Bishop Parsons: Reminiscing about Nashotah House
The Rt. Rev. Donald James Parsons, thirteenth Dean of Nashotah House (1963-1973) and Professor of New Testament (1950-1973), died January 4, 2016.
Donald Parsons was born in 1922 in Philadelphia, and he attended Temple University before matriculating at Philadelphia Divinity School, where he earned a Th.B., a Th.M., and a Th.D. in New Testament. He was ordained deacon in 1946 in the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania. Parsons was ordained priest later that same year in the Episcopal Diocese of Delaware. He served as Tutor of Greek and New Testament at Philadelphia Divinity School while also serving as Curate at Church of the Holy Trinity at Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia.
As a priest in Delaware, Parsons served as Assistant Rector of Immanuel Episcopal Church in Wilmington and as Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Smyrna. In 1950 he moved to Wisconsin to serve as Professor of New Testament and Ascetical Theology at Nashotah House.
After election as Sixth Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Quincy, Bishop Parsons was consecrated on Sept. 8, 1973. During his time as bishop, Bishop Parsons authored two books: The Holy Eucharist Rite Two: a Devotional Commentary (1976) and A Lifetime Road to God (1977). He served the diocese as bishop until his retirement in 1987. After retirement he continued to provide episcopal oversight for a number of congregations as well as returning to Nashotah House.
For two years (2005-2007), Bishop Parsons lived on campus and resumed teaching the New Testament. Students at that time recall him coming to morning chapel daily about an hour early to pray in the Corpus Christi Chapel. Following this time at Nashotah House, he moved to Peoria, Illinois, where he lived until his death.
“Hundreds of students had the privilege to learn from this dedicated teacher,” was said of Bishop Parsons in 1973 by the Alumni Association, upon his reception of an honorary degree from Nashotah House. “They have been privileged to learn the experience of the New Testament priesthood during their critical years of formation from a man who lives what he believes.”
Dean Parsons laying cornerstone of the James Lloyd Breck Refectory.
When asked what he viewed as the primary element of his call to Nashotah House, Bishop Parsons said his role was to continue the “emphasis on the spiritual development of the future priest and the solid academic work which is distinctly directed toward preparing a man to be a pastor and a priest. [Further,] all of us remember some kind of sacrifice and love connected with the cost of our spiritual formation here as future priests.”
Conviction, frankness, and compassion are words that have been used to describe Bishop Parsons. After his retirement from Nashotah House, Bishop Parsons continued to be active in the community: visiting students, faculty, and families, and leading in spiritual retreats. During a sermon delivered in May 2014 to Nashotah House alumni, Bishop Parsons said: “We are called to do remarkable things: to bless in God’s name; to forgive sins by God’s promise; to preside over the Eucharist; called to baptize; to proclaim the gospel in season and out-of-season.”
In another sermon to seminarians around the same time, he mused, “As I share with you these priestly duties, I sometimes ask myself: Do these activities make a difference? Are souls really fed as God desires? Is Christ really formed in the lives and souls of our people?” He went on to reflect, “In recent years, I have been helped by 1 John 3:1-2. I have been drawn to those verses, and we should be called children of God, and so we are. We are called, and we shall become the children of God. This is an incredible promise: it does not appear what we shall be, but when He appears we shall be like him: in His Glory.”
Dean Parsons (second from left) with students Else, Oliver, Ford (to the right of Parsons*) 1964.
A Transcription of a “Reminiscence”
The following is a transcription of a “Reminiscence” by the Rt. Rev. Donald J. Parsons that begins with Dean Criss’s introduction of him. Bishop Parsons presented this address at the Sesquicentennial Convocation in 1992, transcribed here by Terry Koehler, whose husband, the Rev. Brien Koehler, graduated in 1976.
I came to Nashotah in the fall of 1950, with a salary of $2,600, plus room and board. The room-- there were two rooms in the administration building on the second floor, looking in this direction. The two rooms on the lake side belonged to Fr. Bosshard, who taught Theology. We shared a bath, but we also shared the bath with the entire public anytime they wanted to use it. So that was . . . (clearing his throat).
What kind of a place was Nashotah in the 1950s? First of all, the primary characteristic was that it was a close-knit community of men living very much of a common life. There were about 45 to 50 students, and only about 15% of them were married, and they lived in two houses on the lower lake. But essentially it was a community of single men living together. We did everything together, so what you had was a community of comrades. Most of them came right out of college. Even those who were veterans from the war had come back from the war, then went to college, then came, and the result was we were all in this together and there was a community spirit that is difficult to comprehend today.
We did everything together. We went to chapel together, Matins, Mass and Evensong, seven days a week, week after week, month after month, for three solid years. We went to meals together, three meals together, every day, seven days a week, week after week after week, with Josie and her glorious, (hmmm), ingloriously greasy food. Worship together, studying together, classes together, work details together, even recreation largely together. We would go to the movies together. Everything was together. We had shared tasks, shared hopes, shared dedication, shared dreams for the church and for our ministry in it. Four out of the faculty, four of us were single, and we would eat in the Refectory too, three meals a day, and so on and so forth. We ate at the high table. This was true largely of most of the seminaries of the church, but especially true of Nashotah. And the result was that there was a spirit of comradeship. You never forgot those who were in your class at seminary, those you shared all of those mornings in the chapel, and all of those meals in the Refectory, and all of those everythings. Now, of course, today with so many more married students, so many older students, and, in fact, so many age stratifications, no seminary, not even Nashotah, has this kind of comradeship, this kind of common life.
Sometimes graduates will say, “Well, the House isn’t what it was when I was there.” No, it isn’t. It isn’t because the whole thing has changed. There was a comradeship, a living together then that isn’t true now. And it isn’t the result of any decision by a Dean, or by a faculty, or a Board of Trustees. It’s the result of a whole shift in the way [things are done]. It’s almost like a shift in one of those tectonic plates, you know, that move around and have continents collide with one another; a shift in the way the church goes about selecting those whom she sends off to be prepared for ministry. It wasn’t anybody’s plot. It wasn’t anybody’s plan, but it has made things radically different. And I’m not sure that any of us, in any of the seminaries, have really faced up to that shift and tried to ask, “How could we, to some degree, today, under these different circumstances, create that sense of comradeship, that sense of community that we had back then when we never even used the word ‘community’?” We just had it, whether we wanted it or not.
In some ways, it was unfair to the few student wives [on campus]. They were really very much left out of things and often, with some justification, felt rather resentful. But there was a comradeship, a commonness in our life then that is not true now.
A second distinctive thing about Nashotah in those days was that we had--we were the only seminary in the church that had it--a required course in Ascetical Theology. You know, the principles of spiritual growth, how to say your prayers, and other such things. At Sewanee there was a course that Dean Alexander taught, centered largely around Augustine’s Confessions. And that course, many of the students told me, meant a great deal to them. General Seminary had an “elective course,” but notice, “elective.” And the people who need it most never elect it, no matter what the course is. They had an elective course in Ascetical Theology, usually taught by somebody imported from Great Britain. Whether this implied that nobody in the United States ever said their prayers was never explained. But ours was the only seminary that had a required course in Ascetical Theology. One of my privileges in my years here was that after the death of Fr. Whitman, I was allowed to teach that course, and it is something for which I have given thanks repeatedly.
Nowadays, the situation is rather different. These days, you hear a lot about spiritual direction. You never heard about it then, except perhaps in some strange place such as Nashotah House. Now spiritual direction is one of the “in” things. And in that I rejoice. Attention is given to that matter these days that has never been true in the American church until quite recently. In part, I think this is one of the results of the Cursillo Movement, which led people to go running around looking for spiritual directors. And you know, sometimes demand can lead to supply. Also, there is a great deal of attention in the church press, and in publications on spiritual direction and on the great classics of the spiritual life. For this, I rejoice, and at the same time I rejoice about it, I am a little concerned that this might be just another one of those church fads. You know, something is “in” for ten years or so and then it disappears. I also must confess to a certain degree of squeamishness when I discover from the computer office that so many graduates of seminary, as soon as they turn in their first computer thing, one of the specialties they list is spiritual direction, two weeks after graduation from seminary.This makes me feel a little uneasy, perhaps wrongly, but nevertheless it does. This is one of Nashotah’s traditions that I hope we never lose. We had that required course in Ascetical Theology, the ABC’s that you have to have first before you can start talking about spiritual direction, long before anybody else did. I hope we never lose this element as an important element of what goes on at Nashotah, a solid course in Ascetical Theology. It’s not the same as a Dean’s course, a Dean’s class, where the Dean has little chats with the new students about what life will be like. That’s not a course in Ascetical Theology. One of the great perils in any spiritual direction is direction by someone who knows only one kind of spirituality, and that’s his or hers. And so, you try to make everybody else walk your road. And that may not be at all what the Holy Spirit needs. One of the great needs in spiritual direction is to have persons who know the classics, and the different classics of the Christian spiritual life, so that they may be able to perceive a path the Spirit desires for someone else that is different from theirs. For further details, see the writings of Fr. Martin Thornton. One of the things, now that we are not so distinctive, I would pray that we will be distinctive in the emphasis we continue, and the thoroughness with which that element of preparation for priesthood is carried out here.
The third point I would like to make about the days of the 50’s, is the great Romanism Plot. I arrived in the autumn of 1950, and peacefully and innocently walked into the middle of a very tense situation. In fact, the atmosphere was so poisoned. You know what happens after awhile, when there is enough suspicion and enough poison, anything that anybody says is immediately given the worst possible construction, and you never look beyond that. That was the climate that existed. The dean at the time, Dean Ness, was a talented priest and a very remarkable man. His ministry as the dean of the Cathedral in New Orleans is the great historic ministry in that congregation. He was a remarkable preacher and an incredible [wordsmith], a highly talented man, and a man of great courage. His eyesight was very bad--no sight in one eye, and very little in the other. As a child the doctors told his family that he would probably be an invalid all his life. Instead of which, he was a very extraordinary priest, and after he left Nashotah had many years at Seabury as professor of Homiletics, years in which he led many priests of this church to have great respect for him and great devotion to him. [He was] a splendid person, but I’m afraid the Lord did not really design him to be a seminary dean. Just what it takes to be a seminary dean is a little hard to know, but it’s an odd talent. Not too many people are given that talent.
The tension that existed eventually ended in May of 1951 with Dean Ness’s resignation being accepted by the board, and Fr. Bosshard, the professor of Theology, being terminated. Now it was alleged that the problem was a Romanism Plot. And, indeed, a two and a half inch item in Time Magazine, in the religion section, told this to the world, including the bishops of the Episcopal Church, that there was a Romanism Plot at Nashotah which had now been uncovered and ruined, destroyed. You can imagine what that did to enrollments and prospective enrollments at Nashotah House. More than once we have been hanging by that thread. As a matter of fact, I don’t believe it was Romanism at all. There may have been some of that, but it was a symptom. What the real causes were, I don’t know, because it was going on before I got here. But to give you a sample, it was discovered at one point, in the course of the year, that two members of the student body were members of the Living Rosary Society which was headquartered someplace in New Jersey. Dean Ness, therefore, gave us a somewhat fervent lecture on the subject after Evensong one Thursday. Within 24 hours there were 32 members of the Living Rosary Society. I cite this little fact as a bit of evidence that the problem may not have been Romanism but something else.
At any rate, the result was, of course, that Nashotah became even more suspect than she had ever been before, and there was a real question about whether we would ever get any students from any place to come to the seminary again. Fortunately, we managed to survive largely for two reasons. One was that a number of the bishops on the Board of Trustees remained steadfastly loyal to the House and stood by her in this time of crisis. For example, the Diocese of Colorado was mushrooming in those days. Bishop Minniss was the bishop, and the diocese grew tremendously. For a number of years the largest single contingent by far, in fact a considerable percentage of the student body, were students from Colorado. That was one factor. Another factor that, in the long run, may have been even more important was Edward Sidney White. Dean White had been a parish priest, a slum parish priest in St. Louis, in the days when slum parish work hadn’t yet become the thing to do to get your name in the church magazines. He had been a slum priest in St. Louis where he had insisted on living in the rectory next to the church. Finally, he and his wife decided they had to leave when their little children would come home and knew all of the prostitutes in the area by their business names. . . . And then he had a multi-cultural parish in Chicago near the university. Then he came to Nashotah as Professor of Pastoral Theology. After Dean Ness resigned, Dean White was Acting Dean for a couple of years, and then finally became the dean. I think it is entirely true to say that Dean White saved the seminary. He was blunt; he was outspoken; he was totally unvarnished. What you saw was what you got, and what you heard was the absolute truth. He was a man of total integrity, and a man whose word you could count on. And all of the bishops of the church knew that. When Edward Sidney White said to you, “No, we don’t have a Romanism problem at Nashotah,” a bishop would know that this was true. He had his failings, one of which was that once he made up his mind about a person, that was it. And mere facts were not going to change it. There was one unfortunate student who, about the second week he was at the seminary, Dean White decided that this student didn’t bathe often enough. As a matter of fact, it turned out not to be true. But three years later, nothing changed; there it was. He was blunt, he was plain, he was honest, and in many ways his contribution to Nashotah was perhaps greater than may have been recognized at the time, or might even be recognized now.
One last thing about those early days at Nashotah, those were the days in which, unless we were down for the Community Eucharist, we all said so-called “private” Masses. I use quote marks because there really is no such thing. Every priest on the faculty would celebrate every day, either at one of the side altars in the chapel before Matins or in one of the three oratories in Lewis Hall or the one up in the Fort. We celebrated every day, except once a week we would have a Community Mass. And this was true, I think, through all, certainly through most, of the 50s.
The James Lloyd Breck Refectory dedication by Fr. Parsons and students, 1965.*
I would like to talk a bit about my time as dean here from 1963 to 1973. After 13 years here, to my surprise, I was elected as the 13th Dean. That’s really piling up the 13s, but we managed to survive, in spite of that. Two things, in particular, I would like to mention. First, the faculty. We really gathered -- we had, and we gathered, and we developed even further -- a truly remarkable faculty. Of this faculty, for example, James Brown, became Warden of St. John’s College in Winnipeg. Arthur Vogel became the Bishop of West Missouri and an internationally recognized theologian. Fr. Foster became the Dean of General Seminary. Bill Peterson became the Dean of Bexley Hall. Terry Holmes became the Dean of Sewanee. Richard Grein went on to become the Bishop of Kansas, and now the Bishop of New York. O.C. Edwards became the Dean of Seabury-Western. Some of the other names were Louis Weil, James Griffiths, Fr. Hunt, Bob Cooper, Fr. Cross -- a remarkable faculty. They raided us, they stole us. My faculty disappeared. They went off to be deans of other seminaries. I remember very well one of the last faculty meetings we had before all of these gentlemen departed; some issue was raised, a petition from the students or a request for something or other, and the faculty gave a thumbs down. This was after the 60s, and they wouldn’t even discuss the matter. He may get into heaven for this, but Fr. Foster looked up and looked at me, smiled, and asked, “Do you find that the tones of the faculty meetings have changed?”
But it was a remarkable faculty, and one of the reasons was that we followed the old Nashotah tradition. It’s an old Nashotah tradition that goes back many years. Nashotah’s history was to find young men who had promise and bring them onto the faculty. Then, occasionally, they would become famous and be taken off somewhere else. For example, in the days when, in the United States, the theological college in the United States was Union Seminary in New York -- remember those days, that was when the Dean of the Graduate School was Fred Grant, who came from Nashotah. Perhaps one of the best known in scholarly circles of all of the professors at General was Burton Scott Easton. He began as a faculty member at Nashotah. Over the generations we’ve done this. What is it they used to say? The old chauvinist routine used to be about a wife – “Get ‘em young; treat ‘em rough; tell ‘em nothing.” Well, that was sort of the way Nashotah did with its faculty. And in many ways, this is how we happened to get the faculty we got. We went looking in places that other people weren’t bright enough to look to find young promising characters for the future. I really think we did rather well. For example, I [recruited] Fr. Foster from the seminary in the Philippines, and Fr. Weil and Fr. Griffiths from El Seminario del Caribe, just before they closed it. I was criticized rather severely for doing this. There were those who said, “It isn’t right to go taking faculty members from overseas seminaries. It isn’t right to take them away from there. You should leave them there.” I thought to myself that this was rather short-sighted because if the word gets around or if the understanding is that once a promising young professor volunteers for an overseas seminary, that’s it for the rest of his life, and he’ll never be considered by a mainland seminary, what’s this going to do for your opportunity to attract the men you would really want to have for overseas seminaries.? So, I think the criticisms, in that instance, were misplaced, as frequently criticisms of me are misplaced. (Said he, modestly and humbly.)
[Some missing content here, as the videotapes got changed.]
I mentioned earlier that at one time much of our population came from Colorado, but when I first came here, much of the population came from Long Island, otherwise known as “Loong Island.” One evening, a number of us went to the movies in Oconomowoc. It was one of the cowboy things, and the Indians were attacking the fort. Most of the students in that particular group, who went to the movies, were from Long Island. As the Indians encircled the fort and really started to attack, they all went “oi, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi, oi.” These particular Indian extras must have come from the Bronx; they couldn’t have been from (inaudible), and of course, this group of students from Long Island, they got the accent immediately, and they broke into gales of laughter, howling, rolling, literally rolling in the aisles. The usher had to come down and ask us either to behave ourselves or get out of there.
One last little gem: I had never sung a Mass before I came here, so I had to be trained how to do it. Since Fr. Thatcher taught music and voice and so on, I went up once more to “Snuffy” to learn how to sing. I made a little progress, but I was really having trouble with the introduction to the Creed. “I believe in one God.” (sung) I’d really had an awful time with it, and he drilled me on it, and drilled me on it, and drilled me on it, until I finally got it in my head. It came time for me to celebrate the first Sung Mass on a Sunday as a new member of the faculty at Nashotah House. We got to the Kyrie and the organist went, (musical notes) you know, and in a panic, all I could think of was “I believe in one God” (sung). Then it came time for the Creed and the organ went this way (fingers waving), “I believe in one God,” and that was right. Then, as you know, when you get to the end of the Mass, what ends it is the Gloria in Excelsis, and the organ went this way (fingers waving). What do I do? “I believe in one God.” This was my first Sung Mass at Nashotah. Afterwards, one student, I was told later, went to the dean and suggested that I never be allowed to celebrate again. On the other hand, there was another member of the student body who was more charitable. He came up to me and said, “Well one thing’s for sure, we know that your theology is solidly Trinitarian.”
I have many memories of Nashotah and great love for Nashotah. I’m indebted to Nashotah for her ideal for the church, her ideal for the priesthood, but also the ideal of spirituality which belongs to Nashotah. All of those years teaching Ascetical Theology, I’m grateful for them; all of those years in the chapel with the Blessed Sacrament reserved right there; all of those years of Matins, Mass, and Evensong. In 1949 I was asked to come to Nashotah, and I came out for a visit. I had to say “No” because I was relatively new in my parish, and it would have been very unfair to leave them at that point, even though so many of my friends said, “You’re crazy to turn it down. Seminary jobs are extremely rare. You’ll never get another chance.” But I felt I had to. Yet I remember that visit to Nashotah in the summer of 1949. It was in the summer and everybody was away, and just a few students were around here. It was a low Mass, in the chapel, at the high altar, four or five of us present. The celebrant was a member of the faculty who was not dreadfully impressive, or at least I didn’t find him such. But there was something about it that made me want to come to Nashotah when I would have a chance to do so. And it’s that about Nashotah that means most to me, that the spiritual ideal that Nashotah has for the church, for the priesthood, for all the members of the church. There is a line in one of Browning’s poems about the “blessed mutter of the Mass.” What I found here was the blessed hush of the Mass. You go to a parish and you just watch what goes on. If there is that “blessed hush” at the right times, you know what kind of a parish you’re visiting. If it’s not there, you wish they had it. That’s one of the things I found at Nashotah and one of the things that I thank God for the most.
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*Alumni, if you have any information identifying the gentlemen in these images, please contact us at chapter@nashotah.edu and we will update with the information.