Excerpt from the American College in Rome
by Robert McNamara, pp. 467-470

The American College, it is true, was not injured, but only now and then inconvenienced, by this social confusion. Nor should it be gathered from what has been said above that conditions at the College itself during the period 1918-1922 could be considered tragic. "Trying" would describe them better. And the Americans were suffering no more, and probably a good deal less, than the students of the other Roman ecclesiastical colleges, which had filled up much more rapidly than the American College was to do, after the armistice. In the last analysis, also, it was not always an unwholesome thing for the American students to have been subjected to these relatively mild trials. If they took them in the right spirit, they could in some measure profit - as Cardinal Mercier had warned them they should - by "the spiritual value of pain and the lessons of the philosophy of suffering." Alumni of those lean years, looking back upon them today, may well wonder that they survived as well as they did. But older men are all too likely to forget that youth has a resilience which age has not only lost, but forgotten.

Even the deaths of the young American students were not unmitigated tragedies. One of these deaths in particular taught the Collegians a profound spiritual lesson: the death of Frank Parater.

At the North American College, as at all Catholic seminaries, the piety of the students exceeds - it goes without saying - the piety of the average layman. Among such pious students as these, there will always be a small percentage whose spirituality can be called really unusual; and in this group there will appear, from time to time, a person whose holiness tends to the heroic.

Frank Parater certainly belonged to this latter class. Born in Richmond, Virginia, on October 10, 1897, he had received his early education first under the Xaverian Brothers and then under the Benedictine Fathers who conducted Benedictine High School in Richmond. Though not by disposition an athlete, Frank was none the less an "outdoors man," and became very much interested in Scouting, as a moral and religious apostolate especially well adapted to spreading and maintaining a staunch Catholicism in the South. It was this apostolic interest of his, in fact, which prompted him to enter the seminary at Belmont Abbey, North Carolina, as a candidate for the priesthood.

In 1919, the Bishop of Richmond decided to send him to Rome to complete his studies. He was officially enrolled in the roster of the American College on November 25th. Here those same qualities of cheerfulness, optimism and manliness which had made him loved wherever he had been, soon endeared him to his new companions. But it was not long before the Collegians detected beneath his cheerful exterior manner, a tremendous earnestness. Even when he won the "Epiphany bean" in January 1920, and was therefore crowned King of the Revels, he surprised all by the masterly way in which he presided over the festivities. His new schoolmates also sensed his strong piety. Not that he affected devout singularities: he was careful to avoid anything of the sort. But every now and again he would make some remark which was as deep as it was spiritual. Often, for instance, he would speak joyfully about the glory of living in a city hallowed by the blood of martyrs, and of the great privilege it would be to die and be buried in such holy ground.

In late January 1920, Parater suddenly fell ill, apparently of acute rheumatism, and was advised to go to bed. But the malady, far from yielding to rest, quickly developed into rheumatic fever which brought with it tremendous suffering. So delirious did the pain make him that it often took more than one man to hold him in his bed. Removed to the hospital of the Blue Nuns on January 27th, he continued, in his delirium, to preach sermons to an imaginary congregation. Finally he recovered from this mental confusion, but his physical condition was by then desperate.

It fell to the lot of Father Mahoney to explain to Frank that his illness was serious and possibly fatal. Parater said he was aware of that, and was not afraid to die. When he was about to receive Holy Communion in the form of Viaticum, he wished to get out of bed and kneel; but having been told he should not do so, he was content to kneel on the bed itself. Death came not long after, on February 7th, which was the first Saturday of the month. His passing brought great sorrow, not only to his fellow Collegians, but also to other seminarians at the Urban College who had made his acquaintance and taken an immediate liking to him. The American College men kept vigil at his wake. Monsignor O'Hern sang the Mass of Requiem, and the whole student body followed the hearse on foot to the Campo Santo. Here he was entombed in the College mortuary chapel, which stood in that same perennial burial ground in which St. Stephen, St. Lawrence, and hundreds of other early Christians had, in their own time, been laid to rest.

Frank's painful illness and premature death had a depressing effect upon his fellow-students. But not for long. On the very day he died, Francis Byrne, another Richmond seminarian, while searching for Parater's passport, came upon a paper labeled "My Last Will." The dead seminarian had written it almost seven weeks before, while he was still in excellent health; and he had sealed it in an envelope marked: "To be opened only in case of my death." Byrne, seeing at once that this little document - a spiritual rather than a financial testament - was something extraordinary, straightway delivered it to the Rector. O'Hern, equally impressed and deeply moved, read it to the Collegians assembled in chapel.

After the Collegians had heard this remarkable statement, there was no more gloom among them, and there could be none. Instead, as one of the students confessed, "We actually rejoiced because we felt a saint had been in our midst but we didn't know it…" Nor did the others to whom the "will" was shown think any differently. Not long afterward, one of them, the Jesuit Father O. Marchetti, printed a complete Italian translation of it in the Osservatore Romano. Commenting on this "beautiful and edifying" writing, he wrote of Parater: "He died among the Saints who are the honor of the Eternal City; and he is buried among the Saints, who with their bones have blessed this privileged ground."

When news of the "will" reached the United States, here too, and especially in Virginia, it stirred the hearts of many. Eventually Frank's earlier alma mater, the Benedictine High School in Richmond, enshrined an expression of the admiration in which all had held him. The tablet unveiled to his memory at the Academy says that Frank Parater "died in Rome while pursuing his studies for the Holy Priesthood, leaving behind him a tradition of Courage, Purity and Integrity of life."

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