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The Priest at St. Francis One of the people he plans to have a word with is the late Bishop Gallagher of Detroit, who, shortly after Irvin was born in 1933, confused his personal opinion with Church teaching and declared it a mortal sin for Catholic parents not to send their children to Catholic schools. Irvin's mother and father risked the eternal flames anyway and sent him to Angell School. "Since Bishop Gallagher is now dead, he knows what is a mortal sin and what is not," Irvin says, smiling. He also wants to compare notes with priests who lived during the Protestant Reformation to find out what was on their minds during that great upheaval. He thinks the windstorms of change that have swept the Catholic Church during the twenty-two years he's been a priest are every bit as momentous as those that split Christianity open 500 years ago. Of course, he knows he'll have to provide a few answers of his own to what he calls the ultimate question: What did you do with your life? He's been working on his response to that question ever since 1960, when he "surrendered to the call" to become a Catholic priest. From his smooth boyish face, Father Charles Irvin looks out with experienced eyes. They are sensitive, attentive, often amused, sometimes sharp. He speaks softly, patiently, like someone who uses words as tools, aware of their uses and impact. He is fond of stopping in mid-sentence to examine a word for hidden meaning, like the geode he fingers as he talks about his life. The plain volcanic stone, scarred and pocked on the surface, reveals a sparkling, crystalline interior. It is a kind of emblem for him, he says. "We judge ourselves by what is on the outside; God judges us by what he sees on the inside," Born in the old St. Joe's Hospital on Ingalls Street, Irvin spent a quiet boyhood in Ann Arbor. His father worked for Ann Arbor Federal Savings, and his mother was an artist who painted miniature portraits on quarter-sized slices of ivory. He remembers fondly his sixth-grade teacher at Angell School, Miss Sturgis. "We loved her," he says. "She was strict, but extremely fair. When she walked into the room she'd bang the butt of a jackknife against the chalkboard, then leave it on the chalkboard ledge during class. She got instant attention and total silence from us. Those who went to Catholic schools are mistaken in believing they have a monopoly on classroom horror stories." When his father joined the faculty of the U-M business school, the family moved to an apartment on East University. Irvin attended University High School across the street, in the building that now houses the U-M School of Education, After high school, it was a few blocks farther for a business degree, a law degree, and an MBA. Upon graduation from Michigan in 1959, Irvin went to work as a corporate attorney in the trust department of the 5,000-employee Continental Illinois National Bank in Chicago. A year and a half later he entered Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit. "One of the guys I was living with in Chicago talked me into making a weekend retreat at a nearby Franciscan retreat house," he explains. "There, I could no longer resist the urge to respond to God's call." It was a call that had begun to nag him four years earlier during his first year in law school, when in the space of a few short months he broke up with the girl he planned to marry and lost his father suddenly to lung cancer. "I started asking myself basic questions," he says. "What is life all about? Who is God? If God is so good, why do these terrible things happen to people? And when I died what would I be able to say I did with my life?" Irvin entered the seminary on the threshold of what many consider the Catholic Church's second Reformation: the Second Vatican Council, which opened in 1961 and closed in 1965 and whose effects are still being felt today. It certainly affected Irvin's training for the priesthood. "They had me take two Latin classes concurrently and study the philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, then they threw it all out," he says. "After my first semester of theology, they threw out all the books. The rest of my theological training was spent studying the documents coming out of the council. So I spent seven years in the seminary without getting an education." He pauses, a smile slowly forming on his face. "Seriously, the most liberal education I got was in the seminary, in terms of liberating my mind from the prison of the immediate, the urgent, the now. My mind was free to range over the history of ideas and cultural development and of our response to God and life." Priests coming out of seminaries in the late 1960's were charged with nothing less than transforming the Church from what Irvin calls an "elitist, exclusive, and kingly institution," to one more "inclusive, humble, and servant-like." Their new vision of the Church was at odds with the laity they were being sent to serve. Many Catholics, even the educated and affluent, still clung to the passive, protectionist attitudes of their immigrant parents and grandparents, for whom the parish priest • was a powerful combination of teacher, preacher, and protector of the faith in a nativist, anti-Catholic environment. More than a few priests, as well, found it difficult to surrender their old roles. "It was tough," Irvin says. "Fifty percent of my class left the priesthood within five years of their ordination.'' He hastens to add that other factors were at work in this exodus of priests. "For many, especially those who entered the seminary in the ninth grade, it was their parents or an eighth-grade nun who had the vocation, not them. And then there was the revolution of the Sixties, which was in effect a mass rebellion of 'baby-boom' adolescents, who rejected history, wisdom, and anything not experienced personally. Many priests who hadn't adequately dealt with their sexuality acted out their own delayed adolescence and left. "I remember several people saying, 'Gee, Charlie, how do you feel with all the good priests having left?' I didn't know how to respond." He whispers, "I mean, who are the good ones?" then falls silent. "It's still demoralizing. You ask yourself, 'Why am I staying on and attempting to live what's demanded of a priest when so many others have left it?' And I don't have an answer, except that I continue to surrender to the call. "It's similar to the challenge faced by a married couple whose friends are getting divorced. It's no mystery that priesthood is in trouble in the very context in which marriage is in trouble. What's at stake is the value of commitment in our culture. In church language, it's called covenant, I an agreement that can't be broken. In our marriage preparation, we stress that God has given a covenant commitment in his love for us. It's a question of our response. And that's what's involved in priesthood, too." After his ordination in 1967, Irvin served in a Port Huron parish for a little more than a year before being sent to St. Mary's Student Chapel, at Maynard and Thompson streets, the official parish for the estimated 5,000-plus Catholic students, faculty, and staff at the U-M. "The revolution was on. Bras were being burned. A science building on North Campus was dynamited," he says. "It was overwhelming to arrive at that time without any experience to speak of as a priest. I guess the cardinal figured that with my background as a university brat I might have something to offer." Irvin also witnessed the birth of Ann Arbor's Word of God community, which gathered at St. Mary's during its early years. "I was an avid supporter of the Ann Arbor charismatic movement in its initial stages, when it was interested in renewing the life of the Catholic Church from within," he says. "When they formed their own distinct community apart from existing parish communities, I had a problem. They put time demands on some of my best leaders, which took them out of my parish. Their analysis of scripture and their teachings on women's roles and on headship and subordination put us at variance with each other, too. "I find that when people talk about Baptism in the Spirit and then jump to the rapture, they skip over the passion and death of Jesus. They have a hard time dealing with loss, sin, failure, and pain. Their vision is that if you follow God, everything will go well with you. If it doesn't, you're not right with the Lord. Baptism in the Spirit also casts doubt on the validity of infant baptism. But in spite of all that, charismatics definitely occupy a zone under the umbrella of Catholicism. The charismatic experience has dramatically improved the spiritual lives of many people." After eleven years at St. Mary's, Irvin was commissioned to start a new parish in Hamburg Township, just outside of Whitmore Lake but a world removed from liberal Ann Arbor. "It came at a good time in my life-my midlife crisis. It was very generative and challenging. There was literally nothing there, not even a piece of land. So I had to go up there and find people and a place to say mass." What became Holy Spirit parish started in a VFW hall, then moved for a while to St. Paul's Lutheran Church before it had its own church building. The pastor of the fledgling parish got to dust off his legal skills briefly to draft purchase agreements and conduct title searches and deed work. But that was on his own; no one in authority in the Catholic Church has ever asked him to do anything with his legal training. "At times I think it's strange," he says, "but many times I am very thankful to be left alone." At Holy Spirit, Irvin confronted a longstanding personal problem. In 1986, after "faithfully and steadfastly" downing two double manhattans every evening for years, he checked in for three months at Guest House, an alcoholism treatment center near Lake Orion. He calls the treatment he received "the greatest thing that ever happened to me outside of my ordination. "Alcoholism is a cunning, powerful, and baffling disease that attacks one's relationship with one's self, with other people, and with God. It had been progressing slowly and insidiously in me for over twenty years. There was no dramatic moment. It was only when some people who love me very much demonstrated how my relationships were deteriorating that I saw I had a major problem. "Living a life of serenity and recovery has to do with living a spiritual life in which urges toward addiction or substance abuse have little power over you. I look back at the days I was drinking and I'm mystified that I ever did it." Rather than scandalizing the members of Holy Spirit parish, his announcement at Sunday masses of his decision to seek treatment met with tearful ovations. Since then, word of his experience has gotten around and prompted people, who are struggling with alcoholism, personally or in the lives of loved ones, to seek him out for counseling, he says. In 1987, Irvin was sent back to Ann Arbor to become pastor of St. Francis of Assisi parish. He says going from a parish of 500 families to one with 2,500 families, an elementary school, and an annual budget of $ 1.5 million came as a shock. " The only thing that has kept me from the loony bin is my training in business and law," he jokes. He says he's "at war" with the size of his parish and has launched a project to break it into smaller groups "to reduce it from a five-thousand-pound marshmallow to something we can deal with." Another parish project was a recently offered program called "Recycling Old Catholics," for people in their forties and fifties who are returning to church with "out-of-date expectations. Many of them expect the Church to be a controller rather than a teacher. It's the one expectation that those who love the Church share with those who hate her," Irvin says, laughing. The need for such a program was brought home to him recently when a parishioner reported overhearing a young child in a nearby pew ask his mother who "that man" was up at the altar. The mother hesitated before answering, "Don't you know? That's Father Rademacher." The previous pastor had left the parish two years before. "I think people are coming back because there's a need to ground oneself in what is lasting, a tradition that gives one the power to face life," Irvin says. "In the history of the Church, you see this again and again. Just as people are about to bury the Church as irrelevant, it's coming out of the grave." Irvin cites The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene's best-selling novel about a hunted alcoholic priest in Central America, as his favorite book about priests. "Even though he is weak and flawed, he knows that God has ' chosen to work through him and that he is still responsible, to God. It reveals a profound perception of what it means to be a priest and the nature of the sacrament of holy orders. God is acting through our brokenness." He's angry about the way priests are portrayed in films and on television. "They're like old black Joes," he says, "nice, doddering, harmless fuddy-duddies you pat on the head. They say their prayers but don't know a thing about human relationships, particularly those tested in the crucible of marriage. No virile, strong, wise, and powerful models are presented. "A lot of priests are heroic people. Their lives are unbelievable stories in terms of what's happened to them, what people have done to them, and how they've struggled with sex and prayer and spirituality and God and Church and religion. They've lived through a lot of pain and come out on top, on the other side. "But the same is true of a lot of married couples who've gone through living hell in their own relationship and with their children-and they've become very saintly people I hear the confessions of saints. A lot. "But the popular culture is just as unfair to married couples. Just look at afternoon television. And what is the message about religion? When do you see ordinary people going to worship in an ordinary, wholesome way? American culture only presents us with a kind of civil religion, reduced to the common denominator." Irvin loves Catholicism as a believer and an intellectual and is passionate about its contributions to Western civilization and culture. He is particularly incensed by anti-Catholicism, which he calls "the last intellectually respectable bigotry in America. "There's this mythology that it's impossible to be a Catholic and an intellectual, that one hands over one's mind to become a Catholic. People forget where the academic robes came from"-the robes given to Church scholars when they were authorized to teach. It is no accident, he says, that although Gabriel Richard, one of the founders of the University of Michigan, was a French Catholic priest, there have been no Catholic presidents of the U-M until James J. Duderstadt took over in 1988. "Take a look at some of the photos of early presidents and you'll see one after another dressed in Masonic robes," he says. "My father used to tell me that he'd never die a full professor." Irvin's father never received that final promotion-which would make his bitterness easy to dismiss, except for the fact that Catholics have long been under-represented on American faculties. Explanations range from the centuries-old antipathy between the Church and the Masons to the Catholic distrust of secular education. Whatever the cause, a massive 1969 Carnegie Foundation study by Stephen Steinberg (summarized in his book, The Academic Melting Pot: Catholics and Jews in American Higher Education) found that Catholics made up 26 percent of the American population, but only 18 percent of its university faculties-and among senior faculty at elite universities, they accounted for less than 10 percent. Ann Arbor's intellectual, skeptical culture calls for a special approach to evangelization, Irvin says. "I do it the same way Saint Paul did in Corinth, which was very cosmopolitan, the San Francisco of its day," he says. "I like to ask questions in my homilies, and I like people who question. You don't ask a question unless you believe there's an answer. The people who bother me most aren't the ones who question the Catholic Church, the Christian faith, or the Bible. It's the ones who blow it all away and say it just doesn't matter." With teenagers, Irvin says, the challenge is to convince them they have a soul. "They know they have enthusiasm and school spirit. The trick is to develop their sense of character so that they'll do something even if nobody's watching- that they'll be honest at a price or stick out in a crowd because they're willing to say no when everybody else wants to say yes. "But you can't make someone be Catholic or Christian or good. That's a fallacy of our culture, especially in Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan: the belief that education is enough to guarantee that people will behave well. Well, the most intelligent of our sons and daughters, graduates of Ivy League colleges, engaged in all the activities of Watergate, and their education didn't guarantee moral behavior or character. There has to be something more than enthusiasm for the latest fad passing by on a wagon with a band playing. It's that 'more' that is the business of the soul. "The history of Christianity is one of mutating itself so that it impregnates a culture and takes on parts of that culture at times. There's a dialogue, a transaction that takes place. For instance, the Church today is becoming much more participatory than it was twenty or thirty years ago. We're picking up what the culture is offering. " 'Culture' has the word cult within it," he observes. "It's about the business of worshipping something. The issue is what does our culture worship and what are the elements in that worship that it values and asks us to emulate?" According to Irvin, the Church in the United States is in a strong position compared to European countries, even Poland. A key reason, he believes, is that it is becoming declericalized. "The lay people are taking over more responsibilities. At St. Francis School we don't have one nun, and on the pastoral team we have two priests and the rest lay people, and we're doing very fine. "When I entered the seminary, the pastor literally ran the parish all by himself. He had no parish council, lay groups, or even consultative bodies-except for his poker cronies on Saturday nights. But today it's entirely different. The old days of domination and control are gone. If you try to pastor a parish that way today, you kill it. My motto as a pastor is 'Get out of the way.' I inspire, teach, and delegate, and the parish runs itself. "My job is to minister to the ministers. I can't be out on a rescue mission to close an abortion clinic, but people who are shaped and formed here can be. I can't be in the halls of the legislature enacting laws, which in effect regulate behavior. Folks have to bring the kingdom of God to earth as it is in heaven. They have to be in the civil rights and anti-war marches. As more people take on that vision, they'll see that the great hidden strength of the Catholic Church in the United States is all these people who continue to belong to the Church even though the clergy is diminishing rapidly." Irvin worries, however, that the declericalization process also poses a threat to the Church's sacramental life. "I told the bishop the other day that the quickest way to protestantize the worship of the Catholic Church is to do nothing about the celibacy issue, and thereby ensure that no priests are left to celebrate mass. Then we get into glorified Bible reading and hymn singing on Sunday. "The day is rapidly coming when the lay Catholic critics will have nothing left to criticize if the only criticism they can direct is against the priests. Pretty soon everybody's going to wake up and say, 'Wait a second, we're criticizing ourselves.' "The priest crisis is very complex. So many of the major problems for the Catholic Church revolve around our human sexuality. A certain fear is operative. And when you're afraid, you don't change, you circle the wagons. Until that fear is overcome, I think a lot of issues won't be adequately addressed. Anyway, I know when the regulation on celibacy is going to change," he jokes. "Five minutes after I die." He cautions, however, that allowing priests to marry will not in itself ensure an increase in priests. Another conflicting force, he says, is "the yuppie trail of medical school and the MBA. What is considered a successful life, an admirable career? I've asked people, 'If your sixth- or seventh-grade son said he'd like to be a priest, would you be disappointed?' Some are taken aback and admit they don't know how they'd react." After twenty-two years as a Catholic priest, Irvin admits to wondering at times what his life-style and salary would be had he remained a corporate lawyer. "But those moments of envy and jealousy pass quickly," he says. "I've probably had more freedom as a Roman Catholic priest to operate than had I been an employee of a major American corporation-which is an astonishing thing. "It's been a fascinating journey, more liberating than I could ever have imagined." This article first appeared in the December 1989 issue of THE ANN ARBOR OBSERVER. |
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