Prince of Peace (19 page)

In short, the Catholic University of America became the centerpiece of a great Catholic subculture. It was an authentic monument to the aspirations of the simple people who built it. It was endowed not by a few bequests of wealthy people but by annual collections proudly taken up in every Catholic parish in America, as if this university was an extension—and of course it was—of the parish school. But it was supposed to be more. The dream was that it would embody in the New World the great tradition of Saint Thomas's Paris. Weren't universities invented by clerics, after all, under the sponsorship of popes? But CUA failed to distinguish itself and never made it to the first rank even of Catholic universities like Georgetown and Notre Dame and dear old Fordham where, having been launched on the seas of academe with my doctorate for a sail and my bluster for ballast, I pulled quickly in. Not much of a journey, you say, from Washington Square to Fordham Road, but the idea was to stay in New York. I dropped my heavy-duty anchor on a lightweight teaching job. The Jesuits loved my work on Hopkins for its anticlerical tone and thought of themselves as open-minded for hiring an Irish agnostic from NYU. I was better than a Jew. I didn't tell them about Inwood or that my best friend was a seminarian or that finally ending up at Fordham felt like coming home.

It was the perfect time to come to Fordham. In the next decade even an out-of-fashion ideo-Socratic like me—I hated the seminar method and only asked questions of my beloved imbeciles to wake them up—became a campus fixture, one might almost say a campus light. It helped that as we moved to a shiny new campus in mid-Manhattan, my Jesuit competition on the faculty—those bright would-be sons of my own Hopkins—began dropping like flies in the priest-exodus of the sixties. And lo! To keep me from an assistant's slot at Columbia, they would make me the youngest full professor in the place! They even would give me my whack at running the department just as Marshall McLuhan came on board with his barrels of bullshit about Swedish massage. He made me look unoriginal and unopinionated. I didn't mind the former—it is not a teacher's job to be original. But I couldn't forgive him for the latter. What does a teacher have but his opinions? Nor could I forgive him for earning so much more money than I. He couldn't touch me in the classroom, but his books on the end of books sold wonderfully. I used to wink at him in the corridor to let him know that I knew, but wouldn't tell. I seriously intended to challenge him to debate, but before I could the war hit us, made all the talk about McLuhan seem absurd—which was its one good effect—and made, eventually, the ground open up beneath my feet and swallow me.

But my failure is another subject. I was talking about Catholic University's. Even the Methodists, whose equivalent nineteenth-century movement resulted in Boston University, Northwestern, SMU, Emory, Southern Cal and my own NYU, outshone the Catholic bishops. Still, CU became and remains the center of the effort to educate American priests and nuns. Perhaps it was handicapped impossibly by its clerical orientation, though some of its priest-facuity, Fulton Sheen for example, or John Tracy Ellis, had left enduring marks. Of course CU has had its achieving laymen too. Among the alumni of its famous drama department are Jon Voight, the midnight cowboy, and Ed McMahon, the midnight card.

The site chosen for the university in the 1880s was on a hill just northeast of Washington, and over the next seventy-five years, around a first modest hall of lecture rooms and a primitive observatory where presumably the priest-astronomers asked forgiveness of Galileo, there clustered the monasteries, convents, postulates, juniorates, theologates and colleges of Paulists, Benedictines, Redemptorists, Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Claretians, Capuchins, Christian Brothers, Xaverians, Salesians, Oblates of Francis de Sales, Carmelites, Carthusians and half a dozen competing factions of Franciscans. Each of these places housed students who attended the university or faculty who taught at it. By Michael Maguire's time there, Catholic University and its religious satellites so dominated the growing new section of Washington known as Brookland that it was referred to as "Little Rome." It was the perfect setting, that genteel but modest neighborhood with its quiet tidy streets and small tract houses on quarter-acres of grass, each with its garage; the little tudor shopping centers with ample parking; the sprawling parks where Little League and Pop Warner flourished. Brookland was an early suburb and as such a type of the world into which the entire postwar generation of American Catholics was moving. The fifties boom was for the Church too a suburban phenomenon. Newly ordained clergy weren't going to serve in the gloomy parishes—"Saint Paul's," "Saint Mary's"—of the decaying cities, but in the bright new all-purpose parishes—"Our Lady of Hope," "Holy Innocents"—of the sparkling child-dominated suburbs. The knotty-pine cheer of such places already paneled their lives.

Thousands of young religious were at large in Brookland. On its streets monks, friars and cassocked seminarians could stroll in their medieval robes without the least self-consciousness. The officials deferred to them and the merchants gave them discounts. On the class-free mornings of Holy Days they could attend en masse in a local moviehouse special gratis screenings of features in which Bing Crosby was forever paying off the mortgage of the new church and Ingrid Bergman was perpetually taking her final vows. Brookland was an enclave like Vatican City itself, complete and entire, and across its boundaries the junior clergy were forbidden to go, except in the afternoons of those same Holy Days when they might hike across the city to Arlington for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or down to the Smithsonian, wondrously cluttered with the wax figures of Indian chiefs and the original Spirit of St. Louis. Not that larger Washington was regarded as wilderness or that the institutions of government weren't prized by those highly patriotic Catholics, but that, for all their success, the last vestige of that old alien feeling had yet to be removed. In truth it wasn't the
world
they were in but not quite of, but their beloved America.

In the fall of 1958 Michael Maguire began his second year at Catholic University's Theological College. Washington was continually abuzz with news; events that would shape the future followed each other in quick sequence that year. The president, acting on his own authority and with no particular regard for the precedent set, sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon to restore order and bolster a friendly government. The Supreme Court, applying its own four-year-old principle, affirmed the right of embattled black children to attend a segregated school in Little Rock, Arkansas. "Here come the niggers!" the rednecks cried, and they were right. The first American satellite was successfully shot into space. Nikita Khrushchev became the premier of the USSR. A grand jury found that quiz-show winner Charles Van Doren, the son of my own literary idol, was a fake. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration was sponsoring tests on an oral contraceptive that would free women from the fear of pregnancy. Che Guevara and Fidel Castro routed the last of Batista's troops to complete the liberation of Cuba. Stereophonic recording was developed and among young people outside the seminary the hits of the year were Buddy Holly's "Maybe Baby" and the Kingston Trio's "Tom Dooley." 1958 finished Elvis as a musical innovator—he went into the army—but it launched a trio of Liverpool teenagers who called themselves "The Silver Beatles." Any one of these events would have justified Eldridge Cleaver's comment made about Rosa Park's refusal to relinquish her seat to a white man on a Montgomery bus: "Somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery had shifted." Taken together they support the view that the era of tumultuous change we call "the Sixties" actually began in 1958.

But no event of that year was more fraught with significance for the young men studying for the Roman Catholic priesthood than the death of the man who had come to embody everything triumphant, timeless and secure about their Church, but also everything static, rigid, morose and moralistic. He was an Italian, born Eugenio Pacelli, but revered by two generations as Pope Pius XII. When he died that fall many Catholics reacted as if some law of nature had been transgressed. His Holiness dead? That was no gear shifting, but the machinery shutting down. A kind of tensing—that glandular "
Achtung
!"—swept the Church, and with it the unexpected visceral knowledge that the last of the ancient command societies, dating back one and a half millennia, was, like an old Roman, about to fall on its sword. Catholics sensed implicitly that the ecclesial structure that had enabled their achievement in postwar America could continue serene and unshaken, immutable as well as infallible, only if Pius, as some thought he might, lived forever.

Seminarians were ordinarily restricted in their ability to follow the news. It wouldn't do to have them distracted by the man-chasing sensations of Jayne Mansfield or Marilyn Monroe. Let me say, aside, that the wholesome movie stars like Doris Day and Grace Kelly were vastly more seductive as fantasy figures to such repressed young males. After all they, like the "innocent" actresses, were being taught the manipulative values of chastity. The most insightful actress of the day, by the way, was Jane Wyman, being the first American to see through Ronald Reagan. But actresses are not my subject, alas. If they were I'd pay homage to Brigitte Bardot, who rescued cinematic eros from the weirdos on Forty-second Street. It was a great day for us Puritans when we learned that sex was art. But seminarians, I was speaking of seminarians.

Reports of goings-on in "the world," whether sex-related or not, could only make it more difficult for the boys to keep their eyes on the ball, in Michael's phrase, which was not God but the thirteenth century. And so by and large newspapers, magazines, radio and television were forbidden unless there was a Catholic angle to the event reported, Edward R. Murrow interviewing Senator and Mrs. Kennedy, for example, or any Notre Dame football game. This restriction, of course, played its part in the larger strategy of seminary discipline, which was to reduce those young men, even those best ones, to the status of dependent children. Seminarians were being trained in subservience, and no one had embodied the totalitarian system in which obedience was synonymous with humiliation better than Pius XII. He had run the entire Church the way every rector ran his seminary. When the cardinals of the Church sequestered themselves in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new pope, their Consistory became the top news story of the day and seminarians across America were not only permitted to follow it but expected to.

The places of honor in the students' common room at Theological College belonged to two pool tables and a Ping-Pong table. The television was a small-screen floor model with a battered wood cabinet, the hand-me-down gift of some faculty member, and it was impossible, even after the head student and two others lifted it onto one of the pool tables, for more than a couple of dozen fellows to watch it at one time. There were a hundred and twenty-two soutaned theologians in the room, the entire student body not counting the eight who were in the kitchen washing dishes, a chore everyone took turns doing except the deacons. Deacons could smoke too, though not in front of the others. Theirs were the petty privileges of a petty elite; the last lesson in how to be a priest.

It was the free period after the evening meal. Ordinarily, during those thirty or forty minutes, they all donned sweaters over their cassocks and went out in raucous groups of three, always three because more was impossible on the neighborhood sidewalks and fewer was forbidden. For a seminarian to stroll alone was antisocial, and for a pair to go could indicate an incipient "particular friendship." For obvious reasons homophobia thrived in the seminary culture, and not only among the faculty. Seminarians were alert for any sign of intense feeling in themselves or others. Affection reaching to any depth at all set off alarms, and you can imagine what that did to their capacity for friendship. And so as trios they strolled along Michigan Avenue or down Fourth Street or onto the CU campus to check the progress of "the shrine," the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the massive Romanesque basilica that after intermittent construction over thirty years was nearly finished: With its pencil-sharp K. of C. bell tower and its brilliant blue mosaic beach ball of a dome, it already dominated the northeast hill of Washington as completely—and wasn't this the point?—as the Episcopal National Cathedral dominated the northwest hill. Unfortunately the Protestant Church was a classic Gothic masterpiece while the National Shrine seemed garish even to the unaesthetic Catholic donors whose names were being chiseled on pillars in the vast crypt. There was a story, in fact, that on the morning of the day that the great dome was dedicated at last the Blessed Virgin Mary herself appeared on the massive shrine plaza and said to two humble seminarians, "Tell the bishops that I want them to honor me by building on this very spot a beautiful church."

But that evening, despite the mild late October weather, they weren't outside. They were attending as well as they could to the tiny television. A hush fell over the room when Walter Cronkite reported the amazing news that the Consistory had still not chosen the new pope. The smoke had risen black twice that day, indicating two more futile ballots. Speculation now, he said, was that the cardinals, divided between progressive and traditionalist factions, were deadlocked. Cronkite went on to other news, but the seminarians ignored him, bursting into heated conversation of their own. Many took offense at the newsman's implication that liberal versus conservative politics, not the guidance of the Holy Ghost, would determine the outcome of the papal election. Others, the more worldly ones, thought it naive in the extreme to expect a secular commentator not to impose some human analysis on the sacred process.

 

Gene O'Mally didn't care, frankly. He was worried about the game. The next day Theological College was playing the Paulists, and on the Paulists' court. O'Mally was the captain. He was a type and I know all about him. They came through Fordham by the gross. Even as I remember what Michael told me of him I can read his mind. He'd played basketball for Notre Dame, and he knew better than anyone that his team didn't have it. Hell, it was embarrassing. They'd lost six in a row now. Even the Capuchins in their fruity beards beat them, and the Paulists had won the league the year before.