From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:
For when the One Great Scorer comes
To mark against your name,
He writes not that you won or lost,
But how you played the game.
—Grantland Rice
The end was approaching. I had arrived at XU with a fresh start, teaching English, my first enthusiasm as a teacher. Fellow Jesuit Tom Savage as head of the department found classes for me and halfway through the semester asked if I was up to teaching honors English in the coming summer and thenceforward in the fall. It was fine with me. Things couldn’t be working out better.
At the honors students dorm of which I became rector, I greeted one non-honors student (a few were inserted in the midst), a few years older than the others, arriving several sheets to the wind one night and next day informed him he could move pronto to another dorm. I may have said the same to one or two others, but in any case I spotted morale holes and plugged them, presto-change-o, helping to make the honors dorm a very good place to be.
But I was allowing my frustration at living a bachelor existence to determine my general attitude. I also had my social, especially racial, justice itch to contend with, which was not all bad, of course. I got close to some black football players, and when it came time for the compulsory students’ retreat, I volunteered to give it to the black athletes. We met in the chapel or some other meeting room, and I organized a few days of supposed retreat for them.
Later I sat with them and a visiting black academic from California who looked like a footballer himself but had revolution on his mind. At one point in the conversation, with a half dozen XU blacks and me in the room, the visitor looked to the students and asked if I was “all right.” They, surprised as I at the question and not especially of revolutionary bent, said yes, and he spoke in vague terms of armed rebellion. I just sat there.
It was the sort of thing you heard those days. My friend Sally, a Lutheran-church-connected community worker out of a Milwaukee suburb, was asked by a “community leader” if she would help blacks get guns. It wasn’t what she had in mind, neither was it what I had in mind. Sally made that clear. I never quite had to, but I was skating close to the edge of really dumb involvement.
JESUITS I LIVED WITH Within the Jesuit community, I found a sympathetic guy in the minister—the man in charge of supplies and all physical requirements, from cars to liquor cabinet. This was Gene Helmick, whom I had known at Ignatius when he was pastor of Holy Family Church. He cherished no illusions about anything and had frank, wry comments about the Holy Family neighborhood, once characterizing a Taylor Street (Italian) storefront “social and athletic club” as a place where for the boys and girls it was “zip, zip, and into each other.”
Neither did he have illusions about the XU community, with whose drinking and other habits he was familiar. Later, while still a Jesuit, he got a counseling certificate from Menninger Clinic in Kansas for which he wrote a clinical-psychological description of the community that the Menninger people refused to believe. Do it over, they told him. He did, and they still couldn’t believe it but took his word for it. Their solution was to break that community up and start over, he told me.
I did have my minor run-ins with the university president, Paul O’Connor, who like Mike English had been a high-ranking military chaplain (I think Navy) in World War II. He had been aboard the battleship Missouri for the signing of surrender by the Japanese, I heard. Paul was a rangy, athletic guy, good-looking and possessing a fine presence for his position.
The university was a major fixture in Cincinnati life, more than Loyola was in Chicago. The city also had U. of Cincinnati, of course, which dwarfed XU but seemed to have less influence. Cincinnati is heavily Catholic, for one thing, and the Jesuits had been there a long time. There was also the downtown Jesuit parish, St. Xavier’s, and its high school, St. Xavier High (X-High), which had moved to the city’s outskirts in a spacious new building and grounds a few years earlier.
SENT TO THE KITCHEN That said, and whether from Navy experience or the Germanic Cincinnati sense of orderliness—even the Irish were Germanized in Cincinnati, said my brother Jerry—Paul ran a ship that was tight in ways I was not used to from my days at Ignatius. For instance, I walked over to the main residence for my first meal on arrival wearing a sport shirt, which was standard at Ignatius in the summer time. But a Jesuit some 10 years older than I, a Chicagoan who had some responsibility in the matter, spotted me and steered me into the kitchen to eat.
Why? Because at XU you wore cassock to meals. There was to be no sitting down and realizing I was out of place or even (with a smile?) reminding me of how it was done there: it was to the scullery with me, where I sat with cooks and helpers eyeing me with barely concealed grins. Wasn’t that a nice welcome!
Litanies were big also. These were the 15 minutes or so of group prayer in the chapel before dinner, an exercise in rote petition which I knew from novitiate days. I skipped litanies and decided not to hide it, planting myself at the rector’s table as “the monks” filed in for grace before meal. O’Connor made a crack on this occasion, as he did later about the length of my hair, in this case as indirect critique of my non-observance.
Smarting from this but not smart enough to ignore it, I went to see him the next day and said I found litanies harmful to my prayer life (such as it was, I should have said) and would not be attending. A day or so later, I retracted that, deciding there was no point in making an issue of it.
He seemed impervious both times, and indeed when all was said and done, was someone for whose demeanor I could have nothing but respect. Like Mike English, he was an earlier generation of Jesuit who were direct and, I should say, manly. There was nothing nervous about him.
PROTESTING THE POLICE On another, more substantive occasion, I signed my name to a protest statement that got play in the Cincinnati Enquirer. It was a fairly mild protest, by me and maybe ten other church-related locals, of how police handled antiwar protestors who had come down from Antioch (Ohio) College in early December.
That was our complaint, how the police handled the situation, dragging a protestor down courthouse stairs by his hair, and the like. It was not about the war as such, about which I remained ambivalent, though generally suspicious.
As I said before, I hadn’t studied it, as I had studied the race question, nor had I been there, as I had been on the race scene. Neither had I been at the scene of the Cincinnati protest but read and heard eyewitness accounts that convinced me: the cops had used a hammer for the fly on baby’s nose, it seemed to me. We church liberals got together, worked out a statement, and sent it off.
I saw it in the paper and called Paul O’Connor right away, before he had seen it, because I didn’t want him blindsided any more than he was by my not consulting him in the first place. I had not even considered consulting him, but as one of his people who had gone public in a sensitive matter, I thought he deserved to know, before benefactors and the like came at him.
He was as good about it as I could have asked. “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked me. “Yes, Paul,” I said. “I’ve been informed in detail about it and do know.” OK, he said. No fulmination, no sign of upset. He seemed less exercised by this than about my abstaining from litanies.
Meanwhile, toward the end of the semester, I had more to think about than Paul O’Connor or Antioch students. My vocation problems were taking over my thinking. I discussed them with a contemporary with counseling credentials who lived in a high-rise dorm while plying his counseling trade. I described my situation to him.
Beset by the demon sexual desire, I was looking ahead to a rocky road of survival and risk. It was risky business, this being unmarried. I was distracted and unable to come to terms with the life I had chosen, indeed had reached the point where the only thing keeping me back was how my mother would react. Not a good enough reason, he said. And that probably tipped it.
— Yet more to come . . .
Blithe Spirit 