Fr. Blase William Schauer, OP

It was right in the middle of the twentieth century.  I was 18, in my fourth month as a novice at Kentfield Priory in Marin County, when in August 1950, I saw some new arrivals being welcomed.  In their midst was one man alternately standing on his toes, rocking on his heels, clasping and unclasping his hands, smiling broadly.  I had never seen so much energy put forward by a person standing in one place.  I never saw the like again.  It was my first glimpse of Blase William Schauer.

Seventeen of us received the habit that year - Vincent Lopez and I are still alive and wearing it - and we soon became aware that we had among us the Irresistible Force.

As time went by the Irresistible Force became aware that in the Province's formation team he had met the Immovable Object.

And so the grinding began; so the negotiations were begun, and dropped, and begun again, so the dance never ceased.  He always resisted, and yet he never quit the Order.  We younger Brothers watched fascinated, for we were seeing the emergence of a natural leader in the fullness of his youth and energy.  Some of us received from that natural leader an additional dimension of the religious life, of the intellectual life, of the aesthetic life - of life in all its forms, for no man ever was so vital.

The virtue of art - the virtue of making things rightly - was fundamental to Blase.  He had high standards, for himself and for others, and he was undeviating in his dedication to those standards.  Fortunately, there were men at St. Albert's, prominent among them the poet and master printer Brother Antoninus William Everson, who not only had high standards but also the skills to create true art.  The combination of all those men made for an environment that enriched everyone who chose to partake of it as, unknowing, we lived out (or at times endured) the very last decade of fifteen hundred continuous years of Latin monasticism, now but a memory.

That was the second and final decade of the pontificate of Pius XII.  It was the time right before the Second Vatican Council was convoked, it was "the old Church."  To many today it was the Dark Ages, others call it the Good Old Days.  This country was prosperous beyond all memory, but often dull and sometimes mean, as in the Senator McCarthy affair.  The Cold War was new.

We lived in Latin and in some darkness, but it was like sleeping outdoors in the summer, in the time between first light and sunrise.  In the long night behind us, the stars and lights of the Hebrew and Greek and Christian centuries twinkled far, far away in the dome of tradition and of legend, while people like Blase pointed to rays of dawn in the east, in the Church and the Order in England and France and Belgium and Holland, in Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker, in the U.S., and called us to arise, saying, "Let Us Bless the Lord."

And bless the Lord we youngsters did, and still do, living centuries of change in one lifetime.  Our ministry wherever we go, whatever we do, is touched by the figure and the fire of that man in his prime, and of those who accompanied him and gave substance to what he advocated oh so very long ago.

Blase later founded Liturgy in Santa Fe, folding into the worship of the Creator every form of art and craft, of knowledge and experience.  There he was passionately loved and served and followed; he was a focus of concern, of debate, of controversy; he was never dull.  He was a critic of the Church's liturgical reform, because it was never perfect.  Eventually some came to consider him irrelevant, but only time can tell the truth or falsity of that.

Blase was born in New Mexico on March 23, 1921, and died in New Mexico on June 4, 1996.  He was ordained in California on June 16, 1956, but by 1961 he was back in New Mexico, first as Director of the Newman Center at Las Cruces, then at Santa Fe, which he so loved.  His only later time in a Western Dominican community was in the late 80s and early 90s after he had moved Liturgy in Santa Fe to Berkeley.  It surprised and saddened me that by then he had lost the power to draw young Dominicans to him, even before he entered the long decline toward death.  He was always critical of us, but remained always one of us, even from afar.  He is the first to be buried in the new circle at Benicia, by the right hand of St. Dominic.

- Fr. Finbarr Hayes, O.P.
Lives of the Brethren

Pictured on the road

XII: 349