Robert Haggett

CHOOSING LIFE OVER DEATH

Rev. Robert Haggett

Credit is given to:

Tom Hoyer, a member of “The Writers’ Guild”, in Rehobeth Beach, DE.

for collaborating with Rev. Bob Haggett in writing Bob’s story

of transition from canonical ministry to married priesthood.

The world of Moses was a simple one. God offered us just the two alternatives: “I have set before you life and death . . . therefore choose life.” The author of Deuteronomy made it sound like a simple choice; a choice between one thing and another. Ask a simple question today and you’re likely to hear, “It’s complicated.”

Bob Haggett’s story is both ancient and modern. He chose life but his choice proved to be complicated. Such choices often are. And as with the Israelites who made the choice Moses offered them, his story involves not just that first choice, but the repeated choices made at forks in the road of experience. The choices were not all obvious or self-evident, but at each fork in the road, Bob tried his best to choose life.

Bob was born in Oakland, California in 1937, to a family in sketchy circumstances. His parents took the view that the children should be free to choose their own religion and Bob ended up choosing the Catholic church because he had attended catechism classes conducted by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Their total acceptance of Bob as he was is what closed the deal for him. He and his brother decided to become Catholics. The family held together until he was in fifth grade, when his father moved out. Nothing was the same after that. He and his brother were too much for their mother and were sent to live with their father. The boys ended up duping both their parents but were eventually turned in to the authorities by the father of a friend. They ended up in the Youth Guidance Center. By seventh grade they were under the care of Catholic Charities, which placed them in St. Vincent’s School for Boys in San Rafael. They ran away again, and were returned to the Youth Guidance Center. Bob was then placed in the first of two foster homes, an arrangement that failed almost immediately. Fortunately, the second foster home “took” and he stayed there until he was eighteen. Bob was a reflexively happy, carefree boy. Today we would say he had attention deficit disorder or some such thing. In any event, his effervescent personality and tendency to be distracted stood him in good stead during the difficult years.

The second foster home was, for Bob, a turning point. The foster mother was a staunch Catholic and he continued in Catholic schools during seventh and eighth grade. He attended Sacred Heart high school, a place where he was happy and very active socially, though not particularly academic by inclination. Despite the distractions of puberty and his own enjoyment of life, Bob’s heart was open, in this case to the call of the school’s public address system, over which came an invitation for students to take the entrance examination for the diocesan seminary. To the surprise of his friends and himself, he left the typing class where he had heard the announcement and went to sit for the examination. The diocese felt he needed to strengthen his English before he could be admitted, so he signed up for a course at City College.

Shortly after, the Marist Fathers, who were opening a minor seminary in San Rafael, asked the diocese for the names of young men who had shown interest in the priesthood and thus learned about Bob. Their interest came at a good time. The military action just then going on in Korea was an incentive to choose quickly, so when the Marist Fathers called, Bob joined them, remedial English forgotten for the moment.

He started with two years in the minor seminary. The work was demanding and at first, despite his best efforts, Bob was hampered by low grades, which could have caused him to wash out of the seminary. He was determined to succeed and he asked God to help him earn the grades he needed to graduate. His grades did improve and he moved on to a third year in the novitiate on Staten Island.

He’d been a happy-go-lucky, social kid, but Bob took to the new surroundings, embracing both silence and celibacy with enthusiasm. He had some good luck, too. A conservative novice master fell ill and was replaced by C. J. Parent, a liberal priest, who saw potential in him and helped with his development. Bob was put in charge of the Library and Father Parent helped him broaden his spiritual reading. Bob read about mysticism and philosophy and the novice master talked to him about these things as with an equal, treating Bob like someone who could actually understand the reading.

The new ideas were exciting, discussing them with the novice master was exciting, as well, and most exciting of all was the approval he got hfrom the novice master for his scholarship and his spiritual development. In his own words, he “opened up like a flower.” It seemed that the chaotic life of his childhood had finally ended.

The major seminary was at Catholic University, where, after two years, Bob graduated with an A.B. in Arts and Science with a major in Philosophy. Then came Theology and Sacred Scriptures at Marist College, located behind Catholic University. At the end of the seminary experience there was the issue of ordination, and Bob was asked explicitly to make that life or death choice again. Again, Bob chose life. He was ordained in 1964. He was made a sub-deacon and deacon in the crypt at the Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on the Catholic University Campus

At the same time he was finishing up in the seminary, Bob was also seeking a Master’s Degree in religious education from Catholic University, the course work for which he pursued sporadically for four years, returning to classes in D.C. during the summers and in intervals between assignments on the West Coast.

Vatican II had begun its deliberations on October 11, 1962, and would continue for just over three years. The Department of Religious Education at Catholic University was on the cutting edge of Catholic intellectual life and hummed with the liberal spirit of the Council. Predictably, there was a gulf between the spirit diffusing in the university and what turned out to be business as usual in many of America’s dioceses. Bob’s oscillation between the exciting world of Vatican II that infused Catholic University and the pre-consular practices of the pastors to whom he was assigned was to create continuing problems for him.

Bob was ordained to the priesthood at St. Peter Chanel Minor Seminary in San Rafael, California, where he had initially studied. The initial assignment as an assistant parish priest at first seemed ideal. The parish was in the small town of Kakaha on Kawai, Hawaii. As it happened, the pastor for whom he would work had a one-size-fits-all notion of who his new assistant would be. He had even published a detailed description of the new assistant-to-be in the parish bulletin in advance of Bob’s arrival. It had not previously occurred to Bob that the prerogatives of command included the authority to make him alter his personality to fit the pastor’s procrustean bed. Bob chafed under the autocratic personality of the older pastor. When the bishop visited to perform confirmations, there was a dinner for all the Hawaiian priests. Bob used the opportunity of the dinner to share the Vatican II spirit of Catholic University with the group, assuming he was among like-thinking people. The bishop put Bob firmly in his place. He had been learning about the Church’s new ideas,* preparing himself to share the Church’s leap into the modern world. Now he was discovering how massively resistant to change were many of the Church’s bishops and pastors.

After Hawaii, Bob was assigned for a year to teach in the seminary where he had been ordained. He taught religious education, history, and public speaking and was successful with the students, though his continued commitment to “harmful modern ideas” made him unpopular with some of the priests who ran the seminary.

The next year he spent alternatively as an assistant pastor of a parish in Nampa, Idaho, and a summer student at Catholic university. In San Rafael he smoked his first joint. In San Francisco he met Alan Ginsberg, the poet. He returned to Idaho recharged with new ideas and with energy.

The effortless celibacy of the seminary had long since waned. He was an adult now and had gotten to know a few women very well. Bob now questioned the Church’s notions about sexuality and the rules that flowed from those notions. He did not feel that celibacy offered the exclusive pathway to God. The ideas emanating from Vatican II and the emotions arising from his own relationships with women seemed to him to be perfectly consistent with his vocation, but he knew his views were not widely held. He began to realize that the love those Sisters of the Sacred Heart had shown him as a child was not the only attribute of the church he had chosen. He had not anticipated its recalcitrant authority and resistance to Vatican II.

After Idaho, two more years went by in the active priesthood, this time as a priest assigned to the Mission Band, a group charged with conducting retreats and days of recollection in parishes throughout California, Idaho, and Oregon. He also continued his intermittent attendance at Catholic University in pursuit of his degree in religious education, returning each time with his “new ideas” enhanced and refreshed. Increasingly he was disturbed by the discontinuity between the Church as he understood it and the Church he encountered in his duties. Before he returned from the East Coast, he even spent ten days in a psychiatric hospital attempting to assure him self that his feelings were not the result of mental illness.

When he wasn’t on the road, Bob was an assistant at Notre Dame du Victorie, a parish located in the heart of 1960s San Francisco. The Mission Band was demanding work, rousing congregation after congregation and Bob seemed to be doing a decent job, satisfying his superiors. When back in San Francisco, he was exposed to the full, creative frenzy of 1960s life – the politics, the drugs, and the anti-war movement. He was having experiences and establishing relationships – one with a woman whose acquaintance he made in the rectory -- that clearly challenged received Church wisdom. He kept hoping that everything he was becoming could fit within his priesthood.

The crisis came from an unexpected source. Vice President Agnew strongly supported the Vietnam War and advocated crushing the protest movement. Bob didn’t expect these views from Richard Nixon’s vice president. He certainly didn’t expect to hear from his moral theology professors, one of the Marist Fathers most brilliant teachers, speak strongly in support of both propositions. The shock of it was staggering. How could the Catholic Church hold these positions? Bob’s world exploded. He took leave from his duties to reexamine his vocation.

Bob worked as a cab driver during this period. At first he lived at the rectory as he attempted to sort out his thoughts and feelings. He met a woman named Claire at a jazz bar in North Beach. She said, “I’m going to make you spontaneous.” It was all he needed. He fell in love with her, moved out of the rectory, married Claire in San Rafael, moved to New Jersey, and had a son in 1971. They had a daughter in December of 1972 and would remain married for thirteen years.

His reaction to the views of Vice President Agnew and his moral theology professor had been another choice point for Bob and, albeit clumsily, he chose life over death when he took leave of his duties to clear his head. He may have been too confused and preoccupied with his problems to dot the i’s and cross the t’s with his Marist superiors, but they were institutionally more clear headed. They granted him a dispensation from his vows in absentia, something he would not learn for many years.

Bob and Claire wound up in North Bergen, New Jersey, and Bob graduated from driving cabs to driving trucks. The next year he arranged with Catholic University to take the comprehensive examination that would enable him to receive the Master’s degree for which he had been studying all those summers. By the time he sat for the comprehensive examination, the Church had succeeded in reinstating its previous conservative views at the University. The questions and answers had changed. He gave up the idea of a degree (and career) in religious education. However, he did not give up the notion of pursuing his vocation.

Bob and Claire did move back to D.C., though, and Bob worked first as a carpenter (though not in homage to St. Joseph) and then for the D.C. schools, teaching shut-in students, before he found his career in the course of buying an insurance policy from Prudential. He got a job with Prudential – another large institution, a mutual company which, like the Church, was governed by its members – selling insurance and then training agents. It was a job that lasted twenty years.

With two children, Bob and Claire wanted to marry in the Church and Bob wrote to Rome to petition for a dispensation from his vows. The response, which came through the Bishop of Wilmington, brought the news that Bob was no longer bound by his priestly vows, including celibacy. The Marist Society had applied for the dispensation years earlier. The bishop encouraged him to reconcile with the Church. Meanwhile, Bob and Claire decided instead to end the marriage and they were divorced after thirteen years.

Bob took est Training in 1978 and continued his association with the organization through various transformations, gradually finding himself associated with The Mastery Foundation, a non-profit, volunteer, interfaith organization, also founded by Erhardt, that was designed to empower individuals and communities in their ministries, in the reconciliation and healing of divisions, and in creating new conversations and possibilities for the future.

The est experience enabled Bob once again to choose life, to find a way back to his vocation by exploring spirituality through other approaches that enabled him to reconcile his faith and his life. In one of his most famous books, Alan Watts draws a distinction between “belief” and “faith.” Belief, he suggests, usually involves embracing a set of specific tenets (e.g., that the earth is the center of the universe) that leave the believer unprepared to cope effectively with advances of human understanding. Faith, he notes, involves holding an open-ended receptivity to reality as it evolves. It is the shift from the mode of belief to the mode of faith that makes the world intelligible.

His association with The Mastery Foundation has enabled Bob to pursue his own spirituality through centering prayer. “Centering Prayer is another, very simple way of praying, of listening, of opening our awareness to the Spirit or Creator we know dwells within us. Rather than imposing an artificial unity of thought or belief, Centering Prayer invites us to sit in silence, guided by our own proper principles of faith and the convictions of our own religious traditions. Because of this, it is a form of prayer which can be shared and practiced by those of different faiths without compromising what they believe. Centering Prayer is not meant to replace other kinds of prayer, but to refresh, renew, and restore us.” (http://www.masteryfoundation.org/interfaith/centeringprayer/index.php)

It was in the course of his pursuit of centering prayer that Bob came across the organization that enabled him to reconnect with his ministry, CITI Ministries (Celibacy Is the Issue). CITI is a free referral service of ordained married Roman Catholic Priests committed to serving the spiritual needs of the people of God. Bob has been affiliated with CITI Ministries since 1991 and has, as a result, been able to resume his priestly duties as a member of the Society of Christ’s Priesthood.

Bob has remarried and retired from Prudential. He and his wife Lis live in Lewes, Delaware, where he regularly works as both a substitute teacher in the Cape Henlopen School District and as a priest. The Mastery Foundation, through centering prayer, has been instrumental in enhancing his spiritual life and CITI in helping him reconnect with his ministry.

Robert Haggett – Contact Information

Email: haggett1331@comcast.net

Website: http://homecomcast.net/~priestatthebeachweddings/html

Primary Phone: 302-644-1338