St. Ignatius Parish in Chapel Point, Maryland, may well be the parish assignment Jesuit Father Thomas Clifford has been preparing for his entire life.
As he celebrates the 40th anniversary of his 1981 ordination this year, Father Clifford is immersed in understanding and documenting the history of the 380-year-old church overlooking the Port Tobacco River in Charles County, Maryland. He has since 2013 served as pastor at St. Ignatius, one of the oldest continuous Catholic congregations in the country. It’s the perfect position for the Maryland native who long taught history and wrote his master’s thesis on the 19th century era of a Jesuit parish in Baltimore.
Father Clifford delights in the history of St. Ignatius and particularly in studying its church and other structures. This July the parish bulletin announced four tours he was giving of the church buildings, pointing out how to “read” them from variations in construction styles and materials. After fires in 1798 and 1866 the church was rebuilt, and the current structure is comprised of a combination of buildings.
“It is all too easy to walk by buildings without noticing them, but buildings often reveal their history to the curious,” teased the bulletin announcement.
His current post in Chapel Point isn’t far from where he grew up. As a child, his family moved several times for his father’s job – from Rockville, Maryland, to Richmond and then Williamsburg, Virginia, and back to Maryland, to Cockeysville. After the Clifford family returned Maryland, he began attending the Jesuits’ Loyola High School in Baltimore, at a time when the Second Vatican Council was inspiring frequent changes in the church. “Some of it was a little crazy,” he observed in an interview with the Catholic Standard at St. Ignatius.
Upon graduating from high school, he said he wasn’t inclined to choose religious life, in part because “too much was up in the air. My intention was to become secretary of state and succeed to the presidency, the first to do that since John Quincy Adams.” So it was on to Johns Hopkins for college.
Then, at the end of his first semester, he went Christmas shopping, he said, planning to buy some shotgun shells as a gift for his brother who liked to hunt deer. While standing at the counter in a gun store, the customer standing next to him asked to see a handgun, loaded it with some bullets he had carried into the shop and killed himself, as the college student and the store clerk stood by helplessly.
More than 50 years later, Father Clifford described that disturbing scene, still vivid in his mind. In the days and months that followed, “It caused me to pray in a way that I hadn’t previously prayed,” he said. “That led me to talking to various people and praying some more.” A counselor suggested he spend Holy Week on a retreat, where he was first exposed to Ignatian spirituality and Ignatian contemplation exercises.
His path soon changed. Instead of pursuing a career in politics, he entered the Jesuits’ formation program. The life experiences the Jesuits exposed him to in formation broadened his horizons. They included working nights at the infirmary of a home for the elderly run by the Little Sisters of the Poor and another stretch among rural poor people alongside Glenmary missioners in far southwestern Virginia. For the latter experience, part of his work involved talking to evangelical Protestants about Catholicism. He sometimes had to counter anti-Catholic tropes that were commonly spread at the time through publications known as Chick tracts, pamphlets on Christian themes, many of which were pointedly anti-Catholic.
“I was going into homes in the ‘hollers’ with a film strip projector and a record player,” he said. “There were maybe 10 or 12 Catholics in all of Lee County. You might as well have dropped me on Mars,” for as different the experience was from his life to date.
Later, after his ordination, Father Clifford primarily was a teacher, including a couple of stretches at Gonzaga College High School in Washington and two stints at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School in Philadelphia. Mostly he taught history, he said, including a class he particularly enjoyed: the history of agricultural equipment. He also served as pastor of St Aloysius Church in Washington.
“My former Gonzaga students include someone who’s on the Council of Economic Advisers,” he said, adding that he taught students who went on to work in a variety of professions, including as teachers, doctors and lawyers.
While priests don’t typically retire the same way other workers do, Father Clifford said “this parish had been on my list of places I wanted to end up.” However, Father Clifford remains in the “young” half of the Jesuits in the Maryland province, so he doesn’t expect retirement is on his horizon just yet.
“I consider myself lucky in my vocation because I’ve lived so many places,” he said. “I did not grow up in any single kind of neighborhood or religious community. I always had some kind of change in my life.”
