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

One of the more memorable New Englanders at St. Robert’s Hall was the perceptive and funny Hugh Riley, a liturgy expert who’d studied in Germany.  He was a species of Boston Irish that I appreciated.  I got a pretty close look at the breed in my month’s “probation” (within a probation) in a Roxbury parish.

Roxbury was billed as black and slum, but compared to Chicago it looked pretty good to me, and I walked around it and got around the city in general, for instance taking the subway at night to attend a lecture at Boston U. by John Silber, who was to become its president.

My wife and I were to visit BU many years later as father of a student, for early visits.  Later the family came for his graduation—a lively affair in the heart of town.

My month in Roxbury, at St. John-St. Hugh parish, was a stimulating, welcome relief from rustic Pomfret, with all its stone-wall fences.  My duties were churchly—mass-saying, preaching, hearing confessions, rectory-sitting on Sunday night when the four priests on staff went elsewhere.  Not much else, as I recall, but I filled in gaps with my customary running about.

As on the West Side at Ignatius, I moved around the neighborhood, zeroing in on the civil rights nodes, including a storefront on main-drag Bluehill Avenue.  What the St. John-St. Hugh pastor, an assertive, outspoken type, didn’t know about my meanderings wouldn’t hurt him, I decided.  But I chose to mention it at dinner, suggesting the use by these civil-righters of unused space at St. John-St. Hugh.

“Those people are communists,” bellowed the pastor, a wiry, sharp-eyed man in his 50s, shouting me down.  After that I kept my counsel.  Hugh Riley followed me in the Roxbury probation, which he enjoyed immensely.  But he reported back to me that the rectory staff considered me a communist and felt excluded from my comings and goings.  I was secretive, in other words, and they were hurt, Riley reported genially.  But you could have bowled me over with a goose quill by telling me they cared.

In any case, I had pulled back defensively, writing them off, and they knew it.   Not all.  One of them was unlike the rest.  Not just in being black—this was Harry Furblur, the first black priest for the archdiocese—but in his being ordained just two years earlier than I and thinking like me.

I could tell from his book shelf.  He had books I wanted to read.  Another of the staff, ordained just two years before Harry, had detective novels.  Temperament and habit partly accounted for this, but also our seminary upbringing.    Two years made a huge difference in the early 60s.

If you had studied theology during Vatican II, you became sharply aware of reform and revolution.  Jesuit theology faculties were generally with the flow.  At least they paid attention, some avidly, though as is often the case, it didn’t matter where they stood.

So the likes of Harry Furblur and me had perked up and stocked up with new books and ideas, and that made a big difference.  Years later we corresponded.  He had left the priesthood and married, as had I.  Nice guy, he was my friend in the rectory, though with his own work as assistant pastor he had hands full and did not accompany me in my rounds.

The parish housekeeper and cook lived in an upper floor of the rectory.  One was young, good-looking, and of a manner called “saucy” in 18th-century novels.  I was given a room near the stairway, and when the stairway light went on, as she was ascending for the night, I knew it.  In fact, I think I had a switch in my room for the stairs.  Hmmm.  The mind and imagination raced.  It was not the sort of thing you ran into in Jesuit houses.  Nor in most rectories, I suppose.

The neighborhood, hardly a black ghetto, was such that nobody paid attention if you walked the streets in your cassock.  I’d do so on my way to St. Hugh’s for early-morning mass, walking from St. John’s, where the rectory was.  It had been a mostly Catholic neighborhood.  Among the black newcomers were far fewer Catholics, of course.  Habits were dying hard, however, and not just in what a priest wore on the street.

The city was the usual cauldron of interracial cookery.  An Episcopal canon (monsignor, Catholics would say) was leading the charge for integration.  His name was mud in the rectory, where the crusty pastor set the tone, as when he would yell out when a fellow priest with a middle eastern name whom they all knew called, “Ask him if he’s making any rugs these days.”

It was a sort of rough humor, but it showed who was ruling the roost.  The Irish hadn’t bit and clawed and cajoled their way up from greenhorn status for nothing.  Of course the biting and clawing era was long gone.

So my education continued.  (Was I a latter-day Henry Adams?)  At least I was seeking it.  Sitting in the rectory did not appeal to me, except when I was placed in charge of things on Sunday night and sat with my steak and bourbon in front of the TV set, happy as a clam.  I was there to cover the phone, which never rang while I was there.    Just as well maybe, because of my funny way of speaking.

I had reason on one occasion to call police about something important, I forget what, and got a lesson in regional pronunciation.  Identifying myself as Father Bowman at St. John’s rectory, I was done in by my short “o,” which came out a flat “a.”  “Saint Jan’s?” the dispatcher asked, until I spelled it for him.

A funny-sounding Cincinnatian had told me in the first week of novitiate, “I like your accent.”  So in Boston.  However, and this is odd, many times I sounded, even in Boston, like a New Englander.  People told me that.  Some said I sounded like a Kennedy.  But I’d never been east of Ohio.

It had to be the attention I’d given to my speech over the years of training, not just as to stuttering but also as to projection and pronunciation, opening my mouth wide, bringing the sound up from down deep, etc., per instruction by Willie F. Ryan at Milford and Jack Williams and Tony Peterman at Baden, all speech teachers, whose role in a Jesuit house of training was important and I think underestimated.

Stay with me, there’s more to come . . .