A Son of the Circus

Three Old Missionaries Fall Asleep

That week between Christmas and New Year’s, when the first American missionary was due to arrive at St. Ignatius in Mazagaon, the Jesuit mission prepared a celebration in honor of 1990. St. Ignatius was a Bombay landmark; it would soon be 125 years old—in all these years, it had faithfully managed its holy and secular tasks without the assistance of an American. The management of St. Ignatius was a threesome of responsibility, and these three had been almost as successful as the Blessed Trinity. The Father Rector (Father Julian, who was 68 years old and English), the senior priest (Father Cecil, who was 72 and Indian), and Brother Gabriel (who was around 75 and had fled Spain after the Civil War) were a triumvirate of authority that was seldom questioned and never overruled; they were also unanimous in their opinion that St. Ignatius could continue to serve mankind and the heavenly kingdom without the aid of any American—yet one had been offered. To be sure, they would have preferred another Indian, or at least a European, but since these three wise men were of an average age of 71 years and eight months, they were attracted to one aspect of the “young” scholastic, as they called him. At 39, Martin Mills was no kid. Only Dr. Daruwalla would have judged “young” Martin to be unsuitably old for a man who was still in training to be a priest. That the so-called scholastic was almost 40 was at least mildly comforting to Father Julian and Father Cecil and Brother Gabriel, although they shared the conviction that the mission’s 125th jubilee was diminished by their obligation to welcome the former Californian, who was allegedly fond of Hawaiian shirts.

They knew of this laughable eccentricity from the otherwise impressive dossier of Martin Mills, whose letters of recommendation were glowing. However, the Father Rector said that when it came to Americans, one must read between the lines. For example, Father Julian pointed out, Martin Mills had evidently eschewed his native California, although nowhere in his dossier did it say so. He’d been schooled elsewhere in the United States and had taken a teaching job in Boston, which was about as far away from California as one could get. Clearly, said Father Julian, this indicated that Martin Mills had come from a troubled family. Perhaps it was his own mother or father whom he’d “eschewed.”

And along with young Martin’s unexplained attraction to the garish, which Father Julian concluded was the root cause of the scholastic’s reported fondness for Hawaiian shirts, there was mention in the dossier of Martin Mills’s success with apostolic work—even as a novice, and especially with young people. Bombay’s St. Ignatius was a good school, and Martin Mills was expected to be a good teacher; most of the students weren’t Catholics—many weren’t even Christians. “It won’t do to have a crazed American proselyte-hunting among our pupils,” the Father Rector warned, although there was no mention in the dossier of Martin Mills being either “crazed” or a proselyte- hunter.

The dossier did say that he’d undertaken a six-week pilgrimage as part of his novitiate, and that during this pilgrimage he’d spent no money—not a penny. He’d managed to find places to live and work in return for humanitarian services; these included soup kitchens for the homeless, hospitals for handicapped children, homes for the elderly, shelters for AIDS patients and a clinic for babies suffering from fetal alcohol syndrome—this was on a Native American reservation.

Brother Gabriel and Father Cecil were inclined to view Martin Mills’s dossier in a positive light. Father Julian, on the other hand, quoted from Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ: “Be rarely with young people and strangers.” The Father Rector had read through Martin Mills’s dossier as if it were a code to be deciphered. The task of teaching at St. Ignatius, and otherwise serving the mission, was a part of the typical three-year service in preparation for the priesthood; it was called regency, and it was followed by another three years of theological study. Ordination followed theology; Martin Mills would complete a fourth year of theological study after his ordination.

He’d completed the two-year Jesuit novitiate at St. Aloysius in Massachusetts, which Father Julian said was an extremist’s choice because of the reputed harshness of its winters. This suggested a proneness to self- flagellation and other chastisements of the flesh—even an inclination to fasting, which the Jesuits discouraged; they encouraged fasting only in moderation. But, once again, the Father Rector seemed to be searching through Martin Mills’s dossier for some hidden evidence of the scholastic’s flawed character. Brother Gabriel and Father Cecil pointed out to Father Julian that Martin had joined the New England Province of the Society of Jesus while he was teaching in Boston. The province’s novitiate was in Massachusetts; it was only natural for Martin Mills to have been a novice at St. Aloysius—it hadn’t really been a “choice.”

But why had he taught 10 years in a dismal parochial school in Boston? His dossier didn’t say that the school was “dismal”; however, it was admitted that the school was not accredited. Actually, it was a kind of reform school, where young criminals were encouraged to give up their delinquent behavior; as far as the Father Rector could tell, the means by which this was accomplished was theatrical. Martin Mills had directed plays wherein all the roles were acted by former felons and miscreants and thugs! In such an environment Martin Mills had first felt his vocation—namely, he’d felt Christ’s presence and had been drawn to the priesthood. But why did it take 10 years? Father Julian questioned. After completing his novitiate, Martin Mills was sent to Boston College to study philosophy; that met with the Father Rector’s approval. But then, in the midst of his regency, young Martin had requested a three-month “experiment” in India. Did this mean that the scholastic had suffered doubts about his vocation? Father Julian asked.

“Well, we’ll soon see,” Father Cecil said. “He seems perfectly all right to me.” Father Cecil had almost said that Martin Mills seemed perfectly “Loyola-like,” but he’d thought better of it because he knew how the Father Rector distrusted those Jesuits who too consciously patterned their behavior on the life of St. Ignatius Loyola—the founder of the Jesuit order, the Society of Jesus.

Even a pilgrimage could be a fool’s errand when undertaken by a fool. The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola is a handbook for the retreat master, not for the retreatant; it was never intended to be published, much less memorized by would-be priests—not that Martin Mills’s dossier suggested that the missionary had followed the Spiritual Exercises to such an excess. Once again, the Father Rector’s suspicion of Martin Mills’s extreme piety was intuitive. Father Julian suspected all Americans of an unflagging fanaticism, which the Father Rector believed was emboldened by a frightening reliance on self-education—or “reading on a deserted island,” as Father Julian called an American education. Father Cecil, on the other hand, was a kindly man—of that school which said Martin Mills should be given a chance to prove himself.

The senior priest chided the Father Rector for his cynicism: “You don’t know for a fact that our Martin wanted to be a novice at St. Aloysius because he sought the harshness of a New England winter.” Father Cecil further implied that Father Julian was only guessing that Martin Mills had hoped to attend St. Aloysius as a form of penitential practice, to chastise his flesh. Indeed, Father Julian was wrong. Had he known the real reason why Martin Mills wanted St. Aloysius for his novitiate, the Father Rector really would have been worried, for Martin Mills had desired to be a novice at St. Aloysius solely because of his identification with St. Aloysius Gonzaga, that avid Italian whose chastity was so fervent that he refused to look upon his own mother after taking his permanent vows.

This was Martin Mills’s favorite example of that “custody of the senses” which every Jesuit sought to attain. To Martin’s thinking, there was much to admire in the very notion of never again seeing one’s own mother. His mother, after all, was Veronica Rose, and to deny himself even a farewell glimpse of her would certainly be enhancing to his Jesuitical goal of keeping his voice, his body and his curiosity in check. Martin Mills was very much held in check, and both his pious intentions and the life that had fueled them were more fanatically shot through and through with zeal than Father Julian could have guessed.

And now Brother Gabriel—that 75-year-old icon collector—had lost the scholastic’s letter. If they didn’t know when the new missionary was arriving, how could they meet his plane?

“After all,” Father Julian said, “it seems that our Martin likes challenges.”

Father Cecil thought that this was cruel of the Father Rector. For Martin Mills to arrive in Bombay at that dead-of-night hour when the international flights landed in Sahar, and then to have to find his own way to the mission, which would be locked up and virtually impenetrable until early-morning Mass… this was worse than any pilgrimage the missionary had previously undertaken.

“After all,” Father Julian said with characteristic sarcasm, “St. Ignatius Loyola managed to find his way to Jerusalem. No one met his plane.”

It was unfair, Father Cecil thought. And so he’d called Dr. Daruwalla to ask the doctor if he knew when