Outwitting Manic Depression: God and Me at Dartmouth

Late one evening while taking a study break at Dartmouth College’s Catholic Student Center, I was praying alone in the darkened chapel before the tabernacle. The beautiful metallic box containing the Body of Christ sparkled endearingly by the lights of the nearby candle stand. Suddenly, I felt a powerful rush of inspiration as if God was filling the sails of my ambition to serve Him and Him alone. I hurried out to speak with the chaplain and got him to come downstairs from his living quarters in his bathrobe. The chaplain endeavored to calm me down and patiently suggested that I not base my spiritual life on pure feelings. He thereupon invited me to retire to his kitchen to have a glass of milk along with his favorite Oreo cookies. 

Before arriving at Dartmouth, I showed few signs of a yen for the cloth or matters spiritual. Along with hundreds of thousands of Catholic children of my era, I had attended my parish’s elementary school that was operated by the Sisters of St. Joseph of their Philadelphia Province in full black and white regalia. While a student there, I received the sacraments of Confession, Holy Communion, and Confirmation. I was an altar boy in the final days of the Latin Mass and the first days of the Mass in English. This was when no layman – and no woman whatsoever – entered the sacristy. One of the great benefits of being an altar or choir boy was the end of the year picnic at Dorney Park (now Dorney Waterpark).

When I transferred to public school in fifth grade to a district-wide “gifted and talented program” called “Opportunity School”, my parents signed me up for mandatory catechism classes (Confraternity of Catholic Doctrine or what we knew and, truth be told, loathed as “CCD”) every Monday evening at 7:00 p.m. Consequently, I never was able to join in the revelry of my classmates when they recounted the jokes from the smash television comedy “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In” the next day. I remember nice catechism teachers telling us repeatedly that God loved us. And a few moments later, that God really loved us. In spite of that lovely message, we behaved very badly. So, we did not get much doctrinal meat in our “CCD” classes.

As a reverent Boy Scout and as one who revered merit badges, medals and sashes, I earned the “Parvuli Dei” and “Ad Altare Dei” awards for Catholic Scouting. I also fulfilled the requirements for the high school level “Pope Pius XII” award but, at the last minute, I told the priest counselor that I would forego the medal. My behavior had nothing to do with subsequent allegations – charges that have been repeatedly disproven - that Pope Pius XII failed to do enough for the Jews in World War II. Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir put those accusations to rest decades ago.

Growing up, I did not exercise any philosophical or religious selection in the choice of my friends. I just hung out with the people who were the most fun to be with. I do not remember speaking about religion to any of my peers or siblings. While I have mentioned that I feared going to teen parties, I should add the caveat that no one invited to such gatherings either.

During junior high school, I well remember arguing about the “abortion” question that had just come down from Nixon’s Supreme Court in early 1973. A good friend’s father told me that there was nothing wrong about it. Likewise, one of my female classmates told me about the same thing in a high school hallway. My pressing problem in argumentation was that I did not know exactly what abortion was, yet somehow, I knew that it was wrong.

Together with most of my Catholic classmates, I entered college in the fall of 1975 with an elementary school appreciation of my religion and with no desire to make the Catholic Student Center my home away from home. Frankly, as an applicant I did not even know that there was such a place on campus. Nevertheless, during my first trimester on campus I befriended the core of my college friendships who spent much of their free time at what was called the “Newman Center” in honor of the renowned Anglican convert and apologist John Henry Cardinal Newman.

When my future lifelong best friend ran headlong through the glass partition around the college cultural center, I myself had a “break-through” of sorts with the re-incarnation of my religious upbringing. Because of the good cheer and good example of an Irish gang on campus (the fellows were noble, and the girls were delightful), I started to join them at daily Mass at 5:00 p.m. We would then proceed together to the dining hall where we enjoyed fine food and lively conversation. Much like the fraternities and sororities and athletic teams and racial groupings, we created our Catholic gang or “ghetto” that had a life of its own. I became a charter member.

Our collegiate doctrinaire political conservatism betrayed a complete ignorance of the social teachings of the modern Church and needlessly limited the scope of our apostolate among fellow Catholics and many other students on campus. In 1961, leading Catholics at National Review responded to a papal encyclical on social doctrine, and later, on artificial contraception, with a rallying cry from their cafeteria line of “Mater si, Magistra no!” (Mother, yes! Teacher, no, thank you!) What kind of daughter or son rejects his mother’s heartfelt counsel?

Logically, they thereby lent their support to Senator John F. Kennedy’s assertion to the Southern Baptist leadership on the campaign trail in 1960 when he stated that there was no connection between a Catholic’s beliefs and his actions in public life. “I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation or imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.” In other words, “Ich bin ein Protestanten.” The Enlightenment according to Kennedy (or Pierre Salinger). This was not the Baltimore Catechism of countless immigrants “Q: What must we do to gain the happiness of heaven? A: To gain the happiness of heaven we must know, love, and serve God in this world” (emphasis added). Neither was this the position of Catholic New York Governor Alfred E. Smith when he ran for president in 1928. He wore his religion in his heart and on his sleeve. Upon being overwhelmingly defeated, it is said that Smith rushed off a telegraph to the pope reading, “Unpack.”

Seven short years later, these individualistic Reformation, Enlightenment, and consumerist concepts served as the foundation for the massive revolt by American Catholics against the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae that reaffirmed the Church’s constant teaching against artificial conception. St. Pope Paul VI heroically pleaded with humankind to avoid any artificial rupture between the natural unitive and creative purposes of human love. The pontiff begged the faithful to see this challenge as an opportunity to come closer to Jesus Christ and his cross. He reiterated the traditional moral teaching that an erroneous practice could not be justified for a greater good such as family harmony or population control.

The Pontiff predicted that the widespread use of contraceptives would logically and inexorably lead to promoting serious difficulties for youth, the materialization of women, governmental interference in parental affairs as well as abortion. Recent peer-reviewed medical research is demonstrating that teenagers who use contraceptives tend to suffer depression in the first two years of use. How ironic it is that the purportedly ardent “conservative” guardians of authority and tradition would help open the floodgates to a systemic culture of corrosive religious dissent also known as the “American Catholic Church”.

Does this mean that I am, indeed, a latter-day “Savonarola” (a Renaissance Dominican friar whose radical preaching eventually led to his excommunication) on the warpath against anyone practicing artificial contraception? No. Am I in favor of going back to laws prohibiting artificial contraception? No. This is the all-encompassing beauty of human freedom assisted by grace in the Christian tradition. Sadly, due to the dissenters about this teaching, that formation would be woefully hard to find for the ensuing decades.

Of all our culture warriors, I had the most radical disposition and the worst study skills. Like an anxious Don Quixote, I was ready and eager to storm the secular citadel of secular humanism at a moment’s notice. During our Freshman Fall, I spent hours forging my newest sally in cartoon or article form in the campus daily newspaper. When not engaged in cultural combat, I read all that I could of the writings of Catholic authors such as Hilaire Belloc and Gilbert Keith Chesterton. Meanwhile, my compatriots were studying hard so that they might become outstanding bankers, doctors, and lawyers as well as devoted Christian parents. A handful of them were to become priests and religious soon after graduation. 

Our innocent piety was based on the Sacrifice of the Mass and devotions such as the Holy Rosary and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. Without a doubt, these are traditional and valuable means to strengthen one’s faith, particularly in a profoundly secular environment such as exist at any of the contemporary Ivy League schools. They served to keep all of us aboard Peter’s boat then and for the rest of our lives. But our challenge as Catholic Christians, according to the Catholic chaplain, was, “Don’t just keep the faith, spread it!”

It was in this spirit that members of our group petitioned an English professor to give a course on the writings of Cardinal Newman. I am ashamed to admit that I did not take this wonderful class for fear of the workload. I certainly would have benefited from an introduction to the Patristic giants of early Christianity. Unlike some of the participants who came to class solely by the light of the Holy Spirit, one student actually read all of the assignments. His name was Alistair, another of my series of roommates. He and his family belonged to the Church of England.

Alistair is a tall, elegant, athletic, and fair-skinned paean to prep school education, who attended Dexter School for Boys in Boston and Philips Exeter Academy. A combination religion major and varsity oarsman, “Ali” was and is the personification of mens sana in corpore sano. In that sense, we had precious little in common. When we unexpectedly found ourselves rooming together freshman spring, Alistair was amused to find me practicing Transcendental Meditation fifteen minutes a day. In short order, he relieved me of that illusion with his characteristic wit and grace.

Alistair’s father was born in Scotland and was a highly respected physician and hospital administrator in Boston. He shared with me and some friends of Opus Dei that he agreed with the Catholic Church’s teachings on artificial birth control for medical reasons. Soon after graduation, Alistair received instruction from a priest of Opus Dei and followed Newman into the Church of Rome. His genteel parents attended his rite of initiation into the Catholic Church at a chapel in New York City. He then began a highly successful career in corporate and private banking with postings in Hong Kong and the Middle East.  Had it been a few years earlier, he would have been immediately recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency. In the late 70s, however, that body was too busy trying to recover from the reforms of the Church Committee.

Thanks to remarkable history and religion professors like Charles T. Wood and Charles Stinson, our gang knew a great deal about the glories of the medieval Church triumphant. Understandably, we did not begin to fathom the teachings of the Second Vatican Council that were but a dozen years old. Sadly, there was a shortage of authentic and orthodox interpretations of these documents in circulation. In its place, there was an abundance of hot air about the “spirit of Vatican II” versus the supposedly hoary and over-materialistic Catholic Church of all previous history thanks to the writings of Newsweek’s Jesuit-educated Kenneth Woodward, a frequent critic of periti St. John Paul II and Opus Dei. 

Perhaps just as importantly, we received little preparation in the philosophical realism of Aristotle and Aquinas that informed Western civilization from the so-called “Dark Ages” to the so-called “Enlightenment”. Not surprisingly, Dartmouth’s Philosophy and Religion Departments were akin to Athens’s altar to the “unknown gods”. How could we have expected it to be any different when most Catholic universities of the day were abandoning Thomism? My freshman seminar on political ideals included a review of Plato and his cave. I had this gut sense that the discussion was pointless. This reaction did not ingratiate me with the professor who gave me a “B-,” an Ivy League “Gentleman’s C” (perhaps I earned it). This groundwork corresponded to the institution’s secular humanism. We were encouraged to be leaders, but leaders to where? Up or down?

Two of our schoolmates who came to Hanover well prepared to answer for their faith had distinct backgrounds. Fernando Felices was a veritable dynamo of intelligence, discipline and energy from Puerto Rico who began writing his senior thesis on St. Augustine’s City of God during his freshman fall term. He would go on to become a priest and subsequently monsignor director of the seminary in San Juan. Closer to home but further back in time, John MacGovern had been raised by Father Leonard Feeney, the controversial former Jesuit and his followers living as religious brothers and sisters at St. Benedict Center in Still River, Massachusetts. Before arriving at Dartmouth, John had been granted a private audience with Pope Paul VI on Feeney’s behalf. John would become a Massachusetts State Senator and later a champion of alumni rights and open governance at Dartmouth as founder and president of The Hanover Institute. We would disagree, however, on the implantation of “The Dartmouth Review” on campus.

When a senior editor of National Review wrote an article that reiterated opposition to the Church’s teaching on artificial contraception, I wrote a brief but respectful letter of disagreement to the magazine that solely identified myself as a Dartmouth student. A few weeks later, the College forwarded to me a letter from a man named Chauncey D. Stillman praising my position and inviting me to tea in Manhattan. At that moment, I happened to be in the dining hall with my friend John MacGovern and he informed me that Stillman was one of the most generous Catholic philanthropists in the country as well as for the arts and education. Maybe I should have written more letters to the editor criticizing faculty members.

This generous alumnus gave Harvard University a large donation to establish the Chauncey Stillman Chair of Roman Catholic Theological Studies that was first held by my intellectual icon Christopher Dawson of Oxford University. In subsequent months and years, I had the honor of meeting Mr. Stillman at the remarkable New York Yacht Club shaped in the form of a ship’s stern and at his Wethersfield estate near Tarrytown. A “blue blood” convert to Catholicism after graduating from Harvard University, Stillman is the most cultured individual I have ever known. He had glorious NBC peacocks roaming about his manicured garden populated by exquisite sculptures. His verdict on Harvard’s evolution into a religiously secular seminary was summed up accordingly, “When they took ‘Cristo et Ecclesia’ out of the public motto, I went with it.” A man of great humility, he forbad any eulogies at his funeral. His family watches lovingly over the estate to this day with a panoply of cultural, intellectual, and equestrian activities.

Our greatest weakness as undergraduates, or at least mine, lay in the fact that most of us Christian soldiers were not receiving regular spiritual direction from a priest. The reigning notion in Catholic circles was that only candidates for the priesthood or religious life ought to have spiritual direction. If a member of the laity wanted more guidance about the faith, then she or he was supposed to take vows for “third orders” in a congregation. Had we but opened the pages of Vatican II’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church entitled Lumen Gentium (Light of the World), we would have found that the Hound of Heaven was now chasing most believers to something called the “universal call to holiness”. Was that a “Bat-Signal” for everyone to engage in clerical politics and the overthrow of the Roman Curia? On the other hand, was it a divine invitation for each follower of Christ to transform her or his daily work and friendships into a holocaust of self-sacrificing adoration? This was a message that harkened back to the actions of the Apostles. Why would it prove so hard to penetrate the consciousness of highly educated Catholics in Europe and the United States? 

Of all the ‘hood, I was the guiltiest of missing the boat on all of the above counts. Especially when I was “high” psychologically, I could be the most ignorant, proud, “hyper”, disorganized, and obsessively political member of our Catholic “ghetto”. In the words of Vice President Spiro “Ted” Agnew, Nolo contendere. When I was “down”, I would sheepishly retreat to the trenches of the Aquinas House chapel and reading room, rubbing the nose on the bust of Cardinal John Henry Newman for inspiration. My mood swings were no secret to members of the Catholic community at Dartmouth or anyone on campus. When I ran for office at the Catholic Student Center, I shared the fate of Blessed Joseph Barsabas who ran unsuccessfully for the apostolic seat left open by Judas Iscariot. I was unable to win the local “Catholic vote”. Group photos of the winners lined the entry hall to the student center.

Fortunately for us and for me, the Dartmouth community was blessed with the presence of Catholic chaplain Reverend William Liguori Nolan, who in time was to be named a Monsignor by the Pope and an honorary Doctor of Divinity by the President of the College. A renowned debater, homilist and musician, Nolan began his ministry in Hanover, New Hampshire, at St. Denis Church across from the football stadium in the early 1950s. The Catholic apostolate to Dartmouth College students dates back to 1924.

One winter when the pastor was vacationing in Florida, Father Bill hosted a keg party for Dartmouth students in the church basement. Nolan was subsequently reprimanded by his pastor. Bishop Matthew Brady of Manchester had a different reaction and asked this young priest to organize a Newman Center for Catholic students in the face of local and alumni opposition. It was to be the first Catholic student center of all the Ivy League universities. This was a milestone marking the changing attitudes of the Catholic Church in America towards non-Catholic higher education. Only a few years before, it had been a tremendous scandal among Catholics when the Kennedy boys enrolled at Harvard University.

By the spring of 1962, “Father Bill” and his flock of rams had grown to such an extent that a new Catholic student center named after St. Thomas Aquinas was built, of all places, at the end of “Frat Row”.

The dedication program for its cornerstone read,

“Because this is the period of ‘inquiry’ it is absolutely essential that young Catholics know their religion and be able to explain the reasons for the Faith they hold. In order to enable men at Dartmouth to do just this… hundreds of Dartmouth alumni, parents, and friends have made possible the new Catholic Chapel and Center at Dartmouth.”

Father Bill’s vision to the center was “to keep the faith alive and vital for Dartmouth’s Catholic undergraduates and to give them the incentive to practice this Faith and understand it, but also to become better Dartmouth men and Americans in the process.”

With his Irish pride, Nolan would later jest that he was able to obtain a donation from the Kennedy family by leveraging earlier gifts made by the non-Catholic Nelson Rockefeller, their political rival, and a Dartmouth graduate. Father Bill employed all of his persuasive skills and energy on endless fundraising trips for the center around the country.

Besides his unflappable efforts on behalf of the students, Father Bill also helped his cousin Shirley Cunningham to raise her four children to maturity. He never referred to this self-imposed duty. Mrs. Cunningham was always a font of good cheer as the receptionist and office manager at “AQ”. Her daughter, pioneering business executive Mary Elizabeth Cunningham Agee, would come to test the glass ceiling for women at two important corporations in the early 1980s. For most of her post-corporate career, Mary Elizabeth has dedicated her life to building up a nationwide support system for women with unplanned pregnancies called “The Nurturing Network”. Father Bill was their founding ecclesiastical director.

Characteristic of holy men and women, Nolan never told us about his accomplishments as a youth. As a child of a Julliard School of Music-trained concert pianist, young Nolan performed as a piano prodigy at the age of eight for the world-class composer, Paderewski. He graduated from the distinguished public institution Boston Latin School in 1935 with highest honors. His classmates elected him Class President and Captain of the Debate Team. Father Bill’s fans speculate to this day whether Nolan received a vote from a promising classmate from Ukraine named Leonard Bernstein. Again, we students never knew of this life-long association either.

During his thirty-seven-year chaplaincy, Father Bill would become nationally renowned among Newman Centers for his fruitful stewardship of what students affectionately called “AQ”. Year after year, Dartmouth produced more vocations to the priesthood and religious than most Catholic colleges and universities, a spiritual complement to our string of Ivy League football championships of that era. With the admission of women to the College in 1972, the center was responsible for female vocations to the religious life as well. One Benedictine nun is the granddaughter of General George S. Patton. It has been estimated that “AQ” has “produced” some fifty priestly and religious vocations under Nolan. Naturally, every spring was also the occasion for numerous wedding celebrations.

Many chaplains came to Dartmouth to find out what was Nolan’s secret recipe. Was it the nightly promise of free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in the basement kitchen? I think that it was his boyish smile, incomparable wit and mature faith that helped believers to recover a sense of proportion and Christian joy whenever tempted to dismay by the formidable ills of this world as seen on and off campus. Who could not be bowled over by the leprechaunish way he had of bouncing along the “AQ” hallways, his bright red face humming a favorite Gregorian chant?

It was my honor to know this winsome but imposing leader of men in the peak of his pastoral career. Because of his intellectual gifts and personal charm, he had garnered an aura of respectability for Catholicism among a skeptical college administration, faculty, and community. He quickly established an enduring friendship with one of the College’s greatest presidents, John Sloan Dickey. In an era of anti-establishment clamor among college youth, Father Bill reveled in dressing up as the flagship of the institutional church with his honorific black cassock with purple trimming and sash along with a black biretta topped by a red tuft. Father Bill liked to remind us that whereas Our Lady of Fatima had spoken of seeing many cardinals, bishops, and priests in purgatory; she did not mention seeing any monsignors there. Believe it or not, the students loved it.

Our Catholic cadre was blessed to be taken by Father Bill to meet Mother Teresa of Calcutta when she opened her first center in the United States. Father Bill said morning Mass at her bare-bones convent in the Bronx. The simple cross was striking in its loneliness. Mother Teresa greeted each person with great interest. I do not remember her giving a talk or speech. She did ask us to pray for her sisters and their ministry. We had a group photo taken in their small reception room that is one of my most treasured possessions. This is notwithstanding the fact that I badly needed a haircut, and my eyes look sunken and manic. I later used this photo on all of my Catholic dating sites to much advantage.

A heavy part of any Catholic college chaplain’s daily cross are over-enthusiastic students like me whose freshly minted ardor for the Bible or the Magisterium or the Liturgy or the Papacy or “orthodoxy” in general could easily obscure the practice of Christian charity and humility. Fortunately, I never dared to question Father Bill on any of these matters, but I did bother one of his devoted associate chaplains, who brought the innovation of the candy dish to “AQ” ministries. Among other things, how is it possible that I could have become annoyed by a priest reading aloud the Psalms during daily Mass following Holy Communion? In my middle age, I find these Scriptural passages among the most sublime in Holy Writ.

When questions about liturgical practice or alleged abuses (that were very common in those days) would come before Father Bill, he would on occasion invoke the talisman of epieikeia (that I vaguely understood to be Greek for “Chill out, bro”). In any event, I would later learn from Opus Dei that a faithful Catholic should treat each and every priest as Ipse Christus, Christ Himself. 

Speaking of abuses, I remember with regret one snowy Sunday evening when I was trying desperately to park my car on campus. I ended up leaving it in an un-official (not permitted) spot that partially blocked (blocked) the garage of “AQ”. The next morning, I was sauntering out of history class on Dartmouth Row when the president of the Catholic student center came running up to me to say that the chaplains were furious about me and my carelessness. I beat a swift path to save my vehicle from being towed and profusely asked for apologies from everyone I encountered along the way.

Father Bill may have been at his best during Sunday Mass at 11:00 a.m. Lo, how he would in vestment sway on his solemn march to the elevated podium of St. Clements’s Chapel, his golden white locks shining from the mid-day glory radiating through the stained-glass windows of his favorite saints (and financial patron Cardinal Richard Cushing of Boston). Slowly he would gather the pages of his sermon from within the podium to place them lovingly on the lectern. Invariably, he would then adjust his spectacles and clear his baritone pipes. On occasion, the pages looked a bit frayed and yellowed, but I never had the nerve to ask him if they were recycled. Father Bill was an outstanding public speaker and apologist. Students of other faiths would come to Mass just to hear his preaching. I know of more than one who converted to Catholicism as a result. A couple of my favorite homilies by Father Bill were about the disciples on the road to Emmaus and the Assumption of Mary into Heaven.

I enjoyed Father Bill the most when he was saying Mass or leading the rosary or Benediction. I savored his company when I was within a larger group of his student admirers. He would love to banter with us in the hallway after daily Mass or later in the evening. In marked contrast, he and I did not seem to connect that well on a one-to-one basis. This was probably because I was oftentimes emitting too much psychiatric electricity. I recall that we spoke together in his office on only a few occasions. Once he asked me whether I had a vocation to be a priest. He should have asked me if I had a vocation to anything other than making trouble and a name for myself on campus. Surely, I would have driven any seminary director battier than the postulant Maria did to her religious superiors in Salzburg. When I complained to Father Bill that some of my professors were virulently anti-Catholic, unto my harmless old Yankee professor in “Latin I”, he told me to “hang in there,” have some more milk and Oreo cookies, and not transfer to one of the recently founded orthodox Catholic colleges.

Nevertheless, despite our personal uneasiness, there was little doubt that my chaplain, my chaplain owned my heart. Twenty-some years later when I came to his funeral at “AQ”, I knelt before his loudly silent body in state and cried like a baby. His echoing voice and laughter resounded like Angelus bells in the chambers of my soul. Former associate chaplain Father Joe Devlin, SJ, was kind enough to place a package of Nolan’s favorite cookies inside the casket, a tribute that required a measure of both civil and canonical epieikeia.

Since Father Bill’s retirement in 1987, Capuchin Franciscan Friars and presently the Dominican Friars have ably stepped forward into Father Bill’s hard to follow footsteps. Together with their female colleagues in ministry, they regularly report to “AQ” alumni of the perennially youthful life of faith on campus, especially the steady crop of baptized and confirmed students each Easter Triduum. Their greatest contribution is to offer Dartmouth students of all faiths an oasis of homely warmth, wise encouragement, weekday masses, and free peanut butter and jelly sandwiches in a furious sea of cultural intranquility.