At a Secular University: Does God Talk to People?

Is it possible to detect the “tiny whispering sound” even at a secular university? Consider the story and influence of a particular Dominican priest, a convert whose evangelical spirit was a life ring at a university Newman Center. Affectionately known as “Father Joy,” Fr. Joseph (Jack) Fulton, O.P., enfleshed not only a deep joy, but possibly all the twelve fruits of the Holy Spirit.

Fulton served at the iconic Blessed Sacrament Parish in Seattle for almost four decades, from 1960 until his peaceful passing at the age of 86 on the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe in 1998. As a freshman, I first met him at the Prince of Peace Newman Center in 1962. But, about “the tiny whispering sound” on a secular campus, it’s best to begin with an unrelated coffee table discussion in 1974.

By then, I was deeply immersed in interdisciplinary graduate studies. Course selections spanned across many “social science” specializations not offered in private Liberal Arts colleges: the impact of the West in traditional Asia, the communal politics of South Asia, communalism in other post-colonial territories, rural tribalism and urbanism in West Africa, ethnic studies in Soviet Eastern Europe, World Politics after World War II, a longer history of the Middle East, all in contrast with Western versions of sociology. Talcott Parsons, Emile Durkheim, Herbert Marcuse, and then Frantz Fanon were on the reading list. Earlier studies ranged from Renaissance art in northern and southern Europe, to a dip into constitutional law with Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, where life is “solitary, nasty, poor, brutish and short,” and Rousseau’s majoritarian General Will, where we can be “forced to be free.”

Lacking any formal Catholic exposure (Aquinas), whether K-12 or afterward, I was blessed to be mentored by a Jesuit history scholar, and by unsystematic readings along the way: Augustine, Chesterton, Newman’s Idea of a University, Maritain, Copleston’s History of Philosophy, Christopher Dawson, the social encyclicals beginning with Rerum Novarum.

Difficulties and doubt

As more of a patchwork dabbler than a scholar, how was I to fit all the above together? At least in my mind, and at a secular university? How to fit specialized silos with the universal and “transcendent dignity of each human person,” without exception?

Newman reminds us that “ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.” But what if the Judeo-Christian dispensation really is simply another narrative, eventually gone with the wind? Without a “universe,” is it the best we can do in terms of hope, only to turn to the so-called “social sciences”? A presumptive branch of the empirical natural sciences? Lost, the fully human person “in the moment of departure, each is greater than history, although but a part” (St. John Paul II, The Place Within, 1982)?

In 1974, the chairman of my doctoral dissertation committee was an anthropologist. His professional career had placed him in Afghanistan in the 1960s during the monarchy, where he had worked to reform the educational system. When I asked even in 1973 if he would ever return: “No, they would kill me as soon as I stepped off the plane.” In a small coffee shop group, this professor also was recounting the mid-18^th-century beginning of British rule in India, long before the communal and bloody 1947 partition of Muslim Pakistan from predominantly Hindu India. Abruptly, there came a silent pause, and then this introspection: “My wife is Catholic and I am Episcopalian, and I do not know if God talks to people.”

Was this pause the hidden and “tiny whispering sound”? Today, I am reminded of the faint opening detected by the atheist C. S. Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, when “the hardest boiled of all the atheists I ever knew” remarked that the historicity of the Gospels was pretty good. “Rum thing, that…All that stuff …about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.”

As in the Temple at the time of Calvary, the veil in the modernist Ivory Tower was split right down the middle. Exposed, was this the amnesia of “learned ignorance,” and what Lewis called “chronological snobbery”? What if God actually does talk to people? As in the Old Testament words of prophecy and then—in the fullness of time—“the Word made flesh” (Jn 1:14). What if the Incarnation event is the Truth in person; and then post-Enlightenment academia is a forgetfulness and a graffiti veneer?

A convert from Methodism

With this radical proposition, now let’s go back to 1962, still at the same University of Washington, when I was a freshman. I first encountered Fr. Fulton at the Newman Center. On Monday nights, he conducted a small Bible study class. Even from the beginning, it was more than his familiarity with the Old Testament that stirred a peace deeper than my academic cognitive dissonance. Digging into his briefcase, Fulton moved with ease between his King James Version, a Greek version, and the Latin. He was also teaching himself Hebrew, to read the Old Testament directly from original sources.

Who was this man, Fr. Fulton? His upbringing, his conversion, his crisis of faith and then epiphany, and his enduring witness within the life of the Church?

Born in 1912 in Brooklyn, he fully converted from Bible-literate Methodism in 1933 when he himself was a student at the university. A distant descendant of Robert Fulton of steamboat fame, he was a lover of trains and trolleys. Fulton’s father died with Jack was only two. After his conversion, he adopted St. Joseph as his own foster father, but late in life also confided, “I sometimes think I have spent my whole life looking for my father.” Fulton was raised by his mother and maternal grandmother. When he was an early teen, the family moved across the country and away from his dear brownstone row houses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of Brooklyn. His mother had noticed Jack’s evening strolls, alone, across his beloved Brooklyn Bridge. Searching the scriptures for guidance, she discovered that she was to take Jack across the country (in 1925) to unfamiliar Seattle and the rainforest Washington State. Maybe she had stumbled across Abraham (Genesis 12:1) and his providential journey into an earlier wilderness.

Their new home was a few blocks north of the university campus. And, within view of a nearly completed and majestic Catholic Church, said to be the best example of Gothic Revival architecture west of the Mississippi River. It was not long, during a lunch break at the nearby Roosevelt High School, before Protestant Jack sneaked into this frightful Catholic Church, at the beginning of the noon Mass. What was this…all kinds of people, some in suits and some in overalls, and all of them together attentive to something happening at the altar? He returned often, and on Sundays would hike south a few miles to St. James Cathedral for Vespers and Benediction. On one such occasion, “I felt that I was lifted right off the ground!”

Years later, Fulton pointed me to the spot in his neighborhood where something similar had happened. Still as a teen, between steps on the sidewalk he had instantly realized three things: “first, I was to become a Catholic; second, I was to be a priest; and third, I was to be a Dominican!” And, then, of a solitary and tiny flower, “every flower is a symbol of God’s love for us.”

Fulton’s attentive mother guessed his path, but he agreed to wait until he had entered and finished four years at the University of Washington. The moment together was stressed and they “both went to bed in tears.” “All through these years I have prayed, and have asked our pastors and friends to pray for one thing only, that you would find the will of our Heavenly Father for your life, and do it. I have never prayed that you would not be a Catholic.”

At the university, the young Fulton majored in Latin, with an additional graduate year in Greek and Political Science. Political science—perhaps this helps explain how one of such simplicity was also later alert to the post-Vatican II deception of a “church within a Church.” Fulton graduated as the top student on the entire campus, the only one with straight As, and the winner of the President’s Medal for 1934. (The plaque is still on the wall in the student union building.) Looking much like a future professor, his real intention was to not be behind when he entered the seminary. As part of a mini-Oxford movement on campus, Fulton was baptized in 1935. His baptismal sponsor was an older and scholarly friend and himself a recent convert, Dr. Herbert Ellsworth Cory, a popular lecturer on science and the fine arts.

Cory had classified himself as originally an “atheistic humanist.” His conversion story, like Newman’s Apologia pro vita sua, is published as the scholarly Emancipation of a Freethinker (Bruce Publishing, 1941). Fulton’s testimony comes half a century later as Love Grows in Brooklyn (Hillcraft Publishing, 1991). Fulton took a year of parish sabbatical to return to Brooklyn and write, and where he found himself deeply loved in the neighborhood of his youth, now overwhelmingly Black Baptist. During an earlier of his four trips to New York, in 1968: “I was delighted to find the friendliness of the people to me, and the cleanliness of the streets, and the good condition of our brownstone houses—much of it due to the Block Associations. Community spirit and self-help seem to be the solution….”

The witness and malaise of Father Fulton

Wherever he went, Fr. Fulton spread without many words the fact that the God of love does talk to people. In the Seattle area in the 1980s, he delivered five different bible classes each week. His “testimony” of finding and being found by Jesus Christ always drew an audience—many not Catholic. In 1982, when he made a pilgrimage to Scotland—on the 150^th anniversary of his favorite author’s death, Sir Walter Scott—it was only a week or two before this Presbyterian stronghold had him on BBC radio to recount his personal story.

Part of the draw was the weekly Blessed Sacrament Sunday feed-in, sometimes drawing over two hundred of the needy, begun in 1969. But another part was that his ancestors had been Scottish Presbyterian and in 1691 had fought on the side of the Protestant William of Orange at the Battle of Boyne! Fulton owned a complete set of Scott’s more than two dozen novels and had read them all at least three times. While in the seminary, he had been on the radio on Sunday nights as the reader for the Bay Area (Charles) Dickensian Society.

The centerpiece of the Fulton testimony came before the 1980s. In late 1967, after I had finished my undergraduate work (a five-year course in architecture), I visited Fulton on a blustery Autumn day when the Priory was deserted. This was the Vietnam era, and I was scheduled to leave shortly for Naval Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. The full weight of post-Vatican II malaise and worse had found its way onto Fulton’s shoulders. He “experienced a crisis in my faith…they have taken everything from me,” he confided, “I wonder if this is what the saints call the dark night of the soul….All I have left is only Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.” The darkness was palpable….Of this moment, he later wrote:

As best I can understand what happened to me, it seemed that my life of prayer and worship was greatly upset by the changes in the Mass which had originated in the [Second] Vatican Council. Although the Council had simply said that from now on the Mass may be offered in the vernacular, the idea seemed to have taken root everywhere that now it must be celebrated in the vernacular [….]

It always seemed to me that the priest was leading us to the altar where God was present in a very special way, and that we were all united as a congregation led by the priest to the altar. The Latin Mass itself gave me the feeling of being united with all the worshipers of the years gone by, and all the worshipers today throughout all the world. We seemed to be united in time and space. Wherever I had traveled, in all parts of the world, it was the same Mass, so that I had the sense of belonging to the great universal Church” [….]

The sense of awe and mystery was gone, and, altogether, the Sunday Masses especially became to me the most unattractive services I had ever attended. Where I had once experienced so powerfully the presence of Jesus and the reality of His worldwide mystical Body, now I was left with a great void (Love Grows in Brooklyn).

But then, in March 1968, a handwritten letter: “Blessed Sacrament Church is still full of young people. I love them all and hope they will find some peace and joy and real experience of God.” Not much later, too, a motorcycle clan parked their bikes on the front lawn of the Priory and made their presence known. To a cautious priest at the door: “May we talk with Father Fulton, our friend.”

Outpouring of the Holy Spirit

In August 1968, Fulton had found himself with only an Episcopalian friend and a cleric, and a member from his Dominican community. It was during a break in the annual diocesan meeting, this time in St. Thomas Seminary, east from Seattle and Lake Washington. The Dominican was suffering in his spiritual life, and it was the Protestant cleric, not the Dominican Fulton, who ministered to him. Fulton sat aside and at least tried to pray. Then, the cleric approached, “Do you realize you were praying in tongues just now?”

The happening had begun…and Fulton later was given the duty to report to the whole assembly from his small group roundtable.

It seemed to me that I was speaking in a very ordinary way, and actually I was quite normally nervous, when suddenly the whole audience began to react with clapping and cheers and our Archbishop [Connolly] from the back of the auditorium cried out, “Father Fulton, this is wonderful. You’ll give our retreat next year.”

About this happening, Fulton experienced four distinct manifestations:

First, I realized that a new power of love had come into my life that broke down all barriers and seemed to flow toward all people [he formerly had been especially fearful around hippies].

Then, As the days passed after that first outpouring of the Spirit, I began to realize ever more cogently that Jesus Christ is indeed and in very truth alive, risen from the grave, and living in intimate union with His Father [….]

This means [third] that all he taught us of His Father’s love and merciful forgiveness is really true. Jesus is alive in me with all His love and gives me all the strength I need. We can live heart to heart [‘cor ad cor loquitur,’ Cardinal Newman’s motto].

And then, in preparing for one of his Bible classes: ‘What has happened to the Bible?’ These were the old familiar words I had so often read and taught, but they all seemed new to me [….] No longer were they just beautiful and interesting thoughts, but I kept saying to myself, ‘Why, yes, that is true. Why, yes, I know now what it means. Why, yes, I know that is true for I have experienced it [….] Now there seemed to be a life-giving power in the message of the words, as if God were truly speaking to me.

“Does God talk to people?” Elijah’s tiny whispering sound—and the alarming reality of the historic and historical Incarnation: “the Word made flesh.” Fulton’s favorite Gospel was John, as in “God is love” (1 Jn 4:16), but his favorite line in the entire New Testament was from St. Paul: “I thank God that the message which I preached to you, you received not just as words, but as power, as the Holy Spirit, as utter conviction” (1 Thes 1:5).

Fulton continued in all those years after the Council to say the Latin Mass for small groups, and seemed untouchable. By word of mouth, the faithful came from other cities. Not quite the Tridentine, but the Dominican, which, he explained, is a century older but differs in only one or two phrases. He also said the Novus Ordo, and even for a while the “folk Masses, all of which I enjoy.” Finally, in 1994, he was delighted to receive from Seattle’s archbishop, written formal permission to continue for as long as he lived (still thirteen years before Pope Benedict’s 2007 Summorum Pontificum). Not to be advertised, but made known only by word of mouth.

After attending another of those Masses in Blessed Sacrament Church (where the tabernacle was still misplaced in a side altar) I remarked to Fr. Fulton that it was too bad that the assembly was not a little larger. He was astonished:

“…didn’t you see them?” What, see whom? “The angels and saints!” he announced, “they were packed into this Church so tight you could have fit another one in!” The Catholic Mass—real union, as he said, “with all the worshipers of the years gone by, and all the worshipers today throughout all the world,” the entire Communion of Saints! In 1997 and only one year before his death, at a simple family dinner cramped into a small dining room, he went silent and then whispered, “the Blessed Mother has been here this evening, with us in this room.”

Over a quarter century now separates us from Fr. Fulton on this earth. And yet, there is no distance in the Communion of Saints. We are “surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1). In his homilies, Fulton physically rocked up and forward on his feet to convince us, with his resonant voice, that before all else, “God is love” for each and every one of us, personally.

At a secular university, the question was distilled in 1974 into five words: “Does God talk to people?” And, for me and a decade earlier in 1962, an obscure Dominican priest had already answered. His same message today for the Church synod of “communion, participation, and mission”—what might it be?

First, while we, both ancients or moderns together, might reach for God, He first discloses Himself—in more than just one narrative among many: “showed his word unto Jacob, his statutes and his judgments unto Israel. He hath not dealt so with any [other] nation…” (Psalm 147:19-20).

Second, on the coherence of revealed evangelical faith with our gifted and inborn natural reason, Fulton would point to who Paul first reasoned with the ambivalent Greeks at the Areopagus (Acts 17:22-23), but then moving on to Corinth to preach nothing but faith in “Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor 2:2). The Creed is both a consensus and a non-inclusive rejection of Arian pluralism. “I wanted to get into the pulpit Sunday after Sunday and assure the people that all that we say we believe in the Creed is really true.”

Third, yes, the Church is a fabric of the ordained with the laity, because the thread of Apostolic Succession and the “hierarchical communion” (Lumen Gentium) remain intact. The Eucharistic Church is assembled within the continuation and extension of the sacramental Real Presence: “do this in remembrance of me” (Catechism, n. 1374).

Of Fulton’s early Protestantism, and then conversion and lasting influence at Blessed Sacrament Church and beyond: “I left nothing behind; instead, I found what I thought I always had.”