Can you describe how the liberal arts — which you experienced as an undergraduate at the erstwhile Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas — brought you into the Catholic Church?
For my first year in the program, I didn’t even see a Catholic connection. It wasn’t even on my radar. My second year, I did notice there were a lot of Catholics in the program, and there were a lot of people who were entering the Church. We read the Bible as literature and had to memorize some Psalms, with the collective effect of the second year, asking, “What is Truth?” You begin to ask yourself those questions: “What do I know? What do I believe? Is there a God? Does He exist? Can we know Him? Has He revealed Himself in the world?” These were questions that the texts were all discussing. You eventually have to ask yourself if you believe in these things.
That’s what started with me, asking myself these questions while I was reading these great ideas. I was getting to know some friends who were converting, and it was through my roommate at the time that a group of us decided to take these classes being taught by a priest at the local parish. (RCIA didn’t exist yet.) Fr. Michael Moriarty, this wonderful Irish priest, was a great storyteller — witty, smart, funny, and with a great gift of the gab. All these college students would end up going to these classes, mostly from the humanities program at KU. It was the 1970s — I’m sure we were sitting around in beanbag chairs with lava lamps — and he would tell these stories of faith and weave doctrine into these wonderful stories.
Did you discern your vocation there?
No, when I graduated, I had no inkling at all for any religious vocation. I had only been Catholic for a year and a half. But I loved to travel, and I had a motorcycle at the time, so I rode it across the country. A few of my friends had ended up at this Benedictine monastery in France, which became a gathering place for guys discerning vocations. You could stay there for free as long as you worked, so that was my motive. I wasn’t even thinking about a monastic vocation; I was just trying to wrap my head around being Catholic. I arrived in December of 1977 and, a couple months into it, I started thinking, “Hmm, maybe God is calling me to monastic life.”
In the meantime, another friend, a fellow convert, had inherited his grandmother’s farm and was raising horses. He just got married and needed help, and I needed a job, so I moved out to north-central Kansas after returning from the monastery in France in August of 1978. At that point, I felt that God was calling me to marriage, so I started dating a Catholic girl from a farm family. And I thought this was what I was going to do: become a farmer, have a big family, raise 10 kids, and I was on my way. The relationship was going well. But then it was the fall of 1979, and Pope St. John Paul II had just been elected the year before. He was making his first trip to the U.S. and visiting all the major cities, as well as a stop in Des Moines, Iowa. My friends and I piled into vans to see this new Polish pope. It was the feast day of St. Francis of Assisi, October 4, 1979. It was an outdoor Mass with some 3,000 people in attendance and, as he was wont to do, at the end of the Mass, the Holy Father made this appeal to the young men to consider the priesthood.
For me, until that point, it had been either “become a monk” or “get married.” I never even thought that I could be called to become a diocesan priest. But then John Paul II made this appeal, and it hit me like a bolt of lightning: Maybe God is calling me to be a priest!
My girlfriend actually set up the appointment with the first priest I talked to about a possible vocation. Long story short, I went down to see him, he called the bishop, whom I then met, and I was in the seminary in January, about four months later.
What did your parents think of your entering the Church — and then becoming a priest?
My parents were not very religious, and I made the mistake of converting to the Church before telling them. Before the end of the fall semester of my junior year, I entered the Church and came home and made this announcement at Christmastime. It might have been at Christmas dinner. It went over like a lead balloon. My mom was actually happy because I had gotten my hair cut, and she could tell that I was becoming more serious minded, more mature.
But my dad was typical of that self-made, successful, post-war generation, and his first reaction was, “Well, son, I hope you know you’ve given up your freedom to think on your own. The Catholic Church is going to do all your thinking for you. The Pope is going to make all your decisions in life. And if you want to give up your freedom to think for yourself, you’re an adult now, but I just want you to know what you’ve gotten yourself into.”
By the time I went into the seminary, he had softened a bit, and as time went on, he warmed up to the Catholic Church, in the sense that he got to know some priests and a few of my seminary friends. My father always had a great respect for the University of Kansas professors, even though he was a little suspicious. After my ordination as a priest in 1985, he got to know my first pastor, Fr. Don O’Hare, and that really had a big impact on him.
After four years in the parish, I was sent to Rome to get an advanced degree in moral theology, and while I was gone in Rome, unbeknownst to me, my parents began taking RCIA….
Surrounding the Pearson Program was a strong wall of angry resistance from the University of Kansas faculty and administration. I had ventured out from the East Coast to KU in the early seventies for its excellent foreign languages program and all-around academic excellence and had some classes near the Pearson Program lecture auditorium and was able to sit in on spell-bound students packed in watching the trio of seated lecturers Dr. Senior, Dr Quinn, and Dr. Nelick nimbly navigate complex ideas with asides revealing the emptiness of the present age. Very strong attempts to cut and defund the program failed despite the anger of prominent wealthy alumni at the conversion of family scions. I remember one of my professors becoming disturbed as I mentioned the Pearson program positively and I could sense that her appraisal of me would affect my grades, so I calmed her. For me it was amazing that the Integrated Humanities Program could have ever gotten off the ground on a campus whose faculty were all products of elite campuses across the country set in a very Protestant state. It was an act of grace that this missionary program appeared then and there and with these saintly men. A historian might find archives of discussion of the program in the Kansas state house where, I heard, moves were brought to the floor to defund and eliminate the IHP. I remember that students were making cassette recordings of the lectures that went on for about 3 hours.
Thank you for sharing your experience at KU, drewelow. Please write on the art of calming a feminist professor –I mean this seriously–as academia seems far more polarized today than in the 70s. I hope you would share more of your experiences on these pages if it suits you to do so.
Thanks Daniel, i will try to share my ‘technique’. In this case it was simply not trying to argue on behalf of the program and simply playing dumb. I was one of her favorites and she invited me into the master’s program in English (which i did not try to enter) and was shocked that i might possibly be a supporter of IHP . That would make me a spy in the house of love. I could feel the anti-Catholic, anti-religion tenor of the liberal arts in general at KU . I simply remained silent, changed the subject, and no interrogation followed. About Dr Senior. I have always wondered what led him to the University of Wyoming almost immediately after his conversion in 1960…who the influential people might have been. In 1966 Senior was listed as one of the country’s top 50 teachers. Shortly afterwards he moved to the University of Kansas. Bishop Conley doesn’t mention Fontgombault by name in his speech, but that was where a generous benefactor (does anyone know, i wonder, who that could have been?) set up a fund to fly prospective lookers to come for about a year to see true monastic life uninterrupted by ‘the Council’. One of my dormitory classmates headed there for a year and never came back. It is possible that he returned to help with the foundation of Clear Creek in Oklahoma. He left Kansas as Scott Markey and took vows as Brother Mary. Rumor was that Dr Pearson made a point to steal a book from the vast KU library that he had authored during his time as a ‘seeker’. He published ‘The Way Down and Out: The Occult in Symbolist Literature’ in 1959, and it entered the American University librarians’ systems in many universities. To his chagrin, i heard, it would be replaced and he would have to re-steal it to protect any students from being intrigued by the paths he had rejected on his way to conversion. In that book he made the case that many poets and writers hade entered a dalliance with the occult that was more than mere allusion and flourish. The Way Down and out is available online every so often as universities discard lesser-read books. On his death bed a post-Council priest tried to push aside his conversation telling him ” no one really knows what happens after death”. He responded “That is not the Church
i joined and that’s not the Church i am going to die in”.
Correction on the name of the monk who joined Fontgombault through the Pearson program: Scott market took the name Martin, not Mary. He did in fact come over as part of founding Clear Creek Abby in Oklahoma.
a thought for historians who might try to reconstruct a more nuanced view of the ‘live feel’ of the lecture experience of the IHP: Clear Creek Abbey likely has many monks who came back to help found Clear Creek Abbey who have rich, deep recollections of Dr Senior’s legacy and wisdom. And many probably have heartening conversion stories that led them to a deeper experience of Catholicism than could be found in the Church after the Council. I remember writing a Carmelite monastery in 1972 to ask them a few questions about what sort of Carmelite life they offered and a copy of the rule . The vocations monk wrote back proudly announcing ‘there is no rule, we are working out what might replace the old one and indicated that it was best to ‘just come and see what we are doing”. Other monasteries i knew of were engaged in full warfare about how to be monks. Dr Senior was aware of all this and found an unspoiled oasis in the Solemnes Congregataion ( see wikipedia’s account of the unbelievable vicissitudes undergone by Solemnes over the centuries)