Picture from the Past
Local Jesuit center to add a headquarters building
Province archivist Brother Tom Marshall, S.J., of the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center--formerly Sacred Heart Novitiate--at the top of Los Gatos' College Avenue recently offered this writer an interesting piece of news. Starting in June, if all goes as planned, the California Jesuits will start themselves a new headquarters right here in Los Gatos.
Currently, the headquarters' staff occupies the top floor of the west wing of the former Novitiate. They moved to the peaceful, wooded venue from an elegant mansion on Lyon Street in San Francisco's Pacific Heights in 1969. Before that, they lived in the old Pastor's Residence on San Fernando Street in downtown San Jose, behind St. Joseph's Church.
Even earlier, the California Jesuit Provincial's home was in Portland, Ore., at a time when this jurisdiction extended from the Mexican border to the northernmost part of Alaska. Formal inspection trips by top Jesuits in those days, Marshall tells us, involved travel by dogsled, steamship, buckboard, horse and train. In 1932, the area was whittled down so that the northern border of California was the farthest north a Jesuit provincial had to venture on his inspection rounds.
A historic spot has been added for the Provincial's new headquarters: the former infirmary for Jesuit old-timers on the property of the Sacred Heart Jesuit Center. Another story will be added and some floor layouts will be modified.
The beautiful view that attracted Los Gatos' Wilcox family to the place long ago will remain, enhanced by all the additions in Silicon Valley. The Wilcox summer home with its verandahs served as the Parish House for the Jesuit Pastor of St. Mary's Church in Los Gatos from the time the Blackrobes, as Marshall calls the order, bought it in 1886 until the Novitiate building was completed in 1888.
Until 1938, the old Wilcox house accommodated the population spillovers as the novitiate's seminary life expanded. In 1938, the Wilcox summer home was dismantled and the lumber was used elsewhere on the property. That time was also the Golden Jubilee of the Novitiate, and the celebration called for a formal garden, a splashing fountain, a bronze statue of St. Ignatius and a designer-planting of flowers.
In 1952, the rest home and infirmary facilities were added to the property, which sheltered veterans of the order until 1989, when the operation was transferred to the ground floor of the Novitiate's west wing.
Today, the Jesuit Center's Father Superior Richard Cobb is supported by Father William Thom and Archivist Marshall.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
