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 . . .
Blithe Spirit 