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My Father's Business - Although I Had Only a Vague, Romantic Notion of What That Was

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My Father's Business - Although I Had Only a Vague, Romantic Notion of What That Was My Father’s Business A Memoir of a Teenage, Catholic Seminarian in the Turbulent 1960s by Charles W. Morel Published in 2013 on the centennial of the founding of the Venard Not for Copying, or Distribution without author's permission. Thank you. Copyright 2013, [email protected] His Father's Business And his parents were wont to go every year to Jerusalem at the Feast of the Passover. And when he was twelve years old, they went up to Jerusalem according to the custom of the feast. And after they had fulfilled the days, when they were returning, the boy Jesus remained in Jerusalem, and his parents did not know it. But thinking that he was in the caravan, they had come a day’s journey before it occurred to them to look for him among their relatives and acquaintances. And not finding him, they returned to Jerusalem in search of him. And it came to pass after three days, that they found him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions. And all who were listening to him were amazed at his understanding and his answers. And when they saw him, they were astonished. And his mother said to him, “Son, why hast thou done so to us? Behold, in sorrow, thy father and I have been seeking thee.” And he said to them, “How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be about my Father’s business?” And they did not understand the word that he spoke to them. And he went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was subject to them; and his mother kept all these things carefully in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and grace before God and men. Luke 2:41-52 2 Dedication This memoir is dedicated to my father, Charles J. Morel 1917 - 2004 He taught his four sons, through his example, to be good men, husbands and fathers. He went about his Father's Business with dignity, humor and faith. He is loved. He is missed. He is emulated. 3 Table of Contents Preface 5 Chapter 1 Vocation 8 Chapter 2 People 22 Chapter 3 Institutional Life 38 Chapter 4 Spiritual Life 80 Chapter 5 Manual Labor 99 Chapter 6 Recreation 122 Chapter 7 Activities 132 Chapter 8 Sexuality 154 Chapter 9 Substances 171 Chapter 10 Music 182 Chapter 11 Reflections 200 4 Preface We live in an age in which time itself seems to be accelerating. The rapid changes that occur continually push events and experiences further and further into the distant past. While there is unquestionable value in living in the present, the past remains important too, if for no other reason than as a means to measure our growth and progress in life. Change is a universal constant. In the midst of continual change, and with attention on the future, we may overlook our past as simply being over and done with. We may even dismiss our past as ordinary. But can there truly be any life that may be considered ordinary? Each person's life offers a unique and fascinating story. Sadly, we don’t hear many of these tales. Usually the stories we read or hear about are either of the heroic or the horrific. Admittedly, most of our lives could be considered ordinary when compared with those of Mother Theresa or Osama Bin Laden. Yet just as they surely experienced ordinariness within their lives, we experience extraordinariness within our own. The insightful Mark Twain said: "There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior, there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy". There simply is no such thing as an ordinary life. I believe each of us has a life story worthy of a published biography. That's because each and every one of us is extraordinary and absolutely unique. Through our stories, we can recognize the universality of our struggles and triumphs. This is because at an essential level, we are all connected. We can relate to the familiar themes within each other's lives, and at the same time relish the details which surely differ from person to person. Though the details and specifics of our experiences may be unique, the themes 5 are universal. No matter how plain and ordinary our lives may be by the standards of the world, each and every one of us has moments of greatness! This is the story of a sixty-something man recounting the events of high school some fifty years past. That sounds pretty ordinary, doesn't it? Well yes, but the high school was not ordinary. It was a seminary, an institution for preparing teenage boys for the Catholic priesthood. The roots of this time honored means of preparing priests grew out of the monasteries of the Middle Ages. By the mid-20th century however, the junior seminary was becoming an anachronism. Efforts to retain the tradition were failing and high school seminaries were slowly dying due to changing times and decreasing enrollments. The turbulent and revolutionary 1960s provided the final blow. Though the specific events recounted here will undoubtedly differ from your own, the searching, the questioning, the struggling may be familiar to you. Questions of divine and sinful nature, mortality and immortality, right and wrong, heaven and hell, meaning and meaninglessness, are issues faced by each of us. In this, we are all ordinary. What makes our lives extraordinary and unique, are the myriad ways in which we discover our own answers to these universally vexing questions. This is the story of my teenage years as a Catholic and as a seminarian studying for the priesthood. I did not complete my journey to the priesthood. My seminary experiences are threads woven within the fabric of my life-long spiritual journey. My purpose in writing is to document a way of life that has vanished and is in danger of being forgotten. As a memoir, it is written from my personal perspective, and includes elements of my spiritual development and thoughts about the Church itself. 6 Within seminary life in the 1960s, I experienced the joy of community living, guidance from excellent role models, a first-rate college preparatory education, and close relationships that affect me to this day. For this, I am grateful and will always hold my seminary experiences dear within my heart. Note: The events recounted here are true. They are, however, recalled from my memories of fifty years in the past and may not be absolutely or historically accurate. I used the actual names for all adults. The names of all seminarians have been changed. Information about Catholic doctrine or practices are from my recollections as an adolescent and may not be entirely accurate. CWM 7 Chapter 1: Vocation The Catholic Church of my youth was familiar and comforting to me. Born to life-long Catholic parents and baptized as an infant, I was steeped in the culture of the Church from birth. My childhood recollections are filled with memories of Sunday Mass, First Friday breakfasts (crumb buns, cinnamon rolls and hot cocoa in the cafeteria of St. Anthony’s School), evening Novenas, and Christmas midnight Masses. I abstained from eating meat on Fridays. I served as an altar boy for weddings on Saturdays. I wore ashes on my forehead each Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent, and abstained from eating meat until Easter Sunday. Every year I went with my family to the Holy Name Day Parade in Paterson, New Jersey and cheered as Dad and the other men of the parish marched by, each carrying a blue, triangular Holy Name Society pennant. My favorite marchers were the Knights of Columbus, resplendent in their fancy uniforms, complete with ceremonial swords and plumed hats. As a Catholic boy I treasured my rosary beads and fingered each bead hundreds of times as I prayed the rosary, repeating an "Our Father", "Hail Mary", or "Glory Be to the Father" for each bead. I wore Miraculous Medals, St. Christopher Medals and green scapulars around my neck. I possessed an awesome collection of holy cards depicting Jesus, Mary, and many of the saints. I was frequently exposed to - and listened with fascinated horror - to the stories of the many martyrs of the Church who willingly suffered all manner of imaginative tortures. I amassed centuries of indulgences, a means for deducting time from my future sentence in Purgatory, by the utterance of short invocations, called ejaculations, such as “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph”. For years my Saturday evenings were spent selling cigarettes, candy, hot dogs, soda pop and coffee at countless Bingo games in the smoke-filled school auditorium. I was a Cub Scout and Boy 8 Scout in St. Anthony’s Parish and I sang in Pueri Cantores, the boys’ choir at church. I was an acolyte, which was what amounted to a junior altar boy. Then after learning my Latin prayers and responses, I became a full-fledged altar boy with black cassock and white surplice. I was a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic kid and I took great joy in hanging around the priests and helping out in the rectory, the sacristy and the sanctuary. In spite of the stories of sexual abuse of children by priests, I never had a hint of trouble like that until I returned to the closed seminary for a visit during the summer between high school and college. It had been converted into a retirement community for elderly and impaired priests.
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