From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

One of the more memorable New Englanders at St. Robert’s Hall was the perceptive and funny Hugh Riley, a liturgy expert who’d studied in Germany.  He was a species of Boston Irish that I appreciated.  I got a pretty close look at the breed in my month’s “probation” (within a probation) in a Roxbury parish.

Roxbury was billed as black and slum, but compared to Chicago it looked pretty good to me, and I walked around it and got around the city in general, for instance taking the subway at night to attend a lecture at Boston U. by John Silber, who was to become its president.

My wife and I were to visit BU many years later as father of a student, for early visits.  Later the family came for his graduation—a lively affair in the heart of town.

My month in Roxbury, at St. John-St. Hugh parish, was a stimulating, welcome relief from rustic Pomfret, with all its stone-wall fences.  My duties were churchly—mass-saying, preaching, hearing confessions, rectory-sitting on Sunday night when the four priests on staff went elsewhere.  Not much else, as I recall, but I filled in gaps with my customary running about.

As on the West Side at Ignatius, I moved around the neighborhood, zeroing in on the civil rights nodes, including a storefront on main-drag Bluehill Avenue.  What the St. John-St. Hugh pastor, an assertive, outspoken type, didn’t know about my meanderings wouldn’t hurt him, I decided.  But I chose to mention it at dinner, suggesting the use by these civil-righters of unused space at St. John-St. Hugh.

“Those people are communists,” bellowed the pastor, a wiry, sharp-eyed man in his 50s, shouting me down.  After that I kept my counsel.  Hugh Riley followed me in the Roxbury probation, which he enjoyed immensely.  But he reported back to me that the rectory staff considered me a communist and felt excluded from my comings and goings.  I was secretive, in other words, and they were hurt, Riley reported genially.  But you could have bowled me over with a goose quill by telling me they cared.

In any case, I had pulled back defensively, writing them off, and they knew it.   Not all.  One of them was unlike the rest.  Not just in being black—this was Harry Furblur, the first black priest for the archdiocese—but in his being ordained just two years earlier than I and thinking like me.

I could tell from his book shelf.  He had books I wanted to read.  Another of the staff, ordained just two years before Harry, had detective novels.  Temperament and habit partly accounted for this, but also our seminary upbringing.    Two years made a huge difference in the early 60s.

If you had studied theology during Vatican II, you became sharply aware of reform and revolution.  Jesuit theology faculties were generally with the flow.  At least they paid attention, some avidly, though as is often the case, it didn’t matter where they stood.

So the likes of Harry Furblur and me had perked up and stocked up with new books and ideas, and that made a big difference.  Years later we corresponded.  He had left the priesthood and married, as had I.  Nice guy, he was my friend in the rectory, though with his own work as assistant pastor he had hands full and did not accompany me in my rounds.

The parish housekeeper and cook lived in an upper floor of the rectory.  One was young, good-looking, and of a manner called “saucy” in 18th-century novels.  I was given a room near the stairway, and when the stairway light went on, as she was ascending for the night, I knew it.  In fact, I think I had a switch in my room for the stairs.  Hmmm.  The mind and imagination raced.  It was not the sort of thing you ran into in Jesuit houses.  Nor in most rectories, I suppose.

The neighborhood, hardly a black ghetto, was such that nobody paid attention if you walked the streets in your cassock.  I’d do so on my way to St. Hugh’s for early-morning mass, walking from St. John’s, where the rectory was.  It had been a mostly Catholic neighborhood.  Among the black newcomers were far fewer Catholics, of course.  Habits were dying hard, however, and not just in what a priest wore on the street.

The city was the usual cauldron of interracial cookery.  An Episcopal canon (monsignor, Catholics would say) was leading the charge for integration.  His name was mud in the rectory, where the crusty pastor set the tone, as when he would yell out when a fellow priest with a middle eastern name whom they all knew called, “Ask him if he’s making any rugs these days.”

It was a sort of rough humor, but it showed who was ruling the roost.  The Irish hadn’t bit and clawed and cajoled their way up from greenhorn status for nothing.  Of course the biting and clawing era was long gone.

So my education continued.  (Was I a latter-day Henry Adams?)  At least I was seeking it.  Sitting in the rectory did not appeal to me, except when I was placed in charge of things on Sunday night and sat with my steak and bourbon in front of the TV set, happy as a clam.  I was there to cover the phone, which never rang while I was there.    Just as well maybe, because of my funny way of speaking.

I had reason on one occasion to call police about something important, I forget what, and got a lesson in regional pronunciation.  Identifying myself as Father Bowman at St. John’s rectory, I was done in by my short “o,” which came out a flat “a.”  “Saint Jan’s?” the dispatcher asked, until I spelled it for him.

A funny-sounding Cincinnatian had told me in the first week of novitiate, “I like your accent.”  So in Boston.  However, and this is odd, many times I sounded, even in Boston, like a New Englander.  People told me that.  Some said I sounded like a Kennedy.  But I’d never been east of Ohio.

It had to be the attention I’d given to my speech over the years of training, not just as to stuttering but also as to projection and pronunciation, opening my mouth wide, bringing the sound up from down deep, etc., per instruction by Willie F. Ryan at Milford and Jack Williams and Tony Peterman at Baden, all speech teachers, whose role in a Jesuit house of training was important and I think underestimated.

Stay with me, there’s more to come . . .

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

Tertianship was sometimes explained as the third probation, after the 1st week of novitiate (the first) and two-year novitiate itself (the second).  This was 10 months in relative seclusion, a la novitiate days, in a rural or far-suburban setting.  Two other Chicagoans and I chose Pomfret, Connecticut, over Parma, a Cleveland suburb.  We wanted to travel, I guess, though one of us had been in New England for several years, working incognito at an investment firm in Boston, the better to manage province funds in years to come.

The Jesuits had many ventures going, educational and otherwise, and many members to take care of, as in sickness and old age.  Much money was to be required.  My tertian classmate had trained to be a reliable handler of that money.

We lived in one of those big buildings that fell into Jesuits’ hands in the 30s, when depression undercut owners’ ability to keep them up and live in them.  It was St. Robert’s Hall, named for Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), one of the early Jesuits, an apologist and defender of the faith—a smart guy and a decent one too, who managed a degree of civility in the midst of acrimonious times, when wars of religion were being waged on battlefield and campus.  And in publishing houses, where Bellarmine wielded a big pen.

St. Robert’s Hall had its big house and grounds, including pool and tennis courts.  I dove into its not yet emptied pool one autumn day and found it bracing.  The estate was fine indeed, with big trees and wide grassy spaces.  But more attractive were the surrounding winding country roads where the walker could see for himself the kind of stone wall that Robert Frost said is unloved by something.  He did not make his case with me.  I loved those walls.

The walks were standard for us.  If as an 80-year-old I [did] a lot of walking, it had much to do with what I did as a countryside-dwelling Jesuit.  They put us outside the city in those days, in pursuit of seclusion.  We found ourselves surrounded by nature.  At Milford I’d stop while walking to see the red-winged blackbird swoop, for instance.  In 1964 at Pomfret, 30 miles west of Providence, R.I., we had room to wander, as during the Long Retreat, our second 30-day run through the Spiritual Exercises.  I know not what others found in this exercise, which I was practicing just 14 Octobers after my first, but I found it an endurance contest and nothing more.

For one thing, it was “dry” prayer time, as we called periods when in meditation nothing held the attention or, more to the point, fed a sense of well-being.  I had neither “consolation,” as we used the term, nor sense of strengthening resolve.  What had absorbed my attention at 18 at Milford under the novice master Bernie Wernert now escaped me.  I’d skip meditations, just walking around the countryside trying to get my head together or at least stay calm.  Ordained only 16 months, I was committed to the Jesuits and priesthood and was looking forward to my “apostolate,” as we said then. But in general I was distracted and on edge.

My prayer life had pretty much evaporated.  Later I told a shrink of my plight, and he registered astonishment, as if to wonder what I had going for myself if not that.  I had no sense of where I was heading, except to heaven, I hoped, when I died.  This I took for a bad sign.  Another scholastic, who entered the society a year after I did and had everything going for him—looks, savoir faire, social standing, a great smile, athletic and musical talent—said at one point with his million-dollar smile, that he couldn’t wait to die.  He left instead, well ahead of ordination, and later died.

“Do you want to be a utility infielder?” George Murray asked me in my room at Baden one day.  The issue was focus.  I remained (to a fault) open to possibilities.  The world beckoned, but I stood like the philosopher’s ass, unable to choose a path, starving to death.

Staying busy was important, but I had to stay busy building something.  John Hardon made writing a top priority for me.  Father Bill Mountain, giving the scholastics and me, not yet finally vowed, a three-day retreat at Ignatius, during the school year no less, made the same point, urging me to demand time off or somehow make time for writing.  There had to be a way to beat this game.  I was groping.

The kindly old tertian instructor and 30-day retreat master, a survivor of decades of goldfish-bowl life in the society, had adapted to his environment.  But he was literate and fluent and intelligent and not overblown.  He didn’t take himself too seriously; I could take him seriously.  If tertianship was a problem, he did not exacerbate it.   Neither did my two Chicago Province friends.  One had trained at an investment house, as I noted.

Working where he would not be recognized—considered important at the time—he had used a cover story.  He was a man of consummate discretion and could pull it off.  That was behind him, and he was now a tertian.  He was unique among us in that he had some notion of finance.

We were shown a movie that in true movie-industry fashion mocked business and finance, in this case the Italian stock exchange.  None of us gave a hoot about this, but in post-screening discussion, the once undercover Jesuit took vigorous exception to the depiction as inaccurate and scurrilous.  He was a solid guy as to his Jesuit identity and a good companion for these months.

AVANT GARDE VS. PEW-SITTER CATHOLIC   Another tertian, of neither Chicago nor New England province, later taught theology in Chicago.  With him in due time, I had sharp disagreement that epitomized the learned theologian vs. pew-sitting layman gap, stemming apparently from one of those wink-and-nod issues that never reach the pulpit.

It happened in the late 80s, when a colleague of his at Loyola, a layman in the philosophy department, was making waves with his claim that Jesus did not rise from the dead.  My friend and I discussed it on the telephone, I in our kitchen in our house in Oak Park.  Growing impatient with his fine points demonstrating uncertainty in the matter, I finally said, Look, either Jesus rose or he didn’t.  To which he unfortunately (and shockingly) responded that we should not “play the logic game.”

I couldn’t take this, especially from a Jesuit, and our conversation ended abruptly.    My friend was thriving on a theology faculty, while I was doing the same as paterfamilias, and the twain were not meeting.  Question is, how common was such a twain-splitting among Catholics of the late 20th century?  More common than is mentioned, it seemed to me.

On the same topic, another Jesuit contemporary told me at a social gathering that it did not matter to him if Jesus had risen from the dead.  This from a hard-working contributor to Jesuits and church.  He did not want to play the logic game either, it appeared.  But neither would say that from the pulpit.  It would have made a headline in the newspaper I worked on, I guarantee you.

— So it went for Jesuits and others during those days of change, change, the world was changing and the church we had grown up in too. More to come of this story . . .

Ice did it, not disability on your’s truly’s part, no sirree. People flocked to help, two men and a woman. Treacherous curb area. Balance not an issue, no sirree.

Yet and still . . .

A look at a Sunday mass few years ago, sermon started 9:48, ended 10:10!

Considered writing organizer of liturgy about it. Instead decided to love this preacher and forget about it.

It’s my strategy these days. When irritated, think good of the irritator, whom God loves, and so should I!

Thing is, am I on speaking terms with God? Therein lies a tale. It’s crucial. Ask when did you last speak to Him? He’s at your beck and call, you know.

He is our friend. Talk to Him, He’s listening.

Egad, get on it, you fool.

Egad?

Try this:

English has a raft of ‘minced oaths’ to take the place of swear words for the sake of politeness. We still use words like darn, ruddy, and flippin’ ‘eck.

Egad, as well as zounds, ‘sblood, struth, gadzooks, etc. are from Elizabethan times, when plays contained plenty of swearing, but in 1606 all oaths on stage were banned. [!]

You want to go further on this? Be my guest.

A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately changing the spelling of, or replacing, part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to remove the original term’s objectionable characteristics.

Also, a new term can be created from scratch. The goal is to create a new term that expresses the same emotions but does not carry the same offensive denotative meaning. An example is “gosh” for “God“,^[1] or fudge for fuck.^[2]

Many languages have such expressions. In the English language, nearly all profanities have minced variants.^[3]

I did not know that.

Back to mass. I asked myself, did I not, do we want a special way of reading Scripture aloud at mass?

Yes and no, for starters. Yes because the mass is a prayer, for one thing — much more than that, of course — and the reader instinctively adopts a tone that reflects this.

So it is that readers at mass, people who volunteer for that role, adopt the tone.

Or seem to.

Me, faced with a long passage from Old Testament greats, I am tempted to announce to my audience, buckle up, everybody.

Or faced with Epistle passages whose translator did the best he or she could but still the audience is faced with complicated, complex passages which as an English teacher ages ago I might have asked the class to paraphrase and see what they came up with and discuss it.

That is to say, if they took a shot at solving the problem presented by the passage, they would be ready to talk about it.

Well for lots of reasons, none of that’s gonna happen. My audience at a weekday mass will be entirely on the receiving end, which is why I read the passage as if it’s a hot story. Not too hot, of course.

Not going to dramatize it but to spit it out as a good story, something engaging, you know, emphasizing all that needs it, spelling it out as if listeners were not a captive audience, but people who will stop what they are doing and listen.

Let the religious element speak for itself. If the prophet is reading the riot act to his audiences, deliver it to your audience with the vigour it deserves, delivering it with gusto, driving it home as something they are likely to remember.

As for you readers, assuming there are at least two of you, see you at church — and not “if the windows are clean,” as we Catholic wise guys and gals would put it in the 40’s in old Oak Park.

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

West Baden College was the place.

The course in question was about dogma.  This was our term for doctrine, what the church had taught, was teaching, would never stop teaching.  Dogma is a bad word in some circles, but it was a neutral one in ours.  With the dogma course came an ingenious system of footnotes.

Every statement of every church council and every papal pronouncement and anything else that had survived the winnowing process of tradition had a “note,” or rating as to its reliability.

If the statement was “de fide divina definita” (defined as revealed by God), it was a matter of faith: you could take it to the bank, and you’d better, if you wanted to call yourself a Catholic.

If it were anything less, down a ladder of assent, you had steadily decreasing certainty and obligation to endorse it.  Notes were assigned by professional theologians, who did not always agree.  They were learned by student theologians like us, who always agreed or were expected to.  Some things were more certain than others.  You could even have your own opinion about some, found at the ladder’s bottom.  The higher you went, the greater the risk of heresy for the denier.

This was systematic theology with a vengeance.  It provided a framework for discussion and even a sort of mnemonic outline.  It was belief calibrated.  If it was in a way mechanical, it also imparted nuances that encouraged a sort of sophistication as to belief.  The very notion of calibrating doctrine promotes a healthy relativism: not all doctrines are equal.  This relativism, if you pardon the term, would stand the confessor, preacher, counsellor in good stead, and through him the faithful with whom he came in contact.

In fact, opinions could differ about a doctrine found on the lower rungs of certainty.  Jesuits, less reluctant to assign the higher note, were known for being less restrictive.  One teacher quoted someone as saying we Jesuits could be more liberal because we knew more.  There was something in that to make a fellow sit up in the saddle.

In any case, theologians dealt in dogma, the church’s arsenal of beliefs that had survived the centuries.  We student theologians were to absorb them so that later we could defend and propagate them by what we taught and preached.  My religion teacher at Fenwick High school would say, “If dogma won’t do it [convince us to be good Catholics], nothing will.”  No one at West Baden cavilled at the word.  This was the one, true church, and we its functionaries were to be schooled in its teachings.

My classmate Paul Quay, fresh from obtaining his physics doctorate, wanted us theologians (students) to be exposed to nothing but arguments against dogma in the first two months of theology.  Shaken in our certainties, he figured, the more would we appreciate the faith once we had heard and given full study to the arguments.

In that enterprise we would spend the rest of our four years.  Deeply committed to the church, he wanted us exposed to doubt about it and God and everything else, so that we would keenly anticipate the answers we would get from our teachers and study.   You can imagine what a worrisome thing that would be, however.  If the dean had a problem with me as recalcitrant student, what would he think of two months of faith-shaking?  As intelligent and committed as Paul was, his was an idea whose time had not arrived.

Paul was a challenger of the accepted in other ways.  Another theologian, a footballer from Cleveland and an incipient biologist who was to become a psychiatrist while remaining a Jesuit, took a walk now and then with the indomitable Quay.  This was George Murray, who would walk with Paul around the terrazo-floored atrium, head down, hearing Paul out.

Many made such walks during after-meal recreation, noon and night.  We had grounds to walk on, but when weather forced us inside, we strolled under the world’s largest unsupported dome, through whose overhead glass the sun shone in good weather, sometimes brightly.  They made a noteworthy pair, Paul a gaunt fellow, George with a lineman’s beefy solidity.  George likened Paul’s face, skin drawn tightly over high cheekbones, to the wind-tunnel look of a test pilot under G-force strain.

Joe Sikora was another walker from whom one picked up memorable commentary.  He was a tall, somewhat stooped galoot from Chicago who had entered the novitiate with philosophy doctorate in hand and some very deep stuff in print or headed there—Inquiry into Being was one title.  Catchy, I thought.  The province fathers had unsurprisingly let him skip philosophy.

He caught up to us in a hurry and became part of what I found to be the rich conversational backdrop to theology.  He once drew a helpful if elementary distinction between theology and church politics, something important to keep in mind in those years of Vatican Council 2, when the air was full of controversy.

Joe was not about to be sucked in.  He was a nice corrective to the whirlpools that swirled about us.   He served the same purpose when John F. Kennedy was shot, quietly cavilling at the community’s absorption in it.  I shared his feeling, noting something “ghoulish” about our spending so much time watching television in the auditorium, set up specially for the days immediately following the assassination.

I was among those watching, in fact, when Jack Ruby, the Chicagoan with mob ties, shot Lee Harvey Lee Harvey Oswald on camera.   It had not been on television that I had heard of the Kennedy shooting, however.  I do remember how we heard it, don’t I?  I can easily recall a first-year theologian walking down the hall knocking on doors, giving the awful news, “The president was shot.”

Sikora also reminded me that JFK (and brother Bobby) had started investigation of steel executives who had raised prices, in the course of which the executives had been called at home by FBI agents.  Most of us applauded JFK when he blew his nose.  Even then there were very few Republicans among us.  Sikora, on the other hand, was quietly critical, indeed appalled at those dark-of-night telephone calls.

Gene Kotz, a few years older than I, was a labor union specialist prone to support liberal causes and very data-based.  He had a high-pitched voice and ready laugh.  We had an elderly sociologist on faculty, Father John Coogan, whom he classed with neanderthals for his anti-union and other conservative stances.

I never dealt with Coogan, but if I had, I would have heard from him something much like positions I take today.   We had a ferment going.  It was not as literary as I would have liked, but ideas were popping, largely about political and other current events.  The place was lively in that respect.  We supplied liveliness for each other.

In addition, the writers among us got a boost when Maurie Moore, a Chicagoan, plugged us into the national Jesuit Writers Agency out of Weston, Mass.  This met my needs and interests nicely.

— to be continued . . . Coming up, TO WRITE, TO LIVE . . .

Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading. Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one). Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.

Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I tell myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head) and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage.

Four days of the week I go to Kass at Trib or check out Dennis Byrne or Krauthammer and look for some crisply traditional raking of city, county, and state muck in either paper — especially Sun-Times, as by Tim Novak et al. and Fran Spielman, who gets more out of a Daley presser than any man or other woman I know about.

It’s getting worse. Size of paper I can live with, but boring biases and crippled imaginativeness I cannot.

So I look around and today found something worth spilling coffee on. It’s, lo and behold, Our Sunday Visitor, which by definition is not a daily paper but is definitely a newspaper not a magazine and which I am receiving on a trial complimentary basis.

More later, I trust, with special attention to [the late] Russell Shaw’s columnizing. Its web site takes some study, but you can start here.

WUXTRY, WUXTRY . . . Let us now read Chicago’s two highest-circulation newspapers, headlines first. Headlines because they are the ultimate shorthand, blunt instruments but not so blunt in the hands of skilled practitioners such as create them at Chi Trib and Sun-Times.

First grabber is “War funding bill passes” in Chi Trib. Gives one pause, in that rebuilding Iraq is what we have been hearing. War funding? “Fund the military and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan” is in the lead paragraph by Jill Zuckman. That’s war funding?

2nd is “Jailed Russian oil chief resigns: Company’s stock soars after CEO announces exit,” heading very interesting story by Alex Rodriguez in Moscow, with “fueled speculation” in 2nd ‘graf that the man, a billionaire, is going to challenge Putin politically. [!]

Funny, for readers of the internet and watchers of TV news, the 1st story, “war funding,” is not new. That’s your hard-copy daily newspaper problem: how to tell readers what they don’t already know.

Big picture on p. 1 of returnees from bloody ‘copter downing in Iraq, “For families, sad news hits home: Copter victims.” But has Chi Trib been also telling us about progress reported in Iraq? As vividly? I will have to read it more closely, because I seem to have missed news of this aspect of our success. [?]

“Rockford [airport] tries to lure fliers from O’Hare: Northwest Chicagoland Regional Airport uses its new name, free parking and budget fares in effort to woo fliers from northwest and west suburbs” certainly has flare, with photo of spanking-clean passenger-waiting area. And news to this reader. Nice going, Trib, two stories so far on p. 1.

“U.S. rates home health firms: Survey compares 7,000 providers”? Really? Our govt. is rating health firms? What do you know about that? And what are these home health firms? Families?

“Poll says many on campus marching to GOP’s beat: Campaign 2004”? Now you are talking. Republicanism on campus may not be brand new, but it’s new enough to capture attention.

“Students leaning right” heads a mini-graph of poll results: 61% undergrads approve of GW [Bush], vs. 53% of general population, per Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Jeff Zeleny reports it out of Columbus, OH, where he went to talk to students. (And he really went there, we presume, vs. Jayson Blair of NY Times and his infamous hotel-room creations of sights seen and people interviewed.)

Three stories this day on Chi Trib page one!

Sun-Times? Has big pic of “two brothers in mourning” over their brother killed in a ‘copter crash. Neither am I full of recollection of this paper’s stories about progress in Iraq. Must read more carefully.

“SADDAM SURE U.S. ATTACK WAS HOAX [upper case in original]: [Ex-foreign minister] Tariq Aziz tells interrogators that deposed leader did little to prepare for invasion” is head for p. 3 story from sister-paper London Telegraph with AP help, citing a Wash Post story that ran yesterday.

So we have here the work of enterprising editors who assume (safely) that most of us do not read Wash Post regularly.

Nothing like that in the head, “Burke [feisty alderman] wants ‘car for sale’ signs banned from Chicago streets: Claims Indiana car dealers use roads here for sales,” by the excellent Fran Spielman, enterprising City Hall reporter.

It’s about “Let’s Have an Ordinance” Alderman Eddie B., recently heard complaining about smokers on THE SIDEWALK, FOR GOSH SAKES, whom he had to pass on his way from the Hall to his law office for this or that highly lucrative meeting.

This, of course, is Sun-Times’s forte. (Say “fort” not “fortay,” by the way, although being not the first by whom the new are tried nor yet the last to lay the old aside is a rule increasingly hard-pressed to justify it.) What aldermen do is grist for S-T mill. Burke of course favors a draconian measure; he thinks draconian.

P. 1 has other reefers (not marijuana but blotches of type & pix that refer the reader to story elsewhere in paper): New Sox mgr, new movie, and a Richard Roeper column, “Why this girl’s parents are despicable,” next to head shot of Utah girl abducted by Mormon lunatic.

Ah. Roeper has found something he truly, truly objects to and is very, very angry.

— Thus did one reader discover and pass on to blog-readers in (23) years gone by. —