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12 Jesuits and Women
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12. Jesuits and Women One summer afternoon in 1998, I biked from Mitchell Farm, Fordham’s Jesuit villa house in Mahopac, Westchester County, to the little town of Shrub Oak about a half-hour south of Mahopac. There I pedaled laboriously to the top of a steep country road called Stony Street, where a vast four-winged Colonial rosebrick structure sprawled across the horizon. It was a building that could have been a public school, a corporate headquarters, a factory, or a prison. I had been here before. I felt like Charles Ryder, the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, who came upon Brideshead Castle at the end of World War II after not seeing it in twenty years, except that Charles’s memories of Brideshead, for all their pain, included days of joy and love. The large boxy edifice before me now was a branch of Phoenix House, a drug-rehabilitation program headquartered on Manhattan ’s upper West Side. Before that, it was a fundamentalist Bible school, and before that, Loyola Seminary College of Arts and Letters. When I graduated from Fordham as an ROTC student in 1955, I joined the Sixty-second AAA Battalion (AW) in Mannheim, Germany, where John Manning had left it at the end of World War II. In 1957, I joined the Jesuit novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, 247 16950-06_Fordham_227-263 6/4/08 11:45 AM Page 247 then moved to Shrub Oak for philosophy in 1959. Both the novitiate and Shrub Oak were branches of Fordham at that time. A fellow Jesuit has said that he once tried to revisit Shrub Oak, but halfway up the hill he got sick to his stomach and had to turn back. Planning for Shrub Oak had begun as far back as 1945. In the early 1950s, the American Catholic Church was so prosperous in both cultural influence and vocations that the Jesuit New York and Maryland Provinces were clearly unable to accommodate both the three years of philosophy and the three of theology at old Woodstock College in the hills outside of Baltimore. They were convinced that they needed a new seminary, a philosophate, in New York, and one with a huge chapel and a large sanctuary so that in years ahead, as more and more men became priests, they could be ordained there too. The New York architects of Voorhees, Walker, Smith, and Smith studied Woodstock to prepare plans for its counterpart in the north, and Jesuit fund-raisers reached out to their most generous benefactors, including the students in their schools, for the money. They achieved their goal of $5 million by 1954. From the beginning, the most difficult question was where the new seminary should be located. One school of thought, on a European model, says that priests should be trained near the people, in the big city and on a university campus, where they can have contact with people with secular minds. The other tradition, on the original, more American Fordham model, isolates young men in the country, remote from distractions to study and from some occasions of sin. Regardless of this tradition, however, the St. Louis and New Orleans Provinces had placed their philosophates at St. Louis University and at Spring Hill College in Mobile. In 1945, as part of the broader province consultation, Fr. Laurence McGinley polled his faculty colleagues at Woodstock for their opinions as to where the new school should be located. The various proposed sites included St. Andrew-on-Hudson, the Brady mansion at Inisfada, the campus of the new LeMoyne College at Syracuse, and the retreat house at Monroe. The strong majority of the Woodstock faculty favored Fordham, however, with the student residence either a short walk from the campus or on the campus by 248 F O R D H A M 16950-06_Fordham_227-263 6/4/08 11:45 AM Page 248 [3.236.55.137] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 00:24 GMT) the Southern Boulevard gate, landscaped with trees to set it apart. Their arguments were all academic and intellectual: they felt there would be heightened stimulation for faculty and students alike, as well as competition, increased self-confidence, special lectures, and access to New York libraries. As McGinley summarized their arguments, “It seems to be the modern way for intellectual progress.” The fathers caution that only faculty who “will not succumb to the attractions of city life” should teach scholastics. The minority argue for healthy country air...