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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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My seminary years [1962-1968, high school and junior college] were not the best years of my life. It was a duty, earning your clerical stripes, and each of us made our way by adapting as best we could. The idea of a teenager attending a boarding school seminary far away from home dates to the Council of Trent’s [1545-1563] reforms after the Reformation, when a holier priesthood was the dream of the future. The 1917 Code of Canon Law described the purpose of minor seminaries: "to take care especially to protect [seminarians] from the contagion of the world, to train in piety, to imbue with the rudiments of literary studies, and to foster in them the seed of a divine vocation.” The word “seminary” comes from the Latin, semen, “seed.” As it turns out, one of the eight remaining minor seminaries in the U.S. today is located in Rathdrum, Idaho, a village near Coeur d’Alene where my cousin Mimi lives today, and I found the school’s most recent edition of its equivalent to our Cord and Cowl and Seraph of the 1960’s.
What was the 1917 Code of Canon Law protecting us from, precisely, on Aroma Hill all those years? The Code in force at the time stated that young seminarians were to be protected “from the contagion of the world.” This was code for women, or more precisely, teenaged girls of our age cohort. But all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not prevent our class rendezvous with Sally Olwen Clark, in the basement of the seminary chapel on a Sunday evening in the winter of 1965. Let me set this up. As much of the “world’s contamination” was transmitted by television, we saw virtually no TV at St. Joe’s. {I’ll come back to that in a moment.] I believe we could watch the CBS Evening News [possibly in later years], but I am certain we had permission to watch the weekly Ed Sullivan Show over in the chapel basement, two-hundred metal folding chairs in a semi-circle before a black and white TV with the volume cranked to “possible audio damage to this unit.” In my class’s sophomore year, 1964 began a wonderful era of popular music, and I loved every minute of it. Music, sports, and writing bad literature got me through the monotony of my life. This was the springtime of the arrival of the Beatles and the “British Invasion.” In our seminary world the only way to see and hear the big hits of the day was to watch Ed Sullivan’s variety show in the church basement or to listen to a radio in your class’s assigned rec room. Private radios were forbidden, though I know someone owned one because we listened to the first Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston title fight on the roof of Scotus Hall with it. Most of you in my generation or who know your rock history remember what happened next on the music charts. But as rock historian Fred Bronson observed years later, it took about one year for a woman to join the English invasion. On January 23, 1965, she reached the top of the Number One Billboard Chart in the United States, edging out “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles. Her name was Sally Olwen Clark. Her father had two previous girlfriends before his marriage, named Pet and Ula, and so when Sally took a stage name, it was “Petula” Clark. Her song was “Downtown,” a smooth upbeat number that stayed in your head. If my memory is correct, the song was widely popular up on the hill. The guys could hardly wait to see her on TV, probably with the expectation that such a beautiful song could only be sung by a beautiful gal. Ed Sullivan booked her for his CBS variety show of Sunday, March 14, 1965. It was a standing room only performance in the chapel basement that night. I need to interject a word about Ed Sullivan here. He was an unlikely MC, not smooth, and given to awful misstatements. He hosted a variety show, which meant that you had to sit through a Polish Dance Troupe to see the Rolling Stones. [“Let’s hear it for the Forty Polish Dentists!” he actually said.] When Sister Janet Meade sang her Number One version of the Lord’s Prayer, Sullivan beamed, “Let’s hear it for The Our Father.” But Sullivan was OK that night, although the production was not. Petula Clark’s plane landed in New York 45 minutes before the show and there was no time to rehearse. So Petula never moved from her spot on the stage and sang “Downtown” and “I Know A Place” back to back with the camera on her face. At cue, the camera zoomed in on her. Now, how do I describe the sound of dozens of guys groaning at the same time? “My God, she’s old!” The disappointment was palpable. Some guys left. How old was she? She was born in 1932, or a “decrepit” 33. I thought she was drop dead gorgeous, but I didn’t dare say anything. I was just turning 17 at the time, and to admit to “those kinds of feelings” for a woman over 30 was a peculiar admission to the herd psychology of the locker room. Today I went back and looked at the YouTube clips…and concluded I was right all along. Clark, who started singing during World War II and performed for King Edward and Winston Churchill, had seen tougher audiences than our little school in lockdown. She is close to 90 today. Later, Dusty Springfield and Lulu both became popular in the U.S. and on the hill; Lulu sang the theme to “To Sir With Love” later in the 1960’s. As I alluded to earlier, it was hard to stay current via the television on seminary property. I can only remember two sets: the church auditorium set and another, in the Scotus Hall dormitory, in what was called—possibly sarcastically— “the TV room.” This second site was an appendage off the north [?] locker room assigned to freshman and sophomores. The viewing capacity was modest because the room doubled as a trunk storage facility. Our “home theater” was furnished in “early delivery truck” motif. I have been scouring my mind to recall the nuances of our TV policy. Of course, most nights we had study hall at 7:30, and we retired after night prayer at 9 PM, so there was never opportunity to follow the TV series coming online at that time like “The Avengers” or “Wild Wild West.” This does not mean that some of my classmates did not set their own TV hours. My good friend John Burke reminded me this week that he skipped a study period to watch an early evening entertainment program, possibly “Shindig” or “Hullabaloo,” two programs devoted to current rock in 1965 and 1966. John heard the duty Prefect of Discipline approaching [Cyprian Burke, no relation], so he switched the TV to PBS, and when Father Cyprian asked him what he was doing, John replied, “I’m watching Rachmaninoff.” In my final year on the Hill, January 1968, I somehow got designated to ask the duty Prefect, Father Ed Flannigan, if the school’s dinner schedule could be moved back so we could watch Superbowl II, Green Bay and Oakland. In a tone of voice that can only be termed pontifical, Father Ed declared that “the NBC Sports Department is not going to dictate our living schedule.” Most of our music came from the radio, and most rec rooms had one [except the freshman rec room in Scotus Hall.] All the dials were set to WABC in New York City, which could be picked up reasonably well from 110 miles away in the Catskills. WABC was a commercial platform; the ratio of songs to advertising and self-promotion was way out of kilter. The DJ’s I recall were the morning drive time Herb Oscar Anderson, the evening drive time Dan Ingram, and the nighttime Cousin Brucie, who is still working today on Sirius. |
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