by Lynn Krefft

Why did you go to the seminary?

Mostly it was out of idealism.  From an early age I got it in my head that priests do God’s work, and to me that seemed to me a most desirable occupation.  As early as age 7 or 8 my younger brothers and sisters would play church.  In this play-acting I would take the roll of priest, wrapping a towel around my shoulder like a priest’s vestment.  So, idealism was the primary attractive force for going into the seminary. 

A negative reason for entering the seminary was my parent’s marriage.  My father was an alcoholic, and he and my mom from time to time fought intensely, sometimes physically.  I began to see marriage life as not particularly attractive and over time came to the position that I wanted to avoid it.  I can remember telling myself that I would never ever get married.  So the combination of the strong attraction of idealism and the negative disaffection of married life combined to propel me into the seminary.

I might add that I never felt that my parish pastor or any priest or nun had targeted to recruit me to enter the seminary.  If anything, my pastor asked me several times in the eighth grade if I was really sure I wanted to enter the seminary.  However, once I announced my decision, most everyone around me was supportive and to some degree began to put me on a pedestal.  In particular my grandmother, my mom’s mother, was ecstatic about my decision to enter the seminary and during all my years there would regularly bake all kinds of goodies for all of my classmates.

How long were you in the seminary?

8 years, from 1959 to 1967.

Why did you stay in so long?

My reasons for staying 8 years changed over time.  In my early high school years I stayed, as silly as it sounds right now, to prove grammar school buddies wrong about their doubts about my vocation.  In particular one buddy in the eighth grade had told me repeatedly, “You will never make it.”  Yes, it’s hardheaded but in those years I wanted to prove him wrong.  In my last few years in minor seminary I stayed mainly because I felt I had nowhere else to go.  By the time of my late teens my father’s alcoholism had become rampant, and so I saw living at home as being more intolerable than returning to seminary every September.

In my senior year of high school, Fourth Class in seminary, I developed a crush on a classmate's younger sister, the first in a series of romantic crushes I developed on sisters of other seminarians.  A large number of my classmates quit after high school, and so when I came back to Fifth Class, I fell into a deep depression for not having quit with them.  My only refuge was to study as hard as I could and do as well as I could academically, and I did.  By the time I got to major seminary, junior year in college, I had pretty much made up my mind that I was going to quit, but I had not figured out the timing.  I decided to stay long enough to get a bachelors degree because I knew grad schools would honor the degree.  So my decision to stay went from hard headedness to loneliness to practicality. 

If you had it all to do over again, would you?

Ah, a temporal paradox.  Let me answer that hypothetical question with a contingent response.  If I had to do it all over again in order to get where I am today, in particular to have met you, my beautiful wife, and to start our family, the answer is yes.  I would not want to go back and change anything that would put me somewhere else from where I am right now.  Yes, I do feel that in some ways I wasted a good portion of those 8 years.  On the other hand, some of my best friends are those I made in the seminary.  For example, my co-author Steve Duplantier, who has been my friend for over 45 years.  If going back and not entering the seminary would mean not being married to you, the answer is no, I would not change anything.

Are you angry your parents let you go or sent you to the seminary?

I’m not angry, but I have often thought that my parents might have asked me to postpone entering the seminary until after high school.  Good gracious, I was 13 years old when I entered.  Thirteen.  Of course I felt I knew what I was doing, and it is clear I had not the foggiest idea of what I was doing.

Did going to the seminary have anything to do with your feelings about the Catholic religion?

Indirectly I suppose for me the twin motivators of idealism and disaffection with marriage as an institution were always the primary drivers.  The vehicle for my idealism happened to be the Catholic religion because I was raised Catholic.  I’ve thought a lot over the years about my inner motivation, and I’ve concluded, perhaps erroneously at this point, that I am an impact junkie.  I always believed it important to be able to affect the lives of others.  To make thing better for other people, to stand up for the little guy.  To me it seemed a priest was in a perfect position to make a difference, to help people change their lives.  My guess is that had I been raised in another religion I would have made the same decision and ended up in the seminary system in that religion.

Do you believe today in the Catholic teachings?

It depends how you define “Catholic teachings.”  Note that I’m resorting to something I learned in the seminary: St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical caution to “Seldom affirm, never deny, always distinguish.”  I believe in Christ’s message of love: in his command to love one another, in his directives to feed the hungry, give drink to thirsty, and so on.  But if Catholic teachings include the officious rules and regulations promulgated by power-addicted and property-hungry bishops, cardinals, and popes, then I do not.  The church’s position on celibacy is one instance in which I do not believe in the church’s teachings.  Other of the church’s positions trouble me because those positions seem to me to undercut Christ’s core message of love.  God is love, and we are made in his image, so we too are beings of love.  How a religious message of universal love came to be encrusted over the centuries with so many caveats, rubrics, and asterisks is beyond me.

What do you think of celibacy, then and now?

As a precondition for doing God’s work in the religious life, it’s utter nonsense.  On the other hand if an individual person, whether lay or religious, chooses to embrace a celibate lifestyle, I would certainly never condemn or disparage that person for that decision.  When the Second Vatican Council convened, virtually all seminarians I knew began to talk about the possibility that Pope John XXIII would make celibacy optional for the priesthood.  Now that I think about it, part of the reason I hung around for major seminary was the hope that Vatican II would set aside celibacy as mandatory.

As it turns out, in my second year of major seminary, my senior year in collage, we began to hear through the grapevine that Pope Paul VI was going to go against a bishops’ recommendation to make celibacy optional and reaffirm it as a requirement for ordination.  I got my bachelors degree from Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans in June 1967, and Pope Paul VI’s encyclical reaffirming mandatory celibacy for priests was issued that same month.  I submitted my letter of resignation later that summer.  I thought about celibacy in the priesthood and myself a lot during those first few years after I quit.  Although its one of those who-can-ever-tell “what ifs,” my best guess is that if that encyclical had gone the other way I would be a married priest today.

Is it true there were tunnels leading from the seminary to the convent? Just kidding.

Actually, this question has substance to it.  Of course there were no subterranean passageways between out seminary and any convent, at least as far as I know.  On the other hand I believe I can assert with confidence that I observed quite a number of psychological tunnels between the domiciles of seminarians and priests and nearby nuns.  Priests and seminarians naturally crossed paths with nuns and novices in the course of daily life and religious work.  It’s the same thing as an “office romance.”  In my earliest years in minor seminary my classmates and I heard stories of various monks who had abandoned their vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience in order to “run off” and get married.  While at minor seminary, I can count at least a half-dozen instances in which a young (usually thirty-something) monk met an attractive woman, fell in love, and boogied from the abbey.

It happened to me.  In my last year in the seminary our class decided to go on a weekend retreat to celebrate graduation and to prepare ourselves for theological studies that would have begun in my ninth year in the seminary.  One of our classmates had a well-to-do aunt who owned a big country home north of Lake Pontchartrain, in the piney woods of St. Tammany Parish.  The home was big enough to sleep the 20 or so of us.  While there one of my classmates made arrangements for us to attend Mass at the Dominican sisters novice house coincidently, and I truly believe it was coincidental, located close to where we had chosen to have our retreat.  He had also arranged for us to have dinner with the nuns and novices after Mass.

I was designated to do one of the readings at Mass, and in my customary uninhibited way gave a dramatic reading.  After Mass one of the novices, probably 19 years old (I was 21), approached me and complimented me on the reading and told me how much she enjoyed it.  We spent the rest of that day talking with each other.  Bottom line, we fell hard for each other, and that summer she also made the decision to leave the convent.  I later found out that several of my classmates had made similar personal connections with novices that day.  After I left the seminary, I discovered a wider network of secret trysts that occurred between seminarians and young nuns.  Several classmates married women who had been in the convent.  So no earthen tunnels, but tunnels of love perhaps.

What about homosexuality in the seminary?

In my early years I wasn’t personally aware of homosexuality being an issue in the seminary.  I knew that many outsiders viewed seminarians as “queer,” but I knew it was not so, and so I did not pay much attention to those comments.  In my later years in minor seminary I started to see behavior between some seminarians that might be characterized as effeminate.  But I’ve always been a fairly accepting person, and so those behaviors did not particularly trouble me.  I was never overtly propositioned by any priest or seminarian, though several did  “inadvertently" touch me in ways that made me uncomfortable.

When I got to major seminary, I began to see more overt behavior that could be classified as homosexual, and I began to hear lewd accounts of homosexual propositioning and homosexual acts among priests and seminarians.  But no one ever approached me, or I was simply too stupid to know I was being propositioned.  I should add, however, that after I left the seminary two ex-seminarians on separate occasions groped me.  Each of these men eventually came out of the closet.

What are the most valuable things you learned at the seminary?

I’ve always been inclined to literature and the arts, and the seminary gave me as broad a liberal education as I could have desired.  I studied Latin and Greek and French, all languages that later proved to be incredible assets in my study of literature.  As a boy I also had great interest in science, but the seminary offerings in that regard were minimal.  I excelled at math and biology and chemistry, but that was as far as I was able to go with science.  I have thought that had I attended conventional colleges I might have pursued a career in medicine, but in the end what I love to do most is read, converse, and write.   I probable would have ended up like Walker Percy, becoming a doctor getting bored with it and quit to write.

I should add that another valuable thing I learned in the seminary is the art of “vibrant dialogue.”  My classmates, such as our co-author Steve Duplantier, were exceedingly bright people with fast minds, widespread knowledge, and sharp tongues.  The discussions we had, often long into the night, about literature, philosophy, and theology were incredibly stimulating.  Yes, of course I do freely admit and acknowledge that these jousts of the intellect were a poor substitute for getting laid, but they were nevertheless genuinely enjoyable.  We all spoke our minds precisely and passionately, whether the topic was Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot, or Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, or the semantics of epistemology.  Yes, I get off on metaphysics, ontology, and the pureness of being.  I’m so glad to get that off my chest.

Why did you quit the seminary? 

I fell in love.  As I mentioned above, in my senior year of collage, my second year of major seminary, I met a young nun who was sexy, bright, and needy.  I was handsome, bright, and needy.  What a match.  I had already pretty much resolved to leave once I had gotten my bachelors degree, but she put me over the edge.  Over the years my disaffection for married life had slowly eroded, principally because I came to see that I could be happily married even if my parents had not been.  At some point on the way, and I can’t really pinpoint when it happened, I began to tell myself, “I’m not going to let my parent’s bad marriage prevent me from having a great marriage.”  In fact I went in the opposite direction an swore to myself that when I finally got married I would make sure that I would never treat my wife the way my father treated my mother.  I was determined to break that cycle of self-destruction.

I'd be lying if I did not add that the Vietnam War played a major roll in when I left the seminary.  I knew that within two weeks of notifying my draft board that I was no longer a divinity student, I would receive my 1-A classification.  So a part of why I stayed so long that I did not mention above was to preserve my draft exemption as a seminarian.

How do you feel the church is handling the present crisis of pedophiles within the church?

True to form through its 2000-year history, the church’s reaction has been to see victims as a threat to its existence.  The policy, purposeful or accidental, of recycling priest abusers to avoid scandal is both unconscionable and criminal.  Bishops should be going to jail as well as the predator priests.  Clearly the church must find a way to screen out potential predators from the seminary.  In A Tragic Grace, Steven Rossetti presents six red flags for sexual abuse as a way to do the screening more effectively.  Other suggestions have been made to implement more effective screenings.  But to my mind the true bugbear is celibacy.  If priests were allowed to marry, diocesan vocation directors would not have to admit marginal candidates to the seminary.