On Labor Day weekend, 1968, Albert Gelpi and I drove up to Junipero Cottage in the Wilbur dorm complex as newmembers
of the English Department and as Junipero’s incoming Faculty Residents. I realized, therefore, as Al and I participated in
the milestone course organized by Father Paul Crowley, S.J., to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Vatican II, that by spending
almost all of those 50 years in the Catholic Community at Stanford, we have had the privilege and blessing of being in a place
formed and inspirited by the ideals of Vatican II.
Father John Duryea, the chaplain at the time of our arrival, and his assistant, the Sulpician priest Robert Giguere, had both
enthusiastically embraced the changes both in doctrine and in practice advocated by the Council. Sunday Mass was already
being celebrated in Memorial Church at 4:30 in the afternoon by that time, but it was poorly attended; Al and I and our two-
year-old Christopher found the community gathered at Saint Ann’s Chapel on Sunday morning much more congenial. Not
only was the altar now facing the people, as had been stipulated by the Council, but the many children present were invited
to sit on its steps, where, in a wiggling group, they too faced the congregation.
Ecumenical dialogue, suspect when not forbidden in the pre-Council Church, now had encouragement from conciliar docu-
45Years: A Retrospective
By Professor Barbara Gelpi
Barbara Gelpi is a
professor emeritus in
the Stanford English
Department. Her
fields of interest
are Victorian and
Romantic literature
and feminist literary
criticism. She and
her husband Albert,
also a professor
emeritus in English,
have been Stanford
Catholics for 45
years.
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