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The Boys of Aroma Hill 8: A Day in the Life

2/10/2019

I have two audiences in mind today: my old friends from minor seminary days and those of you who wonder what boarding school seminaries were like, at least from 1962 when we entered. From accounts of other seminaries I have read, St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary on Aroma Hill probably scored on the median between bizarre seminaries such as that described by ex-seminarian Paul Hendrickson during his 1956-63 stretch with the Trinitarians, Seminary: A Search [1983] and some of the religious communities we played in varsity sports, which seemed more familial. I remember a visiting priest consoling his baseball team by offering to buy them ice cream on the way home to their seminary. Several correspondents from our seminary told me recently that particular priests took a paternal interest in their troubles and made significant contributions to their future well-being, but daily life on the hill is never mentioned in the same breath as “The Brady Bunch.”

I posted at the onset of this log that the senior Prefect of Discipline of our first two years did not seem suited to the job and depended upon inordinate fear and intimidation in his daily management of our lives. He created a constant undercurrent of stress where our daily schedule was concerned. It was he who woke us up from our nightly sleep at 5:30 AM. The freshmen and sophomore classes slept in dormitories of about 70 students each; the Prefect would throw on all the fluorescent lights and walk through the floor ringing a hand bell. We would spring from bed and hustle down to the institutional lavatory at the end of the floor. It is amazing to me that we could all take care of grooming business and walk over to the chapel in the main building in time for 6 AM Morning Prayer and Mass, dressed in the required coat and tie, or black suit on Sunday.

The seminarians, along with the senior and assistant prefects, lived in a relatively new structure called Scotus Hall. The dorms, rooms, library, and locker room were all housed in this late 1950’s structure named after the medieval Franciscan philosopher John Scotus or Duns Scotus. We were too young to appreciate the irony that the English word “dunce” is derived from attacks on Scotus by his enemies; perhaps the etymology was apt for the residents of my day, including myself, of course. Until Scotus Hall was completed, the seminarians slept on the top fourth floor of the old 1904 structure and the school offered a monthly mass invoking St. Agatha, I was told by the college guys, to preserve the building from a fire and the loss of the best and the brightest, the future of the Order.

The Masses on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday were high Masses; a schola or small choir of collegians sang the Gregorian chants appropriate to the day. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays were low Masses with no singing. Some peculiar points: there was no padding on the kneelers, no small thing when you remember that the Mass was offered in the pre-Council Latin rite which was not noted for brevity. Another peculiarity by today’s liturgical law was the offering of multiple Masses at the same time. While the student Mass was being offered on the high altar, ten or so other priests were offering low Masses at side altars along both walls, and the seminarian servers rang bells for each of them.

At 7 AM we were served a breakfast of cold cereal, fresh baked white bread and butter, and coffee. On my last day on the Hill, six years later, the breakfast menu was cold cereal, fresh baked white bread and butter, and coffee. There were some classmates who added variation by “toasting” their buttered bread, i.e., setting the hot coffee pot on the buttered bread. [On Sunday, the bread was generally a frosted raisin bread.] The dining experience deserves its own treatment in a separate post. We were out of the refectory by 7:30 to dash back to the dorms, make our beds to seminary standards, and gather up our books for the first class at 8 AM.

Classes continued till noon, with a mid-morning break of fifteen minutes. Smoking of cigars and pipes was permitted for those 17 and older with parental permission, and a lot of guys huddled around outside during this interlude for some nicotine fortitude to face the next classroom battles. There was a coterie of us who often used this break to check the dormitory delivery dock. The seminary did not have its own student laundry services, and some of us mailed our laundry home in metal laundry cases. The catalogue for parents assured a quick turnaround, but that rarely happened, and the uncertainty of the laundry supply line was a factor in my early days there. My siblings joke that when they came home from school on some days, the family house reeked of chlorine, and they would say, “I guess Tom’s laundry arrived today.”

After about a year or two of this, I did what most of my classmates did—employ a local woman in town who billed our seminary student account. The turnover was quick, though I pity all those families at the foot of the hill who received regular bundles of boys’ high school wash. It is a little-known fact that the hazmat suit was invented in Callicoon. In my last year in Callicoon [1967-68] we could carry personal cash and could go into town to use the new laundromat.

It is my recollection that we had four classes in the morning and two in the afternoon sandwiched around a PM study period. The noontime lunch opened with the Angelus, as did most other meals, and was notable for the delivery of the mail, which had been opened and read by the Prefect before we laid eyes on it. The surveillance of personal mail between a seminarian and his parents is one of the most egregious institutional policies that rankles me to this day. During my first year my mother wrote to tell me she was pregnant; this letter had been opened and perused before I ever saw it. Finally, a change in administration ended the practice in my college years.

The seminary did little to facilitate students’ ongoing communications with their families. There was a rule that students must write home weekly, but knowing the letter would be read by the Prefect—and we were forbidden to seal the envelope—what are you going to say if you had difficulties with teachers, or morale issues, or personal problems? Under these circumstances, could a young seminarian tell his parents about abusive behavior of a friar or a breaking of boundaries? I think we were permitted a phone call on our birthdays, but phone use was very limited and monitored for our high school years.

Back to lunch: on some days of the week there were devotions in the chapel after the meal; Tuesday’s was devoted to St. Anthony, “whose purity was the ornament and glory of Christianity…” The afternoon classes extended until 3 PM when a two-hour recreation commenced. There was an expectation that a student be involved in some form of exercise or sports after school, and it was always easy to get up a pick-up game of whatever was in season. There were organized intramurals, but for those of us who struggled with math, regular appearance at Father Elmer’s daily volleyball game was a sine qua non for a little mercy at the black board in trig or later in college set theory.

By 5 PM we were showered and at our desks in the giant study hall in Scotus. Study hours were monitored by faculty members and were generally productive unless one fell asleep, and the different monitors had varieties of ways to wake us up, particularly if we were drooling on a school-issued text book. Dinner took place at 6 PM, and afterward the Franciscan Crown, a seven-decade rosary, was recited outdoors around a small lake next to the old seminary building. While not mandatory, it was good to be seen publicly saying the community Crown more often than not. Our evaluations were based in part on observing our enthusiasm for things holy. After the Crown there was a half-hour break to do personal reading, chat, or other personal chores and interests until we were back in the Scotus study hall at 7:30 for a 90-minute study period. Night prayer in the chapel was held at 9 PM, often accompanied by benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. We returned en masse to Scotus to retire at 9:30 PM, though the fluorescent lights seemed to go off ten or fifteen minutes later than that.

The Seminary maintained a “grand silence” from the end of night prayer till breakfast the next morning. Consequently, there was supposed to be silence in the dorms upon retiring and awaking. However, the dark nights were known for pranks and mischiefs. In my sophomore year I sat on the steps from the dorm to the roof to follow the first Cassius Clay [Mohammed Ali] boxing match with Sonny Liston from someone’s contraband portable radio in 1964. None of us got caught but organized after-dark activities such as dorm raids were punished with significant gravity. The death sentence punishments included immediate expulsion for absence from seminary grounds, and automatic C’s in conduct for smoking cigarettes. Somewhere in high school two students were expelled when one tried to pass a letter to his girlfriend by sending it through another’s laundry case. The second party returned to Franciscan formation after college and distinguished himself as an exemplary friar and college professor.

But sudden expulsions were unusual, and the majority of our seminarians left at the end of a school years for academic difficulties or personal discernment issues. However, some who were dismissed by the rector at year’s end told me they were frustrated that they never got concrete answers to their questions of why they were let go, except in a generic “you don’t seem suited to our life” way. Truth be told, some of our administrators were not so well suited to our life, for which a significantly larger body of proof exists

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The Boys of Aroma Hill 7: "And What Brings You Here?"

1/19/2019

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It cannot be understated how much the office of priesthood was respected in the Church in my youth—and even today in most quarters, recent events notwithstanding—such that a respectable number of young men, and particularly the adults who influenced them, believed until the 1960’s that early induction into a minor seminary was a worthy and worthwhile goal. Entering a seminary “to become a priest” was a venture held to be “self-evident” to borrow language from our American forefathers. To the outside world, including the seminary benefactors and my own parents, the focus on ordination was understood as a common attraction and universal organizing principle for those of us who attended.

It did not take much time in a minor seminary to realize that the intentions of our parents and sponsors, let alone of our classmates, were much more of a mixed alloy. I came to the seminary with the expectation that the routine would be challenging, but I entered with the comforting thought that we would all be on the same page about what we were looking for. An immediate surprise was the absence of anything we might call “evangelical.” The guys in that class of 1962-63 were businesslike in their approach to the long-range career goal, spoke little if any to each other about priestly or spiritual topics, and engaged in the multiple devotions probably in much the same fashion as they had in the elementary schools they and I hailed from.

The official reason we were joined together in common purpose so early in life is stated in the documents of the Council of Trent [1545-1563], a council focused upon reform of the priesthood. The absence of appropriate training of priests was considered a major cause of clerical moral indifference at that time, and the establishment of standardized seminaries addressed the twin challenges of competence and devotion. The documents set the age of admission to the seminary at 12 or above; the author Paul Henderson in his Seminary: A Search [1983] cites the Council’s preference for this early age “before the habits of vice take possession of the whole man.” Clearly by 1962 there was not universal agreement about early seminary candidacy, and the statistics from my own ordination class show that only half of us entered at 14; an equal number entered after high school or even later.

So, there were respectable options of age in my time, which makes the subject of early entry more intriguing and complex. Some of my classmates were clearly misplaced. I have wondered over the years what stories brought them to Callicoon. A Capuchin friar in Washington, D.C., a classmate in graduate school, told me that his minor seminary was the only Catholic high school for 100 miles in each direction, and he believed that its attraction for parents was the quality of the education for the minimal cost. Every seminary memoir notes the remarkably low tuition of the various institutions. In my case, St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary charged $43/month for tuition, room, and board. Even in 1962 this rate was considered as something of a token against actual costs. (College seminary on the hill was a better bargain, the tuition being $53/month. As those of us from New York State all earned an annual $500 Regents scholarship, I can truthfully report that I earned my first college degree, an A.A. junior college degree in Classical Languages (Latin and Greek) for the princely sum of $60.)

In years of reflection upon some of my obviously troubled and unhappy classmates, I have concluded that some were sent to the seminary by their parents to “straighten out” or “grow up.” It is a mystery to me how some survived the admissions process, and the best source for this information, our legendary vocation recruiter “Doc” Fink, has long passed away. Were he alive today, Doc would probably admit that he took a chance on some applicants, perhaps seeing promise in a sullen eighth grader for some reason or other. There were classmates of mine who would meet today’s criteria as “bullies” and we had to endure them for a year or two before the faculty decided to cut one or more of Doc’s iffy draft picks.

In adult life, and particularly in recent correspondences, I have come to learn that some of my peers from seminary days preferred life on Aroma Hill to living at home. Some had genuine strains with their family dynamics that could easily be covered in the admission phase. My father was at work when Doc paid his “home visit” and the two never met, but my papers got punched, nonetheless. If you told me that some applicants needed a break from home life, I would not fall over in shock.

Others came from distressed areas and poor school districts, or saw the seminary as offering greater educational and cultural opportunities. This was probably more common to college applicants, who brought their affinities for Peter, Paul and Mary or Pete Seeger to the seminary program. One of my classmates came from rural South Carolina, but the quality of education he had received was evidently quite poor. He labored mightily to keep up with the class, but he was dismissed after his first year. At some level I like to think he saw the seminary as an opportunity to better himself and his skills. We never heard from him again.

Another word that comes up frequently about the Callicoon years is “searching.” I use this word with an asterisk, because it is easy for us in our memories to conflate our college years with our early years from the distance of over half a century. I find myself doing that all the time. After all, our Callicoon years spanned the heart of the 1960’s. When I graduated from the high school division in 1966, the Mamas and the Papas’ “California Dreamin’” was virtually our class song.

I can say that while I was a bit more culturally obtuse than a lot of my classmates, I had to do significant mental rearranging to merge my pre-Council vision of the priesthood to the demands of a changing Church and the changes in America. It was a strain to relate to long-time classmates whose searching was taking them to horizons far beyond the swamp at the foot of Aroma Hill. In the last two years of Callicoon life [the junior college years] I lost some close friends who departed for other ventures. It was even more painful because, in my day-to-day preoccupations, I hadn’t picked up the cues.

The guys who attended last September’s reunion and those who post regularly on Facebook feel attachment to their years in Callicoon, if not the institution and its program itself. That is an important distinction. I was not a happy camper living there, but I made some of the best friends in my life during those six years. And, I would be lying if I didn’t say that some of the funniest things I ever saw and heard were the end-product of our common life there. But as I say, the “one size fits all” of minor seminary existence began to decay almost immediately after my arrival, and by 1968 it was a chimera.

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The Boys of Aroma Hill 6: The Mother of the Thought

1/13/2019

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Celebrating the feasts of the Epiphany and the Baptism of the Lord in my home parish this month brought back memories of my return to the seminary in the winter of 62-63, my first year there, after two weeks home with my family around the Christmas tree. My commute was a little longer than most of my classmates as I had the all-day rail trip from Buffalo to the heart of the Catskills. I can remember, though, the shock of walking into the seminary chapel on my first night back, seeing it decorated with poinsettias and a large nativity scene. The large institutional seminary seemed far removed from the human festivities of life back home. I had forgotten momentarily that our chapel, which seated as many as 300, was also the local Catholic parish church for the village of Callicoon and was tended to by an older friar who lived at the seminary.

I can’t recall if anyone decided not to come back after Christmas, though I could certainly understand the impulse. It would have made more sense to leave after January examinations and transfer into a local high school at the semester break. Everyone, it seems, was back to the Hill from a variety of locations, though geographically there were some rather easy fault lines to fathom. Numerically, the largest cluster of my classmates came from “the Jersey parishes.” The Franciscans staffed a significant number of suburban parishes in the Diocese of Paterson, New Jersey, where my branch of the Order had planted its flag in the 1870’s, German refugees from the onslaught of Bismarck. The term “Jersey Boys” was not yet in our national lingo in early 1963, but I do recall that a new music group called “The Four Seasons” was making a splash during Christmas vacation with a song about big girls not crying.

I can still remember the names of the Jersey towns—Fair Lawn, Little Falls, Pompton Lakes, Clifton, and a few more I have forgotten--stretched along or near the cross-state highway U.S. 46 before it enters metropolitan New York. It is not surprising the best harvest of young seminarians might come from the friars’ most prolific cluster of parochial ministries. The fact that most of my classmates came from the same few counties did not create any social strains that I am aware of. But there were other constituencies to be heard from. Several of my classmates hailed from Queens and Long Island, enough for a potential small but determined bunch of fans for a new baseball team, the New York Metropolitans, which set up shop in the Polo Grounds two years before my class set up shop on the hill.

Small but vocal in identity were the “B” town representatives, i.e., Boston and Buffalo. In truth, I was the only student from Buffalo in my class but there were others spread out in the classes ahead of mine, and in subsequent years there would be “reinforcements,” so to speak. Similarly, I can only recall one true Bostonian in my freshman class, partly because he always used my Rite-Guard and mostly because he is among my closest friends today, and a Café contributor to boot. But the Beantown contingent throughout the school was not insignificant, particularly when our small lake froze enough for hockey.

There were interesting stories of how other classmates joined the seminary; I had classmates from New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Florida, among other sites. But while it was easier to latch on to someone’s place of origin, it is harder today to understand what motivated each of us in 1962 to even think about leaving those varied locales for seminary life. The phrase “to become a Franciscan priest” seems simple enough, but even in my freshman year it was obvious that our personalities, ambitions, and influences were remarkably complex. The fact that there are no minor seminaries today is enough to make me curious as to why the Church—and the significant adults in our lives—thought a minor seminary was a good idea back then. And more to the point, why did any of us in our deepest souls make that choice, to the degree that anyone is capable of significant career choice at age 14?

I am grateful to reader Mark Griffin for pointing me in the direction of Paul Hendrickson’s Seminary: A Search (1983). Hendrickson, a writer of some note, was a reporter for the Washington Post when he was encouraged to write his seven-year memoir of minor seminary life by, among others, the Post’s legendary Ben Bradlee of Watergate fame. I am barely into Henderson’s first year of seminary life, but even at this stage of his work he stops to consider why so many young products of Catholic elementary schools entered minor seminaries.

He begins with the religious temperament of the times: the post-World War II years, when a religious revival of sorts was taking place in America. Most of our fathers had fought in World War II, and the work of Catholic priest-chaplains had won admiration in all quarters, including our future parents. But even beyond that, the War had impacted different countries different ways. France, for example, fell into existential hopelessness. Church attendance dropped, and the famous “worker priest” experiment of the 1950’s attempted to win back the loyalty of French blue-collar workers.

The United States, by contrast, was an energized country after the war, and nowhere more so than in the parochial life of the Catholic Church. Hendrickson observes that by 1958, his first year in the seminary, there were 381 minor and major seminaries in this country [though within twenty years there would be 259 less.] The cultivation of youthful vocations was part and parcel of a seemingly bright future for the Church. The two primary agents of recruiting and nurturing future priests, in Hendrickson’s assessment of things, were religious sisters in elementary schools and Catholic mothers. He describes the process of easing into seminary life as “going with the flow” of convincing, cajoling, and encouragement.

I can say that to a point this was true in my own life and probably so in some classmates. A very close friend today from seminary days has two sisters who became religious nuns and an uncle who joined a religious order, but from knowing him for 56 years I don’t think that these circumstances alone do justice to his inner existential choices of remaining in the seminary for ten years, as he did. The men who have corresponded with me through the Café blog or Facebook tell a more complex story, such as a seminary friend who was orphaned at age eight and acknowledges that his life was turned around by two friar priests who became surrogate fathers to him during his five-year stay.

I will continue the thought in future Sunday posts from the Hill, and I welcome conversation here at the Café blog, or at the Facebook page St. Joe’s Reunions. Search on Facebook.

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"The Boys From Aroma Hill: It's Complicated."

12/30/2018

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This is the fifth installment of "The Boys From Aroma Hill," tales from my seminary class of 65 which entered the boarding school minor seminary on September 8, 1962.

It was 56 years ago this Christmas that I was starting to get my stomach in a knot with the reality that a few days after New Year’s Day I would be riding the Erie Lackawanna Railroad back to my new permanent home in the Catskill Mountains, St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary, “Aroma Hill.” Many years later, as a psychotherapist, I would hear adult school teachers relay the same kinds of symptoms starting in late July every summer as they anticipated a return to the classroom, which quite literally filled them with dread. As a psychotherapist I would sit back and ask with enough naivete, “So why don’t you try another setting or another line of work?” Just as you might ask why a 14-year-old goes back to a seminary and a lifestyle he was very unhappy with.

One piece of mail to the Cafe recently came from a thoughtful man who was about six years my junior in Callicoon. He said that when his own son turned 14, he had to wonder what in the world had possessed his parents to send him off to boarding school at that age. It is a very good question, not simply for us old timers trying to make sense of our life narrative, but as a slice of recent church history that gives insight to our catechetical ventures today. How many times do we ask today “how can we reach the young?” The minor seminary—particularly the isolated minor seminary—was a special piece of the catechetical pie for well over a hundred years till the radical shifts in practice after Vatican II, as well as dwindling applications and resources, led to an almost total disappearance of “minor” or high school seminaries in the 1970’s.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the summit or precious jewel of the Catholic educational process was the development of vocations to the priesthood (and for women to cloistered monasteries or open parochial education and health care ventures.) I was born in 1948, making me a “boomer” at a time when returning GI’s were attending college paid for by their veterans’ benefits. The Catholic demographic in the United States was thriving. Catholic families tended to be larger because the predominant confessional morality of the time followed the lead of Pope Pius XI and his insistence in 1930 that artificial birth control was mortally sinful.

The need for Catholic priests and religious throughout my youth swelled. Parish life, with regular confessions (every two weeks in my household and probably close to the norm), marriages, and particularly schools, devoured every able-bodied cleric and religious who could report for duty. I have read that the goal of some of the metropolitan archbishops was an annual ordination class of 100! At one point after World War II the diocese of Buffalo, according to a retired priest I met on retreat last month, contained 700 incardinated priests and another 700 religious order priests. I have seen recruiting correspondence from around 1949 from the Archdiocese of Los Angeles to religious sisters in Ireland, with data that Los Angeles was opening a new parish every 90 days.

It is interesting, though, that many future priests chose not to seek training and career in their home dioceses, but rather with religious orders. There are multiple reasons, not least of which was the influence of the many Catholic colleges that were established or expanded after the war by religious orders for veterans attending night school. (The Franciscan-established Siena College, my first ordained assignment in the 1970’s, was forced to erect Quonset huts after WWII for classroom and operational space.)

Another factor was the variety of spiritual and vocational paths available to a man seeking the priesthood. Thomas Merton’s “Seven Storey Mountain” was published in 1949 and influenced a good number of men (and women) to entertain thoughts of a vocation to the simple, contemplative life of monks dating to St. Benedict. The writings of the lay medical missionary Dr. Tom Dooley, notably his “Deliver Us From Evil” (1959), sparked interest in clerical and lay interests alike to combine humanitarian and religious purpose in ministry to third world sites. Religious orders varied in their devotional emphases, lifestyles, and career priorities. The Sulpicians, for example, devoted themselves to seminary teaching, spiritual direction, and scholarship. The Jesuit pursuit of academic excellence is well known, and several orders and communities were the product of devotion to Mary.

This, then, was the atmosphere of the 1950’s Church in the U.S. when the 1962 edition of the Hill Gang began to discern high school and vocational choices. I doubt that any of us were consciously aware of the influences that shaped our—and especially our parents’—choices, but this does not mean there was no critical assessment of choices. Pastors, as a rule, were not overly fond to see young men opt for a religious community over the diocese’s own seminary. Parents, I noticed, did not always think a secluded seminary atmosphere was a good idea for 14-year-olds and preferred that their sons have some “real world” experience and maturity before signing any dotted lines.

Even my own mother, whose life’s ambition was to see her oldest son ordained a priest, also showed some discretion in her decision-making process. From about the time I was four the master plan for me was to attend a day school/high school minor seminary for the Diocese of Buffalo that, coincidentally, was located all of six blocks from my home. (For Buffalo readers, this was the “Little Seminary” on Dodge Street on Buffalo’s east side; we know now in 2018 that the clerical abuse problem did not leave “the Little Seminary” unscathed.) The idea of going somewhere else did not appear on the family radar until rather late in the game.

My mother was in the custom of making an annual retreat, and somewhere around 1960 she mentioned to a Franciscan retreat master that she had a son planning to enter the seminary in Buffalo. This friar turned out to be a good salesman, because the next evening I had an interview with him. From what I can recall, the “pitch” to me was that being a Franciscan priest was better than being a diocesan priest because “you can do any kind of work you want.” However, I think he was more analytical in discussing the matter with my mother, and by the lights of the day he raised some good issues for a parent, pointing out the community life of the Franciscans was a more wholesome lifestyle than the isolation of diocesan life and that I would be well cared for in my old age. In my mother’s youth, her pastor had wandered the street in his pajamas, fenced in the rectory, and raised a herd of deer in the middle of Buffalo. No Lyme Disease for this boy.

Somewhere in all this the issue of living away from home must have been brought up, because my mother began to extol the virtues and advantages of boarding school life with all the enthusiasm of someone who did not have to go herself. She had heard “horror stories” of the sort that the Little Seminary was very hard, and that the boys had so much homework that they were exhausted all the time. Closer to the truth was the deterioration of Buffalo’s East Side; this was the time of “white flight” and, to recoup some of their investment, and to protect me from street assaults, my parents sold our Buffalo house and moved about 15 miles out of the city. And I would be safe up on Aroma Hill.

Today, when kids say, “It’s complicated,” I can resonate.

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The Boys from Aroma Hill Part Four: Did We Get More Religious?

11/18/2018

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The question of why 13 and 14-year-olds would leave the comfort of kith and kin to live in a distant boarding school is a question that differs from man to man. I had the good luck, however, to finally trace down something of an official explanation. In the same year (1962) my class entered St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary in Callicoon, N.Y., a description of the life of my province was released for sale to the general public. The title is The Franciscans: Love at Work, and the authors were Franciscan Fathers Boniface Hanley and Salvator Fink. “Sal” Fink was one of the two traveling vocations directors of our province whose own residence between trips was the Callicoon seminary. From there he would come up to Buffalo very early in 1962 to interview me and see my family prior to final approval and acceptance. We would remain friends for almost thirty years, but he did not take well to my leaving the order.

If Sal were alive today, I think he would chuckle at some of what he wrote, particularly his chapter, “Future Franciscans,” (pp. 225-244) There is little doubt here that protecting us from feminine wiles was a major raison d’etre for minor seminaries. “[The seminarian] found it a strictly masculine world. No feminine frills or frippery trifled with its monastic order. Nor were there curtains, rugs, or soft chairs…But above all, it was for him a world of joy. Joined with lads sharing his interests, goals and enthusiasms, he touched here the wellsprings of youthful charity and Christ-like love. The priests of the faculty nourished his mind with their teachings and his soul with their example.”

The authors continue: “It was just for him that the seminary was founded, [the seminarian] felt…Authorities see the seminary not as a mere institution to protect a boy from worldly evil and example, but rather as a blessed opportunity of early and effective preparation for the life he wishes to lead.” [pp. 225-226] Whether every seminarian of my time perceived the experience of the seminary as an early and effective spiritual preparation is at the least a matter of some debate. As I have written on this stream earlier, at our school reunion in September 2018 several of the Aroma Hill Gang expressed openly at the group Mass and other formats what we would call today conversion experiences in Callicoon.

On the other hand, the development of an early adolescent spirituality was an elusive challenge, doubly so because at least some of us had left home with the expectation that we would find more “church devotion” for want of a better word than what we already had in our home parishes and schools. As one of my close seminary classmates wrote this week, “The other topic I’ve thought about for years is how poorly we were exposed to intimate spirituality at Callicoon. I’m not sure if our teachers lacked a sense of the true presence of God in our community or if by lack of experience didn’t have the spiritual vocabulary to invite us there. Our shared reluctance, to this day, of sharing the details of our spiritual journey intrigues me. What’s lacking? We certainly have love for each other formed by our shared experiences …. but have no apparent desire/ability to communicate what grace is doing within each of us.”

I might have worded this a little differently, but I agree in principle that development of an age-appropriate spirituality in the seminary was sorely lacking. I came from Christian Brothers’ background, and I found the Callicoon spirituality similar in the sense that in the early 1960’s the spiritual formation of young men was duty bound. Aristotle and Aquinas agreed that the soul of virtue was habit, doing good things and engaging in religious exercises over and over, for example, until the disposition [virtue] was second nature. The Christian Brothers in my middle school year would post a daily tally on the blackboard of students carrying rosaries [“the beads” as they put it] and wearing scapulars under our shirts.

The seminary was much like that except that there were more spiritual exercises throughout the day, many more, in fact. Devotion to St. Anthony, readings in the dining room, weekly confession, rosary after supper, monthly days of recollection, Sunday Compline in Latin, etc. I should probably add here that the kneelers in our chapel were wooden, without cushioning, apparently for some measure of asceticism that I guess was intended to convey a “tough it out with Christ” motif. Curiously, the one devotion that brought me any measure of personal consolation was reading a chapter of The Imitation of Christ after receiving communion, something I learned from my own initiative that was not part of my seminary training.

I can only offer mitigating circumstances as to why some of us remember the minor seminary with less than warm spiritual fuzzies. My friend-correspondent above raised the issue of seminary personnel, i.e., the example of the priests. The friars who staffed the seminary were themselves products of the same system of priestly training introduced at the Council of Trent [1545-1563], which introduced the concept of stand-alone seminaries. [Whether Trent envisioned minor seminaries is uncertain; Wikipedia writes that minor seminaries “emerged in cultures and societies where literacy was not universal, and the minor seminary was seen as a means to prepare younger boys in literacy for later entry into the major seminary.”]

To be honest, I think of my seminary professors as hard-working men—for the most part—who approached the seminary institution something the same as we came to accept, a necessary assignment for a higher good. A good parallel is an assessment of our academic program. The seminary faculty had one true scientist and one true—if eccentric—mathematician, God love him, but many of our teachers were self-taught, so to speak. I recall several as returning from arduous missionary work. The seminary staff was assigned under canonical obedience, and in candor a fair number did not want to be there. I say that without rancor, because I took a few assignments like that myself after ordination, including teaching in a Catholic high school.

There are other critical factors which each deserve a hearing, but I will summarize them here and pick them up in future posts. One of the most surprising things about the seminary for me was the poverty of the religion courses. They were mostly train wrecks. There was an attitude throughout my high school years that “you’ll get plenty of that later” and the coursework provided us was filler at best. Ironically, the one captivating academic religion course of my time there was taught in my high school senior year by a priest who himself had just completed coursework in the renewed theology of the Vatican II era which had just ended that year. Unfortunately, we had no preparation for this agenda, which I recognize today as the historical/critical method of Biblical analysis…and I got a 60 on one exam, a low water mark for someone with my career ambition.

Were seminarians of our time capable of sharing our “spiritual journeys” as my good friend asks? I checked Erik Erikson’s classic “stages of development” to see what one might expect from high schoolers: “[5] … development now depends primarily upon what a person does. An adolescent must struggle to discover and find his or her own identity, while negotiating and struggling with social interactions and “fitting in” and developing a sense of morality and right from wrong.” There was a very noticeable reticence about discussing personal piety, even some subtle pressure not to go there. Erikson’s stage of “fitting in” describes the seminary to a tee. We were never at a loss to discuss sports, given that most of us played varsity or, in my case, random pick-up games of anything in season. I recall some religious discussions that were “safe” such as whether it is better to be an easy confessor or a hard confessor when we were eventually ordained years down the road. But “touchy feely” matters of the here and now were avoided, including spiritual doubts or experiences. [Later in novitiate and the major seminary we were careful not to show vulnerability lest our superiors hold up our ordinations.]

Another point worth mentioning is that the religious routine of the seminary followed a liturgical style that was being dismantled at Vatican II, in the declaration Sacrosanctum Concilium of 1963. My memory is that the Latin Tridentine Mass was still in use throughout my high school years, and a daily exposure to a 6 AM low Mass in Latin on wooden kneelers was not, shall we say, reinforcing. The Fathers of the Council recognized this in effecting an overall form of the liturgy. Vatican II would call for a communal experience of faith in the Mass, but our seminary liturgy was markedly individual and passive until my college years.

That said, it is a remarkable thing that so many of my classmates and colleagues at Callicoon went on to careers of value and service, married well, served in the military, and still carry a divine spark even outside the Roman Catholic umbrella. So, it must be assumed that with all its faults, Callicoon was a time and a place where many of us found something of our adult identities, which is the cornerstone of a personal and communal spirituality.

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The Boys of Aroma Hill Part 3: Getting My First Look

11/11/2018

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I officially set foot on Aroma Hill in Callicoon, NY, on Saturday, September 8, 1962, after an eight-hour train ride from Buffalo on the old Erie-Lackawanna Railroad, a passenger service that was rapidly dying even at that early date. I had a lot to adjust to in a short time. I had been released from the hospital just a week or two before, and my parents sold our house just two days before I left, and we moved on Friday to a new homestead in a village south of Buffalo. Despite the chaos, my parents made a kind effort to give me a going away breakfast of favorite donuts amidst all the unopened boxes before we left for the train station and my 9 AM departure. At the station we ran into another student in a black suit, white shirt, and black tie who was also heading to Callicoon. He seemed a little lost, so my mother told his mother that “Tommy will keep an eye on him.” Later, in the train he explained he was a Canisius College grad heading to Callicoon’s PG or post-graduate college studies in Latin and Greek, among other subjects.

I could not know it then, but one of my best friends in the world today had a much more complicated route to Callicoon. John Burke took the train as well, but from his hometown Boston, then switched trains in New York City and arrived in Callicoon; the arrangement meant that he arrived on Friday, not Saturday, and the seminary would not admit him a day early even though the returning student body was already there. Years later he would describe to us spending the night in a Callicoon boarding house along the railroad tracks. I was aghast when I heard about that later in adult life, but just the other day John reflected upon our six years there: “I share some of your thoughts but not your uncertainties about where I was. To me, it was the best of all worlds. I can remember getting letters every week from my father and mother. I wish I had saved some of them. Both my sisters and I were away at the same time. Each letter was typed and special. I did not get many visitors but only remember being home sick once….”

It was hard for me to leave home, though given my family’s move it was difficult to say exactly what and where “home” really was. When I arrived in Callicoon late that first Saturday afternoon, there were two friars with a station wagon at the train station to gather up a quartet of us—several other newbies had boarded the train in Binghamton, NY—and drive us up Aroma Hill to the dorm building where we could find our delivered trunks. My new classmate John’s trunk did not arrive for about three weeks. The first weekend was the predictable orientation to rules and procedures, include the reality that I would not be home again until Christmas nor would I have a hot breakfast for six years in the seminary, until virtually my final week in 1968.

After the class photos were taken, we received an orientation to the rule book. My takeaways included that illicit smoking was an automatic “C” in conduct, that “particular friendships” were forbidden, that we could not talk to the dozen or so blue-collar Franciscan brothers on the staff, that we were to write our parents and go to confession every week. There were lots of other prescriptions, and in case anyone forgot the orientation, the rule book was read every Friday during lunch as we ate in silence. I was not a hell-raiser at that period of my life, but I could see that one needed to stay on one’s toes to keep the authorities from forming poor impressions. Leaving the seminary carried a stigma then; expulsion from a seminary was light-years worse, at least where I came from. My first disciplinary conundrum came about fast enough: after being told about absence from seminary grounds being cause for immediate dismissal, the assistant prefect of discipline who also served as the school’s baseball coach announced that tryouts for the seminary’s baseball team would be held that afternoon in the town’s municipal stadium, off campus. Was individual permission necessary to go into town, or had we just received blanket permission? I hoofed myself upstairs to the head prefect’s office for a legal consultation. It occurred to me on the way out of his office that I was the only one who consulted.

The predominant demographic identity of St. Joseph Seminary’s 250 students was white middle-class, the majority coming from the dozen or so New Jersey suburban parishes across the river from New York City which were staffed by Franciscan priests. A fair share came from New York City and Long Island. Buffalo had a small contingent due mostly to Timon High School and St. Bonaventure University being staffed by friars, and Boston made its presence known. But we did have members from Florida, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, and Quebec, as I recall. The entire student body encompassed high school and junior college seminarians as well as college graduates with B.A.’s and veterans for whom the seminary’s college division was an introduction to classical languages [Latin and Greek] and in some cases to college level work in general. I recall two persons of color in my first year, both in advanced courses. My class was entirely white.

After the first week or two I began to sort out what I could expect from the seminary and what I could not. What I can say with certainty after 56 years of reflection and communications is that while demographically and ethnically we bore a basic similarity, each member of the class came to Callicoon in 1962 with unique private reasons for doing so, reasons that none of us significantly understood until later in life. I am receiving mail now from boys on the hill sharing those reasons, the guys who found the seminary a lifeboat and those perhaps who were less enamored. Dr. Wayne-Daniel Berard is a professor of English at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts as well as a chaplain, writer, social justice advocate, and religious philosopher. He graciously passed along to me a segment of his personal memoir summarizing his four high school years at Callicoon with a half-century’s retrospect:

__________________________________________

“Let me say simply that the spiritual was as out of place in seminary as it was anywhere else. Ditto the spiritual person. Only, it was worse, as there was no official expectation of the spiritual in the World. But in the Church (or at least its Academy), the worst thing was to actually be what the institution did not even pretend to be. There was no pretense about pretense here, no falling back on “sacred shoulds.” Nobody cared enough to be duplicitous. The Church was about nothing but Itself; the seminary was about nothing. Not God, not Christ, not compassion, not even putting up a good front. “Don’t go thinkin’ you’re somebody,” my father used to tell me. But the seminary was all about being Somebody just by walking through the door. It wasn’t arrogance, actually. Or privilege. There were many there who felt neither, exhibited neither. It was more a sense of “why bother?” Like the children of rich pensioners, who had lost track years before of where their place had come from or for what. Don’t look. Don’t dig deeper. Don’t question it. The Bark of Peter was on cruise control. Take the ride.

“The fact that the Second Vatican Council had occurred not long before seemed to have no bearing at all on this. Oh yes, we had vicious debates over guitar vs organ in the liturgy. The generation gap existed even in the Eternal Church. But what was Really The Case had nothing to do with age. It had nothing to do with anything. Autonomous self-existence, that was who we were and what we served.”

_____________________________________________________Wayne was four years behind me, entering in 1966 and after the reform Council Vatican II. Several changes in seminary living style were installed in his era that were not available to ours, but there are in his words many constants, too. In looking back, I have thought many times how helpful it would have been if there was some common forum—group encounters, something of that sort—to help us constructively explore exactly why we had left our homes and entered “the academy” as Wayne put it, and incidentally to help us process the bumps in the road from homesickness to spiritual emptiness. The Synod in Rome last month devoted much energy to the need for helpful Church communication with youth; in 1962 I could dimly make out that our game plan was exquisitely devised with a self-assurance that more often than not gets the Church into hot water.

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Christianity's Original Sin: Anti-Semitism

11/4/2018

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The social network Facebook comes under a barrage of well-deserved criticism for its failure to police incendiary and misleading information which poses a danger to the public. That said, I have found Facebook an indispensable tool of keeping in touch with my far-flung family [my father was one of fourteen children], seminary classmates, and folks who have known me through my professional life.

And so it happened that I discovered I had family at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. My cousin and her family were not at the synagogue the day, of the shooting, and we went offline to talk at greater length. She explained to me that “the people in the synagogue on that day, a non-holiday, were the ‘dailies.’ The old people, the devout. The mentally challenged (the two brothers were long time family friends of my husband's, and we will be going to their funerals and Shiva once the bodies are released from the crime investigation). In the Catholic church from my experience, they would have been the daily mass goers, the rosary leaders, the lectors….”

A little later she offered me this thought: “Hi Tom, a little more on the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings, that I thought you might want to hear ... Someone on twitter mentioned that the neighbors of the shooter said, "he just seemed normal." I wonder if "normal" included the basic, low-level, racist crap that you and I both were exposed to growing up. The point from the twitter post was - this is the elephant in the room. This is the underlying cancer that grew into this tragedy. How do you cure racism? Maybe the "broken window" approach from law enforcement - if everyone starts calling out the day to day "cringy" comments/jokes, maybe it starts to make a difference….”

It would be a wonderful thing if American Catholicism had responded with more outrage to the events of Squirrel Hill, if catechists had set aside the prepackaged curriculums for last week, if preachers had torn up the usual bland offerings from the pulpit for some very candid talk about the sinfulness of racism and antisemitism, if Knights of Columbus chapters across the country as a whole had volunteered to assist with security in what is now open season on God’s Chosen People. Incidence of both on-line threats and physical vandalism, such as Friday’s desecration of the Union Temple of Brooklyn, should rouse some sort of reaction from all individuals and congregations that call Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior.

The older I get, the more I read and see, I am coming to the conclusion that “the elephant in the room” in my own Roman Catholicism is our failure not simply to speak out against words and deeds of anti-Semitic mindsets, but our reluctance to acknowledge our own history, that as a Church we have a long history of denying our role as agonists and perpetrators of hatred of Jews. Dissection of the rage borne by the anti-Semitic rabble among us is complex, though it probably stems from an internal conflict in first century synagogues between those who believed that Jesus was the anointed savior and those who could not acknowledge that the Almighty would subject himself to the ignominy of the cross. Expressions of this gulf find their way into the Christian Scriptures themselves. Honest Catholic Scripture scholars have conceded that there are several instances where anti-Semitic sentiment has impacted the very words of the Gospels, notably Matthew 27:25, “his blood be upon us and upon our children."

The perpetuation of the unfortunate term “deicide” or “God killers” served as a pivot for a faulty theology and social segregation and degradation amount over two millennia. In the classroom I constantly remind catechists that the two prominent religious denominations in Hitler’s Germany were Lutheranism and Roman Catholicism. To be honest, this does not get much of a rise in the classroom. I can only attribute this in my religious community to a woeful lack of understanding and emphasis; Catholics—at least in many of the blogsites I encounter, worry more about the means of spacing births by married couples that the preservation of our mothers and fathers in faith, the people of Abraham, Moses and the Prophets.

In 1965 the Catholic Church’s reform council, Vatican II, took modest steps to counter Scriptural justification for hatred of the Jews. Modest steps were the most possible for the world’s bishops raised in an anti-Semitic world, but this statement, from the Council proclamation Nostra Aetate, was a definitive start: “True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ; still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. The Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ.”

My cousin is correct that we grew up with “the basic, low-level, racist crap” that today continues to show its ugly teeth. I recall that after the election of President John Kennedy in 1960, a joke circulated in my extended family that we must all “work with vigor or be replaced with a n-----.” As an altar boy in the late 1950’s the official Catholic formulary for the Good Friday service referred to the Jews as perfidious. We know from the entire body of Scripture, the Hebrew and Christian texts, that we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, without distinction. But for those of us who are baptized Christians, when we love Christ, we are loving the Jew, for that in fact is who Jesus is.

Again, I refer to this from time to time in class or here in the blog, and the reality seems foreign even to lifelong Catholics. Modern catechesis has dropped the ball here in its discussion of Jesus as the “first Christian” who came to promote a new “branding” at the expense of his family, his soul, and his tradition. Antisemitism in any form is a rejection of the Word made Flesh and a willful rejection of God’s Word. Catholicism’s long culture of anti-Semitic speech and behavior is a sin that that has greased the skids for other lies in our history up to and including the present day. The lack of institutional honesty in the matter of clerical child abuse comes immediately to mind.

No one is adequately catechized in the Catholic tradition without immersion in our Judaean roots, and any attempts to rally faith in Jesus cannot succeed without holding dear what he held dear—his religious identity. When it came time for his disciples to defend him, they ran away. When our Jewish brethren in faith are under assault—in Pittsburgh, in Brooklyn, in a nationalist gang meeting, in subtle “jokes”—do we drop our swords and run, continuing the Christian tradition of the original sin?

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The Boys of Aroma Hill: Part 2

10/28/2018

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A few weeks ago, I entered a post entitled “The Boys from Aroma Hill,” describing a reunion of alumni of St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary, the Franciscan minor seminary in the Catskill Mountains of New York. I had intended this to be a mini-series, so to speak—one slice of life that might help understand the Catholicism of today. Thanks to a gentle reminder, I pick up where I left off some weeks ago.

I received an on-line reminder from one of the “Boys of Aroma Hill,” my dear friend and nine-year classmate Buddy Ward, asking when the follow-up to “The Boys of Aroma Hill” would be posted. I had to go back and read my original thoughts [posted September 25 on the Sunday stream]. From the distance of 56 years from the day I entered as a high school freshman, I remain more conflicted about my six-year sojourn on the hill than anything else in my pre-adult life. One might say that since minor seminaries are a thing of the past, the experiences of those years bring nothing useful to Catholic life today. On the other hand, minor [high school/college] seminaries were probably the most intense form of “youth ministry” undertaken by the Church a half-century ago, though Catholicism did not think of seminary life as categorically similar.

In fact, the Church of 1962 looked at seminaries as unique. As I wrote last month, the idea of a seminary was separation, removal from the world of temptation, training for a sacrament that made a man ontologically different from all other human beings. We read a lot today about “clericalism,” the almost inevitable hubris of the priestly life that Pope Francis has sought to eliminate from the first days of his papacy; this same institutional hubris among many bishops is now cited as a core element of the cover-up of priestly abuse of minors. It is worth noting here that when I entered the Franciscan seminary in 1962, candidates for the Franciscan brotherhood and solemn vows were formed and educated separately from priest candidates like myself. It would be nearly a decade before the programs were joined after the Council.

A young seminarian in training lived something of a schizophrenic existence: having been separated from society in quest of a higher calling, the lifestyle of the seminary itself could be quite a letdown. Of course, this experience varies from man to man. At our reunion in September, one alumnus who attended the seminary for only one year shared that his brief tenure had given him a Christian awakening that carried him throughout life. I can’t honestly say the same for my years there. I was one of those seminary candidates who, as the saying goes, “drank the Kool-Aid.” I thought the institution would be an intensification of the piety, liturgy, academic excellence, and generally satisfying interactions with my peers I was leaving behind in East Buffalo.

I search for the right phrasing here, but my experience on the hill for most of my time there struck me as “testing,” i.e., was I tough enough to earn the privilege of becoming a priest? And to be utterly honest, there was, in my early years there, a psychological edge to the discipline that was at times cruel and calculating. I had a very unnerving experience in which I was almost expelled in my freshman year. Our seminary correspondence was censored incoming and outgoing, and I had written home to my parents that another student from my hometown was injured in an accident with a snowblower. The Prefect of Discipline, or daily life manager of the seminary, returned the letter to me because evidently neither the student nor the school had told his parents [the student was a collegian].

I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier, so I rewrote the letter explaining to my parents that my previous effort had not been approved by the censor and that I was sorry they were worried about not hearing from me but there wasn’t much I could do. A day or so later I was summoned into the Prefect’s office. He literally threw the letter in its envelope at me. He screamed, “Here, jump in this letter and send yourself home with it. Get out!” Telling this story years later, one of my wise guy friar friends suggested that I should have responded, “Do you mean that literally or figuratively?” For some period, I wasn’t sure, but I must have groveled enough to be spared the guillotine. It left a bad taste in my mouth, however, and something of my already eroding youthful idealism about seminary formation died that first year. I never truly trusted authority throughout my 27 years with the friars.

Sadly, I find myself reflecting upon that experience again in later life, small potatoes today to be sure, but a window into how vulnerable a minor can be in the Church. I made an honest mistake that provoked an inappropriate response from a cleric in a position of authority. To whom could I turn if the Prefect did expel me on the spot? His superior, the seminary rector, did not know me and there were no mechanisms for “due process” back then. My parents—300 miles away—had virtually no understanding of what the seminary was like, and like most parents of the time, would have given the Church the benefit of the doubt that I had proved to be an insubordinate candidate, unfit for the priesthood.

Earlier this week I took my “Dallas Charter” five-year instruction on the care and protection of minors in the Church for recertification, as I presently provide health services to vulnerable individuals in Catholic settings. The instructions emphasized a nurturing manner with minors, counseling Church ministers to affirm the goodness of youth and to listen carefully to their pain. I could not help but think back to seminary days when I experienced the philosophical reverse.

I never left the hill until I had completed my six years, four high school years and two junior college. By 1968 St. Joseph’s Seminary was undergoing the change that was sweeping the entire Church, the reforms of Vatican II, many of which were directed toward seminary training. The Council decreed in Optatam Totius (1965): “In minor seminaries erected to develop the seeds of vocations, the students should be prepared by special religious formation, particularly through appropriate spiritual direction, to follow Christ the Redeemer with generosity of spirit and purity of heart. Under the fatherly direction of the superiors, and with the proper cooperation of the parents, their daily routine should be in accord with the age, the character and the stage of development of adolescence and fully adapted to the norms of a healthy psychology. Nor should the fitting opportunity be lacking for social and cultural contacts and for contact with one's own family. Moreover, whatever is decreed in the following paragraphs about major seminaries is also to be adapted to the minor seminary to the extent that it is in accord with its purpose and structure. Also, studies undertaken by the students should be so arranged that they can easily continue them elsewhere should they choose a different state of life.”

Optatam Totius made its way up Aroma Hill a bit too late to help me in my earliest years of formation when some “fatherly direction by superiors” would have gone a long way. Again, I cannot presume to say that everyone’s experiences and recollections are like mine. Truth be told, we the students did not talk a great deal about religion or personal feelings. As the entrance class of 1962 came to know itself better, we developed a camaraderie built around our navigation of rules and a mind-numbing curriculum that included three languages and the barest of religious study. We grew up—not surprisingly for teenagers—in fits and bursts. Becoming “ontologically different” from all other humans was not in our line of vision at, say, 16. But some of us who endured would eventually become the closest of friends in adult life—there are four of us, including Buddy, who email almost every day. That reasonably mature teenaged seminarians bonded on the hill into life-long friends is easily my best takeaway from the minor seminary and a story that I look forward to continuing here at the Café.

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Bad Religion

10/7/2018

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I will be away for the next eight days, but I have left interesting links and book reviews for most days I am away. Enjoy!

Bad Religion: How We became a Nation of Heretics
By Ross Douthat

Reviewed by Thomas J. Burns (2012)

“Bad Religion” is a tale of two epochs: the state of American Christianity in the years following World War II, and this millennium’s subsequent pastoral attempts to religiously right the boat, no pun intended. If the name Ross Douthat is not familiar to the reader, the thirty-something journalist is the youngest permanent op-ed contributor of the New York Times. He arrived at Catholicism by way of mainstream Protestantism and later Pentecostalism. It is little surprise, then, the American religious scene is depicted in this work primarily in the Protestant/Evangelical/Catholic triad. All three cohorts are taken to the wood shed.

As is often the case with adult converts to Catholicism, Douthat carries that particular hypervigilance regarding disintegration of something he has worked long and hard to attain, in this case a tradition of faith that brings order out of secular chaos. He is not a theocrat, but he does believe that some sixty years ago the major Christian Churches provided the backbone for a kind of good order and reform. The term “bad religion” used here is less a criticism of personal practice as it is a denunciation of polluted theology and religious philosophy that the author believes has wounded the churches since then.

Douthat is a better journalist than he is historian. His designation of post-1945 American religion as a kind of high water mark rings of Adam and Eve in pre-serpent paradise; the Times’ own review [April 18, 2012] calls the author to task over this arbitrary designation. This is a serious methodological flaw, because for Douthat all of the frenetic religious activism of 1950-2000, most notably Vatican II [1962-65], can be interpreted as a frivolous, dangerous dissipation of moral authority.

Douthat is not the first observer to make this mistake, but as a journalist he is still on the hook for it. The moral horrors of Nazism and the death camps had originated in ostensibly Christian countries. That the Tridentine brand of Catholicism was toothless to prevent such sin was evident to thoughtful Catholics around the world. It was particularly evident to Angelo Roncalli, Papal Nuncio to Turkey and later to occupied France, greatly respected for his work on behalf of Jews. Roncalli was never the jolly, perhaps reckless, John XXIII that many would like to make him, perhaps even the author.

Instead, John XXIII was the honest reformer who blessed the efforts of Catholics [and all Christians, to whom the Council Documents are addressed] to make things right. We forget that barely days after the Council began, the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened global annihilation. The author’s absence of any sense of gravitas as the motivation of reform is lost, and it is hard for me to understand how any treatment of Christianity, a universal church, can be as parochial or American-centered as this work.

That Catholicism and its sister churches fumbled the reform through the balance of the twentieth century is beyond contestation. But the reasons are much more complex than Douthat would have us believe; he wastes considerable ink on Bishop James Pike, of all people, as an errant pied piper of the late 1960’s. Douthat is on safer ground in discussing Harvey Cox and “The Secular City,” for religious liberals of the time labored mightily to harmonize the Christian Church with “modern man,” a notoriously empty concept.

In Douthat’s paradigm, a half century of experimentation with mixed results at best left Roman Catholics and Evangelicals still standing as the best hopes for a fresh start in the new millennium. But the sex abuse scandals of 2002 effectively sidelined American Catholicism, and the author turns a critical eye toward Evangelicals. Here Douthat is at his very best in his analysis of the Religious Right. Once something of the apocalyptic conscience of America, the Evangelical movement came to occupy the ground held by Billy Graham in Eisenhower’s time as America’s house religion. Theologically and strategically this was accomplished in two ways: [1] a merger of American exceptionalism with the Biblical symbol of the “City on the Hill;” and [2] an uncritical embrace of capitalism in a pragmatic theological message that “God wants you to be rich.”

In his chapter, “The City on the Hill,” the author dismantles possibly the most pernicious form of “bad religion,” that the success of God and the success of America are biblically and cosmically intertwined. I was concerned when he began this chapter with Glenn Beck, the Religious Right’s contemporary answer to the long deceased Bishop Pike, both essentially media creations. But Beck simply serves up for the reader the heretical equation of America=the New Israel. Douthat observes that American presidents themselves—Washington, Lincoln, even Coolidge—labored to discourage such thinking. Their wisdom, however, was superseded by Woodrow Wilson [257ff], whose theologically driven political ideology of national righteousness begot a century of what amounts to international US crusading and buttressed military adventures as recently as the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

In his chapter “Pray and Grow Rich” Douthat scorns the theology of “economic blessings preachers” such as Joel Osteen. He illustrates the irony that the message of such cloth worn preaching appeals less to the rich themselves and more to those who wish to be affluent. He marvels that at the height of the Recession, March 2009, Osteen sold out Yankee Stadium. For the author such theology combines manipulation and gullibility.

Having thus unburdened himself, Douthat is somewhat confused about what to do next. [Perhaps he now has more sympathy for the well intentioned reformers of the Vatican II era.] I think it is fair to say that the author would apply Gresham’s Law to contemporary religious thought: disposing of bad coinage, the good currency of traditional faith and values might have renewed opportunity to provide an ecumenical renewal of the personal heart and the communities of Christian faith.

Postscript: Douthat's next book, The Benedict Option, became a major and controversial best seller.

As for Bad Religion, did my review measure up to The New York Times own review of Mr. Douthat's work? You be the judge.

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The Boys From Aroma Hill: Page One

9/25/2018

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Sunday night I returned from a week in New York State to visit my in-laws and attend a reunion of former students of St. Joseph Seraphic [Angelic] Seminary in Callicoon, New York. The reunion was the brain child of the class two years my junior, which celebrated its 50th anniversary of seminary high school graduation this year, the class of 1968. Fortunately, the class threw open its invitation to other St. Joseph’s alumni, and five of my classmates from the high school class of 1966 attended to mark our 52nd anniversary. [What a thought!]

St. Joseph’s Seminary was a boarding school containing a high school and a junior college. It was erected in 1904 in the railroad town of Callicoon, New York, overlooking the busy Erie-Lackawanna Railroad line and the Delaware River from its high perch on a mount originally known as Aroma Hill, due to the swampy terrain at the base. The arrival of Franciscan seminarians in 1904 did not appreciably improve the aroma. As a seventh-grader in Buffalo in 1961 I applied to both the Franciscan Seminary in Callicoon, about 300 miles distant, and the “Little Seminary” in Buffalo, a diocesan day-school for future priests. My mother had strong devotion to St. Francis and considerable weight in my decision to attend St. Joseph’s. I was not too thrilled about leaving home at 14, but the Buffalo seminary was in a rough neighborhood, as they used to say. A quirky note: I boarded the train for Callicoon literally the day after my family sold my childhood homestead. No going back. “Ground control to Major Tom….”

The original photo of my class, taken September 9, 1962, shows 75 awkward freshmen in our black suits. Of that original class, I believe about a half dozen of us finished the full twelve-year course to ordination, studying in Callicoon and later Washington, D.C. From a cost-effective standpoint, minor or high school seminaries were not exactly blue-chip investments, which is why there are virtually none in the United States today. Callicoon closed its doors around 1973 and was eventually sold to the federal government which operates the plant today as a job training center. We were invited to tour the old seminary grounds on Saturday.

You might be wondering about the rationale behind a boarding school seminary in a very rural setting. I have a love-hate retrospective of my six years on Aroma Hill, about 110 miles northwest of New York City and a day-long train ride from my [new] family home. During my high school years, we were permitted two weeks home at Christmas and two months in summer. Short trips home for Thanksgiving and Easter were gradually introduced later.The word seminary comes from the Latin semen, “seed.” [Don’t worry, you are not the first reader to smile at that etymology.] Seminaries were viewed as “little green houses” where young men were snatched from the world to be nurtured and protected so that the seed of the priestly vocation could be brought to fruition. What we were protected from specifically was girls, and more generally, from healthy feminine influence. The older I get, the more I realize what a loss that was to my life. Equally, I regret that the decision to leave home at that young age probably cost me closer contact with my family today. I would never send a son to a minor seminary, though as I noted, one would be hard pressed to find one today.

The year I entered, 1962, was the high-water mark for St. Joseph’s in terms of attendance. I believe that between the four-year high school and the two-year junior college, attendance totaled about 250 students, which included servicemen and graduates from other colleges who joined the seminary’s college department to gain facility with Latin and Greek. During each year of my high school matriculation the entering classes were smaller and in 1969 the college program was relocated entirely, incorporated into Siena College. [My class was the last in the province to obtain college degrees at Catholic University in Washington.] About 1968 the formation programs for Franciscan priest and brother candidates of my province, the Eastern Seaboard, began a unification process which offered more options. But as was typical across America, fewer and fewer young men entered our order, and the mean age of new candidates by the 1970’s was much older than it was in 1962.

Those of us who entered in 1962 can truly say we began our priestly education before Vatican II, as the Council convened about a month after we did, along with the Cuban Missile Crisis, I might add, which was one of the few times I was happy to be far away from civilization should the bombs start to fall. The school I entered was strict, traditional, and clerical, the first leg of a twelve-year marathon. There is some consensus that the “prefect of discipline” and the rector were, to put it kindly, mildly deficient in matters of humanity and fostered a cold and somewhat neurotic exercise of authority that simply did not belong in a seminary, let alone a Franciscan one. [I need to add for the record, though, that we had no problems resembling those of Cardinal McCarrick’s seminary during my time at Callicoon.] There was great relief in my junior year when a much-respected teacher and sports coach, Father Brennan Connelly, O.F.M., was promoted to the position of prefect or senior disciplinarian, i.e., day-to-day manager of our lives. He was strict but eminently fair and unbiased in his judgments about us, big and small. An athlete himself, his sandals always squeaked, giving us a little heads up to break up a card game during study hours. He ran a fair ship during my last four years on the hill. Callicoon was now livable if not exactly loveable.

What I took away from six years at St. Joseph’s was the camaraderie of my own classmates, several of whom I would identify as my closest friends to this day. The physical proximity and shared experiences probably had something to do with that, but I believe that our love of sports and rock and roll, coupled with common frustrations with academics and the regimented life, bonded us in ways that gave us an inkling about friendship and tolerance, and we developed an eye for the funny things, of which there were a great many. I had never experienced the minor seminary as a particularly spiritual environment, strange as that may seem. We had many devotions, daily Mass and rosary, weekly confession and the like, but my circle had something of an uneasiness about excessive shows of piety by any peer.

On the other hand, at the reunion Mass on Saturday, several alumni, particularly laymen who left priestly studies to follow other calls, shared that their time in Callicoon had been a period of religious awakening that has endured to this day. I was very pleased to hear that, and it reminded me that my memories of St. Joseph’s are just that, mine, and cannot be taken as a generalization for the whole. Our three days together gave me an opportunity to hear the experiences of my own classmates and the larger class which had invited us. The next post will look at the Boys of Aroma Hill as they were then and as they are today. I will use the Sunday stream of the Café for several reflections along these lines.

On the Catechist Café Facebook site, I will post several photos from the reunion, at least the ones that flatter me.

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The Boys From Aroma Hill

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