CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE: OH, THE SIGHTS WE SEE (AND THE SOUNDS WE HEAR)!

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED AND THREE: OH, THE SIGHTS WE SEE (AND THE SOUNDS WE HEAR)!

It’s Sunday, September 15, 2013 and the Admiral is resting – a well-deserved rest after an 87 mile ocean voyage from Manasquan, leaving at 5:58 a.m., to Cape May, New Jersey, arriving at 3 p.m.—two hours ahead of schedule. The Atlantic Ocean was just the right mix of calm and mildly choppy (1 to 2 foot waves) all the way. Aside from the usual Sunday boat crazies, mostly fishing boats, our cruise was peaceful. We went past Seaside Heights and saw the blackened boardwalk. We even smelled a very strong odor of smoke at our location three miles off shore. Arson is suspected. Unfortunately restaurant and other retail business owners in dire straits have been known to resort to store immolation. Was Kohr’s running out of frozen custard? Check out who was recently insured – heavily – and you find the motive for arson. It’s not fail proof, but it’s a place to begin the investigation, after sifting through the ashes looking for the fire starter. The businesses that were burned had been knocked down by Sandy less than a year ago. They were all re-constructed, but all suffered losses while waiting to re-open. Arson is often a desperate act of a desperately unsuccessful businessperson. When I practiced with a private law firm in Carmel, certain restaurants that were known to be in financial trouble had a tendency toward “kitchen fires” after hours when no one was likely to be harmed. The restaurants burned down, but with the help of the insurance money, the eateries were back slinging hash (or something more upscale – after all, it’s Carmel) as quickly as they could be re-built.  

Every day as we cruise along a waterway, be it Rondout Creek (crick), the Hudson River, the Manasquan River or the Atlantic Ocean, stories jump out at us from the shorelines. Sometimes it’s a magnificent piece of architecture that sits atop a high rise on the west shoreline of the Hudson. Like just yesterday, or actually the day before (the days are blurry right now), as we were cruising from Half Moon Bay at Croton on Hudson to Hoffman’s West on the Manasquan River, we looked up to the west and saw a Gothic tower, which was attached to a huge complex of stone buildings. This was near Esopus, New York. Turns out it WAS the Mount St. Alphonsus Retreat Center, which closed in early 2012, after “26 years of retreat ministry and more than 75 years as a major seminary” for, are you ready? – Redemptorists. I know – who are these people? Their primary ministry is to “the poor and most spiritually abandoned.” Sounds like they would be kept pretty busy serving that population. But they have been aging – not too many young folks are apparently interested in ministering to the poor and most spiritually abandoned. Perhaps they are too busy looking for jobs for themselves, alongside the spiritually challenged and abandoned workers on Wall Street. At any rate, after more than 100 years spent atop Mounty St. Alphonsus, the Redemptorists had to throw in the towel. They were down to five priests living in their “retreat house” which has 92 bedrooms, meeting and conference rooms, a library, and other facilities on 400 acres of land. I guess 6 priests really filled up the place, but when they got down to five, with 87 empty bedrooms (assuming no priests slept together), it became difficult to justify paying the heating and A/C bill for the entire “house”. Excuse me, but this is a mansion, not a house.

Most of the United States Redemptorists are living and ministering in the Baltimore area, where they still have a seminary. There are about 300 of them and they operate 17 parishes and three retreat houses from Maine to Maryland. Anyone know a Redemptorist? If you’re poor and/or spiritually abandoned, they’re looking for you. They have spread out over the world and number about 5,300 in all. They are an order of priests and brothers founded by St. Alphonsus Liguori in 1732 in Naples, Italy, to “serve the spiritual and material needs of the faithful”, especially the aforementioned poor and spiritually abandoned. What they are supposed to do best is preach. How that puts food on the table of a poor person is not clear, unless the preaching involves a collection plate and the collection money goes to the poor. This information is taken from an article by Mary Ann Poust in the Catholic New York newspaper, “America’s largest Catholic newspaper". Ms. Poust does not mention anything about nuns at Mount St. Alphonsus, but a later article about the sale of the estate revealed that nuns also inhabited the retreat, in a separate building of course, probably a barn or a dormitory or some sort. And good news, the nuns (called "Redemptoristines" -- I kid you not) were able to stay put – at least for the moment. But a later article reported that the 9 nuns were booted out, forced to move in temporarily with the Cabrini sisters – hope that’s working out for them. And lo and behold, the 3 remaining Redemptorist priests are still living high on the Mount – in the gatehouse – no doubt ministering to the poor who climb the mountain for their assistance.

Or maybe not. You see, the Redemptorists sold all 411 acres, including all the facilities except the gatehouse and the cemetery, to the Bruderhof, also known as the Church Communities Foundation, based in Rifton, New York -- oh sure, we’ve all heard of them, right? Probably not. They’re a closed community, compared to the Amish in that they live in the world, but apart from all the evil influences which could break up their community. They paid $21.5 million for Mount St. Alphonsus so that they could build their own high school for 140 of their own children. According to the Daily Freeman newspaper account on June 21, 2012 of the sale, the Bruderhof’s kids had been attending public schools, but their spokesperson, Ian Winter said: “We worked hard with the school(s)…but we felt the morals were slipping”. So they decided to start their own high school with no moral slippage. I wonder how that’s working out for them. There are no known newspaper articles about the new Bruderhof school – as far as I know from a quick search on the Web. The Bruderhof was formed in post-World War 1 Germany – for what purposes I don’t know, except to be separate from everyone else. They must be doing something right, because they had the money to purchase one of the most strikingly beautiful set of buildings and acreage along the Hudson River. Their view from above must be awesome. You don’t think they’re looking down their noses at us, do you? I hope their kids get a great education, although they won’t be using it to help the poor and spiritually abandoned, unless the Bruderhof itself has such an underclass in need of salvation.

If you were wondering how the Admiral and I spend our hours cruising, this narrative about the Mount St. Alphonsus property and the two religious orders involved with it gives you an idea about what piques our interest and sends us to our research aids to learn about the people and places who live along the waterways we traverse. Don’t get me started on what appears to be totally inequitable treatment of the nuns and priests by the Redemptorists. They found themselves in need of selling off this fine retreat because fewer and fewer men wanted to become priests. Duh! Did they even consider opening up the priesthood to women, maybe starting with the 9 loyal nuns they just kicked out of their home? How about this new Pope, Francis (number unknown)? I think he’s all about ministering to the poor and spiritually abandoned. He’s moving off the celibacy requirement, in the hopes that father priests may produce son priests in training, I guess. Wake up, Francis! You’ve got a whole bunch of nuns around the world who could start filling the priesthood gap immediately. You wouldn’t have to wait for priests to reproduce (legitimately). Bring on the nuns! What a concept! Some day this will happen. Why not make history now, when the church desperately needs more priests? All right, just give it some thought and get back to me – in your lifetime.

I started researching the subject of Mount St. Alphonsus, because I looked up and said: “Whoa! What’s that building?” This is a statement the Admiral and I found ourselves repeating throughout our journey up and down the Hudson River. There are more castles per square mile along this waterway than any place we have traveled. Each one has its own lengthy history. Most of them are well worth the time it takes to visit them and take a tour through the mansions and around the grounds. I just got to a few of these gems in our short visit. In the next Blog, I’ll tell you about Olana, the Persian style castle built by Frederic Edwin Church, one of the most successful artists in the Hudson River Valley School of artists, and his diminutive wife, Isabel Carnes Church.

However, in case you think this trip is all about beauty and enlightenment, let me bring you back to earth for a moment. We were back in the land of the F word, Northern New Jersey – the shore area around Manasquan to be exact. And the local boaters were still crazy as ever – and rude, foul-mouthed, and narcissistic. Let’s start with Ba Ba Buoy, a small fishing boat that sat RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the channel, as we tried to enter the Manasquan River yesterday afternoon. The people on the boat had no radio apparently. An angry boater hailed them on Channel 16 to advise them that they were RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the channel, and that it is against every law and rule of boating to park your boat RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the channel. This advice was going out over the radio as we passed Ba Ba Buoy. The guys on the boat just smiled and waved at us, as we tried to avoid hitting them, and they stayed RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of the channel. The Admiral told the boater who had sent out the admonition that it fell on deaf ears. After we had passed Ba Ba Buoy, however, they finally left the MIDDLE of the channel and roared past us in the “no wake” zone. Clueless. This morning as we were heading out the Manasquan River on to the Atlantic, a whole fleet of small fishing boats were flying around behind us, beside us, in front of us. After we had been on the Atlantic for a few minutes, we heard this on the radio: “Hey, you motherf—er. You think you’re funny? You got the whole f-king ocean to go fishing. But you’re right up my a-s! What gives, Motherf-er?”  Rude, foul-mouthed and narcissistic. At this point, the Admiral shook his head and stated: “There is something seriously wrong with Northern New Jersey fishing boaters.” And soon thereafter, I believe a Coast Guard rep came on the radio to note that Channel 16, which had carried the expletive laced tirade, was an emergency channel for emergencies only. Or maybe it wasn’t a Coast Guard rep. We saw a very large Coast Guard station as we left Manasquan, and we still can’t figure out how this place has become so lawless right under the noses of those sworn to enforce the boating laws.

As my brother has said, this is not the Manasquan we knew as kids, when our parents took us there for some idyllic summer vacations of fishing from piers with bamboo poles for bluefish, swimming in the ocean and going to Asbury Park for the rides. I don’t remember one F word. I’m sure there is another Manasquan which does not pride itself in its boorishness. But the Manasquan that greets the transient boater these days really needs to clean up its act. It might be time for a regime change, both in the mayor’s office and at the local Coast Guard outpost. Bring courtesy, decency and generosity back to Manasquan! And your tourist dollars will multiply. Give it a try.