CALLING RETREAT.

Anyone who is old enough may remember how Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler were raising all kinds of academic hell at the University of Chicago in the 1930s and 1940s. Hutchins criticized most institutions of higher learning, including ones founded by religious congregations, as places where "chemistry majors cannot speak to economics majors and hardly anyone is speaking to God."

Hutchins and Adler began speaking to God, or at least listening to God, through the works of Plato, Aristotle, and other Great Books authors, including Thomas Aquinas. About 1937, Adler, who died earlier this year, spoke at the New York Catholic Worker on Mott Street. So many people showed up we had to move the meeting to the Franciscan church two blocks away.

Neither before nor since have I heard a more persuasive speaker. At Harvard I had heard a few--surprisingly few--good lecturers. Among the best was Alfred North Whitehead, whose sheer enthusiasm for what he was saying overcame the difficulty of what he was saying. The difference between Whitehead and Adler was that I could understand Adler. He was a beautifully clear, logical, eloquent speaker.

With their "discovery" of Thomism, Hutchins and Adler went on to create an almost Catholic atmosphere at Chicago, though neither man was a Catholic. As one wit put it at the time: "The University of Chicago is a Baptist institution where Jews go to become Catholics." Until a recent weekend, however, I had never met one of these Jewish converts.

That meeting came about during a retreat in Spencer, Massachusetts, at Saint Joseph's Abbey, a monastery operated by the Cistercian Order of the Strict Observance, commonly known as the Trappists. The monk who gave us a series of talks--ninety-one-year-old Father M. Raphael Simon, "still sharp as a tack," as one of his fellow monks put it--recounted that he had been a student of Adler's at Chicago and had converted to Catholicism from Judaism, and that he had given up a promising career as a psychiatrist to join the Trappists. Father Simon's scientific background was evident in his talks that weekend, as well as in his book, The Glory of Thy People. He recalled seven or eight other Jewish students at Chicago who had joined the church in the thirties, and remarked that Adler, in his mid-nineties, had become a Catholic.

I had not been on retreat at Spencer since the fifties, shortly after it was founded by a group of monks who had been driven by fire from their abbey in Rhode Island. In the postwar years, there had been a tremendous surge in Trappist vocations among returning veterans and others, inspired largely by the popularity of Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain. At the first Mass celebrated at Spencer in 1953, there were 156 monks in residence; two years later 186. Over the years, some left to start daughter houses in Colorado, in Brazil, and in Chile. The current population is about 80, the median age older than in the 1950s, but revealing no serious indication that the contemplative life has lost its appeal. The rate of recruitment is probably better than that of the secular clergy, but this may be because a large percentage of the monks do not go on to priesthood.

Approaching the monastery on a Friday evening, we turned south instead of north and arrived too late for vespers. At compline, a guitar was played and the psalmody was clearly not Gregorian. I thought, "Have the monks gone soft? What's with the pop tunes?" But that was the last of that. From then on we were back in the Middle Ages, where we belonged.

Obviously, a large part of the Trappist appeal is the pull, the charm, of history and of tradition. The psalters we were given were not very useful in following the chant, but they were enough. We sat there in the back of the church, often in the dark, just watching and listening, absorbed by the ambience, the ancient ceremony of prayer and praise, the almost palpable presence of the Holy Spirit. This was the heart of the weekend, a most necessary and useful, strategic retreat into the beauty and chanted wisdom of our Catholic past.

As we drove away on Sunday afternoon, I asked my friend Charlie Bolthrunis, himself a former Dominican friar, "How would you respond to the critics, many of them good religious folk, who say, 'This is all self-indulgence. They make excellent jams and jellies and handsome liturgical vestments, and a few retreatants like ourselves may be entertained and even briefly inspired, but what are they doing to solve, or heal, the pain, the poverty and injustice--the real problems of our wicked world?' How would you respond to that?"

Charlie was at no loss for an answer. He said forthrightly: "One, there are all kinds of flowers in the garden. These men have their own unique vocation, to spend their lives in prayer and praise to God, and to intercede for us who are out here in this 'wicked world.' And two, I cannot understand this lack of confidence in the value and the power of prayer. Our whole Christian faith rests firmly on the power of prayer and the notion that God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--responds to that prayer."

"Charlie," I said, "what do you say we go again next year?"

John C. Cort is a former Catholic Worker, a union and antipoverty activist, and a Commonweal editor.