The American Spectator

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At Stonehill, the seminarians’ touch football team had a reputation both for playing a peculiarly aggressive, rough kind of football--and for being nearly unbeatable. Dick was light but very quick on his feet. Besides, he was intelligent and readily grasped the strategy of the game. On the six-man team, he played a very reliable defensive end. By this time, I was captain and it was our strategy that if the ends prevented the other side from running around them, by "boxing" them in, our backs could cover pass receivers with perfect security. Many of our stronger, heavier ends would try to crash the opposing passer, and in the process yield an open field around them. I found I could trust Dick implicitly, against whatever odds, to keep his feet and keep gliding outwards to box the opposition. The other team would often place huge 200-pounders against him, but in touch football all that weight could be discounted if the defensive end merely slid away, always to the outside, and turned the passer in. Dick used intelligence and courage to make up for his lack of weight. I remember him in the October air, in grass-stained chinos and a green team jersey too big for him, with a face of serious concentration.

In countless ways, there was instant communication between Dick and me. Just as he grasped a strategy I had in mind while calling out a defensive pattern, so I leaped along with him in reading a set of books or developing a chain of ideas. It was not as though one led and the other followed, except for the inevitable factor of the two-year difference in our ages. It was as though, spontaneously, we liked, cherished, and desired the same things.

Sometimes it was difficult for me to get along with the other fellows in the seminary. My last year at Stonehill, for example, I was “dean” or representative of the others before the superior, a lot which fell to the one who had professed his vows at the earliest date. On many minor holidays, the smokers in the group would press me to ask the superior for special smoking periods during recreation times; for the rules on smoking were rather strict. Sometimes these requests seemed foolish, but I made it a point always to ask for permission unless I could convince the smokers in question that we’d be better off not overdoing the requests. There were also the problems of extra work periods, and assigning some men to do some jobs, others to others. It was good to be able to count on Dick for silent support at such times. My own over-sensitive yet assertive ways, hidden sometimes under a studied gentleness, made all such decisions disagreeable. He understood.

Moreover, during the spring of the year I graduated, 1956, Dick gathered a crew of volunteers to begin the construction of a long path across the marshes from our seminary (a former barn, converted by our own hard work) to the area where the new college buildings were going up. Nearly every afternoon during recreation, Dick and the others would take axes, picks, and spades and try to extend their 700-yard bridge another few feet. For fill, they hauled logs, brush, stone, and dirt from the nearby woods. They drove stakes to hold twin rows of logs in place upon the wet ground, and between the logs they dumped their fill. They christened their highway in Latin, to please the taste of their Latin professor, Via Palludosa: the way through the marsh.

THE SEMINARY IN WHICH WE LIVED had once been a cow barn on the famous Ames estate. Our recreation room, in the adjacent building, was a hardwood-paneled room in which the farm’s prize bulls had lived. The pine groves behind the barn and the cornfields beyond them separated us from the college proper: the grotto, tennis courts, and school buildings. Both Dick and I rejoiced in the open skies, the sunlight on the fields, the darting swallows, and the scent of the nearby pine groves.

The one peculiarity of our seminary days at Stonehill was that the college was co-educational. There were girls in nearly all our classes. Our rules allowed us to be courteous and friendly, but forbade us to "linger" or to initiate familiar conversations. Needless to say, for young men in their twenties, when the saps of life seem to run fullest, the presence of the girls was an attractive invitation, a constant warmth. It was a healthy problem: the vow of chastity became a matter for rededication every day, pronounced not in unknowing isolation but in the patterns of later, ordinary life. We felt we were the most fortunate of seminarians.

Of course, the necessary sublimation sometimes required pretty fast peddling, as it were. On certain springtime evenings, in certain moods, or during times when other students attended plays or dances, sweet fingers of desire would sweep through the heart. Officially, there was little advice given us about how to form and maintain healthy attitudes. We had to find our own way. Dick and I and a few others did it mainly by making countless jokes. We referred to the girls at the college as "nuns," we described pretty girls by how many ships they could launch (if Helen’s face could launch a thousand), and the like. Sometimes the humor revealed too much preoccupation. Yet, all in all, I think we took the healthy course. We were very much attracted to girls; and it was difficult to keep our natural instincts for admiration, affection, and human love from overwhelming our commitment to the Lord.

One friend who must be brought into this record is Joe Skaff. Dick’s classmate, even slighter of build than Dick, and blessed with a zany, merry temper, Joe was often the foil of our jokes and our affection. He was our Falstaff and our whipping-boy. His handsome Lebanese nose was the peg of a thousand quips. His knowledge of Arabic, at a crucial point, encouraged Dick’s interest in the tongue. His love of the East brought that love to Dick, together with the experience of Arab dishes, reunions--and belly dances. Joe’s home near Boston became a frequent visiting place, and Joe’s pretty cousins became the storied ladies of imagination and mutual teasing. ("You guys don’t like me; you like my cousins!")

Joe was ordained the same year as Dick, but preceded him to Pakistan by more than a year. There their friendship revived after three years of separation while Dick studied in France. Both families felt consoled to know that the two were together in Pakistan.

3. FRANCE

Dick graduated magna cum laude from Stonehill in 1958. Our cousins from New England, uncles and aunts from Pennsylvania, parents, brothers and sister, gathered round him. Bill and Irene O’Day, second cousins from New Britain, had their little Richard (Dick’s namesake) along--with Timmy and Eileen.

At this time, I was studying in Rome and deep in confusion about my own vocation. My desires to work in fiction and philosophy were running off in more directions than the priesthood seemed able to contain. In searching out the roots of my vocation I came to tangles I couldn’t seem to solve. I was hoping, then, that Dick might likewise be assigned to Rome. I loved Rome, and wanted him to share my love for the city and my many happy experiences. There was talk also of France, but the Holy Cross house in France was small, not well organized, and notoriously difficult for Americans.

It was to France, however, that Dick was sent. Well, at least he was in Europe; I was very glad that the fact that I had earlier been sent abroad to study had not prevented our superiors from sending him, too.

Meanwhile, my own interior troubles were so acute that it seemed that something would have to burst. Yet it certainly did not seem sensible, after so many years, so many deep desires, so much preparation, to leave my studies for the priesthood. Cut a long and confused story short to say that late that summer, after I had written a letter about my doubts to Father DePrizio, he sent back a cable to Father Heston, my superior in Rome, calling me back to America. Within 12 hours I was taking a train away from my friends at summer camp in Bressanone, and looking up at the night sky and at my fellow worldly passengers, and thinking: "This is my world, and I belong to it again!" For I was sure that I was returning to the States to leave the seminary.

Meanwhile, Dick had himself just made his perpetual vows and was at home, preparing himself for the trip to France. (He had spent the preceding summer at St. Joseph’s Oratory in Montreal, where he had made a start on French. He delighted in the pastoral work involved in helping the many pilgrims who come there in the summer.) He heard the news of my coming home, of my confused state of mind, and he was a little shaken. It took him only a moment to adjust, however, for he wrote that night to Father George S. DePrizio that his own desires remained unchanged. "I am anxious to study theology, and willing to do it wherever I am sent, certain that wherever obedience sends me I will find fulfillment of my vocation."