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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780826413840 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2002 |
| Series: | Handbooks of Catholic Theology |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d) |
About the Author
Robert Blair Kaiser is the author of 8 books. His articles have appeared in a score of magazines from Life to Look to Rolling Stone, Saturday Review, Ladies Home Journal, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. He currently writes for Newsweek from Rome, where he also pens his periodical e-mail letters on the Vatican, which are enjoyed by thousands of persons around the world.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
On the winding drive up the hill from Los Gatos, I couldn't see the Novitiate. Then, one more bend of the road, and there it was, looming up at me so suddenly I felt it was going to fall on me. Still in the car, I goggled at a painted statue that was too big for the courtyard, an effeminate figure—with a beard—holding his heart in his hand. My greeter spoke to me as I climbed out of the car, but I didn't hear him. I couldn't wait to flee the perpendency of that façade, and the scary statue. And I wondered what folly I'd embarked upon—minor me, a very young seventeen, hardly shaving yet, daring to enter the mighty Jesuit Order.
The greeter was one of the legendary Callanan brothers from my own alma mater, Loyola High in Los Angeles, Jack Callanan. I was grateful when he led me off to a redwood-shaded walk and helped me calm down, ambling along with both hands stuck in the cincture of his cassock, arms casually akimbo. "That's the Juniors' side of the house," he said, nodding behind him. And then, waving at the nearer building, "This is where the Novices live."
"A lot of trees over here," I said.
"Olive trees," he said. "Weeping willow, elm, oak, maple, eucalyptus. This whole hillside below us—" He waved his arm to the north. "It's in prunes and plums. Countryside's all pink in the spring."
I was soothed by the leafy greenness there, a cool contrast to the hot stare I had seen on the face of that building. I nodded with pleasure at the rows of rose bushes that stretchedon both sides of the walkway in front of me, framing the open gateway to the Novices' garden, where a small printed sign said CLOISTER. And I brightened when I saw Bob Jay, my teammate on the baseball team at Loyola High, who had preceded me here by a year. Well, I thought, maybe I'll just stay for dinner, then leave.
Bob Jay was barely friendly, even seemed bemused at my presence here. Well, we were even. At this point, I was wondering, too. Did I really belong here? He told me to call him "Brother," and then he handed me over to my "guardian angel," a dark Irishman named McDonough, with a crewcut full of unruly cowlicks and a wide forehead. I was disappointed that Bob Jay wasn't going to be my guardian angel. I couldn't help feeling that I'd been given this, uh, Brother McDonough so he could whip me into shape, more effectively, perhaps, than my high school chums who had come to the Novitiate a year ahead of me.
Brother McDonough took me inside to pick out a simple black cotton jacket, which I was to wear over my T-shirt at all times. Then he led me into the Novices' chapel. I didn't pray, too curious about the statues on either side of the altar, which were realistic, life-sized impressions of, I guessed, two Jesuit saints. One of them clutched a lily in one hand and a book in the other. The other figure was holding a cross in both hands and staring at it. Over the altar, I noted a large, illuminated oil portrait of another young man in a black cassock. A very young man, with girlish features, who was holding a lily to his breast with one hand and gazing upward, to the heavens. What was this with the lilies?
When we left the chapel, I said, "Who's the guy in the painting over the altar?"
"Guy?"
"Yeah," I said, ignoring the implied reprimand. "The guy in the painting right over the middle of the altar?"
Too deliberately, Brother McDonough said, "St. Stanislaus Kostka—was —no—guy."
I later learned that Stanislaus Kostka, the patron saint of Jesuit Novices, was a nobleman's son who had died of pneumonia in 1568 while still a Novice. Back in his father's palace in Poland, he had had a habit of fainting whenever he heard someone utter a profanity. When, against his father's wishes, he entered the Jesuit Novitiate in Rome, his mother had sent a valet along with him. My angel was right: St. Stanislaus was not "a guy."
Next day, August 15, vow day, young men who had completed two years of training in the Novitiate were to take their simple vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in the Society of Jesus, and they did so in the main chapel of the Novitiate of the Sacred Heart, while a strong tenor voice from the choir loft sang with excruciating sweetness the words of a prayer written four hundred years before by the founder of the Jesuits, St. Ignatius Loyola himself.
Suscipe, Domine,
Suscipe, Domine,
Universam libertatem meam.
Accipe memoriam, intellectum,
atque voluntatem omnem.
The Latin words in the little black book they'd given me, the Liber Devotionum, were printed in English on a facing page.
Receive, Lord,
Receive, Lord,
All my liberty.
Take my memory, my understanding,
and my entire will.
All right, I said to myself, this is what I chose. I'd come because I'd admired the Jesuits, the priests and the scholastics at Loyola High. They'd taken an interest in me, instructed me in an ancient faith, given me a superb secondary education, and, once they'd told me that I would make a good Jesuit, I began to endow the men in the Order with all the qualities of King Arthur's knights, Mountbatten's commandos, and Hoover's F.B.I. Did they really think I could be one of them? Well, okay, I would join. I hadn't really thought too much about the cost of joining up—and making this kind of sacrifice. "All of my liberty, my memory, my understanding, my entire will." All that, plus poverty, chastity, and obedience. This was going to be some gift. All of me? Is this what God wanted?
The rest of the day was a celebration for all. The vow boys strolled around the grounds in twos and threes, wearing new cassocks and stiff, black three-cornered hats called birettas and then, in the afternoon, we had a baseball game, First Year versus Second Year. I was not a great natural athlete, but I'd played a lot of ball in school, and managed to letter on two league championship teams at Loyola. I was a better bunter than a hitter, I knew how to run the bases, and I had a wicked tongue, which I used to rattle opposing pitchers.
I led off the game by drawing a walk, stole second, and scored from there on a groundout to deep short with a diving, dusty slide that avoided the catcher's tag after a throw that had me beat. That was all that was needed to make a newcomer bolder than he should have been. I started right in razzing the pitcher, a tall righthander named Richard Overstreet. When Bob Jay told me that Brother Overstreet was the golden-voiced tenor who had sung the beautiful "Suscipe" that morning, I had the special opening I needed to make him lose some concentration.
"Hey, choirboy," I shouted. Instead of ignoring me, he whirled and pointed and said he'd soon take care of me. His reaction only encouraged me to continue references to his pretty voice and his pretty face. In the fifth inning, with a man on third and one out, I squared away to squeeze in the tying run against Brother Overstreet. He threw a high, hard one and came charging in, his blue eyes wide and eager. I missed the bunt and the runner was out. My fault. All of a sudden, the game was over. We didn't play nine-inning games. We played for two hours, then marched down the hill in twos or threes, and said the rosary together, out loud.
At 5:30, the entire community, almost two hundred strong, gathered for a feast to celebrate the simple vows that had been taken that day. In the refectory, after the grace before meals, one of the novices read from a pulpit high above our heads in solemn tones. It was one of the daily chapters of an ongoing history of the Jesuits.
Fasti Breviores for August the fifteenth. In fifteen hundred and thirty four, in the little Church of Our Lady of Montmartre, Paris, St. Ignatius and his first nine companions ... took their first, or simple, vows at the Mass celebrated by Blessed Peter Faber, the only priest among them.... In fifteen hundred and forty nine, the landing at Cangoxima, Japan, of St. Francis Xavier, Father Cosmos de Torres and John Fernandez, after a stormy voyage.... In fifteen hundred and sixty eight, at Rome, the happy death of the angelic St. Stanislaus on Our Lady's feast. He twice received Holy Communion from the hands of an angel, and on one occasion Our Lady placed the Holy Child Jesus in his arms.... In seventeen hundred and ninety, at Lulworth Castle, England, Father John Carroll, of Maryland, was consecrated the first bishop of Baltimore....
After that reading, the rector said Satis, "Enough," and gave the signal that we could talk. Then the waiters, wearing white aprons over their black cassocks, started to serve. It was the kind of dinner I had read about in books. It went on for almost three hours and the menu included shrimp cocktail, quail with wild rice, lime sherbet (to purge the taste of the quail), strip sirloin steaks and a glorious ice cream parfait. The waiters poured five successive wines from the Novitiate's own vast cellar of sherry, sauternes, burgundy, black muscat, and port, and then came around at the very end of the meal to pour shots of brandy or crème de menthe.
Afterward, we were allowed to mingle with those who had taken their vows that day. Some of them plied us, incredibly enough after that feast, with boxes and boxes of chocolates. I took the occasion to talk to Brother Overstreet. I walked over to him with an outstretched hand and a smile. "No hard feelings?" I said.
"Why should there be?" he said, blandly. "We won, you lost. In fact, you could have tied the game with a good bunt. And you didn't." He raised his eyebrows, and made a slight explosive sound with his lips that seemed to emphasize his point with a finality that no one could argue with. I certainly couldn't. He moved off to joke with one of the others.
I turned to my guardian angel hovering nearby and said, "Say, Brother McDonough, just who is this, uh (I wanted to say snotty) Brother—Overstreet—anyway?"
He laughed and said, "Oh, don't mind him."
"Yeah," I said, "but who is he? Where does he come from?"
He told me that Brother Overstreet had served four years in the U.S. Navy before he joined the California Province. "I think he's from Washington, D.C. His uncle is the president of Georgetown."
"I'm not impressed by that," I lied, "but if he can make it here, so can I." Now I didn't want to turn around and go home at all.
Excerpted from CLERICAL ERROR by Robert Blair Kaiser. Copyright © 2002 by Robert Blair Kaiser. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.