Novice master makes Miguel Pro preach his ballgame sermon a second time

EL LLANO, Michoacán, October 1911 AD — Miguel Pro, whom the Church beatified in 1988 AD as Blessed Miguel Pro, has been a Jesuit novice at El Llano for two months, and the other novices already know him as the one who makes them laugh. A novitiate is where a religious order tests the men who want to join it. This month, according to longstanding Catholic Tradition, he brought the novices’ holiday game to a halt with a sermon, and then the novice master had him give it a second time.

He is twenty, the eldest son of a mine owner, and until August he ran the office of his father’s mines. The office held nearly two thousand files, and he knew them so well that when one was needed he could say its number at once. Whenever he was free he went down the pit to talk with the miners, and he soon picked up their slang.

El Llano is a one-storey house spread round patios, with a cross over the low entrance and plants spilling from tubs, on a branch railway line about twelve hours from Mexico City.

The game that day was baseball, and Tradition holds that Miguel was waiting his turn at bat and could not stand still. He climbed the wire netting behind the catcher and began to speak to the other novices from the top. They laughed and urged him on, so he kept going. The game stopped, and every novice gathered at the foot of the netting to listen.

The novice master happened to walk past just as Miguel finished, and asked what was going on. One of the novices told him: “Miguel has just been treating us to a sermon.” The novice master answered: “Splendid. Sorry I missed it. Miguel will no doubt favor me with a repetition.” Miguel, flustered, had to start again from the beginning.

A year ago you were a clerk in your father’s office. How did you come to be here?

In August 1910 AD his sister María Luz entered the convent of the Oasis at Aguascalientes. Six months later his eldest sister, María de la Concepción, followed her. Both had kept their plan to become nuns a secret, and their parents did nothing to stop them. Miguel was furious. The sisters’ spiritual directors were Jesuits, so he blamed the Jesuits and swore he would never forgive them.

You decided to become a Jesuit, one of the men you had sworn never to forgive. What turned you?

Miguel walked into a church where a priest was preaching on the Passion, and he heard the preacher ask: “Todo esto hizo y sufrió Jesucristo por nosotros, y nosotros ¿qué hacemos por Jesucristo?” (Jesus Christ did and suffered all this for us, and what are we doing for Jesus Christ?) Miguel began to wonder what he had done for Jesus Christ, and he decided to follow Him.

Did your parents know what you meant to do?

Miguel wrote to the priest who governed the Jesuits in Mexico, asking to be admitted, without saying that his parents knew nothing of it. Three Jesuits at Saltillo, the northern city where the family had lived since 1908 AD, examined him. They had no doubt about his vocation, but all three said he needed his parents’ consent. Civil war was spreading, and Miguel could not face telling his parents he was leaving just when they needed him most. Soon afterwards he fell ill with a very high fever. His parents sat by his bed day and night, and in his delirium he let the secret out. The news hurt them deeply. Even so, when the time came, they were glad to give him their permission, and in August he arrived at El Llano.

What do you do after lunch, when the others stay on to talk?

The novices eat in two sittings. One day, after the second sitting, a fellow novice, Adolfo Pulido, asked Miguel to stay for recreation, the free time the novices spend together. Miguel answered him half joking and half in earnest: “No puedo, porque voy a perder la vocación” (I can’t, because I’ll lose my vocation). Adolfo Pulido said he did not understand, and Miguel told him: “Si no duermo siesta voy a tener mucho sueño en la oración, y si no hago bien mi oración llegaré hasta a salir de la Compañía” (If I don’t take my siesta I’ll be very sleepy at prayer, and if I don’t pray well I could end up leaving the Society of Jesus).

You had to give that sermon twice for the novice master. How does he treat you the rest of the time?

The novice master, Father Manuel Santiago, saw Miguel’s qualities at once and reported to the superiors that he had a remarkable novice. Father Manuel Santiago was the first to laugh at Miguel’s jokes, but he never missed a chance to test his novice, and he rebuked him sharply for the smallest faults. Humiliations neither surprised Miguel nor brought him down, and he often gave the reason: “Ya he hecho el sacrificio de mi honra a Dios al entrar en la Compañía” (I already made the sacrifice of my honour to God when I entered the Society of Jesus).