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Father Thomas Francis Xavier Hoar, SSE, the new diocesan Director of Vocations and Clergy Formation, is well known to many in the Diocese of Albany. Since 1993, Father Hoar, 71, has served as president and CEO of Saint Edmund’s Retreat, Inc., on Enders Island in Mystic, Conn., a multimillion-dollar operation which hosts numerous programs and retreats for seminarians, clergy, religious and laity in recovery and on sabbatical, trauma-informed leadership training, and campus ministry support. Father Hoar also was keynote speaker on ‘Clergy Wellness and the Spiritual Life’ at the spring diocesan gathering of priests and deacons in Latham on May 4-5. In his diocesan role, Father Hoar will oversee and support the formation of candidates to the priesthood and permanent diaconate. Father Hoar recently sat down with staff writer Mike Matvey to talk about his upbringing, his 30-year association with Enders Island and his life philosophy in this latest edition of Catholic Voices.

TE: Where did you grow up?
FH: I grew up in Quincy, Mass. My family had its roots in South Boston, the big Irish community over there. My folks moved from South Boston to Quincy the year before I was born. 

TE: What was your first religious memory?
FH: A new parish, St. Boniface Parish, had been established in Germantown, which is on the peninsula I grew up on in Quincy. But before the building was built, Mass used to be in this gymnasium. I remember as a kid going there to Mass and I remember Archbishop (Richard) Cushing, before he became a cardinal, consecrating the church in 1957. We used to listen to him on the radio pray the Rosary every day.

TE: Do you remember when you were first called to this vocation?
FH: I can remember walking home one Saturday afternoon after going to confession and I said to my mom, ‘I think I want to be a priest.’ And she said, ‘Get that foolish notion out of your head. I am not going to support you for the rest of your life.’ I think I was 8 or 9. I didn’t talk about it a lot because my brother thought that was stupid. I can remember I told everybody that I wanted to be a doctor. I can remember my prayers at night saying, ‘Make me a good priest … no, no a doctor.’ 

TE: Was there anyone in your parish that noticed the calling in you?
FH: We had a very active parish. I was an altar boy from the time I made my First Communion up until when I left for college. There were some very dynamic young priests as the associates. 

TE: How did you get involved with the Society of St. Edmund?
FH: I went to St. Michael’s College (founded by Edmundite priests in 1904) as a pre-med major and I started going to daily Mass because as kids we grew up, especially during Lent, going to daily Mass before school. Father Ray Doherty was in charge of Campus Ministry at the time, and I was very impressed by his preaching and his friendliness. What he used to do is after you were accepted, you had to send in a picture of yourself and he got copies of those from the admissions office and all summer long he memorized the names and the faces. I could remember one day I was walking across campus and so was he and I had been going to daily Mass but I never met him and he just said, ‘Hi, Tommy.’ And I just thought, ‘Oh, he knows who I am.’ I talked to him and some of the other Edmundites who were teaching there and I felt I have to give this a try. After the second year of college, I came to the novitiate in Connecticut where I live now, and I went back to St. Michael’s as a religious brother in temporary vows. After I finished my bachelor’s degree, I went to seminary in Canada. 

TE: What is the mission of the Society of St. Edmund?
FH: The society was formed in 1843 in France. And it was originally formed to re-Christianize, re-evangelize, re-catechize the French people after several periods of secularization. Father Jean Baptiste Muard was the founder and he founded the group under the protection of the Sacred Heart of Jesus/Immaculate Heart of Mary, but they established their first foundation at a Cistercian Abbey which had been closed. It was built in the 11th century and the incorrupt body of St. Edmund was there. So even though our official title was the Oblates of the Sacred Heart of Jesus/Immaculate Heart of Mary, the people started calling us the fathers and brothers of St. Edmund. It was changed after Vatican II formally; informally that’s what we were known in the United States.

TE: How did you end up at St. Edmund’s Retreat on Enders Island in Connecticut?
FH: My first Ph.D. I got from Michigan State in Higher Education Administration, and I was vice president of Christian Brothers University in Memphis, Tenn. I spent two years there but the new superior general who had got elected asked me to come back to St. Michael’s and develop a campus ministry program. I did that and I was there for six years. I chaired a task force that evaluated St. Edmund’s Retreat Enders Island in 1990. After about 18 months of looking at the facilities and the programs, finances and everything else, the task force voted 11-1 to recommend to the superior general to close it. I wrote a white paper on why it shouldn’t be closed because we were stewards of this property for the good of the church. So the superior general decided we were going to leave it in 1991 and when they informed Bishop Daniel Patrick Riley, the bishop of Norwich, he pleaded with them not to. So I became a co-chair for a new task force, along with folks from the chancery, and we looked at different things that could be done — and everybody kept saying, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ Then they put a new superior down here and I was very happy at St. Michael’s and then in 1993, the superior general called me and said, ‘I would like you to go to Enders Island.’ I said, ‘What do you want me to do?’ And he said, ‘As your assignment.’ I said, ‘What? … Can we pray about this? I am very happy.’ He called me back two weeks later and said, ‘I have been thinking and praying about this and I want you there the first of August.’ So I have been here since the first of August 1993.

TE: You have been instrumental in what it has become.
FH: By God’s Grace. One of the first things that I did was I got people that I knew from all over the greater Northeast — New Jersey, New York, all the New England states — to come together on Aug. 22, 1993. I had a big tent out in the field and we consecrated the island under the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I haven’t worried about it since.

TE: Talk about what is offered there.
FH: We have three pillars. We have traditional retreats for priests, deacons, laypeople. Day retreats, private retreats, directed retreats, days of recollection. Spiritual renewal is part of it. And then we have the Institute of Sacred Art, in which we teach iconography, calligraphy, Gregorian chant, stained glass mosaics, so we have workshops that teach that but we also use sacred art as a way to evangelize. We just had a big sacred art show in Manhattan at the end of September. We try to do more of that stuff so we bring sacred art into different venues because the notion of beauty in many senses has been lost. The notion of beauty is something that is really, really important. … My second doctorate is in technology and culture. How to use modern technology to enhance the culture. How can culture influence the development of technology? The notion of beauty has been lost in many senses in American society today and the Church has always been the steward of art. Sacred art is a way to evangelize and even to catechize, to teach the faith. 

The third part is we have a robust recovery ministry. Since 1967, AA has been meeting on the island. Right now, we have 11 12-Step (programs) that take place on the island every week. We help families with interventions and people who are struggling, that kind of developed organically. We have a recovery community for young men, age 20-35. They come to us after detox, after rehab and then we help them rebuild, or build for the first time, a healthy balance and a joyful, peaceful holy life. We either get them into college or graduate school. We had a 23-year-old who couldn’t read when he came to us and he graduated valedictorian of his class. He was on the streets since he was 12. We have a really good success rate about 85 percent of the guys that come through the program are still sober after five years. So we have lawyers, Ph.Ds, we have a guy who is an electrician, a guy who is a mason. It has been very enriching and the way we do it, because it is a community within the context of an active Catholic retreat ministry, we have people from the community who are mentors and tutors and sponsors. 

Some bishops have asked and some superior generals have asked to take a seminarian or a priest who is struggling with issues. … More and more bishops started asking us to help their guys and then there’s a group of psychiatrists and psychologists — they are called the Holy Alliance — and they make themselves available to bishops for their own well-being and for the clergy in the diocese. St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park, Calif., has a real strong human formation program and the director of it is a psychiatrist that I know and have worked with on a couple of other projects and she asked me would I be able to take a seminarian, this was like three years ago, and I said sure. Right now, we have four seminarians and four priests from around the country and we help them in healing. Healing the addictions that oftentimes we are trying to anesthetize. They may stay six months, they may stay a year. It averages out to a year. We have therapy, we have a recovery community. It is not an institution feeling here and we are doing more and more with that. Last year, a woman who was a survivor of clergy sex abuse, came to join us at the recommendation of the director of Clergy Wellness in the Archdiocese of New York. She has been working with the USCCB and the Conference of Major Superiors of Men for 20 years. Right now, we have three support groups for priests who were sexually abused. 

We have also put together some workshops geared toward younger priests on the pastoral response to sexual abuse and trauma because they don’t teach that in the seminary. If you have a guy who is a year or two ordained and somebody comes up and says, ‘Father, this has happened to me,’ and the poor guy doesn’t know what to say or what to do. We are doing programs like that. How do we provide healing for a lot of these priests and seminarians?

TE: How did you become the Director of Vocations and Clergy Formation?
FH: I spoke, as one of the keynote speakers, at the Clergy Days in May in Albany and had gotten to know Bishop Ed in a variety of ways. He asked me to serve on the Clergy Wellness Committee and I did. I was having dinner with him and Deacon Paul Leblanc and his wife, like the second week of July, and I was sitting across from him (and he said) ‘I would like to appoint you as Director of Vocations and Clergy Formation.’ And I said, ‘You want to do what?’ I said I will do it if Deacon Paul is the assistant and Father Quy Vo remains involved because he has been the assistant for a while. He announced it Aug. 1 and we started. He had never mentioned that he had been pondering that but I had been working with him on helping some priests in the Diocese who were struggling with issues.

One of the members of the vocations board asked why I was qualified to do this? I have been working with broken priests for over 20 years and I know the things that break them. I am hoping to be able to use that knowledge and help the seminarians in the Diocese grow and develop. One of the things in many seminaries and with many vocation directors, if you say I have an addiction to pornography or I have this or I have that, they kick you right out. More and more vocation directors and bishops are saying, ‘We are not going to kick you to the side, we are going to help you.’

Many of the seminarians that I have dealt with have what is called process addictions: gambling, gaming, pornography, those kinds of addictions. Probably 90 percent of them were sexually abused as children, not by priests, but by siblings or family members and that creates huge, deep wounds. A study from 2019 suggested that 65-to-75 percent of 12-year-old boys are already addicted to pornography. The human brain does not mature until around 25, so if you are introducing pornography at that young age, you are changing the neuropathways in the brain. You are disordering it. If you look around, why do we have so many 20- and 30-year-old guys who have broken relationships or are not in a relationship? Because they are being inundated with images and thoughts … so you have to try to help them reform their brain through prayer, therapy and healing.

TE: What goals do you have for vocations in the Diocese of Albany?
FH: (Former director) Father Anthony Ligato had three or four jobs, so he didn’t have the ability to have as much attention on the House of Formation. We have begun working to develop a community of prayer and study. The Bishop, at my request, appointed Father John Cronin as rector of the St. Isaac Jogues House of Formation, so he lives with them and I am there most every week. They’re eating together there now. They’re praying together. Before it was more like a boarding house, they came and went as they wanted to, and we pulled back on them working outside. We are still working on developing a better sense of academics but also a better sense of personal prayer and community prayer.

We have been working on some of the priests coming in formally and informally to talk to them about different things, trying to help them because we have a number of foreign students. We have some folks coming in to do accent reduction and to hone their skills in reading comprehension and taking English. Some of them have not done well in academics, because even though the Diocese’s formation folks had put them into an English as a Second Language (ESL) program at SUNY, because they were here on a student visa they had to have 12 credits each semester. They were putting them into graduate and undergraduate programs but they couldn’t understand.

In August, I had them all come down here for two-and-a-half days. Kind of a retreat … and for me to begin to get to know them. We are going to have a House retreat after finals this semester before Christmas. They are going to come here for Thanksgiving to build that sense of community. When they get ordained and they are out in the parishes, they need relationships with their peers. This is where people form them. When the Diocese had its own seminary and everybody went through, those were the bonds that lasted a lifetime. 

TE: Do you have a life philosophy or biblical verse that you lean on?
FH: What did St. Augustine say, ‘Love God and do no harm.’ If I don’t have a robust and consistent life of prayer, I could never do any of this stuff. I absolutely trust God’s grace. Absolutely.

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