Thursday Morning, December 13, 2012

Father Bob Weiss awoke in an upbeat mood, nothing but good things on his calendar. Today: his eighth-graders’ annual pre-Christmas trip to New York City. Tomorrow: a day off. Earlier in the week, he had pleasantly surprised himself by getting ahead of schedule. By Wednesday he’d somehow powered through the completion of his routine church business along with the inscribing and mailing of the 800 or so personal holiday cards that he felt compelled, as the pastor of St. Rose of Lima, Newtown’s only Roman Catholic church, to send out. Plus, he had already taken care of most of his holiday shopping, and the rectory’s decorations had gone up. All he was going to do on Friday, apart from take it easy, was wrap presents.

But today, the New York trip—an exhausting, if edifying, endeavor that entailed leaving before dawn from the Danbury train station with 46 kids and more than a dozen parent and teacher chaperones. The school with which Father Bob’s church is affiliated, also called St. Rose of Lima, runs from junior kindergarten through eighth grade. It had become a December tradition to celebrate the graduating St. Rose class, whose members scatter to other schools the following year, by treating them to a big day in the big city. The activities would begin with a visit to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Father Bob—actually Monsignor Robert Weiss since his elevation to that title in 2008, but still universally known in Newtown as Father Bob—had a couple of ins at St. Patrick’s: he’d risen through the priestly ranks in Connecticut’s Bridgeport diocese under Bishop Edward Egan, later a cardinal and the archbishop of New York, and one of his parishioners was a friend of the cathedral’s current rector. The St. Rose kids were going to receive the V.I.P. tour, where they would get to stand in the sanctuary and visit the crypt where past archbishops are buried.

After St. Patrick’s would come the schoolkid equivalent of shore leave: the Radio City Christmas Spectacular, lunch at the Lincoln Center location of Rosa Mexicano (one of whose founders, Doug Griebel, is a St. Rose parishioner), and supervised shopping sprees at the NBA Store, FAO Schwarz, and Macy’s—a lot of time on his feet for a 66-year-old monsignor with two surgically repaired knees. But Father Bob always enjoyed the eighth-grade trip, and he was more inclined than usual to relish it. The coming year, 2013, would mark the 40th anniversary of his ordination as a priest, and, whether it was for this reason or the fact that he now had two young priests as his charges at St. Rose, Father Ignacio Ortigas and Father Luke Suarez, Father Bob found himself in an uncommonly reflective mood.

He’d graduated from high school in 1964, the middle child of five children of a Martin Marietta executive and his wife, and the only Weiss to enter the priesthood. Why, he wondered, had he chosen this path, arguably more radical for his baby-boomer cohort than that chosen by actual 60s radicals? Certainly, he had boomer-ish tendencies—he liked rock ’n’ roll and, in 1969, had sneaked off with two fellow divinity students from St. Bernard’s Seminary, in Rochester, New York, to attend the Woodstock festival. He was scandalized by the pot smoke everywhere and fearful of unwittingly falling prey to a contact high, but, then again, he enjoyed Janis Joplin’s set and bought a woven hippie belt, blue with white peace signs, from a crafts booth.

Being a young priest in the 70s, that morally and aesthetically murky era of permissiveness and experimentation even among regular suburban folk, could have hardened Father Bob, made him disgusted and doctrinaire. But it did the opposite. It made him gentle, or perhaps brought to the fore his inherent gentleness. At various Fairfield County parishes over the years, he sympathetically listened as people described their bad decisions and tough luck, counseling them out of the traps into which they’d fallen, without raining down judgment. His soft manner endeared him to children too. Stout, with a mustache and short hair that turned white as he got older, he was grandfatherly and approachable rather than autocratic and severe.