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 . . .