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

Meanwhile, in addition to my street-roaming, I had taken over the summer enrichment program started by Jack Arnold and other scholastics and had run it for two summers, using federal “anti-poverty” money that I applied for and was given gladly, because the givers were confident we wouldn’t waste it.

My work on the program included driving a big school bus, taking boys to places where they would not go otherwise.  But it was mainly my oversight of classroom work, recruiting teachers and students with a view to improving their reading and writing.

I was in the midst of that, in the summer of ‘66, when I heard from the provincial about my final vows, corrected as “clerical error” that had told me during tertianship that I wouldn’t have that to decide for another 18 months. He had scheduled it for the Ignatius Jesuit community chapel.

Brother Cardosi planned a festive breakfast afterward for me and my parents and whoever else came for the occasion, which had muted but still palpable solemnity.

For my pre-vows retreat, I went out to North Aurora, where my alma mater, West Baden College, had been relocated in a converted Holiday Inn and was known by then as Bellarmine College.  It was my annual eight-day retreat, which as a priest I would make on my own, pursuing the Spiritual Exercises with my accumulated 16 years of wisdom and presumed expertise.

These final vows called for consideration, which I gave them at length.  The provincial, John Connery, came by Bellarmine while I was there.  He and I sat on a bench to talk.  I asked him what these final vows added to the vows I’d already taken. He spoke of increased solemnity, as I recall, somehow more solemn than the ones I already had.

A moral theologian of international repute, he was not about to b.s. me.  In my opinion, he said what there was to say.  It came down to the ceremonial aspect of life in religion, for one thing, something I do not lightly dismiss.  Our lives are full of ceremony and would be lessened without them.

We may call it also the devotional aspect, and neither do I dismiss acts of devotion.  Indeed, I have come to rely on them in my Sunday mass attendance, which has generally served to remind me of my belief and strengthen it.

These final vows, simple or solemn, also tied me and the society together more tightly, psychologically (as above, through ceremony) but also legally, in that they made it more difficult in canon law for us to split from each other.  That probationary aspect again.

Final vows were the society’s seal of approval and my act of renewed commitment.  This had nothing to do with my being a priest, which had its own Vatican-connected rules.  Vows had to do with me and the Jesuits, the general’s office in Rome being where authority lay.  The pope had charge of me as a priest, the general, or “black pope,” of me as a Jesuit.

So the society was ready to give me final approval, but I was on the ropes or at least staggering.  I was dizzy with weakened commitment to religious life and strengthened feelings toward being married.  I was in process of alienation from my life as a priest and Jesuit.

Months later, when I told a long-time Jesuit friend I was leaving, he asked what I was to do for my identity?  I said I had long before lost my sense of Jesuit identity.  (I was wrong: To a degree, I had let it grow dormant.)  This was too bad.

During the coming year at Ignatius, I was to be asked by a fellow activist as he dropped me off at Ignatius after a meeting, how I managed as a celibate.  I stayed busy, I told him.  I stayed distracted, I might have said.

This fellow was a very genial guy, ethnically Jewish, who wished me “Merry Christmas” with a great smile.  Later he sent my wife and me Christmas pictures of him and his wife and kids—his wife was not Jewish—looking contented and middle-class, no matter his saying once that he and others were in the process of turning my white collar “red.”

He was the first person I ever heard dismiss democracy as a vehicle of justice.  (The second was a fellow newspaper reporter.)  Later he gave me as his reference for a government job.  By then he was on his way to becoming a Unitarian and member of the local Democratic organization in a Western city—both being homes for aging leftists, in my experience.

— to be continued . . .