Serious Vows

        One night while at the Canisius main hangout, the PM or Park Meadow Bar, I saw one of the middle age teachers walk in with a college girl on each arm. All three of them were smiling, and the teacher’s nose was bright red. He was not one of my professors, but I knew his name – one of the more popular Jesuits on campus.

 Suddenly it dawned on me that priests don’t necessarily keep their vows!

        That was a surprise. I knew that there was the occasional priest who had a vice or two – drinking, sex – I mean that was the stuff of literature and movies. We have our moral flaws. But it was at that moment in the PM I realized that each one of us is capable of breaking promises, commitments, vows – and while it is not okay, it is certainly human. Even for priests.

        I had been holding clergy to a higher moral standard – but they are just people. And sometimes they break their vows. Sometimes some of them do it a lot. Some of them even take their vows knowing they will break them, and some intend to not follow them at all.

        There was a guy I knew who had a friend in the seminary. The friend was a math genius and interested in money and power. He thought the Catholic church would be his path to both of those things. I was shocked that someone would become a priest for any reasons other than the theological. This young man aspired to be the first Polish Pope. When John Paul II actually became the first Polish Pope, the young man dropped out of the seminary. Since then, he has probably gotten his money and power some other way. And I’ve since come to realize that there are other kinds of people who train for the priesthood for nefarious reasons that I shudder at the reality of.

        This particular priest who had walked into the PM, I think it was just the drinking – it looked as though the girls with him that night were probably not more than drinking buddies.

        Even though we were not in a classroom that night – the Jesuits still were able to teach me something significant about life through use of a red nose, a couple of smiling young women, and priestly garb.

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