Lux in Tenebris

I always associate conversion stories with dramatic events like Saint Paul’s being knocked off his horse or piously dreamy movies perhaps starring Loretta Young. But my conversion story seems to be sui generis. Or so I would like to think. I could attempt to write my own apologia pro vita mea, but one has to be somewhat famous for a number of people to be interested in reading such a document. My road to the Catholic Church was neither straight nor clear. There were a number of conversion moments that looking back only make sense in the light of who I am today. So my conversion story is my life, a life that I believe has been guided by a loving God Who appreciates irony and Who has a divine sense of humor.

Prelude: “What a Friend We Have in Jesus”
with “O sole mio”

I do not remember my baptism, but it was valid according to the formula used by the Reverend Salvatore Giambarresi, minister at the Broadway Italian Methodist Church in Providence, Rhode Island. There is no way to explain in any sort of rational way what it was like to grow up in an Italian ghetto, where our family, including my parents, my uncles and aunts and many cousins, were among the very few who were not Catholic. All of our ministers were ex-Catholic priests, who often thundered in sermons in both Italian and English against the Catholic Church. The virulent anti-Catholicism of my family and church friends was one of the foundations of my childhood. But amidst all of this we never stopped being culturally Italian. That included above all the food we ate, and this especially on the great Vigilia of Christmas Eve. This is when it all came together, the women of the family who cooked while the men drank wine, the cousins running around and daring each other to eat the eel, which was one of the seven fish. In a culture in which food was always important, the menu that night was all fish because in Italian Catholic culture no meat was allowed to be eaten on this great vigil. On the feast day of Saint Joseph, my grandmothers made zeppole, pastries made especially for the feast. All through the year, special food was prepared for particular saints’ days. And all this I pondered and stored away.

Chorus: “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,
and with fear and trembling stand”

The first act of my conversion occurred when I was a graduate student studying for my Ph.D. in chemistry. I was going through a period of dissatisfaction with my religious life. It had no deep meaning for me. So I decided to visit churches of other Protestant denominations to see if there were anything better than my Methodist upbringing, in which I had memorized countless Bible verses but which had no relationship to my life except in a superficial way. Of course, I would never have visited a Catholic church: Why should I bother to visit a place of superstition and ignorance?

I went to various other churches: Presbyterian, Baptist, Congregationalist. One Sunday I visited an Episcopal church on the east side of Providence. I was quite taken with the formality of the service, the fine music, and a sense of objectivity that I had never encountered in my Methodist church. I went there a few times despite the warnings from my mother that the Episcopalians were almost Catholic. It was on Palm Sunday that I stumbled into Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on the campus of Brown University. It was there that I had my first real conversion experience. It was where I discovered beauty in Christian worship. I had never associated beauty with Christian faith, and that day was a true revelation. Saint Stephen’s is one of the oldest Anglo-Catholic parishes in the East. Sunday worship there is the Mass in English, celebrated with elaborate ceremonial and fine music. The rood screen, the Lady Chapel, the kneeling—I had never felt a sense of awe in worship as I did on that day. And I pondered all these things in my heart, but this time I did not store them away.

In fact, I was soon confirmed at Saint Stephen’s, became a faithful member of the parish, read voraciously, including works such as Dom Gregory Dix’s Shape of the Liturgy, and bought my first but not last recording of the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. But I was not content with what I had found as merely a personal gift, as if what I had discovered could be kept for myself. The gift had to be shared, and this act of sharing had to be my vocation.

I decided I had to become an Episcopal priest. I was in graduate school, but it did not bother me that my goal of a Ph.D. in chemistry would have to be set aside. It did, however, bother my father when I told him that I had applied to the Berkeley Divinity School, now a part of Yale, and had been accepted. My father, a wonderful man who was a proud member of the Providence police force, exploded in anger so fierce I thought he would strike me. His dream of having a son with a Ph.D. who would work for DuPont, earn a lot of money, and have a big house was exploded. My mother cried. All were incredulous.

I still had to tell my major professor, whom I liked very much and to whom I was grateful for introducing me to good scotch. Our conversation was in his office over that scotch. When I told him about my decision, he tried to dissuade me, pointing out that all I needed to do to finish the degree was to complete the experimental work for my thesis. I replied that this is what I had to do, and immediately. I shall never forget his words to me: “You are a damned fool.”

My time in seminary was one of growth. I studied theology, discovered the Church Fathers, and sang in the Evensong choir at an Anglo-Catholic church in New Haven, where my love for beauty in the worship of the church deepened. It was there that I met the one who became the most important woman in my life, Cathie, who is now my wife. But I soon presented a problem for some of those leading the church. While still a deacon, I was summoned by the Episcopal bishop of my diocese because his wife had heard my sermon at Saint Stephen’s on August 15, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a feast not on the Episcopal calendar but often celebrated in Anglo-Catholic parishes. The bishop demanded that I retract what I had said in my sermon, and I replied that no, I could not do that because Mary’s Assumption is true. He stripped me of my clerical collar, banned me from preaching, and ordered me to work in the diocesan bookstore. The next year a new bishop, a kindly man who had no strong feelings about the Assumption, was installed in the diocese. He ordained me, and I was assigned to a parish close to the university where I had pursued the Ph.D. in chemistry.

After settling in, a thought entered into my mind. I use that way of speaking because I cannot imagine that thought came from me. I decided to ask my major professor whether I could complete my research for the degree in my free evenings. That I should do such a thing many might find quite startling, and in retrospect I am startled as well. But my professor was cordial, and over scotch I explained my proposal, to which he graciously agreed. For about a year after that, during my free evenings I donned my white lab coat, worked in the laboratory, and eventually completed the experimental work that became the foundation of my thesis. The following June I was declared a Doctor of Philosophy in Chemistry. Many readers may think that this was in the end a useless endeavor or an act of pride. But it turned out to be crucial to my extraordinary path to the Catholic priesthood.

Entr’acte: Stanford’s Magnificat in G sung by the Choir of Christ Church, Oxford

I have a place at Christ Church, Oxford, to do a D.Phil. in theology! O happy day! And those days were happy days indeed: getting to know John Henry Newman, not only from the Apologia Pro Vita Sua but also from his other writings; going alone to Saint Mary’s, the university church, and reading Newman’s sermons in the pew; pondering deeply Newman’s Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and Grammar of Assent and coming to the conclusion intellectually that if there is a church that Christ founded, it is the Catholic Church; reading texts in the Bodleian Library, discovering Ignatius of Antioch (I had to close the book after finding “I am God’s wheat and I shall be ground by the teeth of beasts”); learning how to decipher medieval texts; studying Pusey and Keble; arguing about ecumenical councils in the Lamb & Flag pub; reveling in the Gothic; being seduced for a while by the pre-Raphaelites; finding out how very bad English food can be; singing in the choir at Evensong at Exeter College as a third-stringer; living in a place where looking out the window we saw every day the towers of Merton and Magdalene colleges, once even with a rainbow; hearing from my advisor Dr. Macquarrie, “Richard, you have to get more work done on your thesis”; witnessing the birth of my daughter, Mary Benedicta; spending Saturdays in London visiting churches and discovering T. S. Eliot’s church; undergoing painful blocks in writing; talking with Americans who had adopted a British accent while I broadened my r’s to ah’s in my Rhode Island accent; reading George Herbert, John Donne, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; typing my huge thesis with carbon paper for the three copies; figuring out how to pay for the binding; walking to my viva voce wondering whether I would survive; hearing, “Mr. Cipolla, with so many spelling errors one might think you did not know Latin at all”; running down High Street in my academic gown after being granted the degree, thanking God for three of the happiest years of my life; deciding to teach at the Anglican seminary in Barbados; leaving there to go home; becoming a curate at Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church in Norwalk, Connecticut; seeing the birth of my son Nicholas; after two years the rector of the parish telling me that I had to leave the parish because his live-in male companion disliked me; reaching the beginning of the end of my life as an Episcopalian.

Chorus: Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar,”
setting by C. H. H. Parry

“When the Lord closes one door,” says the Reverend Mother in the Sound of Music, “somewhere He opens a window.” Sentimental, yes, but to see Peggy Wood hit the high notes with her wimple trembling is delightful. I now found myself in the position of having to find a job that would support my family. With my Ph.D. in chemistry, I decided to seek a teaching job at a prep school. After hitting a number of dead ends, I received a positive response from a Jesuit high school in Manhattan on Park Avenue, and so I became a teacher. That statement may sound negative. But the goodness of God in my life cannot be underestimated, for I found that I was a natural teacher, and I loved teaching high school. The Jesuits invited me to concelebrate the morning Mass, an offer I declined because I was still an Episcopal priest, a fact that the Jesuit chaplain deemed unimportant. From the Jesuits I went to a very High Church Episcopal school on the Upper West Side to teach chemistry and eventually became the principal of the high school. The foundress was a nun short in stature but formidable in personality. Her dog accompanied her wherever she went and was rumored to bite the nuns in the convent.

Enter John Paul II into the saga. In 1981 he issued the Pastoral Provision, which made it possible for celibate and married priests who had left the Episcopal Church because of reasons of conscience to become Catholic priests. After more than a year of prayer and thought, I met with the Catholic bishop of Bridgeport, who spoke to me with kindness and urged me to seek the Catholic priesthood under the provision. I did so, and after two years of study was ordained a Catholic priest on January 28, 1984. At the rehearsal for the ordination, I pondered the interior of the cathedral, a typical Irish American Gothic church from the end of the nineteenth century, which had been gutted to conform to the “spirit” of Vatican II: brutalism at its cheapest and ugliest. As I stood there, I began to realize that it was the will of God that I was about to be stripped of the presence of beauty in my life as a priest, in order to find out what is true and what is good through suffering.

Solemn Reading: The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party from Alice in Wonderland

My first parish.

First Sunday Mass in parish: Go to rectory, ring doorbell. Priest opens the door, says, “Yeah?” I introduce myself. He says, “I heard you were coming.” I ask, “Is there anything you think I should know before I celebrate the eight o’clock Mass?” Answer: “What do you mean? Just celebrate the Mass. And make sure you turn on the microphone at the chair.” The pastor was away and returned two weeks later. I met him when I was celebrating Mass and was at the “chair.” He came in from the sacristy in a muumuu alb, walked to where I was speaking the Collect, and began to adjust the head of the microphone as I was speaking to improve the sound quality. Later, at breakfast, I learned several important things. First, I must look at the clock at the rear of the church during the Mass to make sure I did not go over forty minutes to avoid problems in the parking lot. Second, at Sunday breakfast between Masses, which included the organist and the other curate, the pastor explained, he must choose first which English muffins to take, because he had to find those that were burned by the cook to suit his taste. Third, the speaker in the kitchen that was attached to the sacristy in the church must be kept on during breakfast because he had to hear what “those bastards” were saying about him. He collected “miniatures” as a hobby and hated flowers in the church. The organist was trained in Gregorian chant but played songs from the Missalette because “that’s where the people are.” I met a number of fine Catholic laity there.

Chant: Et lux in tenebris lucet
et tenebrae eam non comprehenderunt

(Sung by the deacon in the gospel tone)

As soon as I entered the next parish church I was assigned to, I knew that this is where I would enter the darkness. It had been built of concrete in the late 1970s. The nave sloped downward like a theater, and the aisles were covered with red carpeting. The focus was on the nondescript white stone altar and the three seats for the clergy in the sanctuary behind the altar facing the people and covered with fake red leather. The tabernacle was in a niche halfway down the nave of the church, the door of which was carved with a pelican feeding her young in the brutalist style.

No words come to me to describe this darkness. At its center was the seemingly infinite distance between my faith and how I was living out that faith as a priest, especially in the liturgy. I remember one Sunday at Mass when I saw a whole family coming into the church finishing off what looked like donuts. I remember being assigned to the Liturgy Committee of the parish and wondering why there was a liturgy committee to talk about such things as what we could do to make Lent more meaningful for the parish. The decision was to put sand in the holy water fonts. I did not understand what the pastor said when he told me that my problem was that I pray too much and that I did not have good eye contact with the people when offering Mass, that I had to remember that I was talking to them, an idea that startled me. In all of this, through those years, thanks be to God, I never lost the faith that was the center of my life. But I was a priest walking in the dark, resigned that this is what I was being called to do. I have already said too much about that of which I should not have said anything.

Brief interlude: Episcopus ex machina

The bishop’s secretary called me by phone to make an appointment to see the bishop. I was not happy about the summons, for the only time I had been summoned was for him to ask me why my children were not in Catholic schools. But I was to find out that his summons was part of the divine plan not only to bring me out of the darkness but also to give me a conversion experience that would both bring me into the light and give me a happiness by which I am still blessed today. The bishop explained that the elderly priest who had been offering the one Traditional Latin Mass allowed in the diocese was retiring. He said that he knew that I knew some Latin and told me he wanted me to take on this particular “ministry” in the diocese. It would only be one Mass, on Sunday at 2:00 P.M. I explained that I did not know the Traditional Mass and would prefer to not take it on. He was not swayed by my preference and ordered me to learn the Traditional Latin Mass as soon as I could.

I knew there was such a Mass at New Haven’s Sacred Heart Church, organized by a group of laymen called the Saint Gregory Society, and so I contacted them. They gave me contact information for their master of ceremonies, Bill Riccio. I called him and made an appointment to see him. He offered to teach me the Traditional Roman Rite and said that we would learn the Solemn Form first. We worked together for some weeks until he thought I was ready to offer the Mass. My knowledge of Latin helped me to learn the rite, but I also developed a love for the sublimity of the language and style of the rite itself, especially the Collects of the Mass, a love that blesses me still today. What those Collects say cannot be translated into English without a loss of meaning.

The day came for my first offering of the Solemn Mass in the fall of 1998. As we began the entrance into the church on that Sunday morning, while slowly coming up the center aisle, preceded by the servers, the subdeacon, and the deacon, I was seized by what people call a panic attack. How could I possibly remember the ceremonial Bill had taught me? The complexity of the Mass, the prayers at the foot of the altar, the singing of the correct tones, the different incensations: All of this suddenly grabbed me, and I asked myself, What are you doing here? Why are you doing this? We were now at the foot of the altar. Genuflect. Introibo ad altare Dei. With those words that begin the prayers at the foot of the altar, I began to lose myself to and in what was being done and sung, and in that loss of myself I caught a glimpse of light in my darkness. The Mass proceeded: Kyrie, Gloria, Collects, Epistle, Gospel, sermon, Credo, and then the Offertory prayers, where the offering of the Spotless Host precedes in time the actual consecration of the Host and the offering of the Sacrifice—where time and eternity kiss.

And then the consecration. It was as I was bowing my upper body over the Host and beginning to say quietly and slowly, “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” that I understood for the first time why I was a priest. It was like a flash of light both in my head and in my heart. That light persisted through the consecration of the Precious Blood. And that light, that joy has never left me to this day, more than twenty-six years later.

Deo gratias.

All sing: O, taste and see how gracious the Lord is!
Blessed is the man that trusteth in him.

(To the hymn tune by Ralph Vaughan Williams)