MY STORY

My Harvard class (1948) will celebrate our 70th reunion in May 2018. Those of us still living have been invited to write on a topic of our choice. Here is my submission:     

                 

The son and grandson of priests in the Episcopal Church, I have wanted to be a priest myself, consciously and without a single interruption, since I was 12 (in 1940). I was ordained priest in April 1954 and over the next six years served parishes in Newark/NJ, Utica/NY, and Bisbee/AZ. I left the Episcopal Church (the hardest thing I have ever done) at Easter 1960, to enter the Roman Catholic Church (the best thing I have ever done). I look back with genuine thanksgiving on my Anglican formation; but also with sadness that the Church which took me from the baptismal font to the altar of sacrifice no longer exists, having largely sold out to what the Germans call the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the age. At the same time I recognize with thanksgiving that many individual Anglicans remain faithful to the Lord and his gospel. 

I spent almost the whole of the 1960s in the German-speaking world: three semesters at an international seminary in Innsbruck/AUSTRIA, followed by seven years in northern Germany: three years as Housemaster and teacher (of religion and English) at a Catholic boarding school for boys, on the Dutch frontier; and four years at the University of Münster, which awarded me the German Dr. theol. in 1969. I was conditionally ordained a Catholic priest in 1968. The decade of the ‘60s greatly enriched my life, leaving me bilingual and feeling at home in three worlds: the USA, England (where I studied from 1948 to 1951 at an Anglican seminary), and the German-speaking lands. 

Following my return home in 1970, I taught for four-and-half years at the Divinity School of St. Louis University, and became a priest of the archdiocese of St. Louis, serving in diocesan administration and in three parishes. Now happily retired, I shall turn 90 in May 2018, grateful for a long life, and most especially for the gift (of which no man is worthy, not even the Pope) of priesthood. Some years ago I told the story of my life in a book, No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to Grace, which is still available from Amazon. It is full of faith, but also of much self-directed humor. Readers have told me they found it difficult to put down. 

We live today in a time of troubles: nationally and internationally. Things will change (they always do). But only when our generation has long gone home to our always loving and infinitely merciful Creator, Lord, and God. I close with some words written, just weeks before his death of cancer in June 1999, by the English monk, archbishop, and cardinal, Basil Hume:  

“We each have a story, or part of one at any rate, about which we have never been able to speak to anyone. Fear of being misunderstood. Inability to understand. Ignorance of the darker side of our hidden lives, or even shame, make it very difficult for many people. Our true story is not told, or, only half of it is. What a relief it will be to whisper freely and fully into the merciful and compassionate ear of God. That is what God has always wanted. He waits for us to come home. He receives us, his prodigal children, with a loving embrace. In that embrace we start to tell him our story. I now have no fear of death. I look forward to this friend leading me to a world where I shall know God and be known by Him as His beloved son.
                                                                                          -- John Jay Hughes