Twenty-Second Sunday of Ordinary Time at Mississippi Abbey

“Being an imposter is a tough habit to break.” Dr. Robert French, a psychologist, joined New Melleray in March of 1945, taking the name Br. Richard. But he wasn’t really a psychologist, he didn’t even have a high school diploma, and his real name wasn’t Robert French. He was the Great Imposter, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr. In 1938 as a husky, round faced youth of 16, Waldo, who wanted to be called Fred-or anything else but “Waldo”—dropped out of Central Catholic High School in Massachusetts and joined the Trappists in Rhode Island. At the outbreak of World War Two he left the monastery and enlisted in the Army. Not to his liking, he deserted the Army and joined the Navy. Soon he went over the hill again, this time to the Trappists at Gethsemani. But Fred was lazy, more of a Gyrovague and a Sarabaite than a Cenobite. He wanted the habit of a monk without the discipline, so he abandoned the rugged monks in Kentucky and joined New Melleray. But we were no easier. He only lasted two months with us before running away a third time, not only from us but also from himself. This amazingly intelligent, unschooled pretender assumed a variety of identities, always wanting to be “Somebody” by becoming “Somebody Else”. He wanted to be called “Doctor” without the hard training and education it requires. Faking a PhD from Stanford University he taught psychology at Gannon College in Erie, PA, and then philosophy at St. Martin’s College, in Olympia, WA. At length the FBI caught Waldo and sent him to eighteen months in prison for desertion from the Army and Navy in time of war.

After he got out of prison, his life as a Master Imposter moved into high gear. He went to Canada and met a young surgeon named Dr. Joseph Cyr. Fred stole the doctor’s identity and credentials. Then he snuck off to join the Royal Canadian Navy at age 29. Without a background check, he was commissioned as a surgeon-lieutenant on a Canadian destroyer and sent to Korea. He bluffed his way through some minor operations until one day he was confronted with a South Korean soldier who had a bullet near his heart. Demara went to his room with a textbook on surgery and proceeded to speed-read the operation he was now forced to perform. Without hesitation young “Dr. Cyr” opened the man’s chest, removed the bullet and sewed him up. The operation was a complete success. He acquired such a lustrous reputation for saving lives that the Royal Navy issued a press release about him. When the real Dr. Joseph Cyr read the article he notified authorities. Embarrassed by their mistake, the Royal Navy quietly dismissed Waldo in 1951 and sent him packing to the United States.

Back home a newspaper reporter asked Fred about his future plans. He said, “I don’t know… Being an imposter is a tough habit to break.” In 1955 posing as Dr. Benjamin Jones, he was employed in a Texas penitentiary until a prisoner recognized him. So he fled Texas and turned up at a high school in North Haven, a small island off the coast of Maine. There, the chubby, 250 lb. teacher with a Harvard accent using the name Martin Godgart, taught English, French, and Latin. People liked this jolly Santa-Claus-like teacher so much that when the state police came in February, 1957, and led the imposter away the islanders were sorry to see him go and wanted him back. But Fred Demara said it wouldn’t work. He was too lazy to earn a teacher’s certificate and he enjoyed his deceptions too much. When he died in 1982 at the age of 60 due to heart failure and complications from his diabetic condition, which had required both of his legs to be amputated, Fred was a lonely, deeply depressed man. His physician described Waldo as a broken man who had wasted his talents. He wanted a doctoral degree without earning it, or a monk’s habit without the labor of humility and obedience.

The Great Imposter is an archetype for anyone afflicted by sloth and deception. Fifteen hundred years ago St. Benedict wrote that a monk should not wish “to be called holy before he is holy; but first to be holy, that he may really be called so” (Ch. 4:62). Jesus was impatient with hypocrisy. When he called the scribes and Pharisees “hypocrites” he was saying, “You actors, Scripture may be the lines you quote, but it is not the script by which you live.” Hypocrisy is a tough habit to break.

Every sin is an act of self-deception. Yet, St. Gregory of Nyssa teaches that it is difficult or even impossible to overcome all sin. He writes, “Whose eye is without sin, whose hearing is without reproach, who is a stranger to the pleasure of gluttony, who is pure from all sins occasioned by touch. One is envious … another arrogant … another given to anger or lust. Who can say his heart is clean from all these interior movements of the soul?” Jesus knows we are tempted many times a day. A good person is not someone who is never tempted, or who never falls, but someone who tries to fall less often and get up more quickly. Being good is a tough habit to acquire!

Time Dec. 3, 1951; Time Feb 25, 1957; Newsweek Feb. 25, 1957; Time June 21, 1982
St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Lord’s Prayer, Ancient Christian Writers, v.18, 77.