Sparksof theDivine Commemorating Archpriest Nilus Lerro

by NICK TABOR

Fr. Nilus Lerro told me once that when he was a senior in high school, he approached his father a bit timidly one night and announced his plans for after graduation: “Dad, I’m going to join the Jesuits.”

His father swore. “I already sent in the $70 deposit for your college tuition,” he said. “I won’t be able to get it back.”

I remember laughing, and Fr. Nilus perceived that I hadn’t understood. He explained that this had been his father’s way of deflecting his emotions. They were an Italian Catholic family, regulars at Sunday Mass, but life in a religious order was not what his parents had pictured for their only child. They wanted him to get married and carry on their family line. The news of his decision came as a blow. His mother would end up taking it even harder.

Fr. Nilus told others a story that complements this one. When his rich uncle heard about his plans, he tried to intervene, offering to bring him into his business. On his 18th birthday, his uncle drove up with a beautiful car. He said, “Look, a sensible man drives off with this car and meets a lovely girl. You’re gonna be a very happy man and make us all happy.” Fred, as Fr. Nilus was known at the time, replied, “The car won’t take me to God, but my religious vocation will.”

For those of us who only met Fr. Nilus five or six decades after this conversation, which is all of us who knew him in an Orthodox context, it’s impossible to imagine his life going any other way. The man we knew had been so fully formed by his experiences in ministry that his personhood seemed inseparable from his role as a pastor. More than most Orthodox clergy, he was a churchman all the way through— truly an “ecclesial being,” as Paul Evdokimov would have said. His presence at the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan in recent years was an unforgettable blessing. Since his death on Holy Wednesday this year, those of us who knew him well have been left with a glow, even while we’ve mourned him.

Fr. Nilus was born in lower Manhattan in 1940 and grew up in Brooklyn. After his education at Fordham University, he spent time teaching at a Jesuit high school (Fr. Pat Moloney, a Jesuit who was a close friend of Fr. Nilus, believes it was Regis High School on East 84th Street, widely regarded as one of the best Catholic high schools in the U.S.). He later studied theology for several years in Amsterdam. The stated mission of the Jesuits is to “find God in all things,” and for Fr. Nilus, this became a way of being. He became versed in scripture, Patristics, and modern theology; but he also had an openness toward contemporary culture. He wrote a master’s thesis on the theology of Ingmar Bergman’s films, and he loved to talk about Italian Neorealist cinema. He read The New Yorker with devotion. The other side of this was his easy, unfussy spirituality. He told me once that in Amsterdam, he and the other seminarians had to pass through the infamous red-light district to get to their morning classes. The women there would tease them, offering a “seminarian discount.” Fr. Nilus chuckled when he told the story. There was no lewdness in his description, but no self-righteousness either. He made it sound like there had been genuine warmth and empathy on both sides.

He was ordained to the diaconate in 1971 and the priesthood in 1972, serving in the Byzantine rite. For several years he was the co-director of campus ministries at Columbia University, and then in 1975, he was appointed to run the Office of Campus Ministries at Fordham. The department’s main responsibility was student counseling, but in an article in the campus newspaper, announcing his appointment, Fr. Nilus said he wanted to get students involved in helping homeless people around the Bowery, and wanted to add drama, music, and literature programs.

Sometime later, apparently in the 1980s, Fordham recruited him to be one of its envoys on Wall Street. The story, as he later told it, was that the university had some funds to invest, and it wanted its own people overseeing them. “The Jesuits have experts in every field,” Fr. Moloney explains. “That’s one of the MOs.” So Fr. Nilus began commuting from Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus to the Financial District, where he was working at the investment bank Salomon Brothers, Inc. “He was, at that particular time, you would say, living high on the hog, having a very affluent lifestyle.” Wearing his expensive suits, and blending in with the high-finance culture, he belonged to the ranks of the “underground Jesuits,” Fr. Moloney says—“the Jesuits unseen.”

By the mid-2000s, he had parted ways with the Jesuits and was living on his own in Brooklyn, working at a Barnes & Noble store. Fr. Moloney isn’t sure what led to Fr. Nilus’s decision, but he says there was a general “upheaval” at that time in the Jesuit order. He believes Fr. Nilus wanted a “more liturgical way of life”—which is not, by and large, what the Jesuits are known for. Fr. Nilus was well acquainted with the Russian spiritual tradition, because at Fordham he had been close with at least two Jesuits who were well versed in it: Fr. Walter Ciszek, a priest who had been imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and Fr. George Maloney, the founder of the university’s Institute for Eastern Christian Studies. Circa 2005, Fr. Nilus found his way to the cathedral on 2nd Street. Archimandrite Christopher Calin received him into the church by chrismation in 2006.

Afterward Fr. Nilus went to St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, where he studied for the Orthodox priesthood. He was vested as an Orthodox priest by Metropolitan Jonah in New York, in 2009, and he then returned to St. Tikhon’s as an instructor and the director of student life. “He loved the students so much,” Fr. Moloney says. I recall an anecdote he told about his time there: a seminarian was scrambling to get his cassock on before going to the grocery store. Fr. Nilus chided him, saying it wasn’t necessary. He didn’t need to go around advertising his status as a priest-in-training. He apparently detected a trace of vanity in the gesture.

Fr. Nilus retired at the end of the 2012-13 school year and came back to New York once more, where he took up residence at the cathedral and served as an assistant to Fr. Christopher.

For many of us as parishioners there, it was in Fr. Nilus’s role as a father confessor where he excelled the most. One cradle Orthodox friend recently told me he was the best confessor she’d ever had. Another friend remarked that Fr. Nilus had the skills of a trained therapist. Speaking for myself, I’ve never had a confessor who was more forgiving. Rather than coaching asceticism, he always emphasized the grace of God. He conveyed a sense of the “limitless love” of God that the French hieromonk Fr. Lev Gillet talked about; and along with Fr. Lev (whose writings Fr. Nilus treasured), he understood confession as a process of healing rather than punishment. But the effect of these encounters was never to encourage me to slack off in my spiritual life. On the contrary, they always inspired me to renew my devotion.

In his years at the cathedral, Fr. Nilus was also a frequent visitor to the Bonitas House, the youth shelter near Tompkins Square Park that Fr. Moloney runs. There Fr. Nilus met some young men who had recently migrated from Colombia and barely spoke a word of English. He became their teacher, working patiently with them until they were fluent. Fr. Moloney says he was also a fantastic cook. He’d take over the house’s big kitchen and prepare food for a whole crowd. Fr. Moloney believes he learned these skills from his mother, but he says Fr. Nilus also acquired a knowledge of fine wine and food from his days on Wall Street. “The Italian food he cooked was incredible. He could bake, he could do everything.”

It was clear enough during his last few years that his health was failing. He was hospitalized in October 2019, and he spent the past year in an extended-care facility. He reposed at Lenox Hill Hospital on Holy Wednesday, April 28.

His example contrasts with some of our conventional notions in the Orthodox Church of what a holy person looks like. Fr. Nilus never married, but he was not a monastic. He wasn’t an ascetic either. There was no somberness about him; he was bursting with joie de vivre. When it came to theology and spiritual counseling, he was no one’s traditionalist. And yet, to deny his holiness would seem ridiculous to almost anyone who knew him well. The 2nd Street cathedral is a church of rare diversity, reflecting the makeup of New York City; and one of Fr. Nilus’s remarkable traits was the way so many of us there, of so many different ages and backgrounds, each felt a deeply personal connection to him. Since he fell asleep in the Lord, I have sometimes wondered if he was an example of what sainthood looks like. This is not for me to say; and there’s no question that Fr. Nilus had his faults. The point here is not to idealize him. But at a minimum, we can say that he carried more than a few sparks of the divine.

NICK TABOR is the executive editor of Jacob’s Well. He is a journalist living on the Alabama Gulf Coast, where he is writing his first book. His long-term parish home is the Cathedral of the Holy Virgin Protection in Manhattan.