The Catholic Culture Bearer to the Rockies

Review of Dan Dervin, Father Bosetti in America: A Biographical Study. Denver: Cache Glades, 2004, paperback. ISBN 0-9724792-2-8, vii-xi + 226 pp., $15.95.

Given the current and decidedly cloudy image of Catholic priests who work with adolescent boys, Father (Fr.) Joseph J. Bosetti, the subject of Dan Dervin’s biography, seems too good to be true. An Italian immigrant, this priest drew on the rich cultural heritage of his native Milan to compose sacred music as well as direct operas like “La Traviata” and “La Boheme” for the Denver Grand Opera Company. He provided the “proper auspices” for seminarians to drink alcohol under his supervision at his camp in the Rocky Mountains. He embraced some aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis while teaching a University of Colorado Extension Course in the 1920’s. As extraordinary as Fr. Bosetti was, Dervin, a former camper and counselor at the priest’s Camp St. Malo for Catholic seminarians and altar boys, never resorts to hagiography or myth-making. In fact, in various places throughout the book, Dervin attempts to unlock some of the significance of Fr. Bosetti’s life through psychoanalytic readings of certain memories, creative acts, and interpersonal incidents.

In the end, though, the book’s ability to render a deep and incisive picture of what appears to be simply a remarkable human being is undermined by some structural problems in the presentation of the narrative and a certain unevenness in the writing (including several typos). Fr. Bosetti’s life is presented in roughly chronological order, but is also structured around his great loves, apart from his priestly vocation: music, mountaineering, and, related to both, his camp. Part I is devoted the origins and impact of the priest’s mission to Denver (chapter one), his music in and out of the church (chapters two and three), and his love of the mountains (chapter four), which he shares not only with Catholic boys but also the Pope at the time, Pius XI. Yet the next three chapters in this section, while related, are somewhat incongruous with what has preceded them. There is a brief account of the history of St. Catherine’s Chapel on the Rock on the grounds of Camp St. Malo; an estimation of the intellectual significance of Fr. Bosetti’s Extension Course on psychology; and an excursus on the campers’ ascents up nearby Mount of the Holy Cross. Dervin then interrupts his chronology with Part II, a selection of Fr. Bosetti’s writings on mountaineering and music. Part III follows with two chapters on the final years of the priest’s life and his impact on others and concludes with an appendix on his seminary years in Rome and Switzerland, which includes a prescient report of sexual abuses by one of the seminary priests.

One should recognize that Dervin has not set out to write a psychobiography of this priest, who clearly meant much to the author. But such an acknowledgment only serves to accentuate the excursions into psychoanalytic interpretation. Some of these are tentative, at best (such as his reading of screen memories of the composer Giuseppe Verdi, pp. 37-39), but others suggest perceptive ways to tie the significant parts of the priest’s life together. One occasion where Dervin successfully achieves such an insight into the whole of Fr. Bosetti’s life comes (probably not coincidentally) in the chapter on the psychology course (chapter six), “Such Sublimity of Mind.” The title here refers to Dervin’s exploration of the dual significance of the word “sublime.” On

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the one hand there is the religious, ecstatic, even mystical meaning that in many ways lies at the spiritual core of the priestly vocation. On the other is the Freudian concept of sublimation, highly pertinent for a celibate who was also celebrated in religious and secular society for his role as a “culture bearer” to the remote western outpost of early twentieth century Colorado. Dervin writes, “the sublime forms a unifying thread in the total Bosetti tapestry,” encompassing not only the priest’s love of religion and music but also the mountains (p. 145). For Fr. Bosetti, Dervin argues, mountains represented not only the literal peaks of natural beauty but also the peaks of the human encounter with God, as seen in the numerous sacred heights consecrated in the Bible. Even mountaineering, so central to the priest’s life and the lives of his campers, can be easily understood as a metaphor for transcending our limitations in both the religious and psychological senses (pp. 146-147).

The play of the sublime and sublimation Dervin discusses neatly illustrates Fr. Bosetti’s remarkable ability to stay grounded in the world while reaching out to its transcendent aspects. However, after using the word “sublime” on the first page of the introduction and briefly alluding to sublimation in the second chapter (“Though their collaboration was long-lasting and fruitful, celibacy makes strange bedfellows with art,” p. 38), Dervin does not develop this theme until well into the second half of the book – and subsequently abandons it. Consequently it is difficult, overall, to understand what is so compelling or illustrative about this particular man of God. Fr. Bosetti arrived in America at 25, Dervin writes, “to all intents and purposes a fully formed adult, a priest committed to his vocation, well equipped to engage the many unforeseen challenges of the New World” (p. 41), a point he reiterates near the end of the book, adding that he “suffered little doubt or uncertainty” (p. 200). Perhaps part of the problem Dervin faces in revealing an absorbing portrait of this subject stems from the fact that he appears so well-balanced and well-suited to his chosen role that little of the internal conflict or outward struggle that one might anticipate from a cultured, non-English speaking missionary to one of the rough edges of American civilization is apparent.

Even when confronting injustices brought about by others’ immoral behavior or unreasonable stances, the priest is unfailingly portrayed as taking an unequivocally upright and sensible position. While he does not back down, he often accedes to withdraw from a situation, as when the “censorious” Bishop of Denver objects to the mixed acting company and romantic situations of the opera “Romeo et Juliette” (p. 34) or when one of Camp St. Malo’s benefactors threatens to cut off funding (pp. 98-104). Dervin introduces an Oedipal theme of obedience regarding Fr. Bosetti’s reaction to his superior in Denver and expands on it through the screen memory of Verdi, who “became a source of both idealization and identification,” providing “the missing role as an idealized, sponsoring parent” (pp. 35-39). As an adult, the priest misremembers Verdi’s relationship to Catholicism, seeing him as he no doubt saw himself: “obedient” (i.e., Orthodox) but creative within its constraints. Throughout his life Fr. Bosetti is never portrayed as chafing under these constraints or surreptitiously subverting them; this culture bearer voices no discontent with the repressive forces of his civilization. Though Dervin assets that Fr. Bosetti, like Freud, was “deeply ambivalent toward civilization,” he is content to accept at face value the priest’s devotion to religion—and mountaineering—as “solutions” to its “hypocrisy of conventionalities and ‘ennui’” (p. 197). The story of Bosetti’s life would be more fascinating and still more richly human if Dervin had been able to not only depict the priest’s great strengths but the inner struggles and constant sacrifices they most certainly required.

Still, the priest’s sense of fairness and justice was acute, at least when injustice threatened to impact the welfare of the young men in his world who had devoted their lives to God. We see true moral indignation when his benefactor jeopardizes his camp, resigning for two years in protest. More striking still is the letter he writes, at age 19, to make known the sexual improprieties conducted by one of the priests at the Bethlehem Mission in Immensee, Switzerland, where he had begun his training (pp. 220-223). Appealing to the issues of trust, morality, and justice upon which such a scandal, left unaddressed, would inflict immeasurable damage for the young seminarians and the Church itself, this letter demonstrates just what a force this man was in all his reasonableness and measured passion. It is unfortunate then that this episode from the beginning of his career is relegated to an appendix at the end of a book on his life. Had Dervin integrated all the aspects of Fr. Bosetti’s life as well as the man himself

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had, he could have produced an extraordinary biography, rather than an uneven biography of a model priest that only offers glimpses of what made him that way.

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