The Benedictine

July 19, 2021

New Hampshire is for me a unique world. I arrived in Manchester a long time ago to attend Saint Anselm College, founded and operated by the Benedictine monastic order. Once the city was an important New England textile manufacturing center. In the late 1960s it was a depressed third-rate town with a polluted river running through it. Today downtown is full of chic bistros, shops, art galleries, and high tech. The mills have been turned into pricey offices and condos. Every four years the St. Anselm Institute of Politics hosts CNN’s Presidential primary debates. Those things aren’t my reasons for going back.

We did go back though, over the years, to visit the school and especially to see Father Peter Guerin O.S.B. (Order of Saint Benedict), who spent nearly 60 years serving the monastic community and the college, as professor, dean, and counselor to men who were candidates for a monastic vocation.

Father Peter passed ten days ago. The man who is no longer in this world taught all who knew him the meaning of virtue in all things, but above all, love of God.

We never considered not attending the funeral. We arrived in New Hampshire the day before the Mass. That evening we stopped in Nashua, just south of Manchester, to visit a nephew and niece of Sandy’s, Alex and Rachel, who grew up in the state. We talked about family, about life in New Hampshire now and 50 years ago. Alex said business is booming in the Granite State. Technology has replaced the mills. He and Rachel are building a new home. It’s a good place to live, he said.

I came to New Hampshire to get a degree, not to stay. Father Peter already had arrived, to teach courses in theology, but more important, the way of the spiritual life. Through all his own time he showed all who knew him the meaning of goodness that grows from faith at its most profound. In his eulogy Abbot Mark Cooper, who knew him best, said:  

“It was belief in Christ’s resurrection that was the center of Father Peter’s life. It was his certainty … that in an instant, in the blink of an eye, the dead would be raised incorruptible and that which is mortal shall clothe itself in immortality. And this certainty shaped Father Peter to be the man we all knew and whose loss we mourn. Father Peter was that wise man of the Gospel who built his house upon rock. The rain fell and the floods came and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock.

“He never wavered in 85 years, even for a moment. For Father Peter everything in life: family, monastic vocation, work, the moral life, compassion, goodness, truth, what is beautiful, justice, all these took their shape, their direction, and their meaning from God’s gift to mankind of his only Son.”

He graduated from Holy Cross College in his home town of Worcester, Mass., in 1957. He then entered the novitiate at Saint Anselm. He was ordained a priest in 1963 and earned advanced degrees at universities in Ottawa and Paris. At St. A’s he taught courses in biblical, sacramental, and monastic theology, not every college student’s cup of tea. His courses were tough, he assigned huge chunks of—for me, difficult, sometimes abstruse reading, in a subject that I knew was not going to equip me with any practical or vocational skill. That was then, as it is today, the general thinking of college students. But year in and year out, they took his courses.

When I met him in 1968 the country was traumatized by near-open warfare on college campuses. Students and faculty were distracted and demoralized by the Vietnam nightmare and cataclysmic waves of protest, often violent. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy had been murdered, cities were torn apart by riots. Academic life, the serene pursuit of knowledge, was disfigured by anger and despair. It was the same at our school. In spring 1970, after Kent State and Nixon’s Cambodia operation, the campus, like others across the country, steered towards chaos.

At that moment a close friend, a lifelong friend and I inherited the management of the campus newspaper. Father Peter, biblical scholar, professor of theology, guided us toward prudence, never quite achieved. But in those raw moments, those who knew him understood him as a man of wisdom and compassion, who sought probity in every aspect of life. They knew him as a man of sublime virtue, a man of God. They learned from him.

In time he proved indispensable to the school. He raised students to a higher awareness of the mystery and miracle of faith. “Tireless” was the word Abbot Mark used. Father Peter served as dean of the college for 25 years, from 1977 to 2002. In that mission he advanced and defended the role of liberal arts as the foundation of higher education and the life of the mind. When he retired as dean the trustees awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree. The citation read in part:

“ He has called every constituency of the college to be committed to high standards of excellence    … for the profound good of the students. Through all these years, he has built strong and deep relationships with colleagues … helping them in ways that only he and they will ever know. Always the monk, Father Peter has been an unparalleled champion and model of fidelity to the daily routine of the monastic life, demonstrating in his own life the very Benedictine combination of the love of learning and desire for God.”

When the funeral Mass ended we followed the Abbot and the procession of monks to the Benedictines’ cemetery in the lush pine woods behind the monastery. The moment was solemn. Father Peter’s family stood with the Abbot for a final prayer. Then we turned and walked back, knowing that, resting in the Lord’s peace, he will pray for us.