Choosing God, the second time around

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The first setback occurred after only four months and was easier to accept than the second, which occurred after more than a year. By that time, I was much deeper into the stories and lives of the seminarians. Although the reasons for my losing access have never been entirely clear, they seem related to a coinciding change in leadership and the effects of the sexual abuse scandal, which began to claim priests within the diocese. I will never forget how, one by one, the seminarians dropped away. First it was phone calls that went unreturned, then visits that were planned but canceled at the last minute, and finally the honest admission by one man, visibly chafing at the restriction, that he had been told in no uncertain terms not to talk to me and advised by others that it was better not to risk saying anything until he was ordained.

While access eroded, I was getting the cheery “You’re certainly welcome in our diocese” treatment from the vocation director. Frustrated and sensing I had nothing to lose, I finally pushed the envelope of my supposed access, only to find myself being awkwardly asked to leave a dinner to which I had come with several seminarians. We’ll be speaking soon, I was told, as they showed me the door. A year or so before, a prominent Catholic writer had expressed interest in the book’s aspirations but doubt about whether it could ever be reported. Now it seemed that he was being proven right.

I did not want to write another book critical of the Church. There had been enough of those, even before the sexual abuse scandal. And although I did not pretend to be objective (if such a state exists among writers), I certainly could not set about fashioning a saccharine vocation story. I believe that a committed priest can do an extraordinary amount of good in the world. But I also know that a vocation, as is the case of all religious experience, is rooted in the reality of the human condition and often emerges from a jagging, uneven road. Some of the stories I wanted to tell would have more in common with Saint Augustine and Thomas Merton, especially as witnessed by his Seven Storey Mountain, than the pabulum of the diocesan newsletter. The individual spiritual life also is a metaphor for the life of the Church, flailing at perfection, often well-intentioned, sometimes not. The Collar had to reflect these things, or it would be better left unwritten.

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Yet two closed doors did not mean the end of the project. Fortunately, the Church is not ruled absolutely by “Vatican central.” Although the Vatican exerts a sort of federal power over the dioceses, canon law, the law of the Church, dictates that much power rests with each bishop. Moreover, religious orders, although they might be bound to a diocese and its bishop, typically are outside local authority.

The Sacred Heart School of Theology, where I eventually ended up, trains priests for many dioceses but is run by a religious order called the Priests of the Sacred Heart. I first learned about Sacred Heart one night while I was sitting in the bar of a French bistro in Manhattan’s theater district. I started talking with an actor who was finishing a plate of steak and pommes frites. I told him about the book, and he insisted that I speak with a priest friend of his who taught homiletics, the art of delivering homilies, at a Catholic seminary in the Midwest. He happened to be in town, and I reluctantly agreed to meet him. Father Andre Papineau was entertaining and insightful, but since his seminary was in Milwaukee, it seemed unlikely that we would meet again. At the time, I had no idea that I would lose my access to my second diocese.

A few months later, the unlikely became a reality. The moment I arrived at Sacred Heart, I had a strange and comforting sense of coming home. The contrast between the Byzantine pall that hung over many of the dioceses of the northeastern United States and the openness at Sacred Heart was dramatic. Fortunately, however, the question of vocation and the process of formation were roughly the same, the latter thanks to the uniformity imposed by the bishop promulgated “process of priestly formation,” which sets the norms for the education of priests in the United States.

At our first meeting, the rector, Father James Brackin, grasped the aim and scope of the book immediately and gave me unprecedented access to every dimension of seminary life. He never wavered during the following year. In addition to having the run of the place, I was allowed to attend faculty and board meetings, and more than once I was alerted to unflattering issues and events that might have effectively been concealed.

The access was so straightforward and generous that I would need twenty books to capture the seminary in its entirety. The Collar is an attempt to tell a story of meaning about a seminary and several different men at different points in their priestly formation. The story is both specific to a particular time and place and universal. Sacred Heart is the largest seminary in the United States for second-career, or delayed, vocations. Many of its men have had other careers and families; all of them have lived radically different lives than the one they have currently chosen. Some of them are young, and others are old. The Collar follows them through a single year in which two men will leave the seminary, one by choice and the other not; two men will continue on to the next year; and one man will be ordained a priest. It tells the story of a supportive community that fosters the making of priests but also of the limits of this community in a very individual quest. It brings the reader into the classroom with the seminarians; wrestles with questions of theology, Scripture, and celibacy; and delves into the internal world of each man as he judges the meaning of his own calling against the external reality of daily life and what is being required of him in this new life. The Collar is a story of redemption and spiritual discovery in the context of both the exigencies of the Catholic Church and the often conflicting values of contemporary society.

Excerpted from “The Collar: A Year of Striving and Faith Inside a Catholic Seminary” by Jonathan Englert. Copyright © 2006 by Jonathan Englert. Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Choosing God, the second time around