A Death in the Family

Even into the 1960s, the Jesuit seminarians at Maryland's Woodstock College seldom left the leafy campus overlooking the Patapsco River Valley. They rose at 5:30 a.m. to the clang of a seminary bell, attended compulsory early Mass, skittered around the campus in long black cassocks. They ate their meals silently while a prefect read from learned books. But neither its cloistered atmosphere nor its age (founded in 1869, it was the oldest Jesuit theologate in the U.S.) prevented Woodstock from being the nation's most dynamic institution of Roman Catholic theology.

Woodstock led; it did not follow. Its theological superstars paced U.S. Catholicism into Vatican II thinking before the Second Vatican Council existed. Woodstock's Gustave Weigel was more than anyone else the father of American Catholic ecumenism. The late John Courtney Murray, the nation's most brilliant Catholic political thinker, was the prime inspiration behind Vatican II's decree on religious liberty.

But the new Catholicism that such men fashioned could no longer be contained in strict cloisters. Gradually, the Maryland campus became more relaxed. Then, in 1969, Woodstock abandoned its country retreat altogether to move to New York City's clangorous, ecumenical Upper West Side, where its students could live cheek by jowl with rabbinical candidates and Union Theological Seminary's liberal Protestants. They would also be able to minister to the whole polyglot, polycaste world of the Secular City, and that they did--tutoring in Harlem, working in the U.N., in drug clinics, in mental health, with the aged. Last week the 125 seminarians were called together and told that their noble experiment had come to an end. On orders from the Jesuit Superior General in Rome, the Very Rev. Pedro Arrupe, Woodstock will cease to be a Jesuit school of theology.

Death Sentence. The Jesuits tried to put a good face on things. It was no simple ukase from Rome, they said. Arrupe had simply endorsed a recommendation made by the heads of the ten U.S. Jesuit "provinces." Because the number of Jesuit seminarians was dropping off so severely--only 120 or so are expected to be in theology schools by 1978--the provincials wanted to pool their educational resources by closing two of the five existing Jesuit theologates and strengthening the remaining three. Chosen by Arrupe to survive: Cambridge's Weston College, Chicago's Bellarmine School of Theology and the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley. Sentenced to die: the Jesuit theologate at St. Louis University, which will be resurrected as a theological graduate school and non-Jesuit seminary, and Woodstock, which may not survive in any form.

Why Woodstock? For one thing, geography: the Jesuits had to sacrifice one of two schools in the Midwest, one of two in the East. For another, the Woodstock experiment had been broadcast as a failure even before it really got off the ground--principally by ex-Jesuit Garry Wills in an acerbic 1971 piece in New York magazine. Wills' article (currently a chapter in his book Bare Ruined Choirs) was made even more damaging by the accompanying photos of seminarians lounging en deshabille. It undercut Woodstock's hopes and image at a crucial time.

Wills contended that the New York move hurt Woodstock academically. But Woodstock's president, Teilhardian Scholar Christopher F. Mooney, points out that the school was received enthusiastically in New York's academic community. It retained such luminaries as Theologians Avery Dulles (son of John Foster Dulles) and Walter J. Burghardt (one of the two U.S. members of the papal Theological Commission). This year 130 students from Union Theological registered for Woodstock courses, and the school was building close alliances with Columbia University's history and religion departments.

Whatever the reasons for the decision, the action did not seem to be a disciplinary one. The Manhattan version of Woodstock was admittedly a haven for many and varied lifestyles. The residences, scattered along 1 1/2 miles of the Upper West Side, housed the studious here, the activists there. Beards and long hair vied with modest sideburns, turtlenecks and slacks with cutoffs and bare feet. Some places became crash pads and beer-and-coffee houses for local activists (a number of the Woodstock Jesuits were active Berrigan antiwar allies). More than a few of the many visitors were young women. But the surviving Jesuit colleges are not that much different. Their seminarians live fraternity-style in neighborhood houses or apartments, receive monthly checks just as those in Manhattan do, come and go as they please. What Woodstock lacked, though, was the geographical cohesiveness of which the other campuses retain at least a semblance.

Many of the men at Woodstock are clearly angry at the decision. Himself a convert to the Manhattan experiment, Father Burghardt, editor of the order's prestigious quarterly, Theological Studies, argues that "experimentation with the different life-styles available in New York is indispensable for our students if we are to prepare them for a contemporary ministry. The decision to close Woodstock has been interpreted by many as another sign that the Society of Jesus has lost its great vision, its instinct for leadership, its openness to the world." Second-Year Student Harry Fogarty groused that it was "a loss of nerve. To pull out of New York City and say we can't make it means we are asking a lot from those Christians who do live and work in the city."

Woodstock could conceivably survive in some form. A meeting of the school's board later this month will determine whether it should continue as some sort of graduate theology school or research institute, although it would need the support of the Jesuits or some other sponsor. But the decision from Rome sharply inhibits whatever potential remains--and that is the loss. Woodstock was once renowned, after all, as an institution of particular excellence. Given time to recover from the admitted trauma of its move, it might well have become one again.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.