On joining the Jesuits 72 years ago

As described in my 2012 book, Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968

And here presented, from CHAPTER 1.  BOOT CAMP: NOVITIATE, 1950–1952:

More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of. —Alfred, Lord Tennyson  

Five of us took the New York Central from Chicago to Cincinnati in August, 1950, arriving with hours to spare before our 6 p.m. novitiate-arrival deadline. 

Our destination was suburban Milford, 15 miles east of the city.  Killing time, we cabbed it at one point.  One of us wanted to buy a fielder’s glove.  We asked the cabbie where we could find a sporting goods place.  He picked up on the sporting part and was about to suggest a brothel.  We cut him short smilingly. 

Athletic goods, yes.  Sexual athletics, no.  

Milford was a village of a few thousand souls, on the Little Miami River.  Across the river was the novitiate, a three-story brick institutional structure on 99 acres.  Showing up with minutes to spare, smelling slightly of beer, we entered a sort of frat house existence, minus amenities, including beer.  No more of that for four years.  

We each arrived after a year of college, all but one of us destined to remain through priestly ordination, all but one of those to leave the order and the ministry. We brought the total of new men to 22 or so.  Another 25 came a few weeks later, making a first-year novice class of close to 50—from Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Cleveland, and elsewhere in five states including Indiana and Kentucky.  

Those were palmy days for Jesuits, as for seminaries all over, what with 90-man novitiates and two-hundred-man “houses,” counting Latin and Greek classics students on the other side of the big brick building, in their third and fourth years at Milford, plus brothers, faculty, and retirees. 

Catholics were not second-guessing themselves as they would 15 years later, especially seminarians, priests, and nuns.  Among Milford novices, for instance, objections were personal, not institutional.   

We missed “beer and babes,” as one novice said—a sprightly fellow from downstate Illinois who would have been a barrel of fun in a bar.  Some missed the lost ability to become fathers, which hadn’t occurred to me and wouldn’t, until I became one.  Others, including me, missed the freedom to hang on the corner and watch the girls go by.   

Not all of us missed girls, it turned out.  The point did not arise, except in advice against forming “particular friendship,” which in any case was presented more as an offense against community spirit than sexual carrying on.

More to come . . .