During my sophomore year I made the annual retreat at Holy Cross.
When I confessed to the retreat director, he said, "Have
you ever thought of being a priest?" I guess I really had
never thought of it, but I started to think about it. The more
I thought, the more I decided that was what God was asking me
to do and that was my desire. A lot of Holy Cross students had
followed that invitation. I had no special moment, but it just
became clearer and clearer that was my vocation. It became a certainty.
On the other hand, with the example of so many Jesuits teaching
at Holy Cross, I thought that my vocation would be as a teacher
and I knew I loved mathematics. So Fr. Swords consulted another
Jesuit if it would be good for me to do my graduate studies first,
and the answer was yes.
A very good friend of mine from Chicago, a Brazilian, who had
been doing his doctorate at Chicago while I was in Evanston at
Northwestern University and had returned to Brazil as a professor
at PUC, the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro,
invited me to go down to PUC for one year. After discussing it
with some other mathematicians who had visited PUC, it seemed
to be a good idea. It fitted in with the mission of the New England
Province in Bahia in Brazil at that time. So I proposed it to
the provincial, who approved, and I went down to Rio for one year.
When I was in theology in Cambridge, I attended lectures by Prof.
John Milnor, an outstanding mathematician who was at MIT for one
year. He spoke about the area of foliation theory, a kind of a
topological and geometrical structure. I got very interested in
that, and that's what I've worked in most of the time since then.
There have been a few other areas, but most of my work has been
in foliations.
I am convinced that my vocation is an example of God's providence
for me. Also, often when we're trying to do what God wants us
to do, an incidental word or a gesture will have great value.
The Holy Spirit inspires us at one moment to do something that
we hadn't really been thinking of, provided that we are really
trying to be responsive to God. Certainly I think my being in
Brazil has been God's work. I'm quite convinced that God arranged
for me to get that invitation to go down there. Even when I took
my final vows in Brazil on August 11, 1977, with twenty other
Jesuits, something wonderful happened. We pronounced them directly
to Fr. General, Pedro Arrupe, who was visiting Rio de Janeiro
on that day. A great blessing.
