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The late French-Canadian Jesuit Father Onesimus Lacouture gave the first retreat to priests in 1931. Father Hugo made the retreat in the summer of 1939 in Baltimore under Fr. Lacouture’s direction. Father Hugo began to preach it to the laity soon after. To emphasize the importance of silence during the six days, in the 1980s Fr. Hugo named the Lacouture-Hugo retreat “Encounter With Silence.” The most famous proponent of the retreat is no doubt Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who made the retreat many times from the 1940s to 1976, the year of her last retreat.

The retreat plants the seed of conversion within a spiritual hothouse of strict silence, profound prayer, and daily Mass. This seed is the doctrinal truth that Christ’s teaching is meant to radically change our lives, and especially our purely natural mentality, by calling us to live supernaturally, through God’s grace. It challenges the purely human thinking with the supernatural demands of the Gospels. Christianity demands more than respectability and natural virtue. Christians are called to holiness and Christian perfection. This truth is presented at the retreat, Fr. Hugo said, within a “full panorama of the Christian life.” No aspect of the Christian life is left untouched. Fr. Hugo often quoted the words of Pope Paul VI: “The Church is an evangelizer, but she begins by being evangelized herself.” By calling the already Christianized to go further in the resolution to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and teaching them how to do so, the Lacouture-Hugo retreat both evangelizes and converts.