“Priest of Jesus Christ celebrate this Holy Mass as if it were your first Mass, your last Mass, your only Mass.” This saying is on the vesting bench in the sacristy where I prepare for Mass. I suppose it is meant to stir up devotion and awe in the priest who reads it. In me it also produces a feeling of gratitude to God for all that He has done in my life.
I am Father John Burger of the Missionary Society of St. Columban, the Columban Fathers. I have been a priest for 52 years. I was born in 1946 in Philadelphia. I am the son and first child of John Jacob Burger and Frances Mary Burger. My parents were just getting engaged when Pearl Harbor happened, and my father immediately knew he would be drafted. They decided to wait until after the national emergency was over and did not get married until four months after V-J day.
My father’s great-grandfather came to Maryland from Switzerland sometime before 1851. His maternal grandfather, Leopold Hunsinger came to Philadelphia from Alsace in 1882. My father had four cousins who were priests: Three of them were Holy Ghost Fathers: Frs. Francis Trotter, C.S.Sp.; Charles Trotter, C.S.Sp.; Leonard Trotter, C.S.Sp. The fourth was Fr. John Martin of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia. Sister Peter Faber (Mildred Trotter) of the Sisters of St. Francis of Philadelphia was also a first cousin of my dad.
My mother was born in Derry, Ireland, in 1913 and came to the U.S. with her family as an eleven-year-old in January 1925 on the Cameronia from Moville, Northern Ireland, to New York, arriving at Ellis Island. Two of my mother’s brothers also became Holy Ghost Fathers: William G. Marley, C.S.Sp., and Edward G. Marley, C.S.Sp. My Grandmother’s uncle was Cardinal Michael Logue of Armagh.
That’s a lot of priests in one family, I’d say! Why have I told you all that? Well, all that background, plus the fact that I attended Catholic School from first through twelfth grade, might have you thinking that my vocation has a certain inevitability. But I assure you that is not how it felt to me. My uncle, “Father Bill” Marley, was the one I saw more of than any of the others. He was usually assigned somewhere on the East Coast between Rhode Island and Virginia. He even stayed at our house while recovering from a heart attack. It was good to have seen so many priests in informal situations. It humanized them in my eyes. The other Spiritans (Holy Ghost Fathers) spent a lot of their time overseas or assigned far from Philadelphia.
Our family home was in the Cornwells Heights section of Bensalem, walking distance from St. Charles Borromeo Church and School and the Blessed Sacrament Sisters Convent that we always referred to as Mother Katherine’s. This location meant that it was easy to get myself to Church and to Mother Katharine’s when I was scheduled to serve Mass.
Cornwells Heights was also home to the Holy Ghost Apostolic College, then the minor seminary for the Spiritans. In 1959, the order moved its College Seminary to the campus of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and the Apostolic College began its transformation into Holy Ghost Prep. That was the year before I graduated from Eighth grade, and I entered Holy Ghost Prep in its second year as a Prep school.
During my time at Holy Ghost, I started thinking about various professions. I read a book about the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and dreamed of designing buildings. In those years, I was not at all attracted to anything in the medical field. Our freshman religion textbook was called Man’s Search for Happiness. Thinking about the various ways people strive for happiness captured my imagination. At some point, I thought perhaps of becoming a priest. I did some volunteering with one of my priest-teachers among the deaf patients at Byberry State Hospital. Nine of the 39 in my graduating class were seminarians. And I was friendly with some of them, but this presented me with a problem: if I went along with family tradition and joined the Holy Ghost Fathers, would I just be tagging along with them? Prolonging high school? How would I know if I were really testing my own vocation? I was not attracted to the prospect of spending all my life in a Philadelphia area parish or teaching in a Catholic high school.
What I did have was an interest in the Far East, and was impressed by the large populations of the countries of Asia. I had a penal in Japan, and I was reading books such as Deliver Us from Evil by Dr. Tom Dooley. Just at that time, another priest arrivedlike Melchizadek – seemingly out of nowhere. A Columban priest who had known my mother’s family when they were children in Ireland passed through Philadelphia in the summer of 1962. He was traveling across the States before returning to Ireland, having been assigned to Burma (now Myanmar) for 25 years. He had some great stories. It was the first contact I had with any of the Columban Fathers. The following year I did a “come and see” weekend at their seminary in Milton, Massachusetts. The Holy Ghost priests were always very supportive of my pursuing my own vocation path. And in September 1964, I started at the Columban College Seminary in Wisconsin.
Vatican Council II was in session, but not much had changed by the Fall of 1964. By the time I was ordained in 1973, a great deal had changed. In one sense, I am glad I experienced the changes as they happened, but the 1960s and early 1970s were not an easy time. As someone described it, the essentials would not change, but non-essential things could change. The only problem was that there did not seem to be a consensus about what was “essential.” For the first three or four years of seminary, we were away from the world, surrounded by farmland. Later, we continued to live at a Columban Seminary but commuted to the Boston Diocesan Seminary and had many opportunities for cross-registration to other theological schools in the Boston area. And I took advantage of many of these opportunities.
Toward the end of my seminary years, we were asked to write an essay about ourselves, our talents and interests and where we would like to be assigned overseas. In my essay, I mentioned that I would rather work with a small group of people that I got to know well rather than a large group with whom I had superficial contact. I have always suspected that those words sent me to Japan.
In the 52 years I have been a priest, I have worn many hats: foreign missionary, student priest, pastor, counselor, college lecturer, seminary rector, editor, superior, chaplain. I believe we learn academic theology in the seminary, but that we learn how to be priests from our parishioners and other priests. I was in the priesthood for about five years before I had a sense of that. I followed a priest with long experience as a missionary in Japan and China. His were big shoes to fill. People looked to me for direction and leadership as they had turned to him. I had to combine the skills of listening keenly and preaching. I had to know when to speak up and lead and when to let the parish council build a consensus – something the Japanese are good at.
It was also in that parish that I realized the extent to which the Church is a beacon of hope for people on the fringes of Japanese Society. It may play into the Japanese prejudice that religion is only for the weak, but I feel proud that some troubled people have enough hope and trust in the Church to come calling at our doors with their problems. It is not that I stayed in the parish compound and waited for the town to beat a path to my door. I tried to be out in the neighborhood, letting myself be known. For example, I became acquainted with a barber who once gave me such a close shave that I was good for 48 hours, a teller at the bank, and other people around the town. This was another forte of my predecessor, who loved to joke with people. I am not sure his jokes always translated well, but I am convinced that the warmth of his humor did. I inherited his cordial relationship with elementary and junior high principals around the area. Years have passed since all this took place, but looking back, I still marvel at what that priest taught me by example, without his even being present, just giving me his path to walk in.
Columban Fr. John Burger lives and works in Pennsylvania.
