Inducted in 2009
Prep Counselor, Teacher, Speech & Debate Coach (1941-1944; 1949-1961)
Educator & Administrator, Various Jesuit Institutions
School Historian (1985-2007)

Induction Video

It would be hard to find another person who has served Fordham Prep and Fordham University in as many capacities as did the Rev. Thomas Christopher Hennessy, SJ. He was born in Manhattan in 1916 and raised in Queens, the third of seven children of Anna Regan Hennessy of Connecticut and Thomas C. Hennessy, Sr., a schoolteacher who had been born in Ireland. The Hennessys raised five boys and two girls on Union Hall Street: James, John, Thomas, Jr., Edward, Donal, Cathleen and Eileen.  Two would become Jesuits: James and Thomas.

Tom entered the Society of Jesus after high school in 1934 at St. Andrew-on-Hudson in Poughkeepsie. For the three-year teaching period of his regency, he was assigned to Fordham Prep, where, as was the case with most scholastics, he taught a variety of subjects. In the recollections of fellow Hall of Honor inductee James Kane Class of 1944, the tall, red-headed scholastic "was hard working and extraordinarily devoted to his students from the very beginning." He also served as speech and debate coach, revitalizing the team which had been founded back in the 1850s by Civil War hero Martin T. McMahon during his Rose Hill days. Hennessy also founded of the Prep’s Gaelic Culture Society, a club which persists to this day. In an oral history of Fordham, Tom Hennessy recounted his impressions of his regency at the Prep:

Regency at Fordham [Prep] was a great time for learning about teaching. In my years in schools of education, I would tell prospective teachers about the experience of those years. There would be about a dozen Jesuits in this same capacity, namely teaching high school, living together, working together, and recreating together. In many ways, it was a fabulous way of sharing one’s experiences, learning what worked and what did not work.

In 1949, a few years after his ordination, Hennessy returned to the Prep Faculty. He earned advanced degrees in counseling at Fordham University and became a guidance counselor at the Prep in 1952. He also continued to coach the speech and debate team as he had in his scholastic days.

During his tenure in the Counseling Department, Father was credited with introducing modern, professional guidance techniques to the Prep, setting the stage for his successor and fellow Hall of Honor member, Rev. Mallick Fitzpatrick, SJ, who would build upon Hennessey's legacy and become legend in the field of guidance and counseling in Jesuit secondary education.
 
Though he left the Prep in 1961, Hennessy remained at Fordham, teaching courses in counseling at the University’s School of Education. In 1972, he was appointed director of counseling at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus, a position he held until 1981. He was instrumental in the development of a counseling laboratory for the department..
 
From 1981 to 1985, Father made his only professional venture to another educational institution, serving as dean of the School of Education at Marquette University in Milwaukee. 

Returning to his beloved Fordham in 1985, he devoted most of his retirement to studying and writing about the shared history of Fordham Prep and University, founded together as St. John’s College in 1841. He was the editor of Fordham: The Early Years, published in 1998. He also wrote How the Jesuits Settled in New York, which was published in 2003. When interviewed by a Catholic New York reporter in the late ‘90s, Hennessy modestly commented, “I’m not a historian. I’m retired from education, so it was a wonderful hobby for me to find out about as many of these individuals as I could.”
 
Non-historian though he may have considered himself, Hennessy had some other eclectic and fascinating ventures into the story of Rose Hill. In 2001, he became a key figure in the renovation of the Campus Cemetery, just across Bellarmine Road from the Prep building today. By the second half of the 20th century, the small 19th-century graveyard had become a plot of ruined, crooked and flattened headstones among a tangled mass of weeds. The popular myth among Prep and University folks alike was that the burial ground was really just a phantom one, containing no remains, and that the bodies had been left buried somewhere over in the Botanical Garden, originally a part of the Campus. Poring over obscure diaries, reports and charts housed in the University Archives, Hennessy eventually disproved that long-held legend. His findings are summarized in The Chronology of the Cemetery, which traces its history from the first burial in 1847.

One of Father's last projects was the identification of the thirty-nine Prep alumni killed in World War II. His research eventually which led to the creation of a plaque commemorating their service and sacrifice. 
 
Rev. Thomas C. Hennessey, SJ passed away on December 13, 2007 at age 91. According to his niece, Veronica Larsson, he chose to spend the final months of his life at Fordham, for “that was where he belonged — that was home.”