Theology done, now “tertianship,” ten months in relative seclusion, with another long retreat, two pastoral breaks of a month or so each, feeling my way as to what the future held.

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 . . .

GRADUATION. I PASSED? NOT QUITE. EXAMS A-PLENTY. FINAL VOWS.

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

I have digressed. Back in theology, student life continued. I was among the fourth-year fathers who one spring day challenged the rest of the theologate in softball. This was 12-inch with gloves, fast-pitch. In the course of the game, I speared a liner at third, reaching it at the absolute top of my leap. I can still feel it. Those sweet memories remain of what one did on the playing field, as I have said. Nobody else remembers it. I gain neither fame nor fortune from it. But I remember it with pleasure. There’s something special about it. Keep that in mind next time you hear someone downgrade athletics.

The year ground to a halt. The “ad gradum” exam, or just “ad grad,” came and went, the last of nine such oral exams with which we closed out a school year. They were in Latin, as I mentioned earlier—a half hour each for first and second years of juniorate and philosophy, an hour for third-year philosophy, the “de universa [philosophia],” or “day you,” covering the previous three years.

Theology years one through three ended with hour-long exams. The ad grad (say “odd grahd”) was two hours. It covered all of theology. The “gradum,” in question was the “step” or grade to be achieved so that one might be solemnly professed, that is, could take “solemn,” vs. simple, final vows. These were the usual vows of poverty, chastity (celibacy, not getting married), and obedience—each for the second time—and a special fourth vow of obedience to the pope.

I put “solemn” in quotes because I never could figure it out: either I was committed to poverty (living modestly and getting permissions), continent bachelorhood, and following orders, or I wasn’t.

Why solemn? Why final, for that matter, since we never took temporary vows? The answer is, they were the final seal of approval by the Society. You were still on probation, even after ordination. You could still be held up, you could still be expelled if you acted up.

The course was 15 years—the 15th I will get to. The solemn vow-taker took his vows not before 17 years. If you failed the ad grad or any end-of-year final before that, you qualified only for “simple” final vows, which by rights meant you were less committed to obeying the pope, though no one said that. More to the point, it meant you could never be provincial superior or rector of a major seminary.

Neither of those possibilities were in my playbook, but I was still pleasantly surprised, I should say astonished, to be told early in my 15th year of training, “tertianship,” that I had passed my ad grad. My friend Pete Fox had been giving long odds for several years on my passing my orals. It was pleasant to think I had somehow, against all odds, beaten them. I was misinformed, however.

I PASSED? NOT QUITE The tertian instructor, a tall, gaunt New Englander of kindly manner and measured demeanor, gave me the word in his office early in the coming ten months of tertianship. However, it was a “clerical error,” I learned 20 months or so later from John Connery, the provincial. I had completed a year of teaching as a priest at St. Ignatius and was running a summer enrichment program for neighborhood kids. In the mail had come word that I was scheduled for final vows in a few weeks—a year early if I had passed my ad grad as Father Instructor had said. I called Connery, who is better known in church circles as a major-league moral theologian (morality umpire) of the second half of the century. He said he’d get back. He did, with the clerical-error explanation. (Yes, Virginia, even Jesuits make mistakes.)

There I was busy with a summer program for which I had with federal anti-poverty money set up my own office with telephone in a corner of the school building. It was 1966, we were “fighting poverty” the LBJ way. As someone who looked as if he knew what he was doing, I had looked very good to the folks downtown, who were deluged by highly questionable seekers after federal money for their various schemes and programs.

But poverty money or not, I had a decision on my hands. I had to make the final plunge. The contented, wholly dedicated soul, full of the Ignatian “more” and dying to serve, would have rejoiced. I didn’t. Faced with a decision I hadn’t seen coming, I blinked and called off the final vows. It was a signal to a number of people, including my mother, she told me later. All I knew was, it was time to put on the brakes.

As for the ad grad, I had done well enough to earn the degree, if not solemn vows. This may have been standard. If you made it down to the wire, you got the consolation prize. I hadn’t collapsed while questioned or denied the Trinity. “Bene sedebat” was the wry expression — the mother tongue (Latin) for he sat well, that is, showed up for classes. I passed to that extent, and had my S.T.L. — licentiate in sacred theology —among my academic accomplishments.

But I have diverged from straight and narrow telling of my story, for which I make apologies. In any case, theology drew to a close. It was on to tertianship.

Tertianship? What the heck is that? Stay tuned. . . .

Took a spill today. Recalling a 22-minute sermon. Explaining away offensive expressions. Reading at mass. A mixum gatherum.

Ice did it, not disability on your’s truly’s part, no sirree. People flocked to help, two men and a woman. Treacherous curb area. Balance not an issue, no sirree.

Yet and still . . .

A look at a Sunday mass few years ago, sermon started 9:48, ended 10:10!

Considered writing organizer of liturgy about it. Instead decided to love this preacher and forget about it.

It’s my strategy these days. When irritated, think good of the irritator, whom God loves, and so should I!

Thing is, am I on speaking terms with God? Therein lies a tale. It’s crucial. Ask when did you last speak to Him? He’s at your beck and call, you know.

He is our friend. Talk to Him, He’s listening.

Egad, get on it, you fool.

Egad?

Try this:

English has a raft of ‘minced oaths’ to take the place of swear words for the sake of politeness. We still use words like darn, ruddy, and flippin’ ‘eck.

Egad, as well as zounds, ‘sblood, struth, gadzooks, etc. are from Elizabethan times, when plays contained plenty of swearing, but in 1606 all oaths on stage were banned. [!]

You want to go further on this? Be my guest.

A minced oath is a euphemistic expression formed by deliberately changing the spelling of, or replacing, part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to remove the original term’s objectionable characteristics.

Also, a new term can be created from scratch. The goal is to create a new term that expresses the same emotions but does not carry the same offensive denotative meaning. An example is “gosh” for “God“,^[1] or fudge for fuck.^[2]

Many languages have such expressions. In the English language, nearly all profanities have minced variants.^[3]

I did not know that.

Back to mass. I asked myself, did I not, do we want a special way of reading Scripture aloud at mass?

Yes and no, for starters. Yes because the mass is a prayer, for one thing — much more than that, of course — and the reader instinctively adopts a tone that reflects this.

So it is that readers at mass, people who volunteer for that role, adopt the tone.

Or seem to.

Me, faced with a long passage from Old Testament greats, I am tempted to announce to my audience, buckle up, everybody.

Or faced with Epistle passages whose translator did the best he or she could but still the audience is faced with complicated, complex passages which as an English teacher ages ago I might have asked the class to paraphrase and see what they came up with and discuss it.

That is to say, if they took a shot at solving the problem presented by the passage, they would be ready to talk about it.

Well for lots of reasons, none of that’s gonna happen. My audience at a weekday mass will be entirely on the receiving end, which is why I read the passage as if it’s a hot story. Not too hot, of course.

Not going to dramatize it but to spit it out as a good story, something engaging, you know, emphasizing all that needs it, spelling it out as if listeners were not a captive audience, but people who will stop what they are doing and listen.

Let the religious element speak for itself. If the prophet is reading the riot act to his audiences, deliver it to your audience with the vigour it deserves, delivering it with gusto, driving it home as something they are likely to remember.

As for you readers, assuming there are at least two of you, see you at church — and not “if the windows are clean,” as we Catholic wise guys and gals would put it in the 40’s in old Oak Park.

Newly ordained, first mass, first confession, Writers’ Workshop, my A.M.E. friend, Vance Bourjaily, Marengo parishioners, housekeeper and I did not hit it off, pastor disappointed . . .

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

Day after ordination, we had our first solo masses. Mine was at Our Lady of the Springs, the pretty little parish church in French Lick a mile or so away. Family was there for that, proud and happy. A few days later I ascended the main altar at the church of my boyhood, St. Catherine of Siena, in Oak Park; and with the help of two other priests, deacon and subdeacon for the occasion, celebrated solemn high mass. My picture was in the parish bulletin and in the weekly Oak Leaves. I was famous. And unbeknownst to me, my name was engraved on a corridor wall of my alma mater, Fenwick, a mile or so down the street, I discovered years later, when it no longer described my situation.

In the rectory before mass, I was told by one of the four assistant pastors that a “colored lad” was at the door to see me. It was a grown man, a onetime boxer, retired mailman and fellow writer whom I had met at a writer’s workshop in the city a summer or two earlier, Harold Sampson. He was Catholic and had come for the mass and wanted to say hello beforehand.

The “colored lad” reference, made by the priest, a big handsome red-faced Irishman, without rancor, gives an idea of the insularity then plaguing the white community. Harold was an excellent man, nicely dressed, a South Sider whom it was my pleasure later to entertain at our house two blocks from this very rectory in the early 70s, when it was Winnie and me and babies made three, then four, then five (in that house). In a few years, therefore, my friendship with Harold spanned my transition yet to come from holy Jesuit priest to husband and father.

MY IOWA SUMMER In June of 1963, however, a writing summer awaited me, at the State University of Iowa, as it was known, now just University of Iowa. I’d been accepted at the much acclaimed Writers’ Workshop for the eight-week course in fiction, where novelist Vance Bourjaily was to be my teacher-supervisor. I couldn’t get a room on campus at the Newman Center, but a local pastor was looking for a priest to take his place that summer while he visited his native Ireland. We corresponded—by U.S. mail, this being long before email and cheap long distance calls—and I got booked for my coming weeks in Iowa.

The town was Marengo, 30 miles on Route 6 from Iowa City and the university. Looking back from a writing standpoint, my living in Marengo was not a good idea: I could have gotten a dormitory room and plunged into life as a writing student, undistracted from my work of the moment. But the Marengo experience was a rich one for me as a priest and a chance to exploit my newly bestowed priestly position. Besides, it was broadening for me a city boy to live in a small town.

The priestly business began right away. On the plane to Cedar Rapids, my first flight, I heard a woman’s confession. Young woman. Can’t remember what it was about, wouldn’t say so if I did. I do remember, however, her writing me at the Iowa parish where I had said I was going to live. She wanted to get together, which I took as overly keen interest in me rather than my pastoral style. There I was, bishop’s oils barely dried on my consecrated hands, and some woman was making a play for me, I thought. The perils of announced celibacy! In any case, I did not respond.

Vance Bourjaily gave me encouragement enough, though he was clearly skeptical about where I would fit into the fiction landscape of the ‘60s. I know I felt like a square peg in round hole in the workshop, emphasis on “square.” I wore clerics to class at first, taking it for granted that I would do so, but gave it up. A Catholic in the class of 10 or 15 students, a wheelchair-bound black guy whom I got to know, knew I took it for granted I’d wear them and knew also that most would object.

Bourjaily, a nice guy, encouraged me but also said I might consider a book of sermons. I heard him out with a straight face at his gentle enough putdown of my whole reason for being there, namely to get good enough to write fiction that would sell anywhere, not just in Catholic publications, which he also observed were “too easy” a sell. For me a priest, he meant, and for writers in general probably. Not so easy as all that, I found.

The Marengo parishioners, straight, honest people, provided the rich experience. Preaching to them on farmers organizing union-like at a time when National Farmers Organization was afoot in Iowa, I quoted the pope in support. This did not sit well with some. Here was my pattern: if the pope said it, I was supposed to say it too, even in matters too complicated for me to grasp, and for that matter maybe for the pope too. No matter where I went, I was one to use the pulpit to push a point of view, something I learned later as a pew-sitter to resent greatly.

In addition, ever ecumenical and interracial, I looked up the African Methodist Episcopal pastor in Iowa City, Rev. Fred Penny, calling then knocking on his door. He was five years into an illustrious career at his church, Bethel A.M.E., which had opened its doors in 1868. I got to know him and his family and invited them to Marengo, where parishioners put on a wonderful affair, full of food and fun.

There were six Penny kids in all, including two lovely daughters. Regarding them their father, an ebullient and friendly man, noted that he was leery of the attentions bestowed on them of a handsome black guy who had got acquainted with the family. “Guy like that can take a jump and leave a package,” he told me. Rev. Penny died as pastor in 1994.

Meanwhile, the Marengo parish’s housekeeper and I did not hit it off. She was a hausfrau in her 50s. I had no idea she expected to sit at table with me, as she did with the pastor. He and she were a comfortable pair, apparently; she and I were not. When my parents visited me there, she was most gracious with her meals, and I believe we put them up in the rectory, a white frame house on that small town street. Neither did I expect that. It was only after I was back at Baden and corresponded with the pastor that I realized how put out she was with me.

“Thank God she didn’t leave,” he wrote. It would have been an unmitigated disaster for him, whereas I would have welcomed the chance to fend for myself, after years of community life. As I said, I’d have been better off in a student dorm, with nothing but writing and student life to occupy me. Dealing with parishioners was broadening, but rectory life made for a doldrum experience. I was cordial to her as far as I recall, but she knew I found her no company, I’m sure.

— To be continued —

FERMENT IN SOUTHERN INDIANA, life with Jesuit theology students, 1960-1964

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 . . .

The breakfast table challenge . . . 15 Oct 2009, a blast from the past . . .

Have been groping lately for breakfast-table reading. Nothing autocratic, you know, a la the senior Oliver Wendell Holmes (the good one). Something to feed the mind without requiring Great Books-style concentration.

Groping, I say, because of the increasingly slim and flimsy offerings in my two daily newspapers, Chi Trib and Sun-Times, both as to interest-level (don’t care about this, don’t care about that, over and over, I tell myself), lack of imagination (dying for a good lede, even a good head) and even-handed, let-chips-fall coverage.

Four days of the week I go to Kass at Trib or check out Dennis Byrne or Krauthammer and look for some crisply traditional raking of city, county, and state muck in either paper — especially Sun-Times, as by Tim Novak et al. and Fran Spielman, who gets more out of a Daley presser than any man or other woman I know about.

It’s getting worse. Size of paper I can live with, but boring biases and crippled imaginativeness I cannot.

So I look around and today found something worth spilling coffee on. It’s, lo and behold, Our Sunday Visitor, which by definition is not a daily paper but is definitely a newspaper not a magazine and which I am receiving on a trial complimentary basis.

More later, I trust, with special attention to [the late] Russell Shaw’s columnizing. Its web site takes some study, but you can start here.

WUXTRY, WUXTRY . . .The writer took on Chicago’s two main papers in November of 2003 and told what he saw, in case anyone was listening, watching, whatever . . . Some of you newspaper readers may remember . . .

WUXTRY, WUXTRY . . . Let us now read Chicago’s two highest-circulation newspapers, headlines first. Headlines because they are the ultimate shorthand, blunt instruments but not so blunt in the hands of skilled practitioners such as create them at Chi Trib and Sun-Times.

First grabber is “War funding bill passes” in Chi Trib. Gives one pause, in that rebuilding Iraq is what we have been hearing. War funding? “Fund the military and rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan” is in the lead paragraph by Jill Zuckman. That’s war funding?

2nd is “Jailed Russian oil chief resigns: Company’s stock soars after CEO announces exit,” heading very interesting story by Alex Rodriguez in Moscow, with “fueled speculation” in 2nd ‘graf that the man, a billionaire, is going to challenge Putin politically. [!]

Funny, for readers of the internet and watchers of TV news, the 1st story, “war funding,” is not new. That’s your hard-copy daily newspaper problem: how to tell readers what they don’t already know.

Big picture on p. 1 of returnees from bloody ‘copter downing in Iraq, “For families, sad news hits home: Copter victims.” But has Chi Trib been also telling us about progress reported in Iraq? As vividly? I will have to read it more closely, because I seem to have missed news of this aspect of our success. [?]

“Rockford [airport] tries to lure fliers from O’Hare: Northwest Chicagoland Regional Airport uses its new name, free parking and budget fares in effort to woo fliers from northwest and west suburbs” certainly has flare, with photo of spanking-clean passenger-waiting area. And news to this reader. Nice going, Trib, two stories so far on p. 1.

“U.S. rates home health firms: Survey compares 7,000 providers”? Really? Our govt. is rating health firms? What do you know about that? And what are these home health firms? Families?

“Poll says many on campus marching to GOP’s beat: Campaign 2004”? Now you are talking. Republicanism on campus may not be brand new, but it’s new enough to capture attention.

“Students leaning right” heads a mini-graph of poll results: 61% undergrads approve of GW [Bush], vs. 53% of general population, per Harvard’s Institute of Politics. Jeff Zeleny reports it out of Columbus, OH, where he went to talk to students. (And he really went there, we presume, vs. Jayson Blair of NY Times and his infamous hotel-room creations of sights seen and people interviewed.)

Three stories this day on Chi Trib page one!

Sun-Times? Has big pic of “two brothers in mourning” over their brother killed in a ‘copter crash. Neither am I full of recollection of this paper’s stories about progress in Iraq. Must read more carefully.

“SADDAM SURE U.S. ATTACK WAS HOAX [upper case in original]: [Ex-foreign minister] Tariq Aziz tells interrogators that deposed leader did little to prepare for invasion” is head for p. 3 story from sister-paper London Telegraph with AP help, citing a Wash Post story that ran yesterday.

So we have here the work of enterprising editors who assume (safely) that most of us do not read Wash Post regularly.

Nothing like that in the head, “Burke [feisty alderman] wants ‘car for sale’ signs banned from Chicago streets: Claims Indiana car dealers use roads here for sales,” by the excellent Fran Spielman, enterprising City Hall reporter.

It’s about “Let’s Have an Ordinance” Alderman Eddie B., recently heard complaining about smokers on THE SIDEWALK, FOR GOSH SAKES, whom he had to pass on his way from the Hall to his law office for this or that highly lucrative meeting.

This, of course, is Sun-Times’s forte. (Say “fort” not “fortay,” by the way, although being not the first by whom the new are tried nor yet the last to lay the old aside is a rule increasingly hard-pressed to justify it.) What aldermen do is grist for S-T mill. Burke of course favors a draconian measure; he thinks draconian.

P. 1 has other reefers (not marijuana but blotches of type & pix that refer the reader to story elsewhere in paper): New Sox mgr, new movie, and a Richard Roeper column, “Why this girl’s parents are despicable,” next to head shot of Utah girl abducted by Mormon lunatic.

Ah. Roeper has found something he truly, truly objects to and is very, very angry.

— Thus did one reader discover and pass on to blog-readers in (23) years gone by. —

From the long-ago box: a Courage conference at Chicago’s Mundelein seminary in 2010. A man recounts his “spiritual journey” from “practicing homosexual to practicing Catholic”. . .

. . . and priests are challenged to preach “hard truths” in addition to the more common “love and forgive” message.

The Rev. Jeffrey Keefe’s first encounter with a same-sex-attracted (SSA) client had a “profound effect” on him, he told priests and other pastoral workers at St. Mary of the Lake Mundelein IL Seminary July 30, 2010.

The man had confessed to another priest and then heard a “grunt of disgust” from the other side of the confessional screen. Father Keefe, a Syracuse, NY, Franciscan ordained in 1952 and a Ph.D. psychological counselor since 1965 with decades of experience with same-sex-attracted clients, was the first person he discussed his SSA condition with who didn’t make him feel like “a barrel of shit.” He “needed someone he could trust,” Father Keefe said.

He spoke at the 22nd annual conference of Courage, the national Catholic ministry to the same-sex-attracted, held July 29 to Aug. 1 at the seminary (U. of St. Mary of the Lake). Three hundred people were registered for the conference, including 70 priests and seminarians and three bishops, among the latter Bishop Thomas Paprocki, formerly of Chicago now of Springfield, IL.

“We need an understanding heart,” Father Keefe said, urging his listeners not to be judgmental, but neither to be persuaded by the position of the American Psychiatric Association and other groups that the SSA condition is not a disorder but inborn and immutable and that to try to change orientation is unethical and dangerous.

There’s “no backing” for this, he said. “Ideology,” not science, “rules” this discussion.

Or it did until 2001, when Robert L. Spitzer, the Columbia U. psychiatrist who led the move to erase the “disorder” tag in 1973 (and with it the hope for change in orientation), announced his own research that held the opposite. (Two years later, he reversed himself and apologized for the 2001 change.)

“Like most psychiatrists,” Spitzer said in 2001 after interviewing hundreds of ex-gays, “I thought that homosexual behavior could be resisted – but that no one could really change [his or her] sexual orientation. I now believe that’s untrue – some people can and do change.”

The talk at the Courage conference, however, was almost all about change in behavior, not orientation. Janet E. Smith, who was teaching moral theology at Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit at the time, delivered a spirited exhortation to priests, proposing a “daunting but exhilarating” challenge to preach “hard truths.” She further encouraged them, as supplement to the more common “love and forgive” message, to preach on “how to pray” and the importance of reading Scripture.

“Tell them you went to a Courage Conference,” she urged. “Tell them to ask God to show them how to love family members with the SSA condition.”

Her commentary was pithy and pointed. Lacking “20 minutes to explain” to a nephew objecting to her saying same-sex activities are unnatural, her quick response had been “Bobby, the parts don’t fit.”

Later, addressing the conference on “Theology of the Body and the Single Life,” she explained papal statements and offered her own experience as one who lives the “chosen,” rather than consecrated, single life.

“When I feel glum about it,” she said, offering a common-sense solution to chafing about one’s situation, “I call up a married friend and ask, ‘How you doing?’”

Another speaker, “Dan,” told of his “spiritual journey” from practicing homosexual to practicing Catholic.

The youngest of four boys born to a mother who wanted girls, he was presented to aunts and uncles in pig tails at age 6. By junior high, he was dreading being naked in the locker room. In due time, his fantasies were exclusively of men as the object of pressing desires, “always with shame.”

He desperately wanted to shut the desires off. “The pain was profound.” The word “gay” is a misnomer, he said, advising his listeners to search “I am gay and I want a boyfriend” on the Internet and “I am gay and I want to die” and compare the results – many million, he said, want a boyfriend, more than twice that number – 17 million – want to die.

He dated girls but ended always as a friend – a buddy not a sweetheart, as the old song goes. He resorted to pornography, and not the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issues which were a staple of locker-room talk.

Then it was phone sex and the Internet. In college he once put in 24 hours non-stop on a computer in an office to which he had access. His roommate was worried enough about his whereabouts to call his parents.

At 21 he managed to get a girlfriend, but she left him for a woman. He entered a nine-month relationship with a man over the Internet, the web cam playing a part. “Parents,” he interjected, should “beware” of giving their children a computer with web cam for their rooms, such are the dangers of entanglement. What parents should do in any case is “just show love, unconditional love.”

He turned to Exodus International, a Protestant organization, since closed, which gave him a place where he could talk about his problem with other Christians. He found it a “very positive experience.”

But he remained “miserable” at 30 years old. He “turned his back on Christ,” went off to gay bars but was “cautious” about liaisons. He had one “random encounter” but decided – fortunately, he said – against more of the same. He cherished feelings of hostility for the Church, would make an obscene gesture at a basilica he passed every day on his way to work.

He found Ryan, a man with whom he stayed a year, then found Megan, but did not date her before asking Ryan’s leave to do so. Ryan gave it, with a long hug and tears. “Ryan loved me enough to let me go,” he said. He and Megan had sex, which he found “profoundly healing,” even if it was against God’s law. “Grace came from it,” he said. God was repaying “evil with good.” He began to turn back to “God’s kindness.”

After a year and a half with Megan, they took time off from the relationship. He returned after a year, ready to pick up where they had left off, but she was no longer interested. He was shattered. A friend asked him to wait with him while his wife had surgery. “We two sat there, one having lost, the other in danger of losing his loved one,” Dan recalled.

He spent two years mourning Megan, then joined a mega-church in a shopping mall. He began to read about religion and suffering and abandonment to God’s will. He came across St. Augustine and began to be drawn back to the Catholic Church, in which he had been baptized and where his brother was a priest.

His Catholic godparents, leaders of EnCourage International – for family members of SSA people, meeting at this same conference – drew him to last year’s Courage conference at Villanova University. There, much moved by his worship experience, with its “incense and song,” he decided to “reconcile.”

He told Philadelphia’s Cardinal Justin Rigali, who was at that conference, who responded, “Welcome home.” He went to confession to his priest-brother. It was his first in 30 years. He is “a prodigal son,” he told the priests. for whom “Courage led the way.”

========================

This account appeared here in July of 2022, is repeated in light of Pope Leo’s recent meeting with leaders of Courage International who called it “a momentous occasion.”

“The apostolate,’“ they said, “has grown steadily over the last 45 years, expanding to serve members in countries around the world.

“This historic occasion affirms the peaceful joy of the staff and members of Courage who seek to grow in holiness through living the truth in love.”

Dialogue of the pill-disposers . . .

He to she: I have these pills I’ll be getting rid of. Shelf date violation.

She: Put them here (pointing to garbage).

He: Not the toilet?

She: No. Then they pollute the water supply.

He: My excrement doesn’t pollute the water supply?

She, heading for door: OK. I’m on my way.

Kiss, departure.

St. Eulalia day according to pre-Vatican missal. 13-year-old virgin who stood by Jesus in 303 in an emperor’s persecution, paid with her life painfully . . .

Mass goers used to recall and pray to her . . .

Her story in brief.

Saint Eulalia, 290–12 February 303, co-patron saint of Barcelona, was a 13-year-old Roman Christian virgin who suffered martyrdom in Barcelona during the persecution of Christians in the reign of emperor Diocletian.

For refusing to recant her Christianity, the Romans subjected her to thirteen tortures; including:

Putting her into a barrel with knives (or glass) stuck into it and rolling it down a street (according to tradition, the one now called Baixada de Santa Eulalia “Saint Eulalia’s descent”).^[2]

Cutting off her breasts

Crucifixion on an X-shaped cross. She is depicted with this cross, the instrument of her martyrdom.

Finally, decapitation.

She is commemorated with statues and street names throughout Barcelona.^[2] Her body was originally interred in the church of Santa Maria de les Arenes (St. Mary of the Sands; now Santa Maria del Mar, St. Mary of the Sea).

It was hidden in 713 during the Moorish invasion, and recovered only in 878. In 1339, it was relocated to an alabaster sarcophagus in the crypt of the newly built Cathedral of Santa Eulalia.^[3] The festival of Saint Eulalia is held in Barcelona for a week around her feast day on February 12.^[4]

Posted by Deacon John at 12:30 AM . . .

. . . who posts such pre-Vatican 2 items every day