Wrestle: to struggle in opposition; strive; contend, as in a struggle for mastery; grapple.
In retrospect, I think that wrestling may be the best word to describe my college experience—but not at all in the sense of wrestling as a collegiate sport.
Again, in retrospect, I realize that I was wrestling to understand who and what I was, what was expected of me, what was the purpose of my life, what plan did God have for me.
When I arrived at Amherst in 1949, it was the first time in my life that I was away from home for any length of time and entirely on my own.
I also was relatively young, not quite seventeen, academically very smart, not particularly athletic, and unfamiliar with the cultural world of the college.
Sharing a room with two other guys in the dorm was challenging. Not having had any brothers, I wasn’t used to living in close quarters with other young men.
The milieu of the college was challenging. I grew up in an Irish Catholic, German Jewish family and neighborhood in the Bronx, and now I was living in a New England college town and, for the first time, in contact with the “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant” world.
The social life of the college was challenging. In those days, fraternity life was somewhat like the film “Animal House” and shocking to a relatively up-tight, sexually uninitiated, religious teenager like I was.
The teaching of the college was also challenging. The “New Curriculum” at the college required a basic, balanced course of studies for the first two years, involving math, science, social studies, literature, and the arts. It also focused on the relativity of language, meaning, and one’s point of view of almost anything.
College for me was sink or swim. I swam!
I hadn’t gone to Catholic schools, but I was raised and was a practicing Catholic.
For the first time, I found my beliefs and practices critiqued, even mocked! It got my hackles up, and, thanks be to God, being pretty smart, I mounted adequate defenses.
I used to read avidly a couple of weekly Catholic journals in the college library and some other publications. I got serious about religious observances, deciding to bike to daily Mass during Lent at the local church.
What was gradually taking shape in my mind was that, although my view of life had a place and understanding for my college experience to date, the view of life that underlaid most of my academic experience didn’t have room for my values and vision.
The National Federation of Catholic College Students was sponsoring a Holy Year pilgrimage to Rome the summer of 1950. For some reason, I felt I had to go.
I applied. It was rejected, since the trip was fully subscribed. I was desperate. I remembered that the priest who had witnessed my parents’ marriage later became a bishop. I begged my mother to seek him out and ask his help. She did. He did. I went to Europe.
We traveled in what had been the private yacht of Kaiser Wilhelm. During the slow voyage to France, we were crowded into triple-stacked, narrow bunks in the hold, but we were young, and it was an adventure!
I got to know three priests on the trip, and each influenced the course of my life as did the holy places we visited.
My first challenging year at college plus the pilgrimage were the seeds of my vocation to the priesthood, although I was not aware of it at the time.
9 September 2021