Published Autumn 1998
by Walton R. Collins
August 26, 1923:
The stationmaster wasn't sure what to do with the 14-year-old boy wearing a tag that read: "Deliver me to South Bend, Indiana." He had just stepped off the train from New York and it was 2 a.m. and he appeared to speak German, and maybe French too, but certainly no English.
A call to the police station brought a German-speaking policeman, who loaded the boy into his motorcycle sidecar and drove him home for cake and coffee. The youngster ate hungrily, and no wonder. He'd eaten almost nothing since he was released from Ellis Island two days previously and put aboard a westbound train with $25 in his pocket and the note pinned to his shirt. He didn't know if he was allowed to spend the money or if he'd be asked for it when he reached Notre Dame, where he was scheduled to enter the Holy Cross Minor Seminary.
A priest was supposed to have met the boy when the boat from Hamburg docked in New York
nearly two weeks ago, but the connection was missed and Ludwig Josef Putz was detained on Ellis Island as an unaccompanied minor for nine
days until authorities were certain he had a legitimate destination in this country. It
was a long and lonely nine days, but now young Ludwig had reached his new home. After the
cake, the policeman drove the lad to Walsh Hall on the Notre Dame campus, where a Holy
Cross Brother put him to bed for an hour, then woke him for Mass and breakfast and the
first day of a new life.
June 1998
Ludwig Josef Putz, known for more than six decades as Father Louis J. Putz, CSC, lay in a Saint Joseph's Medical Center bed, complaining vehemently to an old friend, Gene Moore of Attleboro, Massachusetts, a 1947 graduate of Notre Dame, "Frustrated is not a good enough word," Moore related later. "He was pissed off at not being able to attend to his work. He wanted to get out of bed, this 89-year-old man. He had important things to do."
He did manage to leave the hospital bed, but not for long. Early in the morning of June 24, in Holy Cross House back on Notre Dame's campus, a stroke put a final end to his earthly work.
Never mind. Louis Putz had accomplished an astonishing number of important things during that work. One of them was to reform seminary education in the United States. Another was to launch such Catholic Action movements as the Young Christian Students, the Christian Family Movement, Harvest House and the Forever Learning Institute. Scarcely winded by all that, he also wrote several books and founded Fides Publishers, a company that translated for American audiences many of the key thinkers who paved the way for Vatican II. And those are only the major landmarks of his life.
In a foreword to an unpublished biography of Father Putz, Father David B. Burrell, CSC, wrote: "It has long been my contention that were the Holy Spirit to write the history of the Church in America, the name of Louis Putz would loom large. . . . [His] is a view which develops the priesthood of the laity as central to the mission of the Church, thereby directing ordained clergy and religious to concentrate their efforts on formation of informed and dedicated Christians."
In virtually every liturgy he celebrated, Putz's homily message was unvarying: "You, the laity, are the Church." He was so blunt in delivering this message that some considered him a crusader, others a rebel and troublemaker. "St. Paul of Tarsus is my hero, my role model," he wrote not long before his death. "I feel he was the first to record the founding of the communities of the early church and needs to be studied and scrutinized at this time in the Church. We are in the presence of a highly centralized and bureaucratic church . . . [with] a strong conservative element that is all for maintaining the old order, and a very secular, amoral and materialistic society. . . . We can learn from St. Paul how to renew our society with the help of lay communities that discover a Christian way of life in their own social environment."
A Prison Called Seminary
Louis Putz didn't do very well at first in his seminary studies. "Pretty miserable," he would later say of his early performance. But once he mastered English -- which didn't take long -- he began to excel. By the time he was graduated from Notre Dame in 1932, his diploma read magna cum laude.
Studies were one thing, life in the seminary was something else again. He felt stifled by the inflexible curriculum priests-to-be were forced to follow. Notre Dame's rich array of courses tantalized him but lay out of reach. Worse yet were the prison-like rules of that era. Seminarians were discouraged from associating with Notre Dame faculty, lay or clerical, and they could not enter student residence halls, not even to visit priest-rectors. They were permitted out only in groups, never alone or in pairs. The notion of reforming seminaries implanted itself in Putz's mind as he puzzled over a system that walled off future priests from the people they were preparing to shepherd. One good friendship started in those years, however. Father Howard Kenna, CSC, a future Holy Cross provincial, was impressed by the young German's intelligence and spirit, and would remember him at a crucial moment in the coming decades.
After his Notre Dame degree, Putz was sent back to Europe for theological studies, this time to France. Over the remainder of the decade he studied at the diocesan seminary in LeMans and at the Institut Catholique de Paris. He was ordained, became director of another seminary in France, and was deeply involved in a variety of programs grouped under the phrase Catholic Action -- the umbrella term in that era for groups inspired by the belief that lay Catholics must play an active and central role in the church's social mission. During these years he met and worked with many of Europe's most prominent theologians, including Teilhard de Chardin, Yves Congar and others who paved the intellectual and theological path to the Second Vatican Council. He was profoundly impressed by the activism and evangelism of Canon Joseph Cardijn and the young workers' movement that the Belgian priest liked to describe as "the wondrous intersection where prayer and action unite." Late in the decade, as chaplain to French youth groups, Putz often celebrated Mass outdoors, facing the people and speaking, except for the canon, in the vernacular. These habits he would take back to the United States when the time came.
It came in 1939 after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Still technically a German citizen, Putz was in danger of internment in France, and he even risked street attack by angry Frenchmen. It was time to go back to Notre Dame.
Second Coming
Louis Putz's second journey to New York was, if anything, more harrowing than the first. Just getting out of France proved to be the stuff of high wartime drama.
First he needed a visa. Suspicious of this German citizen's motives and documentation, the U.S. vice consul in Paris was on the verge of turning the petition down when he decided to test the priest with a trivia question. "What's the name of the men's shirt factory in South Bend?" asked the vice-consul. "Wilson Brothers on West Sample Street," the priest shot back, and then showed the official that he was wearing a Wilson shirt. That cleared the first hurdle.
As Putz left the consulate with his visa, he was seized by French police and taken to a detention camp. When he offered to serve as camp chaplain, the commandant sent him to a parish church down the street to get what he needed. Instead, Putz hustled back to LeMans, where he surrendered to civilian authorities and then persuaded them to allow him to migrate to America.
The next problem was finding a ship. Stopped on his way to Le Havre harbor by a platoon of British marines, he showed his papers but withheld his German passport. None of the British were fluent enough to read the French documents, but they recognized one of the signatures and cleared him to board a ship departing for England. From there he continued across the Atlantic, successfully evading the deadly U-boat hunters that prowled the sea lanes in those days of submarine warfare.
The next tense moment came in New York where immigration officials, after scanning the passenger list, pulled him out of line for the very first interview; not a good sign, he feared. They questioned him closely -- mostly about the University of Iowa's 7-6 football upset of Notre Dame a few days earlier. Though he had been in mid-ocean when the game was played, Putz commiserated with one of the immigration officials, who proved to be a Notre Dame alumnus, and promised to carry greetings back to campus for him.
Finally he walked down the gangplank to find a westbound train. This time, when he reached South Bend, he needed no kindly policeman to feed him cake or transport him to campus.
The '40s
Soon Father Putz was teaching history at the University and serving as prefect on the second floor of Cavanaugh Hall . . . and finding students sympathetic to the Catholic Action cause. Burnett C. Bauer, who received Notre Dame degrees in 1938 and 1946, vividly remembers the evening when he accepted an invitation to visit Putz in his "cell" following a lecture on the Cardijn approach to prayer and activism. "He immediately organized us," Bauer recalls. "I was treasurer. We met every week and brought a nickel or a dime to cover things like paper. Even after I moved to LaPorte, I came back every week to the meetings." This group was a precursor of the Young Christian Students, or YCS, at Notre Dame. A natural fit with the Catholic Action culture Putz transplanted from France, YCS encouraged members to become student leaders and seek out campus institutions in need of reform. In the placid 1950s, long before student activism was in fashion, recalls Father Burrell, "YCS was the only radical group on campus."
The next Catholic Action venture to carry the Putz imprint was the Christian Family Movement "Father Louis resisted the idea at first," Bauer says. "He believed in the 'like by like' formula for Catholic Action, workers meeting with workers, students with students, men with men. But despite his reputation for stubbornness -- and he did tend to give orders -- he could be convinced. My wife and I were part of a couples group in LaPorte after our first child was born, and I invited him to come to a meeting. He liked what he saw and immediately sat down and outlined a six-month program for us."
The Christian Family Movement provides a mechanism for members to integrate their roles as Christians with their daily lives as husbands, wives and children within the family unit. Within months, the CFM idea was implanted in Chicago by Patricia and Patrick Crowley, and from there it spread from to both coasts, thriving until it came under withering fire in the 1960s from conservative Catholics who disagreed with the social agenda of those CFM groups that focused on issues like war and peace, racial equality and women's rights.
The next couple of decades were among the most productive of Putz's life. Though disappointed that his order did not choose to send him on to advanced studies, he continued to teach at Notre Dame and work with students. He guided YCS and encouraged it to start a student book exchange and an annual Mardi Gras fundraising event. He launched Fides Publishers to translate and spread the works of Vatican II-style thinkers. He met and exchanged ideas with Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin of the national Catholic Workers Movement during their periodic visits to South Bend.
Then Father Kenna stepped back into his life.
Seminary Reform
In June of 1966, with Vatican II over for less than a year, reform was sweeping the Church, in seminaries no less than everywhere else. When Father Kenna, now head of the Indiana Province of Holy Cross, pondered candidates for rector of Moreau Seminary, Louis Putz was the name that kept coming to mind.
Putz still gritted his teeth over the regimentation of his own seminary days, when obedience and conformity were the only virtues that counted, and isolation from the real world was maintained rigorously. Little had changed in the intervening years, but now the seminary students and a portion of the faculty were rebelling against the status quo. Putz's response to was invite Father Henri Nouwen, Monsignor John Egan, Father John Dunne and other reform-minded priests to come and help him re-create the seminary experience. Gradually he gave seminarians input into their lives. He set aside Wednesdays and Saturdays for them to work in parish or community activities. He met with their parents. He encouraged them to hold jobs and live among the laity during summers. He even let them go to classes without wearing cassocks.
Father Patrick Gaffney, CSC, remembers those years: "The Louie Putz I knew trained young seminarians, but he was ambivalent about that task because so much of his life was spent trying to get people out of that clerical mode -- and here he was training people to go into it. But he did a great job. One example: Under his predecessor at Moreau, vows were renewed in a ritualistic way; renewal decisions were discussed at a higher level with no input from the candidates, who then were notified by letter. Putz came into this crisis atmosphere and opened up the place really fast. He changed the system so there was interaction seminarians got their input. And we were free to integrate with our age mates.
"It wasn't 'do-your-own-thing,' though," Gaffney adds. "He wanted community. The old system in many ways was based on fear, on conformity. His principle was pastoral. He believed the key mission of a theologian was to care for people's inner life, to encourage their growth in grace and faith. Years later he quipped, 'In the first year at Moreau I took the lid off, then spent the next five trying to put it back on.'"
One of the reforms Putz was most proud of got him into trouble with the hierarchy. He instituted a "People's Mass" at Moreau, opening the liturgy not only to families and friends of the seminarians but to the entire local community. Mass was celebrated facing the people and in the vernacular, and the crowds grew week by week. A few local parish priests and laypeople took offense at these changes and complained to the local ordinary, who took the complaints seriously enough to consider placing Moreau Seminary under interdict and firing Father Putz as its rector. The Putz response was typical: He invited the bishop to come and see the situation for himself. The bishop came to campus but concluded he did not have enough information to make a decision either way. The forces of change won on a technicality.
In 1972 Father Kenna asked his protégé to stay on as rector for another three years, but Putz, now in his 60s and experiencing health problems, declined. Most of the reforms he instituted remain in effect 30 years later.
Miracle
It took a lot to slow Louis Putz down, but it looked for a while as if his developing arthritis, diagnosed as incurable, might accomplish it. Father Dave Burrell remembers what happened next:
"Louie went to Montreal where a doctor gave him new medicine and he prayed to Brother André," a venerable Holy Cross brother who has since achieved beatification as Blessed André. "He told me that the first night there, he had trouble walking down the hall to the lavatory. But the next night he realized he was walking without pain. He gave the credit to Brother André. Someone later asked him, 'How do you know it was Brother André and not the medicine?' He replied, 'Brother André would never have asked that question.'"
Father Putz was an unprepossessing man for a rebel and a crusader. His never lost his mild German accent. He had a sleepy look and a serious mien that disguised a droll sense of humor. The sleepy look sometimes was genuine. "He was a very disciplined guy," says Burrell, "and a man of prayer. He got by on about five hours of sleep, but he sometimes dozed through meetings."
Though his low-key manner helped shield him from many of the problems crusaders usually encounter, there were a few bumps in the road that he couldn't sidestep. One was a court defeat in the1950s when Fides was sued by a secular publishing house, which charged that the not-for-profit Fides enterprise enjoyed an unfair competitive advantage over commercial publishers. Fides lost both the suit and its not-for-profit status in a landmark decision that changed the rules for all religious publishing houses.
As for ecclesiastical authority, though he won his first contest with the bishop of the Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese over the People's Mass, Putz lost a later round to the same bishop in the 1970s after he took over the diocese's Marriage Preparation Program. He was just starting to reinvigorate it when the bishop became aware that Putz was troubled by the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which proscribed the use of artificial means of birth control. Like many other clergy, he thought more consideration should have been given to the recommendations of the Papal Commission on Birth Control and the opinion of lay couples. The bishop found this view intolerable and relieved Putz of command.
'Third Age' Advocate
At about that same time, the Holy Cross innovator was turning his attention to what he called "ministries for Third Agers," a term he preferred to "senior citizen" or "golden-ager." He borrowed the phrase from French social scientists who see life as a chain with three links: the age of learning, the age of earning, and the age of returning, the last being that point in life when there's time to give back accumulated knowledge, talent and experience to society's needy members. First Father Putz founded Harvest House, a center designed to foster the spiritual, physical, mental, social and cultural well-being of Third Agers. A year later he founded Forever Learning Institute, an inexpensive continuing-education program for adults over 50. Though they were started in South Bend, these initiatives soon spread to such places as Phoenix, Houston, Galveston, Wichita and California's Coachella Valley.
Late in his life, the indefatigable priest was instrumental in getting still another program for Third Agers off the ground, this time for Notre Dame senior alumni. Called ND's FIRST -- for Fighting Irish Retired Service Team -- this initiative encourages retired alumni around the country to pool their talents to help solve social problems in their home towns. FIRST represents the newest outreach of the Notre Dame Alumni Association's Community Service Program.
A Last Blessing
In a eulogy delivered in Moreau Seminary the evening before Father Putz's funeral, Father David Burrell reminded listeners of his old friend and mentor's emphasis on the priesthood of all the faithful -- an emphasis, Burrell declared, that inspired the pattern he imposed on seminary education: "formation in small groups of young men whose priesthood would ideally be one of galvanizing lay persons to become church."
A few days earlier, during a visit from an old friend, Louis Putz had demonstrated how fervent and unflagging that belief remained in the final days of his life. He and his friend, a layman he had known since the late 1940s, talked for a while and then it was time for the layman to leave. As the friend rose to go, the bedridden priest bid him pause.
"Give me your blessing," he asked.
His friend was glad to comply.
Walt Collins, a former editor of Notre Dame magazine, is indebted to Robert L. Ball and Kyle Markham for access to their unpublished biography of Father Putz, Ventures in Faith.