The Greater Glory: Thirty-Seven Years with the Jesuits

By Stephen Casey

Stephen Casey was twenty-one when he entered the Jesuit Order in Canada in 1947. The striving for Christian perfection eventually led him to depression and a complete breakdown - he almost lost his ability to speak. After thirty-seven years as a Jesuit he left the priesthood.

The Greater Glory is a candid memoir about a way of life that, after fifteen hundred years, is disappearing. Casey offers a vivid and incisive portrayal of the seminary, especially the training for novices - the physical and spiritual discipline, the asceticism, the anxieties that surrounded the socialization of young seminarians, the struggles that their chosen careers held for them.

Casey also describes growing up in Winnipeg during the Depression in a comfortable but strict Catholic household, offering an intriguing look at childhood during that period as well as revealing his painful experience with a pedophile priest. But it is his critique of life in the Jesuit Order that lies at the heart of the book.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0773532439
• ISBN13: 9780773532434
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 7.1" x 9.2"