Called To Serve: The Untold Story of Father Irenaeus Herscher, OFM

By Kathy Cecala

In his classic and best-selling memoir of spiritual epiphany, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton tells of a delightful and friendly Franciscan friar who freely lends him books and discusses matters of the spirit with him. This biography tells the full story of that man, Father Irenaeus Herscher OFM, describing not only his friendship with Merton and the poet Robert Lax, but also his own American-immigrant narrative: his early years as a young shipyard worker, his unlikely call to the Franciscan order and eventual career as academic librarian and historian. Against a backdrop of great 20th century events and cultural changes, Father Irenaeus managed to touch many lives. As 'pastor' of his library, he encountered US presidents, cardinals, bishops, famed writers and journalists, famous athletes, film stars and other cultural icons—as well as housewives, grade-schoolers, local businessmen and hospital patients he ministered to as chaplain. But perhaps his biggest influence was on the thousands of students, scholars and researchers he worked so hard to serve and help, following his own guiding spiritual principle: Do your best, let God do the rest. His legacy lives on through his beloved library at Saint Bonaventure University.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Franciscan Institute Publications
• Release date: Oct 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781576594285

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INTRODUCTION

In the early 1930s, a young, newly ordained friar arrived at St. Bonaventure College in Western New York state, to teach classical languages and assist the college’s librarian. Barely thirty years old, his life had already been something of an amazing journey. The former Joe Herscher of Camden, New Jersey, who had taken the name Irenaeus upon entering the Franciscan Order, had immigrated to the United States as a boy with his family from war-torn Alsace on the French-German border. He’d entered Camden’s public high school, only to drop out at the end of his sophomore year to work at a local shipyard, performing menial tasks and labor. Perhaps improbably, while still a teen, he received the call to join the Franciscans, and the order took him in gratefully, recognizing his hidden intelligence and talents, shaping him into a priest and scholar.

His life had already taken some dramatic turns. But there were about to be a few more, taking place in the pivotal years between 1937 and 1941, while the world beyond the Southern Tier once again raced toward war. The events that occurred in these years might be attributed, by some, to chance, coincidence, or luck. But to Irenaeus himself, they were simply proof of a divinely benevolent plan he ardently believed in and placed his trust in. For hadn’t Divine Providence already brought him here, from troubled Alsace and the grim streets of Camden?

When Father Irenaeus arrived on campus in 1932, there was no separate building housing the college’s collection of books. In fact, the college was still recovering from a disastrous fire in 1930 which had destroyed nearly half the buildings on campus. The college president, Father Thomas Plassmann, cleverly managed to acquire generous funds for a new library building from a New York City philanthropic organization, but the building was only in the planning stages. Overseeing its creation was the august and highly respected college librarian of the time, Father Albert O’Brien. While the new building was being designed, Father Plassmann decided to send young Irenaeus to library school—Columbia University, no less, in New York City. Within a few years—by 1936—Irenaeus was a newly minted librarian, returning to Bonaventure just a year before construction would begin on the new library building, which would be named for its financial benefactor, Col. Michael Friedsam.

In May of 1937, Father O’Brien picked up a spade, and dug out the first clod of dirt, launching the library’s construction. He then immediately set off for New Mexico, where he served at a summer mission. But he never came back. He died in Albuquerque, at the somewhat premature age of 57, and all of a sudden, Father Irenaeus Herscher, at the age of 34, was director of a library that did not yet physically exist.

If this wasn’t extraordinary enough, having the opportunity to see the building he was newly in charge of rise and take shape, then getting to fill it, another chance—or perhaps divinely ordained—occurrence took place only a year later in 1938, when a very ordinary sort of visitor—a college boy, on summer break—came into the brand-new Friedsam Memorial Library. This visit would not only change Irenaeus’s life, but it has actually been written about, in a best-selling book:

The librarian was Father Irenaeus, who looked up at us through his glasses and recognized Lax with ingenuous surprise. He always seemed surprised and glad to see everybody. Lax introduced us to him. This is Ed Rice, this is Thomas Merton.

‘Ah! Mr. Rice…Mr. Myrtle.’ Father Irenaeus took us both in, with the eyes of a rather bookish child, and shook hands without embarrassment.

‘Merton,’ said Lax. ‘Tom Merton.’

‘Yes, glad to know you, Mr. Myrtle,’ said Father Irenaeus.

In late autumn of 1948, Mr. Myrtle—aka Thomas Merton, or later on, Father Louis M. Merton OCSO—introduced Father Irenaeus Herscher OFM to the reading world. The then-young Franciscan friar and librarian appeared in Merton’s groundbreaking and best-selling memoir, The Seven Storey Mountain, as one of many supporting characters in the tormented spiritual journey of a single protagonist, Merton himself.

Researchers and scholars are familiar with the Merton Archives at Friedsam Memorial Library, St. Bonaventure University, which were begun, organized and maintained for many years by Father Irenaeus himself. That mention of him in Seven Storey Mountain might seem to be Father’s proverbial—and only--fifteen minutes of fame, but oddly, he had a number of brushes with celebrity in his lifetime. He actually became a rather well-known figure in popular American Catholic culture in the 1950s and 1960s, for reasons I will elaborate on later—reasons that have nothing to do with Thomas Merton.

The subtitle of this book is, The Untold Story of Father Irenaeus Herscher, and this is because Father’s story has really not ever been told completely. Merton himself has been the subject of exhaustive research and perhaps hundreds of books by other authors and scholars. But there seems little literary illumination about the people who may have influenced him most: friends, mentors, associates, fellow monks and the Franciscans he knew and loved at St. Bonaventure. Father Irenaeus’ story reveals, I think, some interesting things about Merton. But in researching Father’s life, I found there was far more to his life than meeting Thomas Merton, who was just one person among many Irenaeus would connect with. I was astonished to find Father’s lifelong influence on an astonishing number of people, over many years.

But the truest meaning of Irenaeus’ life lies not necessarily in his many friendships and social connections, but in his simple and endless spiritual generosity, his practical and cheerful employment of the commandments of love and mercy in his everyday life. More essential, is his absolute faith and conviction in God’s plan, and the importance of being open to it: Recognizing it, accepting it wholeheartedly, and with joy. Do your best, he said, endlessly, let God do the rest. That his life story is also a unique example of the 20th-century American experience is almost beside the point.

The life story of Irenaeus Joseph Paul Herscher OFM is as compelling a tale as Seven Storey, though in a completely different way. If Merton discovered his spirituality in monastic life and solitude, Irenaeus found his in activity and other people. His is not just one story, but many threads, spooled out over a lifetime. It is at first a classic immigrant tale, a young boy fleeing World War I Europe with his impoverished family for opportunity in the New World. It becomes the moving tale of spiritual calling that manages to find a young laborer working in the anonymity and hellish working conditions of the country’s largest shipyard; and then the journey of that naïve and under-educated young man through the Franciscan order, where sound mentors shepherd him into the priesthood and then, improbably, into the halls of academe. It is the tale of an inexperienced library-school graduate suddenly thrown into the directorship of a college library with the unexpected death of his superior; and then his lifelong efforts to grow and develop that library into a unique place of learning. And along the way, he encounters people—famous and ordinary, academics and farmers, students and housewives. Although Irenaeus never served in a diocesan parish church, he clearly saw his role of university librarian as pastoral, and his parish extended far beyond the borders of the university where he served—out into New York State, nearby Pennsylvania and even beyond, reaching to New York City, California, Franciscan missions abroad, and the isles of Greece…and to a certain monastery in western Kentucky. His entire life can be condensed into a single phrase, service to others; hence, the title of this book. Father Irenaeus lived a well-recorded and documented life of constant service to others, following to the end the principals and core philosophy of his beloved Franciscan order. In addition to this powerful commitment to his parishioners and fellow Franciscans, he had enough professional achievements to fill a very dry sort of academic biography, not the least of which was a forty-volume-plus bibliography of the Franciscan order, comprising its history from Francis himself until Father Irenaeus’ own time. In addition, he wrote a fair number of newspaper and magazine articles on various subjects, mostly historical in nature, and was a frequent contributor to many library journals, reviewing books he thought might be of interest to fellow librarians. And he wrote letters, many, many letters, conducting a prodigious correspondence with people throughout the world that rivalled Merton’s own. Of course, he was one of Merton’s correspondents as well.

I think scholars, and even some of his contemporaries, tend to overlook or underestimate Father Irenaeus because of quirks in his personality, and his simple, understated spirituality. He could be a bit absent-minded and error-prone, as illustrated so charmingly in the excerpt from Seven Storey. He was not a serious or moody sort of contemplative; he wasn’t deep, or philosophical. He had a bit of problem, simply sitting still. He always seemed to be running about, gregarious and smiling and friendly, eager to talk; he loved to laugh and hear a good joke or story; he followed the college’s basketball team and ‘March Madness’ avidly and with a fierce devotion. He could be a bit boyishly star-struck and dazzled, when he met someone famous; and he had odd, quirky personal interests, such as postage stamps (creating them, not collecting) and the local oil industry. He had a weakness for glib aphorisms and sayings: Do your best, let God do the rest, was his very favorite. He had a special devotion to specific saints and ritual, definitely pre-Vatican II in his approach to Catholicism, an old-church man somewhat resistant to the changes that came in the 1960s and beyond. It seems he rarely got visibly angry, becoming stubbornly grim, or simply walking away when faced with any idea or situation he didn’t like or objected to. But mostly he was cheerful: The many people who knew him commented on his almost childlike sense of joy and delight with the world.

He kept up an extraordinary pace of activity, which perhaps makes him seem un-spiritual, a bit worldly. But an undercurrent of faith and deep belief ran through it all, as well as his commitment to serving others. As if running a university library were not enough for him, he also served as chaplain to the local Catholic hospital and adjacent nursing home, where he devised ways of bringing reading material to his patients, sometimes projecting it onto their walls and ceilings. He received perhaps thousands of letters annually, many from scholars and researchers but often complete strangers and ordinary folks, seeking a small favor or answer to a question: And it seems, judging by his replies, that he almost never said no, or let a query go unanswered. In his later years, he did grow a bit absent-minded and forgetful, though he did not succumb to dementia—by all accounts, he was alert and mentally active until the day he died.

Writing this book has presented me with the unique opportunity to travel back in time, going back to an era before marriage and motherhood and a long career in publishing, to my days as a student at St. Bonaventure in the 1970s. I met Father Irenaeus as a nervous 17-year-old, on my first day of work at Friedsam Memorial Library (as St. Bonaventure’s library is called). He was at the time the Librarian Emeritus, yet he still pretty much functioned as the man in charge despite the recent hiring of a lay library director. He smiled, took my hand and told me, We’re happy to have you! In the following four years, I had ample opportunity to interact with him and come to appreciate his unique and cheerful, generous personality. It wasn’t an act, but genuine, and ever so charming: a little shy smile, bright dark eyes focused on your face, and that eagerness to connect, find common ground, even with a lowly student worker like me. I would listen with trepidation to his hurried footsteps on the deadly iron spiral staircase beside the circulation desk—even as he approached his eighties, he was always running, in a hurry--the rapid clicking of his rosary beads as he hurtled up onto the first floor, in search of visitors or students to talk to. Eventually I realized, well before graduation, what a great treasure he was.

The task of reconstructing his life—and reviving my memories of him--began with what he left behind for us. The man who so lovingly tended Thomas Merton’s archives at St. Bonaventure, now has his own archives at the library. He had been a famously disorganized sort of librarian—I remember one fellow friar referring to his desk as a pile of rubble—but he had saved virtually every letter and important document that crossed his desk. He made carbon copies of most letters he sent out, except perhaps the most personal, and from these alone—a vast correspondence to persons known and unknown—I was able to construct a rough plotline for his career as librarian and archivist.

The rest of the archive is a treasure trove, to be explored with a bit of wonder. There are his breviaries, one touchingly near falling apart with daily use; there were books from his early Alsatian schooldays, yellowed pages with his own penciled scrawl—in German; a Latin grammar from seminary. There were Christmas cards and photographs of family members so dear to him that he did not need to label or identify them; newspaper clippings and holy cards for deceased friends, a folder filled with sermons he had written and delivered; another with little speeches and talks he had given to local Rotary clubs, Boy Scout troops and library associations. And then I came across a true find, one that helped fill in the lost years, before his ordination and life’s work: an attempt at an Auto-biography. About thirty pages of typewritten script, single spaced on lined paper—rambling, disorganized, touching, funny, as sweetly eccentric as he was, but most importantly, crystallizing two of the most important events of his life: His journey as a young immigrant to America from Alsace, on the border of France and Germany, at the start of World War I; and his calling to become a Franciscan, when he was a high-school drop-out, working in a shipyard in Camden, New Jersey.

A trip to Camden, then interviews with a number of others who had known him, or had been affected by him in some way, helped me fill in some of the gaps. And I was amazed to find a life story that could serve as the plot for a hefty mid-20th-century novel—at a time when novels celebrated great lives and ascribed profound meanings to those lives; when a person’s actions could carry a moral or message. Yet this life had actually happened. Father Irenaeus lived and touched perhaps thousands of lives with his simple grace and friendliness and urgent need to serve others.

His life, lacking in juicy detail and salacious improprieties, presents at first an unlikely candidate for a full-scale biography. There are no secret romances or love affairs as far as I can tell, though there