Jesuit Days

Converting whitey

Jim Bowman — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:04:59 +0000

In my year of converting white boys to a Christian viewpoint, I did my best to swing my students around. The only sign I had that it did any good — my only confirmed kill — was the comment in a semester-end paper by one of them that before the class he had joined others of his neighborhood in driving into nearby black neighborhoods to find a black and beat him up. Now he wouldn’t be doing that any more.

My colleagues definitely had reservations. A Jesuit religion teacher who emphasized the inner life for his students, vs. my emphasis on behavior argued from data, told me he was doing more for the race problem than I was. I did not argue with him, at a loss as to how either of us would know.

A lay teacher whom I knew better than most from his years in the Jesuits, cut me off one day as an extremist for some position I had taken in class. This had to do with my failing to condemn outlaw behavior by black punks on an el train. He was right. I was slipping into the blanket defensiveness of the true believer in equality.

Prologue

Jim Bowman — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 17:23:33 +0000

Work in progress. A multi-page ms. is in hand from which I glean most of these posts. It’s about Jesuits in these years who may be taken as a fair measure of American Jesuits. I’m not out of this account entirely, but the effort is to stay with the society as such, with the Bowman role reduced to what exemplifies it.

Tags: Prologue

Rector Bob, Mrs. Daley

Jim Bowman — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 15:00:12 +0000

Mrs. Daley complained about my use of Silberman’s Crisis in Black and White in my religion/social problems class, giving the principal stomach aches. The rector, Bob Koch, who was very patient with me amid all this, told me about her complaints, but never with so much as an admonition.

He had apparently signalled earlier that I not be given much in the way of extracurricular assignment, with a view to my writing or my “social justice” work or helping him raise money for the school, which was struggling and would be struggling until it went coed in 1980.

This apparently did not sit well with the principal, who at a faculty meeting at the start of the year noted with adequate hesitation and inflection to show something was amiss that Father Bowman would be “doing some writing.” I didn’t, however.

Tags: Mrs.+Daley, Crisis+in+Black+and+White

Teaching in ’65-’66

Jim Bowman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:36:54 +0000

My classroom assignment at Ignatius as a newly released priest in ‘65 was a course for seniors called “religion-slash-social problems.” In view of my consuming interest in social problems, I was a natural for it. The course title came with no instructions, not that I was looking for any.

Another young priest taught a course on marriage. Each of us had three sections, three days a week, for a semester. By year’s end, each had taught six out of seven senior sections. The prolific textbook author Mark Link had the 4-A seniors, as I recall.

I have no idea what the content was of the marriage course; but if it were half as vivid and confrontational as mine on social problems, that teacher probably would have had the Parental Decency League on his back.

As it was, I had the Mayor Daley family mightily upset with me after one academic quarter, having jumped in with both feet, tackling race relations and assigning a book called Crisis in Black and White, by Charles Silberman. Not that the Daleys were the only ones. They didn’t like Silberman either.

But there was no point in being abstract about it, I figured, though even abstractions set my white students’ teeth on edge. For instance, I also assigned a pastoral letter from the U.S. bishops on racial justice which got them even more upset than Silberman. I had not just whites students, but one or two blacks at most per class. In at least one class, I had none.

Tags: Charles+Silberman, Crisis+in+Black+and+White

Ordination as afterthought

Jim Bowman — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:59:23 +0000

Ordination came almost as an afterthought, something I had to do before returning to teaching. Becoming a priest was a means to the end we had embraced as Jesuits.

I took being a priest seriously, but I was primarily a Jesuit. Ignatius himself was not sure he had to be a priest to pursue the work of the kingdom, and we as Jesuits had 13 years as full-fledged Jesuits before ordination.

So most of us had specialties for which we trained, as money manager or physicist. We were “hyphenated priests,” as we said then, “priest-scientists” and the like. With many others I was a priest-high-school-teacher.

Tags: ordination

Finally, a job

Jim Bowman — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 00:12:48 +0000

The time came, in the fall of ‘66, to go to work full time. I had discussed this with my old teacher, Bob Harvanek, who was province director of studies, going over possibilities with him as to my employment after tertianship. I had my “teaching master’s” in English — no thesis, two extra courses — which meant I qualified as a high school teacher.

I hesitated. But Harv told me that in the previous ten years only three priests had gone from tertianship directly to teaching in a high school in the Chicago Province, which had four high schools. In other words, the thriving high school network was understaffed as to young priests, which was a measure of the foolishness then abroad among us. There we were with this proven “apostolate,” as we used the term, our high school work, and greener pastures were beckoning our younger men.

Tags: Robert+Harvanek, teaching

Summer work

Jim Bowman — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 19:07:26 +0000

At Ignatius in the summer of ‘64, a summer enrichment program was in full sway. Jack Arnold and other scholastics had organized a program for neighborhood boys who otherwise would never darken the school’s doors.

I took the program over for its third summer, in ‘66, using federal “anti-poverty” money that I applied for and was given gladly, because our program was obviously worth it. It was a time of many piggies heading for the federal trough. We looked as it we knew what we would be doing.

My work on the program included driving a big school bus, taking boys to places they would not go to otherwise. But it was mainly my oversight of classroom work as administrator. This included recruiting Jesuits and hiring others, including a Loyola Academy and Georgetown graduate whom I had taught at Loyola.

Tags: Summer+Enrichment+Program, St.+Ignatius+High

The short life of a writer

Jim Bowman — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:53:19 +0000

Full-time priesthood began after tertianship. I asked to spend the summer at Canisius (writers’) House, in Evanston, a block or so from the lake. The man in charge, John Amberg, who headed Loyola U. Press, welcomed me, hanging my picture on the wall with other writers.

I had nothing to do but write. During the previous summer, at the U. of Iowa writers workshop, I’d got a fair amount of fiction written and a “B” from my teacher, novelist Vance Bourjaily. But having nothing to do but write was not a good formula for me. I found myself lolling on the beach a few steps away and otherwise hanging about.

Jack Trahey, a year behind me in the course, was living there as a doctoral student at Northwestern U. in drama. Otherwise, I was in Endsville as I saw it, with all respect to the five or six older Jesuits who also lived there.

So in a few weeks I was off to Ignatius, where I was to teach in the fall, and my picture was off the wall at Canisius House. It was an omen. In my remaining three years in the Society, I was to move three times.

Tags: Canisius+House

Darkly on a darkling plain

Jim Bowman — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:32:44 +0000

Grinding it out in theology, no wonder the comment on Englishing the liturgy by Maurie, ordained a year after me, that he had enough trouble “believing” in the mass without hearing (or saying) it in English, when the intended reality became too clear. Better the vague but somehow awe-inducing ritual in a dead language — rather, a language for the ages, I’d say.

Theology was a time to remember Paul as seeing God “through a glass darkly,” and the man’s prayer to Jesus, “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.”

And in any case, it was on to completion of the course — ten years down (fewer for some), four to go (for all). Would we persevere or wouldn’t we? That was the question. Forget peripheral matters.

Ordination day when it came meant we had cleared the hurdles, though for some it was a bittersweet victory. These plowed ahead with no great enthusiasm but lots of determination.

Tags: Theology, ordination

Jesus risen? Not?

Jim Bowman — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:01:29 +0000

Theology was like seeing sausage made. Was a time largely of endurance, but from it came sophistication in matters of belief. But not so sophisticated as to make Jesus’ bodily resurrection something on which my faith does not depend, as a Jesuit of my time told me a few years ago, flouting the Pauline notion that of all men we Christians are the most miserable if Jesus be not risen from the dead.

Nor this from another Jesuit, a theology professor and author, who roundly rejected “playing logic games” by putting to him the killer conundrum — either Jesus rose bodily from the dead or he didn’t. I was more dashed in my respect for the current state of Jesuits by his trashing of Aristotle — couldn’t he have come up with a qualification or two? — than by his deficiencies of faith, although European as he was, he may have had a third possibility in mind.

Tags: Resurrection, Theology