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

We novices waited table, washed dishes, set tables.  A brother was in charge of the refectory and scullery, “triclinium” in Latin, where dishes and glasses and placeware were washed in super-sized machines and then dried by hand.  Another was in charge of the kitchen, “culina” as in “culinary.”  He was the head cook.  The kitchen had its own wash, for pots and pans.

STRATEGIC RETREAT Another probation, newly established in the early ‘50s, was at Bellarmine Hall, a men’s retreat house in Chicago suburban Barrington.  Second-year novices, having completed the required year spent entirely in the novitiate, went off in twos to wait tables, wash dishes, make beds, clean toilets, and the like.  Getting there was an adventure.  In the absence of expressways, you had to drive through city and suburban streets.

The driver for my partner and me, a brother stationed at the retreat house, took a route from the train station through west suburban Oak Park.  I was thrilled to go down Washington Boulevard — pre-expressway days — past Lombard Avenue, a half block from the family house.  But I knew that was all we would do.

There was not the slightest chance the driver would go even a block off his course, if only to drive down Lombard, much less stop to let me have even a short visit.  Not for another three and a half years, five years after I’d left home, was I to darken its door and sit at its dining room table and eat and drink and enjoy good time with family.  This was detachment from earthly delights.  We didn’t fool around.

The month in Barrington was a major change of pace, exhilarating if tiring.  The priest in charge was a big redheaded guy of nervous intensity who gave me quite a message at the end of the month, telling me I’d turn out all right if I were as good as my father, whom he knew.  That would have been a wonderful thing to hear if I didn’t suspect he thought I was lazy or otherwise deficient.  However, even if I were prone to calling out my superiors, which I was not, I was in no position to object to his comment, even when I took it as a slam.

A word about the two years of novitiate and the “canonical” first year.  Jesuits’ two-year requirement was unique.  All other religious communities—orders, congregations—imposed only one, as required by the church.  The Dominicans, for instance, at the time accepted novices no earlier than after two years of college and ordained them to the priesthood after seven years, for ordination if on schedule at 27.  Jesuits accepted candidates after high school, for ordination at 31, but with two years of training scheduled after that, for a delay of full-time priestly work to age 33.

As for the retreat house, Bellarmine Hall welcomed 50 or 60 men a weekend for a Friday-to-Sunday “closed” retreat.  That is, the retreatants were out in the country far from the madding crowds they were used to, and were expected to keep silent and show up for four or five group “conferences” a day for lecture-sermons by the retreat master.  Years later, I was to be a retreat master at this very place.  The men would file in and listen.  The retreat master and one or two other priests who lived there would be available for individual conferences and, of course, confession.

My father had been going to Barrington since it opened a few years earlier.  He had made retreats in St. Louis, where the Jesuits had “the White House,” and before that at the Franciscans’ retreat house in Mayslake, near Hillside, a western suburb.  The Mayslake retreats were loose affairs, with silence not observed and, as I heard, card games at night for those who were interested.

Not so among the Jesuits, whose retreats were serious refueling operations.  My father took them very seriously.  They satisfied a spiritual hunger for him, though he’d never have put it that way.  He’d had two years of Catholic schooling, just before confirmation at 12 or 13, on the West Side, and two years or so at Chicago’s Austin High before becoming an apprentice printer.

From Joe, the retreat-house cook, I got a chance to be like Jesus, taking it on the chin and smiling.  Joe was a rough-hewn character who found me eminently unlikable and tore into me once for saying something along pacifist lines that sounded unduly idealistic to him.  He practically tore my head off as I washed dishes, yelling in my ear about war never ending, always was, always will be, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Someone, probably a fellow novice, mentioned it to the novice master when we got back.  The master asked me about it nervously and was relieved when I brushed it off as Joe’s just not liking me, without reference to what Joe might do to the next novice he didn’t like.  The novice master apparently took it as a case of a novice’s being willing to put up with shit.  We weren’t supposed to respond in kind and were supposed to rejoice in it for the sake of the kingdom and to be like Jesus.

On the other hand, he couldn’t be matter-of-fact about this fellow at Barrington.  He hadn’t relished the idea of complaining about him to the priest in charge, though I’m sure he would have done so if necessary, and I can’t say I blame him.  I know I didn’t blame him at the time.  I was reshaping and steeling my soul and couldn’t be bothered.

Coming up, the 30-day retreat . . .

The source of our problems: You’ve heard of blaming it all on television, especially when Elvis danced on Ed Sullivan. Or on Prohibition or the Reformation or the Edict of Constantine. Well I have found one who blames it on the Earl of Shaftesbury (1621-83), that well-known apostle of sentimentalism, which I define as the mood that makes one unable to understand a news story without “human interest” thrown in.

Sentimentalism is only half the problem, however. The other half is association-of-ideas, a philosophical doctrine from Hobbes and Locke and a hot item of discussion by 18th-century talk-show hosts.

The pinpointer of these seminal ailments is Yvor Winters (1900-68), a U.S. literary critic who shook up his Stanford students in the ’30s and ’40s, etc. with anti-Romanticism and would be strung up by students or other teachers if he tried it today.

Winters’ problem would be the primacy he gives reason — in poetry but one suspects in all of life — over emotion. For him emotion is a deep pit, something faced as “the brink of darkness,” as he called his only short story, published the year his friend the poet Hart Crane jumped ship in mid-ocean without a lifejacket in 1932.

Crane, a tortured soul by any measure, ordered (and apparently ate) a big breakfast before taking the final leap of despair, a victim of what Winters identified as rampant emotionalism. What do you expect? asked Winters about Crane and any number of other mad poets, the 18th century’s William Blake among them, who bought the primacy of feeling and scorned reason.

This idea was “to break the minds of . . . men with sufficient talent to take the theory seriously.” One is reminded of Janis Joplin and other performers, tragic spirits, who give their all for chaos, saints “of the wrong religion,” as Winters identified Hart Crane.

The crime of sentimentalism: This association of ideas idea seems to absolve the thinker of a need for coherence and unity, leaving him with nothing but emphasis — lots or less of it depending on the weather. In other words, your ideas are great, kid, even if they don’t hold water. They’re yours, aren’t they? And who am I to say you’re wrong? Etc.

Romantic poets — one of whom coined or made memorable the phrase “blithe spirit” — looked in their hearts and wrote (as the Elizabethan Sir Philip Sidney was advised by his muse when worried what he would tell his girl friend). Winters favored “a logical, plain-spoken poetic,” as reviewer-commentator David Yezzi put it in the New Criterion. This meant he vastly preferred the far less known and honored Barnabe Googe to Sidney, both 16th-century poets, which is like preferring the plain-spoken Harry Truman to the oratorical FDR in political terms, or whole wheat to raisin walnut in Prairie Bread Kitchen terms.

In his poem “Of Money,” Googe says he’d rather have money than friends because with the first he’d always have the second but not vice versa, which is an arresting consideration:

Fair face show friends, when riches do abound;

Come time of proof, fare well they must away.

The appeal of this to Winters lay in its restraint of feeling and rhetoric “to the minimum required by the subject,” as opposed to “rhetoric for its own sake” as practiced by other Elizabethans.

Another of Winters’ favorites, Fulke Greville, a good friend of Sidney, said his own “creeping genius” was “more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit” and thus wrote for “those that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.” An earthier sort, in other words, and not sentimentalistic by any stretch.

In Winters, discontent: Winters’ own poetry was on the money in Greville terms. In his “A Grave,” he has this: “Life it seems is this:/ To learn to shorten what has moved amiss;/ To temper motion till a mean is hit . . . ”

And translating from the 17th-century French of Mme. des Houlieres: “Pathetic plaything of a witless chance,/ Victim of evils and of laws,/ Man . . . must suffer life’s impertinence.” Facing death, he is to “regard it with unhurried breath,/ And know this outrage for the last.”

Or the stunning motto on the back of a bicycling youngster the other day in River Forest: “It’s not the pace of life that bothers me, but the sudden stop at the end.” Only in River Forest.

Winters held feeling in suspicion and wanted it served up with restraint. This is art, to tell the tale, describe the experience, emotion and all, trying to understand it and then presenting it with the feeling it deserves and not a gulp more.

It’s the poet’s duty to take a fix on the feeling and put it in its place. He is to control emotion, “releasing it through constraint,” in Yezzi’s words.

An excess of emotion “obscured the experience” to be communicated, which is why we call sentimentalism sloppy. Bad poems are “slipshod” in their rendering of experience. They are inaccurate.

Ralph Waldo who? Winters clearly thought there was something to be said about the world. Unlike those theorists engaged in “the killing of history” as Keith Windschuttle tells it in his book of that name, he thinks we can get at the truth, or at least get close.

He defended an “absolutist” theory of literature, by which literature “approximates a real apprehension and communication of . . . objective truth.” This alone would get him laughed out of many a classroom today, if we are to believe higher education’s critics.

Interestingly, one of his absolute bad guys in the literary realm was Ralph W. Emerson, who said things like “No man, no matter how ignorant of books, need be perplexed in his speculations.” Oh? This is somewhat like what current educationists say, “Every child can learn,” without saying what it is he or she can learn. But theirs is a slogan.

Emerson saw art, Winters said, as resting “on the assumption that man should express what he is at any given moment,” regardless (apparently) of what he is at that moment. Spit it out, and it’s good, because it’s you. Makes one wonder what did happen to the handsome Narcissus when he fell in love with his reflection in the pond. He pined away and died, that’s what.

. . . reviewed at the time by the late Paul Likoudis:

The unprecedented manner in which Pope Paul VI imposed the Novus Ordo of the Mass created tragic consequences for the Roman Catholic Church, says Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, in his new autobiography.

Speaking boldly, like a private citizen, before holding elective office.

Not only did the banning of the old Mass represent a severe departure from tradition, but the revolutionary manner in which the new Mass was imposed has created the impression that liturgy is something each community creates on its own, not something which “is given.”

Not Paul’s finest hour.

Rather than being a force for unity in the Church, the new Mass has been the source of liturgical anarchy, dividing Catholics “into opposing party positions” and creating a situation in which the Church is “lacerating herself.”

Tough language.

Formally imposed after a six-month period of “liturgical experimentation” in which anything -and everything-did go, the Roman Catholic Mass has never attained a universality, stability-or even an element of predictability — for most Catholics around the world; but instead has been a stimulus for never-ending innovations-from altar girls to dancing girls to women priests.

See or have seen the first and second, not the third.

While the Missal of Paul VI “brought with it some authentic improvements and a real enrichment,” the banning of the old Mass caused some “extremely serious damages for us,” he wrote in La Mia Vita, released in mid-April in its Italian translation.

Here’s the nub, the banning.

“I was dismayed by the banning of the old Missal,” he wrote, “seeing that a similar thing had never happened in the entire history of the liturgy….

A blot on the historical landscape?

“The promulgation of the banning of the Missal that had been developed in the course of centuries. starting from the time of the sacramentaries of the ancient Church, has brought with it a break in the history of the liturgy whose consequences could be tragic…. The old structure was broken to pieces and another was constructed admittedly with material of which the old structure had been made and using also the preceding models….

But . . .

“. . . the fact that [the liturgy] was presented as a new structure, set up against what had been formed in the course of history and was now prohibited, and that the liturgy was made to appear in some ways no longer as a living process but as a product of specialized knowledge and juridical competence, has brought with it some extremely serious damages for us.

A manufactured product.

“In this way, in fact, the impression has arisen that the liturgy is ‘made,’ that it is not something that exists before us, something ‘given,’ but that it depends on our decisions.

It follows as a consequence that this decision-making capacity is recognized not only in specialists or in a central authority, but that, in the final analysis, each ‘community’ wants to give itself its own liturgy.

Gallicanism?

But when the liturgy is something each one makes by himself, then it no longer gives us what is its true quality: encounter with the mystery which is not our product but our origin and the wellspring of our life….

The sort of thing you cherish.

He carries the idea further.

“I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis [!] in which we find ourselves depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy, which at times is actually being conceived of etsi Deus non daretur: as though in the liturgy it did not matter any more whether God exists and whether He speaks to us and listens to us.

A sort of navel-gazing?

“But if in the liturgy the communion of faith no longer appears . . . where [does] the Church appear in her spiritual substance?,” he asked.

The spiritual gets downplayed or left out.

Too often, Ratzinger lamented, “the community is only celebrating itself without its being worthwhile to do so.”

Waste of time, he’s saying. You can do that at a birthday party.

He’d already said things like this.

On at least two other occasions, Cardinal Ratzinger has criticized specific liturgical abuses [at] other highly publicized events, [where] he has praised the beauty of the old Mass.

But this newly released autobiography is “the first prolonged lament over the wholesale replacement of one liturgy with another.”

In 1969, in his General Instruction of the Roman Missal, Paul VI revised the the Mass and related prayers and banned, with few exceptions, the Mass rite, effective after a transition period of several months.”

The die was cast.

The Mass had undergone “evolutionary changes” throughout history, but always with a sense of “continuity,” Ratzinger wrote, including when Pius V, after reworking the Missal in 1570 following the Council of Trent, allowed for continued use of some liturgies “with centuries-long traditions.”

Not this time, and aiming at recoverying that sense of continuity, he called for “a new liturgical movement to call back to life the true heritage of Vatican Council II.”

“It is dramatically urgent,” he wrote, “to have a renewal of liturgical awareness” and “understands Vatican II not as a break, but as a developing moment.“

Few talk that way in our day. Quite the contrary.