Actually, the priesthood was the last thing I
wanted to do at the time. During my first three years at B.C.
High, I had Fr. Mattie Donovan. He was a great old tiger who believed
that knowledge should make a bloody entrance-and he saw to it
that was what happened. One famous motto he adopted was based
on what was written by a Civil War General, "We will fight
until hell freezes over and then we'll fight on the ice."
He changed it to, "We will study until hell freezes over
and then we'll study on the ice." He was a good grammarian.
We didn't do quite as well in literature as we did in grammar,
but he really taught us how to write. We did a tremendous amount
of composition in Latin, Greek, and English. I was told by Fr.
Bill Healy, our English professor in the juniorate, that since
I had already developed a style of writing, I should now read
Newman to learn how to think straight.
After being ordained on June 17, 1950, I finished
theology in 1951 and Fr. Ray McGuiness, the Tertian Master, died
very suddenly. This led to a tremendous number of changes. I landed
in Boston City Hospital as a chaplain about two weeks after I
was ordained. My father was not able to come to my ordination
because he was dying. The day I was ordained I went home and I
anointed him. The following day I said a private Mass for him.
About two weeks before I was ordained he had said to me, "How
long, Joe?" And I said, "Give me two weeks, Dad, and
I'll be ordained." He waited three weeks. I said my first
Mass the morning following my ordination at Weston. The next private
Mass I said was in my own home for my father after I anointed
him the day before. The following Sunday I said my first solemn
public Mass. The next Saturday I said his funeral Mass.
I remember especially one open house. An elderly
English gentleman came with a boy named Peter Counsel. His wife
had died and he didn't remarry until around eighteen or twenty
years later. He married his secretary, a younger woman; she was
Peter's mother. The elderly English gentleman had gone to St.
Edward School on the Isle of Man, founded in the 1600s in honor
of King Edward. Over those hundreds of years, they had outstanding
athletes. So when Peter was ready for high school, I showed him
around, along with his father, who was a remarkable man. That
was the only time I saw Peter or his father until that summer
just before school began. I was one of the Jesuits minding the
place, while the rest had gone off to prepare for the opening
of school. I was in my office, when the front door of Xavier opened,
and I heard a young man's footsteps in the hall....
The young man walked on and had gone fifty feet or so when I stepped
out of my office and recognized Peter, the boy I had met five
months before, by the back of his head. All the while his father
was behind me, and I hadn't seen him. So I said, "Peter Counsel,
what are you doing here?" And suddenly I heard a voice behind
me. It was the father, Mr. Counsel, who said, "My God, if
you can recognize a young boy after five months by the back of
his head, then this is where he goes to school."
My thanks to you as well. Let me conclude
by saying that, due to the limitations of time and space, we haven't
had the opportunity to do justice to my stay in Gloucester, to
all my Passamaquoddy friends, and to acknowledge the remarkable
reception given to me by the parishioners of St. Pat's in Carlsbad,
California as I left there. It is amazing how they return the
love and service we tried to give them. God bless them all!
Due to death or sickness some of these selected
readings have been read by someone other than the author. This
page contains one such replacement.
