The Servites

Who were these Servite priests?  The official name of the Servites was “The Order of Friar Servants of Mary (Ordo Servorum Beatae Mariae Virginis).”  In other words, I would be a servant of Mary.  That did not sound bad since I had gone to St. Mary’s HS in Perth Amboy, NJ.  The Servites have a particular slant on this service to Mary.  They were dedicated to the sorrows of Mary, the sorrowful Mother.  The only thing that I knew about them was they were the priests at my parish and grade school in Carteret.  Father Cortney had explained that their American headquarters was in Chicago.  Their worldwide headquarters was in Rome, Italy, which made sense.  They had a few other parishes in the Chicago area, the Detroit area, the St. Louis area, and New Mexico.  I soon realized that Carteret was their only parish on the east coast.  They also ran and taught at a high school in Chicago called St. Philip HS, plus the minor seminary high school at Hillside, Illinois.  Their main church monastery in Chicago was the Basilica of Our Lady of Sorrows, where the high school was.  In 1937, the American Servites had started the “Perpetual Novena in honor of Our Sorrowful Mother,” that was very popular in the 1940s and 1950s, that handed out a monthly Novena Notes.  I had served at this novena as an altar boy.  Also, these Servites had mission houses in Ireland, Australia, and South Africa.  In other words, I had a vague idea of some of the ministries that these Servite priests were involved with.  I had no idea how many American Servite priests there were, but I assumed that it was around a couple of hundred.  What did you know about the organization that you went to work for before you started working there?