EXTRA   MATERIAL

Chapter Four - 1909-1913
Becoming a Jesuit

The Musical that Shocked Father Cassilly!

Lord recalled about the show that shocked Father Cassilly:

Yes, the costumes did show the calves, a remote and taboo territory in those days when skirts made unnecessary any other form of street sweeping.  And the nervous song was sung by a girl in a Holland costume.  It concerned the fact that Dutch boys gave the girls they courted petticoats; and she had so many suitors that she was simply swathed in a pretty pink petty from Peter, and here’s a blue petty from John, and there’s one trimmed with yellow from some other fellow, and one that I haven’t got on.  By modern standards it was positively prim.¹

An archivist looking at Lord’s hundred-year-old high school/college transcript commented:

He was quite an accomplished student, and quite involved in co-curriculars.  Today we would call him a leader of the school.  He appears not to have been much of an athlete, though he did manage to insert himself into the Gymnasium Exhibitions, but only as a piano player (?!) and an actor in a skit.

Stories of Novices

Year later Daniel Lord would tell this story:

I knew a young man who after a long struggle with family opposition arrived at a novitiate.  His novicemaster listened while he announced himself.  Then as first point in the young man’s training the novicemaster picked up the young man’s name and pronounced it disdainfully.

That, he said, with dramatic contempt, is a family name, isn’t it?  Have you no Christian name?

The new arrival shook his head regretfully.  He was one of those unfortunates who had been given two family names and who had in consequence been deprived of a patron in heaven.

You know of course that there is no saint of that name, said the novicemaster.

The young man smiled gently but with a humble confidence.

Then, Father, he said, it is your job to see that I become the first saint of that name.²

On his first morning he encountered Brother Terry.

What’s your name? he demanded in a rich brogue.

Lord, I answered.

He cocked a shocked and indignant eye at me.

Lord, indeed! he mocked.  And why would you be making a fool of an old brother like myself?  Sure, there’s nobody named Lord but the good Lord above, and I’ll have none of your fresh fooling of an innocent, guileless, unworldy brother.

He whisked away with a great swish of his cassock, leaving me completely speechless.  Then over his shoulder he turned and gave me the most reassuring wink I had ever caught.  It was his joke, and we were instantly friends.³

Among the other arrivals, one had several drinks before he showed up.  Another intentionally missed the train and showed up late hoping they would reject him for being late.  He later became a very wonderful priest and one of the most zealous apostles of the down-and-outer that I’ve ever known.⁴  Another young man came from a wealthy family and remembering the call of Jesus to give all to the poor, gave all his money to the Porter on the train.  When he left the train he realized he did not have trolley fare to get to the seminary.  Another young man arrived: He brought his matched woods and irons, his best sports clothes, and a sense of general relaxation.  He lasted two days.⁵

The Brothers of St. Stanislaus

In his 1953 pamphlet These Jesuit Brothers of Mine, Lord described several of the brothers at St. Stanislaus:

Brother Terry, the amazing baker.

Brother Mahan ran the creamery.

Brother Germing, the Gardener.

Brother Saeger, the Infirmarian.

Brother Conroy presided over the wine cellar.

Brother Keenan drove his mule around the farm for cultivation and grew tobacco that cured into the strongest cigars that ever knocked over a heavy smoker.

Brother Blaes developed our herd into the prize Holsteins of the district.

Brother Flaherty, the blacksmith, Who made the blacksmith immortalized by Longfellow look somewhat of a midget.

Brother Crotty the gatekeeper. Who, when your parents had come and gone, could with a change of voice from humor to sympathy make you turn back to your new life glad that you had come and quite content to stay.

On the Feast of the Holy Angels, October 2, 1909, he started his thirty day retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola guided by Father James Finn.⁶  Years later he would describe the experience in his pamphlet I Walked With God (1952).

At the end of his life, Lord looked back on how the novitiate was structured:

For two years one got the amazing education which consisted in being obliged to talk with men entirely different in almost everything, except a common dream of becoming good Jesuits.  . . . It was an amazing education all in itself.  When one had learned to talk to fifty-six other young men and listen sympathetically to what concerned them, one had gained a great deal of sheer insight into human character and had circled a small but fairly complete universe.

Only in the retrospect of years could a person measure the education which comes simply by being tossed into the ranks of fifty-seven dissimilar young fellows, studying with them in a common room, eating and praying side by side, elbows touching, sharing the order of a day, moving to the command of jangling bells, and ending the day in a dormitory where the beds formed long, cold, formal ranks as in some spiritual barracks.⁷

A large tolerance or traces of incipient petulance were inevitable outcomes of the years.⁸

Lord later recalled his thoughts on studying:

I had forgotten the lesson faintly glimpsed in college days, that a good class has three elements: a satisfactory teacher, an attentive student, and reaction.  I had had the first two; the third was entirely missing.  From that hour on, I never attended any class without a notebook and a poised pencil.  I became the delight and the despair of a lecturer.  For my teachers soon came to know that one student in front of them was taking down everything they said.  If the teacher was good, he was overjoyed at the compliment of my attention.  If he was not good, he knew very well that I was making a record of his messy order, his muddy statements, and the fact that he had not mastered his material or organized it in convincing style.  The lecturers knew too that I would bolt from their classrooms to make a fresh copy of the notes, and that, if there were a repetition asked on the next day, I was ready to give them back almost everything that they had given us on the preceding day.⁹

His parents visited and when his father saw him coming back with the children: He bowed to be in his unfailing courtly fashion, and quoted strictly by ear, ‘Blessed are the feet of those who come teaching the good news.’¹⁰

NOTES

•   ¹ Played by Ear, 103.
•   ² Lord, Letters to Nun (QW, 1947), 141.
•   ³ Lord, These Jesuit Brothers of Mine (QW, 1953), 8-9.
•   ⁴ Played by Ear, 87.
•   ⁵ Ibid., 88.
•   ⁶ James Finn, S.J. was the novice director, Francis J. Finn, S.J. was the author of 27 novels for young people.
•   ⁷ Played by Ear, 198.
•   ⁸ Ibid., 125.
•   ⁹ Ibid., 201.
• ¹⁰ Ibid., 47.  See also 127.

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Copyright 2021 Stephen Werner