Jesuit novices 72 years ago: scrubbing pots, washing dishes, a month in Lake County

Back to Chicago area, helping run a retreat house.

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

We novices waited table, washed dishes, set tables.  A brother was in charge of the refectory and scullery, “triclinium” in Latin, where dishes and glasses and placeware were washed in super-sized machines and then dried by hand.  Another was in charge of the kitchen, “culina” as in “culinary.”  He was the head cook.  The kitchen had its own wash, for pots and pans. 

Each novice took a turn working full-time in the kitchen or triclinium or the “garden”—with the brother in charge of grounds maintenance—or on the working farm a few miles away which supplied us with milk and chickens.  These were month-long “probations,” during which we lived a brother’s life. 

STRATEGIC RETREAT Another probation, newly established in the early ‘50s, was at Bellarmine Hall, a men’s retreat house in Chicago suburban Barrington.  Second-year novices, having completed the required year spent entirely in the novitiate, went off in twos to wait tables, wash dishes, make beds, clean toilets, and the like.  Getting there was an adventure.  In the absence of expressways, you had to drive through city and suburban streets. 

The driver for my partner and me, a brother stationed at the retreat house, took a route from the train station through west suburban Oak Park.  I was thrilled to go down Washington Boulevard — pre-expressway days — past Lombard Avenue, a half block from the family house.  But I knew that was all we would do. 

There was not the slightest chance the driver would go even a block off his course, if only to drive down Lombard, much less stop to let me have even a short visit.  Not for another three and a half years, five years after I’d left home, was I to darken its door and sit at its dining room table and eat and drink and enjoy good time with family.  This was detachment from earthly delights.  We didn’t fool around.

The month in Barrington was a major change of pace, exhilarating if tiring.  The priest in charge was a big redheaded guy of nervous intensity who gave me quite a message at the end of the month, telling me I’d turn out all right if I were as good as my father, whom he knew.  That would have been a wonderful thing to hear if I didn’t suspect he thought I was lazy or otherwise deficient.  However, even if I were prone to calling out my superiors, which I was not, I was in no position to object to his comment, even when I took it as a slam.

A word about the two years of novitiate and the “canonical” first year.  Jesuits’ two-year requirement was unique.  All other religious communities—orders, congregations—imposed only one, as required by the church.  The Dominicans, for instance, at the time accepted novices no earlier than after two years of college and ordained them to the priesthood after seven years, for ordination if on schedule at 27.  Jesuits accepted candidates after high school, for ordination at 31, but with two years of training scheduled after that, for a delay of full-time priestly work to age 33.

As for the retreat house, Bellarmine Hall welcomed 50 or 60 men a weekend for a Friday-to-Sunday “closed” retreat.  That is, the retreatants were out in the country far from the madding crowds they were used to, and were expected to keep silent and show up for four or five group “conferences” a day for lecture-sermons by the retreat master.  Years later, I was to be a retreat master at this very place.  The men would file in and listen.  The retreat master and one or two other priests who lived there would be available for individual conferences and, of course, confession. 

My father had been going to Barrington since it opened a few years earlier.  He had made retreats in St. Louis, where the Jesuits had “the White House,” and before that at the Franciscans’ retreat house in Mayslake, near Hillside, a western suburb.  The Mayslake retreats were loose affairs, with silence not observed and, as I heard, card games at night for those who were interested.

Not so among the Jesuits, whose retreats were serious refueling operations.  My father took them very seriously.  They satisfied a spiritual hunger for him, though he’d never have put it that way.  He’d had two years of Catholic schooling, just before confirmation at 12 or 13, on the West Side, and two years or so at Chicago’s Austin High before becoming an apprentice printer.

From Joe, the retreat-house cook, I got a chance to be like Jesus, taking it on the chin and smiling.  Joe was a rough-hewn character who found me eminently unlikable and tore into me once for saying something along pacifist lines that sounded unduly idealistic to him.  He practically tore my head off as I washed dishes, yelling in my ear about war never ending, always was, always will be, and there was nothing I could do about it.

Someone, probably a fellow novice, mentioned it to the novice master when we got back.  The master asked me about it nervously and was relieved when I brushed it off as Joe’s just not liking me, without reference to what Joe might do to the next novice he didn’t like.  The novice master apparently took it as a case of a novice’s being willing to put up with shit.  We weren’t supposed to respond in kind and were supposed to rejoice in it for the sake of the kingdom and to be like Jesus. 

On the other hand, he couldn’t be matter-of-fact about this fellow at Barrington.  He hadn’t relished the idea of complaining about him to the priest in charge, though I’m sure he would have done so if necessary, and I can’t say I blame him.  I know I didn’t blame him at the time.  I was reshaping and steeling my soul and couldn’t be bothered.

Coming up, the 30-day retreat . . .