March 25, 2021
As an institution in the Paulist Community, St. Peter’s Juniorate, our minor seminary, located on South Chapelgate Lane on the edge of Baltimore, did not last long. Begun in the late 1920s, it was closed in 1967; it’s property was sold to the city of Baltimore shortly after that. (Many wags have since said, noting the use of the property for mentally-stressed juvenile delinquents, that its use never changed—it always housed the stressed and loony.) It comprised one building, with chapel and dining room providing the breadth of its façade, attached to a long perpendicular corridor, with some rooms added in the back. Three stories—the basement made for common space and classrooms; the first floor housed high-school candidates; and the upper two floors housed students in their first and second year of college.
This set-up of minor seminary—high school students and two college grades—now almost universally abandoned, was not as preposterous in the 1940s and 1950s as it would seem today. “How can a 14-year-old know what he wants to do?” But in those blue-collar days before 1965, people fell in love in second-year high-school, graduated at eighteen, and were married-with-children before the age of twenty. From our modern perspective, when college and grad school provide endless options for young people, this all looks premature: who grows up before 30 or 35?, we ask. But before 1965, it was credible enough, and, each year, some 50-60 students arrived at 605 S. Chapelgate Lane. (“What a perfect address,” people would say.)
Back then we were all very serious, ready to give our lives to God and the Paulists when we were fifteen, measuring every moment of our lives against the relentless scale of eternal life or eternal damnation. Perhaps that’s what was remarkable about the set-up of the minor seminary back then: high school students mingled with college students, at least pretending they could follow the conversations about the heady novels the college students were reading, or the meaning of the Enlightenment. One learned to lip-synch very quickly. The first year of college students were known, collectively, as “Poets,” because they read the poets in Latin; the second year were known as “Rhets,” because they reputedly read rhetoricians in Latin.
I do not have clear memories of my train ride from New York down to Baltimore when I entered the Juniorate at the age of 14. I know I found the transition from New York City housing apartment to a large building with sixty people almost unfathomable. From having to negotiate West Side streets filled with potential art or, just as likely, threat, I now had a relatively defined space in which to try to locate my new self—a Paulist seminarian! The West Side was so close to the theaters, but also ground zero for drug use among youth.
There were about a dozen Paulists priests living at St. Peter’s—most of them men whose apostolic lives had now been detoured into doing what they probably least wanted to do, teach three or four college-level courses to students more or (often) less receptive to their absorption of basic humanities. I look back at that faculty, whatever their reluctance, with wonder at what they could bring into our world: John Kirvan introducing his students to the religious themes behind modern novels; John Kenny getting us to read French novels within months of our initial “Parlez-vous Francais” initiation; Rudy Vorisek doing his best to make Renaissance history exciting; and Justin McCormick giving us the only respite from humanities—science and biology. “Do you really want me to cut up this frog?”
Vinny McKiernan was drafted, with the oils of ordination still fresh on his hands, to teach Latin and Greek—this, after his own thirteen years of seminary life. Like me, Vinny was a “lifer,” this almost-extinct breed of Paulist who started seminary at first-year high school. Vinny was later joined by Bob Mize. Both of them toiled mightily to get us to do our declensions and conjugations correctly, as well as uphold the ultimate importance of learning these now long-dead languages. Of course, 1959 was well before John XXIII’s revolutionary Second Vatican Council. Our world was one of endless infallibility, and what was more infallible-sounding than Latin—or, even more, Greek?
My first rector was Ed Gleason, a funny and rhetorically gifted man who suffered greatly from the events he witnessed as a chaplain during World War II. I know he would not drive—nerves—so other priests would take him here or there. He regaled us with vignettes from his long life as a missionary, passionately depicting the sufferings of Jesus. He strove to be unsentimental and to uphold a viral image for us; even Mary, when he preached about her, was a “manly woman” because of her suffering along with Jesus. “Meditation,” he often said, “was a veritable springboard into mental prayer.” So that’s what we were supposed to be doing early every morning—using that springboard. Bill Manning came along with a softer image of the Paulists: funny, wry, he made sure that the high school students stayed connected with home, and were not picked on by the upper grades.
The wake-up bell was something like 6:10 in the morning, with twenty minutes to throw whatever water we could on our faces and get to chapel by 6:30. Our bathrooms, called “the loca” after some obscure Latin phrase, were in common, so we could see our joint suffering as we strove to wake ourselves up and make it to chapel on time. One dared never be late, unless excused because of illness. We sat in rows of four or five, following the prayer book’s prescriptions. The first half of the year was in English; after that, in the immortal Latin which as the proper language of the Church.
Most of us strove to do the half-hour meditation with relative alertness, waiting for the “springboard effect.” Occasionally we’d hear a “thud” as some poor seminarian brother’s head hit the pew as he slid into sleep. Believe me, at that time of the morning, anything out of the ordinary seemed just utterly hilarious. “Who was that snoring during meditation? Oh my God, it was one of the priests! How funny is that?” Our superior, or his designate, read some sentences from “The Imitation of Christ” each morning; that was then the standard of what holiness seemed to be about. It’s lugubrious message only made the occasional chapel lapses seem even funnier. “Does so-and-so have his pajamas on under his cassock?” “Look at this one, coming to chapel in his slippers.” Snickering was an effective method for staying awake.
Then came Mass, and we all had missals to help us get through the Latin and follow what was happening. Occasionally one would actually recognize a word in the Mass that one had studied in class the day before, proving how important Latin could be. Each priest back then, in those days before concelebration, celebrated his own Mass; a slew of small chapels accommodated the priests, and we vied to get the priest who could finish Mass in seventeen minutes, rather than the usual twenty-five. Or the one who would not correct our Latin. Or maybe the one as sleepy as we were. We wore white shirts, black ties, and black jackets, looking like undertakers or Mormons. I imagine our clothes looked pretty rumpled then, but we didn’t notice it. Just to make it to breakfast was an achievement!
Then at7:30 or so we had breakfast. I had to learn to drink coffee black—our tables were so long, it would take forever to get milk or sugar from one end of the table to the other. It was just easier to drink coffee black. We were fortunate to have the Oblate Sisters of Jesus the High Priest serving us in the dining room (and the laundry, too, for that matter). These were a group of Mexican Sisters who serve Jesus the Priest in the rather lowly form of half-baked seminarians. (When Baltimore closed, how blessed we Paulists were to have them come to our Mother House in New York!) The Sisters prepared breakfasts, now that I think about it, quite diverse and ample. They must have known what adolescent and slightly-post-adolescent young men needed in life. French toast, pancakes, poached eggs on toasted bread or even, wow!, English muffins, omelets, sausage links and sausage patties, bacon, and hot cereal. I supposed a part of us thought that, having gone through meditation and morning Mass, this breakfast was our reward.
Not long after this, it was time for our first class. Here the differentiation between high school students and college students stood out the most. The high schoolers had to walk a half-mile or so through a wooded-road to the minor seminary of St. Charles College, where the Sulpician Fathers—the world experts in forming priests—let us Paulists attend class. When I say “walk a half-mile,” I am being a bit euphemistic, as the road began with a steep-angled hill that snaked into woods, none of which was able to withstand the influences of weather. If it rained, we literally slid down half-a mountain of mud—no size boot was sufficient—to be wiping sopping red clay off our shoes and pants (and sometimes our rears) for the rest of the day. Ice brought its own form of challenge, while snow combined both mud-and-ice—enough to make a fifteen-minute walk often take a half-hour.
I don’t know what the Sulpicians made of us Paulist high school students. Here we were, mostly New Yorkers or Chicagoans, bounding into class with genteel Marylanders and Virginians. We had a certain Paulist cockiness—we were studying to be a special kind of priest, and we came from cities bigger than Baltimore or Hagerstown. We’d love to crack jokes, do riffs on our classmates or teachers, and test, within the careful borders set for us, how far we could go before we got a teacher’s stare or a classmate’s nasty look. Twice a day we’d make the woodsy round-trip, going to our classes: Latin (every day, 6 days a week), English, history, math—with German or French supplanting math later on in high school. The Sulpicians frequently reminded us that we were getting the greatest classical education—yes, one had better like the humanities or else one was out of luck.
Some of the afternoons were free for things like house jobs or recreation. The Paulists enjoined recreation upon us vigorously. “Mens sana in corpore sano”—that was the slogan—a sound mind in a sound body. Unspoken, but implied, was the theory that a good hour of tough recreation would tire our bodies and help us withstand the normal whims of temptation that adolescence brings. We’d form football teams—one group against the other, highlighted by a student-faculty game once a semester. Although it was touch football (President Kennedy only enhanced this after his election in 1960), I learned that my 110-pound frame could be whacked this-way-or-that without much effort. My specialty was, given my size, to sneak around the defending line and tag the quarterback before he could throw. This worked well until I was positioned against someone quite more substantial than me. He would lower his head and make bull-like sounds (he was from Nebraska or someplace like that), then proceeding to put his head into my chest and simply lift me over his back.
I was surprised at how much people would get into these games, although, given our isolation, it should have been obviously to me. We would talk for days before a game, and watch opposing quarterbacks practice so we could detect their weak spots. Game time, touch football or not, came with ferocious energy and a toughness that I learned to avoid as much as possible. Some of the fiercest competitors were the priests. Stuck in the minor seminary, they had to let their pent-up feelings out somehow; what better way than to land a snarky and smart-alecky seminarian on his butt. And then laugh in his face. I suppose, given “The Lord of the Flies” and other examples, we could easily have been much meaner to each other than we were. (My adapted skill was hand ball, perfect for quick, intense play, all with the aim of beating one of the priests with a sneaky hit into the corner; however, they always got revenge.)
Our meals depended no only on the wonderful Mexican Sisters, but also on the vagaries of the priest who had the misfortune to be named “procurator,” usually an assistant to the superior. All issues of budget, food, house maintenance and repair feel on this poor fellow. He didn’t even have the semi-fun of jousting with seminarians in class. And the procurator depended on the budget set for St. Peter’s by the general Paulist community. So we long-timers would note the difference in how one procurator could extend a dollar compared to another. One developed the theory that all vegetables could be stretched further if they were “creamed.” Day after day something green swam in something white, and we students would snicker to each other at the imagination—or lack thereof! One procurator thought that the students would like pizza, but the Sisters didn’t know how to make it. Well, who did? Surely Frank DeSiano, the “EYE-talian,” knew how to make pizza. (Of course, my mother would never let us anywhere near her kitchen.) After some speculation and several tries, something resembling pizza would appear at lunchtime now and then. And, yes, the students did like it.
Dinner could be strange, and not because of the food. One of the traditions carried on by seminaries in the days before 1960 was to imitate some aspects of monastic life, even though congregations like the Paulists or Maryknoll had no monastic heritage to speak of. (After the 1917 Code of Canon Law was promulgated, a rather uniform notion of “religious life” pervaded the whole Church; it made no difference what your specific community’s purpose was, what your different religious founders had in mind. Religious life was religious life, whether one took vows or not, or whether one took solemn vows or simple.) At dinner before meals we recited the “Roman Martyrology,” which, we soon learned, was far more conducive to eating when read in Latin than in English. Invariably it recalled lurid details of Roman torturers, and the heroic resistance of saints far holier than we could ever be. After beheadings, lashings, and flayings, one did not always feel like eating. Most of the year the dinner commenced in silence as the assigned reader for the week would read, thankfully in English, from one or another book throughout the meal. So we ate in silence, listening to a chapter from the life of some saint or from an inspiring novel. When the reader misread one or another word, it was the superior’s job (or his designate) to bang a gavel and publicly make a correction. A little humble pie to go along with dessert.
Following dinner, high schoolers had a very different experience than those on the college level. They were presumed able to study on their own, but we high schoolers were put into a single room with class-room desks. A priest, perhaps as a form of punishment, was assigned to watch over us as we took out our Latin grammars, or our history books, and studied under the diligent eyes of Father Prefect. Most of the priests, particularly the elderly, saw this as a blur on their day, yawning or nodding their ways through their supervisory tasks; occasionally, a diligent father would proceed to show off his skills in Latin or French, checking your homework and bemoaning your mistakes. “Go back and do that over.” “Yes, Father,” we’d answer, hoping that his eagle eyes would find another to prey upon.
Minor seminaries could, at times, mirror the meanness of middle school. After all, there were some fifty or sixty of us, all torn from the patterns of normal adolescent growth, thrown into a system invented in the Middle Ages. We would, then, readily develop nicknames for each other, each one designed to highlight a particular personal limitation of someone. How often was I “four-eyes,” or, in special recognition of my genetic structure, simply “Wop”? We would learn Latin names for certain things and apply them to each other—“what was the word for ‘illegitimate”? Or wait till people were almost asleep and then water-balloon them after throwing on the light, just to blind them in the process. Of course, the priests tried to suppress such native cruelty, but they could become objects of nicknaming pretty easily themselves.
Periodically we had something called a “Gaudeamus”—Latin for “Let us rejoice” or “Let us have fun.” These were skits that different ones of us would put together, usually about each other. We loved being able to put on a skit about an incident that made fun of the priest sitting right in front of us—usually pointing out a trait or usual phrase of speech. We hit the sweet spot when he didn’t even know he was the object of our barb. Some of these things could be pretty cruel, but some could prove quite clever. For one Gaudeamus, a classmate convinced me that the two of us could do the opening act of “JB”—a Broadway play that replicated the arguments of the Book of Job. We memorized and practiced for weeks. I still hear the opening lines in my head: ”This is it.” “This is what?” “Where we play the play, Horatio!” “What, no stage?” “The world it the stage . . . “ One of the great leaders of these nights, and one of the few high schoolers to be ordained and persevere in the Paulists, was John Collins, from Good Shepherd in New York. He would have us rolling on the floor with his imitations of this one or that. Bob Gunton joined my class in college; he is now a world-famous actor. He brought a level of art and skill to the acting and singing that raised our efforts many notches higher.
All these Juniorate moments took place against events that would change the world. When I entered the seminary, John XXIII was just elected; the stiff and sober visage of Pope Pius XII gave way to the jolly, filled-in face of our new pope who had the audacity to call the Second Vatican Council. And my second year in high school brought the election of John F. Kennedy—not only the first Catholic to be elected president, but even more the image of a dynamic, intelligent man who nuanced strong world-positions with wit and charm. As we would go down weekly into the Baltimore “ghetto” to visit homes, the surging voice of the Civil Rights Movement felt autobiographical for all of us—sure “we could overcome”—we were a new generation who could re-create the world, if only we imagined it and fought for it.
Between these two men, John the Pope and John the president, we saw change happening before our eyes. Each had visions of a world of justice and love, when artificial barriers would be destroyed, and every person afforded opportunity. John XXIII challenged us to a world-order based on love; John Kennedy to one based on the eradication of oppression, whether foreign or home-grown. During my years in high school, I witnessed the end of each of these men—and the unfulfilled state of their visions. We were permitted television only a few times in my six years in Baltimore—I can count them: the Cuban Missile Crisis, the burial of JFK, and the election of Paul VI.
This wider backdrop actually explains more about life in Baltimore than the daily happenings and happenstances. One could not stay in Baltimore without high ideals. The Paulists provided us a vision of modern spirituality—rooted in Christ, the Spirit and faith, but geared to our modern world which, we felt, yearned for just the truth we were learning. For all the naps snuck during meditation, I can also imagine the moments that amounted to conversion, to transformed lives, to renewed dedication. We went to Baltimore to do just what John XXIII’s Vatican Council was laying out for us—to speak to the modern world the ever-ancient and ever-new principles of our faith. We went to Baltimore to further the image of an engaged Catholicism such as we saw, at least at that time, in John F. Kennedy. His murder was not the death of his dream—just, rather, the cruel evidence of its importance.
About half the men who went to Baltimore decided to join the Paulist Novitiate, the next step after the Juniorate. Unfortunately, not many who went to the high school division decided to enter the college division. But Baltimore provided the Paulists, while it lasted, the opportunity to see their vocation take root in the lives of the youngest and freshest. Perhaps, it was inevitable that Baltimore would close; the forces of change, and more realistic appraisals of youth, already strained the very concept. Closing Baltimore was yet another way to acknowledge that the Church had slipped into another era, one not based on culture and tradition, but rather one based on choice. A choice that only older people could (perhaps) make.
Once, after Kennedy’s election, doing fifty-mile hikes became the craze. Bobby Kennedy was actually the booster of these hikes. Some of us high schooler prevailed upon our superior, Bill Manning, to let us hike from Washington back to Baltimore. I remember us trying to get up the steep hill, at the end of the walk, at 605 S. Chapelgate, physically lifting our thighs to be able to make the next step, exhausted—and sore for days afterwards. Fr. Manning insisted on taking us out to eat, despite our near-mobile state. We waddled into the restaurant, half nodded into our soup, and were grateful to be able to get out of the car and into bed afterwards. But the idea, its boldness, its culture-popping tone, was typical of Baltimore. Whatever the exterior structure, we could, at that young age, dream very big.
Paulist Fr. Frank DeSiano is president of Paulist Evangelization Ministries. He served as president of the Paulist Fathers from 1994 to 2002.
- In 2018, Fr. Frank wrote Growing Up Paulist, another essay about his youth with the Paulists
- Listen to an interview with Fr. Frank about his life and ministry.