HISTORY

Father Wizeman first appeared at Corpus Christi attending Music Before 1800 concerts six or seven years ago. The English Martyrs window above the Blessed Sacrament altar attracted his attention, and he asked Father Rafferty about it. Soon he was helping out with Masses at Corpus Christi. In 2005 he officially became assistant pastor, a position also known by the grander and more British-sounding title of parochial vicar—guess which one he always chose to use.¹

Parishioners appreciated his reverent manner of presiding at Mass and his sermons which were both scholarly and accessible.² Father Wizeman’s Masses were very different from anyone else’s. Early on, he asked Louise Basbas, our Music Director, to help him learn the chant for the Canon of the Mass, as he did not read music. His pleasant tenor voice and fine sense of pitch truly were a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy.

Father Wizeman’s piety was simple and sincere, despite an Oxford doctorate. For instance, his genuflection after the Consecration was not perfunctory; he was down for so long that I always assumed he needed a drink from his ever-present water mug and wanted to be unobtrusive about it. Once I was Eucharistic minister at his Mass and saw that it was all from devotion, not mundane practicality.

At the prayers for the living and dead in the Canon, Father Wizeman regularly added the names of musicians, artists, and writers, especially composers whose works were performed at that Mass. The selection could be somewhat idiosyncratic; Tallis, Byrd, Michelangelo, and Caravaggio appeared regularly. When I asked why Caravaggio, the answer was simply “I like his work.” Without Father Wizeman to pray for them, deceased composers and artists are left on their own now. He did not, however, mention non-Catholics like Bach because he didn’t know how they would feel about such a papist act. I would have figured that in the Great Beyond one finally understands these things, but he was still concerned for their feelings. During the time when the Mary Tudor commemoration was being planned, he regularly included her and Cardinal Pole among the dead to be prayed for—to him, a historian, they were as real as the parishioner who had died last week.

He also added the names of saints whose feasts were celebrated that day or whom he had mentioned in his sermon. Once he mumbled something that sounded to me like “Martin Luther.” When I asked him about this, a look of absolute horror crossed his face; what he had said was “Mark and Luke,” the two evangelists not mentioned in the Canon. Ever after, he carefully said “Luke and Mark,” lest anyone else misunderstand.

The most outstanding project of Father Wizeman’s time at Corpus Christi, one that combined his interests in history and religion, came to fruition on November 17, 2008: a commemoration of the 450^th anniversary of the deaths of Mary Tudor (Mary I of England, “Bloody Mary”) and Cardinal Reginald Pole, her Archbishop of Canterbury, who both happened to die on the same day, ensuring the end of Catholicism as England’s state religion. Father Wizeman presided at a Requiem Mass for them and preached the sermon, with period music by Taverner, Tallis, Byrd, and Sheppard sung by the Choir of Corpus Christi Church. After the Mass, the ensemble Parthenia performed Byrd’s elegy for Mary Tudor, Crowned with Flowers and Lilies. The evening concluded with a talk by the famed church historian Eamon Duffy on the Catholic restoration under Mary and Pole. A scholar who came from Australia for the event reminisced after his death: “I console myself that at least he had those days around the Mary/Pole occasion when so many things of such importance to him were so splendidly commemorated, and I have never ceased to wonder at the size of the congregation that evening—they can’t possibly all have been devotees of either Mary or Pole, let alone both, so I assume they were responding at least in part to Bill and his interests.”

Father Wizeman’s interest in the English Reformation far predates his 2006 book The Theology and Spirituality of Mary Tudor’s Church. He had already written a letter to the New York Times the day before he turned eighteen; it was published under the headline “Roman Antecedents of England’s Church.” At that tender age, he was already correcting misconceptions! The letter closes, “With the present Pope and Archbishop leading the way toward reunification, it is sad there are still those who seem to hope to deter rationalization of religious issues, an idea for which such men as Thomas More and Thomas Cranmer died.”³

In the parish he presented a number of Saturday afternoon retreats focusing on some of his favorite themes: Julian of Norwich; the English martyrs; the Catholic Reformers Teresa of Àvila, Ignatius Loyola, and Francis de Sales; Our Lady of Walsingham. These events always included reproductions of related art from his books and appropriate recorded music from his large collection of CDs. He showed movies on themes that interested him, like Kristin Lavransdatter, based on Sigrid Undset’s novels about medieval Norway, and gave a series of talks on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was a favorite of his since childhood, when he had named the cows on the family dairy farm after characters in the book.

One contribution of his continues. In union with Jesuits worldwide, to mark the 450^th anniversary of the death of St. Ignatius Loyola, at Corpus Christi Father Wizeman offered a Retreat in Daily Life, based on the saint’s Spiritual Exercises. Participants spent a half hour daily in meditative prayer and met with him for a half hour every two weeks for the liturgical year 2005-2006. The program was more popular than expected and involved quite a time commitment on his part. However, he noted with pleasure that tiny Corpus Christi produced many more retreatants than some of the larger Jesuit churches! This surely says something about the caliber of Corpus Christi’s parishioners.

At the end of the retreat in spring 2006, a continuing group emerged: the Saints Edmund and Robert Christian Life Community, named for Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell, two Jesuit English martyrs especially dear to Father Wizeman. The group met every two weeks under his guidance to ponder how theory meets practice in trying to live a Christian life in the real world.

Despite the difficulties, Father Wizeman offered the retreat again in 2008-2009, again quite successfully. At its conclusion, those retreatants also became part of the existing Christian Life Community. By this time, he was less and less able to attend meetings. His death, far sooner than expected, left the group orphaned. Now it continues, groping along to discern the next step.

But a list of Father Wizeman’s many accomplishments, both in the parish and beyond, fails to get at the essence of the man. There was a basic kindness about him, an unwillingness to break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick. There was also an instinctive helpfulness, perhaps the result of his youthful days on the farm. When he saw something that needed doing, he just did it—whether cleaning the statues of More and Fisher in the church or polishing the tarnished silver chalices or sending out meeting notices or carrying out the trash. When I looked for pictures of Father Wizeman in the archive of photographs from the various parish centennial celebrations, I found several that showed him in this helping role: setting up for the special Mass to come or cleaning up after the reception that followed it.

A truly unique character, he was not without his rough spots. Father Wizeman was always shy and a bit awkward socially. His impatience and perfectionism could lead him to utter harsh words. But, a rare trait among the clergy and others in high places, he always apologized soon after. Indeed, at one weekday Mass on the anniversary of his entrance into the Jesuits, he knelt before the altar and made a public apology to all he had offended—this is the kind of thing you read about in the lives of the saints but never, ever find in real life.

And here we encounter the paradox that was Father Wizeman. He grew up on a dairy farm in Palmyra, New York, and somehow ended up with a doctorate from Oxford as the leading scholar of Mary Tudor’s Church. An Anglophile if ever there was one, he nonetheless had very Middle-American tastes in food and dress. He was respected in academia and yet always thought of himself as one of the ordinary folks. He read the most exalted scholarly tomes but loved to watch cartoons with small children. From the start, it seems he knew his own path and was single-minded about it; yet he could be amazingly tolerant of other very different paths.

When he first introduced himself in the pulpit, Father Wizeman mentioned his poor health from a congenital liver disease and the transplant that would eventually be necessary. Of course it all sounded very abstract and distant to us then. But in fact his condition did gradually worsen, deteriorating markedly through 2009. At first he wasn’t sick enough to be high on the transplant list, and then suddenly he was too sick for the surgery. The seesaw finally came to rest when he was given a healthy young liver that September.

Physical suffering was not the only kind he experienced in his last year. In May a brother died suddenly, and the family was stunned; Father Wizeman saw it as his duty to avoid inflicting another death on his grieving relatives. Then when he was sick and indeed almost dying, his mother died; she had been seriously ill but expected to live another six months. Her funeral was on the very day of his transplant—September 24, 2009, the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, the English shrine to which he was attached. Jesuits from his community at St. Francis Xavier went to Palmyra and said the funeral Mass that he should have presided at. When he finally could be told the sad news, he was bereft.

Physically his condition improved steadily. The operating team had never seen a transplant take to its new host so beautifully. Hope awakened—perhaps at last, thinking of Tobit 7:17, the Lord of heaven will grant him joy in place of his grief.

In due course Father Wizeman recovered from the surgery and resumed some of his duties at Corpus Christi. Especially moving was his first public Mass, on a weekday noon. Attendance was much above the usual. He chose as the hymn Old Hundredth, so appropriate to the occasion and to his Anglophile tastes. We all gave heartfelt thanks to God and awaited his full return to normal life.

But the good news was not to last. Traces of an aggressive cancer soon appeared, and chemotherapy was begun, further sapping his strength. In early July a biopsy revealed the awful truth. He was given six months to live and died two weeks later.

During this whole ordeal, he was calm and accepting, while the rest of us asked how this turnaround could happen and wondered whether God had been too distracted with Iraq and Haiti to pay proper attention here. At the cancer diagnosis, when a visitor asked what to tell those who would ask about him, Father Wizeman said, “Tell them I’ll be all right.” On another occasion, a visitor asked what he was thinking about, and he replied, “The tenderness of God.” The tenderness of God, who had dangled before him the prospect of a normal life and then suddenly snatched it away? More than once in the course of things, I found myself thinking in surprise, “Good Lord, he really believes this stuff.” The rest of us come to church and have the outward trappings, but he had really taken it into his heart.

The funeral took place on July 22, 2010, the feast of St. Mary Magdalene. The wake was held at Corpus Christi in the afternoon, with the Mass of Christian Burial that evening. During the wake, Catherine Parsons, a student at Manhattan School of Music, spontaneously got her cello and played some of Bach’s unaccompanied partitas as a tribute. Despite its being the height of vacation season, the church was full for the Mass, and four rows of Jesuits were present.

Father Wizeman had left very detailed instructions about his funeral. It was to be at Corpus Christi with Father Rafferty presiding, and he was to be buried in the Our Lady of Walsingham chasuble made for him by his mother. The music, too, was spelled out fully.

Many of us were expecting an extended orgy of the English polyphony he so loved. Instead, to our surprise, the program was quite sparse musically, all in chant or by Vaughan Williams: the organ preludes on Rhosymedre and Hyfrydol, The Song of the Leaves of Life and the Water of Life, and his arrangement of “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say.” In Latin Gregorian chant the choir was to sing the Introit, Alleluia, Communion, and “In paradisum” of the Requiem Mass; the congregation was to join them for the Sanctus and Agnus Dei, also chanted in Latin. Hymns were to be “Blessed city, heavenly Salem” to Purcell’s tune and “Praise to the Holiest in the Height” with words by his beloved Cardinal Newman. Tolkien’s poem “At the Grey Havens,” on p. 7 here, was to be read. (In contrast, the Jesuits, not being a liturgically oriented order, were surprised at the amount of music and puzzled by what to them was elaborate ceremonial.)

Much of this music was what Father Wizeman had recently chosen for his forty-sixth birthday on June 19, 2010, which was to be his last. He was scheduled to preside at the Saturday vigil Mass that day, and a party was planned for afterwards. As a special birthday gift, some parishioners arranged to have Louise Basbas play the organ, not usually provided at that Mass. Father Wizeman requested the same Vaughan Williams preludes then, as well as the Newman hymn. As a Communion meditation, he read an extended passage from Cardinal Newman, reproduced here on p. 6.

Since so many people were away over the summer, the 11:15 Mass on September 19, 2010, was the parish’s memorial to him. By happy coincidence, it was also the day of the beatification of Cardinal Newman, to whom Father Wizeman had been so devoted. Hymns at the Mass were Newman’s “Praise to the Holiest in the Height” and “Lead, kindly Light” (to the tune Sandon) and Purcell’s “Blessed city, heavenly Salem,” two of them repeated from the funeral. The choir again sang Vaughan Williams’s arrangement of “I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say,” as well as Louise Talma’s Prayer to Newman’s words “O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and evening comes.” The Vaughan Williams preludes again opened and closed the service.

Father Wizeman had planned to go to England for Cardinal Newman’s beatification in September and then, once the cancer was diagnosed, to go sooner, but that was not to be. A close friend from his years in England, whom he was supposed to visit on the trip that never was, came to New York for a few days and happened to be with him when he died. She later wrote, “My final prayer at his bedside was that of Thomas More to his daughter Meg—Pray for me as I will pray for thee, that we will meet right merrily in heaven.” It is also the prayer of the parishioners of Corpus Christi Church.

notes

¹ Neil Mack, Fr. Wizeman’s friend since college, shared this memory:

“Bill had fun with his ‘full title’. . . and I always used it when sending him our Christmas card. This "full title"—whimsically embellished and directly dictated by him as I wrote it down—was as follows:

A poor, simple, country priest, but in the Bronx it's Reverend Father Doctor William Louis (Patrick*) Wizeman, SJ, MDiv, MSt, DPhil (Oxon)
“Confirmation name; if allowed to make final vows (distant future) I may take a vow name too.
Louis, Patrick & Oxon—Latin abrev. for Oxford—are droppable. If there's room for DPhil, keep that; otherwise just Rev Fr Dr WW, SJ or
        Bill Wizeman, SJ, pscp
        MDiv - Master of Divinity
        MSt (more commonly known as MStud) - Master of Studies
        DPhil - Doctor of Philosophy (philosophy in the old sense = knowledge)
        pscp - poor, simple, country priest

I can still hear him saying all of this to me as I wrote it down, especially the pscp part delivered with a smile and a laugh.”

² Some of his sermons, as well those of Father Rafferty, are on the parish web site at http://www.corpus-christi-nyc.org/Clergy.htm.

³ New York Times, July 1, 1982.

___________________________________________________________

Ann Plogsterth has been a member of Father Wizeman’s Christian Life Community since its beginning.

Organ Donation in New York State

To learn about organ and tissue donation so that others

like Father Wizeman may have a new chance at life, go to

www.health.ny.gov/professionals/patients/donation/organ/.

You can enroll as a donor online or print out a form to sign.

Or call the New York State Organ and Tissue Donor Registry

at 1-866-NYDONOR (1-866-693-6667).