Inducted in 2017
Prep President (1997-2004)
Advisor to the President (2024-5)
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 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 1997 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 the Columbière 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 enjoyed a remarkable career in Jesuit education that would span six decades. He served as the president of both St. Peter’s Prep and Fordham Prep from 1979 through 1986 and from 1997 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, however, Fr. Parkes also 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 would note, “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.

Fordham Prep will always be grateful to Fr. Parkes for having made the school community whole again.

In addition to his tenures at Society schools, Fr. Joseph Parkes served as the business manager and assistant editor of America Magazine, as assistant provincial and provincial of the New York Province, and as a member of the New York City Campaign Finance Board under Mayor Bloomberg from 2007-2013. 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 was tapped to share his time and talent with many institutions down through the decades, holding positions on the boards of the Loyola School in Manhattan; University of Detroit Jesuit High School in Michigan; Cheverus High School in Portland, Maine; St. Peter’s College in Jersey City; as well as Georgetown University; Mt. St. Mary’s in Emmitsberg, Maryland; and, of course, Fordham University. 

Reflecting on his time at Rose Hill, Fr. Parkes would remark, “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. 

In the mid-2020s, Father returned to the Prep as a special advisor to the president, Mr. Anthony Day .  His presence was a great blessing not only to the Administration, but to the members of the Faculty and Student Body with whom he would share his insights and fantastic stories (many of which seemed to involve baseball — one of Father's great loves), as well as to the alumni with whom he maintained meaningful ties over the years.

Fr. Joseph Parkes, SJ passed on June 19, 2026.