Tower Topics ~ Spring 2002

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Orange juice, hash browns, and prayer
Seminarians savor Saturday-morning tradition

The silence of a Saturday sunrise at Conception Seminary College is fractured by the rasp of an ice scraper on a frosted windshield.

While their classmates happily sleep in, a small band of seminarians appears in the parking lot. Rubbing sleep from their eyes and warmth into their hands they start car engines.

There is no name for the group, no sign-up sheets, no planning. There are a few die-hards who always show up, but for the most part, the rest of the faces change week to week.

They pile into cars and drive the two miles to Clyde for 7:30 Mass with the Benedictine Sisters of Perpetual Adoration. Afterward, there’s visiting with the sisters and maybe a rosary in the convent’s grotto. Then it’s on to nearby Ravenwood for breakfast with the regulars at Kim’s Country Cafe.

It’s a casual custom that began long before these students were at Conception. No one is sure exactly when it started or how it keeps going.

“It’s a beautiful way to start the morning,” says senior Anthony Ouellette of the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. “To get up early and celebrate Eucharist and have a hot breakfast. It’s one of the things I’ll miss most about my time at Conception.”

He calls the morning ritual a little bit of “non-institutionalized seminary,” and resists sternly any attempts to formalize it.

Mark Setright, a junior from the Diocese of Cheyenne, says there is a special freedom for a seminarian on Saturday morning, and getting away from campus, away from classes and meetings, is the perfect way to start the weekend. He says he savors every detail of the mornings – waking in the dark, slipping on ice in the seminary parking lot, riding in a cold car that heats up just as they enter the driveway at Clyde, and of course stepping into the candlelit warmth of the sisters’ chapel.

“The female voices singing are so beautiful and the sisters are so welcoming,” he says. “They make us feel like we’re part of the community.”

The feeling is mutual. “Their male voices certainly add a lot to our liturgy,” says Prioress Karen Joseph. “And we are happy to give them an experience of feminine monasticism as well.” She adds that maybe down the line, when the seminarians are priests, they’ll remember the sisters at Clyde and send a few prospects their way.

Seminarians Viet To, Bernie Starman, Anthony Ouellette, and Stephen Chojnicki, with cafe owner Kim Downan.

The sense of community pervades the morning. Later at Kim’s, farmers, factory workers, teachers and retirees greet the seminarians as their own. The smell of bacon, coffee and cigarette smoke hangs in the air.

At one table, a group of men in overalls plays cards. Another man, wearing a Pioneer cap, gets up to refill his coffee cup and amiably makes his way from table to table with the pot.

Setright says it’s the big glasses of orange juice that owner Kim Downan serves. Ouellette says it’s her hash browns. She’s promised to teach him the secret before he goes to Rome for theology studies next fall. “It’s a lost art,” Ouellette says. “No one knows how to make hash browns anymore.”

But everyone, local and seminarian alike, is drawn to Kim’s for more than just the food.

“I think its fantastic that they join us,” says one local, who says its refreshing to see some younger faces among Kim’s mostly over-50 crowd. “Although we don’t always know all their names, we recognize their faces. The more people who show up, the merrier it is.”

As the morning rush slows, Downan makes her way to the seminarians’ table to say hello.

“They’re a nice bunch of guys,” she says on the way back to the kitchen. “They’ve always got a smile on their face, and they like my hash browns.” She claims they’ve become such regulars she knows what most of them will eat before they order. Even though the men hail from Wyoming and Kansas and Texas and other parts unknown, they just fit in, she says. “They take the coffee pot around just like everybody else.”

Setright says as a child, his family always went to early-morning Mass, so the Saturday morning excursions are a little taste of home. But more important, they have become an informal extension of everything he’s been taught in seminary about the importance of community.

“You learn a lot pouring coffee for strangers,” he says.

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