Baptists & Benedictines

In the rolling green hills of Alabama, a ceremony took place last week that would make the most ardent exponent of Protestant-Catholic amity polish his glasses. Roman Catholic St. Bernard College, founded and staffed by Benedictine monks, was ending its first academic year of accreditation as a senior college with a solemn High Mass in the stadium, commencement exercises, blessing of class rings. The odd thing about it was that of the 494 St. Bernard students, 394 were Protestants--most of them Bible-belt Baptists.

This phenomenon was no planned experiment but part of the sociological revolution in U.S. interfaith relations that was described last fortnight by Jesuit Theologian Gustave A. Weigel (TIME, June 2). From the time it was founded 66 years ago until the end of World War II, St. Bernard's Benedictines and their Catholic students maintained an aloof hostility to the Baptists and Lutherans of nearby Cullman, Ala. (pop. 12,000). Occasionally, there was even violence; at one gown-town brawl a priest was bopped by a bottle. But after the war, two things happened: the G.I. Bill enabled more local boys to go to college than ever before, and the Rev. Brian J. Egan became St. Bernard's director of public relations.

Light & Air. Redheaded young Father Egan had graduated from St. Benedict's College in Atchison, Kans. and earned an M.A. in sociology at the University of Notre Dame; he was determined to let some fresh air and light into the academic stronghold of St. Bernard. First, he banded together with a group of younger priests, some of whom he had known in prep school. One of these, Irish-born Father Malachy Shanaghan, who is now head of St. Bernard's English department and finishing a Ph.D. thesis on Novelist William Faulkner, describes the change they put into effect: "In the past, if a monk went to a university, it was thought he would come back less a monk. Now we believe that a man is less a Christian for ignoring his education."

At first, the Protestants of Cullman viewed this new friendliness with suspicion. But the fact that St. Bernard was the only college near by and, as Father Shanaghan says, "the country boys don't want to get far from mother's home cooking," brought more and more of them around. Enrollment jumped by 60 in 1956 (the year after Egan arrived), and three months ago Benedictine Egan was made president at the age of 32.

Greatest achievement of the new regime at St. Bernard has been in winning over the hard-shell Protestant businessmen of Cullman. To do this, the priests became civic boosters, joined the Chamber of Commerce leaders in lassoing new industry, notably a recently arrived cigar manufacturer, whose emissaries were entertained at the college (which knows how to throw a good cocktail party in a dry county). Says Cullman's Mayor Bill Arnold: "St. Bernard is the greatest institution we've got. For the first time we're beginning to feel a cultural upswing. Certainly St. Bernard is the nucleus of it."

Easy on Metaphysics. Each student is required to take a course in ethics and one in logic, but there is no stress on Catholic doctrine except for the courses in philosophy. "Teaching Thomist philosophy to Baptists," says one priest, "is not as hard as might be thought. They may be baffled by metaphysics, so we go easy there. But they are intensely religious to begin with, so you have something to build on." Since Father Egan has been at St. Bernard, only two Protestant students have become Catholics, both after they graduated.

Symbolic of the new unity is the occasional attendance of many local Baptist leaders at Mass at St. Bernard. "By learning how we live and what we stand for," says Father Shanaghan, "Baptists and other Protestants will project this to the Roman Catholic religion as a whole. What we are doing can be done anywhere."

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