Jesus spotted him, well-known to his neighbors, blind from birth. His disciples asked who was guilty of the sin that caused it, the man or his parents?

Neither. It happened so that God’s work might be seen in him, Jesus explained.

Theirs was common enough thinking. We take Jesus’ answer for granted. But think on it. Everything he says is groundbreaking. He is God on earth, manifesting, even announcing himself to chosen individuals, as to the Samaritan woman at the well and as this episode unfolds, here as well.

He’s on a three-year tour, is he not? Breaking open the mixed-up, wayward thinking of his day. Thanks, I (we) needed that, they could say, as he slaps down prejudices, misgivings, pedestrian inadequacies, one after another.

He has a plan, explains it to his followers soon to be partners:

“While daylight lasts, I must work in the service of Him who sent me; the night is coming, when there is no working any more. As long as I am in the world, I am the world’s light”!

He has the moves:

With that, he spat on the ground, and made clay with the spittle, spread the clay on the man’s eyes and told him to go to the pool of Siloam. So the man went and washed there, and came back with his sight restored.

Glory be.

The man’s neighbors and others who had regularly seen him begging, began to say, Is not this the man who used to sit here and beg? Some said, This is the man, and others, No, but he looks like him.

And he told them, Yes, I am the man.

“How is it, then,” they ask, “that your eyes have been opened?

He told them.

A man called Jesus made clay and anointed my eyes with it and said to me, “Away with thee to the pool of Siloam and wash there.”

“So I went there and washed and recovered my sight.”

“Where is he?” they asked, and he said, “I cannot tell.”

They took him to the Pharisees, recognized judges in such matters, who asked him how he had recovered his sight.

“Why,” he said, “he put clay on my eyes and then I washed and now I can see.”

On the sabbath?

“He cannot be a messenger from God if he does not observe the sabbath,” some of them said.

Others questioned that, asking how a man could “do miracles like this and be a sinner?”

They questioned the man further. “What do you think happened?” And “How did he open your eyes?”

“He must be a prophet.” It’s what prophets do.

They thought that was coming.

They sent for his parents to confirm he’d been blind.

“Is this your son? Was he born blind? How now is he able to see?”

“We can tell you he’s our son and he was born blind. We cannot tell how he is able to see now. We have no way of knowing who opened his eyes for him. Ask the man himself. He is of age. Let him tell you his story.”

Cautious they were, knowing who was asking.

The Jews had by now come to an agreement that anyone who acknowledged Jesus as the Christ should be forbidden the synagogue.

The fix was in.

They called the man back, telling him to “give God praise. This man, to our knowledge, is a sinner.”

“Sinner or not, I cannot tell. All I know is that once I was blind, and now I can see.

Ball in their court.

They asked him again, “What was it he did to you? What did he do to open your eyes?”

They can’t give it up.

“I told you already, and you wouldn’t listen. Why do you have to hear it again? You want to become his disciples?”

Beautiful.

They didn’t like that, telling him, “Keep his discipleship for yourself, we are disciples of Moses.”

Their theme, their fallback point.

“We know God spoke to Moses,” one of them said. “We know nothing about this man, or where he comes from.”

And were not about to ask.

The once blind man was not going to let that go.

“Here is matter for astonishment; here is a man that comes you cannot tell whence, and he has opened my eyes.

“And yet we know for certain that God does not answer the prayers of sinners, it is only when a man is devout and does his will, that his prayer is answered.

“That a man should open the eyes of one born blind is something unheard of since the world began.

“No, if this man did not come from God, he would have no powers at all.”

Let’s hear it for this dude!

Seems he learned a lot in his years. Did a lot of listening, was not about to humor these double-talkers who had little to say to him, except to get lost.

“Are we to have lessons from you,” one of them asked, “all steeped in sin from birth?” mouthing the superstition of the day, what Jesus had explained away when his disciples had wondered about it.

They sent him away.

Jesus heard they had dismissed him, saught him out, and asked, “Do you believe in the Son of God?”

“Tell me who he is, Lord,” he said “so I can believe in him.”

“It is I,” said Jesus.

Dropping to his knees, the man announced, “I believe, Lord.”

Jesus: “I have come into the world so that a [juridical] sentence may fall upon it, that those who are blind should see, and those who see should become blind.”

Some Pharisees who were in his company heard this, and they asked him, “Are we blind too?”

“If you were blind,” Jesus said, “you would not be guilty. It is because you say you can see, you are.”

Re-run here five years later as reminder and because I like it . . . the telling, that is . . .

Wow! Just discovered a major change in the replacement mass scheduled for December that no one has mentioned so far. It’s in “The Introductory Rites,” first thing:

1. When the people are gathered, the Priest approaches the altar with the ministers while the Entrance Chant is sung.

When he has arrived at the altar, after making a profound bow with the ministers, the Priest venerates the altar with a kiss and, if appropriate, incenses the cross and the altar. Then, with the ministers, he goes to the chair.

When the Entrance Chant is concluded, the Priest and the faithful, standing, sign themselves with the Sign of the Cross, while the Priest, facing the people, says:

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

The people reply:

Amen.

It’s a stunner, right? What? you don’t see the big change? Look closer. Read it again. Now get it? No? Come on, do I have to explain everything?

THERE’S NO “GOOD MORNING”!

How? The old way, letting the priest do what he had to do while I meditated and communed, privately.

That’s how I put it on a December Friday.

It was the nearest thing to heresy you could come up with in those days. But it was that or lose out as far as churchgoing was concerned. Like so now.

There was too much going on at mass. Priest in my face all the time, mumbling or orating, performing, always as if I had no resources and he alone could provide them for me. Ditto.

The various songsters with hand raised at prescribed moments, as if hailing a taxi. Plus announcers, of all things worshipful or presumably so. Same.

I tuned it out, reading St. Paul or Gospels or other New Testament passages or Psalms.

Old Religion was the only religion that kept me focused on things spiritual and my duty to love my neighbor, including those whose hand I did not clasp at mass, do good to them that hurt me, etc., as I learned long ago before the Pope of Rome took pot shots at capitalism.

Such was the age we lived in! And do.

Try Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic, which offers “old logic,” as opposed to the now common symbolic, or “mathematical,” version.

The book, a textbook, is for do-it-yourselfers as well as students, says a seller, BooksRun.

It interprets ordinary language, analyzes and builds arguments, teases out hidden assumptions, makes “argument maps,” using the Socratic method in various circumstances.

I looked it up while reading Kreeft’s 2021 book of essays, How To Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss, (Ignatius Press), about which more later (I hope).

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

DEPARTURE PLANNING It was better to marry than to burn, as St. Paul said.  I decided I was not for burning.  I told the provincial, Bob Harvanek, the same whose philosophy classes were one of the bright spots along the way.  He suggested outside counseling, which I thought was a good idea.

I went to a man in Cincinnati who asked a lot of questions, including whether I wanted to discuss my situation with a priest.  Negative to that one, because I felt I couldn’t trust a priest not to tilt toward my staying—though I had just gotten open-minded advice from a priest-professional.

I decided to stay with this fellow, which I did, all expenses paid.  The Jesuits did things right, even when one of theirs was jumping ship.

Meanwhile, I called Tom Savage and resigned from the English Department.  With weeks to go before start of the second semester.  “Well, Jim, that’s a hell of a note,” he said, reasonably.  “I know it is, Tom, and I’ll tell you about it some day.”

That took care of that.  John Felten, a Jesuit some 20 years my senior, and long on the XU faculty, hearing that I was loose, came at me with a great idea: I should become XU’s man for the neighborhood.  He was impressed with the need to relate to the outside.  I would be liaison.

I ridiculously put it to Paul O’Connor, who again was reasonable:  “Jim, you resign from the faculty, leaving those duties hanging, and now you want me to appoint you to represent us in a sensitive area?”  I told him he was right.  End of that idea.

Harvanek suggested I go crosstown to St. Xavier High, where there was a part-time hole in the faculty I could fill.  Good.  I had friends there of my age and tenure in the society, not to mention scholastics, with whom I had more in common than with most of the XU Jesuits.  I moved out of the honors dorm and went to the high school.

The university newspaper interviewed me.  Was my leaving Xavier related to my signing the protest or my other activities?   Not at all, I said, speaking the truth.  It was easy to shoot that one down, and I heard later that the XU Jesuits appreciated that from me.

Not all Jesuits were going as quietly into the night.  One in Detroit got splashed all over the papers, having gone to Rome to protest his treatment by superiors.  I knew him for a tremendous athlete, smart as hell, an impulsive, outgoing personality.  The air was full of this sort of thing.

Another, who had been our “spiritual father” as a second-year novice when we entered in 1950, left quietly but wrote a letter to everyone he knew explaining why.  I tucked that in the back of mind and later did likewise.

ASSASSINATION AND RIOT — I slipped away from XU to the high school on the edge of town, where I found a younger, more congenial community by far, headed as rector by none other than Tom Murray, the genial, easy-going but strong principal at Loyola Academy whom I had found a relief after my first year under Rudy Knoepfle.

Two Jesuits I had been ordained with, and with whom I had ridden the train down to Cincinnati in August 1950, were on the faculty.  One of the teacher scholastics had been a student and sodality member when I’d taught at Loyola Academy.  There were others I knew.  It was old home week.  I settled in with an abbreviated teaching schedule and other activities, including my weekly sessions with the shrink.

Meanwhile, I stayed in contact with my activist friends in the city, remaining in the loop with regard to deployment of our rapid-response team in case of riots.  The cities were erupting.  We figured our role was to be on hand helping achieve peace with justice as the saying goes.

We were not running guns, as the black guy proposed to the church worker Sally.  But we would be on hand in other capacities.  The occasion arose when King was shot, and Cincinnati had its riot, a mini-riot compared to Chicago, where Madison Street became a river of fire.

I heard about the assassination at a meeting.  My assignment was night court, where rioters would be brought.  I sat in my clerics in the front row taking notes and glaring at the judge when I thought it necessary.  (Later he complained to Paul O’Connor about me.)

The dozen or so arrested citizens were all black but one.  They seemed a feckless group rather than dangerous.  The judge was stern and unbending.  I wrote what I saw.  It became a sort of samizdat, copied and passed around and even used as supplementary reading material for a history class at a Catholic women’s college in town.

Eventually it ran as a cover story in Ave Maria magazine, a national weekly.  I had submitted it to that publication on my arrival as an associate editor straight out of the Jesuits.  Indeed, I edited it for publication.  My account, as dispassionate and baldly descriptive as I could make it, was of that night court on the night of the riots—a “drumhead court,” I called it.

Once it had gone to the press room downstairs, a printer came up and came to me at my desk.  “This stuff you write about,” he asked, grimy from setting type.  “You saw it happen?”  When I said yes, he walked away shaking his head, not as objection to me but to the procedures in the courtroom.

A Cincinnati Enquirer columnist castigated me for it.  The church worker Sally wrote to say my “S.J.,” stood for “swinger for justice.”

FINDING A JOB But before that happened, I had my own row to hoe.  Looking towards my departure, I put feelers out for public-school teaching jobs and gave Tom Savage as a reference.  Tom, who was in the dark about my plans, asked Tom Murray, the rector, what was up.  Murray, also in the dark, asked me.  I told him I was leaving.

“Have you got a bishop?” he asked, that is, was I remaining a priest but joining a diocese?  No, I was leaving completely.  “Have you got a job?” he asked.  How do you like that?  I’m walking out of everything and his first concern is whether I was employed.

No, I said, mentioning some aspects of my search and adding that there was a Catholic Press Association convention in Columbus, a few hours’ drive away, where something might be available.  “You ought to go there,” he said, and so I went, introducing myself as Father Jim Bowman looking for a job.

“See John Reedy,” people told me.  This was the Holy Cross priest who was editor of Ave Maria, a national Catholic weekly based at University of Notre Dame.  Reedy and I talked, and a week or two later sealed our deal by telephone.  I would be associate editor at $8,000 a year.

Finally, my day came to depart.  The night before, I sat in the kitchen having a beer with some of the community, including Jim Brichetto, a solidly built, husky guy, a Cincinnatian teaching at his alma mater, from which he had gone directly to Milford years earlier.

He had seen his life’s opportunity and taken it.  Rough-hewn and a scholar by default, he ruled the classroom like a colossus, pounding Latin into the heads of his students.

As a scholastic at Ignatius, he had the swim team, whom he would drive in a bus for practice at a nearby YMCA.  One of the boys yelled at some black kids on the way back and Brichetto stopped the bus and made him get off.  Apparently nothing happened to the kid, at least worth telling anyone.

On my last night, Brichetto and I and two or three others had a good hour or so chatting in the kitchen over a beer.  As we broke up, he commented that this is how we Jesuits should get together with each other, referring to our relaxed camaraderie.

Next morning after breakfast, five or six gathered at the loading dock to say goodbye to me.  My rental car was waiting, compliments of the Xavier U. minister, who also gave me $400 for the pocket. I was good to go, as people say.

As we stood there, joshing briefly, Brichetto, who was not one I’d told of my leaving, passed the area and looked out at me from some 75 feet away, me in civvies and obviously on my way.  We caught each other’s eye.

He had a slightly bewildered look I had never seen on him—like Jesus being led away by Roman soldiers, looking at Peter, who had denied him.

Way in the back of my head, it was occurring to me that I was betraying him.  I wondered momentarily, how many others?

The feeling disappeared and did not return.  I was off to my new life, simultaneously apprehensive and exhilarated.

End of story.

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

For when the One Great Scorer comes

To mark against your name,

He writes not that you won or lost,

But how you played the game.

—Grantland Rice

The end was approaching.  I had arrived at XU with a fresh start, teaching English, my first enthusiasm as a teacher.  Fellow Jesuit Tom Savage as head of the department found classes for me and halfway through the semester asked if I was up to teaching honors English in the coming summer and thenceforward in the fall.  It was fine with me.  Things couldn’t be working out better.

At the honors students dorm of which I became rector, I greeted one non-honors student (a few were inserted in the midst), a few years older than the others, arriving several sheets to the wind one night and next day informed him he could move pronto to another dorm.  I may have said the same to one or two others, but in any case I spotted morale holes and plugged them, presto-change-o, helping to make the honors dorm a very good place to be.

But I was allowing my frustration at living a bachelor existence to determine my general attitude.  I also had my social, especially racial, justice itch to contend with, which was not all bad, of course.  I got close to some black football players, and when it came time for the compulsory students’ retreat, I volunteered to give it to the black athletes.  We met in the chapel or some other meeting room, and I organized a few days of supposed retreat for them.

Later I sat with them and a visiting black academic from California who looked like a footballer himself but had revolution on his mind.  At one point in the conversation, with a half dozen XU blacks and me in the room, the visitor looked to the students and asked if I was “all right.”  They, surprised as I at the question and not especially of revolutionary bent, said yes, and he spoke in vague terms of armed rebellion.  I just sat there.

It was the sort of thing you heard those days.  My friend Sally, a Lutheran-church-connected community worker out of a Milwaukee suburb, was asked by a “community leader” if she would help blacks get guns.  It wasn’t what she had in mind, neither was it what I had in mind.  Sally made that clear.  I never quite had to, but I was skating close to the edge of really dumb involvement.

JESUITS I LIVED WITH   Within the Jesuit community, I found a sympathetic guy in the minister—the man in charge of supplies and all physical requirements, from cars to liquor cabinet.  This was Gene Helmick, whom I had known at Ignatius when he was pastor of Holy Family Church.  He cherished no illusions about anything and had frank, wry comments about the Holy Family neighborhood, once characterizing a Taylor Street (Italian) storefront “social and athletic club” as a place where for the boys and girls it was “zip, zip, and into each other.”

Neither did he have illusions about the XU community, with whose drinking and other habits he was familiar.  Later, while still a Jesuit, he got a counseling certificate from Menninger Clinic in Kansas for which he wrote a clinical-psychological description of the community that the Menninger people refused to believe.  Do it over, they told him.  He did, and they still couldn’t believe it but took his word for it.  Their solution was to break that community up and start over, he told me.

I did have my minor run-ins with the university president, Paul O’Connor, who like Mike English had been a high-ranking military chaplain (I think Navy) in World War II.  He had been aboard the battleship Missouri for the signing of surrender by the Japanese, I heard.  Paul was a rangy, athletic guy, good-looking and possessing a fine presence for his position.

The university was a major fixture in Cincinnati life, more than Loyola was in Chicago.  The city also had U. of Cincinnati, of course, which dwarfed XU but seemed to have less influence. Cincinnati is heavily Catholic, for one thing, and the Jesuits had been there a long time. There was also the downtown Jesuit parish, St. Xavier’s, and its high school, St. Xavier High (X-High), which had moved to the city’s outskirts in a spacious new building and grounds a few years earlier.

SENT TO THE KITCHEN   That said, and whether from Navy experience or the Germanic Cincinnati sense of orderliness—even the Irish were Germanized in Cincinnati, said my brother Jerry—Paul ran a ship that was tight in ways I was not used to from my days at Ignatius.  For instance, I walked over to the main residence for my first meal on arrival wearing a sport shirt, which was standard at Ignatius in the summer time.  But a Jesuit some 10 years older than I, a Chicagoan who had some responsibility in the matter, spotted me and steered me into the kitchen to eat.

Why?  Because at XU you wore cassock to meals.  There was to be no sitting down and realizing I was out of place or even (with a smile?) reminding me of how it was done there: it was to the scullery with me, where I sat with cooks and helpers eyeing me with barely concealed grins.  Wasn’t that a nice welcome!

Litanies were big also.  These were the 15 minutes or so of group prayer in the chapel before dinner, an exercise in rote petition which I knew from novitiate days.  I skipped litanies and decided not to hide it, planting myself at the rector’s table as “the monks” filed in for grace before meal.  O’Connor made a crack on this occasion, as he did later about the length of my hair, in this case as indirect critique of my non-observance.

Smarting from this but not smart enough to ignore it, I went to see him the next day and said I found litanies harmful to my prayer life (such as it was, I should have said) and would not be attending.  A day or so later, I retracted that, deciding there was no point in making an issue of it.

He seemed impervious both times, and indeed when all was said and done, was someone for whose demeanor I could have nothing but respect.  Like Mike English, he was an earlier generation of Jesuit who were direct and, I should say, manly.  There was nothing nervous about him.

PROTESTING THE POLICE   On another, more substantive occasion, I signed my name to a protest statement that got play in the Cincinnati Enquirer.  It was a fairly mild protest, by me and maybe ten other church-related locals, of how police handled antiwar protestors who had come down from Antioch (Ohio) College in early December.

That was our complaint, how the police handled the situation, dragging a protestor down courthouse stairs by his hair, and the like.  It was not about the war as such, about which I remained ambivalent, though generally suspicious.

As I said before, I hadn’t studied it, as I had studied the race question, nor had I been there, as I had been on the race scene.  Neither had I been at the scene of the Cincinnati protest but read and heard eyewitness accounts that convinced me: the cops had used a hammer for the fly on baby’s nose, it seemed to me.  We church liberals got together, worked out a statement, and sent it off.

I saw it in the paper and called Paul O’Connor right away, before he had seen it, because I didn’t want him blindsided any more than he was by my not consulting him in the first place.  I had not even considered consulting him, but as one of his people who had gone public in a sensitive matter, I thought he deserved to know, before benefactors and the like came at him.

He was as good about it as I could have asked.  “Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked me.  “Yes, Paul,” I said.  “I’ve been informed in detail about it and do know.”  OK, he said.  No fulmination, no sign of upset.  He seemed less exercised by this than about my abstaining from litanies.

Meanwhile, toward the end of the semester, I had more to think about than Paul O’Connor or Antioch students.  My vocation problems were taking over my thinking.  I discussed them with a contemporary with counseling credentials who lived in a high-rise dorm while plying his counseling trade.  I described my situation to him.

Beset by the demon sexual desire, I was looking ahead to a rocky road of survival and risk.  It was risky business, this being unmarried. I was distracted and unable to come to terms with the life I had chosen, indeed had reached the point where the only thing keeping me back was how my mother would react.  Not a good enough reason, he said.  And that probably tipped it.

— Yet more to come . . .

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

Meanwhile, the summer program completed and my paper work in the hands of the Office of Economic Opportunity downtown, I packed my trunk and bags one August day and decamped for Cincinnati to teach English.

I was a late appointment; but the English department head, found three slots for me.  I had to bone up on my poetry for an evening class of business majors and others, whom I intended to make a little more sensitive to the finer things in life.

In the class was Bill Mason, a black guy known around Xavier and in the neighborhood as stand-up and congenial, a 20-something bachelor and guardian of a teen-age nephew.  He and I played basketball and ate pizza and drank beer together.  He took me into black bars and in general helped make life more familiar and comfortable in my new home.

On campus I lived in the so-called honors dormitory, a three-story mansion, a gift to the university and thus in no way scarred by dormitory architecture or design.

It housed mostly honors course students.  As a high school senior many years earlier, I was considered for and considered entering the Xavier honors program.  I took at least one phone call at the time from Father Heatherington, who ran the program then and was running it 18 years later when I went to live in the dorm.

I did not go to Xavier but to Loyola.  My generation of our family was the first to attend college, and leaving town for school was not accepted procedure.

As dorm rector, I was in the midst of students, living in my first-floor room with fridge and pantry.  I shared the latter two with an older Jesuit, a very nice guy who taught theology.  Between us we had our own car.

Moreover, at XU you only had to go to the common supply room in the main Jesuit residence, a fort-like structure on a hill in the center of campus, to replenish your liquor supply.  Not bad.

Between my bedroom and the rather extensive hallway entrance area was an anteroom where I had a desk and telephone and typewriter.

DEATH AND BURIAL   On November 1, 1967, I was sitting in that anteroom office with a female student, going over her work, the outer door wisely kept open, when the phone rang.

It was my brother in Chicago saying our father had died.  He had dropped by his and my mother’s Oak Park apartment in the middle of a work day, between calls on customers for a printing company, had gone into the bathroom and hadn’t come out.

My mother pushed the door but couldn’t get it all the way open because he had slipped off the toilet and was leaning against it.  A vascular occlusion had done it, as it had done to his younger sister Enid some years earlier at 63.  He was 72.  The brother who called with the news went the same way, 30 years later, at 73.  Circulation was quick death for some in our family, in the blink of an eye.

I drove to Chicago for wake and funeral.  The wake went two nights, was packed each night—a tremendous outpouring for my father, whose memory meant much to those he left behind.  My mother revived nicely for it, buoyed as ever by the socializing, to which she always responded with her sparkling smile and conversation.

Back at Xavier after wake and funeral, I continued my brand of outreach to the neighborhood.  I had gone looking for activity but did not find anything right away.  I did make contact eventually with some white activists who gathered and devised a plan of deployment in case of rioting, which was in the air.

And I found and went to meetings, standing at one of them at a microphone somewhat foolishly waving my membership card in the Association of Chicago Priests.  Someone asked me later if my XU superiors had sat on me for that appearance.  It had never occurred to me that they would, and they didn’t.

While attending another meeting later in the spring, word came of King’s being shot, and we went into action in our assigned roles and places.

— More to come . . .

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

Meanwhile, in addition to my street-roaming, I had taken over the summer enrichment program started by Jack Arnold and other scholastics and had run it for two summers, using federal “anti-poverty” money that I applied for and was given gladly, because the givers were confident we wouldn’t waste it.

My work on the program included driving a big school bus, taking boys to places where they would not go otherwise.  But it was mainly my oversight of classroom work, recruiting teachers and students with a view to improving their reading and writing.

I was in the midst of that, in the summer of ‘66, when I heard from the provincial about my final vows, corrected as “clerical error” that had told me during tertianship that I wouldn’t have that to decide for another 18 months. He had scheduled it for the Ignatius Jesuit community chapel.

Brother Cardosi planned a festive breakfast afterward for me and my parents and whoever else came for the occasion, which had muted but still palpable solemnity.

For my pre-vows retreat, I went out to North Aurora, where my alma mater, West Baden College, had been relocated in a converted Holiday Inn and was known by then as Bellarmine College.  It was my annual eight-day retreat, which as a priest I would make on my own, pursuing the Spiritual Exercises with my accumulated 16 years of wisdom and presumed expertise.

These final vows called for consideration, which I gave them at length.  The provincial, John Connery, came by Bellarmine while I was there.  He and I sat on a bench to talk.  I asked him what these final vows added to the vows I’d already taken. He spoke of increased solemnity, as I recall, somehow more solemn than the ones I already had.

A moral theologian of international repute, he was not about to b.s. me.  In my opinion, he said what there was to say.  It came down to the ceremonial aspect of life in religion, for one thing, something I do not lightly dismiss.  Our lives are full of ceremony and would be lessened without them.

We may call it also the devotional aspect, and neither do I dismiss acts of devotion.  Indeed, I have come to rely on them in my Sunday mass attendance, which has generally served to remind me of my belief and strengthen it.

These final vows, simple or solemn, also tied me and the society together more tightly, psychologically (as above, through ceremony) but also legally, in that they made it more difficult in canon law for us to split from each other.  That probationary aspect again.

Final vows were the society’s seal of approval and my act of renewed commitment.  This had nothing to do with my being a priest, which had its own Vatican-connected rules.  Vows had to do with me and the Jesuits, the general’s office in Rome being where authority lay.  The pope had charge of me as a priest, the general, or “black pope,” of me as a Jesuit.

So the society was ready to give me final approval, but I was on the ropes or at least staggering.  I was dizzy with weakened commitment to religious life and strengthened feelings toward being married.  I was in process of alienation from my life as a priest and Jesuit.

Months later, when I told a long-time Jesuit friend I was leaving, he asked what I was to do for my identity?  I said I had long before lost my sense of Jesuit identity.  (I was wrong: To a degree, I had let it grow dormant.)  This was too bad.

During the coming year at Ignatius, I was to be asked by a fellow activist as he dropped me off at Ignatius after a meeting, how I managed as a celibate.  I stayed busy, I told him.  I stayed distracted, I might have said.

This fellow was a very genial guy, ethnically Jewish, who wished me “Merry Christmas” with a great smile.  Later he sent my wife and me Christmas pictures of him and his wife and kids—his wife was not Jewish—looking contented and middle-class, no matter his saying once that he and others were in the process of turning my white collar “red.”

He was the first person I ever heard dismiss democracy as a vehicle of justice.  (The second was a fellow newspaper reporter.)  Later he gave me as his reference for a government job.  By then he was on his way to becoming a Unitarian and member of the local Democratic organization in a Western city—both being homes for aging leftists, in my experience.

— to be continued . . .

From Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968:

GOOD TIMES   All in all, I liked my time in the neighborhood.  I met some good people, including the storied Florence Scala, who lived on Taylor Street in back of Ignatius and had bucked Mayor Daley in his building the U. of Illinois “circle campus,” smack dab where people lived.

Studs Terkel gave her a chapter in the first of his immensely successful interview books, Division Street: America.  She was a woman of deep integrity who as a girl, daughter of an immigrant tailor, had found Jane Addams’ Hull House a home away from home.  It was a pleasure to mix with her in these days of turmoil and excitement.

The black ministers were also a pleasure.  Arthur Griffin, our little organization’s treasurer who let himself be euchred by a white summer worker, later headed the historic once Congregationalist (United Church of Christ) church at Ashland and Washington, across from Union Park.

The portly W.W. (Woodrow Wilson) Taylor lived well next to his substantial church near Loomis Courts, on the southwest corner of ABLA.  I never begrudged him this.  He was an island of middle-class achievement in the midst of trouble and was always warm and friendly.

RIOT   Indeed, it was while headed toward his church on the far side of the projects that I ran into trouble in the riots of ‘66, which had been set off in part by the closing of a fire hydrant on a hot day on Roosevelt Road a few blocks west of Ignatius.  I

It was about 7 o’clock on a summer night as I made my way.  I knew of the commotion that had started or was threatening.  There was a meeting of concerned citizens at Taylor’s church, a formidable stone structure.

I was crossing a field when a young adult Fagin who was organizing teen-agers for mischief spotted me 30 or so yards away, heading away from him and his Artful Dodgers.

“Hey,” he called out.  I kept going, not having been born within the previous 24 hours.  “Hey” again, “you with the collar.”  I chose not to dialogue with this group, and kept going.  They did not pursue.  These were kids meant for greater things, including the taunting of cops.

Later that night, after darkness fell and police and citizens were all over Roosevelt Road, a black organizer whom I knew, not of the West Side Organization, advised me to go home, my white face making too tempting a target.  I did so, but not before making a white-liberal telephone call to the cops.

“This is Father Jim Bowman from St. Ignatius High School,” I told the cop at the station, calling from a pay phone in the drug store at Roosevelt and Loomis.  “The problem is the fire hydrants,” I said.  “Police turned them off on Roosevelt but not on [white] Taylor Street [a block away].  This is the problem.  That’s what people are mad about.”  (I expected him to call the squads back to the station?)

“I haven’t got time for sociology,” said the cop, using the catch-all (inaccurate) going term for do-goodism.

So much for Father Bowman’s intervention in history.  I thought with supreme naivete that I was using my credentials and influence to make peace on the Near West Side.

But the Fagin who yelled at me with “the collar” had other ideas.  So did the men who stood behind rows of teen-agers and younger children throwing rocks at the police, as was reported to me by a young friend.

Next day, another friend showed up on the street with an arm in a sling.  We talked at Roosevelt and Loomis.  He wouldn’t be going to work that day in a far suburb, partly because of the broken or bruised arm, what a cop had apparently done to him in a melee, partly because he was afraid to show himself, a black guy, in a white enclave after the previous night’s rioting.

END GAME   This gives a flavor of life at Ignatius after teaching.  It was going to end.  I knew that.  My free-lancing from retreat to retreat was no life for me.  I was fairly directionless, without assignment.  I talked about it with Harvanek, who suggested Xavier University, Cincinnati, where I would be an English teacher.

Fact is, if I hadn’t been saddled with my itch to change the world and my specific itch to achieve racial justice, I’d have wanted nothing better.  He probably did more than suggest.  It didn’t matter.  I was ready to do something else, even if it meant leaving Chicago behind.  And teaching English on a college campus?  Just what the vocation doctor ordered.

I told people on the street I was leaving, including Chester Robinson, who chided me, implying that I’d been appreciated and it was a shame I would no longer be on the scene.  He regretted my leaving, he said, the two of us having dismissed or even forgotten his fingering me months earlier.  Maybe Don Benedict had said something.

— More to come, (again) stay tuned . . .