80th Birthday Reflections Part 7: Priestly Disorder (continued)

St. Columban’s Seminary, Dalgan, Ireland where in 1970 & ’71 I took part in a General Chapter of the Society of St. Columban

[Before I continue with my 80th birthday reflections about my political development, I must add a brief account of a very important event in the process that eventually led me to leave the priesthood I had prepared so long to enter. The event I describe below gave me an insight into the inner workings of the missionary organization I had joined (the Society of St. Columban) — at the highest level.]

As indicated in previous postings, the changes represented by Second Vatican Council reforms introduced into my life a certain alienation from the Society of St. Columban, from traditional ideas of the priesthood and from my vow of celibacy. My immediate superior’s unfounded accusations recounted in part 5 of these octogenarian reflections were central to the process.

The feelings I described were compounded, when the Columbans convoked their post-Vatican II “Chapter” (leadership assembly) in 1970. The idea was to gather together the group’s leaders to determine how the Society of St. Columban might change in the light of Vatican II documents such as “The Church in the Modern World.”

The leadership in question was comprised of ex officio members such as our current Superior General and his Council. At large members were also either appointed or elected by the group which at its height had about 1000 priest-members. The majority delegates to the Chapter turned out to more than 60 years of age.

With that in mind and because of the objections of younger members, a compromise was reached to allow invitation as well of one representative each from Irish, American, and Australian members of the Society 30 years of age and under. Because of their junior status, the “young” invitees, it was determined, would have voice at the Chapter, but no vote. Joined by two bright counterparts from Ireland and Australia, I was elected to represent U.S. juniors.

The voice without vote restriction had all of us feeling like outsiders from the get-go.

My own alienation was brought to the fore by the ex officio presence of my rector from Rome. Soon after my arrival at the Chapter’s venue (the Columban major seminary in Navan, Ireland about 30 miles from Dublin), I learned that he had wasted no time before conveying to others my status as suspect and “dangerous.”

And why was I considered dangerous? It was because of positions I had taken on issues hotly debated at the time. In retrospect, the positions seem quite tame. But when I wrote them up in an “Introductory Note on Youth Representation,” even my Irish and Australian youth delegate counterparts thought them “too polarizing” to share with the Chapter at large.

The paper contrasted pre-Vatican II positions with post-conciliar approaches to church, mission, sacraments, priesthood and authority. Here’ the gist of what I wrote. Now, it almost seems laughable that such tame positions were considered polarizing:

  • Church: Pre-Vatican II theology, I noted, thought of the Catholic Church as an organization to which everyone must belong in order to save their souls – i.e. to get into heaven. There was “no salvation outside the church.” By contrast, the Post-Vatican II position envisioned the church as an often-small prophetic community at the service of the world itself – helping it towards the fully human life of love exemplified in the example and teaching of Jesus the Christ. Even a very this-worldly life based on self-giving constitutes the meaning of “salvation.”
  • Mission: According to older understandings that had shaped the Society of Saint Columban, our work as missionaries meant saving pagans in China, Korea, the Philippines, and Fiji by baptizing as many as possible into the Catholic Church without which it was impossible for them to get to heaven. In the newer view, quantity of membership took a backseat to quality of witness. And witness meant replicating Jesus’ life of healing, forgiveness and self-sacrifice – for the benefit of the larger world.
  • Sacraments: In the theology imbibed by most members of the Chapter I attended, the sacraments were rituals that made human events like birth, marriage, sickness and death holy. The faithful needed sacraments to turn such secular events into acts of supernatural worth. However, the newer vision saw those human events as already holy simply in virtue of God’s creative order. On this understanding, sacraments became occasions to celebrate life itself and the transcendent dimension found in every human birth, marriage, visiting of the sick, in every act of forgiveness and sharing – whether they might be formally celebrated or not.
  • Priests: Pre-Vatican II theology understood priests as men set apart – almost of a caste different from lay people. Post Vatican II theology understood priesthood as one function or charism among many others within the Christian community – e.g. counsellor, teacher, administrator, musician or prophet. 
  • Authority: In the world of my inculturation, authority was given to administrators. Obedience was a supreme virtue for the rest of us. According to the old view, the ideal superior was a “sound man” who was safe, took no chances and “runs a tight ship.” After the Second Vatican Council, authority is earned, not conferred. Here community leaders are listeners who articulate a community’s consciousness of itself.  They enable rather than direct. They are forward-looking, innovate and take chances. When mistakes are made, they are freely admitted.

I conveyed my initial impression of the Chapter in my journal when I wrote soon after my arrival at the end of September: “Reading over the Chapter publications and talking with various people here make it awfully hard to identify with the Society and with the approaches of this Chapter. It makes me wonder what my own future in an outfit like this can possibly be. I’m estranged; I really am.”

Meanwhile, I also noticed that the Irish seminary itself seemed behind the times. True, I hit it off well with the seminarians taking part in field day competitions and playing basketball on the outside courts. They even wanted me to play on the seminary team.

However, a November (1970) letter to my constituents had me making the following observation regarding the stage of renewal in our seminary in Ireland: “As for the stage of seminary renewal here. . . It’s about up to where we in the States were in the ’64-’66 period. Or maybe even a little before that. . .The difficulty with renewal here (in the seminary and in the Irish church in general) seems to be this: here the church is more or less coextensive with the culture. . . The Irish church can go on speaking in archaic terms, it can go on doing rather meaningless things and still have the impression that it’s communicating the Good News in a meaningful way to the world. However, it’s not. And, after speaking with young people here (outside the seminary), it has become clear to me that this kind of illusion will not be long-lasting. The young are being alienated here too, sad to say.”

The break I predicted came in 1973 with Ireland’s integration into the European Union and with the pedophilia scandals of the late 1980s. Together, they changed everything. Entry into the EU brought the secularization and eventually the Thatcherism and Reaganism of the 1980s that centralized money, entrepreneurism, and consumption just as they did elsewhere in the western world. And, of course, the pedophilia crisis completely discredited the clergy and hierarchy.

The changes introduced were so profound that by 2018 – the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Society of St. Columban – the head of the Society characterized Ireland’s culture as “post-Christian.” Hearing those words from a Columban superior was shocking to me even at the age of 78.

During the two Chapter sessions I attended in Ireland (1970 and ’71 — each lasting several months) all of that was only vaguely foreshadowed. But it certainly was part of the disorder I’ve been trying to explain in these 80th birthday reflections. My highly ordered world was disintegrating at very deep levels that were intellectual, ecclesiastical, very personal, and eventually highly political.

Jesus & Rent Strikes: Violent or Non-Violent?

Readings for 27th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Isaiah 5: 1-7; Psalm 80: 9-20; Philemon 4: 6-9; Matthew 21:33-43

During the COVID-19 hiatus, I watched in its entirety Ken Burns’ and Lynn Novick’s PBS production “The Vietnam War.” The series has ten episodes, each about an hour and a half long.

I bring it up because the viewing experience has relevance to this morning’s Gospel reading which describes resistance to a landlord system similar to the one that provoked Vietnam’s peasantry to take up arms.

Closer to home, the parable is also relevant to our current Corona Virus context, where unemployed renters will soon be required either to pay their rents or risk eviction. Their dilemma, like those of Jesus’ audience 2000 years ago is whether to pay those rents or to join a general rent strike. Additionally, Jesus asks to what extent citizen violence might be justified as a strategic option as they resist paying rent.

Ironically, both the Burns and Novick film series and this morning’s gospel obscure the questions just posed. The producers of “The Vietnam War” avoid the rent question altogether. As for Matthew the evangelist, he completely allegorizes Jesus’ parable to similarly obscure its central question about absentee landlordism, rent strikes, and the role of violence in social change.

Vietnam & Rent Strikes

Let’s begin with Burns and Novick. The official story they tell is that of a geopolitical struggle between China and Russia on the one hand and the U.S. and France on the other. So, the film’s narrative is dominated by maps depicting huge swaths of geography (China and Russia) looming menacingly over Vietnam. The maps indicate that Vietnam along with the rest of “French” Indochina (including Laos and Cambodia) were threatened by monolithic communist takeover.

U.S. officials one after another describe their alarming “domino theory” contending that if Vietnam were “lost” to communism, so would Laos, Cambodia, Korea, Japan, the Philippines and the rest of Far East. It wouldn’t be long before Ho Chi Minh’s forces would be landing in Hawaii and then in California.

So, viewers are asked to believe that in the footage showing huge numbers of Vietnamese civilians (including the elderly, women and children) moving equipment, building bridges, and ferrying supplies, we are simply witnessing mindless agents of China and Russia. The Vietnamese were somehow persuaded to risk their lives (four million of them were killed in the conflict) to advance the totalitarian cause of Sino-Soviet world conquest.

As John Pilger and others have written, that simply doesn’t stand to reason. For one thing, there was no monolithic alliance between Russia and China. Any semblance of that lay in ruins between the years 1960 and 1989.

That is, for the Vietnamese, what they call “The American War” (1960-75) could not have been fought on behalf of China or Russia. Rather, the conflict represented a struggle against colonial rule by French and American forces. It was also fought against a rent system that had peasants paying predatory tribute to absentee landlords. The latter were holed up in Saigon along with other beneficiaries of deteriorating colonial arrangements including its dysfunctional army, government officials, and participants in the supporting infrastructure.

Meanwhile, outside of Saigon, the peasants’ revolutionary army (the Viet Cong) defended farmers against rent collection. They had the peasantry stop traveling to Saigon to pay their land fees. This, they said, would force representatives of the landlord class to venture out into territory controlled by the Viet Cong to collect their money or in-kind revenue. And there in the countryside they would be duly slaughtered.

In other words, patriotism and the peasants’ immediate economic interest, not geo-political considerations, provided their main motivations for resistance to a colonial rental system that had long exploited them and caused their families to starve.

Jesus & Rent Strikes

All of this has relevance to this morning’s Gospel episode where Jesus tells a story that parallels the situation I’ve just described. Jesus and his audience too were living under an imperial system not unlike Vietnam’s. The Romans controlled Palestine using tactics highly similar to those of the French and Americans in Indochina. The system’s administrators, armies, police, and hangers-on were all holed up in Jerusalem protected by Roman legions.

Meanwhile, absentee administrators and landlords kept the province’s peasants impoverished by exacting rent and taxes that the farmers detested. The latter resisted accordingly – at times in Israel’s history forming armies of resistance similar to the Viet Cong. One of those militias was known as the Zealots.

In any case, the parable centralized in this morning’s gospel has Jesus problematizing a situation of violent peasant conflict over rent collection. In so doing, Jesus, no doubt, provoked a spirited discussion among his listeners about colonialism, landlordism, and about violent vs. non-violent resistance.

Jesus’ story goes that an absentee landlord has rented out his vineyard. Peasants are resisting payment. So, the man in the Big House sends out no doubt well-armed rent collectors. After the first ones are murdered by the farmers, he sends out what was probably a small army of “enforcers.” But the peasants successfully defeat them too. Eventually, the landlord gets more serious. His own son heads up a collection force probably much larger and better armed than its predecessors. But surprisingly, the renters wipe them out as well. They assume ownership of the land in question presumably under some ancient version of the revolutionary slogan “Land to the tiller.”

That said, the Master articulates the problem that certainly provoked spirited discussion in his audience. “What will happen,” Jesus asks, “to the revolutionaries demonized as ‘wicked’ by the landowning class?”

No doubt, some in Jesus audience would say they weren’t “wicked” at all, but heroic champions of the exploited. They would applaud their armed resistance. Others though joining the applause, might point out that the peasant victory would be short-lived and doomed.

These more cautious discussants would hold that the better-armed and trained forces of the landowners and their Roman sponsors would eventually prevail with disastrous results for the entire province of Palestine. Accordingly, they might advise nonviolent resistance to the system in question. (There were, by the way, at least three such forms of nonaggressive struggle in Jesus’ first century context.)

It is unlikely that any in Jesus’ audience would defend the imperial status quo the way Matthew’s allegorized retelling of the parable seems to do. Fifty years after Jesus death the anonymous Jewish author called by that name even goes so far as to imply identification of the absentee landlord with God and the landlord’s son with Jesus himself. Such identification would have been possible around the year 80 or 85 when the Gospel of “Matthew” was written following the utter defeat of Jesus’ people by the Romans in the year 70.  That same identification would, of course, have been abhorrent to Jesus listeners and thus impossible in the Master’s revolutionary context.

Considerations like these – about the similarities in revolutionary situations separated by 2000 years – might help viewers better understand the causes of the Vietnam War and other conflicts even closer to our own day. Clearly, I find those causes obscured in the Burns and Novick documentary despite its very evident artistic merits.

Conclusions

Several conclusions suggest themselves from the considerations just advanced. They have to do with Jesus himself, with rent, and with considerations of violent vs. non-violent resistance.

First of all, Jesus:

  • As originally told, Jesus’ parables weren’t nice little five-minute vignettes. They were meant to stimulate long lively discussions as indicated in this morning’s reflection.
  • As thought provocateur, Jesus was wildly popular among peasants and the dispossessed on the one hand and hated by the religious-political establishment and occupying Romans on the other, not because of one-dimensional religious teachings, but because he constantly connected his people’s faith with issues like land reform, workers’ wages, debt and rent.
  • Those are the same connections that put religious leaders in danger and in early graves today, whether they’re Jewish, Christian, or Muslim.

Secondly, rent:

  • According to Jesus’ teaching, land reform, wages, and rent were more matters of faith than what we term “going to church” or saying the right words about God, the Bible, sexual behavior, or “thoughts and prayers.”
  • For the dispossessed including basically conservative peasant farmers (in ancient Palestine, Vietnam, or in the United States) such local issues are what lead to revolutionary action, not geopolitical considerations.
  • That is, like politics, all revolutions are local and center on issues of exploitation involving food, shelter, and dignity.

Thirdly, violence:

  • High rents imposed on poor people are an egregious form of violence.
  • Even violent resistance to such deprivation of the fundamental human right to shelter and subsistence is entirely justifiable as self-defense.
  • The U.S. Founding Fathers said something like that.
  • However (as indicated by the “more cautious discussants” referenced above) such secondary violence can be counterproductive in terms of the absolute destruction wreaked in response by state and empire.
  • Ironically too, the propaganda arms of state, empire, and church (including someone like Matthew the evangelist) excel at lastingly branding justifiable violence by the poor and oppressed as (to use Matthew’s word) “wicked.”

Finally, the very least people of faith can do today is to support rent strikers and to help others understand motivations for violent response in places like Vietnam, Lexington and Concord – or the streets of New York today. Equating state and imperial violence with the self-defense and counterattacks of the poor represents a false equivalency. Thoughtful people of faith must reject it.

My Recent Hospitalization: Do I Really Need to Live Beyond 80?

Norwalk Hospital: Scene of Last Week’s Five-Day “Retreat”

Is there something perversely magical about crossing the line between 79 and 80? All I know is that no sooner did I make that transition, than I found myself hospitalized for the second time in my life – the last time being more than 40 years ago.

In both cases, the cause was the same – complications introduced by atrial fibrillation (periodic rapid heartbeats). When that happened for the first time, I entered a medical labyrinth that I swore never to fathom again.

I’m sure many of us are familiar with the drill – endless tests, being sent from one doctor to the next, prescribed medicines with threatening side effects. (I didn’t like one doctor’s answer when I asked him how long I’d be on beta blockers. “For the rest of your life, of course,” he said.)

That experience along with the tale I’m about to share have me wondering about ensuring life beyond 80. After that, shouldn’t we just back off and let nature take its course?

Let me tell you how I came to that question – and to its surprisingly clear answer.

The Medical Nemesis

I recall that during my first serious run-in with the medical establishment (again, about 40 years ago), I was reading Ivan Illich’s The Medical Nemesis. There, the great philosopher, trenchant social critic, and (like me) an ex-priest advanced a thesis relevant to my then-emerging medical situation. He wrote that modern medicine was making westerners sicker rather than healthier.

All of that was in line with his wider analysis, viz. that after a certain point:

  • The more formal education we have, the stupider we become (knowing more and more about less and less, while understanding less and less about more and more).
  • The further we advance in the field of transportation, the more immobile we find ourselves (sitting in traffic jams and airports, separated from each other by increasingly greater distances, and dependent on machines that only the few can afford, and even fewer can repair).
  • The more “advances” in communication we experience, the less meaningful our interactions seem (as we use phones and computers to occasionally talk rather than enjoying the daily face-to-face conversations that are part and parcel of being human).
  • The more food modern agriculture produces, the less nourishing its content (due to monocultures, feedlot diseases, preservatives, and dependence on inputs such as artificial fertilizers, animal drugs, and poisonous pesticides).

It’s the same with modern medicine, Illich argued. Its takeover by hospital equipment and pharmaceutical companies has us all hooked on procedures and drugs whose side effects and interactions are only partially understood. Within the system, doctors claim authority due only to those who know everything about the human body, while in reality 90% of it remains a mystery.

Even more basically, hospitals serve patients typically terrible food, which should be the major source of health in any circumstance. But instead, already undernourished patients are further deprived in places that are actual germ farms – ranking high among the most dangerous environments human beings have ever produced. It’s all “iatrogenic,” Illich charged – a disease-inducing epidemic intensified by physicians and the medical establishment itself.

To reiterate, then: beyond a certain point, the more modern medicine we have, the sicker we become.

My Medical History

Well, my experience with the medical establishment 40 years ago confirmed Illich’s insight.

For instance, after I expressed my concerns about rapid and irregular heartbeats, doctors at the Universities of Kentucky and Louisville, had me doing things that seemed well, “iatrogenic.” At one point I recall, they gave me a “tilt table test.” That meant strapping me to an upright mobile board that was turned to various angles in attempts to induce (for purposes of analysis) the very symptoms I was complaining about. The resulting sight appeared quite self-consciously ridiculous and somehow comic to me. Something seemed wrong.

At another point, I found myself enduring a stress test on a treadmill while connected by electrodes to an electrocardiogram monitor. That was o.k.; I had already done several of those.

However, this particular time, the technicians were amazed by my endurance. They even called some colleagues over to witness the wonder of it all as they progressively increased the treadmill’s speed. Suddenly however, they realized I was approaching cardiac arrest. In panic, they shut down the machine, rushed me to a nearby couch and urgently sent for the emergency doctor to attend to me lest I expire.

Episodes like those led me to see the truth of Illich’s argument. I concluded, “These guys don’t know what they’re doing. Much of it just doesn’t make sense. I have to make my own decisions here.”

Eventually, I did. After obtaining a second opinion from an elderly Asian physician who explained my options, I decided to “self-medicate” in the sense of changing my diet, committing to a rigorous daily exercise program, and (most importantly) meditating twice each day for half an hour. And here I am, still alive, healthier than most of my physicians and telling the tale. The Asian doctor just mentioned had given his presumed medical authority straight back to me. His crucial question was, “What do you think?”

My Current Situation

Of course, I was carrying all of that in my mind when three weeks after my 80th birthday, and following the direction of my primary care doctor, I reported to the Norwalk (CT) Hospital’s emergency room complaining of extended heart palpitations, skin sensitivity, and shortness of breath. I thought I might have COVID-19.

Instead, following a COVID test, a couple of x-rays, a CT scan, two ultrasounds, an electrocardiogram, an echocardiogram, and innumerable blood tests, it was determined that I have blood clots probably caused by my recent 12-hour, single day drive from Canadian Lakes Michigan to our home in Westport Connecticut. The condition was aggravated by my chronic atrial fibrillation. Together, those inputs caused my shortness of breath and unusual fatigue. And, yes, I would have to submit to a regime of three medicines taken twice a day for “the rest of my life.”

Suddenly, this very healthy and strong person (me!) was rendered “sick” and reduced to invalid status.

So, I spent those five days hospitalized and ingesting intravenous drips containing various formulations of blood thinners and heart tranquilizers.

The doctors’ problem was determining the correct dosages of the three prescribed medicines. We experimented daily with blood thinners and heart calmers. The therapies worked while my body was at rest. But as soon as I started moving around, the heart irregularities and shortness of breath returned (though I hardly noticed). My heart continued to race at times even as the blood clots dissolved themselves. (This was natural, I was told, even without Heparin or its equivalent.)

With their alternatives apparently exhausted, an excellent pair of very bright and articulate staff physicians (and teachers in the medical school) with stellar bedside manners suggested a procedure reminding me of the term “iatrogenic.” They wanted to shock my cardiac system back into normalcy. According to the procedure, (1) I’d be sedated, (2) swallow a miniaturized scanning device in search of a possible clot in my heart, and if none were found, they’d (3) give my heart a normalizing electric shock and hope for the best.

Hmm. I wondered what Ivan Illich would say about all of that. I didn’t know. But I recalled his distinct suggestions that:

  • The less apparent the causes of one’s symptoms
  • The more exotic and complicated their diagnosis and anticipated cure
  • The more “sophisticated” the technology
  • And the more numerous the medications involved,

the less likely it is that a given therapy is on the right track.

Thinking like Illich, I wondered: given my age, does it make sense any longer to take such life-prolonging measures for someone who up to a few days before had been progressing quite nicely as far as his health was concerned? (I was taking only one med each day – for enlarged prostate. I walked four miles seven days a week at a rate of 14:30 minutes per, did 40 pushups midway through each of those walking sessions, and played golf regularly with great enjoyment – especially with my two sons. That along with the healthy diet provided me for the last 44 years by my gourmet vegetarian wife were keeping me quite healthy.) Why not continue trusting my body and Life itself to give me a few more relatively healthy years – or not? At 80, it’s been a good run. Who could ask for more?

Enter Ezekiel Emanuel

In asking that question, I was reflecting what I had read six years earlier in an Atlantic Monthly article written by University of Pennsylvania oncologist and medical ethicist, Ezekiel J. Emanuel. The article was called “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

There (writing at the age of 57) Emanuel wrote that statistical concerns about physical and mental decline among aging Americans had inspired him to conclude that “Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either.”

Practically speaking that would mean, he said, no regular doctor visits, no colonoscopies, cancer screenings, cardiac stress or PSA tests, no pacemaker or implantable defibrillator, no heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery, no hospitalizations – nothing curative; only palliative medical procedures.

In Emanuel’s opinion, death according the natural lifespan of a post 75-year-old body is far preferable to the indignities of artificially prolonged life with its probabilities of immobility and mental decline.

I was convinced that Emanuel’s diagnosis of my “condition” would be that there is really nothing wrong with me at all. Despite appearances, I’m simply old. My body parts including my fibrillating heart and sometimes gasping lungs are showing normal signs of wear and tear.

It’s all part of life’s wonderfully mysterious process.

I found myself agreeing with that position. After all, I’ve already led a full productive life. Everything from now on is gravy.

So, once I’ve consumed my present supply of meds (to appease my family members), and after my next appointment with my cardiologist (for the same reason), I plan to swear off the whole thing. I’m going to follow Emanuel’s advice.  

Conclusion

As it has turned out, my time in the Norwalk hospital was a great gift – almost a spiritual retreat. The experience provided me time to focus on the topics I’ve raised here – the nature of U.S. medical care, the advisability of adopting curative (vs. palliative) measures after the age of 75 or 80, and other end-of-life issues.

Like Emanuel I’ll forge ahead without any exotic interventions whatsoever. If the heart attack comes, I’m ready to go. As I said, it’s been a good run.

If a stroke comes, same story. And should I become disabled, I’ve clearly asked my family members to simply put me in a nursing home without any life-extending treatments and let me die. Absent those medicines and treated only with palliatives, my life’s end will probably come quickly and painlessly.

Meanwhile, I’ve resolved to continue enjoying life, writing for social justice, following my spiritual practices, and concentrating on lowering those frustrating golf scores rather than my unfathomable heart rate.

80th Birthday Reflections Part 6: Political Order

Just in case readers might have forgotten: my project in this series of reflections on the occasion of my 80th birthday is to illustrate Richard Rohr’s observation about human growth in terms of the “three boxes” into which, he says, everyone’s personal growth trajectory more or less fits. According to Rohr, if we’re lucky, the first part of life is characterized by order, the second by disorder, and the third by reorder. In those terms, I’ve been very lucky.

I’ve tried to illustrate that luck in previous entries in this series. There I briefly described how I mostly benefitted from a highly ordered life starting in a very Catholic household with loving parents. Those years included nine years of education in St. Viator’s Catholic school on Chicago’s northwest side. Then, I shipped off at the age of 14 for a monk-like, highly regulated existence in a seminary preparing teenagers for a life of celibacy and service to God. In St. Columban’s minor seminary in Silver Creek, New York, we were already being shaped to convert what we understood as pagans in foreign missions like Korea, the Philippines, Burma, and Japan. 

So far, my story has taken me from my family home in Chicago and subsequently in Warrenville, Illinois to that seminary in Silver Creek. From there I attended a corresponding college seminary in Milton, Massachusetts. I then completed a novitiate-like “spiritual year” in Bristol, Rhode Island. That was followed by four years of “graduate” scripture and theological studies back in Milton. Then finally, following my ordination in 1966, I completed my formal education with five years of doctoral studies in Rome, Italy. By then, I was 32 years old.

When I left my story off, I was in the middle of telling about those halcyon years in Rome.

My hope is that sharing such reflections might help me better understand my own journey as I enter my ninth decade. In the process, it would be wonderful if readers would also be stimulated to similarly examine their own transitions from order to disorder and hopefully to the ongoing process of reorder.

In any case, I want this particular blog entry to help me (and anyone mildly interested) better understand my own political development. Recounting its story will stretch me far beyond Rome to most of western Europe. It will then take me to more than 40 years of teaching (and learning!) at Berea College in rural Appalachia. Sabbaticals and other travel opportunities sponsored by Berea ended up peppering my journey with subsequent long stopovers in Brazil, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, India and Cuba. At each of those stops, I learned political lessons that have informed and shaped my life. I’ve been lucky indeed.

But let me begin at the beginning.

My parents were basically apolitical. As a truck driver, my father was a Teamster Union member, but he never betrayed any corresponding political consciousness. (I just remember that he didn’t like paying union dues.) My mother sometimes spoke of her preference to “vote for the man, not the party.” Together, both mom and dad claimed to be Independents rather than Democrats or Republicans. However, their leanings were clearly towards the GOP.

Apart from that, my first recollection of a significant political thought came when I was a freshman in the high school seminary (1954-’55). We were off at some sort of day of recollection at a nearby rival seminary. And older priest (I’ll bet he was about 50!) was onstage giving a keynote address. In its course, the old man remarked for some reason that the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (a decade earlier) amounted to the most heinous crime in human history.

I was completely shocked. At the time the McCarthy hearings were in full swing. Anti-communism was in the air. I wondered, “Why would a priest say something so unamerican? Was he perhaps a communist? Surely no priest could be a communist.”

My question was framed like that because at the time, anti-communism was in the very air all Americans breathed. After every Mass, we all offered specially mandated extra prayers “for the conversion of Russia.”

The sentiment invaded our minor seminary with a vengeance. The Columban Fathers had just been expelled from China by the 1949 Communist revolution. So “Old China Hands” returning from “fields afar” addressed us frequently about their experiences with such evil incarnate. They told us that the communists hated the Virgin Mary and her rosary. That was enough for any of us. Nothing could be eviler than that.

I remember that during one study hall on May 2, 1957, one of my most admired teachers who was monitoring the session came by my desk and whispered, “A great man died today.” He was referring to Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Politically speaking, that was the world I grew up in. I had no idea what communism was other than an anti-God, anti-Mary worldwide conspiracy by absolutely evil people.

Again, cut off as we were from the news and unexposed to any historical information other than that conveyed in standard (boring) history books, no wonder my political formation was so narrow. Everyone’s was.

It was also no wonder that when I cast my first ballot for U.S. president (1964), I voted for Barry Goldwater. I did so not only because of strict “American” indoctrination, but also because I greatly admired my mother’s brother, my uncle Ben. Of all my relatives, I thought he had the most respectable job. He worked in some capacity at Chicago’s First National Bank; he went to work in suit and tie each day. [Everyone on my father’s side of the family were laborers – brick layers, bartenders, plumbers and general construction workers. One of them was a bookie. (I remember him showing us one day his basement with a whole array of phones connected with his work.)]

So, in my desire to be more informed and sophisticated politically – more like Uncle Ben – I had long conversations with him about issues of the day. He steered me towards the Republicans and criticism of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam War resistance.

For instance, in 1967, when Martin Luther King voiced his searing criticism of U.S. aggression in southeast Asia, I thought, “It might be well and good for him to speak about civil rights for blacks, but now he’s gone too far. What does he know about foreign policy and Vietnam?”

That was the state of my political consciousness when I went off to Rome at the age of 27.

And that’s precisely when political disorder set in to complement the theological disorder I’ve already described.  

(Next time: the particulars of political disorder)

80th Birthday Reflections Part 5: The Priesthood & Disordered Celibacy

My first year in Rome, James Kavanaugh wrote a national best seller called A Modern Priest Looks at His Outdated Church. It was a general critique of the Catholic hierarchy for not going far enough with the Vatican II reforms. For Kavanaugh, the church was still too priest and hierarchy centered. It needed more democracy. 

However, what most of us remember about A Modern Priest was its rejection of celibacy as a prerequisite for ordination. The book sparked many discussions at the dinner and supper table where our community of 12-15 young priests took our meals each noon and evening.

There, debates about scripture, theology, politics were the liveliest and best-informed that I’ve ever experienced. And I took part with great enthusiasm. My studies at the Anselmo were radicalizing me. They took me beyond post-Vatican II positions I had previously never dreamed of regarding church reform, the inspiration of the Bible, Jesus’ divinity, Mary’s virginity, the Reformation, papal infallibility, the priesthood itself, and, of course, celibacy.

Reluctant Celibates   

Intense debates about that latter issue were influenced not only by Kavanaugh, but by the more general sexual revolution that was a central part of the ‘60s and ‘70s. The contraceptive pill had been introduced in 1960. And with the fear of unintended pregnancy largely shelved, sexual freedom became the watchword of the day. Priests were not immune from any of that.

Previously, I mentioned earlier my own concerns about “reluctant celibacy.” Every priest I knew shared them. In fact, as I traveled (on motor scooter) and worked with priests in Austria, Germany, France, Spain, England, Ireland, Scotland, Belgium, Poland and elsewhere during my summers in Europe, I couldn’t help but notice that some priests had openly set aside their reluctance. For all practical purposes, they had become married priests. (Later, in Brazil, Costa Rica and elsewhere in Latin America, Africa and India I came across evidence of the same phenomenon.)

That was one aspect of the priesthood and the sexual revolution; priests were voting with their feet against mandatory celibacy; mostly informally some were getting married. Another aspect was that priests in general were leaving in droves in order to marry; they were seeking Vatican dispensations from their vows – including 3/4 of those who had entered the high school seminary with me back in 1954. In fact, thousands upon thousands of priests worldwide were abandoning their vocations.

In between those two categories were priests I knew who had girlfriends – something totally unheard of in the church I had grown up in. There, particular female companionship was absolutely forbidden. Even more, it was entirely scandalous for ordained men to seek dispensation from their vows. And no one (at least in the U.S. church) would live openly with a female partner. At least, that was the church I knew.

The Big Ed Factor

The girlfriend phenomenon showed up with a vengeance on Corso Trieste with the arrival of a character called “Big Ed.” He was a bullshitter; there’s no other way of saying it. And he changed the atmosphere in our house. Not that he lived there, but he was greatly admired by a whole clique of my friends who did.

Big Ed claimed he was a priest. But I’m not sure about that. That’s because (as I said) he was an inveterate liar. His shtick was to tell the girls that he was Tom McNeely, the 1960s heavyweight prizefighter whom he apparently resembled. (He’d tell them that as he mixed, shared and downed pitchers of boilermakers.) I suspect the ruse worked with many women. But who knows if he was telling the truth about being a priest?

What I do know is that his shtick worked with that clique I mentioned. Not that they believed him about being McNeely. But they all thought he was very cool. And they certainly admired his savoir faire with the women. For a while there, it seemed that they went out clubbing with him almost every night. All of a sudden, every conversation the next morning at breakfast was about Big Ed this and Big Ed that. Suddenly the man was a legend; he could do no wrong.

I bring him up because Big Ed epitomized the changes I’m describing here around the issue of priestly celibacy. As the years lengthened following Vatican II, we all found ourselves loosening up in relation to the restrictions that were so much a part of our seminary lives. We were drinking more, clubbing more, and interacting more with women. Eventually, I was no exception – except in my doubts, suspicions, and reservations about Big Ed. Even according to my own more relaxed standards, he seemed over the top.

My Own Crisis

Yes, eventually, I succumbed – or rather, I would say I finally appropriated my own sexual identity and acceptance of close female friends. I made the decision to do so at the age of 30. I won’t go into detail about the resulting discoveries, relationships and repercussions – things that all of us have gone through, but at ages much earlier than 30.

Before any of that, my own decision was hastened by those lively discussions mentioned earlier. I mean my growing “radicalism” had not passed unnoticed by the rector of our house on Corso Trieste. So, one morning just before my 30th birthday, he said he wanted a word with me. I remember our walking together in our residence garden ‘round and ‘round the house in deep discussion.

The rector informed me that he had written a letter about me to the Columban Superior General. Because of what he heard me saying at table, the rector had identified me to our Society’s leadership as “dangerous” and unfit to teach in the seminary after the attainment of my doctoral degree. Moreover, the rector said, he was disturbed by the fact that some young females from a high school on our street had been seeking me out for spiritual guidance. He thought that was inappropriate and suspect.

I was completely shocked. First of all, I was amazed that the letter had been written before discussing it with me. But secondly, there was absolutely nothing inappropriate about those meetings with the girls in question. I was actually proud that my Italian was good enough to do something “pastoral” other than simply offering Mass at local churches and convents. (At this point, I was involved in an alternative, lay-led church connected with the high school. In the middle of each week, its members met to discuss and prepare the following Sunday’s liturgy. It was extremely inspiring). Thirdly, I knew that unlike others in our community, I was studiously avoiding relationships I still considered ill advised.

Processing It All

I remember subsequently writing such reflections in my diary. They drove me to think more deeply not only about celibacy, but about decision-making in the religious group I had joined and generally in the church. The celibacy obligation, I knew hadn’t been imposed on priests till about the 12th century. And it had largely originated from the desire on the part of church officials to protect ecclesiastical property from inheritance by the offspring of priests.

I now allowed myself to recognize that such avaricious motivation had created an entirely patriarchal, basically misogynist and hypocritical subculture. It inflicted guilt on young people for following the dictates of the second most powerful human drive (after self-preservation) viz. their sexual instinct (or as Darwin might put it, propagation of the species). The church did that in general. Practically speaking, it reduced faith to obsession with sex. It had in the process put unbearable burdens on unsuspecting young boys like me at the age of 14. In retrospect, all of that seemed like an unwitting form of abusing children too young to give informed consent. And then by the time age of consent was achieved, we were all too indoctrinated (not to say brainwashed) to escape.

With all of that more or less unconsciously in mind, the priests I was increasingly encountering were exercising what theologians called the “sensus fidelium” about celibacy. (Something similar had happened more widely regarding contraception and divorce.) As I was coming to understand it, that theologically recognized “sense of the faithful” referred to near unanimous agreement on the part of lay believers about a matter of faith or morals regardless of what the hierarchy might say. That implicit unanimity, I saw, had already been achieved among priests across the Catholic Church; they no longer believed in celibacy. Among other Christians, that consensus had long since been reached following the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Regardless of what the hierarchy might say, the people had spoken. In short, I concluded that celibacy was no longer a priestly obligation.

Conclusion

As I write these words, I’m not even sure I should be sharing their revelations. It would be very easy for readers to get the wrong idea judging harshly the young priests I’ve described (including myself) as hypocrites cynically unfaithful to a vow we had freely taken. It would be very easy to be shocked, repelled and (for Catholics) to feel somehow misled and even betrayed.

In retrospect however, I see it quite differently. As I knew them, the men in question had in no way abandoned their faith. They remained very good priests – compassionate, understanding, idealistic and kind. We were simply products of our time characterized by a sexual revolution that touched everyone.

Even more (as the great German theologian Karl Rahner put it) the young men in question were not sinners; rather, we had been sinned against. And the offending party was an ecclesiastical institution whose stubborn regulations had laid a nearly unbearable and certainly unnecessary burden on the shoulders of good willed, highly motivated youths who had accepted obligatory celibacy with little notion of its implications outside the seminary’s protective walls. We simply wanted to be priests, not celibates.

I’d go even further. The priests I’m talking about were implicitly or explicitly influenced by the very theological studies I’ve been celebrating here. Following Vatican II those studies affirmed the insights of secular disciplines such as history, sociology and psychology. Freud, Jung, and their successors had shown that the celibate decision involved much more than just saying no. And yet, no one was there to help priests figure out what that “more” entailed. In other words, many of us had moved from Rohr’s first “order” box into inevitable “disorder” around our celibacy. It would take most of us a long time and many errors before we could get to “reorder.”

(Next time: Political disorder)  

80th Birthday Reflections Part 4: Almost Famous – Sports & Music in Rome

Giulio Glorioso, Italian baseball’s Babe Ruth who offered me and a friend baseball contracts

Music, eventually acting, public speaking, and especially sports all came to play important roles throughout my life. All except acting became prominent for me in Rome too. Here, I’ll describe the forms they took once I escaped the seminary hothouse. All of them – music, public speaking and sports – contributed to my “disorder box” in a life and self-understanding that was changing and opening up to a world much wider, more complex, and far more interesting than the one I had known up until ordination.

Music

Like most teenagers in the 1950s, I paid close attention to the Top Forty there at the beginnings of Rock ‘n’ Roll. I loved Bill Haley, Connie Francis, Elvis Presley, Patti Page, the Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jo Stafford, Chuck Berry, Little Richard and all of that crowd. Each week in the high school seminary, we all eagerly awaited clippings from home declaring the order of the day’s most popular songs.  

Then, in the ‘60s and ‘70s I fully embraced folk music stars like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. When hootenannies were popular on TV and in everyone’s living room, I took up the guitar.

I recall my first public coming-out with the guitar. It was at a St. Columban’s Day celebration in the major seminary in November of 1966. I had only been playing for maybe six months. Yet, I actually had the gall to get on stage and “sing” Woody Guthrie’s “Talkin’ Guitar Blues.” It turned out to be a huge hit and thereafter, any time a guitar was passed around a group, I was asked to perform that song. It was fun to do.

Along those lines, one of the most delightful features of my years in Rome were the frequent dinner parties held in our house. They always ended with a songfest. Such special occasions were frequent since our house rector was the Roman liaison between the Society of St. Columban and the Vatican. So, we often had international dignitaries and associated friends and acquaintances over for elaborate dinners (including interesting women). Archbishops, bishops, and government officials were frequent guests. All of these occasions ended up in our community room where we’d retire for cognac and cigars, and where we residents (and some guests) would perform our party pieces – like “Talkin’ Guitar Blues.” My first taste of cognac actually took my breath away. But I quickly got used to that.

Acting

Late in my seminary career, I also discovered acting. My first role probably came during my second year of theology studies – i.e. two years after we all got our bachelor’s in philosophy. I guess I was 24 at the time. Mine was a bit part as “old Jim” in “The Boys in 509.” It was a comedy that originally was “The Girls in 509.” But the title and content were adjusted for obvious reasons. (Though in previous productions, some in the seminary proved to be quite good and comically convincing with their female impersonations. Eventually however, for some unexplained reason, such quasi-trans roles were discontinued.)

In any case, success as old Jim led the next year to a prominent role in Agatha Christie’s “The Mousetrap.” There I played Detective Sergeant Trotter, the character who actually done the dastardly deed in Christie’s famous who-done-it.

The following year, I had the lead role in “Brother Orchid.” Everything was going swimmingly until the final scene, when I was to take a drink before uttering a final crucial line. The water went down the wrong pipe and I virtually lost my voice. I ended up talking in a whisper that no one could hear. I was so totally embarrassed by the fiasco that I skipped the after-party celebration. That was not a good decision. . .

Luckily, acting and theater (other than attending movies and plays) weren’t part of my life in Rome.

Public Speaking

Late in my seminary career, I came to realize that I was an effective public speaker. That was important in Rome, where we were expected to preach – in Italian.

Like most people, I had always hated the thought of addressing a crowd. In fact, my earliest memory of trying to do so (in grammar school) was that I’d get laughing fits that just wouldn’t quit. It happened every time.   

I got over that in the high school seminary, where we took various courses in public discourse and had to deliver occasional papers before our “Literary, Scientific and Debating Society” and at “Catholic Students’ Mission Crusade” meetings.  By the time we got to the major seminary, those courses became “homiletics” – how to preach. However, I was never very good at any of it. It was the usual story – nervousness, awkward gestures, speaking too fast, not preparing thoroughly enough. The complete disaster.

Then came a breakthrough. It occurred after I had a pretty severe accident skiing at the Blue Hills Ski Area near the major seminary in Milton. I had taken a fall there that nearly broke my leg. Well, the next time my speaking turn came up in class, I told the story in a way that had everyone laughing. I described coming down the hill absolutely out of control, dodging other skiers and snow-making machines, and finally falling disastrously and limping home. For some reason, everyone loved it. And there was no stopping me afterwards. Later, I remember someone a couple of years ahead of me calling me a “gallery man” after I gave a paper at some meeting or other.  I guess I was becoming precisely that.

Eventually though, it all led me to work hard at preaching. I never read from a text. Instead, I’d more or less commit to memory what I had written out. Then I reduced the text to very brief notes – just words and phrases – which I held on a small paper in the palm of my hand – in case I got stuck. I would rehearse the talk six times and go from there. In almost every case, the final product would come out much better than my last rehearsal. I always used the same method – even for long and crucial talks like my dissertation defense my final year in Rome. I had learned to preach, to speak in public. That ability stood me in good stead not only in Rome but for more than 40 years while teaching at Berea College. (More about that later.)

Basketball

As for sports, I’m convinced I never would have made it through the seminary if it weren’t for sports. I loved them and from the beginning was fascinated by baseball, football, basketball, boxing, running, ice hockey, skiing, fishing, and golf. I did them all. Basketball and baseball surfaced as important in Rome as well.

From about the age of 10, boxing was one of my favorite sports. My dad and I watched “the fights” on TV every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Before that, I remember listening to radio broadcasts of fights between Joe Louis and Jersey Joe Walcott.

Personally, I even went so far as to secure an application to participate in Chicago’s “Golden Gloves” competition when I was in 8th grade. My mother went along with it till the last moment. Then she put her foot down. “No, Mike, I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. I got the message. In retrospect, my mother surely knew best. I can just imagine getting knocked silly by some much tougher kid from Chicago’s South Side.

As I mentioned earlier, sports were compulsory in the high school seminary. And I always felt sorry for the ones who weren’t athletically inclined and who often seemed tortured by having to swing a bat or run up and down the basketball court.

It was the opposite for me. (As a high school junior, I was even assigned the drill-sergeant role of calisthenics leader in the seminary gym each morning. “C’mon, you guys,” I’d shout, “quit jackin’ around and do real push-ups – all the way down! C’mon let’s do it!”). I was especially good at basketball and baseball – which, again, you’ll see below served me well in Rome.

That hadn’t always been the case. In seventh grade, I tried out for the St. Viator’s basketball team, but didn’t make it. So that summer, I practiced every day on the Independence Park courts near our home on Chicago’s Northwest side. Our family couldn’t afford to buy me a basketball, so every day I borrowed a volleyball from a neighbor kid and spent afternoons shooting and dribbling with that. It paid off.  

Then the spring before I left for Silver Creek, I discovered the jump shot. In 1954 that was new. Till then, no one shot jumpers. But then I saw it for the first time. It happened during a telecast of the Chicago City Basketball tournament — a game between two South Side high schools, DuSable and Dunbar. I still remember that DuSable had a player called “Sweet Charlie Brown.” He did it all. I decided to learn to shoot like him. Besides his jumper, I liked what we came to call his “Hesi,” i.e. his hesitation layup which involved leaping and maneuvering the ball deceptively to avoid defenders before laying it trickily in the hoop. Then there was Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics and his behind-the-back dribbles. At that time, no one else did that sort of thing. I wanted to do it too. No one as yet was dribbling through their legs.

In any case in Rome, the other Yank in our house, Tom Shea, was a better athlete than me. Tom was a junior my first year in the high school seminary, so I really didn’t get to know him till the summer before our departure for the Holy City. There he was to study Sacred Scripture eventually finishing his work in Jerusalem.

Both Tom and I loved basketball and baseball. And the summer before our departure for Rome, we got to know each other a lot better as a result. The two of us were staying at the major seminary in Milton. I forget what Tom was doing, but I was taking a required course in Hebrew at Harvard.

Each evening after supper, we’d drive over to Boston’s West Roxbury section to play in b-ball pick-up games there. The courts were always crowded with really good African American players. (One night, even the Celtics power forward Satch Sanders showed up. He was exactly Tom’s age.) In those contests, Tom and I would always end up on the same team in what turned out to be take-no-prisoners contests. And we always held our own. We did that the whole summer. Obviously, it was unforgettable for me.

I mention that because the basketball dynamic carried over to Rome. Every year there, Tom and I ended up playing in the city’s developmental league. Our first team was affiliated with Rome’s then professional team (Serie A at that time), Stella Azzurra sponsored by Ramazzotti liqueur.  Sometimes we’d scrimmage against the pros who were really good of course.

Every team in Italian professional basketball was allowed one foreign player. For a time, Bill Pickens filled that role for Stella Azzurra, and Tom and I got to know him pretty well. Bill was 6’9” tall and weighed 275 pounds. He had been drafted by the Atlantic Hawks and had also played pro football for the Kansas City Chiefs.

(Bill drove a Maserati and once told me about chasing down some Italian guy who had cut him off in traffic. Any of us can imagine the terror of the poor man faced with this angry Yankee giant.)

Another U.S. player for Stella Azzurra (I forget his name) was arrested for possession of over a kilo of hashish. I became his “chaplain,” visited him regularly in prison and smuggled letters written on toilet-paper to his girlfriend and others. I often wonder what would have happened to me had I been caught.

The bottom line here is that basketball greatly enriched my stay in Rome. I still remember the team meals together following away games. I recall attending basketball games in Rome’s Palazzetto dello Sport and feeling so welcome because of all the greetings from fans, players, coaches and referees. Great fun.

Baseball

Then there was our near brush with fame in baseball. Tom was a great pitcher and shortstop. I played left field and had a decent arm. Tom hit with power. I was a singles and doubles guy.

Well, somehow (I’ve forgotten how) we ended up working out regularly with Rome’s Lazio entry in the Italian professional baseball league. We’d chase flyballs with the other players, hit fungoes, and take our turns in the batting cage.

Once in an exhibition game with Tom playing shortstop, I was in left field with a man on third and one out. I fielded a decently hit fly ball and the runner on third tagged up. I threw a perfect on-the-fly strike to cut the runner down. He should have been out by a good bit. But the throw went right through the catcher. He missed it. Really disappointed.

Nevertheless, the two of us impressed somebody. I say that because a few Saturdays later Tom and I got a visit from none other than Giulio Glorioso, the Babe Ruth of Italian baseball.

No kidding. I think Glorioso was managing the Lazio club at the time, and he wanted to know if Tom and I could play with the Rome team that summer. He told us we’d be traveling by train up and down Italy for away games.

Tom and I really didn’t know who Glorioso was at the time. We hemmed and hawed, but in the end said no. Instead, our plan had been to travel that summer to Vienna to study German at the university there. We stuck with that.

Regretfully by doing so, we missed out on that once-in-a-lifetime experience. Had we accepted, I’d still be telling the story. Oh wait, I guess I just did that.

(Next time: Rome and disorder around celibacy)

80th Birthday Reflections Part 3: Roman Disorder

The Anselmo, where I studied my 1st 2 years in Rome

I knew NOTHING about politics when I arrived in Rome. I knew little about the world. I knew even less of women. All of that was about to change.

Understand that in all those spheres, I had been cooped up in the seminary hothouse since I was 14. For years, we had no access to newspapers. And it wasn’t till after Vatican II that we were even allowed to watch TV news each night. As a result, I was very uninformed about a world that I was taught to consider not worth caring about. (After all, we were here on this planet to pass a test and prepare for heaven.)

With the Columbans, the saving grace was that we returned home each year for Christmas and summer vacations. So, the divorce from the world wasn’t complete. My family [my loving mother and faithful father (a commercial truck driver), my brother and two sisters] kept me more or less sane and in touch. The six of us lived in a tiny two-bedroom house that had my sisters sleeping in the same room and my brother and me sleeping on a pull-out couch in the living room. (I’m sure life was easier for them all when I wasn’t taking up so much space.)

During summer vacations, I worked for a couple of years in a gas station learning about cars and mechanics. Then, when I was 18, I took a summer job at a golf course not far from my family home now in Warrenville, Illinois. I worked there on the grounds crew every summer till I was ordained – and even a little bit afterwards.

Working at Arrowhead Golf and Country Club was a delight. Sometimes I could hardly believe that I was getting paid for that kind of labor (cutting grass, laying sod, felling trees, changing cup locations on the greens, working on small engines . . .) in such an idyllic setting. The job also allowed me to play golf for free. That was fun, but despite decent athletic ability, I was never able to master that highly frustrating game. (I continue to work on that.)

As for women. . .  They represented completely forbidden territory. “Custody of the eyes” was the order of the day. However, I do remember being fascinated by one of the girls who worked at Arrowhead’s lunch counter. I made sure to order from her during our grounds crew’s lunch half-hours each noon. I recall that she was also to be present at a year-end party I was invited to. But I decided for that reason not to attend.

With that kind of background, I flew off to Rome in 1967 taking up residence in the Columban house on Corso Trieste 57. Suddenly I found myself in a house with about 15 other young student-priests. They came from Ireland, Great Britain, Scotland, Australia, Tasmania, and New Zealand; two of us were from the U.S.

Our house was headed by an Irish Columban rector and his Irish assistant. In residence too was a retired Irish bishop from Vietnam. (Such recollections make me recall that most of my teachers over my 12 seminary years spoke with brogues – quite understandable, since the Society of St. Columban had been founded in Ireland.)

My first impressions of my new community were that its members were much more sophisticated and better-informed in every sphere than I was. These guys were good. Conversations revealed that they even knew more about U.S. history and politics than me.  I found that embarrassing.

So, I started reading – no, I started studying – Time Magazine. I couldn’t wait for each week’s edition. Eventually, I won one of our periodic light-hearted quizzes we all took (and joked about) on current issues.

As for academic life in Rome, I was soon faced with an important decision – which of the Roman theological universities to attend? Ironically, even though seminary education had required four extra years of scriptural and theological study following “graduation” from college (with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy) we had nothing to show for those added four years – no master’s degree, nothing. Instead, I suppose, our degree was ordination itself – something (in the eyes of the church) much more valuable than a mere graduate degree.

In any case, before I could enroll in moral theology courses at the prestigious Academia Alfonsiana, I had to get the equivalent of a master’s degree (a licentiate) in systematic theology. The question was where?

I had two choices. One could get me the degree in one year at a school called the Angelicum. The other option was to study for two years at what I learned was (at that time) the best school in Rome – even better than the gold-standard Gregorian Institute – viz. the Atheneum Anselmianum. I chose the latter, even though in those early Roman days, I wanted to get back to the states as soon as I could. (Little did I know that I’d soon be wanting to extend, rather than shorten my time in Rome. Even my eventual five years there would seem far too short.)

If I thought I was out of my depth when I met my housemates in Rome, imagine my feelings at the Anselmo.  Classes were in Latin. Students were fluent in Greek; they referenced New Testament texts in the original language. And if I was intimidated by the theological, classical, and general knowledge of those on Corso Trieste, that was nothing compared with the international students I was thrown in with there on Rome’s Aventine Hill. They came from all over the world – from every continent. I was especially impressed by the Italians, Spaniards, Africans, Indians, and Latin Americans. In seminars, some were so fluent (in Italian, English, Latin, Greek, and of course their native tongues) that it sounded like they had written down everything they said before speaking. I was really impressed (and frankly intimidated).

And my professors!  Wow. They were so inspiring, even in Latin. Two in particular, both German, impressed me greatly. (I continue to remember them prominently in my prayers each day and I find myself tearing as I write these words.) One was Magnus Lohrer; the other Raphael Schulte.  I’m so indebted to them for the knowledge, passion, interest, and joy in learning that they communicated and transmitted. I decided that I wanted to be like Magnus Lohrer!

Significantly in terms of this account of order and disorder, my licentiate thesis centralized the topic of “Ecclesia Semper Reformanda” – the always necessary reformation of the church.

(More about Rome and its welcome disorder next time.)

80th Birthday Reflections Part 2: Disorder Enters My Highly Ordered Life

In 1962, disorder began to enter my life. Its cause was the Second Vatican Council started by Pope St. John XXIII. Out of the blue, it seemed, he decided to reform the Catholic Church – to “open some windows,” he said to the modern world. And with that decision, my life was changed forever – but not overnight.

As a basically conservative person, I initially resisted Vatican II – or at least some aspects of it. I liked the church the way it was. Everything there was so clear and certain.

But now, they were introducing English to replace the Latin Mass. The priest celebrant was turned around and faced the community. Guitars replaced organs. And the music became folksier and less solemn. All of that was fine and rather exciting.

But then, colleagues of mine became critical of things like our nightly Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, priestly vestments, and Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ. (I loved that book.) The seminary chapel was radically remodeled so that the tabernacle now moved to the side, looked like a huge treasure chest. It had been designed, we were told, by a Jewish artist. I wondered, “How can someone who doesn’t share our faith in the Eucharist create art that reflects centuries of reflection on Jesus’ Real Presence in the eucharistic elements?” I remember writing a long screed in defense of The Imitation of Christ.

That was at the beginning. But gradually, I became persuaded. More progressive and better-read classmates and elders influenced me. One of them prevailed upon the dean of students to have our library subscribe to The National Catholic Reporter (NCR). It was fascinating.

But most influential of all were my classes in Sacred Scripture and theology. Our scripture professor was Eamonn O’Doherty. He was wonderful. He taught us about text criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and more. For four years and line by line we went through biblical texts that I came to see as richer than my literalist, fundamentalist mind was ever able to imagine. What I had learned about poetry from Fr. Griffin when I was a college freshman and sophomore enabled me not only to understand what the scholars were saying, but to find my own textual meanings as well.

And then there were the theology classes. Their focus changed from preoccupation with bland traditional manuals written in Latin to actual books by controversial authors like Teilhard de Chardin, Bernard Haring, Hans Kung, Ivan Illich and Edward Schillebeeckx. I remember being greatly impacted by the latter’s Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God as we studied it under the guidance of another of our great professors, John Marley. Fr. Marley was a liturgist who helped us all develop sensitivity to the history and profound meanings associated with public worship and sacrament.

We were reading non-Catholic authors as well – something completely unheard of before John XXIII. I found Paul Tillich especially powerful.  I actually discovered sympathy with the Great Reformers we had previously been taught to dismiss and even despise. I read everything I could from the psychologists Erich Fromm, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers.

Yes, my ordered, predictable world was coming apart. Along with my seminary colleagues (and professors!!), I was questioning more and more – accepted doctrines such as papal infallibility, moral teachings on contraception, abortion, the uniqueness of the church itself, the role of priests, and, of course, mandatory priestly celibacy.

I remember reading an article in the NCR about “reluctant celibates.” Those were actual and would-be priests who felt called to the priesthood but unenthusiastically accepted the celibacy requirement without having an actual vocation to the celibate state.  

I feared I fell into the reluctant celibate category. Before my ordination to the diaconate, I discussed this with my spiritual director. We agreed that it was probably just a matter of pre-ordination jitters.

So, come December 22, 1966, I was finally ordained along with nine classmates – three of whom I had been with since my first year in the high school seminary. After 12 seemingly interminable years, I had finally reached my goal. However, by now I was a Vatican II product. The new theology and my scripture studies influenced every aspect of my priesthood from my homilies and the way I celebrated the Eucharist. Eventually, it shaped the way I dressed and the length of my hair; I even flirted with a moustache and beard.

I was at last on fire academically. During my final semester in Milton, I was honored with a request to teach an adult education class in a Boston parish. The topic was Vatican II and the Bible. I relayed to my class of 30 adults – some twice my age and more – exactly what I was learning under Eamonn O’Doherty. They loved it. The class was a great success. I was discovering that I could teach. And I loved that too.

So, I was delighted when my first priestly assignment was not to Korea, the Philippines or Japan, but to continue my studies in Rome. My Columban superiors wanted me to get a doctorate in Moral Theology there, so I could come back to Milton and teach in the seminary.

Rome still smoldering from the conflagrations set by Vatican II (’62-’65), held wonderful and unexpected surprises that would continue the disorder that I (and the entire world at the time) was coming to embrace.

[Next installment (still on disorder): Rome challenges me to grow up in every sphere – intellectual, political, and personal.]

80th Birthday Reflections, Part One: Order

(This is the first in a series of reflections on the occasion of my 80th birthday.)

Last Sunday (Sept. 6th) I celebrated my 80th birthday. I feel as if I’ve crossed a line into a new psychological and spiritual territory. I’m now officially old.

On Sunday, my daughter, Maggie, and her family graciously celebrated the event. My younger son, Patrick, was there as well. He works in DC and came to Westport for the occasion.

My elder son, Brendan, was unable to come. He works for the State Department in Paris, France. COVID-19 kept him from crossing the pond with our lovely daughter-in-law, Erin, and our recently arrived granddaughter, Genevieve Simone. (We’re still feeling bad about not yet having seen little Gigi except on ZOOM.)

Maggie invited us for lunch. She made my favorite dish for the occasion – spaghetti alle vongole (with in-the-shell clams freshly delivered from the ocean a few miles away from here). Maggie’s white clam sauce was perfect. Then, of course, there was a birthday cake (chocolate mousse – again my favorite).

After lunch we all drove to nearby Greenwich to begin an hour-and-a-half yacht ride to the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The weather was glorious. There were drinks, cigars, laughter and just enjoying the boat’s swift dash to Manhattan.

In the presence of Lady Liberty, we took photos (see above), marveled at the historic objet d’art, and then turned back towards Greenwich, stopping on the way for crab sandwiches and French fries as the sun rapidly descended and the cool breezes forced us to put on our wraps.

The next evening (Monday), we reprised the celebration with friends from our new church in nearby Darien. Again, there was cake, candles, and singing “Happy Birthday.” And then everyone took turns saying nice things about me.

Imagine that: not one, but two birthday celebrations!

Still, regret was expressed that COVID kept us from a bigger party with more relatives and friends, including some former students. However, I pointed out that I already had such a celebration when I formally retired from Berea College ten years ago. I remember thinking at the time as people spoke kindly about me, “This is like hearing speeches at my own funeral. I’m glad I’m here to experience it all. What joy to be with so many relatives, friends, and so many of those I’ve taught!” For me, that was enough.

When my own turn came to speak on Monday, I quoted Richard Rohr who speaks of the “three boxes” that contain life’s memories for all of us. One is labeled “Order,” the second is “Disorder,” and the third, “Reorder.” The categories represent apt summaries of my life, I said; its elements clearly fit into such containers.

An Ordered Life

Like Rohr, I was blessed with a great deal of order in my early life – till about the age of 21. As a Roman Catholic boy attending St. Viator’s School on Chicago’s Northwest Side, I had clear ideas of who I was. I knew exactly what life was for, who God is, and what he expected of me. I wanted nothing more than to save my soul; nothing else mattered.

So, having just turned 14, I chose to leave home and begin preparation for becoming a priest. I figured that was the best way to get into heaven.

Accordingly, I shipped off to St. Columban’s Minor (i.e. high school) Seminary in Silver Creek, New York (40 miles west of Buffalo). There, every day was highly ordered with 6:30 rising and 10:00 “lights out,” intense study especially of Latin, mandatory study hall, compulsory sports activities, and strict supervision by a host of father figures, disciplinarians, and demanding teachers. At “The Creek,” I doubled down on my determination to become a priest, even as most of those I entered with either decided otherwise or were “bounced” (as we said) for disciplinary or academic reasons. 

In 1958, I entered the college seminary in Milton, Massachusetts. There, my inner student was awakened as never before by Fr. James Griffin, my English teacher nonpareil at Milton for two years. Under his watchful eye, I discovered poetry, music appreciation, and creative writing. I learned how to read with a critical eye. I feared and loved the man at the same time. He was the best.

In 1960, my classmates (now reduced from 32 to 12 in number) and I embarked on our “Spiritual Year” in Bristol Rhode Island. It was the Columban version of a religious novitiate. Its centerpiece was a 30-day Ignatian silent retreat that began on October 6th of that year. It was unforgettable. So was the entire year. It taught us to pray, silence our voices and minds, to meditate and appreciate God’s creation as never before there on the shores of Narragansett Bay.

After Bristol, it was time to return to Milton – this time to the major seminary – to complete college work on our philosophy majors and then to continue with four years of theological and scriptural studies. As far as order was concerned, it was more of the same: rising at 6:30, retiring at 10:00, mandatory classes and study periods, long periods of silence, regular spiritual retreats, daily meditation, and little contact with “the outside world.”

I thrived on it all. I still knew who I was and what was expected of me. God was in his heaven. All was right with the world – despite what was happening outside e.g. with the Civil Rights Movement and the war in Vietnam.

(I’ll soon post a reflection on the collapse of my ordered certainty.)

Unforgetting the Past: The Karmic Roots of U.S. Border Problems

Readings for the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Sirach 27: 30-28:7; Psalm 103: 1-4, 9-12; Romans 14: 7-9; Matthew 18: 21-35. 

This week’s readings are about forgetting and unforgetting. They emphasize our tendencies to remember, rehearse and perversely treasure wrongs done to us, while denying, ignoring or dismissing those we’ve done to others. The wrongs in question can be both personal and/or political.

For today, let’s leave aside the myriad personal grievances we all nurse.  

Instead, let me focus on political resentments and point out that this week’s selections are especially relevant to an interview many of us may have seen last week on Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now. The telecast spent time with Salvadoran journalist Roberto Lovato who has just published his own memoir called Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas.

Problems at the Border

In tune with our readings, the book addresses the topic of our collective amnesia about the true causes of immigration problems and their uncomfortable cure. In Lovato’s case, both remembering and forgetting connect more than four decades of destructive U.S. policy in Central America with the refugees and asylum seekers at our southern border mostly from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Those three countries, Lovato pointedly recalls, were absolutely destroyed by counter-insurgency wars that go all the way back to 1932.

Without “unforgetting” those disasters, the author insists, we can understand neither the border crisis nor the gang phenomenon that causes it.

To begin with, Lovato reminds us why almost no one outside El Salvador remembers “la matanza” of ‘32. Instead, that massacre along with its more recent reprise at El Mozote in 1981, have been shoved down our Orwellian memory hole by the U.S. and Salvadoran states whose very job is to destroy records and manufacture the mass amnesia that afflicts American culture.  

Similarly, very few of us connect our contemporary border crisis with U.S. Central American policy during the 1980s. Virtually no one links the Central American policies of the Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump administrations to immigrant prisons and baby jails.   

Nonetheless, on Lovato’s analysis, the connections are there for the rescue.  La matanza, he says, was one of the most violent episodes “in world history in terms of the numbers of people killed per day, per week, in a concentrated place.” The massacre at the hands of a U.S. supported military government killed thousands upon thousands of mostly indigenous Salvadorans.

As for El Mozote, some can still remember that horrendous U.S. crime where nearly 1000 unarmed Salvadoran villagers were slaughtered by U.S.-trained forces.

In fact, El Mazote encapsulates the entire disaster of American policy towards Central America foreshadowed in la matanza and resumed with a vengeance all during the 1980s. Under its aegis, entire towns were destroyed; homes were set ablaze and jobs destroyed; families were decimated; sons and husbands were killed; wives and daughters were systematically raped; union leaders, social workers, and teachers along with liberationist priests and nuns were assassinated without pity.

Disgracefully, much of the destruction was financed by CIA operations that flew narcotics from Central America to Florida and carried guns and ammunition back to U.S.-supported terrorist troops in Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras – not to mention the Contras in Nicaragua. 

And of course, in the aftermath the militarily decommissioned terrorists continued their lucrative involvement with narcotics. They became the drug gang kingpins and foot soldiers who in turn have driven so many families northward.

All of that, Lovato repeats, must be “unforgetted” if we North Americans are to have any hope of solving our problems of immigration, gangs, drugs, and social justice. Our country owes extensive reparation to Central Americans.      

Today’s Readings

So, with all of that in mind, please consider this Sunday’s selections. On the one hand, they centralize the divine amnesia of Jesus’ Great Father-Mother God regarding our personal and communal shortcomings that some refer to as “sin.” On the other hand, our Divine Parents’ compassionate forgetfulness is contrasted with our own petty preoccupation with the way we imagine others have somehow done us wrong.

Sirach, the Psalmist, Paul, and Jesus all remind us of how easily we forget the way we’ve abused “strangers” (like those at our border) whom the Master identified as our very sisters and brothers. Ironically, unforgetting them is the karmic key to our own forgiveness and liberation.

In any case, what follow are my “translations” of today’s biblical excerpts. You can find the originals here to see if I’ve got them right. 

Sirach 27: 30-28:7: Karma is a Law of the Universe. LIFE will treat you as you treat your neighbor. If you’re vengeful, you’ll inevitably experience others’ revenge. If you’re always angry, life will seem cruel. But if you’re forgiving, Life itself will forgive you. So, forget about your own fictitious wounds. Instead practice forgetful mercy, forgiveness, and compassion. After all, life is short. Vendettas will mean nothing to you on your deathbed.

Psalm 103: 1-4, 9-12: Our Divine Mother herself sets the example. She is patient, forgiving, kind, generous and compassionate. She doesn’t remember any of our faults – not even grave “sins” we fear may have destroyed our lives. Far, far from such guilt, it’s as if she never witnessed our shortcomings at all.

Romans 14: 7-9:  Practicing such forgetfulness, none of us will have anything at all to fear from death which will simply be surrender to the One in whom we have always lived and moved and had our being. This is what Jesus himself showed us by the example of his own life.

Matthew 18: 21-35: When Peter asked him about the limits of forgiveness, Jesus said there are none at all. “Or maybe” (he joked) “you can stop forgiving after the 490th time – but be sure to keep track, Peter, as I know you will. Don’t let yourself go over 500.” (He said that with a gentle smile.) “In any case, remember what Sirach said about karma. If you’re generous to others, Life will treat you kindly; If not, you’re creating your own tragic misfortune – and that of your entire family. It’s you, not God who creates your inevitable destiny.”

Conclusion

Yes, Karma is a law of the universe. All the world’s great spiritual traditions teach that simple profound truth. What we do to others will eventually come back to haunt us. There’s no getting around it.

The problems experienced at our borders are simply blowback from our country’s own criminal missteps in the world. While we imagine that we’re threatened and wronged by those at our border, simple unforgetting reminds us that we’re actually the ones who have victimized the ones seeking refuge and asylum. Actually, we have nothing at all to forgive them. Instead, we owe them enormous repair.

No, it’s the ones at our border who have so much to forgive us. So far, they’ve been generous in doing so – well beyond the 500-mark specified by Jesus. Both our karmic liability and our debt of gratitude to our southern siblings are huge.

We’re indebted to Roberto Lovato for helping us unforget all of that.