Deadline for a Critic

Part Three

Liturgy of the Word

6

Father Koesler hoped his mouth was not hanging open. It often did when he was lost in thought. And he had, indeed, been lost in the memory of Robert Koesler, the musical hack; David Palmer, the gifted musician; and poor Ridley Groendal, talented, but not quite up to his own or others’ aspirations and expectations.

By simply bringing his eyes into focus once more, he saw David Palmer seated in the congregation. He appeared to be musically evaluating the motet just rendered by the choir. There seemed no other thought or concern on his mind.

There should have been.

Koesler forced his attention back to the Mass of Resurrection. It was time for the Liturgy of the Word. There would be three readings from the Bible: one from the Old Testament, one from the Epistles, and one from the Gospels. Since the Second Vatican Council, there had been a reemphasis on the importance of Scripture in the Mass. Before Vatican II, Scripture readings had been more or less perfunctory. Nor had much importance been made of drawing upon the Scriptures for homiletic purposes.

All that had been changed. Now, Catholics were encouraged to find the living presence of God in “God’s Word.”

Willliam Doran, one of St. Anselm’s lectors, stepped to the podium to read from the Second Book of Samuel.

“The king was shaken and went up to the room, over the city gate to weep. He said as he wept, ‘My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you. Absalom, my son, my son!’ Joab was told that the king was weeping and mourning for Absalom; and that day’s victory was turned into mourning for the whole army when they heard that the king was grieving for his son. The soldiers stole into the city that day like men shamed by flight in battle.”

Doran closed the lectionary and held it high, saying, “This is the word of the Lord.”

To which the congregation replied, “Thanks be to God.”

Koesler reflected that while Doran read well, there was one in the congregation who would have read even better. That would be Carroll Mitchell. Although he was a playwright and a screenwriter, his earliest training and experience on stage had been as an actor. And he had the actor’s finely trained voice and presence. He would have read the Scripture excerpt magnificently. But that, of course, was out of the question under the circumstances.

The sight of Carroll Mitchell brought Koesler’s memory back to his earliest days at Sacred Heart Seminary. When he had first entered that specialized high school in the early forties, he had known no one but his fellow Redeemerite, Ridley Groendal.

In those days, seminaries were well supplied with candidates for the priesthood. They would become steadily more crowded until the dramatic drop of the seventies.

Seminary faculties of that era liked to think that they conscientiously promoted only the best and brightest. In reality, as time would tell, it was a buyer’s market. Because there was such a record number of students, the administration had the luxury of being very selective in their choice of who would move on to the priesthood. The weeding-out process went on inexorably from year to year. While great numbers of students were dropped for intellectual, moral, or medical reasons during high school and college, it was not rare for some to be asked to leave even during the final four years of theology.

Koesler and Groendal quickly blended into that group of young men who had a common vision and goal. As high school freshmen, they were hazed by sophomores. They bought tickets to nonexistent swimming pools. They were sent on missions to off-limits sections of the buildings. Eventually, they became upper classmen.

Quite a few students were musically inclined. But there were no David Palmers with whom to contend. Early on, Groendal resolved that he would dominate the musical scene. And so he did. He became the principal organist, frequent accompanist for others, and regular performer whenever concerts were held.

Koesler continued to play the piano mostly for his own amusement. He was in competition with no one. While Groendal competed, or at least tried to compete, with almost everyone. It was, Koesler had often thought, as if Ridley were obsessed. With the exception of sports—Groendal had never been very well coordinated—he seemed compelled to challenge nearly everyone.

This tendency led to disaster when Groendal collided with Carroll Mitchell. Mitch, as everyone called him, was to the theater what David Palmer was to the violin—a natural. Tall and freckled, with thick red hair and brows, Mitch, with his chiseled features, was one of the seminary’s most handsome students.

But he wasn’t just a pretty face. He had a powerful, affecting, and pleasing voice, great presence, and the ability to involve an audience with genuinely moving performances.

To top it off, Mitch was a playwright—albeit an amateur. None of his plays had been published; all of them had been performed in the seminary, without charge and on a shoestring. Many were no more than skits, sometimes pulled together for a full-length performance. Though most of his work was comedy, he had also done serious drama, particularly on Lenten themes.

Though Ridley did perform from time to time, he knew he could not keep up with Mitch on stage. But he did consider himself a playwright and he had worked out some fairly entertaining stage pieces. Of course in that setting one could be fooled. A captive audience, the students were astonishingly easy to please.

And so the rivalry between Mitch and Ridley went on. But the only one conscious of the combat was Groendal. As David Palmer before him, Mitchell never considered Groendal a competitor.

Enter the subject of girls.

Koesler and Groendal had, in a manner of speaking, been without them virtually all their lives. While they attended Holy Redeemer School, boys and girls were separated from the first through the twelfth grades. Thus, through the first eight grades, neither boy had ever been in class with a girl. Girls, of course, could, under ordinary circumstances, nowhere be found within a seminary building. This would seem at best strange to almost anyone but a strict Catholic and/or a seminarian of that time.

Strange but true.

Over the centuries, the Church had formed a system that mass-produced priests, who were at the same time asexual and macho. It achieved the macho image by emphasizing “masculine” pursuits. Sports were not only encouraged, there was an insistence on at least minimal participation. The more violent the physical contact the better.

At the same time, a brotherly camaraderie was nurtured. But this good fellowship had to be completely free of any sexual feeling. Even the hint of anything remotely sexual between seminarians was branded a “personal friendship” and was grounds for expulsion.

Women, in the abstract, were easier to exclude from the future celibate’s life. As Tertullian once remarked about women: “The judgment of God upon your sex endures even today; and with it endures inevitably your position of criminal at the bar of justice. You are the gateway of the devil.”

If that were not strong enough medicine, a little more than a hundred years later, St. Augustine wrote: “I consider that nothing so casts down the manly mind from its height as the fondling of a woman, and those bodily contacts.”

So, instead of “those bodily contacts,” seminarians were encouraged to dust each other off in baseball, elbow each other in basketball, flatten each other in football and maim each other in hockey. “Particular friendships” scarcely ever sprang from such violent contacts. Before vacations—Christmas, Easter, summer—the seminary rector would ramble on to the effect that, “Take it for granted, boys, that you’d like girls if you tried them. So, don’t try them.”

At one point in high school, Koesler and a few others decided they would like to spend a profitable summer as lifeguards. So they took the Red Cross safety course, only to discover that seminary rules forbade them to be lifeguards at a public beach or pool. They could be lifeguards only at a summer camp for boys.

It took only a modicum of thought to realize there was something one might well expect to find on a public beach that would never be found at boys’ camps. Girls.