at Union Theological Seminary in New York City started a campaign to pressure banks to end a line of credit they had been offering to the South African government. The idea was to pressure the South African government to end its apartheid system of oppression of Black South Africans. “That’s when the idea of using the capitalist system to effect change really took hold,” says Robert Ross, author of a forthcoming book from Fordham University Press about the role of American churches in the South African anti-apartheid movement. It changed the way churches “handled their investments in relation to a host of social and environmental issues.”
Ethical investing
How to invest ethically in the stock market is a question that has become its own field of study in Christian and Catholic circles.
There is some debate about whether shareholder advocacy actually works—and if it is moral. Another alternative, says Timothy Smith, senior policy advisor at the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, is to run traditional investment funds but screen out investments in companies that do not correspond to the investor’s values. Methodist-affiliated funds, he notes as an example, are more likely to be wary of companies that make alcohol and tobacco products.
“Shareholder advocacy is a vital tool, but it hasn’t been enough,” says Felipe Witchger, executive director of the Francesco Collaborative, which partners with faith-based investors to make investments based on Catholic social teaching. “We need to move beyond corporations. They are not able to be ethical actors. If you get child labor out of Vietnam, it pops up in Malaysia.” Instead, Mr. Witchger recommends lobbying for a transformation of companies into employee-owned firms.
Father Pham is aware of the controversy. “Sometimes I get hate mail saying why are you in bed with the enemy; you have to divest,” he says. “College students know what I’m doing and they want me to divest. Even if the activism doesn’t amount to anything, even if it looks like it’s a losing effort, it’s still worth it,” says Father Pham. “We are the voice that no one wants to listen to,” he says. “It’s the Gospel value. We can’t stop.” In the case of private prison operatorss, he adds, “we are advocating for the detainees and their families. If we don’t speak for them, who would?”
The company that Father Pham is most focused on is the GEO Group. Founded in 1984 and based in Florida, the company operates approximately 80,000 beds in about 100 detention facilities. A subsidiary of GEO, GEO Transports, Inc., has been one of the biggest carriers for ICE air deportations. In February, GEO lost a case at the U.S. Supreme Court after it was sued over its practice of paying inmates at a detention facility in Aurora, Colo., $1 per day for custodial work.
In 2014 shareholders, including Jesuits West, persuaded GEO to implement a human rights policy. In 2019 they passed a resolution demanding a report on human rights abuses at the company. Resolutions have to be framed in a way that makes it clear the shareholders are nudging the company toward a more profitable strategy.
In a new resolution that Father Pham and his team are working on presenting, they are requesting an “independent third-party report, at reasonable expense and excluding proprietary information, on the effectiveness of GEO Group’s (“GEO’s”) due diligence process to determine whether its services contribute to violations of international human rights law and expose the company to material risks.” At issue, he says, are media reports that GEO is transporting immigrants from the U.S. back to jails in their home countries, which may violate international human rights law.
GEO did not return requests seeking comment.
Father Pham wears his identity as a lawyer almost as visibly as he wears his collar.
Gonzaga’s legal clinics offer pro bono services to Native American clients through teams of student interns. Given the country’s and the church’s complicated history with indigenous peoples, there sometimes is a lot of distrust, says Father Pham, but he feels it is important to help people navigate the American legal system, including Tribal Courts, which have their own legal codes distinct from state laws.
In the state of Washington, there are 29 federally recognized tribes. “You think of this part of the country as not being diverse, but if you look at all the tribes, it’s actually very diverse,” he says.
“It’s the care for the person,” says Thalya Cruz, a legal intern. A recent Catholic convert, Ms. Cruz is in her second semester at the clinic. She has been working on many complicated family cases. Having grown up in foster care, she is motivated to help families and has found a mentor in Father Pham.
A crisis in college sports
Father Pham does not play team sports because he doesn’t like the idea of having to depend on somebody else. His sport is skiing.
As chaplain, he finds himself ministering at a time when college sports are in a massive identity crisis. Instead of organizing sports teams for student-athletes spending four years in a place to earn a degree, colleges are basically employers of professional sports teams. If a player has a good season, they, or rather their agent, can expect to field offers from even bigger universities with even more money. That is a problem at a small school like Gonzaga.
Big-time college athletes, especially basketball players, are now professionals. But it is a mistake to think it’s just hoops. “Even a relief pitcher with an E.R.A. in the fours can go out and get a sponsorship deal with a car dealership,” says Tim Breen, S.J, who leads the school’s Zag360 program. It’s Gonzaga’s attempt to inject some humanity into a broken system by offering a range of services, including spiritual counseling and classes on financial literacy, and by helping athletes with their mental approach to sports.
The women’s basketball team often asks Father Pham to lead the team in prayer before a game. “For the men, it’s more one-on-one,” he says. “For the women, I’m in the locker room with the whole team a lot more often.”
Baseball players are often loners who work out late at night, and that’s when Father Pham can find them to talk to them during the season. But they are more likely than other athletes to call him during the off season as they train and prepare.
“Father Pham has been great,” says Mark Machtolf, Gonzaga’s baseball coach. “He’s low-pressure so [my players] know they have him to go. They have a mentor. He reminds them they can be a better person, and they can use their God-given gifts to be competitive.”
Unlike Father Pham, Mr. Machtolf says he doesn’t pray for victory. The other team is likely also praying to win. “And the two sides would cancel each other out,” he posits. Father Breen reminds me that Sister Jean, the legendary chaplain of the Loyola of Chicago basketball team, used to pray for the referees’ eyesight.
The challenge, which preoccupies Father Breen and Father Pham, is how to bring a deeper dose of humanity to the program. “Our tagline is ‘everybody retires eventually,’” says Father Breen. Young star athletes attach their self-worth and self-esteem to success and performance, and they often experience severe grief and depression if those go away. Father Breen’s message: Start thinking now about who you are when you’re not playing a sport, and you’ll be ready when that actually happens.
Gonzaga basketball is a mass-spectator, mass-television event. Watching their game against Pacific, I felt as if I were watching a Broadway show. An event producer scripts every scoreboard video, dance number and fan participation. The on-court product is immaculate. Under its head coach, Mark Few, who arrived in 1999, the men’s team is no longer a Cinderella squad but a true 21st-century sports dynasty, a miracle for a relatively small school. Fans are frenetic, players intense.
During timeouts, as a mass of towering young men huddles to discuss trap defenses, zone coverage and pick and rolls, Father Pham sits quietly at one end of the bench. He says a prayer or pulls out an iPhone to dash off a few text messages or emails. “I am not a coach,” he says.
Not only is he not a coach; Father Pham admits he doesn’t even know all that much about basketball. “And I’m also short, and the guys around me are super tall, so I can’t really see the games,” he says, adding that he cares about the action but prefers his college hoops with expert commentary. “I watch the game again on TV when I go home at night.”
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