Shining City Upon a Hill

Insight on the News, Sept 25, 2000 by Julia Duin

A Catholic society is planning a city in the medieval tradition, mixing faith and culture.

There was a time when the Roman Catholic faith was found everywhere in medieval Europe, where faith and culture were one. Today in America, faith and culture are mostly at odds. But a new order of priests and a handful of families plan to re-create a Catholic medieval city on a 1,025-acre tract on a small mountain in Pennsylvania. With the help of the Internet and computerized mailing lists, the Society of St. John in the town of Shohola is busily raising $300 million for what could be one of the 21st century's more unusual social experiments.

"This is not Utopia," the Rev. Eric Ensey, 34, tells visitors. "We are not building the perfect society. We are trying to bring people who are human so we can witness to the beauty of the lifestyle. We wanted to make it possible for people to have access to the sources of the faith, to beauty and a Catholic ambiance."

There's plenty of that in the stone farmhouse where the society has headquarters amid a thick forest off State Road 434. The roomy home with Italian-beamed ceilings, a gazebo and a fountain comes with the camaraderie one would expect at a nobleman's castle in France. In fact, several of the society's members just returned from a year at the Benedictine monastery of Fontgombault near Poitiers in central France, learning how to live together as a consecrated community.

Now back in Pennsylvania, they wear black cassocks that are highly visible to the 2,035 residents in this rural resort area. Life among them does not appear stern, judging from the music jam sessions and the laughter amid a simple lunch of pizza and fruit served in the farmhouse's modern kitchen. Sandwiched between the times of worship, they have poetry and Shakespeare readings.

"I came because I was excited with what's going on here," says Mark Schwerdt, a junior at Christendom College in Front Royal, Va., who came to help conduct fund-raising for the summer. "I'd like to help this thing. We want to be city builders."

This city, which has no name yet, aims to be a citadel of Catholic culture with daffy Masses in Latin, a college specializing in classical education, church bells tolling hourly and streets configured to be safe for families with children. It will be constructed like the French towns of Vezelay, Angouleme and the island fortress city of Mont St. Michel in that at its crest will be a church, visible for miles as the guiding light of its inhabitants. Like its European counterparts, the church would be built on a plaza next to a city hall and a fountain. Beyond would be a greenbelt of fields and woods. Throughout would be chapels, shrines, a cemetery and wayside crosses.

All that exists on the church site is a golden meadow laced with scrub oak trees and a view of three states. The society bought the land in September for $1.9 million and since has been trying to raise the funds to pay off the mortgage. At least $200,000 has come in thus far, but society officials refuse to reveal the total amount raised.

Meanwhile, the society receives 300 hits a day on its www.ssjohn.org Website, and boasts a waiting list of 150 men who wish to sign up as priests, a number almost unheard of in any diocese today. The society has 16 full members, including seven priests, one religious brother and several deacons, plus another 12 postulants due to join them next month. It will take the postulants at least six years to be ordained.

The idea, these priests say, is to create a Catholic "ambiance" that would attract professionals, merchants, artists and homemakers to relocate there. As for jobs, the resort town of Milford is 10 miles away. Scranton is 45 miles to the west, Philadelphia 173 miles to the south and New York about 90 minutes to the east via Interstate 84.

"They're very ambitious," says their bishop, the Rt. Rev. James C. Timlin of the Diocese of Scranton. "They're young and intelligent and they want to do great things for the church. I'm very impressed with them, and with the help of God this will bear fruit." Timlin, who shepherds 343,000 Catholics in northeastern Pennsylvania, long has been sympathetic to traditionalist groups. Ordained in 1951, he is sponsoring another Latin-rite group that is building its own seminary in Lincoln, Neb.

The church discouraged Latin rite Masses after the Second Vatican Council, but in 1988 Pope John Paul II issued a decree permitting dioceses to reinstitute them. Since then, dozens of dioceses have brought back the Latin Masses, which have a strong appeal for younger Catholics. Seven of the society's members were schooled at a Latin-rite seminary in Winona, Minn.

Pike County Commissioner Harry Forbes says local officials have welcomed the group. "We look at this as another avenue of a good neighbor moving into the county," he says. "It's a gorgeous piece of property they've purchased there, on which will be our first college and our first Catholic high school." The Catholics legally cannot restrict who moves in. One of their inquiries has come from a family of Orthodox Jews and "of course, they'd be welcome," Ensey says.