At St. Ignatius, Jerry was a debater and a cheerleader, but “the only reason you would be aware of Jerry at that time is he was the son of the attorney general,” said Frank Damrell, a debate opponent from Modesto who later became a college roommate.9 But biographer Roger Rapoport, in his dual biography of Jerry and Pat Brown, California Dreaming: The Political Odyssey of Pat and Jerry Brown, has a differing version of Jerry Brown’s days at St. Ignatius, saying that Brown “distinguished himself in the oral arts. No one at St. Ignatius could match his verbal abilities.” Rapoport reports that Brown was a star on the debate team and won freshman elocution and sophomore oratorical contests.10 He developed a technique of picking apart an opponent’s case with a series of strategic questions.
When he graduated from St. Ignatius at age seventeen, Jerry wanted to enter a seminary and train for the priesthood. But he had to be eighteen to do that without parental consent, and Pat refused to give it. He advised his son to attend college for a year, and then, if Jerry still wanted to become a priest, he would consent.
Brown may very well have had spiritual reasons for wanting to enter the seminary, but it’s a good bet that he also wanted to out of rebellion, said George Skelton, the longtime political columnist for the Los Angeles Times who has covered Brown for more than four decades. “He was rebelling against society, I guess—against the way things work,” Skelton said.11
Acceding to his father’s wishes, Jerry, with a few of his St. Ignatius friends, entered Santa Clara College, a pleasant and quiet males-only Jesuit institution thirty miles south of San Francisco, in the heart of what was then known as the Valley of the Heart’s Delight and would later become Silicon Valley. Santa Clara College appeared to be an ideal place to begin higher education for a thoughtful young man with a strong religious bent and some thoughts about politics. Now a university, Santa Clara declares its goal to be “the preparation of students to assume leadership roles in society” through liberal, professional, and preprofessional education.
During his year at Santa Clara College, Brown had a reputation as a night owl, fond of staying up late, not to carouse, but to discuss philosophical questions with roommate Damrell, the former debate opponent. To continue their discussions past lights-out, the roommates tucked towels under the doors to block the light. Jerry continued to be a debater at Santa Clara, once participating in a debate in which one of the judges was Marshall F. McComb, a justice on the state Supreme Court.12
Despite the intellectual attractions and pleasant student life at Santa Clara, the desire to be a priest still burned in Jerry Brown. After a year at Santa Clara, on August 15, 1956, the now-eighteen-year-old Jerry entered a seminary to begin training as a Jesuit. The institution he chose was Sacred Heart Novitiate, founded in 1887 in the Santa Cruz Mountains near Los Gatos, a town some sixty miles south of San Francisco. Jerry was one of forty incoming novitiates, including two close friends—Peter Finnegan and Damrell13—who drove down to Los Gatos together to enter the seminary. They entered on the day of the Feast of the Assumption, the traditional day that aspiring priests enter the seminary.
Young men studying to become Jesuit priests face a long process, as much as fifteen years. It requires consistent, long-term dedication. The novitiates’ studies included the classics, theology, languages, and literature (within limits). Some parts of Brown’s new life were familiar. He had already been steeped in Jesuit education by the time he arrived at Sacred Heart, including his enrollment at the Jesuit Santa Clara College and his high school attendance at St. Ignatius, which was named after the Jesuits’ founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius was a charismatic and devout Basque Spaniard of noble birth who experienced a religious epiphany after being wounded in battle. He founded the Jesuits—the Society of Jesus—in 1534. The order emphasizes rigorous religious education, intellectualism, obedience, poverty, and chastity, all of which were visited upon the young men at Sacred Heart. The Jesuits were also then interested in proselytizing, attempting to stop the spread of Protestantism. Of formidable intellect and deeply dedicated, they have been referred to as “the Pope’s Marines.” They have also been accused of intellectual arrogance and having an unfeeling attitude toward fellow human beings, even while engaged in education and charitable works. Because the educational institutions they founded were at that time far superior to those otherwise available, Jesuits trained lawyers and public officials; their educational institutions have spread around the world. Jesuits came to California in 1849, when two Jesuit priests originally from Italy, Michael Accolti and John Nobili, arrived in San Francisco from Oregon.
Life as a seminarian was tough, especially for a young man raised in relatively affluent circumstances. Shortly after their arrival, novitiates at Sacred Heart began a thirty-day retreat designed to cleanse their minds of secular biases and ponder the meaning of Jesus. They were housed six to a room, and the room was austere, with no running water. The day began at 5 A.M. and was spent in meditation, learning Latin, attending Mass, doing kitchen chores and other housekeeping, and learning the rules of life laid down by the order. Other physical labor was also required at times. Sacred Heart’s stately main structure is located in the midst of a vineyard, and the novitiates spent each October being hot, sweaty, and juice-stained, picking the grapes for the esteemed dessert wines of the Sacred Heart winery.
Novitiates spent their long days mostly in silence. No casual conversation was permitted. Parents or close relatives were allowed one two-hour Sunday visit per month and one letter per week. Except for what they learned through the visits and letters, novitiates knew little of what was occurring “outside,” because newspapers, television, and radio were forbidden. There was no smoking. Dates with women were out of the question. The Jesuits wanted no distractions or interference with the business of instilling their ideas in young heads. It was total immersion.14 Occasionally, Brown and his fellow novitiates engaged in a practice called “taking the discipline,” which involved wrapping wire around a leg to produce discomfort that was thought to increase spiritual awareness and penitence. Brown on occasion wrapped the wire so tightly that he limped, according to fellow novitiates. Self-denial was daily preached and practiced.
Although a novitiate was severely constricted in reading material and outside influences, the inward life of the mind suited Jerry at that point in his life. He felt it gave him inner discipline, and he enjoyed the pure intellectual exercises involved in meditating on life’s most important issues through the lens of the Jesuits. It instilled in him a certain amount of intellectual arrogance, a sternness, a liking for austerity, and a sense of righteousness (critics would say self-righteousness) that has manifested itself throughout his political career. Years later, as a member of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees, as secretary of state, as governor, and as a mayor, he lectured fellow politicians, voters, and reporters on what was important. He has continued the practice in his third gubernatorial term, telling voters that they have to face up to “tough choices” and be realistic about what government can do.
Although he had taken his initial vows and been elevated to the “juniorate” level on the pathway to priesthood, by 1960 Jerry had become frustrated and grown tired of the limited life of a seminarian. He was restless, and his intellectual curiosity had begun to burst the boundaries of the Jesuits’ rigorous, but constricted, educational outlook. Jerry had begun to question some of the Jesuits’ teachings, including chastity and obedience to a set of unshakable rules on how one should live one’s life. He was unhappy with the Jesuit Province’s decision to forbid Sacred Heart juniors from reading the works of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit intellectual Jerry admired who became internationally famous as a paleontologist but whose writings on science, especially cosmic history and evolution, disturbed the Vatican.
Along with his scientific studies, Teilhard de Chardin was an explorer of the spiritual. He told his admirers that they were not human beings in search of a spiritual experience; they were spiritual beings immersed in a human experience. And he instructed that our duty,