copies of the examination papers used in the previous few years, in which many of the same questions recurred year after year. Quite how she justified this chicanery I never thought to ask.
As it turned out, this was a favor I could well have done without, for my grade 9 year at Michael Power was one of the most miserable of my life. The school had been founded only two years earlier by the Basilian Fathers and was a long commute from home, involving three different city buses. None of my pals from elementary school went to Michael Power, and I largely lost touch with them. Apart from a few scholarship kids like me, the student body came from wealthy Catholic families, the sons of doctors and lawyers and bankers. While some were thoughtful and intelligent, a disproportionate number were vulgar and arrogant bullies. Older ones would physically intimidate us younger kids and they in turn would be physically intimidated by a couple of the brawny Basil-ians. Some years later the school was amalgamated with a nearby Catholic girls’ school, and today it boasts an active social justice program and a code of conduct that promotes “responsibility, respect, civility, and academic excellence in a safe learning and teaching environment.” But that was scarcely the tone during my brief stay. I hated the bullies and I hated the place and, of course, soon came to hate myself as well. No longer able to deliver newspapers after school, I kept on with the dismal janitorial work at our church, but as for the charms of capitalism, the bloom was definitely off the rose.
After a year of high school hell, it didn’t take much for me to convince myself that I had a vocation, called by God to the priesthood. I’d been more or less prepped for this all along. Our family’s deep piety, our almost fanatical attendance at daily Mass and other religious observances, our diligence in work, plus the fact that I usually secured top marks in class, all conspired toward repeated suggestions from various priests and nuns that I think seriously about becoming a priest. As a final inducement, my brother Ger had gone off to the seminary the year before, returning home for the summer holidays with tales of the marvelous time he was having there. Detesting my home, my school, and my work, I decided to answer God’s call.
You don’t have to suffer to be a poet.
Adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.
JOHN CIARDI, Simmons Review, Fall 1962
AT THE TENDER AGE OF fifteen, bristling with anxiety and excitement, I entered Holy Cross Seminary in Dunkirk, New York, in the fall of 1960. Operated by a monastic order known as the Passionist Fathers, the preparatory seminary represented the initial stage of a long and demanding journey toward becoming a monk and eventual ordination to the priesthood. “The Sem,” as we called it, was a sprawling, four-story brick building with crenellated roofline, set amid seventy acres of fields and woods. Physically the place appealed to me immensely—the venerable old building, the sense of religious depth that echoed along its silent corridors, in its chapel and library, refectory and study hall. Outdoors it was everything I loved, set in a rural area, with mature trees, expansive fields, woodlands through which a lazy stream meandered, and a long stretch of beach fronting on Lake Erie. I was thrilled to be away from the confinements and neuroses of life at home but also apprehensive about finding my place among so many strangers. Things were eased for me considerably by having Ger, who was plainly liked and admired by his classmates, introduce me around, without ever showing even a hint of irritation over my having trailed after him there.
We were close to two hundred seminarians at the time, divided into six classes covering four years of high school and two years of junior college. “Fraternization” between the two levels was not allowed. An imposing Boston Irishman named Father Brendan Breen was our director of students, and two other priests served as his assistant directors. The entire community composed of priests, brothers, and seminarians was under the guidance of the rector, a dauntingly cerebral character named Augustine Paul Hennessey. It was widely whispered that he could think in Latin, which seemed to us the zenith of intellectual attainment. The seminary atmosphere was one of strict discipline, certainly, but not of oppression or meanness of spirit.
Two momentous events dominated all others in that autumn of 1960. The Pittsburgh Pirates were, against all odds, heading into the World Series against the mighty Yankees. A disproportionate number of our student body came from Pittsburgh, because of the Passionists’ long and respected presence in that city. When the second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit his legendary home run in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game to clinch the Pirates’ Series victory, an unearthly jubilation erupted in the student body. Shortly afterward, Americans went to the polls to choose between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon for president. Seeking to become the first Catholic ever to hold the post, and familiar to some Passionists from their monastery in Boston, Kennedy was the house favorite. The evening before the election, we knelt in chapel while the rector bid us pray that the outcome of the vote would be whatever might best advance God’s purposes for the nation. This we understood to be a nonpartisan suggestion that we implore divine intercession in having our good Catholic candidate give Nixon the thumping he deserved. Which of course he did, in large part due to the machinations of another good Catholic, Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley. Long before recognizing that mainstream politics and professional sport are cut from the same entertainment cloth, I sensed the symmetry of Mazeroski’s homer and Kennedy’s election.
The seminary was a sports-mad place. Here you had two hundred young men, deprived of any contact with females, spending most of their time in earnest study or prayer, but periodically released onto the sprawling seminary grounds that held two softball diamonds, a football field, handball and tennis courts, and a basketball gym. For many of us, sports provided a necessary diversion from the pressures of piety, purity, and silence. The three years I spent there marked the apotheosis of my sporting life. We’d have a track-and-field meet every spring at which I specialized in the one-hundred-yard dash, the long jump, and the one-mile run. On days when nothing else was happening, several of us would do a mile run around the grounds. I established myself as pitcher for our class softball team. But in autumn, as is true in high schools across America, football ruled. Back in Toronto I’d spent time tossing a football around with pals and had dutifully followed the exploits of my beloved Toronto Argonauts—the magnificent Dick Shatto, kooky Cookie Gilchrist, and all the rest—but I’d never really played the game.
At Dunkirk every student, whether willingly or not, was drafted into a team and regular games were scheduled. Although fully equipped with helmets and shoulder pads, we were confined to playing touch football in order to keep injuries to a minimum, but still we played with a bumptiousness not perhaps expected in divinity students. I took to the game like a maggot to rotting meat. Blessed with speed and size, I played wide receiver on offense, but playing defense was what I loved best, busting up opponents’ plays by superior strategy. Every year we put together a school team to play against another nearby seminary. Disturbingly reminiscent of religious warfare, these games were bloodier than anything likely seen on the genteel fields of Eton. No game of the year was more important than the annual Mud Bowl played on Thanksgiving Day, in which the oldest students—first- and second-year college—did battle for overall school supremacy. It was an iconic event, with stories passed down through the years of particularly epic clashes, sometimes involving students who had become the priests now teaching us. Throughout this storied history there was an unquestioned belief that playing football, indeed all sports, was beneficial to both mind and body—mens sana
