Sean Sammon

Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY
Transcribed by Ann Sandri
For the Marist College Archives and Special Collections

















Sammon, Sean






Transcript
–
Sean Sammon
Interviewee:
Sean Sammon
Interviewer:
Gus Nolan
Interview Date:
15 May 2018

Location:
Marist Archives and Special Collections
Topic:
Marist College History

Subject Headings:


Sammon, Brother Sean
Marist Brothers
Marist Brothers-United States-History
Marist College-Staff
Marist College-History
Marist College (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.)
Summary:
Brother Sean Sammon reflects on his early life growing up in Manhattan and his
Catholic schooling. As the former Superior General of the Marist Brothers order, a role he held
from October 3, 2001 until 2009, we hear what he has to say about his time with the Marist
community and what he hopes the future of Marist will look like.

























GN:
00:00:00
Today is May 15th, Tuesday. And we had the real privilege of
interviewing Brother Sean Sammon for the Marist College
Archives. I was going to start to give a listing of Sean Sammon
who is a Marist graduate, who is now in the Marist faculty as a
scholar-in-residence
, he’s
a former Superior General, he's a
Master of Novices. Let me stop there [Laughter.] Sean, there's
like four parts to this: Before Marist, Marist College, after
Marist, and then later life, the administrational work. So it has a
kind of four segments I'm trying to lay out here.
SS:
00:01:09
Terrific.
GN:
00:01:10
I’d like to have
a little thumbnail review of steps along the way,
like the beginning. Where were you born? Parish, school, grade
school? That kind of thing.
SS:
00:01:23
Ok, yeah, I was born in New York City in Manhattan. My father
is from the west of Ireland, my mother from the north of
England, and I was born and baptized in St Vincent Ferrer Parish
on east 66th street and right down from where the St Andrews
used to be.
GN:
00:01:39
Yes, right. That's an area we've passed it all the time from the
west going home for the Cathedral. And that's another story
[Laughter.]
SS:
00:01:46
And I went to elementary school there and had the Dominican
sisters of St Mary's in the Spring. Actually, the woman who was
the Principal, her name was Sister Marie Veritas, were very
tough at the time, but she was later Marjorie Tuit. She was a
social activist as a Dominican sister, and she had a profound
influence on the school. It was very progressive and there were
very progressive ideas. A simple example in elementary school, I
never saw a nun hit a kid in school. She came in one day to the
fifth grade, she was the principal, and she belted this kid who
probably should've been hit about five years earlier, but she
came in the next day and apologized, and I had never seen an
adult apologize to a child. It stuck with me. She
said, “W
hat I did
yesterday was wrong, and I did it publicly, and therefore I need


to say I'm sorry publicly.
”
It was like, there were so many life
lessons these women taught me. From there,
I actually…

GN:
00:02:40
What years were these? Roughly.
SS:
00:02:43
This would have been
…
I graduated elementary school 1961, so
this would have been from 1954/55 to, well it was eight years,
so I was born in 1947…

GN:
00:02:56
Kennedy was president, that's what I go by.
SS:
00:02:57
Well, actually, I remember the election for Kennedy.

00:03:00
I was in the eighth grade when that was taking place. So, it was
the fifties, really. And the neighborhood is a very working class
neighborhood. One of the rich things about it is that we're all
sorts of different ethnic groups and religious groups. I grew up
with Jewish friends, people with different ethnic backgrounds.
So, when I actually encountered things like antisemitism and
stuff later in life, it enraged me because I said many of the
people who had those sentiments didn't have, didn't know
people and did
n’t
have relationships. But then, I applied to four
Catholic high schools. I didn't apply to St Agnes, and this is kind
of an interesting thing. I applied to Power Memorial, which is a
Christian Brothers school. LaSalle, but not LaSalle on Second
Street, there was a LaSalle high school up in the seventies, and
it was, like, not too far in the neighborhood of Fordham Prep,
and All Hallows might’ve been the last one, I think.

SS:
00:03:51
But I got into all four, and I was going to go to Fordham Prep,
and then a friend of mine was at Saint Agnes. And I got the idea
in my head that that's where I should go to high school. Well,
my eighth grade teacher was wild because she said,
“A
re you
crazy? You should be going to Fordham Prep or the Jesuits,
”
but
I still remember I got my elementary school transcript, went
down, Tim Murphy was the principal at St Agnes
, and I said, “I'd
like to apply,”
and he said,
“
Why didn't you apply with the
COOPs?”
I said, I didn't know that Saint Agnes was here. So I got
in, and I went to St Agnes, and that's how I ended up there.
GN:
00:04:26
Where were you, were you living in Manhattan at the time?
SS:
00:04:28
Yeah, I was living, we were living on east 67th street.
GN:
00:04:29
So that wouldn't be too hard to go down by the subway.
SS:
00:04:32
Yeah. It was a very simple commute.


GN:
00:04:33
What were the conditions at the time economically? This is
post-Depression era. Those jobs are back pretty much. So, were
you hustling after school? Did you work at a prestigious?
SS:
00:04:47
Yeah, I had a part time job. I walked a dog. I did, I worked in a,
like a local store as a clerk. Yeah. And it was, it was a time, and
like what I remember is my mother would pay cash for
everything. Like it was, they were really affected by The
Depression. Actually, both came to, well, my father was in the
Irish revolution. That's one of the reasons he came to the states.
They were killing the messengers. He was 14 when he was in
the revolution as a messenger, and he went to England then
and then he came to the states. My mother's father was a ship
builder and a minor in the north of England. He came to the
states for a year to earn money thinking he'd go back and things
would be better. They weren't. So, he brought the whole family
over.
GN:
00:05:28
Where in the west of Ireland is he from?
SS:
00:05:30
Mayo.
GN:
00:05:30
Oh, okay.
SS:
00:05:31
Yeah, from actually right near Westport.
GN:
00:05:35
Okay. My father drove a laurie, so he was on the run, you know,
for the beginning. Both sides wanted him. They wanted the
truck, anyway, so, his only way out was to flee to America. Inn
that, we are the very much the same. Back to Saint Agnes. How
long were you there? How many years?
SS:
00:05:55
I was there just a year.
GN:
00:05:56
Just a year.
SS:
00:05:57
I went to The Juniorate at the end of freshman year.
GN:
00:05:59
Okay. In St Agnes, Brother Cyril? Rob? Who did you have?
SS:
00:06:03
Oh, Cyril was there, and Cyril had a profound effect on me at
different times of my life. Cyril was living there and was the
recruiter for the Brothers because whenever I hear a church bell
ring
, I remember we were freshmen… n
ow, can you imagine
saying this to freshmen? We were in the classroom on the very
top floor. It's 9:00 in the morning and a funeral is taking place
and the bell was ringing. And Cyril, giving a vocation talk, started


by saying,
“
Do you hear that bell
? One day, it shall ring for you.”

It was like, chilling, you know, to these 13 and 14-year-old kids.
But he was a presence in the school. John Malich was there,
Robert Besium was there, Jude Parker was there.
GN:
00:06:42
Ziggy Rancort?
No, you, right, right right…

SS:
00:06:43
Yeah, Ziggy wasn't there at that time. He was still at the college.
But what I encountered was a group of young, very vital, happy
people. We actually only had one lay teacher, Mr. Lemania, who
wrote one of the freshman classes and he and John were very
good friends.
GN:
00:06:59
Through your high school, there ca
n’t be
very much activities in
St Agnes, per se. I mean, it's a midtown school and so on. Were
there activities? Was there choir, p
lays …?

SS:
00:07:16
For the size, there were a number of things. There was, the
sodality was going on. It was a lot of volunteer work. But you're
right. I mean, we didn't have a science lab. We did a science fair
at one point, and literally, it was, we took an empty classroom
and set up tables and put up exhibits. They were very creative
with what they did. But we didn't have a gym, you know, a
regulation gym. We used to use the 54th Street gym.
GN:
00:07:37
Good.
SS:
00:07:37
It was. It was incredibly limited, but there was a terrific spirit
among the students there.
GN:
00:07:42
Yeah. Yeah. It’s, you know, and I think it
reduced to a fairly good
number of graduates, I mean, it was a school
… people hold
onto Saint Agnes, hold it with affection, you know, with hard to
it. Where
did the interest in the Marist Brothers… who planted
that seed?
SS:
00:08:02
Would have been, John Malich would've been very influential.
He ran the sodality. He would've been about 24 at the time,
maybe 25. And sodality, was, you did a lot of service projects
and a number of freshmen got involved in it. It was like one club
that was a thing that seemed to draw a lot of the freshmen in.
Also, there was like an expectation in the school that some
people would go to religious life, and Cyril was very visible, very
upfront about talking about the Brothers. I mean, he came in
several times during the years, but it was something that had
come to my mind even in elementary school, like Mary Nell
came during elementary school, and I was just intrigued by …



China. I mean, it's very naive when I think of it now, but like,
they were 10 years, not even 10 years after China had changed
governments. There was all sorts of persecution, it seemed
quite dramatic and adventuresome and stuff like that. So, all
through elementary school, we had had people come in and talk
about vocations. Trappers came in, so it was always something
that was there. And then Cyril talked a good bit about it, and he
was just very close to the students. He didn't work at the school,
but that was his base, 38
th
Street community. So he's over at the
school a great deal.
GN:
00:09:16
Was he into his Mariology at that time?
SS:
00:09:17
Yeah. He was, yeah.
GN:
00:09:19
Collecting books and so on …

SS:
00:09:20
Yeah.
GN:
00:09:25
So, you go to the Juniorate- Esopus?
SS:
00:09:28
No, in Cold Spring, and Leo Wall was the
…
first year it was just
the former Poughkeepsie province, and Leo Wall was the
director of the Juniorate, and we only had about 40 people in
the whole, in the three years. So it was very, a very kind of
intimate atmosphere.
GN:
00:09:43
Did you have Verke?
SS:
00:09:46
No, that occurred in the second year, and the second year, the
Esopus folks came over, and we went from 36 to 120-something
overnight, and it was a much bigger operation than
… Dennis
Damien became the Juniorate director and
…

GN:
00:10:01
So on, or when the rest of the tea
m…

SS:
00:10:03
Yeah, came over. Pat, James was there, Jimmy Consella, well,
Danny Grogan was with us when we were just at Cold Spring as
a smaller group, and Roy Mooney was there. So they had some
exceptional people.
GN:
00:10:18
Yeah. That, I always say that the sphere that was created in
those Twinnie Houses, you know, whether it be the Juniorate,
the Novitiate, the Scholasticate, they, put an implant in my
mind. That's just, they can't be erased. So, the operations,
though,
let’s talk
about the academics and what we would have


in high school in those days. Right. You were there for, were you
located there for three years, and then you went to Tyngsboro?
SS:
00:10:53
Yeah.
GN:
00:10:54
Okay. And so, it was really first, second, and third year of high
school that you did there.
SS:
00:10:57
Yeah.
GN:
00:11:01
Foreign language? Any?
SS:
00:11:02
Yeah. I studied a year of French there with Gregory Ballerina,
and I had Latin for three years.
GN:
00:11:11
You had Latin for t
hree years. Okay. What…

SS:
00:11:16
And actually we were put in French Four which was [Laughter]
because they, they kind of put it, it was only about five of us in
the class and they called it French Four. But the classes were so
small they were trying to do an intensive sort of French the way
they put it together.
GN:
00:11:32
Yeah. Well you had, you have capable faculty to do it except
that it had to be translated. I mean, if it were French Canadians,
you know, you come to us with a terrible accent. That’s what
some of the French teachers used to say here about the
B
rothers and their …
especially those coming out of Tyngsboro.
Well, the machine for the car, and so forth.
SS:
00:11:54
When I went to learn French, when I went to Rome, I was going
to go to Canada, and one of the brothers and friends said to me,
“
what would possess you to go to Canada if you wanted to learn
French?
”
[Laughter] It was this comment.
GN:
00:12:08
[Laughter] Moving on up…

SS:
00:12:10
But I got a terrific high school education. I mean Jimmy Cansella
was probably the best math teacher I have ever had. Danny
Grogan made the Civil War come alive. I had Roy
Mooney’s
senior year English literature notes till about 10 years ago.
GN:
00:12:25
Really?
SS:
00:12:26
And when I talk to kids here about Beowulf, Ralph Royster
Doyster, you know, the WWI poets, Siegfried Sassoon, they


haven't
heard of any of these people, and they’re
finishing
college. It blows my mind. We got that in high school.
GN:
00:12:40
Yeah, it's amazing. What went on, I mean, I've heard
people …
we
’
ll moved out into another phase, later. Well, moving up to
Tyngsboro, now you come into David Kammer, and Judy, and
Brother Jude, Brother Jude, who was still there.
SS:
00:12:57
Yeah. He used to do the summers.
GN:
00:13:00
There's also, it was kind of a farm
, wasn’t it?

SS:
00:13:01
It was a farm, like we worked, actually, we raised everything
that we ate except fish.
GN:
00:13:04
Yeah. So
…

SS:
00:13:11
We learned canning, I was the milker. I ran the barn
, and we’d
go down at 4:30, I
’d
milk the cows, and I took care of the pigs to
chickens. We had…

GN:
00:13:19
Was there a milking machine? At least?
SS:
00:13:20
Well, there's a thing you put on, but I learned how to milk by
hand, but we also knew, we would put the machine on because
we had to milk twice a day. And, the second year, Wilford, who
was the farmer, was sick. So, Greg Last Name and myself got up
seven days a week and milked in the morning, and then
someone else did it in the afternoon.
SS:
00:13:36
We often went in the afternoon, and we worked with, like,
Peter Anthony Bossis. Louis Theotore.
GN:
00:13:43
These are the carpenters, this is technical work.
SS:
00:13:44
Yeah.
GN:
00:13:46
Well, this is not traditional work. Their classroom is the shop.
SS:
00:13:41
And they taught us a lot of those sorts of skills.
GN:
00:13:53
Yeah. Yeah.
SS:
00:13:54
Because actually, in the Kirk House, when I got back from
Columbia, there were curtains that needed to go up and they
tried to put them up and they put about six or seven holes in
the wall and then just left it. So, I went Sunday. I got my drill



and I just put the whole thing up. And they said,
“W
here did you
learn that?
”
We learned that in Tyngsboro. You just learn those
kinds of skills from these guys.
GN:
00:14:14
Yeah.

00:14:23
I'm trying to get to the agenda, the curriculum and the
Novitiate. The fourth year was really fourth year of high school?
SS:
00:14:32
Yep.
GN:
00:14:32
Okay. How many were you?
SS:
00:14:35
In the Novitiate?
GN:
00:14:35
Yeah.
SS:
00:14:36
My class was 21, and then there was another, like, 20 novices.
So, there was about about 40 some odd.
GN:
00:14:42
All right. Okay. And there you did history, English. Were you
taking the English Regents or were you part of the New York
City?
SS:
00:14:51
We had taken all of that in high school.
GN:
00:14:52
Oh, I see.
SS:
00:14:52
So, like, when we got to Tyngsboro, John Cobra was on the
faculty. John Malich had just come out of CU [Catholic
University] with a Master's in theology. We had oh, Robisho was
his last name. He had a nickname. He was a Marist father who
taught us philosophy. John Bosco was there during the
summers. Conan Deneen taught us a psychology course. John
Colbert taught us creative writing. But we took
… John Wilcox
then later came. So, we took Old Testament, New Testament,
Dogmatics, Christology, Mariology
, liturgy…

GN:
00:15:30
Again, The Constitution, the Rules of Economy
,
all of those part
of it.
SS:
00:15:34
We did those, yeah.
GN:
00:15:38
Fast forward. The Novitiate today is quite different from the
Novitiate you had. Was it not?
SS:
00:15:45
Yeah, it is.


GN:
00:15:47
With good reason. I think.
SS:
00:15:48
Uh huh.
GN:
00:15:52
I us
ed to say that I couldn’t believe what I was taught
in the
Novitiate, spiritually. It was kind of basic simplicity. The Rosary,
go to bed saying the Rosary, the angel will finish it. Why you
don't know versus, you know, I really don't know what level you
would address the question about prayer life. I mean, I was
reading to myself, do you want to go to the contemplative
view? Do you do the Jeduitic kind of approach? Where do you
see, what does the Marist spirituality…
Is there such a thing?
SS:
00:16:29
Yeah, no, I believe there is. Like, and I think really a lot of it's
been the recent research that's gone on that Champagnat,
obviously, a lot, relied a lot on Ignatius, and that was in terms of
some of the spirituality they began to develop. But Jean Colin,
who founded the Society of Mary, he really relied a lot on a
Spanish mystic, Mary Agrasia? [María de Agreda] And what he
did was, some of her stuff is a little bit strange, but he would
manage to draw out of her writings the basis for a Marial
spirituality, and that's something that I think the institute lost
for a number of years. The original founding vision was that we
are Mary in the world. Not that Mary is a model. Not that Mary
is someone we
’re
devoted to. That, just as the Jesuits had the
sense that they were Jesus in the world trying to re-evangelize
after The Reformation, since the Jesuits were suppressed that
when the time that society of Mary was formed, of which the
brothers were going to be a branch, we were seen as the
replacement for the Jesuits, but being Mary in the world and
putting a maternal face on the church. So, in some ways I think
they were ahead of their time.
SS:
00:17:19
To me, a lot of what they were talking about were things that
emerged because at the time of Vatican II. Unfortunately, I
think the formation that came in, because of things that
happened that was given to people up until probably Vatican II,
fell back on hold of things. I think we just lost a lot of the
heritage of the institute, so Lewis and myself have spent just
about a year working solely on the founder, the history of the
institute. Today, we were finishing up the first volume of the
history of the institute. It's like, there's three volumes of the
new history, and looking at the crisis of 1903, when there were
4,200 brothers, a thousand left the institute, 1,200 were what
th
ey called “laicized;”
they were still brothers, but were lay
people because you couldn't operate as a religious. Another
thousand went overseas, and then there were about 500 who
were retired and were taken care of.


GN:
00:18:29
Overseas is pretty much Canada? Whereas
…

SS:
00:18:32
No, well, no many went to Canada and the United States, but
they went to many different countries. The reason the
congregation is in so many countries is due to crises. It's not due
to planning. When there was a crisis, they realized the only way
to preserve the institute was to…

GN:
00:18:48
… is get out
.
SS:
00:18:49
Is to push it out.
GN:
00:18:52
Back to your
own development. You’re in the N
ovitiate. You
come on now after the formation with the spiritual life
developed there with David and Jude particularly, I think, were
kind of the pushing towards. We were in Esopus, myself and
Vinske, and Bill Levine, and Chesky, and Peter Hillary
beforehand. Well, Pete was pretty much of the old school, very
old school. He was not going to have any kind of support on the
kneelers, they had to be hard wood.
That’s what you kneel on
when you pray. Forget this cushion stuff, you know [Laughter.]
So that’s
why it was in a process of
… and we were
trying to
change it somewhat, why, we had started the vision of going
out and working with the apple orchard people and trying to do
instruction of their kids and religion, and as a carry-out for that,
we arranged with Esopus to use the gym. So this was the
tradeoff the lollipop, and, and they cooperated, but, for us, it
was an eye opener. You go to Highland to work when the kids
come in and they go to the refrigerator, they open
it, there’s
apples there. They come back 20 minutes later, you know
what's there?
SS:
00:20:20
Nothing.
GN:
00:20:20
The same apples!
SS:
00:20:21
Oh, the same apples [Laughter.]
GN:
00:20:22
So this was, you know,
we had …
we were religious, we were
making a sacri- [fice.]
SS:
00:20:28
Yeah,
I know it’s …

GN:
00:20:30
I know, it really … it made its mark.
Alright!
SS:
00:20:36
One thing about the novitiate I would say is, like, David was, we
went to the mission 1965. The council had just ended. If Rauner


wrote a book that was published on Monday, we had it in the
library on Thursday. And I didn't realize, I think he was getting a
lot of pushback in the province at large, you know, like what are
these guys need to be reading all that stuff for. But I couldn't
imagine a better theological foundation than we got there. And
even his conferences, like, he was trying to push us further into
like a world that was beginning to emerge, and I think he did
that at a lot of personal expense, which we weren't aware of,
but I think him just seeing that the world that people had been
p
repared for was falling apart… it wasn't going to
be there
anymore.
GN:
00:21:23
I'm in touch with him almost weekly.
SS:
00:21:25
Okay.
GN:
00:21:26
And Jude was one of his supports to Jude, Driscoll, so kind of,
because he was a member of the, Luke Driscoll was also part of
it.
I’m getting a lot of names together here, but you follow
[Laughter.] You come to the Scholasticate?
SS:
00:21:44
Yep.
GN:
00:21:44
A new world now. What were you studying?
SS:
00:21:48
I was studying English, originally, and I was living at Lafayette
Street with John Bosco. It was when they started that first small
community, and I studied English until I came to junior year, and
then I decided I wanted to switch to psychology.
GN:
00:22:02
Did you have George Tower?
SS:
00:22:04
No, I didn't.
GN:
00:22:05
Thank God. [Laughter.]
SS:
00:22:07
I know, I didn't.
GN:
00:22:07
Shroeter?
SS:
00:22:09
No, I didn’t have Shroeter, either.

GN:
00:22:09
Milton Teichman?
SS:
00:22:11
Milton Teichman
I didn’t have.

GN:
00:22:12
Father Louis, at least!


SS:
00:22:13
Father Louis, I had. Who was one of the most influential
people?
SS:
00:22:17
When I was here, to me. I took Contemporary America Novel
with him. He made literature just come alive. I was really quite
interested in American literature.
GN:
00:22:26
Yeah, yeah. He had a medical procedure this morning.
SS:
00:22:30
Oh, he did. Okay.
GN:
00:22:32
I don't think it was serious. Not that
, it’s never not
serious, but I
think it was planned. I think he went in, and I don't know
whatever the heartfelt, but it would be what, I'm just guessing. I
just
really called to say that’s where he is. W
e
’re
on a daily
basis. But the student here in the Scholasticate, who is the
director?
SS:
00:23:01
Of the first year here at the Scholasticate? The first year,
might've been you
… Arthur?

GN:
00:23:06
No. You had Chicago Lyons.
SS:
00:23:12
Highous Lyons, no, I don't think so. The second year was, the
five, was Jerry Cox, and Larry, and Richard LaPietra, Mo Bibeau,
and Jerry Weiss.
GN:
00:23:23
Yes.
SS:
00:23:23
But I lived off campus for two years. I only, and when I finally
came to campus it was in Benoit House and I lived there with
John Malich and Gene Ostrowski.
GN:
00:23:33
Oh, okay.
SS:
00:23:37
So I never really experienced the Scholasticate the way it was
here.
GN:
00:23:40
Right, right. Oh!
SS:
00:23:42
Because the second year at Lafayette Street, Dave Kammer was
the director.
GN:
00:23:45
Right. Okay. Okay. I had lost track of all that. What about the
student body? How much was lay students? How much
B
rothers? How much …
what else?


SS:
00:23:58
There were probably about 800 students, maybe 900. About
120 were student Brothers, and there was a lot of contact with
the lay students. I mean student Brothers were involved in
theater, were involved in a lot of activities. And actually, people
like Pat McNamara, Han Cameron, they were all lay students
here when we were scholastics, and they joined the brothers
later on.
GN:
00:24:17
Was Jeff Dolani here?
SS:
00:24:20
Jeff was here. Yeah. And very, and Jim Bridge.
GN:
00:24:23
Jim Bridge, that’s the theater group.
Yeah.
GN:
00:24:25
Jerry Cox, of course,
we’ll
go into it. Were there women on
campus yet?
SS:
00:24:34
They came in
’67
in the night division, and the next year in the
day division, but most of them were. I remember there was a
group that I knew well, but they were, like, candidates for a
religious order. I remember Ruth was one young woman, but
they were just a very, very small group. They grew in senior year
a bit more, but not, nothing like what you'd have today.
GN:
00:24:56
Oh, right. Well no, they dominate now.
SS:
00:24:58
Yeah.
GN:
00:25:00
But, yes, at the very beginning, the nurses, they didn't, they
took Marist College courses at the hospital. I gave it.
SS:
00:25:10
Yeah.
GN:
00:25:11
Literature and composition.
SS:
00:25:13
Okay.
GN:
00:25:14
They had to have some academic programs for their nursing
degree, they had to be able to read and write. And so, I had that
function
. And, I don’t know, we were
bringing students over
here for the lab on a yellow school bus. I just continued right up
to the hospital,
walked in, and taught them, and I’d
pick them
up when I went home. So that was that role. The f
aculty here…

SS:
00:25:48
Yeah
GN:
00:25:49
Was Cashin here? Linus here? Who was…



SS:
00:25:51
Yeah, Eddie Cashin was here. Linus was the president. Danny
Kirk was here.
GN:
00:25:57
Oh, Kirk was here.
SS:
00:25:58
Yeah, he taught, because taught me Eisabel, the personality
theory. Yeah. He was here, and Bill Idol was here. Ed O'Keeffe
was here in the psych department. But some of the other
people who were here
…
Well, Jerry Weiss was here.

00:26:16
Oh, I'm sure blanking on his name.
GN:
00:26:19
Mike Shurkas?
SS:
00:26:21
Yes, he was here in the theology department. And Joe Greg was
here.
GN:
00:26:27
Oh, right.
SS:
00:26:29
Oh,
he took…

GN:
00:26:30
But he died somewhere in the early years.
SS:
00:26:32
Yes. During those years. Joe Bob was here, who taught Greek
and Latin. Italo Beneen was here Eddie Donahue was here.
GN:
00:26:41
Yeah.
SS:
00:26:44
Richard LaPietra was here. Because I had an experience with
Richard with when I switched to psych, I had to take a chemistry
course. So I had signed up for a course not realizing it was
organic chem honors, organic chem. So after the first class he
called me up. He said,
“W
hat are you doing in this class?
”
I said,
“
I need four credits in chemistry.
” He said
,
“Y
ou're not qualified,
you just had high school chemistry. This is an honors course for
chemistry majors.
”
So I said,
“L
ook, I'll make you a deal
… would
you let me try for 30 days, tell me what I need to do to get up to
speed, and if I don't do it in 30 days, I'll drop out.
” He said,
“F
ine.
” So after 30 days he said, “S
tay.
”
And he was such a
wonderful teacher. I was so dumb, I had my hand up all the
time, and he was so clear. What I didn't realize until later is the
chemistry majors knew as little as did, but they were too
embarrassed to raise their hands. So, I ended up getting an A+
in the course, which is funny. [Laughter.] But I will never forget
how kind he was to me in terms of letting me stay for those 30
days, and he gave me program learning books, difference


between molul and molar and all those sorts of things. And he
was absolutely a phenomenal teacher.
GN:
00:27:43
Yeah. Everybody who's ever had him has said the same things.
Now…

SS:
00:27:47
Every class was like a one act play. It was just brilliant, really.
GN:
00:27:50
Right, and also play acting, too. He
wouldn’t let you in. You’d
wait outside, don't discharge. If you're late, 10 minutes late,
don't come in. Still, he's left his imprint, I say, on me personally
because we became very good friends in later years. The other
thing about, coming back to this now, Marist College in those
years really did not have, you know, I remember a monsieur out
in Long Island, somebody who was saying, I think it was Bob
Lynch, saying that he was in high school and they wouldn't
know what to… “Oh, go to Marist, they’ll take anybody.”

SS:
00:28:37
Okay.
GN


GN:
00:28:55
So it was like an open door. And it was survival. And I remember
Linus, I don't know where the dormitories were at this time
about, but, you know, Paul had this idea that was going to
become a community college that would be supported by the
mid-Hudson communities. And then Danny Kirk, and John
Malich, and John Willhoff did this statistical study and they
came to Linus and said that there are not enough students in
the Hudson Valley, and if there were that wanted to go to
college, they wouldn't necessarily come here, you know. But we
have 10 high schools in New York. They graduated 400 every
year. So the idea of billing dormitories, first Sheahan then Leo
then Champagnat…
were any of those up when you came
there?
SS:
00:29:28
They were all up. Yeah.
GN:
00:29:29
They were all up? Oh, okay. So that's where the student body
was, they're all from Long Island for the most part.
SS:
00:29:35
Yeah.
GN:
00:29:36
And very few from the west of the Hudson. It was all
Connecticut, New York.
SS:
00:29:41
Yeah.



GN:
00:29:43
Okay. But I had people say that after they had left here and
went to other places, they found themselves just as well-
educated, you know, that you didn't lose by coming here. Yeah,
I mean we were just patting ourselves on the back.
SS:
00:29:58
I found myself incredibly well-prepared. I think we got a better
education than they're getting now. I mean, Bob Lewis for
example, we had Contemporary
American Novel…
we read 15
novels and all the supporting literature. And I remember I had
some kids over to the Gate House for dinner one night and I was
talking about the course,
and he said, “W
hat'd you read?
” I said,
“Well, we read 15 novels” and he said, “
15
books?”
I said
, “It
was a course in contemporary American novel. We read a book
a week
.” L
ike, they read, and even now, like, the freshmen
come in and they read one book. I mean, in high school we used
to read three over the summer. Even philosophy, I've tried to
get some kids interested in philosophy. They take an
introductory course, they read
about

philosophy they don't…
Eddie Donahue had us reading Hegel, Heidegger Kierkegaard.
Italo Beneen had us reading the existentialists. Either we got a
great education
…
Later I went, when I went to graduate school
at Fordham, I felt very well-prepared. Later, I worked with
people from Yale and Columbia. I felt I got a terrific education.
Absolutely could hold your own. And in some ways it was richer
in terms of the exposure that we had.
GN:
00:31:02
Yeah. I think it has to be said for the record that, in other words,
people will say, “Well, w
hy did go to Marist?
”
People who came
here were very satisfied. I mean, it was tough.
SS:
00:31:16
Yeah. [Agreeing.]
GN:
00:31:16
First of all, you had to go to class, you know, you couldn't
…
we
developed this attendance policy, have responsible attendance.
It used to be mandatory, but they dropped that, but dropping it
didn't change any.
SS:
00:31:30
No. [Agreeing.]
GN:
00:31:31
Kids who stayed in the dormitory just failed out. You couldn't,
“Tell me what he [the professor] said today.”
That's not going to
work.
SS:
00:31:39
And you had challenging projects. Now they have this capping
project, and I've read some of the capping projects, and some
are good. Some haven't really impressed me as, like, an
integrated project. Whereas, like, for Bob Lewis, I did a paper on


the concept of the Schlemiel in the literature of Bernard
Malamud. And you had to read all of Malamud or you really
immersed yourself in Yiddish literature, Chaim Potok, all these
people. I fell in love with it, and I remember, years later, I was
up at The Culinary [Institute] dinner one night and I was with
Senator Salandon and his wife, and we were talking and his wife
said, “D
o you know what a Mensch is?
”
And I said,
“L
et me tell
you something. My senior paper was on the concept of the
Schlemiel in the literature of Bernard Malamud.
”
Well, we
started, and that is bound us every time I see her, you know.
But, like, that's the kind of thing. In addition, for Bill Idol, I had
to do a senior project study in REM sleep and dreams and do an
overnight project on that. So the kinds of intellectual challenges
we had, I think are far superior to some of this stuff the kids get
today. Plus, the other thing is, a vast majority of the scholastics
had Regent scholarships.
GN:
00:32:44
Yeah.
SS:
00:32:44
So, like, I mean in terms of an intellectual community of
students, you had bright people. I think of people like Freddy
Griffenstein and
other people like that…

GN:
00:32:54
John Klein
SS:
00:32:55
In science, literature, histo
ry…
you had people who really were
reading all the time and talking. It was a very rich world to live
in.
GN:
00:33:02
I gave John Klein a B+ in composition.
SS:
00:33:05
Did you? [Laughter.]
GN:
00:33:05
He never got over it. [Laughter.] And he could write,
but … w
hy I
did it, I have no idea except that I think we were not supposed
to give too many As. And so, the Marist Brothers were humble,
they would bear with it, you know, not easily, but they did. All
right. You go to out of finishing Marist College. Now, apostolate.
You go to St Agnes?
SS:
00:33:33
Yeah. This was fun. This was a funny time. What came up was I
had applied to Fordham when I was a senior in college, hoping
you go to graduate school, and this is kind of a strange time in
the province history. I didn't get into Fordham until four years
later, and I could see in retrospect why. I had no experience at
all. For a program in clinical psych, you needed experience. So,
what I did was I went part-time to the New School and I worked


two days a week the first year at St Agnes. Jimmy Kearney hired
me there because I remember, when I went for the interview,
he said to me after the interview with he and Barry Ryan, who is
the
director of guidance, he said, “You're
really not what we're
looking for.
” He said,

“
We're looking for someone at the end of
a Master’s degree, not beginning one,”
but, he said
, “We'll take
a chance on it.”

SS:
00:34:14
And it worked out. The second year, they wanted me to come
on full-time, because Barry was leaving, and take over the
guidance department, which I did. Then, I continued at the New
School doing nine credits and working full-time at St Agnes until
I got the Master's degree at the end of that second year.
GN:
00:34:29
Oh, so…

SS:
00:34:30
I was living up at 115th Street then. You know we, there was
nine of us who the province let us live up there. We were
working on rehabilitating tenement buildings in East Harlem
and then teaching at different schools. Joe Letter was at the
Kelly School which was run by the Christian brothers. Joe Letter
was there. Mike Kelly was at Hayes. Barney Sheridan was down
on the lower east side. John Malich moved in when he became
Provincial. John Wilcox was there, he was studying at Union
Theological. Tony Miserendina was there. He was working a
t…
I’m not sure where Tony was,

SS:
00:35:09
but we were working at different high schools and then living
there, and on the weekends and some evenings we worked on
rebuilding these tenement buildings.
GN:
00:35:15
What did you teach when you were teaching?
SS:
00:35:17
I taught, well, first I taught in Chicago during the summer, I
taught English and math, and then later I taught psychology.
GN:
00:35:25
[Inaudible Name] was here to teach psychology.
SS:
00:35:27
Yeah, he taught psychology.
GN:
00:35:28
Yeah, oh.
SS:
00:35:29
I had a class of 41 doing general psychology, and then I did a
seminar for eight kids in psychology, and they read Rollo May's
Love and Will, Treblinka, Frankel's Love and Will. They read
some very interesting stuff.


GN:
00:35:45
Alright, there are three aspects I want to talk about: writing,
teaching, and studying. What intrigues me is your writing. How
do you do the research? Like the Champagnat Study,
The Heart
that Knows No Bounds
, and
the detail that you get… where the
heck did you get that?
SS:
00:36:06
Okay, well…

GN:
00:36:07
How do you sweep it all together?
SS:
00:36:11
The way I construct things is as a teacher. So, for example, that
book was an exception, but the other books that I've written
were… like, I like to teach, s
o I would do workshops and I
’d
refine it, and then I'd sit down, and based on the outline and
everything I'd done in the workshop, that's our creative book.
But, the book
The Heart that Knows No Bounds
, Benito gave me
a week to write that. That book I wrote in seven days because it
was for the canonization. Well, I was lucky because Steven
Pharrell had done a major doctoral dissertation on Champagnat.
Ramuel Gibson who was
…

GN:
00:36:47
In English or in French?
SS;
00:36:48
In English, and he was an Australian. Ramuel Gibson, who was a
New Zealander, had done a major thesis on the spirituality of
Champagnat. There were, Fred McMann had written
Strong
Hearts, Gentle Mind,
which, he was an Australian. So, I used a
lot of those secondary sources and kind of took the best of
them and worked them into a popular account.
SS:
00:37:11
Like, Benito said to me,
“
I want you to write a book aimed at a
youthful audience, and I want it to be able to be read between
the General House and the Vatican on the subway.
”
So when I
finished it, I actually took the metro in to St Peter's, and on the
way in and out, I was able to finish the book.
GN:
00:37:27
Incredible.
SS:
00:37:30
I also have had some excellent critics when I've written. There
are people who will be brutal in their critique, and I find that
always more helpful when you're writing a book. People who
will give you an honest opinion.
GN:
00:37:42
You have one on spirituality of the 20th century. Where did that
come from?
SS:
00:37:48
That was
…



GN:
00:37:52
2-0-0-1
SS:
00:37:52
Revolution of the Heart,
I think it is. That was one of the
circulars I did, which were like
, they’re small books,
I did five of
them.
SS:
00:37:59
Well, with that one, there was a whole controversy going on in
the institute about, like, what our spirituality was. There was a
whole group in Latin America that were very Ignatiun, and I
don't think Ignatius is our spirituality. So, I set out to write a
book. Talking and trying to use the stuff I knew about
Champagnat and had researched, and then using some
contemporary thought and trying to see how that reflected off
what Champagnat was doing. So, like, Ron Rolehauser is an
oblate of Mary Immaculate who was down at the Oblate School
where he talks about spirituality as passion. When I went back
and looked at Champagnat, I said,
“T
here's a lot of similarities
here.” S
o, I crafted a circular around that. Now, to give you an
example of frank feedback, the first letter I got from a brother
after that circular was published was from Mariana Verona,
who's in the province of Chile. The first line of the letterhead,
“Dear Sean, your recent circular
is a disservice to this
institute.”
[Laughter] And then three pages tearing it apart,
which I love because you get into a discussion.
GN:
00:38:57
Why did you add alcoholics’ children?

SS:
00:39:02
That was out of personal interest. My father was an alcoholic,
there’s
alcoholism in my family.
GN:
00:39:06
I see.
SS:
00:39:06
So, I got involved with Al Anon [Alcoholics Anonymous] and
started to read about it. So, I wanted to write a simple book
that would be helpful to people who came from families...
GN:
00:39:14
And it had to do with the study in your dissertation or
…

SS:
00:39:18
In Graduate School. I actually was going to do my dissertation
on the area of alcoholism, and then I did it on an area of
developmental psychology. I was more interested, I had a
fellowship in neuropsychology, I was interested in the
neurological aspects of alcoholism.
GN:
00:39:31
Alright. Teaching, how do you prepare for teaching?


SS:
00:39:36
Read a lot, try to develop stories. When I teach, people tell me
I'm a storyteller. I feel like stories can, will stay with people, and
the point may stay with them, also.
GN:
00:39:50
How do you focus on what are you trying to say? What's the
meat of it, you know? Is it developmental? Or is it something
that's growing, or here it is, you know? In the message you want
to give, you get it across by story within the lecture itself.
SS:
00:40:12
Yeah, no, what I would do is I'd say like
, “W
hat are some key
points I wan
t to interact with the group on?” A
nd I like, like an
open atmosphere where people come back and people draw on
their experience. So, like, I did a lot of workshops, and in the
workshop atmosphere, I do some presentation within small
group interaction. Like, I think people learn in a variety of ways.
So I tend, when I do the First Year Seminar, not First Year
Seminar, I mean the Emerging Leaders Program, like I do a
program called The Imposter Syndrome: learning how to be an
adult. I'd set up a couple of goals on that. I want them to know
that life is developmental, that the most stressful time in life is
the early adult years, that there are four major tasks, and let's
take a look at them, and can we apply this to your own life? So
I'd have that general idea, but then I
’d
work around that frame
in terms of developing things.
GN:
00:41:13
Okay, and studying, do you have a particular private area you'd
like to pursue? A biography? Reading?
What’s
your hobby?
SS:
00:41:25
Oh, okay. Well, I like to do work
in…
I love biography, but my
mother was a reader, so I don't watch television. I read all the
time, and my family's like that
, we’re all
readers. She was a
woman who educated herself in many ways through [inaudible.]
When we were growing up, Dickens was in the house, Wilkie
Collins was, all this literature around. So that, like, I would read
a lot. In terms of areas of interest, like I'm writing a book now
called …
what is the working title of it? Surviving Early
Adulthood: skills for the early adult years.
GN:
00:42:02
Yeah, I saw that someplace. Yeah.
SS:
00:42:02
And I bounced it off just a couple of graduates, and they said,
“G
ee, we'd really love a book like this. It would be very helpful.
”

So, I'm hoping to do that over the summer and in the fall. That
would come from like a lot of work that I've done and from a lot
of their stories. I will also, I'm very interested in area of sexuality
because
I feel like the church’s
outlook on sexuality is informed
by the 1950s. I don't think it's speaking to young people.


GN:
00:42:25
Right.
SS:
00:42:25
And since I'm not a priest, and what are they going to do to me?
I might as well write about it is what I think.
GN:
00:42:31
They had disinvited you to come and talk about that.
SS:
00:42:35
And in my age, doesn't matter. I'd rather stay home.
GN:
00:42:40
When do you do your writing?
SS:
00:42:43
I do it whenever I have a chance. I read a book, an essay, once
about Edith Stein and her writing, and it said, if you're going to
be in a religious order, you're never going to just have time to
write. You need to work and write. And so, it said, if you're not
willing to do that, then you're never going to write. So I write
when I have a chance.
GN:
00:43:00
We have a teacher here, she just retired, same thing. She has a
notebook in the car.
SS:
00:43:05
Yeah.
GN:
00:43:06
She writes sometimes at a red light. Yeah, I mean, things will
come to you just to note, you know, to put it down there.
SS:
00:43:13
When I was a runner, I used to run with a small pad, the same
way, you'd get ideas running. Like, when I work out at Mike
Artea
ga’
s, a phrase comes, had to edit something, etc.
GN:
00:43:24
Turn the page. Called to administration.
You’ve been in
it for
years.
I mean like nine…

SS:
00:43:31
Too long.
GN:
00:43:35
[Laughter.] So we’re talking about the
nine year lapses, you
know. You went to Rome as Assistant General, and you were
there … and then you were Superior G
eneral. So, how does your
diet stand up, how does your language ability stand up in this
foreign environment? You know, how do you even sleep and
move around and stay alert through it all? It must take a terrible
…

SS:
00:44:02
With great difficulty. [Laughter.]
GN:
00:44:04
Oh yeah. With great difficulty [Inaudible] Well, you talk to it.
What drives you?


SS:
00:44:15
When I got out of graduate school, I went to work at a place
called House of Affirmation up in Massachusetts, and I was
based in Whitinsville the first year. And then after a couple of
years, they asked me to be what they call the International
Clinical Director, and we had centers all over the country and
one in England. A lot of it was doing promotion of the center.
We worked with a lot of priests and religious going through
transitions or with emotional problems with five residential
centers. So, I started traveling then, but my real love was
teaching and doing therapy. So, I did some of that. When I got
elected Provincial, I remember Martin Resnocoff, who was my
mentor at Fordham, h
e was furious because he said, “How long
is this going to last?” Because he said, “Y
ou know, you're a good
teacher, you could really… so I thought you'd be working in the
area of psych and making a contribution.”

SS:
00:44:58
And I thought I'd be doing that, too. So I remember I said to
him, “T
his will be for no more than three years, maybe six, but
that would be it because I didn't think it'd be anything beyond
that. When I was Provincial, the province went all the way to
Japan, so I had to go over to Japan, and then a couple of times I
had to go to Rome for different sorts of meetings. So, I got used
to traveling. But you're always
… a friend of mine,
Craig, would
say to me, he said,
“
I think you're in perpetual jetlag because
you're moving to so many places.
”
When I went to the chapter
of 85, I thought this is going to be it. I'm going home. I was
stunned when I was elected Vicar General, I had no language
but English.
SS:
00:45:39
I mean, I had a little bit of French in high school, but nothing to
speak of. I was then thrown into a community that lived and
worked in French, with no French. I was also diagnosed with a
brain tumor. When I came home from the chapter, I went to get
a physical, they found I had a brain tumor, so I had to undergo
neurosurgery. So right away, people think you're damaged
goods because, I remember when I went back, people were like
looking here [pointing] to see if they had cut into my head.
[Laughter.] I said no, they went in through here [pointing.] But
the brain tumor was one of the best things that ever happened
to me because it gave me a whole different view on life. And a
good friend of mine said, a woman friend, she said
, “T
hat tumor
sent you on a journey that's the shortest distance, but takes the
longest time: from your head to
your heart.”

SS:
00:46:19
Because I've lived the second part of my life out of my heart. I
think I lived the first part of my life out of my head. But what
happened is, I go back and Chris Manion, who was the youngest
on the council, I was the second youngest, and we had become


good friends, he was murdered in Africa. He was murdered in
Rwanda, shot by the Rwandese army during the genocide. So,
Benito came to me, because the council wouldn't replace him,
which was a whole other thing that I never was able to sort out.
He said,
“
I can't let you take time off for French because I need
you
to do his job and your own job.”
So, now I'm the Vicar and
doing the work of a counselor, with no French, living and
working in a community that was French-speaking. It was
terrible for two years.
SS:
00:46:58
What I did is whenever I had time, I studied French. And then,
finally, I insisted that I get some time off and he sent me to
Verenseraliet, which was a retirement house in France. And this
brother, Maurice, was going to, they said perfect my French, it
was
improve
my French is what it was. He was blind, he had a
baton. Every time I made a mistake, he hit the table. I said, I'll
develop a t
ick, I don't know if I’ll learn
French here. But to show
you the state I was in with my French
… T
he last day, they had a
party for me, and this is a retirement house, there were a lot of
retired guys. So, in the dining room they had some wonderful
wine on the table. Thinking that my French had improved, and
that I’d compliment the wine, I noticed that o
n the label, there
were no chemicals or stabilizes or preservatives like they have
in this country. So, I say in, what I think is, my best French, I
said, [Inaudible], but I'd actually said was
, “T
he wine is
excellent. I noti
ced there are no condoms in it.”
[Laughter.]
GN:

[Laughter.]
SS:
00:47:53
And John Bertell, who was the director, burst out laughing.
Some of these older guys almost fell out of their wheelchairs.
[Laughter.] So I said, “What
did I say
?” He
said,
“
I'll tell you
later,
”
but, he said
, “I
n the future, you might find a word other
than [French] to describe wine.
” [Laughter.]
So I just struggled
through it in terms of getting the French. By the time I got the
French down, I was finishing up as Vicar. I thought I was going to
come home because I thought, in no way would this
congregation ever elect an American. So, I was stunned when I
was elected General. Actually, someone s
aid to me, “You look

like you're in shock.
” I was i
n absolute shock. Then, the council
said they didn't want to work in French. They wanted to work in
Spanish.
GN:
00:48:25
Oh, gosh.
SS:
00:48:26
So I had to learn Spanish. We worked in Spanish and English,
then, the second council.


GN:
00:48:31
Quite a story, honest to God. Alright.
SS:
00:48:33
But I loved, absolutely loved, living in Rome. The Italian people,
the style of life
…
I'd moved back tomorrow. I made many
friends there.
GN:
00:48:44
The range of problems that was come on your lap over there, I
mean. All kinds, with, I
’m only
guessing, like, financial ones,
personal ones, decision making, diagnostic ones, almost. In
terms of
teaching and “What are we going to do?” Or, “Where
are we going
to stand?” I mean, how often were you called
upon to “W
hat do the Brothers say about homosexuality
?”
and,
“What did they say about…” You know.
I mean, did you have a
firsthand advisor that you could go to?
SS:
00:49:17
No, I… there
was a terrific council and there was so many
people were helpful. You can't…
Like, I never felt I was doing the
job alone. No, and we had all those problems.
SS:
00:49:26
We had personnel issues. We had a major financial disaster
where a guy who was an affiliate of the order borrowed millions
of dollars saying it was for the Marist Brothers. The banks didn't
do the due diligence. We had to restructure corporations. We
had absolutely incredible people working. Not only Brothers,
but lay Marist together, and the lay Marist movement was
forming then. I never felt I was in it alone, so they were just
terrific people. And like on every committee in Rome, we have
lay Marist and Brothers: financial people, organizational people.
And I found anyone I called and asked would they help?
Absolutely. Like five Americans came over. I just picked the
phone up and say I needed, I needed someone to organize
things. [Inaudible name] He said, “G
ive me a week. I'll wrap
things up. I'll be over.”
Came for six years. So people were just
incredibly generous.
GN:
00:50:22
Again, turning the page. Let's talk about the future. Talking
about the Marist Brothers.
GN:
00:50:30
You gave a wonderful little talk one night about how you
thought we're on a downswing now from where we used to be
at 12,000 to 6,000 to 4,000. What is a good case?
Well there’s a
good chance it's going to come back. I said, well, it is for
Americans here during the Great Depression and seminaries
and so on and so on. Do you see this as the Marist Brother of
the future or we don
’t yet know what he looks like?



SS:
00:51:01
No, I think so. And Lewis and myself talk a lot about this. Like, I
said to him that one of the reasons I wanted us to study the
history together is at every moment of crisis, the congregation
had to make decisions which helped created the future. Like an
example and this stun me. When we first started running
schools, around the end of the 1900s, a lot of priests thought
that schools was not the not the most effective way to
evangelize because a lot of kids were falling between the cracks.
So, they
put together what they called “Catholic A
ction
:” youth

groups, retreats. The brothers opposed that, and were against
it, and it was only when Thea Fing
came in and said, “W
e're
going to do that, and we'll incorporate it into what we're
doing.
”
Then, a whole new future came up, and the
congregation began to grow again because, to me, it responded
to some of the signs of the times.
SS:
00:51:52
I think we're at a point where we have to do that now, and I
don't know what the future's going to look like, but when
Ernesto, who's the General, was over, you met him in the
chapel that day. When he spoke to the province chapter, it was
two-thirds brothers and one-third lay Marist in the chapter. He
said something that stayed with me. He said, in 1967, we were
9,000 Brothers, 10,000 lay people or 15,000 lay people, and
300,000 young people around the world that we're working
with. Today, we're 3,500 Brothers, 40,000 lay people, and
750,000 young people we're working with. That we've tripled in
our work, and yet our numbers are smaller, we have to stop
thinking in old categories.
GN:
00:52:33
Yeah.
SS:
00:52:34
We have to think of, like, this world that's opening up if we
really are interested in evangelization. So, for me, there's that
possibility.
SS:
00:52:42
The second thing is, and I love this [inaudible] who was at our
house actually the other night, he’s a Brazilian, h
e's on the
council. And, when I went to the last general conference
between chapters, he presented the statistics, and he said we're
actually growing as a congregation right now, worldwide, and
that more people who are coming in are staying rather than
leaving. The reason we are still dropping in absolute numbers,
he said, is all these people over 65. He said, but don't worry,
they’ll be gone in 20 years [Laughter.] I said to him, “T
hanks
very much,
”
but, like, he said, we'll probably bottom out at 2000
among the Brothers, at least, but it will be a standard normal
curve then, and then we'll start to grow slowly but within a
standard normal curve. So, you won't have this enormous


number of us who came in in the sixties around the world,
that

was the aberration, and yet we made it normative. So, when
people look back on the congregation, we probably have about
as many people as we had now in the 1940s, and then it just
skyrocketed in the fifties and sixties for a number of reasons.
What I think is very hopeful is the whole lay Marist movement,
which people are still trying to get a definition of, and still trying
to understand how that's going to get lived out in so many
ways.
GN:
00:53:52
I think one of the places I find most exciting is Esopus.
SS:
00:53:56
Yes.
GN:
00:53:57
What Brother [inaudible] is doing over there. The girls, the
whole community, they talk that it’s
home now, you know,
people go there and they feel secure in their territory. What you
said that we’ll end up
building houses, I'm sure, will be the next
move. And Sean O’Shay’s
daughter worked there one summer,
and she said, “Dad, I would pay to work there next year.”

SS:
00:54:24
Yeah.
GN:
00:54:25
You know, it's just such an invigorating, you know…

SS:
00:54:28
It transforms people.
GN:
00:54:30
It does, and I think that Marist may not be the one, I was going
to spend more time on community life and all that. That's why
it's… I think the spirit of a belief,
Jesus Christ, you know. Okay.
We talked the last few minutes about Marist College,
specifically Marist Brothers, Marist College. I don't think there's
much impact now for the Marist Brothers on Marist College. I
think you are a par
ticular unique voice that there’s something
personal and something unique about it, and I think the
ministry

is good. I'm not quite sure all that's going on and how it's going,
b
ut when I see “Campus M
inistry
”
on a van
, I guess it’s a hired
one because it had a Nebraskan plate on it or something.
SS:
00:55:26
Yeah, it is. [Agreeing.]
GN:
00:55:27
[Laughter.] So I said, what the hell is this? Liz and I gave a
sizeable contribution to the college in the Legacy for the
continuation of the Marist spirit, whatever that means. Yeah.
So, you speak, what do you think about it?


SS:
00:55:45
But that was one of the reasons I wanted to move the Novitiate
here because I agree with you. My fear is that the influence and
the heritage of so many people, yourself and others, Richard
LaPietra who built this place, and then generations that came
afterwards, that that was slipping away. I mean, the story I
often tell is the one about the Champagnat dormitory, which
you probably heard. When a student guide was taking some
perspective students and parents around, they got to the
Champagnat dormitory, and one of the fathers said, “By the
way, who is this guy,
Champagnat?” and
without missing a beat,
the students said,
“
I'm really not sure, but he must've been a
major donor because they named a building after him.
”
[Laughter.] I went crazy when I heard this. So, I went to
admissions and said, “Y
ou've got to do a little bit of in-service,
which I've been doing. But no, I wanted to move the Novitiate
here and do a different model of an open house.
SS:
00:56:32
And we've been working on that this year. Like, for example,
just two weeks ago, three weeks ago, we did a Busy Person's
retreat. We got 13 kids who signed up, four of us worked on
that. We had them all over for dinner when the retreat was
over. Wednesday nights, we've been doing, during Lent, we did
an evening prayer in the chapel at 9:15. We had 50 kids on Ash
Wednesday. We never had less than 12. Many kids have asked
us if we
’d
continue that throughout the course of the year
because one of the things I wanted to do was do a morning
prayer at 8:10 and make it open to staff or faculty, anyone who
wanted to come, and then do an evening prayer once a week,
and if people wanted it more than once a week, we could do it.
People come when they want, that sort of thing.
SS:
00:57:10
The second thing was to have kids over to the house, and I think
it would be good for the possibility of vocations, but also kids
getting to know who we are. Like tonight, it's interesting, a
graduate from two years ago texts me last night, he and his
brother are in the area, can they stay over?
They’re goi
ng to
stay over tonight, they'll come for dinner, they'll stay tomorrow.
We had Landon Moore up. Landon is a divinity student at Yale
Divinity studying for the episcopal priesthood. He's Episcopalian
from Saratoga, and he was preaching at Christ Church, so we all
went to Christ Church. He spent the weekend with us. Mike
Duffy came up and spent the weekend with us. Mike is one of
those kids who was featured on the webpage. He went to Asia
and raised $20,000 for freshwater wells. They were based at our
school for handicapped street kids in Cambodia.
SS:
00:57:56
So, I'm trying to stretch them, the kids, and get them out to as
many Marist contacts as possible, and get kids here aware of


things. A woman who I prepared for Confirmation last year,
wrote to me recently, she's third year abroad in South Africa.
She said,
“
I walked down the street from the dormitory that I'm
staying in and there's a Marist College. Does that have anything
to do with Marist College?
” I wrote back and said, “N
o, but it's
got everything to do with the Marist Brothers who have
something to do with Marist College. So, let me get you some
contacts so you can meet these people.
”
I've tried to say to the
third year abroad people, “W
e
have a network.” W
hat Joe Bell
and Jay used to do with Ernie and his wife in Spain. I mean,
we've got that network all around the world that the college
could benefit by. But, to me, we've got eight Marist now, with
two Marist fathers, and six Marist Brothers on campus.
SS:
00:58:45
I'm going to try to exploit that. We have no interest in money in
the administration or whatever, but my fear about Campus
Ministry is that it does a lot of projects, but I don't know if it
links it to faith.
GN:
00:58:55
Yeah.
SS:
00:58:56
So that, to me, what I'm interested in is the evangelization
aspect, and I'm hoping that house can become a center of it.
One thing we're starting next year are home liturgies. John and
Kevin and Richard said, Richard Morris said he'd be happy to
help with this, but I want to have some kids over in groups of
five or six, they've never experienced to home liturgy. That may
be a way of awakening something in terms of their faith.
GN:
00:59:22
Terrific. I got in at th
e end of that. I said, “I
s there something
you'd like to say that we didn't touch?
” There’s about a
thousand things. I'm just talking about Marist College, now, I
mean, we have something like 45,000 alumni.
SS:

Yeah.
GN:

I'm sure half of them have a Marist Brothers, you know,
[inaudible] to them somehow. So, they didn't go four years with
a LaPietra around or Jeff around, or Larry Sullivan around,
without being somehow stamped by
… it’s
who they were.
SS:

Absolutely.
GN:

And I think that's what I would like to not lose track of, you
know, and I think that we are persevering in that, and I don't
know where the next person is going to come, but we need
more. [Laughter.] Not a lot.


SS:
01:00:10
No, but we need some visibility. Like, one thing that I hope to
introduce next year, Maureen Hagen, who runs our Sharing Our
Call/Deepening Our Call programs, she said to me, if there were
any faculty here interested in a one-day program, they'd be
willing to come over here and do the program, so that people
could, you know, fit it into their work day, but just expose
people to who's Marcellin Champagnat? What's this network
we've got worldwide, like, what's the vision? Because, like, I go
into some classes for the freshman seminar, go into Kristin
Bayer's class, I've been into Carla Hill
’
s class to talk about the
history of the Brothers. I do a thing for the international
students every August where I talk about who are the Brothers,
Marist Brothers, who is Champagnat, who are the Marist
Brothers at Marist College and its history, and where we are in
the world, and like, at the international students orientation last
year, there was a kid from one of our schools in Australia. There
was a kid from another school in Mexico. It was amazing.
GN:
01:01:05
Have you always had my program in History of Development of
Marist?
SS:

No.
GN:

It starts with the buying of the MacPherson Estate.
SS:

Okay.
GN:

1903. And I've done it a couple times. Yeah. It's in a recycling
now because since I last touched it, I mean, we put up the
Murray building, the medical building, four dormitories, and the
places just flowing, you know, and it's hard to get pictures of it
happening, you know?
SS:

Yeah, no, it is. And
now there’s the steel works across the
street.
GN:

Yeah, right, yeah, and, down the line, is the medical school,
perhaps, you know? All of this stuff is just booming. Do you
have anything more you want to say? [Laughter.]
I mean…

SS:
01:01:57
No, except that, like, to me, one of the things that Marist
College needs to go into the future and continue is it needs its
Marist heritage because, if it loses that, it'll become another
small private liberal arts college. I think the tradition of all the
people who have gone through here have left, as you say, a
mark in the lives of alumni. When I run into alumni, they're
interested in Brothers from the past.


GN:
01:02:21
Yeah.
SS:

I mean, when Tom Ward got up at the dedication last week, and
he was talking about Brother Paul, I knew he was talking about
Paul Stokes. Most people thought he was talking about Paul
Ambrose, but he was talking about Paul Stokes.
GN:

The Sheriff [Laughter.]
SS:

The Sheriff, exactly! [Laughter.] Like, pack your bags, all this sort
of stuff. And later, I was kidding with some of the people in that
age group, and even Paul Wryn and people like that, about that
whole time, but they have memories of all of that sort of stuff
that goes back.
GN:

Paul Wryn is another character. I mean, he's one of those, for
instance, always saying that, I was talking to LaPietra, you know
he learned more here, you know, going into the academy after
that and the whole navy business, you know, and they said,
“N
o, where did you learn all this?
”
You know,
“I went to Ma
rist
College.”

SS:

Yeah.
GN:

It's just, you know, I had his daughter in class, and it was just
like, “M
y father, my father, my father talks about this place,
”

that she had to just come here.
SS:

Yeah.
GN:

I see what this is all about. And she, herself, has made her own
marks. Okay.
SS:

Great.
GN:

Let's say thank you very much, Sean.
SS:

Okay, thanks, yes.
GN:

And maybe this is part one of three.
SS:

Great, okay.