Br. Sixtus Roslevich in Zimbabwe

In September 2016, the United States was in the final months of the Clinton-Trump presidential election campaigns, just as we are now nearing completion of the presidential election cycle. But at that point in time, I was 7,705 miles from Portsmouth, working my second mission stint at the Monastery of Christ the Word in Macheke, Zimbabwe, in southern Africa. When there was a wi-fi connection, indeed when there was electricity, we would occasionally tune in to the BBC for the latest updates from the campaign trail. In that month, as one of my assignments, I was preparing to lead a “Retreat for Couples: Choosing Our Role Models Wisely (Remembering, Acknowledging, Identifying and Discovering).” I told the participants from the outset: “We won’t be talking much about politics this weekend, but I will tell you that Hillary Clinton wrote a book twenty years ago, in 1996, when she was the First Lady in the White House, titled It Takes a Village. She borrowed the title from a Nigerian proverb (Igbo and Yoruba). …I often hear it used to this day, twenty years later, by exasperated parents and teachers of the boys in our [Saint Louis Priory] high school back home, when they throw up their hands and say, “It takes a village!” Little do they realize, perhaps, that they are quoting a Nigerian proverb.”

Now, as then, I won’t be writing much about politics. But that proverb, regardless of its origin or cross-cultural appropriation for use as a book title, has been resurfacing in my thoughts since the summer. In 2019, When the monastic community revived the monastery newsletter for “Friends and Oblates” of Portsmouth Abbey, formerly produced by Dom Damian Kearney, our editorial team produced a new masthead for The Current – a title evoking current events and the current of Narragansett Bay. As the new Director of Oblates, I began to sift through old files, mostly on paper, intending to recreate not only a mailing list, but an accurate up-to-date listing of current oblates, lapsed oblates, and deceased oblates. The very first issue of the freshly-minted newsletter explained on September 8, 2019 that the renewed newsletter team, “now looks forward to renewal and development” through these efforts in communication with our oblate community.

This is where the “village” comes into play. In my efforts to gather our oblates, in addition to Dom Damian’s typewritten and often handwritten notes, I contacted the Alumni House across Cory’s Lane. Their offices house the tech-savvy staff of Development Data & Analytics, Special Events, the Annual Fund, Marketing and Communications, among others. Their databases, going back decades, flag when a person is an Oblate of Portsmouth, along with other identities in this community, such as alumni, parents or grandparents, board members and donors. When notice is received of a death among the Portsmouth family, I am alerted to such details in their history, occasionally discovering they were, in fact, oblates here. The most recent example of this came in last week in an email from Nora O’Hara, Director of Development Data & Analytics, who passed along the news that Lucille Marie Moreau Petrucci, who died on September 29, was “marked as an Oblate in our database.” Lucille’s obituary requests that, “In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to Portsmouth Abbey School.” Heretofore, Lucille had not appeared in any of our existing oblate records. I fact-checked this the next day with Oblate Jeanne Perrotti of Newport, part of our “village” and longtime friend of the monks, who wrote back, “I used to give her a ride to the Days of Recollection back then. I didn’t know she was an Oblate.”

The name of another oblate which has not yet surfaced in any paper records is that of Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy (1890-1995). Mrs. Kennedy’s Promise of Oblation came to mind upon hearing news of the death on October 10 of her daughter-in-law, Ethel Skakel Kennedy (1928-2024), widow of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, who had briefly attended the School with younger brother Ted. This connection, known to some of those long-connected with Portsmouth, came to my attention not from a database but rather from the pages of a book authored by a Portsmouth alum, James P. MacGuire ’70. In his Real Lace Revisited: Inside the Hidden World of America’s Irish Aristocracy (Lyons Crest, 2017), in a chapter titled “Profile: The Kennedys and the Buckleys,” MacGuire writes that, “[Teddy’s] mother, Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, was a longtime oblate of the monastery.” Thank you for that info, Jamie, fellow member of our “village.”

Sometimes, I discover that someone needs to be subtracted from our historic oblate group. One such person, another with a recognizable name of note, is Servant of God Dorothy Day (1897-1980). Day had been well-connected with the early monks of Portsmouth. After I became Director of Oblates, several people told me that Dorothy Day had been an oblate of this monastery, although I could find no supporting documentation either in the database nor in the paper files. Day had been a good friend of artist Ade Bethune of Newport, Rhode Island, who was an oblate of Portsmouth. She had come to Portsmouth Priory on several occasions while visiting Bethune’s Catholic Worker group in Newport, and Fr. Joseph Woods, a monk of Portsmouth, was involved extensively in programs of the Catholic Worker Movement. Concerning Day’s oblation, I uncovered the critical facts not from within our monastic records nor from the other side of Cory’s Lane, but from another “village” farther afield.
Promise of Oblation, Dorothy Day
(image: St. Procopius Abbey)My discovery happened on a visit to Manhattan. Whenever I am in New York City, mainly for the December meeting of the Board of Directors and the Abbot’s Reception, I try to attend an early Mass in the Extraordinary Form at the Shrine and Parish of the Holy Innocents on West 37th Street. The facts about Oblate Dorothy Day thus came to me not from my own village, but from a church not too far from Greenwich Village. Holy Innocents notes that Dorothy Day made her promise as an Oblate of Saint Benedict there on April 26, 1955, and not to the prior of Portsmouth, but to the abbot of St. Procopius Abbey in Lisle, Illinois. She had encountered the monastic community of that village through visits of their monks to Holy Innocents to offer retreats and Days of Recollection. One attraction for her to Procopius Abbey had been the connection the Lisle monks had to the Byzantine liturgy. Her oblation is well-publicized and documented on the St. Procopius website. We in any case remember here this Procopius Oblate, a “friend” of our abbey, and hold in prayer the promotion of her canonization as put forth by the Archdiocese of New York.

Call all of this gathering what you will: gumshoe-researching, fact-checking, investigating, looking into... But it does lead me to reaffirm that it still takes a village, with its drumbeats and rhythms, to get the story right.

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