Koesler and Groendal quickly blended into that group of young men who had a common vision and goal. As high school freshmen, they were hazed by sophomores. They bought tickets to nonexistent swimming pools. They were sent on missions to off-limits sections of the buildings. Eventually, they became upper classmen.
Quite a few students were musically inclined. But there were no David Palmers with whom to contend. Early on, Groendal resolved that he would dominate the musical scene. And so he did. He became the principal organist, frequent accompanist for others, and regular performer whenever concerts were held.
Koesler continued to play the piano mostly for his own amusement. He was in competition with no one. While Groendal competed, or at least tried to compete, with almost everyone. It was, Koesler had often thought, as if Ridley were obsessed. With the exception of sports—Groendal had never been very well coordinated—he seemed compelled to challenge nearly everyone.
This tendency led to disaster when Groendal collided with Carroll Mitchell. Mitch, as everyone called him, was to the theater what David Palmer was to the violin—a natural. Tall and freckled, with thick red hair and brows, Mitch, with his chiseled features, was one of the seminary’s most handsome students.
But he wasn’t just a pretty face. He had a powerful, affecting, and pleasing voice, great presence, and the ability to involve an audience with genuinely moving performances.
To top it off, Mitch was a playwright—albeit an amateur. None of his plays had been published; all of them had been performed in the seminary, without charge and on a shoestring. Many were no more than skits, sometimes pulled together for a full-length performance. Though most of his work was comedy, he had also done serious drama, particularly on Lenten themes.
Though Ridley did perform from time to time, he knew he could not keep up with Mitch on stage. But he did consider himself a playwright and he had worked out some fairly entertaining stage pieces. Of course in that setting one could be fooled. A captive audience, the students were astonishingly easy to please.
And so the rivalry between Mitch and Ridley went on. But the only one conscious of the combat was Groendal. As David Palmer before him, Mitchell never considered Groendal a competitor.
Enter the subject of girls.
Koesler and Groendal had, in a manner of speaking, been without them virtually all their lives. While they attended Holy Redeemer School, boys and girls were separated from the first through the twelfth grades. Thus, through the first eight grades, neither boy had ever been in class with a girl. Girls, of course, could, under ordinary circumstances, nowhere be found within a seminary building. This would seem at best strange to almost anyone but a strict Catholic and/or a seminarian of that time.
Strange but true.
Over the centuries, the Church had formed a system that mass-produced priests, who were at the same time asexual and macho. It achieved the macho image by emphasizing “masculine” pursuits. Sports were not only encouraged, there was an insistence on at least minimal participation. The more violent the physical contact the better.
At the same time, a brotherly camaraderie was nurtured. But this good fellowship had to be completely free of any sexual feeling. Even the hint of anything remotely sexual between seminarians was branded a “personal friendship” and was grounds for expulsion.
Women, in the abstract, were easier to exclude from the future celibate’s life. As Tertullian once remarked about women: “The judgment of God upon your sex endures even today; and with it endures inevitably your position of criminal at the bar of justice. You are the gateway of the devil.”
If that were not strong enough medicine, a little more than a hundred years later, St. Augustine wrote: “I consider that nothing so casts down the manly mind from its height as the fondling of a woman, and those bodily contacts.”
So, instead of “those bodily contacts,” seminarians were encouraged to dust each other off in baseball, elbow each other in basketball, flatten each other in football and maim each other in hockey. “Particular friendships” scarcely ever sprang from such violent contacts. Before vacations—Christmas, Easter, summer—the seminary rector would ramble on to the effect that, “Take it for granted, boys, that you’d like girls if you tried them. So, don’t try them.”
At one point in high school, Koesler and a few others decided they would like to spend a profitable summer as lifeguards. So they took the Red Cross safety course, only to discover that seminary rules forbade them to be lifeguards at a public beach or pool. They could be lifeguards only at a summer camp for boys.
It took only a modicum of thought to realize there was something one might well expect to find on a public beach that would never be found at boys’ camps. Girls.
What the seminary seemed to be teaching was that while it was all right to save girls’ souls, it was very definitely not all right to save their bodies.
Or, as St. Alphonsus Liguori once noted (replying to his own rhetorical, “Is it then a sin to look at a female?”): “Yes; it is at least a venial sin to look at young females. And when looks are repeated, there is also danger of mortal sin.”
He wrote that in the eighteenth century, but the theory was still very much alive in the seminaries of the 1940s and fifties.
Briefly, that was the setting for the formation of the priests of yesteryear. The priest was to be a man’s man with no overt or covert sexual expression whatever. To help achieve this goal, the seminary system was replete with some of the strictest discipline imaginable. By and large, it worked.
In the seminary of Groendal and Koesler’s day, there was one major exception to this rigorous code: Carroll Mitchell.
Mitchell’s attitude toward the seminary’s attitude toward women was one of benign neglect. His reaction was somewhat akin to that of Eddie Daugherty, who had entered a seminary several decades earlier. Daugherty, who later became a journalist, wrote in his autobiography that a seminary spiritual director had explained women apparently so attractively that Daugherty decided he wanted one. So he quit the seminary and, as it turned out, found quite a few.
Mitch could see nothing basically wrong with women. He understood that there was a solemn promise to lead the unmarried life expected of a priest. But he wasn’t a priest Not yet. And he hadn’t made anyone any promises. He was not unaware of the seminary rules nor of the rigid attitudes behind the rules. He thought they were silly.
His was a most rare reaction. That was a day when rules were not a matter for discussion or dissent.
The love life of Carroll Mitchell, considering his station, was both rich and varied. It was anyone’s guess how many and who knew about it. It was not general knowledge, although certainly his closer friends and associates knew.
Koesler, associating through sports and an occasional stage appearance, was close enough to know. Groendal, as a fellow playwright, was close enough to know. As were several others. They did not so much envy him as just not understand.
It was questionable that anyone on the faculty might know. If they did, they should have expelled him . . . unless they were marking time in hopes this talented lad would straighten out before the administration’s hand was forced.