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The Boys from Aroma Hill

Memories from St. Joseph Seraphic Seminary, Callicoon, New York, my home from 1962-1968

Eating Our Way to the Priesthood

3/17/2022

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​I calculated that over my six years at St. Joe’s [1962-1968], factoring in an estimate of 300 days per year on campus, I consumed 1800 breakfasts. One of those breakfasts, in the spring of 1968, consisted of bacon and eggs. The other 1799 breakfasts all featured the same menu. I barely remember my first breakfast on September 9, 1962. I was just in survival mode moving with the herd of 250 as a newbie, and I have no recall of whether I was pleased or disappointed in the breakfast menu. I just had no idea that this would be it for the next 1800 mornings.
 
Half the fun was getting to breakfast. We rose at 5:40 AM with a twenty-minute window to faire une toilette and show up, in jacket and tie, across campus at the chapel for the 6 AM hour of Morning Prayer and Mass on wooden kneelers. Looking back, that was a minor organizational achievement, if you toss in the uncertainties of a Catskill climate. It is true that from time to time in Anthony McGuire’s regime we would get a little lax about the 6 AM deadline, and he would move the waking bell back to 5:30 for a spell. Cue Cool Hand Luke: “What we got here is a failure to communicate.”
 
The mind is a funny thing. My most intense memories of eating come from my first year [1962-1963] when we were crowded into what later became known as “the old refectory.” Groundbreaking for the new refectory was held just a week or so after my class arrived. The old facility is the last thing I will remember when I die. It was the ultimate culture shock of leaving home unless you grew up with fifteen siblings in an apartment over a sailors’ greasy spoon joint. The artist Eric Enstrom must have passed through Aroma Hill around 1918, and his famous “Grace” painting was something of a cosmic protest.
 
“Eating in peace” was a foreign concept. For an introvert, the entire boarding school experience was very trying, but for the first year or so I found meals to be the hardest adjustment, as we were assigned to the same table and the same seat, at four-month intervals. If, by chance, you were assigned to a table of guys who were working through anger issues, it could be grueling, particularly when mixed with the typical adolescent tendency of herding and piling on. For example, if you received a regular stream of mail from home—which was distributed at lunch or supper—you could be tagged “a mama’s boy.” Looking back, I realize now that a fair number got no mail, which may have been painful for them. I told my family not to send birthday cards. In the absence of privacy, mine, and theirs, we were all kind of raw with each other. I found the new refectory to be considerably more congenial where there seemed to be more “psychological space.” [Smaller table groups, more space, etc.]
 
Breakfast is not hard to recall because, as I noted, there was only the one menu. The positives: the bread was fresh baked, the butter was butter, there were several options of cold cereal, and the coffee was hot. The negatives: rinse and repeat 1800 times, and an absence of warm food. The cereal was always Kellogg’s, in the little boxes. I don’t remember any of the “kiddie” brands like Frosted Flakes or Sugar Pops. I ate Rice Krispies for six years. We did get Shredded Wheat; in my notorious fourth year dorm room, which started the 1965 Northeast Blackout, one of my classmates would have a midnight snack of shredded wheat and Tang in bed after lights out. At breakfast, guys went to considerable extremes to replicate the experience of toast by buttering their bread and placing the table coffee pot on it. For us caffeine addicts—and I became one in my second week—the pot was so greasy that it slid down the long table in our direction like a meteor in the atmosphere. It does surprise me, looking back, that caffeine ingestion by minors was never an issue. I can recall drinking three or four cups at breakfast and walking out with a true high that sustained me for several hours.
 
All meals depended on the politics between a table and its waiter. There were two waiter crews that rotated weekly, and your table’s regular two waiters were all that stood between you and second helpings—and sometimes, first helpings. In the old refectory, it was not always possible to get all the food out on one platter, and there was a “gentleman’s agreement” to start the food at the opposite end of the table every other week. My table in freshman year was served by Aubrey McNeill from fifth year, a man of extraordinary patience who faced the cries of Aubrey! Aubrey! Aubrey! with considerable magnanimity. In 2017 my wife and I visited Aubrey, then a pastor in Anderson, SC, and I had a chance to thank him and apologize for my classmate John Burke.
 
Lunch and dinner were more unpredictable meals in that the appeal of the various offerings differed widely. But first they were preceded by some of the worst spiritual reading in Western Civilization. For my entire freshman year, we were subjected to Luke Delmege [1902] by P.A. Sheehan, all 592 pages. I wondered if that book was still available today: as of 8 AM March 17, 2022, it is rated Amazon’s 10,920,482nd best seller. Amazon had this to say: Luke had thought his vocation lay in converting the English to Catholicism, but instead he was taken in by the lure of fine manners and polish. Although it was sometimes hard to wade through the preachiness and nationalism typical of a Canon Sheehan novel, I am glad for the glimpse it provided of the time--ca. 1900--and the place--Co. Tipperary, Ireland--when nation and faith were viewed as intrinsically bound. That time, of course, is over, but it can be hoped that the gentle spirit of the Irish people lives on. How nice on St. Patrick’s Day.
 
The mood of the student body alternately rose and fell with the entrees du jour. In truth, looking back at the seminary from a culinary vantage point, we did OK. We certainly never went hungry, and the sheer amount of food preparations—three full meals a day—for a population of students ranging in age from high school freshmen to army veterans must have been quite a challenge. However, there were “eccentricities” in our food service—as there are in any institution—that we immortalize over the years. Just the other day someone mentioned to me how he hated the liver meals. We never had liver in Callicoon, but there was on occasion some mystery about what we were eating—a sliced offering we called “mutton” and a fish fillet we called “shark steaks.” [Just yesterday I was reminded by a classmate that “green jelly” was served with one of our meat dishes, probably the mutton?]
 
The grand-daddy of despised kitchen offerings was a tureen filled with a grey sauce and chunks of Spam-like meat. This offering was called “L.P.” and in good taste—no pun intended--I will not spell it out. David Lingelbach told me once that he mentioned this meal by its student name to one of the friars, and he replied, “We had L.P. on our side of the house, too.” [Anybody that spells this out online is cut off from all future posts. Facebook might beat me to it.] I’ve been asked to mention the meatballs: “belly bombs,” were small individual meatloaves requiring a serrated knife. Personally, I was never much for the canned peaches in vanilla pudding tureen when it came by.
 
What kept a lot of guys alive, in their telling, was peanut butter. In my recollection a jar or two of peanut butter was always available at lunch. I have heard the legend that a student in the class ahead of me screwed the lid of a jar permanently into and under the table and changed out a fresh new jar every few days in case he didn’t like dinner. That would have been possible with the old refectory tables. The oil separated from the peanuts in storage, and the first guy who opened a new jar had to churn things up a bit before passing it along. In my first week at St. Joe’s, I was told that the oil separated because we bought our PB from the New York City Welfare Department. I was lied to a lot in my early days. I asked an upper classman if they were going to pad the kneelers in the chapel, and he said, “they’re being ordered.”
 
The desserts were generally good; fresh cake and frosting was not unheard of. Desserts were the gambling coinage of the land—our jump on bitcoins—as we were not supposed to have “walking around money” as Lyndon Johnson once put it. As in Vegas, gambling had hidden trap doors. If you bet a dessert and lost a bet, inevitably the kitchen served up spice cake with frosting. When you won, it was a prepackaged Moon pie. The fall season brought cider to the table in place of milk, and with it some dining room “cider bouts,” as in who could [or would dare] drink the most cups of cider. Some guys consumed as much as 25 cups of cider during a meal. More detail could be provided but I doubt it is necessary.
 
At lunch on Friday, the rule book was read in its entirety as we ate in silence. Naïve young student that I was, I took the precept “particular friendships are strictly forbidden” to mean I had to like all the other seminarians equally. I had an idea that this would be quite a challenge, judging from a week or two of sizing up the place. Soon I adopted the general wisdom that it was an unenforceable rule. Later I came to learn that there were sexual overtones implied. All I can say is that in 2022 I still have particular friendships with about a half dozen classmates that I met sixty years ago. We talk frequently on the phone to this day, and we are still waiting for something terrible to happen…and so are our wives.
 
My own table manners were nothing to write home about, and on my fourth night in Callicoon, feeling depressed and homesick, I got flagged after dinner by Father Cyprian Burke. “You did not cut your tomato slices. You put them in your mouth whole. I will be looking for an improvement.” Now I felt worse, and I wandered into the chapel and discovered the Tuesday night confessions in progress. To my surprise, Father Cyprian’s name was on one of the confessional doors, so I went in, and I apologized for my poor eating habits. This confession came as quite a surprise to Father Cyprian Lynch, the history teacher, who said, “I don’t think I’ve heard that before.” He would be my confessor for the next several years.
 
Some of the sidebars to meals: after supper on Wednesdays and Saturdays the prefect on duty would read a list of the house jobs that were imperfectly executed. On a rare occasion I recall the list being read before the meal and the guilty were sent out immediately…disciplinary infractions during the meal were punished by forced kneeling in front of the prefect’s table…occasionally there was a midmeal expulsion from the room, as when one of my classmates pretended to throw up in a tureen of lunch.
 
After dinner each night the seven-decade Franciscan Crown rosary was prayed as the students who participated walked around the lake. I still chuckle at how we would plan our mischief for “after the Crown.” I would ask my friend who had a contraband copy of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue if I could see it for a minute, for a dessert, of course, and he would say, “sure, meet me after the Crown.” Or two guys would get into a fight during dinner, and one would say, “Let’s settle this after the Crown.”
 
_________________
APPENDIX:
 
I was never formally assigned to the waiter’s crew in six years, but in college I subbed several times a week. I was working my first breakfast shift with a table of freshmen. I hadn’t had my coffee and I was grouchy. I called for their empty cereal boxes and held out my apron, and they fired them through the air to me in a cascade. Suddenly the prefect’s bell rang, the room went silent, and Ed Flanagan red in the face, called out “Mr. Burns!” I did the “dead man walking” procession to the head table with an apron full of empty Kellogg’s boxes. “What in the world are you doing?” He proceeded to lecture me on how I should be setting better example for the younger men, how they looked up to us for example. He went on and on. And then he stopped. He looked at me. He looked at the student body watching us. Finally, he sighed and muttered, “This sure isn’t the Ritz.”
 
Amen to that.


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Preordained Chapter 6: "Protective Custody"

2/11/2022

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Chapter 6 of Preordained, Joseph F. Sheley’s study of minor seminaries, is titled “Protective Custody.” That is as good a phrase as any to describe seminary life. The question of “protection” always involves what you are keeping in, and what are you keeping out. Sheley’s analysis of his 1960’s experience is so pertinent to St. Joe’s life that I almost wondered if there was a national template somewhere for the minor seminary model, right down to the doing of house jobs on Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. In writing about our free Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, the author observes that “some of that precious time was poached by the institution because seminarians were also responsible for a portion of the upkeep of the campus; we were assigned work duties such as building maintenance, and these could occur only when we were not in class, chapel, or dining hall.” [pp. 148-149] I would have gladly cleaned toilets with a toothbrush to escape some of the courses over the years, if only school time could have been poached.
 
I received several messages from St. Joe’s alumni asking about seminary life vis-à-vis families. Sheley talks about the specific issues of separation from one’s family in Chapter 6, beginning with sad farewells on opening day of the first year. I had the strangest farewell I can imagine: I had been hospitalized for a week just before entering, my parents sold our house on a Thursday, we moved to another town on Friday, and on Saturday at 8 AM I was boarded on the Erie-Lackawanna in Buffalo all by myself. As we were saying goodbyes, there was one other little kid in a black suit, and my mother said to his mother, “Tommy will look out for him on the trip.” It turned out this kid was a graduate of Canisius College. In a way, entering that September 8, 1962, as I did was smart because by the time I got to the campus late that afternoon I was all cried out. That night, the first three guys I hang out with on the Scotus Hall patio are Tom Trots, Don Lee, and a colorful fifth year fellow. [Amazingly, 25 years later, when I am a pastor in Orlando, I get a fax from my bishop warning me that someone by that same fifth year name was passing himself off as a priest in Florida. I faxed back, “Where is he? We’re old friends. I’ll take him to lunch.”]
 
Sheley pinpoints a true division along us in Callicoon: those whose families were closer, and those who came from a distance. Buffalo was an eight-hour train ride—or about 7 hours of driving; N.Y. 17 had just been converted to an expressway. But Boston was far, too. I need to get my classmate John Burke to describe his first day; he spent the Friday night alone in a boarding house in Callicoon. [We were in Callicoon together in 2018 for a reunion but forgot to look it up.] In my class Allen Asselin arrived from West Palm Beach, Jimmy Longo from Fayetteville, NC, and Davy Bourque from Maine. Mostly I recall a sea of new classmates from the Jersey/New York area. Sheley said that in his seminary there was a monthly “Visiting Sunday” which I think was also our policy. My family came down for the October 1962 visiting day, and assuring themselves that Callicoon met the standards of the Geneva Convention, that was their last visit as a family for my whole six years. They did come for reception and first vows later in my life. But I was the oldest of five, and my little brother was born in my sophomore year; Anthony McGuire threw a crinkled piece of paper on my study hall desk alerting me to his birth in October 1963. It was hard and expensive for the distant families to visit. My parents did come for my high school and college graduation. My very last supper in Callicoon included our parents; it was a standard Callicoon supper. When the tureen of peaches in vanilla pudding came around, my mother grumbled about the food. “A little late for that one, ma,” I muttered under my breath.
 
I got used to the idea that I would not have visitors when that third Sunday of the month rolled around, although several classmates’ families took me out to lunch, which I still appreciate. I was sometimes envious that I did not have a convenient pipeline for such things as replacement clothes or other needs from home. The first few years I sent my laundry home in those memorable aluminum laundry cases but consider that the speed of your fresh clothes depended upon both the U.S. postal service and the Erie Lackawanna Railroad. There were many close calls. Things improved considerably when I started using the local laundry service. [Laundromats in town became accessible in 1967, I believe.]  
 
Looking back at the process of the boarding experience philosophically and emotionally, I have very mixed feeling about the pain of leaving kith and kin and striking out into a bigger new world that was a major overhaul for me. Callicoon marked the beginning of a slow but steady disaffiliation from my family, in terms of being a meaningful interactor in their lives. Sheley writes that “our families had surrendered us such that we never again could or wanted to recapture the traditional parent-child relationship. We were not going to high school; we were pursuing a holy career. We felt it the very first time we returned home. Our parents would ask for details about our life away, and we would hold back or answer vaguely, as if they could not understand and appreciate our world fully. They seemed to accept this and to trust us out of their sight to an extent not granted to our siblings. When we were with family, we were “on leave,” independent, just passing through.” [[. 163]
 
In my recent years [I will be seventy-four in two weeks] I have come to appreciate two aspects of a “Callicoon launch.” The first was a bonding with a group of guys in later high school and college who—by being themselves—gradually broadened my outlook on life. With age my interaction with them had a natural formative impact that expanded through novitiate and the major seminary years in Washington. I arrived in Callicoon in 1962 as a parochial kid from a town which itself could be and remains parochial. In the seminary I interacted with some very solid citizens—I hesitate to name names because I know I will miss many, but I think back to as much as a decade of rubbing elbows with David Lingelbach, Joe Michaels, Marty Neilan, Buddy Ward, Matt Seymour, Tony Callahan, Wayne Ward, Billy O’Donnell, John Hayes, Bobby Hudak, Johnny Burke, Dick Fleshren, Gene Joyce, Jim Cosgrove, Mike McCarthy, and a lot of others.
 
All these guys have done outstanding things with their lives. About forty years later I was a speaker at the National Catholic Educators Association Convention in Philadelphia, I believe, and after my presentation on mental health I grabbed a Starbuck’s, loosened my tie, and wandered into another conference, a high-power presentation to school superintendents and bishops on Catholic school financing by a Wall Street firm executive. I sat down, looked at my program, and realized I was listening to “J.V. Lee” Brennan, my colorful high school neighbor across the corridor in Scotus Hall. We introduced our wives later and bored them to death with nostalgia.
 
As a group we passed through the 1960’s and the cultural and church revolutions taking place. For me, all of this took place, not in Buffalo, but in the broader atmosphere of the more cosmopolitan setting of an East Coast establishment, including our years in Washington in many cases. I have doubt that my parents—and my broader family—had any idea of the man I was becoming in those settings. In a Zoom meeting with my family a few weeks ago, I mentioned that as a musician in the seminary I belonged to a group that provided the music for the Saturday night Mass at Fort Myer, VA, Arlington National Cemetery. [1969-1974] No one had the slightest memory of that. I don’t remember anyone back home with much curiosity about my life as it unfolded, even after ordination. I guess it was a different world at the time and we were on different tracks, and that has not changed.
 
The true shock of disengagement came recently when President Trump was elected, the Capital was stormed, the Q-Anon Conspiracy spread, and the Covid and anti-vaxxer upheavals took root. Unfortunately, that still is my old home and much of my family in Buffalo. I am grateful that I had an opportunity in my life to strike out and taste more of what was happening, including these last 44 years in Florida. Callicoon—problematic as it could be—was the ticket out.
 
Sheley writes: “There was a closeness especially among those boys who persevered into third year and beyond. By that time, the herd had been thinned dramatically—more than half of the boys in my freshman class were gone by junior year…for many seminarians, this meant that the ones that had given me trouble were gone as well. For the most part, the remaining students liked or respected each other or at least appreciated the fact of their shared circumstances.” [p. 165] That was certainly true in my reading of things.
 
But Sheley notes, too, as close as we were as friends, it was still hard for us to talk about God. [p. 166] That is a loss. I hope to pick up this thread in the book in two weeks, from his chapter, “Survival Skills.” 

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"Preordained: Boys As 'Future Priests' During Catholicism's Minor Seminary Boom and Bust"--Part 2

1/14/2022

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I went back and reread significant portions of Preordained to continue the discussion here, and I found on second reading some significant considerations I had glossed over the first time around. One of the author’s important contributions is insight into when and how the decision to enter a minor seminary at age 13-14 was made. To arrive at some answers, Sheley divides young seminary candidates into three clusters: [1] the anointed boys; [2] parental offerings; and [3] runaways.
 
“The anointed boys” [pp. 102-110] refers to a young man who expresses an interest in the priesthood at an early age and who becomes something of a community project. In my own case, I remember wanting to be a priest at age four [though my profile better fits the “parental offering” category.] Once a boy announces his interest, his Catholic community congeals around him to make this happen. Parish priests, the Catholic school, neighbors, and extended family identify the boy as chosen or “anointed,” and as several of Sheley’s interviewees admitted, a lot of doors open in the elementary school life of a boy slated for the seminary. The intensity of Catholic identity in the 1950’s and 1960’s is probably foreign to the world of the 2020’s, though even now, when a member of my parish goes off to the major seminary, there is still corporate pride among some parishioners, and a touch of sadness if he leaves priestly study.
 
Creeping adolescence was an issue, however. “The only bump in the journey forward came in the seventh and eighth grades as young adolescents began to have parties and to pair off in early romances. It was then that the seminary-bound boy felt distanced a bit from the social scene because ‘he was going to be a priest.’” [p. 106] I can recall very clearly in the springtime of 1961, my seventh grade, when my classmate of all those years, Margaret, suddenly turned into a woman and my hormones went into high gear. And, as it turned out, the girl’s mother asked me over to their home on weekday evenings so I could help Margaret with her math. Oh, I was extremely glad to help. My mother was very angry about this, and I regret that what was a memorable part of my growing up was tainted by tension at home.
 
I should interject here that my infatuation with Margaret [and other girls when she moved to the suburbs] did not give me pause to reflect upon what I was giving up becoming a priest by moving to Callicoon. I developed a narrative in my head that the seminary and the priesthood would be such an all-consuming and exhilarating life that the absence of feminine companionship and intimacy would not become a longing that I could not ignore. This mental construct did nor dissolve after entrance into the seminary; it endured till well after ordination and was not seriously confronted until I was well into my 30’s and 40’s.
 
Parental offerings. [pp. 111-119] “Parental offerings were boys or young men who were deliberately steered toward the priesthood by one of their parents, usually the mother.” [p. 111] I think that if Sheley writes a second edition of this book, he will merge “anointed boys” with “parental offerings,” because if seminary intentions won kudos for a boy, they raised the status of his mother to the envy of most every other woman in the parish. “The mother of a priest syndrome” probably deserves a place in the psychiatric bible, the DSM-V. The image appeared in so much religious and fictional literature that I am surprised more professional literature has not addressed the dynamic of mother and son-priest.
 
Mothers of seminarians and priests were the biggest lay victims of clericalism during my lifetime, because they bought so heavily into the mystique of holy orders that they could not objectively look at the major adult challenges of priesthood down the road. For example, my mother was sold on the idea of my going to Callicoon by a retreat master she met in Buffalo. [He later appeared on the list of substantively accused perpetrators of child abuse in Holy Name Province.] What he told me mother back in 1960 would make any parent give the order and the seminary a closer look. He said that if I joined the Franciscans, I would never go into old age alone, but with a community of fun-loving guys. The irony, of course, is that our senior friars today are dying in a network of private nursing homes as our infirmaries are closing. But I must respect my mom for thinking so far ahead.
 
There are no minor seminaries today, though some would like to restore them. And parents of my acquaintance today have more caution about the trials of the priestly ministry—the abuse crisis has taken some of the glitter off the rose—and the passion for grandparenting seems much higher than in my youth. But in the 1950’s the devotional language that surrounded the priesthood was unbounded, and the spiritually exalted role of the mother was a very heady wine. [For a flavor of this 1950’s maternal/priestly connection, see here.]  When I was in middle school I went out for baseball and tried out as a catcher, and my mother was upset that I might damage my “priestly fingers.” [In seminary, our priest-baseball coach never harbored such worries; he dropped me during tryouts—five years running--for the simple reason that I was lousy at it.] When mumps ran through my neighborhood when I was about eleven, I complained that I would hate to contract the infection. My mother replied, “Would you prefer to get the mumps on the day before your ordination?” A mother’s preoccupation with her son’s ordination could well exceed her son’s.
 
Interestingly, Sheley suggests that fathers were more reserved about the seminary decision [pp. 114-119]. He believes that Catholic men had a better eye for the weaknesses of the priests they knew, such as alcoholism. In a typical family, married men knew their priests through parish societies, sports, the Knights of Columbus, the Holy Name Society, etc. and were not on the same enthusiasm bandwagon as their wives. In the next post in this stream, I will look more closely at the relationship of the boarding school seminarian to his family, a subject which is complex. Sheley describes the stresses of seminarians leaving the minor seminary. Again, I will return to these in later discussions, but if I had to guess, the pressure of disappointing mom [or on occasion, dad] increased significantly with the length of time in the seminary. That said, the family dynamic was significantly altered in many cases whether a seminarian left the seminary or persevered.
 
Curiously, this was an issue we did not discuss among ourselves as seminarians at St. Joe’s. Sheley observes that most of us of high school age perceived our seminary tenures as our own choice and could not have recognized the power imbalance in our parental relationships, and to a bigger degree than I realized, with siblings. Teenagers know everything: that has not changed from the 1950’s to the 2020’s.
 
Runaways. “Many of the boys and young men with whom I attended the seminary were running away from something bigger than they could handle. Often it was conflict within the family, even physical threat. Sometimes, it was a sense of drift, perhaps of hitting a wall, the feeling of having no appealing options in life…” [p. 119] Sheley’s term “Runaway” is a bit confusing and restraining. For one thing, it was common advice of the day that if a young boy were on the fence about a vocation, he could use the seminary to try out the life. He was not drifting; he was experimenting. For another, it was always my understanding in my younger years that a screening process took stock of a candidate’s family circumstances—through a home visit, recommendation of pastor, and review of school grades. How thorough this vetting was is anyone’s guess, as well as how it was weighed by the admissions board. Anyone of my era will remember the dean of recruitment, Father Salvator “Doc” Fink, who in later years would regale us with hilarious tales from his home visits and descriptions of characters he weeded from the application files.
 
Several of my friends have shared with me their sentiments that unhappy home life made the seminary a better alternative. Since I began blogging on this theme several years ago, a few have confided that they were victims of abuse before they entered the seminary. [I have been told of abuse that occurred in the seminary, too, which I will address in a later post on the author’s discussion of that subject in seminaries. [See Sheley, pp. 185-233] I do believe that there were other factors that brought us to the seminary that the author may have overlooked.
 
In my major seminary school years in Washington, D.C., [1969-1974] I got to know several Capuchin Franciscans with whom I attended classes. The Capuchin minor seminary bore some similarities to St. Joe’s. Like Aroma Hill, St. Fidelis was in a rural setting, distant from Pittsburgh, PA, as we were from New York City. My Cap friends observed that their seminary was the only Catholic high school for miles around, the only private school, for that matter. [St. Fidelis was located about fifteen miles from my father’s homestead in Butler County, PA, and one of my uncles attended briefly.]  They contended that the economics and the quality education was a significant attraction for some families in the region. Their view makes sense, and it would not have been an abuse of the system if a Catholic family had enlisted a son into a minor seminary; my own friars were then operating two private high schools in Buffalo and Olean, NY.
 
The tuition at St. Joe’s was set at $430/year; my parents paid $43/month over the ten-month school year. [The college rate was $530/year; for New York Staters like me the Board of Regents paid all but $30 of our college tuition.] Comparing the Callicoon tuition rate to a local Catholic high school is an apples and oranges comparison; the seminary rate included room and board. We were required to keep about $20 on deposit with the school store, primarily for Rite Guard spray deodorant and Vicks-44 Super D with codeine. and paying the ladies in town to do our laundry. As I was the oldest in my family, I think my parents came to appreciate just what a bargain the St. Joe’s package really was when my siblings passed into adolescence.
 
One question has haunted me even back to my first year in Callicoon. I had classmates who clearly did not want to be there and who acted out their discontent in troublesome and aggressive ways. In some ways the openly unhappy students were one of my biggest headaches in my early years at St. Joe’s, because much of the dysfunctional behavior was directed toward other students who were trying to maintain academic achievement, follow the rules, or were simply “unconventional”—artistic, eccentric, ethnic, etc. Sheley comments on something I perceived as well—these troubled students generally lasted two years at most. Such was the tale of Tom Cruise. [p. 174] I can remember returning to St. Joe’s in the fall of 1964, entering third year, with a comforting sense that all the disruptive members of my class had left or been asked to leave, and that socially I could truly relax with my peers for the first time.
 
Looking back, I have wondered over the years if some candidates were referred to Callicoon from the feeder Franciscan institutions—parishes, in particular [i.e., the “Jersey Parishes”] and our high schools—as reclamation projects. In my years as a priest, I lived with Ligouri Mueller at Siena College for four years; I wish that I had asked him more questions about the behind-the-scenes operations of the seminary in the years he was rector. [He certainly shared his opinions with me about the faculty.] But there were more than a few of my classmates who made me scratch my head, as in “exactly why are you here?” When I obtained my master’s degree in counseling in the 1980’s, I did come to understand that disruptive and aggressive behavior in adolescents can be a symptom of depression. Unfortunately, neither the Church nor the mental health community possessed more insight into adolescent development and spirituality in the 1960’s.
 
This entire post has addressed the influences that encouraged boys of my generation to enter the seminary. I have yet to consider the mindsets that we ourselves brought into play; what was our “agency,” given the cards we were dealt? I can only speak for myself, of course. I do not remember any conversations with classmates like “why did you decide to be a priest?” or “why did you pick St. Joe’s?” So much of Catholic life in that era was built upon assumptions that few people, particularly teenagers, ever parsed to any great depth except to say “well, it would be cool to go to the missions.” But it is safe to say that everyone who went into a minor seminary did so for his own set of reasons, and even the best set of theories does not do justice to the subjective experiences of all involved.
 
There are several more posts on Sheley’s book to follow. I would say that the best autobiographical treatment of a six-year seminary stint may be Seminary: A Search [1983] by Paul Hendrickson; I admit I did not write one of my better reviews for Hendrickson’s book on Amazon a few years ago [it is dated], but Hendrickson’s first-person experience is an informative read to accompany the Sheley text.
 
 
I should add a postscript. My first love of my life was a classmate named Margaret back in 1961. In 1989 I first met another Margaret, and we are coming up on our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary. I always tell my wife that my first and my last loves are both named Margaret.

 
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Preordained: Boys As "Future Priests" During Catholicism's Minor-Seminary Boom and Bust [2020]  Part 1

12/1/2021

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 I thought that all the “seminarian books” of my generation had been written by now, but along came Preordained: Boys As “Future Priests” During Catholicism’s Minor-Seminary Boom and Bust [2020] by Joseph Sheley. The author, a published professor of sociology and college president in the California State University system, as well as an expert in criminology, was also a seminarian [1961-1967] at St. Pius X Seminary in Galt, California studying for the Diocese of Sacramento.
 
His seminary life tracks with a typical St. Joe’s lifer; he was one year ahead of me as I entered the Callicoon seminary in 1962 and graduated in 1968. We both attended “minor” seminaries, schools for young boys who had completed the eighth grade and believed they had a vocation or calling to the priesthood. Both Sheley and I attended boarding school minor seminaries, leaving home to live in a tightly controlled facility. For readers who were not seminarians, a typical boarding school seminary of the time included four years of high school and two years of college. After the sixth year, a seminarian progressed to a “major seminary” to complete college and graduate studies for ordination to the priesthood. The completion of the minor seminary years was also an opportune time to leave priestly study and assume another career venture altogether, as many did. Sheley departed the seminary at this juncture. I continued all twelve years through ordination in 1974 but left the active ministry in 1994 and was laicized by Pope John Paul II in 1998 to marry.
 
I have to say that this is an exceptionally informative book. It checks a lot of boxes. Sheley does his best to engage the general reading public and the seminarians of that era. He provides a history of minor seminaries, their raison d’etre dating back to the Council of Trent [1545-1563], and particularly the boom in seminary construction and admissions after World War II, a boom that crashed to a halt in the late 1960’s. He interviews dozens of former seminarians from across the United States. He draws on many books and clinical studies about seminarians; I had no idea that the research was this broad, or that it is continuing at this late date. My minor seminary closed 50 years ago and there are next to no boarding school seminaries currently operating in the United States, which makes the continuing interest in the minor seminary era even more surprising.
 
A substantial number of seminarians of my era are still working to make sense of their years of youthful, formalized training for the priesthood. I suspect that one reason for continuing interest in the structure of earlier seminaries and student experiences by researchers may be related to the revelations of clerical abuse that became known at the turn of this century. The question of predatory clerical sexual assaults on minors involves seminaries in two ways. First, there is the question of whether and how many seminarians may have been victims of sexual abuse by priests and religious brothers in the confines of a typical 1960’s seminary. Idealistic teenagers living away from their families in secluded locations in a life of systematic obedience certainly constitute a “vulnerable population.” On the other hand, did the isolation and indoctrination style of a post-World War II seminary produce graduates with significant psychological immaturity, to the degree that some of its products would engage in pathological behaviors as priests?
 
Sheley examines the question at length in Chapter 9, “Betrayal” [pp. 207-233]. Even a few years ago I was inclined to think that my own seminary had been generally immune to this problem, in part because the hothouse environment of a secluded minor seminary fostered endless gossip, and it has been hard for me to imagine that a predatory friar could operate with impunity or exposure in my time there [or that I didn’t hear about it in six years there.] But several months ago [2021], my province released its list of friars “with substantiated allegations” of abuse of minors. The names include two friars of my minor seminary during my time there, one from my major seminary while I was there, and the friar who recruited me to the Franciscan Order in the early 1960’s. Unfortunately, the list includes only names; unlike most dioceses, my province did not release the career assignments of these friars, so whether these reports of abuse in my province involved my seminary or in other institutions of my province is not publicly known.
 
Moreover, I am not certain that my province’s list is complete. I was recently stunned to discover that a student friar several years behind me in our major seminary published an account of a sexual assault he suffered at the hands of his spiritual director. This account appeared in the June 17, 2004, edition of Commonweal, a Catholic publication. [Subscription may be required for access.] The author/victim did complete his studies for ordination, and eventually succeeded me as chaplain at one of our province’s colleges. I suppose I have lived most of my life with a certain naivete about what might or might not have happened during my seminary years. Reading the author’s compilation of research, court records, and personal interviews, my take is that abuse in seminaries ran from the occasional misfit perpetrator to institutional corruption of the sort that has made national news, such as St. Lawrence Capuchin Seminary in Wisconsin and St. Anthony Franciscan Seminary in California [pp. 213-215]. I suspect outright sexual abuse was rare in my minor seminary, but even one is too many.
 
If the boarding school seminary of the post-World War II era is simply another extinct trinket of a long-lost past, consider the surprising popularity of this book and the substantial number of favorable reviews written by readers [54 at last count]. Many of the reviews run something like this one:
 
“Fifty years after graduating from high school at a Catholic minor seminary, Joseph Sheley's book Preordained helped me understand for myself why I went, why I stayed, and why I left. More importantly, this book helped me understand how that four-year high school experience shaped the family life and career that followed. As I read and re-read "Preordained" the research and observations were so relevant that I felt as though I had been interviewed by the author myself. The book challenges those who shared that experience to take that "box of memories" from the back of the top shelf of our mental closet, examine it, and most importantly discuss it with others. The book has been life changing for me. I hope it is for you as well.” [Amazon purchaser review]
 
Sheley, who like me is in his mid-70’s, is still sorting out the meaning of his six years of seminary life, to the degree that he devoted considerable time in his seniority to research a 400-page work that will probably enjoy a long shelf life. The author is not a bitter man, and this is not an accusatory book. The author’s style is reflective, with a need to address again the motivations that led to his spending his entire adolescence in a structured setting away from his family, his local church, and his youthful domestic support system. As a contemporary, I too find myself reflecting backward as part of my spiritual autobiography, a journey that always reveals surprises, new insights, and grace.
 
A brief overview of Sheley’s work will point us in the direction of the next Aroma Hill posts.
 
First, what was the Church’s intention in creating the minor seminary structure?
 
Second, what was the role of parents and facilitators such as teachers, pastors, etc. in the journey to the minor seminary?
 
Third, what were we like? What did we hope to accomplish?
 
Fourth, what were the common experiences of seminarians of that era?
 
How did minor seminary life impact the life experiences of major seminary students, particularly in the late 1960’s-1970’s era that the John Jay Study referred to as “the Woodstock experience?”
 
Finally, why did minor seminaries die out, and would it be wise to revive them today?

 
 
This will be an ongoing series of posts. If you would like to submit materials or experiences anonymously, you can reach me at tjburns@cfl.rr.com. Confidentiality will be respected.
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He Was, truly, FATHER Brennan

8/28/2021

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I was going through my computer storage files today when I came across this eulogy I wrote on the death of Father Brennan Connelly, the longtime Prefect of Discipline at St. Joe's. A portion of this was printed in the Holy Name Province Newsletter with his official obituary. I don't believe I ever posted this piece here on the Aroma Hill page.
________________________________________________

He was truly “Father” Brennan

I received the sad news Friday afternoon that the man who had so much influence upon all of us in our formative years at Callicoon had passed away. I share the sentiments of so many of my own classmates that Brennan was wonderfully suited for his years in Callicoon. Despite the fact that he would live on and minister fully forty years after the closing of the seminary, it seemed very fitting that Holy Name Province’s Facebook announcement of his death would observe that he is remembered by so many, in and out of the Province today, for his formative work.

Everyone who passed through Callicoon during his years will naturally have very personal recollections and impressions. In my own case, I was not particularly close to Brennan in Callicoon; it was in later years as a priest friar that I developed a warm and profitable association with him as an adult. And yet I am very grateful to him for his influence upon me and my generation in my formative years.

He was for me an exemplary priest. He was not charismatic, his sermons did not rival Fulton Sheen’s, and he was not much of one for gimmicks, trends, and junk. He was a man rooted in a deep faith whose example was that of rigorous faithfulness, personal discipline, loyalty to duty, physical fitness, scholarship, and wholesomeness. It is no mystery that he was a successful disciplinarian; he himself was disciplined. He led by example and enjoyed credibility among the students because he never told us to do what he himself was not already doing.

Over the years what has remained with me is his healthy masculinity, a virtue of his that I appreciate more and more as I observe the American Church over time. Healthy men are not much found in the priesthood today. I still smile when I think of Brennan conducting Marian devotions; he was one of few individuals who could rise above the smarminess of Marian excesses. I really miss him on the Feasts of the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption.

His great gift to Callicoon as an institution [and I use that word in multiple senses] was his steadiness at the helm. We all know what a wacky place the hill could be, and that some of the friars and students were ill suited for that kind of common life. One did not have to be particularly close to Brennan to profit from the stability and even handedness he brought to the seminary. In all six years of Callicoon I can never remember exerting emotional energy worrying about my interactions with him. He was level headed and constant, day in and day out. If you screwed up, it was your doing; the punishment was administered, the time done, and the slate wiped clean. I cannot recall him ever playing head games. By sixth year he trusted me with a lot of responsibility for different things. One unfortunate day just before college graduation, I forgot to clean the sixth year class room. Brennan, always a man of duty, summoned me to his office after dinner. You guys know the drill. Anyway, I stood before his desk. I was embarrassed, to say the least. But so was he. It was awkward. But he knew he had to say something, and finally he said softly, “I’m disappointed.” One of my most painful moments in Callicoon; I would have preferred ten outbursts from his predecessor, but I brought it on myself, and he paid me the ultimate compliment of being honest, not easy for either of us.

On a lighter note, I told him one day in sixth year that I had a female pen-pal in London. This puzzled him; he was still coming to grasp the new “liberality” of the times, and I really hadn’t broken any rules, but I thought I better tell him. He had to sit quietly and think for a moment, and finally he said, “Well, just don’t let this turn your head.”

If Brennan played a critical role as Prefect of Discipline from 1964 on, consider his pivotal role in earlier years when he served under his predecessor. Not to speak ill of the dead, but you-know-who was not suited for his position. He could be moody, carry grudges, unpredictable, and in my view generally counterproductive in the formation of young men toward the life of Francis of Assisi. I have no way of knowing precisely, but I have wondered over the years if Brennan’s presence on the scene kept a bad situation from getting worse. At any rate, it was a good day when he assumed the reins.

I have several funny memories of Brennan. I went out for the baseball team all six years and finally “won” a spot in sixth year as a catcher when Matt Seymour went on to join the service. Mike McCarthy also made the squad as a catcher. I took my new responsibilities very seriously, going down into town to buy the prerequisite protection for the family jewels, etc., on Brennan’s recommendation. When the first regular season game came along, Brennan said to Mike and me, “This is going to be a tough game. How about letting Buddy Ward catch this one?” It turned out that all the games were tough games, and Mike and I passed the season talking election politics at the end of the bench. Brennan approached coaching sports as Hippocrates approached medicine, his first principle being: “Do no harm.”

But over the next two decades, when our paths would cross, we always talked hockey; many discussions about the relative merits of the Boston Bruins and the Buffalo Sabres. In 1985 he and I participated in a dreadful Provincial Chapter of elected delegates in Holyoke, Massachusetts. It was the kind of Chapter that violated the Geneva Conventions. Neither Brennan nor I were exactly “the meeting type.” One morning, though, he made a point to walk over to my discussion table and whisper in my ear, “Barrasso pitched a shut-out last night.” [This was a reference to Buffalo Sabres’ goalie Tom Barrasso denying the Boston Bruins a hockey goal.] First things first.

Brennan preached a mission in my mother’s parish in Hamburg, New York, some years ago. My mother’s primary recollection was that he was in great physical pain and suffered with dignity. It is my understanding that he had significant back difficulties after we had him in Callicoon. Whatever his precise ailments, it is good to know that he has passed to a new life where every tear will be wiped away.

I have spoken of my gratitude for his “predictability” as our daily leader, but I have heard first-hand accounts of his extraordinary interventions and compassion for students with personal difficulties and crosses. His was probably more complex that I ever knew, but ever the Franciscan, he probably had a little of Ernie Banks in him, “always a great day to play two” as Mr. Cub used to say.

A great part of my history has passed away. I hope I have imbibed enough of his faith to meet him again in a better place. And I pray for the Church that more of our new candidates for priesthood in the US might be cut from his cloth.
   
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Seminary Years in the Mosaic of a Lifetime

7/20/2021

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In research for my blog The Catechist Café, I came across a timely essay by an Australian Dominican friar and theologian, Father Michael Baxter, on the subject of “the priesthood of the faithful.” * The gist of his topic is the relationship of the priesthood conferred in Baptism vis-à-vis the priesthood conferred by the Sacrament of Holy Orders. The concept of a “priesthood of the faithful” was not much discussed in the years we attended Saint Joe’s, in my case at least not till our college years in the later 1960’s, even if then. In our years together we were discerning the possibility of or grinding our way toward the priesthood of Orders. Those Baptismal certificates we submitted for admission with our medical records and letters of recommendation were affidavits assuring the faculty that [1] we had been washed clean of original sin, and [2] that we were indeed Roman Catholics, since extra ecclesia nulla salus. Theophane Larkin and Myron McCormick would shudder at the thought that any St. Joe’s alumnus cannot translate that, even today.
 
I know that many of the Aroma Hill Gang went on to marry and raise beautiful families. By the time you were presenting your infant children for baptism, the Vatican II Catholic baptismal rite was in use and pronounced your children “priests, prophets, kings.” The idea of the Priesthood of the [lay] Faithful is now a backbone of catechetics, though as Father Baxter points out, the meaning of the term is still rather nebulous and lacking the precision of the priesthood conferred by Holy Orders. Over the time I have been posting our St. Joe’s memories, we have talked from time to time about the ratio of Callicoon student numbers to the ordination numbers of each class. The ratio is indeed small: of my starting class of 75, only a few were ultimately ordained priests—myself, Bobby O’Keefe, Larry DeCoste, Kevin Cronin, and Bob Hudak. Joe Czapla and Vinny Laviano joined later in high school and were ordained, as well as John Hogan and Dick Fleshren who entered in fifth year. Several in my ordination class joined in novitiate or in Washington, such as Jack Monsour and Eric Carpine.
 
[Just for the fun of it, I do need to mention that in sixth year I was the senior of one of the refectory clean-up crews; my buddy Gene Joyce had the other. I had an abundance of high school freshmen working for me who became “long haulers” including Kevin Mullen, now the Provincial of Holy Name Province; Bobby Gonzalez, now the Archbishop of San Juan, Puerto Rico; and Tommy Walters, who has had a distinguished city ministry in New York. Think where they would be today without me! And in 2018 at a Callicoon reunion I found myself having breakfast with another underclassman, Dennis Littlefield, who today is Father Philaret Littlefield with a long career of pastoral leadership in the Greek Melkite Rite.]
 
For all the young souls who passed through Sullivan County on the way to St. Joe’s, though, very few were ordained to the Church’s institutional priesthood—and in cases like mine, even a fair number of the ordained did not remain in the active ministry. [I was laicized and married in the Church in 1998.] Having spent twelve years in formation—six in Callicoon—I have wondered how to process those years when I worked toward a goal that ultimately, I was not suited for. I am hardly alone in that regard, as a good number of young men invested years into the seminary process, “long haulers” or not. There is much to be grateful for in the experience however long it was. We ate well, received private school education and board at a bargain price, made long time friends, received exposure to religious practices in the distinguished Franciscan tradition and probably, in unique ways, experienced the opportunity to assess ourselves and make decisions about faith and life appropriate to our ages. I do agree with those who have posted on the St. Joe’s site that career guidance and religious discernment was not uniformly attended to in Callicoon.
 
The seminary experience did not come without cost. One of the most significant sacrifices was uprooting. We left home, family, friends, and neighborhoods. [In my own case, my family moved to another town on the day before I entered Callicoon in 1962.] During my sophomore year my youngest brother was born, and as a long hauler who was assigned to Florida’s southern missions soon after ordination, I was no longer an active player in my family interactions, a factor that is noticeably clear to me today in my 70’s. There were other challenges to be sure: bullying was certainly not unheard of in Callicoon, and no one would deny that the life was regimented to a degree that probably chafed everybody at some point or other. I chuckle as I look back on 1968 when I asked the prefect on duty for an adjustment in our Sunday schedule so we could watch Superbowl II. I was informed, curtly, that “the seminary schedule would not be held hostage to the NBC Sports Department.” Unfortunately, Father Brennan was away that weekend.
 
From my private conversations and the public posts with St. Joe’s alums I have never heard anyone say that they outright wasted their years in Callicoon. Some speak of their time with greater enthusiasm than others, and it is no secret that I was not the happiest camper in the settlement, due to a restlessness that remained my cross to bear for many years after. I gained over 50 pounds in my freshman year. On the other hand, I have talked with guys who were broken-hearted to leave when released by the faculty. As I get older and reflect upon the course of my life in a spiritual vein, I do attempt to integrate my formation years into the mix, and when I filed my laicization papers with the Vatican in 1998, I was asked to describe those formation years in considerable detail. Interestingly, the Vatican assessment took only three months to render a judgment [usually the process is several years], and I was granted the laicization on the grounds of deficiencies in my formation, primarily in the later years of the process in novitiate and in Washington, and the fact that I was a square peg in a round clerical hole.
 
Curiously, this ecclesiastical analysis highlights one of the few pivotal decisions of the Callicoon years for me, or more correctly, a decision I fought and dodged. I had the opportunity to discuss at great length my Callicoon years with a psychotherapist when I left the active priestly ministry in the mid-1990’s. I still have the autobiography I wrote for my therapist, Lois, in 1992, and I narrated for her in considerable detail the controversy surrounding my Callicoon class in the 1967-68 academic year. That was the year of the institution of the “Siena Program” when my class was told we would be finishing our college years at Siena instead of proceeding to Novitiate in 1968. After several weeks of angry lobbying, my class was assured that we would be going to Novitiate in the summer of 1968, the original plan we had lived with for years. In 1992 I wondered on paper how my life would have been different had I gone to a regular college, chosen my major, dated, and the like. Would I have gone on to priesthood? I never much reflected on the positives of the Siena plan at the time it was proposed, as I was too busy complaining about the unfairness of having put in six years at Callicoon only to postpone novitiate and the taking of the habit.
 
As it turned out, the Siena option was probably the healthier one, in that at least we might have had better life experience to undertake vows and orders later in the formative process. Later, as an ordained friar, I served briefly on the formation team at Siena, and I can say that the candidates were processing many developmental issues that were postponed in my development. But as Dandy Don Meredith used to say on Monday Night Football, “If all our ifs and buts were candy and nuts, what a Merry Christmas we would have.”
 
It is with this history that I read this month Father Baxter’s essay on the term “priesthood of the faithful” vis-à-vis the “priesthood of ordination.” Is seminary experience a “detour of life” if one does not progress to the reception of Holy Orders, lost years in multiple senses of the term? In our hearts we have long known that this is probably not true; the years devoted to St. Joe’s, or any other seminary have been profitable even if they induced tough decisions and arduous discernments in our growth. But I have long sought a kind of theological lingo for the seminary experience, which Father Baxter has generously provided.
 
The author begins from the reality of Baptism, that sacrament we all share. As I indicated at the beginning, the understanding of Baptism in, say, 1962, was limited and judicial. Baptism was said to wash away original sin and legally incorporate one into the Roman Catholic Church. The old law that “outside the Catholic Church there is no salvation” or extra ecclesia nulla salus was still on the books until the last decade of our seminary’s existence. Thankfully, in the 1960’s Vatican II restored pastoral emphasis to the Biblical concept of Baptism, the vivid description of St. Paul that we are “born again” and designated as new persons in Christ, a “royal priesthood” as 1 Peter 2:9 puts it. It does not matter that we do not recall the moment of our infant baptisms, for our parents and our local church made the profession of faith in our name until we could grasp and own the desire in our consciousness, a process that we continue for ourselves to this day. Nor does it matter that the idea of a baptismal priesthood was not in our consciousness or dimly grasped in our formative years in school, though the concept that all our sacrifices and good works in Callicoon were constitutive of a baptismal priesthood might have been a helpful insight in making sense of the seminary lifestyle.  
 
The Council also taught that Baptism is the true universal sacrament of Christ. Even in Callicoon days, the Church taught that anyone could baptize in an emergency so long as the Trinitarian formula—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—was used and water poured. [This is still the case.] The Council correctly recognized, too, that churches not in full communion with Rome celebrate the same true saving Baptism as Catholics do, and that ministers of these churches exercise a true ministerial office of preaching the Gospel. During the 1967-68 academic year in Callicoon, several ministers from Sullivan County were invited up the hill to explain their traditions to the student body; I remember well that the Pentecostal minister was a woman. I mention this aspect of baptism because several of my classmates answered calls to minister in other Christian traditions; it is a surprising fact, though unknown at the time, that Callicoon was subtly exercising preparation for a broader definition of church, the universal body of Christ, the reality of Ecumenism.
 
It is also true that many of my classmates and other St. Joe’s friends have sought the solace and purpose of their lives in Christian churches other than the Roman Catholic communion. I know of old friends who are Quakers and Episcopalians, high church and low church. And there are a good number seeking communion with God outside of “structured religion.” Solid research from PEW Research indicates that less than 50% of Americans identify with any structured church. That a good number of my confreres would fall into this cohort would not be surprising, particularly given that idealistic persons would likely be alienated by the imperfections of church life.  I understand the need to unplug, so to speak. Thomas Merton once wrote that there is a great temptation of many thoughtful people to go into the woods and build one’s own chapel. [Merton, incidentally, lived his later years in a hermitage on the grounds of his Kentucky monastery.] I remain a practicing Catholic today, but the stress in the Church at large does make “the chapel in the woods” awfully tempting; if you see my car outside the Home Depot construction pickup dock…
 
But the fact remains that we all took the baptismal bath and have gone about working at an inner priesthood that manifests itself in myriad ways over the past half century. To that priesthood, I lift my glass and give thanks. In mysterious ways St. Joe’s delivered something for everyone.

 * Ecclesiology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium (Theology at the Beginning of the Third Millennium): Wagner, Kevin, Naumann, M. Isabell, McGregor, Peter John: 9781532665332: Amazon.com: Books
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The Big Brothers

3/2/2021

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My class at St. Joe’s [freshman high school, September 1962] was the last of the six-year classes, i.e., four years of high school and two years of college on Aroma Hill. It occurred to me that those who joined several years later would not have experienced the campus as a high school/college establishment. Looking back, it was a curious arrangement, probably more difficult for the college men, particularly those who entered from the military or as graduates from outside colleges. None of the men who entered the college division of Callicoon from other colleges, businesses, or armed services received any “life experience” credit, and thus started from seminary scratch and lived side by side with the “lifers” who had come up through the seminary.
 
I was reminded of the college population when I received a kind letter from George Kelly, who had seen the St. Joe’s Reunion page and my Aroma Hill blog. We connected by phone in December and I picked his brains about life in Callicoon. George was a sixth-year man when my class arrived in September 1962, and his tenure on the hill began in 1957. He reminded me that he left St. Joe’s after the first semester of the 1962-63 academic year, so our “overlap” was just four months. George was the older brother of Gerry Kelly, who was a high school junior or senior and a basketball starter in that 62-63 academic year. I did remember George, as I looked up to his class on Olympus from my lowly freshman high school status, as well as a good number of his classmates.
 
George was a wealth of information about his class and St. Joe’s life. A few of his classmates I remembered by name, and he filled in most of the rest. The class senior was Bernie Del Mastro [see below]; Bernie’s brother Tony was senior of fifth year. Some other names: Bruce Pilon, Rich Pescatore, Paul Ehrhardt, Kevin Sweeney, Bill Gorley, Paul Wyskoska, Joe Kiernan [see below], Jack Leavins, John Gerdes [whose brother Dick was in my class], Anselm Spada, Paul McAuliffe, Bill Baranick, and Wayne Gartner among them.  His class was among the first to break in Scotus Hall and recalls that there were problems with the building from the beginning. He told me that in his years there was a healthy interest in ham radios on campus, with a room in the main building dedicated to that hobby—with a cable extended to the gym, if I understand correctly.
 
George would go on to two distinct and highly successful careers—with the exploding computer field with IBM in 1967 and later the financial management world with Morgan Stanley. He remains active with his alma mater, what is now the New Jersey Institute of Technology or NJIT in the college basketball wrap-ups. He also maintained close contacts with several of the friars from Callicoon, those living at the retirement facility in Ringwood, New Jersey, including Anthony McGuire, Eric Kyle, Romuald Chinetski [the brother cook], and Brennan Connelly. He mentioned several other St. Joe’s veterans some of you may remember, including Dennis Vannote, Chip Brescio, and Frank Cincotta. Dennis was one of the seminary’s projection operators, and I remember very well that he was at the helm during the showing of “Sink the Bismarck” when the table fell, and the mighty ship disappeared beneath the screen. Amazingly, he got things running again.
 
George mentioned several Aroma Hill alumni whose stories are close to my own heart because of my later relationships with them. His class senior, Bernie Del Mastro, would take the religious name Brother Gabe, and six years later, when I arrived in our major seminary, Holy Name College, Gabe was in what would have been his ordination year but because of a nervous disorder his ordination was postponed. He lived at Holy Name for a few years during my time, and we became thick as thieves as we were both musicians and played every Saturday night at the base chapel Mass at Fort Myer [Arlington National Cemetery.] He taught me how to play a bass fiddle, among other things.
 
The Order believed that a change of scenery might do him good, and Gabe was assigned to Timon High School in Buffalo. As it turned out, my younger brother Al was the Don Corleone of the student body, and he and his friends protected Gabe and took a strong liking to him. Gabe, in turn, was the soul of kindness to young people, something I had seen when we gave youth retreats together inside the DC beltway. Soon Gabe and other friars [including Venard “Gerry” Carr] were regulars at my parents’ house, stopping in for dinner at least weekly. Gabe’s parents in New Jersey became close friends with my parents.
 
But Gabe’s emotional and physical symptoms did not abate, and in the summer of 1974, as I was working at St. Bonaventure University just prior to my own ordination, surgery revealed that Gabe had a massive brain tumor which led to his death that summer. I will never forget that funeral in New Jersey in his parents’ parish. It was a personal blow to me and maybe even more so to my family.
 
One of George’s classmates in his final year of Callicoon was a “belated vocation.” Joe Kiernan came to the seminary in 1962 from several years in the employment of Raytheon, the military contractor. Years later I would always chide him about his involvement in the military industrial complex. I was newly arrived at the major seminary in Washington about a week when Joe was ordained in 1969. He stayed in Washington to complete his doctorate in moral theology on world population at Catholic University. He became a professor in my seminary, and I had him in my last semester, spring 1974, just before my September ordination. The course was “social justice” and I enjoyed it, but in the madness of the pre-ordination build-up, I never completed the course paper and was awarded an “I” grade, as in incomplete. I had until October 6 to complete the paper.
 
Needless to say, with my summer job, then my first assignment in late August to a college campus ministry, then ordination and first Mass, I never got the paper done. I had a wedding scheduled for one of my retreat ministry kids in Georgetown on October 5, so I decided to fly into DC a day early and rejoin my Washington friar friends for the Feast of St. Francis before the wedding. At the cocktail hour I ran into Joe, and in some embarrassment, he reminded me that he would have to submit an “F” in two days for the course. In the glow of good scotch, I laughed it off and told him not to worry. [Little did I know that I would be submitting my transcript to Florida institutions and colleges for teaching positions in phase two of my life.]
 
Fast forward to 1985, a decade later. Joe was seeking a change of ministry, and the Order assigned him to a Florida parish where I happen to be the pastor and superior. We had remained good friends over the years and I was delighted to have him come on board, but I wasn’t going to let this opportunity for humor pass by. At the Masses on his first weekend, I announced to the parish that Father Joe had failed me in grad school, and therefore he would never have a day off while I was in charge.
 
In fact, Joe was the missing piece to the past pastoral team I ever belonged to. We quickly established the practice of having the entire adult parish staff join us for dinner several nights a week at the friary. Everyone had at least a master’s degree and read new theological books religiously, so we had many a fine dinner alongside the wine du jour. Joe, our true resident Ph.D., was coaxed to bring his professorial skills to the table. [A humble gentleman, he was averse to flouting his sheepskin at the table.] Somewhat prophetically, I observed to the group one day that it was rare to belong to such a compatible team, and that we should cherish our time together. It was during that time frame [1985-89] that we built the present church structure. But, as I sensed, good teams can disband very quickly, and by 1990 I had left the order on the way to laicization, and several others were promoted. Joe remained as pastor, but his health began to deteriorate, and he died about ten years ago.
 
Before I close, I need to remember several other college seminarians who left a good impression on me. A college freshman waited on my table during my first months on the Hill. Aubrey McNeill was extraordinarily patient with our incessant demands for seconds and thirds. He did not remain in the formation program then, but reconnected with the Order as an adult and eventually pastored at one of the friars’ historically Black parishes, St. Mary of the Angels, in Anderson, S.C. I had worked in that parish during summers in 1970 and 1971. My wife Margaret and I drove up to Clemson, S.C. in August 2017 to view the total eclipse on the Clemson University campus. We arrived the Sunday before, and I drove over to St. Mary’s on the chance that I might catch Aubrey. Aubrey was indeed home, and we spent several hours talking about Callicoon, but more about the outstanding work the friars in Anderson, which had come a long way from my student days in the early 1970’s. Aubrey was clearly in declining health, and he passed away shortly after our visit.
 
I believe it was my sophomore year [1963-64] that a Minnesotan entered the college program after graduating from St. Bonaventure University. Orrie Jirele had been a starter on the St. Bonaventure Division I basketball team that finished fourth in the national polls in 1961. I had seen him play in Buffalo and on TV, where the Bonnies, then #2 in the country, lost the final game of the Holiday Festival to Ohio State, the nation’s number one team, by an 84-82 score in Madison Square Garden, on New Year’s Eve, 1960.
 
Orrie was an affable and friendly fellow who frequently fielded my many questions about his basketball days. On occasion he would break out his fiddle. He played for our college team in his one year with us and shocked quite a few of our opponents with his magical ball handling, particularly a memorable night against Delhi Tech, which generally had its way with us. There is an old surviving story that some of Orrie’s former teammates at St. Bonaventure called the seminary’s emergency phone number to say hello to their old friend at 2 AM. I looked him up this week and discovered that he died in 2013 at the age of 73. From several Minnesota reports, it appears that he devoted his life to high school coaching and teaching math, as well as significant involvement in the leadership of his Catholic parish.
 
God bless them all.    

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By the Light of the Halloween Moon

10/31/2020

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By the end of October, the leaves were pretty much gone from the trees on Aroma Hill, frost was a near nightly occurrence, and mist from the Delaware River greeted the sunrise. Halloween marked the halfway point between return to the Seminary around Labor Day and a trip home for Christmas around December 22. Every four years the end of October also featured a presidential election. And, in my freshman year [1962], late October was marked by the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 
St. Joe’s was a poor vantage point to follow major news stories, with the strict regimentation of our daily existence. We were permitted to watch the CBS News with Walter Cronkite at 6:30, but our only paper was The New York Times; the Grey Lady was delivered by mail, and at times it was two days behind. Time and Newsweek were available in our library to a point. Our prudish friar librarian would take scissors to any picture he considered a danger to our virginity. In my first year at St. Joe’s a widely covered news story was the Profumo Scandal in which Mr. John Profumo, British Secretary of State, frequented the same prostitute, Christine Keeler, as a Russian attaché. Every time Ms. Keeler’s picture appeared in any publication, the librarian took his scissors to it, even if coverage of Vatican II was on the other side of the page.
 
Consequently, I do not recall a major sense of panic among the students when the Cuban Missile Crisis unfolded over the last two weeks of October in 1962, at least among the younger students at my level. I am sure that the veterans in our college division understood the crisis better than we did. News from outside of St. Joe’s percolated the walls slowly. I do not recall any special announcements from the faculty, and certainly no atomic war drills. [It is possible that by 1962 most of the American public had already come to realize that in a true thermonuclear war those atomic drills of crawling under the desk and putting your head between your knees were pathetically inadequate; remember the T-shirts with printed atomic instructions, the last directive being “kiss your a-- good bye!” Father Rene Ouellette was the only faculty member who brought up the crisis in class, with a daily report of the progress of Russian ships racing toward the U.S. naval blockage of Cuba. Oddly, I cannot remember any Masses for peace or other devotionals, either, though I would welcome any corrections of that.
 
It was only when I returned home at Christmas and saw my family’s emergency food supplies in the basement that I began to appreciate how dangerous this confrontation had been; in 2000 the movie Thirteen Days would make a prayerful man out of the most hardnosed cynic. But the Cuban Missile Crisis was a one-time event, thankfully, and most of our October memories (I hope) are more benign. When I arrived in 1962 the custom of long standing—how long, I can’t say--was “The Maze,” held every Halloween Night. How would I describe it? Well, it was an evening when the authorities looked the other way and the fifth-year students [college freshmen] could haze freshmen. The Maze was one of those events with a long and threatening build-up; the event itself was unimaginative and lame, consisting of navigating a trail in the basement of the chapel and having your clothes stuffed with mud, sod, and cow manure, all of which were in more than sufficient supply on the new football field. Except for the inconvenience of laundering one’s Maze clothing, it left little impact on me.
 
In fact, I cannot remember the Maze after 1962. I do recall in third year [1964] one of my classmates, Marty, asked me to help him find a mouthy freshman and explain respect to him. [If you watched “the Sopranos,” this was my Chris Moltisani moment, doing an “errand” with big boss Tony.] I went along and we ended up throwing him in the lake. Unfortunately, the kid caught my leg and pulled me in with him; who says there is no such thing as Karma? I thought I would die of hypothermia. But that regrettable stunt was an “independent operation” unrelated to any class activity. Marty was disengaged from the seminary about two weeks later, though I doubt it had anything to do with our little caper. That night stands out in my memory because later in the evening we had the best movie shown in my six years at St. Joe’s, “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” [Callicoon movies are another future post in the queue.]
 
This morning I received several Facebook posts about the Maze. The event never crossed my radar again; I don’t believe my class hosted one in our college freshman year, October of 1966. But some form of the ritual continued that I am unaware of. One of our best Callicoon historians with a pen and a camera, Terry M., recalls three distinct memories of the Maze.
 
“Three memories…one year, people getting thrown into the pond…another year the cry “Heruska hubs [sic] the Maze”…and a post-Maze Halloween party/show in the auditorium where [J.F.] hooked up an electric chair and a first year guy [name uncertain] sat in it, got zapped, stood up, and in a voice that could be heard up on Crucifix Hill screamed out [the “s” word or the “f” word] or something along these lines.”
 
Another student in the year behind me [the 1963 Maze] posted “Remembering Hell Night” at St. Joe’s on Halloween. “That night is probably responsible for most of my psychological problems.” That has been a point of discussion among us old hands who remember the 1962 Maze and have talked about it. There was a palpable sense of intimidation to the event that by today’s lights might be seen as harassment or hazing; one wonders about several of the collegian enthusiasts who seemed to be working out their own anger on students some years younger.
 
Halloween was the entre to the “Bowl Season” where every class played the other five for the school championship throughout the month. In my first year the championship tourney [though no one called it that] was played over Thanksgiving Weekend, with 5th year playing 6th year on Thanksgiving Day, 4th year against 3rd year on Friday, and the “Pigeon Bowl” on Saturday with the freshmen versus the sophomores. Later, when we started going home for Thanksgiving, the bowl championships were played a little earlier in November. The fall of 1963 was the first year on the new football field, which became my class’s house of horrors for opponents. In our sophomore year [1963-1964] the class pulled together nicely, and we began an undefeated streak that ran till early November 1967, when we were tied by the college freshmen behind us. This was the last college game ever played on Aroma Hill, as the college division was closed in the summer of 1968.
 
In my junior year [1964-1965] a presidential election was in full swing, and around Halloween, a few nights before the election, the entire student body was given the night off from study hall to engage in a political rally on campus. While the Republican candidate Senator Barry Goldwater had a few fans, most of the student body—if enthusiasm was any measure—sided with Lyndon B. Johnson, who won the national election in a landslide. There were a few floats, but most of us improvised shirts and just made a lot of noise. My class was gone by the tumultuous election of 1968, but we were still in Callicoon for the primaries to that election. I contacted Time Magazine to enroll our college in Choice ’68, a national poll taken in April 1968. The voting age in 1968 was 21, and there was considerable interest then in lowering the voting age.
 
We had the lobby of Scotus Hall filled with voting desks, and I threw the election open to the entire student body. Regrettably, I have lost the exact results, but in writing a summary for Cord and Cowl, I recall observing my surprise at how well Richard Nixon had polled at St. Joe’s. He was second to Robert Kennedy by about ten votes. I believe the entire enrollment at St. Joe’s was about 150 at most. Nationally, Eugene McCarthy won among collegians. Sadly, about a week after my class’s graduation from St. Joe’s in late May, Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles after declaring victory in the California primary.
 
Time to go to the printers if we want a true Halloween post, but Tom Devlin, one of our regular readers, just posted this Halloween memory…and it is funny.
 
“P.H. and I snuck out at night and went trick or treating [in the village of Callicoon.] We stopped by the Franciscan Sisters Convent at the bottom of the Hill and guess who were in there: [Father] Ronald Stark and [Brother] Bill Mann. Busted, two weeks grounded.”
 
Remember, the cheaper the Halloween candy, the worse the heartburn. Be safe and have a merry night of memories tonight. 

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A Checkered Sports Career

7/14/2020

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With all the problems around us, I thought some humor might be in order, mostly at my expense, Thus, on the St. Joe’s Reunion site and the Catechist  Café’s Aroma Hill posts, I decided to write my St. Joe’s sports autobiography, a look at my hitherto unrevealed sports achievements over six years with reminisces of our sports programs.
 
The Babe
 
It is a good thing that the seminary did not require a baseball “sports combine” as a requirement for admission. If they had, my scouting report would have read “Slow. Poor arm. Poor fielder. Tends toward weight. Reflexes below average. No wrist speed. Likes sports.” On my third day on the hill in September 1962, there was a tryout with our baseball coach, Father Brennan Connelly, to see if there were any prospects among the freshmen for the high school’s varsity. I had gone out for a third base position in elementary school, signing in as a third baseman. I have had a lifelong affinity for infield positions because, when you field like Edward Scissorhands, on infield plays the shame and embarrassment is swift and immediate, unlike center field where misplays drag on like molasses. Living and playing as we did in the Catskill Mountains, the laughter and booing during tryouts had a way of echoing for quite some time down the Delaware Valley. Having never made the elementary school team in Buffalo, I had low expectations about making the St. Joe’s team where the competition was better, and they declined throughout the afternoon.
 
I must have impressed Father Brennan, because two years later he invited me to serve as the team manager. In seminary culture the manager was actually the bench scorer and equipment boy, with the added responsibility of phoning box scores to the sports editor of the Middletown NY Times Herald Record [later famous as the paper of record for Woodstock in 1969.]  In the “he had one job to do” department, on my first game as manager I was phoning in results where we lost to a pitcher who struck out 16 St. Joe’s batters in seven innings. As I am reading the tally out of the scorebook to the typing on the other end of the line, the reporter stopped me and said, “What was the pitcher’s first name?” Silence. “Uh, I don’t know.” “You mean this guy strikes out 16 and you don’t have a first name?”
 
My turn for a cup of coffee in “the bigs” did not come until my last three months on the hill, as a college sophomore preparing to graduate from St. Joe’s and move on to take the religious habit. By 1968 the squad was depleted, as a lot of friends and players were moving on to life paths in other careers. Our all-star catcher and one of my closest friends left at Christmas to enter the service. In March 1968 we had no designated catcher, so Father Brennan accepted my offer and gave me a uniform as the emergency “break the glass” catcher. I am laughing today because my mother would not let me catch in elementary school lest something happen to my “priestly fingers.” Actually, I spent that 1968 spring season learning how to wear the catcher’s protective gear, particularly the part you never see on TV. I hiked down the hill to the Callicoon pharmacy, which carried a one-size-fits-all lower protection shield made from titanium, I think. When in uniform I waddled like a penguin. I think there was an understanding that some of the better athletes on the team [which would have been any of them, really] might catch the actual on-the-record games, which were primarily against other seminaries. That is what happened, and I spent the short season on the bench talking politics with Mike McCarthy, the other doomsday catcher. For the record, I was on the roster for the last college baseball game ever played by St. Joseph Seminary, as the college division would close with my class graduation.
 
The St. Joseph’s Sports Emporium:
 
Sometime just before my class arrived in 1962, the seminary had undertaken to carve out a new multi-sports field from a steep hillside. Visually, it was quite a feat. It was not ready during our freshman year; as I recall, the turf situation was the elephant in the ointment. When we finally got access to it, we speculated that the turf was a mixture of sod, straw, and cattle byproducts. After a full summer, the turf was passable for football if there was no rain or snow. But in the chill damp spring of the mountains, baseball was another story. A pop fly that landed on the ground literally disappeared. I seem to remember that Father Brennan preferred scrimmaging at the Callicoon downtown field. Today, looking back, I do feel badly that the new field never quite measured up to the hopes of those who planned and paid for it.
 
Most of my experience on that turf was football, which I will get to momentarily. But one gloomy spring day I asked my friend and varsity pitcher Buddy Ward to help me with a bucket list dream; I always wanted to pitch from a regulation mound to see what I was capable of. Buddy agreed and slipped on the catcher’s gear. He flipped a baseball to me, and it was waterlogged, as they always seemed to be up there, so I knew I better throw this thing with everything I had. I went into the windup and released 17 years of hopes, dreams, and fantasies. My pitch can best be described as a 58’ sinker. The ball landed about three feet in front of Bud and splattered him from head to foot with sod, straw, and cattle byproducts. He never said a word, just cleaned himself off and walked over to retrieve the ball. In a matter of fact voice he observed, “You know, I read somewhere that a baseball has to go 56 mph to reach home plate.” It was that gentleman cool that later led old Bud to a distinguished Air Force career and the prettiest girl at Catholic University, two of my wife’s and my closest friends today.
 
The “outdoor courts.”
 
As part of that massive engineering project of carving out the mountain, the seminary created an asphalt complex right outside our dormitory that included a basketball court and a volleyball court. Known as the “outdoor courts,” the facility was the true everyman facility. The basketball varsity players practiced in the friendly confines of the gym, but anybody who itched to play could scamper up the incline and get up a game. We played in every weather, even shoveling the court for a half-court pick-up game in January.
 
Next to the basketball court was the volleyball court, which was also frequently crowded but often for more political reasons. The hardest math teacher in my six years was the legendary Father Elmer Wagner. If you only knew him from the classroom, he was an intimidating instructor and disciplinarian. Nobody wanted to be sent to the blackboard, and I suggested we keep time on the guys who “tied up the class the longest at the board” by prolonging his blackboard agony and protecting the rest of us, and give him an atta boy after class. Eventually we kept track of season records for running out the clock.
 
However, Elmer was very fond of volleyball—he loved those courts. And he didn’t invite you into his games as much as announce with Pythagorean certainty that you would be there. When the bell rang at 3 PM and the halls were full of students, Elmer would point at me and yell “Burns.” And I would wave and say, “I’m in,” and he would go his way. At one point in my college freshman year, I was carrying an 18% test average in his “set theory” course, so I wasn’t in the strongest position to decline. Looking back, though, and thinking of the mix of jocks and non-jocks who played, and the integration of new college students with us fifth-year students, the volleyball matches were and are an overlooked community builder. Elmer played competitively but his insults seemed funny up there.
 
Football.
 
There were lots of pick-up games in the fall, but attention turned to the interclass games. Hypothetically, each class played the other five on the record, though I am not sure the freshmen had to run that gauntlet, as they barely had time to know each other. My recollection is that in my first year we played the sophomores and got steamrolled. By second year we had sorted ourselves out and I found myself playing right guard on offense, a position I maintained for five years. It was not a matter of skill as much as size, of which I had a good amount. The collective thinking in the huddle went that by the time a pass rusher ran around me to get the quarterback the play would be long finished.
 
We had a terrific class of players at the “skilled positions” on offense and defense, i.e., passing, catching, intercepting, etc. The seminary did not allow tackle football, which for all practical purposes ruled out a running game. We offensive linemen in the trench had one job to do, pass block. As a high school sophomore, I might find myself trying to block an ex-GI who entered the seminary at the college level, and predictably I caught hell in the offensive huddle as our quarterback cleaned himself of the sod, straw, and bull byproducts into which he had been dumped face first. I said tackling was not allowed; I did not say it never happened. Or on my watch.
 
Today my buddy John Burke and I laugh about those years. He was the center of the line, the hiker, directly to my left on the line. This was fitting enough because for ten years in the seminary we were paired together alphabetically. On report card day, for those of us with “issues,” academic or disciplinary, John was late for his appointment one time with the rector, and I went in first, and I got John’s dressing down instead. One day we were in a class game, bent down and waiting for the quarterback’s snap count. There was a guy opposite us from the other class who had been running his mouth, and with the three of us inches apart, John utters a truly funny off-color put-down of the guy. I had never heard that phrase before, and I laughed so hard I fell forward and got flagged for an offsides penalty.
 
The toughest moments were practice scrimmages within the class. We had a great sprinter in our class, Joe DiGiacco, who played in the defensive backfield far away from the line. However, on occasion he would “blitz” and rush the quarterback. It was my job to block him if I saw him running in. Unfortunately, nobody ever told Joe this wasn’t a track meet, and he would come in full sprint form, all knees, elbows, joints, etc. The next day I would hurt everywhere. Never block a sprinter. I won’t even go into the baton.
 
Somewhere in my sophomore year we started a winning streak and went from 1963 through 1967 without a loss. The very last college class game at St. Joe’s, college sophs versus college freshmen, or “The Turkey Bowl,” was played in mid-November 1967, and ended in a tie. The field was horrific as usual, but this was a game between guys who knew each other very well. I cannot remember if anyone thought of the historic implications; I doubt it. But it is true that in six months we would be off to novitiate in New Jersey and our opponents would inaugurate the new seminary formation program at Siena College in Loudonville, NY.
 
As for me, the clean living of novitiate would help me lose all my excess weight, and I took up running 5-8 miles daily. Wouldn’t you know, finally some athletic success and nobody around to see it. Anyway, I had fun writing today’s post. Please file protests on the St. Joe’s page. And if you would like a little more football humor, you’ll enjoy this Johnny Carson interview with Art Donovan…which may remind some of you of your best athletic moments.

 
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Getting In and Escorted Out of the Seminary

5/24/2020

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I talk regularly with several of my close friends from St. Joe’s, and one question that always comes up—with humor and wonderment—is the precision or lack thereof of the admission standards for acceptance into the seminary formation program. Usually the prompt for this question is the difficulty some of us had with various classmates. There were always beefs about something, but we generally agree there were at least several of our classmates who suffered from personality disorders by today’s reckoning. The mental health community today would say that about 20% of Americans across the board suffered from a definable clinical disorder, so I would feel comfortable using that figure in any seminary of our time—perhaps higher, judging from some autobiographies of former seminarians.

But we have been scratching our heads trying to discern the actual process undertaken in 1961 and 1962 when we signed up. I recall these signature moments: [1] A letter of intent. [2] A physical from one’s family MD. [3] A dental exam and appropriate work. [4] A letter of recommendation from the pastor. [5] A photo. [6] A home visit by one of the two legendary vocation directors, Doc Fink and Dan O’Rourke. I must think our academic records were asked for, but I have no memory of it. There was no preadmission psychological screening. As a sidebar, I was playing both sides of the street, having applied to the Diocese of Buffalo’s “Little Seminary” day school, where very little admission documentation was required, probably little more than admission to any Catholic high school in Western New York. I was accepted in both seminaries on the same day of the winter of 1962. My mother pushed the friars, and I am glad I did take that choice. The Diocese of Buffalo is now the “new Boston” or ground zero of the clerical sex abuse scandal.  

Sadly, I lived with the then former rector, Ligouri Muller, for four years after my ordination when it would have been safe for me to ask generally about the admission process and other questions about Callicoon, but we never got around to it. He intimated to me that he did have ambition beyond the hill, but it broke his heart when his Callicoon term was up in 1967 and he was not elected to higher office in the Province. The same Chapter elevated Columban Hollywood to the Rector’s position at Callicoon in my sixth year and brought a wave of younger faculty to St. Joe’s. About a decade later Ligouri told me he lost an election to the provincial council in that 1967 Chapter by one vote— “to a guy seeing a psychiatrist.” This suggests to me that whatever the admissions and retention standards were in our day, psychiatry was not necessarily near the top of the list on Ligouri’s watch in our time.

This is not to say that it was ignored, though. I recall, as a freshman or sophomore, taking what I recognize today as the MMPI or Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory in the Scotus study hall. I remember the guys joking later about its questions of whether “one has dark and tarry bowel movements.” Many years later I had to learn how to administer and score the test, and I took the test at Rollins College in 1986. In that run, I scored high on the schizophrenic scale and I ran to my professor to inquire about it. He replied that this was a symptom of an individual who “thought outside the box.” In the words of the immortal football coach Bill Parcells, “You are what your record says you are.”

We did have at least one campus visit by a psychiatrist friar, George Flannagan, and each of us had a visit, though I cannot remember any stress involved, nor any interpretation of tests we might have taken. My recollection is that this occurred in my second year, 1963-1964. Somebody about two years ahead of us went into the office to see the psychiatrist, closed the door, whipped out his hanky, and cleaned the doorknob. In May 2020 that would have been considered conscientious behavior.

Another relevant question is how often we were seriously evaluated by the faculty. My guess is that our grades and conduct were scrutinized very closely after first year, and probably after second year, as it is true that some of our classmates came from poorer school systems and some possibly suffered from learning disabilities or ADD issues. After second year the enforced departures were much less frequent. Again, I would imagine that some special scrutiny was done after fourth year, since the next year’s progression was into college level work. And, as a matter of generosity, if the faculty had serious doubts about a student’s long term prospects as a priest, it would be better to let him make a fresh start in an outside college or whatever endeavor he was better suited for.

As the last class to progress from Callicoon to novitiate, I cannot remember any special interviews about our fitness to move on to St. Raphael’s. I believe we went to novitiate as a class sometime in sixth year to acclimate, but nobody took me aside to ask if I was ready to leave Callicoon for North Jersey. I suspect a good number of my classmates may have been asking themselves that question, and likely with some faculty guidance. Going back to faculty meetings and votations, I believe all faculty members had a vote on our staying or leaving. It would make sense that the prefect of discipline [Anthony McGuire or Brennan Connelly] and the academic dean [Myron McCormick] presented a summary before the vote. My gifted classmate David Lingelbach always maintained that the votation was the reason we had to submit photos. He would do a brilliant imitation of Ligouri calling forth “pictures, please.” According to Canon Law of our time in seminary, spiritual directors could neither vote nor comment on a student’s issues. That law may be more nuanced today given the clerical abuse scandals; I need to research that.

There were, of course, some immediate dismissals, de jure in Latin legalese. Two of my classmates got tossed when one smuggled out another’s love letters in his laundry case. [Happily, the second was readmitted into formation years later and was much loved in his ministry before his untimely death.] Two students behind us got tossed for possession of porn, and a college student was immediately dismissed for aggressive behavior. There are probably others I am not aware of.

I have considered several more nebulous admission factors, and the reader may recognize others I have overlooked.
First, despite the popular belief, Church leaders were concerned about a priest shortage even before my class entered Callicoon. Patrick W. Carey’s history, Catholics in America [2004], goes into this issue in considerable detail. Religious orders with large institutional commitments such as colleges, high schools, and missions were already hard pressed as the baby boomers came of age. The pressure to fill seminaries was great.

Second, an institution the size of Callicoon was expensive to run even at capacity. Given the province’s investment, it is possible that admissions officers were willing to take marginal candidates in the “Boys Town” spirit.

Third: Church theology of the time put great stock in the reformative and regenerative power of grace to create diamonds from coal. The daily religious regimen probably helped all of us to become better Christians, and there may have been some thought that a boy would come around in such an atmosphere, particularly if he was referred from a friars’ parish or elementary school

Fourth: For a high school student and his parents, Callicoon was the best bargain in town. The $43/month tuition covered private school caliber academics and room and board. In Washington later, one of my Capuchin Franciscan friends told me that his minor seminary was the only Catholic high school in a radius of 50 miles.

Fifth: I am not certain that the faculty nor its recruiters were entirely trained to recognize the Eriksonian issues of adolescent development or to identify abnormality, or the cultural changes stirring in 1960’s America. In making judgments on the fitness of candidates and seminarians, the faculty’s only data was behavior and academic performance. Doc Fink told me many years later that he felt he lost his touch in assessing candidates in March 1966. Doc, a great raconteur, said “I sat up half the night calling my confreres around the country and they all agreed that there was something different in the air they could not identify.” Doc soon left vocation recruiting and became guardian of the Lafayette novitiate.

Allowing for some campfire expansion, Doc was correct that the times were a’ changin. That some candidates were accepted with unperceived baggage and different values and expectations is understandable. From what I glean from Facebook posts of students behind me, the problems of the later 1960’s may have been more complex than my time, when we only had some thugs and bullies to endure, budding personality disorders.   

I can only hope that when I pulled my trunk up the hill for the first time in 1962, nobody looked out a window and said, “Hey, who’s the schizophrenic?”

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