Catholic school owned by lay people!

Hales Franciscan High School on Chicago's South Side is black, all-boys, and Catholic. The Archdiocese of Chicago and the Franciscans sponsor it, identify with it, consider it part of the Catholic fold. But ownership is in the hands of a mostly lay board of eighteen trustees, and with them the buck stops. Hales is the only officially recognized Catholic high school in the United States thus owned.

At the center of this novel arrangement is a Hales graduate, Donald Hubert '66, a Chicago lawyer, member of the school's first four-year graduating class, and otherwise a totally Catholic-school product from primary school to Loyola University, right up to law school at the University of Michigan.

Hubert is an African-American from birth and Catholic from shortly thereafter. For him the Hales story is personal, life-changing, maybe even life-saving. He grew up in gangland Chicago, in the Rangers and Disciples rather than the Capone and Accardo tradition. As a kid on the South Side, he had Rangers to the north of him and Disciples to the south. A young man walked, shall we say, a fine line between the two, carefully and prudently. Hubert went to several grade schools--Saint Anselm, Saint Martin, Our Lady of Solace--and came time for high school, he was off to Hales, newly established in a black neighborhood, at 49th and Cottage Grove.

The ground was hallowed already, by decades of Sisters of Mercy presence. Their Saint Xavier's College (later university) had moved south and west to bigger and greener pastures in an area annexed for their purposes by the City of Chicago-- that' s how things happen in this Catholic city of cities.

Meanwhile back at 491h and Cottage: The Saint Louis-based Franciscans had a two-year, co-ed parish high school at nearby Corpus Christi. Seven priests, four sisters, and two (count 'em) lay teachers taught in this school at its peak enrollment of 385. The sisters left in 1957 and the place became a four-year, all-boys school. The Franciscans pitched the archdiocese for the nine acres vacated by the Mercys. The archdiocese gave them the land and put up $1 million to build the school. The resultant Hales Franciscan High School opened in the fall of 1962.

It was built for 600 and peaked at 550. Catholic school superintendent, Monsignor William E. McManus, later bishop of Fort Wayne-South Bend, and Cardinal-Archbishop Albert G. Meyer, Chicago's Old Milwaukee import, signed the papers. McManus called it "hallowed ground," again serving "the people of the neighborhood by giving its young men high-quality Catholic education."

One of them was Don Hubert, who did time as a stock boy at Del Farm grocery, at 63rd and what's now Martin Luther King Drive, rather than at the Audy Home or Saint Charles-- two options for teen-age offenders then and now. He thought that was what every kid did, work full-time at a grocery while attending high school. He did his homework when he got home at midnight and on weekends.

For two years, he played four sports, then took on the grocery job. Hales had a drama program under Father Barry Schneider, whose African Hamlet barnstormed in the Midwest. Hubert played the prince' s father. One of the stops was Carleton College, in Northfield, Minnesota, where white families took the kids in overnight, providing a strange and wonderful experience for the young black men of Hales, as Hubert recalls it.

He talks about it in his law office on the thirty-ninth floor of a nicely preserved tower building with elevator operators across Randolph Street from the Bismarck Hotel, "the Vatican of Chicago politics ." At the University of Michigan Law School he pulled average-good grades but did better than average in corporate law. He figures he might have gone into that esoteric branch of the profession if he were white. But as an alumnus not only of Hales but of the Woodlawn neighborhood, he went for the gold buried in criminal work, moving eventually to "complex civil litigation."

He even got political work, from Cook County Board President George Dunne and later from Harold Washington's mayoral administration as well. (Dunne, a durable Irishman, was a solid supporter of Harold Washington.) This is how it works, of course. Winners divide spoils here as in most places.

And old boys look after other old boys. Which brings Hubert round to the Hales question. He was a loyal alumnus of the school when the wolf came knocking at its door in 1989. The archdiocese, increasingly handling nickels like sewer covers, told him, $82,000 by tomorrow, or the school closes. Hubert forked over the $82,000. The wolf went away, but it went away hungry.

Hubert and his "acting board of regents" set about raising the required cash and did rather well for a couple years, hosting a "classic Black" benefit at Orchestra Hall, a black-tie affair featuring singer Nancy Wilson and trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. More to the point, the school got $500,000 in a matching grant from G.D. Searle & Company, whose CEO read of its plight in the newspaper.

The plan was to make those regents trustees of their own institution, and that' s what happened in July 1993. Enrollment is up, to almost 400 boys. Tuition is $2,800, 60 percent of the going rate in today' s market. It can't go any higher because the students' "socioeconomic" profile, to use Hubert's word, sets a limit. You can price yourself out of the market Hales has a niche in, rather a comer on, as quickly as you could end up on the wrong side of the law if you grew up at 63rd and Ellis.

He's on the law side of the law now, smiling and outgoing, with associates working busily in his law office. He's dressed for the Daley Center courtrooms, a few blocks away, and leaves the interview for a while to make a necessary appearance.

Yes, he does feel about being African-American, Catholic, and a responsible citizen, he said when he returned, as he felt a few years earlier, when he had expatiated on those issues in the same tidy office for the same writer. At the time, he had recently visited Ghana's Accra castle, where he'd seen the holding pens for blacks before being loaded into the holds of slave ships, "like Jews going to Auschwitz." It was a shocker for him. And it was not so long ago at that, two hundred years or so. Two hundred years to catch on to European ways? Not much time, when you consider it. The pushy ones were muzzled, literally, with contraptions on display at Accra castle. You were an up-and-comer, you got muzzled. Not a formula for success.

But "we can't cry in our milk," he says. "We have to develop a family system and values and get the best education possible." We have to make the institutions in our neighborhoods reflect those values. I ask myself what I can do to make other African-Americans strong." Among other projects, he works with black lawyers who are sometimes loaded down with "nickel-and-dime" cases which they neglect. It' s no way to make a living or a career. He tells them that.

"I have paid my dues," he said, taking another tack. "But American society never really accepted us as full dues-paying members."

Another: "We [blacks] live in a society that' s color blind but we are not ready to take advantage of it. In many organizations, I'm the only black. Black men in such groups are neglected. It' s not that simple, to take advantage of the opportunity.

"No millions were spent for education of freed slave kids. How then do whites expect us to have their values?"

So look to black institutions. "But when black institutions grow strong, they move to mainstream culture," leaving other blacks behind. "Hales once had 550 students. They needed a trailer in the school yard to handle the overflow. The whites moved to the suburbs, athletics got bigger, and blacks were recruited by white high schools."

The issue? "What whites take for granted is not there for blacks--an educated populace where the family is the central unit. At Hales we isolate the boys, we tell them they count, we say they can make it. They come from an environment that says they can't make it. We tell them different."

White folks? "Everybody must give back to the community that nurtured him. Don't call whites racists. They are doing for their institutions, their children. Whites are discriminated against too, for many reasons: too fat, too short, and so on. We [blacks] are so absorbed [in our problems], we forget it's not easy out there for anybody."

When it came to the 1989 crunch, he put it to himself: "Hales close? Ridiculous. What would that do to the fabric of the neighborhood?" Now, with trustees in place and enrollment up and enthusiasm rife, he looks at the scruffy grounds and pictures what grassy knolls and well-kept trees would do for the neighborhood.

And the stopper: "Why should black kids have to leave their neighborhood for better schools?"

Talking a few years back to public school principals visiting Hales, Hubert made the point about not turning away from his origins: he hadn't moved to a white neighborhood, he hadn't dated white women, because he believed in "anchoring" himself within the community. That was why he gave Hales the money. It was why he kept coming back to his alma mater, to the place that had nurtured him and given him a home away from home.

"We need institutions," he told the principals. "Mom and Dad can't do it alone. We need stronger focus on the family unit, more dialogue between black men and women. I don't know where we are to start to become anchored. I have decided on defined limits, so I turn to my high school as Mayor [Richard M.] Daley turns to his, De La Salle High School, making sure they get jobs. White males are buddies with each other. I tell kids at Hales, you are part of a gang, stick together."

Still, Hales is not an only-black thing. One of its new trustees is H. Dennis O'Neill, an Evanston bank executive, whom Hubert touts as "a great find for Hales," himself from a Catholic boys' school back East, where he has helped raise "substantial sums" for Catholic schools.

Chicago is a good place for Catholic fund-raising. The only problem is, there's so much of it. But Hubert turns to white lawyers who are Catholic, and they help out. He's a bar association officer. It's one of those organizations he has joined to find himself one of very few blacks. (He also belongs to another, mostly black bar group.) He's gotten used to that. But he'd rather not ask the same of young black men on their way up.

The 380 or so Hales students have him to look up to and will have each other to look out for in the years to come, as the mayor' s De La Salle buddies have each other to look out for.

Hales students also have a distinguished African-American president to look up to. He's the Reverend Charles Payne, a Jungian psychotherapist and one of a half-dozen Franciscans on the staff. Father Charles, as the Franciscans say it, is one of three black-priest Ph.D. psychologists in the United States. As a child in his native Tennessee, he rode in the back of segregated buses and trains. From Detroit, where he grew up, he joined the Army and saw Germany; there he decided to join a religious order. The representative of one discouraged him (it was the early '60s) but steered him to the Franciscans, who welcomed him, dark skin and all.

Father Payne could tell the visiting principals it was time "we," meaning the black community, took responsibility for Hales, until then borne by the Franciscans. The role-model concept operates. Payne remembers being "shocked" years ago to find a black president at Grambling University. He's the first black president of Hales. Hubert is an obvious role model. The school' s black teachers are too, on a day-to-day basis. Ever the counselor, Payne speaks of degrees of "transference." "Students figure, if they did it, I can do it."

Sounds simple, and the formula is an old one. Indeed, the observer at Hales is tempted to say, "If you've seen one Catholic boys' school, you've seen them all." Boys raise their hands eager to answer, boys sleep in class, boys listen, boys push and shove, boys get serious, boys get comical. One said he had learned about black saints and three black popes (!) at Hales. Another said he had heard that Jesus lived near Egypt, a center of black African culture. Another said he had come to Hales because of its black male teachers, to hear of "obstacles [they had] overcome." Such as discrimination? he was asked. But the kid shook his head. It wasn't his focus at all.

Survival is still a problem. Hales depends upon its friends. These are not all black. It's a Catholic school, after all, and this is Chicago. There' s an annual walkathon, an "ad book," and a few thousand here and there from the archdiocese's Big Shoulders Fund. Otherwise, the board, the school's new owners, have a $450,000 annual deficit to meet. For four years, as a board of regents, not yet owners, they have been raising $375,000 a year. Now they have new status, new members, old motivation, and Catholic chutzpah to get them through what Hubert admits is a "very tough" first year.

Meanwhile, it's gap-bridging time, between the $2,800 tuition and the $5,000 or so cost per student. Scholarship aid comes to $150,000 a year for a school of 380 students, which Hubert says is high, citing another boys' school with over twice as many students but only a few thousand more in scholarship money.

"We're working the foundation lineup now," he said. He adapts the late Tip O'Neill quote about all politics being local. "All church is local too," he says. "Look out from the expressway and see the steeples. That's the church out there. We want to keep the church where Hales is now."

JIM BOWMAN, a Chicago newsman, is the author of Bending the Rules: What American Priests Tell American Catholics, due out in June from Crossroad.