Authors: William Kienzle
Her eyes crinkled in amusement. “Okay.”
Though it was early for the meeting, Koesler was used to being first on every scene. This exceeding promptness had its inception in boyhood, when his mother had shooed him out of the house well before the gathering time for him and his buddies. The habit had taken root. Nor could he rest on his laurels. Even now as an elderly man he grew anxious whenever a deadline or an appointment was imminent.
So, with time on his hands and feeling quite at home in these once familiar surroundings, he decided to let the memories flood in at their own good pleasure.
He was standing in what had been the Prayer Hall, directly beneath the ornate chapel that hadn’t even existed during the four years he had been a student here. As he had told his guide, what in those days had been the chapel was now the library reading room. What had been the Prayer Hall was now just a large, nondescript, rectangular space. Years ago, it had been filled with bench seats with snap-up tabletops and kneelers that could be lowered to the floor for prayer. With the tabletops raised and the kneelers down, it was no place for a claustrophobic.
Sometimes the room had been used for classes. At other times, the Prayer Hall had actually been used for prayer. As in morning, noon, and night. Morning prayer was the diciest. That prayer was followed immediately by silent meditation, during which many of the group—those not yet fully awake—fell blissfully asleep. On one occasion a young man was concluding his reading of morning prayer in preparation for somnolent meditation, when he inadvertently turned too many pages. Unmindful of the fact that he was on the last page of evening prayer instead of on the final page of morning prayer, he read aloud, “Let us offer up the sleep we are about to take in union with that which Jesus Himself, took while on earth …”
Even the priest in charge had laughed.
Laughter in Prayer Hall was not unique or even rare. There was, for instance, the pre-luncheon examination of conscience. The composure of a couple of hundred students in cassock and clerical collar was sorely tested one day when a mouse came through the doorway, eyeballed the reflecting group, then dove under a nearby lowered kneeler.
There followed a good deal of fidgeting, shifting, and outright jumping as some of the more mischievous boys ran a finger up a neighbor’s leg. Their victims were forced either to exercise extreme self-control or hop up on their seats, pulling their floor-length cassocks up around their knees.
All the while, on the podium, the presiding priest, who hadn’t seen the mouse, wondered what in hell was going on.
Fortunately, the examination period ended shortly thereafter, and the students, still wary, made their way to the dining room. Sad to say, a few who were fresh from the farm stayed behind to dispatch the mouse, who, with the kneelers now raised, had forfeited any hiding place.
Two floors directly above where Koesler now stood were meeting rooms, which, in his day, had been classrooms. As was true of most of the original buildings, the classrooms were bright and airy with plenty of window space.
Sulpicians had made up the faculty. The Sulpicians were diocesan—or parish—priests on loan from their home diocese and totally dedicated to training young men to become diocesan priests. Thus they were held in high regard by their students.
In addition, the courses at St. John’s were at the heart of relevance for the seminarians’ future ministry. Core subjects were dogmatic and moral theology, Scripture, Canon Law, Liturgy, and homiletics—the meat and potatoes of the lives these students longed to live.
So intense were some courses that gobs of dogma as well as blocks of Canon Law had to be skipped over in favor of more relevant and immediate material. So dedicated a student had the maturing Robert Koesler become that, almost alone, and on his own, he studied such otherwise neglected matter.
How things had changed over the years! His alma mater had been transformed from a single-minded seminary to a sort of Catholic resort. In Koesler’s day, most courses had been taught entirely in Latin: questions, answers, texts, exams—all in Latin. Now, Latin was an elective, with few takers—even though the largest by far of the branches of Catholicism is the Latin Rite, whose primary language remains Latin.
Koesler was engaging in one of his favorite pastimes: remembering the past. Sailing along on this sea of memories, he thought it ironic that he could think of nothing negative … nothing of the sort of recollection that causes one to wince.
Actually, of course there had been some less than enjoyable events … but they had softened with the passage of time. Even though these students of yore were, by and large, dedicated, they were also young, sometimes bored, and frequently funny.
Koesler continued to slowly make his way toward the meeting place. He paused as he reached what had been the crypt chapels.
Originally, one large space had been divided into five small chambers, each with three walls opening to the central area. Now, it was no more than an oddly shaped room so empty it gave no clue as to its previous use.
Once, each of the five chapel spaces had been equipped with all the necessities for the celebration of Mass. Though “celebration” seemed too grandiose a term for what had taken place there.
Each morning after meditation—slumber—five faculty members went to their assigned cubicles, where the vestments of the day were arranged on the vesting table. Each priest had a student appointed as sacristan. It was the sacristan’s responsibility to care for everything. Other students took their turns serving Mass, a week at a time.
Everyone whispered, in a futile attempt to cause no distraction to the others. At least the intention was honorable. With five priests and five seminarians whispering their Latin prayers in a very confined space, there had to be noise. Limited sound, but sound nonetheless.
The most heroic effort at quiet centered around the bell. A very small bell was provided at each altar. It was the server’s responsibility to ring the bell—a total of ten times at each Mass—while attempting to keep the sound at a minimum.
One morning, a server tipped his bell ever so carefully and slowly. There was no sound. Eventually, the server was shaking the bell violently. Still no sound. It did not occur to him at the time to look inside the bell where, unbeknownst to him, the clapper had been taped to the bell’s interior. The sacristan had been bored.
On another occasion, this same sacristan received a complaint from his priest. The priest claimed that he was being distracted during Mass by a spider that crept and crawled on the cross during each and every Mass. No way would the priest himself contribute to the solution of this problem. That contract was given to the sacristan, who conducted an intense search-and-destroy mission—without success.
Finally, he reached a solution—at least as far as he was concerned.
“My priest,” he reported, “gets vested, picks up the chalice, and goes to the altar. He puts the chalice on the altar, takes the corporal [a cloth resembling a handkerchief] out of the burse [a type of purse], props the burse against the wall, spreads the corporal on the altar, puts the spider on the cross, sets the chalice on the corporal …”
As far as anyone knew, the spider was never found. Had it been, it would undoubtedly have joined the inquisitive mouse as a sacrificial offering to the peace and quiet of the seminary.
By far, the most intriguing aspect of the crypt chapels—perhaps of the entire seminary—was the once occupied, now empty tomb in the floor.
It had been Cardinal Mooney’s wish—and his wishes were law to the faculty—to be buried in this spot where five Masses would be offered simultaneously each and every day during the school year.
And so it came to pass that the only thing missing from this tomb was a body. The roped-off area safeguarded a plaque bearing Mooney’s biographical statistics. The major events of the Cardinal’s life were noted on the six-foot-long plate—with the exception of his date of death.
Arguably, Mooney may have found the tomb depressing. It surely must have reminded him of his mortality. But undoubtedly he had considered it consoling that he would be laid to rest in so sacred a spot.
In any case, there it was: No guided tour of the seminary had ever skipped a visit to the Cardinal’s empty but waiting tomb.
In time, of course, the tomb was occupied. Cardinal Mooney was laid to what was thought to be his final rest on October 31, 1958. At that time no one would have dreamed that anything would ever happen to contravene his order. However, who could have foreseen the drain of seminarians and the change in name and purpose of St. John’s Provincial Seminary to St. John’s Center?
Eventually, nearly unoccupied, the seminary was officially closed in 1988.
When it became clear that such a drastic change was inevitable, the administration of the archdiocese decided to have the Cardinal’s body moved to Holy Sepulcher Cemetery, there to be interred in the section reserved for deceased priests.
A small crew of workers was put to work on the transfer.
They cracked open the seal of the plaque and laboriously raised the heavy casket from the tomb and placed it on a carriage. They rolled it out of the crypt and through the empty Prayer Hall. They maneuvered it up a flight of stairs and pushed it to the front doors of the one-time seminary.
As they crossed the threshold, something eerie and inexplicable occurred. All the power in the buildings failed, and the telephones went dead.
The moving crew was unaware of what had happened. Those few still inside the building of course knew that suddenly the electricity was out and so were the phones. But they didn’t know that the outage was in any way connected with the noncompliance with Mooney’s order.
Nor, when the stories had been meshed, was the incident made public. Perhaps the powers that be were loath to fan the embers of what could give rise to a cult, a shrine, and/or talk of a “miracle.”
Those who knew of the phenomenon ever after shied from the emptied tomb.
As Koesler was recalling these events, he stood motionless at the very foot of the Cardinal’s now-vacant crypt. He smiled as “The Twlight Zone” theme sounded in his head.
Koesler resumed his journey in the direction of the Power House entrance. As he did, his thoughts returned to the present and the upcoming meeting.
At one time, not that long ago, this would have been a gathering of The Six. Over the years, The Six—four men and two women—had formed a special bond that had survived the test of time.
Their relationship had begun some fifty-five years before. It was a bond that could, and did, survive disagreements, misunderstandings, and even enmity. Of course their usual response to one another was just the opposite of such negatives. The point was that the group’s comradeship was built on a rock-solid foundation that could withstand all manner of testing.
But what they were experiencing now was a sterner test than any in the past.
They had been six. Now they were five.
Only days ago, one of their number had died. This, in itself, was not extraordinary. Koesler was in his early seventies. The others, all at one time classmates, had been one year behind Koesler. Now they too were in their early seventies, a year or two younger than he, depending on their month of birth.
It was the cause of this demise that was ambiguous. Rather than dying of a sharply defined illness or from so-called natural causes, the death could be attributed to either an accident, or suicide, or murder. Whatever the true cause of death, it seemed possible—albeit unthinkable—that one of the surviving classmates might have been responsible for the death, had assisted in the death, or was an accessory.
Koesler had reason to believe he knew the answer.