The Sparrow - Mary Doria Russell [8]
There was even a time when Jimmy had considered becoming a Jesuit himself. His parents, second-wave Irish immigrants to Boston, left Dublin before he was born. His mother was never vague about their motive for the move. "The Old Sod was a backward, Church-ridden Third World country filled with dictatorial, sexually repressed priests sticking their noses into normal people’s bedrooms," she’d declare whenever asked. Despite this, Eileen admitted to being "culturally Catholic," and Kevin Quinn held out for Jesuit-run schools for the boy merely on the basis of the discipline and high scholastic standards. They had raised a son with a generous soul, with an impulse to heal hurts and lighten loads, who could not stand idly while men like Emilio Sandoz poured out their lives and energy for others.
Jimmy sat a while longer, thinking, and then went quietly to the debit station, punching in perhaps five times the amount needed to pay for their meals this evening. "Lunches all week, okay? And watch him while he eats, right, Rosa? Otherwise he’ll give the food away to some kid." Rosa nodded, wondering if Jimmy noticed that he himself had just eaten half of the priest’s meal. "I’ll tell you his problem," Quinn continued, oblivious. "He’s got two-hundred-pound ideas about getting things done, and a hundred and thirty pounds to do it with. He’s gonna make himself sick."
Over in the corner, Sandoz, eyes closed, was smiling. "Sí, Mamacita," he said, mingling sarcasm with affection. Abruptly, he hauled himself to his feet, yawned and stretched. Together, the two men left the bar and walked out into the soft sea air of La Perla in early spring.
IF THERE WAS anything that might have strengthened Jimmy Quinn’s faith in the ultimate reasonableness of authority, it was the early career of Father Emilio Sandoz. Nothing about it made much sense until you got to the end and saw that the collective mind of the Society of Jesus had been working patiently in a direction mere individuals could not perceive.
Many Jesuits were multilingual but Sandoz more than most. A native of Puerto Rico, he’d grown up with both Spanish and English. His years of Jesuit formation tapped the rigorous riches of a classical education and Sandoz became nearly as proficient in Greek as in Latin, which he’d not just studied but used as a living language: for daily communication, for research, for the sheer pleasure of reading beautifully structured prose. That much was not far out of the ordinary among Jesuit scholastics.
But then, during a research project on the seventeenth-century missions to Quebec, Sandoz decided to learn French, in order to read the Jesuit Relations in the original. He spent eight intense days with a teacher, absorbing French grammar, then built vocabulary on his own. When his paper was complete at the end of the semester, he was comfortable reading in French, although he made no effort to learn to speak the language. Next came Italian, partly in anticipation of going to Rome someday and partly out of curiosity, to see how another Romance language had developed from the Latin stem. And then Portuguese, simply because he liked the sound of it and loved Brazilian music.
The Jesuits have a tradition of linguistic study. Not surprisingly, Emilio was encouraged to begin a doctorate in linguistics immediately after ordination. Three years later, everyone expected Emilio Sandoz, S.J., Ph.D., to be offered a professorship at a Jesuit university.
Instead, the linguist was asked to help organize a reforestation project while teaching at Xavier High School on Chuuk in the Caroline Islands. After only thirteen months of what would ordinarily have been a six-year assignment, he was moved to an Inuit town just below the Arctic circle and spent a single year assisting a Polish priest in establishing an adult literacy program, and then it was on to a Christian enclave in southern Sudan, where he worked in a relief station for Kenyan refugees with a priest from Eritrea.
He grew accustomed to