Rufus Halley was riding his motorcycle to his home in Malabang in the Philippines on Aug. 28, 2001, when he was flagged down by gunmen on a dirt road, dragged from his bike and shot once in the head.
He died on the spot.
He had spent more than 20 years of his life working in the Philippines, with his passion being reconciliation between Christians and Muslims. He had a reputation for taking tough human-rights stands on issues involving just about everyone, including the members of various armed groups involved in conflict in the region.
He was undoubtedly viewed by some as a dangerous, threatening man.
After he died, he had a Catholic funeral. Then the Muslims came for his remains and he had a Muslim ceremony, too. They loved him that much.
That was what being a priest was for Rufus Halley in August 2001. He was, said one of his priest friends, “larger than life and saw the best in people. He believed passionately in the poor and in the work of dialogue and reconciliation. He was a deeply spiritual person and when with him, one was aware of being in the presence of God.”
Reading what’s in the news, you might assume that the priesthood, particularly in the United States, is defined by an awful sex scandal that threatens the whole church. What could possibly be worse than the sexual abuse of children, and the scent of cover-up that oozes from the whole, stinking mess?
Nothing.
But it is not a defining experience for the Catholic priesthood. This is a deep, serious problem that demands scrutiny, public prosecution, punishment, penance, healing, Christian forgiveness and understanding.
If the institutional church is in trouble about the way it has handled its scandal, that is good. It deserves it. Shuffling troublemakers around, exposing children to predators, burying the evidence.
What in God’s name was the church thinking?
But that is an institutional sin.
Rufus Halley was not the world’s only valiant, committed priest.
They are legion, dependable, strong and eager to be nothing more than priestly, which is a huge burden. Scratch a priest and what you find are the Latin words alter Christus–“another Christ.” If you know the story well, then you know that it presents Christ as both God and man. Priests are men, with the same emotions, the same needs and the same drives as other men. They decide to take on some of Christ’s role, a difficult and most demanding option, setting aside some of their own human nature in the process. The “burden of the cross” may seem a cliche, but for good priests, it is not.
Think about what that means this Easter.
All the details about Halley’s life are collected from the Web site of a religious order, the Columban Fathers, a brotherhood of priests originally founded in Ireland in 1918, but now peppered in some of the world’s worst places. An order formed initially to carry the gospel to China, the Columbans are spread all over the Philippines, the Far East and Latin America.
There are formal mission statements describing what Columban Fathers and Columban nuns do, but it’s best just to cut to the short version: spread the word of the gospel in places you can hardly imagine.
They seem somehow drawn to trouble.
No, that’s wrong. They are drawn to the need to confront trouble and find a way to supplant it, repair it, replace it with peace.
They are, indeed, men and women of God, which is good because the kind of work they do frequently brings them into contact with the worst kind of people, although they would never describe their mission that way.
I feel at liberty to write about the Columban Fathers because for a brief period in my life, when I was not much more than a child, a Columban father was all I wanted to be. I met my first one when I was 12. I was an altar boy and he celebrated mass at my church.
He was not like the local parish priests. His primary concern was Korea. His objective was to collect as many old cast iron foot-powered sewing machines as he could find in a town where just about everyone’s grandmother had one sitting in some dusty basement corner. The order would ship them to Korea and because of that, his impoverished parishioners could sew and sell clothing and buy food.
His mother told me he was so worried about them that he had sold his pistol (I didn’t know priests got pistols, but it made sense, given his assignment) to buy food for them.
Of course, I was hooked. I would be a Columban Father. I would convert the Far East and perhaps die a martyr’s death. So I went away to be with the Columbans, first for high school, then college, then seminary and then ordination and a life of deep religious commitment.
That was 40 years ago.
It didn’t happen the way I had planned.
I lasted just about two years in the Columban seminary at Silver Creek, N.Y. (now a nursing home).
During that brief period, I was exposed to the strongest men I had ever met, Irish and American priest-intellectuals who taught at the seminary between their missionary assignments.
Everything about St. Columban’s was serious. Mess up on your grades and you were out. Mess up in your social life and you were out. It was as though every day was a rigorous vetting, with the goal being to get rid of as many slackers as possible and winnow that collection of 30 boys or so down into the group that would move to the next step.
I had anticipated a life of prayer, contemplation and good works. That’s not what the seminary was about.
“They did two really good things at St. Columbans in Silver Creek,” a Columban told me as I prepared to write this essay. “They identified the people who were going to be priests and helped make them into priests, and they identified the people who were not going to be priests and got them out of there.”
I recall Father Tom Daly’s algebra class.
“EHHHHH . . . .YOU!” Daly would shout. Then he would extend his arm and point, right at you.
“To the board.”
Then algebra would happen, or not. If it did not happen, Father Tom Daly would give you this look, the look that won him the nickname “T.D. Terrible Daly.” And you would sit down. Later, there would be a conversation. Were you really interested in becoming a priest? Why wasn’t that reflected in the algebra? Could you please settle down?
They were all variants on that theme, although not necessarily as intimidating. They were smart. They were tough. They could be big brothers when they had to be and severe taskmasters when that was called for too. If you got out of line a little, perhaps you found yourself facing Father O’Sullivan on the other side in Irish football (no substitutions, no timeouts, injured dragged feet-first off the field).
There would be some whacking and battering on the field, and then you would get to spend a few hours on your knees, scrubbing the dining room floor with a little brush and waxing it until it sparkled.
If you got out of line a lot, you would be told to leave.
They were committed men and their mission was to take flabby, weepy, pimply, difficult young boys who thought life was all about mystical visions, isolation and eventually sainthood and put them to a severe test.
Why?
I think it was because they knew from the lives they had lived long before I arrived at St. Columbans that Father Halley’s fate might await all of us at some point in the lonely night when we were out there doing God’s work.
You had to be prepared to accept that, to not let it get in the way of your mission. If Terrible Daly and algebra were going to stop you in your tracks, you weren’t going to have much luck in whatever awful place God and the order had decided to send you later.
I just couldn’t measure up.
Whatever it took to be like that, I didn’t have the faith for it, the determination for it, the calling for it. I started to drift in my second year. Girls got my attention during summer vacation. I really liked them. Really. There was no longer any point in pretending I could be saintly.
These guys could see through that in an instant, and I didn’t want to disappoint them by being dishonest.
I quit. They sent my stuff home. No goodbyes. Just another one gone. I closed that chapter forever, or so I thought.
Seven years ago, I was driving one of my sons to school in Massachusetts, and the route carried me past Silver Creek and St. Columbans. I decided to show the place to him. The ice hockey arena where, in my non-skating glory, I was anointed “goalie” and the target of perhaps a million slapshots, was grown over. The fields are still tended, but not for Irish football.
There is a small cemetery at the top of a knoll.
I was surprised to see the names on the grave markers of some of the men who had taught me, mentored me, pushed me around, helped me make the right choice.
It made me weep just to read them.
Father Daly is buried there now, back home in Silver Creek after a long assignment in Fiji and minor surgery that went wrong and killed him. Father Dan O’Connell is there, along with Fathers Ken Koster and Martin O’Brien and Joe Sweeney.
Like Rufus Halley, like a lot of men who made a hard choice and then adhered every day of their lives to the promises they made, they were all really good priests.
One of the jobs of the media is to create shorthand about complicated events.
The shorthand about priests now seems to involve psychiatric disorders, self-selection, secret sexual lives, cover-ups and spot diagnoses of what went wrong. This is saddening because of what it does to the reputations of the vast majority of priests who are only working hard at very difficult jobs.
How well would you do if your job description was: Be like Christ?
As bad as the news about bad priests can be, the good ones shouldn’t be forgotten, none of them.
