I took a leave of absence from Marquette Medical School in the spring of 1958 after my freshman year for the purpose of going to Rome nine months later. I had joined Opus Dei the previous February and was offered the opportunity to be in Rome with the founder, Saint Josemaría Escrivá, and to pursue studies in philosophy and theology while there. While life-changing, the right choice was clear to me. My mother, though, was beside herself.
As the date approached for me to leave for Rome, she pulled out all the stops. She went to the headmaster of my high school, whom she knew well, and also to a young man who was famous in my house: Antonin Scalia. My parents had come to admire Nino through my close friendship with him; my father had been especially impressed when Nino, during a televised high school debate, “cross-examined” guest panelist Averell Harriman, who was director of the Mutual Security Agency at the time and went on to become governor of New York.
Scalia and I had spent four years at Xavier High School, 1949 to 1953, studying in the same homeroom and taking the same classes. We did four years of Latin and three of Greek, and found ourselves duly exercised—particularly in Latin—in our junior year when our instructor drove us relentlessly through the five declensions of nouns and four conjugations of verbs under pressure of a stopwatch. We were marked on speed and accuracy every morning. This was followed by approximately thirty lines of Cicero’s Catiline Orations to translate, then turning an English sentence into Latin, with all the pitfalls of verb complexities. Daunting work. Every day. Through the misery, we got to be good friends. After coming into contact again in 1983, there was not a time that we saw each other and did not revel in the conjugation of some irregular verb or laugh with the sheer joy of reciting the conjugations by rote, pulling them out of some recondite cavity of memory we both had within.
At my mother’s bidding, Scalia and Father John J. Morrison appeared at my house in Jamaica, Queens, in June 1959. The priest tried to give me a sense of timing and proportion, which I thanked him for. Nino asked what this was all about. I explained Opus Dei as I understood it, and the imperative I experienced to give it all—now—in this radical way of being in the world and living Christ. He took in everything I said and got it: “Sounds good to me.” I don’t know what he said to my mother on the way out, but it was decisive. He had the stature and authority, even then, to calm nerves. I appreciated that he took the time and effort to do what he did, and seeing it now in the perspective of who he was, I love him for it. What was astounding to me over the years was his loyalty to that friendship built on a few Latin and Greek verbs.
Father Robert Connor is a numerary priest with Opus Dei and the chaplain of the Southmont Center in South Orange, New Jersey. (A version of this recollection was previously published in National Review, which has given its permission to publish this recollection.)