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"I did something different right from the start," says Rev. Raymond Helmick, S.J.
Helmick, a 75-year-old resident Jesuit and professor in the theology department, embodies the ideal "citizen of the world," and if you claim to "heart" Jesuits, brace yourself. He eased tensions among Christian sects in Belfast, befriended anti-Catholic Rastafarians in Jamaica, and helped Portuguese colonies in Africa gain independence. He taught himself woodworking to build his own harpsichord; visited the White House to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; worked with Yasser Arafat, Israeli leaders, and a religious coalition led by Jesse Jackson on solving the conflict; and wrote a nationally recognized book on the topic, Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp David Failed.
While all of these accomplishments add up to a wonderful résumé, they mean nothing to those who want to follow in his footsteps without understanding how he got to walking on that path.
It's essential to start at the beginning, when he decided to seize control of his own education.
"I went through that children's section in the library so fast," he says. "I read every book I could get my hands on. Then I went up and demanded that I be admitted into the adult library."
Helmick's first memory of defying authorities was a success; after a few weeks of arguing with the librarians, they granted the young scholar freedom to roam the library in its entirety.
"That was my breakout of the Catholic ghetto," he says.
It's no wonder that Helmick has been driven to study the realm of conflict resolution; the town in which he was raised, Arlington, Mass., was tainted by Protestant-Catholic disagreement in the 1930s.
After completing public school and graduating from Boston College High School, he decided to join the Jesuits, and on his 18th birthday he moved into the novitiate of Shadowbrook, Mass.
Helmick, a young man once completely in charge of his life and studies, encountered unexpected limitations in the novitiate.
Jesuit training mandates that all men take vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience, but the last one was especially bothersome to his mindset of self-governance.
"I knew that 'blind obedience' was part of the drill," says Helmick.
Therefore, like his peers, he dutifully signed an agreement monthly. By doing so, he committed to remain a Jesuit permanently, but once again, Helmick demanded that he take the matter into his own hands.
He confronted authority again, this time his notoriously strict novitiate master.
"I told him I couldn't sign again until we had straightened out this matter. I was not about to commit to something that meant I was not going to be responsible for my own life," he says.
As a result of the meeting, Helmick devoted two extra hours a week for the next seven months studying and writing about blind obedience.
He never hesitated to go beyond expectations in order to accomplish what needed to be done.
"At the end of March, [my novitiate master] told me that he could not understand how anyone could contemplate the Jesuit life in the terms I was describing," says Helmick.
"Those were the bad old days," he says. "Jesuit novitiate training is so different now, it's been so humanized." Nonetheless, Helmick's own experience unquestionably allowed space for self-growth, a gift for which he expresses gratitude. "I've always found it very remarkable that, in that rigid atmosphere, the novitiate master gave me so much freedom to let me discover," he says.
"Then I got thrown out," says Helmick. In 1951, 20 percent of the men in his novitiate had developed ulcers, and the Jesuit General in Rome sent a letter demanding all trainees be dismissed immediately.
Of all those who left Shadowbrook, Helmick alone returned, a testament to the seriousness with which he approached his commitment to the order.
"By that time, I had made up my mind that I was going to become a Jesuit," he says.
When Helmick was to begin regency, three years of teaching usually done abroad, he yearned to head for Japan. He wrote a persuasive letter to his Jesuit provincial asking for the placement in Japan.
"I wrote, 'If you have any other destinations in mind, that's fine,'" Helmick says. The vow, however, came back to haunt him: "That got me to Jamaica," he says.
He spent his regency in Jamaica and then returned to the country after studying more in Germany and Connecticut.
Helmick recalls the roots of the strongly anti-white and anti-Catholic movement that he found himself in the midst of. "These people with their Marcus Garvey ["Back to Africa"] background saw on a news reel Pope Pius XXI blessing Italian troops on their way to [invading] Ethiopia, and decided there was something wrong," says Helmick.
"'Woe to you who scattered the sheep of my people,' one said to me in a park," he says.
"I thought, 'Now that's the opening of a conversation.'" While most of society regarded Rastafarians as lazy because they refused to work for white people, Helmick empathized with this marginalized mass of poverty-stricken Jamaicans.
He saw this extreme gap in society as an opportunity to challenge the status quo. "So I sat down with this fellow with the dreadlocks" he says. "I got to know the Rastafarians in this very peculiar way."
From Jamaica, Helmick traveled to Belfast, Northern Ireland's capital, to rebuild structures destroyed in the violence of the Catholic-Protestant conflict that dominated the city.
As his relationships with all Irish citizens, including paramilitaries, deepened, Helmick realized the universal need for safe jobs.
"What I wanted to do was find something that was a common interest that they would all admit to, even though you had to see them all separately," he says.
"Then I became aware," he says, "I was making an assumption which I'm sure was right, that I was not dealing with psychopaths who enjoyed killing people, but people who enjoyed working for the interest of their community. I genuinely did not agree with the violence of what they were doing, but I could respect their motives for getting into it."
Sectarianism, he saw, was debilitating all groups of Belfast. "These were people that things happened to," he says. Therefore, he organized a network of thoroughly organized community associations that would give people strength in numbers and louder voices.
Helmick then spent nine years in London working to resolve the conflict in Belfast, Lebanon, South Africa, Rhodesia, East Timor, Portuguese colonies of Africa, Angolia, and even more. He then rose as a national figure when he turned his attention specifically to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Helmick's activism also manifests itself in letter-writing, to the White House and the leaders of other nations, and he advises that only serious letters merit responses, and every letter adds up to make a difference.
From Arlington to Ireland and now operating from St. Mary's, Helmick has maintained the belief that success requires control. In his formative years, he refused to settle, challenged authorities, and recognized the need to fix that which won't fix itself.
His deep commitment to the Jesuit tradition of, in his words, "the recognition of the dignity in everyone," has opened doors, allowing him to travel the world, meet people, and discover common ground.
Most importantly, Helmick's inherent drive to be different has fueled his life-long determination to fight for peace in real life. And at 75, he's still fighting.
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