No, the Archdiocese of New York didn’t have any recruitment posters like the U.S. Navy—but at least in my case it played out like that.
When I was thinking about becoming a priest, I was attracted to the Benedictine lifestyle primarily because of a Benedictine priest I had gotten to know during a student pilgrimage to Rome. But, then, I had the same experience with two diocesan priests who also were chaplains in that pilgrimage.
My final decision was very pragmatic. A religious order priest was a priest plus religious community life; a diocesan was the basic model! I thought it more prudent to start out as a diocesan and possibly “upgrade” to a religious than vice-versa!
I also thought that the future of the church was the church in the city. And, for me as a native of New York City, the prototype of the modern city was New York.
I joined the clergy of the Archdiocese of New York, and after one year in rural parishes I was twice sent to Puerto Rico for summer language study and intercultural formation. The first time included parish work in Puerto Rico and rural Mexico; the second, experiencing parish life in Colombia and Venezuela.
Ordained four years, I was assigned to doctoral studies in Rome in preparation for work in archdiocesan administration—and obligated not to return home until the three-year program was completed.
During those school holidays I traveled in Italy and to Portugal, Spain, the Holy Land (Jordan and Israel), Egypt, Greece, Germany, France, Britain, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Soviet Union (Ukraine, Russia, Byelorussia), and Poland.
Invited by the priest coordinator of their Christian Family Movements, I visited Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela, returning through Panama and Puerto Rico.
Later, after four years in New York in central administration, I was assigned to coordination of Hispanic ministry for the archdiocese for another four. That involved travel within the U.S. and to Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Venezuela.
In 1985, the Archbishop of New York asked me to join the staff of Catholic Near East Welfare Association, a special aid agency of the Holy See, and, two years later, to direct it until my retirement in 2011.
My responsibilities included frequent and extensive trips to the Vatican, to our regional offices, to countries we served, and to the countries of our collaborators.
This included Canada, Western Europe (Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, Spain), the Middle East (Turkey, Cyprus, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq), Northeast Africa (Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea), Eastern Europe (Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia), India (especially Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Delhi), and Australia.
Looking back, now years later, I confess this was a challenging time for me. I was frequently traveling and as a result frequently exhausted and jetlagged.
But, it also was a wonderful time—to encounter and to get to know well so many and such diverse people all over the world.
The great experience and lesson of all this was, of course, that notwithstanding many kinds of challenging differences (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, and political) fundamentally we’re all the same, brothers and sisters, children of the one and the same God. O that we never forget it!
26 August 2021