Guest Speaker: Peter Finney, Jr. ’74

The Class of 2018 will be welcomed into the Alumni Association at the 17^th annual Commencement Luncheon on May 4, 2018, in the Bienville Room at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. The coat and tie affair begins at 11:30 a.m. and ends at 1 p.m. Tickets are $43 each and may be purchased online. Parking in the Dome is available for $15.

The commencement luncheon is now SOLD OUT. We hope to see interested alumni at next year’s event.

The seniors will be joined by alumni from the 1940s to the 2010s to celebrate being an alumnus of Jesuit High School. The soon-to-be alumni and the actual alumni will sit together at tables of ten to share stories of life at Carrollton and Banks, stories from yesterday and today. The Luncheon will include remarks from Ian Blanchard ’03, president of the Alumni Association.

A special feature of the event is an address by a noted alumnus, who speaks on the significance of being a Blue Jay. This year Peter Finney, Jr. ’74 will address the Jays.

Finney has served as executive editor and general manager of the Clarion Herald, the official newspaper of the Archdiocese of New Orleans, since 1993. He is the son of Jesuit’s 1971 Alumnus of the Year, the late Peter Finney, Sr. ’45, who was the guest speaker at the 2005 Commencement Luncheon.

In 2013, Finney received the St. Francis de Sales Award, the highest individual award bestowed by the Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada for contributions to Catholic journalism. In 2001, 2009 and 2014, he was named by the Catholic Press Association as the national winner of General Excellence as an Editor, and he finished second in that category in 2013.

He is a former sportswriter for the New York Post and New York Daily News and was selected in 1988 as the recipient of the “Dick Young Award” by B’Nai B’Rith International for “achievement and continuing excellence as one of New York’s top sports journalists.”

As a student at Jesuit, Finney was a member of the Blue Jay staff, the Christian Life Community (CLC), and the Glee Club.

He and his wife Carolyn have four adult children. Their two sons are Jesuit alumni – Rev. Peter Finney III ’02, who was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of New Orleans on July 10, 2010, and Dr. Jonathan Finney ’06, who is a resident in physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

In addition to his two sons and his father, a fourth generation of Finney’s can be added the list of Jesuit alumni with his grandfather, John G. Finney, who finished at the school on Baronne St. in 1909.