Truth and Catholic Education by Dom Aelred Graham, 1977
Reprinted from the Portsmouth Abbey School Fiftieth Anniversary Publication
Members of the monastic community in 1960: from left to right, Dom Anselm Hufstader, Dom Philip Wilson, Dom Peter Sidler, Dom Gregory McClure, Dom Ambrose Wolverton, Very Rev. Dom Aelred Graham, Brother Basil Cunningham, Dom Wilfrid Bayne, Dom Christopher Davis ’45, and Dom David Hurst.
Rather than yield at the outset to my besetting weakness for generalities and abstractions, it may be well to give some account of how I came to know and increasingly to love the Portsmouth community. On August 8, 1951 I landed from the Nieuw Amsterdam at Hoboken, to be met and warmly welcomed by Father Peter. The car assigned to be driven down to New York from the Priory (as it then was) had burned out its motor in transit. A satisfactory substitute was somehow found, but the initial mishap lingered for a little in my mind. Was it a portent of something to come --one did not quite know what? Misgivings were soon dispelled and within a few days I found myself settling into what were at that time decidedly primitive monastic quarters on Narragansett Bay. Looking back on those sixteen years (1951-1967) when I was not only resident in the United States (for the first time), but also virtually a member of an American Benedictine community, they appear to me now filled with pleasant memories. First in importance comes the slow influx into
the monastery of dedicated young men, several of whom now hold posts of key responsibility. They had been called to serve God through a life of prayer and liturgical worship, also to play their part in handing on to others the religious and cultural values they themselves had received. While getting to know the community one was also learning to know its friends, to become aware how strongly Portsmouth was supported by its alumni and by parents of present and past students in the school. Things seemed to happen around one, through the insight and energies of the community, rather than by any marked direction from the top. The choice of a distinguished architect, for example, to design our new buildings, Pietro Belluschi, emerged by an inspired consensus. The fighting off of a menace from an oil refinery was chiefly due to the skill of our redoubtable attorney, the late Cornelius (Connie) C. Moore. Awareness of our needs and a generous readiness to help led to the raising of sufficient funds for our development program. Meanwhile the routine work of the school
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