Fr. Patrick O'Reilly, SJ 1872 - 1958 Fr. Patrick O'Reilly's mission band efforts for the California and later the Oregon provinces led him to miners in the Yukon, prisoners in the state pen at Salem, Ore., and lepers on the island of Molokai. Jesuit historian Fr. Wilfred Schoenberg (Paths to the Northwest) describes Fr. O'Reilly and longtime partner Fr. Thomas Meagher, SJ: "Meagher and O'Reilly made a great team when they preached a mission. Meagher was a holy terror in the pulpit but in the confessional he was as gentle as a dove. O'Reilly, on the other hand, preached sweetness and light. ... The timid lined up outside his confessional, expecting a soft, easy time of it. Many found, instead, an unpleasant surprise."

by Fr. Tom Clancy, SJ

A generation ago I was approached by a novice who proposed that the Society of Jesus form a group of articulate and learned Jesuits who would go from one parish to another preaching to the people in the pews on themes from Ignatius's Spiritual Exercises.

I told him that we were already doing that. We called it the mission band, which gave parish missions throughout the country.

During the last century and the first half of this, a number of Jesuits in each province were detailed to the mission band. Singly or in teams they would respond to invitations from bishops and pastors to visit parishes whether in New York, St. Louis, New Orleans, Denver, or points in between, such as Lynn, Mass., Oliphant, Pa., Parsons, Kans., and Rochelle, Ill. For anywhere from one to three weeks they would give sermons, hear confessions, accept converts, and prepare parishioners for first communion and confirmation.

Fr. Thomas Meagher, SJ 1870 - 1936

For shorter missions, women would come to church in the afternoons and men in the evenings; for longer missions it might be women one week and men the next. The Jesuits' sermons, heavy on oratory, were generally of the fire-and-brimstone variety. This revival aspect of parish missions was complemented by confessions and catechetical instruction and sometimes visits to every home in the parish.

The number of people involved could be astounding. An 1865 mission in New York was the occasion for "twelve thousand communions, ninety-seven conversions from Protestantism, and five hundred first communions of adults," according to one Jesuit historian.

Things have changed since then. From time to time Jesuits are still approached to give parish missions; I myself have given several throughout Alabama and Louisiana. But it is safe to say that the parish mission is no longer a familiar concept to most U.S. Catholics today.

It was the Portuguese who made the word missão popular in the fifteenth century when they used it to describe their effort to christianize their vast empires in Asia and South America.

Fr. Arnold Damen, SJ 1815 - 1890

Fr. Cornelius Smarius, SJ 1823 - 1870

A three-week mission given at St. Francis Xavier in New York in 1863 was described by another preacher there: "Our mission finished yesterday . . . Father Smarius preached in the church to men and women, Father Damen in the large college hall to men only . . . Each . . . was greeted with the sight of crowds of people thronging with every eagerness to hear him . . . The stage from which the Father preached was crowded with men standing up. At the entrance to the hall, a hundred auditors, unable to find room in the hall, were ranged along the steps of the stairway. Several controversial sermons were given in the church. The Protestants came in good number. Last Sunday after high mass twenty of them were baptized in presence of the whole congregation . . . The confessions began the second day of the mission and thereafter there was no falling-off in the crowds around the confessionals."

By the time Shakespeare used mission in Troilus and Cressida, circa 1606, its meaning had expanded to include secular concepts in the fields of business, diplomacy, and war.

But in my dictionary you have to go all the way to definition number 13 under mission to find this meaning: "a series of special religious services for increasing religious devotion and converting unbelievers."

Mission is a key word in the Jesuit constitutions and rules. In the Society's early days, every Jesuit school or house had one or more preachers who preached in church or chapel or even in the streets. The material for their sermons was taken for the most part from the Spiritual Exercises, in which Ignatius recommends that retreatants pray on the nature of sin, the end of humankind, and the four last things: death, judgment, heaven, and hell.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such missions flourished in Europe. After a downswing in the late eighteenth century there developed in the nineteenth century a new enthusiasm for foreign missions, of which the United States was deemed most needy. Some Jesuits sent to the United States brought with them experience in the parish missions. One of the earliest was Fr. Francis X. Weninger (1805 1888), an Austrian who was already a priest and a doctor of divinity when he entered the Jesuits in 1832. In 1848 he asked the Jesuit general, John Roothaan (himself a great enthusiast for the parish mission), to send him to the United States.

Fr. James Chrysostom Bouchard, SJ 1823 - 1889

Fr. Francis X. Weninger, SJ 1805 - 1888

For thirty years, he had preached and taught until the people of California, Oregon, Nevada and the territories beyond the Sierras had come to love and venerate his name. We remember well, on several occasions, when he was announced to preach at St. Ignatius Church, San Francisco, having seen streams of people turned away at the door. Hundreds of converts are to his credit, and a whole generation of the faithful among whom he labored will feel that, in his death, a household friend has been lost." -- New York Freeman's Journal and Catholic Register, January 18, 1890

As regards to the number of times one is to preach, I myself gave ordinarily two set sermons, one of these class-conferences, and an address, thus preaching four times a day. When, as was frequently the case, the congregation was a mixed one, of English, German, or French, I had to preach eight times a day, or upwards of 60 times in eight days. If it happened that all three nationalities were present in large numbers in a congregation, the leading points had to be put out before each nationality. Then, of course, each sermon is considerably shorter, the three taking an hour and a half. Such a mission, in the three languages, is very taxing upon the missionary, but the effect is far greater than when a special mission is given to each nationality."

Weninger gave his first mission in Indiana later that year, opening on the feast of the Immaculate Conception and closing ten days later. At first he preached only in German, but then he branched out into English and French. He normally gave 30 or more missions a year and also wrote popular devotional books, which he sold at his missions.

Fr. Arnold Damen, SJ, (1815 1890) a native of Holland, was recruited by De Smet to work in America. Ordained after only seven years with the Jesuits, Damen was sent to Chicago where he founded Holy Family Parish and St. Ignatius College. For most of his Jesuit life, however, he spent up to 200 days per year giving missions with fellow Dutch Jesuit Fr. Cornelius Smarius (1823 1870). Both had their particular gifts in the field of oratory. A contemporary wrote, "Smarius attracted crowds and won prestige by his distinguished presence and his power of eloquence. Damen had the unction that converted hearts."

It was Fr. Damen who introduced James Bouchard (1823 1889), a future Jesuit, to the Catholic faith. Bouchard, whose mother was French and father a Delaware Indian, joined the Jesuits after his conversion. He first worked with Damen in the Midwest but eventually moved to California, where his sermons attracted great crowds to the local Jesuit church. He traveled to many Western states, preaching in cities, towns, and mining camps. When he died, a New York newspaper called him "the Father Damen of the West."

On the eastern seaboard the most notable Jesuit preacher was Fr. Bernard Maguire (1818 1886). Though twice president of Georgetown University in the mid 1800s, his favorite apostolate was the parish mission.

In New Orleans the superior of the mission band, Fr. Will Power, served as a special envoy ("visitor" in Jesuit terms) with all the powers of the General to the Jesuits in Canada, Belgium, Ireland, and Australia. His companion of the mission band was Fr. John F. O'Connor, first provincial of the New Orleans Province. Like Power, O'Connor preached in a variety of languages, including French, Spanish, Italian, and English.

Frs. Thomas Daly, SJ, (1888 1936) and Julius Oberholzer, SJ, (1891 1942) were in the New Orleans Province mission band, a prestigious appointment in Jesuit circles. Their itinerant preaching took them through Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, and Texas.

From the late nineteenth century down to recent times every Jesuit province had a mission band of as many as twenty Jesuits whose exclusive duty was to preach parish missions. They also did retreats, novenas of grace, forty hours, and tridua.

Fr. Bernard Maguire, SJ 1818 - 1886

His voice was sweet, penetrating, full-orbed and capable of expressing the varied sentiments of his mind. He was a great preacher and missionary. He never pretended, like some youthful pulpit orators just out of philosophy and metaphysics, to wrestle with recondite problems and ‘shoot o'er the heads' of his audience; but everything he said was limpid and to the point, suitable for the wise and otherwise." -- James Randall Ryder, Reminiscences of Father Maguire

In the first half of 1949 the mission band of the New England Province, for instance, carried out at least 50 assignments: 32 parish missions (half of which lasted two weeks), 9 retreats, and various other assignments including Tre Hore devotions. A quarter of the assignments were preached in languages other than English, including Lithuanian, French, and Italian.

What happened to the parish mission? Somewhere in the 1960s the "mission band" entry in province catalogues disappears. Jesuits are still giving retreats today, but usually in their own retreat houses. Perhaps parish missions are no longer popular because of movies and TV. Or perhaps fire-and-brimstone sermons are no longer palatable, though there was a time when Catholics at their missions, like Protestants at their revivals, loved to hear about the horror of sin and the pains of hell.

That novice who approached me years ago is now a learned theologian. The mission band is a thing of the past. But in their heyday, parish missions were a wonderful way to catechize Catholics, 95 percent of whom had never attended Catholic schools. Parish missions were also an opportunity for healing feuds, going to confession, and uniting families divided by long-forgotten grievances. Parish missions were one of the most important instruments for the growth of the Catholic Church in this country.