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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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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. 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. 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. 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?” 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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