Reviews

The CYO and civil rights

Reviewed By Steven P. Millies
Sunday, January 15, 2017

An Irish-American boy and an African-American boy meet in a Chicago Coliseum boxing ring, each to “fight for his race.”

A 17-year-old Irish-American boy is shot and killed in front of an Auburn-Gresham-area Catholic school after exchanging words with a group of African-American teens.

A 25-year-old African-American man is shot dead by white police officers on a busy street after a traffic altercation in Mount Greenwood.

The event might take place in 1940 or 1965 or 2016, but the contours of race and geography have not really changed across Chicago’s South Side for generations. Those of us who call home an area of the world defined by Madison Street as its northern border, stretching south down the spine of the Dan Ryan, or tilting along the axis of Archer Avenue and reaching nearly to Joliet, know that the conflict is as much about immigrant groups or racial identity as it is about parish and neighborhood. We also know, in this predominantly Catholic part of a predominantly Catholic city, that a silent player in all of these events is the church. In “Crossing Parish Boundaries,” we have a welcome addition to a growing literature about race and place in Chicago that puts the Archdiocese of Chicago at the center.

Timothy B. Neary is associate professor of history at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island. While his faculty appointment at a Sisters of Mercy institution may suggest his interest in Catholicism, Neary’s study under Timothy Gilfoyle at Loyola University Chicago marks him as an urban historian and a knowledgeable Chicagoan. That proves to be a recipe for a richly textured and deeply researched book that offers not just another look at the history of ethnic and racial conflict over neighborhood, but uncovers a forgotten brand of “everyday interracialism” in Bishop Bernard Sheil’s Catholic Youth Organization (CYO).

Other historians — particularly, Edward R. Kantowicz and Steven M. Avella — have written about the Archdiocese of Chicago’s efforts to promote racial equality during the Cardinal George Mundelein and Cardinal Samuel Stritch eras, decades before civil rights was on the national agenda. Neary’s book focuses in on a particular detail of that period: the role played by the CYO and sports under the leadership of Bishop Bernard Sheil. Amid Chicago’s tribal ethnicities in that immigrant era, and in the light of Cardinal Mundelein’s commitment to the “Americanization” of those groups, sport functioned through the CYO as a source of common ground. It offered both an outlet for the loyalties of tribal groups and a place sometimes to set those loyalties aside. CYO participants took a pledge to “be loyal to my God, to my country, and to my church.” Sheil did not embark on building the CYO in order to conduct an experiment in interracialism. He hoped mainly to address juvenile delinquency — to teach “discipline, teamwork and fair play” — and to bind young Catholic men more strongly to the church. The opportunities that African-American Catholics like Ralph Metcalfe and John Stroger found through participation in the CYO were not part of any plan Bishop Sheil made. But they were a natural consequence of the course Bishop Sheil had charted for his organization and his own commitment to the church’s social mission.

Neary observes that Bishop Sheil “anticipated the Second Vatican Council, the modern civil-rights movement, and the modern women’s movement by 20 years,” but of course this is not just a reassuring story about social progress. “Crossing Parish Boundaries” also recounts the stubbornness of racial prejudice that today’s headlines confirm. Catholic interracialism and the CYO made a difference in many lives. But in Chicago, as much as in other parts of the United States, Catholics also played their part in prolonging the sins of segregation and racism. In 1966, St. Justin Martyr parishioners threw rocks and bottles at Martin Luther King Jr. in Marquette Park. In 2001, the Southside Catholic Conference (SCC), made up of mostly white, suburban parish-school athletic programs, refused to include St. Sabina.

Even at the height of Bishop Sheil’s influence on young Chicago Catholics, Neary documents a 1938 incident during an international CYO boxing tournament held at Soldier Field. Clarence Brown, an African-American boy from Chicago, faced a young fighter from Ireland. “The Chicago crowd booed when officials announced Brown the winner, even though his triumph ensured a tournament victory for the [Chicago] CYO.” No matter how great the effort of Bishop Sheil in 1938 or of Cardinal George during the 2001 SCC controversy, “the hearts and minds of racists living in white parishes” remained implacably unmoved.

A Catholic could stand today at the intersection of 111th and Troy, with six Catholic churches, three Catholic high schools and a Catholic university inside a 20-minute walk, and feel legitimate pride in a rich legacy of local Catholic social action. That certainly would include the work of Bishop Sheil, as Neary has so masterfully and faithfully recounted it.

That feeling would be complicated only by the recent blood stains on the street.

Millies is associate professor of political science at the University of South Carolina Aiken, and the author of “Joseph Bernardin: Seeking Common Ground” (Liturgical Press, 2016). He is a graduate of St. Gerald School, Oak Lawn.

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