Hayek agrees with me on health care?

The First Things weblog quotes Friedrich Hayek on health care:

Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance – where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks – the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong… Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make the provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken, …

Now, Hayek was an unabashed opponent of all things socialist; his The Road to Serfdom is something of a bible of economic conservatism. Look it up if you don't believe me. So it surprises me that it sounds somewhat like what I was trying to say some time ago, although Hayek gets it much better.

The rest of the article is pretty good, too.


This is completely unrelated, but for some bizarre reason the reference to "Morning Zoo DJs" in that article reminded me of Mancow, the Chicago DJ I heard once or twice while in seminary. I might remember wrong but I believe I disliked the show because it contained a lot of vulgar humor. However, I had no car, so I had to ride to pastoral assignments with a fellow seminarian who did.* One of the seminarians I rode with was a huge, huge Mancow fan. He called it a guilty pleasure, but he was considerate enough to turn it off when I said that I really disliked it.

Believe it or not, the archdiocese of Chicago subsequently asked that seminarian to study in Rome. You'd think that this could explain a lot about the Chicago archdiocese, but I prefer the malin genie hypothesis: someone figured that packing him off to Rome was a surefire way to wean him off Mancow.

You think I'm making this up, don't you? But it's the unvarnished truth. Unless my memory deceives me, which it doesn't.

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*I couldn't afford the car I owned, so I let my parents drive it and make the payments. The car stayed in Virginia while I stayed in Chicago.

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You can't go home again, unless you speak a different language

When I was a seminarian for the Catholic Diocese of Richmond, I had two home parishes of sorts. One was the parish where I had made the decision to enter the formation process. This was the small parish of St. Francis of Assisi in Rocky Mount, Virginia. It's a nice parish, and probably ordinary in many ways, although at the time that I was there it was a little extraordinary in that its "pastoral director" was a religious sister instead of a priest. (They received a priest in residence when she left, which was shortly after I entered seminary. I doubt any of these events were related.)

The second parish was Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a large parish that I frequented when visiting my parents in Newport News. The pastor of Mt. Carmel at that time was Monsignor Michael McCarron, a large man with a booming voice who exuded confidence both in himself and in the Catholic Church.*

One could probably write several books about Msgr. McCarron, and perhaps someone will one day. During the time that he served as pastor of Mt. Carmel, it grew immensely. If memory serves, the RCIA class topped out over 100 for several years in a row. New buildings were built; new ministries were developed; etc. The one building that wasn't expanded was the worship space; during the morning masses it was regularly packed to overflowing. Easter and Christmas celebrations presented logistical nightmares that involved several simultaneous masses. Three priests served at the parish, and for a while it incubated a number of seminarians and deacons destined for the priesthood. Much of what went on was started and carried on by an active laity with the full blessing of the pastor & his vicars. It was, in many respects, the epitome of the mega-parish, which Msgr. McCarron frequently described as the future of the Catholic Church.

Since I've been in town… I returned to Mt. Carmel today. Msgr. McCarron has long since moved to another parish, but if memory serves the number of Masses, along with their scheduled times, remains the same. The number of priests at the parish has diminished by one. On the other hand, the once-legendary, packed-to-overflowing 11·30 mass is far different.

How? To begin with, it's a Spanish-language Mass. (I knew this going in; I had visited the website, and I am sufficiently familiar with Spanish that I was happy to visit and see.) Many of the ministers speak English, and the parish pastor speaks English and Spanish. However, he delivered the homily in English, with a native Spanish speaker translating each sentence. The alternation of language takes the edge off some of the jokes.

This may not seem remarkable, except that I last remember visiting the 11·30 mass not so many years ago. At the time, it remained a mostly English affair, with nearly everyone in attendance a "white Catholic", and the music of an abysmally bland variety that one usually finds in "white Catholic" parishes. I recall an announcement being made that they would start introducing some Spanish hymns and/or phrases into the Mass, in order to make their Spanish-speaking sisters and brothers feel welcome. Back then, the 11·30 mass was packed so badly that I avoided it whenever possible, even driving longer distances to other parishes.

By now, both the white Catholics and the English language have virtually disappeared from that Mass. Today it seemed sparsely populated. I'm sure it was more than half full, but in comparison to the old 11·30 masses, where people were lined up along the walls and outside the doors, the place looked empty. Where did all those people go? I have a hard time believing that they shifted to other masses, both because of the less convenient times and because those other masses were also fairly well packed. Strange.

On the other hand, this Mass sounded louder and more raucous than my memories of the old 11·30 masses. This is no mean feat; the old 11·30 mass was often noisy and at one point Msgr. McCarron ordered the bathroom doors locked because people rose too often to visit the bathroom. All this commotion was only worsened by the design of the worship space, where two halves of the congregation "face off" with the altar between them. The design is supposedly inspired by the choirs of monasteries, where monks do indeed face each other during the Divine Office—but the altar is not between them, and in my experience they turn to face the altar during the Mass, facing each other only during the Divine Office.

In any case, the Spanish choir sang vigorously today, accompanied ably by guitars and various instruments of percussion that characterize folk music south of our national borders. Unfortunately I didn't recognize any of the hymns from the repertory of Spanish hymns that I do know. I would have liked to sing along, but the Spanish-language missalette was hard to come by, and once I did come by one, it contained zarroo musical notation, so I couldn't figure out how to match the words to the music. How these modern hymnals are supposed to assist us with singing is a bit of a mystery to me.

Another strange thing: even the English-language missalettes are out of date. I don't say this because I was unlucky enough to sit in the one spot in the church where someone overlooked the 2007 missalette. After mass, I found a copy of the pastoral council minutes posted on a wall. "A parishioner" had raised the concern that the missalettes were out of date, to which the pastor replied that "the decision was made" to update the hymnals first. Now it's July, and the missalettes are still from 2007. Odd.

A few other things looked to be in disrepair, such as some plaster peeling off a doorway, but one can hardly extrapolate from one visit on one Sunday after several years.

So, you can't go home again, unless you speak a different language. A few things remain the same:

• kneelers are absent, keeping with the Diocese of Richmond's longstanding notion that kneeling during the Eucharistic prayer is a sign of repentance, rather than a sign of adoration;
• the Eucharistic bread remains a tough confection that one must chew;
• the Mass was bereft of sacred silence.

So, as a matter of style, the Spanish-language mass appealed to me just as little as the English-language masses used to.

Nothing in this is inherent to Spanish-language masses or to Spanish speakers. Some of the quietest, most dignified, and most traditional masses I have experienced take place at the Catholic Church that I visit in Kazan, Russia, which is run by an Argentinean order of priests and sisters. It seems rather an inherent trait of the Diocese of Richmond.

The strangeness doesn't stop there. A local Catholic Charities outfit was recently racked by a scandal that strikes me as bizarre: four members of the staff helped an immigrant to obtain an abortion, and the bishop knew about it beforehand. Never mind the teaching of the Catholic Church; this was worsened by the fact that the immigrant was not yet a legal adult, so that the staffers broke a law of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

There is an explanation to all this (there always is):

1. the bishop admits he knew, but says he was misinformed that nothing could be done to stop it;
2. neither the girl, nor the staffers involved, were Catholics (strangely, the diocesan spokesman insists that Catholic teaching on abortion is "clear"—just not to people who work for the Church);
3. Catholic Charities claims that the staffers were ignorant of the Church's teaching against abortion, and in any case they have been dismissed.

I'm sure that Msgr. McCarron, and many of the other priests of the diocese, had a solid, reassuring answer for parishioners who came to him, troubled by this story. It probably started with the observation that one cannot rely on the AP for reliable news on the Church. I am sure that not a few of them shrugged to hear it. There are a few priests in this diocese who openly dissent from Church teaching, and a few more who dissent quietly, or only through wry comments that misrepresent the Church's teaching.

I also doubt Msgr. McCarron's confidence in the Church was shaken by the story. I cannot say the same for myself. As I wrote previously, this character flaw of mine is part of the reason I walked away. In my opinion, my current reaction is all the evidence I need that walking away was the right decision. His response would likely be what it was when I left formation: I need to open myself to grace.

There are certain issues where, like Peter, I never walk on water, but sink into it.

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*A perfect example of his confidence in the Church, as well as his ability to turn the perfect phrase, was related to me by another priest, who described an incident where Msgr. McCarron asked a clerk in a Christian bookstore where the Bibles were. The clerk remarked, I didn't know that Catholics read the Bible, to which Msgr. answered, Read it? We wrote it!

I can turn a phrase rather quickly, too, but they tend to be perfectly tactless, which figured into my decision to leave formation. This decision, along with the haste in which I made it, dismayed Msgr. McCarron, who reminded me in a long conversation that what matters is not our weakness but God's strength. (Something to that effect. The precise words escape me now.)

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Fr. Pfleger revisited

I mentioned Fr. Michael Pfleger a while back in the context of Mr. Obama's pastor, the Reverend Wright. Now Fr. Pfleger has appeared on his own in a YouTube video, mocking Senator Clinton's tears after New Hampshire: I'm white, I'm entitled, and this is mine!!! As a consequence, Mr. Obama has withdrawn his membership from that church, and the Archdiocese of Chicago has issued a sharp rebuke of Fr. Pfleger's words. Pfleger himself has felt the need to apologize.

I confess myself at a loss to understand why Fr. Pfleger subsequently apologized for the words he spoke about Ms. Clinton. I half-suspect that Fr. Pfleger is sorrier for the effect his words may have on Mr. Obama's campaign than for the content of those words and the tone in which he delivered them.

I am also surprised that Cardinal George felt compelled to issue that statement. He can't be unaware that this is typical of Fr. Pfleger.

During the two hours I heard him preach at St. Sabina's on that Sunday afternoon almost ten years ago, I heard worse things come out of his mouth, and in worse of a tone. (As I wrote before, I never once saw any insanity preached. Fr. Pfleger came close…) There was a Senate race coming up, and Fr. Pfleger did not merely endorse a candidate; he told the parishioners whom to vote for. I recall the words, I can't tell you whom to vote for, but…, drawing a huge laugh and applause. It was clear that this sort of stuff went on all the time in his church.

(An aside. Had Fr. Pfleger told them to think twice about voting for that candidate, or that she should not have received communion at a Catholic church, because she has been an unabashed supporter of abortion, placing her in direct conflict with his parishioners' Catholic faith,* the national media would have been in an uproar, and public figures would be shaking their heads about how the wall of separation between Church and State is crumbling. Do you think that Fr. Pfleger won't tell his parish whom to vote for this fall, Cardinal George's statement notwithstanding? No one in the media will care, because he is telling them to vote for a Democrat, just as no one in the media cared when he told them to vote for Carol Moseley Braun.)

What to make of the man? As I mentioned in my previous post, Fr. Pfleger waged war on what he perceived as causes of vice in the community, such as beer billboards and the like. He had made national headlines for protesting Jerry Springer's show for his negative television at a time when Springer was at the height of his popularity. I admired him before I walked into St. Sabina's that Sunday morning. I believe that Fr. Pfleger cares genuinely and deeply for the sheep entrusted to him. I also think he has veered terribly off course, and risks leading them to destruction.

What bothers me most about that videotape is not what it shows, but what it hints at. Certain passages of his speech have been cut from it, and I can extrapolate from what remains the sense of those passages. It sounds a lot like something that I heard often during my time as a seminarian: a highly politicized view of poverty and race, where the poor and minorities are always victims, everyone else is always an oppressor. Those of us who don't fall into the categories of poor or minority are obliged to fall at their leaders' feet, beg their mercy for our crimes (which happen to be the crimes of our ancestors, from which we have profited), and give the poor anything they ask for.

I am not exaggerating. There were priests within and without the seminary who tried constantly to make us feel guilty merely for being in the seminary. A priest once told that the words of a letter I wrote him revealed that the poor deserved to be poor, even though I had said nothing of the sort.** I don't know how many times I was told that I came from a "privileged" background, that I was thinking "the wrong way", and that I could never understand what it was like to struggle at the bottom rungs of society.

If I may speak briefly in defense of myself and of my family: I have never held a grudge against the poor or against minorities. My grandfather had the highest grades at his school, but his principal wanted to name someone else valedictorian because John Perry was "poor white trash." My mother struggled to find a teaching job because of her Italian accent, and certain minorities would disparage her within earshot because "she can't talk right."

I myself may not have been poor, because my father had a job as an engineer, and so was able to pay for his house and his kids' food. I did attend school with poor kids, however; I played with poor kids, and worked at Hardee's and Wendy's alongside poor kids. I remember one of my coworkers, a sweet and decent young woman of black and white parentage, crying because her daddy told her that black people were stupid, "and he's right; I'm stupid." I remember a rich white kid whom I knew at school coming in and demanding of me a cup of Sprite, as if he couldn't afford it. I remember a girl I secretly liked who lived in the trailer park nearby and complained frequently that the money she earned at Hardee's had to pay for her car and insurance and maybe college one day if she could get in, while the rich kids just got these things for free from their parents.

As for myself, I left home at 18, and received only room and board payments from my parents after that. I bought my own books, paid for my own entertainment, and built up some debt that I mostly paid off over two years as a high school teacher. I struggled to make ends meet in seminary, and had to give my car to my parents because I could no longer afford it. (Some dioceses pay for their seminarians' cars. Mine would not.)

I noticed that many of the same priests who rhetorically savaged my life of "privilege" regularly enjoyed fine restaurants, lived in fine rectories, collected expensive trinkets, and generally enjoyed a higher standard of living than I had ever seen before.*** They may have cared for the poor, but they didn't care to live like them. Whenever a priest from the diocese came to visit us at seminary, an expensive dinner was on the agenda. This was quite typical, in fact. Other seminarians regularly visited bars, drove cars financed by their dioceses, and lived quite well. Some of the biggest spenders were seminarians from "unprivileged" backgrounds. Quite a few from "privileged" backgrounds like my own had sold or given up their possessions in order to attend seminary, rarely enjoyed a night at a restaurant or a trip to the movies, and took odd jobs at the seminary to pay our bills. I cleaned the chapel one year, and delivered mail the next.

One of the older seminarians described these priests' attitudes aptly when he said (not verbatim):

A lot of these guys grew up in rich families. Once they became priests and were assigned to black parishes, they saw how poor people lived and never got over the shock from the disparity.

Why that means they have to blame me for it I'll never understand.

I don't know what background Fr. Pfleger has. I do know that he has bought into, and encourages, an attitude all too common among many priests of poor or minority parishes: that they have to seize political power in any way possible, using any means available. This is why I write that Fr. Pfleger is sorrier for the effect he may have on Mr. Obama's campaign than for the content of the words he said and the tone in which he uttered them.. If his words mean Mr. Obama loses, then the culture in which Fr. Pfleger has invested so much energy, a culture which sees politics ultimately as being about seizing power to benefit their community through patronage, will have lost their chance at power again, just as in 1998 the candidate Fr. Pfleger openly endorsed, the corrupt Carol Moseley Braun, lost her Senate seat to a white Republican from a privileged background.****,*****

As I wrote before,

I am no Fr. Pfleger, however. When I left St. Sabina's four hours later… I was on my way out of seminary.

The visit had been for a class on liturgy, and I concluded the report that for the first time in my seminary career, I was thinking about leaving seminary. (The professor wrote something to the effect of, "I hope not.")

A black darkness had already come over me then, an anguish I had never felt before, and never felt since. I began to believe that I would serve God better outside the diocesan priesthood than within it. My experience as a seminarian intern at a parish church the previous summer hadn't been very positive, either. (I had been assigned there in order to "grow". When I wanted to talk about some things that bothered me, I was told "later", but "later" never came. I had wanted to talk about things such as the fact that the priest didn't care about declining attendance so long as the weekly offering was growing.)

If I've learned anything about myself over the years I spent trying to perform public service (high school teacher, volunteer tutor, parish minister) or even of myself as a general human being: people don't like me. I do not possess characteristics conducive to affability and leadership. That is not my nature. Grace builds on nature, they told us at seminary, and I don't have the nature for diocesan priesthood. All my life I have loved Christ and have wanted to make him known, but I seem to succeed only in driving people away from him. It broke my heart to leave seminary, but I don't know what in good conscience I could have done. I tried over a period of years: I volunteered at Christ the King, served at Holy Family, tutored for free at an inner-city Chicago parish, and did lots more that I don't care to repeat. I walked out of St. Sabina's church with my vision cleared; I cannot be a priest. I would help any way I can (and I do when I can, but I won't recite that here) but I surely could not have helped as a priest.

If this seems strange to you, that doesn't surprise me. I'm the only person who has understood it. I tried to explain this to people when I left seminary, but no one believed me. My father's words were, I'm not sure even you know why you left seminary. Everyone was sure that I had some deeper reason for leaving—I suspect from the way they quizzed me that some hoped for a scandal—but no, that was all.

Perhaps that reveals me for a shallow, faithless, and false Christian. Some people have said as much. Perhaps my words are equivalent to those of Milton's Satan, I will not serve? God have mercy on my soul.

It has been ten years since I walked into Holy Family Parish, and began slowly to fall apart. Again I find myself in a position where the weblog is taking a direction I don't like. I have a family to tend to, so I think I will walk away awhile. I'll probably return, but it will be a while.

God bless.

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*The irony is that a few minutes before endorsing Carol Moseley Braun, he had warned his parishioners against falling prey to the culture of contraception and abortion surrounding them. I have wondered if he did that because he genuinely believes that that culture is poisonous, or because he knew there would be some seminarians there.

**What I recall writing in that letter was something I had been told: namely, that companies fled black neighborhoods of Chicago after many of them were burned down during race riots. I had added the comment that now I understood why these companies no longer wished to set up shop there, something that had made no sense to me previously. From this the priest extrapolated my supposed belief that the poor "deserve" to be poor.

***My Italian grandfather worked his way up from a poor childhood to a high position in the Bank of Naples. He never lived so well as some of these priests who spoke loudly of my "privileged" background, despite the fact that he lived with his brother, who died a childless bachelor and contributed his income to the home. To my knowledge, my only benefit from Nonno's position was a yearly trip to Italy every summer, and some money that my mother used to buy us clothes (that other kids made fun of, because I looked "poor"). Nonno didn't leave much inheritance to his children, either. That's a story I'll never get discuss, not merely because of the virtue f discretion, but because I don't understand it. It does seem to be a hallmark of the Leboffe family of Gaeta, which in the mid-1800s prospered on a small fleet of merchant ships, but in the early 1900s was reduced to such poverty that Nonno's brother, as a teenager, had to take a job as a sailor to support his mother and younger siblings.

****If I understand Wikipedia correctly, this white Republican from a privileged background turned out to be one of the most honest and decent men we had in government during the worst excesses of the current administration's own approach to patronage-based politics. He so resisted the culture of corruption and kickbacks that his own party turned against him. Read about him and judge for yourself.

*****As for privilege and victimization, I wrote everything I care to write on that two years ago. In my opinion, these are the things that Fr. Pfleger and others like him should be telling his sheep from his pulpit, and this is why they lead their sheep astray.

Like I said, I could never have been a priest.

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A white seminarian visiting a black churches

Senator Obama's pastor is making headlines again, so I'll mention a few seminary memories regarding African-American churches. There shouldn't be anything controversial here, but I will touch on a few issues regarding what Pastor Wright has been trying to pass off as genetically African.

My first real experience with African-American worship occurred when I volunteered in July 1996 for the Society of Most Holy Trinity (SST) and served in Christ the King parish in Jersey City, New Jersey. If I recall correctly (and maybe I don't) one can see the Statue of Liberty from the second floor on the back of the parish rectory.

At the time, Jersey City had a reputation as one of the most dangerous parts of the country, but I never saw any violence, just a lot of blight. I once walked home (two blocks from the parish) a 10 year-old who was afraid that some other kids would beat him up. I walked back alone. I think the pastor would have been unhappy about that, but nothing befell me.

Aside from that, I didn't get out of the parish unless I was in a car with other people. I worked in the Vacation Bible School, attended Mass, met another (white) volunteer with the Society, and met two seminarians whose notions of theology drove me away from the SST. One of them in particular told me that many theologians now believe in a fourth member of the Trinity called Sofia. I am not making this up; it alarmed me so much that I privately spoke with the pastor about it. The guy was probably yanking my leg, but if so he was extraordinarily good at keeping a straight face.

As a seminarian, I visited several African-American parishes. As an assignment for a class in pastoral practice, I took in a Sunday Mass at St. Sabina's parish in Chicago, where Fr. Pfleger preaches. When I arrived I harbored admiration for Fr. Pfleger. He was known for fighting to get billboards advertising beer and cigarettes out of inner cities, to get his parishioners to stop listening to violent-themed music, as well as a lot of other crusades regarding personal morality. If you look at his webpage you will see that he is immensely creative in his pastoral practices, and I still admire him deeply for this.

I am no Fr. Pfleger, however. When I left St. Sabina's four hours later, however, I was on my way out of seminary. I'll leave that story for another day (if ever), but "four hours" is no exaggeration. Fr. Pfleger's Mass was a long, drawn-out extravaganza with two hours of preaching. Even he couldn't sit through all of it, and left before communion was distributed. He had to catch a plane, so I and my fellow seminarians ended up staying at Mass longer than the priest celebrant!

I also spent a "pastoral weekend" visiting two black churches in other parts of Chicago. This included walking through inner-city Chicago after watching the original Rush Hour in a theater filled with African-Americans. The film was a lot of fun, made more so by the enthusiastic audience.

The walk home was somewhat disconcerting. We received a lot of strange look. At one point, one man started to follow us and sing, "We are the world..." for reasons that I still don't understand, apart from the fact that we were a bunch of white guys following a white priest at night through a reputedly dangerous black neighborhood.

One of the seminarians who fancied himself black on the inside stopped to talk with this man. (This is no smear; he really did fancy himself black on the inside, and harbored no qualms about labeling other seminarians as racists, for no better reason than that they disagreed with him.) The priest ran back from the front of our group and ordered this seminarian to join the rest of us. Later, the same priest told us that someone had been shot there recently. This outraged two of the seminarians who came from farm country. They left seminary at the end of the quarter.

I also visited a majority black parish in Norfolk, Virginia, but I don't have many memories of it, except for its gentlemanly black pastor (see below).

Three things were common among all these African-American parishes. First, they all had a copy of Lead Me Guide Me, the "Black Catholic Hymnal". Second, I never once saw any insanity preached. Fr. Pfleger came close, but I would have remembered it if he had said something as extreme as what Jeremiah Wright has said, e.g. the government created AIDS. Third, white pastors of black churches, such as Fr. Pfleger, go out of their way to act like stereotypical "black" pastors, even when their own parishioners are completely uninterested in that.

I want to emphasize that one line: Even when their own parishioners were uninterested in that.

I'll concede that the parishioners at St. Sabina's noon mass seemed to get a charge out of Fr. Pfleger's approach. At every other parish, however, Masses dominated by older black parishioners were usually relatively calm, except for the white guy in the white robe acting like an idiot. I asked one white priest about this afterwards, in more polite words, of course. He confirmed my impression in words that I never forgot: A lot of the older black Catholics converted to Catholicism because they wanted to get away from that "nonsense" in the black church.

All the African-American priests I have ever seen, by contrast, are very staid and laid-back. They seem to have come from those families that wanted to get away from the noisy black churches.

One of my favorite pastors ever was a retired black priest at Sacred Heart Cathedral in Raleigh, Monsignor Hadden. In a steady, dispassionate voice he routinely gave some of the most spiritual, thoughtful homilies I ever heard. (This, even when I disagreed strongly with what he said, which happened once. I don't recall the topic, but I think it was political.) The current Rector, Msgr. Sherba, is the opposite: a passionate, guitar-playing, five-minute homily priest. Msgr. Sherba is white (and a very good pastor, in my opinion).

Another black pastor I had was at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Health problems moved him away eventually, but he believed strongly in traditional liturgy. He might have said something about America inviting disaster because of abortion, but if so he did it without the theatrics of Jeremiah Wright. I learned later that he also got up and preached, week after week, with knees so bad that he sometimes wept from the pain when no one was watching.

The point of all this is that African-Americans are by no means a monolithic group. There are different cultures within the group, and I suspect that many of them disagree with the ravings of Jeremiah Wright.

I want to add something a comment that I made on Brandon's site a while back. Jeremiah Wright and his defenders may fancy him a prophet for speaking inconvenient truths to power, but he never seems to have done so. Even if he were speaking the truth when he says that the United States perpetrates terrorism on its own citizens, or that the government created AIDS and hands out drugs in order to destroy black people, he has until recently never said them outside the comfort of his own congregation or other like-minded people. They apparently liked what he said, found nothing outrageous in the remarks, and paid him handsomely for it. For all the bad things one can say about the American government—and the Tuskegee Experiments are among the worst of them, although it was not nearly on as grand a scale as, say, the Trail of Tears—it does say something that a man like Jeremiah Wright can say such things about America and not fear for his life. Try doing that in other countries. And none of this takes away from all the good works he may have done. Fr. Pfleger apparently thinks highly of Pastor Wright's works, and that estimation certainly impresses me.

On the other hand, I have known many priests who had no qualms about telling their parishioners things that they did not want to hear, not getting paid highly for it, and receiving as a consequence at least a cold shoulder, and usually something worse. There are many clergy for whom religion is not a business, but a genuine sacrifice. African-Americans are among these. I am quite sure that such clergy exist outside the one, true Catholic faith (I'd say I've know at least one or two Protestant clergymen like this).

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Seminary: professors

I've talked a little about the seminary I attended ten years ago, and about some of the humor in seminary life. Here I'll take a look back at the faculty I knew.

The faculty could be divided into the following categories:

• theology;
• worship;
• pastoral care;
• support (basically this means that I don't really know what they did, but I saw them around a lot).

I won't sit here as a judge of anyone's orthodoxy, but I will relate at least one incident that shocked me.

Overall, the faculty as I knew them were highly educated, thoughtful, and open to discussion. They were willing to entertain contrary opinions, and challenged the students to overcome bad habits of thinking. They set a high academic ideal, and assigned an immense amount of reading. In my wholly unreliable opinion, the "orthodoxy" of the priests generally declined as one moved down that list, with a few exceptions.

Let me give an example of "willing to entertain contrary opinions". My class in Moral Theology was taught by a professor known not only for rigorous fidelity to the teaching of the church, but for his unapologetic defense of unpopular teachings like contraception and euthanasia. (One of the biggest surprises of my seminary career was learning how many American Catholics seem to accept at least the soft euthanasia of withdrawing feeding tubes, which incidentally is contrary to the teaching of the Church.) During one discussion of whether an unmarried couple could use prophylactics during the conjugal act, the professor was enjoying himself while defending the teaching against, well, condoms.

I broke in to take a contrary point of view, based on something I had been wondering for a few months. I began with Cardinal Schoenborn's then-recent statement that it is a lesser evil for homosexuals engaging in sexual intercourse to use a condom and stop the spread of disease than not to—although, he pointed out, the homosexual intercourse itself remains a sin. The point was that if you've surrendered yourself to one evil, there's no point in making it worse by placing your health in danger.

Well, I asked, since intercourse between an unmarried couple is not the conjugal act, inasmuch as they aren't married, could one not extend the Cardinal's opinion to this case? Could an unmarried couple, for reasons of health, legitimately use prophylactics to avoid the spread of disease?

Quite a few students told me afterwards that they were shocked by this argument, not so much at the argument itself but at the person who made it. (I was also known for a spirited defense of traditional views of Catholic doctrine.) What I want to point out, however, is that the professor looked at me and smiled. He was delighted to have a new, original argument to deal with. He also batted it down rather quickly, explaining the "the conjugal act" refers to any intercourse between a man and a woman; what makes it "conjugal" is what is done, and not the legal structures around it (like marriage). Homosexual relations, on the other hand, are by their very nature not the "conjugal act", since they do not take place between a man and a woman. He had to explain this to me a couple of times before I saw what he was getting at, and I hope it conveys what I'm trying to explain. Questions, and different opinions, were invited and entertained, but in the end a reasonable case for the Catholic teaching was presented, usually addressing objections that had been presented. There is only one case where I remember that Catholic teaching was treated with anything less than reverence; I will explain that below.

Grade inflation had an effect. Whether due to the shortage of priests or to the lowered standards prevalent in many universities, no one that I knew was in danger of failing. Some students who, as far as I could tell, did nothing aside from visit the golf courses, and learned only a little more from osmosis, were making C's. I saw one deacon joke with younger students that, once he had received ordination, he would write a book on how to make it through seminary without reading anything. (How he could expect the book to sell is a mystery to me.)

However, most students made a good-faith effort to learn something, and some managed to complete nearly all the assignments. One of my seminary friends drove himself nearly sick with worry over his inability to read and comprehend everything assigned—sadly, he left seminary the semester after I did.

Few of the faculty at Mundelein Seminary ten years ago struck me as being outside of the mainstream. Most were even what one might call solid Catholics. One of the professors told us how he had sat on a committee that reviewed scripture for the Catholic bishops, and explained that the committee rejected the ICEL Psalm translation because its concern with inclusive language (a hot topic at the time, probably still is) "lost too much". Another offered the Holy Mass every morning at 6am, dressing in pre-Vatican II vestiments (complete with maniple!) which some of us attended. Befitting his past as a Marine chaplain, he tended to bark the Mass in fewer than 20 minutes.

The professors were not for the most part dry and boring. Several had already made names for themselves in the world of Catholic publishing as effective popularizers of theology. I'll mention Father Bob Barron, whom you can read more about (and by) at WordOnFire.org. Fr. Barron taught a Modern Philosophy class that everyone loved and a bunch of Theology classes that I never sat in, what on account of my leaving seminary and all, but his homilies at the Daily Masses were also very good. I learned from Father Barron the following summary of Hegelianism: history is God's attempt to come to know and undersatnd himself, and in Hegel God finally succeeded. I thought this was a gross exaggeration but Fr. Barron stuck with it and at least one other person I talked to since then who claimed to know a bit about Hegel agreed. (If Brandon reads this, maybe he can give his opinion.)

One might have described a couple of professors as mystical. One was a dual-rite priest who had permission to celebrate according to both the Roman Rite and the Byzantine Rite. Actually I don't think it was Byzantine per se, but related to the Byzantine Rite, but Melkite perhaps. He was soft-spoken and would mention quotes from Philokalia in his homilies. He taught a course on the Old Testament that changed the way I looked at the Jewish scriptures and greatly deepened my faith.

Most professors adhered, at least in words, to the full spectrum of Catholic teaching, including Social Justice. One of the liturgy professors openly disagreed with the teaching that only men are able to be priests—he was also rather critical of ICEL's translation of the Mass, and taught that the Mass was a sacrifice, which is solid Catholicism—and probably a number of them disagreed privately.

I only recall one example where, without any doubt, a professor spoke heresy openly and unapologetically. During my second (and final) year, the professor of Systematic Theology was a new arrival, formerly of the famous Louvain University. He started class with an assault on apologetics, criticized the church's reaction to the Modernists and generally defended them, admitting only that they had gone too far when I pointed out that one of them (Loisy I believe) denied the divinity of Christ. But they were pushed in that direction by the Church's reaction to them, he shrugged dismissively, moving on to another explanation of the brilliance of the Modernists.

Another time, he taught that it was ridiculous to baptize babies. This proved highly controversial (to my surprise) but no one had brought up the question of Original Sin, so I approached him after class to ask about it.

Yes, well, that teaching is a mistake, he said, or something to that effect. So of course it isn't necessary to baptize babies.

The general sense I had of his class, from day one, was of feeling that we had been dropped into this middle of a war zone. This professor had axes to grind, and he wasn't ashamed to grind them on us. If one of us advocated an opinion that didn't agree with his narrow opinions, he dismissed it quickly, with a hint of disdain. You could cite all the church documents and all the logical reasoning you wanted, but he didn't care. He wanted your mind to be open only as long as it was open to his opinions and to his snide remarks about the current regime in the Vatican.

He was, not to put too fine point on it, the least popular professor. I suspect that he received very low evaluations, because he started class the next quarter complaining about what we had written, and scolding us for not coming and talking to him directly about our concerns. He also explained that he had misunderstood the situation, and didn't quite realize what it meant that we were not being trained to be theologians but pastors, so that we should not be too challenged intellectually.

This obviously did not make him any more popular. I personally found his complaint deeply disingenuous, since most students, like me, had in fact talked to him directly about our concerns. One of them, a former doctor who probably wrote a scathing evaluation, had scolded him in class for not teaching us the things we had to know, teach, and defend once we received ordination and faced the real world. The one thing I remember saying on his evaluation was that he had seemed to deny Original Sin, so I went to ask him about it directly, and he made his denial explicit. There was hardly any subterfuge about it; simply put, he, like his theological worldview, resided in a fantasy world that, when it encountered reality, would deny it rather than admit it was wrong. I heard from a friend who received ordination that shortly after I left, he also left, and the story circulating among the seminary students was that he had returned to his home country, left the priesthood, married, and fathered a child. You can't entirely trust those stories; I would stop at the part where this professor left the seminary.

The remarkable thing about my experience at Mundelein was that those professors taught "orthodox" Catholic doctrine were the most popular, as well as the most open to discussion and debate. Even if the students didn't like what the professors had to say, they appreciated the discussion and were thankful that they learned something to relate to the Catholics in their care once they entered the real world as pastors.

Conversely, the less orthodox a professor was, the more reactionary he seemed, the more dismissive or even disdainful of other points of view, and the less open to hearing arguments against his favored positions and dealing with them respectfully and fairly. I mentioned the one extreme above, but he was merely the extreme; I noticed this in other professors, too. That phenomenon made an impression on me that I've never forgotten. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's always true, of course, and it may be that, in the environment of a seminary where they (usually) felt some compulsion to approach orthodoxy, they struggled against a natural desire to place their own beliefs in a better light than the Church's. That's actually quite hard to do.

Of course, that's my point of view. But it would have been a difficult time for them. Chicago had a new Cardinal, less easy-going than the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, and Cardinal George gave an address early on to the faculty where he made plain his own disdain for seminary professors who imagined themselves at "a school of theology" rather than a "seminary". He explained the difference between the two, and took some shots at other problems he perceived in the Church, like ICEL's translations. My spiritual adviser didn't care much for the address, explaining afterwards, "He was just reciting a list of things he doesn't like."

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You may have noticed a trend, incidentally. I have criticized ICEL's translation of the Mass in places on this weblog; in this one entry today, I've cited three authorities (scriptural, liturgical, and pastoral) who also took ICEL to task for abysmal practices in translation. I once remarked to my wife on what certain passages of the Mass actually say in the original Latin, as compared to how ICEL translates it.

Speaking of the original Latin meaning, my wife said, "I want to say that, instead." That speaks for itself. Not surprisingly, the phrase we were discussing appears as a common refrain of the people in every liturgy that I know of. It is translated correctly from the Latin in every language I know execept English.

Yet the correct translation of et cum spiritu tuo remains controversial in many sectors of the Church.

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Seminary humor

My ten-year search for a vocation led me to visit a number of organizations:

1. St. Michael's Abbey in Orange, CA;
2. the Fathers of Mercy;
3. the Society of the Most Holy Trinity's mission at Christ the King parish in Jersey City, NJ;
4. the Discalced Carmelite monastery in Washington, DC;
5. the Benedictine monastery in Richmond, VA;
6. the Dominicans of the Eastern Province;
7. the Diocese of Richmond in Virginia, which sent me to Mundelein Seminary in Chicago.

Every organization I visited had something in common with all the rest, but the one thing I never really expected to find was a healthy sense of humor.

I wouldn't have guessed it from most media depictions of the clergy, but the vast majority of priests, monks, and seminarians I met had a great sense of humor. The closest I think I've seen is in the TV show Firefly, when we catch a glimpse of dinner on the spaceship and Shepherd Book is relating a hilarious story of life at the Abbey. While I was in seminary I witnessed a number of practical jokes.

The one I remember best centers on a practical joke that nearly backfired. Most seminarians hung out in small groups, and one small group was particularly energetic, perhaps because they were the youngest (I think). They were big sports fans.

One of these enjoyed pulling pranks on other people, then claiming that someone else did it. We'll call him The Weasel, not out of any sense of malice, but because that's what the students at seminary called him. This was partly because during the Super Bowl that year, Bud Lite ran a commercial of a chameleon named Frank who tried to assassinate the Bud Lite frogs by hiring a ferret to electrocute them, or something like that. The ferret failed miserably and Frank ends the commercial by groaning, Never send a ferret to do a weasel's job. Someone in the room pointed to our prank-pulling acquaintance, and the name stuck.

One of the more common recipients of the Weasel's pranks was a good-humored fellow named James. (Remember that names have been changed to protect the guilty.) James, suffering one too many of these pranks, decided to wreak his revenge. One weekend, while the rest of the gang was out of town for a retreat or a visit to a parish or some such, James obtained from the local shopping centers an inflatable pool, the kind that people buy for their children to play in in the back yard. His goal was to inflate the pool, fill it with water, and leave it in the middle of the Weasel's room.

If you're scratching your head trying to figure out why this is funny, you're not alone; I never figure that out either. Still, that was the plan. It might have had something to do with turning the Weasel's room into some sort of tropical paradise. Like any comedy, you shoudln't think this through too carefully.

The Weasel always left his room door unlocked, so it was no problem for James to walk in with the pool and inflate it. His next task was to fill it with water. This created an unforseen challenge: there was no ready access to water in the sleeping area.

One of Cardinal Mundelein's more practical ideas for promoting vocations to the priesthood had been to include a bathroom in every seminarian's room. This was different from any other Catholic seminary or religious house at the time (and probably even today) where men slept in individual cells but shared a common bathroom. The story we heard was that Rome did not approve of such things, and would never approve of such things, but Mundelein knew that young men who lived in large families and share one bathroom with a father, a mother, and probably at least one sister would find seminary a much more attractive proposition if it involved having a bathroom to himself. To avoid Rome's veto, Mundelein sent them plans of a conventional layout: individual cells for sleep and study, and a common bathroom area. When approval came back, he changed the plans so that each student had his own bathroom.

This meant that James had ready access to water. Unfortunately, he didn't have any easy method of getting the water from the bathroom to the pool. He could carry the pool into the bathroom, but the bathroom was too small to set the pool down and fill it. (The shower stall has room enough to stand and stretch in, but not much more.) He hadn't thought to bring a hose to hold one end at the sink faucet and leave the other in the pool. The sink wasn't deep enough to fill a pitcher. He was reduced to walking from the pool to the bathroom, filling a glass with water from the sink, walking back to the pool, pouring the water in, and repeating. You can imagine that this was taking him a long time.

There was one more major oversight in James' plan: he forgot to close the door to the Weasel's room. Eventually he walked out of the bathroom to find the Vice-Rector sitting on a chair, contemplating the situation.

"Oh, uh, Father!" James stammered, at a loss for words.

"I wonder what the Rector would say if he were to see this," the Vice-Rector remarked in an even tone. He was famous for that even tone; he never seemed to get overly excited or depressed.

No sooner did the Vice-Rector say this than the Rector himself walked in. The timing could not have been worse, and I have wondered if there wasn't some collusion on their part. You can imagine James' state of mind at the moment. He looked from the Vice-Rector to the Rector and doubtless imagined what his diocese's Vocation Director would say upon receiving a letter informing him that James had been dismissed from seminary for this sort of prank.

The rector was also known for an even tone; I never remember him being particularly excited, either. They made a good pair, and I admired them. The rector looked at the pool, then looked at James, and said, I believe I will leave this in the very capable hands of my Vice-Rector, and walked out.

The Vice-Rector asked simply, You're not going to fill the pool more than halfway, are you? It was more of a statement than a question, to which James answered, No, sir!

Good, the Vice-Rector said, then stood up and walked out.

Upon hearing James tell this story, the only thing any of us could make of it was that the Vice-Rector was not unaware of the Weasel's pranks, and was sympathetic. Whatever the case, James immediately stopped filling the pool, walked out of the Weasel's room, closing the door behind him this time, and tried to find a way to calm down. The Weasel returned to find the pool in the middle of his room, and suddenly the curious prank became funny because the Weasel had to spend quite a bit of time getting the water out of the pool. This provided the cam (="floor") with some entertainment, and made James something of a folk hero among us. We already liked him, but now here was a guy who had out-weaseled the Weasel.

...until the next morning, when James woke and opened his door to find his still-inflated pool taped to the wall around the exit. He had bit of a hard time getting out.

The Weasel played a few more pranks on James and others, but my favorite prank of all was played on the Weasel a couple of weeks later. He still hadn't learned to lock his room, and someone went in and toilet-papered the place. He didn't merely toilet paper the place in obvious ways: he put toilet paper between the bedsheets, took some of the Weasel's pants from the dresser and inserted toilet paper in the leggings, placed toilet paper in the shower head and the faucet, in the desks, among the books—the Weasel himself said that he was still discovering toilet paper one or two weeks later. The coup de grace, if I may use the phrase, was the message left on the Weasel's screen saver.

The Weasel's computer had a screen saver that scrolled a message across the screen. It was probably a religious message; I don't recall. The prankster changed the message, turning the Weasel's nickname on its head: Never send a weasel to do a ferret's job.

No one figured out who pulled that prank. The one certain thing is that James had a clear alibi. Pranks continued, but my memory is that James was no longer such a target as he had been.

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Both James and the Weasel completed seminary, and are still priests today. I've looked them up on the internet, and just listened to part of James' most recent Sunday homily on "how to pray." They seem to be doing just fine.

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Seminary: The University of Saint Mary of the Lake

The University of Saint Mary of the Lake was, according to the lore, Cardinal Mundelein's dream of a "Catholic University of the West", something more accessible to midwestern Catholics than Catholic University in the District of Columbia. Mundelein looked to some land north of a town north of Chicago and decided to plant around a man-made lake a university that would rank among the best universities of the world. The first stage of his plan was to build a seminary, and he arranged things so that the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, would train the finest priests in the world.

Things didn't work out quite the way Mundelein had envisioned. I don't know with certainty why; I only know the rumors that I heard from other seminarians or faculty. I won't repeat them now, but it is a matter of history that the university never grew beyond the seminary at the head of the lake.

The main chapel, center of the seminary, stands at the head of the lake, I believe its northernmost tip. From the outside it looks remarkably like any of the Baptist churches here in town, actually, but once you went inside you lost any doubt that you were in a Catholic church. This main chapel is splendid. I remember a beautiful painting, but I don't remember the subject. A tall wooden rail, mounted by angels, had been built to separate the seminarians from any of the laity who might visit; the rail remains, although when I was there any laity in attendance were now allowed, even encouraged, to sit ahead of it. I don't know what sort of ceremonies they held in Mundelein's time, but during my time the seminary held formal masses there such as commencement, as well as one mass a week. One of the priests squandered a homily to, among other things, deride those masses, with all the pomp and circumstance they entailed, as "imperialistic", but I suspect that he was in a small and dwindling minority. He was also—amusingly, to me—the Archdiocese's vocations director at the time. I wonder if Cardinal George has any idea what that man used to tell his spiritual directees. Probably not; these things were supposed to be confidential, but the story went around that one of his directees was ecstatic at being relieved of the obligation to pray the Psalms through the Liturgy of the Hours.

To the east and west of the chapel stand two classroom buildings. I have no idea what one of the buildings was used for then; I'm not sure they used it at all at the time. The other, however, was where we had theology classes and some (but not all) philosophy classes.

In the courtyard between each of these buildings and the chapel stood a statue. I only remember the statue between the chapel and the theology hall; it was a statue of a sublime Virgin Mary, pointing to her heart.

Cor Immaculatum Mariæ, Ora Pro Nobis.
"Immaculate Heart of Mary, Pray for Us."

Those words were etched onto the pedestal beneath the statue. I have a photo of it somewhere, although I can't find it at the moment.

East of the theology hall stands the theology residence, where all the theology students lived. Students were organized by cams, which is short for the Italian word camera. I always thought that word meant "room", especially when I was sleeping in a camera da letto, or eating in a camera da pranzo, but lots of students at Mundelein insisted it meant "hall".

Further east stands the faculty residence, where philosophy students lived in the north wing, while the faculty not assigned to cams lived in the remaining wings. Across a little road further east lay a cemetery that I don't remember anyone ever visiting except me, and that only rarely. I don't even recall who lay there. A statue of Saint Paul stood to the west of the faculty residence and to the south of the theology residence, keeping silent vigil over the main road around the lake. South of the faculty residence stood a theater that, while I was there, saw use only for the meeting of a society of organ enthusasts that. Apparently the organ was good enough to play with silent film music, although I don't recall if we watched a silent film.

The cafeteria, called the "refectory", stood north of the chapel. This was separated into three main areas: two large dining rooms and the kitchen. The seminarian's dining room was a raucous affair when school was in session. We sat eating underneath a portrait of Christ's passion, which was signed by an admirer of the Nazi party. The artists so admired the Nazis that he had painted a Nazi swastika into one of the corners. This offended one of my fellow philosophy students so much that he talked to the rector, who agreed to look into having the symbol removed. I don't know whether it ever came off.

The other dining room was used when large groups came to visit, although some faculty ate there too, as I recall. The faculty had a quieter room in the back, but some of them liked to mingle with the seminarians. In case you were wondering: no, fidem scit is not written over the entrance. (Literally it means, "he knows the faith." The urban Catholic legend associating this phrase with refectories makes sense only if you pronounce it as Ecclesiastical Latin and interpret it as vulgar English.)

There were some other buildings to the west; the seminary was largely symmetric. One was the library; another was a residence for the nuns who served the faculty. Directly south of the chapel was another building that the casual visitor would not see unless he took a walk aroudn the lake, and perhaps not even then; below the road was a recreation building containing a heated pool and rowboats. The boats didn't see much use, because it was generally too cold to go out when school was in session. The lake would freeze over and eventually the maintenance chief would put up signs stating that the ice was thick enough to skate on. I tried swimming in the pool, but my skin started to complain about the chlorine, and besides I didn't like walking all the way out there in the cold.

I definitely remember how cold the Chicago area becomes! The snow would start and never seem to stop; the window would frost; the radiator would work either too well, or not well enough, and it seemed so dry all the time. I've wondered many times how differently things might have turned out if the Diocese of Richmond had sent me to Rome instead, or at least to Catholic University in DC. I acquired all kinds of curious maladies while I was at Mundelein; nothing serious of course, but still disconcerting to someone whose only real health problem in all his years before then had been persistent, nasty attacks of asthma. I don't recall a single asthma attack while at Mundelein; at least that favored me.

The rest of the university was largely an undeveloped forest. A couple of small roads led from the main highway through the (never closed) gates, around the large lake, in front out of chapel and around the seminary, then out onto a highway behind the seminary. A path led around the lake, and one could walk there and pray peacefully, or just enjoy the scenery. I tried to make a habit of walking around the lake while praying the rosary, but it never took; the lake was too large. I tried to make a habit of walking around the seminary side of the lake while praying the rosary, but that never took either. I must have done it frequently enough to discuss with my spiritual director some Canadian geese that I saw once.

I also remember the rector, Fr. Canary, walking past me on one such walk. I was approaching the chapel on a cold, cloudy day; He had left the administration building and was huddling in a long, black coat. I didn't expect him to say anything to me, but he did. Say a decade for me, John, he asked as he passed me by. I did.

Ten years ago today, on a typical Sunday evening, I likely returned to my room after dinner, sat down facing the window, and sang Vespers in my room. Afterwards, I likely walked out and visited the common room, where I probably watched a little television, joked with other seminarians, and eventually went to bed content. I probably didn't study, not out of laziness, but out of an attempt to keep the Lord's Day holy; as a rule I avoided studying on Sundays. As a "pre-theology student" I studied philosophy and had fallen in love with it quickly. Indeed, I enjoyed the common life of prayer and study. The school year's progress had had melted nearly all my fears of inadequacy in the seeming light of God's grace. As the school year wound down in the Spring, I harbored no doubts that I was on course to become a priest and to serve God's people.

Today, of course, I am a professor of mathematics, married, with three children. My inner eye widens in amazement to recall these memories. It amazes me that, for a year and a half, I progressed joyfully to what was either the greatest miracle or the greatest mistake of my life. I ask myself how I could have been so perfectly happy with it then, so perfectly self-assured, and so perfectly ignorant of the weeds growing within that would ultimately dash it all to pieces.

For some strange reason I've recently felt a desire to describe those seminary days in the weblog. I don't plan to psychoanalyze myself and discover what went wrong; I have no competence in such matters, nor any interest. I plan only to revisit the seminary as it remains in my mind every now and again. These memories are probably not quite the same as the real thing—for example, I'm worried now that I've placed the library on the wrong side of the chapel, and that it stands between the theology hall and the theology residence, or perhaps between the hall and the chapel. Still, I hope that the memories are be close enough to give the reader a feel for what one might expect. Names will be changed, not to protect anyone from scandal—since I have remained blissfully unaware of any serious misbehavior or scandal—but merely from a sense of decency. The people in my memories, after all, are not the same as the people I genuinely knew, of whom I remain, by and large, quite fond.

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