Word: ignatius
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...Jesus Christ," he would say, eying me as if I had developed a recent liking for Martin Luther, "Harvard doesn't have a religion department--you might just as well be going to Yeshiva or someplace like that." (Ignatius had done graduate work in mathematics at Yeshiva and had never recovered from the shock.) Worse than that, though, Harvard didn't have discipline--no more parietals, no compulsory chapel at 6 a.m. And to top it all off, Harvard had women. The path to damnation was opening wider and wider in Ignatius's eyes...
Reason would not work. I made my case forcefully, noting that none of the major Catholic schools had parietals anymore, that even Holy Cross had surrendered to co-education, that early-morning chapel had gone the way of all flesh, even at Fordham. In short, all of Ignatius's arguments were bogus--Harvard could not possibly corrupt me any more than the purest citadel of religious learning. Fulton Sheen would have been proud...
...Ignatius was not. Calculus class became a horror, and the slightest fudged quadratic would inspire the oak-desk routine. Then Ignatius began dropping hints muttering about how when he was a missionary they really had to discipline the heathens. I looked around and saw nothing but people stepping out to St. John's and Fordham for their admission interviews. With my faith shaken by memories of the last heathen Ignatius had to discipline--an unfortunate physics whiz who three years earlier had barely survived the fall-out when Ignatius heard he was on his way to Yale--I decided...
...next day I cornered Ignatius after class, and walked down to lunch with him. Like a fox confronted by an ambitious canary, he listened carefully as I made my pitch...
...Brother," I pleaded over the meatless chile, "all those other schools you talk about have Jesuits." Ignatius was clearly on the ropes now, because if there is anything Ignatius hates more than an Ivy League professor it is a Jesuit professor. Jesuits--an order of priests that spends much of its time being intellectual and professorial, or sometimes political, like Fathers Berrigan and Drinan, or sometimes bureaucratic, like Father Hesburgh of Notre Dame--are, in fact, the bane of Ignatius's existence. (They are the bane of most Catholics' existence, because they usually adopt a lofty air that implies they...