Father Christopher Collins: Passionate Passionist.

Monday, July 19, 2010


Father Christopher Collins: Passionate Passionist.


Thanks again Google for helping me find something that was in my memory banks but not so much. It took a quite bit to find where in the cloud that part of my brain was held hostage. I finally located it.

CC&S was written all over my freshman English Composition paper, an introduction of one of my best and most severe teachers. Father Christopher took no mercy on any student at Holy Family Seminary, least of all me. His handout included a full page of code. Sp meant misspelling. CC&S was combine, condense and subordinate. Every time there was some error in a composition it would bear his red Bic scribbling across the offending mistake. CC&S were paired with brackets outlining the particularly offensive text. My papers usually started and ended with brackets with lots of CC&S’s in between.

Our first class was dedicated to that handout that had that purple mimeograph smell to it. It was a list of code and the explanation of the rules of how our mentor would grade. While everyone was huffing the paper Father Christopher explained: “Either you get better or you fail”. It was that simple.

It did not matter if you were Charles Lamb or Adeline Virginia Woolf, although if you were Ms. Woolf you would not be allowed in the class in the first place. For us naïve college seminarian freshmen we had not a clue. It would have been best if we first submitted our worst ever writing sample for our first assignment. I did not know that.

I thought I was spectacular. I got an A- on my first paper, only slightly worse than best. I bragged about it to my classmates and got lots of slaps on the back. Hubris was my first mistake in Father Christopher’s English Composition class. Other blunders of equal proportion would eclipse it as I sailed from almost perfect instantaneously through the solid B on the second paper, then a C, C-, subsequently a D and then the dreaded F.

I could not believe it, an F. The only time I had ever gotten an F was when Father Dennehy caught me saying something to Bob Saglime during a World History test. Bob asked me the answer to #17. I whispered back for him to look it up. I bit the bullet and did not rat Saglime out. It took me all semester to raise my average back to passing for being stupid enough to be a smart ass instead of keeping my mouth shut.

My steady progression to “not worthy of even reading” happened although I was certain I was getting better. I met with Father Christopher to avoid settling into the tenth level of hell. I was hoping he would provide some insight. He did. His advice was follow his advice. Get better.

I advised Father Christopher that he had no advice only criticism. Even with my mimeographed Enigma Key I could only determine what was wrong. There were no instructions on how to make it better or even better, right. He looked at me as if I were speaking Hochdeutsch. Then he told me that if I looked at all of my papers it was obvious that I continued to make the same mistakes paper after paper, paragraph after paragraph and sentence after sentence… the dreaded WinDoze green underline. The one when right clicked simply states fragmented grammar (consider revising). Father Christopher’s dreaded red CC&S.

I was supposed to be the student he said. I needed to learn how to learn. If I could not figure out how to stop stuttering like an imbecile then I deserved no more than an F. The odd thing was Father Christopher had a bit of a stutter himself. It was one of the things he knew we mimicked.

He made his point abundantly clear. It was not that my ideas or writing were THAT terrible. It was only terrible because I was not improving. His original point was either get better or fail. Nothing had changed.

Father Christopher had other special rules that were enforced with priestly diligence. ‘guy’ was never to be used in any sentence unless it was someone named Guy or it was used in a conversation and was cited with parenthesis. If someone slipped up and wrote the word guy in any other context the penalty was to identify ten other words that could be used in its place and write them all down with the unabridged definition of each word.

Intentional misspellings were allowed as long as they were underlined and in quotes. Unintentional misspellings brought an automatic drop of one letter grade per misspelling. So I could improve from an F to a D by eliminating one misspelling per paper and I would not have to turn in the misspelled words spelled correctly with their unabridged definitions written ten times for every mistake. That was at least a start.

I had been living in Florida and our last assignment of the semester was to write a Christmas story. It hadn’t even snowed at Holy Family Seminary in West Hartford Connecticut. Writing about palm trees and sandy beaches was not going to pull my ass from the fire. I had to do something drastic.

Before the days of personal computing the closest thing I had to a word processor was a Sears portable typewriter in its molded plastic case. I had no Google. I did the best thing I could. I went to the library and checked out Robert Frost and anything I could find that was fiction, descriptive, narrative and available. Oh, and it was something about snow. I decided to make my paper “Christmas through the eyes of a St. Bernard.” I thought introducing the idea of a saint in the title couldn’t hurt. I even spent time crawling around on all fours near the Christmas tree to gain a perspective. The correct narrative style and adjectives were important elements of the grade. It would have helped to have DakotaDawg around to help with further research.

Thankfully three days before the paper was due it snowed. And it snowed and snowed and it snowed. I hadn’t seen snow in more than five years. Some of the descriptive terms used by the poets and authors started making a little sense. I came up with the term schrunched. Although I did not have WinDoze Spell and Grammar Checker I was certain it did not appear in the unabridged dictionary so I underlined it and put it in “parens” as I pounded the keys with two index fingers and then back spaced and held down the shift key while I deftly cut a black edged incision through the paper.

Father Christopher gave me a B-. He then settled on a C for the semester. Among all of my grades in college I am proudest of that C. The second semester Father Christopher and I disagreed whether I deserved a B+ or and A- but he prevailed. I still think it was the A-.


Get better or fail. It is not rocket surgery. It is one of the reasons I am persisting in this. I want to improve as a writer... I am shooting for a solid A.


“Father Christopher Collins, C.P., St. Paul of the Cross Province (1909-1988)

[April 6, 1988]
Born Michael D. Collins on April 12, 1909 in the Bronx, New York, he was the son of Michael and Mary Dineen. He professed his Passionist vows on August 15, 1929. His religious name was Christopher. He was ordained on May 30, 1936. He graduated from The Catholic University of America and went on for more studies at Laval University, Quebec, Canada. Father Collins was a professor at Holy Cross Seminary, Dunkirk, New York and the Passionist Junior College, West Hartford, Connecticut. In both places he was also the Dean of Studies. When the Passionist seminary system came to an end he became a preacher. He also wrote a Current Fact and Comment column each month for Sign Magazine and was province archivist. In September 1979 he joined the retreat house staff in Riverdale, New York.”


Chris, there is a lot missing from your story.

© 07.19.2010 steven d philbrick SR+ DakotaDawg