& Harkleroad, Tobias. “What did we learn at St. Lawrence? Reflections of a high school seminary alumnus.” Seminary Journal vol. 10, no. 2 (Fall 2004): 49-51.

Several months ago, I found myself preparing for a job interview. I ironed my blue shirt, I collected examples of my best work, and I printed crisp copies of my resume. During the course of that interview at a local Catholic school the principal (a religious brother) asked me all the usual questions I had expected to encounter. As he glanced over my resume, he paused at one section about half way down. “St. Lawrence Seminary? But you didn’t become a priest!” he stated. I explained to him that I had attended the Capuchins’ minor seminary for high school, but did not go on to major seminary to seek ordination. He responded, “What was the point of the Capuchins even having a minor seminary then?”

Thinking about his question, I could have responded in many different ways. This kind of comment is not uncommon when people ask me about my past. There is always a long conversation involved when people ask where I went to high school. Honestly, I get a little defensive when people begin questioning me about having gone to a seminary and not having become a priest. I always seem to feel like they see me or St. Lawrence as having failed in some way.

High school seminaries are not common in the United States. Some people have heard of the high school seminaries that were in vogue for a time during the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Others take whatever they know about major seminaries and attempt to do some mental acrobatics to determine what they imagine a high school seminary to be. In any event, both types of people that I encounter only have their imagination to rely on. There are so few high school seminaries today that I cannot blame people for their odd speculations. St. Lawrence Seminary is nothing like what many people have told me they imagine: a medieval setting where young, angelic looking boys scurry about in cassocks singing in Latin. This, of course, was never what a high school seminary was. Those who have some experience with high school seminaries are usually older priests and brothers who tell me about their time in a high school seminary. They often have fond memories, but these too are not the high school seminary experience that I had.

As new acquaintances try to sort out my seminary experience they often assume that I left the seminary to get married once they meet my wife. Many see my time at St. Lawrence Seminary High School as a lost opportunity for priestly life. It usually goes in one ear and out the other when I try to explain that I see marriage as vocation and as something that I spent much time discerning. They look at me puzzled when I tell them that high school seminary prepared me to be a loving partner and to share in vocation and ministry with my wife.

I could explain to these people about the enriching experiences that I was privy to at my time on “the Hill,” a common school nickname given for the rolling Wisconsin hills upon which St. Lawrence rests. I could tell them all about the community focus of St. Lawrence. Community is a key of St. Lawrence. It is stressed frequently that the seminary must function as a community; it serves as a family. Students have to work together, students have to care about each other, and students have to minister to each. So much of St. Lawrence would not thrive if the school ran strictly as a boarding school; it is that students are expected to do so much as a group to build bonds that really has helped me to see community around me and to strive to build up community whenever I can. I see my parish community and the civic community I live in, as well as my nation and the world community, as more than just the people around me; they are people that I care about. I look around and see brothers and sisters, and not just nameless strangers.

I could also mention to these people that my time at St. Lawrence opened me up to empathy and compassion for other cultures in ways that no other experience could. So often as a Church we celebrate our catholicity, but rarely is that diversity experienced on a day-to-day basis like it is at St. Lawrence. This real expression of the universal nature of the Church is more than just some politically correct rhetoric; it is the daily, dirty, and often uncomfortable act of asking more than 200 young men to see each other as brothers, even if these brothers do not look like them. In any community living there is tension. However, when four young men, away from home for the first time in their lives, are put into a room together and asked to live together for the next year, friction can be expected. On top of these demands, these young people are dealing with homesickness, making all new friends, learning to take on personal responsibilities like their own laundry, and trying to adapt to having group responsibilities like work crews – all while working to excel in their studies at a brand new school. Somehow, these young men end up bonding as brothers during their seminary experience. Instead of cultural differences being a hurdle, they are celebrated as a gift. The time shared together each day at prayers, meals, and other gatherings is always stressed as essential to building and maintaining community, which is a living branch of the Church.

While I attended class at St. Lawrence, the diversity of the students was unlike I had ever experienced. My class was about a third Latino, a third Asian, and a third European descent. Not only was the class ethnically diverse, but members of the class were geographically diverse as well: Mexicans from Chicago, Vietnamese from New Orleans, Hmong from Minnesota, Caucasians from Michigan, as well as Indians and Filipinos from abroad. We also ranged in terms of our socio-economic backgrounds. All of this made for a sometimes difficult but very rewarding experiment in community life. My time at St. Lawrence opened my eyes to other ideas, cultures, and attitudes, and put me more in tune with the universal nature of the Catholic Church.

Finally, I could tell people what they are expecting from a high school seminarian: the ministry practices learned at St. Lawrence. On the Hill, ministry was consistently defined as more than just liturgical ministry and sacraments. Ministry was what we were shown - and told - our lives should be about, no matter what our other vocations in life. At this seminary, ministry, serving and caring for others was quite clearly not the sole domain of the priests. Brothers, sisters, and lay men and women all demonstrated that their lives were devoted to ministry. From Br. John, who donated his time and talent to beautifying the campus through his knowledge of horticulture, to Mr. Lou, who has devoted his life to living at the seminary and being the initial caretaker to all freshman, or to Sr. Evangeline, who even in her 80’s, having lost her right arm to cancer and having already had a long and distinguished career, gave up her retirement to teach at St. Lawrence. These, along with the many others, ordained and non-ordained, who have served at St. Lawrence stand as real, even heroic, models of the Christ’s universal call to ministry and holiness. Even on that day, as I sat in front of that religious order principal at the Catholic school I had hope to work for, I reminded myself that I was not interviewing for a position as a social studies teacher alone, but that I was interviewing for a position in a ministry of the Church of whose involvement I have been called.

Instead, I gave that principal the response that I most often give those with questions about St. Lawrence: I nodded, I smiled, and I said, ‘you’d be surprised at what you can learn from the Capuchins, but it’s something you really have to experience to really understand.’

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Alternate version

"But you didn't become a priest?"  These are the words that come immediately after someone asks about the entry “St. Lawrence Seminary High School” on my resume or job applications.  Often their questioning takes the tone of a Catholic school principal, a brother, who was recently interviewing me for a job.  When I told him that I did not go on to major seminary he asked "what was the point of the Capuchins even having a minor seminary then?"

No one really knows what a high school seminary is today, and if they think they have an idea then they imagine it as some pre-Vatican II priest factory of youths marching about in cassocks, chanting in Latin and quoting Thomas Aquinas.  They also assume that the average student at one of these fantasy seminaries are young men of devout families who have some kind of social issues and are therefore escaping the world and committing to lives of celibacy at 14 instead of being “normal,” whatever that means. 

Needless to say, the question "where did you go to high school" generally leads to a very long attempt for me to capture in words an experience that has shaped my life as much as my parents and family have, an experience that is very hard for people to relate to.

First, I should point that oddly enough, when I was in eighth grade I was looking for one of those fantasy priest factories.  I came from a fairly devout family.  My mother and grandmother had, for a time, even lived in a convent while my grandmother worked as the sisters’ bookkeeper.  When I was in fifth grade my mother went back to college to get a Bachelor's in Theology, her best friend and frequent addition to family gatherings was a sister, and I was a regular fixture serving in the sanctuary of our parish church.  Our pastor was a man who had immigrated to America after his own high school seminary experience in Sicily and would proudly tell people, when recalling his own vocation, how he received special permission from the Vatican to be ordained to the priesthood at 21.

It’s from this home environment that in fall of my eighth grade year I decided to explore a suggestion. While having refreshments after a mission that I went to with my mother and her sister friend, an older Redemptorist brother who was chatting with my mom heard that I was very interested in pursuing the priesthood.  He told us about his high school seminary experience and gave my mother the phone number for the Redemptorists’ high school seminary in New Jersey.  This is odd to say, but fortunately, that school was closing at the end of that school year.

The Redempotorist vocation director sent us a list of the other high school seminaries in the US.  I think that there may have been 12 schools on the list, but we quickly found out that the list was several years old. That meant that as we started calling schools we discovered that seminary after seminary had closed within the last year or two.  We started by calling the schools on the list that were closest to our home in Pennsylvania, but there was no luck. Finally, we found that Archbishop Quiqley in Chicago was operating, but we also discovered that it was a day school. We were left with three choices on our list in Wisconsin, a place I only vaguely knew existed, they were Divine Word, Holy Name, and St. Lawrence.  It was a random choice as to which one to call next, so I can only assume that it was the Holy Spirit that guided us to choose St. Lawrence.

My mother called and spoke to a friar, Br. Len, he told her that the following week was the last weekend visit of the year and that they typically did not admit students without a weekend visit.  My parents could not afford to fly all of us out to Wisconsin with only a week's notice and a 12 hour drive was out of the question too.  After some discussion and a little pushing from me, my mother called AAA and ordered a ticket for just me to go to Wisconsin.  I was in eighth grade and had never flown anywhere a on plane before, but my parents trusted that I could handle it and the apparent rarity of the opportunity seemed worth the $300 plus for the flight.

After two short plane trips and a drive from Milwaukee to Mt. Calvary I arrived on "the Hill."  The campus was impressive.  The sight of the large, old, collegiate looking buildings mixed with some very modern looking edifices sitting high atop a hill made for a strong first impression as the car approached St. Lawrence. For the next two and a half days I experienced life on the Hill, it was not exactly what I expected, but at the end of that weekend I was convinced that this was the place I wanted to be.  When I went home there was a lot of discussion with my parents, I was already enrolled in the local Catholic high school for the fall and St. Lawrence was hundreds of miles away.  Later in the spring my parents decided to drive out with me for a second visit, they were impressed too.  So, the following August we loaded our minivan for what would become an twice-yearly event, our 12 hour trek to Wisconsin.

When I arrived at St. Lawrence I was a very different person from who I am today. Last fall in the days leading up to my wedding I was reminded of what changes I had made over the years. Fr. Gary was the co-officiant at my wedding, he had also been one my teachers and dorm supervisors at St. Lawrence. He and I were talking and he mentioned that he remembered that when I first arrived at St. Lawrence I was very rigid and fairly conservative fellow. Not that those things are necessarily bad, but in my case they were indicative of a fairly immature understanding of my faith.

Even though I was very aware of what St. Lawrence was like I sometimes had a nagging desire to be some kind of junior priest. I occasionally dreamed of putting on a cassock and walking about with classmates discussing the Summa. This wasn’t the reality, and I quickly found it wasn’t something I thought about any more. Looking back I think that my early ideas of Church ministry were very limited. My impression of priestly life was superficial, despite my many interactions with priests before. I guess I was like the little kid who wants to be a police officer, but only imagines the officer doing the impressive stuff: busting murderers and the like. I suppose that just like one of those kids wants to feel heroic like the cop by wearing a police uniform, I wanted to wear a cassock and do some of the things were visibly “priestly.”

The biggest thing that St. Lawrence did from day one was go deeper than those very surface level impressions. On the Hill, ministry was consistently defined as more than just liturgical ministry and sacraments. Ministry was what we were shown and told our lives should be about no matter what our other vocations in life. More startling at this seminary was the fact that ministry, serving and caring for others, was quite clearly not the sole domain of the priests. Brothers, sisters, lay men and women all demonstrated that their lives were about ministry.

St. Lawrence stressed that we were a community of students, friars, faculty and staff. The time we shared together each day at prayers, meals, and other gatherings were always stressed as essentials to building and maintaining our community, which was very much a living branch of the Church. We gathered together as a very diverse community; my class was about a third Latino, a third Asian, and a third European descent. Not only was the class ethnically diverse but members of the class were geographically diverse: Mexicans from Chicago, Vietnamese from New Orleans, Hmong from Minnesota, Caucasians from Michigan, as well as Indians and Filipinos from abroad. We also ranged in terms of our socio-economic backgrounds. All of this made for a sometimes difficult but very rewarding experiment in community life.

That is another one of the keys of St. Lawrence, something that is stressed frequently, that the seminary must function as a community, as a family. Students have to work together, students have to care about each other, students have to minister to each. So much of St. Lawrence wouldn’t work if the school functioned like a regular boarding school. The fact that students are expected to do so much as a group builds bonds that really have helped me see community around me and to strive to build up community whenever I can. I see my parish community and the civic community I live in as well as my nation and the world community as more than just the people around me, they are people that I care about it some way and worry about. I look around and see brothers and sisters and not just nameless strangers.

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