Saint Ignatius of Northern Utah

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Members of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but also pledge loyalty to the worldwide mission statement of their founder. This mandate from St. Ignatius of Loyola (Feast Day July 31) is simple: to help others and seek God in all things. It’s not mere lip service, and the proof lies in various obscure corners of the globe, including my hometown in rural Northern Utah.

Jesuit priests from California built St. Mary’s Parish (formerly in Roy, now in West Haven) in 1957. Along with the Holy Cross sisters, they also helped start my alma mater, St. Joseph Catholic High School in Ogden in 1954. These projects include many interesting stories, but the people—the Jesuits—behind the stories are quite interesting too. I knew four of them.

One was Father Louis Kern (1898-1984). Ordained in 1938, he was one of the first Jesuits assigned to work in Northern Utah. He initially led a congregation at the small Santa Maria Mission in downtown Ogden (established in 1944), where there was but one Mass a month. Father Kern grew that tiny community into a full parish of over a hundred families and built a brand new red brick church for them. In his spare time, he taught Spanish and French at my high school. An accomplished scholar and civic leader, he may have been best known for skiing on Utah’s mountainous slopes well past the age of 80.

Father Raymond Devlin (1924-2011) taught religion and Latin classes and coached our high school track and distance running teams. With the assistance of his good friend Shawn Alfonsi, one of my classmates, Father Devlin wrote a fascinating book called Cha about another St. Joseph teacher—his brother, Father Joe Devlin (1916-1998). Father Joe did extensive and extraordinary work helping Vietnamese refugees and as a result they called him “cha,” which in their language means “dad.”

Father Francis P. Saussotte (1914-1994) taught math at our high school for several years. He was unique. Instead of calling exams tests, he timed them around the holidays and gave them unusual nicknames such as the annual “Turkey Shoot,” administered in November just before Thanksgiving, and “Santa’s Grab Bag” before the Christmas holiday. His class could have been nicknamed Sines, Psalms and Cosines, given his frequent propensity to go off on a tangent and burst out singing the Twenty-third Psalm.

His love of verse was not strictly biblical, however, and often was mischievous. He taught us new and interesting ways to good-naturedly taunt opposing schools during varsity basketball games. My favorite was his clever but infamous horsemeat-as-dogfood cheer when we played the Mustangs from faraway Dugway High School: “A-L, A-L, A-L-P-O, Dugway, Dugway, ALPO.”

The beloved and perhaps best known Northern Utah Jesuit—Father Neale Herrlich (1919-2006)—taught our religion classes and coached several sports teams, including in basketball and track. My old high school gym now proudly bears his name in gratitude for acts of selfless service too numerous to list here. Father Herrlich was a short and lively character with sparkling eyes, known for randomly and loudly uttering such bits of wisdom as “when the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the pit!”

Whenever a student was causing disruption or otherwise annoying him, Father Herrlich would look him (it almost always was one of us males) in the eye and say, with an exaggerated emphasis on the final syllable, “Mr. O’Brien…may I help you OUT?” He also had a deadly accurate aim with soft chalkboard erasers, and could lob one twenty to thirty feet and hit a distracted, dozing, or talking student square in the head.

One day I tried to match wits with Father Herrlich, no small task given his high level of education and experience. He kept asking the class if anyone wanted to be a member of what he referred to as the “Dolphin Club.” Even now, I have no clue what he meant. One day in class, I raised my hand and asked him, “What is the porpoise of the Dolphin Club?” He gave me a half grin but, blessedly, did not throw an eraser at me. Such passive positive reinforcement doomed me to a lifelong love affair with puns.

Father Herrlich was best friends and fishing buddies with a St. Mary’s parishioner named Dolph “Doc” Comeau, who was my future wife Vicki Comeau’s great-uncle. A few years after we got married, but before Father Herrlich passed away in 2006, Vicki and I were able to host him for dinner in our home along with Doc’s daughter and son in law, Mary Ann and Ron Spindler. We all observed, more than once, how the world is a very small place.

The website for the Jesuits of the Western United States, the organization to which these four extraordinary men belonged, describes the great gift their founder gave to the world—the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The exercises are “a dynamic process of prayer, meditation, and self-awareness” with a basic thrust “to make us more attentive to God’s activity in our world, more responsive to what God is calling us to do.”

A popular Ignatian exercise is the Daily Examen, which involves “prayerfully recollecting moments during the day and reflecting on how God was present at those times, followed by a decision to act in some way.” Reflecting on the service of these four Jesuit men is a form of this exercise too. They brought God’s love and grace into countless lives, every day, by their kindness as well as their care and compassion for us. And what better decision could flow from such an insight than to try emulate even a small portion of their humanity and their purposeful devotion?

After all, they embodied three of the most important things their St. Ignatius taught: (1) Love is shown more in deeds than in words; (2) Teach us to give and not to count the cost; and (3) Pray as if God will take care of all; act as if all is up to you.

*Mike O’Brien is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. His book Monastery Mornings (found here), about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, will be published by Paraclete Press (more information here) in August 2021.