ARTICLES

Chad Wanted More

San Diego Altar Boy Answers His Vocation in Chicago

BY JAMES MCCOY

Editor's note: Chad McCoy and James McCoy are not related.

Chad McCoy was born an uncle. His mother and father had 13 sons and daughters, but they wanted more. Brother Chad — now 24 yet the baby of the family still — can't number his nieces and nephews for the reporter on the phone.

He was born an uncle. But it would take him more than twenty years to find what God had in mind for him since before he was born.

Like his siblings, he could have married and had a passel of kids. But he wanted more. "I have over 60 kids in the youth choir," he says from St. John Cantius Parish in Chicago. This unique parish, which offers both the Tridentine and the Novus Ordo Mass in Latin, is served by its own archdiocesan order — The Society of St. John Cantius. "[They're] drawn from a lot of different backgrounds.... [Those] kids that weren't really around a lot of Latin, or chant, or good church music — they don't know it; it's foreign to them."

Chad grew up a liturgical bilingual himself. Beginning in the late 1980s, the McCoys would drive for more than an hour from their home in Anza, Riverside County to the old Latin Mass held with Bishop Brom's indult at Holy Cross Mausoleum in southeast San Diego. Two of McCoy's sisters and their families still drive to Holy Cross each Sunday. Worshipping in the mausoleum's chapel, Chad soaked up lots of Latin. As an altar boy in the sanctuary making the age-old responses, he learned to speak it like a native. After Mass, in classes held in hallways banked with above-ground crypts, where kids, like early catechumens, learned Church mysteries surrounded by those who had gone before them marked by the sign of faith, ten-year-old Chad was taught the Memorare — in Latin.

The people bowed their knees to the tabernacle while bowing their hearts to the Sacred there and Chad thought, 'How awesome is this place! This is the gate of heaven!' And still Chad wanted more.

But troubled teenage years followed. Chad was expelled from the boarding school in Elmhurst, Pennsylvania run by the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter. He returned home where his parents had started a school. Sped along a downward path by drugs, he almost lost his faith. Yet God was calling him all along — even in his party life.

Chad surrounded himself with young people who were looking for something transcendent, something heavenly, something more. At a nearby Indian reservation, raves were held. How awesome is this place! This is the gate of heaven! But even ecstasy fell short. He always felt that there had to be something more.

The rave scene had led him into meditation; but that meditation itself led nowhere. Caving in on itself, his soul became a black hole. He had done drugs, been in a rock band, dated girls. He had done everything to which the all-American boy is called. But he had yet to find what he'd been called to since before he was even born.

Having chilled out in New Hampshire's Magdalen College, Chad was a senior with plans on becoming an artist and art teacher. The Society of St. John Cantius was founded by Father C. Frank Phillips in 1998. During a visit to the college, Father Phillips had dinner with a group of young men including Chad. He told them how the Society was dedicated to the restoration of the sacred in parish life — how it was training men to help Catholics rediscover their patrimony of solemn liturgy and sacred music. Its priests and brothers would draw for parishioners from the treasuries of Catholic doctrine and culture. Chad was awed. When he woke up the next morning, he just knew. He presented himself as a postulant to Father Phillips that afternoon.

"In the consecrated life," says the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "Christ's faithful, moved by the Holy Spirit, propose to follow Christ more nearly, to give themselves to God who is loved above all and, pursuing the perfection of charity in the service of the Kingdom, to signify and proclaim in the Church the glory of the world to come." In the Society of St. John Cantius, now 16 strong, Chad discerned his call to the perfection of charity by taking the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Not called to be a priest, all that's left for him now is to make his final vows.

"This is important," Chad stressed as the phone call was ending, "since I've been in religious life, I've had the best times in my life; I've also had the worst times in my life. But through it all, I know that this is where God wants me.... Since I was a little boy — everything— it all was pointing towards this life ... including everything that was bad too."

TOP