My Story

You can tell a different story about yourself every time you do it.

This one is different from the one I put on a website ten or twelve years ago. That one, for example, I wrote in the third person, “Fr. Joe was born . . .” etc. This one comes out of my reflecting on my life in new ways in recent years.

The subject or field I taught for close to 30 years was sociology. So the story I tell now begins with the social class background of my parents.

My father, Vincent Alois (“Al”) Zimmerman, dropped out of school after the seventh grade. My mother, Gertrude Marie Gallenbach Zimmerman, wanted to go to high school but could not, because she had to work to support her five siblings. That puts me solidly in a working class background.

As I compare my life with others in my Franciscan province, some of my fellow friars stand out as taking the initiative in ways I never dreamed of. Sociology used to contrast middle class and working class childrearing as follows: middle class parents trained their children to be autonomous and to take the initiative. Working class parents trained their children to be obedient and to take orders. Obedience has been the guiding virtue of my life.

Obedience and thift. My reaction to a new initiative has always been, “Where will I get enough money to do it?” The result has been unfilfulled potential.

My story is wrapped up with Quincy College (now Quincy University). I was sent to school to get my degree so I could teach here. That I did, in spite of my persistent dream of becoming a writer. I think that on some level I must have recognized that I would not be able to move in a different direction unless someone in authority ordered me or at least recommended that I move that way. Then, only a few years into my teaching career, my parents fell ill. I was the only sibling living near enough to them to help, so I resisted moving from Quincy. By the time they died in the late 1970’s I had developed other close relationships, which have kept me here ever since.

My ideas about poverty played into this. I reasoned, “Few people can just pack up and move in order to fulfill some personal dream. I profess to be poor like Francis of Assisi. For me, poverty means staying here and helping to support my Franciscan brothers financially.” Furthermore, I had been privileged to get my degree from a prestigious university, Harvard. Many people would have given their right arm to have that kind of education. I felt obliged to make use of that degree, and not just walk away from it.

There is another way that my social class background has shaped my academic career. I never learned the disciplines required to do sustained scholarly work.

My father, probably to compensate for his decision to drop out of school, spent his life trying his hand at all kinds of things. He studied trigonometry by correspondence school, and chemistry by night school. So in our basement he built a chemistry bench, complete with Bunsen burner, and a draftsman’s table. He had a circular saw, drill press, and lathe for working with wood and metal, and both acetylene and arc welding equipment. He did all the electrical, plumbing and carpentry work that needed doing. At his work at Illinois Bell Telephone he became very good at repairing electronic “carrier” units, amplifiers mounted on telephone poles that allowed several conversations to be carried on one pair of wires. From him I learned that you can get great satisfaction in life by bouncing around doing what appeals to you at the moment. I never learned the discipline of sustained effort and its rewards. Above all I never learned the value of sustained reading. I liked to read, but even as an adult, I found my reading interrupted by my mother. She seemed to think reading was unhealthy for me, and whenever she caught me doing it, would find something else for me to do. I learned to view reading as a guilty pleasure, to be postponed till after real work was done.

I loved the Church. Our home was across the street from St. James Church in Decatur. My parents speculated that their Catholic faith meant more to them after they moved from Springfield to Decatur. Springfield was a much more Catholic town. In Decatur, Catholics were a much smaller minority. Being a minority can reinforce your identity. But another reason for our strong Catholicism may have been the influence of the pastor at St. James, Fr. Francis Ostendorf. He was a very kind and gracious man, who I once heard described unfavorably as a “sacristy priest,” one whose life revolved around the church, not around the wider world. That kind of priesthood appealed to me.

I served Mass as soon as I was able, and was soon one of three boys selected to serve Mass at St. Mary’s Hospital, next door to the church. That meant getting up at 5:40 in the morning every third week and walking in the dark to the hospital, where I would wait in the dark for the Sisters to finish chanting their morning prayer.

Those were the days when Communist governments were taking power in eastern Europe and in China. I grew up expecting Communists to take over at any time, and once became convinced that a reclusive lady who lived on a wooded lot across the alley from our house was storing machine guns in her garage. An exiled Croatian priest was assigned as a chaplain at St. Teresa’s High School, and he because a frequent visitor in our home, with his stories of persecution by the Yugoslav Communists. In the minor seminary I copied trigonometry tables into my notebook. I figured that when the Communists kicked us out of the seminary, I would have those tables to use in building things.

After a year of novitiate in the Franciscan Order in Teutopolis, Illinois, our class spent three years in Cleveland studying philosophy and science. The experience was exhilarating. Some of my teachers were working at the Franciscan Institute at St. Bonaventure University, where there was a revival of interest in the fourteenth century Franciscan, William of Ockham. It was deliciously daring to ignore the prevailing focus on Thomas Aquinas. My personal development was helped by the friar in charge of our formation, Valerius Messerich. He commanded me under obedience to quit being so obedient, a remarkably freeing strategy for me.

After ordination I was sent ot Quincy for a year of pastoral internship—a year of experiencing a little bit of everything that most priests do. During that year I read Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in Terris, in which he suggested that political systems can contain germs of truth even when they are combined with unacceptable philosophical theories. This document, along with his 1961 encyclical Mater et Magistra, which urged Catholics to work with others outside the Faith, set me on a course that has characterized my life ever since. It was because of these two letters that I listed “sociology” as one of the fields I would like to study.

During my years of theology study, I became a close friend of a classmate, Clyde Ebenreck. We were very different, and almost always started any discussion on opposite sides of an issue. But we discovered that if we talked long enough we could come to an acceptable common position. The Province sent him, the non-conformist, to Catholic University, where he wrote a doctoral dissertation on Karl Marx. They sent me, the obedient conformist, to Harvard University.

My career at Harvard was not stellar. I lacked the discipline to become a true research scholar. I became involved in the anti-war movement (this was the 1960’s), and continued some priestly work at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Boston. After many ups and downs and false starts I finally finished my own doctoral dissertation, a study of St. Peter’s Church in the Chicago Loop. One professor mentored me through the process, a woman named Renee C. Fox. She once told me “your sociology is the way you should exercise your priesthood.” I never really accepted that. It took me a long time to overcome the lack of fit between sociology and my own spiritual outlook.

To sum up. I am 73 years old, a priest with a love for the Church, a lot of sociology background, and a delight in tweaking Church authorities when I think they have forgotten about the needs of today’s Catholic laity. Maybe I still have something to say to my fellow Catholics, cleric and lay.

Family Postscript

I have some neat pictures of my family that I want to share.

Shortly before he retiured in 1967, my Dad bought an Isetta car. He loved it because it was simple enough that he could take it apart and fix it.

My mother was the socializer in our family, the one who pushed her husband out of his basement workshop and encouraged me to meet people.

I have one brother, Vincent George, four years younger than me. He became a Franciscan priest, spent nine years in Brazil as a missionary, came home, left the Order and priesthood and got married. This past year he and his wife boarded two Korean high school students, and helped baby sit a granddaughter. Vince’s decisions have been freeing for me.