Father Martin's Road to the Priesthood

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. We have Father James Martin with us now.
Maybe you know how he is sometimes called Stephen Colbert's Priest. In fact, he texted just recently or he posted, I should say.
My take on what makes Stephen Colbert one of today's best Catholic evangelists. So we'll ask him about that. Maybe you know Father Martin's work for LGBTQ recognition within the Catholic community, or his previous books, or previous appearances on this show. What you may not know is that Father Martin spent his early years working jobs that could sometimes be not what you'd think of perhaps for a man headed to the cloth. He got in trouble as a busboy, hated being a bank teller, and was in his own words a corporate tool at General Electric before he became a Jesuit priest. He has a memoir out now called Work in Progress, Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Teller, Corporate Tool, and Priest, that's all in the title of the book. So, we'll talk about what he learned from some of those jobs. And because he's a prominent voice in American Catholicism, we'll get into some other relevant topics. He did have a sit down with a private audience, really with Pope Leo, the 14th first American Pope in the Papal Library at the Vatican, I see. And this summer, the reason he is most in the news recently, he published an essay arguing that celibate gay men, gay men should be ordained as priests. So we'll talk about that and more now with Father James Martin, a Jesuit priest, founder of the group Outreach, which is an LGBTQ Catholic resource, editor at large for America Magazine, also known as American Media, and now the author of the memoir Work in Progress, Confessions of a Busboy, Dishwasher, Caddy, Usher, Factory Worker, Bank Peller, Corporate Tool, and Priest. Hey, Father Martin, welcome back to WNYC.

**James Martin** (2:19)
Thank you. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:21)
Why did you want to tell this story?

**James Martin** (2:23)
Well, I wanted to tell these funny stories about some crazy summer jobs simply because they were funny stories. And the rest of the book is really about my vocation to the Jesuits. So it's kind of in two parts. It's finding work through a variety of crazy summer jobs and some mishaps, and then finding God.
I also think it's kind of a vanishing age. This was the 70s and 80s, where pretty much all of my friends and myself worked during the summer.
And I think that expectation that kids would be working in menial jobs or sort of menial labor jobs has sort of diminished a bit. So I just wanted to tell this, you know, kind of story about yesteryear.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:04)
That's so interesting that you went right to that change. We're actually going to have another guest on the show this week who wrote an article about specifically that.
People growing up almost no matter what sort of income group you're in or class or whatever you want to call it, teenagers should work some of those menial jobs. So do you want to say anything in general about how you feel that they helped shape your world view or for that matter your path to a spiritual vocation?

**James Martin** (3:33)
Well quite a bit. As I say in the book, they taught me a lot of life lessons. Some simple ones, right? Work hard, show up on time, apologize if you don't know how to do something, ask if you don't know how to do something, don't be mean. Some of the stories I tell, most of the stories are humorous, but some of the stories I tell are being mistreated because I was on the low end of the, you know, kind of the job ladder.
A 15-year-old busboy dishwasher or a 16-year-old caddy, you know, or a 17-year-old movie theater usher is not always treated very well. And I think being mistreated, you know, occasionally by patrons was as effective as a year's worth of homilies on, you know, why not to be mean to people. So I learned a great deal in those jobs.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:17)
Yeah, and you say it's mostly a lighthearted tale, but honestly, I could have wept for teenage James Martin because of how rude some of the patrons were to you when you were a busboy dishwasher. You want to tell us a little bit of what happened and how to quote the title of that first chapter of your book, puts it, how the Bicentennial Wagon Train almost got me fired?