Charles Schnorr, S.J. Award at Saint Joseph’s Prep’s

Father-Son, Alumni Communion Breakfast

 

First I want to thank everyone honoring me with this award (especially the Alumni Board).    And I congratulate this morning’s other awardees: Alex and Santiago.  They both are and will continue to be wonderful men for others.   

And with my award I want to honor Father Schnorr and the other Schnorr awardees down through the years.  This Communion Breakfast, is my favorite event of the Prep year.  In 2008 while at this event I was discerning an invitation to become President of the Prep.   That day I looked around at the outstanding faculty, staff, alumni, students and family members.    That day the Monaghan family received an award for taking up leadership in the kind of service their son, Patrick, enjoyed while a Prep student before he died in a tragic skiing accident.   That day I thought, “of course I will choose to play a role in this faithful community.”                                     

Fast backward, in 1955 I was one of the freshmen who entered the 17^th & Stiles St door and immediately turned left.  Down the gloomy 17^th St. corridor was classroom IJ.  Most mornings when we arrived our classroom door was locked.   We hung around in the corridor copying homework and trying to memorize a few Latin words.  But Father Schnorr, our homeroom teacher, arrived each day in time for class.    Then homeroom, then two periods of Latin and one of English.    Father has to be a saint to have done this for years with groups of 14 year old boys.  

Much later in life I met one of Father Schnorr’s nieces, Jeanne.  With us today, too are one of Father Schnorr’s nephews and his wife, Joseph and Rita Lane.  The niece, Jeanne, gave me a gift that her uncle had given to her, his biretta.  After the changes in the liturgy in the 1960’s, Fr Schnorr imagined sadly that he would never again have the opportunity to wear a biretta in procession or at an altar.  

But I brought it to celebrate him today, a second-class relic which I now momentarily prop on my head.  May Fr. Schnorr’s love of Christ and Prep’s Catholic and Jesuit mission continue to thrive among us!   Go Prep!  175 years!