Home No More

By Francis Sullivan

About the Book
Growing conflicted after years in seminary studies, the author became restless to find a challenge in his spiritual journey. Home No More is the culmination of journals he kept over the years detailing his decisions, choices, and ultimate path from the Philadelphia Seminary to the Priesthood to eventually taking a very different direction.

About the Author
Francis Sullivan was raised in a Catholic family, attended Catholic schools, leading to his decision to enter Philadelphia Catholic Seminary to become a Catholic priest. At the end of his college years, he went to Europe for four years of theology at the University of Louvain in Belgium. He visited the Holy Land with a group of English Pilgrims, came home for ordination to priesthood in the Diocese of Allentown, and was assigned as Catholic Chaplain at Lehigh University. After being dismissed by the Bishop, Sullivan was accepted by the Archbishop of Baltimore, where he served in an inner-city parish, met his future wife, and resigned priest status to marry Fontaine. They were together for forty-eight years until her death two years ago. Sullivan is retired and living with daughter, Kate, in San Diego, California.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Company
• Release date: May 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798886045604

Book preview

PREFACE

The following narrative is based on journals I kept beginning in the 1950s. It is a story of the slowly unfolding discovery of personal identity. The obstacles to understanding one’s own needs and possibilities can be enormous. Two major social environments influenced my development: (1) The Irish Catholic culture of my family and (2) the Protestant American culture everywhere outside of my home, church, and school. This created in me a certain objectivity toward my religious environment, which led my sister to tell me that I didn’t believe enough. My decision to become a priest was my choice, not a calling that I had to follow and, in spite of fluctuating doubts, I committed myself to becoming a priest, to developing spirituality, and to achieving the highest level of education allowed to me. Success seduced me to continue even while the requirement of priestly celibacy bred loneliness and reoccurring malaise. When I finally reached the point where I was able to choose Fontaine and marriage, the restlessness ended. In pedestrian terms, I settled down and remained married for over forty-eight years.

In the course of the narrative, the reader has the opportunity to understand that each of us is a continuous emerging originality. Every parent has experienced the emergence of the two-year-old’s individuality and responds by directing, setting limits, encouraging, or discouraging. Parenting remains an unskilled labor, and the environment created by parents can be formative or harmful. The best-meaning parenting can disrupt the integral connection between our own interior selves and our external behavior. In the name of manners or politeness, we can learn to repress the expression of our very integrity as an individual. Some negative circumstances can foster behaviors requiring therapy and medication to adjust. Regardless of our own personal experience and recognizing that uncontrollable circumstances most often determine the direction of our lives, at some point it is possible for us to exercise our individual transcendence, to take charge of ourselves. The positive or negative values we bring to our self-realization raise the whole question of human morality, which is a discussion beyond the purpose of this story. Learning and internalizing values from our early environment is an essential part of our development. My story of self-emergence takes place within a very circumscribed milieu of religious values and practices. This does not make the process towards self-identity less valid.

This narrative is not a story of a crisis of faith. I do not primarily intend a critique of the Church. Nevertheless, I cannot help but wonder how different the Catholic Church would be if priests were permitted to marry. Would the Church then focus on its own organizational inadequacies and other areas where it has failed to focus, leaving many faithful feeling abandoned. For example, will the Church then join in solving the national pandemic, address terrorism in moral terms at least as well as Camus, re-examine the teaching affecting the gay and lesbian population, objectively research women’s rights and issues, come to grips with modernism and science, and present a guiding spirituality to twenty-second-century people? I believe that shedding the culture of celibacy would lead the Church to be more urgently responsive to current human needs and issues.

This narrative takes us to the point of proposal to marry within a personal story. Perhaps, at the same time, it gives the reader the opportunity to speculate on what would have been the outcome if my marriage and priesthood were compatible.

CHAPTER 1

The Call

In October of my first year in the seminary, the letter from Mother arrived announcing that my sister’s baby died at birth. How I would have loved her, my mother wrote. I went off to be alone with the letter to try to absorb the loss of the lovingly anticipated full-term baby girl. It seemed as though we were, as a family, never to have things work out, never to be casual and happy. Our lives seemed to be a constant experience of disappointments, many of which were brought about by our father’s pernicious drinking. Where other families seemed to face life relaxed and confident, we held back, daring not to hope, for fear that the hoping itself might cause another disappointment. As moved as I was by my mother’s letter, it didn’t occur to me to ask permission to phone home, because the seminary rules prohibited using the phone. I felt I had to give myself over to the seminary without question. Unable to talk to my family or to challenge the carelessness of the general practitioner, who failed to monitor the labor until it was too late, I wrote consoling letters to my sister and my mother and withdrew into an unfamiliar loneliness. My prayers begged for divine comfort for any family and, through the intensity of my petitions and sheer busyness of the seminary regimen, the sadness began to pass.

Can an impulsive decision, followed by a stubborn adherence, be considered a calling? That is exactly how I came to enter the seminary to study for the priesthood. In my final year of high school, in the midst of an argument with my mother about taking a Protestant girl to a dance, which she foresaw as the loss of my faith, I blurted out that I would be in the seminary the next year and not going to dances. I hope you mean that, she responded to my impulsive declaration. I swore I was serious and from then on, I didn’t back down. My mother had always pushed me towards the priesthood, so that she was certainly pleased and proudly told relatives and friends of my intention. For my part, lacking any other opportunities for college, I didn’t have any better ideas for my future. There were very few scholarships, actually none, available to me, and I didn’t want to go into the military, which was not about college education. The more I thought about the seminary, the more attractive and even daring it became. For a poor boy with few options, becoming a priest appeared an exciting career choice. As far as I was concerned, it certainly measured far above unskilled jobs. In addition, for me, as totally sexually inexperienced as I was, the celibacy requirement meant only that I would have to remain a bachelor all my life, a situation that didn’t seem very different from my already established image of myself as alone, mature, and self-directed. There would be no looking back, no second thoughts. In some perverse abdication of self, I compared my choice with death—at seventeen years of age—and, assuming that I no longer had a life of my own, rationalized that the time remaining to me would be given with total acceptance to everything being dictated from without. In this somewhat dramatic frame of mind, I entered the seminary to begin my preparation for the priesthood.

Deciding that prayer would be my sole recourse for self-development, I plunged into the Gospels to find out more about Jesus, working my imagination vigorously as I went through the events of His life. The lessons were to defer, to be gentle, to forget self, to love others, and to praise God. The Saints had done it, as the daily reading of their lives at mealtime in the seminary was intended to inspirationally demonstrate, but failed to do. The distortions of hagiography smothered the unique persons they must have been. We learned more in history class about the personalities of the Roman emperors described by the ancient historians than we learned about the lives of saints in the Martyrology readings. Who were the saints and martyrs? What were they like in life? Eventually, as my interest increased, there were clues to their differences and individuality so that I began to think that, maybe, the way to be a saint was first to be just me and not to try to dissolve totally somehow into another Jesus. My curiosity was genuine; I was truly interested in living a Christian life based on the values of Jesus and lived out in the lives of saints. In the sad and violent twentieth century world of war, the Holocaust, atom bombs, roads full of refugees, atheistic persecutions, and shallow materialism, the Gospels offered a courageous alternative. But I needed direction.

Without adequate guidance, my seminary classmates and I plunged into Christian spirituality like amateur mountain climbers challenging Everest without previous experience or instruction and without appropriate equipment. The seminary’s spiritual advisors gave well-meaning talks, but didn’t have an original concept about spirituality, quoting the saints of spirituality, Augustine, Ignatius, Theresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, without personally understanding what these people meant. Blatantly missing was any critical historical perspective of the spirituality of the renowned mystics. Our spiritual development became a game with rules to move from one notch to another. I felt I was dedicated to being truly spiritual, but needed to know what to do. Fortunately, to a certain degree, Thomas Merton’s writings did provide a contemporary mode. Even so, who could understand a modern man becoming a Trappist monk? The person that Merton was did not truly emerge from his early books that influenced many of us in the early 1950s. The reality of Merton was almost as obscure as that of Saint Augustine, but, at least, he was alive and had experienced our world. As a seventeen-year-old struggling to become something other than himself, I had only a vague idea of what I was trying to do. Thomas Merton’s Seven Story Mountain played a heavy role in my quest for spiritual development. Has intelligent and classy writing, in which he described familiar Catholic spiritual themes, appealed to me. He had searched the Gospels and meditated on Jesus and His teachings directly from the Gospels. Merton did not represent the Irish Catholic religious practice that appalled me as unsuitable for a twentieth-century American. My approach to spirituality depended on Merton, whose writings became a kind of correspondence course for me. Merton gave me the courage to go on my own into the life of Jesus and to try to make sense of Christianity from its roots. Merton, sufficiently for me at the time, provided spiritual impetus. Unfortunately, for intellectual stimulation, there was no source available to me to fill the void created by the seminary’s frozen academic curriculum.

The seminary faculty, exclusively Rome-educated diocesan priests, did not lack education, but their lack of freedom and competition created an excessively anti-intellectual environment. Be a man of one book was the advice of the philosophy professor in response to my request for references to outside reading. Without bibliographies or research, the education was proffered by way of a fixed curriculum, which had withstood the test of time, essentially unchanged throughout the entire eighty-year history of the seminary. My only real academic challenge was the study of Classical Greek, a language I was determined to master. Greek was taught by the firmest and fairest professor, under whom I learned Greek well and got a gold medal as first in the class. Otherwise, facing intellectual blandness from the disadvantage of a student, I was restless and bored without being able to know what was wrong. This is not to say that my days were passed in unremitting depression; I was optimistic and happy enough to participate fully in the daily routine, and to compensate for the vague restlessness by achieving other successes.

During the first year in the seminary, each student was supposedly minutely scrutinized and observed. Maximum conformity and neatness were said to be the key traits for catching the favorable eye of the Dean, who appointed the prefects, sacristans, and masters of ceremonies. I conformed totally, which was my usual behavior anyway. I was neat like the Pennsylvania Dutch environment I came from and, in my second year, the Dean unexpectedly appointed me to the sought-after position as one of the three prefects in charge of the incoming class. The position took me out of the student mainstream with responsibilities for the new students in study hall and in their dormitory. The prefect role suited me well, restoring me somewhat to my old responsible, in-charge, self-directed self. Everything went well that year. I briefly became a legend for two episodes in the dormitory.

The first happened Thanksgiving night after everyone had returned from the day at home. One of the new men threw up in the john, and the Dean, flashlight in one hand and a mop and bucket in the other, came to my bed in the dormitory at the beginning of a row of thirty beds and shook me awake to help him clean it up. Someone threw up in the toilet, the Dean said to me. I blinked at the light from his flashlight and said, Shit! The Dean might have smiled, which he didn’t do often, and he didn’t say anything more as I held the light while he mopped up the mess. The next day the story of my expletive made the rounds. The second incident occurred on the night before Christmas vacation, when the new men were restive, to say the least. There were fifty-seven freshmen in the dorm and the other two prefects were shouting orders, in their best drill-sergeant style, as was their custom, trying to keep order and the required silence.

The dorm got noisier. We knew that the Dean would be walking through to inspect at any moment and that, if the grand silence was being ignored, he would punish the whole dorm by rescinding a day of vacation. My exercise of authority as a prefect had been limited to making rare announcements, which I never repeated, with the result that the men got quiet on the few occasions when I did speak. With the Dean’s inspection imminent, I got up and called calmly down the length of the dorm, Excuse me, may I have your attention, please, as introduction to an announcement. Sudden quiet! The Dean is about to be here for inspection. You want to lose vacation time? Grow up and go to sleep! The silence continued. I went back to bed and immediately the Dean pushed open the door and stopped to listen before continuing to walk through the dormitory. It was quiet. He found nothing out of order. The next day the story of my rescuing intervention, saving the dormitory a day of vacation, temporarily took on mythical proportions.

During the next two years my success continued, when I was appointed sacristan with responsibilities for the chapel, setting up the proper vestments and making other preparations for daily Mass and other services and then putting everything away in its designated place. The sacristan kept a daily log in a ledger that repeated the entries from prior years without any changes. This job guaranteed a lot of freedom from the daily routine since it required work at odd hours, often rendering many otherwise compulsory activities practically optional

The tightly controlled schedule of the seminary allowed little time for brooding or for sorting out. True to my original mindset, I submitted to the external structure of my days. Even during holidays, I kept busy working to earn spending money for the school year. At school I was rewarded with positions of trust or leadership. I played sports, enjoyed friendships, and continued an effort to develop a spiritual life. In the summer before the last college year at the seminary, however, my attitude of comfortable passivity changed. As the end of the summer vacation approached with cool, August mornings and nights, I began to dread returning to the seminary. I was haunted by the image of standing alone in the middle of the seminary baseball field looking out on the busy suburban roads, which ran along the perimeter of the seminary grounds. The world was literally passing me by. The sheltered day-to-day life in the seminary did not even require me to go outdoors if I didn’t want to. All I had to do was follow the schedule. Suddenly, I couldn’t stand the thought of being institutionalized any longer and reluctantly at the end of vacation, returned to the seminary with a deep sense of emptiness. I didn’t want to be there.

Every school year began with a spiritual retreat, which allowed a lot of rest before the rigid daily schedule began. Retreats were bland and unchallenging, maybe on purpose. For the first time I felt the need to be intense, to ask God for strength to cope with my new feelings of aversion to seminary life. Jesus continued to be the focus of my attention. I was, after all, following Him. During the retreat the spiritual director urged us to develop a devotion to the Virgin Mary with the idea of going to Jesus through Mary. I had always preferred to be direct, to think about the episodes in Jesus’s life and to draw from them practical lessons. This rather fundamentalist approach to Scripture continued to inform my spirituality until later on when I gained some technical information from Scripture and Theology courses. The seminary curriculum required four years of regular college courses followed by four more years of theology. The college level students were not instructed in Scripture studies and, as a consequence, after four years in the seminary, I was still meditating and praying in a self-directed, fundamentalist way. Nevertheless, Jesus was growing into a strong model for me. His teachings and example became even more attractive. I was developing an evangelical Christian philosophy, very primitive, one dimensional, and unsophisticated, but motivating. My spirituality was theoretical with no adult, life experiences to inform it or to test it, or for it to inform or test.

The final year of undergraduate college centered on Scholastic philosophy contained in a set of three text books written in Latin. We would be men of one book! Aristotle would have been appalled at the rigidity of the concepts interpreting him, but, at least, if I could have gone back, time-warp fashion, to the University of Paris during the early Renaissance, I would have fit in nicely. It was in this context that the philosophy professor told me to be a man of one book. The philosophy course was so grim intellectually that I finally began to have trouble controlling my disdain for the courses and my dislike for the seminary. One day during a chemistry lab class, while the professor was shooting the breeze with the class with small talk and sports-related stories, out of frustration at not learning any college-level chemistry, I looked through the laboratory work manual and found an experiment for distilling alcohol and proceeded to set up a still to distill a bottle of Electric Shave, which turned out to have a very high percentage of alcohol. The relaxed professor, never acknowledging my behavior in any way, apparently took a dim view of this initiative and my grade in college chemistry reflected his disapproval.

My overall sense of physical well-being continued to override my growing dissatisfaction. The opportunity to swim, play basketball, or softball or to run the field daily was a luxury for a downtown boy like me, who had never been able to do these things at home. Being young