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!