Bishop Emeritus John S. Cummins

By Bishop John S. Cummins

Something about priesthood attracted me when I was very young. There is also abiding mystery in the call.

Circumstances influencing my vocation are identifiable, such as my growing up in Oakland’s St. Augustine Parish. There I experienced lively and warm community. It was, outside of my home, a center of life with school, sports, Scouts, keeping score at parish whist parties, participating in First Friday Sacred Heart Masses and First Saturday Marian devotions in churches that were full.

This is the second in a series of reflections written by priests in the Oakland Diocese as part of the observance of the Year for Priests, designated by Pope Benedict XVI.

Another influence was two of my mother’s first cousins — Father Nick Connolly who was very attentive to his younger cousins, and his brother Father Matt, easy and athletic, whom young people would be inclined to emulate.

But from the parish, Sister Mary Bernarda, my fifth grade teacher, focused on three of her students and recommended that we say a Hail Mary each day until we became priests.

Newer members of orders ethnically diverse By Catholic News Service BALTIMORE (CNS) — Religious orders may be shrinking in size and their members aging fast, but a study of their newest members offers signs for hope, said Holy Cross Brother Paul Bednarczyk, executive director of the National Religious Vocations Conference. The “Recent Vocations to Religious Life” study conducted by the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate at Georgetown University was the first of its scale ever done. “Our study has confirmed that part of the richness of religious life lies in its diversity of charisms, lifestyles and ministries that have always been a hallmark of religious institutes in this country,” Brother Bednarczyk told U.S. bishops at the fall general assembly. “The truth is that throughout history men and women religious have always made up a small percentage of our Catholic population,” he said. “The temptation is to compare the high numbers of the ‘50s and ‘60s as the norm, when in actuality, they were an anomaly.” Among the newest members of religious orders — those who professed vows within the last 15 years — a higher percentage are Hispanic, Asian and African or African-America, Brother Bednarczyk said. And they are older and more likely to be college graduates with career experience.

My father regularly took my brother Ben and me to Holy Names Society breakfasts, while easing into us the conviction of going to college for an education denied him as a youth in Ireland.

There was also a very persuasive presence of seminarians from our parish — Bud Duggan, Bill Hughes and Tommy Shea. All became superb priests who were treasured by our pastor, Father T.J. O’Connell, who long had wondered why the parish, so full of devotion, did not have young men in the seminary.

Happily, he lived long enough to see in his last seven years six men from the parish ordained.

The field was fertile and the parish community so encouraging that, after elementary school graduation, four of us entered St. Joseph’s College Seminary in Mountain View — Billy Duggan, Pete McWalters, Bobby Jensen and me.

Part of the attraction and mystery was the manner which the priesthood was presented to us. Though we were young, we had much religion in us and we understood that priesthood was the giving of life to God and that it was our call to do good with that life. The decision in some way contained a sense of valor and grit.

The first giving was leaving home for the seminary. There were desperate and recurring moments of homesickness. Additionally, though we had well-organized intramural sports, I missed the opportunity my brother had at Berkeley’s St. Mary’s High School for interscholastic competition.

The times conditioned us for sacrifice. All through our high school years World War II raged. We also knew the strictures of the Great Depression. More than once my mother’s words, quoting Joseph the patriarch of the Boston Kennedy clan, were repeated: “The easy way of life in America is a thing of the past.”

The major seminary at St. Patrick’s in Menlo Park was a good fit for me for the last six years of preparation for ordination. I could have spent my life in those surroundings. In its strong atmosphere of community, studies and friendships with like-minded peers, I grew into maturity of faith, not particularly confronted with dramatic crises.

The seminary training conveyed to us that development of our personal talents would be subordinate to the needs of the community we were to serve. We understood that well.

My first assignment was at Mission Dolores Parish in San Francisco. Not yet 25 years old, I was touched my first week by an evening call to a man ill in a Guerrero Street flat. I heard from his daughter an extensive family story as we walked up three flights of narrow stairs.

There were also regular penitents, weekly and monthly, people of edifying and deeply spiritual lives, whose voices I would recognize, but whose faces I would not see.

The obedience to authority in which we were trained opened avenues of experience that we would not have chosen on our own.

I remember, especially, two unexpected appointments — first being made Catholic chaplain at Mills College in Oakland and later having our Bishop Floyd Begin “volunteer” me to be secretary of the California Bishops Conference in Sacramento. These were opportunities that remind me of a phrase from the Spoon River Anthology, “A thousand memories and not a single regret.”

Attraction and the mystery of life’s unfolding came anew after a decade in the priesthood when I had reached what I might call “cruising altitude.” By that time, I, along with my classmates, knew what it meant to be a priest.

But at that moment, Pope John XXIII called together the bishops of the world to begin the Second Vatican Council. The stirrings during our late seminary years in scripture studies, liturgical explorations, lay responsibilities, style of authority, the nature of Church and Christian relations burst into fruition. Vatican II was an adventure unanticipated.

Catholics around the world were attentive to its deliberations. I was privileged to be invited by Bishop Begin to accompany him to the council’s second session in Rome in 1963.

The final instructions from this most authoritative body were for us more than invigorating. Its mix of assurance, debate, assimilation and division redirected our understanding of Church and of our priestly responsibility within that Church.

From family days and vibrant parish community, through seminary and 57 years of priestly ministry, there is much for me to remember appreciatively. As Father Raymond Brown so aptly called it — “The unpredictable graciousness of God in our lives.”

Attraction and mystery continue, “grace upon grace.”

Bishop Emeritus John Cummins served as the second bishop of Oakland from May 1977 until his retirement in October 2003.

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