Spa to Jesuits

The zealous, well-disciplined fathers of the Society of Jesus number 4,700 in the U. S.--more than in any other nation including Catholic Italy and Catholic Spain. Most intellectual of Catholic orders, the Jesuits are famed for their colleges. Last week in their Chicago Province (Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Michigan, Tennessee and Illinois) there was pious rejoicing, for a rich Indianan named Edward Ballard had just given the Jesuits a sumptuous $7,000,000 hotel to turn into a new college.

Edward Ballard is a modest, retiring millionaire who likes to raise and show horses. He is not a Catholic, not even a churchgoer. Born of poor parents some 60 years ago in the hills near French Lick, he made his way alone, accumulated a fortune in the hotel business and in American Circus Corp. At West Baden, a mile from French Lick where the late Thomas ("Tom") Taggart, Indiana's longtime Democratic boss, operated a famed spa (Pluto Water), Mr. Ballard built a handsome 500-room hotel, surrounded by 585 landscaped acres. Until the Depression West Baden Springs Hotel prospered. With the decrease in business, Mr. Ballard made ready to sell out and retire. In casting about for a buyer two years ago, he met Rev. Hugo F. Sloctemyer, Jesuit president of Xavier University in Cincinnati. Would the Jesuits be interested in buying at a low price? No, said Father Sloctemyer. But learning that Mr. Ballard wished to have his hotel maintained intact, as a landmark, the Jesuit promised to help him try to dispose of it. Months passed and the business association between the two became friendship. Last week came announcement that persuasive Father Sloctemyer had obtained hotel, spa and grounds as outright gift, to be run as an affiliate of Loyola University (Chicago) under the name of West Baden College.

To train a Jesuit under the militant principles laid down by Ignatius Loyola,* requires 15 years from the time the candidate leaves high school. West Baden College, primarily a graduate school of science and philosophy, will take Jesuit scholastics after they complete two years of ascetic theology and two of classics, before they embark upon three years of teaching, four of theology and one of ascetic theology. Rev. Aloysius Henry Rohde, assistant to the Jesuit provincial in Chicago, will be the school's temporary rector until a full one is appointed by that most formidable cleric, the Superior General or "Black Pope," Wlodomir Ledochowski in Rome. The 80 students who will study under eight priests at West Baden College will live in ordinary Jesuit routine -- up at 5 a. m., to bed at 9 p. m., plenty of work, prayers, meditation. They may well be appalled in contemplating the hotel's Pompeian Court which, 200 ft. in diameter and six stories high, is supposed to be the world's largest room not supported by pillars.

*Because the Baltimore Sun, in its foreign correspondence, found in Jesuit Loyola and Adolf Hitler "the same readiness and determination to exercise their power with ruthlessness and brutality in order to carry out" their missions, Baltimore's Archbishop Michael Joseph Curley last week flayed the Sun, commanded his flock to take "action."

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