On his 90th birthday, a look at Rev. Bill Watters’ legacy: launching ‘three notable schools’ in three decades

In the early 1990s, Father William “Bill” Watters, a Jesuit priest, was sent to Baltimore with a discomfiting question: whether the venerable but struggling St. Ignatius Church, founded in the 1850s, should be closed. His superior made clear he favored an exit. Watters pondered the boarded-up rowhouses across from the church and noticed a plaque marking the founding of a Jesuit university and prep school on the site more than a century before.