Paul Feyen

Feyen the Lion died on February 10, 2025.

I’m not sure who gave him that nickname. I think it might have been Jack O’Neill.

Myself, I always called him Luap, which was Paul spelled backwards. It seemed to fit him,

because Luap was a goofy kind of name and Paul was - at least in part - a pretty goofy guy. I

say “in part” because he was also a very serious person who worried a lot. He was a

fascinating combination of trickster, clown and worry-wart.

You’d usually see the worry-wart first. Paul would manage to twist his forehead into

that half-bewildered, half-angry look of his, and start bemoaning some looming crisis that only

he seemed aware of. We’d all kid him about it, until finally his face would begin to relax and

he’d let out that deep-throated chuckle that always seemed to resonate from some wise funny-

bone lodged deep in his soul. The chuckle always signaled his release from dread to humor.

According to Paul, his family were all worry-warts, so he came by it honestly. His main

worry in the seminary was flunking tests. He’d blown a Religion test in his freshman year,

which resulted in him being demoted from the “A” group to the “B” group, and his father had

freaked out about it. Paul was terrified it might happen again and, even though he was very

smart, he became convinced he couldn’t pass any test without cheating. So he spent

enormous amounts of time devising ingenious ways to cheat. I remember one time he showed

me the bottom of his wing tip shoes where he had minutely written an entire set of test answers

on the instep. Most of our professors had taught the same classes for years and were too lazy

to change the tests, so Paul’s test answers would have come from a pony handed down by

someone’s older brother. The one time Paul’s cheating didn’t work and he ended up getting a

“D” on a biology test, he blamed the guy sitting next to him for having written down the wrong

answers.

Even though he was always terrified of getting caught, Paul broke all the rules: He hid

an illegal transistor radio in his room; he talked out the window after lights-out; he smoked in

the bathroom. He did all sorts of stuff, and the faculty never caught on. They trusted him

implicitly, enough to make him manager of the student store which he’d furtively unlock at night

for friends who wanted free candy bars.

Despite his anxieties and self-doubts, Paul had a strong entrepreneurial streak. As

soon as he arrived at the seminary, he signed up as a barber and developed a prosperous

clientele that lasted through his seminary career. He brought the same drive to sports, where

he was a dedicated competitor, never above a little crafty cheating. When his Rambler team

played the Indians in basketball, he neutralized Al Potter’s rebounding by standing on his feet

under the basket. Later in life, his fanatic dedication to the Oakland Raiders won him a spot on

one of their billboards wearing an eyepatch.

Paul’s humor would often catch you by surprise, suddenly appearing from behind a

worried facade when you least expected it. And he loved practical jokes. Once he intercepted

a package for Dick Ganci in the mail room. Dick’s mother had sent him a new pair of shoes,

and Paul carefully unwrapped the package, took one shoe out, and re-wrapped it. The daily

mail call was a big deal, a public event, so Ganci’s single shoe soon became a seminary

legend.

Being a practical joker myself, I often recruited Paul as a co-conspirator. One time we

were in the local drugstore on a walk and saw a very realistic rubber worm on a joke rack. It

was brownish orange, the same color as the Chef Boyardee beans that were often served in

the refectory. That night at dinner we managed to slip the worm into a serving bowl headed to

one of the tables, then watched as a hungry seminarian ladled up a huge spoonful of kidney

beans with a four-inch earthworm dangling from it. Several guys at the table started gagging

and the table head subsequently reported it to the seminary bursar. The bursar was Father Ray

Maher, the bishop’s brother, and after dinner we saw him charging into the kitchen to

investigate. By the time Paul and I caught up with him, he’d cornered a bunch of French-

speaking nuns who couldn’t understand what on earth he was trying to say with his frantic

finger wiggles. I interrupted his charades.

“Ah Father, this wouldn’t be about a worm in the beans, would it?”

He whirled around. “What do you know about a worm in the beans?”“It was just a joke, not a real worm.”

He glared at me, turned on his heel, and stormed off. The nuns, still bewildered,

shrugged their shoulders and went back to work. Paul and I cracked up.

Near the end of our seminary career, Paul and I ended up on opposite political sides.

I’d became a radical activist, questioning and challenging everything about the seminary, from

the rule to the liturgy. Paul wasn’t at all political; he just wanted to keep his head down and get

ordained. We’d still collaborate on the occasional prank, but our ideological paths began to

diverge sharply. I finally left the seminary and moved to the Haight Ashbury. Paul stayed in

and got ordained.

Not to say he didn’t keep breaking all the rules, but he performed competently enough

as a priest that the bishop never found out about his shenanigans - not until he hooked up with

Kathy. Then the bishop made him an offer he had to refuse: leave Kathy and accept a transfer

to the diocese of Fresno. For Paul the jig was up. He left the priesthood, got a job selling

textbooks for Prentice Hall, and moved to Minnesota with Kathy. By then he’d found that his

insecurities and worries could be masked with alcohol, a strategy embraced by many of his

fellow salesmen.

Paul and I didn’t see each other for a couple of years, then reconnected in the early

80s. By then he was drinking heavily, but he was just as funny as ever, and maybe a little

wilder. He’d even gone to the College of Clownology and become certified as Gus the Clown.

I was living in Denver by this time with two kids, managing a sandwich shop. One night I got a

call from an irate customer who claimed his wife had been hospitalized that afternoon after

eating one of our sandwiches. The guy described the sandwich in great detail and said he was

going to sue me and the restaurant. Panicked, I started apologizing profusely and was about

to hang up and call our lawyer when I heard Paul’s distinctive chuckle coming from the other

end of the line. He’d called the restaurant earlier that day and gotten a description of our

premier sandwich so that he could totally jape me. I loved it.

Our class had its 25th reunion in 1986, and the first person I saw there was Paul. He

had a new video camera to film the event. (That was another thing about Paul: He was always

up on the latest technology.) When I shook his hand, I could tell there was something different

about him. He didn’t seem as caustic as before, not as much the extroverted wise-ass. He

was still charming and witty, but also more subdued and serious. Something had clearly

changed.

Earlier that year, at Kathy’s insistence, Paul had stopped drinking. What I was

experiencing that day was a new Paul, one I’d never met before. He was suddenly discussing

things he’d always avoided or mocked - feelings, values, beliefs. He was just as warm and

engaging as always, but now he was much more present, with an intensity that was almost

disarming.

Paul’s original priesthood never had much of a spiritual quality about it. He’d always

been pretty superficial and pragmatic, a guy who could competently fake his way through

anything, from Latin tests to ordination. But starting that day, and during the next 40 years, I

would watch Paul transform that original, cynical priesthood into something beautiful and real.

I would see him take the Serenity Prayer to heart, tap into his true authentic self, and start

ministering to hundreds of his peers across the country. I’d see him find his true priesthood,

first by confronting his own demons, then by bringing the rest of us to a level of honesty we

might never have experienced without him.

And the amazing thing . . . he kept us laughing the whole time.

For that, I’ll be eternally grateful to my dear friend, Gus the Clown.