Francis J. Buckley, S.J. Spiritual Autobiography

I am a happy person. When my mother brought me back home from St. Vincent’s Hospital in Los Angeles after I was born, her mother had come out from New York to teach her how to be a mother. My mother put me down in a crib, and I began to howl. She reached down to pick me up and her mother told her, “Don’t touch him.”

“Don’t touch him?” asked my mother. “But he’s crying. He wants to be held.”

“Don’t touch him,” repeated my grandmother. “Wait until he smiles. Then pick him up.” It almost broke my mother’s heart, but she obeyed. It took me two weeks to learn that if I wanted attention, I should smile. After that, my parents would go out to a party, invite friends to come back with them, and announce, “Watch this!” Awakened from a deep sleep, I would smile beatifically. I am the result of behavior modification.

I grew up in a multicultural society in Los Angeles. At age 5 I went to kindergarten at St. Thomas. Sister Guadalupe, who had fled Calles’ persecution in Mexico, butchered the English language. I made a deal with her: I would teach her English if she would teach me Spanish. It worked. I solidified my Spanish in Mexico at age 9, where my parents took me to recover from a blood disease.

I also used to play with Japanese orphans. When Pearl Harbor came on Dec. 7, 1941, my father put me in the car and we spent the night with a Japanese family, to protect them in case anyone should attack.

Every summer, we would drive across the country, singing songs, praying the Rosary, and practicing French. My father had grown up in Quebec, and was bilingual. My mother’s family could speak German. When attending Mass, sometimes I would use an English missal, sometimes French, sometimes Spanish, sometimes German. The variety kept me awake and helped me focus on different meanings of the Latin. I would learn Latin only in high school.

One day I was serving Mass at St. Brendan’s. I must have given Msgr. Mullane the water instead of the wine, because he gave me the back of his hand, and I tumbled down several steps to the floor of the sanctuary. On the way home after Mass, my mother asked, “Do you want to go on serving Mass?” “Of course,” I replied. “But Father hit you,” she said. She remembered my reply, “I’m not serving Msgr. Mullane, I’m serving God.”

Growing up during the Depression, I had various odd jobs: delivering magazines, working at Pep Boys auto parts store, barker at Warner Brothers theater downtown, assistant manager at the 4 Star theater on Wilshire Boulevard. The cashier there, a gorgeous blonde, asked me about the Catholic Church. The Jesuits at Loyola High had prepared me for this. I began with the five proofs for the existence of God, went on to prove the divinity and humanity of Jesus, and that he had founded the Catholic Church. About that time, she lost interest. If only Vatican II had taken place, I would have taken her by the hand, marched her to Mass, and explained things from there. Or at least I could have taken her to the Perpetual Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows at St. Basil’s Church and gotten her to join in singing, “Good Night, Sweet Jesus.” But the liturgical reform had not yet taken place, so I wound up celibate.

One time, I saw “Song of Bernadette,” in which Jennifer Jones gave up marriage to enter the convent. I felt that God was calling me to give up everything and join the Jesuits. My father, however, insisted that I go to college first. This was during the Second World War, so I applied for early acceptance to Notre Dame after my junior year in high school. Desperate for warm bodies, they accepted me, and off I went.

There was just one hitch. My father went with me. I remember praying that the ground would open up and swallow him, to let me make my own way. God heard my prayer and my father left after one day. Within two more days I was singing in the Glee Club, editing a liturgical newspaper, enrolled in Catholic Action [which seemed to me like the Sodality], working at a printing press, running a date bureau, coaching swimming for the Navy students, and running for office. Like my father, I was something of an entrepreneur.

In my third semester at Notre Dame, I told my father, “I still want to join the Jesuits.” “But you haven’t graduated,” he protested. “You said I had to go to college. I’ve been to college,” I replied. Recognizing a Jesuitical argument, he gave in.

In the Jesuit Novitiate at Los Gatos in Northern California we worked from before sunrise until we collapsed into bed at night, picking grapes, cleaning chickens, peeling fruit, washing clothes, and praying throughout. “Pray always” was our motto, and we tried to live up to it.

Despite the best efforts of our superiors, certain personality traits remained. My master of novices broke the rule by giving me a nickname, “Brother Buckley of the Council of Trent”, because I was always making dogmatic proclamations. At the end of two years, just before my solemn vows, he called me in and told me, “Brother Buckley, for two years I’ve been trying to give you trials, but nothing has worked.” “Yes, Father, I noticed that,” I replied. “But don’t worry, God has been giving me trials, and they worked.”

A classmate from high school joined the Jesuits after a stint in the Navy and confided to me at a mixer, “Frank, you haven’t changed a bit.” I was devastated. Surely all that work and prayer would have transformed me. But he was right. I was pretty much the same.

After four years of studying the classics at Los Gatos, off we went to Mt. St. Michael’s in Spokane, Washington, to study philosophy for three years. Our teachers were Thomists, so the Intuition of Being was all the rage. I kept praying for some experience of God as Pure Act, Ipsum Esse Subsistens. Eventually, God heard my prayer, and I received a precious, transforming experience. It cannot be put into words, for God is beyond all words, no matter what Cardinal Ratzinger says. This experience did what high school and college and the Novitiate and Juniorate and Philosophy had failed to do. It changed my life, relativizing everything. It strengthens and nourishes me, up to this very day.

When I was finishing Mt. St. Michael’s, the faculty wrote my provincial, urging him to send me to teach philosophy at a university. The provincial, for my greater humility and spiritual growth, sent me to Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, California, to prefect boarders, teach Latin and Religion, and moderate the yearbook. This provided three years of first-hand contact with adolescent psychology, educational techniques, and book layout, which turned out in God’s Providence to be invaluable later on.

While studying theology for four years at alma College near San Jose, I switched from philosophy to theology for future studies. I asked to go to Germany to work with Otto Pies, S.J., for tertianship [a year of spiritual formation after priestly ordination], but my provincial sent me to Port Townsend, Washington, to work with Fr. Harold Small, who later became Assistant to the Jesuit superior general in Rome. Father Small was the best superior I ever had. Full of wisdom and mischief, he spread joy everywhere. I tried to learn from him.

During tertianship I asked my provincial to send me to Rome for doctoral work. Instead, he sent me to the University of San Francisco to teach theology. My dean, Fr. Edmond Smyth, S.J., and the chair of theology, Fr. Albert Zabala, S.J., were trying to move the department out of the doldrums. Zabala hit upon the scheme to assign me to teach four sections of the same course, 100 students in each section, and to rotate me through teaching every required course offered by the department.

During my first year at USF a new provincial took office. He sent me to study at the Pontifical Biblical Institute and Gregorian University in Rome, where I was the envy of my classmates, for I was the only one who had already taught in college.

On my way to Rome I made an 8-day retreat at Loyola in Spain. Unbeknownst to me, Loyola was famous throughout Spain for the size and ferocity of its fleas. Sprays and powders did not prevail against these monsters, so at the end of the retreat I made a pious pilgrimage to Lourdes [remember the Song of Bernadette]. There I bathed in the Lourdes waters and the fleas disappeared.

Rome was alive with preparations, pro and con, for Vatican II. Almost all my teachers were experts or members of various commissions, and they would regale us with gossip and ask us for prayers. I had grown up working for interracial justice and involved with the liturgical and biblical movements ever since high school, so all these developments were exciting. I realized that if I had gone to Rome when I wished, I would have missed all this. So my trust in divine Providence deepened.

I had gone to Rome with a draft of a doctoral dissertation on the Mystagogic Catecheses of Cyril of Jerusalem, but no one was willing to direct it. Godfrey Diekmann had suggested a fall-back topic, the sacramentals. But no one was interested in directing a thesis on popular religiosity. Finally Luis Alonso Schokel, S.J., suggested reading Gregory of Elvira, a Spanish bishop who attended the Council of Nicea, so I wrote on “Christ and the Church according to Gregory of Elvira”. Gregory’s greatest claim to fame is that he wanted to impose clerical celibacy, which prompted Nicea to condemn the idea.

Back from Rome, I was assigned to replace a sick chaplain at the convent of the Helpers of the Holy Souls. At Mass I read the Gospel facing the Sistersoly Souls.H—and gave a homily, the first they had ever heard. After Mass on the second day the Superior asked if I would give them a retreat. After the retreat she asked if I would help her revise in the light of the Council a catechism she had written for children. Remembering the Baltimore Catechism of my youth, I estimated this would take about three months. Thirty-nine years later, we are still working together.

This Mexican Sister, Maria de la Cruz Aymes Coucke, S.H., has had a profound impact on my life. For many years I would work at her convent every day. Together we produced the On Our Way Vatican II Series [kindergarten through grade 8] , the New Life Series, the Lord of Life Program, Familia de Dios Series, the God with Us Program, and various other books and videos. We gave lectures and workshops around the world. We complete one another’s sentences and laugh at the same jokes. She has sensitized me to a woman’s viewpoint and opened my mind and heart to new dimensions of the gospel. She has shaped my spirituality and ministry.

Many elements in my life had prepared me for this collaboration: my early love of Mexico; my interest in child psychology and learning; my experience with printing and layout; my fascination with popular religiosity; my compulsion to talk and write and tell stories in different languages; my vocation to the Jesuits and the priesthood; my devotion to scripture, liturgy, and social justice; my theological training in Rome; my American pragmatism. All of these enrich my apostolate.

Many people have changed my spiritual life. Archbishop John Amissah of Cape Coast, Ghana, taught me that in his country the people pray, “Our Father with the heart of a mother, hallowed be thy name.” Bernard Haering, C.SS.R., taught me to reduce the moral life to loving like Jesus. Albert Zabala, S.J., who was in constant pain from arthritis, showed me how to fight through the pain. My mother, as she aged, would laugh and say, “Well, that’s one more thing I can’t do anymore.” Fr. Louis Putz, CSC, at Notre Dame introduced me to Catholic Action and “observe, judge, act”, a Thomistic principle which was enshrined in Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Fr. Louis Twomey, S.J., in his newsletter, Blueprint for the South, whetted my passion for social justice. Fr. Johannes Hofinger, S.J., termed “the ecclesiastical Sputnik” for the international catechetical congresses he planned, introduced me to the world Church scene. Archbishop Joseph Bernardin modeled for me the principles of consultation, subsidiarity, collegiality, and corresponsibility.

I parted company from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine over the question of whether the Incarnation would have taken place even if humans had not sinned. Following the theology of the prologue of John’s gospel and the letters to the Ephesians and Colossians, I hold it would have. “O happy fault, which merited such a redeemer,” from the Exultet at the Easter Vigil, is basically blasphemous, trivializing the enormity of sin. I also parted company from St. Thomas Aquinas about heaven. In the third part of the Summa Theologica, he maintains that risen bodies do not eat. To the objection that Jesus ate after the resurrection, Thomas replies that Jesus ate to prove the reality of the resurrection, but in fact risen bodies do not eat. I could not stomach that.

On the other hand, I am not so much looking forward to heaven because of its sensual delights. I look forward to an eternal life of discovery in heaven. We shall remain ever finite, with a limited human intellect and understanding. But God remains infinitely knowable, so we shall be full of delight in discovering new dimensions of God. And our joy will be intensified as we share our discoveries with those we love and they share their discoveries with us. Who would not look forward to an eternity of that?