LIVING A DREAM

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St.Benedict’s Prep, founded in 1868, is celebrating its 150th anniversary this year. We’re planning all sorts of special events to mark the occasion, one of which is a play that recounts the history of the school in a series of brief vignettes.

Twice this past week I attended after-school meetings with the student actors and Miss Pat Flynn our drama director, to look at the first version of the play, written by students in two different drama classes over the past year or two. The plan is to start with this script and work it into something that fits the personalities of the present cast.

As we read through the script I got choked up a few times, especially during the scenes about the closing of the school in 1972, and hearing voices from the past repeating what they said back then (many of the lines are direct quotations from the original people as cited in books about the school).
I came close to tears listening to a kid read prophetic lines from a speech given by the then abbot, Martin J. Burne, challenging the school community at a centennial banquet in 1968 to begin to respond to the racial and socio-economic changes taking place “at our doorstep.” Within four years the school suspended operations, and Abbot Martin’s dream seemed dead.

Our Family vs. their team.  Note Medals

As the read-through went on, I relived all the emotions of grief and anger, fear and confusion as the monastic community split apart both ideologically (over whether we could or should respond to the challenge posed by the growing presence of African-Americans applying to the school) and then physically (when a dozen members transferred to another community).
For me, the play is about the Easter theme: the death and resurrection of St. Benedict’s,


But for the student authors, the theme is that since its beginning, the school has been a place where students of differing ethnic groups come through the front door and forget those differences and become one family. At first the Germans and the Irish formed the family, strange partners at the time, since they came from two ethnic groups that had plenty of mutual animosity. But, once inside the building, they all became simply “Benedict’s men,” giving their parents, I suppose, an important lesson in breaking down walls of prejudice. Then came the Italians, then the Poles, and a wide variety of others.

Students from various s**t hole countries

As a student here in the late 1950’s, I took it for granted that my classmates were Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Germans, Irish, English, and so on. We were all brothers. Period.
Missing at the time, of course, were African-Americans and Latinos -- they would come later, as the population of Newark continued to evolve. In response to the changing population of Newark, the school itself had to undergo changes that rocked its foundations, but somehow, through the grace of God, St. Benedict’s come through the period of revolution or evolution with its former ideals intact: Black kids and White and Latinos walked through the same front door, and were transformed into a family of “Benedict’s men.” Today, on the 150th anniversary, the family includes Muslims and Buddhist, kids who speak Arabic, others who speak a couple of African dialects, and a good handful who speak Haitian Creole.

After the read-through on Thursday, I walked back to my room in the monastery feeling proud and grateful that God has blessed us with such a diverse family in St. Benedict’s. Then I turned on the radio to listen to the news. That’s when heard the quotation from our President, crudely slurring the countries of Africa, Haiti and Latin America, as if targeting on purpose the homelands of so many of our family members here at school.
I prefer our dream to his.