Happy chapter to me, happy chapter two-me, happy chapter Twomey ...

Another Dawn'd thick, square book in the making

               At the San Diego Museum of Art, October 21, 2024

Today I’m grateful to be in beautiful San Diego, having just completed a private writing retreat at a friend’s house on Palomar Mountain. Work on A Priest in Good Trouble, my biography of Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ, is going well, and I’m eager to share the beginning of chapter two in hope of your comments.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in the footnotes. I don’t expect everything in them to make the final cut. However, at this stage, I’m overwriting a bit—both in the comments and in the text itself—with the thought that, as the book takes shape, I’ll be able to go back and remove material that doesn’t fit.

Also, to be perfectly honest, since this is my first book to be published by an academic publisher, I’d rather have every jot and tittle footnoted than have to receive my manuscript back with five gazillion comments saying, “Source?” “Why didn’t you cite so-and-so’s book?” etc. Perhaps all the effort I’m putting in will lessen the number of such comments to only four gazillion.

So, with no further ado, here are the opening paragraphs of chapter two, which will bear the title, “Jesuit, Interrupted”—a reference to a major hiccup that occurred early in Twomey’s vocational journey. I look forward to your thoughts. Please keep up the prayers for me as I write, and know that I’m praying for you and all my readers and backers. Thank you and God bless you.

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Just how rigorous was the program for the formation of Jesuit novices when Lou Twomey entered the Society of Jesus on September 7, 1926? A pair of anecdotes from twentieth-century Jesuits give an inkling of what awaited Lou during the two-year novitiate at St. Charles College, the New Orleans Province’s novitiate house in Grand Coteau, Louisiana. Although the events they describe transpired some three decades after Twomey entered, the distance in time makes little difference. Prior to the Second Vatican Council, the program at Jesuit novitiates in the United States had remained virtually unchanged since the establishment of the nation’s first novitiate in 1806 at Georgetown University. Even the program of that pioneering novitiate was fundamentally the same as that which was implemented by St. Ignatius of Loyola himself.^[1]

The first anecdote, from early 1963, is from Father Patrick J. Howell, SJ’s account of his time at the Oregon Province’s St. Francis Xavier’s Novitiate in Sheridan, Oregon.^[2] Although Vatican II had recently completed its first session, the proverbial fresh air blowing through the open windows at St. Peter’s Basilica had yet to penetrate St. Francis Xavier’s brick veneer.