THE DIRECTED RETREAT

John English, sj in conversation with Tom Clancy, sj 

(October 7, 1977)

            This conversation between Thomas H. Clancy, SJ and John English, SJ took place in Guelph in 1977. As Fr. Clancy explains in his opening question, he was interested in asking some questions about the beginnings of the directed retreat movement. Fr. Clancy is now at the Jesuit Community at Loyola University in New Orleans, LA. He is the Director of the Jesuit Seminary and Mission Bureau and the Province Archivist for the New Orleans Province of the Jesuits.

JJE - No, I had two years in which I was teaching theology at Loyola (Montreal) and I was hoping to go on for a doctorate in theology. One day the Provincial walked in and asked me to become master of novices. That would have been in 1965.

TC - When you came here did you start doing the personally directed retreats with the novices right away?

JJE - No, I didn't. I was so frightened, you know, that first retreat - I got all my tertianship notes out and I gave three talks a day and a homily, so I was giving four talks a day. And I interviewed everyone, at least once a day the first year. About the third year, I think, I cut the talks down to three a day, and started interviewing twice a day. I never gave the novices what we would today call a fully directed retreat. I always gave them points, but I was interviewing them every day. I felt the interview was very important and they were relatively short, maybe 15 minutes. Bill Peters was invited over here in 1962 or 1963, and he gave a course on the Exercises at Regis College. A number of men attended. Then Dave Asselin was made spiritual director of the theologate and two or three years after he arrived he started giving the Exercises to people 
-- Annotation 19 -- as part of their spiritual direction. Then he set up with two or three other scholastics a program in which they would go out and give talks and use movies and have interviews. Really, I didn't give that many directed retreats until 1969 when we started this program over at the retreat house.

TC - You went out as novice master then?

JJE - No, I was still master of novices, but what happened was the province had this commission of ministries coming out of the 31st General Congregation and I was asked to be part of the sub-commission on retreats and retreat houses. We were having our meeting. We had this beautiful place over here and John LeSarge had just been put in charge of it the year before and he had real difficulties filling the place. I told them I had been in contact with two Loretto Mistresses of Novices who were asking me what I was doing in the novitiate. I spoke about the Exercises as part of the novitiate program. They were quite excited by it. I said that I was convinced that there is a real market up there - there's a whole group of novices and mistresses of juniors who really need a lot of training and spiritual direction in how to guide people. They asked what I suggested. I told them that I would suggest that we have a short introduction, give them the 30-day Exercises personally, and have a two-week follow through. Then they, in turn, would be able to use it with their novices. Now that was in the summer of 1969. That's when we really started giving spiritual direction or giving the Exercises the way we do now; I gathered together a team of six or so people.

TC - Who were some of the other six?

JJE - Allan Peterkin, Colin Maloney, Petin Romallo and Gib Hallam, who has since died. I'm not sure if John Veltri was on it or not. We did it pretty well the same way we do it now, although there's been an adaptation taking place all along. We saw the retreatants once a day for half an hour and we gave them direction. We had no talks in common.

TC - What about following the Exercises literally - that was from the very beginning?

JJE - Yes, we did that from the very beginning. We've learned a few things of course since, but that's what we did. People would do the midnight meditation. The person giving the direction, the priest, would have his own little liturgy with five or six of those he was directing.

TC - When did Jesuits start coming?

JJE - Well, the very next summer (1970) the Provincial became quite enthusiastic about Jesuit renewal and right here in this house we had a 24-day Jesuit renewal in which there was a 14-16 day personally directed retreat for Jesuits.

TC - Were some of the theologians coming in at this time?

JJE - I would say the theologians themselves were starting to get these 8-day personally directed retreats around 1967 to 1968.

TC - Well now, what about your contact with people at other renewal centres?

JJE - Well, what happened here is quite interesting. Of course from 1965 on, just right after Vatican II, the North American Jesuit masters of novices were having their meetings. There was Dominic Marruca, Tom Walsh, Vince O'Flaherty and Bobby Rimes. We had this group of top-flight men and when we first got together we talked about crazy things like the timetable of the novitiate, the clothing, etc. But, gradually, at around the third or fourth year of these meetings we were getting deeply involved in the meanings of the Spiritual Exercises, the spirit of Ignatius, etc. What happened, I think, as far as Guelph is concerned, revolved around seven-week institutes for sisters. Then we started to have just 30-day retreats as well over at the retreat house. And in some instances we would have a team of nuns directing their own sisters. This went on for two or three years. LeSarge and I got together and talked to the Mother Generals in Ontario and told them that the demands are so great that we can't possibly fulfill them. Our plan was to run six 30-day retreats concurrently in Toronto, Guelph, Hamilton and London, so we did workshops, with about 40 sisters and 20 Jesuits. Now these were very practical workshops. Very quickly we organized them into teams, told them where they were going to be, who their chairman was and the process. In some instances all you would work with was scripture and so we had a whole scripture plan, that we called a game-plan. I think there were 360 sisters in the 30-day Exercises at the same time in Southern Ontario. Of course, this "jamboree" as we called it, cleared away the big demand and created a whole number of spiritual directors for the sisters to use. It introduced, in a really grand way, the notion and practice that sisters could direct other sisters. Since then, of course, sisters are directing men, even priests. It was a big breakthrough. I think it was after these retreats that some of the centres in the States started moving in the same way, giving a directed retreat, giving workshops on how to direct. Wernersville, Monroe, Cambridge, and all these places began in the 1970s.

TC - In our province you came down in December 1971. Did you ever go and start things in other places?

JJE - Well, LeSarge and I went to St. Louis, but we just gave a two-day workshop. We didn't actually run the retreat such as we did in Grand Coteau. By 1971 the Canadian bishops had been convinced that they should make the Exercises, so Petin, Colin and I were giving the Exercises to the bishops when Ed Dougherty phoned me. That's when I said to him "Well suppose I can talk Petin into coming down, how would that be?" That's how it happened.

TC - Well, you knew all these people like Dougherty, or did they just know someone who knew you?

JJE - I didn't know Ed Dougherty, to tell you the truth. He heard about me and then he invited me. He knew what we were doing, that we were moving in this direction, and he was convinced about it himself. In the case of St. Louis, of course, I knew Vince O'Flaherty. He was a novice master. I had met some others like Gene Merz of the Wisconsin Province, and Paul Robb of Chicago. It was quite a nice little nucleus of spiritual directors there - around 68 to 72 - coming mostly out of what I would call a master of novices group, plus another group, which I guess you would call spiritual directors.

TC - At the 31st General Congregation, I was struck by the fact that some people thought the Exercises were of a bygone day, that they were not suited for the psychology of modern men. Did you ever hold that position? I guess you were tempted to at times.

JJE - I always had the conviction that the first week Exercises were important, but I noticed that a lot of people could not handle the first week, that all the graces that we were hoping for in the first week would take place somewhere late in the second or the third week of the Exercises. We couldn't figure this out and that's when I started to realize that the real issue is what I call a psychological hang-up with sin - not a spiritual thing but a psychological thing. I'd say it was coming out of a semi-Pelagian theology. The exercitants couldn't face sin. They had no way of entering the first week of the Exercises and with this awareness we started to change our introduction to these long institutes. We created what we now call the disposition days of the Exercises. We always had a kind of introduction to the first week. You know, a kind of blow-up of the principle and foundation in terms of the God who is love. But we really expanded on that and tried to clear out of the way what I call false images of God. They prevent the person from praying; they prevent the person from really seeing Jesus as Saviour, and so the retreatant is prevented from entering the first week of the Exercises. So, I guess my bias would be that it was a theological misunderstanding, this heresy of semi-Pelagianism having the psychological effect of blocking someone from doing the Exercises. I really have to attribute a lot of this insight to Paul Kennedy. He really opened my eyes about God as a loving, compassionate father, desiring our salvation.

TC - Well that comes through very strongly in your book. Are you conscious of any opposition to the whole movement of directed retreats in the Society? Has there ever been any kind of opposition that you've been conscious of in the Society or in the Church?

JJE - In the late 1960s there was a real strong feeling among a lot of scholastics, and even some very good fathers, that this was a destructive instrument. Their experience of the Exercises in retreats was negative. They couldn't see why the 31st General Congregation was making such a hoop-to-do about giving the Exercises.

TC - But that feeling was against the Exercises; it wasn't against the directed retreat movement.

JJE - Oh, there was a lot of concern that the sisters were giving the Exercises and they were neither trained psychologists nor trained theologians. There was quite a bit of criticism.

TC - What about the problem of anybody and everybody hanging up their shingles as a director?

JJE - Everybody should not be making the Exercises. We all agree with that and that's why we had our phrase, "A thirty day retreat following the pattern of the Spiritual Exercises". In many instances the person was not making the Exercises, but a thirty day prayer experience with scripture. So who should make the exercises is a big question. Our position on this was that such a decision is to be made by the one doing the directing. The director has to make that decision and in the meantime he can give 30-day prayer experiences using scripture. Who should be doing the directing is a further question. We were very fortunate on this front. Our institutes were pretty expensive, at least in those days, and we felt that the Mother-Generals were making a good selection for us. If you were getting mistresses of novices and mistresses of juniors there was already a selectivity taking place and having to pay this big sum of money to come here was just such an instance of selectivity.

TC - What about Jesuits directors? It's easier for a counterfeit Jesuit to pawn himself off than it is for another priest or a nun because they figure if you're a Jesuit you must have some credentials. How can the Society put the counterfeit sign on this?

JJE - The only thing we have been able to do is to bring people in here and they direct an 8-day retreat while we watch the way they operate and make a judgement from that experience. Our position is that you're not in danger of hurting anyone too much in an 8-day retreat to start with. And secondly, there is always the team that does a certain amount of balancing. I would say that many Jesuits feel that the Exercises are a program of doctrine rather than a program of experience and so their tendency is to give a one-to-one preached retreat, making sure that everything is understood by the retreatant. Consequently, they don't send the person off to pray and then hear a report on the experience. That's a big danger.

TC - What about the danger of sort of relaxing the disciplines of the additions, of silence?

JJE - We have a reputation of being quite strict as far as all these externals are concerned. We have a great conviction that these externals are very helpful for recollection and for prayer.

TC - I don't know how you bring it off with the priests, and I suppose there are a lot of modern religious who don't have much of a background of silence. It's really amazing, I must say.

JJE - There's an interesting phenomenon here. We had been, at the beginning, highly criticized for doing so much work with women. But our theory is simply that they will move and change the church. About the fourth year after we started doing this, we started having institutes for priests because their nun friends had been putting the finger on them. So gradually we got more men coming. That's in full silence.

TC - That's how Stack always quoted you to me. He said the nuns are the ones who recruit the priests. What kind of spiritual reading do you find most helpful?

JJE - I find Karl Rahner expresses for me the incarnation of Jesus. I've read quite a bit of him and studied him fairly carefully; I've read some of the liberation men in South America; and I'm in touch with the whole existential thing. I haven't really done that much deep spiritual reading in the last couple of years because I've been involved in trying to write a new book. I think what is interesting in this kind of work is what I call vicarious spirituality. You're sitting there and you're listening to the great way in which God is working with this person in front of you and the great insights they are getting and they're articulating them for you. It's all living experience coming at you.