End of an era: Jesuits to leave eastern Montana

When the Jesuits arrived, Montana was little more than a blank space on a map.

Inspired by Iroquois tales of "men clothed in black" who could teach them "to know God" and "enable them to live after death," the Salish people sent four delegations to the east, on long and sometimes fatal journeys to find the "black robes" and bring them back to the Bitterroot Valley.

Finally in 1840, after nine years of waiting, a wandering Jesuit priest named Pierre-Jean DeSmet arrived at the Three Forks of the Missouri River and was greeted by bands of Salish, Nez Perce and Shoshoni people. The construction of St. Mary Mission one year later is commonly recognized as the first permanent European settlement in Montana.

At a small church near the southern edge of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation, a final act in the long history of the Jesuits in Montana is being played out. After 53 years of pastoral care for Native American communities across the state, Father Joseph Retzel is retiring.

With his departure, a 128-year history of Jesuit residency at Fort Belknap will conclude. Only two permanent communities of Jesuit priests will remain in Montana: one attached to St. Francis Xavier Church in Missoula, the other at the St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Indian Reservation.

"Our provincial (Father Scott Santarosa) came last October to talk about retirement," Retzel said recently. "He said, 'Joseph, I know it's in your mind to die here, but I want you to pray about it, and start thinking about retiring.'"

Retzel's prayers ended in quiet humility.

"It is difficult — and I grieve — yes," Retzel confessed. "These people are my family, and with my leaving — I'll be leaving my family. But following the provincial's lead, I've been praying about it, and I've come to the point that I see it's going to be OK. At 87, I'm feeling physically infirm, and also as a priest I'm feeling a declining quality of my priestliness. For those two reasons I can see it's going to be OK to move into retirement. It will be good to have someone fresh and new take over.

Retzel remains vibrant and active. He greets visitors warmly, grasping their hands or clutching their shoulders — recalling the names of students and parishioners from decades before, whose acquaintance his company might hold in common. The old Jesuit has a quick wit and a disarming laugh. He employs it often.

On July 15, he will make a short journey to Spokane, where Retzel will join a community of retired Jesuit priests on the campus of Gonzaga University. Those who know him best grieve at his departure.

"It's not just that he's a special priest, he's a special person," said Mary Byrne, a teacher at the St. Paul Mission school. "Some people come here and feel like they belong. Some people come and always feel out of place. Father Retzel is comfortable with all the people. He's just so in tune with the people around him — he is there for all of them. Of anyone I've ever met in my life, he's the least judgmental person I've ever met. He just listens and is peaceful — and absorbs the people's pain. He's so happy to show them some kind of caring, and doesn't make any judgments."

Yet Byrne recognizes the prudence of Retzel's decision — even if she is saddened by the reality.

"I had to get my heart OK with him retiring," she said. "I think if he stayed, he couldn't slow down. Nobody would let him rest, and he wouldn't let himself rest. I don't think he could see a need and not fill it. I believe now that retiring is probably better for him, because if he didn't, he would never ever have a chance to just stop and relax — to just pray and be with other Jesuits. He loves hanging out with the priests and talking — he loves that. It's probably a good thing for him — it's definitely not a good thing for us."

To be clear, Retzel's departure from St. Paul will not mean an end to the Catholic mission on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation. The churches at Hays, Fort Belknap Agency, Lodgepole and Zortman will carry on, though without the comforting presence of a resident priest.

"We just got word the other day from the bishop himself that the care of the people will continue," Retzel assured, "but not by a priest residing here. For the time being, he will be coming in from outside somewhere. Who that priest will be and where he will come from, we don't know."

Whoever that new priest is, he almost certainly will not be a Jesuit.

For the progress of souls

Founded at the outset of the Protestant Reformation, the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was formed in 1534 by a Spanish soldier (Ignatius of Loyola), who dedicated his life to "the defense of the faith and for the progress of souls."

Sometimes referred to as "God's soldiers," Jesuit priests take additional vows of obedience and poverty, and throughout their 500-year history have often been called upon to travel to remote locations and to live under extreme conditions.

In 1885, the German Jesuit, Father Frederick Ebeischweiler, was selected to establish a mission among the Gros Ventre and Assiniboine people of central Montana. Arriving at the Milk River near the present-day town of Harlem that same year, Ebeischweiler built a small chapel, then immediately decided to move it further south —far away from the corrupting influences of the military trading post located there.

"We four arrived on that beautiful May morning at the place where the People's Creek gushes forth from the Rockies (Little Rocky Mountains) into the valley," Ebeischweiler wrote in 1886. "There I found what I was seeking. Here is a mountain forest, the best of timber. Here is a living creek with the purest of water. Here is a valley where once old Indians used to hunt buffalo. My firm resolution to build a mission at this place was settled."

The original log church of St. Paul was consecrated in the spring of 1887. Aided by a delegation of Ursuline nuns, Ebeischweiler opened a boarding school a few months later.

He remained at the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation for less than six years. In 1892 Ebeischweiler left the mission. He spent the rest of his life as a wandering missionary establishing churches across eastern Montana.

His short career at St. Paul was not unusual. Of the 29 Jesuit Priests who have led St. Paul over the past 128 years, most have remained at Hays for three years or fewer. Information from the Catholic Diocese of Great Falls/Billings shows that, with more than 29 years of service, Father Retzel is by far the longest serving priest at St. Paul.

"I was ordained 55 years ago in Spokane. I was a real workaholic back then — oh God bless America," he said, chuckling at the exuberance of his youth. "I was as busy as could be, doing everything. I'd have maybe five or six people coming to me who wanted to become Catholic, and then I'd go up to the hospital to visit the sick — and baptisms and funerals and the Holy sacraments ..."

Joseph Retzel was the youngest of seven children born to German parents who had moved to Wenatchee, Wash., from New York City. As a child during the Great Depression, Retzel recalled his mother feeding homeless men who'd jumped off the freight trains running down the railway near their home.

After graduating from Gonzaga High School in 1945, Retzel enlisted in the U.S. Navy. While stationed in Gulf Port, Miss., Retzel witnessed the injustices of segregation first hand. In memoirs provided by the Great Falls Diocese, Retzel spoke of the deep impression on his memory of black people being forced to ride at the back of the Gulf Port City bus, and of small children denied an education at the local school because of the color of their skin.

Following his stint in the Navy, Retzel graduated from Gonzaga University, then entered a Jesuit Seminary. He was ordained as a priest in 1960, and was sent from Spokane to became the assistant pastor at St. Jude Church in Havre in 1962. He took his final vows as a Jesuit in 1963. Eight years later he was assigned to replace Father Frederick Simoneau at St. Paul Mission on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation.

By the early 1970s the mission school at St. Paul had been graduating students for more than 30 years. About 35 seniors received their diplomas from St. Paul Mission High School at the end of Retzel's first full year there. Only one more graduating class would walk out of the mission high school doors.

On the night of Dec. 5, 1973, a fire broke out in the upper floors of the St. Paul school. The closest fire truck was 45 miles away.

"We had no preparation for a fire whatsoever," Retzel recalled. "By the time they got here, the pump on the front of the truck was frozen."

Desperate firefighters drove the truck forward, closer to the flames, in the hope of thawing the pump out, but the intense heat nearly started the truck's tires on fire. By then it was already too late.

When daylight arrived, the St. Paul school was a smoking wreck. Half of the adjacent convent had also been destroyed. The Franciscan nuns who lived there were forced to move into a converted garage without running water for the remainder of that winter.

The grade school students at St. Paul were immediately absorbed into the public school system in Hays. High school continued in three converted Air Force trailers that were hauled in from Glasgow.

The graduating class of 1974 was the last from St. Paul. A new grade school was opened in the fall of 1975.

'We don't have any persons to give them'

Since the order's foundation nearly 500 years ago, the call of the Jesuits has been to serve on the frontiers of Catholicism; to bring both the faith and education to distant corners of the planet.

Today, with close to 17,000 members, the Jesuits remain the single largest men's religious order in the Catholic Church. However, the number of priests entering the Jesuit order has been declining for nearly 60 years. It is a trend the entire Catholic Church is being forced to confront.

"Fifty percent of the priests in the United States will be 65 or older by 2020," said Father Michael Tyrrell, executive assistant to the provincial of the Oregon Province, the main administrative body for the Jesuit order in the northwestern United States. "That's a huge issue. What do you do when 50 percent of your priests retire?"

Tyrrell noted the shortage of priests is especially acute for the Jesuits, who require about 12 years of advanced education and pastoral experience before accepting new members. Throughout their history, the Jesuits have become well known for their educational work, establishing hundreds of universities, colleges, high schools and elementary schools in dozens of countries. With an ever-declining number of priests, that educational mission is imperiled.

"When I was a young priest, there were probably 65 Jesuits working at Gonzaga University," Tyrrell said of the prestigious university in Spokane where he works. "Today there are probably 15, and, of those, probably 10 of them are over 70. What we know is that there are only about 20 Jesuits across the United States in graduate studies to obtain their doctorates to be working in colleges and universities — and we have 27 colleges and universities in the United States. With fewer and fewer Jesuits, there is a coming reality that we're going to move on and do other things. But these schools are going to go on in the Jesuit tradition, and they're going to continue to be called Jesuit schools. It's just that some of them are probably not going to have any Jesuit priests, and most of them only two or three."

That impending change is exemplified by the experience of Retzel at St. Paul Mission.

After 15 years in the Flathead Valley, Retzel was called to return to St. Paul following the death of Father Bernard McMeel. Though he thinks fondly upon his years at the St. Ignatius Mission, Retzel's return to Fort Belknap was like a long-awaited trip home.

"When I was driving back here — driving back east and crested over the mountains — my spirit just went whoosh," he recalled. "I realized the claustrophobic effect that had on me over there, and how free I felt coming away from those alpine, high mountains."

For the past 21 years, Retzel has remained at St. Paul — a steady and consistent presence on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation through both times of both joy and sorrow.

Three years ago the Rocky Mountain Mission of the Jesuits sent a younger priest, Father Rich Magner, to assist Retzel with his duties. Now in his final years of formation, Magner will be sent to the Philippines in July, just as Retzel retires from his mission at St. Paul.

"It's a humbling experience of our own limitations," Magner said of the order's future. "The Jesuits needing to withdraw from the mission has no implications on St. Paul mission grade school. The sisters are here, the school continues, the parish continues. To some extent it's just going to be a change of priestly personnel. It's a significant change, but the administration of the sacraments will continue, and we're hopeful there will be a residential priest here in time."

But there are no absolutes in the future.

"I don't know what's going to happen there," Tyrrell said of the St. Paul Mission. "My understanding is that the Jesuit Volunteer Corps is going to continue to be there, but how long that commitment is, I don't know. If there's not a resident priest around and the sisters leave, that may change the feasibility of their continuing there. We just don't know at this point.

"This continuity of persons with the Native American people is very, very important," Tyrrell said. "Our problem right now is, we don't have any persons to give them. So there's a real sense that they feel somewhat abandoned by us; but the abandonment is not because we want to leave, it's because we don't have any people. It's a very different world that we live in today."

Retzel weighs the changing times with the patience of age and experience.

"The people here — especially some of the elders — have taught me the importance of being present," Retzel said quietly. "Just to be present in the moment, wherever I am. They've taught me the gift of that, the meaning of that."