By Anthony Cardellini ’17
THE ROUNDUP

Students walking around the Piper building or Office of Faith and Justice may have noticed a new presence on campus lately: a new Jesuit.

The Rev. Juan Pablo del Toro, S.J. said he comes to Brophy as a new priest looking to get involved in education.

“I just became a priest in June 2015, and I felt called to go into either a high school or college,” he said.

He said he first visited Brophy in November 2015 and fell in love.

“I just loved it. The faculty here are amazing, the students are amazing,” he said.

He said he has “been loving it so far” and called Brophy a “very welcoming place.”

Fr. del Toro was born in Guadalajara, Mexico and attended Catholic school all his life.

He said he was first introduced to the Jesuits in college, at the Jesuit University of Guadalajara.

He said he got a job at Deloitte & Touche, a large consulting firm, after graduating in 2001.

“I was immersed in the business world of money and prestige … but I was just not happy,” he said.

He said he began feeling calls to the priesthood and told himself he “had to give this Jesuit thing a try.”

He said that he had to decide if he would give up his life in business to join the priesthood.

“It was very scary, because I was just leaving my life behind and starting fresh,” he said of deciding to become a priest.

He was assigned to the Oregon province and received his Masters in Philosophy at Loyola Chicago and his Theology degree at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara in Berkeley, California.

Fr. del Toro teaches in both the math and science departments at Brophy.

Jack Brown ’17 has Fr. del Toro for precalculus, and said he enjoys the way Fr. del Toro teaches.

“I feel that he is a fantastic teacher with a great amount of intelligence,” Brownsaid in an email. “The class is one of my favorite classes because I love math and I love a teacher with a great spirit and as well as a deep understanding of the subject at hand. Fr. del Toro happens to have both of these attributes.”

He said that the fact that Fr. del Toro is a priest means he brings a calm sense of spirituality to the classroom.

He said that something not everyone knows about Fr. del Toro is that he has met two different popes.

Brown said he highly recommends meeting Fr. del Toro “because he is a great man with much to offer to Brophy students