Jock Spirituality: Part 3
Jock Spirituality: Part Three
I’m still wrestling with Ken Kelzer’s contention that our seminary faculty over-emphasized sports instead of trying to form us into Other Christs. I suppose it depends on what one means by Other Christs. Since the Sulpicians who originally created our four-team sports program have long since left the field, we can only speculate about what was going through their minds as they separated us into Bears, Ramblers, Trojans and Indians.
I personally think their image of Alter Christus was that of a highly disciplined soldier/athlete, probably closer to St. George than to St. Francis. Catholicism of the 40s and 50s was rife with military imagery. I remember St. Anselm’s schoolyard, where we all lined up in stiff formations, saluted the cross Bob Murnane solemnly held aloft, and then belted out, “An army of youth, flying the standard of truth; we are fighting for Christ our Lord. Head lifted high, Catholic Action our cry, and the cross our only sword.” We were young Christian recruits waiting to be sworn in as full-fledged soldiers at Confirmation; and a select few of us might eventually be promoted to officers in Jesus’ army (priests). These would form the front line in the war against Satan, armed with Jesus’ own weapon: celibacy.
Ever since our guilt-ridden forefather, Augustine, declared that Original Sin is passed down through the act of intercourse, Catholics have equated sin with sex, and Satan with semen. The Sulps were no exception. When they claimed to be forming us as other Christs, they were actually trying to turn us into soldier/celibates. The result was a Christianity right out of Dr. Strangelove where semen retention was a sign of muscular sanctity. Sex, especially masturbation, was to be avoided at all costs, lest our precious bodily fluids be dissipated. Perhaps the Sulps were influenced in this regard by the Male Purity Movement of the early 1800s, which included leaders such as Sylvester Graham and John Henry Kellogg. These two came up with Graham crackers and Corn Flakes respectively, as dietary sedatives to keep young men’s carnal urges in check and their chastity intact. In their mind, retention of semen guaranteed peak male performance, both physically and spiritually. Dr. Kellogg, a Seventh Day Adventist, lived to be 90 years old and was celibate throughout his entire life (including the 40 years spent with his wife).
Semen retention as a performance enhancer is nothing new. It dates back to the ancient Chinese and Greeks, and has been embraced more recently by such athletes as Mohammed Ali and, allegedly, the 1980s 49 football team. Back in the 50s, someone told me that Notre Dame owed its predominance on the gridiron to its players’ mandatory abstinence before games.
This may be the explanation for the Sulps’ over-emphasis on sports. If they primarily viewed the seminary as a semen preserve, they no doubt thought a vibrant and competitive sports system would help sublimate and channel sexual urges that might otherwise drain the testicular pond. And maybe that explains why there were always Corn Flakes on the table at breakfast. Remember all those boxes of cereal desperately jammed into the legs of refectory chairs, cached for future meals? Some especially pious lads seemed to consume Corn Flakes at every meal.
Once the Sulps became convinced that a manic sports program was an essential part ofAlter Christusformation, it would be an easy flip to assume that masturbation would negatively affect one’s batting average, maybe even cause insanity. We don’t know if Augustine was a jock, or if he ate the 6thcentury equivalent of Corn Flakes, but we do know that, once he converted, he got very paranoid about launching his sin-tainted semen through masturbatory ejaculations. Fast forward thirteen hundred years, and we can understand why one of our retreat masters, thundering Hellfire, exhorted us to sleep with our rosaries sandwiched between our genitals and our mattress, in order to ward off temptation.
All of this is to verify that, yes, the Sulpicians probably did over-emphasize sports as Ken suggests. But it was not because they weren’t trying to make us into other Christs. They were. It’s just that, in their mind, the Christ ideal was all about celibacy, sports, and semen retention. Oh, there were a few other virtues thrown in too, like compassion, faith, and love, but if a guy couldn’t hold his semen he wasn’t worthy to be a priest. The Little City of Godlays it all out:
“Twenty thousand hours of virile discipline have chastened, strengthened and subdued him into some beginning of a warrior of Christ.”(pg. 3)
“Constant self-surrender which leads to abiding self-control, is the keynote of his character building; not the modern self-improvement or progress.” (pg. 5)
There’s no doubt the Sulps loved us in their own peculiar way. They faithfully passed down to us the same training, assumptions, and fears they had received from their own mentors. We had all been programmed to be spiritual warriors, semen-clad athletes of Christ, variously known as Bears, Ramblers, Indians and Trojans. That was our basic identity.
Was it a false identity?
Maybe.
But only if you think Jesus might have been calling us to be something other than Catholic commandos.