Men Astutely Trained

...Because if it had remained what it was then, it would have meant choosing death, not life...

...But for the rest of us, the matter is closer to Garry Wills's insight about the life-giving effects of sunderings and breaking molds, of learning to die...

...Such an education qualified one for nothing so much as the welfare rolls...

...Which doesn't mean that any of us who have passed through the trauma of recent years quite understands the event, or sees it whole...

...As Garry Wills remarked in Bare Ruined Choirs (1972), "There could be no motion, because no change...

...That inimitable champion of Gaelic charm and foible, the late Robert I. Gannon, S.J., would probably have accepted this embittered analysis...

...The Society of Jesus, he suggests, "may have reached the terminus in the evolution of a species of religious life...

...And with the church as a whole after Vatican II, we have dropped our Counter-Reformation and anti-Enlightenment conservatism (with its preference for steady-state politics and...

...The so-called social apostolate was never, McDonough demonstrates, more than a marginal side show...

...The Catholic church had not known death...

...As Jesuits began searching for a new mission in a postimmigrant church, the inadequacy of "eternal verities" formulated in a time-bound, arcane, virtually private code, became all too obvious...

...2) the clash of a stoic spirituality of emotional constraint and longsuffering with home-grown American standards of emotional expressiveness...

...Then, when we turned to the Society itself to make up the deficit here, its old asceticism of emotional distance and tough endurance was ill prepared to offer solace...

...The usual needs that the organization prided itself in satisfying for its members— a sense of deep meaning, mastery, and emotional support—were no longer being met...

...And one consequence was that by midcentury, the mold of Catholic religious orders had grown so brittle and fragile that a question, any question, could shatter them like glass...

...This period," writes McDonough, a professor of political science at Arizona State University, "was the fulcrum time between past and present...

...In the course of the seventies, the number of American Jesuits fell by over a third, from eight thousand in the peak year of 1965 to about five thousand in 1980...

...On this score, McDonough's theme, "the ambiguous meeting between a 'nation with 32: 31 January 1992 Commonweal the soul of a church' and a religious organization with a commitment to the mundane," deserves a wider audience than just Jesuits or Catholics...

...It took awhile before the tidal wave of disillusion hit the ranks of our elders hard at work in the field...

...The test is to muster the imagination, the ceremony, to face the worst that can be suffered and borne...

...my once fnre-eating brothers had lost their bearings...

...In short, this is not the Order I entered in 1958...

...but later, in 1970, when I returned there after graduate studies, the community had fallen in on itself, become a hideout under siege...

...Analysis of these deceptively quiet years reveals, as if in slow motion, the accumulation of tensions inherited not only from the Counter-Reformation but also conflicts that had been building up since the French Revolution and the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century...

...The book is a "study of the prelude to revolution," of the seemingly quiescent years from the turn of the century to the eve of Vatican II and the U.S...

...And in the process, our normative worldview—our sense of meaning, purpose, and community— has radically altered...

...Lamenting over the disappearance of the ghetto Catholicism of yesteryear and reckoning Vatican II an unmitigated disaster, they will agree with Malachi Martin's thesis in The Jesuits (1987) that we've simply sold out, and that our new agenda is to subvert the papacy and turn the church into a wholly owned subsidiary of (at best) the Democratic National Committee or (at worst) the Marxist party...

...In the aftermath of World War II, notably in the late fifties when swelling numbers of recruits (socialized during a period of abundance and by television) had to be initiated into "our manner of proceeding," the old tacit understandings, the very myth system of the Society, came undone...

...entry into the Vietnam War—when, coincident with the virtual end of the "American Century," Jesuits descended into a collective dark night of the soul...

...At the same time, on the theological front, Gustave Weigel would excoriate sterile abstractions devoid of historical context and remote from contemporary questions—even as his friend John Courtney Murray, through his advocacy of historical change and pluralism, "cut the legitimacy out from under roughly half a century of antimodernist defensiveness and organizational encapsulation that had fortifned the Counter-Reformation, anti-Enlightenment tenor of Catholicism...

...Idealistic younger Jesuits of my generation were accordingly offered slots in a system from which the juice of romance had drained away, and the alternative of missionary activity overseas only provided heroics for a minority...

...Peter McDonough's brilliant Men Astutely Trained goes a long way toward being the multiperspectival analysis and interpretation that I have been looking for...

...According to no less a figure than the late Hans Urs von Balthasar, the oath created an "atmosphere of terror" in the church at large, which, as effectively as an auto-da-fé, "methodically burned the Catholic spirit...

...Clearly, the forces of near terminal breakdown were already present in the late fifties, the accumulation of decades of dry rot, and if Vatican II had not come along to open the windows and breathe new air into the system, the law of entropy would have had the last word...

...To be a Jesuit in such a context was a class act—and meant status and respect...

...That, he implies, would be tragic...

...Within the matrix of an immigrant church, Jesuits stood out and were immensely effective...

...For decades, Jesuit seminarians had vented their frustrations with overregimentation, surveillance, and dry-rot scholasticism by resort to evasion, athletics, and stage plays lampooning the system...

...As for our former clients, well, they now had a multitude of other heroic options to consider, and no longer needed our expertise...

...Throughout these pages, McDonough pursues Jesuits at work—in parishes and labor schools, in high schools and universities, in missionary activity and in journalism— who wrestled with three clusters of issues: (1) the basically arcadian economic and social philosophy inherited from Counter-Reformation conser y ativ ism which severely hamstrung them in dealing creatively with the "social question" in the United States...

...The heroics of a celibate way of life, he shows, were rooted in the tight-knit social structures of immigrant communities and their patriarchal Irish and German families...

...But he ends on just the right note, citing Wendell Berry's comment that tragic drama simply reenacts the way communities survive actual tragedies...

...During the same period, we changed from a rule-governed hierarchy to a role-driven network in which Jesuits, for the most part, search for tasks rather than being assigned to them...

...or if it does, it may turn out to be a drag...

...3) issues touching on the institutional and ideological core of Catholicism as a binding force, that is, on the links between family and gender relations and the church's authority structure...

...I am also here to say that the self-questioning did not break us...

...The provincial superior could no longer appoint a man to one of the colleges...

...For a time, not only did Jesuits not know what they were doing—they didn't know who they were...

...But soon enough, after I began studying the fossilized remains of the Thomistic synthesis at Loyola Seminary in 1960, high atop a barren hill near Peekskill, New York, it began to be clear: I had entered an institution in the throes of catching up on its delayed dying in order to live...

...and now, to know life, it has a lot of dying to catch up on...

...the tensions exploded...

...Thank God, I say...

...The author allows us to see the irony here, that is, the danger of a great project succeeding only too well...

...The received wisdom had been that the Jesuit course of studies prepared a man to do just about anything...

...by successive resurrections, life out of death...

...On one level, the explanation for this phenomenon is simply a matter of demographics...

...McDonough's documentation of our intellectual deficiency is the most forceful argument yet for a new generation of Jesuits to reclaim our mission as first-rate intellectuals, something that with a few exceptions, American Jesuits have never really been...

...As the author envisions his account, it is the first act of a tragedy whose second act, following 1965, he does not much allude to (except in discussing Walter J. Ong's theories of gender relations and masculine dynamics...

...The abandonment of positions in these [sexual] issues," writes the author, "would come closer than alterations in social and political theory to a paradigm shift capable of transforming the being of Catholicism...

...The sense of shock, of being cheated and left intellectually virginal in a complex cultural landscape that required a new level of competence and sophistication, cut across generational lines...

...Through our schools— and our conviciton that knowledge and virtue went together—we were the gatekeepers for the American Dream...

...We empowered generations of Catholic students (over 1 million graduates of Jesuit colleges and universities by 1980) to enter the mainstream of American life and, forthwith, that upward mobility (and the consequent suburbanization of the church) meant the dissolution of the very enclave Catholicism that had provided us with so much emotional ballast...

...Peter McDonough has done us the great favor of opening our eyes to the worst, and I shall forever be in his debt...

...American Catholics have yet to take the measure of the mischief caused by the Oath against Modernism propounded in 1907 by the undeservedly canonized Pope Pius X. Until 1967 when Pope Paul VI abolished it, all seminary faculties swore to it annually, and with them the year's candidates for ordination...

...My advice: Go directly to the swiftly moving narrative chapters, the bulk of the book, and save the preface and introduction (chock full of indigestible social-science jargon) until later when these categories will make more sense...

...But more than that, this is an exemplary case study of the interaction between two cultures, Catholicism and the American way—"two cultures that have much in common, made up as they are of layers of the pragmatic and the transcendental...

...In the interim, the bottom had dropped out...

...From the beginning, then, hierarchical authority had always been in jeopardy of getting on the wrong side of the demands for autonomous action, intellectual probity, conscience, and emotinal expression...

...34: 31 January 1992 Commonweal...

...One lives, if at all, by parturition, the pangs and sunderings...

...When I dropped out of Columbia Law School in 1958 and joined the Society of Jesus, I was quite innocent of such things...

...What had happened to bring us, the fabled "swift, light cavalry of Christ," so low...

...By midcentury, the erosion of ethnic ghettos, transformations in family structure, and the hugeness of organizations had chipped away at Jesuit identity and spun the Order into a crisis of character...

...Death to the past...

...economics), and shifted to the less conciliatory Left...

...The old spiritual ideal of unemotional, ramrod machismo no longer rules our psyches...

...Commonweal 31 January 1992: 33 For all McDonough knows or can surmise, the Jesuit drama may not continue...

...So long as a basic consensus on the level of myth, symbol, and mission held, however, the tensions could be—and were—creative...

...Jesuits, astutely trained for leadership in an immigrant church, were ill-equipped and at a loss in confronting the larger, unprotected fneld of American society— and for some time, went into a tailspin, questioning our very reason for being...

...Already in the postwar era of fat union contracts, it had become glaringly clear that if Jesuits wanted to tackle the new economic and social issues of the time, they required professional skills that "the course" did not provide...

...Without that, says Berry, there is no "consolation or forgiveness or redemption...

...David Toolan Saints can do the most terrible, witless things...

...and those there, often devoted to moral formation rather than to scholarship, chafed under the new regime of "publish or perish...

...The death involved in deciding, in moving, parting, breaking ties, breaking the mold...

...When I left the asylum-like atmosphere of Loyola Seminary in 1962 for two of the happiest years of my life teaching at an upstate college, the Jesuit community there was still full of vitality and self-assurance...

...What we have needed and waited for—especially at a time when a mentality of "restoration" is abroad—is an analysis of where we have come from that enables us to count our losses, yes, but to lay certain things to rest, that is, to bury them forever...

...For some, of course, none of these changes is for the better, or for the glory of God...

...We were not running the show, and our accustomed sense of competence and mastery flagged...

...One does not ease oneself into life, or into change...

...The tensions, McDonough shows, were built into the Order from its founding, the legacy of a top-down hierarchical system of governance clashing with an equally strong tradition of mobility and adaptability to concrete situations...

...no life, because no death...

...For the church in North America, historians now agree, the impact was disastrous: for nearly fifty years, it produced intellectual retreat and theological sterility...

...By way of the adventures, indeed the sometimes "manic psychodrama" of Joseph Husslein, Daniel Lord, John LaFarge, George Dunne, John Courtney Murray, Robert I. Gannon, William F. Lynch and many more, the author follows us "to the pit of [our] night, but has not gone beyond that...

...Commonweal 31 January 1992: 31 Otherwise, I fear that our energy will constantly be sapped by old business, the ghosts of a legalist, clericalist, and triumphalist church past: as if a Catholic's main duty were to conduct a never-ending funeral rite...

...By the early sixties, none of these ritual releases was working, and burlesque had turned into open, bruising revolt...

...Moreover, with the GI Bill and enrollment skyrocketing after World War II, our colleges and universities grew big—and increasingly out of our control...

...In a very real sense, we did ourselves out of a job—and the prestige and élan of leadership that had gone with it in the immigrant community...

...It is the tale of the demise of an old regime that, despite its lofty reputation within Catholic enclaves, was deeply flawed by professional incompetence and a paucity of ideas when it came to dealing with the wider horizon of secularized American culture...

...There will be those who will gibe that bringing Jesuits to their knees is an overdue achievement...

...Not so...