From God to books: Next step in Jesuit training 70 years ago.

Coming up: Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare et al.

LEAVING THE DESERT

All that correcting each other sounds awful.  But these exercises in humility, or humiliation, imposed or otherwise, did not crush us.  In due time, most of us finished our two years, twice the canonical requirement, and if approved took our vows and went to the other side of the house. 

Gone was “carissime”—what we had to call each other.  We would be now on a first-name basis.  We got a biretta, a four-cornered hat with wing-like handles on three corners that gave us a very clerical look, and a turned-around clerical collar.  We graduated from novitiate regulation to juniorate deregulation. 

No more afternoon meditation or manualia.  No more reading Rodriguez with his tales of desert hermits.  Far less introspection.  Time spent on that would go to study.  No more walking only in threes; now we could go in pairs.  No more a million things that made up the relentless testing or annoyance.  It was time to shed the chrysalis, straighten up and fly right into the world of literature.  None too soon. The time was for . . .

LANGUAGE TRAINING: JUNIORATE, 1952–54, The glory that was Greece . . . the grandeur that was Rome.

As novices we answered to God alone.  As juniors we also had teachers to worry about.  We had studied God and ourselves for two years, praying up a storm.  Now we studied Latin, Greek, and English literature, with a touch of history and public speaking. The speaking part was not new. 

As novices we addressed each other in small groups and eventually took our turn reading to a refectory-full of Jesuits during a meal.  We each gave a “Marianum,” also during a meal.  This was a sort of narrative sermon connected in some way with the mother of Jesus.  Mine was about a Jesuit in Mexico.  I remember the word “Tarahumara,” the name of an Indian tribe among which the Jesuit worked.  We wrote the Marianum from scratch and delivered it from memory.  I practiced mine in various places, including in the big musty attic, to an audience of trunks and crates. 

HITTING BOOKS

Well ahead of juniorate time, I took my turn at meal-time reading, play-acting, debating, and the rest.  In any event, juniorate was study time.  The dean greeted us the first day with a jocular nod to our apprehension at returning to full-time study.  “We got you now!” he told us in an orientation session. He himself taught us Cicero the essayist on friendship, “De Amicitia.” 

Later we studied Cicero the orator, inveighing against the conspirator Catiline, “Quousque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?” or roughly, “How long will we have to put up with you, Catiline?” We had Greek from one of two Hartman brothers, both Jesuit priests, as were all the teachers, of course.  This one was big and broad-shouldered, a barrel-chested guy of somewhat arch demeanor who had studied at Oxford.  His name was Ed and he became “Physical Ed.” 

For him we put the Gettysburg Address into Attic Greek.  It was a purely liberal pursuit, of no practical use whatever, he assured us, heading off narrow pragmatists’ objections with which he had obviously grown bored.  It was keen mental exercise, part of our ongoing enterprise of becoming aware of language and its contents.

We composed in Greek, and each year on the feast of the “golden-mouthed” fourth-and-fifth-century preacher John Chrysostom, one of Ed’s students stood in the refectory pulpit and gave a sermon in Greek of his own devising.  I have to ask you readers: How many of you have eaten lunch to such an accompaniment?

Our English teacher was Illinois-small-town-originated, a jokester who made so much of writing for publication that this junior had gotten his first check from a magazine before the two years were up.  This man later became rector of the house and oversaw digging of a small lake at the juniors’ “villa” a few miles’ walk from the novitiate grounds.

Another English teacher, a kindly old fellow on his last legs, put us to reading essays and speeches and the like.  He gave us a dose of pure style, much of it 19th-century stuff, British and American.  A sweet guy, if not with a lot to say, he once crashed to the pavement before my very eyes.  I wasn’t kidding about last legs.  His illness, whatever it was, did him in a few years later.

Next: Speech, a dab of history, William F. Ryan . . .