St. Ignatius High teaching in the '50s, colorful, historical, in which the writer calls on ancestors. Seeing no evil in some matters . . .

. . . which were to come to bite the Society and the whole church

MIXING WITH VETERANS

Ignatius had atmosphere you could find nowhere else in the province. The school was intimately part of Chicago immigrant history. We scholastics mingled with history-makers. When a fire broke out in the rear section, we were told, one of the old-timers cried out. "Not the new wing!" referring to the 1895 construction. Buddy Esmaker, so called for his calling everyone Buddy, had retired from decades of teaching freshman Latin the year before I arrived. He shuffled around, fastening a gimlet eye on one and all.

Ray Grant had been the fire-breathing principal in the 40s and early 50s. I found him kindly and alert, a splendid individual. On Sundays I drew my assignment now and then to go with him to the nearby juvenile detention center, the Audy Home, where he said mass for the inmates. With them he was gruff but no more so than he'd been with students, I supposed.

Father Grant's secretary was Brother Mike O'Connor, who served long enough in the position for the quip to gain currency, “Who's buried in Grant's tomb? Brother O'Connor.” He overdid alcoholic consumption sometimes and would be brought home by the local cops who had found him collapsed in the 11th Street alley behind the school.

Ignatius and next-door Holy Family church were at the heart of Irish immigration. My grandparents James H. and Mary Clarke Bowman, he from Kingston, Ontario, she from County Mayo, wed at Holy Family in 1883. My father, Paul Clarke Bowman, and my mother, Kathryn O'Connell, wed at St. Thomas Aquinas, five miles to the west, in 1919. The youngest of my three brothers and my sister were married at St. Catherine of Siena, a mile west of that, in 1950 and 1962. Thus went the migration. But Ignatius stayed.

James H. Bowman watched the 1871 Chicago fire from his back yard, I was told - at Jefferson and Harrison, according to his 1935 Chicago Herald Examiner obituary. That’s two blocks north of the O’Leary barn, where the fire was (inaccurately) said to have started, then moved east and away from his house and Holy Family church and the two-year-old St. Ignatius. Miraculously, it was believed.

He might also have watched parades down Roosevelt Road, then 12th Street, of the temperance societies, a sure adjunct to the Irish neighborhood. Heading the marching Pioneers, total abstainers, would be a crusading priest, followed by men and their wives and children. “Father, dear Father, come home with me now,” sung plaintively by the drinker's small daughter in a saloon, was not merely a popular refrain. Something like it happened, often.

In any case, your average community of priests and brothers had its drink problem. It was still so in the 1950s. "Some of us drink too much," we of the Ignatius community were told (by one of us who didn’t) in the Jesuit chapel in 1957, and a 25-year-old took note. I had learned to tell dry wine from sweet at West Baden and now, a fledgling teacher, was hearing how the veterans talked to each other.

The speaker, one of the community, knew whereof he spoke. Such confrontation was rare, however, no matter what Saints Paul and Ignatius had to say about correcting one's brother. We corrected each other regularly as novices, face to face or in a group, but not regularly or not at all as the years wore on. We had to live with each other, after all.

HOUSES OF NON-CORRECTION

In our era, decades later, there appears to be similar tolerance for the more publicized failing of sexual performance and predatory molestation. The Jesuits suffered a "gaying and graying" experience in the wake of the exodus from their ranks beginning in the ‘60s, say Peter McDonough and ex-Jesuit sociologist Eugene C. Bianchi in their 2002 book Passionate Uncertainty: Inside the American Jesuits.

The 2000 Kansas City Star series on priests dying of AIDS nailed Jesuits hard --and was judged in Jesuit-edited America as giving “plausible” figures but ones far lower than those among “highly sexually active gay populations,” which some would consider beside the point. Indeed, the writer, a Jesuit medical doctor, blamed the Star for being late with old news about homosexual and AIDS-afflicted priests. His main point, however, was to emphasize tolerance and understanding of the sexually active.

Indeed, a mood and policy of acceptance seems to be the norm, and in-house critics such as Navy and Marine chaplain Paul Shaughnessy and publisher Joseph Fessio are few. If the spirit of the "exercitium modestiae,” the in-the-round sessions where those with or without sin threw stones, ever endured beyond novitiate, it has not endured in recent years, to judge from published accounts.

To emphasize the gap further, if criticism of Jesuit drinking habits was rare in the ‘50s, criticism of their sexual habits was almost nonexistent. Sexual sin in general, forget homosexual, was what no one apparently dared name, though we scholastics joked about it, as I have mentioned. On one occasion we were hit hard on the subject, in an eight-day retreat given by a New Yorker, Vincent McCorry, who turned the Exercises into “Sexercises,” I said at the time.

It was McCorry, an America Magazine columnist who wrote on spiritual matters, who produced two of the most dramatic moments in my Jesuit retreat-going. One was his Gothic portrayal of masturbation as kicking Jesus in the face during his final agonies. The other was his reading a note from one of us -- this in the early 60s -- raising problems encountered by the homosexuals among us. McCorry read it at a daily session just before lunch, in which he answered questions or discussed issues sent to him in writing during the retreat.

There were 200 or so of us in the main chapel at West Baden. We were a quiet group in church under any circumstances, chuckling maybe when the diminutive Brother Freddy turned his hearing aid up too high in the front row and a high humming sound resulted. But we were never quieter than when McCorry read the note from a homosexual among us, a cry for help.

McCorry gave his advice - sympathetic, if primitive - which included indulging one’s artistic proclivities. How many of us thought immediately of extensive decorations of chapels by various sacristans over the years is anybody's guess. In any case, the McCorry intervention stood alone in my 18 years as a Chicago Province Jesuit in the 50s and 60s. The proclivity was never named.