{"id":1615,"date":"2015-07-02T11:47:03","date_gmt":"2015-07-02T15:47:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=1615"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:54","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:54","slug":"guided-by-the-rule-of-saint-benedict","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2015\/07\/guided-by-the-rule-of-saint-benedict\/","title":{"rendered":"Guided by the Rule of Saint Benedict"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The success of Father Edwin Leahy \u201968 in running Saint Benedict\u2019s Prep in Newark has generated national attention and inspired a new documentary.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>When students are moving through Saint Benedict\u2019s Preparatory School in Newark, between classes and at either end of the day, Father Edwin Leahy \u201968 likes to station himself at one end of the main corridor. It is the pulpit from which he does some of his best preaching.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cYou working today?\u201d he asked one the students hurrying past from an exam, grasping his shoulder.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cOf course,\u201d the student answered.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s the way to say it,\u201d Father Leahy said, patting him on the back and propelling him on his way.<\/p>\n<p>It was the next-to-last day before Christmas break, and the traffic inside Saint Benedict\u2019s was two-way \u2014 current students heading out, former students heading in to offer greetings to the headmaster they know as Father Ed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow\u2019s school?\u201d he asked one of the recent graduates back from his first semester at college.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a lot of work.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s the way life is, my friend,\u201d Father Leahy said. \u201cCome on. Courage.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHow\u2019re the grades?\u201d he asked another recent graduate. \u201cEngineering? Fighting your way through, right? That\u2019s what you\u2019ve got to do, fight your way through.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Father Leahy\u2019s voice is loud and raspy from decades of exhortations on behalf of the school where he has spent most of the last 56 years \u2014 to his fellow monks for the faith to resurrect Saint Benedict\u2019s after it died in 1972; to alumni and other benefactors for the money to keep it alive; and to the students, most of them African-American and Latino, for the commitment demanded of them by the school that sends almost all of them to college.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a good place, because everybody\u2019s got to go by you,\u201d Father Leahy said of his spot in the corridor. \u201cThe worst thing they ever created in a school is the office because it gets adults tucked away from the kids.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a good place, too, because it gives him a view into the past \u2014 the spot at the far end of the corridor where he had an epiphany when he was himself a freshman.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSomething told me I was home,\u201d he said, marking the spot where he was standing in his first week at Saint Benedict\u2019s in 1959. A sign of more recent vintage hangs on the wall above: \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life,\u201d in recognition of the movie whose schoolwide screening has become an annual Christmas ritual.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNow if I theologize about it, I guess it was the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n<p>I just had this sense that this is where I belonged.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Guided by the Rule of St. Benedict\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jKJuOMeY0Ts?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Founded in Newark by Benedictine monks in 1868, Saint Benedict\u2019s educated the sons of successive waves of immigrant Catholics for more than a century. The front door on the brick building at 520 High Street, shaded by a Tiffany stained-glass awning, was their gateway to college and professional careers.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1658\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1658\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/files\/2015\/06\/FatherLeahy300x248.jpg\" data-rel=\"lightbox-image-0\" data-rl_title=\"\" data-rl_caption=\"\" title=\"\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1658\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/files\/2015\/06\/FatherLeahy300x248-300x248.jpg\" alt=\"Father Ed Leahy and his students\" width=\"300\" height=\"248\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1658\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Father Ed Leahy and his students<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>But that gateway led away from Newark for most of its graduates, and as the city changed, the school did, too: There were fewer students, and more of them were African-American. During city riots in 1967, National Guardsmen slept in the gym. Enrollment dropped further. In 1972, after years of internal dissent, 14 of the monks moved out of Newark Abbey, and the school closed. In 1973, the monks who remained reopened the school. Father Leahy, just 26 and not yet ordained, was headmaster then and is still.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen you reflect on it now, at 69 years old, you say to yourself, \u2018What the heck were you thinking?\u2019\u2009\u201d Father Leahy said. \u201cBut the anger that I had motivated me. I thought that it was just too easy for people to interpret the closing of the school and blame it on African-Americans \u2014 \u2018See, here\u2019s another great institution that goes down the chute as soon as they start going to it\u2019 \u2014 which wasn\u2019t the case at all. It was a problem of a lack of faith and infighting within the community.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The school\u2019s mission \u2014 to offer a hand up to promising boys \u2014 didn\u2019t change after it reopened, but its methods did. The students were more often from poor families and needed more scholarships, and from broken homes and needed more extracurricular guidance. The school itself needed more help, too, which came from wealthy alumni.<\/p>\n<p>Saint Benedict\u2019s grew in both size and stature, gaining attention far beyond Newark. The 12-acre campus now straddles both sides of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard \u2014 the former High Street \u2014 and includes a 60-room dorm that is home to students whose own homes are plagued by too many risks. After graduation, 98 percent of the students continue directly to an array of colleges that would induce envy in guidance counselors at the wealthiest suburban high school. This incredible record recently attracted a pair of Newark-based documentary filmmakers who wanted to show the rest of the nation what it might learn from a small band of monks whose vows have bound them to a battered city.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey\u2019re graduating their kids and sending them to college, and a college degree means a job and a job means a reduction in poverty \u2014 that\u2019s concrete,\u201d said Jerome\u00a0Bongiorno, who with his wife, Marylou, chronicled Saint Benedict\u2019s in \u201cThe Rule.\u201d The documentary, which has been showing on public television nationally since the fall, takes its title from the 6th-century Rule of Saint Benedict that guides the lives of the monks, and that has shaped the school. It is a long document, with 73 chapters, but its core values can be summarized in a few words: \u201cPrayer and work in community,\u201d Father Leahy said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe felt so strongly that this was not a story only about the school, but about the monastic influence and impact on its evolution,\u201d Marylou Bongiorno said.<\/p>\n<p>Among the vows that Benedictines take is a vow of stability. \u201cIt\u2019s the exact opposite of most religious congregations,\u201d Father Leahy said. \u201cWe make a commitment to a place.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The place he committed himself to, though, was initially hesitant to commit itself to him. An honor-roll student at Saint James School in Woodbridge, he did poorly on the admission test, and his application was rejected.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSo my father goes to the pastor and he writes a letter \u2014 \u2018You\u2019ll be helping a good Catholic family and I believe you\u2019ll be fostering a vocation,\u2019\u2009\u201d he said. \u201cSo I get in, and I\u2019m still here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In high school, he was a backup quarterback on the football team, swam, wrestled and played tennis, and graduated in 1963. After a year at a Benedictine college in Alabama and another at one in Minnesota, he entered the novitiate. He spent his final two undergraduate years at Seton Hall, where he earned a bachelor\u2019s degree in philosophy in 1968, and was disappointed that his superiors wouldn\u2019t let him try out for the football team. He was a commuter \u2014 taking the bus in from the abbey in Newark one year, driving in from the Benedictine abbey in Morristown the other year \u2014 and the classes that stuck with him longest were the ones that challenged him the way he challenges his students now.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cMost people, when they were in his class, the first day they ran out of it, but I loved the guy,\u201d he said of an upper-level philosophy class with Professor Vincent J. Ferrara. \u201cHe was demanding as all get-out. I appreciated his insights and I also appreciated the level of expectation he had.\u201d Father Leahy was similarly challenged by classes in genetics and art history. \u201cI was a little bit in over my head; I knew that, but I just loved it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He had no training as an educator when he became headmaster at Saint Benedict\u2019s, but he had learned much from watching the pastor whose letter had opened the door for him, Monsignor Charles McCorristin, who ruled his parish like a mayor for three decades \u2014 greeting the merchants as he walked the downtown streets each afternoon; handing out every report card at the school; taking note of which politicians turned up at midnight Mass on Christmas.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe town was Catholic, and he was going to make sure it stayed that way,\u201d Father Leahy said.<\/p>\n<p>Father Leahy has been similarly ubiquitous at Saint Benedict\u2019s \u2014 presiding at his post in the corridor, patrolling the halls, cheering at the athletic events (the soccer and basketball teams are perennial powerhouses), greeting by name each of the 550 students and many of the 5,000 alumni, listening through the window of his room in the monastery, which overlooks the front door.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey don\u2019t know they\u2019re telling me everything, even though I tell them, \u2018Guys, watch out, I live at the front of the building,\u2019\u2009\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>Because Saint Benedict\u2019s has proved so good at a job that has proved so hard elsewhere \u2014 educating young men from the inner city, and steering them away from the traps that snare many of their peers \u2014 Father Leahy is often asked how other schools might do the same. \u201cYou need two things to have a chance at it,\u201d he said: to have the people who run the school live at the school, and to be open around the clock, \u201clike a diner.\u201d Which sounds a lot like the Benedictine vow of stability.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNobody has cracked the code with young men, not even the best charter schools. We\u2019ve probably come closer than anybody has, but we\u2019re not knocking it out of the park every time either,\u201d he said. \u201cThe people who think that I\u2019m like the Delphic oracle on education, they don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about because I\u2019m not that at all, not even close.<\/p>\n<p>All I know is how to try to accompany teenagers through this part of their life. That\u2019s all we\u2019re trying to do here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>This year Father Leahy has begun to step back from daily administration \u2014 he has handed off to an assistant both his office and his job of addressing the schoolwide convocation in the old gym that starts each day \u2014 to spend more time on broader tasks, like raising the $5 million in donations he needs each year to keep Saint Benedict\u2019s solvent, and thinking about the school\u2019s future. There are 13 monks in the abbey now, less than half the number when the school reopened.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWill we sustain it? We won\u2019t \u2014 God does,\u201d he said. \u201cI don\u2019t know where God will lead us, but if you told me 42 years ago that I\u2019d be sitting here, I would have said you\u2019re out of your mind, there\u2019s no way that\u2019s going to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As the fall semester was ending, he also had some smaller decisions to make. For many years it has been a tradition at the school to gather in the auditorium to watch \u201cIt\u2019s a Wonderful Life\u201d on the last day before Christmas break. But now there was a conflict: The school\u2019s longtime nurse had died, and her funeral was scheduled for the same time in the adjacent church. Paying respects to the dead is important in the Saint Benedict\u2019s community; just a week earlier eight buses had taken students to Saint James in Woodbridge for the funeral of Father Leahy\u2019s mother.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cNobody dies on schedule,\u201d Father Leahy said. \u201cWhat the kids need to learn is that they need to respond to people\u2019s needs and people\u2019s grief when they have it.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The church would not hold all the students, so he made a Solomonic decision: The older students, who had already seen the movie, would go to the church. The younger ones would go to the auditorium, where they would see just how much of a mark one man\u2019s life can leave on others.<\/p>\n<p><em>Kevin Coyne is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The success of Father Edwin Leahy \u201968 in running Saint Benedict\u2019s Prep in Newark has generated national attention and inspired a new documentary.<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2015\/07\/guided-by-the-rule-of-saint-benedict\/\">Continue Reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Guided by the Rule of Saint Benedict<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":1676,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,258,9,12],"tags":[41,40],"class_list":["post-1615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-articles-2015-2019","category-catholicism","category-features","tag-education","tag-service","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1615"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3693,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1615\/revisions\/3693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}