Hail and Farewell to the Hermit of Miller Place
By Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser
“Manhasset Stories,” Vols. 1 and 2.
One of my new-found, Facebook friends - formerly of Manhasset - shared her copy of Monsignor John K. Sharp’s autobiography, An Old Priest Remembers, with me.
Having just reread the book, my new friend offered this sage advice:
“Take all the time you need. There’s a lot in it.”
No kidding.
The Monsignor’s memoir was first published in 1977* when Sharp was 85 years old. He intended it to be a gift book for 100 of his family members and friends, both laity and clergy. However, demand required a second printing with an extended version and a larger distribution, selling at $10 per copy in 1978.
There’s no doubt Sharp’s life was an interesting one. He was born into the Victorian Era of Brooklyn in 1892, worked for a while at becoming a “captain of high finance,” and ended up as a seminarian whose self-proclaimed “most productive work” was the growth of St. Mary’s Church in Manhasset and his supervision of the 2800 students who attended the three parish schools, including the high schools which he established.
Ironically, he never wanted to be a teacher, but he was always a writer penning “ten books and countless articles...including a monumental three-volume history of the Catholic Church on Long Island” for the Diocese of Rockville Center, an enormous accomplishment on its own.
However it is the Monsignor’s memories of the Brooklyn and Long Island of his youth that are among the most informative and charming in his story. He was called “Kean” by family and friends, for his middle name which was an homage to his mother’s family. The Keans were a large tribe, who lived and vacationed well. They interacted among each generation for decades, with Sharp and other clerical relatives presiding at family weddings, ordinations, and funerals.
Reading Sharp’s story was eye-opening to the child in me who remembers having to face him after committing a few minor offenses that the nuns deemed worthy of the Monsignor’s input. Each instance involved me cutting high school - once to attend the ticker-tape parade for John Glenn with JFK through Wall Street and again, to greet The Beatles at JFK airport. ( As a side note, I came very close to Glenn and JFK, but nowhere near the Beatles).
Whatever! the teenager in my head gives in response to the Monsignor’s indictment today, but then I didn’t have the word. Monsignor Sharp grounded me, if you can believe that. Priests and doctors held sway over my widowed mom.
So, by the order of the holy church, I wasn’t allowed to attend Mission Day at school for the first offense - deemed less serious, perhaps, because JFK was Catholic.
As for idolizing infidels, I was not to be admitted into the boys’ basketball game or sock hop that weekend, a ruling Sharp dictated to my mother whom he charged with keeping me home lest I become a “ne’er-do-well.”
Lo, these many decades since, while reading Sharp’s memoir, I took a certain glee in the spaghetti junction of ADD ramblings that pepper his paragraphs.
He was a clearly a man who kept meticulous records and frequently quotes from letters he wrote to and received from family, parishioners, and various bishops. His approach to telling his story involves the structure of these pieces of correspondence mingled with tales of the times surrounding them related in a Dickensian prose.
I can’t critique Monsignor Sharp. It’s just not right. I will say, however, it is this very style that weighs his story down with the employment of words likeienic, panegyric,and sacerdotal, as well as obscure allusions to “Medes and the Persians” and Latin idioms: Dominus pars heredidtatis meae(The Lord is the portion of my inheritance).
I am unclear about the means which afforded Sharp to travel as widely and well as he did, nor about how a priest bought a house 100 feet above LI Sound upon retirement. I can only assume one avows to different levels of poverty in the religious life, and recognize that I really don’t know anything about the mechanics of the priesthood at all.
The Monsignor retired in 1969, a year after the Second Vatican Council, when he began “to experience the headaches and frustrations of a pastor in the new age into which the Church was entering with the laity beginning to participate in its management and strange ideas about authority becoming prevalent.”
In his memoir, Monsignor Sharp is a vocal critic of both Vatican Councils and the Ecumenism brought to the Church into which he’d been ordained. He expresses disdain for the change from habits to street clothes favored by the nuns and often notes his disagreement with the Second Council’s decision to require retirement for priests at age 75 - even questioning why the “carism of the papacy makes it unnecessary for its incumbent” to retire at the same age as priests.
Sharp’s later years, by his own assessment, were lonely. “I style myself The Hermit of MIller Place,” he wrote. “Often days pass in which I speak to no one; hear from no one; neither phone nor doorbell rings.”
I was unable to find the date of Sharp’s death, another lonely fact in consideration of the man’s accomplishments for the Diocese as well as for St. Mary’s.
Consequently, his advice at the book’s end haunts me: ”If you live long enough, you too will want to be wanted.”
I’m sorry I didn’t know that the Monsignor was pining for visitors in the 70s. I would have stopped by to tell him I hadn’t become an astronaut, a star stalker, or a ne’er-do-well. In fact, like him, I was going to be a teacher - the last thing I had ever expected myself to be - and a writer - the one thing I’d always planned on.
Now, it is only appropriate that I use the Monsignor’s Latin to pay the man his due, and so I say: Frater Ave atque Vale, Monsignor. Hail brother and farewell.
*published by Exposition Press, Hicksville, NY
