Word: paulists
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Father Eugene O'Malley was rehearsing the Paulist Choir of Chicago's St. Mary's Church, and the sound and fury was something his 100-odd choristers took in stride. He ranged up and down the basement rehearsal hall like a restless spirit, his ears stretching for sour notes and his eyes for inattention. "Watch me!" he shouted. "If you don't watch me, you'll go flying out of here so fast you won't know what happened to you!" Suddenly he swooped. "You're flat! You're throwing everyone else...
...Chicago's Civic Opera House, celebrating the famed choir's soth anniversary, such a thing as a flat tone was unthinkable. The program, which ranged from Palestrina to Stravinsky, produced a fortissimo reaction from the music critics. "Cool, thin, silver tone . . . timeless patina," said the Tribune. Said Paulist O'Malley: "It was one of the finest concerts I've ever conducted...
...Nerve. This was no small thing to say, for St. Mary's Paulist Choir is one of the best in the world. It was well known in 1914, when twelve-year-old Eugene O'Malley first thought of joining it. He had read about its triumphal tour of Europe two years before, when it sang before Pope Pius X.* For years young O'Malley had been practicing the piano and going to almost every concert and opera in Chicago. At his tryout he sang Gounod's Ave Maria straight through with such solemn precision that Father...
...three years later he decided to give music up to become a priest, a Paulist like his idol, Father Finn. "I had the idea of becoming a priest from a small boy," he says. Manhattan helped."I used to float around with a lot of theatrical people, and they didn't impress me very much." Instead of depriving him of his music, the church gave it back...
...Syrian desert. After leaving Rome, he re-entered the monastic life for good. Inside the monastery, the razor-witted controversialist could be kind and inspiring to his spiritual charges. But he was uncompromising about the monastic rules, and had little patience with those who found them too severe. Writes Paulist Father Eugene Burke: "He never lost sight of the fact that the vocation of a Christian is to be a saint...