Monk's Tale

PilgrimageThe Begins, 1941–1976

Edward A. Malloy

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780268162016
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Biografías religiosas

One of the most respected figures in Catholic higher education, the Reverend Edward A. Malloy has written a thoroughly engaging first installment of his three-volume memoir. This book covers the years from his birth in 1941 to 1975, when he received his doctorate in Christian ethics from Vanderbilt. Written in his trademark self-effacing and humorous style, Malloy's book portrays his childhood growing up in the northeast Washington, D.C., neighborhood of Brookland (the neighborhood's alias was "Little Rome" because of all the Catholic church-related institutions it encompassed). Malloy describes his family and early education, his growing love of sports, and his years at Archbishop Carroll High School where he played on an extraordinarily successful basketball team. The next five chapters chronicle his undergraduate years at Notre Dame, where he was recruited to play basketball, his decision to become a priest, his seminary experience, the taking of final vows, and his graduate school experience at Vanderbilt University.

Monk's Tale is a captivating account of growing up Catholic in the 1940s and '50s, as well as a revealing reflection of the dramatic changes that occurred in the Catholic Church and in American society during the 1960s. This book is also a loving tribute to Malloy's parents, sisters, friends, teachers, religious mentors, and colleagues who helped pave his way to the University of Notre Dame and to his profound commitment to service, leadership, and God.

CHAPTER 6

“SPES UNICA—THE CROSS OUR ONLY HOPE”

(THE SEMINARY YEARS)

IN AUGUST 1963 I ENTERED THE HOLY CROSS CANDIDATE program at Saint Joseph Hall—the first of my six years of preparation for final vows and ordination to the diaconate, and of the seven years until my ordination to the priesthood. I knew little about the nature of seminary life and even less about the Congregation of Holy Cross. However, I joined of my own free will, with the support of my family and friends, and with a strong sense of a calling from God.

I had enjoyed my years at Notre Dame and felt some attraction to working in higher education. Most of the Holy Cross priests and brothers I had come to know seemed like down-to-earth, happy, committed teachers, pastors, and administrators. I could imagine myself in their midst as a member of the order. I knew there was no guarantee that I would end up at Notre Dame, but serving as a diocesan priest seemed to offer fewer options and, except for the Augustinians, I did not have any firsthand experience of other religious communities. Holy Cross seemed my best option. The fact that my first stage of religious formation was to take place on the Notre Dame campus meant I would be on familiar terrain, even if I was now across Saint Joseph Lake from the heart of campus. We had been told that the candidate program was deliberately low key so that the participants would have the opportunity for vocational discernment and a smooth transition.

By the time I joined the candidate program, ninety years after the death of the order’s founder, Father Basil Anthony Moreau, the community had over 2,000 members, a presence on four continents (soon to be five), and responsibilities for parishes, high schools, colleges and universities, formation programs and retreat houses in the United States and abroad. Holy Cross was actively involved in ministerial service in the United States, Canada, France, Chile, Haiti, and East Pakistan (later to be called Bangladesh). By the time I was ordained, we also had a presence in Peru, Brazil, India, Ghana, Uganda, and Kenya. I was preparing for service in a large family with a sweeping vision of its role in the Church, and I had a lot to learn.

Saint Joseph Hall (1963–64)

The candidate program for undergraduate college students and recent college graduates dated back to the closing years of World War II. The early candidates lived in undergraduate dormitories and took a regular college curriculum, supplemented by courses in Latin and philosophy. They also participated in weekend retreats and spiritual direction. Eventually, “Old College,” the first building erected at Notre Dame, became the program’s location, but as time went on that facility became crowded. In 1958, when the new Moreau Seminary was completed along Saint Joseph Lake, the old Moreau (its name changed to Saint Joseph Hall) became the site of the candidate program. From then on, although the number of candidates varied, the average was around forty.

As I soon discovered, the tone of a religious house, especially a house of formation, is set by the religious superior and his staff. I was fortunate to have as my first superior Father Joe Fey, C.S.C., an experienced parish priest who was strong on encouragement and inspiration and not preoccupied by rules and formal requirements. He was gentle of heart, a big baseball fan, and someone who instinctively projected the heart of the Gospel message. He treated those of us who were college graduates with respect and displayed an appropriate level of confidence in our judgment as young adults. The assistant superior was Father Len Banas, C.S.C., who taught classical languages at Notre Dame. Father Banas was a dedicated priest who regularly assisted at parishes on the weekends and who, while more reserved than Father Fey, was more familiar with the demands of higher education and more plugged into the culture of Notre Dame. Their personalities were nicely complementary.

Four other priests and two brothers also resided in the hall. The one who had the biggest influence on me during the course of the year was Father Tom Chambers, C.S.C., who became my first spiritual director. (We both became college presidents, he at Our Lady of Holy Cross in New Orleans.) The role of the spiritual director, especially for a new seminarian, is to help the candidate adjust to the rigors of a structured prayer life, to answer questions about the Church, the Congregation, and the seminary, and to assure that the directee dealt positively with the normal human emotions that go with major transitions in life. Tom Chambers has a characteristic hearty laugh and an upbeat attitude toward life, and we hit it off quickly. Generally men are wary of discussing their inner life, especially their emotions and their struggles, so the challenge for a spiritual director in a seminary is not to push too hard too fast. My relationship with Tom Chambers was helpful to me, and unlike some of my peers I did not dread the time set aside for our meetings.

As time went on, I became familiar with the two other Holy Cross formation programs on campus. The first was the minor seminary for high school students, called Holy Cross Seminary. The seniors from that house who were approved for the Novitiate would be joining those of us from Saint Joe. Some of them would have spent all four years of high school in a seminary setting. To be honest, I was never convinced that minor seminaries were a good thing. I felt they took teenagers away from normal social interactions prematurely and tended to foster immaturity and discomfort around females. Many of my peers at Saint Joe Hall had the same point of view, so we shared some trepidation about what the Novitiate would be like when we were joined by a cohort of high school seniors from Holy Cross Seminary. But the young men we would get to know a year later often were far from our stereotype of them. (Eventually, in the wake of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, the Indiana Province elected to close the minor seminary.)

The other formation program was located in the new Moreau Seminary, a stone’s throw from Saint Joe Hall on the same side of the Lake. The men in Moreau were college students who had been through the Novitiate and were under temporary vows. (In the formation period before final vows, each seminarian was approved for temporary vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience for one year at a time.) In 1963–64, there were approximately ninety seminarians at Moreau, along with a staff of thirteen. The seminarians, in addition to taking classes, dressed in habits and adhered to a fairly rigorous prayer schedule.

Most of my involvement with Moreau during that first year was through the use of its gymnasium, which was available to us when not otherwise reserved. In addition to the basketball courts, there were several handball courts and a small weight room. In the winter that was a real plus. The better athletes at Moreau knew that I had played on the Notre Dame basketball team, so they were eager to invite me and some of my colleagues to their intrahouse games. In general the Moreau seminarians, though younger than I was, seemed to consider themselves as more elite because they were under vows and had been through the Novitiate. It was as though that rigorous year of testing in Jordan, Minnesota, was tantamount to official approbation of one’s vocation. If they were the Army Rangers or the Navy Seals, we were just regular grunts who were still learning the rudiments of religious life.

Our class at Saint Joseph Hall had about thirty-five participants, of whom eighteen would be approved to go to the Novitiate. Of the eighteen, seven of us were college graduates when we entered. In the social dynamics of the hall, there were no great barriers between the younger and the older among us; however, a core group of elders, all of whom were of age, used to get away to local establishments, particularly on weekends. We were accustomed to shooting the breeze over a few beers with our friends, a routine that carried over into our new circumstances. We never made a big deal about it or caused any disturbance, so the staff was tolerant of our desire to get away periodically.

When I moved to Saint Joe, I wondered if I would be drawn back to Badin Hall. As it turned out, most of my attention and interest were focused on the seminary and the new friends I was making, and on the responsibilities that went along with my new condition in life. At the same time, I and my fellow candidates participated selectively in events on the campus, where we took classes as well. At home football games we sat in the top row in the end zone above the student section. The interim coach, Hugh Devore, did not produce much of an improvement over Joe Kuharich. One of my peers at Saint Joe, Ollie Williams, knew Hugh Devore’s son, so twice during that season the two of us went over to the Devore home on Friday evenings before home games, an experience that provided a more personal look at the life of a Notre Dame football coach, even a short-term one. At home basketball games it was an odd feeling not to be on the team myself. As it happened, that was Coach Jordan’s last year as head coach.

Our time at Saint Joseph Hall began and ended with a retreat. The regular schedule included morning prayer before breakfast, mass in the late afternoon, and evening prayer after dinner. Compared to the later years of formation, it was a relatively light level of formal prayer, but for us it was far more than we were accustomed to. We also had times of special devotion: praying the rosary, doing the Stations of the Cross, and attending holy hour. Once a month we met with our spiritual director, and we went to confession regularly.

Periodically Father Fey or one of the staff led a conference on some pertinent topic about the Church, the Congregation, or the Novitiate. Several members of our group could play the guitar, so the music for our worship was better than it would have been otherwise. Nevertheless, in an era when Gregorian chant was still popular in community prayer, Father Bill McAuliffe, C.S.C., had the responsibility of teaching us the rudiments of chant and how to read the musical notation that goes with it. These exercises were the subject of endless humor and mockery. The seminary system we were preparing to enter after our candidate year had changed little since the reforms of the Council of Trent in the sixteenth century. The main intellectual development had been the adoption of scholastic philosophy as articulated by Saint Thomas Aquinas, which was intended as a synthesis of the best of human and divine wisdom. Mass and the other sacraments were celebrated in Latin, so we were expected to gain a competency in that language, and the college graduates among us took basic courses in Latin that year. Because philosophy was seen as a necessary preparation for the study of theology, the same group took courses in philosophy too. I was an earnest student, but I found both types of courses less than stimulating, and that judgment was shared by most of my peers. We were not learning the disciplines for their own sake but because someone had determined it was necessary.

Because of my low level of enthusiasm for a relatively light load of required courses, I read widely in other fields. One day I was carrying around a copy of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, which is a beautiful treatise on love by a Swiss psychoanalyst, when one of the staff members inquired whether I was reading salacious literature. He was embarrassed when he found out what the book was really about.

While changes were taking place gradually on campus during the 1963–64 academic year, developments were taking place externally that would revolutionize both the Church and the seminary system within it. When Pope John XXIII summoned the Second Vatican Council in 1962, few even of the Council fathers realized what their three years of meetings would lead to. Each year of my formation was progressively more shaped by the Council, its documents, and the ensuing debates about their implementation. Change was also happening in the sphere of American government and culture. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, was the first of what would become a sequence of public killings that eventually included Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy. The civil rights movement, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and other protests led to rioting in the streets and profound social changes.

I was in one of the house cars picking up another candidate, Tom Smith, at the dentist’s when I heard the first radio reports of the shooting of President Kennedy. We rushed back to the hall and, like the rest of the country and the world, we watched events unfold on TV almost non-stop for days. The only times we broke away were for prayer and meals, since University classes had been cancelled for the mourning period. Since Kennedy was a Catholic, most of us had been deeply inspired by his leadership, eloquence, and charm. He was one of us. In a sense our decisions to enter the seminary were connected to his appeal to “ask what you can do for your country.” Whether it was the Peace Corps or the inner city or the seminary, it was a time when the young were seeking to make a difference. The summers I had spent in Latin America were, for me, a concrete connection to the rhetoric of the Kennedy era. But now, after his shocking death, our generation was learning firsthand about the reality of evil and the capacity of human agents to thwart even the best-motivated plans. That November, none of us recognized that a decisive change had taken place in American life. We simply mourned with the nation and the world, and admired Jackie and her two children for the way that they handled themselves right through to the burial in Arlington National Cemetery.

One of our members was an older candidate for the brothers who seemed to possess about every idiosyncrasy one could imagine. He was ascetic looking, wedded to strange forms of piety, prone to dress oddly, and utterly devoted to helping out in the sacristy. For me, he embodied everything I feared I might find in the seminary, and to my pleasant surprise it quickly became clear that the seminary staff had the same misgivings. Long before the end of the year, they let the young man know that his future lay elsewhere. It was my first lesson in the old saw of religious life: “Many may feel called, but not all are chosen.” Next to this unfortunate candidate, the rest of us felt rather normal. Every seminary cohort can pray that at least one among them is manifestly unacceptable.

Every group needs a class wit and humorist as well. In Saint Joseph Hall, an insightful individual named Ray helped the rest of us keep our sense of perspective when times got tough (like February in northern Indiana). He was somewhat overweight and a master imitator; he could do knock-down impressions of the seminary staff. A passably good student, he had the courage to say publicly what most of us thought about the academic quality of classes designed especially for seminarians. Ray never made it to ordination, but he was a prized part of our social network during that first year.

Our group had a pretty good distribution of athletic talent. Among our informal activities in the fall were touch football games. Tom Stella had been a highly regarded quarterback in high school, so he usually ran one team and I led the other. Our main offensive strategy was to throw long bombs on just about every play. The final scores were high, but the competition was intense. For me, as for many of us, athletic participation was a key to surviving the seminary years. I had been accustomed to several hours of exercise daily all through my teen years; when deprived of it, I felt logy and antsy. Little things got exaggerated and my coping skills were diminished. The same was true of the group dynamic; when we exercised together we felt a closer bond and were more tolerant of each other’s failings. And athletics provided something to look forward to that was not imposed upon us.

On December 14, 1963, the University announced that Ara Parseghian had been hired away from Northwestern as the new football coach. Because Northwestern under his leadership had beaten Notre Dame several times, there was a great enthusiasm for the appointment. At a spontaneous pep rally that took place immediately after the press conference, the Fieldhouse was crawling with students and media representatives. After Joe Kuharich’s four years, hopes were high and everyone was dreaming that Ara would wake up the echoes. Handsome, well spoken, modest, enthusiastic, and full of energy, Ara immediately won the hearts of fans. Little did he realize how demanding his new responsibilities would be, and little did I realize how much my future life would be connected to the fortunes of the football program.

By the end of my first semester at Saint Joseph Hall, the Vatican Council had approved the Constitution on Sacred Liturgy, which began the process of liturgical changes that would be the most obvious result of the Council to the average parishioner. It also approved the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church (Lumen Gentium), which would begin a new phase of theological reflection about the very nature of the Church. As a seminarian, most of my access to the debates among the Council fathers was through the writing of Xavier Rynne (a pseudonym for Father Francis X. Murphy, a Redemptorist priest) in The New Yorker magazine. Rynne regaled his readers with behind-the-scenes information, with the good guys (the reformers) against the bad guys (the traditionalists). Because the outcome was always in doubt and I was clearly on the side of the reformers, the three years of Council deliberations were full of drama for me. By the time the work of the Council was done in 1964, I knew instinctively that the Church in which I was preparing to serve as a priest would be significantly different from the one I had grown up in. For me, this was a source of great hope and expectation. I wanted to be one of the agents of change. Yet I also knew that the transition would not take place in a year or two, and I suspected that seminary life might be among the last facets to feel the impact of the Council’s new vision.

That year also saw the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which offered a critical interpretation of women’s subordinate place in American society and became a rallying point for a sometimes harsh national debate about gender, domestic roles in the family, equality of opportunity in the workplace, and related matters. This secular discussion inevitably carried over into the life of the Church, where religious women were the bulwark of the Catholic school system as well as its health care systems and social service agencies. Yet women were excluded by gender from eligibility for the priesthood. Here too, ideas percolating in those years would influence both the world and the Church.

In our candidate year, we wore no distinctive dress. Most of the time we were indistinguishable from other students at the University. Since we were new to the Congregation, someone recommended for each of us to befriend one of the retired priests in Holy Cross House, the Indiana Province’s health care and retirement home on campus. That seemed like a good idea, so I met about once a month with Father Matt Schumaker, C.S.C., who must have been in his eighties. He was a kind, gentle priest who enjoyed sharing stories about his ministry years and some of the humorous incidents he had experienced. He was a grandfather figure to me. Among the staff of Saint Joseph Hall were three Holy Cross brothers who normally were engaged in some form of manual labor. In 1948 when Holy Cross divided into two societies, one for priests and one for teaching brothers, some of the brothers asked to stay with the priest’s society. This was a highly controversial matter among the teaching brothers, since they thought it relegated the coadjutor brothers to a subordinate status within the priests’ society. But by the time I joined Holy Cross, the debate was a historical curiosity because the coadjutor brothers were held in high regard by the priests and even more so by the seminarians.

At Saint Joseph Hall one brother was responsible for the kitchen (the candidates helped out with meal preparation, serving, and cleanup); one oversaw the maintenance and cleanliness of the building; and one kept the grounds in good order, including snow removal. Each of us was expected to work on one of the crews under the supervision of the appropriate brother. Their word was final, but generally they were tolerant of our ineptness in domestic tasks and the use of mechanical equipment. Cleaning the bathrooms and doing the dishes were our least favorite tasks. One of my jobs was to clean the room of Father Ralph Fisher, C.S.C., the vocation director. He was a several-pack-a-day smoker, so the biggest challenge was removing all the cigarette butts. He was also a great storyteller (only a certain percentage of whi...