Loyola Academy, late 50's: Works of mercy. "Racial justice" to the forefront. Jesuit made to wait. Forays into black neighborhoods. Awful revelation. A worse: the egregious Catholic scandal.

As a teacher at Loyola Academy, I had "sodality" work with students as my extracurricular responsibility. The sodality — “of Our Lady” — was a student organization meant to promote religious devotion. That meant daily prayer and self-examination presumably inspired by one-on-one conferences with the Jesuit moderator and retreats at a retreat house.

It was thankless work for the most part, though some students may have derived profit from it, and in any case it was a show of personal interest in them that they would have noticed.

There had been nothing like it at Fenwick, where Dominicans were less aggressive, even shy about it, and reaped far fewer recruits. On the other hand, at Fenwick religion was a five-day-a-week matter, a daily concern, on a plane with the three R’s, and counting equally in one’s grade average. It was a matter of daily discussion and serious application.

We Jesuits had religion only three days a week. In the sodality, on a voluntary basis, we took kids in hand and taught them what we knew, especially we scholastics — a breed of cat not teaching at Fenwick. Nor was the sodality a fringe organization. It had 40 or 50 members in each school year, including athletes and school leaders. I had the juniors.

We worked on their spirituality, but also on "apostolic" work, which we identified in traditional works of mercy. Sodalists visited old folks and orphans, packed and delivered food for the needy at Christmas time, and performed other good deeds.

There were spiritual and corporal works of mercy. We had learned about them in the catechism as kids, long before societal goals and the pursuit of social justice became the norm. Ahead of the curve, I made "racial justice" my specialty, bringing Sodalists to visit black people and hear lectures and in general have their consciousness raised in matters of interracial concern.

Race became my focus. It was a time when Marillac House on the West Side, a Daughters of Charity settlement house, lost donors when its clientele went black.

Pat Crowley, an Irishman of unfailing politesse, resigned from the Chicago Athletic Association, the Michigan Avenue bastion of Irish prosperity to which my grandfather, uncle, and brother had belonged or then belonged, because he couldn't bring his colored friends there. Instead he joined a new club atop the nearby new Prudential Building, which at 35 floors was Chicago's tallest.

The Chicago Serra Club, dedicated to fostering religious vocations, lost a whole meeting debating whether to admit a black member. I heard about it from my father, who was to introduce the day's speaker, Father Jim Egan, a Jesuit living at Ignatius High who worked with deaf mutes. It was a Friday lunch in a Loop hotel such as my father attended for years, coming to our dinner table at night enthusiastic about nuggets of Catholic teaching he had never got in his two years of Catholic grade school. The then-famous Father Patrick Peyton spoke there, and we as a family began saying the rosary.

Jim Egan was a little guy, red-faced and near-sighted with a permanent backward tilt to his head as if from a lifetime of looking up to talk to people, which he did at the drop of a hat, his face wreathed in smiles. You knew when he had his mutes for basketball in the Ignatius gym, across the hall from Jesuit quarters, from the grunts and moans that accompanied their play. When you're in the clear and the guy with the ball doesn't see you and you can’t talk, you do what you can to get his attention.

But there was no hearing from Jim Egan on the day a point of order was raised by an intensely anti-black member, a county judge, who vociferously objected to a proposed Negro or "colored" member. The whole business left my father sick to his stomach, as I remember he had felt after we overheard anti-semitic remarks from another restaurant table many years before. Jimmy Egan had to be rescheduled for Serra.

In that climate, I mounted forays into black neighborhoods under auspices of Friendship House, bringing sodalists with me. This caught the attention of people trying to save Loyola from the Knights of Columbus. I know this from hearing it months later, not from admonitions by Mike English, who never objected. English could hear about it and be aware of a Bowman reputation stemming from it and say nothing to Bowman about it. Never once was I told not to push interracialism. Never once did superiors try to stop me, then or later. How ridiculous would sound to me the ex-priests who said they left the ministry because of racism.

Later, as a priest teaching at Ignatius in the mid-60s, I pressed racial issues very hard and reported to a meeting of Chicago-area teachers what I was doing. Many were amazed that I got away with it. In public schools, for instance, they had no such license to push the issue. But in our Catholic school, I had church teaching and my priestly authority to back me up.

So at Loyola Academy in the late 50s, when on a Saturday morning other scholastics were out with debaters at a tournament or various teams at games, I was going to the South Side or downtown Chicago with my charges. After one busy weekend at this sort of thing, I turned up sick Monday morning, and a classmate had to cover for me. I got reminded of that for some time. There was Bowman getting all excited about justice but unable to show up for class.

My racial preference sent me to Mike English on the day of the entrance exam in January, 1960, as my last Loyola semester began. A black kid had come for the test, and the assistant principal, as if to settle our fears, told one of us the kid wouldn't make it whatever his score. I went for English, who did not deny it, said it would "hurt us" to take the kid. In a few years we could afford to do so, he said.

It was an awful revelation, but English didn’t soft-soap me. There was in him none of the excited concern I caught from others over the years. English knew I could make a stink about it (I didn't) but said nothing about this. He also knew he had a make-or-break financial situation on his hands as regards the academy and the example of Marillac House and its disappearing contributors. In any event, he was straight about it, which is rare enough among administrators.

Without palaver about being a team player -- it was not the point and he was too smart to make it -- he just laid out the situation. Later I told an older Jesuit about our meeting. He advised that it was nothing to leave the Jesuits about. I agreed, mainly because of my commitment but also because I liked Mike English.

But a few years later, in a worse matter, he and his sidekick John Reinke failed both church and society, as did dozens of other church leaders, and followers too, in thinking you just shuffled predators around. The dreadful pattern did not come to light for 20 years.

The problem surfaced within the Loyola community several years after I left it. Some Jesuits went to English with dire suspicions. The suspect, Father Donald McGuire, left the school eventually, pursuing other priestly work, but was eventually accused, tried, and found guilty in Wisconsin for crimes committed in that state against Loyola students. Call it a chapter in the story of this egregious Catholic scandal.

— More to come, from Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968 —