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Chapter Three

Minor Seminary — a Rugged Trial

When young John Noll entered the seminary in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, he entered a whole new world. With so many younger brothers and sisters at home, John had never been spoiled. He was a hard worker and used to taking care of himself. Still, nothing had prepared him for the rigors of life at St. Lawrence Minor Seminary. In spite of the austerity, though, this was a place where boys developed lifelong friendships; the difficulties bonded them together and formed a new set of “brothers.”

A strict schedule, based on that of many religious orders, was followed. Each morning the students awoke at 5:30 A.M., washed and dressed in silence and filed out for the short walk to the local church. Here, they had a period of Morning Prayer and meditation before daily Mass. During the winter, that meant kneeling for an hour in a very cold church, shivering in spite of their heavy clothing, as the church was only heated on the weekends.

After Mass, the boys returned to their upstairs dormitory to make their beds and prepare for the day. There were no modern conveniences at the seminary, not even running water, so the boys took turns bringing water in buckets from an outside well to their third floor dormitory to fill the wash basins on the stand by each bed. Also in turns, they took large baskets of dirty clothes each week to the sisters’ convent three blocks away. At the end of the week, they returned to the convent for the clean laundry.

During their morning work, the boys maintained complete silence lasting through their meager breakfast — a thick slice of bread and coffee made from roasted barley. Afterward, the boys could relax for half an hour while getting ready for morning classes.

For ten minutes before noon, the boys gathered in the chapel for a daily examination of conscience, kneeling in earnest soul searching. During lunch, one of the students read selections from a pious book in the refectory; no one was allowed to talk or visit over their plain, but healthful, food. Afternoon classes were followed by an hour of recreation. The boys gathered again in chapel to recite the Rosary and for spiritual reading before supper. Just as at lunch, supper was eaten to the accompaniment of more pious reading. After a final hour of recreation, the boys studied until night prayer and lights out at nine.

There was no daily contact with life outside the seminary. These young teenagers aspiring to the priesthood led a life of study and contemplation. No newspapers or magazines were allowed, no one left the grounds without permission, and the sports were intramural. It was a hard life and must have been difficult for the boys who came from large and loving families. Undoubtedly, many tears of homesickness were shed in the dark of the silent dormitory at night. School lasted from September to the end of June. For the five years that John studied at St. Lawrence, he only returned home during the school year once. During Christmas of his first year, his six-year-old sister Effie died, so John was allowed to visit with his family during this time, and to attend her funeral.

For John, far more daunting than the rigorous schedule at St. Lawrence was the fact that most of the instruction, and almost all of the textbooks, were in German. His grandfather spoke German, but John had never studied the language. Although the task seems almost impossible to modern students, John not only learned German, but also Latin, French, and Greek at the same time. At times, the hours he spent preparing for class seemed hopelessly inadequate. John would wake in the darkness and, stumbling to the washbasin, splash his face with the frigid water, hoping to clear the mists from his brain. At night, he threw himself on his bed, exhausted.

Daily he struggled through his course in Classics. He read and studied the works of Nepos, Caesar, Livy, Cicero, and Horace, in Latin, and Xenephon and Homer in Greek. He also studied Ovid and Virgil and the great philosophers like Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard, Peter Lombard, and others, and the Christian spiritual classics.

The young seminarian

Proof that his efforts paid off is the fact that he finished his five years of preparatory seminary as an honor student with near perfect marks in all subjects. In his final year there, 1892-93, John took courses in Christian Doctrine, Latin, Greek, English, Rhetoric, Geometry, Physics, History, and French. He received all I’s (very good), and graduated third in his class.

Like most of the boys at St. Lawrence, John became a member of the Third Order of St. Francis. With them, he regularly recited the Little Office of the Blessed Virgin during the day. Because of this, he learned many of the breviary prayers by memory. Following the Mass with the Latin missal, he also was familiar with the entire Latin text of the Ordinary of the Mass before he entered major seminary at the age of nineteen.

The hardships of minor seminary served as a test for the students’ vocation, and John Noll passed with flying colors. Later, he treasured the fact that he had been forced to learn German and French, as both languages helped him in his work as a parish priest. The Indiana immigrants from these countries were much more comfortable making their confession in their native language, and young Fr. Noll often said a few words at Mass in these languages.