Priests from the Polish province of the Dominican order arrived in upper Manhattan in the late summer of 2003. In their consecrated hands, the Church of Notre Dame and the Catholic ministry at Columbia grew in holiness, a concept that must annoy diehard empiricists, because holiness can’t be quantified. It can’t even be identified with certainty through the bodily senses. Like love, holiness is hard to define accurately, and hence the reluctance to talk about it at all. Let me suspend my reluctance.
Being a teaching order, the Dominicans were well disposed to lead the Catholic community in the university neighborhood of Morningside Heights. And lead they did, by their demeanor as much as by their words. “Obviously, people came not because our grammar is so beautiful,” Fr. Romuald Jedrejko told me at a farewell event held for them in the rectory after the principal Mass on Sunday, their last at Notre Dame. Earlier in the week Krzysztof Poplawski, or Fr. Christopher, as we called him, the provincial of the Polish province, in town for the friars’ final week here, apologized for his English by telling of an American woman who once reassured him that she understood everything he meant to say.
The Dominican friars moved cheerfully in a world of cosmopolitan Catholic thinkers, if you’ll pardon the near-redundancy, cosmopolitan and catholic (Greek for “universal”) being nearly synonymous. At the invitation of the friars, Fr. Richard Neuhaus spoke on campus often and said Mass at St. Paul’s Chapel. Erik Ross, the managing editor of First Things, would come uptown to hear him. Impressed by the friars there, he decided, in fairly short order, to join them, to become one of them if they would have him. They would. In the spring of 2006 he left for Poland, resolved to become not just a Dominican but a Polish Dominican. He began to study Polish on his own while still in New York. He’s in Cracow now. They tell me he speaks like a native.
Robert George, George Weigel, Michael Novak, Maciej Zieba, Aidan Nichols, Peter Cameron, Joseph Koterski—the lineup of powerful Catholic minds, one after another after another, whom the Polish Dominicans introduced to Columbia students was scary. I mean for the other team. Avery Cardinal Dulles, a mentor of Fr. Neuhaus, was up in years at that point, and so for him to come down to Columbia would have been difficult, but no matter. A corps of graduate students and a Dominican or two would make the trip from Morningside Heights up to Rose Hill when he gave one of his McGinley Lectures there.
It was, as I now appreciate, a golden age, when the integration of fides et ratio was in the air we breathed and the water we drank. It’s what gave shine and color to the garden around the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the courtyard nestled between the church and the rectory. A garden! Who knew? It had been so neglected. Everyone just took its wild weedy look for granted until, shortly after the Polish Dominicans moved in, the space was tended and now a neatly barbered little lawn punctuated with shrubs and flowers lay where only yesterday that patch of litter-strewn urban wilderness had snarled and bristled. Now all of a sudden, for those with eyes to see, it was a living picture of the ordered vitality that marked the friars as individuals and, what’s more important, or at least interesting, as a fraternity of priests.
Serving at the pleasure of the Archdiocese of New York, the Polish Dominicans were asked to leave by the same earlier this year, in the spring. Parishioners sent letters to the archbishop and to Rome, to the prefect of the Congregation for Clergy. As is his prerogative, the archbishop hinted at but did not state the reasons for the friars’ departure. He mentioned money, that Notre Dame was in the red, although the books are closed and so it’s hard to guess how much of that debt the Dominicans inherited from a costly and controversial renovation project undertaken during the parish’s previous administration.
I might be tempted to get into the weeds about all that if there were any. The Polish Dominicans largely uprooted them, as is their style. They took vows of obedience. Now they would honor them. In this case, I think, they informally added vows of good manners, discouraging parishioners from firing off letters to the chancery and to the curia and, during the transition, working graciously with the diocesan priests who would succeed them, showing the new guys the ropes. To my mind, the archdiocese could ill afford to reject Polish reinforcements to its jurisdiction, but if the same thought ever crossed the minds of the friars they never expressed it.
Cardinal Dulles died in December 2008, Fr. Neuhaus a few weeks afterward. And so the breakup of the Catholic intellectual community that the Polish Dominicans gave so much life to had already begun. The apostles had Jesus for three years. We had the Polish Dominicans for all of eight, and, for five of those, the Polish Dominicans in conversation with Dulles and Neuhaus.
We never wanted any of them to leave. But God called them home—some to be with him and, in the case of the friars, some to their temporal home, Poland—leaving those of us left behind to mourn the loss of a Catholic culture such as we had never known and are unlikely to experience again unless we cultivate our memories of it and let them shape our effort to reconstitute it somehow. Whatever we end up making will be different, of course, so come, Holy Spirit. Surprise us again.
The garden is gone but not its fruits. To Erik Ross, now Erik Ross, OP, add Zane Torretta, now Gabriel Torretta, OP. Zane was a graduate student in the East Asian languages department, home of Theodore de Bary, another contributor to First Things, and writing his dissertation on something to do with Japanese comic books when he too came under the influence of the men in white. Three years ago he joined the Order of Preachers and is currently at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington. You may remember him from his articles in this space earlier this season, when he was a summer fellow at First Things.
To have brought, in less than a decade, two young men with a lot of upside, as the baseball scouts would say, to realize their vocations to the priesthood is a strong record for any ministry during this age of the priest shortage in the United States. That’s a new priest every four years, I’ll add, with a nod to the empiricists. Other souls have been touched and changed in ways less dramatic but, for all we can know in such matters, yet more profound. Some of them have written about it in testimonies that parishioners gathered into a book and distributed at church. You can read them here.
Holy Spirit, surprise us again.
Nicholas Frankovich is an editor at Servant Books, an imprint of St. Anthony Messenger Press.
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Comments:
I was actually in the area because I was visiting Columbia for the day, in order to determine whether or not I wanted to study my masters degree there (I am a law student in Mexico City). I had finished visiting the schools, and I noticed that I had some time left before my friend finished doing some research in the law library, so I decided to go to mass at Notre Dame, without expecting what I would experience there.
Praying and singing to Our Lord in Latin with the polish friars was by far one of the most moving and deeply enriching experiences that I had this summer. It only lasted about 20 minutes, and afterwards the same friar that had first approached me came up to me again and introduced himself, asking if I had understood what we were doing, so he seemed surprised and happy when I explained that I was Catholic and not simply a curious young tourist girl who happened to walk in.
I am very thankful to have been blessed with not only meeting them, but also accompanying them in their daily afternoon prayers, and witnessing their incredible kindness and deep faith. I pray that they continue with their apostolic mission in helping others getting closer to God wherever God wants them to be, and that the seeds that they planted in the community of Columbia, one that still needs their prayers and now the presence of holy people such as them, give plentiful fruits and help transform the culture towards the Truth.
In his vagueness about the reasons for the departure of the Polish Dominicans, the archbishop is only following a long precedent. He’s taking the prudent course. But here prudence involves a complication. What are we to think when sufficient reasons for his decision haven't been forthcoming? Into the void of our ignorance, speculation and conjecture naturally rush.
Stephen speculates that the reasons for the archbishop’s decision are not theological. Dwight speculates that the archbishop is privy to information that we don’t have and that, if we did, would cause us to see his action as justified.
Those are charitable conjectures -- charitable to the archbishop but at some cost to the parishioner or student whose mind is naturally restless in the absence of an explanation for why he’s been deprived of this spiritual resource that he values. Promises that, trust us, such an explanation does exist may appeal to his heart, to his wish to put the best possible interpretation on the actions of others, but they do nothing to satisfy his mind. The only thing they feed there is his skepticism.
He wants to believe that the truth in this case is innocuous. How, though, do you propose to help him overcome his unbelief? Neither silence from the chancery nor “Surely, now” from well-meaning observers are adequate answers to his concern.
Of the eleven hundred words I wrote about the ministry of the Polish Dominicans in Morningside Heights, more than a thousand were on different facets of their virtue and holiness, but exactly half of the eight commenters have homed in on the single paragraph that touched on the archbishop. That suggests to me that the mysterious character of his decision is a sore spot that demands attention. I’m not in a position to treat it. I can only advert to it, and so I do, because it poses a problem that it’s better to confront than to dance around. Sancte Dominice, ora pro nobis.
and should be accepted in that Spirit. For those who had the experience of the good friars, remember them now with love, pray for them, and follow their good example. Enough of skepticism, closed books, undisclosed reasons! The Holy Spirit will surprise us again!
I should mention that I personally know some of the Polish Dominicans that staffed Columbia's campus ministry, and have the highest respect and affection for them. Fr. Buda graciously invited me to give the Merton Lecture at Columbia several years ago, and it was at that time that met him and some of his confreres. I also am sad to see them go. I appreciate the tribute you are paying here to these fine priests. I just happen to think your comments about the archbishop accomplish nothing and run the risk of stoking unjustified resentments.
My comments about the archbishop were not entirely speculation. One of the first things Archbishop Dolan did when taking office was to pay a visit to the annual meeting of the First Things editorial and advisory board. At that meeting he expressed strong support for the magazine and its goals. This last Spring he hosted the First Things staff and editorial and advisory boards at a dinner at the archdiocesan chancery, at which he spoke he spoke eloquently and convincingly of the important work that the magazine was doing and of the legacy of Fr. Neuhaus, whose good friend he was. I believe that he spoke sincerely and honestly. You do well to pay tribute to the Polish Dominicans. But I think I also do right to speak a word in behalf of Abp. Dolan, especially given the lengths to which he has gone to show his friendship and esteem for this magazine.
We are lucky to have Archbishop Dolan in New York. It is wonderful that he supports First Things. He has the authority to determine who runs the various ministries in New York, and we owe him obedience and the benefit of the doubt.
Nevertheless, the abrupt and unexplained dismissal of the Polish Dominicans has left an extraordinary wound in the parish.
Please pray for the Archbishop, for the parish, and for our new priests.
God save us!
Dominicans at the Church of Notre Dame and at Columbia.
But then this is our life. We are itinerant preacher of the Gospel. We go where Holy Mother Church needs us and wants us. What one man sows, another nurtures, and yet another reaps. I pray for the priest who are now at Notre Dame, that their ministry may bear the same good fruits.
"As is his prerogative, the archbishop hinted at but did not state the reasons for the friars’ departure. He mentioned money, that Notre Dame was in the red, although the books are closed and so it’s hard to guess how much of that debt the Dominicans inherited from a costly and controversial renovation project undertaken during the parish’s previous administration."
An echo of Obama's complaints about inheritances? In all events, the archbishop has been on the NY scene for even less time than the Polish Dominicans.