I Alone Have Escaped to Tell You: My Life and Pastimes

Chapter Three: Spoiled Priest

t h r e e Spoiled Priest nazareth hall stood on the shore of lake johanna, north of St. Paul, out Snelling Avenue from the fairgrounds. That was where the street car line stopped in the fall of 1947 when I set off for my old school on foot, thereby impressing the rector Father Shanahan and doubtless making him more amenable to my request that I be readmitted to Nazareth Hall. I had already spent the best years of my youth here. The seminary system of the archdiocese of St. Paul in those days comprised twelve years, six of them to be spent at the preparatory seminary , Nazareth Hall, and the rest at the major seminary on Summit Avenue and the River Road in St. Paul. As I noted earlier, in the spring of my eighth grade I sometimes walked from home to the chapel of the seminary on Sundays to watch the seminarians process into chapel for vespers , clad in their cassocks and surplices and birettas. Sister Ellen Joseph made sure that the boys in her class knew of the possibility of a vocation. Looking through the bulletins from various seminaries, I was struck by their horaria. Each day was ordered by the hour, from rising to going to bed. Four boys from my eighth-grade class went off to Nazareth Hall: Eugene Schmidt, John Johnson, Art Hesburg, and myself. In the event, none of us was ordained (although our classmate Marvin Deutsch became a 13 14 Spoiled Priest Maryknoll missionary), but then, the point of the prolonged system was to give one an opportunity to make a careful decision. I had left Nazareth Hall after three years and joined the Marine Corps (of which more later), and now I wanted to return. I had lolled on the main beach at Lake Nokomis , I had put in a quarter term at the University of Minnesota, but I was dissatisfied. When I entered Nazareth Hall in 1942 I was thirteen years old, a First Year boy. Each year received its ordinal designation, suggesting a continuum that ran through high school into the first two years of college. My heroes were upperclassmen, especially those college men who held positions of prominence—head prefect, head waiter, editor of the Puer Nazarenus, even the student barber, Don Schnitizius—and I became a kindof petduringmyfirstyear.ForonethingIwassmall,naïve,andsassy. One of my assignments, fulfilled on Sunday morning between the low Mass and the high Mass, was to take a pitcher of holy water along the college corridor and fill the little fonts inside each door. After knocking, I would open the door and call out, Ecce aqua benedicta. To which the reply was Sit nobis salus et vita. As the year went on, I intoned my message to the opening notes of “My Darling Clementine” until, when the novelty wore off, a disapproving frown or two told me that laughter could be had at too high a price. One of the agonizing aspects of my first year at Nazareth Hall was the factthatIdidnothaveasuit.Itwasspecifiedinthelistof clothingtobring along, but my mother apparently thought it was optional—a thirteenyear -old wearing a suit? I had two sweaters, one red and one green, which I alternated. It was only on Sunday that the lack of a suit mattered, since that is the day one dressed up, but I was dressed as I always was. However keenlyIfeltthis—andinmyownmindthehumiliationwasmagnified— I never said a word to my mother. How proud she had been when they brought me to school and she came up to the First-Year dorm to get me settled. Because of our small size, Johnnie Johnson and I were chosen by Father Casey to serve benediction in the sisters’ chapel in the afternoon. The service could not have occurred every day, but I forget which days it was. In any case, we would set off from Father Casey’s freshman English class and march through the refectory into the kitchen, where double doors admitted us to the convent wing. The place was spick and span, but the sacristy and sanctuary were Lilliputian in size, which was why the altar boys had to be small. When we arrived the nuns would already be at prayer in their heavy German accents. This was war time, and one of them, Sister Theotima, had a brother in the German navy, but Catholicism is catholic. How...