Memoir
Raised Catholic, I knew a lot of priests.
A few were great; others, less so.
Three Great Priests: “Father Fitz”
The Reverend Francis FitzGerald, of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark, New Jersey, was a man divided.
In Catholic elementary school, we didn’t see it; in high school, we did.
I grew up in the 1960s. My hometown in northern New Jersey, leafy green and suburban smug with a dusty sports field called “the Rec,” nearly a dozen churches, and a mix of track housing and Victorian manses–the latter worthy of Nathaniel Hawthorn or Vincent Price–was half working and half middle class, majority Protestant but rising Catholic, and nearly all white. Protestants voted Republican; Catholics, with the exception of pioneer pastor Father William Sheen, Democrat. In 1960, the Dominican nuns who ran our parish’s elementary school were tireless in pointing out that John F. Kennedy, if elected, would be the first Irish Catholic President. The nuns, of course, were known by their stage names (Rita Joseph, Salvador and Maurice were some), behind which must have lurked Mulligans, Morans and O’Connors. In the town, there resided one black person. I knew of a single Jewish couple.
The priest who would eventually become known to everyone as “Father Fitz” came to our parish as a curate in his mid-30s. To us kids he seemed, at first glance, simply another ageless, universal adult. He was balding and somewhat round faced with blocky, uneven teeth but his speech, and his manner, differed from other priests, differed, in fact, from most other adults. School children were the first to call him “Father Fitz” because we were the first to understand, and appreciate, what he was really like.
One reason was that Fitz never spoke down to us…because he never spoke down to anyone. He didn’t heckle or hound schoolchildren in the gym or the corridor the way the other priests did. Even as a sixth grader, I felt that approaching Father Fitz on any subject, whether mundane or scholastic, was a conversation not a chore or an exercise. He made you feel grown up.
Of course, Fitz was also a softy. Nobody failed religion or got kicked out of altar boys.
But Father Fitz also settled in well with adults. He smoked cigars. At Holy Name Society meetings he traded jokes with the men. He owned a hulking, dilapidated Cadilac, which he parked in a shed across from the rectory and serviced on Saturdays dressed in a greasy flannel shirt. You could hang out with him while he labored under the hood. He had a funny way of laughing, especially when puzzled by engine mechanics, throwing back his head and emitting a single “ha” into the wind.
He never cursed, even at machines. The worst thing I ever heard him say was to a crowd of rowdy altar boys: “Don’t make me raise my voice; I might lose it, and then I’d be out of a voice.” Followed by a “ha.” The women of the parish delighted in Father Fitz. He was universally helpful. He never complained. He didn’t “mansplain” like the other priests, who were, if anything, even more misogynistic than the Irish and Italian extracted husbands of the time. My mother called him “a big kid.”
Which he was. While he treated us like adults, we brought out Fitz’s inner teenager. We’d invited him ice skating. When the first high school seniors got their drivers’ licenses we took him out to dinner at a restaurant called, fittingly, the Friar Tuck. He took us on a boat ride up the Hudson.
But Fitz had another side.
It came out when he taught religion class to seventh graders. For once, it wasn’t the Baltimore Catechism, a second-hand paperback with a plain green cover and a picture of old Cardinal Gibbons inside. Father Fitz chose The Acts of the Apostles. He used it to conjure up the image of early Christians gathering, not bowing and kneeling, in homes and workplaces, the plain, pure Christianity of Antioch and Damascus that led Third Century scholar Tertullian to exclaim: “See how they love one another!”
Father Fitz proclaimed the Christian community before it was gussied up with dogma by Paul and Augustine or converted into centuries of oppressive bureaucracy by the Council of Nicaea in AD 325. More than once, he called church doctrine “pie in the sky when you die.” It was subtly subversive.
But no one paid attention.
Not in seventh grade.
High school was different.
Catholics attending public high school were expected to join something called The Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD), basically Sunday School on Wednesday nights.
That’s where I found myself in 1968, a year that produced transitions for the world, the country, teenagers like me…and Father Fitz. One night at CCD, someone mentioned Vietnam. “Our government is killing people,” said Father Fitz. “We’re killing people. The archbishop in Newark is killing people.”
He was vehement in a way I had never seen him before. Fitz, like us, was in the middle of a journey, one that would eventually lead him out of the priesthood and into marriage.
The last session of CCD—the last session ever for high school seniors, male and female—took place at the home of a prominent Catholic high school teacher. It was a frank talk about sex…very frank. The teacher, a respected sports coach, lambasted the recent papal encyclical on birth control, Humanae Vitae. He outlined in detail the encyclical’s restrictions to conclude that “the Church essentially doesn’t want you to have much of a sex life.”
Father Fitz endorsed the view. Someone asked what would happen if the government banned birth control. Fitz said, “A man can use saran wrap if he has to.”
There was an audible gasp from one of the girls. Catholic priests didn’t talk like that; Catholic parents didn’t talk like that, not in 1969.
We adjourned.
Father Fitz said mass…in the dining room, where we gathered–a half dozen Catholic girls and a half dozen Catholic boys–not around the altar but the family dinner table in the pure, ancient spirit of the agape meal described by Saint John in the gospels marking unconditional love within the Christian community, but, for us, like a Last Supper, celebrated at the edge of sadness. At the homily, Father Fitz announced he was leaving our parish after six years. One of the girls burst out in tears.
Shakespeare said it best in Much Ado About Nothing. Only in loss do we find “the virtue that possession would not show us.”
We loved Father Fitz. Those who knew him, even after 60 years, still do.
Great Priests: Father King
Father Fitz, jovial but troubled, epitomized the dilemma of the modern Church.
For Father Thomas M. King S.J. there was no such dilemma.
In 1969, I began my academic career at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., the oldest Roman Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States, founded in 1789 by none other than Bishop John Carroll, America’s first Catholic prelate and Baltimore predecessor of the aforementioned Cardinal Gibbons.
Unlike Father Fitz, King didn’t seem to harbor doubts about doctrine or conflicts over sex. But he was still, like Fitz, highly unconventional for a Catholic priest.
Father King got to Georgetown the same year I did. He was 40. Like Fitz, he would also, in time, become a beloved figure in the community.
King was an unlikely icon.
Thin as a rail and pale with sunken cheeks, he looked like a cross between William Butler Yeats and Jeremy Irons. My aunts might have said that he carried “the map of Ireland on his face.”
Father King was soft-spoken. His teaching method was Socratic, in line with Jesuit tradition, without a whiff of dogma. His chief scholarly interest was Twentieth Century French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin but his main personal mission was something he called “exploration into spirit.”
This, Father King took seriously. He could be downright spooky about it. King would conduct late night mass in a campus chapel under candlelight backed by organ music that could have been borrowed from a Hammer horror movie. Other times, he would blast an Iron Butterfly hit, In-A-Godda-Da-Vida. His sermons, and classroom lectures, often began in a whisper, building slowly to a crescendo of hope and mystery with the good padre finally spreading his arms and rising, as it seemed, bodily to the heavens. The performance was similar to a Bruckner symphony. I would observe it again years later in another great priest, this time in Brazil.
In 1972, Hollywood came to Georgetown when director William Friedkin filmed scenes for The Exorcist on campus.
Rumors abounded, many involving Father King, that he was the model for troubled Demien Karras S.J., the heroic and sacrificial figure of the title, and/or the “official” exorcist for the archdiocese of Washington. When asked, King always demurred.
I saw him angry only once, on an annual Encounter Weekend in the Maryland hills when a group discussion turned from intellectual–and emotional–honesty to personal invective. Father King was called in. He stared the group into silence, uttered two words—“Stop it!—and was gone.
At one point in my undergraduate career, I confronted a hard-to-manage health scare. I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know where to turn.
Father King, at that time, lived like a student, occupying a single room on a floor in one of the dorms. I went to see him in his little room. He counseled me. I choked up. We prayed.
In the subsequent hours, behind the scenes, Father King took all the medical and bureaucratic steps necessary to meet the emergency. The crisis passed.
I saw him often after that. We rarely spoke of the incident. We didn’t have to. It had become a subject between friends.
Great Priests: “Dom Paulo”
Where Father Fitz represented Catholicism with a Human Face and King the call to spirit, Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, the Roman Catholic Cardinal Archbishop of São Paulo, Brazil embodied the Church Adamant but not in the old medieval way of dogma fronting for power, rather the ancient path of the indefatigable prophet and the Sermon on the Mount.
From 1983 to 2013, I worked as a foreign correspondent in São Paulo, Brazil’s biggest city and a dynamo of financial and industrial power, but a ‘power’ behind which lurked police abuse, poverty and political repression. Much of the period coincided with Arns’ tenure as archbishop, a tenure marked by the Cardinal’s signal battle against dictatorship and injustice.
Stocky, grey-haired and amiable, Arns turned a cherubic smile on everyone. Even denouncing government abuse, he seemed to cajole rather than assail as if coaxing stray sheep back into the fold. Like Father King, he was soft spoken but, like King, he would sometimes evoke saints, prophets and divine providence in a prayer-like crescendo, rising from his place as he spoke as if bursting with news of a new miracle or an urgent prophecy. I once witnessed this at a news conference whose ostensible purpose was to discuss the Cardinal’s memoir of serving, and rooting for, a famous São Paulo soccer team!
Arns lived modestly. Appointed archbishop in 1970, he declined the luxury of the Archdiocesan Palace on Avenida Paulista, the city’s Wall Street of financial institutions and swank hotels, favoring a suburban rectory. Over the years, he moved frequently from rectory to rectory, at one point occupying the chaplain’s quarters above a São Paulo fire station, as a way to stay in touch with his flock and its shepherds.
In São Paulo, the flock was vast and the shepherds many.
From the 1950s to the 1970s, São Paulo was the fastest growing city in the world, adding a thousand new residents every day. Most were Catholic. The archdiocese was building new churches at a pace outstripped only by gas station chains and McDonald’s. By the late 1970s, Dom Paulo was presiding over the largest Roman Catholic archdiocese anywhere. His decision to sell the Archdiocesan Palace had as much to do with finance as it did with humility. Avenida Paulista real estate was the highest priced in the city. Sold to developers, money from the palace built dozens of new churches in the city’s spiraling periphery.
Among reporters, no one ever called him “Your Eminence.” We addressed him as “Dom Paulo.” Everyone called him Dom Paulo. (In Portuguese, the prefix ‘Dom’ is an honorific reserved for bishops and royals.)
He was especially adroit with the press.
I saw him in action during a visit to São Paulo by Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the embattled Catholic Primate of Poland, in 1984. Arns and Glemp met at a suburban rectory. Reporters gathered on the curb outside. Glemp was news. These were the days of the Polish Solidarity movement and its struggle to overturn Communist dictatorship.
Arns and Glemp emerged from the back door of the rectory. A car was waiting. Glemp glanced at the reporters gathered at the end of the driveway. He shuddered visibly and dove into the car. Arns, laughing, dragged him out of the back seat and ambled, Glemp in tow, toward the press gang.
Glemp, timid with an ashen complexion and comically protruding ears, approached the reporters like a man condemned to the gallows. Arns and Glemp shared French as their handiest common language. Arns invited reporters to ask questions. They were all directed at Glemp, Arns translating. Glemp didn’t say much, but it was on the record, enough to satisfy the press.
After a few minutes, Arns turned to Glemp, laughed, said a few words in French and they returned to the security of the waiting vehicle. The French news agency correspondent laughed too. “Here’s what Cardinal Arns said to Cardinal Glemp,” she intoned. “’Don’t worry, brother, they’re our friends!’”
And, in a way, we were.
Arns was a soft-spoken but irresistible hero. He put the entire weight of the Catholic Church in the world’s biggest archdiocese behind the campaign to contain, and finally defeat, Brazil’s military dictatorship, including support for labor unions and street protests and the use of church facilities as sanctuary for opponents of the regime. It was a lonely struggle, with most Catholic bishops in South America either accommodating themselves to military rule or condoning it. Arns also made a crucial contribution to scholarship by sponsoring a detailed and definitive study of military repression in Brazil, published in 1985 as Brasil, Nunca Mais.
Dom Paulo retired as archbishop in 1996. He died in 2016 at 95. He was an exemplary Franciscan, a tribune battling oppression and hunger; for decades, he was Brazil’s conscience. It was a privilege to know him.
Others
Growing up, there were many priests.
Some had funny names like Father Savage, Father Path and Monsignor Tute (pronounced “toot” as in “toot, toot, the Toonerville Trolley”).
My mother, consulting her sisters, conjured up a link with Father Savage as a second or third cousin since my grandmother’s maiden name had been Savage, from a Thirteenth Century clan with Norman roots in County Down.
As altar boys, we rated Father Savage, a middle-aged man with thick glasses, “a nice guy.” High praise.
Father Path was a different story.
Wirey and sallow, Path was a vigorous preacher. His rendering of a Bible story always seemed to include the idea of ‘woman’ as symbolizing weakness, temptation or deceit. The real housewives of the Rosary Society took to calling him “Father Pathological.” Altar boys avoided him as temperamental.
Monsignor Tute was also a renounéd preacher. An archdiocesan educator, he would come around once a year or so to offer a sermon on Faith, Hope and Charity. He spoke in soaring and rotund phrases like Bishop Sheen of television fame but in falsetto.
As young as the parish curates, Monsignor often appeared in full regalia, including purple cape, black cassock with red piping and biretta with a russet tuft on top. Father Fitz offered the definitive evaluation: “He has LLB, BA after his name; it means ‘looks like bishop, but ain’t.’”
Not So Great Priests
In 2019, the Newark Archdiocese released the names of 63 former priests who had been “credibly accused” of pedophilia since 1940. I recognized one name, the young curate in charge of altar boys in my parish when I joined in 1961.
For me, the announcement didn’t spark any particular memories but, then, the pedophilia scandals in the Catholic Church tended to eclipse more conventional sexual lapses. One such percolated through parish life when another young curate abruptly left the priesthood in the late 1960s after an alleged affair with a married woman. Years later, I learned the priest had resumed his vocation, but in a different diocese. Among his duties was work as a sex counsellor!
I brushed up against the problem myself at Georgetown.
The context was odd. In the summer of 1972, I landed a dream job—security guard…at the girl’s dorm! I checked student IDs eight hours a day…and all the students were girls! The experience marked an abrupt shift for me, from “exploration into spirit” into something closer to “exploration into sex.” I interacted with girls all day. I listened to their stories and their complaints. I joked with them. I got to know some of them. I dated a couple. I liked it. They liked it. I had never spent so much time with members of the opposite sex. I learned from them…I learned a lot.
One night, into that idyl, stepped a priest. Serving duty in something called the Campus Ministry, he was not a Jesuit but, rather, a secular priest on leave from a parish in the Midwest. I knew him from the annual Encounter Weekend, at which he had been enigmatically pointed out to me as “a somewhat confused member of the clergy.” He was distinctly unpriestly, a loud, burly man in early middle age who rarely wore clerical garb and who insisted on being addressed by a jaunty nickname. He came across more as construction site boss than priest.
At the end of my shift, he invited me to his office.
The “office” was a cubbyhole featuring a desk and two chairs which, alone, practically filled the space. It was dark, stuffy, claustrophobic, a little room like Father King’s but the opposite in atmosphere and spirit.
We sat on the chairs. He announced an “extension” of the recent Encounter Weekend, which had ended with a session in which each participant hugged all the others. The good padre of the Campus Ministry then proceeded to hug me. He held me close. His grip was tight. He mumbled what sounded like a prayer. We hugged…the minutes went by…another mumbled prayer. He released his grip. He looked at me with satisfaction, made the sign of the cross, and hugged me again amid the whine of more mumbled prayers.
A short lecture followed. In the close quarters of the tiny room, I could smell his breath. He urged me to hug my friends. “Don’t be afraid to rape them,” he said. It was the only time I shuddered.
It was late. I excused myself. He accompanied me to the elevator.
At the time, I did not consider the incident a case of sexual abuse, nor do I now. He had sufficiently cloaked it in the garb of Christian fraternity. But it was not innocent. The sweat and aura of sexuality—and a middle-aged man’s sexual confusion–hung over the episode as it had pervaded the little room. Yet, I did not feel threatened or violated or any of the other feelings so often associated with such encounters, however successfully veiled; instead, I felt pity. And I still do.
Priests of the Old School
Growing up, our hometown pastor was Father Francis Ballinger.
Like most of the pupils in our elementary school, I tended to avoid him. Ballinger was dour, demanding, and, when it came to children, prone to petty criticisms. He was at his worst saying early mass, celebrated at 6:45 a.m. on weekdays, punishing enough for young altar boys expected to be alert and proficient in the cold, drafty chapel, a converted barn, but made all the worse by Ballinger’s autocratic bearing and testy critiques.
Slight and wirey, Ballinger, in his 50s when he took over the parish in 1961, was prematurely old. His complexion was pale and his face shrunken into a squirrel-like mask. His hair, cut military style, was pure while. He rarely smiled. Part of the problem was a long, and lonely, battle with diabetes. Ballinger died in 1971 at 64. Another was a daily cocktail hour.
Yet, Ballinger was not a poor priest or a heartless master. In some ways, he even epitomized Christian charity and, in others, he was a bona fide hero.
The problem was something modern Human Resources managers would call “the fit.” Ballinger was simply not cut out to be pastor of a suburban parish in the turbulent 1960s. He came from a different era and belonged in a different place.
That place was aboard ship, specifically war vessels. From 1942 until his appointment as pastor, Ballinger was a U.S. Navy chaplain, rising to the rank of Captain and, late in his Navy career, commanding all the Roman Catholic chaplains in the service. He was used to giving orders…and having them obeyed.
My mother, President of the Rosary Society, once said, “Father Sheen would yell at you and you could yell right back at him. With Ballinger, all you get is a cold stare.”
I felt that stare more than once. At the opening of a school show, I was asked by the nuns to consult Ballinger, in the front row, about arrangements. He glared at me every time I approached him. The third time, he fluttered his eyes to signal the limit of his patience. It was also the limit of mine. Even at 14, I wondered why a person so unsuitable should be running a Catholic parish in the New Jersey suburbs. For me, it was good training for a role later in life as middle management in the news business.
My friends and I felt it again one night in 1967. Father Fitz invited us to the rectory to sample the Beatles latest album, Magical Mystery Tour. Fitz put the record on the turntable. We were halfway through when Ballinger arrived home with a couple of his Navy buddies.
Fitz turned to us. “That’s it,” he said. “Sorry.” He stopped the music and nodded us out the door. Ballinger glared at us as we left. Youth, modernity and rock-and-roll were invading his space. And he would have none of it!
Many years later, I stumbled upon the Valasquez portrait of Pope Innocent X (at the Pamphili Gallery in Rome), considered one of the greatest character studies in the history of art. The Pope wears an expression of dour, moody suspicion. Giovanni Battista Pamphili, anything but “innocent,” is said to have hated the portrait, precisely because it was “too realistic.”
My first reaction seeing it was to utter, out loud, “Ballinger!”
Yet, like Father Fitz, he had another side.
The one black person residing in our town was a man named Theodore. He lived at the rectory, serving as cook and housekeeper. Theodore was extremely timid, rarely seen outside the rectory, barely uttering a word of greeting to anyone who knocked on the door. The story was that Theodore served with Ballinger during the war, was severely injured and retired from the Navy on disability. He had nowhere to go. Ballinger gave him a job…and a home.
Captain Ballinger was, in fact, a genuine war hero, serving on vessels during the North Africa invasion in 1942, then in Sicily and Salerno in 1943. One vessel, a transport ship named the Joseph Hewes, sank in combat, with Ballinger intoning prayers as he helped his men into lifeboats with the sea around them in flames.
Beneath the military bearing, there was a core, but to the pampered, suburban Catholics of northern New Jersey in the 1960s, he never learned to show it.
Ballinger, of course, was only one in a centuries-long line of authoritarian Catholic priests of whom, in North Jersey, the most famous was Dean William McNulty, founder of Saint John’s parish in Paterson, New Jersey and, late in his career, the Dean of pastors throughout Passaic County.
McNulty, born and educated in Ireland, came to Paterson in 1850, ministering to Irish and German Catholics as one of the great brick-and-mortar priests of what would later become known as “The Catholic Ascendency” in America. Amid the building of churches, schools and orphanages, he also gained a reputation as the scourge of saloon-keepers, deadbeat fathers and, down almost to the present day, parochial school children.
My Aunt May McDermott (born 1912) was old enough to remember McNulty (died 1922). Aside from longevity, Aunt May was noted for her wry outlook on life and masterful comedy timing. She once told a story about a schoolmate named Margaret, who was chased down and spanked by McNulty for some misdeed or other. At the end of the story, Aunt May paused for effect. “Of course, Margaret was…you know…(pause, a slight smile of anticipation)…a little bit retarded…(another pause, the beginnings of a wheezy laugh)…and so was the Dean!”
McNulty is buried in front of Saint John’s Cathedral in Paterson. A statue stands nearby. It speaks to a double irony—in the age of the Roman Catholic pedophilia scandals, it portrays a smiling Dean comforting a small boy in a distinctly “handsy” manner; the added irony is that schoolchildren almost universally detested him.
Priests, like everyone else, range from great to criminal, but most are, like people in all walks of life, somewhere in between. To have known three who were memorable I count as a privilege.
-Thomas Murphy, 2025
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