What Is… A MENTOR?

The rest of my stay at the University of Ottawa boarding school was paradise. I was a good student and a Mass server, and that put me in a very small dormitory with eighteen other guys. I think the reason we became Mass servers is because of the perks involved. We were first in line for the commissary. We could stay up a little later. We could leave the facilities in the evening. Instead of going to study hall, I could go to a movie theater, as long as I came back before the doors were locked. We worked hard for those privileges. Some mornings, I would serve two Masses at a time. There were two small altars next to each other, each with a priest performing a concurrent Mass. Boy, you had to be on your toes.

There was never any inkling of the kind of horror stories we hear about nowadays with priests and young boys and young girls. These were priests who were there to educate us. In my senior year, I had a spiritual adviser named Father Lorenzo Danis. He wasn’t so much a spiritual adviser as a banker. I kept running short, so he would lend me money. And counsel me.

There were forty-four priests living in the building. Just down the hall from Father Danis was another of my favorites: “Big John” L’abbé, no relation to Miss L’abbé. He’d say Mass in about twelve minutes. He knew I didn’t have much money, and when he’d notice I was hungry, he would give me some hosts and let me sip the wine. The other priests’ rooms were very spartan, outfitted with little more than a cot, a pew, a desk, and perhaps a small radio. Big John’s room had a sofa that opened into a bed. He had a Blaupunkt radio that could pick up the moon. He would sit there and read his breviary, smoking a Corona cigar and sipping cognac. He was enjoying the good life and taught me all about how to enjoy it as well.

He was my Latin teacher, and he created a special prize for me. There were already prizes for the first- and second-best grades in class. Those prizes were books. Just to help me, because I had never studied Latin before, and because Father L’abbé also knew that I had financial problems, he created a new prize for the student who showed the most improvement.

He said, “The winner is Alex Trebek, and he gets fifteen dollars in cash.”

So I loved Big John. That was a sign that he cared for me. He was a good man.

Father Lorenzo Danis