ARTICLES

Neither Saccharine Nor Nice

Cop Turns Priest

BY JOE MARTI

Gino Cerelli is going home. He has entered the Marist seminary and will one day be ordained a priest of God. Though unlike most of his confreres, his path to the priesthood has taken a much more circuitous route, Cerelli has been well acquainted with the service aspect of his new vocation; for 27 years Cerelli served the people of San Leandro as a police officer.

Cerelli grew up in Oakland. His mother was a fashion designer and his father worked for the Oakland Tribune. Cerelli first attended school with the Salesians at the Italian-American National Church in Oakland. After some good reports from friends acquainted with the Marists, he looked at the Marist school himself. He visited in 1964, and finding he liked it, he signed up. He attended the high school in the East Bay and at St. Peter's in San Rafael; Cerelli took first vows in 1969. He then did a stint at the University of San Francisco and took a job at the Marist high school in Phoenix, Arizona, where he spent two years teaching religion.

But at that time, things were not running smoothly. As Cerelli puts it, "everything was insane. The seminaries and religious orders reflected the times. Everything was question authority." Cerelli saw the active prayer life and religious identity he treasured slipping away, so he decided to leave the Marists in 1973 and experience something else. Since he saw that the Marist provincial council was beginning to clean things up, he thought in a few years he would continue his journey to ordination.

The "few years" stretched into five, then ten, then nearly twenty years. But even if it took him nearly three decades, for Cerelli a vocation was never far from his mind. That, as well as a quote from St. Augustine's Confessions, sustained him. "In my first years of college, when Latin was still a part of the curriculum," said Cerelli, "I read the Confessions, and I always remembered that quote from the beginning: 'you made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.' I went out and had a good time, but throughout the years I would always remember that quote. There was something missing. I missed that total overall contentment. Dorothy Day wrote about the long road of loneliness, and for me it was the long road for that missing piece."

Going off into the world, Cerelli realized quickly that the world expected him to work while he waited out the storms within his order. He took the civil service exam in San Leandro, following which he began checking parking meters. He then went on to dispatching and finally settled into the position he would hold the longest -- that of Officer Cerelli. Speaking of his delayed vocation, Cerelli said, "life presents other things. My parents got sick. Plus I was enjoying what I was doing." Nevertheless, Cerelli never forgot his original intentions. "I never entirely lost that feeling. Even if I would fight it for awhile, I never cut my ties with the Church or the Marists."

So what compels a man with a vocation to be a priest of the Prince of Peace to become an officer who busts hardcore criminals and deals with the baddest of the bad? "It's interesting that throughout all the documents in the entire state of California relating to police officers," said Cerelli, "police are constantly referred to as 'peace officers.' A police officer could actually do good for some people who were in dire straits. [You could help] people caught in a violent situation, you could prevent violence, you could arrest people who were hurting others. It was sort of an altruistic thing. You couldn't change the world, but you could get things moving for people on a local level."

As the years wore on, Cerelli considered leaving the police force. But then another year would pass, and then another, until finally he found himself at a point where retirement and a healthy benefits package awaited him if he kept on the job. He had attended classes at the University of San Francisco over several years since the late sixties, and having graduated this spring with a degree in theology and religious studies as well as earning a Saint Ignatius Institute certificate along the way, he had vaulted the final hurdle.

Cerelli's off-and-on journey to his vocation finally reached a point where he had to make a decision after his retirement. After cashing in unused vacation days, he took the money and decided to go to the Holy Land on a pilgrimage. As he stood in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, he thought, "what am I supposed to do? Should I get married, or am I supposed to go back to the religious life?

"I wanted the big sign -- the doves flying, the skywriter writing the message," Cerelli continued. "Then I heard a voice say, 'When have I stopped calling?'" Cerelli continued, "I don't hear voices. I looked up and thought, 'yeah, so? Calling me to what?'" Cerelli started talking to people and met with Marists with whom he had maintained contact over the years. He ran the idea past one of them whom he respected and thought about it some more. Then Cerelli had a dinner one night with them and stopped the conversation. He simply asked, "can I come home?"

After receiving his answer, Cerelli began attending conferences on Marian spirituality every Wednesday evening in Berkeley put on by the Marists in preparation for reentering the order. Once he made the decision, the reaction from fellow officers took Cerelli aback. "It was kind of strange. They said, 'yeah, that's what we figured.' 'Yeah, we're not surprised.' I thought, 'gee, I wish you would have told me.' In fact, the jump from cop to collar is not that far a leap, according to Cerelli. "My time as an officer was spent trying to bring something of joy or something of meaning into others' lives, and I think the best thing I can bring to people is the Gospel. It's just grace; it's God."

As an officer, Cerelli witnessed horrifying events and was asked to do things no one in society would ever want to do for fear of becoming cynical, a notion Cerelli dealt with by his solid faith. "You could [do this job and] either say this is insane and say it's all existential and meaningless, or you could say instead that there's something missing here," said Cerelli. "To me [crime] was an absence of God's presence. You can have all the social programs you want, and that's fine, but I chose to see something lacking rather than to reject it all as meaningless. My realization is how fragile human nature is. You see people in the worst predicament all the time and you're expected to do something about it. I've learned that humans are fragile and weak." Cerelli added further that much of what he learned on the beat will give him an edge as a priest. He said, "I think what I gained is the ability to communicate with people and also seeing the good in people in the midst of seeing them at their worst. How valuable human life is, not how worthless it is. When you put that in a religious perspective, that's what I want to do; take those experiences and bring that into ministry."

Perhaps equally intriguing is the fact that Cerelli has maintained his interest in the same order he began with. According to Cerelli, this stems from the Marists' regained sense of spirituality and the renewal they have undergone in the last 25 years. In particular, Cerelli feels drawn to the Marian aspect of their spirituality. "That's what always attracted me," he said. "It's not a saccharine thing. Sometimes Marian devotions are really saccharine and 'nice.' But [the Marists have] the idea of spreading the Gospel by imitating Mary's life, especially the Mary of Pentecost. I also value the idea of doing things without bringing attention to oneself. Our main thing is to go in there where there is need and just do it."

As someone who saw the very best and worst of mankind, Cerelli looks on the current priestly scandals with a seasoned stare. "I see it first as a cop," he said. " I've been a cop during scandals before and I got into police work to make a difference and help things along. But I think overall the Church will come out stronger, and it's something that needed to be addressed for several decades." He went on, "it doesn't dissuade me at all from entering the religious life. There are still people clamoring for spiritual guidance. It's almost a moot issue for me now. I think things are moving now to correct this. Now's not the time to back out, now's the time to go forward. The church needs people now."

TOP