Seminary: A Search

Playboy Best Nonfiction Work of the Year

Paul Hendrickson made his choice early. At fourteen, he entered a seminary at Holy Trinity, Alabama, and became a student for the missionary priesthood. 

He loved the life of the seminary, the purity of the goals, and above all else the essential spirit of the place. For seven years he felt he was in touch with deep mysteries, and it occasionally troubled by vague longings, he knew he wanted no other life. Then, six weeks before he was to profess his vows, he left. No longer Brother Garrett, he was Paul Hendrickson again and "twenty-one years old, a virgin, scared stiff. I had never met a Jew; I had never been on a date; most of my cultural heroes had 'Saint' affixed to their name." What subtle shift had occurred to shake his passionate commitment? The memory and meaning of that time have haunted him ever since, and in this remarkable book Paul Hendrickson looks into the past and present to search for answers. 

Hendrickson was not the only boy who left -- all but one of his classmates are out in the world now, and many of the men who taught them are no longer priests. In Seminary he traces their lives, asking, each in turn, why they left, what happened to their faith. Among those we meet are the Liteky brothers -- one won the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam and, when Hendrickson found him, he was living in a transient hotel in San Francisco; the other is a poet in a nine-to-five job. We also meet a community organizer, a former Army Intelligence officer who has been out of work for eighteen months, as well as Father Bertin Glennon, the only one who lasted. 

Seminary is a moving account of the forces that drew Hendrickson and his classmates to the priesthood and of the forces that ultimately wrenched them away. And in the telling, Hendrickson vividly recreates the life of the seminary: the ritual, the dedicated and sometimes misguided priests who taught the boys, the moments of profound spirituality which marked them all forever. He also shares the fears, dreams, high spirits and occasional high jinks of adolescent boys living out the most private moments of their lives in full view of one another. 

This eloquent book evokes and identifies the power of an experience that didn't survive the 1960s but that won't let go either. For, as Hendrickson says in this impressive literary debut, "wherever I go, almost whatever I do, I find that the seminary comes softly clacking along behind, like a child's duck dragged on a string."