Despite the
seismic events
that were
rocking
the Church to
its very foundations
in that
tumultuous era
—yes, this is the way people used to talk in the 1960s, especially on television—more than a few of us might have persevered and become priests if only the men who ran the seminary had tried to meet us halfway. They did not. In fairness to them, they could not. Their lives had been too hard and, in some cases, too long, and it clearly irked them that ours had not. They were missionaries, not nursemaids. Their courage and travails notwithstanding, the men who ran the seminary made poor guiding lights for boys of our age, particularly in that era. If learning to be like them was what was required to edify the heathen, then the heathen was probably going to remain unedified.
The Maryknolls did not fail me, however; I failed them. From the day I started my new life in Clark’s Summit, I knew I would soon be ending it. The seminary was, for all intents and purposes, military school for soldiers of Christ. Life in small-town America struck me as electrifyingly dopey, and by this juncture I was starting to realize that I had probably never had a vocation in the first place. One problem was my deteriorating relationship with God. A sine qua non for success in the spiritual realm was faith: In order to be a good priest, you had to believe in God. But my faith in God had never extended much further than lack of faith in my father. God was an affable abstraction; my father was not. To me, God was a talisman, a rabbit’s foot, a good-luck charm useful in combating evil spirits. But He was never immanent or real in the sense that I could feel His radiance enveloping me. I had less trouble believing in the devil, who kept bouncing around from Berlin to Peking to Moscow. Even in college, where rehearsed contempt for organized religion was de rigueur, I could never bring myself to dislike God in the way that atheists did, pillorying Him with a virulence so out of proportion to His alleged failings that the denunciations themselves seemed to confirm His existence. I never hated God; I simply never felt His presence. All those years I had been serving mass in my bedroom and acting out scenes from
The Lives of the Saints,
I had told myself that rock-solid proof of God’s existence would one day manifest itself to me, though perhaps not in Philadelphia. This never happened. It was exactly like rooting for the Eagles: No matter how much I wanted to believe that they would one day win the Super Bowl, I never really felt that they had it in them.
Things might have turned out differently had the faculty included a few priests who combined intelligence and piety with a bit of pizzazz. It did not. Father Casey, the rector presiding over the seminary, was a case in point. He was the classic, no-nonsense tough guy, short on warmth and humor, with the physical appearance of a leg-breaker Dutch Schultz might have sent over to collect from an obstinate bookie after Gallant Knave finished a surprising third in the Preakness. Still only in his thirties, but creating the impression that he’d been around the block a few times, Father Casey made no effort to conceal the disdain he felt for us. His face perpetually wore a malignant smile; he resembled Jack Palance in
Shane
, or perhaps a calculating spider awaiting a meal he planned to enjoy immensely. When we gathered together in the assembly room late every Saturday afternoon for his weekly review, he would spend about fifteen minutes updating us on how useless we were, as if it had somehow slipped our minds. The whole time he was talking, he would fiddle around with the sleeves of his cassock and play with the bridge of his Clark Kent eyeglasses, as if he was getting ready to slug somebody. We were all afraid of him, not because we feared physical violence, which was never threatened, much less meted out, but because there was something about his blast-furnace scorn that made us feel that we would never be men. Those of us who had contemptuous, condescending fathers now realized that we had jumped out of the frying pan into the fire. There was nothing soft or sentimental about Father Casey; personality-wise, he bore as much resemblance to the ingratiating, compassionate Lamb of God as Erwin Rommel. Putting a man like that in charge of boys struck me as hopelessly counterproductive, especially when you were trying to attract those boys to a profession where staffing problems was becoming an increasingly serious issue. Cracking a smile just to lighten the mood every now and then wouldn’t have hurt; for Christ’s sake, we were only kids. All of this suggested that, however strong its hiring record over the previous 19½ centuries, the Church was now in a bit of a slump.
The only priest I both liked and admired was Father Ratermann, a crotchety varmint who taught Latin and Greek and moderated the speech club and the debating society. Of indeterminate age, Father Ratermann was a tall, rail-thin curmudgeon who had a slight hitch in his step, seemed to be speaking out of the side of his mouth even when he wasn’t, and squinted. He had served seven years as a missionary in Guatemala, and looked like he had missed a few meals out there, as if all those tortillas and maize had not agreed with him. He looked like the brainy fellow in the IRA movie who, though he does not actually kill the informer, makes the phone call to the provos pinpointing his whereabouts. He was gently abrasive, caustic, fun to be around. A few other priests didn’t mind us; he actually seemed to like us. He encouraged me to read Martial and Juvenal, not just Caesar’s
Gallic War
; he was the first person in my life to describe me as a cynic, an observation I may have incorrectly interpreted as praise. Very few of the students could understand his sly sense of humor, certainly none of the plowboys. Unlike most of his colleagues, he was cerebral, intellectually adventurous, and did not give the impression of being especially deferential toward his superiors. He looked about as much like a reaper of wheat or a harvester of papayas as Kublai Khan. With an intellect and a sense of humor like his, he should have been a Jesuit; what he was doing in the Maryknolls was beyond me. It was thus a bittersweet irony that the only Maryknoll who ever inspired me in any way is the one that inspired me to leave the Maryknolls.
From the purely pedagogical standpoint, amazingly enough, the seminary turned out to be much less stultifying than I had expected. Though Father Ratermann was the only four-star standout, Father Vittengl was certainly a solid professional, and most of our teachers were competent at the very least and, in some instances, enlightening. The only exception was Father Trettel, the retiring little priest who taught theology. All along, as I had been preparing to enter the seminary, I was aware that missionary orders did not place much emphasis on scholarship. So I was not surprised that the priest assigned to teach us the subtlest, most arcane elements of Church doctrine was a bit of a chucklehead. A country bumpkin, he had been shipped off to the junior seminary in all likelihood because he could never learn the Swahili word for Sanhedrin and was thus incapable of explaining the concept of transubstantiation to closed-minded Third World cannibals. Those in the know theorized that Father Trettel had been assigned to the freshman class with the express purpose of instilling humility in us. But at the same time, his inept pedagogical technique, his earthy malapropisms, and his hysterically amusing attempts to navigate from the beginning of a sentence to the end provided a strange brand of backhanded encouragement to the entire student body. His very existence seemed to be the Maryknolls’ way of saying: “If this guy could get himself ordained, anyone can. You boys are in like Flynn.”
Father Trettel was a thoroughly nice man, a gentle soul without an ounce of malice in him, but because he was not especially bright, he could make neither heads nor tails of the scriptures and had no more idea than a budgerigar why Pontius Pilate was so supine in the face of the ostensibly powerless Pharisees or why Origen of Alexandria castrated himself. Because of this, he frequently found himself mired in doctrinal quagmires from which he could not extricate himself. He would start off by trying to explain the concept of eternity—when, for instance, did it start?—only to lose his train of thought. Or he would forget the narrow, technical definition of “simony,” the cryptic transgression against the law of God that had provided me with so many hours of entertainment as a child and remains to this day the sin I would most enjoy committing if time and circumstances permitted. He was also weak on such subjects as how Jesus managed to surgically reattach the severed ear of the high priest’s servant on the Mount of Olives on Holy Thursday without impressing His captors and could not readily recall either the advice the Witch of Endor offered to Saul or whether he had taken it.
One afternoon, Father Trettel informed us that Moses had not led the Israelites across the Red Sea, eight miles wide and a thousand feet deep at its narrowest point, but rather across the Reed Sea, a series of nearby marshes. This was back in 1965, when the Church was making a frantic—albeit belated—attempt to reconcile the scriptures with science, to tone down any discussion of burning bushes or self-levitating divinities or descending tongues of flame, to deemphasize the necromantic overtones to Christ’s raising of Lazarus, to stop concealing the literal truth of these events beneath the all-encompassing cloak of metaphor. By advancing the clever but somewhat loopy Reed Sea explanation for the flight of the Israelites—a theory he had not devised himself but had read somewhere—Father Trettel was attempting to demythologize one of the least plausible events in biblical history. In effect, he was laying the blame for three thousand years of nonstop confusion at the feet of shoddy translators, who, in another context, might have confused the Danube with the Dunube or the Mississippi with the Mippississi.
I shall never forget the look of surrender on Father Trettel’s face when one of the more persnickety students raised his hand and pointed out that the name Red Sea could not possibly be confused with Reed Sea, because the Bible had been written in Greek or Aramaic or Hebrew or Yiddish or Coptic, meaning that the Red-Reed mix-up would have had no opportunity to come into play. Anyway, if Moses and the Israelites could so easily cross the Reed Sea marshes on foot, what would have prevented Pharaoh’s army from doing exactly the same? Father Trettel made a halfhearted attempt to convince us that this admittedly perplexing wordplay might parallel an identical case of mistaken aquatic identity in these other languages, but he was at a loss to explain away the fatal submersion of the entire Egyptian army in what appeared to be an innocuous swamp. Vanquished, he merely gazed off into the distance, the way Ronald Reagan so often did toward the very end of his presidency, and smiled.
“Well, it all gets very confusing back there in history,” he said.
Father Trettel had another ceremonial function, also designed to teach us the virtue of humility. Catholics are not allowed to receive the Holy Eucharist while in a state of mortal sin; one of the most serious offenses a soldier of Christ can commit, it can lead to excommunication, an eternity in Hell, death, or blindness. Because all ninety-three of us were soldiers of Christ, it was impossible for us to attend mass in the morning and not receive Holy Communion, because that would indicate that we were guilty of having committed some mortal sin we had not yet owned up to. Realistically, the only mortal sins seminarians were capable of committing on a day-in, day-out basis were “impure thoughts” and “impure deeds,” as there was nothing worth stealing and very little worth coveting on campus grounds. “Impure thoughts” and “impure deeds” were Church-sanctioned euphemisms for “fantasizing about girls, usually scantily clad,” and “masturbation.” If you did not receive Holy Communion each and every morning, it could mean but one thing: You had been physically desecrating the temple of the Lord (or at least one section of the temple) in bed under cover of darkness the night before. True, it was theoretically possible to be guilty of the sins of sloth or envy, or to have plotted the rector’s death, but no one would have believed anyone who tried using such far-fetched, recondite excuses to explain why he had forgone receiving the body and blood of Christ.
Complicating matters was the fact that confession was held every evening immediately after dinner and every morning immediately before mass. This meant there was never any reason not to receive Communion. Evening confessions were held in the chapel, morning confessions in a tiny office directly adjoining it. Evening sessions were lightly attended: Any seminarian who had already made up his mind to masturbate later that night would be wasting his time going to confession a few hours earlier, as he would have to come right back for another breast-baring the following morning. On the other hand, no one wanted to be seen lining up outside the office for confession every single morning, because then everyone could see that the penitent was an unreconstructed sex maniac. None of us honestly believed that God would condemn us to an eternity in Hell for sloth or envy or even gluttony, but we were concerned that masturbation might do the trick, because masturbation involved the penis, and the penis was the Scourge of Christ.
Until my arrival in the seminary, I had never had any objections to the sacrament of confession, because in the churches I attended as a child, Father Confessor was always seated behind a grate, concealed inside a dark booth, making it impossible for him to identify the transgressor. Though it was mortifying to admit to impure deeds the first time I went to confession, this shame quickly passed, as I soon realized that priests had heard it all before and nothing shocked them. Like most boys, I tried to disguise my voice and sound like an Okinawan stevedore when I catalogued my sins; I also got into the habit of shaving a few digits off the weekly carnal tally, confessing to ten impure thoughts and three impure deeds since my last confession a week earlier, when the actual grand total was more like one hundred and fifty. Confessors rarely upbraided us for these rote sins of the flesh; they seemed to accept that it was all part of growing up. They merely advised us to avoid “proximate occasions of sin”—any place girls might turn up—and to try to think about the Blessed Mother swaddling the Baby Jesus whenever we caught a glimpse of a girl’s underwear or spied a photo of Marilyn Monroe busting out of her nightie. I tried to implement these cerebrally prophylactic gambits many times, but they never worked.