The Oblates of the East

A Living Stories Project

THE STORY OF MIGUEL's PROMISE

This is a joint story because we’re both involved in it. It’s about Miguel. Miguel was a Seminarian. He was a doctor who came to us and entered the community, and he also died of AIDS with us. And we want to talk about his vows and then his death because they’re really striking us we’re doing this. So Alex is going to tell you about his vow ceremony.

ALEX: Well, Miguel, as Dick said, had AIDS and Miguel was very sick. This was the either late winter or early spring of 1989, and he was at this point in Newburg, New York. The community was taking care of him there. And Rome granted him his perpetual vows.

So here is the ceremony- the seminarians are all there. I was newly ordained, and I went there. Friends from Newburg were there. And the vows--it is usually a very joyous occasion. This time it was a wake service we were having. The chapel is full and here is Miguel laid out in the middle of the room in a stretcher in his cassock, and the vow ceremony begins.

So Miguel begins to profess his vows for life, but every time he said about chastity, poverty, obedience "for life," he’d say, ". . . and beyond life." And so, every time he said "beyond life" we would cry. It was a very moving moment, and all of us are weeping.

George Kirwin, the Provincial, begins to follow the ritual for the ceremony, and so Miguel, gasping for breath, begins to tell them, "Be quiet." And as we all listened, everybody was in total silence, Miguel says, "Father Provincial, I promise to you that when I go to heaven and I see Jesus Christ face to face, I will ask him to send someone to replace me in the community, into the congregation." Again, the tears are falling, and it was just a very moving moment.

And then -- you want to take it from there?

DICK: And so a couple of months later, Miguel was sort of lingering and just lingering and lingering, you know, and as a matter of fact, they took him off the medication hoping that he would die--and he got better. It was just a bizarre thing.

But anyhow, I was in Washington and Alex was in Florida, and I was going to do a retreat in McLean at the retreat house. I was driving along the Potomac, and he was really on my mind because he was just suffering like that, and out loud in the car, I said, "It’s okay to die. Just die."

I get to the retreat house and they called me and said that he had died like at 4:30, and I know at 4:30, I know where I was on the Washington GW Parkway. And at the same time, that same time . . .

ALEX:I woke up that morning. It was a Friday -- I thought it was Monday but it was Friday -- Friday morning, I woke up, and this thought came to my mind: Do a mass for a happy death. I said "Well, a happy death, I’ve never heard of such a thing." I did this mass. It was actually in the sacramentary. I did it for Miguel for a few minutes.

I’d gone on with my day. It was a sort of a day off, and in the afternoon I said, "Let me get going with my homily." So it was around three o’clockish and I’m trying to put a homily together. All I could think of was Miguel, Miguel, Miguel, Miguel. So I laid down on the sofa sort of like in a prayerful mood and took a little nap with Miguel. All of a sudden, I just got up -- well, it’s fine now.

I walked by the TV set where a gift that Miguel had given me, which is a ceramic dove, was sitting. I’m going to my desk, and as I’m walking by this thing, it just flies off the TV, lands on the hard floor, and I’m stunned that this thing broke. How did this happen? Because I don’t even want to touch this thing. I pick it up. There’s not even a nick on it. I put it back, go sit down. The phone rings and it’s Terry O’Connell to let me know that Miguel had died about 20 minutes ago.

And I said, "You mean he died 20 minutes ago?" At that point I knew Miguel had been in that room with me because this was his gift. I had put it in my room as the symbol of the holy spirit, and it fell right in front of me. Nothing had happened to it. I believe that Miguel told me,"Everything is okay."

So now the wake service. I go off to Tewksbury. We’re going to have the wake service in the Tewksbury chapel, and all the priests are vested for the vigil. We’re all standing around, and they’re in teams and groups. As we’re standing there, a young man comes in and it is John Staak. He had never met any of these Oblates, and a few of us who had been at Miguel’s wake look at each other and say, "Miguel kept his promise." That’s all we could say. "Miguel kept his promise." So we have the thought that because John Staak was the first missionary sent out ( to Africa) in so many years, that Miguel kept his promise. That is the story.

CRUMP’S DUMP

From the sublime to the ridiculous. My story is entitled "Crump’s Dump." I think this story starts outs with the Eastern American province, their openness to the missions, and, I think my class, which were not very many in those days--six in number. In the years before that, there were 18 and 20. But when it got down to us, the missions still were not forgotten.

Actually, my whole class was wiped out because of missions. Three of us went to the Philippines, one went into the army, and the last one was sent to the Western Province. So that wiped us out.

What I’m trying to say here is about two missionaries who are outstanding, both of them named Frank -- Frank McSorley and Frank Crump. Frank McSorley-- I can truthfully say that in all my years of experience, I never met a better missionary than Frank McSorley. The only problem is they made him a bishop. Otherwise, he would have been terrific.

Frank, when he became a bishop, went back to the States, of course, because he had to collect money. He was the first bishop of Jolo which was the capital city for the Sulu archipeligo, a chain of islands which borders on North Borneo, and is a Moslem province. And Frank McSorley is going to America to collect money to try to keep the mission rolling.

He somehow talked Frank Crump into coming back with him to the mission, and Frank Crump at that time was superior in Washington. I called one, the "ideas" man and the other one, the "do it" man. Frank Crump was the ideas man. He had a million of them. And whenever the situation arose, he always had some kind of a theory of how to correct it.

On one occasion, he wrote to the bishop -- the bishop was in America-- and he said, "I want you to buy me a dump truck." Why on earth a dump truck in the Philippines, down in Jolo at the end of the chain of islands? But anyway, the bishop did. He bought the dump truck, and they shipped it back.

When Crump got it, he went down to the authorities and he made a deal with them. During the time that the bishop was absent, Frank Crump had manipulated the diocese into buying a parcel of land which was on the promontory overlooking the beautiful Sulu Sea. But in front of it, it was just a disaster. It was a volcanic rock, and it was all filled with caves and mud holes and whatever. So he made an agreement with the government that he would give them the dump truck if they would bring all the garbage and all the refuse from the city and put it in the front yard of where he had built the house for the bishop. Well, anyway, he did it, and they filled up that whole place, and then they put the topsoil on it and seeded it.

Eventually, Bishop McSorley died. His successor, Bishop Dion, when he was ordained with all of the festivities that are connected with it, they were held outside on this beautiful park which was tiered in front--maybe four tiers of grass, beautiful grass--which today is called(by the Oblates only) "Crump’s Dump." Not very edifying, but.....

OBLATE INGENUITY AND MISSION ACCOMMODATION

When I was in scholastics somebody told us this story. I think it was about Jim Dunleavy. It could have been Ernie Brown or one of the Americans who went to the north, but I think it was Jim Dunleavy. *( Later attributed to Bishop .....)

Trying to get the Christian concept of marriage across to the people of the Far North, the Eskimos, was very difficult because of their native culture in which they were very quick to dump any wife that they didn’t care about.

So one particular night after the Oblate missionary had instructed them and married this couple, some months later the couple came to him very irate and very upset, and asked him to unmarry them. He tried to explain to them that that was not possible. Marriage was for life, that you couldn’t separate what God has joined.

None of the explanations, none of the theology worked at all. And they kept insisting, with the husband getting quite irate, and Jim, being afraid perhaps that he would get violent, said,"Okay, if you want to get unmarried, I warn you, the ceremony is a very long one."

He said, "We don’t care. We’ll get unmarried."

So he took them over to the church, which was undoubtedly an igloo, cold stone floors--ice floor, and he made them kneel. And he went back very ceremoniously and opened his breviary, and in those days, of course, it was in Latin. It was the old breviary, so he recited matins -- nine Psalms, nine antiphons, while they were kneeling together on this floor. At the end of it he came up in front of them and with great ceremony, took the holy water and stoop, and blessed them with the holy water, and then gave them both a hell of a whack on the head with the little ball on the end of the stoop, then went back, sat down, and said Lauds. At the end of Lauds, he came back, sprinkled them again and hit them both a resounding whack on the head with the stoop, and went back and did the same for Prime, and Terce and None.

And when he came to Vespers, he was about to do it again and the guy grabbed his hand and he said, "What are you doing?" And by this time he’s got a knot on his head the size of a goose egg.
Jim said, "You asked for an unmarrying ceremony, didn’t you?"
And he said, "Yes. How long will this take, and how many times are you going to hit me?"
And Jim said, "We have to keep this up until one of you dies. Because I told you, only death can separate you."
The guy grabbed his hand and said, "Never mind. We’ll stay married."
And they lived happily ever after. True story.

DEMAZENOD DERBY WITH A SIDE ORDER OF SHRIMP

Back in 1963, the Oblate Fathers had two parishes in Fayetteville. One was Saint Anne’s, the other was Saint Patrick’s. Saint Patrick’s was a downtown parish, and the church and facilities were rather small for the expanding crowd. So the bishop of Raleigh asked the Oblates to close the downtown parish and move out to the larger parish that they supplied or built, still called Saint Patrick’s. The Oblates owned the rectory. We weren’t about to give it away to the diocese, naturally, so Bill Ryan got the idea we should make it a mission house. He called it the deMazenod Mission House, and I happened to be the one to go down and take over.

At that time, they had a wonderful custom in Fayetteville. Every Sunday night, all the priests in the area would get together -- all the Oblates, all the chaplains, those from the surrounding little towns would get together, and three Sundays of the month, we’d have a marvelous dinner at Saint Patrick’s, and the fourth Sunday of the month, we’d be the guests of the chaplains out at Fort Bragg. But it was unfortunate that since I was in the mission house with--Lord rest him-- John Tracey, and for a couple of years with--Lord rest him--Pat Mangum, we, were never home together because of our preaching, and we were never home usually on a Sunday night.

So one day I got the idea. We’ve got to reciprocate to these guys, so why don’t we block off the last Sunday of January (this was before the Super Bowl came in) and we’d have a party for everybody. So we did. And I decided the best thing for us to do, since it was clergy,-everybody knows that priests like the race track, we should have a party and call it the deMazenad Derby, which was to be run at the deMazenad Downs on the -- whatever -- of January. And I got some decorations. I didn’t get any horse manure, incidentally, but I got ashtrays that had horses on them, and I had napkins and book matches and all the rest, and I sent out invitations on a tip sheet.

Now, at that time Charlie Costello, Lord rest him, was in Hamlet, and he was holding that place down all alone, and by that time, Charlie Costello had mellowed quite a bit, and the proof of that is the point of my story. All of us realize that Charlie Costello was always formal.

Well, the thing was to be on a Sunday night, and I was preaching in Savannah all the week before. Savannah, whether you realize it or not, is really the shrimp capital of the East Coast, and you can get shrimp down there for a song. I was preaching, and staying at the Cathedral, and I called one of the seafood merchants who lived in the parish and I asked if I could have a few pounds of shrimp -- 25 pounds, 25 bucks. Imagine those raw shrimp, those nice, big things, raw, for a buck a pound. You pay about $15 a pound for them now.

But at any rate, I asked if the guy would deliver them to the Cathedral rectory, and he called me out at dinner and he said, "Father, they’re in the icebox. All you’ve got to do is when you get on the train back to Fayetteville, give them to the Pullman porter. He’ll put them on ice, and pull them out, bring them to your place, and you’re home free."

So remember, it’s January, and it’s chilly up there, and they had the heat on in the train, and I got on and it so happened I gave them to the Pullman porter and gave him a couple of bucks and said, "I’m getting off in Fayetteville. Give them to me when I get off."

I just got settled down when all of a sudden, the Pullman porter came and rapped me on the shoulder and said, "Sir, here’s your shrimp. We don’t get to Fayetteville until 2:30 in the morning. I’m not up to opening the icebox at 2:30 in the morning to give you these shrimp, and I’m not entrusting the key to the icebox in here to any of these Pullman porters because that’s where my liquor is. And you know what would happen if they got that key. So here’s your shrimp."

"Well, what am I going to do with them?"

He said, "Why don’t you put them on the landing between the two cars on the train. It’s cool out there. They’ll hold."
"Yeah, they’ll hold. Somebody will steal them."
"Well, that’s your problem," he said.

So anyhow, here I am with 25 pounds of shrimp, and I said, "What in God’s name am I going to do? I can’t put them on the overhead. God, if they ever leak out there, we’re all going to get soaked."

So I stuck them under my feet, and naturally, the heat of the train helped to unthaw them. And I want to tell you, it was a smelly car to begin with, with all the sweaty people in there, and sure enough, the shrimp let go, and it was terrible, believe me.

Well, anyhow, halfway up the car on the other side was this drunk, and I think it might have been the smell that kept him awake, but every 20 minutes, the drunk would bellow out, "Who the hell has the freakin’ fish?" Every 15 minutes. "Who the hell has the freakin’ fish?"

Well, anyhow, I said a silent prayer that the guy had put a good plastic bag underneath because when I got off at Fayetteville,they were all water. Thank God I didn’t break the bag. But the joke was on me because that night at 3:30 in the morning, I’m standing at the stove cooking the doggone things so that the shrimp wouldn’t spoil for that party,

And it was a good party, and Jockey Costello was present, but he never realized that the shrimp that he had in the cocktail came from the same car where they melted and didn’t hold fast, and the commentary of the guy in the front of us was "Who the hell has the freakin’ fish?"

GEORGE PARKS AND THE MIDGET

I’m holding the cross of Father Charlie Costello, and it has a pertinence to the story I’m going to tell you.

Charlie was the classmate of the superior of my classmate, Bill Maguire, and I. Charlie picked us to put the wood beam plank and walk on the ceiling of the house in Washington so that anyone who wanted to go up in his bathing suit and sun himself, could and it would be quite comfortable.

Well, anyways, Bill Maguire and I taught school at HACI in Buffalo for a number of years, and Bill ran out of academic breathing, and volunteered to George Parks that he would be a curator of his at the Sacred Heart Rectory. This story of Mac is quite indicative of the sharpness of his mind and the quick turn for a good story.

The man on whom he was going to pull this fast one, George Parks, was a very short man and quite ultra-sensitive about his height, to the point that he put a lift into the pulpit so that the people could see him over the top. And Mac looked for the time that he could pull something on George that wouldn’t be mean, but would be a play on that ultra-sensitivity.

Well, anyways, the circus came to town and Mac went up to the circus on O’Donald Playground, and he’s browsing around and he caught sight of this midget. And the lights flashed all through his mind for a story on George.

So he engaged the midget and told him to come up to the Sacred Heart Rectory that night at 7:30 and meet the pastor, "A very fine man and I think you’ll be very pleased to meet him."

So Mac then made the preparations. He went to the girl that would be on the door that evening, and he told her that there would be a midget coming to the rectory at 7:30, and would she kindly usher him to the pastor’s office and place him sitting behind his desk. So the girl went on the phone contacted George and said, "There’s a visitor here to see you, George. I put him in your office."

So George . . . down he went swarming in the door, and he looked at the midget and he blew his top. And when he finally controlled himself, he apologized to the midget, and got him on his feet and ushered him out of the rectory. Then he went looking for the man he knew had to have done this. And he finally found Mac and confronted him, and his last words to Mac were, "As long as I am pastor in this Parish, don’t ever bring a midget to my office."

That story I told is indicative, I think, of the humor that’s part of a good Oblate community. And also it plays on the many pranks we play on each other, and we make fun of each other for our own community love of one another. But it’s a good story. Mac was sharp as hell, and that is very indicative of Mac.

GEORGE WHITE

I went to Brazil in 1947, and I was at the chapel, the English speaking chapel. That’s where I arrived, and I couldn't speak some Portuguese. All I could say in Portuguese was, "I don’t know how to speak Portuguese." But I didn’t have to, because I got to the English speaking community, and the Father Provincial was in the States, Father Mooney. Father Lendecugal was in charge of the English speaking community, but he decided to go to El Pina, and he left me alone in a community where I knew nobody.

So I was there for two weeks, and I was in charge of the midnight mass and so on. I got through all that. But then, two weeks later, I was sent out to help Father George White. He was 50 kilometers outside of San Paolo, and I could say mass because I could speak Latin, at least read Latin. So I was suffering from the equivalent of Montezuma’s Revenge in Portuguese, and I had to go out on a train. The trains in Brazil in those days had no doors on the exits, just wide open. So I stood close to an exit, figuring I might have to get off at any station along the way. And I didn’t realize, though, that the train was going to fill up with people as they do in Brazil so that you’re shoulder to shoulder. I kept getting pushed closer and closer to the exit.

Finally, I wound up on the last step holding onto the bars, and I managed to survive without having to get off at any station. I got to Susano, and somebody told me where the rectory was, and it was just a block away from the station. I got there, and Father White -- and for those who don’t know him, he is a Mohawk Indian, and he was also unpredictable. Actually, he had to get a citizenship because he was born in between Canada and the United States, and he finally decided he would be an American citizen. So he is a naturalized American citizen.

In any case, George is unique, and I was there to help him with the midnight mass, New Year’s Eve mass. George, of course, was getting the church all ready. Finally I get over there and he said, "You’re going to say the mass." "Okay, I can do that. I can say the Latin Mass. I don’t know about preaching, George, I don’t know any Portuguese."

"Well, you won’t have to worry about that."

So I went in and I got all ready, and it was about five minutes before midnight, and they didn’t tell me what to do, but I came out of the sacristy and I got up behind the altar, and I’m just about to begin the mass. He was in the choir loft because he was going to play the organ. It was one of those pump organs. And the horns of the factory were blowing, and I had asked him, "When are they going to stop, George?"

"Well, they promised me that they’d only blow them for five minutes."

So midnight came and they were still blowing, and the crowds were coming, and I was just about to start and he said, "Stop."
I said, "What?"
"Just a minute." The next thing I know, the organ is coming over the rail of the choir loft, coming down on two ropes. I went up and I said, "What’s happening, George? He said, "Well, there are too many people, so we’re going to say it outside."

And so he put the organ out in front of the doors and there was a music bandstand. He got his group over there in the bandstand, and the horns were still blowing, and I’m waiting for them to stop, and they didn’t stop. So after a while I decided I’d say the mass.

So I said the mass -- it was a high mass. I sang my mass, and he sang his mass, and we didn’t hear each other. I don’t know whether we gave out communion or not. I have no recollection of that. But it’s something that I will never forget.

And then Ray -- we have all kinds of stories about George. I have to also include this story that Ray told about when George was building his hall. He had to get help, so he made a bet with some brothers that if they went to help him shovel sand, that he could shovel more than they could. There were three of them and only one of George.

And so what he did was when they brought the truck over to the river bed, he put a piece of plywood in the middle of the truck. He had his cassock on, and they never saw the priest without his cassock on. He bet a case of beer that whoever put in more dirt got a case of beer. So while they were sitting there, he took his cassock off and put it on the seat of the car, and they were all staring at him, and he’s shoveling sand, and they couldn’t get over this phenomenon of this priest shoveling sand.

When they got started -- well, George was way ahead of them. But if you knew George, he was very, very strong, and very, very quick. Fascinating strength, tremendous strength, and he won the case of beer. And Ryan and Sullivan reminded us also of George’s thinking, just two instances.

When he got the hall more or less finished, and Joe Ryan was there with him, and Joe went off to town for some reason or other, George had the altar railing put in. When Joe got back, he looked at the altar railing and it was about this high. And Joe said, "That’s too high."

And so he called up this 12 year old kid, and the kid knelt down and his head come up to the top of the railing, and Joe said, "You see, it’s too high." George said, "He’s going to grow up."

And he had some chickens -- John was telling us this one -- he had some chickens in a fenced-in area, and somebody was stealing the chickens. So he electrified the fence. But he forgot about the electricity in Brazil, and he put 220 watts on the fence, and some kid went up to steal a chicken and hit the fence, and it blew him . . . .

And John told him, "George, you could have killed him."

"He didn’t get the chickens, did he?"

SCHOLASTIC DAYS

Often when we start thinking about stories, sometimes they go back to scholastic days, and I’ve heard many of those, and so I only have to go back a few years. I did my scholastic studies over in San Antonio, Texas. So here I am, the person from the Northeast, coming from Boston, going to San Antonio; and Texas, as we all know, has their independent mentality. Everything is bigger in Texas, and the Marlboro Man and stuff like that, and then I appear in the house, so things changed radically.

So one year, I think it was spring break or something, and one of the guys said they were going to go out to Padre Island, out to do some camping. Well, I would much prefer to go to the downtown Marriott Hotel and do some shopping, but I said I’ll go along with this. So the Superior was delighted, Rufus Whitley -- you all know him -- was delighted that I was entering into the Texas mentality.

So we drove Rufus’ mother’s car, which was probably like a Lincoln Continental, this huge car, electric seats, electric windows -- everything was very nice. So we’re driving this car as good Texans down to Padre Island to set up a camp site on the beach. So we set it up, and I have to make sure the inside of the place looks decent, you know, and Moe Lang -- I went with Moe, who is Mr. Camper himself, who goes out hunting and fishing, and he’s a very woodsy person. So we went down there and went out gigging for flounder in the afternoon.

Now, flounder is a flat fish, and you go into the back bays where it’s nice and still, and you have a harpoon and you gig them, and you make sure you don’t hit your feet. So we were gigging for flounder. We got our flounder and came back, and all of a sudden, a storm blew in from the Gulf coast that caught everybody off guard. And this $25-$30 thousand dollar car was surrounded by water.

Moe was nervous; I didn’t know what to do and started to laugh. He got into the car, and the more he put on the gas, the more the wheels sank into the sand. The waters go crashing into the car now, and going down through the exhaust pipe, and you could see the bubbles coming up. And this thing is just going, and nothing is stopping it. Cars are going by. They stopped but they couldn’t help us.

We finally got the car out. At that time, the water had already gone up to the top of the street and was crashing onto the street. So we moved the camp on the top of the dune, like Lawrence of Arabia, and the wind is blowing and all this, and Moe just couldn’t get it out of his mind that it was the mother of his superior's car that almost went into water, into the Gulf of Mexico.

So he said he couldn’t handle it, so we went back to Padre Island and got a nice shower, and it was like one of these trips from hell. It was horrible, and I would have much preferred to be at the Marriott.

LAKELAND MISSION

Let me do my Frank McCarrin story. I see him now, you know, every year I’ll get my --- and I like to scrunch over in the pew next to him and chat him up a little bit. He’s glad to see me and all that stuff, but boy, he’s not like what he used to be, you know.

And the way he used to be, I guess I was unfriendly to him. I didn’t find him a very likable person, you know. I mean, the way he laughed, and he’d be overbearing, and when he was a _____ he didn’t have the sensitivity in some circumstances that he should have had.

But I worked down in Douglas, I guess it was probably a dozen years ago, and I remember going down several times to the Lakeland Mission where this guy put in 14 or 15 years, you know. And when I saw Lakeland, Georgia, and these skimpy, skimpily constructed, one-storey buildings on cinder blocks and stuff like that, and bleached paint, I thought, jeeze, what a dump, you know.

Still now I think it’s a black population, and Frank McCarrin went down there and he kept that mission going for easy 14 or 15 years. And I’ve got to tell you -- probably a lot of it was me--but, I mean, you go in there, especially on an August day, you couldn’t be in a more disagreeable place. There’s nothing about it that looks nice, or feels nice, and the heat is just awful, awful, awful. And Frank McCarrin kept that place going, and one of the ways that he kept that place afloat financially was through rummage sales. I remember -- probably everybody in here has packed a box or two of clothes and sent them to Frank McCarrin down in Lakeland, Georgia. And he had discovered the flea market long before it was as popular as it is now--selling dresses for a dollar, and little kids’ clothes for 25 cents and things like that.

But Frank McCarrin, you know, he kept the Oblates there for those poor people, when it was not, in my mind, like a sexy kind of apostolic work to do. There wasn’t a lot of people in line to get down there with the poor like there are now. A lot of people prized that, living with the poor, but it wasn’t back in the fifties. Frank McCarrin -- his fidelity to keep that mission going and keep it afloat financially without drawing on the resources of the province. His example of faithfulness to those people, and the demonstration of our solidarity with them, with the church’s solidarity with them, and we would not back down from it no matter how crummy it was, and hard it was economically to keep going.

His piece of work down there seems to me to be like a benchmark of what we are capable of doing, you know, as a province, working with the poor. I thought it set a standard, and something to shoot for. I’ve worked in crummy places, but shit, I don’t think I could do Lakeland, Georgia, myself,you know. But what we could do, what we were capable of, you know, living out what the province is called to, what the Oblates were called to.

I just thought that was a shining piece of missionary work that he did for us as a province. And I’m so glad I can see that in him, see the sterling goodness of Frank McCarrin because I can see through his flaws, see such goodness, such lovely, lovely goodness, the grace at work in him. Frank McCarrin has come to my mind three or four times here, in mulling over this process of telling stories about people who meant a lot to me. I think they mean a lot to the province, too.

CARDINAL COOK AND THE OBLATES

This story is not very humorous at all, and it’s just a very touching story and it’s a very brief story. A number of years ago when I was stationed in Newburg, on weekends we would help out at one of the parishes over across the river. Eventually, the pastor of that parish died, and we all went over to the funeral. So it was Pat Hollywood and myself, and I don’t know if Dick MacAleer was with us and perhaps one of the lay brothers. We went to the rectory to vest, and while we were vesting and getting ready, the procession was beginning.

Cardinal Cook came up from New York to preside at the funeral, and I had never met the Cardinal. I had only heard wonderful stories about him, but if any of you have ever met him, you probably could verify -- a very tall, very stately man, very pious looking fellow, very warm and sensitive man. I understand now that in the archdiocese of New York they give him the first process for the cause of the first canonization.

But as he stood in the foyer as the procession began, we had to walk across a big open parkway and then over to the church. As each priest went by, he would stop and talk with them briefly and shake their hand, guys he knew from the diocese. And as we approached him, I think I approached first and then Pat Hollywood was right behind me, and I knew by the look on his face, he didn’t know who we were, had not recognized us as priests of the diocese. So we introduced ourselves, and I began by telling him. ."Oblates of Mary Immaculate." And then Pat Hollywood said the same, and he just stopped right there and just looked at us, and he said, "Oblates." and there was this long pause.

In the meantime, the rest of the procession had gone on, and all the guys were piled up behind us and couldn’t go, and he just stopped, and he started asking us about specific individuals -- men he had served with in the military or Marriott, and he would update his information as to whether they were alive or dead or what. And then he asked us about men like Jim Cleary--you know, how much he loved Jim--and this went on for like three or four minutes, and you could see the guys behind us getting very nervous. He didn’t care.

And then he . . . the thing that just blew Pat and myself away is he looked at us just very quietly for a moment, and then he said, "The Oblates. What a great bunch of guys. There’s never been an Oblate that I met that I didn’t admire."

It was just a mind-blowing moment. And then the procession went on. It was one of those moments where you recognize that he had had tremendous experiences with us over the years, and it was a tender moment, a touching moment for us.

FOREIGN MISSION IN PUERTO RICO

I don’t consider myself much of a story-teller, but the story I told in the group was -- well, a good place to begin it is: Have you ever been in a parish where there’s 16 murders in three months? I was living in the parish right here, I was the pastor of the parish at that time a few years ago.

I think I’ve heard many more people being murdered than I ever want to in my life, because you hear the gunshots in the night, and you hear the gunshots all around. The psychological effect it has on people is tremendous, and people know how many people are going to die. They tell you: "You know, this will be over with and three die, three more die, this will be over when four more die." They do it -- drug wars and other types of things.

Pablo had one guy come into him saying 'I want to go to confession. I have . . . I have an appointment," which means they’re going to kill me. And they did.

And this brings me to a reflection in general on the Oblate mission in Puerto Rico. A lot of good people have gone through the Oblate Mission at Puerto Rico. I never believed it has ever been staffed to the level where a mission should be staffed. It’s been two, three, or four for 20 years, and there are very few missions in the Oblate world that have survived that way.

I do believe that it is a foreign mission. The culture is different. The language is different. When you go there, just as your experience was in Brazil -- go there not speaking the language--it’s a long time and a very isolating experience without being in touch with an English speaking community. The television, the radio is in Spanish.

I think a lot of people have dedicated their lives there, and I see it has taken it’s toll, too. People like Don Conklin, who a lot of us remember as a very competent seminarian, a very competent priest, always had a struggle with the language and was always rather incompetent in his ministry. I really don’t know what happened to him because it was before I got there, but Dave Henner, we all know, left and got married

Sometimes I think Puerto Rico gets a bad rap, and I feel people judge personalities -- us as personalities that have been there. I mean, anybody can give us a bad rap if you want to based on personalities. But I think the fact that the dedication to try to go to the poor, to try to be with the poor, and to live in situations that were very difficult cannot be faulted, and I just wanted to tell that as a story.

MISSIOLOGY

The story that seemed to set us talking was number three, ingenuity, reading what was manifested, and the underlying theme seemed to be that of missiology. What we would like to communicate to Oblates 30 years from now is a sense of missiology. It’s expressed in various ways and for various personalities.

The Oblate is creating the sacrament of unmarrying. Any good missionary in this one sense has to create his own sacramental theology or stretch the theology of the church so that, you know, people can feel loved by God and loved within the church.

Walter Mack, although his name has not come up, was one who loved his people, that theology or sacraments did not get in his way.

Dunleavy was mentioned as one who had to create, or go beyond the structures to live and to show his love of the people.

McCarrin, another individual, you know, the sacrament of the bazaar, or the flea market–Who would think that would be a way in which God has manifested Himself, through a flea market? And yet it’s a sacrament of presence, of being present to people, letting people come together and be themselves, and to find the love of God manifested among themselves.

Someone mentioned the phrase, and maybe this summarizes this theology of a mission or missiology, "a first class brain, no; a first class heart, si. Yes." In other words, brainy people you really don’t need, it helps; but a first class heart is essential to this missiology.

PERSEVERENCE

My subject is one of perseverence. Certainly if anything is to be passed on through the generations to come, how important perseverence is. I don’t think there’s any heartache worse for a provincial than to lose men, not only to his province, but to the congregation when they take off, and usually for reasons which are not ones you see as valid, but they do. And I think that perseverance is one that we kind of pass over.

I’m thinking of a priest who talks about the vows, and he says well, what the hell, they’re changing the vow of poverty. It’s not the same as it was 30 years ago. And the vow of chastity, well, we won’t talk about that. But, he said, the vow of perseverance, we’ll talk about that.

I mean, who looks at that as being really important? It’s the fourth vow, but it’s almost a forgotten vow. And yet everybody, I don’t care who they are, is going to have problems as a priest, and he’s going to reach a time of crisis in his life. Everybody does. But what do you do? Do you throw in the towel and take off, and then live a miserable and unhappy life the rest of your life for the most part -- at least the ones that I’ve met that have left our province are unhappy. But just a mistake that can’t be corrected. But it was a mistake that they made themselves, and then they get themselves so involved that it’s almost impossible to get them out of it.

But I like to go back to that priest who always says that poverty, chastity, and obedience, well, we’ll work at them, but perseverence, I’m keeping that one.

LEAVE NOTHING UNDARED

In our group, I shared an experience that I had, and it’s based on the idea of taking the risk. I mean, leaving nothing undared. And as many of you know, we’ve been in a process in many of our places, particularly Saint Mary’s and St. Steven’s of creating an OEC, an Oblate Episodic Community, which basically has seemed to go down the drain. Still talking about it a little bit now again, but my story is not about that in a sense.

In the midst of our trials and tribulations, we’re talking ‘94, ‘95, and meetings of the sort. It was like boom, it’s coming together, you know, fighting each other. Something happened, an event happened .

It was spring of ‘95, I got a phone call from Bishop Alexandro Mon___ here in Miami saying, "Alex, I’ve been praying and I need the Oblates to help me in a tremendous endeavor."

"How can we help you?"

"Well, the Cubans are coming on rafts."

And what was happening was 34,000 young men and some women as well, but young men basically, and they’re up in Guantanamo Bay, in the Base, with no hope for coming into the United States or going anywhere, and the church has to be the pivotal access to help these people. Miami diocese was the one trying to do it, and the bishop, after praying, said, " I want the Oblates in there." And he wanted us to know. . . . The Father said, "I don’t know if I can do it, but I’ll see what I can do. I’ll call Father Bill Sheehan at the provincial office."

What he wanted was -- the bishop wanted was Jim Taggert or myself to go down. Now, here we are, the two pastors of Saint Mark and Saint Stevens, very active parishes, the ones that spoke English and Spanish. I mean, the ones that were the key players in this thing. And the thing is in the midst of our relation, our congregation and our province said yes, and we were sent for two weeks.

???Father had to leave within the time of going down there, but yet that wasn’t the end of it all. I mean, it was a very difficult situation with all the refugees, people hungry for God’s word, fears, repression, persecution of humans, awful things.

Again, the bishop called and said, "I want the Oblates to take over the mission" and once more, here we’re faced with an ??episodic community, all of our trials and tribulations, and then only as a promise by the congregation, the Oblates said yes.

And that’s what I want the future generations to hear. I mean, the numbers are down. It is difficult when we have to narrow down, but in the midst of it all, yes, we take the risk. And that’s what it’s all about, and that’s what brought me to the Oblates, and that’s what’s going to always bring us to the masses.

GET OUT OF THE WAY–THIS IS GOD’S WORK

We had talked about a number of points that we would like to offer as little bits of wisdom to give to the next generation of Oblates, but when it was all said and done, we chose this one, which was basically a sense of: Trust in God, and leave nothing undared.

And to personalize the story, I began speaking about the experience I had in Overtown, in St. Francis Xavier parish with the school situation, of its pending closing, and then the miraculous things that started happening around us that kept it open. I tried to capture that in our group, and I would capture it in the remarks I’m going to make now with words that were spoken to me by Joe O’Keefe.

I think most of you are familiar with the story. We had made a decision to close the school with a great deal of reluctance. However, realizing that we couldn’t continue financially, we were prepared now to deal with the fallout of that when things started happening, community leaders getting involved. . . .

It started taking off like a rocket. It started out with one man’s suggestion and so many others in the community getting involved and on board. Every day became like a new revelation of fantastic things that were happening to that facility and to me.

Joe at the time was working as the swing man in the three black parishes in Miami. He was living in Holy Redeemer with Mike O’Hara at the time, but every day he would come over to Saint Francis to see me, to just kind of give me a sounding board, to experience the joy that I was experiencing. But also my head was spinning from things happening so fast. And most days I could just share with him another wonderful thing that happened today, or another wonderful person who stepped forward with this idea or that idea.

But on occasion I would have to say to him, "You know, it’s getting too much. I don’t know where this is going, I don’t know what’s going to happen here."

And so finally, he said what I thought were very, very calming words for me, but words of deep wisdom. He said, "Joe, get out of the way. Get out of the way, this is God’s work."

And I never forgot that, and from the moment that he said that to me, I started to relax a little bit more with the whole phenomenon, because it was a phenomenon. I mean, this was incredible stuff happening. And when I realized I could probably hinder this more than help it by trying to control it–just get out of the way and just let it take its natural course.

The end of the story was a remarkable success. You know, maintenance in a facility that otherwise was going to be gone, and now Jack Lau could tell you, and the other guys working in Miami, that it’s flourishing. Five years later, it’s flourishing with the new classrooms and with everything else.

The other thing that I reflected upon with the men in our group was Joe’s words to the people. I went away on vacation that summer, the summer of ‘92. Joe came to cover the parish, and he happened to be there when Hurricane Andrew hit. I was up in Massachusetts with my family.

Joe came; the first Sunday he was there -- he told me this later -- he said to the people the first Sunday after I was gone on vacation, "If anybody here is afraid of God, get away from here because He’s all around this place right now." It was the whole idea of just trusting in God, get out of the way, we’re doing God’s work, and miraculous, remarkable, unexpected things can happen.

It was just a fantastic story that I"ll never forget as long as I live, and I don’t think I’ll ever match it again. But to me, that’s something that I would certainly hope that the next generation of Oblates could have that same sense, as Alex was talking about, too, the courage to leave nothing undared, to trust in God, get out of the way, and let His work happen, sometimes in spite of ourselves.

THIS IS OUR STORY, THIS IS OUR SONG

Well, in many ways I think our group came up with just about the same kind of inspiration that we’ve been hearing here, and we sort of ended with thinking of a song: "This is my story, this is my song." And then we say,"MY" praising my savior all the day long." it is we who are -- this is our story, this is our song, and it goes back over the centuries -- or the years, to the time of De Mazenod himself, in which we are today, again, reviewing and renewing within ourselves that whole spirit of De Mazenod, as the work that we’re doing in various places in our province -- our present province.

But it was brought to a suggestion that we might almost look at I-squared R-squared. Look at that particular incident which took place back in George Croft’s time, where he had the courage to say, "It’s time that we stop talking and began to do something about it," as we gathered our thoughts together about the direction in which we were going. There was a lot of contention, a lot of disagreements, a lot of things that were happening, but we began to talk to each other.

And so from there we began in the ‘70s calling ourselves to renewal of our own personal prayer lives. We gathered together in meetings throughout the province at that time, and ideas and thoughts were happening, and we were talking. And that talk went around and around a number of times, but it began to take effect, and we began to see it in operation, as we’re seeing it today in the stories that are being told over many of them. We’re seeing a sense of compassion, a sense of energy, a sense of direction, a sense of the spirit of De Mazenod, and I like to keep thinking of that spirit of De Mazenod, and going back to it.

My personal experience in the last few months is in the sense of looking at prison ministry. And I said,"Why am I in this?" I said, "I think I have to let go and let God do it," and move from there as they did down there with our Miami experience.

Now, our story is being told in many ways today. It’s being told in South Florida where our group are coming together and working, and under great difficulties, and problems or whatever you want to call it, in reaching out to the blacks. We find it in Lowell where they are struggling with the greatest efforts to bring together our congregation or our men of the area there, and working in the Spanish ministry as well as in the Anglo ministry. Two parishes up there which have been what we might say the grandfathers of our province here.

We see it certainly in North Florida at the present time, as we struggle and work at, and go through things which have been in the process of discussion and work things over the past eight years, reaching out in the rural parishes and trying to stimulate a sense of involvement in a real mission spirit. Reaching out to those who may never have heard of God, or have ignored God all their lives in our prison ministry, taking us back into that same sense of what it is that De Mazenod was all about–to go to the people . And as has been said a number of times here today already leaving nothing undared.

And we see this. We see it with George Croft with his I-squared, R-squared. We see it in the work that was done by Bill Ryan, who sometimes would get us very upset when he said, "Why aren’t you people doing something more with the integration problem?" where he underwent a great deal of difficulty. And it was he who stimulated and strengthened integration at the very time, at the beginnings of it.

We see it in the incidents in the story of Bill Adkinson and Eddie Randall, Eddie building up the Sumpter area, and in Bill coming in and taking that, working together in a sense, taking what has been developed and strengthened in that area. The story goes on and on and on, when we move from just the talking, of making the plans, and then moving into action. Many times, as we all know in this room, we’ve gone around the circle a number of times. We talk and we talk and we talk, but it is over the years that every once in a while that talk bursts forth into real action. We’ve seen it in South Florida, we see it in Lowell, we see it in Washington, we see it in a number of places. We see it in North Florida. So it is yet. This is our story, and this is our song, and this is praising our savior all the day long. This is what we’re . . . .

This is my story, this is my song, praising my savior all the day long; this is my story, this is my song, praising my savior all the day long.

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