Timothy Crowe. Credit: Boston Globe

There was a great story in Sunday’s Boston Globe about Timothy Crowe, an actor who was an altar boy at St. Gabriel the Archangel in south St. Louis, and later a St. Louis seminarian.

Crowe, 63, portrays Father Patrick Murphy in “The Savannah Disputation,” a play that just opened at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Crowe “attended parochial school and Catholic high school before entering a St. Louis seminary as a high school sophomore,” writes Globe religion reporter Michael Paulson. “It was another era in the church, when Mass was in Latin and Cardinal Glennon College had 400 young men studying for the priesthood.”

“This was the old days, when we studied Aquinas in Latin, had a monastic schedule and a very strict academic program,” Crowe said. “There were no newspapers, no radio, and no TV. There was silence during meals - we would be read to - and every night there was the ‘magnum silencium’ [the great silence] until after breakfast.”

Crowe left the seminary and was never ordained, but he studied philosophy and theater at St. Louis University before leaving for England to attend the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.