Prince of Peace (18 page)

He stepped toward her.

"Don't touch me! Just answer me! You wanted to make love to me so that you'd have done it once! Right? Right?"

"Mary Ellen..." Of course, what she said was true, but he only saw it now. He'd never meant to hurt her.

"You goddamn saint!" she screamed. "You goddamn saint!" And then she turned, broke through the virgin branches that enclosed them and was gone.

Michael's hands trembled as he buttoned his shirt.

When he left the grove he walked to the peak of the hill and looked down on the city. The Cloisters loomed, a shadowy fortress, behind him. He told me that he wanted to concentrate on Mary Ellen, to memorize what they had had and what she'd looked like and what the touch of her flesh did to him. But he couldn't because, despite himself, his mind reeled off what he'd memorized before. "After this I saw an angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority and his splendor brightened the whole earth. He cried out in a loud voice...'Whoever is meant to be captured will surely be captured. This calls for endurance and faith on the part of God's people.'"

E
VEN
if I had been able to imagine being a priest myself—they lived well, after all, did good things, had in their spheres great power and a leg up in getting their poetry published—I couldn't have stomached the thought of burying myself alive for six or seven years in a seminary. A seed bed, literally, from the same root as semen; often referred to accidentally by Catholics as the cemetery.

Most American seminaries, like Dunwoodie in Westchester County where Michael did part of his training, would have reminded you of the eccentric lavish country estates of extremely wealthy Protestants of the sort whose art collections wound up at the Cloisters. In fact many began as the estates of such people and came into the Church's possession only when the great fortunes began to fade under the burden of taxation in the period after World War One. It is an irony of American Church history that the leaders of the immigrant Church were financially in the position to ape the fabulous style of the WASP elite just at the moment when the WASP elite could no longer afford it. Of course, bishops were exempt from the other great tragedy, besides taxes, that befell the aristocracy about that time too—the shortage of good servants. And so Carnegies and Mellons and Lawrences and Biddles and Fricks retrenched somewhat, while Catholic orders and dioceses converted their splashy mansions into novitiates and seminaries. Now in the Berkshires of Massachusetts and on the Main Line of Philadelphia and on the fashionable North Shore of Lake Michigan and in the hills overlooking the Hudson Valley the great prince archbishops—Spellman of New York, O'Connell of Boston, Mundelein of Chicago and Dougherty of Philadelphia—realized their poor boy dreams for country places of their own.

These seminaries had their acres of rolling lawn and their formal gardens with trellised rosebushes and clipped boxwoods, their lakes and ponds stocked with bass and their nine-hole golf courses complete with practice ranges and winter greens, all meticulously tended by legions of immigrant—though not Irish, who were above such work now—or colored gardeners. Now part of the grounds, however, were given over to football fields and baseball diamonds. To the tennis courts were added bunkerlike handball courts, but the swimming pools, with their threatening air of sensuality, were covered over for basketball. Amid cultivated groves of spruce and cedar loomed artificial grottoes, evoking Fatima and Lourdes, but also the cement-over-mesh "mountainside" in the zoo. To these shrines the boys were expected to come daily, pacing along the winding tidy pathways from one Bavarian-style "station" to another to tell their beads. Tell them what, you ask? No doubt how grateful they were, as the sons of the low and foreign born, to have been admitted to the world—for this was the delusion of that generation of ecclesiastics—of the American aristocracy.

Those places are mostly empty now. Despite their tax exemptions they cost too much to run. Even as conference centers or Job Corps training sites or retreat houses or old folks homes they turned out to be simply too drafty, too impersonal, too much the depressing relics not of one age, but of two. That the Catholics are stuck now with those lumbering white elephants in the Berkshires and the hills above the Hudson is the last revenge of the WASP elite who built them in the first place.

And of course the main reason they are empty is that today there are only a tenth the number of boys presenting themselves as candidates for the priesthood. In Michael's day the seminaries were jammed. Thousands of young men, beginning at the end of World War Two and continuing through the Catholic heyday of the fifties, entered every year. A huge expansion of facilities was required and the edifice-complex bishops built thousands of schools, churches and hospitals everywhere in America. It is both an achievement and a revelation that they did so without constructing a single architecturally distinguished building, adding sham-Gothic wings to the gracious old mansions or replacing them altogether with the sterile brick and poured-concrete of fifties "modern." One order sent off its plans for a new seminary building to the Vatican for review. The Vatican office wouldn't think of faulting the architect for his mundane design, but it did note that he had failed to include toilets and baths for the seminarians. It responded with the question,
Suntne angeli?
Are they angels?

They weren't angels. The seminarians were robust young men, talented, smart, well groomed, aggressively American, lovers of ball games. Their talk was full of slang and they were jazz buffs and devotees of Broadway musicals. But the life they led in the seminary derived from a fierce European regimen that hadn't changed in its essentials since the Reformation. Every Catholic seminarian in the world had his daily schedule, his course of studies, his style of dress, the length of his siesta and even his right to toilet facilities supervised by one curial office in Rome. The most minor detail of daily life (the Latin words, for example, with which seminarians awakened each other in the morning:
Benedicamus Domino! Deo Gratias!
) was considered as sacrosanct as the most major—that, say, the seminarian had slept alone that night. Every such detail, minor and major, was codified and had been for centuries.

The young men had such vitality, such abundant goodwill, and the Church herself enjoyed such a cheerful burst of energy in the period of her "arrival" in America that no one seemed to notice that the ideology underpinning all this building was fossilized. The classroom method of seminary education was intended to be a confrontation with the mind of Saint Thomas. But, first, it was conducted in Latin, a language which few professors, much less students, truly mastered. And, second, the structure of Thomas's thought was misunderstood. His masterpiece, the
Summa Theologiae,
has its origin as a record of a vital dialectic, a Socratic conversation that was supple and dynamic. Instead of teaching his method, most professors simply recited the record of it, so that Thomism was taken to be a kind of catechism for clerics. The monotony of the rote review of
Quaestio, Sed Contra
and
Responsio
was relieved only on those rare occasions when the class penetrated, as if by accident, to the genius of Thomas, glimpsing his still revolutionary insight, for example, that faith is not opposed to reason, but dependent on it, and vice versa. More often, the monotony was relieved not by understanding but by youthful snickers when the bland meaninglessness of the endless text-bound consideration was interrupted by a line made wonderfully ludicrous by loss of context, as in "Man in sexual intercourse is an animal," or "No part of a foot is a foot," or "The whiteness of a man's teeth primarily belongs not to him but to his teeth."

As undergraduates in philosophy, seminarians were expected to divine what Thomas, citing Aristotle, meant by potency and act. As graduate students in theology they were flogged with his distinction, also derived from "the Philosopher," between the
esse
and the essence of God. They were told that their vocations hinged on their successfully grasping such material, but no priest they knew, often including the professors themselves, showed the slightest sign outside the classroom that any of it mattered. Even the Five Proofs of God's Existence, which few remembered beyond the exam, would be of little use in the parish where priests weren't famous for arguing with atheists.

What counted for success in the seminary was mastering that peculiar mode of high-toned mediocrity—to be devout but not pious, savvy but not intellectual, athletic but not physical, selfconfident but not arrogant, deferential but not insecure, jocular but not sarcastic, friendly but not intimate with anyone—that developed as the dominant personality type of the American Catholic priest.

Thomism was not taught in seminaries as a way of opening the minds of students to great ideas at all, and it did not matter for the life of the Church that the long, arduous academic program of the priestly formation system was a complete sham. The
Summa Theologiae
was one of history's few works of true genius but by the twentieth century its function as the base document of Catholic thought was merely metaphorical, and in fact the dry, static, constricted framework of the professors served that symbolic purpose better than a vital appreciation of the original theology would have. The
Summa
fit perfectly with the culture of immigrant Catholicism because, as presented in the seminaries, it embodied that sense Catholics had that there are only so many questions and in the symmetry of God's creation there are just that many answers. Perfect happiness—what we called "beatitude"—was possible to Catholics because we participated in a divinely ordained system in which the one set,
quaestio
, could be matched with the other,
responsio.
Even if a particular professor or priest didn't know the answer, someone did. The rector maybe, or the bishop. Certainly Saint Thomas did, or God. The rigid authority of Catholicism derived not, as Protestant critics particularly in America held, from the archaic monarchism of the papacy or a perverse vestigial love of feudal aristocracy, but from a deliberately sustained and unabashedly premodern philosophy that put hierarchy at the dead center of existence. And of course this
philosophia perennis
was not regarded as a system of thought, but as an expression of the Truth Itself. As long as they subscribed to it, what others experienced as the absurd, alienating pressures of life in the twentieth century had no discernible effect on those young men. The seminary discipline that we outsiders would wince to hear described kept seminarians, as an expression of the day had it, on the beam. Or as their motto had it, in all things, they kept the Rule and the Rule kept them. It was an ordered life on the way to Orders.

No wonder they loved America. It had given them their castle-seminaries where they could, on feast days at least, listen to Ella Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington in their music rooms, but where, also, they could pretend to enjoy not as remote historical figures but as present masters Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Abelard and Aquinas. They could be in the world but not of it, or was it of but not in? We never knew. The totalitarian quality of seminary life and its cultivated anachrony alerted them to the dangers of materialism and license that so infected their age. Or, as they might have put it about their
horae
if they'd known Robert Penn Warren to quote, "It is not dead. It is simply weighty with wisdom." All they knew finally was that how they lived made them feel so much a part of the most important project they could imagine that their responses, despite all the Jansenist gloom of centuries of Catholic moral teaching, were instinctively optimistic. During their golden age, seminaries of the Catholic Church in this country, in sum, took a huge crop of gifted boys, nurtured an irresistible camaraderie that made their common rooms and refectories puerile, discouraged true distinction among them, yet enabled them to lay a near permanent—though as it turned out years later, a merely apparent—hold on a rare American happiness.

 

One of the ways to prevent the emergence of an intellectual or personal spirit of true excellence in seminaries was to segregate the smartest and generally most promising young men from the rest. Among the diocesan clergy, as opposed to the religious orders like the Jesuits or Paulists, this actually occurred when top prospects from all over the country were sent for their theological education either to the North American College in Rome or to the Theological College at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. These two theologates produced the ecclesiastical elite from which future American theologians, canon lawyers and bishops were invariably taken, and that fact alone is enough to make one wonder about those places, but that's my prejudice, isn't it? Of course it is. Prejudice is my starting point on the subject of the American Catholic hierarchy. In fairness I should rein it, but, hell, fairness was excommunicated from the Church some time ago, and not by me. Let me make my simple point about these seminaries. Training of the leadership was the stated intention of the system, but perhaps its more telling effect on the Church at large was to remove from diocesan institutions the very element, the "leaven" in the metaphor of Scripture, that might have raised the standard of the whole American parish clergy through the period of its greatest prestige when, ironically, it was about to be put to its greatest test. But maybe not. I'm an opinionated cynic on the subject, but it seems evident nevertheless that even the flower of American Catholic manhood lost its bloom in those places too. Not to say its virginity.

But let me tell you about Michael's school because it's important for our story to understand what happened to him there. It happened to everyone who went through the place.

The Catholic University was founded with papal approbation in the late nineteenth century by bishops who were moved by the booming American embrace of higher education, and they encouraged their fellow bishops to send students and faculty, and religious orders to locate houses of study there. These bishops were enlightened enough to foresee the importance of professionally trained clergy and an educated laity, even though the immigrant poor who made up the bulk of the Church's members at the time did not seem to require intellectual sophistication either of themselves or of their leaders. But those bishops who look like giants, in Newton's image, only because they were succeeded by dwarfs, were not enlightened enough to imagine, nor were the structures of American society yet fluid enough to permit, that large numbers of Catholics could be educated in the great American secular institutions of higher learning. The impulse to establish the Catholic University of America was thus part of a larger pattern of duplicating the prevailing social structures, which led to the founding of such venerable institutions as the Catholic Boy Scouts, a Catholic Forestry Association, a Catholic Lawyers Guild, a Catholic War Veterans and a Catholic Philatelist's Club. By the time a fellow name of Francis Spellman was archbishop of New York it seemed the most natural thing in the world for him to preside over a Catholic debutante ball at the Waldorf Astoria. Spellman himself aspired to be the Catholic Frances Parkinson Keyes. He wrote a little-known novel called
The Foundling
which fell short, frankly, of her
Came a Cavalier.