by Kathleen Duplantier

Why did you go to the seminary?

I have asked myself the same question at various times. The latest answer is that I was benevolently brainwashed by nuns, one in particular. Then I got double-teamed by the pastor of our parish who lavished attention and special outings on 8th graders who were targeted as potential seminarians.  I was a malleable thirteen year old in the late 50’s, but it was not just me who was targeted. Many more of my friends in eight grade miraculously got vocations too.

Of the seven or eight seminarians from my eighth grade class, none were ordained. It’s correct to conclude that none had a “vocation.” Our pastor was Msgr. Gerard Frey, who set some kind of Catholic record for the Guinness Book of World Records for the number of seminarians from his parish who went to the seminary. It was something like 27—an unheard of number.  We were ridiculed and made fun of in the seminary because we were such a huge number of seminarians. Most parishes had two or three boys.

To this day I wonder what those priests and nuns of the 50s and 60s thought they were doing when they told so many young boys that God was calling them. It wasn’t God.

So if this was the work of the Holy Ghost, as we called the one third of the Deity in he 50’s, then the Holy Ghost was hyperactive in St. Francis Cabrini Parish.

How long were you in the seminary.

10 years, from 1959 to 1969.

Why did you stay in so long?

Good question. An easy answer is that I liked it. But my six years in the minor seminary at St. Joseph Seminary were a combination of faulty logic and the fact that it was good place to go to high school and college.

The faulty logic went like this: since I have a vocation to be a priest, this is where I have to be. So if you stay, then you must have a vocation, and if you have a vocation, then you stay.

But it was an interesting place to be—very alluring to a young teenager. There was this amazing environment of 1500 or so acres of woodlands full of wildlife, especially snakes, which I really loved, and also prehistoric Indian sites, a pristine river running with cold water, lakes to fish in, and a farm a dairy herd and some huge smelly pigs that ate the slop of the monks and seminarians.  I also liked the medieval ambience of the monastery.

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

No. I do regret going because I really wanted to be a scientist—a naturalist actually. I know I can’t retrace any steps or rewind the tape, but I know I should have been a scientist. My life has not been ruined by those years in the seminary, but it could have been a lot different. It was ten wasted years.

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

It wasn’t their fault. They did encourage it and were very supportive of the decision to go. The thing is I thought I had a vocation-that mysterious thing you just feel. It was like saying God spoke to me in some way and now I know what God wants me to do with my life. I did feel honestly that I wanted to help people. This altruism was at the heart of it. It had to be because the actual daily work of a parish priest was a complete unknown to me. A vocation meant something mysterious and ineffable, certainly it had nothing to do with the sociology of priestly life.  It may also have had something to do with the psychosocial development of an adolescent boy. Thirteen must be the age when individuation dawns on the psyche. So some of the dynamics came from within but most came from the

Background mantra of “You are chosen…” that we heard from parish priests, nuns, instructors, spiritual directors, etc. Eventually we believed it.

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

Part of the brainwashing of Catholic experience is the blatantly arrogant position of the Catholic Church that it is the one true church. This is repellent to any normal person with normal sensibilities. I knew at some level that this could not be true, but the cocksureness of the church has a way to sweep away the opposition. In the old days it was with the inquisition, which, by the way, is always an active part of the Vatican political apparatus.

What I am trying to say is that probably the feelings of “vocation” were a normal component of development that was transmogrified theologically into a reason for being in a seminary.

Do you believe today in the Catholic teachings?

No. This makes me, in the old terminology, a “fallen catholic.” Actually I am an apostate, again to use an old term. I made a checklist once of the Apostles Creed, which begins “I believe…” and then lists the core beliefs and dogmas of the Catholic faith. I didn’t believe ANY of the things in the creed, so, since the Catholic Church is a creedal religion, I was out. If you don’t believe the creed of a creedal religion, then the only reason t stay is sentimental.

Are you an atheist?

Yes. This is a declaration that takes some courage to say, because being an atheist is definitely worse than being a pedophile.  This must be the case on the face of it because pedophiles were and are protected by bishops and even lately shielded from criminal persecution. Pedophiles are screwed up psychologically, so even though we fry them or lock them away forever, we still understand them, sort of. Not so with atheists. An atheist is practically an alien.

Try to imagine a scene in which a closet atheist priest takes altar boys to the rectory at night and reads them excerpts from the writings of Robert Ingersoll or Bertrand Russell and tells the innocent, unsuspecting altar boys that there is no God, that YHWH (Yahweh) and Jesus and 5000 years of Judaeo/Christian/Islamic theology is a horrific fraud that has destroyed millions of lives and claims victims to this day.  Now that priest would be tossed out of the church in record time.

As a heretic in the old days I would have been burnt at the stake or maybe my arms and legs pulled off on a rack. And of course I would have been damned to Hell for all eternity for good measure. Not being a believer today conjures up about the same amount of opprobrium, but the civil penalties are not as harsh. Of course, if the Religious Right gets its way (and it might with Bush in the White House) then the wall between church and state will crumble and laws against being an atheist could be enacted. In the worst case there could become a new amendment to the Constitution banning atheism as inimical to citizenship. This is happening now in the theocratic states of Islam.

With our new fundamentalist Pope, the new Grand Inquisitor-in-Chief Ratzinger, there will be more movement toward a fundamentalist posture for Roman Catholics. Catholics talk about the “acceptable losses” of those “weak” Catholics who pick and choose what thy want to believe. The old Jewish theology of the “remnant” has long been a part of Christian theology. The remnant of true believers sets itself apart from those who make accommodations to the world of nonbelievers. And then of course it makes sense to have an all-powerful deity with a sword all to ready to smite enemies.

Being an atheist is just about the worst thing you could be, in the minds of most theists. Even serial killers on death row can be saved by nuns or preachers. But atheists are beyond the pale.  And an ex-seminarian atheist must be especially heinous.

I like to think that my better theology professors (there were a couple of them) would secretly cheer me on. The famous quote from St. Anselm would still apply. Anselm wrote that theology is “faith seeking understanding.” But what happens when faith seeks understanding and then achieves it, but that understanding makes faith in a deity unnecessary.  So the Anselmian logic easily leads to atheism as well as theism. Paradoxically, there could be said to exist a kind of “faith” faith in atheism. This may be why I stayed in the seminary so long. Discussions like this are both maddening, but important. I sometimes think of all the brilliant European theologians who were squelched by Ratzinger and forbidden to teach. Those theologians must understand the crisis of belief and how close unbelief is, lurking just underneath the surface.

I consider myself a successful product of seminary teaching that I was led to see the absurdity of theism. Still, I will be pitied and hated because of this. But at least now I won’t be barbecued.

What do you think of celibacy, then and now?

In the minor seminary I didn’t think of celibacy at all, as I also didn’t think of marriage at all. Celibacy means no marriage. Chastity means sexuality appropriate for your station in life. Of course the Catholic Church with its age-old fear and hatred of sexuality took the strong view about what that meant. The “teachings” of the Church on this meant strict abstinence from any overt expressions of sexuality apart from what is allowed in marriage.

Still, when talk of changing the customs regarding celibacy for priests began circulating in the mid 60s as a result of Vatican II, then there was a moment of exhilaration for seminarians. Maybe it would be possible to be priests, to do important work in service to people who needed help, and still find a beautiful wife as a life partner and with whom you could find sexual bliss and fulfillment. At least I found my partner—my beautiful wife who is interviewing me

Kathleen:  Thank you Steve

But that utopian dream did not last long, as we know.

Celibacy is a huge mistake. It mocks marriage and has been he root cause of so much corruption and evil in the church.

I don’t think the church will ever change. There are too many centuries of entrenched error. And the Vatican establishment is a self-perpetuating evil virus that will never change. The current Pope is an example of the kind of leaders the church will continue to have.

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

Yes. But they were flooded with underground water seepage so we could never use them. Just kidding.

Seriously, there was some serious sexual tension between nuns and seminarians and priests. I don’t know the statistics, but many nuns married priests and ex-seminarians. I guess it’s obvious, because they knew each other, worked closely together and shared some worldviews. And in a weird way, the old nun habits were sexy, which is ironic since they were meant to deny sexuality by hiding breasts and hips, kind of like the Muslim veiling of women does today.

I doubt if the nuns and postulants thought we were sexy in our long black cassocks. They probably thought that our dresses were not too stylish.  Just kidding!

What about homosexuality in the seminary?

There were many gays in the seminary. I have no idea how many. Of course when I was a 14 year old in a minor seminary, I barely knew anything about gays and what they felt and did. But it soon became obvious that there were gay guys at the seminary. Those who were obvious behaved in ways I might call “swishy”—those small mannerisms and affectations that can signal homosexuality. In the minor seminary we were warned about “special friendships.” The priests did not want any paring off. The strange thing was that some of the monks were gay too, so the foxes were guarding the henhouses. I never had any knowledge about gay monks in the minor seminary molesting the seminarians, although apparently it did happen. Our Visiting Sunday script is based on a true story of an ex-seminarian who killed himself on the steps of the church because he had been molested as a seminarian.

It was a different story in the major seminary. Nothing happened to me personally, but ex-seminarian friends told me about the sexual predators operating there. The difference is that major seminarians were 19 years old and older, so technically the sex could have between consenting adults. Still, it was exploitative and wrong for men on the theology faculty to be having sex with seminarians.

Actually, by this time as people became of age, the bigger problem was that the heterosexuals were dropping out of the seminary to lead normal lives and so there was a filtering effect that left the gay men and the pedophiles behind, still within the seminary walls. The infamous Gilbert Gauthe, the pedophilic serial rapist was in the seminary with me. He was from Lafayette diocese. Those guys from so-called Immaculata seminary (smirk) stuck together, so I didn’t really know Gauthe. There were others.

I don’t know of any ex-seminarians who were also pedophiles, but maybe there were some. Many of the ex-seminarians came out of the closet and became openly gay. Again I don’t have any numbers but probably more of the gays stayed in the seminary than left it. So this meant there were and are a number of gay priests. An ordained classmate of mine died of AIDS. He was ambiguously gay, but in retrospect it seems obvious. Other close friends are now living gay. 

We all know that homosexuality and pedophilia are not connected. Heterosexuals can be pedophiles too. Yet there was at least one case I knew about of a homosexual pedophile priest who hung out with the closeted gay priests.

I just wanted to say one more thing about this. My ex-pastor, Msgr. Gerard Frey, went on to become a bishop, perhaps partially as a result of the number of seminarians he turned out. (By the way, of all the dozens of those seminarians, not one became a priest). So Frey ends up in Lafayette where his family had a big meat processing plant that made Cajun baloney, among other products. Frey is at the helm when Gilbert Gauthe is ravaging the altar boys of Acadiana. You have to read Jason Berry’s account of this unbelievable story in his book Lead us not into Temptation. Frey’s response is to tell Gauthe to “stop sinning” and move him to other parishes where there was fresher meat. Eventually, despite the power of episcopal conspiracy to cover up the criminal rapes, Frey got busted and had to resign as bishop.

A few years later, Cardinal Bernard Law in Boston gets his comeuppance for the very same crimes.  Both Law and Frey went to St Joseph Seminary together. I am not suggesting a conspiracy, just the fact that the same types of people end up becoming bishops and cardinals and their responses to pedophilia and sexual crimes is so identical that it suggests that there was an unwritten policy in place.

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

The education we received at the seminary was generally good, though it was deficient in the things I was most interested in—science and biology.  I ended up studying language, humanities, the classics, more or less.  I made good friends for life, one of them being my co-collaborator in this script, Jim Krefft.

The best thing I did at the seminary was to volunteer for two summers to go a monastery at Esquipulas in Guatemala. I worked in small remote mountain villages mostly just hanging out with the villagers. This was a life changing experience for me. The significant events were my awakenings in the political sphere (Guatemala was in the midst of a civil war after the political murders and a coup by the CIA and corporate interests especially the banana companies.) I also had an anthropological awakening by living with ladinoized Mayans in a small village. Later I studied anthropology in graduate school trying to make sense of the experiences. I think about my friends in those mountains frequently.

Why did you leave the seminary?  Was it because of me?

I had decided to quit before I met you, but of course after I met you I knew I had made the right decision.  If being in the seminary means I was called by God, when I decided to leave I guess it meant that God said “Never mind.”   

I left in May 1969. The year before was a scary one. I was heavily involved in the anti-war movement and general anti-fascist activities. I went to a liturgical conference in Washington that was a hotbed of progressive, antiwar talk and activism. The Soviets had just invaded Czechoslovakia, so I joined the conventioneers as we marched against the Soviet Union at their embassy in D.C. The talk was all about the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which was convening a few days later. I joined a group that went to Chicago to protest the war. Those few days before the convention got started were amazing. Thousands of protestors from around the country gathered in Grant Park. A counterculture village arose with workshops by political activists such as old-time leftist Dave Dellinger and rising names in the new left such as those who later became known as the Chicago Seven. Allen Ginsburg held meditation sessions, which advertised that the meditators were going to levitate the Pentagon. I went and tried to help, but the Pentagon didn’t levitate. Conga drummers and flute players staged impromptu concerts. Hundreds of Frisbees flew through the hot August Chicago air.

The Democratic Convention began with Richard Daley at the helm. We heard that things might get heavy. It broke at a big rally at the band shell in Grant Park. Norman Mailer was on stage giving a speech when organizers Rennie Davis and Carl Oglesby interrupted Mailer with an urgent announcement. The announcement was that the pigs were here. The crowds turned around and looked behind them and saw what looked like maybe five hundred cops in riot gear beating their truncheons in synchrony into their hands. Behind the cops were National Guard jeeps and halftracks with mounted machine guns. Cops were carrying shotguns and tear gas guns. Then they started marching toward us in a slow beat, whacking their billyclubs into their open palms. The organizers on the stage announced that since we were under an unprovoked attack, people should now leave immediately if they did not want to be hurt by the cops. They also announced that though who wished to resist the pigs should gather at the back edge of the crowd to act as a buffer. Before these tactical plans could be enacted, the swat teams shot tear gas canisters all around the crowd starting a panic stampede. Then the cops deployed their gas masks and charged. When they reached the unarmed crowd they began swinging and beating people in the head and wherever they could. The scene was a madhouse. Enraged cops cursing and swinging at us, men, women and children running away from them toward the bandstand, the marshals of the rally tried to stop the cops but it was no use.

I saw what was happening and ran as fast as I could from the swirling clouds of teargas and attacking cops. The situation was so intense that I thought they were going to open fire with the machine guns. This same scene had just happened a few weeks before in Prague. Now it was happening on a summer Sunday in Chicago. Someone made a sign; “Welcome to Czechago.”

The cops, under orders by Richard Daley, started the Chicago riots that enveloped the convention. The antiwar candidate Gene McCarthy went down in defeat. Humphrey was nominated after Johnson’s resignation. The Democratic Party debacle was made worse by the arch-evil Richard Nixon waiting in the wings, ready, with Kissinger to ramp up the war. Some left commentators actually urged progressives to vote for Nixon rather than Humphrey because this would hasten the apocalypse and then the revolution could begin in earnest. It looked like the beginning of the end. The military draft was in full gear. Seminarians had a 4-F exemption. We were protected from becoming cannon fodder in Vietnam, but our friends were going and men were dying for a meaningless war.

By this time, back in Theologyville, it was obvious that the same kind of reactionary, fascist thinking that was against freedom and liberation around the world from Prague to Chicago also was at work in the Vatican. There would be no revolution in he church. Everything would stay the same, in fact, everything would be worse than when the possibility of liberalization was first aired just a few short years ago, because now progressives knew that things should change, that they almost changed, but were snatched back by conservatives. As a fifth year theology student, I would have to face ordination to sub-diaconate. I had previously been ordained to some of the minor orders. The one I liked best was Exorcist. It was symbolic, we were told, just a step along the way to the priesthood and we really could not nor should not try to cast out devils. Although, it was admitted we had the power, but not the authority to do so. The power came from the bishop. We were serfs in a fiefdom. What century did you say this was?

Against this dismal backdrop of world political crisis and a surreal, absurd Catholic church, I knew that I could never make it as a priest. The conservative Vatican-controlled church was far too powerful. I wasn’t even sure I could make it in the United States, since quitting the seminary would make me 1-A in the military draft.  I had resolved to leave not only the seminary, but also the US and try to get to Canada if my number came up in the lottery. I had registered in the draft as a conscientious objector, but was turned down twice by my draft board. Someone on the board knew that my father had been in the Army and was a Lt. Colonel in the National Guard, so they said I could not be a C.O. My next appeal was a presidential appeal to Richard Milhous Nixon.

I had carefully planned a long trip to Europe. We were going to Prague to visit the scenes of the Soviet invasion and to Paris to mingle with the student revolutionaries of Soixante Huit. I went with Mike Early and Matt Hogan, two priests who had been ordained a couple of years before. Because the trip was so well planned, we knew where we would be from week to week. This enabled Mike Early to give a copy of our schedule to a young catechism teacher who was helping him at his parish in Kenner. This teacher said she was going to be in Summer School in Rome with Louisiana Tech and might get a chance to rendezvous with Mike at some point in the summer by using her Eurail pass. She did go to Paris in late June and left a note at the American Express office. When I went in the office to see if we had gotten any mail, I found the note addressed to Mike and gave it to him. We left a reply note and met up with Mike’s friend later that night. Her name was Kathleen Bordelon. We went to a boite with the curious name of “Qui-etes-vous, Polly McGoo” in the Latin Quarter near the old medieval church of St. Eustache. That cute catechism teacher made eyes at me. The next day we went to the Eiffel Tower, and in a bold move for a recently-quit ex-seminarian, I pinched her elbow.

Kathleen joined us later at St. Jean de Luz in the Basque country of the South of France. We then traveled to Pamplona where we had timed it to be there for the Festival de San Fermin—the running of the bulls (or as the bulls call it, the running of the assholes).

While we were there, we met novelist James Michener who told us how to survive the running of the bulls. He was also gathering characters and situations for the novel he was writing at the time-The Drifters. He interviewed Mike, Matt, Kathleen, and I. Parts of my interview made it into the novel. Over many pitchers of a potent Sangria, I told Michener about my experiences at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I also told him about my impending draft into the Army and what I intended to do about it. He put these in the book. Michener kept up with us. He sent us a photograph later of his amazing experiences that same summer during which he was almost killed by a bull.  The picture shows that the 73-year-old Michener had the presence of mind to do what he knew was the one thing he could to avoid getting his intestines ripped out. He stood perfectly still as the 2000 lb bull with razor sharp horns a meter wide at the tips raked the wall he was pressed against. At that precise second, a Spaniard on the ground began scrambling away and the bull saw the movement, swerved-- avoiding Michener, and killed the man next to him.

When I returned to the states, my draft situation was not yet clear. I wondered if Michener’s Pamplona gambit might work. It did. I turned 25 before my number came up and I was no longer 1-A.

Kathleen and I got married a few months later.

What a long strange trip it had been. From the minor seminary still in the shadow of the Council of Trent, to my awakening in Central America, to the radical days and nights of the assassinations, riots, wars, and revolutions.

Kathleen:  I’m glad you left the seminary

Steve:  Me too.

VS Interview - Steve.doc