In Praise of Father John Perricone
“For the lips of the priest shall keep knowledge, and they shall seek the law at his mouth: because he is the angel of the Lord of hosts.”
Prophecy of Malachias 2:7
I am not much for panegyrics, but this one is long overdue.
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Conversion is a complicated business – it does not lend itself well to disentangling. Chance encounters, diverse experiences, personal fickleness, and varied relationships all contribute into a movement of the soul towards God that defies ready explanation. At some point, every soul who calls himself a Catholic must make a choice to live for Christ – even the most cradle of cradle Catholics must decide. That single choice, while not technically a conversion, might as well be the same. You see the faith is not an heirloom passed from one generation to another – it is a gift that each soul must “yes” or “no” within the confines of the heart. For those of us who have said “yes,” the reason we did is often inscrutable. After all, many of us had parents, siblings, cousins, and friends who lived similar lives – in similar places with similar talents – and said, “no” to God. Why did we go against the current, as it were, and swim the Tiber?
At least today, casting our lot with the Nazarene brings no discernible social or economic benefit. There are no parades down Fifth Avenue for Catholics – not, at least, ones that I would attend anyway. Choosing to be Catholic today – choosing Christ – is something that cuts against the social milieu of secularism, relativism, and hedonism. Why bother, most seem to say, in the slumbering bourgeois existence that consists of little more than distraction – little more than bread and circus. We should not overstate things, however; conversion today does not bring a death sentence as it had (and still does) in certain places and times. No, conversion today in the modern West is one of befuddlement to the mass of unchurched. For those soaked in modern ennui, what is the point?
By way of work, I glide in and out of professional circles. As a lawyer in New York City, I am surrounded on all sides by a marble slab of personal secularism. The people I know professionally are decent enough members of society – they pay their taxes, they work hard, they vote, and they care about a variety of causes, but their genuine interests are often much more superficial – driven, or so it seems, by country clubs and travel – by fine automobiles and college admissions – by restaurants and entertainment and so many other worldly concerns. Indeed, there seems to be so little “there” there. I look at their lives and realize that I could be one of them but for the grace of God. I could be waxing my new Mercedes right now while I planned my next vacation to Europe if I didn’t have so many children and I sent my wife back to work ten years ago. But even though I work with these people, even though they are in my professional class; I am a million miles away as a matter of the heart. I long for Christ in this life – I burn to do something great for Him – I want to see Him reign in my country and in my world. How I escaped the soft and comfortable secular life that modest talent and education will provide in contemporary America is a miracle to me. I did not deserve to escape but escape it I did.
This panegyric is not about me so I will not belabor my own conversion any more than is necessary. All I can say about it is that I cannot say with certainty what it was that moved me – indeed, I cannot even say when it was. All I can say now is that I believe, and I believe all of it. And for a Catholic, believing is more than an act of the intellect – it is something expressed in what we do and what we love. Not only do I love being a Catholic, but I also want to do what is necessary in order to live a Catholic life with integrity. When and how that happened beyond the dry recitation of biographical details is completely mystifying to me. But I do know that certain people were put in my life like angelic guides who helped on a journey that I little understood. Like signposts, these people challenged or confounded me – they helped me see something, even if opaquely, that pointed to something greater than what was ostensibly before my two eyes. One of them – as important to me as any of them – was Father John Perricone. And given that Catholicism is the most important reality in my life – considering that I have cast the entirety of my lot with Jesus Christ – a man who helped me get there is deserving of as much praise as I can muster. While I cannot make intelligible sense of my conversion – at least in words – I can make sense of those who helped me gain it and live it, and Father Perricone did more for me than anyone else. And I am sure I am not alone in that sentiment.
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Father Perricone should not be.
Coming of age during the years of Vatican II, Father Perricone is like a black swan. Almost every priest who was ordained in the years immediately following the Council was indelibly marked by its fascination with the cult of novelty. The collective mentality – no, really the mass psychosis – during his seminary years was one that burned with hope for a new Pentecost fashioned by new forms and new ways. This manic hope for the future, for progress and a distinct newness came implicitly with a wrecking ball: Father Perricone was a firsthand witness to the auto-da-fé of everything Catholic that was “old.” What was true or false, orthodox or heretical, virtuous or vicious became passe in the face of one simple rule: that which was new was right, true, and good; and that which was old was wrong, false, and bad. Everything that predated the Council had to go – and that meant everything. No part of the Church was left unmolested by the tide of furious change – and the enthusiastic agents of change were the young priests goaded on by older bishops who cheered on their enthusiasm for destruction.
Many good priests – priests who should have known better – were frozen by a type of inertia that prevented this smashing of the altars – by this fit of iconoclastic self-destruction. Two thousand years of cultivating obedience was used by evil men in a moment to make most obedient to a callous – an insane – spirit of change and demolition. While we live in the obvious wreckage of the Vatican II experiment, and while it is painfully apparent that it was doomed to fail from the start, we are wise to recognize the power of its appeal during its moment in the sun – the era was one of unrestrained confidence in the new path – contemporary Catholics then were caught in a type of hubris; after all, if the Church said, it must be right. To every question the path – to doubt its foreordained success – was deemed to be both a sin against the Holy Ghost and a lack of confidence in the truth of the Catholic Church. Needless to say, swimming against such a raging current then was no small thing.
And yet one was ordained who had his doubts – not on the faith, to be sure, but on the promises of the certainty of the new Pentecost. He had been a boy in during the halcyonic days of the 1950s – when its Catholic schools were filled with teaching nuns and brothers, when its parishes were filled at every one of its several masses on Sundays, when families still got together for Sunday dinner, when large Catholic families were still the norm, when people offered masses for their dead friends and family as a matter of course, when the family rosary was a regular occurrence, and on and on and on. I’m sure he wasn’t sure what to make of the changes that the whole Catholic world was lauding in the early 1970s, but I am sure that he knew that the collective revulsion at the time before the Council was wrong. As it would turn out, Father Perricone would became an army of one – the rare man of contrarian integrity who surveys popular opinion and has enough confidence to say the word that binds all heroes – “no.”
Make no mistake, Father Perricone’s “no” was a costly one. A man of prodigious gifts – a keen intellect, a strong sense of culture and refinement, a winsome charisma, and a profound capacity for discretion – Father Perricone could have used his gifts to advance within the hierarchy of the Church had he chosen the path of least resistance. Indeed, he would not be required to be a cheerleader for Vatican II – all he had to do was never question its spirit nor cast doubt on the prudence of its changes, and the proverbial brass ring was his. But integrity welled up within him, he saw that things were spiraling out of control and that the care of souls was being compromised in the name of advancing a program of change for the sake of change. But unlike many of his generation who saw the same thing, he had the gumption to challenge it – he had the courage to say the truth. While some of his contemporaries saw it – they blinked – they shuddered at the thought of the professional oblivion that would follow even the most modest criticism of the pace of change sweeping the Catholic world. In their moment of challenge, they choose the easier road of accommodation and snuffed out the voice of truth in service to a life of relative comfort and non-confrontation. But Father Perricone crossed the Rubicon and said “no” – he choose truth over career, hardship over ease, faith over human acclaim. And to know him is to know that he suffered on account of it – lesser men – far lesser men – have risen to great heights of power and decision-making in the Church while he was deemed an anachronism.
He took all of his considerable talents and began the lonely work of rebuilding what everyone else was destroying. While the bombs of change were still falling, he walked without fear through the carnage and rubble and began by putting back together that which those bombs had destroyed. It must have seemed like a dauting task – no, it must have seemed like an impossible task. The assault from above was like the firebombing of Dresden, what could the solitary efforts of a single priest with no support do against the ravages of seemingly the entirety of the Catholic Church’s hierarchy? Well, quite a bit in fact as it turns out because he had the courage to stand in the breach.
It is our utter misfortune that so few joined him when if only a few more had, the worst of what was to come might have been staunched. But alas, we cannot begrudge what we were not given when what we were given was someone so great – it may be true that Father Perricone’s generation is one of the worst that ever lived but it is also true that in that generational void, our Lord raised up an horn of salvation for us in Father Perricone. Ok, ok, perhaps you are saying, am I really comparing Father Perricone to Saint John the Baptist? My answer is yes, and no. Saint John the Baptist is the epitome of courage in the face of ecclesial and secular corruption – the man whose very life was one marked by a hard “no” to vice and a vigorous “yes” to God. In this age, which mirrors to a lamentable degree the same corruption and vice faced by Saint John the Baptist in the first century, another man like Saint John the Baptist had to be raised – in fact, several men like him had to be raised. Father Perricone is one of those men raised up, and I apologize to no one for the comparison.
In giving up a “career” in the Church in the name of telling the truth, Father Perricone will prove to have a much more lasting impact than virtually all of his peers. When we think of bishops and cardinals in the Church, we think of men, at least in their context, who wield enormous power. They are really like CEOs of large corporations – presidents of Catholicism, Inc. They have the power to make and break men under their charge – to banish or reward – they interact with the powerful and are treated like royalty by those under them. The worst of them revel in the sycophancy that accompanies great power but few of them live lives that remind one of the Savior. The vast majority pass through this life without influencing a single soul in a way that counts for anything. In the words of scripture, they epitomize, “all is vanity.” What is ironic of the revolution, and Vatican II was a revolution of spirit, is that it eats its young and old alike. These men – these careerist bureaucrats – are remembered by no one almost at the moment of their deaths. All that defines them is the sorry lamentation of what could have been. Such is the deplorable state of Catholic leadership today.
Yet someone like Father Perricone has had a mammoth impact on souls because he instinctively did what every great man of the Church has done since the Apostles began their missionary efforts two-thousand years ago – he looked carefully for men and women of potential conviction and encouraged and confirmed them in it. The followers of Father Perricone have always been relatively small in number. They have not been the most handsome or the most successful of people. They weren’t the richest and they weren’t the smartest. But what he recognized in them was the kernel of courage that only required tending and encouragement to flourish. Father Perricone would take his people and inspire them with words that seemed crazy – they were the army of Christ that would save the world? They were the ones who would rebuild Christendom? Even his audience must have had its doubts. But he was right, they would be the ones – and they are the ones.
Father Perricone’s task was seemingly incredible. Not only did he need to encourage a group of people who were discouraged, he had to teach them how to live as Catholics as if he were starting from scratch. One of the primary casualties of the revolution had been the loss of basic understanding of how a Catholic lives, and Father started there. He promised that if they listened to him, he would teach them the traditions and practices of the Church that had produced generation after generation of saints. He never claimed an originality in any of this – he was simply passing on to them the faith that had been discarded for sixty years. The originality that is his was marked by a dogged determination and a cheerful resolution. For nearly fifty years, his influence is now momentaneous.
Speaking as just one of his disciples, Father Perricone helped me to understand what the life of a Catholic was and how to live it. I am sure that I am not alone – coming to the faith in our era, especially after the lack of formation that is all too common, is challenging. For the first several years of groping at Catholicism after my conversion, I felt like I was drinking from a firehose of information. Everyone seemed to have an opinion on what to, who to read, and where to start. In reality, what one converts to today is a cacophony of noise that is not easily silenced. The first step, for me anyway, was the grace of discovering the Latin Mass – at least the worship there matches the dignity of the faith that we hold. But I still needed more – I still needed to know what I was supposed to do with this faith. Father Perricone taught me – and he taught so many others. He calls his regimen the “norms of piety,” and I will not belabor them here. But the norms of piety are essentially the accumulated wisdom of the Church on how one practically goes about building one’s relationship with God with greater and greater fervor. His has always been a mission of action with a decided caution against platitude that so many of us can mistake for action. In addition to the norms, Father Perricone reacquainted his flock to the themes of order, discipline, and sacrifice as indispensable attributes of the Catholic. Taken together, he taught a lost generation of Catholics how to be Catholic in the most authentic and meaningful sense.
I wanted to be a hero – I wanted to live for something more. But that sentiment was mucked up by a civilization in decline, a Church in confusion, and a muddle of discordant voices counseling seemingly contradictory things. It was Father Perricone who helped me – more than anyone else – to live the life I wanted to live. It was him who showed me how to love God, what to read, how to confess, and what to do that made all the difference. If I am saved, and it is still an “if,” the human agent most responsible was not my parents, not my siblings, not my friends and not my family – it was Father John Perricone. And for that reason, I love him more than anyone else.
Over that time, he has touched countless souls, both priests and laity, with the message that we ought to love the faith of the Church – that we ought to love the Church – and we should conform ourselves to her as if our lives depended upon it, because they do. And he is tireless and indefatigable. He writes, he preaches, he gives conferences and retreats, he directs, and through it all, he encourages. And his spiritual footprint is much bigger than those who have actually heard him – you see, for every man and woman who was inspired to live a life of sanctity by Father Perricone, those people in turn went out and did the same for others, and those others did the same for still others. His reach therefore has had a profound multiplier effect – literally thousands upon thousands have seen their lives changed because one man from Jersey City said “no” fifty years ago. And all of these people say nothing of the children that were born by men and women he encouraged to be generous with God as it relates to having children. His impact has been great.
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I stand in a middle position with Father Perricone. I have known him for almost twenty years, and I have religiously attended his retreats and he has been my spiritual director for most of that time. Others have been with him much longer, and there are newer ones as well. The inspiration for this piece was during his most recent retreat – in the choir loft, I knelt alone taking in the many men below in the Church listening attentively to the message of Father. It wasn’t anything new that I was hearing, I know him well by now. But all the same, I felt my soul concurring with his words. Yes, we should be soldiers for Christ; yes, we ought to love our Mother with a deep affection; yes, the Church will be rebuilt by men like us if only we have the courage to see it through – yes, a thousand times, yes, we will not abandon our Lord even if everyone else cowardly leaves Him. And I thought what a profound mission this priest has – what a Hercules he is. And his inspiration, which is rousing, is intermixed with a catechesis that is something they all might have learned in a Catholic school a century ago. You see, Father is not just a spellbinding orator, he is also a careful schoolman. He is not all flash but also substance. I saw all of this in a moment, and I was moved by gratitude that God put this priest in my life. How good is He to give me this priest who helps me. How good is He indeed. I am but one now of many “Perriconistas.” And I take this moment, on behalf of all of them, to sign my praises for our sage.
Heaven and hell mirror each other in one particular way – reciprocity. In heaven, I suppose, the blessed are moved to a flowing love when they see the souls that helped them attain the beatific vision. They remember those who encouraged them in Godly things – who extolled virtue and criticized vice – and who counseled the righteous path. The love they feel for their fellow souls goes out and comes back in a never-ending cycle of affection and appreciation. In hell, the damned suffer a reverse form of reciprocity – they see the faces of those that brought them low. They remember those who encouraged them in vice, who rationalized their sin, who abused them and filled them with bile – and their souls are filled with rage and hatred that pours of the boiling cauldron of odium that is their lot forever. The cycle in hell is reversed but it is nonetheless one that acknowledges what was done here.
In this image, Father Perricone will be remembered in both places – I imagine that many in heaven will discover that there was one priest who helped them get there – and some who were helped will never recall even meeting him because they did not. They were influenced by another who was influenced by Father and so on. There will be a community of souls that will exclaim to the God of Heaven their love for the man who helped them. And he will love them back. In hell, it will be a different story altogether. As many as Father helped, there were many who met him, heard him, and decided that what he counseled was too difficult or too inconvenient. For those who heard him and rejected him, the souls in hell will remember Father Perricone and their own cowardness in rejecting him. They will burn against him when the crime was theirs and theirs alone.
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It could be that these verses were simply the excess of yet another retreat with my director. Perhaps. But the sentiments that upsurged in my heart do not feel like an exercise of maudlin sentimentality. Sometimes we ought to express such sentiments while they can be heard by the living – sometimes we ought to tell those we love that we love them. Even though I leave much to be desired as a soul in progress, I have confidence in the path because I know that Father Perricone has confidence in me. When the road becomes difficult, which happens more often than I want to admit, I take solace that Father Perricone is always there – encouraging, cheering, and inspiring me. And isn’t that what our Lord wanted us to do for one another – to love one another and give each other heart in this valley of tears? For that reason, I do not think my words are the effluence of mawkishness following a lovely retreat in a beautiful location – no, God reminded me in an unspoken way to speak encouragement to him who has encouraged me.
Saint John the Baptist, pray for us.
— Christopher Gawley, November 15, 2023
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