My Two years in the Priest Corps is one insider’s answer to the question, ‘how do priests get that way?’ From elementary school aspirations, to theology studies in Rome during the Second Vatican Council to eventual disaffection with the Catholic Church, I focus on larger life lessons arising from my personal experience of the ministry rather than reminiscence for its own sake.
My Two Years in the Priest Corps
Joe Novara
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Copyright 2010 Joe Novara
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Preface: A priest came to administer the sacrament of the sick to my terminally ill father. After he left, my father remarked, “Too bad this wasn’t ten years ago. Back then, this would have meant something to me. Now…” he twisted his hand in the classic Italian gesture for futility, insignificance—who needs it. I knew what he meant. I had followed a similar path from zealous, totally engaged seminarian to arm-length indifference to the Catholic Church. Some would call it ‘falling away’ from the faith, others, ‘outgrowing’ it. I like to think I outgrew my need for the institutional church of my youth.
This is the story of how I became a Catholic priest and then left the priesthood. In this account I do not speak for other priests or ex-priests of my generation. Nor do I intend to pass judgment on the institutions and the changing times I pass through. I simply recount what I experienced. If, at times, this narrative seems a bit jaundiced and perhaps even flip, it does not mean that I wasn’t whole-hearted and fervent in my faith and devotions during my twelve years of seminary formation and two year’s ministry as a priest. I’m just not anymore. Therein lies the story.
By definition, seminarium, is a place to grow seeds. So, it could be said that I spent twelve years in a hothouse, seemingly cloistered from life. In reality, those years were quite ordinary. I went to an all male high school. I spent summers working as a counselor at a summer camp. I got a great education at a small liberal arts college. I lived and traveled abroad during my early 20’s. And finally, I went through the typical stages of young adulthood—distancing myself from formative institutions and emotional memory banks in the run-up to maturity.
I entered Sacred Heart Seminary as a commuter student at the age of fourteen. In those days the seminary campus housed both the high school and college. I spent the next eight years there, graduating with a BA in Philosophy in 1963. My high school freshman class of 120 students had, by the end of college, been reduced to approximately forty students (twelve of whom were eventually ordained). Those of us continuing in the vocational track would predictably go on for four year’s theological studies at nearby St. John’s Provincial Seminary. Another classmate and I, by way of exception, were chosen to pursue our theological studies in Rome. We resided at the North American College (NAC) with seventy five other freshmen classmates from various dioceses across the United States. We attended lectures, in Latin, at the Pontifical Gregorian University (the Greg) with other seminarians from around the world.
Once in Rome, we were not expected to return home until we either dropped out or were ordained four years later. During our stay, 1963-1967, we were immersed in the Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) absorbing the tectonic changes in the church on a minute by minute basis while the tremors from the Civil Rights movement, anti-war protests and the Age of Aquarius back home were only vaguely felt through weekly installments of Time magazine.
I returned to Detroit as a newly ordained priest in June of 1967 just as a major riot broke out in the inner city. After a short stay with my family, I was assigned as an assistant pastor to a parish near the rapidly changing neighborhood of my childhood.
At first, as a young priest, I felt comfortable with my blue-collar parishioners and I was eager to share all the energy and enthusiasm built up during twelve years of prayer and study. Two years later, at age twenty nine, I took leave of the parish and the priesthood, angry and disillusioned with the church to which I had dedicated myself.
I relate my tale in story form, the way I learned so many things as a child. “Years ago...” my Uncle Tony would begin, as if he were recounting a medieval fairy tale, and I knew I was going to hear about life in the old country, about surviving in the depression, about bootlegging in the prohibition. In this work, I try to follow that oral tradition (minus the tips on rum running) going from anecdote to reflection to moral. Thematic rather than linear, this account is more like a mosaic—one small, sharp piece of story at a time adding up to a large picture.
This story is not meant to be an objective history of the times—just one man’s experience of a difficult time in the Catholic Church when large numbers of priests just before and after my ordination class decided to leave their chosen calling. Perhaps the recounting of my experiences, personal, sometimes humorous, may afford insight into the times and forces that shaped my life and decisions.
I have chosen to use first names or fictitious names for the people involved to protect their privacy or memory. What I talk about is real. Some of the incidents are compressed or compiled for the sake of clarity and pacing but are true nonetheless.
EARLY YEARS
Mamo and Cagalupu
Recently, I had occasion to drive through my old neighborhood, a kind of roots-trip, to compare the odometer to my memory of four long hikes a day to and from school, to look for familiar landmarks, to prod long-dormant memories. I was shocked by the state of decay and dereliction I found. My childhood home from the 40’s and mid 50’s had been demolished. The whole neighborhood was shot through with empty lots.
When I arrived at the playground next to my grade school, I suddenly flashed to Mamo: fists clenched, a perpetual green glob glistening on his upper lip, hunched forward in the ring of my classmates waiting to administer the ritual thumping I had earned for crossing him. Mario Loguardo, held back for three years, was probably educationally challenged and certainly, to our dismay, older and bigger than the rest of us fifth graders. But he was part of our neighborhood and never really hurt any of us— badly. As I strolled around the parish grounds, I composed a letter.
Dear Mamo:
How're you doing? I haven't seen you since grade school. I think about you from time to time. Especially when I tell my kids stories about you and the old neighborhood. How things were in our grade school fifty years ago when we used war-surplus knapsacks for school bags. We called our neighborhood, Cagalupu. It's hard to explain what it was, what it meant. It's a place where we lived—where the street cars made a loop (car-a-loopo for the old Italians). It was an Italian ghetto in a blue collar neighborhood.
It was a safe place. At least it felt safe and secure with relatives, friends or a well-known storekeeper on every block within a square mile. Although I have to admit that you were a source of terror for me and my friends. "Gonna get you after school..." would have us quaking in our seats all afternoon. Well, you were thirteen-years old in the fifth grade. No wonder we were scared.
You gave the poor nuns a hard time too. Sometimes I wonder if they saw them selves as missionaries—Polish nuns teaching in a predominantly Italian parish. Sister Stella, one of the Felician nuns I remember most fondly, would occasionally share her thoughts with us. "Mario", she remarked one day, "you give me gray hair. Every night I look in the mirror and see more gray hair." We all stared with our mouths open trying to imagine a head of hair under her starched coif.
Then there was the time she had to diplomatically ask you not to sing at daily Mass because your voice was chang ing. She must have laughed under her wimple (if she had the sense of humor I suspect she had) the time she set you up with, "Mario, do you mind when someone calls you a dago?" You an swered, "Sister, I don't mind when another dago calls me a dago, it's when a dumb polack calls me a dago that I get mad.”
It was obvious that you had trouble with school. But I wonder if you weren’t pretty smart after all. I mean, there was me, one of the smart kids in the class, but I took everything the priests and nuns told us very seriously: the ranks of angels—cherubim and seraphim, personal guardian angels, anti-communism, saying short prayers (ejaculations) throughout the day, buying mission babies and especially all the guilt and fear about impure thoughts and deeds, about dying in the ‘state of sin’ and going to hell. I bet you didn’t worry about all that—at least not very much. I bet you weren’t scrupulous, playing the rules of casuistry over and over in your mind trying to somehow prove to yourself that some imaginary sin wasn’t really a sin. You were dumb enough to take all those warnings and rules as nice suggestions and move on with your life. It took me many years to catch up to you.
Looking back on that school as an adult, it must have been hard on those dedicated women who taught us. Do you remember that we had forty-eight kids in our eighth grade class—all in one room with no gym, no recess? And the priests. The daily Masses at 7:40 and 8:20; the ‘Praised be Jesus Christ, good morning, Father...’, shouted in unison whenever the priest visited the classroom; the First Communions with all the little girls in white dresses and boys in blue suits and white-ribbon arm bands carrying lilies in a procession around the church.
When you think about it, the priests used the First Communion routine to get non-practicing families back to church. And there were plenty of those parents around. For them, religion was part of their heritage. They were born Italian. They were born Catholic...‘and don’t you forget it’. But they only stopped for religion at important crossroads of their lives.
The priests knew who they were dealing with. The devout parents—no problem. The other ones needed a little friendly persuasion. Parents were expected to flank their first-communion-child at the altar rail and if they didn’t want to look bad in front of their friends they had to go to confession and receive communion even if they hadn’t done so since their wedding. Smooth move by our old-school Italian pastor, Father Anthony—playing nominal Catholicism against family pride.
The priests and nuns had their work cut out for them in the parishes of Cagalupu. And when they weren't dealing with the generation that came directly from the old country, they were trying to change the religious attitudes and practices of the second and third generations—us—by making sure we had the education, the attitudes, the kind of self control we needed to make a decent life for ourselves and our kids to come. I wonder if the priests and nuns thought about their churches, their schools, their boys’ clubs, altar societies and parish outings as ways to make whole groups of people otherwise isolated and ostracized in the larger society, feel part of a larger group in which they were an important element?
Hey Mamo, none of us belonged to a country club, not even the YMCA, right? But the church, we had, with a boy’s club that met on Monday nights. We cut out plywood figures with jig saws and painted them. We wrestled and ran in the gym. Mainly we got out of the house to give our mothers a break. On Tuesday and Thursday we played basketball with vol unteer coaches. One season we even got uniforms and played four scheduled games. So who needed Little League?
And we had paper drives. And we had a Christmas pageant every year. And each spring the whole school took buses to Walled Lake Amusement Park for a day. Remember? Altar boys got free tickets, priests wore sport shirts, nuns took rides in a Chris Craft on the lake and I re member holding hands with Marie Miller in the spooky house.
Parishes. If you wanted to belong, you had something to belong to. If someone asked where you went to school, you said "St. Cyril" and they knew it wasn't St. Jude, nor worse yet the public schools—A.L.Holmes and Burroughs. The parish was an important part of Cagalupu. It centered a lot of energy and in turn shaped us for later life.
As a kid, didn't it seem that the parish, the school, the neighborhood and our relatives all ran together? And why not? On any given May evening I might collect cousins who lived across the street and walk to church for a rosary and benediction. On the way, we could stop at any of five different corner stores for penny candy. I could wave to Uncle Leo who lived on Isham, Uncle Tony on Peter Hunt, Uncle Jim on Rohns. After church, I could hang out with classmates, stop at a friend’s house...maybe say ‘hi’ to Gramma.
On Sunday after church, my Dad used to shop at Ventimiglia's. How about that store? There were snails in wicker baskets, bananas hanging in bunches next to dried oregano and garlic, barrels of olives and bins full of roasted chick peas. And across the street was the fish and chicken market—live chickens waiting in cages to be selected, dispatched, plucked and dressed. In those pre-TV days that was a lot of enter tainment—smells, sounds, blood and gore. Well, maybe not for you. I was easily entertained. Next block was the Spada cheese company where they made ricotta cheese. Who needed supermarkets? A person could find everything within a couple of blocks—hardly more distance than a good sized jumbo mart today.
Did your grandfather belong to the Italian-American club? That was much more important than church for my grandfather. As often as he could, he would walk over to see his buddies to play briscola or pinochle by the hour. It was a place where a man could feel at home, or at least remember something of home, far away in the old country.
But now my grandfather is gone, as are his friends. The club is no longer. The ghetto moved north, the other side of Eight Mile Road, to Harper Woods and Roseville and St. Clair Shores. Ventimiglia's followed. The corner stores closed. My uncles have passed on. My grandma's house on Georgia was razed. Our classmates have become architects, teachers, FBI agents, priests, ex-priests and who knows what else.
The church has been converted into a non-denominational congregation. The pastor who had so lovingly brought statues from Italy and had angels painted in the arches would be revolted by the current state of the property. In its prime, there was a grade school, a high school, a gym, a rectory for the three priests and a convent for the fourteen Felician nuns. The fence post next to the convent drive way is still bent where my mother backed into it, years ago, but the convent itself—once a place of cloistered serenity and whispering robes is now agape—doors and windows opening on garishly painted rooms.
The whole neighborhood, as we knew it, is gone.
So, Mamo, I don't know if I would recognize you if I saw you. Or your sister Rose, for that matter. And I don’t think we could ever go back to the way things were, even if everything could have stayed the same for fifty years. I wouldn't be afraid of you beating me up, I’m guessing, because at our age, three years older means just the opposite than it did then. And I know I could correct some of the facts-of-life you taught us in the restroom. But that whole time and place called Cagalupu is gone. It was a rich experience. I'm glad we were part of it. It's sad that my kids couldn't experience it. But it’s gone and we’ve moved on.
All the best,
Joe Novara
By the late 50’s, Cagalupu, as an Italian enclave, had pretty much blended into the suburbs. In the late ‘60’s, I was assigned to a parish just a couple miles up the road from my childhood turf. I knew the territory; I knew some of the remaining old-timers—my Uncle Tony was actually in my parish. I gave Holy Communion to a woman who babysat me. Some of the homebound, Italian-speaking elderly women reminded me of my grandmother.
I knew these devout people. I knew what they were looking for in their religion—the very things I had sought growing up: the security of clearly defined boundaries announced emphatically and often; the anxiety-soothing predictability of ritual and devotions, and the comfort of floating half awake in the billowy bosom of Mother Church.
At the same time, I remembered the arm length Catholics, the detached, the indifferent, the men in my neighborhood who had little need for formal religion. Strangely, while I served the former, I found myself more and more aligned with the latter. While the families of Cagalupo were assimilating into the larger culture and moving into the suburbs, I was moving on as well.
Inner City Pioneers
But that was not the case with Father G and Sister J.
As I continued my nostalgia trip, I drove a couple of blocks to a neighboring church—as much a part of my childhood territory as my home parish and now, almost as badly reduced. The church was still there. The rectory. The grade school was repurposed to a community program. The convent was gone. It was no longer the place I knew as a chaplain to the high school.
Circling the block I spotted an old man heading into the back door of the church. I pulled up, intending to ask if Sister J was around. She had been the principal of the high school in the ‘60s and was rumored to still be there—the last remaining nun out of a convent full of Dominican Sisters. We had enjoyed many a twenty minute break from our schedules, chatting in her office. I missed the shy smile and soft voice that downplayed her administrative competence and fierce loyalty and dedication.
The man in corduroys, a frayed plaid shirt and a Detroit Tiger baseball cap turned to greet me.
"Hey, Ger!" I called out.
After a studied glance, Father G called back, "Joe. What's up?"
A few years older than I, he was still obviously involved in his ministry. “Come on inside, I’ve got to set up for a mass.”
I followed the aging priest into the vestry, a high ceiling room, one wall filled with walnut stained drawers, closets and shelves which previously held multi-colored, ornately embroidered liturgical vestments. I could detect a faint whiff of incense, bees wax and furniture polish under the dusty fug of second hand stores. It wasn’t hard to picture a priest, from my days as an altar boy, in an ankle length cassock standing before the full array of starched, white linen under-vestments laid out on the counter waiting to be donned in a regimented sequence before completing the day’s liturgically correct ensemble with a colored stole and chasuble.
The rest of the room was a warren of boxes filled with canned goods. “...food supplement program,” Father G called, wending his way between the stacks like a stock boy at a supermarket. I paused for a moment, caught between the church that was and the church that is. “I’ve got an evening liturgy in an hour,” he explained, grabbing a couple of folding chairs and heading into an adjoining room containing a simple table, a Bible, a plain white stole and a semi-circle of a dozen chairs.
"Why not the church?" I asked.
"Too big. Too cold. Takes too much to heat,” he called over his shoulder.
I peeked out the sanctuary door at the chill dark church that at one time would have been warm and well lit to accommodate a capacity crowd of pious faithful. Another time, another church.
I helped arrange the chairs for the smaller, more intimate liturgy to come. I wondered if Father G’s community, down-sized by shifting demographics, might not be a model of the church to come—full cycle back to the way the very early church used to be.
"What's your homily going to be?" I asked.
He grabbed three pages, folded lengthwise, from his back pocket and shoved them at me.
Punched out on a manual typewriter, his sermon was good. No cliches. Strong message followed by a call to action. I respect a good sermon. I consider it a touchstone of serious dedication to a priestly vocation. It’s so easy to resort to bromides and platitudes. It takes work—serious reflection, research and skill to craft a meaningful, cogent message.
As a priest, I had always made a special effort on my sermons. One Sunday, from the height of the pulpit, I spotted my brother-in-law, who had been in the seminary with me through college, in the congregation. I had worked hard on that morning’s homily and was pleased and proud to have him listen to it. He would appreciate it—for sure. From then on, whenever I prepared my sermons, I talked to Ernie—‘how’s that?’ ‘make sense?’
Into his seventies, Father G was still putting effort into his homilies. That’s dedication.
I went over to the rectory to find Sister J. Strange that a nun would be living with a priest under the same roof. But it was a big roof and a huge building that used to be home to four or five priests. Now it just looked old. The kitchen had chrome plated chairs with shiny vinyl seats. The front room couches were as lumpy and sunken as halfway-house furniture.
Sister J’s smile was the same, as was her voice. And soon she was talking, with the enthusiasm I recalled from the past, of her recent efforts to establish and run an experimental high school.
Father G and Sister J—missionaries to Detroit’s East Side, urban-renewed wasteland. As I drove home, I had to wonder if I had skipped out too soon—had left right after the bloom went off the romance of priestly work. Theirs has been a lifelong commitment. Mine was a kind of 'living together' arrangement—fine as long it worked. I refused to become a physical-emotional wreck—a martyr to my vows. Obviously that was not a problem for that priest and that particular nun.
Why I Went to the Seminary
That's what I did—I went to the seminary as a freshman in high school. I wasn't at all sure that I wanted to be a priest.
I had liked the liturgy in our cozy little church. It was soothing and predictable and felt secure like my neighborhood—an extension of the familiar and the familial. I was drawn to the colors and smells—the theatre of the liturgy. As soon as I could, I became an altar boy. It was no small task to memorize Latin responses to the dialogue I was to engage in with the celebrant in place of the congregation. I struggled to memorize the formulas: Introibo ad altare dei, deus qui laetificat juventutem meam. But eventually I passed the test and was able to get closer to the magic and mystery behind the communion rail. I was enthralled by the mumbled ritual and my part in it; the special magic of donning a cassock and surplice and climbing the scarlet carpeted steps to light the bees wax candles; to set out the water and wine cruets and to light the charcoal in the censer which would billow clouds of exotic incense. In order to participate in this daily ritual I was willing to get up at 5:45, hitch a ride with my uncle Rocco on snow covered mornings to serve the 6:30 Mass before a faithful congregation of five or six people.
After several years of this dedicated service, my pastor, Father Anthony concluded that I might be a prospect for the priesthood and called me into his office. I studied the racks of rosaries and scapulars, medals and holy cards in the cabinet behind his desk. A picture of the head of Christ from the Shroud of Turin loomed on the periphery of my vision. Father Anthony, probably in his fifties in those days, cut a striking figure: Gray-streaked black hair rolled in carefully brushed waves from his prominent forehead. I wished I could do that with my hair. Being very conscious of shoe styles at that time of my life, I noticed his old-man, arch-support shoes under the desk. He folded his hands, leaned forward and asked, "I wonder if you have considered going to the seminary?" He must have read the surprised look on my face and the beginning of an objection because he quickly added, "You don't have to decide to become a priest. You can just go there and try it out. If you don't like it, you can leave at any time. At the very least you'll be getting a very good education."
The next week was 'vocation week' in the archdiocese so the newest assistant pastor, shy, red-headed, Father Harold, took me and a couple of other altar boys to St. John's Theological Seminary in Plymouth, Michigan. At one point in the visit, I recall standing at a balcony that looked down on the sunlit library where two seminarians were silently reading in the hushed monastic setting. I was smitten—it was so serene, so peaceful, not at all like my tiny home stuffed with five children, where I had to sleep on a mat on the dining room floor. Not like my overcrowded parochial school classroom of forty-eight kids simmering in a stew of bubbling hormones and budding girls. There was space and quiet and above all distance from the tumult of puberty threatening more grounds for scrupulosity on the horizon.
So that's why I went to the seminary, not to become a priest but to find out if I wanted to become a priest, and to hide from girls.
Our priest teachers played right into my needs: "Watch out for girls. Be careful that you don't lose your vocation over summer vacation. Spend enough time around a girl and she can become very interesting. And it's not just from your end. Girls find you very attractive—you're dedicated to a supernatural cause, to an ideal that puts you out of bounds, unattainable. What a catch you would make if they can snatch you away from God—a pretty flattering competitor."
Another time, speaking to the theme that real men don’t need women, one of our teachers reminded us that we wouldn’t have a sweet wife waiting to comfort us after a hard day at work. We were being called to an elite corps—the few, the proud, the ordained.
Not all our professors were that direct but it was clearly understood that we were not supposed to date or have any regular connection with mixed groups. If I didn't have to make a definite decision about becoming a priest, I at least had to act like I was going to do that.
The theological seminary, seen from a balcony, may have looked peaceful and serene but the high school seminary, with 120 entry-level classmates, was loud and raucous. The majority of us were commuters called day dogs by the live in, out of town house rats. We had four classes every morning, Monday through Saturday. Wednesdays we had the afternoons free to play sports in lieu of practicing yet more celibacy. In the winter the gym and handball courts were fairly throbbing with desperate sublimation.
Going to the seminary in high school and the first year of college, meant an hour long bus ride each way and bell driven class changes six days a week. So much for tranquility. By the time I was far enough along to attend the peaceful theological seminary, I had been sent to Rome where the setting was more peaceful but my mind was in turmoil between the ongoing Vatican Council and the postponed decision that Father Anthony had proposed. Sunlit monastic libraries could be tranquil places but important decisions would follow me there.
While it was true that I could have left the seminary at any time, I was not tuned into the pressure and dynamics of enrolling in a behaviorally engineered system. Once I entered the school, I felt no more psychologically free to leave the seminary than a marine recruit could walk away from boot camp. I was part of a noble venture, aspiring to an ideal, a challenge. I was immediately drawn into the conditioning—mental, spiritual and physical—based on the premise that I had a vocation as long as seminary life agreed with me and I with it. Of course, I had to play my part: obey the rules, get good grades, avoid girls and generally keep in the good graces of the faculty who made decisions about my suitability for the priesthood. I may have been hedging at the beginning but soon I was convinced that I had a vocation and had to take measures to protect it.
I may have delayed, arrested if you will, my adolescent development by going to the seminary, but eventually I had to face it, albeit in an accelerated form, as a twenty eight year-old. A fellow Detroiter, Joe Louis once said about an upcoming boxing opponent, "He can run but he can't hide." Puberty and rebellion would catch up to me, eventually.
Faculty Priests as Role Models
I had mixed feelings about the men who served as teachers and mentors for us.They were fine men who taught us well. We knew them for eight years. Some of them taught us in both high school and college. We frequently and regularly visited them in their living quarters for heart to heart talks and guidance. They played sports with us and coached our basketball team. We worked with them at summer camps. As I said, they were fine men. Admired. But I somehow never got past considering them as, well, father figures. As our teachers they held academic power. Failing grades could lead to dismissal from the seminary. As vocational mentors they would observe us and from time to time ask one or another fellow to leave. So, in part, I felt like I was living with benevolent dictators. Some examples:
One day in class, there was a knock on the door. Someone asked to see three students. They left and were never seen again. I knew one of the students, let’s call him, Russ. He was actually a classmate from my home parish. I spent time at his house. Our parents were acquaintances. You could say we grew up together although we were never close friends.
During the summer following our sophomore year in high school, Russ worked at the same summer camp I did. We all slept in the junior counselor cabin, Russ in the bunk above me. Sleeping face down one night, I awoke to a hand persistently groping along my backside trying to reach around in front. Once I realized what was going on, I whipped over, coiled both legs and kicked the sagging bunk above.
The next day I corralled a priest, who was visiting the camp, for a quick consult—should I report what happened the night before. The priest thought about it for a moment then basically said to let it slide for now because sometimes young men aren’t real sure of themselves just yet.
So, when Russ left the classroom and never came back I could only conclude that he had oriented himself, perhaps too openly. As for the other two, who knew? We weren’t about to ask. I never considered it strange that people could be whisked off into vocational oblivion with no general explanation. It was how things were done.
Here’s another example of the unquestioned authority our superiors wielded. Father William who always offered me a sympathetic ear, and impressed me with his ability to nod empathetically whenever I stopped by to chat with him, called me to his room one evening just before I graduated college. I took in his familiar spartan quarters, plain furniture, walls of history books. I was wearing my black cassock—we wore the robes during our last two years of college. I had arranged for several of my classmates to give a preview of the philosophy program to sophomores entering that phase of their studies the following fall.
Father William was the man I had turned to in high school to complain that another basketball player, certainly not as good as I, had been chosen over me to play on a team. The unfairness had me on the point of tears. Father William nodded empathetically. I felt better.
“Joe,” he began, “I understand you’re giving an orientation to philosophy to some underclassmen and that you’ve included Bob as one of the presenters.
“Uh-huh.”
“Well, I don’t want Bob to be on that panel.” When I opened my mouth to ask why, he continued, “We’re asking Bob to leave after graduation and I don’t want him representing us.”
I was shocked. Bob was a close personal friend. I had no idea he was about to be booted out of the seminary. Furthermore, what I was being asked to do would be insulting to him. I flushed, gulped. “Then I’ll just cancel the whole thing.”
Father William glowered through his shaggy eyebrows. “So, you’re just going to take your marbles and go home. Is that it?”
I hadn’t played this game before. I couldn’t think of how to respond. Habits of submission, compliance and unquestioned obedience kicked in. I left his room confused, upset, angry. But I did the inservice. That’s what the promise of obedience to my bishop meant—I was being trained and tested to do just that. And, if I didn’t think of it at the time, a few weeks later when I was chosen to go to Rome for my theological studies, I realized that I might not have been given that opportunity had I pushed back and refused to cooperate.
Admiration, careful closeness, polite deference mixed with wariness were lessons I carried forward when dealing with authority figures in other parts of my life.
It Wasn’t All Prayers, Books and Liturgy
As monotonous, boring and repetitive as those eight years in the seminary were, I also had fun.
Summers in high school, I relished the opportunity to escape our tiny house, crammed with siblings, and head up North to a boy’s camp where I worked as a junior counselor in the company of other seminarians. Fresh air, horseback riding, swimming, fishing, days off with older counselors to explore neighboring resort towns—what’s not to like? I knew the other counselors from school. The priest director taught me church history during the year. It was seminary ‘lite’, but exciting nonetheless.
Back at school, we put on plays. I directed Requiem for a Heavyweight, casting a 130 pound classmate as the lead. Every Easter we put on a Passion Play even though the plot was well known and no one wanted the honor of playing Mary under the cross.
We sang beautiful polyphony and Gregorian chant as part of the choir. For the holidays we performed a Christmas chorale. I even had a solo for one event—Christmas Around the World. Because I knew Spanish, I was asked to sing a traditional Mexican lullaby to baby Jesus. I stepped forward, took a deep breath, and got out the first two bars of the long, one-breath opening before my diaphragm seized up. I paused. Tried again. Same result. Red faced, I segued to the bridge and finished the song. As I said, we had fun.
The summer in Mexico between my third and fourth year of college was fun, too. Several of us seminarians went along as part of a student exchange program. We attended a language school in Mexico City where, because of the well-structured immersion program, our background in Latin, and living with local families, we made very rapid progress. After three weeks, armed with a 1000 word vocabulary, I was able to live for a week in a mountain parish where no one, except for an attractive coed I was happily surprised to find stationed there, spoke English.
It was a thoroughly engaging experience. Karen and I hit it off with the young people in Tamasopo. We swam under waterfalls and inside florescent blue grottoes. We played volleyball and had long discussions comparing our cultures.
I stayed with Padre Cisneros, the local priest, sleeping in the adobe office next to his church. One day, just before the arrival of the twice-a-day train—the only connecting transportation in or out of the village—Padre Cisneros invited me to join him on his pastoral rounds to outlying villages. We got off the train at an unmarked stop. The only structure in sight was a simple kiosk—two Pepsi cases, a board and a few bottles of warm soda. When I bought one, the salesgirl asked, “Do they have Pepsi in the United States, too?”
Someone met us with two horses and we rode farther incountry. We stopped at a small collection of huts and a thatch roofed church where the padre promptly set to hearing confessions. In a quiet moment, I noticed a chicken hopping along with a strangely shaped leg. Father stuck his head out and asked me to see if I could come up with an impromptu sermon for the fifty or so people waiting to be shriven. I gathered a few thoughts while one of the men fired up a gas generator behind the church to power the PA system—a mic and speaker—out front. As any public speaker knows, the hardest part of a speech is getting started. I took a deep breath and got out the first two sentences when Padre came running up, grabbed the mic and said, “You’ll have to understand, this young man is from the U.S. and doesn’t speak Spanish very well. So indulge him, please.”