Maryknoll, soon to celebrate its 100th birthday, has sent forth thousands of missionaries…each entirely distinctive and unique. Nevertheless, like any community or organization, it does develop a shared or corporate personality. I have known three distinct Maryknolls:
- The original Maryknoll of the founders: China-loving, anti-modernist, Tridentine Maryknoll.
- Transitional Maryknoll of the 1945-65 years after World War II: modern, Latin America-loving, Americanist, social action Maryknoll.
- The declining Maryknoll after Vatican II: multicultural, post-modern, leftwing, psychology-as-religion Maryknoll.
The Maryknoll of Price/the Walshes/Ford was a classic expression of Tridentine Catholicism as it emerged from the combatative, countercultural immigrant American Church. This Church was reactive against a hostile Protestant culture and therefore fiercely loyal to the institutional aspects of counter-reformation Catholicism: the sacraments, moral teachings, hierarchy, and traditions of piety including love for Mary. The primary focus of their mission activity was pagan China which needed to hear the Good News and to come to know the saving power of Jesus Christ as mediated in the one, only, Catholic and apostolic Church. This Maryknoll might be described as anti-modern at least in the sense of anti-modernist in theology. Its concern was to bring the Catholic faith to unbelievers and was in no way enamored with nationalism, politics, technology or social engineering. It was classic, traditional, sacramental Catholicism …nothing more or less.
The end of the war found Maryknoll expelled from communist China and refocusing, largely on Latin America. This was a Catholic continent, not in evident need of evangelization, but plagued with material poverty. By contrast, America was now THE superpower, materially, economically, technologically and culturally. American economic expansion in those two postwar decades was something extraordinary: surely unparalled, in sheer quantity and mass, by any period in the history of the world. Maryknoll shared this American confidence and therefore entered into mission with a great concern to feed the hungry and clothe the naked using all our cultural resources (credit unions, cooperatives, etc.) In this period, Catholicism became widely accepted within American society and the Church in turn took a positive view, free of ambivalence, of America and all the modern developments including democracy, free markets, trade unions, and the secular academy. Maryknoll Magazine was everywhere and full of inspiring stories of confident, virile missionaries teaching the natives agricultural methods or how to form coops or credit unions or trade unions. At this point there was no break with tradition or hierarchy as the fundamentals of Catholicism (pro-life and pro-family, sacraments, etc.) coexisted peacefully with the dominant revivalist values of the USA of Billy Graham and Bishop Fulton Sheen. The Church was no longer at war with a Protestant America but was becoming enamored of her and would finally fall into bed with dominant elite culture at the close of the Vatican Council. Ivan Illich was possibly the most incisive critic of Maryknoll as a vehicle for American cultural imperialism and his work was one of many forces that worked for Maryknoll’s rapid deconstruction after 1965.
1965, the close of the Council, is the beginning of end of Maryknoll as she joined most of the Catholic elites in opening wide the windows for renewal, understood as mimicking a secular world that was rapidly turning agnostic, relativist, and post-modern. An enchantment with change spread through Maryknoll in a radical disconnect from tradition, authority, pious customs, and traditional sexual morality. Maryknoll is not a religious order and never had a distinctive unifying spirituality but the late-Tridentine piety of the founders was clear, deep, and motivational. In the late 60s this piety was scornfully dismissed. A collage of fashions was to take its place: liberation theology, humanistic psychology, and alertness to God’s presence in other cultures and religions. Maryknollers continue to do beautiful work with the poorest of the poor all over the world. Indeed, the word “beauty” might best characterize their work. Maryknoll Magazine always offered splendid images, especially of the human face in all its agony and magnificence. This tradition continues. For example, the mission museum at Maryknoll is filled with such photographic icons. But noticeably missing from that collection is any real focus on the dogma, the morality, or the liturgy of the Church. The beautiful has become detached from the true (dogma…which is a dirty word for the postmodern), and from the good (morality, which is scorned as moralism when it shows its absolutism). Indeed, one of the hallmarks of postmodernism is this disconnect: beauty is accepted but truth and morality as absolute claims are rejected. The only absolutes are tolerance, relativism, and inclusiveness.
This soft, inclusive, aesthetic Maryknoll, uprooted from authority, tradition, and law cannot attract our young. It lacks the virile backbone of the earlier Maryknoll as well as its gentle Marian piety. It is a neutered, de-gendered, sterile and impotent hybrid, similar to its Episcopalian sister, champion of contraception, choice, homosexuality and (the latest fad) masculine, Episcopal nuns. (I am not making this up.)
Maryknoll as an institution does not seem to have much of a future. Surely, we will never again see the “glory days” of the mid-twentieth century and the remarkable synthesis of American confidence and Catholic piety. Nor can we return to the Tridentine Church of the founders. The drastic decline of the society over the last ½ century is a sorrow for those who have loved her.
The future of mission is, however, another story. Institutions, like Maryknoll, come and go but the Church will endure until the end of time. The Church is a garden that is ever new and fruitful, giving birth to new orders and movements in every age. The spirit of the founders of Maryknoll, the love of Christ specifically IN His Church, is alive in a new flowering of groups fiercely loyal to Mary, apostolic authority and the sacramental life. We are in the midst of a renaissance of Catholic life as the bridal Church is being aroused with a fervent love of the Bridegroom who loves her so intimately in sacrament, apostolic Word, prayer, and Marian holiness. Some disparage this renewal as “Romantic Conservatism.” Nevertheless, the founders, heroes and martyrs (“witnesses”) of Maryknoll must smile as they look down on the corporal acts of charity still practiced by aging but faithful Maryknollers as well as the flourishing of Catholic life and mission in so many new, thrilling expressions under the shepherding of John Paul and Benedict.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
What Happened to us at Maryknoll?
What Happened to Maryknoll? What Happened to Us at Maryknoll… Long Ago?
Our senior year at Maryknoll Seminary College (1968-9), at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, involved heated discussions on questions like “Why Mission?” and “Why Maryknoll?” Our personal struggles to form our identities mirrored the macro-crisis of the Maryknoll Society and the entire American Church. That robust, vigorous Maryknoll was not to survive this crisis: today the average age of a Maryknoller is 77 and new ordinations usually don’t exceed one or two a year. Maryknoll Society as we know it is on its death bed (Although miracles DO happen: if He did it for Lazarus He can do it for Maryknoll.)
It is of interest however that our cohort of ex-Maryknoll seminarians now in our 60s, who passed through and out of the formation system in the late 60s, today becomes fervent and emotional in expressing their gratitude and devotion to Maryknoll. We become sentimental and nostalgic, despite the fact that we left the society decades ago and have maintained little or no contact with the order itself. One wonders: What is the object of this affection?
Our love affair is not with the actual Society of Maryknoll. We have spent the four plus decades of our lives raising families and pursuing careers with the slightest contact with the society. I doubt many of us even contribute financially to Maryknoll with any regularity and generosity.
There is, however, a genuine gratitude and affection for the priests who taught us during those tumultuous years; there are even stronger bonds of loyalty and affection for each other: friends and classmates who went through that “coming of age” together. What unites us even today is the memory of the extraordinarily intense experience we shared within Maryknoll…an experience which generally led us to leave Maryknoll for other life paths.
We entered the formation program, sometime around 1965, intending to serve God, the Church and the poor as missionary priests. Several years later, we left this path to pursue family, career, and generally happy, prosperous bourgeois lifestyles. In 1965, with the close of Vatican II, Maryknoll leadership followed the prevailing fashions and discarded the rich network of Church and seminary traditions in favor of “change and renewal.” Unfortunately, the Church was looking to the world for guidance just as that world was itself undergoing a drastic Cultural Revolution centered on values including: liberation into sterile sexuality (contraception, homosexuality, and radical feminism); freedom from authority and tradition; pursuit of personal fulfillment and disparagement of classic practices involving chastity, poverty, obedience, sacrifice, humility; and justice for the poor through governmental or “systemic” engineering.
Maryknoll, indeed the entire American Church, was unprepared intellectually and spiritually to confront the Cultural Revolution. Maryknoll was always identified with the pragmatic, hands-on, masculine dimension of American spirituality. Many of our professors, for example, pursued doctoral studies out of obedience as they really wanted to be in the missions, working in the ditches and fields with the poor. I cannot recall a single professor who was able to comprehend, confront or critique, from classical Catholic reasoning, the emerging liberational, anti-Catholic consensus. Many of the brighter intellects threw themselves exuberantly into the current of change, left Maryknoll and priesthood, and assumed a confident, self-righteously “prophetic” stance toward the pathetically dysfunctional institutional Church (e.g. Eugene Kennedy.) Those who remained faithful to their vocations remain to this day befuddled as to the nature of the tornado of confusion that fell upon us in that troubled few years. I vividly recall, for example, a lucid presentation by theologian Bill Frazier, circa 1968, in which he taught us that the pace of cultural change had become so fast that only youth were in tune with modern realities and that moral and spiritual leadership had shifted from the elders to the young. Attributing a vague indefectibility to youth, he forcefully, if unintentionally, discredited tradition and authority and validated the narcissism and arrogance of the Youth Rebellion.
But for those of us emerging out of adolescence into young adulthood at the time it was a different story, a remarkably happy one. How exciting: every day it seemed there was a new book, a thinker, a movement…coming to us from psychology, politics, theology or the humanities. Every day a new horizon of freedom and fulfillment seemed to open. The intuitive optimism and expectancy of youth was inflamed by ever new currents of renewal and liberation. And Maryknoll: What a happy place to process all this change and excitement. We were surrounded by idealistic, wholesome friends, classmates and teachers. We were protected from sexual promiscuity (indeed, from women in general), from the drug culture, from the more vicious and resentful currents of revolution. Humanistic psychology and liberational politics on behalf of the poor filtered through only the more enlightened aspects that were acceptable to what remained of our Christian idealism.
Bursting confidently out of “ghetto,” reactionary, counter-cultural Catholicism, we threw ourselves trustingly and uncritically into messianic psychology and politics. We reacted violently against the “thick” (Carlin) Catholicism of our forefathers and fervently embraced the “thin” Catholicism often referred to vaguely as “the spirit of Vatican II.” Carlin describes a “thick” religion as one with strongly distinctive practices, beliefs and values so that it is sharply set off against the dominant culture. Examples include: Orthodox/Hasidic Judaism, the Amish, and the Catholic Church before mid-20th-century. “Thin” religions are those which blend seamlessly into the dominant culture, accommodating all essential beliefs and values, with the weakest veneer of opposition or contradiction. Examples would be Unitarianism, Reform Judaism, and today’s Episcopal Church.
The “thin” religion we were being inducted into in those years entailed:
- A critical rather than a trusting attitude towards Church authority and tradition.
- A new sexual ethic of sterility and satisfaction rather than fruitfulness and sacrifice.
- A weakened sense of the sacraments which became social celebrations rather than efficacious actions of Christ in his Church.
- A boredom with holiness and piety, Mary, the communion of saints, and the last things.
- Trust in psychology and liberal politics.
- A positive embrace, ambivalence-free, of secular culture as well as other religions along with embarrassment for own tradition (as patriarchic, rigid, moralistic, doctrinaire, homophobic, etc.)
Example: I returned home for vacation from the seminary, around 1968, to find my family still praying the rosary as they had done for about two decades. With an arrogant air of infallible authority, I told them that the rosary was formalistic, mechanical, and retrograde and that they needed to move into bible study and more informal and creative forms of group prayer. They immediately discontinued the rosary. Where did I get this confident contempt for the rosary? Not from the documents of Vatican II. It was in the air we breathed at the time. Upon arrival at Glen Ellyn in 1965, just before the viral madness struck, a traditional practice was for small groups of 2-4 men to walk around the grounds, after supper, and pray the rosary together. It was a most wholesome, un-self-conscious masculine expression of Catholic piety. It vanished quickly as the toxic “spirit of Vatican II” spread. This happened quickly, subtly, deceptively. It was fed by many currents: a reductionist critical-historical approach to the Bible; a bogus ecumenism which scorned Catholic distinctiveness; and an unacknowledged rationalism which disparaged the genuinely feminine and especially the Marian. What are the chances of any of us praying the rosary together in small groups at our upcoming Maryknoll Alumni Reunion?
There is a refreshing clarity and candor about one who explicitly renounces the Catholic faith to become, say, an Episcopalian, an evangelical, a Wiccan priestess, or a postmodern nihilist. Implicitly, at least, the apostate recognizes the integrity of the Catholic Way (doctrine, liturgy, morals) which is being rejected. This allows for the possibility of a future dialogue and a “reversion” to the Church. The apostasy of our generation of liberals was more deceptive and subtle: it self-identified as a renewed, contemporary, and authentic Catholicism. It scornfully dismissed as outdated and ignorant essentials of our Catholic way: apostolic (Petrine) authority, the inherent fruitfulness of sexuality, the femininity (bride, mother) of the Church, and the masculinity of the priesthood (of Christ the Groom.)
We fell away from the Church in a mimetic contagion; in a (sophisticated) mob mentality; in a fog of seductive confusion; in a swoon of infatuation with liberation...liberation from the past, from authority, from God as father and Church as mother, from a rigorous sexual ethic of sacrifice and fecundity, from the restrictions and limitations of the institutional (which is to say “enfleshed”) Church. It involved neither rational deliberation nor a clear decision of the will; it was a kind of “group-think,” an adolescent infatuation, a movement out of desire and self-interest.
What is, then, the “Maryknoll” which we aging ex-seminarians cherish so? It surely is not the classical, foundational Maryknoll of Fathers Price, Walsh and Walsh, Ford and a long list of heroes and martyrs. For this Maryknoll was: love of Mary, mother of God; loyalty to THE Church; sacrifice and discipline; and a hunger for souls (to guide them to heaven and away from hell.)
Rather, we cherish the complex of culture forces, friendships, movements and ideas which led us away from classic Maryknoll into the novel, promising pastures of an acculturated, thin religion; into the anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-tradition of the “spirit of Vatican II.” What enthused and motivated us in those heady days was actually a spirit of Anti-Maryknoll (the actual, historic institution) and Anti-Catholicism (the concrete, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic reality.)
In other words, in those thrilling years, we lost The Faith together. We lost the Catholic Faith…that is, faith in Christ’s presence in the authoritative, sacramental, Marian Church. We did not lose all Christian values, far from it. But we “converted” (or maybe “diverted”) out of foundational Catholicism into an alternate Christianity. We were catechized into mainstream, late-or-post-Protestant American Christianity. Some simply left the Church in all good candor; others remain at the edge, defiant and dissenting. It is likely that most of our children (and now their children) have melted seamlessly into enlightened, liberal America and are indistinguishable, as Catholics, from their progressive Jewish, Protestant or even atheist neighbors. Our grandchildren, if they are baptized at all, are immersed into the “thinnest” kind of Christianity.
The tentative schedule for our reunion of Maryknoll Alumni in 2011 plans an ecumenical prayer service rather than a mass for the weekend. This is a candid, if tacit, acknowledgement that it is not the Catholic faith, more particularly the Eucharist, which unites us. Rather, it is bonds of affection and communion in a more diffuse pattern of de-institutionalized Christianity.
In 1965, at the age of 18, we left home for Maryknoll to convert the world to Christ; within a few years we had been converted to the world…the exhilarating world of personal fulfillment, leftist politics, and relativistic multi-culturalism. Maryknoll was the place this happened. But what a thrilling time it was!
Our senior year at Maryknoll Seminary College (1968-9), at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, involved heated discussions on questions like “Why Mission?” and “Why Maryknoll?” Our personal struggles to form our identities mirrored the macro-crisis of the Maryknoll Society and the entire American Church. That robust, vigorous Maryknoll was not to survive this crisis: today the average age of a Maryknoller is 77 and new ordinations usually don’t exceed one or two a year. Maryknoll Society as we know it is on its death bed (Although miracles DO happen: if He did it for Lazarus He can do it for Maryknoll.)
It is of interest however that our cohort of ex-Maryknoll seminarians now in our 60s, who passed through and out of the formation system in the late 60s, today becomes fervent and emotional in expressing their gratitude and devotion to Maryknoll. We become sentimental and nostalgic, despite the fact that we left the society decades ago and have maintained little or no contact with the order itself. One wonders: What is the object of this affection?
Our love affair is not with the actual Society of Maryknoll. We have spent the four plus decades of our lives raising families and pursuing careers with the slightest contact with the society. I doubt many of us even contribute financially to Maryknoll with any regularity and generosity.
There is, however, a genuine gratitude and affection for the priests who taught us during those tumultuous years; there are even stronger bonds of loyalty and affection for each other: friends and classmates who went through that “coming of age” together. What unites us even today is the memory of the extraordinarily intense experience we shared within Maryknoll…an experience which generally led us to leave Maryknoll for other life paths.
We entered the formation program, sometime around 1965, intending to serve God, the Church and the poor as missionary priests. Several years later, we left this path to pursue family, career, and generally happy, prosperous bourgeois lifestyles. In 1965, with the close of Vatican II, Maryknoll leadership followed the prevailing fashions and discarded the rich network of Church and seminary traditions in favor of “change and renewal.” Unfortunately, the Church was looking to the world for guidance just as that world was itself undergoing a drastic Cultural Revolution centered on values including: liberation into sterile sexuality (contraception, homosexuality, and radical feminism); freedom from authority and tradition; pursuit of personal fulfillment and disparagement of classic practices involving chastity, poverty, obedience, sacrifice, humility; and justice for the poor through governmental or “systemic” engineering.
Maryknoll, indeed the entire American Church, was unprepared intellectually and spiritually to confront the Cultural Revolution. Maryknoll was always identified with the pragmatic, hands-on, masculine dimension of American spirituality. Many of our professors, for example, pursued doctoral studies out of obedience as they really wanted to be in the missions, working in the ditches and fields with the poor. I cannot recall a single professor who was able to comprehend, confront or critique, from classical Catholic reasoning, the emerging liberational, anti-Catholic consensus. Many of the brighter intellects threw themselves exuberantly into the current of change, left Maryknoll and priesthood, and assumed a confident, self-righteously “prophetic” stance toward the pathetically dysfunctional institutional Church (e.g. Eugene Kennedy.) Those who remained faithful to their vocations remain to this day befuddled as to the nature of the tornado of confusion that fell upon us in that troubled few years. I vividly recall, for example, a lucid presentation by theologian Bill Frazier, circa 1968, in which he taught us that the pace of cultural change had become so fast that only youth were in tune with modern realities and that moral and spiritual leadership had shifted from the elders to the young. Attributing a vague indefectibility to youth, he forcefully, if unintentionally, discredited tradition and authority and validated the narcissism and arrogance of the Youth Rebellion.
But for those of us emerging out of adolescence into young adulthood at the time it was a different story, a remarkably happy one. How exciting: every day it seemed there was a new book, a thinker, a movement…coming to us from psychology, politics, theology or the humanities. Every day a new horizon of freedom and fulfillment seemed to open. The intuitive optimism and expectancy of youth was inflamed by ever new currents of renewal and liberation. And Maryknoll: What a happy place to process all this change and excitement. We were surrounded by idealistic, wholesome friends, classmates and teachers. We were protected from sexual promiscuity (indeed, from women in general), from the drug culture, from the more vicious and resentful currents of revolution. Humanistic psychology and liberational politics on behalf of the poor filtered through only the more enlightened aspects that were acceptable to what remained of our Christian idealism.
Bursting confidently out of “ghetto,” reactionary, counter-cultural Catholicism, we threw ourselves trustingly and uncritically into messianic psychology and politics. We reacted violently against the “thick” (Carlin) Catholicism of our forefathers and fervently embraced the “thin” Catholicism often referred to vaguely as “the spirit of Vatican II.” Carlin describes a “thick” religion as one with strongly distinctive practices, beliefs and values so that it is sharply set off against the dominant culture. Examples include: Orthodox/Hasidic Judaism, the Amish, and the Catholic Church before mid-20th-century. “Thin” religions are those which blend seamlessly into the dominant culture, accommodating all essential beliefs and values, with the weakest veneer of opposition or contradiction. Examples would be Unitarianism, Reform Judaism, and today’s Episcopal Church.
The “thin” religion we were being inducted into in those years entailed:
- A critical rather than a trusting attitude towards Church authority and tradition.
- A new sexual ethic of sterility and satisfaction rather than fruitfulness and sacrifice.
- A weakened sense of the sacraments which became social celebrations rather than efficacious actions of Christ in his Church.
- A boredom with holiness and piety, Mary, the communion of saints, and the last things.
- Trust in psychology and liberal politics.
- A positive embrace, ambivalence-free, of secular culture as well as other religions along with embarrassment for own tradition (as patriarchic, rigid, moralistic, doctrinaire, homophobic, etc.)
Example: I returned home for vacation from the seminary, around 1968, to find my family still praying the rosary as they had done for about two decades. With an arrogant air of infallible authority, I told them that the rosary was formalistic, mechanical, and retrograde and that they needed to move into bible study and more informal and creative forms of group prayer. They immediately discontinued the rosary. Where did I get this confident contempt for the rosary? Not from the documents of Vatican II. It was in the air we breathed at the time. Upon arrival at Glen Ellyn in 1965, just before the viral madness struck, a traditional practice was for small groups of 2-4 men to walk around the grounds, after supper, and pray the rosary together. It was a most wholesome, un-self-conscious masculine expression of Catholic piety. It vanished quickly as the toxic “spirit of Vatican II” spread. This happened quickly, subtly, deceptively. It was fed by many currents: a reductionist critical-historical approach to the Bible; a bogus ecumenism which scorned Catholic distinctiveness; and an unacknowledged rationalism which disparaged the genuinely feminine and especially the Marian. What are the chances of any of us praying the rosary together in small groups at our upcoming Maryknoll Alumni Reunion?
There is a refreshing clarity and candor about one who explicitly renounces the Catholic faith to become, say, an Episcopalian, an evangelical, a Wiccan priestess, or a postmodern nihilist. Implicitly, at least, the apostate recognizes the integrity of the Catholic Way (doctrine, liturgy, morals) which is being rejected. This allows for the possibility of a future dialogue and a “reversion” to the Church. The apostasy of our generation of liberals was more deceptive and subtle: it self-identified as a renewed, contemporary, and authentic Catholicism. It scornfully dismissed as outdated and ignorant essentials of our Catholic way: apostolic (Petrine) authority, the inherent fruitfulness of sexuality, the femininity (bride, mother) of the Church, and the masculinity of the priesthood (of Christ the Groom.)
We fell away from the Church in a mimetic contagion; in a (sophisticated) mob mentality; in a fog of seductive confusion; in a swoon of infatuation with liberation...liberation from the past, from authority, from God as father and Church as mother, from a rigorous sexual ethic of sacrifice and fecundity, from the restrictions and limitations of the institutional (which is to say “enfleshed”) Church. It involved neither rational deliberation nor a clear decision of the will; it was a kind of “group-think,” an adolescent infatuation, a movement out of desire and self-interest.
What is, then, the “Maryknoll” which we aging ex-seminarians cherish so? It surely is not the classical, foundational Maryknoll of Fathers Price, Walsh and Walsh, Ford and a long list of heroes and martyrs. For this Maryknoll was: love of Mary, mother of God; loyalty to THE Church; sacrifice and discipline; and a hunger for souls (to guide them to heaven and away from hell.)
Rather, we cherish the complex of culture forces, friendships, movements and ideas which led us away from classic Maryknoll into the novel, promising pastures of an acculturated, thin religion; into the anti-establishment, anti-authority, anti-tradition of the “spirit of Vatican II.” What enthused and motivated us in those heady days was actually a spirit of Anti-Maryknoll (the actual, historic institution) and Anti-Catholicism (the concrete, One, Holy, Catholic, Apostolic reality.)
In other words, in those thrilling years, we lost The Faith together. We lost the Catholic Faith…that is, faith in Christ’s presence in the authoritative, sacramental, Marian Church. We did not lose all Christian values, far from it. But we “converted” (or maybe “diverted”) out of foundational Catholicism into an alternate Christianity. We were catechized into mainstream, late-or-post-Protestant American Christianity. Some simply left the Church in all good candor; others remain at the edge, defiant and dissenting. It is likely that most of our children (and now their children) have melted seamlessly into enlightened, liberal America and are indistinguishable, as Catholics, from their progressive Jewish, Protestant or even atheist neighbors. Our grandchildren, if they are baptized at all, are immersed into the “thinnest” kind of Christianity.
The tentative schedule for our reunion of Maryknoll Alumni in 2011 plans an ecumenical prayer service rather than a mass for the weekend. This is a candid, if tacit, acknowledgement that it is not the Catholic faith, more particularly the Eucharist, which unites us. Rather, it is bonds of affection and communion in a more diffuse pattern of de-institutionalized Christianity.
In 1965, at the age of 18, we left home for Maryknoll to convert the world to Christ; within a few years we had been converted to the world…the exhilarating world of personal fulfillment, leftist politics, and relativistic multi-culturalism. Maryknoll was the place this happened. But what a thrilling time it was!
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