From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:
A MIDWESTERN LENT In December, my Roxbury “probation” over, I resumed my highly restricted day-to-day life. In Lent, however, things looked up considerably. It was back to the home province for us non-New Englanders, sent off barnstorming throughout Chicago and Northern Ilinois.
Pat Boyle, one of the four I had entered with at the novitiate, and I drove out to Sterling to a high school where I talked up the Sacred Heart on the public address system. (Catholics of an age will remember the Sacred Heart.) Frank Bonnike, the principal, put me behind a mike in his office, and away I went, delivering the palaver.
This was in the Rockford (Illinois) diocese, where Frank was a priest. He later married the sister of a grade and high school classmate of mine who had been a nun. Also in the Rockford diocese, I gave a mission or retreat in the downtown parish, St. Peter’s, which had a contingent of three or four priests on hand—with whom I had a good time.
I held on to my habits of gadding about, however, and performed poorly in a scheduled talk for which I had not adequately prepared. An old priest at the dinner table made a remark that stayed with me. “Deus providebit,” he said, using Latin for “God will provide,” as in Genesis 22, “won’t be enough.” It was a neatly delivered mild rebuke from an elder.
A year or so later in Chicago, I was to give two eight-day retreats to nuns. I was the 34-year-old new priest in a chapel full, many of the sisters more than twice my age. There were 70 in one group, 50 in another. The 70 were in south suburban Blue Island, the entire complement of an Italian-origin community, each of whom before retiring for the night knelt and kissed the hand of the aged, revered mother superior sitting in the rear of the chapel.
One of these sisters I got to know, a woman of Polish ancestry about my age. Race issues were to the fore. She told of one of their sisters who had been surprised by a black man in a sacristy. Did he touch her? I asked. “Touch her? He plowed into her!”
Another eight-day was for 50 BVM sisters at Immaculata High School on Marine Drive, near Lake Michigan. I made it up as I went along, scrambling to pull together notes, scribbling or typing conferences with minutes to spare, brazening it out.
Bad habits there, but I discovered I could do this and was willing to do it. I tried to deal with emerging issues, for one thing. My leanings were for what I considered reform, of course, but I tried to gain a sense of what was going over and what wasn’t.
The latter included what one nun told me grimly in my room to my face, my not following Ignatian Exercises such as she was used to. Indeed, not all welcomed the ferment, nor did I blame them.
In any case, I would chat with someone who told me what I was doing, and this way I could make changes more or less on the spot.
Again, there I was, newly hatched as a guide for perplexed souls, telling veterans how to lead their lives.
A Jesuit who had entered Milford with me in 1950—a day earlier because he’d gotten a ride from his native Gary, Indiana—was to draw the line at dealing with the new nuns. They wanted group discussions, for instance; and Joe, a solid citizen and math teacher of normally patient disposition, wanted none of it. He left the society and married and taught math as a layman, disappearing from the sight of us former colleagues.
He was one who left not to protest anything or not to marry, but because the new church was nowhere he wanted to be as a priest. Another said as much in an announcement letter: he was leaving because the priesthood wasn’t what it used to be. Support was missing that used to be there in a more tightly knit Catholic community. I can’t say I felt that. The support was there for the kind of Catholicism I was promoting.
CONNECTICUT CLOSING Meanwhile, returning to tertianship, our Lenten preaching completed, the other Chicagoans and I returned to St. Robert’s Hall for our final months. We did “supply” from there too, going on weekends to say mass, preach, hear confessions. I went several times to a boys’ prep boarding school in Connecticut, where giving a retreat to the boys, I declared what to me was a no-brainer, in answer to a question, that fornication was a mortal sin.
One of them, surprised at that, seemed shaken. But a few weeks later, when I met him on another visit to the school, he seemed anything but shaken, and I concluded that he had seen through my position or thought he had. I had entered briefly the world of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus—not as Stephen Dedalus but as one of his Jesuit teachers.
An admirable young couple ran the school, which was in a summer-camp-like setting in rural Connecticut. They had many small children of their own, whom you could not miss around the place. The two parents were tall, good-looking, healthy, and committed to the church’s anti-birth-control position.
Chatting with them once, sitting in deck chairs on the grounds, I got the sort of look at married life that a priest could pick up. Sex in marriage, said the man, with whom the wife was in evident agreement, was for him “just somewhere to put the seed.” And they appeared by no means pitiful people, just realistic about the life they had chosen.
There were other things to learn about being a husband and father. One of the teachers, deciding if a certain musical group was to perform for the boys, said in my presence that he disapproved of the group. I asked him why, being of a liberal bent and favoring permission in general over prohibition. He just didn’t like them, he said, implying that their performance would work harm on the boys. I nodded without entirely getting it.
But in time I realized he was on to something. Long before Tipper Gore went after seamy lyrics as the vice president’s wife, there were people like this teacher who objected to things that I in my pre-parental, liberal-Jesuit ways did not. I had read and studied more than this man, but he had better instincts.
— More to come. Believe me. —
Blithe Spirit 