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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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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. 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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