If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?
In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library he entered the search term “Jesuit” and filtered it through the genre of “Biography”. The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits.
Today’s Jesuit lived from 1888 to 1955, and although little talked about today, his influence on Catholic life in North America was astounding. He was everywhere in media of his day: books, magazines, lectures, radio, theatre, and – indirectly – film. In fact, every time an audience sees a film in a theatre in Canada and the United States today he has influenced what gets on that screen. Daniel A. Lord SJ was instrumental in developing “the Code” – the agreement of the film industry to self-regulate rather than be censored externally. But that’s to jump far into the story of this Illinois-born son of an Irish Catholic mother and a Dutch Reform minister (later Catholic convert) father. Lord wrote his autobiography – Played By Ear – at the final year of his very public life. In a rhetorical flourish that could be personal or about his Jesuit “family” he writes:
“How strangely limited is the swing of our person knowledge! How circumscribed is the vision we have of those whose characters and ideals, shortcomings and heroisms, national characteristics and acquired skills help make us the people that we are! At best we seem to go back a couple of generations. Then the clouds of obscurity settle in, and our ancestors become anonymous figures without face or history.” (p. 23)
He had a strict Catholic education and was embraced by the strong parish culture of that era (processions and adorations etc.) The outcome was somewhat inevitable: “In the end, I doubt if I decided to become a priest. What I found myself being forced to accept as inevitable was my designation as Jesuit… Right then and there, I knew that the good Lord had picked in me.” (p. 91-2)
He entered the Society of Jesus in 1909 in the Missouri Province and was based in Florissant, in farm country. “From the moment of arrival, I loved the place. The city lad settled down into the country atmosphere with a sigh of content. Never did I learn to distinguish growing corn from a field of potatoes… and could not tell one from another.” (p. 124)
“Silence was the atmosphere of the novitiate…It is so quiet in a world that is deadened with the constant battering of sheer noise…Silence is the lovely and in these days rare atmosphere in which to thrive … to find God … to take time to discover … [my] inner depths, a place of uninterrupted calm, of work done without the constant fracture of clamor and nose and speech without purpose and words spoken for the mere dread of wordlessness.” (p. 142)
He followed the traditional Jesuit route: novitiate, first vows, studies, regency, more study, ordination, and tertianship, much of it based at St. Louis University and High School.
In a world of heady Jesuit scholarship he quickly understood his particular niche. “My field of vision has been wide if inaccurate. I have loved many things rather than known intensely a few. I have liked to talk sweepingly and I am no master of footnotes.” (p, 164)
These, of course, are also the skills of a journalist. From the 1920s Lord was seriously involved in magazines, at first Catholic (The Queen’s Work and America) and then, writing articles for Time, Life, Colliers, and Saturday Evening Post. He was prolific and quickly became a go-to commentator on things Catholic in America because of his deceptively “simple” approach. He wrote in a popular, accessible, and direct style. A series of 1918 articles for America were later reprinted as Armchair Philosophy – “I still hear from people who have read it. I still am sure that because I forced myself to write it, philosophy for me became not a thing of closer, library, and study, but of the streets, the countryside, and the town.” (p. 218)
And then he entered he world of Cecil B. de Mille when films were still silent. De Mille wanted Catholic input into The King of Kings, his follow-up to The Ten Commandments. “And De Mille welcomed me, like the emperor he is, to the fabulous empire which demands and receives more voluntary taxation than most of the great empires of history.” (p. 278)
What did he do? “My contribution to The King of Kings was singularly slight. At best, I was there in the set for brief days, as a protection against mistakes.” (p. 283)
From its birth, cinema was polarizing art form and lighting-rod for organizations such the Legion of Decency. “Silent smut had been bad. Vocal smut cried to the censors for vengeance.” (p. 295)
The industry countered external pressure to censor with an internal compromise: self-regulation in the form of the 1930 Production Code, or Hays Code – a list of “Dos and Don’ts” that could or could not appear on the screen. Lord was its invisible author. He drafted it though his name did not appear anywhere. “I heartily agreed that it would be the greatest possible mistake to announce that the actual authorship of the code, the words in which it was expressed, could be laid at the feet of a Catholic priest, and a Jesuit at that.” (p. 303)
“I came to Hollywood with great curiosity and zest. I left it with infinite relief. It burned up human life too fast.” (p. 284)
Safely away from Hollywood, Lord’s career as the poster boy for Catholicism in America was launched. He wrote 48 books for children, 30 for adults, hundreds of pamphlets, 25 plays, 12 pageants, and three musicals. He was as famous as his contemporary, Fulton Sheen, but through his presence in different media.
Today, Georgetown University houses Lord’s papers in 30 boxes taking up 41 linear feet of shelf-space. The catalogue describes him as “perhaps mid-20th century American Catholicism's most widely recognized producer of popular religious literature, was a prolific writer whose work reflected and responded to the sometimes brusque social upheavals and moral uncertainties of the times.”
Played by Ear provides a broad and soft-edged sweep of Lord’s life and Catholic culture in the twentieth century. There’s a more personal perspective in one of his early pamphlets. In 1928 he was 40 years old and editor of The Queen’s Work, the magazine of the sodality movement. In addition to editing, he also wrote pamphlets for the magazine, including one he playfully entitled These Terrible Jesuits. Contained in 52 pages of often mannered style, are these brief insights into Lord’s understanding of Jesuit life:
Ultimately we know things best through our own experience with them; and it is my own experience, not what anyone else has said or written, that has guided my hand as I write of the Society I have come 'to appreciate and love. (p. 27)
I just want to say that, if I have fallen and fall short of what a Jesuit ought to be, there is only one person to blame, myself. …If I have approached but little the beautiful ideal held up to me as a Jesuit, that is because I have been selfish, spiritually cowardly, tolerably lazy – in other words, just a little too human in the weak and miserable sense of the word. (p. 42)
The fact remains that for me the old Jesuits have always been the greatest proof of the value of the Society of Jesus to a man who lives his life in it to the end. …That group of venerable men whose fight is largely over and won, whose year is drawing toward the quiet of winter! There was the crippled, rheumatic Indian missionary who lay dying when I was a novice; the peaceful old former master of novices with his unbroken, motionless hours on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament; the dear old author who, as he looked back over his years, said to me in almost an awed whisper, ‘How beautiful it has all been!’ (p. 44)
Lord died before Played by Ear – The Autobiography of Daniel A. Lord S.J. was published by Loyola University Press in 1956. “Those Terrible Jesuits”, one of his many short pamphlets, was published in 1928 by the St Louis-based magazine, The Queen’s Work.
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Next in this series, a celebration of Ignatius of Loyola on an important day in the Jesuit calendar: July 31.