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.