Advice to a new semiarian

WHY ARE YOU READING THIS? THIS IS A PRIVATE CORRRESPONDENCE AND NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS!

Dear Rev. Know-it-all,

I have just gone off to the Seminary of the Diocese of Frostbite Falls, at Bathsheba Bible College and frankly I feel like I am on my way to a desert island. Do you have any words of wisdom, or at least some humorous anecdotes that can distract me from my current nervous agitation?

Yours,
Robinson K. Russo

Dear Rob, may I call you Rob?

I remember my first night at Bathsheba Seminary. I lay in bed thinking what am I doing here? That was about 50 years ago. It was a very different world, but I must admit, the Lord has not changed one little bit. He has been faithful. You are investigating the diocesan priesthood, and I will not spare you one gory detail, so before I start, I want to share an experience I had when I was first ordained. People make a great fuss over young priests. I’m not sure why. I was once a young priest and believe me, I was pretty much a self-absorbed idiot. 

Still, people are very kind and if you are ordained you will find that you celebrate about twenty “first Masses.” There’s the parish, the prayer group, the cousin in Iowa, the first assignment. The list of people who want you to say a first Mass is unending. I even said a first Mass back in Lower Upper-Hessia. After visiting my cousins in Germany, I went down to Italy and realized that it was the first time I had been alone since I had been ordained almost a year before. I made my way to Rome where I found rooms at the Casa Internazionale del Clero (International House of Priests. I am not making this up.) I asked the dear Irish nun who ran things if I might be able to say Mass. She showed me a chapel and set me up with chalice, vestments etc. and then left. I was about to say Mass absolutely alone, except of course for the Angels, the Communion of Saints, the Blessed Mother and the Holy Trinity present in that tiny chapel. 

I got to the words of the offertory, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation” at which point I broke down sobbing. I was a priest. I was offering the sacrifice of Calvary for the redemption of the world. I was about to call down the Holy Spirit on bread and wine and I would hold heaven in my hands. The goal of so many years and so much internal and even external suffering had been reached. I was a priest. By God’s grace, I was a priest. From that day to this I have never regretted the decision. There are lot of things I have regretted, decisions, failures, tasks and even sins, but I have never once regretted the decision to accept God’s call to be a Catholic priest.

I want to start with the central beauty of the priesthood because I want to be completely honest about the stuff that isn’t so beautiful. I want to tell you all the everyday things I wish I had been told when I was your age. I want to talk about studies, money, friends, people, what not to throw in your garbage can, family, people in whom you shouldn’t confide no matter how nice they seem now. You need to know about how to handle a calendar, sleep, health and sports, diet, being invited out to dinner, priest collectors. 

You will need to learn about building maintenance, building permits and the construction trades. Make sure that you assemble a good tool kit and know carpentry and basic wiring as well as boiler maintenance. You need to know about spiritual warfare. Believe me, the devil will come calling sooner than later and he is usually disguised as an angel of light. You need to know about gifts and charitable contributions, the ones you get and the ones you give. You need to know about popularity and the lack thereof. You need to know about the intellectual life of the priest. The Bible!! You need to know about the priest and the Bible, as well as the priest and his life as a disciple. You need to know about alcohol, drugs and sex (just say “no”) and how to live comfortably in a glass house, rather a magnifying glass house. And you need to know, above all, about prayer.

Why do you think the Lord may be calling you to the priesthood? The answer, “I want to help people,” just isn’t good enough. If that’s your answer, I would suggest that you become a social worker, or better still a plumber. There is a specific way that a priest helps people. He brings the forgiveness and healing of Christ in the sacraments of anointing and penance and he brings them the most valuable thing in all the world: the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus. If you don’t believe the real presence of Christ is the Blessed Sacrament, I would suggest that the priesthood is not for you. Therefore, the first suggestion I want to give you is that you spend time in front of the tabernacle. Time spent in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament is never time wasted. Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you. Seek FIRST.

The devil, who is not very happy with you at the moment, will do his best to weaken you if he cannot dissuade you. There is a saying that whom the devil cannot make bad he makes busy. Prayer FIRST. Remember that the disciples spent 9 days in prayer before the afternoon of Pentecost, but what an afternoon it was! Let the Lord build the house, and then it will be well built. There is a reason Jesus worked in construction. Let Him do the designing and the heavy lifting and the project should come out well.

To be continued…

Is Charismatic Renewal for real? part 3

(Letter to Kerry Zmatick continued)

Last week I ended with, “In a time when both the Church and I were forgetting the supernatural reality of the Christian life, I met people who never let me forget that to be a Christian is to live in a supernatural reality.”  I shall elucidate.

In the college seminary I was attending at the time we were given a steady diet of “Christ as....” Christ as Marxist liberator, Christ as mythic hero.... Christ as weaver of tales and teller of stories..... Never Christ as son of God and Savior.  We had a rookie professor fresh from a liberal German University who kept telling us all we really had was an empty tomb, nothing more. He used to gather us in the chapel to teach dreary songs about the empty tomb and other Biblical quandaries. We called them the Dead Sea Chanties. 

He didn’t last long. Ran off with a nun, I think. We were fed a steady diet of Christ figures that included Easy Rider, Billy Bud and Cool Hand Luke. Nobody believed that there was anything supernatural about the Gospel. Jesus was a swell moral example and nothing more. Then I had this amazing experience and met all sorts of apparently normal people who loved Jesus, talked about Him like He was really alive and had more joy than any circus train I’ve ever ridden on.  I remember going home for summer break and telling my parents that God spoke in our times, the Bible was true, God healed the sick and you could have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. They looked confused and said “We’ve been trying to tell you that for 18 years.” That stopped me in my tracks. I realized that all this wonderful new truth I had discovered was the same as the wonderful old truth by which my parents and most of the Catholics I knew had tried to live their lives.  The speaking in tongues and being loud in church were a little odd, but the rest was what we had always believed as Catholics. There really was no reason for me to leave the Church or the seminary. In fact, now I had a real reason to be in the seminary, having lost my purpose a few years back. It was all good....for about six months.

I went to house prayer meetings and home Masses that went till midnight. Hundreds of us would gather in a Presbyterian church for a glorious meeting where Pastor Floyd Weaver, a Methodist minister would preach and pray for the sick and those who wanted to receive the “Baptism in the Holy Spirit.”  

Then the snake arrived in the Garden. Pastor Floyd would preach about how God was forming the perfect church (us). People started getting words from the Lord that we were to leave our stuffy old denominational churches and join the perfect church that God was forming (us). At one of the beautiful home masses, an Episcopalian woman who had left her stuffy old denomination came up to me and said, “Thus says the Lord: You are not to continue studying for the Catholic priesthood, You are to leave the Catholic Church and join the perfect new church (us).” 

It was a starry night and I remember going out and lying down on the ground, looking up at the stars and saying, Lord, what do you want me to do. The still small voice inside said “Hold on.” It didn’t say to what, so I decided to hold on to the Roman Catholic Church because I believed that Jesus had founded it and would not forsake it. I left the group. They called and looked for me. In fact they kind of stalked me, but I made myself scarce. Just a side note. About a year after I got out of the perfect church (us), it was announced that no one was to prophesy or speak publicly in the meeting except the twelve apostles appointed by pastor Floyd. Then a while after, no one was to speak in the meeting except Pastor Floyd. Then Pastor Floyd announced that he would make the major decisions for the congregation. This included the buying and selling of real estate the arranging of marriages and even the purchase of furniture in the homes of members. There is now no trace of the perfect church (us). I can’t even find it on the web. I guess the west suburbs of Chicago just weren’t ready for perfection. I sure wasn’t. 

Meanwhile, St. Peter tells us that the dog returns to its vomit (2Peter2:22)  and I returned to life at Crayola University. Let the good times roll. They say if you remember the sixties, you weren’t there. There are very large hunks of the late sixties of which I have absolutely no memory. Enough said. I do remember a brief stint as a fashionable socialist, intrigued by the life and times of Leon Trotsky. A few things happened that separated me from my slide into the gutter. The peace committee of which I was a very active member had a big fight during peace week and split down the middle. The violently non-violent faction got into a heated argument with the non-violently non-violent faction. I decided the whole thing was nuts. 

At about the same time a young woman with whom I was keeping company went home from a party with someone other than me and so I figured I should make up my mind about this priesthood thing one way or another. I went on a retreat at a Trappist Monastery and there I found a bunch of monks who led a charismatic prayer group and, having softened on the issue, I sat in. Four hours later, I was again a convinced Pentecostal or whatever we were calling ourselves at the time. 

I started work at an orphanage where there two Charismatic nuns who stuck to me like white on rice. I had a car and they needed rides to prayer meetings. I would come back from the orphanage late at night and go to chapel pleading with the Lord to tell me what I was supposed to do. I kept asking “What’s my ministry Lord?” A couple of friends invited me to hear a Pentecostal Gospel singer/prophetess. She was great, an African American woman who had the requisites to really belt out a tune. After the meeting when she was praying over us, and looked at me and prophesied. She said, “Honey, you are going to be a Gospel teacher. It’s written all over your face.” 

The nuns and I had started going to a Catholic prayer meeting downtown, and when the group found out that I was in the seminary, I was immediately appointed to teach the introduction seminar explaining what all this was to visitors.  I was clueless so I did some quick research, gave the seminar and thus was born the future  Reverend Know-it-all. 

The rest is, as they say, history. I returned to the seminary and started to actually learn things. I studied History, Latin, Greek and Hebrew and became a truly fanatical Pentecostal in a liberal Catholic institution. I was the kind of fellow who glared at you if you so much as mentioned beer. I would tear the cigarette from your mouth, loudly protesting that the body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. I made no converts and won no friends. By the time I was in the theology graduate school, there were some professors who suspected I was not ordination material. I wish I could say that it was because I was obnoxious, because I truly was and often still am.

Subsequent developments have made me think that they understood the real danger of Pentecostalism, not that it was fanatical, but that it was actually very traditional. Pentecostals worshiped the God who works wonders. They worshiped the God who gives seminars. I was hauled on the carpet for being too “proclamational” and not “incarnational” enough. That meant I talked too much about Jesus. I was distraught at the thought that I was not to be ordained. I remember how sad I was at the First Mass of a friend who had just been ordained, but a rather frightened looking woman came up to me and said, ”I don’t know why I am doing this. I don’t really know anything about the Holy Spirit. I’ve just started going to the prayer meetings, but the Lord told me to come over here and tell you that you are going to be a priest. They will ordain you, but whatever is happening to you now will happen to you the rest of you life.” I was thunderstruck. A few days later I got the news that most of the seminary faculty had rallied around me and I was to be sent forward for ordination. It was a great lesson to me.

First, I learned that you can’t bludgeon someone into faith. You have to be Christ before you speak Christ. Second I realized that no matter what happened I really wanted to be a priest. No one conned me into it or lied to me about its difficulties. I have no illusions about weak and sinful men like myself who are given responsibility in the Church; and third, I have learned to worry only when someone is NOT complaining about me. I had letter-writing campaigns directed at me, I had people march in protest.  

I’ve had nasty letters written anonymously and have been hauled on carpet after carpet. I’ve even been vilified in the  “Frostbaitske Foss Daglega Bull Tímarit” (Icelandic/ Frostbite Falls Daily News Journal). It was great. They accused me of being a Nazi. They were only the first to call me that. I know that when people are unhappy about what I’m saying, I’m saying something that they are hearing, unless of course I am being a jerk and they are unhappy with me for perfectly good reasons. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.” (Matt. 5:11)   

Still, every once in a while I say something that gets a rise out of people in a way that I hope pleases the Lord. The difficult times have been made much less difficult because the Holy Spirit has sent people into my life who really spoke for God. To me, that is the heart of Pentecostal spirituality. It is not so much about loud prayer meetings and catchy music. It is quite the opposite. It is about hearing God.

Next Week: “My ministry among the ex-patriot Icelandic Cod Fishing Community of the Frostbite Falls Harbor District.” 

OR

“I can tell when a fish is rotten.”

A short history of the Hootenanny Mass & other absurdities... part 22

Letter to Harold “Hoot” and Annie Gibson cont. part 22

OLD KING LOG
“Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out.”

The frogs were tired of their government. It was too old-fashioned, and so the cranes suggested they nominate a large log in the middle of the swamp to be their king. They would dress the log in royal robes so it could entertain them with the pomp and display of royalty and rule them in a way that made no demands.

Until now, the frogs had hidden themselves among the reeds and grasses, but now they had a new and more open government. How tame and peaceable Old King Log was! In a short time, the younger frogs were using him for a diving platform, while the older frogs made him a meeting place, where they complained loudly about improvements the government should be making. The cranes had suggested such a king in the first place, and when the frogs had forgotten how to hide, the cranes gobbled up the poor frogs right and left. And the frogs soon saw what fools they had been.

A frog about to be devoured, wept and pleaded with the cranes, reminding them that they had been the proponents of this new government. To which the cranes responded, “You have what you asked for and so you have only yourselves to blame for your misfortunes.” And so the few frogs who still knew where to hide understood all the dangers that lurked in the swamp, even those dangers which seemed pleasant at the time, and they were better and wiser for the lesson. “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out!”

“Did you really mean what you wrote about motorcycles and pro-choice marches? How could you let things like that go on in your parish, Father, and still worse, how could the bishops and the pope let such things go on?”

You are not asking the right question. Better you should ask, “How could Almighty God let such things go if the Church is indeed His Church?”

There are two schools of thought at the present who say that God does not recognize the church whose pope is Benedict XVI, whose popes Pius XII and Blessed John XXIII and Venerable John Paul II also were. There are rebels on the right and rebels on the left. On one side, there are those who ordain women and on the other, those who ordain bishops both in defiance of the bishop of Rome. On one side, there are those who think the Church of Rome is outdated and, on the other side, those who think her throne is occupied by anti-popes. Some think the Second Vatican Council and its liturgy are heretical and some think that all councils before Vatican II have been superseded.

Both factions are, at heart, the same. They are rebels who have turned their backs on the Bride of Christ. They are both motivated by the same spirit though they come to seemingly different conclusions. “For rebellion is like the sin of divination, and arrogance like the evil of idolatry. Because you have rejected the word of the LORD, he has rejected you!” (1 Samuel 15:23.)

The radical traditionalist faction rejects the Second Vatican Council. They claim that the “new” Mass is, at best, corrupt, at worst, invalid. They somehow believe that the Holy Spirit has abandoned most of the members of the Church. The most radical among them are called “sede vacante” or “sedevacantists” (from Latin for “empty seat” referring to the teaching chair of St. Peter.) They claim to be the true Catholics, but are anything but Catholic in its fullest sense of “universal”.” They are a tiny faction who seem to think that the Holy Spirit has no power to protect the larger Church. They claim that the last valid pope was Pius XII. John the 23rd was invalidly elected, as have been all popes since.

Their reminiscences about the 1950's and the reign of Pius XII are flawed. They forget that the Liturgical renewal they so detest and the Biblical renewal were sponsored by Pius XII. The madness of the sixties and seventies were the fruit of the forties and fifties. The Church of the fifties, as I remember it, was “at the top of its game.” Soon after the Second World War, convents and seminaries were full to overflowing. The good pastor was defined by his skills as an administrator. We suffered from something called the “edifice complex.” The good pastor built new schools and new convents and churches and filled them with eager young candidates. The pressure to join the religious life was intense. If an eighth grade boy was in trouble with his teacher, all he had to say was, “Next year I’m going to enroll in the seminary high school.” Of the 50 plus boys in my eighth grade class, fully half went to the seminary. One was ordained.

When a boy got to the seminary, the pressure was really on. We didn’t live on campus. We went home at night like regular high school students, but regular stopped there. We were in school on Saturday and had Thursdays free. We were told this was the custom in Europe, but it was designed to “protect our vocation.” It was the duty of every parishioner to tell Monsignor at the rectory if they saw one of the seminarians in long conversation with a girl. Remember, these were 14 and 15 year-old boys! Leaving the seminary was a Herculean task. If one wanted to leave, it was necessary to have all your teachers sign a “pink slip” in order to have your credits transferred to another school. Each teacher gave you “the talk.”

“You would make such a fine priest! Why don’t you give it one more year?”

After facing three or four teachers, you gave up, threw the pink slip in the trash and told your girlfriend that you were going to stay in the seminary one more year, and no, you couldn’t take her to the junior prom. Maybe next year for the senior prom.

The pressure from outside was just as great. It was the dream of every pious mother on the south side of Frostbite Falls that, had she three sons, one would be the alderman, one would be the police or fire chief, and the gem in the crown, one would be Monsignor at St. Turalura’s down the street. Everyone was pulling for you. I remember a seminarian whose next door neighbor, a young girl, prayed two Rosaries a day for him, that he persevere in his vocation. When finally in the graduate school, he got up enough nerve to leave the seminary, the girl next door had a nervous breakdown. I remember going to the theology school on the monthly “visiting day” to see an older relative a few years ahead of me in seminary. He stood in his cassock at the door of the residence waiting for us. He had lost about 30 pounds and one eye was twitching. He told me later that he paced on the eve of his ordination wondering how he could get out of it. He had been an exemplary seminarian and did not long remain a priest.

At the same time, there was pressure from the inside in the opposite direction. It was hard to leave, but it was easy to be thrown out. There was strict demerit system and we all dreaded the words “Give me your demerit card.” It was always said with an icy tone of dispassionate justice. Something like Darth Vader, but more matter-of-fact. Then there were the academic demands. Every year, the bottom ten percent was routinely thrown out for grades, at least in the seminary I attended. If one had an obvious physical deformity there was simply no way to be welcome in our seminary. Let him go to a religious order. Perhaps they would take him In this incredible tug of was for what were essentially the souls of teenagers, the question was rarely asked, and then only by the pious few among the faculty, “Does this young man have a sincere calling from the Lord?” Some real saints were turned away from the seminary I attended. Some real (word deleted) excelled.

Then one day it all changed. There was going to be a council. It was like that scene in the “Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy inadvertently throws a bucket of water on the Wicked Witch of the West and all her evil guards suddenly fall to their knees in thanksgiving for their freedom. Ding Dong the witch is dead! Catholicism was going to be fun! We would make up the rules as we went along. The same frightening disciplinarians suddenly became flower children. I remember a bunch of these old guys one year were dressed in cassocks and scowls and the next year they returned from a summer retreat sensitivity center at Big Sur, California wearing love beads and turtleneck sweaters. (I am not making any of this up.) A few of them started dating because the rule about celibacy was about to change. An older friend of mine went ahead with his ordination because he had been told by his teachers that celibacy would soon be abolished. One heard stories of some of the guys going on dates on the eve of their ordination.

Those in charge were not always different people. These were the same rigid disciplinarians that had controlled the seminary system and they were strangely rigid about change. The “new” became as rigorously enforced as the old had been. Young men were actually thrown out of the seminary for being “too pious.” My point is not that a new group had taken over the system. It was the same old crew. The pressure was off. The explosion was inevitable. The “spirit” of Vatican Two made everything acceptable for a little while, that is until the cranes started to devour the frogs. The attitude that makes the Gospel and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass a personal plaything did not spring into life full grown, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It was there all the time.

To be continued...