Forster, Father Andrew A., S.S.

1997, September 17

Date of Birth: 1914, November 25

October 17, 1997

He was unique. While it is, of course, true that since no two human beings are identical, everyone is unique, it is also true that certain people possess a uniqueness more memorable than that of the general run of humankind. Those who knew Fr. Forster, and particularly his students over the years, would agree, I think, that uniqueness may even be the first quality that comes to mind at the mention of his name. It might be added that, also over the years, he has very often been the one first inquired for whenever old grads, particularly of our California seminaries, gather to trade news of their former teachers.

Andrew Albert Forster was born in Borgess Hospital, Nazareth Michigan, just outside Kalamazoo and lived in that city during his entire childhood except for a few years when the family lived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and in Petosky, Michigan.

His father, whose surname he bore and whom Andy very much admired and loved was a physician. The doctor died prematurely when Andy, the couple’s only child, was barely ten years old.

Mrs. Forster (Helen Daley) was a tall, handsome lady with a vague physical resemblance to Eleanor Roosevelt. She was, as a matter of fact, a very ardent Democrat, so avid in her politics that regularly every four years she would buy a new television set lest the current one fail at some crucial moment during the presidential campaign, convention or election returns. As is true of many another widowed parent of a Sulpician, she possessed a kind of honorary “S.S.” as, throughout the rest of her life, she dutifully changed residence to match each one of Fr. Andrew’s new assignments. Her home often became a gathering place for her son’s friends. She would live until Christmas time of 1962.

The Sisters of St. Joseph, whose motherhouse was on the same grounds as the hospital in which Andy was born, had a rather substantial influence on him, being his teachers from kindergarten up through high school as well as being friends of his father and mother. They were to be a source of encouragement to him throughout his life. Once he arrived at Sacred Heart Seminary, he would find members of this same community staffing the seminary kitchen and infirmary. I feel sure that his loyalty to this group would prompt him to wish that they be mentioned with gratitude in this obituary.

Seminary years

Our friend graduated from St. Augustine High School in Kalamazoo in June 1931 and in the following September enrolled in the freshman college class at Sacred Heart Seminary, Detroit. From the start he found the seminary very much to his liking and he could later become almost painfully nostalgic about it. It was not a Sulpician-staffed seminary but apparently those who set its style had themselves been Sulpician-trained. Thus, many of the prayer formulas used there were the same as the ones he would later encounter at St. Mary’s. For a seminary of those times Sacred Heart was unusually permissive. Students, for example, rather easily received permission on free afternoons to leave the grounds and, if their homes were close enough, go home for a few hours. Also, the seminary was part of an interscholastic athletic program in basketball, though only at-home games could be scheduled by the seminary team. Yet both the academic and spiritual programs of the seminary had the reputation of being challenging enough to produce good candidates for the priesthood.

For Andrew, life in the Detroit seminary offered many advantages, but none more to his liking than the presence in the seminary chapel of a magnificent Casavant organ and the presence on the seminary faculty of an organist and choir director named Reverend Francis X. O’Riordan. Andy had been playing the organ at St. Augustine’s in Kalamazoo for several years and already had a cultivated voice and an intense love for church music, especially plain chant and polyphony. This fine priest helped Andy build on an already good musical foundation and prepare himself for a future in which good church music would play a major part.

In the spring of 1935 Andrew graduated with distinction from the philosophy department of Sacred Heart Seminary and applied, through his bishop, for entrance into St. Mary’s Seminary, Roland Park, Baltimore. Sending Mr. Forster to Baltimore was a departure from diocesan policy; the theologate in Cincinnati or, for students of Polish ancestry, Ss. Cyril and Methodius Seminary, Orchard Lake, Michigan, were the destinations of the other thirty-six members of the graduation class. Why the exception for Andrew? Fr. John Selner, S.S., who had spent much of his youth in Kalamazoo and in close association with the Sisters of St. Joseph, had already been an influence on Andy and had described the Sulpician vocation to him. Andy’s frank reason for asking to be sent to St. Mary’s was his interest in becoming a Sulpician himself.

At St. Mary’s he took eagerly to the formational and educational program of the seminary, was as happy as he had been at Sacred Heart, and again was deeply involved in church music.

One afternoon in June of 1939, having completed his theological formation, he left for Detroit and ordination. As the taxi cab carrying him and a fellow Detroiter pulled away from the curb in front of St. Mary’s while the gathered seminarians sang Ecce Guam Bonum, Andrew wept a few tears of mixed sorrow and joy. He was leaving a place he had learned to love deeply and was about to begin a new chapter in his life.

Ordination and early assignments

It was Archbishop (later to be Cardinal) Edward Mooney of Detroit who ordained Andrew on June 3, 1939 in Blessed Sacrament Cathedral, Detroit. After ordination the young priest spent his first summer assisting the pastor of a Detroit city parish.

His first faculty assignment that autumn was to the philosophy house of St. Mary’s located on Paca Street, Baltimore. This assignment would last through the school year 1941-1942 but with time out for the nine-month Sulpician novitiate program (“Solitude”).

It used to be almost axiomatic in Sulpician circles while the Paca Street seminary was extant that “everyone who has ever lived at 600 North Paca Street has loved the experience.” That certainly was true of the young Fr. Forster. He enjoyed the teaching, the formational duties and his involvement with the music life of the seminary and of the nearby Baltimore Cathedral, but even more than that he reveled in what seemed to be the special charm of the old building itself. He would later look back with great fondness on his Paca Street years.

Following his Solitude, Father Forster earned his master’s degree in philosophy from The Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.

California

Most of Andy’s Sulpician life was spent in California, mainly at St. Joseph’s, Mountain View, for fewer years at St. Patrick’s, Menlo Park, for another relatively brief period as a commuting professor between the two locations and for five years in parish work in Marin County.

The arrival of the Forsters (son and mother) for Andy’s initial California assignment, at St. Joseph’s College, occurred in the autumn of 1943. They had driven across the country in their little Buick Special and, arriving near the College one afternoon, they drove into a filling station to ask for directions to St. Joseph’s. The attendant told them that they were indeed fortunate because, as it happened, someone from the College was seated nearby. The “someone” then approached, a tall, very gaunt figure in clerical attire.