Inducted in 2017
Prep President (1996-2004)
Educator & Administrator, Various Jesuit Institutions
Co-Founder, Cristo Rey New York High School, East Harlem, New York
Provincial, New York Province of the Society of Jesus

To this day, he is recalled by the Prep as a tireless administrator and a founder of schools. He has been called dauntless, driven, strong-willed, no-nonsense, and tough-talking when necessary. But above all, he has been remembered as unswerving in his devotion to those institutions with which he has been connected and to those whom he has served. 

Such is the legacy of Archbishop John Hughes who founded Fordham Prep and University together as St. John’s College in 1841. Such also happens to be the legacy of Fr. Joseph Parkes, SJ, Prep president from 1996 to 2004. 

Joseph Parkes was born in 1944 in Jersey City, New Jersey. His father, Joseph, Sr., an Irish immigrant from County Leitrim, worked in an oil yard. His mother, Mary McAloon Parkes, was a homemaker from County Fermanagh who had arrived in the United States in 1927. 

Joe, Jr. grew up in the Greenville section of Jersey City along with his older sister, Patricia. He attended St. Paul’s, his parish grammar school, eventually making his way to Grand Street where he entered St. Peter’s Prep as a freshman in September of 1958. A four-year footballer during his high school years, he also served as sports editor for The Petroc, St. Peter’s student newspaper. Summers and weekends, a teenaged Joe would likely be found at the nearby Palisades Park where he hawked the amusement park’s famous vinegary French fries.

In 1962, after four years with the Jesuits at St. Peter’s, Joseph Parkes would answer the call to join the Society of Jesus, entering the novitiate as St. Andrew’s-on-Hudson in Hyde Park, New York. He would spend the juniorate portion of his formation both at St. Andrew’s and at the Columbiere House of Studies in Clarkston, Michigan, returning east in 1966 to complete his philosophy studies at Loyola College in Shrub Oak, New York, and his theological studies at Woodstock College, which in those days had just moved to Manhattan.

Fr. Joseph Parkes, SJ was ordained on June 12, 1976 in the Fordham University Church. 

Including his regency at Ateneo de Manila High School in the Philippines in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, Fr. Parkes has had a remarkable career in Jesuit education that has spanned six decades to date. He has served as the president of both St. Peter’s Prep and Fordham Prep from 1979 through 1986 and 1996 through 2004 respectively. Leaving Fordham Prep, he would go on to co-found Cristo Rey New York High School in East Harlem, serving as the school’s first president.

Father’s straightforward, methodical, and practical approach to school leadership certainly proved useful at Rose Hill. During his tenure he worked to pay off the construction of the then-recently completed Leonard Theatre, to update facilities which had gone untouched since Shea Hall’s 1972 opening, and to increase the endowment to secure the Prep’s financial future. 

In looking forward, Fr. Parkes had the wisdom to know he needed to look back, too. Barely recovered from the institutional instability of the legal separation from the University and the move from Hughes Hall some two decades earlier, the Prep of the 1990s had found itself sadly detached from the “Old Boys.”  “When I first came to the school,” Father has noted, “we could not locate over 1,500 alumni. For whatever reason, we had lost touch with them as the years went on.” With the help of fellow Hall of Honor inductee, Prep librarian and archivist Gus Stellwag ’49, Parkes made it his goal to find and connect with as many alumni as he could — not only to lean on them for support, but to remind them that they still were and always would be a part of the story of Fordham Prep: past, present, and future. The Prep will always be grateful to Fr. Parkes for making the school community whole again.

In addition to his tenures at Society schools, Fr. Joseph Parkes has served as the business manager and assistant editor of America Magazine, as assistant provincial and provincial of the New York Province, and from 2007-2013 with the New York City Campaign Finance Board under Mayor Bloomberg. It is worth noting that during his time as provincial, laboring as always for the greater glory of God, Father was instrumental in founding Loyola Jesuit College, a secondary school in Abuja, Nigeria.

On account of his keen administrative sense, Fr. Parkes has been tapped to share his time and talent with many institutions down through the decades. He has held positions on the boards of the Loyola School in Manhattan, University of Detroit Jesuit High School, Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine, St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, Georgetown University, and Mt. St. Mary’s in Emmitsberg, Maryland, and, of course, Fordham University. 

Reflecting on his time at Rose Hill, Fr. Parkes has remarked, “Fordham Prep was a great experience for me — to work with people who were so committed to the mission; who put in their blood, sweat and tears.”

Without hesitation, the Fordham Prep community will always be able to say the same in return.