Immersed in Jesuit ways 70 years ago
Being formed intellectually. Respectful of culture. "Paradise Lost" read aloud for the joy of it . . .
Continuing with Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1965, the Juniorate, two years of the classics . . .
DEAN’S LIST John A. (Gus) McGrail, the dean, never raged. Short and stocky, an athlete in his time, he was the soul of precision, encouragement, and good humor. If we were to yawn, he once advised, we should do it so that “many men together” would not know it. Faced with a difficult task, we should keep in mind that “what man has done, man can do.”
Most of all, he taught Cicero as if it was worthwhile in itself. This is noteworthy. We were coming from a spiritual hothouse, where we had investigated ourselves unrelentingly, applying rules and spiritual advice in daily meditation. Now we were to look outward, at Cicero, Virgil, Homer, Thucydides, Shakespeare, Milton.
One summer I read “Paradise Lost” out loud, alone in the auditorium, reveling in the cadences. We memorized Greek drama and acted it out on a small stage. We did the same for Shakespeare. We declaimed Cicero. We took secular, pre-Christian learning seriously. It was new for us. Not even in our pre-Jesuit Catholic classrooms had we so obviously embraced such material. It’s as if we were big boys now, able to to see beauty bare, to adapt Euclid per Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Such experience had as much to do with making us Jesuits as the Long Retreat. We were to think and react with a view to the best thinkers in Western tradition. Years later I was chided by a Chicago monsignor for sending our kids to non-Catholic colleges. “What about your tradition?” he scolded, signalling the tongue-wagging and head-shaking or -scratching that had been a silent chorus to my wife’s and my decision, or rather, our children’s decisions.
But he and I did not look to quite the same tradition, I decided. His was Catholic-no-matter-what, mine was Catholic as part of and crucial to Western civilization. So off our children went, to Vassar, Swarthmore, Carleton and the like, as part of their affirmative action program, I have thought, sprinkling Irish Catholics in their midst.
Not all Jesuits bought into this heavy-learning business. “Are you an intellectual?” a Chicago-based Jesuit asked me playfully in my father’s presence during a visit to Milford during my juniorate. “I’m working on it,” I said, adding, “If so, what can I do for you?” His was the skeptical, I might say utilitarian mentality, he a friendly, gregarious man whom my parents knew from their Loyola University parents’ experience. Much later, a colleague on the Xavier University faculty took strong exception to my joining a protest of treatment by police of anti-war protesters and my reporting of it in the Province Chronicle. Our discussion ranged beyond that far enough somehow for me to invoke John McGrail’s juniorate teaching about the validity of the purely secular. Fair enough, but I didn’t have to tell the fellow he was full of shit, now did I? I sure didn’t learn that at Father McGrail’s knee, and even less from Ignatius’s rules for conversation with an adversary.
On another occasion, the minister of the Milford house—in charge of running it in all things material—equally affable and friendly, wryly spoke of those who got impractical about daily life, aiming especially at spenders-without-common-sense. He considered it important to make this well-aimed, wholly legitimate point with us as a group, but conversationally with a few of us he demonstrated amused scepticism at my grand scheme, as I recall it, of comparing the Roman historian Tacitus to Hemingway—which I never got around to doing, by the way. Nor had anyone else, I was reasonably convinced, until, by heaven, I found just such a comparison in a review on Amazon of a Tacitus translation whose lack of “redundant verbiage” provided “a curious parallel” to Hemingway. I’ll be darned.
WRESTLING WITH LANGUAGE Indeed, not all of us bought into the literature and, later, philosophy study in which we were immersed for five years in all. How could this not be so? None of us came from scholarly families that I can recall. Indeed, one mother, an articulate, competent woman, fearing a supposed distancing from real people, told her son not to get a doctorate. He did, much later, in theology. She had made an exception for theology. We were absorbing the concept of “the hyphenated priest”—priest-scientist, priest-editor, and the like, especially, of course, priest-teacher, with whatever studies any of it would require. But not all our parents were ready for it. The fathers came to visit Milford—printers, salesmen, ground traffic controllers, fire engine drivers, office managers. They were hard-working, not always gentle folk. A contemporary of mine who later got a (non-theology) doctorate told of being smacked with a folded newspaper at table one night when he complained about the food. Another told of his physician father, returned from World War II service, pushing people off the sidewalk as expression of his hard-gained hostility to the world.
My father had left Austin High School on the West Side of Chicago after two years to enter the printing trade. He had been a printing broker cum creative direct-mail ad man and producer of industrial catalogues for many years before I entered the society. He and my mother had been quite demanding in terms of doing well at school, leading me on one occasion to complain that some kids got praised for passing, but I got bawled out for getting B’s.
more more more to come . . .