Miracle on High Street: The Rise, Fall and Resurrection of St. Benedict's Prep in Newark, N.J.

7. ‘‘He Was Afraid of the City’’: Abbot Patrick, the Monastic Family, and Postwar Newark, 1945–1967

7 ‘‘He Was Afraid of the City’’: Abbot Patrick, the Monastic Family, and Postwar Newark, 1945–1967 In the months before the end of World War II, Abbot Patrick O’Brien appointed a committee to plan for the building of ‘‘a new and greater St. Benedict’s, to be located in Newark, N.J.’’ On four separate occasions in the 1940s, the monks agreed to build at Benedict’s, but shovels never hit the ground as concerns repeatedly stalled their plans to expand. In particular, Abbot Patrick had major reservations. ‘‘He was afraid of the city. He saw no future in it,’’ his successor revealed years later. After a decade of indecision, Abbot Patrick controversially switched the abbey ’s title from Newark to Morristown in 1956. Bitter about the decision , monks in Newark did not allow Abbot Patrick to move the school too. After ‘‘spurning strong overtures’’ to set up the ninety-year-old prep school in a suburban location, it was decided that St. Benedict’s Prep would remain in Newark. Mayor Leo P. Carlin, a 1926 alumnus, chaired a fund-raising committee for a new school building on High Street. The campaign rallied behind the banner ‘‘Benedict’s Builds with Newark.’’1 Ironically, as Abbot Patrick and his fellow monks debated their future in Newark in the late 1950s and early 1960s, St. Benedict’s was a thriving, self-confident institution at the peak of its influence. More than seven hundred students jammed into the school’s classrooms and an estimated five hundred qualified applicants were turned away each year for lack of space. Graduates went on to college in record numbers before distinguishing themselves in various professions, especially the church, business, law, and government. Joe Kasberger’s football and baseball teams pieced together incredible winning streaks, garnering state and national recognition. With the school’s reputation as an ‘‘he was afraid of the city’’ | 135 excellent academic institution and an athletic powerhouse that was also concerned with molding young Catholic men, St. Benedict’s mirrored the generational tale of Philip Roth’s ‘‘immigrant rocket’’: ‘‘As a family they flew the flight of the immigrant rocket, the upward, unbroken immigrant trajectory from the slave-driven great-grandfather to the self-driven grandfather to the self-confident, accomplished, independent father to the highest flier of them all, the fourth generation child for whom America was to be heaven itself.’’ One monk-teacher of the era commented, ‘‘Everybody thought St. Benedict’s would be the same for years and years to come. It felt secure in itself; it had its own niche and was set to go on that way forever.’’2 The sense of accomplishment and timelessness at St. Benedict’s Prep, so characteristic of the Catholic Church at the time, was shattered by the dramatic changes wrought by events of the 1960s, including the civil rights movement and the Second Vatican Council. Additionally, suburbanization and deindustrialization continued at breakneck speed, and it did so at the expense of cities like Newark. In particular, the times influenced how individuals in the monastic family thought about the crucial issues of the day, and the interplay among religion, race, and community helped explain many of the individual and collective decisions made during such uncertain and unsettled times. It also sheds light on the debate over the futures of the monasteries and schools in both Newark and Morristown. Some monks no doubt empathized with Roth’s character Lou Levov in American Pastoral; he looked back on the changes in his beloved Newark from the vantage point of the late twentieth century and said, ‘‘The changes are beyond conception . I sometimes think that more has changed since 1945 than in all the years of history there have been.’’3 Double-Cross Abbey Most Newarkers believed the days and years following the conclusion of World War II held boundless opportunity. Beginning in 1946, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey started to pour millions of dollars into the development of Newark Airport and Port Newark. 136 | ‘‘he was afraid of the city’’ Newark’s two largest insurance firms, Mutual Benefit Life and the Prudential , linked their futures to the city when both built new office complexes overlooking the historic Washington Park. Anheuser-Busch, the nation’s largest brewer, planned construction of a twenty-nine-million -dollar plant near the airport. Rutgers and Seton...