In defense of Mt. Saint Mary's
Portier, William L.
William L. Portier IN DEFENSE OF MT. SAINT MARY'S They are evangelical, not conservative Last Easter Sunday (April 4, 1999), the New York Times Magazine ran a long cover story titled "Why a...
...If our contemporary thurifer had been a 1950s' basketball player, my old Irish pastor would have benched him for being a hot dog...
...Hasn't conversion in evangelical America always seemed so to those who observe it from without...
...He was swinging the thurible in a one hundred and eighty-degree arc...
...Personal conversion and public witness are central to the evangelical ethos...
...From this perspective, and with due allowance for the predictable excesses of "first fervor," the seminarians Jennifer Egan profiled are doing a new thing...
...How would the priests who taught me to serve benediction have responded to such an extravagant display...
...Imagine a 1950s' seminary...
...SAINT MARY'S They are evangelical, not conservative Last Easter Sunday (April 4, 1999), the New York Times Magazine ran a long cover story titled "Why a Priest" by Jennifer Egan...
...Authority in a well-defined subculture may have seemed stifling...
...uring my years at Emmitsburg, I have come to see these seeming anomalies as examples of American evangelical Christianity in Catholic form...
...But in a more open and pluralistic culture, some young Catholics may welcome authority as helping to center their lives and define their common identity...
...Its editorial (April 23,1999) said that "seminaries like Mount Saint Mary's are preparing priests to serve a church in full retreat from the modern world...
...past that, if done by more sympathetic or exotic figures, we might call inculturation...
...I experience a similar liturgical dissonance on Sunday mornings in my parish when I hear a church full of Catholics singing "Amazing Grace" or "Just a Closer Walk with Thee...
...They all wore cassocks and surplices...
...What really convinces me in preferring evangelical over conservative is the seminarians' marked contrast with the 1950s as I remember them...
...In contrast to the age of Eisenhower, the following stories show contemporary Catholics investing significantly in dramatic forms of individual religious witness that go beyond the example of a good life in the world...
...It is an exhilaration that comes from being in the middle of things and knowing that your holy dreams have time on their side...
...After their ordinations, parishioners and others will help complete their formation...
...9 A couple of years ago, at noon Mass in a dorm chapel without pews or kneelers, I watched in amazement as a seminarian nearly touched his forehead to the floor in a solitary act of reverence after the elevation of the consecrated host and chalice...
...In establishing new boundaries and identity, Mount Saint Mary's seminarians have sometimes, in my experience, gone to extremes...
...In response to the Commonweal editorial (see Correspondence, July 16,1999), Father Kevin Rhoades, rector of Mount Saint Mary's Seminary, cast his seminarians as timely rather than retrograde, signs of "the new springtime of the church," inspired by the teachings of Vatican II and the example of John Paul II...
...Among many dismayed by its tone was Commonweal...
...Even if a number come in or leave together, they appear to pray, not together but individually at the same time...
...This could have been a scene from the fifties except for the incongruous sight of the seminarian at the head of the procession...
...But a comparison of the council's reception in the United States with its reception in other countries, where it did not always result in a polarized "unholy alliance" between liberals and conservatives, highlights the central place of the subculture's dissolution in our own history...
...The latter is especially distinctive in an American setting...
...Each of Egan's seminarians has a conversion story and tells it eagerly as a form of witness...
...Given the pitfalls of individualism that we see in the history of American evangelical Christianity, an emphasis on church authority among evangelical Catholics should come as no surprise...
...In working for a new future, liberal Catholics will have to engage not only with the world, but also with younger evangelical Catholics who do not, in the manner of Durkheim's homo duplex, carry the Catholic subculture around inside themselves...
...Why "evangelical...
...Back then, only "converts" told conversion stories...
...If this had been the 1950s, everyone in the congregation would have performed this act of reverence or no one would have...
...My reading rests on the view that the dissolution of the American Catholic immigrant subctfl~re offers a better explanation of these younger Catholics than an older generation's conflicted experience of Vatican II...
...Like most interesting religious people, Egan's seminarians are making the sort of creative appropriation of the Commonweal 3 ~ February 11, 2000...
...Perhaps this is why they have not replicated themselves on the scale of the hopes inspired by Vatican II...
...All the seminarians come into the dining room at the same time...
...At first I thought I had crashed a 1950s' Catholic TheoCommonweal 3 | February 11, 2000 logical Society of America meeting...
...It is significant that, rather than Egan's "last counterculture," Father Rhoades talks about training seminarians for the "evangelization of culture" according to the vision and teaching of Gaudium et spes, Evangelii Commonweal 3 2 February 11, 2000 nuntiandi, and Ecclesia in America...
...Egan's story touched a nerve...
...As the premier contemporary Christian evangelist, the pope's journeys on behalf of the gospel are unprecedented in the history of the papacy...
...Somewhat foreign to Catholic ears, the term evangelical designates, historically and sociologically, those forms of Christianity especially fitted to modern social and cultural conditions, especially pluralism...
...The rector or another faculty member leads grace...
...William L. Portier is Henry J. Knott Professor at Mount Saint Mary's College, Emmitsburg, Maryland...
...First, the seminarians come in individually at different times...
...he pope is at the heart of evangelical Catholicism...
...They all say it together...
...I can think of older Catholics, more "conservative" than I, who would share my response...
...Even so, I recognize in Egan's seminarians the same spiritual exhilaration I felt as a young religious in 1967 when I was sent from a rural seminary to finish college at Loyola University in Chicago...
...But this new breed's appropriately evangelical preoccupation with witness comes with its own kind of temptation...
...They make the sign of the cross and say grace silently and individually...
...How all this will ~rn out is not yet clear...
...Sometimes I try to imagine how challenging it must be for seminary faculty, formed largely in the older subculture, to guide today's seminarians through the peculiar religious perils of evangelical witness...
...Should we be surprised that the "distance traveled from obedient, rule-following careerist to obedient, Me-following seminarian" is deceptively short...
...As the loyal opposition or safety valve of an immigrant subculture, liberal Catholics were never the majority...
...Should liberal Catholics fail to throw their true gifts into the new post-subculture mix, future answers to questions about how to be Catholic in the United States after the subculture will be missing key ingredients...
...They are here to stay, but they are not the only choice...
...As both Egan and Rhoades insist, this witness always includes service to the poor...
...These three acts of "witness" offended my Catholic sensibilities, formed in the subculture of the 1950s and early 1960s...
...9 More recently, I watched as seminarians filed into the main chapel on a Sunday afternoon to sing vespers...
...William Portier, who teaches at Mount Saint Mary's College and has observed the seminarians of Mount Saint Mary's Seminary for some twenty years, offers an alternative explanation...
...Grace before meals in an evangelical mode is quite different...
...Egan's profile joined a sympathetic portrayal of the seminarians with an emphasis on their stance as "signs of contradiction" to the world...
...In the pluralistic religious setting in which a great many American Catholics now live, such witness helps to establish and maintain the boundaries once provided by an enabling but, in the end, confining immigrant subculture...
...They can be seen as engaging with the world, but in an evangelical mode appropriate to our post-subculture condition...
...This outlook is no more pathological than the routine authority problems of earlier generations...
...Walking into the library one afternoon, I found fifty young men in Roman collars sitting in the main reading room...
...Aren't a convert's subsequent fidelity and growth more religiously significant than a conversion's ironies...
...Catholics are now experiencing the full brunt of American religious pluralism and voluntarism...
...Baptists and Methodists on the nineteenthcentury American frontier were the first to catch on to religious pluralism's evangelical imperative...
...With their emphasis on personal conversion and a comprehensive understanding of evangelization, the latter two documents offer theological substance for an evangelical Catholicism suited to witness in a pluralistic world...
...Welcome to Emmitsburg and a taste of what turned out to be the future...
...We need to learn what they have to teach us about American Catholicism...
...They struck me as examples of drawing undue attention to oneself...
...Gaudium et spes inspires his Christocentric humanism and references to it dot his work...
...Consider the seemingly trivial example of grace before meals...
...On an increasingly diversified religious landscape, both within and beyond Catholicism, Mount Saint Mary's seminarians and other evangelical Catholics represent the sort of clearly defined choice pluralism requires...
...he future of Catholicism in the United States would be better served if we understood the Mount Saint Mary's seminarians, and others like them, as forwardlooking "evangelical" Catholics rather than "conservatives" looking back to an idealized 1950s...
...But, as it turned out, I had inadvertently interrupted library orientation for firstyear theology students...
...such delicate topics would have been treated in confession or on a single-sex retreat...
...Rather, as Andrew Greeley once wrote of another generation, it's a "new breed...
...The very notion of evangelical Catholics raises questions about the future of "liberal" Catholics...
...The two are admittedly difficult to disentangle...
...Much of what was good about being Catholic in the United States during the past three decades will be lost to the church...
...Its spiritual perils are not those of seminarian and clergy grown up in the subc~l~re, whose powerful collective ethos threatened to absorb their individual identities...
...Since liberal Catholics are, in good measure, a function of the subculture, they make little sense apart from it...
...I thought only deacons wore collars...
...The story featured three students from Mount Saint Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and interviewed many others...
...9 My own introduction to the Mount Saint Mary's seminarians (as a new college faculty member) in the fall of 1979 was a bit overwhelming...
...They are religiously alive...
...But, on the whole, Father Rhoades is justified in questioning such harsh criticism of people who are "still in formarion...
...I never heard a Sunday sermon about contraception or masturbation...
...But, no, this is not the 1950s...
...No one is there to watch...
...If Mount Saint Mary's Seminary did not exist, a church in transition from immigrant subculture to evangelical witness in a pluralistic world would have to invent it...
...Especially on issues such as the pope's "mystical theology of the body," with its implications for the momentous issues of our time, Egan's seminarians must be engaged rather than dismissed...
...But far from battleweary agents of negativity, Egan's "conservative" seminarians seem happy and idealistic: "A mood of buoyant optimism surges among the men, a sense, accurate or not, that the bad times are over for the priesthood, and something new and momentous is in the making...
...We should expect that the personal conversions and public witness of evangelical Catholics will be negotiated through practices that are recognizably Catholic, for example, the sacraments, especially the Eucharist and the priesthood, devotion to Mary, and reverence for the papacy...
...But are our sensibilities still normative for a coming generation...
...This grace before meals is an individual act of piety but it is also intended to be witnessed, by other seminarians, college students, and faculty, all of whom need to be evangelized...
...Twenty years at Emmitsburg have taught me that those who experienced Vatican II as adults, whether liberal or conservative, are no longer in sole possession of the future agenda for American Catholics...
...Having already lived in the middle of the modern world, these seminarians have chosen to engage it in evangelical forms...
...Even those who argue that he has overwhelmed the office with his person cannot deny that he embodies a Catholicism engaged with the world in an evangelical form...
...Rather the spiritual perils of evangelical witness have to do with individualism and the divisions that follow from it...
...iberal Catholics have lived long enough to become what younger generations want to get beyond...
Vol. 127 • February 2000 • No. 3
