NOW AVAILABLE: Father Hugo's Retreat from the fall of 1985
Click here to access the recordings of the retreat.
About Father Hugo (Home Page)
The Encounter With Silence Retreat
Upcoming retreats
Further information on the retreat
"The Passion of Father John Hugo," by Rosemary Hugo Fielding; a detailed look at Father John and the retreat
Upcoming Retreats
Fr. John-Mary Tompkins, O.S.B., of St. Vincent College, will be giving the retreat in June and July of 2024 at the following locations:
Sunday, 9 June - Sunday, 16 June, Martina Spiritual Renewal Center in Pittsburgh, PA
Friday, 12 July - Friday, 19 July, St. Emma’s Monastery In Greensburg, PA
For further information, follow the link above to visit the websites of the retreat houses.
Retreatants are asked to bring only a Bible and notebook. Focused on providing spiritual direction, the retreat concentrates on the teachings of the Gospel and the writings of many Catholic saints. It is based on the first week of the thirty-day Ignatian retreat.
The late Fr. John Hugo, of Pittsburgh, one of the earliest presenters of the retreat, called it a “scriptural retreat” with “six days of silence, meditation and prayer;” “a program of self-evangelization;” and “a desert experience in the hills of Pennsylvania.” The retreat consists of the teacher presenting four conferences each day. After each conference, retreatants are asked to meditate in silence on the doctrine presented. The Mass is offered each day, and Confession is also offered during the week.
Further information on the retreat
The late French-Canadian Jesuit Father Onesimus Lacouture gave the first retreat to priests in 1931. Father Hugo made the retreat in the summer of 1939 in Baltimore under Fr. Lacouture's direction. Father Hugo began to preach it to the laity soon after. To emphasize the importance of silence during the six days, in the 1980s Fr. Hugo named the Lacouture-Hugo retreat "Encounter With Silence." The most famous proponent of the retreat is no doubt Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, who made the retreat many times from the 1940s to 1976, the year of her last retreat.
The retreat plants the seed of conversion within a spiritual hothouse of strict silence, profound prayer, and daily Mass. This seed is the doctrinal truth that Christ’s teaching is meant to radically change our lives, and especially our purely natural mentality, by calling us to live supernaturally, through God’s grace. It challenges the purely human thinking with the supernatural demands of the Gospels. Christianity demands more than respectability and natural virtue. Christians are called to holiness and Christian perfection. This truth is presented at the retreat, Fr. Hugo said, within a “full panorama of the Christian life.” No aspect of the Christian life is left untouched.
Fr. Hugo often quoted the words of Pope Paul VI: “The Church is an evangelizer, but she begins by being evangelized herself.” By calling the already Christianized to go further in the resolution to follow the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and teaching them how to do so, the Lacouture-Hugo retreat both evangelizes and converts.
"The Passion of Father John Hugo": "The Famous Retreat"
By Rosemary Hugo Fielding, 1993
Introduction
This booklet attempts to weave together four abbreviated accounts: a short history of the sixty-two-year-old Encounter with Silence scriptural retreat; a miniature portrait of the retreat's great teacher, Father John J. Hugo; a crystallization of the basic teaching of the retreat, which is itself an already beautifully concise presentation of the Christian life; and a sampling of the ways the retreat inspired and, at times, impelled retreatants to understand the radical call of the Gospel.
Father Hugo died in 1985 on the feast day of one of his favorite teachers, St. Theresa, the Little Flower, October 1. At the time of his death, he was the only man who had been conducting the seven-day silent retreats whose name he borrowed from a title of a book by Karl Rahner. After his death, in God's providence, and, I'm sure, to Father Hugo's and Father Onesimus Lacouture's everlasting joy, the retreats continued. In 1987 and in 1993 Monsignor Joseph Meenan and Father Francis Ott respectively began to direct them again after 30-some years. Michael Hugo, John Hugo's nephew, became the first lay teacher of the retreat in 1988; Father Frank Erdeljac also began directing them at that time. [All the priests are now deceased, and Michael Hugo no longer gives the retreats. Fr. John-Mary Tompkins of Greensburg, PA. currently gives the retreats.] Those who know and love the retreat continue to pray for more "laborers" to conduct it, for the harvest is plentiful.
Father Hugo often stated that the greatest failure that followed Vatican II was the Church's neglect of the Council's summons to evangelize. He saw the retreat as a means of evangelization, and it evangelized hundreds. If recognized, the retreat could reach many more and could become an important, perhaps crucial, means of evangelizing within the Church today. As Father Hugo and the other directors emphasized, the retreat does not claim to teach anything new; it simply presents "applied Christianity." But it also sheds light on the centuries-old traditions and doctrines of the Church, showing their beauty and wisdom in a way many modern Catholics have never been exposed to. It follows Father Hugo's favorite aphorism on Christianity: Christianity is neither liberal nor conservative; it is radical or superficial. The retreat is uncompromisingly radical; it teaches the Gospel clearly and boldly to a confused and divided Church. Finally, the retreat instructs wisely in the Word of God. It is for many as it was for Dorothy Day: "like hearing the Gospel for the first time."
The Passion of Father John Hugo: the Retreat
On a cool, sunny October morning in 1985, three days after Fr. Hugo's death, the family, friends, and colleagues of Father John Hugo gathered in Pittsburgh to celebrate his funeral Mass. Fr. Hugo had died in a car accident on October 1. The shock of his sudden death at age 74 imprinted itself in the minds of his students throughout the U.S., and many came to the funeral, for, because of his spiritual leadership, Fr. Hugo was beloved by many. About 400 people stood in the dark shadows of the Church of the Assumption's arches. As the organ music blasted forth like a trumpet, a steady dark stream of priests began to process in. Eighty, ninety, 100 or more, they walked to the front: some who loved him deeply; others who had turned their backs on him in the painful controversy of earlier years. They all came to honor him on this day.
However, most of those who called John Hugo (as I have heard several times) “one of the most important people in my life" were not priests. They were family men, housewives, businessmen and women, school teachers, sisters and nuns, laborers, and office workers. Some were scholars. All were seekers. They knew Fr. Hugo through his passion, "the retreat," which he had taught—with some enforced interruptions— throughout his life as a priest.
Seven pall bearers rolled the casket down the aisle. The white shroud covering it symbolized the joy of the resurrection (in the Novus Ordo Mass), and after the Mass, those who loved him reached spontaneously to touch the pall as the casket was rolled back. Hundreds of lay and religious people had made the retreat over the previous 55 years under either French-Canadian Jesuit Father Onesimus Lacouture or one of his students, including Father Hugo, Monsignor Meenan and Fr. Ott. The retreat became a marker of a profound change for them: seven days of silence in which to realize the love of Jesus Christ and the impact of His Gospel.
For those retreatants attending the funeral Mass, eternity might have seemed to shine in the autumn sun streaming through the high church windows. Monsignor Joseph Meenan, one of his oldest friends and another survivor of the retreat controversy (see below), expressed the sense of eternity in his homily when he spoke of John Hugo's love of God. "We can rejoice," he said, "that these two who loved one another will be joined together forever."
Father Hugo was buried in a small graveyard at Mt. Nazareth Convent of the Sisters of the Holy Family in Bellevue, Pennsylvania, where for the last fifteen years he had lived as a chaplain and had given the retreats to the laity. A scripture verse most identified with the retreat was engraved on his tombstone. For many, his life had proven the truth of what was cut into the gray marble: "Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it remains alone. But if it dies, it will bear much fruit."
First presented to priests in the U.S. and Canada by Father Lacouture in 1931, the retreat challenged a comfortable and worldly religiosity and a deadening legalism current among the Roman Catholic clergy. It broke from the hairsplitting discussions of moral theology that prevailed in seminaries, such as the preoccupation with the distinction between mortal and venial sins, and instead did a rare thing for Catholics at that time. It studied the scriptures as living words. "In seminary," recalls Monsignor Meenan, "we studied scripture as if it were a cadaver."
Father Hugo often recounted that Father Lacouture would often open his retreats by telling his fellow priests of his childhood dream to preach the Gospel, as St. Francis Xavier had, to the pagans. Then he would smile, open wide his arms and say, "God answers prayers. Here I am." Fr. Lacouture thus implied this surprising revelation: until the Holy Spirit revealed the power of the Gospel to him, he had been a pagan in priestly garb.
Dorothy Day made her first "famous retreat" (as she called it) in 1940. In college in 1977 I read The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day's autobiography. I read it because as a little girl I had met Miss Day when she was visiting Father Hugo, (my uncle), his parents and sister. I had a childlike awe for her from hearing about her in my family, and I remember looking up at her as she sat in my grandparents' garden. What most struck me when I read her book was that God could radically change a person. Years later I experienced this conversion, when I made Fr. Hugo’s retreat.
The Teaching of the Retreat
The first night of the retreat I made a choice: to commit fully to it. Like many others I suppose, I had brought a pile of catch-up books and correspondence. But Father Hugo asked us to read only the Bible, to write only on the teachings of the retreat. It was our first lesson in detachment. After that introductory conference, I stood in my echoing convent cell, sweating in the early warmth of the April evening, and packed all my books, magazines and stationery in my suitcase and shoved it under the bed. Wooed from my security blanket, I entered the wilderness, alone, silent, unencumbered.
Father Hugo spoke of the "two ways," God's way and mankind’s way. These were ways in the sense of roads or paths through life. I was used to thinking of the world divided in two—between the permitted and the forbidden, between vice and virtue. But Father Hugo explained that the choice is far more challenging. It is between pagan goodness and Christian holiness. God asks us to follow the supernatural path set high above the natural way of reason, human happiness and natural morality (which remain as the essential foundation for the supernatural way). On the supernatural path, faith is our guide, agape love is our goal and holiness is our vocation.
The first lesson of the retreat, that of the "two ways," confronted us where we felt most comfortable—in our good, virtuous lives. Moderate, law-abiding, middle class respectability looks like Christianity, but Father Hugo taught it may actually be something different—"good paganism." Good paganism is not sinful, but it lives for pleasure and comfort and not by faith, and therefore is inadequate for following Christ. Without the grace that Jesus Christ won for us, we are all pagans. And paganism is always threatening our life of grace. "Scratch a Christian," he'd say, "and there's a pagan underneath."
In the Beatitudes we explored this reversal of respectability and other purely human values, a reversal that Christ taught us is God’s way, the New Covenant. "The Beatitudes are the values of God," Father Hugo said. "We say, 'Blessed are the rich. Blessed are the strong.'" To the world, the Beatitudes are either hogwash—"Blessed are the poor. Are you kidding?"—or beautiful, poetic sayings never to be applied in our practical, workaday world. But Jesus says this is the way we are to live.
For the Christian, sin should not even figure as a choice. "Telling God you love Him more than sin is like telling a beautiful woman you love her more than toads," was his unforgettable analogy. In following God, we give up not only our sin, but our love affair with worldly "goods.
I underwent a profound mental adjustment and hungered to hear more about this purpose of life. How do I live a supernatural life and do what is impossible in the natural: pray deeply, love my enemy, turn the other cheek, be joyful in all circumstances, including poverty? The answer: to live out the new birth which I underwent in baptism in Jesus Christ, my "born again” experience. In baptism, we receive the grace to become perfect, as the Father is perfect.
The retreat examined this connection between sacrifice and agape love by expounding on two images Jesus used, "sowing" and "pruning." Both are practicable ways to follow Jesus's command to lose our lives. The divine way led to Christ's crucifixion and resurrection. "The cross is thought to be one of the less pleasing parts of Christianity," Father Hugo said. "But the cross is the most positive part of Christianity. Because Jesus died out of love." In sowing and pruning, we do the same.
Sowing is rooted in the idea of detachment from the love of worldly goods: the decision to let loose the goods of this world in order to clasp the love of God. The retreat treated Jesus's parable of the farmer to show this. We are like the farmer sowing wheat. The wheat is good, just as many of our possessions and activities are good. But the farmer still must throw away the wheat in order to gain a harvest, and the seed must die to bear fruit. Just like Jesus, we must "throw away" the good things of our lives in order to gain something better: divine life. "It is the law of life," Father Hugo said. "To gain life, you must first lose it."
If sowing is our work, pruning is God's work. But its principal is the same: life lost, good things trimmed away, in order that new life can grow. The concept of pruning illuminates the problem of the apparently unjust suffering that God's children undergo. "I am the vine, and my Father is the vine dresser," Jesus says. "Every branch in me that bears no fruit, He takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit, He prunes it that it may bear more fruit." The righteous are pruned. Though the shears hurt, the "vinedresser” acts out of perfect love.
In sowing and in being pruned joyfully, we orient our every action to God, for we respond because of love, not because we think our possessions or actions are bad. Our losses and afflictions become the very portal through which God's life enters the world. Therefore, our acceptance of sowing and pruning did not speak of superficial changes in behavior and thought, (as Christ knew) but, metaphorically speaking, rattled our very DNA molecules. To live according to these beliefs would indeed herald the death of the natural man.
God looks at the motive as well as the action. Love is the motive for Christian action, "and all natural good works can be elevated to the divine order by doing them for the love of God," John Hugo said. "Everything, no matter how small, everything except sin, can be consecrated to God.” In fact, creation becomes a ladder leading to God. A glass of wine, a spouse's embrace, and the ocean’s glorious crashing waves are "samples” of the attributes of God. "We learn who God is through these natural samples, and are expected to use and enjoy them," he said. But if we get stuck in the samples, we miss God. Though God's creatures give a taste of the Creator, they don't satisfy us. Only God can.
Father Hugo taught that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is central to our work of sowing. The only true response to it is to lose our own lives. If we don't offer our lives along with Christ's sacramental sacrifice, Monsignor Meenan said, "the liturgy for us is, well, kind of phony."
Silence and Prayer
Silence prepared the listener to receive Christ’s message. "Without silence," says Monsignor Meenan, "there is little depth. Without silence, there is no way to grow. If you don't pray over what you hear, you lose it.”
"A week of silence was a bit forbidding to look forward to," recalled retreatant Barbara Ryan of Washington, D.C. "But having experienced it, I know the gift of the retreat is the silence and the fruits of silence." Most retreatants remember that moment, comparable to buckling seat belts on before a roller coaster ride, when Father Hugo or the other priests intoned, "We are now entering into deep silence." No talking during meals, at the end of the day, as we circled the walks of the convent, or in the conferences. Even eye contact was undesirable because "we can express much with our eyes."
Some retreatants lurked beside the coffee maker in the convent kitchen in wait for another person to surreptitiously unload on; some would retire to the pay phone with a pocketful of quarters. But most grew into the silence, and speech receded to become part of that other world we left behind. Soon we conversed only with God and with those parts of ourselves forgotten in everyday life.
"I have a strong image that Father Meenan gave us," said Barbara, "of prayer as a sculptor at work. The sculptor was forming an elephant and when he was finished, someone asked him, 'How did you make that elephant?' 'I just chipped away at what isn't an elephant,' he replied. The object of prayer is to chip away at what is not God."
The retreat was like a story Father Hugo told. Two old men played checkers in a park. They passed minutes in silence with their faces in hands, eyes downward. Finally, one oldtimer glanced up. "Exciting, ain’t it?" he asked. Just like those two old-timers, we retreatants were filled with an unseen, intense excitement. Only on Sunday morning at the breakfast which closed the retreat did we speak of our metanoia, of a change so profound and a mind so renewed that they must bear fruit in action, not simply in words.
Challenges to Wealth, Encouragement of Simple Living
The retreat emphasized the need for simplicity in Christian living. The comforts of life, Father Hugo taught, can stifle this divine grace, deafening us to God's call. "The consciousness of wealth," preached John Cardinal Newman to his well-endowed congregation, "if we are not careful, choke up all the avenues of the soul through which the light and breath of heaven may come to us." (From Plain and Parochial Sermons, quoted at the retreat.)
In fact, more Christians than not depend more on their possessions, incomes, and status than on the Lord—and many of us sat there at the retreat, like the rich, young man, finally weighing the cost of following Jesus. Father Hugo examined the way our possessions seduce us from a truly faith-filled, counter-culture, Christian life. He would always extend the Gospel message to its social implications. In this case, he denounced the way our un-Christian consumerism strains the world's resources and destroys the lives of the poor.
Like many of my peers of the 1960s and 1970s, I had once tried to live simply. But many in our generation eventually metamorphosed into another version of self-justified Babbitry, the Yuppie. In the end it was just too hard to turn our back on affluence. The retreat showed me that only with grace can I persevere in simplicity. Only when it hurts to give away possessions, to give my time generously, do I open up a little more to God's freedom and love.
Father Hugo as Teacher
Father Hugo was a masterful teacher. He appealed to the mind, to the spirit and to the will. "John Hugo was an integral part of whatever the retreat meant for me," said one retreatant, Frank Huber of Pittsburgh, who had feared before the retreat that Christianity, to which he had recently returned, would mean he would have to "castrate" his brain. "He has one of the most powerful personalities that I have ever encountered in my life." For me the teachings of the retreat have been like a rudder of truth that have guided me through many bewildering currents in the Church today.
Retreatants first met this man the Sunday night that the retreat began. The man whom Dorothy Day called a "brilliant teacher" carried himself in humility. "When I first saw him," recalls one retreatant, "I thought he was the janitor." On my first retreat, about twenty of us waited in the convent library that warm April evening for our initial conference with him. The door opened. John Hugo shuffled in, draped in a long, gray cassock. His stocking feet, thrust into well-worn sandals, moved slowly across the floor. He was stooped a little. He had a wide, leonine head on narrow shoulders, swarthy skin, full lips, a mass of gray hair. His wide brown eyes were direct, piercing and humorous.
At that time, he suffered from a heart condition that made him physically weak. He walked so slowly that when he carried himself the long way to the front of the church, the walk was somewhat dramatic. But his voice betrayed no such frailty. It resonated compellingly. Compact, brilliant, startling, his thoughts were expressed. When he made a point, he sometimes carried himself out of the chair. Then he would slowly sink back into it and say, "Well, let us think on these things."
A Short History of Opposition to the Retreat
A discussion of the retreat is incomplete without some explanation of the opposition to it. That opposition signals both the power of the retreat—and the Gospel—to challenge lukewarm Christian faith—in the clergy as well as the laity—and the way in which some in the institutional church responded to that challenge. Because of this challenge to Church complacency in pre-Vatican II days, the retreat faced opposition and ridicule from some clergy. Because Father Lacouture did not publish any material on the retreat, the charges and suspicions at first were often based on a retreatant's misinterpretation of it, either in word or action. In 1939, after a decade of evangelizing hundreds of his brother priests, Father Lacouture was forbidden to give the retreat; his Jesuit superiors sent him to a remote Indian reservation and stripped him of many of his priestly faculties. There he lived, cut off from his fellow priests and retreatants, until he died.
But before being silenced, Fr. Lacouture had found himself a young champion. When Father Hugo returned from the retreat as a young priest in 1938 (27-years-old and two years out of seminary), he joyfully offered an apostolate to his Church—to evangelize the laity. Instead, he found that many colleagues and superiors rebuked him, mocked him and misrepresented and then condemned the teaching of the retreat.
John Hugo was not deterred. He carried on the message of the retreat by organizing and publishing the retreat conferences and explications, histories and defenses of the doctrine. "He had a great mind," said Monsignor Meenan. "He took the conferences of Father Lacouture and systematized and synthesized them." Father Hugo and others continued to give the retreat, until they, too, were forbidden in the mid-1940s to conduct them in their diocese, although Fr. Hugo was allowed to teach the retreat if he first received “express permission” from his bishop, Bishop Hugh Boyle. (Father Hugo began to give them regularly again in 1976.)
He and the other priests who gave the retreat were called "Hugonuts." In Canada, they were called "Lacourturmites.” At times they were called "Holy Rollers" because of their insistence on the scriptures daily application to the Christian life. "It was a painful time," recalled Monsignor Meenan. "Suddenly you realize you are a member of a small minority; you're isolated, and friends distance themselves. We were looked at as kind of extreme. There was witch-hunting in the hierarchy; our careers were damaged."
The extremism charge centered on their teaching the laity "holiness." Many objected not so much to the worthy goal of holiness, but to the way the retreat did not simply mouth the word, but taught very concretely the practice of holiness. Priests, too, learned the hard way, said Monsignor Meenan, "that we can't insist others have the same profound experience. We can’t jam it down their throats. Perhaps we went overboard at first. But we learned."
It seemed that what most upset the critics of the retreat were the priests’ responses to it, for they were often concrete and discomfiting actions. Priests began to throw away their cigarettes, to stop drinking and to give away their golf clubs—and to teach detachment. When religious live a rather worldly life, they rebuff these and other challenges to live simply and the charge to teach the laity to give up their worldliness.
The theologians who printed denunciatory articles about the retreat misread in particular the teachings on the two ways and “holy detachment” from God's creation. They opined that such teachings “seemed to be” a type of Jansenism and Manicheanism, serious heresies indeed.
These charges settled in a dark cloud of suspicion over the retreat, Father Lacouture, and Father Hugo. In Volume I of his book Your Ways Are Not My Ways, one of several of his books that rebuts these shadowy and slippery criticisms, Father Hugo called the murmurs and writings against the retreat a "phantom heresy," for charges were never issued formally or proven, nor were the priests allowed to formally rebut the criticism. So severe did the backlash become that at one point Father Hugo and Father Louis Farina traveled to Rome to plead their case, but were denied an audience with the Cardinal Prefect.
For some 15 years Father Hugo, like Father Lacouture before him, was "exiled" (Fr. Hugo’s metaphorical term for his treatment). In 1944, at the same time that he was forbidden by Bishop Boyle of the Pittsburgh Diocese to give the retreat without expressed permission, he was also abruptly reassigned from teaching at a Catholic college—"diverted from my original hopes"—to begin a series of short-term assignments as a parochial vicar in small, mostly rural, parishes.
Fr. Hugo and the Retreat Are Vindicated
That period of exile ended in 1957 when Bishop John Deardon assigned Father Hugo his own pastorate at St. Germaine Church in Bethel Park, a suburb of Pittsburgh. There, Fr. Hugo put into practice his oft-stated principle that a church should be built and supported on the preaching of the Gospel. He proceeded to construct St. Germaine’s without running the games of chance that he believed were immoral. (This conviction didn't make him popular.)
The phantom heresy was banished when Bishop John Wright of Pittsburgh began to quote from Father Hugo's writings and then nominated him to collaborate on the writing of a new adult catechism (The Teachings of Christ, published in 1975 by Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division). Later, he commissioned him to write a book defending the Church’s teaching on forbidding contraception (St. Augustine on Nature, Sex and Marriage) and praised his scholarship in a preface to that book.
The doctrines of the Second Vatican Council gave further support to the retreat when the Council affirmed that the laity and not just religious were called to holiness. At that time also, liturgical changes in the selective use of the vernacular that Father Hugo's parish had already begun (with episcopal permission) were among those instituted by Vatican II’s Sacrosanctum Concilium (The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy). This document also emphasized that the liturgy is "centered and rooted in the paschal mystery of the Lord's death and resurrection." Father Hugo had emphasized just that teaching when giving Father Lacouture's retreat.
Renowned Jesuit scripture scholar, the late John L. McKenzie, who made the retreat in 1987, wrote this about the controversy: "I affirm flatly that the criticisms leveled against Lacouture and Hugo arose from an incredibly vast ignorance of the New Testament, the classic spiritual writers, ancient, medieval and modem, an ignorance which is frightening when it is manifested by bishops, higher level Jesuit superiors and professors of theology at the Catholic University." (From an unpublished article, which Fr. McKenzie gave to me to use in my work.)
Father Hugo’s Last Years
In 1976 an old friend of his and Dorothy Day's, Sister Peter Claver of the Missionary Servants of the Most Blessed Trinity, wrote Father Hugo at Mt. Nazareth to ask for spiritual direction. She traveled to Pittsburgh and met with him daily, and "that was the startup of the retreats," she recalls. In August of that year Dorothy Day traveled to Pittsburgh to make her last retreat. From that year until he died, Father Hugo conducted retreats at Mt. Nazareth. Many made the retreats often. "The retreats are living, organic, and dynamic," said Sister Rita Brocke, R.S.M. "Every time, there is something new."
On Sunday, September 29,1985, Father Hugo concluded a retreat. On the following rainy Tuesday, he visited his old friend and former fellow retreat director, Father Ott, in Greensburg. Later, on their way to nearby Seton Hill College, with Father Ott driving, the car hydroplaned on the slick pavement and skated off the road. Father Hugo was killed instantly. Father Ott was injured slightly. They had been talking about scripture, and the conversation is "to be continued in eternity," Father Ott said.
The last chapter of the manuscript Your Ways Are Not My Ways, Volume I was found on Father Hugo's desk—finished, it seemed, that day. To the end, he was a faithful son of the Church. On his bedside table was a handwritten note. "It is a great happiness to be spared to present this parting gift to the Church that I love and have served faithfully throughout my life....(I dedicate) this work to the Church as bride of Christ, praying that (I would) help to remove those spots and wrinkles marring her beauty."
"I feel a great vacancy in my life," said Sister Peter Claver. "I never had a friendship like ours." What was it that his students—many who spent such a short time with him—miss so profoundly? Perhaps a friend of Sister Peter Claver, a Methodist from Georgia, describes best this mysterious pull. "In the presence of Father Hugo I felt that God had hollowed him out and filled him with Himself." Father Hugo would no doubt say simply, "Like many, I have sown, and I have been pruned."
Copyright © Rosemary Fielding, 1993