Meanwhile Back in Morristown

Meanwhile Back in Morristown

While the middle decades of the twentieth century were eventful ones at St. Mary’s Abbey, young men, typically after graduating from St. Benedict’s Prep, made their intention known to join the monastic community and were sent to a Benedictine college, generally St. Vincent’s College. Having spent the high school years together they formed a like minded and similarly experienced group, well known to the monks. Occasional “outsiders,” non Benedict’s boys, were welcomed but they may have, at first, felt a slight sense of not quite belonging. Delbarton and St. Mary’s Monastery in Morristown may have seemed a foreign place. St. Benedict’s Abbey in Kansas, with its agricultural environment, where many completed their year of novitiate, was an exotic experience to the eastern “city slickers” placed among the “rustics.” 

After completing undergraduate studies, junior monks finally got a real taste of life in Morristown. Summers before Camp Delbarton, and while the small dairy herd still flourished, meant hard work in the garden, caring for lawns, and chopping corn in “forty-acres,” now the location of the Sugarloaf athletic fields.

About 1950, the cows and corn passed from the scene, and Camp Delbarton began to make use of the fields and lakes and to occupy the juniors as counselors and coaches. The camp schedule was so arranged that the monks, sweaty as they might be, could don habits and take part in the liturgical hours and the common table. Summer came to an end with a day trip to the Shore and a festive dinner. A week or two “home with the family" (the word “vacation” was not yet part of the monastic vocabulary.) was permitted, with PV bestowing the handsome sum of $15.00 on the youngest juniors (those were the days, of course, when one could dine well for five or six dollars).

After solemn vows, junior monks often began graduate degree programs during the summer, at Notre Dame, Catholic University, Seton Hall or elsewhere. It was expected that a master’s degree would be attained, or even a doctorate, as many would be called to be teachers and school administrators. 

Theology classes resumed in September with Father Bede Babo teaching dogma, Father Vincent, moral theology, Father Leonard Cassell, scripture, Father Stephen,  canon law, Fathers Hugh and Michael, homiletics, and the same Father Michael, accounting. Most of the texts were the Latin theological manuals then in vogue and tended to be on the boring side, if truth be told, especially in the pre Vatican II world of the 1950s.  Later additions to the faculty lent some energy, men such as Hungarian refugee Father Egon Yavor in dogmatic theology, Father Christopher Lind with moral theology and Father Denys Hennessy in canon law, a man ahead of the Xerox era, always distributing great wads of mimeographed legal size sheets on esoteric aspects of the law.

The part of the day most anticipated was the class the juniors were allotted to teach in Delbarton School. At last, they got to participate in the work of the community. In addition, almost everyone had a second job such as sacristan, orchard boss, bee keeper, librarian, or caregiver to the wheelchair-bound Father Alfred Meister. Indoor and outdoor housekeeping and maintenance details were mandatory and frater primus, the senior cleric, would post work lists. There were no janitors, and Brothers Alphonse Helmer and Steve Gnandt comprised the entire maintenance staff.

Entertainment was limited to late afternoon haustus and established periods of recreation with clerics, brothers, and fathers in their separate locations. Recreational opportunities consisted of walks in the countryside, sledding, cards, and occasional softball or touch football games. The Friday night movie, shown in the monastery and to the students on Saturday night, was eagerly anticipated. During the summer months and school vacations Father Bede’s three-D slide shows or Father Alfred’s home movies provided entertainment.

Trips to Morristown were rare and shopping largely unnecessary since PV maintained a supply of “Bachelors Friend” socks, tee-shirts, and washable pants in several sheds by the water tower. Brother Aloysius Hutton was the monastery’s man-about-town as he daily picked up mail, newspapers, and did necessary errands to cleaners and shoe repair shops. Young monks looked forward to ordination, of course, and a freer life in the wider world of school, parish or other pastoral work, but in many ways their junior days were idyllic.

While life on the hill top was lived largely within the seasonal and daily rhythm of the liturgical year and of the liturgy of the hours, monks who worked full time at Delbarton School marched to the very different beat. They prefected school boys in dormitories, led classes, study halls, and extra-curricular activities. Little sense of this parallel twenty-four hour seven-day-a-week world of the “school fathers” drifted up the hill from the school building, not yet dubbed “Old Main,” and the Brothers' House. Men such as Fathers Stephan Findlay, Frederick Muench, Kenneth and Arthur Mayer, Cletus Donaghy, Adrian McLaughlin, Lucian Donnelly, David Conway, Peter Meaney, and their successors, by necessity, were drawn away from the life of the monastery.

The typical day of monastic faculty member seems almost superhuman, combining fulltime teaching and dormitory duty with added charges such as bookstore manager, moderator of yearbook, newspaper or club or sports coach. At the same time all ordained monks served on weekends, and sometimes daily, at a local parish or convent, and often pursued their master’s degrees on the side. The obligations of the monastic prayer life also had somehow to be fulfilled even though in private. (There is a curious photo of Fathers Stephan and Frederick sitting it the top row of the bleachers at a football game, heads bowed over their breviaries.  One had to snatch the moment.) 

Up on the hill, the time and labor that went into the operation of a school by the still mostly monastic faculty, was, perhaps, not fully appreciated, but, as critical as some may have been at times, the juniors could hardly wait to become full partners in the work of the community.