SON OF XAVIER

Jerry Harkins


Francisco de Jasso y Azpilicueta (1506–1552) was born to an aristocratic Basque family in the Kingdom of Navarre and became one of the founders of the Society of Jesus (aka The Company) in Paris in 1534. Changing his name to Xavier in honor of the family homestead, he had some success as a missionary to India and the Far East.   He was the quintessential Jesuit, smart, tough and persistent, in some ways even more so than his friend and colleague, Ignatius of Loyola. As one result of this, there are dozens of schools around the world that bear his name one of which is a high school in New York City. (Oh, yes, Francis is also a Saint, having been beatified by Paul V in 1619 and canonized by his successor Gregory XV in 1622. Paul was the Borghese Pope and Gregory was the first Jesuit-educated Pope but sanctification does not require the moral perfection of the sanctifier.)


I attended the Xavier in New York between 1952 and 1956, the years corresponding to the first Eisenhower administration and the rise of Joseph R. “Tailgunner Joe” McCarthy who was also Jesuit-educated (Marquette University, 1935). My father had hoped I would wind up at Brooklyn Tech and when I got screwed out of a couple of Catholic school scholarships because the nuns thought we were rich, he almost pulled it off. The nuns, however, were clever. They told him they would negotiate the matter with my mother. He caved. [1]

Now the truth is I was bright enough but was and still am an indifferent student. I did well enough to be admitted to and retained in the Greek honors class but I was the bottom man. That distinction earned me the position of Beadle, a functionary charged by the Jesuits with significant responsibilities and no authority. Still, it is an honorable office with roots going back to the earliest days of the Roman Empire. It has always had a comedic aspect verging on the clownish or, in our more debased times, the slapstick. If ever a man and an office were meant for each other (think of FDR and the Presidency or, if you prefer, Sancho Panza as Squire to the Man of La Mancha), I was born to be a beadle.

I’m pretty sure there is no God but I agree wholeheartedly with Benedict XVI that Deus Est Caritas which I translate as love is god. Sister Elizabeth A. Johnson of Fordham University (another of my alma maters), building on the theology of the late Karl Rahner, SJ, says that grace is not so much the created gift of God as the primordial, dynamic presence of love in the universe. Both Sister Johnson and Father Rahner are regarded by official Catholicism as heretics, the former because she seems obsessed with the idea that God did not make a mistake when he created woman in his image, the latter because he had been involved somehow in a bizarre love triangle with a widow and a Benedictine Abbot. But I digress. [2]

Xavier in the 50’s was staffed by a hard core of eccentric Jesuits and laymen all of whom seemed to want nothing more of life than success in getting me to do something I did not want to do. Charlie Lehmkuhl, SJ was the Prefect of Discipline, a tall, ugly bastard with a bit of a beer belly and a sense of humor that managed to avoid smiling. In spite of his best efforts to hide it, Charlie was a scholar, a theologian I think, and a lover of classical music. The rumor was that he was a descendent of the Habsburg emperors. He was ugly enough but he did not have the lip and he was certainly not retarded. Still, I found myself believing it after encountering his mother, a lovely and regal woman I met after running an errand for her as partial expiation for one of my many sins.

At one point, Charlie gave up and decided he would have to expel me but I declined to write a letter of resignation from Mary’s Blue Regiment which I had somehow disgraced. [3] He demanded to see my father first thing the following Monday morning. After calming me down, my father told me to go in alone on Monday and tell Charlie that he, my dad, was too busy to deal with the trivia of high school discipline and that he had complete confidence that Charlie and I could work out an equitable solution. “It will only work if you let him know I called him Charlie. But whatever you do, don’t use the word asshole.” Charlie listened to me and then burst out laughing. Without smiling, of course. "No doubt your father thinks I'm an asshole. Well, it takes one to know one."

I was, it seemed, always in trouble with the poor, dear Prefect. In fact, he wanted to recruit me for the Society and couldn’t believe that anyone could lack the necessary vocation. Father Taylor had no such illusions. Vincent A. Taylor, SJ., a man who spent fifty years teaching English at Xavier. I had something of a reputation as a poet because I was, by a long shot, the best translator in the class. As my beloved patron, Saint Jerome, said, translation is the art of blarney. Anyway, Father Taylor thought I should be a littérateur. The only problem was that I found the great Catholic authors boring. Chesterton, Graham Greene, Ronald Knox, Evelyn Waugh and J.F. Powers. Well, maybe not the only problem. As a freshman, I had been assigned to do a book report on Anna Karenina but I took the wrong book out of the library and wrote my report on Annapurna by Maurice Herzog. The Xavier English Department never let me forget it. When asked for the name of my favorite book, I didn’t hesitate. The Catcher in the Rye. The nuns had caught me with a copy in eighth grade and had confiscated it on the ground it was on the Index.  Father Taylor added it to our reading list.

He treated every student as a serious adult which was a double fiction. For me, he was willing to concede that since I had not read Scott, Thackery and Dickens before the age of 16, these worthies probably had little to offer me. I knew he didn’t really believe that. He thought I was working my way through Mortimer Adler’s Great Books because he caught me with a paperback copy of Rousseau’s Confessions and that was my excuse. The truth was as usual somewhat different. I was really trying to find out why the Vatican had put such a boring book on the Index. (Father was not surprised that I had heard of Mortimer Adler and Jean-Jacques Rousseau but he certainly did not believe I would read a book by either one.)

I really did have a talent for translating. I understood what the author was trying to say, even if he was saying it to bore me. I could also do a credible explication de texte from having read the Classic Comic version of almost anything. Father knew I hadn’t read the book but didn’t know I had read the comic book. The perfect Jesuitical formula. Someone, possibly I, started the rumor that Father Taylor’s middle initial stood for Ascanius, son of Aeneas, of whom Apollo said, “Dis genite et geniture deos.” The son of gods will have gods for sons. We were his sons. Indeed, V. A. Taylor was the most civilized man I ever met.

Tom Guerin was a scholastic who taught Latin and Greek. Unlike Father Taylor, he looked the part he played. In preparing their famous series on The Company, the editors of Life had selected a photograph of Tom for the cover of the magazine to represent the entire Society. The picture was cropped to hide the rosary he was holding and the terrible statue of St. Ignatius hovering over him at the right of the image. He was not the best teacher I ever had but he was the one I most wanted to be like. In Junior year, he saved for me that marvelous passage in Book 17 of The Odyssey where Odysseus returns to Ithaca after twenty years and is recognized by his faithful old dog Argos. Odysseus is afraid that if he greets Argos, the shepherd Eumaeus will realize who he is and so he ignores the dog who wags his tail and dies on a dungheap. When I finished, Tom had tears in his eyes and asked me why Homer had used this story. I argued that Homer was making the point that even a great hero can be a first class son of a bitch. Tom, being a perfect straight man, challenged this. “But Odysseus must first fulfill his duty to the gods, must he not?” I replied to gasps of horror that Homer was saying that even the gods can be first class sons of bitches. Exhibit A was what God did to Job. I hadn’t actually read the Book of Job but I knew that it was a story with many parallels in pagan mythology. What good does it do to be Jesuit-educated if you don’t know stuff like that. Tom Guerin didn’t which was why I knew he wouldn’t last. He didn’t.

Tom’s buddy was another scholastic, Richard E. Doyle, who taught Latin and Greek with the enthusiasm of a cheerleader. He is best remembered as a distinguished classicist who became the Dean of Fordham Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and an editor of Traditio, one of the most important journals in classical and medieval studies. But I remember him conducting class with the help of a gavel which he would use to threaten anyone who offered a colorless translation even of something as gray as Cicero’s "Pro Archia Poeta." This is the single piece of literature that separates the academics from the human race. The former universally consider it brilliant, scintillating and even humorous. The rest of us consider it unbearably boring and the archetype of hypocrisy. Poor Archias certainly never got his money’s worth in that old M. T. Cicero skipped town without delivering it. As to Mr. Doyle, he was an enthusiast until I suggested we set up a Cicero fan club to attract cute girls from Marymount. We had all recently been to a tea dance at that esteemed institution and the class found my suggestion uproarious. Mr. D, however, was a good sport. Our next outing was to hear Edith Hamilton speak on the meaning of Greek mythology today. She was 89 that year. At the reception afterward, I found myself in a conversation with her and her sister Alice who was a Professor of Toxicology at Harvard and had been one of the key figures in Hull House. Heady stuff. It even distracted me from the justly fabled girls of Hunter College.

Leo “Twinkletoes” Paquin taught freshman Latin and coached varsity football. Then, as now, I despised the sport but I thought Mr. Paquin was a genius with the driest wit imaginable. He had been one of the Seven Blocks of Granite on the 1936 Fordham football team and the roommate of his fellow blockhead Vince Lombardi. It was many years before I encountered the 1926 silent film “Twinkletoes” but I was mildly offended by the nickname. He may have been a graceful left end for Fordham but he was a big, stolid looking man with a placid demeanor. I remember him asking our star student to conjugate the verb scire. Dougie pronounced the third person singular, scit, as skit. “Douglas, does your book say ‘skit?’ Mine says ‘shit.’”

My parents had both recommended that I become an engineer but in high school that was not even on the radar screen. Still, I enjoyed math even then and was blessed with good teachers, Mr. Nash, Mr. Finnegan and Tough Tony Karpowich in particular. Tony had been co-captain of the 1947 Fordham NIT basketball team. He gave me my first summer job selling refreshments at the Sunset Park Pool in Brooklyn and did his best to keep me safe from girls on the prowl for free ice cream. Given the way my academic career turned out, it is curious that I never thought of math as a career. When I finally did discover its joys and established the credentials to become a statistician, I pursued it as a career only briefly. I blame it on Father Taylor.

Another subject that made little impression on me was religion. Remember, this was a period of enormous theological turmoil. Among the philosophers, Jacques Maritan and Étienne Gilson were revisiting Thomism, and a whole generation of immortal theologians were at or near the prime of their work. Karl Rahner, SJ, of course, Hans Küng, Jean Danielou, S.J., Yves Congar (OP but God is all-forgiving), Henri-Marie de Lubac, SJ, Hans Urs von Balthasar, the immortal Canadian Bernard J.F. Lonergan, SJ and so many other Catholic leaders. Harvey Cox and Martin Buber among the infidels. [4] But at Xavier (and later at Fordham) theology was left to the B team. Even in France, the Jesuits were not innovators. Brilliant analysts, outstanding interpreters, even masters of biblical criticism, yes. But, except for Rahner and Lubac, dull theologians. Well, add Lonergan to the short list of Jesuit immortals but with an asterisk next to his name. The great Trinitarian was really a card-carrying empiricist and a closet mystic. I blame it on Francis Xavier and Ignatius Loyola. The latter’s Spiritual Exercises are promoted vigorously by the Society but, to me, they are no more compelling than the Baltimore Catechism. At one point in my career, I had the opportunity to work with Mircea Eliade on a proposed Book of Uncommon Prayer and came away with the impression that my Jesuit education had been deficient in the life and care of the spirit. It took me many years to rectify this problem by studying the work of Father Andrew M. Greeley, the quintessential non-Jesuit. It wasn’t easy but I blame only myself.

Joe Caruso taught French at which I was hopeless and conducted the glee club at which I was a star. Okay, a faded star. As a child, I had an angelic soprano voice and made a fair amount of money singing at weddings and funerals. No wedding was valid without my rendition of Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” no funeral complete without Mozart’s “Ave Verum.” The pastor thought the former was a Protestant hymn but he wisely decided not to resist the demands of the market. Even at Christmas concerts, the old ladies wouldn’t leave without hearing my rendition of “Danny Boy.” By sophomore year at Xavier, however, I was an insecure baritone, thoroughly depressed by my inability to hit and hold a pitch or sing a single scale without breaking at La. Mr. Caruso insisted I still had a wonderful voice and I would “grow into it” if only I practiced every day. As you may know, there is no Classic Comic on solfège and he quickly discovered my allergy to practicing anything and decided instead to teach me how to improvise around a jazz melody. I’m still not very good at it but it has given me enormous pleasure every day of my life since. I have no idea why he took the time to do what he did but it is what I am most thankful to Xavier for.

Of course, I owe a lot to Xavier. Among other things, I finally learned how to succeed in school without really trying. College turned out to be a lot easier than high school. The teachers, for the most part, were not nearly as interesting. Graduate school was tough because I had to make up so much math but, again, I knew how to get A’s.

Gertrude Stein said, “I am who I am because my little doggie knows me.” [5]

Can you imagine Ms. Stein having a doggie? She was simply embroidering Popeye’s famous line, I Yam What I Yam. Me too. Just another poor dumb sinner making his way in this vale of humiliation and looking up occasionally in wonder at the sky and the stars. I was luckier than some in both my choice of parents and the fact that I encountered at a crucial stage of life a whole choir of interesting teachers who were interested in me.

One last note: There are no original thoughts in this essay. You will find similar—virtually identical—reminiscences written by or about hundreds if not thousands of men who attended Jesuit high schools around the world. In this morning’s Times for example there is an appreciation of the life of the late Jesuit-educated football coach, Joe Paterno. Joe was class of ‘44 at Brooklyn Prep where the Prefect of Discipline was Father Frederick W. Engle, SJ, a clone of my Father Lehmkuhl except for the royal blood. Engle was a tall German “with the fists of a trained boxer.” Probably the cauliflower ears too. Anyway, here are a couple of items about that beloved but, alas, now defunct institution:

• Robert S. Bennett, class of 1957 and President Bill Clinton’s personal lawyer during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, said the school had changed his life more than Georgetown and Harvard.

• Richard J. Carter, class of ’64, a tax and estate lawyer in Manhattan, described Brooklyn Prep as “the hardest school I ever went to.” [6]

Right on!

Notes

1. The nuns thought we were rich because both my parents worked. Also, my mother had been raised by a lace curtain Irish immigrant mother so she knew how to appear rich by the standards of the community. For example, my father, a lace-curtain-Irishman-in-training, liked to serve Haig and Haig Scotch. He never noticed that mother kept his distinctive Haig and Haig “pinch” bottle filled with Teacher’s. Or maybe he did but wisely decided to say nothing.

2. “Bizarre” is not too strong a word for the possibly chaste affair Father Rahner had with Luise Rinser. They exchanged thousands of letters over a period of 22 years and she eventually published her side of the correspondence. (Sadly, The Company claimed ownership of his letters and wouldn’t let her publish them. A great loss to the now extinct world of Belles Lettres. I do not know whether there is a legally binding agreement between Jesuits and the Society as to the ownership of intellectual property and I know nothing of German copyright law but its application to personal letters is exquisitely complex. I do not believe the Society’s position would be upheld if challenged today in an American court.) The Rahner-Rinser affair took place between 1962 and his death in 1984. In her autobiography, she wrote, “We were both clearly aware of the implications of a relationship which became gradually closer, a spiritual pilgrimage along a rocky mountain edge…We did not see it as a lurid tasting of forbidden fruit but as a divine experiment, being wholly man and wholly woman, flesh and blood, and yet intent to live in a spiritual way.” The Benedictine Abbot, known only as MA, was Ms. Rinser’s Spiritual Director of whom Rahner was jealous. It should be noted that Luise was a beautiful woman and slightly weird. But she was no one’s bimbo. In her obituary, The Times of London wrote, “She remained a practicing Roman Catholic to the end of her days, but campaigned for abortion and against celibacy, as well as against the power of the priesthood. In spite of that, she counted among her personal friends Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger ... She stood for the German Presidency in 1984 at the age of 73, as the Green Party’s candidate ... and campaigned in the West for the North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung.”

3. My offense had something to do with being caught by the Cadet Colonel horsing around after a First Friday formation. My partner in crime, Bill Grant, cowered before authority but I allowed as to how I would shove his sword up where the sun didn’t shine if he didn’t stop poking me with it. I had not yet encountered John F. Kennedy’s dictum that life is unfair.

4. Twenty-eight hundred words into this essay, I should not have to admit that, in high school, I was blissfully unfamiliar with these worthies. You already know that the publishers of Classic Comics ignored them and all their works. However, you may have noted that absent from my list of distinguished theologians is the name of Joe Ratzinger who is often said to have been one of them. His Holiness is an interesting theologian (see Deus Est Caritas) but not in the same league. He was a liberal collaborator at Vatican II but definitely on the B team. He might have been better had there been a Luise Rinser in his life. Another missing name is John Courtney Murray, SJ. My only excuse for this is pure prejudice. Father Murray was a brilliant theologian, the principal author of Dignitatus Humanae, the Council’s acceptance of religious liberty. Murray’s claim that moral truth might emerge outside the church led to conflict with Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani and the eventual Vatican demand that Murray cease writing on religious freedom and stop publication of his two latest articles on the issue. He was rehabilitated by Pope John XXIII. However, he was entirely too friendly with Cardinal Spellman for which sin I have not forgiven him. A similar problem appertains to another great Jesuit, Bob Gannon, who was President of Fordham from 1936 to 1949. Father Gannon was not a theologian but was the greatest preacher the Catholic Church ever produced in America—better even than Fulton Sheen. He too was close to Spellman having written the bastard’s official and, some would say, fawning biography. Sadly, he left us little in the way of other writings. He had a marvelous self-deprecating sense of humor and a scholar’s ability to change his mind with grace. He would be the first to say he had been wrong about religious liberty in his youth and wrong about his pacifism in the run-up to World War II.

5. According to Stein scholar Ulla E. Dydo, what Stein actually wrote was, “When I am I I know I am because my little dog knows me.”  Dydo may be right but my informant’s version has the advantage of meaning something.  Anyway, she did have a dog or a doggie to keep her and Alice company during World War II, which is embarrassing enough even if you didn’t know its name was “Basket.”


6. Joseph Berger, “For Paterno, a Playbook Begun at Brooklyn Prep,” The New York Times, January 25, 2012, p. A26.