Page 214 - What They Did to the Kid

202 Jack Fritscher

up subliminal messages hidden in my class notes to motivate them
from apathy and fundamentalism. But a chasm gaped between us.
Words didn’t focus.
I had taken my vocation into my hands to make something of
it in the seminary itself. I tried to warn them away from the insti-
tutionalization of priests. They were the sons of farmers and factory
workers who had survived the Great Depression and many of them
wanted to raise their station in life. They talked about not wanting
to worry where the next meal came from. They competed about
the real estate of their future dream parishes where they’d live in
the biggest house in the neighborhood waited on by a housekeeper,
a cook, and a gardener. They were not amused by the Christian
Family Movement in Chicago. They shook their heads over Canon
Cardijn’s beginning of the Christian Workers Movement.
Many, choosing designs from Romanesque and Byzantine styles
in sample catalogs, had already paid one or the other of the traveling
salesmen from the competing liturgical supply companies for their
own personal gold chalices. They examined the competing salemen’s
chalice displays the way customers shop jewelry.
They compared designs of Mass vestments, especially vestments
for their own First Mass after their Ordination, at modest little
vestment fashion shows, staring at themselves, parading out in the
invited salesmen’s finest traditional vestments and newest Vatican
II styles.
They staked out bragging rights on the monsignors they knew,
and predicted how they themselves would climb up the ranks of the
clergy. They talked of the apostolate, about working with people,
as if they were going to be sociologists or psychologists, not priests.
Their vocations were defined by the world. The most ambitious boys
loved the study of Canon Law and were set on becoming powerful
ecclesiastical attorneys serving bishops and cardinals and the Pope.
God told them so.
My very panic was caused by believing that God should be
speaking to me, whispering reassurances about my vocation in my
ear. Why was God apparently using semaphore flags to tell them to
be canon lawyers, dragging their rich vestments down the halls of
bishop’s mansions, when He wasn’t even speaking to me? The panic

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