Chapter NINE A Novice
When I was twenty-one years old and starting my senior year at the College of the Holy Cross, I lived with nine buddies in what was called a “triple decker” — a house that had three separate apartments, one atop another. One of my roommates was a fellow named Tim Royston, whom I had known since our senior year of high school.
Tim was a member of the Naval Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program at Holy Cross. After his sophomore year, he elected the Marine option in ROTC, which involved extra training and prepared him to become a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps after graduation. He ultimately became an F-18 fighter pilot. When we lived with Tim our senior year, his routine surprised all of us. The rest of the gang and I were used to staying up late, getting up late and being disorganized. But not Tim. The Marines trained him to be very well organized and extremely disciplined. His clothes were clean and folded in his drawers. He even put his initials on them, afraid that we would “borrow” them—and he was right, we did, a lot. His desk was impeccable; the books were always in their proper place, as were the pens and paper. And he was at physical training (PT) at 6:30 a.m. three days a week, without fail. Every other month, he went on a day-and-a-half-long field exercise, which meant that he was up at 5 a.m. Saturday and gone until Sunday afternoon. By the time I awoke most Saturday afternoons, Tim had already put in a full day of hard work. It took a while for me to realize it, but the
Marines were changing Tim’s approach to school and work — to life, really — and the change was fundamental. Tim was not just going through the motions to get his college scholarship. His body was changing — his five-foot-eight-inch frame was becoming more solid, his hair was now cut “high and tight” — not much more than peach fuzz on his head. As his routine changed, his thinking changed, too. He still played rugby and laughed and had a good time, but he was becoming a full-fledged Marine who knew that war and death were real possibilities. The Jesuits have long been referred to as God’s army or God’s soldiers, willing to go anywhere at any time for God. Numerous Jesuits have told me that the Jesuits are trained to have “one foot up and a bag ready”—to be prepared to move, in other words, whenever the call comes. This willingness to go to “any frontier” was the vision of Saint Ignatius, who founded the Society of Jesus in 1540, a time when the immensity and variety of the world were just being realized. Ships were traveling the seas; new lands and peoples were being discovered; a rising merchant class was enlivening cities; the Renaissance was reinvigorating learning; and reform movements within the Catholic Church were picking up steam. These times demanded a new, movable kind of religious order, and Ignatius offered the people of his times a practical, down-to-earth spirituality that was open to all, meeting people where they were and committed to addressing needs no one else would. Ignatius wanted his Jesuits to be out and about, not in a monastery but on the road. They would be “contemplatives in action,” as the first Jesuits put it, monks in the midst of the new worldliness that began with Columbus and other explorers and coursed through the Renaissance. “I ultimately entered the Society of Jesus,” Bergoglio told his biographers, “because I was attracted to its position on, to put it in military terms, the front lines of the Church, grounded in obedience and discipline. It was also due to its focus on missionary
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(right) The nine roommates on the night before their Holy Cross graduation in 1986; (back row, left to right) Paul Hardart, Bill Byrne, Dick Burke, Bruce Stewart, Chuck Coursey (front row, left to right) Sean Duffy, Tim Royston, Sean O’Scannlain, Mark Shriver, Joe Roddy (bottom left) Mark Shriver with his father, Sargent, at Commencement and (bottom right) with Rev. John E. Brooks, S.J., at Commencement
work. I later had an urge to become a missionary in Japan, where Jesuits have carried out important work for many years. But due to the severe health issues I’d had since my youth, I wasn’t allowed.” The Jesuits’ commitment to obedience, discipline and missionary work all attracted Bergoglio, but there was another element: community. While the order nowadays is referred to as the Society of Jesus, the original name was the Company of Jesus—the term “company” signifying companionship. For Jesuits, this “company” means a group of friends living and working together, serving Christ and his people. That sense of togetherness clearly appealed to Bergoglio. In a September 2013 interview for America magazine, he explained, “I was always looking for a community. I did not see myself as a priest on my own. I need a community. And you can tell this by the fact that I am here in Santa Marta [the Vatican guesthouse] ... I cannot live without people. I need to live my life with others.” In 1958, as Bergoglio and his parents approached the door of the imposing Jesuit building called the Novitiate, on the outskirts of Córdoba, surrounded by empty fields, they surely knew the Jesuits’ reputation. As a Jesuit novice, Bergoglio was committing to the first two years of at least a decade-long process of formation, of shaping one’s mind and spirit. But the deeper reality was that he had come to begin a new life — to join the religious equivalent of the Marines — and in so doing, abruptly end his youth. Jesuit novices knew that Ignatius wanted his followers to be mentally and spiritually disciplined; they needed to be grounded in their tradition, able to think on their feet, and ready to adapt to novel