Miracle on High Street by McCabe Thomas A.;

Author:McCabe, Thomas A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2011-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

“The Challenge of a Lifetime”: Abbot Martin’s Vision for St. Benedict’s Prep

On March 21, 1968, in front of more than nine hundred alumni and friends at the Robert Treat Hotel in downtown Newark, Abbot Martin Burne strode to the podium and delivered a speech that challenged most people’s view of the mission of St. Benedict’s Prep. Perhaps more so than anyone else in the banquet hall that night, Abbot Martin appreciated the complexity of the circumstances that situated St. Benedict’s Prep in a post-riot city and a post–Vatican II church. He cited two reports on the previous summer’s civil disorders, and remarked that “not a single monk-priest or lay teacher or student can emerge from the front door of St. Benedict’s without looking up and seeing spelled out for him the very guts of these two reports. A teacher at St. Benedict’s today, lay or clerical, has to be either cynical or blind if he believes himself to represent human society, while ignoring the situation that is at his very doorstep.”

Abbot Martin did not ignore generations of good work, though, as he praised the Benedictines for giving one hundred years of teaching to the city. But he wanted that good work to continue and he had a clear vision on how to make that happen. At one point he asked the crowd, “Which way, St. Benedict’s, you ask?” He replied, “Toward a deeper involvement in the society of which it is a part, toward an increased endeavor to help parents in the education of their sons.” The abbot went on to add:

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